Saramento Poetry Center to Feature Emily Hughes and Terry A'hearn

PRESENTS

Terry Ahearn and Emily Hughes
Monday June 13, 2011 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street • Crossroads for the Arts
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke

Terry Ahearn’s poetry has been published in Blue Unicorn, High Desert Journal, Poetalk, Poetry Now, and the Cosumnes River Journal, among other publications. He has won the Samuel Goldwyn Award for Creative Writing and the Silver Award for amateur filmmaking from the Houston International Film Festival. He has a Master’s Degree in English from California State University of Sacramento and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Screenwriting from UCLA, and he currently teaches English Writing at Cosumnes River College and San Joaquin Delta College. He lives in east Sacramento.

Gardener

Few persons stroll the interstate, where dust creatures snake the yellow-painted lines, where the air trembles with the heat, where the distance might be where you see it and then again might not be anywhere you think it is at all. The only people there are the ones that shatter the silence at high speed, concentrating on the long, black tar-strip that stretches in both directions to the horizon.

A woman in a calico house dress, alone by the highway, bends slowly and reaches out. Her middle-aged knees crackle, as does the hot pavement under the onslaught of cars racing by. The drivers do not glance at the woman for more than a split second, for she has not the proper curvature, nor the smooth, varnished skin nor the perfectly balanced features of beautiful-product-people who adorn the air-conditioned malls
not far away from this interstate.

Lines converge at intersections at the far corners of her eyes, and begin to cross her sunburned cheeks. Curls in her black hair droop in the dry heat rising from the road as if surrendering to the dark asphalt. Her eyes
surrender nothing.

She yanks at aimless roadside grab-roots, and though the flowers she pulls up cling to their little bit of dehydrated earth, the Lady finally frees them and gently unties the wilted leaves from a few rusted beer can pop-tops. Carefully, she brings the small yellow blooms to her chest as if, instead of clutching weeds, she held flowers she had discovered in bound volumes of the Biological Sciences placed in University libraries and studied by selective scholars. To her, these are blooms with fine Latin names somewhere,
all their own.

She leaves the roadside, and crossing the sands, walks the blossoms home. There with the help of cool water from a generous kitchen sink pump, fertilized earth from a bountiful vegetable garden and the strong embrace of a fired-clay pot, she begins
to revive the plants.

She smiles to herself as she goes about other business of her day unseen, unnoticed, like the progress of soft shadows creeping late in the day across
a desert highway.

—Terry Ahearn


Emily Hughes is a poet, educator, and backpacker from Sonoma, California. Recent work has been published in the Sacramento News & Review. She has been featured on “Dr. Andy Jones’ Poetry & Technology Hour” on KDVS. She teaches English at Cosumnes River College, where she is also on the editorial staff of the Cosumnes River Journal. Emily received an M.A. in Creative Writing from UC Davis. Her poetry is influenced in part by her struggle to overcome Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.

Seattle to Sacramento

passing Mt. Rainier, reading Gary Snyder’s The Back Country

Melting glacier, logging scars—
In this we are the dying in life.
How do we know this place—
Once, we went there for refuge and called it by name.
Once, we were covered in dust, naked and happy.
Once, we told each other to forget the names.
All the covers
of the world—parchment,
peel on our eyes.