Sacramento Poetry Center to feature Emily Hughes and Lauren Norton

In my first hosting event of 2012, I will feature Emily Hughes and her friend Lauren Norton, both from Davis, California. I have featured Emily before, and I am glad she is returning to the SPC in January.

The reading is on January 9 at 7:30PM at the Sacramento Poetry Center.

Emily W. 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.  Her blog, thealleysoflife.blogspot.com features posts on day trips, hiking, and recipes. Emily received an M.A. in Creative Writing from UC Davis, and teaches English at American River College and Cosumnes River College.

Love Poem. 

I love you like the moon loves the sun.

Maybe that’s a cliché.  I don’t care.

 Here, in the coffee shop, I sit across a couple playing cribbage.

There’s a Bob Dylan song on.

I look past them, and see us—hips and hands

nearly touching.

We are the sun and the moon.

Our conversation brings animal and     element.

Yours—eagle wings and flame.

Mine—tiled pools and clay.
  

      Bring me an eclipse.

I will open

a new home—it will be our
windowed space.

-          Emily W. Hughes

Lauren Norton is a writer and musician from rural Ireland.  In 2011 she was named one of the Over the Edge New Writers of the Year and was a recipient of the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize.  Poems from her first collection Wink and Elbow have appeared in The Attic, Ropes, Bray Arts Journal, Poetry Bus Magazine and Poetry Ireland Review.  

Spherical

 

Before my brother discovered online poker

he would spend whole days kicking a ball

against the side of our house.

Persistent, methodical as a clock -

the grout-freeing bang of the ball

hitting the blank face between windowpanes.

 

He could do this for hours, my mother

going out at intervals to yell at him

when he left prints on the windows

in thin hexagonals of mud.  Last night

I bought three cantaloupes, their little round

seems starbursting with ripeness.

 

I lined them up in the parking lot

of my lover’s apartment complex

and launched each one at the stucco

 with a belt of my right foot.

The melons exploded in a cruciform

around the door, seeds and gizzards

 fusing with terracotta paint.  Swatches

of skin fell to the ground.  They looked

delicious.