Allison Cobb & Jacqueline Waters, 8/16, 6:30 pm, IPRC

The Switch presents poets Allison Cobb and Jacqueline Waters.
 
When: Saturday, August 16, doors at 6 p.m., reading at 6:30 sharp. FREE Where: IPRC, 1001 SE Division St., Portland, OR

Jacqueline Waters is the author of One Sleeps the Other Doesn't (Ugly Duckling Presse) and A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry). Recent poems have appeared in Fanzine, The American Reader, Everyday Genius and With+Stand. She edits The Physiocrats, a pamphlet press, and lives in Brooklyn.

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” She is at work on Plastic: an autobiography, a hybrid genre work, and a poetry manuscript called After we all died. 






by Jacqueline Waters

DON’T BE UPSET IF YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME

Ranchers lease land from the government
At very low rates
That do not make up for the money spent by the government
To manage the land for the ranchers
Each rancher goes to sleep with a blanket
It doesn’t stop there
Ranchers get sex in places we don’t know about
The sex is hot or good
The sex doesn’t stop there
Ranchers were so mad about 200 coyotes loose in their area
So the government said OK we’ll shoot them from helicopters
When the coyotes died it was OK
Because animals die all the time they are used to it
You like this cake I’ll cut you a slice
A sliver
It’s just a worthless sliver
If it were me I would be more circumspect about it
I would be less going on about it
I’d tear its branches off and act like I hadn’t thought about it
Decorate the tree half and shove it out there to sit


by Allison Cobb


The things you loved

I lived to haunt you. To ask
you to hold this oldest 
piece of human
DNA beneath
your tongue—it’s shit
dug up from wave-
cut caves in the Summer
Lake basin of Oregon, mixed
with red fox, wolf, coyote—animals they
ate or later came to pee
on their remains. Hold this and think   
the thing you love
the most what you most want
inside you, mixed in
with your excrement in fifteen
thousand years when someone
digs it up. Think
the thing you loved so much
you conjured it in labs to live
inside the flesh of every animal to saturate
your own well-fatted flanks, king
of all the creatures. So these
must be the names for things you loved
so much you peed on all the earth
and all its living things which you then ate
to concentrate its thickest dose inside
your pearl-white fat and rearrange your
DNA and gene expression: aldrin, dieldrin, DDT,
mirex, toxaphene, and TCDD. Heptachlor, hexa
-chlorobenzene, and the PCBs nestled in your
genes with you and chlordecone and the hexa
-chlorocyclohexanes. All
the things you loved.