Saturday, August 8: Tolbert & Gray

The Switch is proud to announce a reading from Anastacia Renee Tolbert, and Portland’s own Robert Duncan Gray.

When: Saturday, August 8, doors at 7 pm, reading at 7:30 sharp. FREE 

Where: IPRC, 1001, SE Division, PDX

Anastacia Renee Tolbert is a queer super-shero of color moonlighting as a writer, performance artist and creative writing workshop facilitator. She has received awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Jacks Straw, Ragdale and Artist Trust. She was recently selected as the 2015-16 poet-in-residence at Hugo House, a place for writers in Seattle. Her Chapbook 26, recently published by Dancing Girl Press, is an abbreviated alphabet expression of the lower and uppercase lives of women and girls. A Pushcart nominee (2015), her poetry, fiction & nonfiction have been published widely. Recently Tolbert has been expanding her creative repertoire into the field of visual art, and has exhibited her painting and photography surrounding the body as a polarized place of both the private and political. This year she has begun a yearlong theatrical mixed-media project in collaboration with the Project Room, 9 Ounces: A One Woman Show: Lately she’s been obsessed with the body & the stories (true & not true) it holds.

Robert Duncan Gray is an English artist currently living in Portland, OR. He is the author of Ticklish Animal (Bone Tax Press) and Immaculate/The Rhododendron and Camellia Year Book (1966) (forthcoming from University of Hell Press). He makes music under the name COLDGOLDCHAIN and recently self-released a cassette tape called READY2bWRONG. He curates and hosts a monthly reading series called À reading.

by Anastacia Renee Tolbert

Poem Excerpts

“Memoir”

Memoir (lost chapter)

this memoir has a secret compartment where the dog decides he does not want his biscuits, does not want to bone, cannot keep his shit in one pile.  this part of the memoir you thought you went green on & recycled & you know some things have bigger foot prints than others, you know this print is all fingers & ligaments. you know this part of the memoir has something to do with why your bones ache in june, why you tell that calendar it is not talking to you & that circle is just is just a place mark for consensus & the start of summer stay-cation.

Memoir (8)

this memoir’s pages are taped together with lilo & stitch band aids. it talks about the things you tell your children didn’t happen: (a) you did not get a sister (b) your mother did not carry her to full 1.term (c) your father did not sit by your mothers side after your sister died. (d) the doctors said your non-sister who was not born was an 2. anomaly. (e) your mother has one ovary, one fallopian tube & a folded other fallopian tube. period.

1. luna died in your second term of school. you & your brother spring broke your bodies bending to kiss me. saying mom we are so sorry we did not know. we did not know we are so sorry. sorry. we. did. not. know. & how could you know being a black boy in foreign country with the weight of the world plus divorce on your blades is all did not plus know.
2. luna lived inside a wounded heart & womb for five months. you mother was completely did not & no.

by Robert Duncan Gray

IT’S TRUE

I pretty much love Everything
But Fuck all the men Driving cars
Through the stop signs of the world

Take me south of the Mouth
In chair position crooning
Flexing pizza muscle Western style

What say You to the sickness
Of the Cosmos             Yes
Or No

Worried I'm a Yes man
The perfect emoticon
Matthew said I disappear'd
Explain to me the crime of poverty

Asking for too many buttons
Wrong thing I get But question
Where              I'm smiling

Are the dead ones tonight
Pigeon faced in the slop
It's time to up The moon

The moon isn't hiding It's out
Soak air plant Sunday
Do you speak To your hunger

In the mirror                I am
Pushing myself into Love Lake               You
Can't keep

A good Horse
Out of church
Oh!

I was not born
To write poems
Today

Having been Numbed
By the beauty
I put the book down

Pick it back up
The dough In hell
Is rising

The dogs of Joy are walking
Foreign graveyards
Abandon the space

Inside body
King of dumb
Pain in bed

Am I sick Because I deserve
But the Sun The clock
And feast

I kiss my own
Miss the New
And quickly Carcass my grief

Haley, Kawano, Tran 4/22 7 p.m. Radio Room

The Switch is super excited to host a special event at the Radio Room featuring readings by Jamalieh Haley and Stacey Tran in conjunction with an exhibit of visual art by Yukiyo Kawano.

When: Wednesday, April 22, 7 pm sharp

Where: Radio Room, 1101 NE Alberta, PDX

Jamalieh Haley lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-curates If Not For Kidnap and teaches writing and literature. Her work has appeared in Interrupture, Sink Review, Everyday Genius, Sixth Finch, Plinth and she is the author of Strange Tarot (Poor Claudia, 2014).

Yukiyo Kawano, a third generation hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivor) grew up decades after the bombing of Hiroshima. Her work is personal, reflecting lasting attitudes towards the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kawano’s main focus is her/our forgetfulness, her/our dialectics of memory, issues around cultural politics, and historical politics. She has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is the recipient of numerous grants, and has exhibited her work in the U.S. and Japan.

Stacey Tran is a curator of a performance series,  Pure Surface, and an editor of a small press publisher, Poor Claudia. Her poems have appeared in The Curator, Imperial Matters, BOAAT, The Volta, and other publications online and in print. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

Karmin & O'Malley, Saturday, 1/31, 7:30 pm IPRC

The Switch is pleased to present Jennifer Karmin of Chicago and Portland's own A.M. O'Malley.

When: Saturday, January 31, doors at 7 pm, reading at 7:30 sharp. FREE

Where: IPRC, 1001, SE Division, PDX

Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary projects have been presented across the U.S., Cuba, Japan, Kenya, and Europe.  A founding curator of the Red Rover Series, she is author of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice.  Her poetry is widely published, most recently in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, the Iraq War chronicle 4000 Words 4000 Dead + Revolutionary Optimism: An American Elegy, and as Bernadette Mayer’s assistant on The Helens of Troy, NY.  She teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and has been a Visiting Writer at Naropa University, Oberlin College, California Institute of the Arts, plus a myriad of sites.  In 2015, she returns to Cuba for a collaboration that will be part of the Havana Biennial. Here is her neutrino poem, with Bernadette Mayer.

A.M. O'Malley has been writing and publishing on various planes since 1998. Ms. O’Malley left home at 17 years old and began her own odyssey, zigzagging across the United States, working as a waitress, bartender, a community organizer, a Kirby vacuum salesman, a maid, canvasser and through it all she was writing and reading and making zines. She has recently been published in The Newer York, Jerkpoet, Poor Claudia, Phenome, UnShod Quills, The Burnside Review and The Portland Review. Her work also appears in the forthcoming anthology Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity edited by Carter Sickels for Ooligan Press. She is a Literary Arts Writers in the Schools teaching artist, a Young Audiences Teaching Artist Studio graduate, a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant recipient and winner of the 2014 Skidmore Prize. In 2012, Ms. O’Malley started a writing and publishing program at the Columbia River Correctional Institution and goes there every Tuesday night to teach writing to incarcerated men. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.  Find her work HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Ashby, Haley & Wallace, 11/8, 7 pm IPRC

The Switch presents poets Chris Ashby, Jamalieh Haley, and Mark Wallace
When: Saturday, Nov. 8, doors at 6:30 pm, reading at 7 sharp. FREE
Where: IPRC, 1001, SE Division, PDX

Chris Ashby is a poet, essayist, and the editor of Couch Press. He frequently collaborates with Nate Orton on his My DAY series, assisting in publishing and organizing the events. His most recent books include My Day 31: Kayaking from Sellwood to Swan Island (Abandoned Bike), and After Language: Volume 1 (Couch Press, 2013). Salt Lover I-V is forthcoming from c_L. Chris lives in Portland, is a member of the Spare Room collective, and works in the forests, grasslands, and cities of the West.

Jamalieh Haley lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-curates If Not For Kidnap and teaches writing. Her work has appeared in Interrupture, Sink Review, Everyday Genius, Sixth Finch, and she is the author of Strange Tarot (Poor Claudia, 2014).

Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy, and a novel, The Quarry and The Lot. He lives in San Diego, California, and teaches at California State University San Marcos.






by Chris Ashby: 

from Despite Water


inside society’s fragrant voices

in foolproof authenticity sample

into physician’s saucy imagination

from pataphysical coffee tremors



near laughable prototype signs

for ideal cold transfer

of kinder test marks

except familiar daunting inflection



off rewarding Viking sunlight

during favorable laundry pressure

on zesty smoked capital

down one worrisome treatment



onto farmers’ opportunistic backs

despite obedient shelter catalysis

out here garish imagination

by Karl brewing flarf



outside logic mechanic’s song

beyond generous breathtaking chainsaws

over time town before country side

between indulgent garbage distinction



past Alberta’s burning articulation

beside bronze city eyes

regarding buoyant telephones weeping

beneath bacterial market oxygen



since quiet total domestication

below handy chlorine heaven

through error of weight

behind democracy’s haggard immanence



by Jamalieh Haley:

JUSTICE
The world has angeled some of its horror
for you. Their figures appear serious in the
clouds--they withdraw all your blades from
the wound; clouds--they hold your crimes
hostage; like a battery, clouds--they place a
fire unmantled within; over your face,
clouds--their waterline shows the death
time; clouds asphyxiate that dark look to
become freedom; clouds that further the
expression that does not exist; in you there
are eternities during which lives are spent;
the weapons are shadows, the caves are
sexual perfection, and the clouds--they are
dirty halos for every human touch

by Mark Wallace

from Notes From The Center On Public Policy

            Lately there had been too many accidents. Street against street, plaza roped and marked, voices stuttered about public space and the rewriting of conditions. Beyond a sudden turn, or backed against a laser system, electric currents shot with a momentary stagger, apart from where faces leaned across tables, grasping for a common thought.

            Roles in the production pyramid exchanged anecdotes about what had happened on weekends. They’d heard this or that before, claims to insight expelled with propulsive force across the space of a body locked into its usual deepening grooves, except where a slice was misplaced, or protests cheered in the mud for a new totem with reverberations that backed against poles. Maneuvers learned to trick the trade or trade the trick or utter a clarification three stops past the last stop, leashed to a time-bound coded familiar, while competing bandwidths invented ways to look for love without commitment to believing even the first word.

            Secret phone calls flew between augmented voices, another sublevel of static below the constant audibility of self-presentation, words holding back or stretched beyond endurance, a function of what no single knot could admit about itself. Connections, broken when they shouldn’t have been, carried the aura of made-to-order wakes, flashbacks to scenes misremembered for ulterior or surreptitious motives, circumstantial and misled, that tailed off towards new metamorphoses of what remained unspoken. Oblivion was an assumed priority, although some preferred it to smell nice.

            After all, who didn’t approve of wit, yet many didn’t, preferring their windows, doors and bundles standard, segmented against impossible tasks, suffused with feeling or directness or a clarifying obfuscation, because what could be gained by looking out? Low level burns were distributed on swift guffaws, underachieving but occasionally effective in the race to produce a new axis on demand. Furtive underlings propped themselves against procedures, waiting for an opening that like a final kick might make them into a landmark. Trances multiplied, involving armaments always more up to date, shelved instructions on how to decline politely. From now on the package, a thing the whole world wants to use.

            It was an old trick to count invented suns, tabloid distortions, figurines against a backdrop, hollow points with clichés like fate on the accepted range of tattoos, repeated cries for a drugfest. Methods of belief, sorted in rows for easier choosing, could earn points towards future purchases. There were highly touted styles. Double tracked on the multi-layered wall options, fiberglass alloys imitated observers caught in postures of dismissal, hard against boards, tossed after weeks of smooth sanding to a redundancy easily carted off.

            Quick shifts in tone could expose years of hiding, while the skyline remained regular, subject to systematic interpretation. Those who claimed to be without theories theorized over channels and frequencies, voices enraptured by the sacred hum of their own repetition. Flare guns were popular, fireworks of all kinds, images of bodies in naked ecstasy photographed in conventional colors and poses. Every so often, words on screens would announce that something—a limousine, a credit system, the abstractions of exchange—was on the verge of bursting from its own contradictions, while contradictions walking the streets confused themselves with plunder. Then would come the apparently spontaneous but usually orchestrated call for a final push, a new misnomer, a spray can for killing fleas which also contained necessary nutriments.

Carter, Dowling & Zolf 9/22 7 pm IPRC

The Switch presents poets Nathan Wade Carter, Sarah Dowling & Rachel Zolf
  When: Monday, September 22, doors at 6:30 p.m., reading at 7 pm sharp. FREE  
Where: IPRC, 1001 SE Division St., Portland, OR

Nathan Wade Carter is a poet, musician and artist living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry can be found most recently in Potluck Magazine and on InkNode. He writes and performs music under the name Purrbot. His music can be found on Bandcamp and Spotify. Find him online at nathanwadecarter.com.

Sarah Dowling is the author of DOWN, Birds & Bees, and Security Posture, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Selections from her work appear in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Her critical work has appeared in American Quarterly, GLQ, Canadian Literature, Signs and elsewhere. Dowling is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.




 

Rachel Zolf’s fifth book of poetry is Janey’s Arcadia (Coach House, Fall 2014), an aversive, conversive reckoning with the ongoing errors of Canadian settler-colonialism. Other publications include Neighbour Procedure (2010) and Human Resources (2007), which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Among her many collaborations with other artists, she wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami 2012. She has taught at The New School and the University of Calgary, and has recently returned to her hometown, Toronto.



by Nathan Wade Carter:

DO I MAKE RAINBOWS?


Do you bounce when thrown? Do you shatter like temperature?
Am I clear matter of some kind? Do I distort light and make rainbows?
Do I make this light or leaden?
Do I heave this cloud up like a bad hat?


by Sarah Dowling: 

 I’VE GOT TO TELL YOU



Can you Can you Can you Can

I promise you If we talk and you know

But see

I don’t know if I

shouldn’t tell but if

I let you You can’t I’m talking Are you

I’m not lonely just Is it, Is it Say yes



or say no Cause I really Tell me are

you wet Oh

Boy Won’t you If you tell you know

that I shouldn’t let you but

If I let You can’t tell I’m proud I hope

I’m not Is it Is it Cause I really

Tell me are you that



somebody listen Cause I really Tell me are

you can’t

tell I’m talking if that’s

difficult I hope I’m not

lost just Say Is it Cause I really Tell me are you that

somebody Cause I really You can’t



tell I’m talking further

 

by Rachel Zolf: 

JANEY'S INVOCATION
 
Infallible settlers say this is the latest season
they have known. All seed life seems somnolent,
yet a delicate suggestion of colour is at the tips
of the willows. An insidious, slow-moving process
is at work in the trees – one that spells from death
-car to drive more slowly unto drouth-world. The wine
of spring aflush on the face THE COPS- FIND- 2 J3<3
I H • ^ \ Hn is a Goad of Death Gourd of chanqts Takt
Life is totally totally lonely of Nature. Dearth is
the only reality we’ve got left in our nicey-nicey-
clean-ice-cream-tv scraps, so we’d better worship
the long wall of skulls next to the ball park. The delay
only whets our monstrosity. A unique beauty about
this pre-vernal landscape before it is screened
by red-brown colour, air and surface, semi-thick –
a boldness suggestive of how Janey and the rest
of the people witnessed the Italian primitifs
in ‘wild’ societies where the word ‘why’
can’t exist. With a minimum of means we
get a maximum of expression.
 

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.  

Maryrose Larkin & Anne Shaw, 5/24, 6 p.m., Hazel Room

The Switch presents poets Maryrose Larkin and Anne Shaw.
 
When: Saturday, May 24, 6 p.m. FREE
Where: The Hazel Room, 3279 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland

Maryrose Larkin lives in Portland, where she works as a freelance researcher. She is the author of Inverse (nine muses books, 2006), Whimsy Daybook 2007 (FLASH+CARD, 2006), The Book of Ocean (i.e. press, 2007), DARC (FLASH+CARD, 2009) and The name of this intersection is frost (Shearsman Books, 2010) Marrowing (Airfoil, 2010) and The Identification of Ghosts (Chax, 2013). Maryrose was a founder of Spare Room, a Portland-based writing collective, and is co-editor, with Sarah Mangold, of FLASH+CARD, a chapbook and ephemera poetry press. Maryrose received her MFA from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of Art. She keeps her friends close and her muses closer. 
 

Anne Shaw is the author of Dido in Winter (Persea 2014) and Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize (Persea 2007). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, The Los Angeles Review, Barrow Street, and New American Writing. She has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and From the Fishouse. A graduate of Yale and George Mason University, Shaw is currently a student of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She and her pit bull enjoy scaring small children and eating chicken bones from under picnic tables.


by Maryrose Larkin
from cure fraction

the stranger

in the margins
soft & rooted

her ideas
wandering

as is her habit

her house 
has eaten me
& kept me in awe

by Anne Shaw

New Architecture

 

& therefore the windows in which you must move

through hallways or rooms, their jittery

comeuppance, their glossy tabletops. What is a standard

 

occupation. No, really, define this. Is it self-

reliance? Conduit or spoon? That scrubbrush

ain’t done with its teething, its ache for, its hot

 

mess. I too have spent whole ages under the kitchen sink

erect with your comings and goings, my bristles tuned

to the latchkey & playing your favorite song. But this is how the body fails

 

its rest. In my eyes there are tiny funnels. In my ear

there’s a small, gross space. Meantime the grasses. Lakelight.

Creatures in the dirt-mounds. Small things. Burrowing, shining.