"Words' Worth" Poetry Readings
Poets at the Culture, Arts, and Parks Committee
of the Seattle City Council.
The Snow Lay Down And Slept For A While By Christine Deavel
Then all the daylight day make-bold robins in the choke cherry pulled at its clutched of red fruit. By three-o-clock dusk three cherries remained, but the rain came and woke the snow. We'll leave them, the robins said, for want. We're done with need.
Flush By Christine Deavel
We Float above the little restaurant, the moon a hat pin. Festive! Festive! The wait staff clank about in their dishes and the precious forks. Then they flutter-flutter with the wilted menus and the stiff, available wind list. Private in the room's middle he's bending over a sullen pudding, the man serene at the tiniest table. With pursed prettiness of the spoon he coaxes sweet-sweet from the baked and sleepy thing. Waft of candle flicker keeps us aloft and flushed and bumping shoulders gently. All is unbalanced, delightfully askew, from itch to scratch quickly quickly. The small orange room's a flower: wind- fragrant and sloppy-petalled. Look! The people are writing us love letters on their tablecloths. We grow teary at the tittles of burgundy, the chocolate thread, the miniscule lettuce leaf most of all. And we love them back. With every blanched-to-beauty asparagus spear ascending to the heaven of our mouths, we love them back.
Boy Selling Candy, July By Christine Deavel
A stranger-bird, that teenage boy selling candy at the porches. He was a shivering fern. His little speech tumbled from him. Save him from himself, he was soft to declare. He was such a thin fern, such a lost bird. A man in a van followed him, him listing from his full box. On more blocks, more grim birds working, working in the tight vines of the suburbs. He was such a delicate fern that boy, the stranger-bird working, working into the summer dusk.
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