Shockley & Pennisi, This Saturday, Oct. 28, 8pm, Durham Arts Council!

Please spread far & wide...

Who: Evie Shockley, author of just published a half-red sea, scholar of African American and Gothic literature, a dear friend, give her three words and she brings back a six-course feast.

Who: Linda Pennisi, author of just published Suddenly, Fruit, director of the Creative Writing Program at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, threw a hook into a book and pulled out all the stops.

What: Desert City Poetry Series & Carolina Wren Book Launch, together again, the way we were, for old time's sake, just like yesterday.

When: This Saturday, October 28th, 8pm!

Where: Durham Arts Council, PSI Theatre, 120 Morris Street, Downtown Durham!

Why: "A ballerina will not stop / inserting her foot / into a pink shoe" "I'll stone you from the heart out"

How Much: Free & open to the public!

See you there....

Evie Shockley
Poems.
More Poems.


Linda Pennisi


"elocation (or, exit us)"
by Evie Shockley


the city is american, so she
can map it. train tracks, highways slice through, bleed
only to one side. like a half-red sea
permanently parted, the middle she'd

pass through, like the rest, in a wheeling rush,
afraid the divide would not hold and all
would drown – city as almighty ambush –
beneath the crashing waves of human hell.

the city's infra(red)structure sweats her,
a land(e)scape she can't make, though she knows
the way. she's got great heart, but that gets her where?
egypt's always on her right (it goes

where she goes), canaan's always just a-head,
and to her left, land of the bloodless dead.


"Somewhere in a Dark Auditorium"
by Linda Pennisi

A ballerina will not stop
inserting her small foot
into a slim pink shoe,
criscrossing silk ribbons
over the bone of ankle.
Sometimes I slip into the inside
of her body, where the soul
wells into the walls of that cup
the music, quivering there
like a diver in a swarm
of tropical fishes, her shape brushed
with undulations of hunger
and wonder, a hundred bodies
of tremulous light. The dancer's shoes
fill with flesh; her flesh
brims with music. What can she do
with such hunger, such sadness?
What can her body do
but tremble and spill
into dance?