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Ekphrastacy: Evolution: “Lead”

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Star Struck

by Cathy Barber

after

Lead

by Sara Kabot

 

When the moon rises and a few stars emerge

above the city lit with all its towering

street lights and convenience stores selfishly

glowing, sometimes a tired person

 

will plunk down on a metal porch chair,

one with brightly colored cushions

to cup one’s bones, and stare out at her rectangle

of clover and crabgrass,

 

perhaps beyond the curb to the two narrow lanes,

where an eight-year-old rides in tight circles,

and across to the slanting cement steps

on the facing two-bedroom. She might wave,

 

and someone might wave back, and both

might scan the dandelions amid the green

and think, Tonight, these are my private stars,

this rectangle my only sky.

 

Sara Kabot, Artist:  Sarah Kabot’s work studies everyday objects and sites that are typically believed to embody shared societal truths. These have included public monuments, libraries, and news media. In Forgetting Lessons, a series of newsprint collages and digital prints, she collapses imagery from various stories in a single day’s edition of a newspaper into a single discordant image. The resultant abstractions reflect the distortions and lapses that occur in public recollection of meaningful social and political events.

 

Cathy Barber, Poet: Cathy Barber’s work has been widely published. A partial list of publications includes The San Francisco Bay Guardian, West Trestle Review, Kestrel, Literary Mama, paper wasp, Presence, Sierra Nevada College Review, AIM, Concho River Review, SLAB, Ballyhoo Stories, The Dos Passos Review, Sweet, and Tattoo Highway.

Additionally her work has appeared in several anthologies, most notably, An Eye For An Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11, which won the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award; Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California; and The Cancer Poetry Project Vol. 2, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2013, Midwest Book Awards

Ms. Barber’s work has received individual awards as well, including second place in the S. Portia Steele Memorial Award for Excellence in Poetry (2006) and second place in Gin Bender’s 2003 poetry contest. In 2016, her “Three Short Love Poems” was nominated for a Best of the Net award.

She has three chapbooks, two self-published and the third, Aardvarks, Bloodhounds, Catfish, Dingoes, published by Dancing Girl Press, 2018. A fourth manuscript was a quarter finalist in the 2014 Vine Leaves Vignette Collection contest. She is currently finishing a full length collection.

She has an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from California State University, East Bay, and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  She taught for many years with California Poets in the Schools and served on the board. She has also served on the board of Literary Cleveland for two years.

 

Please enjoy this video for Ekphrastacy August 2020 in Response to Evolution:

 

 

To learn more about our current exhibition, Evolution, click here

To learn more about our Literary programs, click here

Most of Heights Arts’ programming is free! If you would like to show your support for our poetry programming you can text to give HERE, or learn the many ways you can support us HERE.

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