What country, friends, is this?
And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

THIS IS AN INVITATION TO ALL POETS, WRITERS, READERS, AND LOVERS OF LITERATURE, YOUNG, OLD, IN BETWEEN, KNOWN, UNKNOWN, SUBMERGED, EMERGED AND EMERGING: Rhyming, free verse, expensive or expansive verse, reverses, metered, learned, unlearned, experimental—all varieties, styles and non-styles are welcome.

The reading series, Poetry At The Cobalt, is located in downtown Fort Bragg at the beautiful Cobalt Gallery, thanks to Button Quinn, artist and gallery owner who has graciously made the space available to us. The readings are the 2nd Sunday of the month, 4–6 pm. The next reading at the Cobalt Gallery will be Sunday, January 12, 2025, featuring Zida Borcich,* followed by open mic readings. There is a signup sheet and each poet reads for 5 minutes.  Please get this around far and wide, as we’d like to reach all over Mendocino County and beyond. Any suggestions or ideas you have, including other people to invite, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, and looking forward to seeing you Sunday, January 12th at the Cobalt Gallery.

PEGASUS SOARS NO MATTER WHAT,
Larry Felson & Joe Smith
510-684-8270

*Zida Borcich

Zida Borcich is a mom, grandma, journalist, letterpress printer, graphic designer, jazz singer, and occasional poet. She lives on the Mendocino Coast of northern California. Since 2010, she has published Real Estate Magazine, a monthly that features ads and a single, locally focused story. She writes many of the stories, along with a column titled “It’s REAL.” Happiest times are spent with her daughters, grandkids, and beloved partner, and when she is not cooking, traveling, singing, or gardening, she hangs out with a big collection of cherished friends who reside in the nest of creativity, intelligence, beauty, and fun that is her community. The works in her first book of poetry, What It Seemed Then—Poems & a Fable were gathered from many years of sporadic poetry writing spells. The act of gathering these pieces into one place has been a most engaging project and she is surprised to note that, “It’s turned into a kind of inadvertent autobiography.”

FOR THE LIFE OF THE PRINTER

For twenty-seven years, the author had a letterpress print shop on Main Street in Fort Bragg, long after other techniques of printing had supposedly abandoned hand-set lead type reproduction to the Dark Ages. But no, she kept printing that way and kept finding troves of musty old type in people’s defunct hobby shops and sheds.
I walk in and the smell of old just hits me in the face.
It’s that type I bought down south, wooden cabinets
full of dusty gray metal.
These two hot, wet days, muggy, stifling,
swelled the rollers on the C&P
a full quarter inch,
And brought up the grotesque, fetid,
Oaky smell of dead type in mouse-turd cases.
They used to say that a font of ATF type
was good for the life of the printer—
This life is likely its second or third.
Despite their funk, I feel compassion for the lonely elders
Who expended their one-time sheen
on uncountable impressions.
Those letters were left alone too long in that grampa’s
Quonset hut, before the driver leaned
up against my door jamb with his,
“I gotta pickup loada type out here for ya.”
Let us join together now
In a rite of artificial resuscitation:
Let us raise those moribund figures from their little coffins,
One piece by one with our fingertips,
Place the musty relics lovingly
Beside the living ones,
And use them again, ink them up,
Put our fingers up against them,
Click them into place syllabically,
Nesting them against their long-lost brothers,
Press them chummily against the dampened stock
In an alphabetic composition once again
With meaning.