Welcome to The Gallery at darkcoastpress.com!
Think of The Gallery as an art gallery of great writing from a variety of writers in prose, poetry, essay, and experimental work. We diplay the best of submitted work openly, more like a gallery than a journal, magazine, or review. Come in off the street, read a bit, take its impressions away with you. The menu to the left is arranged by latest published edition, and all authors and featured pieces organized accordingly. Check back monthly for each new edition. Thank you, and enjoy reading!
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Paul Everett Nel
son is a poet, father, teacher and broadcaster. Founder of the non-profit SPokenword LAB (SPLAB!) - Paul has published a book of essays: Poetry: North American Field Poetics (VDM, Verlag, Germany, 2008) and an epic poem re-enacting Auburn history, entitled A Time Before Slaughter (Apprentice House, 2009). A professional broadcaster From 1980 to 2006, he's interviewed hundreds of authors, poets, activists and whole-system theorists for a syndicated public affairs radio program.
Paul has performed his poetry in numerous venues in the Pacific Northwest and his hometown of Chicago and has conducted over 400 writing and performance workshops throughout the Puget Sound region. He lives in Columbia City, WA.
Paul Nelson
Paul Nelson
angelic presence to rescue my bad driving; now she rests.
She’s had the soup and moved on, her baby feet still, point south.
They named her Ada; two stems of her bloodline same as mine
of humid prairie evenings west of the city where
onions once stunk. The spiral confounds with its
hard to track fractals but we make the myth a
bloodline angel rests as ever upon a pillow of dirt;
its case made with the image of Odin’s fall from the tree
the Runes unspy’d the flight of this flock resemble
the diagonals of starlings without the gray coherence
how to see it all: Ada, the death of brothers, the blood
line soup, the round stones marked with clues all as
gift an economy that can only pay with soul construction,
perception and the ancient art of invocation.
The Runes brought back to life by the mixing of blood.
I want to know it well: Othila, an inheritance gained like Sam
of that which he loves most. Or Hayden the great
pain assuaged for the species sitting
content in his cat-shredded chair by the fire.
In mahogany chairs, in a burlap robe or not,
smelling of sweat or lavender, they each figure
(conspire) the giveaway maybe fresh deer tracks
in day-old mud: we’ve abandoned the seamstresses
or made their work real again, needle quickly stitching
a lion without a mane the man of the house much
before his time and a touch-up; a hand full of sulfur
how to fix the fire in time turn it make it soft beyond
softness the cloth of the pillow case enables surrender.
The corpse of an old woman.
It is not visible except on second and fourth Sundays, kept
final rest in Colón, huge city of the dead. Separation.
is what the dead teach and this better place is your
birthright, like Sam before he flees NW winter for
Southern summer again a life renewed with South
American wine and a daily maté ritual. Submission.
Retreat. The will to carry it out. The quiet chrysalis.
All things that fly pour out from the deepest cavities
of the cave: gone as far as I can on stubborn will and
guile, the sulfur smell of the hot springs; this is
undeniable. The deep green it makes in mud.
He dreamt of breaking glass.
Timeshift in the convex mirror of the dreamtime. And on the bed she is dead: as
kicking and the grief will go on for one half generation
no poppies for this grave somehow nasturtiums
somehow plum blossoms can find their way from
Slaughter to at least normal, whatever that is
we decide and cast away a birthright and all the
temporary regalia.
He works downstairs; they help him as he smiles through gritted teeth.
His bare feet secrete the silt of all the bloodline’s hesitation black flies feast on; the petals that fall. Insatiable September
roses or maybe in May with gorse blossoms or plum
again good enough for one Frank Natsuhara here’s
a monument to surrender he thinks and he
smiles.
He sees in the distance a heron lumbering into elegant flight.
Distant suns: the local humans prefer the smell of cardamom to
somehow figured how to prevent that grazing
mammoth from ending up elephant ass over
tea kettle in a new latitude; somehow knew
every last one, even the mouth-breathers,
as jewels of the kind that Indra tried to
remind us while we fixed our gaze on
all the falling plum blossoms.
Paul Nelson
1.6.09: My picture’s in the paper a lot & I get to grow my hair out. (M. McClure)
2.6.09: Amalio says he’s a U.M. Observer – Unexpected Mexican.
2.23.09: UNFAIR says the cat’s eyes – feather toy on the other side of the spokes.
3.1.09: Tailgating @ 80 with his bumper sticker: Real Men Love Jesus.
3.4.09: Something inside me wants to beat this cat until he learns to love me.
3.9.09: Happy Birthday ex-wife – here’s two tickets to Crime & Punishment.
3.15.09: Hanging from an Auburn pickup truck, a scrotum – hopefully plastic.
5.8.09: From Almondina’s 1st wordcloud: Fire, hurry dear, share one’s nervous flesh.
5.26.09: I tell April to flesh out her poem about anorexia.
6.22.09: At the farm she says: If you eat venison, I’m not going to give you head.
