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Bob Stanley, Sacramento, CA.

Picture
Poet Laureate of Sacramento from 2009 to 2012,  Bob Stanley teaches English at California State University, Sacramento. Mr.  Stanley has organized readings, conferences and workshops all over northern  California for nearly forty years. In 2009 he was chosen by the California Arts  Council to edit Sometimes in the Open, an anthology of poems by poets laureate of California’s cities and counties. Bob has published two chapbooks, Walt Whitman Orders a Cheeseburger, (Rattlesnake Press, 2009) and Eleven  Blue Strings(little m press, 2012). His poems have been published in many  journals, including California  Quarterly, Calaveras Station,  and Suisun Valley Review, as well as  in The Sacramento Bee. A fifth  generation Californian and UCLA graduate, Bob and his wife Joyce have raised  their four children in Sacramento. His first full-length poetry collection, Miracle Shine, will be published by CW  Press in 2013.

The Taco Truck

They had seen the taco truck down Sepulveda, but couldn’t catch it. It was said  their kobe was 
 he finest this side of Kyoto and the salsa was laced with peppers from the foothills
 above the Sonora – flavored with the fire of a desert sunset.  The first Twitter  feed at 5:47
led them to City of Industry, once-bustling, blighted by vacancy,  but easy to reach from
the 5 and the 91. Traffic looked bad, even at that hour,  but their spirits were high, as they
dreamed of their goal. The hard-shredded  goat cheese from a cave in Oregon, that
Lompoc cabbage delivered via one-speed  bicycle, and of course the beef, that hand-
massaged, milk-marinated beef. Ben  Stiller had called it a heavenly amalgam of flavors,
his tongue cried out for  more. But on that fateful day, it was not to be. Nine million
vehicles with  nine million hungry citizens tried to squeeze onto not enough elevated
roads.  Clouds formed in the west, and the red lights of the taco truck blended in with  all
the others, and merged into the sea of lights on the 405.

The Banjo Justifications

 Living  on a hill there was only one direction down and the instrument had an easy open
 sound so the boy played, or thought he did 

Wind  carried strands of water through cuts in the hill. the boy saw lights wink from
Berkeley at sunset
 
When it came time to leave nobody was ready and that took time to  unravel
 
But  the banjo was always ready to embrace the boy with its staccato  tones
 
An  uncle had once played, but left the banjo in front of an oncoming tractor, or  maybe it
was a mule
 
Generations  of jews listened to it in their ghettos, but that wasn’t exactly a banjo, and
nobody was going to admit to the boy that they were his  jews.
 
He  learned about the tunings, how the minor and the major key can be felt at the  same
time.
 
One  day the banjo was gone
 
He  had learned to play it.


 

Where I'm from

I’m from a foot-tapping hip-hopping 
finger snapping place
where the ideas come out where
all the ideas come
in
 
I’m from whipped 
cream like a bad dream and they all  scream
when it hits my face and drips
 into the space below my ears
across the surface of the moon of
 my nose, eyes closed
 
I am from poems I didn’t
 understand (and some I did)  from
 listening 
watching voices hearing faces
 gathering the shy or rowdy  sounds
 from wonderful wandering  something
 changed how I felt 
who I what I how I knew -
 Am I from you?
 
Who wants to read first?
the last one, hiding his face
from Athens by way of  Shakespeare
lover of Lysander beneath the
redwoods and oldest oaks shading the summer sun
 I am from the beat of the drum
 I am from attitude
 
The attitude of ideas 
the attitude of saying what  you
must say
and knowing the ways of
knowing and writing
the ways of writing I am from poems  and
stories and arguing and singing and sharing  of 
love love love love 
from you are from we are from  spoken
slam poetry word all of us  together
where I’m from’s
changed forever.

Another Semester Ends

Because the goodbye is a dependent clause
Because the goodbye is often unsupported and without specific  detail
Because the goodbye is rarely organized, flowing from a  last-minute need to say or write
        what is due, and therefore lacks structure,  much less effective transition or “flow”
Because the goodbye lacks development, and can seem to end as  soon as it begin
Because there is no formal process of review, because goodbyes  sometimes happen 
        without warning, because they often use wordy constructions  that don’t get to the 
        point, because punctuation is scarce
And perhaps most of all because goodbyes are implicit, not  explicit in their message of I
        hope to see you again soon, or let’s hang out  like this again sometime
I’m looking for a better way to leave you a  note
as you go, as I go.

Hinge

The  way you told us, you slammed the door                                                 
                                                  shattered glass onto the sidewalk
 as  you stormed out onto Mission Street,                                                 
                                                  father and two brothers staring back at  you.
 
Everything  changed for the family then:                                                 
                                                 for one, your name, instead of Salzman,
Jewish, salt-man, looking back toward                                                 
                                                a land your parents fled with you, 
 
you  came up with Stanley, after the  steam car.                                                 
                                               Sounded American enough. For religion you 
never  found a replacement, but money was OK.                                                 
                                               So you opened up a store across the  street
 
from  your brothers, sold the same furniture                                                 
                                               they sold, didn’t speak to them for twenty  years.
 Two  stores, one family, split forever on either  side                                                 
                                              of the door you closed that cold San Francisco  day.
 
Your  father, Harry Salzman died,                                                 
                                              two days after I was born.  He never knew me,
his  great-grandson, knew his grandson not so  much,                                                
                                              knew you, his son, oy, son Joseph, least of all.