Rooftop Poetry Club - Celia White

Celia White

Bio:
Celia White is a poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in local and national publications, including the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Exquisite Corpse. Her collection of poems, Letter, was published by Ambient Press in 2007. She has taught writing to fourth graders, mental health care clients, Hospice nurses, and high school students. In 1995, Celia received the Just Buffalo Literary Center Writer in Residency Award, and in 1998 was awarded the University of Buffalo recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 2006, she won the Best Poet Award from Buffalo Spree and from Artvoice. She is the co-founder of Urban Epiphany, Western New York's largest poetry event, a marathon reading where every poet in the region is invited to read.

Poems:

Letter

Dear head, dear skull, dear cup in the mist.
By now you are here. You have lost
the loosened envelope, discarded it
like shell or husk or shirt.

Dear drinker, dear last star, dear April moon.
I never use up the simplest parts of my self.
Purity is an arrow and a vow. There is no poet
without god or blood. Use this.

Dear broken-hearted true believer, dear breath,
dear Jerusalem.
I had a week of pure paranoia, the sense
of some sensation scarred.
Days of tiny propositions and much pleasure.
A week of words, their littlest workings.

Dear rose in winter, dear word turned name, dear sun, shipwrecked as a lover or an artifact.
I want another town.
An afternoon of sound and lying down.
What is the difference between flirtation
and prediction, between prophecy and confession.
I want to know the world is still going around.

Dear man on the street at midnight, coatless,
arms full of flowers. Dear bone on a string.
Dear secret mouth, speaking.
If you were here I would be drunk and supreme
if you were here I would be naked and afraid
if you were here I would not sing out loud
I would never stop sweating
if you were here each eye would be x-ray
there would be no end of rosin and sawdust.

Dear poet, dear ear, dear axis of voices.
Keep the holy things holy.
Pursue the case for conditional optimism.
Keep spying on my city.
Enclosed is my absence and my ecstasy.
Carry it, like coals, like craving, back to me.