Danusha Laméris is a poet and essayist raised in Northern California and born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her newest book, Blade by Blade (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). Copper Canyon calls it a “book of hungers: Hunger for the bright glare of poppies, for the hidden name of the beloved, for the cracked continental edge, for all we keep in ‘the heart’s farthest chambers’ …These poems are luminous missives tossed on the wind asking us to re-enter the world we’ve forsaken, to set foot, as if for the first time, on the green earth and begin again.”
Join us on Sunday February 9 to hear Danusha read from this collection and other poems, and talk about her practice and the craft of poetry with our host, Meg Weston.
This event is FREE.
They Say the Heart Wants
what it wants, but no one tells you what it gets.
So here’s a list, mine: tall grasses, blowing in the wind,
swirled glass cups, peacock blue, bought in Lebanon.
Fog off the California cliffs, dark boulders on the shore.
Billie Holiday’s I’ll be seeing you in all the old
familiar places, cycling through my auditory cortex.
Dogs pulling at the leash. Small white plates
of wild greens and beets. The time a man kissed
my hand when we met, then pressed my palm
to his cheek. Sei Shōnagon’s eleventh-century list
of Things That Give One a Clean Feeling: an earthen cup,
a new metal bowl, a rush mat, the play of light on water
as one pours it into a vessel, a new wooden chest.
To which I add a drawer of beeswax candles,
steam rising from a pot of tea. So much stored
in the heart’s farthest chambers. And though
he’s been dead for decades now, I still feel the kiss.
My whole arm shivers with its half-life.