First Tuesdays Presents Sarah Gambito

When: March 3, 2020
Where: Espresso 77 Café, 35-57 77th Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372.
Time: 7:00 — 8:30 PM (open-mic sign up at 6:30)
Cost: $5 minimum purchase at the food counter.
More Information: Richard Jeffrey Newman

Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Loves You (Persea Books), Delivered (Persea Books), and Matadora (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, POETRY, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic and other journals. She holds degrees from The University of Virginia and The Literary Arts Program at Brown University. Her honors include the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers, The Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts from the Asian American Arts Alliance and grants and fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts and The MacDowell Colony. She is Associate Professor of English/Director of Creative Writing at Fordham University and co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving writers and readers of Asian American literature.

Here Are Two Sample Poems

Charlottesville Curriculum

I am afraid of your transcendental death.
When people say think of a man. I think of a brown man.
Sometimes the earth grows khella because she can feel our suffering.
Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis.

When people say think of a man. I think of a white man.
I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain.
Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis.
I was drunk holding my teeth in like students.

I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain.
You die like an actor.
I was drunk holding my teeth in like students.
My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water.

You die like an actor.
I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person.
My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water.
Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme.

I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person.
Where does it hurt, we say.
Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme.
I am afraid of your transcendental death.

Rapprochement

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the chance of the enemy not attacking but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. —Sun Tzu

My father called me a chink
so I’d know how to receive it.
So I wouldn’t be surprised.

Therefore the good soldier will be terrible in his onset and prompt in his decision.

In the wall, I bricked up my secret.
So it would gush forth. I did this for effect.
So you would know me.

On the day of battle your soldiers might weep bedewing their garments.

But it grew like a bullet loving its flowerstain.
It happened nonetheless.

But let them at once be brought to bay.

Because you are simply my medic watching me.
I’m a poem someone else wrote for me.
All of the characters “beautiful and flawed.”

When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far.

My sister said, you can forget our way of life?
I said yes and was annoyed. She ran away and I was desperate for her.
I was screaming into the mindspeaker.

When far away, we must make him believe we are near.

I said, Christine, christine, christine.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.