Gail Rudd Entrekin has taught poetry and English literature at California colleges for 25 years. Her books of poems are:   Walking Each Other Home (Longship Press, 2023), The Art of Healing (with Charles Entrekin) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2015), Rearrangement of the Invisible (Poetic Matrix Press, 2012), Change (Will Do You Good) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2005), nominated for a Northern California Book Award, You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998), and John Danced (Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press, 1983).

Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press since 2000, she edits the press’ online environmental literary magazine, Canary(www.hippocketpress.org/canary).  She is editor of the poetry anthology Yuba Flows (2007) and the poetry & short fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra (2002).

Her poems were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize and won the Women’s National Book Association Prize. They placed first runner-up for the Steve Kowit and finalist for the Frontier Open Poetry Prizes. Her newest book, Walking Each Other Home
(Longship Press), was a finalist for both the Blue Light Prize and the Richard Snyder Prize.  She and her husband, who lives with blindness, cancer and Parkinson’s Disease, reside in the hills of San Francisco’s East Bay.

 “Dance me to the end of love.”
                   Leonard Cohen

We see how the end is waving
like seagrass in the sky
its roundelay, its accordions
all the dying songbirds
flying up as you clap
your bruised and scarring hands
from the leafy cushions of your
chair, your unseeing eyes
that stay and stay and stay
you stooped and groping
for the bread I slide into
your hands before you
ask.  The birds swooping
now to pluck it from the air.
Finality is calling you, singing your name
and I would let go now of your hand
pass you on to your next partner
let you enter her embrace as I
declared a thousand times that we
would never, I would never, but you
are only a thread, a whisper, soon
I must take my chances
with the vast and empty world
of unrecognizable song
I who always sing while
you hold me, the way we
move together, how will I sing
when you fly up with the birds
and leave me there with a song
too slow, too dark for dancing?

            from Catamaran

Stewart Florsheim was born in New York City, the son of a Holocaust survivor and a refugee from Hitler's Germany. He has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has won several awards.

Stewart was the editor of Ghosts of the Holocaust, an anthology of poetry by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989). He wrote the poetry chapbook, The Girl Eating Oysters (2River, 2004). In 2005, Stewart won the Blue Light Book Award for The Short Fall From Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006). His collection, A Split Second of Light, was published by Blue Light Press in 2011 and received an Honorable Mention in the San Francisco Book Festival, honoring the best books published in the Spring of 2011. Stewart's new collection, Amusing the Angels, won the Blue Light Book Award in 2022.

Stewart has been awarded residencies from Artcroft and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. He has held readings throughout the Bay Area, as well as in New York, Boston, London, and Jerusalem. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife. You can find more information about Stewart and his work on his website,  
www.stewartflorsheim.com   

Hunger

Walking through the locked hallways,
I imagine maniacal sounds—people howling,
the indecipherable wails of a man
tearing apart a book as he looks for
the one sentence that will save him.
Instead, there is only the blaring
silence marked by squeaking soles.
In the corridor for people who will not eat,
there are no mirrors, only Hockney posters—
blue sky, blue pool, green palms, sun.
The hall appears too cheerful
for the young girls who seem to float by,
girls who may want to be invisible
or defined by the spaces they have emptied.
My daughter does not want to eat. I think
I can understand: there’s purity in restraint.
The body becomes a temple of denial
and grace. She waves to us from her room
and I recall the days when she stopped eating,
my wife and I finally raging at each other—
the hunger beginning to consume our lives.