By Blake More
Point Arena Third Thursday Poetry presents a virtual Third Thursday Zoom Poetry reading at 7:00pm on Thursday, June 17, 2021. This month features Lakeport Poet Laureate Georgina Marie, with open mic to follow.
Georgina Marie is a poet from Lakeport, Northern California. She is the current Lake County Poet Laureate for 2020-2022, the first Mexican-American and youngest to serve in this role for Lake County. She was appointed as the eleventh poet laureate of Lake County in March 2020.
Georgina is the new Volunteer Literary Coordinator and Poetry Out Loud Coordinator for the Lake County Arts Council, has served as co-editor for the Middletown Art Center’s RESILIENCE and RESTORE collections of written word and visual arts, and is an assistant poetry editor for Rivet Journal, an online literary journal from Red Bridge Press.
In 2020 she was an Anne G. Locasio scholar for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference poetry workshop. She was also a grant recipient of the California Relief Fund for Artists and Cultural Practitioners, funded by the California Arts Council.
In the first eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic and of her poet laureate term, she created a poetry column in collaboration with the Lake County Bloom, a bi-weekly writers circle with the Lake County Arts Council, a farmers’ market poetry contest with Lake County Farmers’ Finest, a radio show with KPFZ, and organized and hosted a number of readings and workshops including readings for the LGBTQ+ community and immigrants in detention centers. She aims to continue this path of making poetry inclusive to all.
In 2020, she was featured in a variety of readings including Eves at the Beat: Woman Reading at The Beat Museum, Latinx Poetry Night hosted by the City of Madison, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, the Madison Arts Commission, and the Wisconsin Arts Board; the City of Redmond and Beyond reading featured poets laureate from Washington and other states, and the San Francisco Poem Jam hosted by San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck and the San Francisco Public Library in honor of Native American Heritage Month.
As part of the Broken Nose Collective, an annual chapbook exchange, she created her first poetry chapbook Finding the Roots of Water (2018) and her second chapbook Tree Speak (2019). She is currently working on her full-length poetry manuscript and a series of personal essays. Visit her website at georginamariepoet.com. To watch or participate as an open mic reader, please email blake@snakelyone.com.
Third Thursday Poetry Zoom made possible thanks to local funding and support by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
To Be Still Is To Be Animal
How the sun glimmers and glistens through Valley Oaks on a rustic hillside.
How the warmth permeates amber honey skin and a tense body loosens.
How the ground cover of fallen autumn leaves aches of a soothing vibrancy.
How I breathe between these happenings. How yearning for more makes the muscles weak, turns the heart to a tiny blue egg, an oval shape, a crack on all sides as if someone took it and threw it into the night sky.
How the brittle shell was adorned with cornflower and flaxen.
How I came home to myself after the breaking, half-human, half-bird.
How winter frost is arriving again.
How a hunger remains.
How the Burrowing Owl and the American Robin observe, witnessing all of this.
How they don’t swallow time in the same way or long for difference.
What if all of this was enough?
