Remembering

Steve Abbott

Dan Calder

Doug Carter

Gerry Coletti

William Dickey

Martin Fleischer

Ron Garner

Don Gillis

Jay Hayes

Jim Holloran

Ross Marbury

Michael Rubin

George Stambolian

Steve Steinberg

Shelby Topp

Deb Watkins

Doug Wolfe

and David Glenn Luke Matt Steve Tomàs and Wayne

Long before it started people had claimed the land

from the dead below San Francisco whose bodies

were re-buried in Colma. New storms have blown the sand

off broken tombstones from the last two centuries

that - like discarded manhole covers ruined pediments

dug up foundations concrete slabs - were tossed

for breakwater on the beach. The sea never relents.

Every few years it exposes the names of the lost.

This morning two gulls fell on the Embarcadero dead

white plump unbloodied. Their fellows overhead

circled and keened their looping bodies dawn bright

clouding the blue sky wings flapping as in a rite

their cries like rhymes as the tides take form from regrets

and mourning is the wind that blows through sonnets

Peter Weltner has published five books of fiction including The Risk of His Music and How the Body Prays three poetry chapbooks three collaborations with the artist Galen Garwood most recently Water's Eye and three full length collections of poems News from the World at My Birth: A History The Outerlands and To the Final Cinder the latter two from Brickhouse Books. His poems and stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and journals and several national anthologies including two O. Henry's in 1993 and 1998. A graduate of Hamilton College and Indiana University he taught for thirty seven years at San Francisco State University. He and his husband Atticus Carr live in San Francisco steps away from the Pacific.

"TO THE FINAL CINDER captures what it is to be human. It is a humane poetry without artificiality a poetry that accepts without reservation the whipsaw of joy and pain we all must live through. Despite its title there are no cinders here but live coals glowing with life." -Bradley R. Strahan editor Visions International author of This Art of Losing.

"Formal. Beautiful. Tough. Intricate. Musical. In love with language and music. Romantic. Strong. Homoerotic. Intelligent. Excellent. Flowing. Tight. Descriptive. Narrative. Emotional. Internal world of memory and imagination. Dedication. Serious. Dedication to beauty. Meaning. Formal. Excessive. Glamorous. Finds love and passion in the sea hunger in dust. Urgent. Moral. Difficult. Strong and painful. Loss. Beauty rescues. Desire. Symphonic. Sad. Ambitious. Large and brave. I feel breath&shyless and sad that the world I live in doesn't care or is avoiding the size scale bounty moral rigor and passion of our lives that can be found here." -Linda Gregg author of All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems