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Angela Elizabeth Boyce is a graduate of
the University of California, San Diego with her Bachelor of Arts in United
States History. She has performed throughout the United States and is currently
the Austin International Poetry Slam Champion and ranked 5th at the National
Poetry Slam 2001. Boyce resides in Sacramento, California where she writes.
She will be selling her newest chapbook Sloppy Wet Kisses Goodbye for five
dollars.
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 Emily Kagan started performing poetry one
year ago when a friend of hers dragged her to the Berkeley slam. Since
then Emily has made her mark on the Bay Area poetry scene, competing on
the UC Berkeley collegiate slam team (national champions 2001) and the
San Francisco slam team (top 10 at the National Slam competition.) She
has self published a book of her own poetry, “Duct Taping Halos To My Head”,
and is currently working on a CD. Emily is on of the co-founders of SheSlam,
a women’s poetry collective in the Bay Area dedicated to promoting and
supporting new poets. She hosts a monthly poetry reading called Birth of
Verse in the heart of San Francisco. Teasingly referred to as “the Rock
Star” by her friends, Emily takes an in-your-face approach to poetry, striving
to always keep her work grounded, contemporary and for the people.
Of Beauty I went dancing with angels the other night because I like the smell. The smell of the sweat that spits off their beaming brows falls on the clouds, making hard to keep you balance, making it hard to see who you’re dancing with because it stings your eyes and smells like shit. It kind of smells like my body salted with tears, torn up unto bite size pieces and roasted over the open flame in her chest for the fifth time this week for god knows what. It’s an acquired taste like gasoline fumes that tempt my breath to inhale and ask, got a match? But to stand over a puddle in a gas station you can watch swirls like shapeless desires wondering what they’re doing, wondering why they were spilt, wondering what impossible kind of color they are and why they look so beautiful in the stark fluorescent light. I loved her most when she got like this. I loved her best when she wore virginal white, angle dust white, simplicity’s white as if wearing it were enough to make it true, perhaps gain virtue by osmosis. It kind of smells like starvation because you can’t swallow him whole. And you desperately suck at the neck of your beloved contradiction because he told you he had truth coursing through his veins and if you could only get the jugular it might all start to make sense. He was so beautiful I wanted to smack him. But he was too busy duct taping halos to my head that just wouldn’t stick and looking at me as if I were the most amazing thing he’d ever seen. As he walked away he said couldn’t stand the smell. But I can’t even tell you what it feels like to have been the most amazing thing. I dance with the angels because I don’t believe in the devil, just shit talking 17 year olds with halos stashed in their backpacks. I wouldn’t believe in angels either if it wasn’t for the smell. The smell of a shoulder clenched between your teeth because if you loosen your jaw you just might scream. Or you might just cry or you might just kiss him and love him more for forcing himself on a 13 year-old girl. And that fact that all three are just as likely scares the hell out of you. Because whether or not you believe it becomes irrelevant in a black hole of infinite kindness created in the arms attached to that shoulder and the face resting on top of that shoulder bending down and kissing your forehead “Baby, what’s the matter?” The smell of body parts scattered by the wind of a passing moment, his perfect moment, his picture perfect first kiss moment that he had to pin me down and hold me still for so I wouldn’t ruin it. And I said stop and he said I love you and I said stop and he said I love you and I said stop and he said I love you and tough I said I understood I love you because I know how beauty can fog up everything important just when you need everything the most. And I know what it feels like to watch the blood running rivers down open wrists and think my god to be filled with stuff as beautiful as this. And I know what it’s like to search for clarity to find that angels smell like shit. But I know it’s not that I have simply never loved anything beautiful. I have just never found anything beautiful to be simple.
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