December 4th, 2008
Sam Pereira
Sam Pereira was born in Los Banos, California in 1949, where he attended local schools, graduating from high school in 1967. He enrolled in what was then Fresno State College, with the intention of becoming a teacher. On the way to the credential, he discovered writing and an abundance of writers. The BA was conferred; he got the teaching credential, spent a year doing nothing but writing, and then went forth to that great cathedral of words: The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After two years of snow and other coldness, the MFA was his.
From there he did something truly inexplicable. He went back to Los Banos, where he worked in and later managed a feed/seed/dairy supply store for 21 years, dissolving and disappearing into the rolled oats and alfalfa seed on most days. When it was finally time to leave that existence, Sam pulled out the teaching credential and went to work as one of those teachers he had admired so many years before.
During all of those years, Sam Pereira has continued to write. His poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear, in such magazines as American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Cutbank, Nebraska Review, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. His work has also been included in several anthologies, among them Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets (Silver Skates Publishing, 1987), The Body Electric (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), How Much Earth (Heyday Books, 2001), and Sinatra…but buddy I’m a kind of poem [a collection of writings about the iconic singer] (Entasis Press, 2007).
There have been three books thus far: The Marriage of the Portuguese (L’Epervier Press, 1978), Brittle Water (Abattoir Editions/Penumbra Press, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1987), and most recently A Café in Boca (Tebot Bach, 2007). A reissue of The Marriage of the Portuguese, with an expanded section of poems written since the first edition, is scheduled to be published in 2009 by the Center for Portuguese Studies & Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
Sam continues to live and teach in Los Banos, along with his wife, Susan, and their dog, Sonny, on property once occupied by a livestock auction yard. He finds that final detail amusing.
A Café in Boca
He grabbed her in the middle
Of that busy sidewalk, swearing
At the top of his lungs to a world
Of aging men and their wives:
This was going to be a dance, dammit.
The music would be clarinets and slide
Trombones in the style of the Dorseys.
She’d be wearing the golden pumps
Of her youth, smiling at the drummer
While he, her husband of 37 years, followed
The Cuban waitresses around the room. She’d kid
About his roving old man’s eye and he’d wince
The wince of a player who knew his habits
Had been discovered, and by her.
The smile she gave him over ice coffees
In the San Martin Room of this once proud
Boca ballroom would have made Castro horny
Had this been the 50’s, which it wasn’t. She was
His now, the dancer of his dreams. They waltzed
The sunshine, and forgot the pain of children;
The aroma of the doctor’s spotless office. This
Became the significance of dying. In one another’s
Arms; in the middle of the hot cement, the final
Brave note of Tangerine bounced from the awful
Pink walls so that the world might know they had
Come here to dance and dance was what they had done.
