 I'd like to welcome you to the first rainbow LGBTQ reading during Pride Month. So welcome everybody. So our first read, oh, we're at the, for other people who may be listening who are blind or can't see, we're at the, excuse me, the Kellogg public library. We have picture windows in the back and a nice, wonderful seating area. So our first reader will be youth Jennifer. And her writing includes her poetry, including her 2020 book Minno, and her 1995 book Out of History's Junk Jar, as well as two books of co-translation from Japanese to English with poet Makai Ko. Machiko. Machiko. Oh, she. Two recent anthologies that include her poems on queer nature and Rhodes Taken, contemporary Vermont poetry. She has taught undergraduate creative writing, directed in non-profit in arts and disability, and currently serves on the board of Vermont Humanities. She lives with her wife in Burlington, Vermont. Welcome to Rhodes Taken. It's really great to see everybody here for Pride. And I just want to thank Linda and Robin for organizing this, and Bon Bon, for recording it, and all of you for wanting to be here. So it's been really fun. And I am a white woman with gray hair, and I'm wearing a green paisley turtleneck and a black sweater. That's my description of myself before we begin. So I'm going to read eight poems, and for Pride, I decided I was going to make all of them, read all of poems, or poems that are love poems in one way or another. So, in that celebration, I'm starting with The Climb. We're that couple standing at the edge, dead, second breakfast, a generous shimmer over appalling death, shorebirds, sinking heels, sequences beginning to fail. Today, drowsing has dogged me. We rose early, then try to remember. Slowly a picture, a zigzag stairway up from the beach, and that's it. Here in the banked clouds hover over the spray, the grass so young and pokes up peacock blue against the greening past. This is the sepia and the magic ink of aging. The moment beyond recall, my mind increasingly blank. Well, I reason why fuss, face out to the shore with you reading in a chair, the cloth rim of your hat, a tender curve around everything. Yes, I remember. The climb up sweet hillsides, your body over mine and under, salt cove behind your knee, a great guffaw of love. And just today, as we passed, the breeze picked up a few shoots on the dune, turquoise in the sun and silver. Yeah, so the poems also, as you can tell, also address aging a lot. And they're situated in the natural world, by which I mean the queer world. And by which I mean an abundant, very surprising, beautiful, experimental wayward world. So that immortality is great. An essay on age. It was a day to sing the praises of fire, to bow to its purpose, toes stretched apart, layers peeled, our bodies gathered into their warmest folds. It was a day of mists, of freezing and love. Now the night when it returns will be kinder. Now the moon will dominate the dogs, sending them wild into the burdock, and we will have them for hours on their backs. This is the bright snap of apple, catch in the throat. You realize how deeply you have loved. You blow hard on the flames, and each day is remembered mainly for the brush of lips, for the way we stand, hip to hip in sheets of rain, somehow covered enough. And the next one is ground. It starts out simply at a campsite, a companion low ring of rocks, navigably even ground, a bit rocky for bare feet, yellowing birches, maple tops turning, bathing suit dripping on the line. So much bravery depends on love. This morning you rose early for work, sun dazzling the mist, a warm cup lifted between us. Now the day here is full of slowness, hours after breakfast on foot among ferns, a long time listening, dry leaves dropping into the dishes, a shuffling on the forest floor, the broken bars of the ripples building and rebuilding, sips of coffee, bottom grits in my teeth, a fold-up chair near our fold-up shelter, the dog asleep again in the leaves, checkered tablecloth, red potholder. Once again I'm afraid. Would I know such gratitude without you? Get away. Descending the dune, fine sand and deepest snow, there's a comfort of being no one known. There is so much sky and there is walking the edge, one foot above, one foot below, two women weathered to a crinkling love. There's the luck of aging, a whole seashore empty but for us, the plummet and wings bursting back out. Last night I watched your face above the comforter, knitted cap half on half off, your cheek flushed in firelight, your eyes tender toward the page of a book. There was a time, summer dusk, when children screamed, scaring themselves again and again until they were hushed and the rituals of tooth and towel began. There were the two of us, summer and winter, padding down the pads. In this sweep of sand we sink with each step and our lives, comfortingly small, go on, bundled in our shelves like beetles scaling the rim of a bowl. What stays beneath the surface, the ocean waves won't tell. Not much crawls out to meet us, perhaps a nervous shoreline skitter, something upsetting those seaweed piled with stones. Where, not far into the waves, is something we think we know. First a nose, then whiskers and curious eyes. At night the tips of our noses ride the pillows and our eyes deep under, search, search again and wait to follow. The plate. Along the road the winter birds are stuck to the trees. It's cold. Chocolate doesn't last an hour on the plate. Something's wrong in the middle. Swallowing is hard. The birds hang round as apples no more than an arms distance up. Our failing steps disturb nothing but us. Not the still brown birds, nor the rows of urban compost heaped beneath coverlets of stiff white gulls, nor the hawks who are somewhere in this strip of furrows and trees. We can't go far for fear of a sudden stitch, a catch of breath. This level of illness is new. We turn to go home. I realize again I'm in love. It happened in a sea of summer freckles. It happened as camembert softens in its skin, impossible to refuse. Fingers fall, I'm stuffed with love. Before I knew it the square, the oval, angled jaw, wondering brow, incalculable fin rays, all residue of smiles were drilled into my mind, described more distinctly, more convincingly than any text I've ever learned. There are tests for what hurts her, hordes of plastic tourniquets. The birds pillow their hearts in stillness. I try not to worry. I find a few foods. Neither a bad joke nor a limerick helps. But alone while she sleeps the sound loosed from my throat sings, helpless and bare as any beast alive on our legs to dance across ice in the glittering night. I am granted a great love you must consider that once we stood them all at the top snow-fed their hips the stillness on our cheeks not pain exactly. That we waited and waited life messy and moist that we saw with new eyes this world bright and shocking. That your roundness now is lifted here within my palm curved on fingers arching back that we knew nothing of our bodies we knew only the snow was deep and no one said we couldn't go there. So the next one that I'm going to read is actually part of a longer series of columns that were performed at an anniversary celebration at the Flynn in their black box space the Flynn space for the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and it was accompanied by a choreography but you'll just have to imagine it. So these were a series of moments so I'm going to sort of pause for a couple of beats between each one a series of very short moments covers throne the gentlest bite pear juice runs wild on my tongue morning bed still warm tracing deep circles seconds go by fingers still amid the blossoms gravely glancing down the first bud lives just one petal those close can't hold back rising from dense leaves you may see these buds or not they will feel your touch later steeped in work morning returns a breeze stirs cover throne you stretch slowly the tension leaves my hips to remember dawn morning gates flow early summer dear light melting with the grass you completely kissed the new shoots can't wait they lean out of the basket vanished more humming hip pulled out of joint the aging lover rolls flat old gate part busted still dripping you step from the tile to oil palm touch rose utterly these are yours to hold these mine for the moment unwrapped both feasting summer dusk deepens you draw me to the window moon slipped from its can one more which is in conversation with another poem by the poet C.K. Williams he was somebody who wrote a lot of long lines that allowed him to do a lot of moral introspection and there was a critic an early critic I don't mean a a detractor critic a commentator who described his work as something like if I can remember it psychic paralysis in spite of the need to connect somehow so the title of my poem is this prayer is a line from his poem called The Vessel and I'm going to start with a quote from his poem which is what makes me think though that the region of my soul in which all this activity is occurring is a site which God might consider an engaging or even acceptable spiritual location that is C.K. Williams but is the soul so divided and did it take shape with the usual plan one region labeled prayer and the others marked boiler room or half bath or could prayer change places the way my dog does over here in South Burlington on the second most traveled path of Red Rocks Park just before the overlook with the skinny railing my dog didn't fall all the way down that time I didn't see him behind me and when I went back there he was on a ledge beneath the overhang out of reach with no way to get him back up and what if the soul's only prayer region gets a false negative result for spiritual activity on God's test probe just because of the time for instance now on this gloomy on soulful day there was a patch just now I lived in my spirits putting aside for now C.K.'s thought about God's thought what throws me off and now that patch of blue sky by the way is gone is if I still want a way to say I am there was grateful then do I say the blue patch was given to all of us or just to me how presumptuous is it to claim to be in us if I lived on a dry plane my farm soil cracked would a blue sky elevate my soul what about the many some even here in the gloom who wouldn't want any part of my prayer thank you very much I'm a little baffled by who and I pray I am but putting that consideration aside as well if I just start and let God figure it out is it the blue or the light that's given me a lift it's the blue but if I'm grateful for a clear sky what about the rest shouldn't I be grateful for the gloom but thinking alone and thank God I still got my dog I tried to climb down to the side where there wasn't a guard rail but it was too steep I couldn't get close and that's when he started to cry and the neighbor who climbed down and back up with me said I had to call the fire department so I got out my phone and started to dial and suddenly the dog was at my side and the neighbor gently suggested maybe next time I should follow the law keep my dog out of leash so it kind of feels empty to say I'm grateful for anything you're safe keeping that stains just me but not to ignore him for too long I wonder if C.K. would say God enters his soul to get to the region of prayer or does God sorry, lost my place or does God in C.K.'s mind just put a straw into the soul suck up the prayer all of which brings me to the physical body and how we're stuck here inside our separate skins no wonder C.K. longs for God is a big one for getting under the skin and it's lonely for us but at least we can understand each other through some magic of receptors and nerves and I'm not talking about sex, by the way so that's company and now we know how trees can verse so maybe we're not as separate as it seems and someday someone will find little filaments that connect us though that would be too bad because it's way more poetic and better exercise if our souls could jump through our skins like God and that's how we agree with the system it's lucky given we're each an eye we can even perceive each other and that's just the start there's more to it but once you go down that path you get to everyone you miss and even if you forget about well and death there's so much on the side like trees and sky and the way if you like them if you even start in on being thankful for this life that breaks your poor heart I worked this out once had a former prayer with my wife who would really rather you go out with my partner but that would take too long to explain and now I can't remember what I decided that's the trouble with personal prayer my wife if I made with her permission use again a problematic shorthand for a relationship that is deeply nuanced who is more spiritual than I also more efficient with words says she likes to get her prayers from the book they're catchy almost like a tune for Calvin's Margaret of the highest quality for her being agreeably spiritual some of the words pop out and she takes them aside for a private rock no surprise the dog likes her better than he likes me every day she plucks down on the couch and says come here come here and talk to me she's so cozy and vulnerable I should go home and nuzzle her and ask for God see how a woman above see how a man above I just wanted to do a few logistics too Judith suggested that for visually impaired we describe ourselves when we come up to the mic so I am a cis female with giant uncontrollable hair and a short sleeve black shirt polka dots and Linda had come to me a few months ago and said let's do some hair readings for Pride Month and I got really excited about it so we were doing those we have another one at Fox Market on the 16th there's some little flyers back there if you want to grab one and also I'm doing quite a few poetry events in the area you can get my contact information on here I do a monthly series at the front co-op gallery on Berry Street I have two readers and we're booked through 2023 which is very exciting and then there's other pop-up events around the area there's something else I wanted to tell you but I don't remember what it is but there's a bathroom right here in case you're wondering and then if you don't want to use the one that's immediately in this room there's two out in the main area too that just need a key and there's food oh there's food yes Linda brought because she's amazing there's some really festive rainbow cups that you can have water in and Rick Adrian's here from Goddard Radio Bonmont is the name of his show it's not Goddard Radio it's what it is Central Vermont Community Radio and he has a show on Sundays at 5 where he plays recordings of he does the front meetings that I've been hosting and readings such as this so you can catch those and then they're in the archives for two weeks after they're aired Orca's also here taping so it's exciting and we are down one reader than we expected so I just wanted to sneak in a poem or two from my favorite queer poet, C.A. Conrad obsessed so if you don't know this person definitely read just a couple short ones this is called Jupiter 3 it's from this book while standing in line for death they do a series of somatic rituals and then write poetry after them and they explain all the rituals in this book and then write through the poems after so this one's called Jupiter 3 can I babysit teach them basic disobedience to be deaf to factory bells there's an annoying poet who says she killed poetry just ask her at each poetry reading this is another memorial service for you if poetry is dead call me a necrophiliac I don't want children to inherit the earth I want them to snatch it from heedless adults before it's milked all wish lists at once is heavenly I will introduce Kim Ward Kim Ward is a native Vermonter who has lived in Montpelier for 25 years she has her masters in performance poetry from Goddard College founded the Vermont playwright circle and works for many local theaters she's had productions of her poetic plays produced by herself and Roxy Productions she's been published in Green Mountain Review Metropolis and Vermont Times written the book lyrics and music for a 10 minute musical called Man vs. Squirrel which you can find on YouTube and has worked as a choreographer dancer, actor, director and theater producer for over 30 years welcome Kim the four and three quarters white woman with spiky soft pepper hair a lot of orange on today and I'm wearing my tight boots because I love tight boots so as I walked in Linda was saying to me I was just trying to text her and I was like why it was like two minutes of sex so that tells you the rest of what you need to know about me because I was here but I was like wandering and if anyone is hearing clicks of the door and people coming in and out it's because there's another big event going on here tonight which is a meeting about homelessness and I wish I was able to split myself too so I could go with both of these things I have no idea what I'm going to read tonight and it's really a weird thing to have just recently done reading at the front and feel like well I just read all that so I've been typing up some stuff that's newer and thought maybe I would read some of that thus the iPad this is called against the abyssal plane 4am no sleep just a crackling brain pan of anxiety three of us are left the one whose handprint dusted my ribs is long gone the two of you left with me laying down a bar sink while I hold myself alone one sister against the abyssal plane I'm 57 and I've just this year started writing poems about being related to people who are addicts because because because so it's been very interesting this is called wrong directions take the scenic route they said it's nice it's slower and more scenic until like a sand mandala in the middle of a city street it gets stomped on shuffled over blown by an accurate smoke of the garbage truck of life until all summons of direction are scraped away and you are left if lucky on a dead end dwindling goat path in the woods on some farmer's land a rusted rifle dancing between your eyes sure you want to take that scene I have never read any of these I thought it was kind of fun this is called although and this came out of a prompt speaking of exercise where we're probably here but it's definitely free freestyle but it's got some repetitive words in it although I took myself to be an adult I turned out to be a baby in an aging carriage of carion bones although I thought I had cut you free my foot got entangled in your seeping soul as it slithered out of the last bottle you left in my apartment although I thought I was a woman turned out I was a flea on the back of a cow although I let my record go it flew back to me in a murmuration of ancient starlings their yellow beaks a splintered headlights spearing me ramming into my chest exploding my heart into a cloud of red ravens that pecked out my eyes if only they had punctured my eardrums look at that poem this is an older poem last time I read I was telling folks that I do a lot of work with the German Futhard Runes which were at one point a very ancient magical system that people used sometimes nefariously sometimes for good and then I've been just trying to sort of recapture some of the more positive elements of the runes because they've been used by a lot of terrible way supremacist people and I sort of didn't realize how badly that was until I got like you know years until just loving the history so this is called Dried Ghost a small cave smoke on the water an empty lung boat once filled with settlers the ruin secrets itself inside her chest the men gather trumpeting for war hunting dogs sniff the carving knife a dried ghost under her tongue it's leaf of death dislodging teeth waiting to spring into fruition on the end of the spear and the rune she carves bloody hand in what's next this is called Fill in the Blank I'm such a fill in the blank yourself you're such a I fill in the blank myself it's different every time I trust you and then sure enough the egg into the fire and not the pan and anyone for Pete's sake you're not robbing Peter to pay Paul you're robbing me and taking it all a little bitter I'll read you one that's maybe just confusing so this there's a quote at the beginning of this there's a quote called Fee Nails by Andrea Long Chu and in it she says in the combination of ETH plus testosterone would produce Adam formula fire vessel strap in what way did I fully first come to pass eclipse, skip, turn my skin truly burns to be let loose on the cobblestones of the city and if I have been thicker, taller less pretty have the formula have raged over a bunch and a bit longer than would I have surely been the king of my own destiny the queen left behind in the mud pit in the tin plus estrogen minus father equals trailer my childhood home to rot so I will raise on that this is called I can be pink ribbons classical t-toes point shoes a bird folded in herms I can be pirate boots, leather pants poet shirt with pillowed sleeves and swashbuckling sword I can be jeans and frumpy t-shirt I can be duck boots and chain key ring I can be barefoot in spring dress with daffodils and its folds I can be I asked my ex-partner what I should read for tonight and she lived with me for seven and a half years, bless her and went all the way through my master's degree with me so she said, read that one about the truth that you wrote and I'm like, yeah, okay it's called telling the truth there was going to be a fire and I saw it the bookcase was a flame burning through the dark words spitting outward like stars when I got home it was over the kitchen window gaft blackly it made me sugar to think how close I'd been to death the night came back to me while picking through bedroom ashes we tried to rub loneliness from our bodies your drunkenness was full of new shyness my fear of entanglement a raw river that parted the flames between us until I became a flame whispering became a word I could not hear a dark warmth, a space at the center of your eye in the center of a woman in the word and the word fit itself inside the cry of an owl that beat its wings against me until you spoke your tongue sending forth rivers of truth that finally did not burn the darkness but scattered it like stars I wrote that I wrote that poem after briefly having a flame with a friend from college who was coming out as trans as I was coming out as bi as we were all coming out as something so I guess it can't fit I know many, not as many people in Vermont lost people from COVID as in some places that I did lose a I can't even read this poem now that I'm talking about it I lost a friend who was 44 to COVID and he caught it and posted online when he got it I'll leave it to me to get COVID for the second time just before my second booster anytime so let's read that more uplifting poems it's called the stages of grief there are not five stages of grief no matter what scholars tell you there are an infinite number of infinitesimal stages this grief digs into going down and down into the depths of my bones my viscera, my cells continuing into that hidden layer my lonely physicist shakes hands with until it has burrowed deeper than even they can touch perhaps if you took this grief and placed it in the serum collider and spun it long enough centrifuging my love and loss and anger and grief until the important parts rose to the top and the rest sunk from sight you would find the many stages it holds but then again, no only if you spun this anguish laid out away from earth from your solar system into the galaxy so that it ran for the edges of the universe only then would you see all its stages and then in there we could wait for it all to collapse into the fisted ball of what people call God's hand so that with the next big bang the blistering heat of creation it could be handed out again the body of the universe the blood of the universe to be born beneath a tongue of a new world I mean, I'm going to tell you my shortest poem so I can not feel like crap vegetable strength is saying no to broccoli my shortest poem I've ever written it gets true to saying vegetable strength plain roughshod mumble from above no God, I assure you the drunks play roughshod in furniture, each other rowing machine themselves through bottle after joint until it dawn they tumble down to the back parking lot to piss themselves for the day it's my graphical this is called swaddled I swaddled my way through life for so long wrapping up and sacrificing autonomy now I autonomize the night monetize, monotonize realizing the strength in oneness enjoying the freedom of invisibility even as a lone tides into and out of lonely fist up with the sun then tidying back with the stars black night swaddles my body memorializes itself snap knee to sharp vertebra sinks into the loam of my utopia anybody here like Octavio Paz I love his work there was a line in a poem many years ago that I read where he said something was happening between blue and good evening so that's the name of this poem between blue and good evening she said between blue and good evening there was always a rainbow and the ponies were always fast and the toys were always new she said in there I had time to decide what I would be where I might go how I'd fit in so I tried to step back in time to that very place of innocence between blue and the pillar of the moon between the match flare and the shadow cry then I slipped through before evening and after blue slipped until I had fallen behind the sours moon and the weepers this is from another work what do you call that I know it's called it was in a class but you can do an exercise I have no words it's from the prompt where we were told to take two different nouns that don't go together and you put them together and it's called the salt of infancy the salt of infancy began with the first inmate's death curled as he was around the tongue of space that was the cuff window made for hands that somehow held his head stupid inmate the public says good riddance but was he that stupid or that desperate in trying to escape the ghouls of that terrible place there he lay nestled as a limp fetus in a womb of iron his body and ascended the granulated mist of his soul flicking itself up over barbed wire fence flung salt in a gale storm cutting across the plains headed for home until he came to rest on the near empty dinner table and was shaken into each relative's meal before the family even knew the prisoner had returned salt to salt, earth to earth to their empty hands and I wrote that after reading a news article about somebody literally doing that and telling himself he was trying to get out I'm very sad I'm going to do something say is there anything on this list I've ever read this poem comes from a very long piece called Angel in the Fire that I wrote it's called mother I dare not ask you why I could not seem to love only men to swish my square hips just so to leave behind my favorite boots for a pair of your immaculate pumps you would not listen if I told you I don't believe the skirt makes the woman I'm not attracted to that great hair lump of a muscle across the room that winks and calls me sweetie when he orders a drink I'm intrigued instead by the small boned man by the piano with the delicate fingers who plays the cello and smiles so kindly I'm all flutter with the waitress at the table table five with a shaved head and combat boots winks her pierced eye at me and says she's dying to taste my dull unpainted lips after hours I know you don't believe my search for the perfect balance that you don't want to release me from the grip of your ideals I find myself covered with each bit of praise you ever gave each nod or no has stuck to me like starfish splayed over my cheekbones until your portrait was complete and all of my frightened eyes feel through reflecting your identical face until now now I go out to pick the parts of my gender from the air they float just out of reach as they climb out of me in a twisting dance each piece might burst as the soap dries or solidify as the glass cools into Victorian witch-balls so that if I place them in the window I know they can deflect the worst of the storm while still attracting the lightning I long to feel on my skin Sam has published in I Need North America North American Review and the New Yorker, among others in July 2023 her new book, Musical Figures will be published by 30 West Publishing her two previous books Theater of Animals and Recital won the National Poetry Series USA and the Editors Prize at Elixir respectively she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival first prom prize was selected as the editor's choice at Pinocchio Lee I don't know I tried and was the editor's choice for Brain Milk Prize Recent poems are in On the Seawall and Sugar House Review and are forthcoming in Plough Shares 124 and others so welcome Sam this opportunity initially I'm really short almost five feet I'm wearing dark clothing and I'm old and wrinkled I'm going to read a few poems from and then I'll read some other stuff and we'll see how it goes at night I thought of Mrs. Tufani helping me into my space suit as I lie sweating in my bed first confession Stephen round my face in the snow bank and ran to his mother's house Martin smelled like cow shit and held my hand in third grade my best friend held a velvet postcard of the Virgin Mary glowing in the dark I loved her and wanted to marry her though she committed mortal sins we wanted God to keep us forever riding our bikes over the iron bridge waving to our distant parents and parents were not just eccentric they were really crazy but we had a pretty large bunch of relatives cousins who would come by to visit which was an interesting experience second cousin one of my cousins came to introduce her betrothed they were dept and gaukish hopefulness he did be an engineer and she to secretarial school his wrist stretched out of his sleeves as he wrung his hands in his lap and finally hung them off his knees she dripped her ringed hand on one side and another before tossing it to the back of the couch the couch was orange plaid and a rooster shaped lamp stood on the table our living room was painted green with splotches of blue with this mix of latex and oils my cousins were going to live in Florida they were going to live in sunshine the future had lit lamps at their feet dream we wandered through my grandfather's house sorting plates and twigs and throwing pebbles out the window in the yard squished, tangled in our hair and they couldn't find our way we met two women coming back from a wedding one in a beaded vest with a glass of wine and for years we quarreled about recipes we followed the wide path out of town and found our own house blackened in the clearing between two birches were our broken pots and milled clothes and I went for the things grown old without me this is a more recent poem called another travelogue which is about not going anywhere JR is my wife they are and I were at the bar and I noticed a brunette mopping the space with her quiet it was the natural place to be contemplated I won't contemplate a lot of things because I might cry in the open bold or young tears go snickering down at the joining of a tiny kindness and the smell of aftershave outside the bar I could hear the weed wet her gulping drafts of gasoline and roaring at the fence line I couldn't eavesdrops I lost her whisperings I dreamt I was shepherding rows of families along high litters on the outside of buildings, displaced the streets below the flooded and he kept pinching along JR bought focaccia for Elizabeth the attendant at the bakery child's home JR can't hear nods in place of that it's tiring to work so hard for the ordinary bread is buried in its perfections the ends of it grow slowly from the ends the ribs of it grow slowly from the ends of flour and water some houses, like Elizabeth row from the efforts of their owners and children, a carp-uncle of rooms a garden with parsnips and tomatoes there's a little something cantilever cantilevered every room is a bridge to the space beyond it is every bridge a ledge at tops the mangos were hard but the fish looked dead soft the bark at the greengrocers didn't make eye contact were we not buying the most exciting potatoes we went to the co-op swoops of lines back to the natural cosmetics and people in the stunned contemplation of olives and peperoncini I want to lie down in the aisle drinking prosecco and avoiding other choices I sometimes think of ourselves as poor because we do not own a home instead dogs and we do not go far the home is very abstract and somewhat magical so it's about two sparrows and the sparrows are named distance and temerity the sparrows were enamored but sounded like a congregation of worried mothers distance and temerity flew from Central Park to the bakery like dark flakes they fluttered to the ground and ate crumbs of coffee cake and cinnamon buns everyone emerged from the bakery with white paper cups held out like lamps and hot cups of coffee jiggling in the other hand joggers zoomed by in black tights and headbands a fleet said distance sweetest palms agreed to merrily to the smell of sweat after the joggers the businessmen and women dragging brown briefcases were swinging them like doll missiles then children going to school the boys in pink and purple the boys in blue and red with secrets like feathers is there a sparrow waking at 2am knowing he's alone no I often can't sleep that's been especially true for the last 20 years and at this at this point my wife wakes me up even though I'm actually asleep which is pretty rare spray from a spurt of sleep and in the cold dark snow crust we skippered over to our neighbor his top half collapsed over his lower braced in the snow by one fist the wheelchair hunched over his back his head inching to the snow at the end of his ramp his voice softer than dark but JR had heard him as she lived along the road with the urgent need of the dog at the coldest hour and now the two old of us maneuvered him back in his chair and back into his house we crunched on empty soda cans by the ramp and we also have empty cans and pets to be rich with and where was his lonely mother who talks with her to well as a hero reason and temperance in this poem I get very sick but obviously I live can't and this sort of this is another poem that jumps around from here to there spaghetti I was scanned they gave me morphine I was grayish on the way to the hospital we passed a Jack and Jill adult super store next to Bob's carpet mark you can see how that would work for days the rain had rippled roads until they disappeared in the hospital I heard a clump of voices move down the hall top of the rain robots disappearances last summer we were eating plates of pasta in a pretentious restaurant when the son of the doctor in the next table choked and hurled himself out of his chair the doctor wrapped her arms around his chest and heaved up she was small but strong and he vomited the meat chunk and drank copiously his eyes red and he was shaking and he was not two feet from us so we knew how much his stepfather disapproved of his spikes of hair you can see why I'm telling you this the waiter stood by with a towel the mother showed satisfaction and her skill and accuracy the dinner was over and we two left the restaurant closed later that year but probably for unrelated reasons when I was 12 we ate Chef Boyardy spaghetti dinners the box of pasta rattled like pickup sticks the grains unbeaten the tin of sauce like sand and powdery cheese this is the sound of my father's car on the gravel of the driveway this is the green dress my mother wore and this is the green suit my grandfather wore as custodian of distant college after he lost the barn my father fished not because we were poor though we were but because it was a prize the lake's candy my father and my uncle wanted me to come with them to an observation tower or we're looking the beach I suspected it was a trick because they were after all dead and my uncle laughed a little bitter and wasn't very trusting we were passing around a flask of whiskey I didn't want to come be dead although I'd like to live by an ocean would I remain turbulent? in another dream my dead grandfather was driving me on the back roads of vain to some place I wanted could anything else be so far away when my grandmother died and we were standing in the kitchen he cried because she had been in such pain and he couldn't rescue her sometimes the miracles people court are shy about showing up I was scanned they gave me morphine I thought I would like it better I think I'm going to be alright for a while and I've been thinking of you the entire time that's where it ends the book of days and there aren't other kinds I'm patting the chair beside me for a friend dissolving in smoke I keep a handful of ash by my bedside because of those that are sacred and neat carrying I was reading the Beatitudes and the pets raced a handful of air under their legs and you know the joy you get that's not a distance from others but a gathering and you get it in your feet from dirt and grass and a stray wrapper of an ice cream it's a tumult of misery misery lightened by possibility and even as sleepless you forgive the crankiness and coldness of a stranger and nestle in your heart the one you were sure had exploded in a distant universe a home that has never quite worked so I thought I would try it tonight but it's still doesn't matter an absence mostly of aunts I ate sugar daddies and sugar babies atomic fireballs chocolate stars and squirrel nut zippers peach blossoms and butterfingers glued in my pocket my baby teeth obsessed I ate food too, spaghetti and I was sick mom's measles bronchitis my head bubbled in concussions from car accidents my father a little drunk I had pneumonia kidney infection I was allergic to mold and dust made my lungs clap flat in another age I would have been dead by 5 and cute my hair haloed I wheezed through math but I knew no order as my father moved us from town to town and even though I've worked to write this down I find it unsurprising a late comer to the age of reason I'm sure there's something else that I want to read or not this is another poem that jumps from spots it takes place in a conference when I was working human services I went to a lot of dreadful conferences and probably whatever field you were in you had the same experience so this is called at the conference it pops from place to place in the conference it starts with one of those incredibly boring long activities that you do with chalkboards and whiteboards self obsolete says Donna and her hand squirms with a sharpie sandwiched in the other it's been a long meeting we are finagling the jargon with our knives and forks yellow fingered from cigarettes choking wishing we could wind up somewhere less hopeless under the sadness oceans we watch a sunbaither and pork pie chide his partner and pull his shorts from the crack in his ass we envy everyone who's not suffocating in air conditioned lunches the sales clerk is growing a mustache as slowly as his eyelashes the store smells like bread and fennel and a customer revolves around the shelves lifting glass jars to read the labels someone slams down a tiny cup of espresso and shoves away a newspaper because we are the combined weight of sorryness and unabashed chiseling because the young have not yet broken their glacial skin because we have put our foot down and leapt up again and so every lie we ever told was crawling up our legs it always happens to me like I'm going to read some poems I couldn't possibly read that one it was terrible timber trail one carries the other past hazards our arms around each other partly knowing which one is limping we keep going into the woods a path we don't know we pass the remains of a car from a century ago wrapped deep in an oak tree we bought a flashlight bread and you're wearing the best half my life but more I carry a notebook filled with drawings and words not the same words but words for this section of the trail we take our clothes off by a pond and sleep under the wild night it doesn't seem terrifying the words I wrote about dreams and the words I wrote about monsters how much I misunderstood them thank you so if you want to gather around the readers at the graves of cheese and tell everybody how wonderful they were because we all like that just keep that in mind and thank you very much for coming thank you Orca thanks please come to the next one on the 16th at Fox Market from 7 to 9