 Welcome everybody to the 2023 spring, although it feels like summer salon. Thank you for choosing to spend this beautiful evening with us. At Kickstand, our salon home now for, we're starting our ninth year. We started in April 2015 and we've presented three authors every quarter. Well, I was going to say without fail. One fail, but it wasn't a fail because it was April 2020. But then we picked up in July, we did it online for two years and then we came back in person. And so thank you for coming to join us. And I want to thank the wonderful Emily and Kickstand Cafe for hosting us all these years. Today we will have Ben Berman, Charles Coe, and you know, I never asked you if that is the correct pronunciation of your name and I apologize for that. Charles Coe. That's called Nancy. Nancy. And Kathy Desjardins. So with a little asterisk next to her name and I'll explain why. For a night of poetry, April is national poetry month. And I think every month should be national poetry month, but apparently we have to share with other things. So for the moment it's April. So as many of you know the Arlington, I'm Anjali Mitarduva and the Arlington Author's Salon is a free reading series with a twist. Each author's presentation includes a sensory experience to complement their reading. Sometimes we've had music, sometimes we've had photos, tasty treats, fabrics, sculpture, smells. When we were online, there was somewhat reduced repertoire, but still our authors managed to surprise us. The Author's Salon takes place quarterly, the first week of January, April, July and October, except sometimes we move it a bit to circumvent holidays, which means that our next one is going to be July 13th, so that we're not too close to the July 4th holiday. So mark your calendars. Each author will have 15 minutes to read and will have a combined Q&A at the end. So if you can possibly hold your questions for the end, and then we'll bring all the authors up here to answer questions. So in addition to thanking Emily and the staff of Kickstand, I want to give a shout out to our Salon co-organizer Whitney, who unfortunately, Whitney Sharer, also an Arlington Author who unfortunately couldn't be here tonight. Huge thanks to the Robbins Library and Sarah Regan and the staff who helped run the Salon ACMI for providing video and posting the edited video afterwards. The program is funded in part by the Arlington Libraries Foundation. I don't know if you all know of the existence of this group. It's dedicated to helping open the doors to all who are curious, creating an inclusive space for our Arlington community and ensuring the library's future as the cornerstone of the community for generations to come. So they support the Robbins and Fox branch of the libraries and they work to create a place where readers and resources connect. Also, the Arlington Libraries Foundation raises funds to bridge the gap between assets and aspirations in order to maintain a world-class library, which we have right down the street. They help support current programs like ours and launch new initiatives, and the Foundation believes that libraries are more than physical spaces to find books, but they're windows into adventure and innovation and creativity and community and opportunity. They strive to make that possible by investing in the libraries that we love. So you can learn more about the Arlington Libraries Foundation at ArlingtonLibrariesFoundation.org. We have Mike Bulio here from the book rack. Please consider buying books to support not only the bookseller but also our authors. And I just, before we launch into the real programming tonight, I want to let you know of a new great writing organization in town co-organized by Whitney Sharer called the Blaze Writers Project. I don't know if some of you know about it. They just launched, they've had, they have a fun event for writers coming up on May 3rd called Blaze O'Rama. And it's basically a writing party, which may sound like an oxymoron, but it's not. It's a super productive evening in a bar, and the evening features a craft talk by local author Louise Miller, as well as an hour of super-generative writing time, a drink and appetizers included in the ticket, and honestly just a really great chance to have fun with a ton of other local writers. And by writers, this is anybody who chooses to take some time to write on some device, on some paper. You don't have to be a published author, you don't have to even have written before, but as long as you feel moved to write. So I highly recommend it, and it takes place in Belmont Center at the Trink Tisch, and you can get your tickets at blazewritersproject.com. If you forget the name, come see me at the end, so I recommend signing up. That's May 3rd. Okay, so the little asterisk is that unfortunately Kathy Desjardins couldn't make it today because she is under the weather, and not a weather that she wanted to share with all of us. But she wants to share her work, and so we're super happy to have somebody here who will read some of her poetry so that we can still imagine that she is here at the salon with us. Our first author is going to be Ben Berman, or is Ben Berman. And so I'm going to introduce the author and then they'll come up and do their thing, which I don't know what their thing will be yet, so I'll be surprised as well. Ben is returning as a salon alum, I don't remember when you were here with some years ago. He's the author of three books of poems and the new book of essays called Writing While Parenting, which some of us manage to do, it takes a long time. He has won the Peace Corps Award for the best book of poetry. He's twice been shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and he's received awards from the Mass Cultural Council, the New England Poetry Club, and Somerville Arts Council. He's been teaching for over 20 years. He currently lives, teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He lives in the area with his wife and two daughters, so everybody please welcome Ben. Thank you so much, Anjali. Anjali, it is such a pleasure to be here and thank you to Sarah and the Robbins Library and the Kickstand Cafe. Charles, it is such a pleasure to read with you and Lisa, thanks for coming too. I'm going to read a few essays from my new book. It's called Writing While Parenting. It is literary and humorous essays about the overlap between the world of poetry and the world of parenting. I thought about my sensory twist. My daughter has recently introduced me to a new game called Bean Boozled. The way that it works is you get two jelly beans, the same color. One of them is a typical flavor like cappuccino, and the other one is an atypical flavor like stinky socks. You might get tutti fruity or you might get liver and onions. They love the game. It was very fun and good dare. I thought I would apply that to the reading. I came up with a game that's called Bean Boozled. The way that it works is that the book is filled with quotes from famous poets. But it's also filled with quotes from my young daughters. I cut out all the quotes and I put them in an envelope. You get to choose one without looking and you get to keep that quote. You might choose one that says the real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. The real reason for a quest is attaining self-knowledge by Thomas Foster. Or you might get one that says, I think your hair is beautiful, like the color of a princess's poop. And that's my five-year-old. You've been Bean Boozled. So choose one of these. Choose a couple if you'd like. I figured it's kind of like sense of touch and also kind of sense of humor. So the first one I'm going to read is called Narratives Building Blocks. I really love the chance to be creative. Creativity is sort of my happy place when I can just sort of invent and play in open-ended ways. But in many ways I think of creativity as a destructive force as well. That you oftentimes have to destroy the old narratives in order to build new ones. So I try to dramatize that a little bit with this one. Narratives Building Blocks. My four-year-old is in the living room playing with magnetiles. She is as focused as I've ever seen her, paying as much attention to shapes as to colors, aesthetics as to structure. But I don't have a story until I have two stories, writes Grace Paley, and along comes my two-year-old. It's as though she's just finished watching Donnie Darko and is convinced that destruction, too, is a form of creation. My four-year-old steps in front of her sister, protecting her work, and suggests they engage in parallel play. But my two-year-old is a post-modernist at heart. She fakes left, she jukes right, and then she swipes a square from the bottom of the tower and watches it collapse. There is no center she shrieks. The center cannot hold. My four-year-old should know by now that our attachment to the impermanent is at the very root of our suffering. That, as Mihai checks at Mihai, says, the important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control that one is attaining over their own attention. But she just looks at her once-magnificent creation, now lying in a pile of ruins, and starts to cry. I pick my two-year-old up, take her to her room, and tell her that she needs to apologize. Apologize, she says. Apologize for what? For reminding this family that deconstruction, as Derrida points out, is not an operation that supervenes afterwards from the outside, but is all raised at work in the work, such as the paradox of progress she screams from her crib. Kill your darlings! There's no use trying to reason with the two-year-old, so I pull down the shades, turn off the lights, close the door, and leave. But she refuses to be punished. She begins rattling her baby almost head against the bars of her crib to what sounds like the tune of We Shall Overcome. I go back in there and I confiscate all of her dolls. I want her to understand that vulnerability is at the heart of creativity. I want her to acknowledge how much courage it takes to create something from nothing. But she is adamant now that true courage comes from knowing that our creations are always on the verge of collapse. I try to convince her that she is suffering from massive cognitive distortions, but she has long passed listening to me. She believes in the transformative powers of art and she has transformed her crib into a trampoline. She's jumping wildly now, master of her own private mosh pit, lost in that ecstatic lightness of being. This next one is called What to Expect When You Are Expectorating. My five-year-old, oh, I should say two, the book was written over a period of five years. It starts when my daughters are one in three and travels them up until they're six and eight. So they're different ages. I don't want you to think I have a dozen kids. So this is when my daughter is five. My five-year-old is into spitting these days. Not the nasty huck-a-loogie over a rail kind of spitting, but the motor boating your lips and spray saliva all over the place kind of spitting. I find the whole thing kind of funny until she hoses me in the face for saying no to potato chips for breakfast. Then I sit her down and explain that big kids use words when they're upset and that spitting on someone else is never, ever okay. But papa, she says, that's my thing. I want to explain to her that five-year-olds are too young to have things, that at best they have phases with any luck they quickly drill out of. But there is something so strikingly unapologetic about her defense as though spitting is her way of speaking her truth, that the writer in me suddenly wants to think of my own. After all, writers have always been celebrated for defying the conventional rules and trusting their own visions. E.E. Cummings capitalizing on his refusal to capitalize. Dickinson transforming her dashed literary dreams into a rage of dashes. And now that we've entered the digital age, you need more than verbal precision and a heightened awareness of ambiguity to make it as a poet. It's all about building a brand and going viral, about transforming your thing into a style. However, as soon as I start imagining what my thing might be, I immediately find myself getting overwhelmed, worrying that I might not have a thing, or that the things that I do have aren't actually that interesting. Maybe I'm just feeling defensive, but I start to wonder if it would be reductive to only allow ourselves a single thing. After all, the purpose of poetry, writes Shesla Milosh, is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person. What if I had a plethora of things, I think, to myself, and start making a list of all the various vices that I'd like to be able to get away with? And yet to be a poet is to write with the ear. And the critic, that's my thing, sounds so much better than the coriand. Those are my things. Or the perfectly iambic, my things are in a constant state to flux. And so I look at my list and I start the process of elimination. And I realize that of all the possible things that might be mine, it's probably my predilection for word play. My love for the lightness of language and weight of words that has the most potential. I feel like I'm finally ready to embrace this idea that we should all have a single thing that we can get away with when I look over at my five-year-old and see that she is spitting into a fan so that it sprays back into her own face. She is spitting and giggling and then spitting some more. Surely a better parent would step in and stop this nonsense right here and right now. But I just sit back and watch her take such delight in the sensory pleasures of life and can't stop myself from thinking, that girl is my spitting image. It's no time for puns. But what can I do? That's my thing. I'm going to read one more. It's called, somewhat depressingly, why write when there are thousands of people out there not reading your work? We were at the home of some friends when I found myself in a conversation with their six-year-old son. My dad told me that you're a writer, he said. I am, I said. Then let me ask you something, he said. How come I've never read anything you ever wrote? That's a good question, I said. Think about it, he said. Right now there are thousands of people out there who aren't reading any of your books. That's a true quote, by the way. He shook his head and walked away, leaving me all alone in the kitchen. I grabbed a slice of lukewarm pizza and started laughing to myself. I'd recently published a small book of short prose and was well aware of all those people out there not reading it. I got me thinking about one of the two recurring dreams that I'd been having as of late, which involved me walking into a bookstore to give a reading and seeing that there was only one person in the audience. This, in fact, actually happened once. And although I laughed it off at the time, cracked some joke about the sound of one hand clapping, it was one of those moments that remind you of the fine line between humility and humiliating. We left our friends house shortly afterward, and although it was getting late, we decided to give our five-year-old a bath. Giving our five-year-old a bath is always a bit of a production. She likes to bring trays of Tupperware into the tub with her and pretend that she is the star of some warped Disney film. Look, I overheard her say at one point as I was walking by, I know that you think you killed my parents, but I have news for you. I have a wife who poisoned your parents. Then she started laughing, this evil maniacal laugh. I had no idea what the premise of her story was, but I wasn't about to ask, because if she knew that I was eavesdropping, she would have immediately stopped the show. And as I stood in the hallway listening in, I started thinking about the other recurring dream that I'd been having as of late. In this one, I'm taking a shower. And when I step out, I realize that there's a full crowd of people waiting for me to read. I walk up to the podium, and not only do I not have my book with me, but I'm not wearing any pants. I'd always assumed that this was simply the converse of the first dream. Rather than showing up with something to say and finding no one there, I show up with nothing to say and find everyone there. But as I listened to my daughter play so freely in the bath, her imagination wandering in the most surprising and delightful of ways, I wondered if this dream was actually about the tension between the pleasures of writing and the pressures of being a writer. On my better days, I'm able to compartmentalize the two. But whenever I've sat down to write lately, I've found myself worrying about book sales and Goodreads ratings, about the reviews that people were writing and the reviews that people weren't writing. My five-year-old was starting to sing some song and only be described as a ballad to her bum. I couldn't make out all the lyrics, though, because she was laughing so hard as she belted it out. And I realized that if I wanted to reclaim the pleasures of writing, I couldn't worry about all those thousands of people not reading my books, because that's not why we write. We write for that single, fleeting moment as Mercy Cunningham says when we feel alive. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ben. That was funny and deep and thoughtful and all kinds of things all at once. Thank you for sharing with us. And his book is here, so I hope you will all buy a copy because you need all that in your life. Our second presenter is Lisa Davis, who is coming in lieu of Kathy Desjardins. Lisa is in one of Kathy's workshops and has brought a couple of poems to write, and I'm going to just turn it over to her, but I do want to read Kathy's bio because that is important and we should know. Kathy Desjardins has written two books of poetry, one called With Child and another Buddha in the Garden. And by the way, these photos aren't just because it's April and the tulips are blooming, but actually those are from her garden. A former faculty member at Lesley University at UMass Boston, she has taught writing to all ages from kindergarteners to graduate students and seniors and now teaches poetry workshops regularly at Grub Street Writers and via home Zoom workshops. Her work has been published in many periodicals and journals, including Konnishanti, the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe Magazine, which is a poet laureate emerita of Arlington. Good evening everyone. As Anjuli said, I'm Lisa Davis and I'm really pleased to be here on behalf of Kathy. I got a call around 3.30 today and we're off to the races. Reincarnation is a big, and so I see many of my fellow workshop people here. It's a joy to see you and other people that I've known from other parts of town. Kathy's, you know, very articulate about reincarnations, so I know in Kathy's lovely book with Child that her name is Kathy in Veronica, Slavinsky, Slater, Spence, Desjardins. So there's been some changes in her life. I will be following sort of a script that Kathy gave me and we'll go, we'll do it. Kathy often starts her workshops with a singing bowl and I think I can get it to work. So I invite you as you hear the ringing of the bell to just notice your breath, take in your breath in and out. So Kathy is now, when she works in person, able to use her singing bowl, but for three years on Zoom, she also did the singing bowl. And after about a year, someone, and that someone was me, said, you know, when you do the singing bowl, we just hear a clunk and she was kind of mortified. But she tells this story because she became, she became aware of how generous and sweet the participants in the poetry workshop were about letting her continue on with this. And so when I heard this story, I said, well, Kathy, you know, that was me. She's like, I know. And I said, well, what does that say about me? And she said, well, you were, you know, the reality that brought me out of the fantasy. And I thought, well, that doesn't seem so good. And she said, no, so then I was aware of the sweetness and love that students had for me. So I'm in the clear there. And for her sensory object, she's asked me to pass around something that I'm sure most of you are familiar with, which is the Russian babushka doll. And she wants us to take attention to our previous incarnations are all within us somewhere. And so I'm going to pass this around and you're free to play with it as you will and maybe keep it moving. But the imperative is to please don't lose the baby. The baby is really sweet inside there and she's devoted to the baby. I'll give it to Charleston. And that poetry enables us to hold on and revisit our different incantations in a way that we might possibly not. So I'm going to be reading five poems. The first two are from her book with Charl. The baby cries when they leave the room. They're torn out in the world. Separation wears thin. But so does carrying, carrying, carrying him. At night they've taken to creeping from his room on all fours. If desire could create a ghost double, they'd leave a doppelganger standing by his crib. They buy tapes of lullabies and soon he leaves to drift away on that ocean of sound. Coming in to stop the loop of music, they've snared by the songs. Why is every lullaby so sad? Looting songs of treasures, small pleasures, or mine shafts to caves of regret as if we'd swallowed a stone of sorrow. Nights, one parent or the other can be found weeping, hand hovering over the stop button by the glow of the nightlight. They look at the angel face, lashes drooping on cheeks of the child they've taught to sleep apart from them. And this poem is called No Turnaway. Thump thump of feet, my head pops a signal to come to my side of the bed. Your father would take you back. Too crowded he thinks, but I turn sideways making a hollow. I can't resist your warmth, your ears like small intricate animals. Although our arms and legs become a problem, mine going to sleep under you, yours poking into me, no more sleep. Soon we'll have to stop this skin to skin. I'll wear nightgowns so I won't scar you by what I am. It gets harder than taking on false modesty I'll learn to ignore, or not your shame at my singing and what I have to say. I'll work on learning not to let you matter so much, but now from this locus of known warmth I vow that as best I can I'll always take you in as you will lead me. The next poems are from her book, Buddha in the Garden, and it's not lost on us at Desjardins, you know, means of the garden. Buddha is where you find him. I found mine at Poul City on Route 1 near Saugus, among the bird baths and inflatable floating chairs with twin cuff holders. He's the standard concrete model with pin curls, a top knot, among a Lisa smile. Brought up Catholic, I talked to him as if he were a saint, someone who might intervene on my behalf. Buddha, I say, the weeds are winning, overtaking the garden, what can I do? Or Buddha, no one sees my garden, the showy lilies, the new dahlias, I call bordello fire and sunset feathers. The children are grown, the grandchildren don't visit. Should I post pictures of my flowers on Facebook? Do I need to get on Instagram? Names. In spring, calm among bright blossoms, Buddha. In summer, overgrown by bearberry Buddha. In fall, leaf in lap Buddha. In winter, snow cone head Buddha. I circumnavigate Buddha, no mud, no lotus, I imagine him saying. The ground under him has settled so he leans towards me, a little askew as I talk on the phone. My friend is worried about her adrenals. My grown children are seeking therapists in the changing healthcare market. I put them on speakerphone so I can rip out weeds with both hands. Purse lane, chicouille, twitch grass. Hoping the neighbors won't overhear trauma drama. I assemble little heaps of weeds and find them days later, small piles of brittle, branched paper. And this next phone is called that blue and Kathy says it is specifically about this time of year. One day after the eternal winter, the silla gush out of the ground in a tide that lags at the sidewalk. Cold wind rakes them into ripples so they make a lake on the lawn. There is no color like this blue shimmering with violet. It makes the sky seem pale. You can find it across centuries in beads, ribbons, velvet, concocted on the pallets of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It was favored by the foes, those wild beasts of art. The color makes you pause as if listening for music, as if you could make a wish on it for something you'd forgotten you wanted. And the last phone tonight is called EKG. And I said, you know, Kathy, can I say it's about you and your husband? She said, well, it's about us and everyone else we know. I said, okay. So EKG. We're together in the kitchen when you say you talk to your new doctor, the one who ordered up an EKG because he said he'd heard a skim, a stutter. Most likely it's within a normal range. What's normal in our undercover pumps? Part mystery fist, blossom, cage? Once I saw a tattooed heart clumped on a woman's bare back. Not a valentine, but a thick muscle and full spur. Aortic wad inked in red and blue lines. She said she loved our corporeal hearts. The beauty in anatomy. Anyway, you tell me, my doctor scanned the blips and says I'm fine. Let's look, I say. So you hoist your shirt up from your hips. I place a palm curved to fit among your soft gray curly furs, spider fingers scurrying for a tidal beat. Why had I never sensed a miss when I so loved to lie with you, nest my palm to feel the thumb there? I touch it now, rueful with what I know, ways I thought I could protect, repair, mistaken. But a new grasp of love a dub, all unnoticed, our deep rhythms change, and in what we claim as hub of love, imperfect is our normal range. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lisa, for sharing those with us. And I hope you will convey to Kathy that people were listening intently and moved by those poems. Our last presenter is Charles Coe, and I'm sitting up front here. Charles Coe is the author of four books of poetry. When he sent me the bio, when we were planning this event, it was three books of poetry. It has been published. His latest is Purgatory Road, which just came out in March, published by Leapfrog Press. His others are Allsons For Given, Palms For My Parents, Picnic On The Moon, and Memento Mori. He is also author of Spin Cycles a novella published by Gemma Media. Charles was a 2017 artist in residence for the city of Boston where he created an oral history project focused on residence of Mission Hill. He's an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, and at Bay Path University in Long Beto, Massachusetts, where he teaches in both master of fine arts writing programs. Please welcome Charles Coe. Lisa, thanks for that lovely reading of Kathy's work. And Ben, thanks for those gutmusters. That story about the guy asking you if he'd read it. I think we've all had that. I had this guy at this party say to me, oh, so you're right. So have I read anything of yours? And I said, I took a sip of Mark Beard and looked at him and said, well, a valid. And he was a little taken aback. He didn't, he seemed to think that he was being insulted but he didn't know exactly how. And he was right on both counts. He wanted to be insulted and he didn't know exactly how. So, okay, I'm trying to give myself a little time right here so I don't run my mouth obsessively. My sexual overload piece, this is a didgeridoo, it's a portable didgeridoo there. They're usually a stick but this one has like an intestine. So I'm going to play a little of this and then I'm going to do a short song that I wrote called Black and Gold Blues. Black and Gold Blues. And I'm going to do it obviously because the band's not here tonight. For my sake. The lights in here. Turn them up again. I say, tell that gal a mile. I say goodbye. Won't you tell that I say goodbye. I hope she finds. Won't you do the best you can. Won't you tell that gal a mile. I say goodbye. Send someone to look beneath my bed. Send someone to look beneath my bed. Because there's a box of black and gold. It's got some things it should not hold not. You better send someone to look beneath my bed. What's in the box? I don't know. That's the thing about the art. Sometimes questions are more interesting than answers. So I'm going to read a few poems from my perpetuary road which just came out a couple of weeks ago. I'm very happy. I'm going a little crazy because by the book comes out you go a little crazy. And it's a good thing. It's a good kind of crazy. I'm having my official proof of Pokemon. You have to say that. On Saturday at the Prince meeting at 2 o'clock. So that's what I'll go full front. I'll just read a few now. This is opportunity. A woman on the park bench stands talking to a friend while a little girl sitting behind her on the bench feeds an ice cream cone to the family dog. Dogs had noted opportunities were food as concerned. And this was no exception. Making short work of the job at hand or rather the job at tongue while the woman's attention is elsewhere. Funny how our idea of what's important changes over time. While I am older and rare I won't remember today's headlines but the daily litany of the use of the atrocities. I won't remember the comings of going to some flavor of a month's away. I'll remember the way the wind tossed dry leaves on a dry autumn afternoon. I'll remember a dog's tongue resolute and efficient and the little girl's conspiratorial smile. That was in Vienna. Well, I read this one though. This is... You know what I'm saying? See, that's what you can do when you're a kid. You can do what you want. You can get your freak on essentially. This is... I wish I'd held my father's hand. My father put what he wanted to buy at the drugstore counter and said, good afternoon to the young white clerk who didn't return the greeting or meet his eye, just stared at the irons as his father had done a bucket of kitten scraps and then with exquisite slowness the drip comes out and began to ring them up. It was an ordinary day in Indiana in the early 60s. Everywhere a black person wanted to buy their toe. Looking back over the years I wish I could go back to that afternoon when my father stood quiet and still while that punk tried to put him in his place. I wish I could have caught his eye delivered the silent message that I understood what he had to go through every day to keep the shoes to raise his family. I wish I'd held my father's hand. For it to imply Werner Herzog when asked why red-lined trains are running slow because the old gods lie motoring in their lonely graves while the gringing lures of chaos dance atop blood-coated skies on the smoking ruins of their new empire. Also, there is a disabled train in Parsley. Simple good thing that you're writing about. What did you do? Like this one, I was watching dishes one day and this phrase, the title of the poem popped into my head and I said, what? Packers have to write a poem about that and I was writing the poem and I was sort of getting a little kicked because we writers are really good at entertaining ourselves. But then it's like when the end of the poem as often happens with creative work I kind of want some place I haven't planned to know how that happens. So this is Butthile in Jesus. There was a time when voices emanating from my pants would have caused concern. But now I simply shrugged and pulled out my phone to hear a recording. You have reached the Son of God. I am currently speaking with another supplement but please hold. Your salvation is important to me. This was followed by music. I expected Celestial Wires or maybe an elevator-friendly version of My Sweet Lord, but was instantrient to acoustic dealt acoustic dealt with this guitar. Interrupted after a few minutes by the voice of himself bringing me by name and asking him how he could serve. I was startled but didn't expect to actually get through. What's the one true religion? I asked Luster just to have something to say. All of them he replied. None of them. I was taken aback. What? That's it? That's it, he said. Follow the golden rule. Leave the camera around cleaner than you found it. Look, anything else? I have a lot of people on hold. I had nothing. Mumbled my face. He said, go in peace and broke the connection. I put down the phone and stared out the window. The guy across the street was clearing snow off his sidewalk. I never really liked that, dude. But I grabbed my shovel and put it in my hand. We did it. I will end with this one. Again, thanks to everybody for coming to hang out and for being totally cool people. Thank you for a quote. Let's have a half for independence. Don't buy it from that company that starts with A. Buy it from your independence or they don't have it. They can order it for you. There's nothing that they can do for you that Amazon can do for you that your independent books are cannot. So, yeah. You might check later. I take Confederate currency. Actually, if you have something about me for a while, we'll talk. Every coin, I don't take it. Cowering shells. So this is a flight interrupted. The sending of the Port of Square by T-Style. We all know that. Flight interrupted. Last night at a subway station I'm the only one getting out. No one's getting on. And I stand a long moment watching the train disappear down the tunnel. A solitary figure that somehow managed to navigate three levels from the street down to the platform. And it's walking back and forth along the tides. Through by my nearness, it flies to the ceiling. Flows along the solid barrier. And from no path to familiar sky, returns to face the platform a little farther down. I make my way to the escalator looking for an employee. There's nobody there. There's never anybody there. And as I reach the street and step into the cool air, my fluid brain chugs into motion. The machinery of metaphor rattles and cracks, hissing steam, spitting images as I consider this part of its life. But as Bride might have said, this isn't a metaphor. It's a pigeon. A living, breathing creature with a beating heart like mine trapped in a place that neither belongs nor understands. The seed of a poem has already taken root. I'm already comparing this pigeon's dilemma to every creature constrained and bewildered by whatever invisible ceilings keep us from taking flight. Let's see what it is. This is the quote that was taken out of the Ben... What was it? Ben Boozled. Okay. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline or responsibility and irresponsibility. There's no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis. A quality of doggedness, endurance, and perseverance. This is clearly your five-year-old. Yes. I'm not even going to try to pronounce the last name here. Thank you. Can you say that again? Okay. That was the author of this quote. Well, thank you. Every time we have a salon, I think the next one can't be as good and then it's even better. So, thank you everyone for coming out and thank you to our three presenters and authors. Please come up front, buy some books, ask the authors to sign them. As a writer, there's no greater pleasure than signing your name in your book and putting it in someone's hands. And we all need more poetry in our lives all the time. So, thanks again. Thanks again, Emily and Pinkstown.