Henry Goldkamp Featured Reader at the Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, November 25

Henry Goldkamp will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, November 25.

Also featured will be Amy K. Genova and Julia Gordon-Bramer.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Open-mic will follow the featured readers.

Born and raised in Saint Louis, Henry Goldkamp translated his skills as a union sheet metal worker into the medium of sculpture while simultaneously molding his craft as a self-taught poet. The latter led to the development of his poetry project, Fresh Poetry, Ink, in which he fashions poems tailor-made for passersby. His work has led him to collaborations with Contemporary Art Museum, fort gondo, KDHX, The Mayor’s Office of Saint Louis, Clayton Fine Art Gallery, The Masses, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Crystal Bridges, and many others.

Featured on NPR, Time’s art blog, and a multitude of local media, his recent project “What the Hell is Saint Louis Thinking?” spotlights residents’ typewritten stories across the city and her outskirts. The book of the project’s findings is due out 2014.

He is also currently running the Poetree Project, a city-wide participatory poetry project culminating with an installation of poems in Forest Park, Saturday, December 14th.

Mallory Poem

It is just
Me & Her
in a large new warehouse
with high ceilings
surrounded by mediocre portraits.
“It’s been so long
since I’ve felt so strange,” I say.
It echoes back
in the different voice of nonage
so I am unaware of its truth.
The sinews of flesh and synapse of thought
need not recite themselves:
To remember the poem
I need only see her again.
Is she so foolish to believe
a single traipse
of thought of another of another time
I’ll leave her?
I only love her
because of the drive
as I sit in the passenger seat
& the dashboard never informs me
that I am not wearing a seatbelt.
Her heart and snaggletooth
fidget with something harmful,
like a children’s matching game
of felones-de-se and stark bodies.
Each time I think of her
I trace her body with a certain type of chalk.

-- Henry Goldkamp

Amy K. Genova Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, November 25

Amy K. Genova will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, November 25.

Also featured will be Julia Gordon-Bramer and Henry Goldkamp.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Amy K. Genova teaches composition at St. Louis Community College.  She has been published in in the American Poetry Review, REAL, Bad Shoe, Tipton Poetry Journal, Maize, Homestead Review, the Caprock Sun, and many others. This is her third year in St. Louis.  She'd rather be where there are palm trees, but toasted raviolis are good.  

Becoming light

This time I decide not to count laps but swim until tired.
It’s hard letting go: 2-4-6 … A gnomon-like shadow
slips
over the outdoor pool. Rings un-number themselves
off
my hands, five fingers squeezed like paddles clapping
water. But, then, that’s counting: tic, tic, tic. Anxiety
and sun clock my shoulder rosy. Will I swim enough?
Refocus on drain. Its clog of leaves. Cracks. Rust curving
algae down the pool belly. Lane dividers—red and blue.Perhaps, I’ll just count 400 IMs, neat lengths of 4x4s.
Would that be so bad? My sleek heart beat beat beats
without breath of comma in-betweens, despite symmetry—
left breath, no breath, right breath. Three beats. Undermy 90 degree elbow, freestyles the tree-glisten and sky.
One perfect hole in the clouds, God’s no-more-counting,
flip-turning. Just a good shove off the side into this glass

slipper
of warm shallow into cool deep.  A red-hatted
lifeguard, perches above my lane. Does he note my stroke?
Think I need saving?
Two swimmers come  &   go.      Am I tired?
             Invisible—
             Invisible—Turning, honeysuckle tickles my nose. A cloud-bit of radio
races after me. A thousand white leaves wade in sun.  My father rises again from water. Glasses, speckled
with splash.
My heart dolphins. Pop-static sings from the radio,

makes me feel like … I’m locked out of heaven. When numbers end:
light, cirrus strands, a boy in red trunks. A Doppler of dad in the pool

when I’m five …  This uncountable swim—

-- Amy K. Genova

Julia Gordon-Bramer Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, November 25

Julia Gordon-Bramer will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, November 25.

Also featured will be Amy K. Genova and Henry Goldkamp.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Julia Gordon-Bramer is readying her book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath for its release in the spring with Stephen F. Austin State University Press. If you'd like to be on her email list for more information, please flag her down, or write her at wordgirl @ nighttimes.com. When the Plath work slows down she intends to try to publish some more poetry. She was most recently voted St. Louis' Best Local Poet by the Riverfront Times.

Highway Walk
Maybe I was a little bit
high, but it made sense
then: the comforting
smooth slick of glittering
orange-yellow paint beneath
bare feet, the double
lines the width of my stride.
That fat black expanse of lanes
stretching and long         into the dark,     and me,
there, equidistant. Ten p.m.
Cars lit my way from ahead, from behind.
My soles protected from the gravel, glass,
metal bottle caps of the edge,
from the summer sticky heat and burning
blackness of tar, from the dark
reedy grasses breeding bleeding mosquitoes and murderers, unseen.
Horns honked, cars swerved, people said,
“Man, she’s tripped out!” and through
rolled down windows flicked lit cigarette butts.
Fourteen. This was how I walked, looking
down at my dirty toes, looking for somewhere
to go. The night swallowed everything in
asphalt, but my clear direction: not right
not left, not North, South, East or West.
I wasn’t anywhere. I was
just being
safe in the center of it all. 

-- Julia Gordon-Bramer

Note: "Highway Walk" won honorable mention in the St. Louis Writer's Guild 2011 contest.