Sunday, October 26, 2014

Stefene Russell Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, October 27

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Stefene Russell will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, October 27.

Other featured readers are still to be determined..

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

Stefene Russell is St. Louis Magazine's Culture Editor and a member of Poetry Scores, an arts collective that translates poetry into other media. She is also the author of Go South For Animal Index (2007) and Inferna (2013). 

Keyhole: Emergency Mockingbird 

She sings one thousand songs a night.
She sings the blurry fretting of night doves.
She sings stuck hinges, worrying in their own way,
and the dog testing his bark in the cold dusk.

She’s all small gray birds, the ones you spy
peripheral
tail seesawing the fence-line
as you sift through mail on the porch.

When the summer climbs its sine curve
of heat, and the lawn begins to singe—
the season you can never sleep—she
sits on the roof, singing to you, the same tune
over and over: that one
about someone stealing your car.

She remembers your face, even on days
when you don’t. She is up on the phone pole,
watching you curse your garbagey life
when you lock keys in the car.
Maybe she cares. Maybe she’s afraid
you’ll trash the whole world,
and her, unlucky enough to be around
when you do it.
-- Stefene Russell

Monday, August 25, 2014

Open-Mic Monday, August 25, at Tavern of Fine Arts


Chris Parr and Tony Renner, co-founders of Chance Operations.
Photo by Josh Maassen.

This month's •chance operations• will be a special all open-mic evening at at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, August 25, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Please come and share your words with us!


Since our first reading in April 2010, Chance Operations has featured readers such as Robert Nazarene, Dwight Bitikofer, Richard Newman, Drucilla Wall, Kelli Allen, Kristina Marie Darling, Steven Schreiner, and award-winning Canadian poet Gary Geddes.

Chance Operations is a monthly reading series co-curated by Chris Parr, professor of religious studies at Webster University, and Tony Renner.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Cheeraz Gormon Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 28


Cheeraz Gormon will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 28.

Also featured will be Chris Parr and Tom Simmons.

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

Advance sign-up for the open-mic following the featured readers is encouraged. Click here to sign-up via e-mail.

Cheeraz Gormon is a life-long activist, internationally touring spoken word artist and published poet, documentary photographer turned award-winning advertising copywriter. Cheeraz is currently founder, strategist and storyteller of Alchemy 7 Creative located in St. Louis, Missouri.

Click here to listen to "Words" by Cheeraz Gormon; music by Brothers Lazaroff (Maurice Mo Egeston remix of "I Could Stay Here For the Rest My Life."
Beautiful Boy

In loving memory of a young man I never met... for Terrence Sands

Beautiful boy
No one told you
That this world would be so cruel
That the cold would brush against your soul
And chafe it
Exposing you to pain
That your mother dreamed of protecting you from
As she watched her belly expand
And that your father
Upon seeing that you were a reflection of him
A manchild
Perhaps swallowed a deep breath
Held it for as long as he could
In hopes that the empty space would make a path for you

I am a stranger to you
But not to the ways of this world
That you faced
Until your eyes drifted

Beautiful boy
You have become an ancestor way too soon
Your meeting with manhood
Too short

Beautiful boy
I hope you know that your skin was Black
But you were never soiled
As this world may have made you believe
Know that you were beautiful, boy

You are now free
To be what you may have always known you were

Beautiful boy
Fly
And be
Beautiful

-- Cheeraz Gormon

Tom Simmons Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 28


Tom Simmons, veteran of several •chance operations• open-mics, will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 28.

Also featured will be Cheeraz Gormon and Chris Parr.

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

Advance sign-up for the open-mic following the featured readers is encouraged. Click here to sign-up via e-mail.



Chris Parr Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 28


•chance operations• co-founder Chris Parr will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 28.

Also featured will be Cheeraz Gormon and Tom Simmons.

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

Advance sign-up for the open-mic following the featured readers is encouraged. Click here to sign-up via e-mail.

Chris Parr is a performance poet who has read his work at art spaces, music venues, and poetry events, in his native New Zealand, as well as in Boston, New York and St. Louis.

Note: Please click on the poem below to enlarge it to a readable size.

Going to find it...

(formerly “Lost Children”)
(for Don McGlashan & Ivan Zagni)



Chris Parr adds that this poem, "goes all the way back to New Zealand, before I moved to the U.S. and Boston. I wrote it originally for and while listening to a track on a very interesting EP (I'm sure I still have it, on vinyl) by Don McGlashan (genius behind The Muttonbirds, and Blam Blam Blam before them) and avant-garde guitarist Ivan Zagni, which they released in NZ in the early 80s."

Chris Parr reading "Going to find it...," also known as "Lost Children", backed by Tiger Mountain, circa 1997. (You'll have to open two windows if you want to listen to the recording and read the poem at the same time. Sorry 'bout that.)

Chris Parr with Tiger Mountain

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Award winning Author Howard Schwartz Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, Monday, June 30


Howard Schwartz will be one of three featured readers at at •chance operations• at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, June 30.

Jerred Metz and Michael Castro will be the other featured readers.

Musical guests will be Tracey Andreotti and Henri Claude with a special appearance by David Parker.

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

Howard Schwartz is the author of five books of poems, Library of Dreams, Vessels, Gathering the Sparks, Sleepwalking Beneath the Stars, and Breathing in the Dark. He is also the co-editor (with Anthony Rudolf) of Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. His other books include Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2005, and Leaves from the Garden of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales, published in 2008. He is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Swimming to Jerusalem

The first time
I went on a quest
for forbidden fruit.

The second time
I built an ark
and tried to get there by sea.

The third time
I came in search of my ancestor,
Abraham.

If the sun was hidden
I let the stars
guide me.

If the tablets were broken
I carved
new ones.

In the future
my bones
will roll to that city.

Last night
I dreamed
I was swimming there.

-- Howard Schwartz

Jerred Metz Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, Monday, June 30


Jerred Metz will be one of three featured readers at at •chance operations• at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, June 30.

Howard Schwartz and Michael Castro will be the other featured readers.

Musical guests will be Tracey Andreotti and Henri Claude with a special appearance by David Parker.

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

Jerred grew up in Freehold, New Jersey. He went to the University of Rhode Island, receiving Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English, and the University of Minnesota, earning a Doctorate in literature. He taught at these institutions, then at Webster College in St. Louis. In 1977 he became the Deputy Director of the Department of Human Services, St. Louis, Missouri. To support his wife’s career, the family moved to Pittsburgh, then Columbia, South Carolina. Having passed through several careers, he is teaching writing again at Strayer University in Columbia, South Carolina.

Beginning in 1974, five of his poetry books were published. Then followed three books of prose, Drinking the Dipper Dry: Nine Plain-Spoken Lives (1981 K.M. Gentile Publishing), Halley’s Comet, 1019: Fire in the Sky (Singing Bone Press, 1984), and The Last Eleven Days of Earl Durand (High Plains Press, 2005.) In March 2014, his book of poems, Brains, 25 Cents: Drive In—Selected and New Poems, will be published by Aldrich Press.

Below Lafayette Ridge

Blanketed against the cold, we sat beside the river
watching the moon rise over the mountain’s spine.
Quickly the earth turned showing first a
faint gleam, then light, then moon
full in October free above the ridge.
From the cold river you offered water
to the moon’s parched oceans.
The moon broke into shimmering
points and slivers in the pool of your hands.

-- Jerred Metz

Warrior Poet Michael Castro Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, Monday, June 30


Michael Castro will be one of three featured readers at at •chance operations• at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, June 30.

Howard Schwartz and Jerred Metz will be the other featured readers.

Musical guests will be Tracey Andreotti and Henri Claude with a special appearance by David Parker.

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

Michael Castro has been called “a legend in St. Louis poetry.” Long active as a poet and arts activist, he co-founded the pioneering multi-cultural literary organization and magazine River Styx, in operation since 1975; and for fifteen years he hosted the radio program, Poetry Beat. Castro has given poetry readings on three continents, and has collaborated in performance work with a wide range of musical assemblages over the last three decades, recording four albums. He has published six poetry collections, including his most recent, The Bush Years; two books of modern Hungarian poetry he co-translated with Gabor G. Gyukics; and Interpreting the Indian, a study of Native American influences on modern poets. He is the recipient of two lifetime achievement awards, having been named Warrior Poet by Word in Motion and Guardian Angel of St. Louis Poetry by River Styx. He retired from Lindenwood University as Professor Emeritus of Communications 2012.
Bush Lied
Bush lied
to get the country
to support his war —
projected fear, “Saddam
tried to get uranium from . . .
Africa!” — uttering this word,
after a pause, like a curse —
then a pause as if to allow the silent gasp
you expected
the spooky music to start — Blair said
Saddam’s bombers could be
bringing on the nukes
in 45 minutes
& Bush chimed in, the Iraqis had drones
could reach the states —
fear drove the war,
intentionally generated fear
& foolish arrogance,
the delusion of the invaders
that the occupying army
would be met with flowers & hearts
& the keys to the oil fields

 -- Michael Castro

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Award Winning Author Mary Troy Featured Reader on Monday, May 26, at Tavern of Fine Arts


Mary Troy will be one of three featured readers at •chance operations• at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 26.

Jennifer Goldring and John Dorroh will be the other featured readers.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Mary Troy is the author of the novel, Beauties, winner of the USA Book Award, and finalist for Forewords Book of the Year Award. Her previous three books are collections of short stories. Cookie Lily won the Devil’s Kitchen Award for best book of prose published in 2004; The Alibi Café and Other Stories earned a glowing review in the New York Times; and Joe Baker Is Dead was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner and other awards. A short story, “Do You Believe In The Chicken Hanger?’ won a Nelson Algren award, and her stories and essays have appeared in many anthologies. Mary’s MFA degree is from the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Jennifer Goldring Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, May 26


Jennifer Goldring will be one of three featured readers at •chance operations• at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 26.

Mary Troy and John Dorroh will be the other featured readers.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Jennifer Goldring, originally from Arizona, is studying for her MFA in Poetry at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Jennifer was the University of Missouri - St. Louis's Poet Laureate for 2013 and also serves on the Board of the St. Louis Poetry Center. Jennifer is a photographer and writer and holds a BA Degree in economics from Arizona State University. Despite her training she has given up on solving the world’s economic problems and now writes poetry, which she finds to be a much more meaningful endeavor. She has poetry forthcoming in Tar River Poetry and her photography can be found in Anti- an online poetry journal and in the spring issue of Natural Bridge.
Walking Along Euclid in Early Spring

Tonight the moon
hangs in the sky orange
and sliced like cantaloupe.

A woman stands on tiptoe
head tilted up, her tongue tip
on her lip, arms open
to that mysterious fruit in the sky.

She is trying to take a bite
and though she knows it is beyond
her reach she will always salivate
and ache for this juicy moon.

The moonlight draws the gnat
and lace-wing from the grass.
The small gray bats dart
above blooming dogwoods
and feast.

-- Jennifer Goldring

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

John Dorroh Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, May 26


John Dorroh will be one of three featured readers at •chance operations• at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 26.

Mary Troy and Jennifer Goldring will be the other featured readers.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

John "J.D." Dorroh was a high school science teacher for more years than he can count. He fell in love with the writing process in the 8th grade when his English teacher assigned his class pen pals. J.D. went overboard, ending up with over 100 from 30+ countres. Four years ago he introduced his first white trash poem at a local coffeehouse and people began demanding that he write more. One man said, "You're writing about my kin folks." He writes flash-fiction and cheesy poetry and has published two books.
I Saw Your Follks Nekid

I saw your mama nekid twice last week,
     and she looked good, she looked fine,
     oh so fine. And talk about fit!
She has a better body than you
ever thought about having, Bobbie Sue.
Why is that, do you think?
Could be you drink too much beer?
Inquiring minds want and need to know.

Anyway,
When she saw me looking at her,
She did not get in a hurry to cover up;
She did not act surprised, no not one bit;
She did not tell me to leave;
She did not wink at me, either.
I’m the one who did that.
I saw your mama nekid twice last week.

I saw your daddy at the YMCA last week,
     and he was nekid in the dressing room,
     talkin’ to old weathered men about politics and war.
When he saw me, he asked,
“You seen my daughter lately?”
And I said, “No, sir, I haven’t, but I did see your wife
     twice last week, and she said to tell you hi
     because she knew that I’d see you here at the YMCA,
     sittin’ with old men on fart-covered benches,
     talkin’ to them about football, huntin’, and sex.”

-- John Dorroh

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

David Parker Musical Guest on Monday, April 28, at Tavern of Fine Arts


David Parker, seen below playing his composition "Searching for the Amulet," will be our musical guest at •chance operations• at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 28.

Buzz Spector, Adam Patric Miller and Jessica Baran will be the featured readers.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Buzz Spector Featured Reader on Monday, April 28

Buzz Spector performing as “The Writer” in Ann Hamilton’s 2012-13 installation, the event of a thread, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. (Photograph by Ann Hamilton)

Buzz Spector will be one of three featured readers at •chance operations• at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 28.

Adam Patric Miller and Jessica Baran will be the other featured readers.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Musical guest: David Parker, jazz piano.

Buzz Spector’s artwork has been the focus of exhibitions in such museums and galleries as the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy.

His art makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception.

Spector’s poetry and experimental writing has been published in various journals and reviews since the 1970s, including Benzene, Café Solo, and River Styx. He is the author of The Book Maker's Desire, critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists' books (Umbrella Editions, 1995), and numerous exhibition catalogue essays. A volume of selected interviews of Spector plus new page art, Buzzwords, was published in 2012 by Sara Ranchouse, Chicago.

Spector is Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Thread

for Ann Hamilton

Action’s auspices, to band or
Braid a chain of events;
Gossamer filaments of this story or that
Lanyard, holding the line,
Passing through in
Procession, a ribbon of events in a
Row, of greatening
Scale or sequence;
Set the track for
Trains of thought to travel
A way.

-- Buzz Spector

Jessica Baran Featured Reader on Monday, April 28, at Tavern of Fine Arts


Jessica Baran will be one of three featured readers at •chance operations• at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 28.

Buzz Spector and Adam Patric Miller will be the other featured readers.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Musical guest: David Parker, jazz piano.

Jessica Baran is the author of two poetry collections: Equivalents (Lost Roads Press, 2013) and Remains to Be Used (Apostrophe Books, 2011). Her poetry and art criticism has appeared in Artforum.com, Art in America, Art Papers, the Awl, BOMB, Harp & Altar, and the Village Voice, among other publications. She teaches at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art and is the director of fort gondo compound for the arts.
Glass Ceiling Gala

The final policy stipulation in Johnny Come Lately
noted that judiciousness was feared—a warm egg
placed delicately in a mouth.

Banks ran elsewhere. The Euro Zone was plagued
by kindergarten-like work environments.
Your office remained a toy train. Climb a ladder

and get a lemon. Whimsy can step aside
to let production lead. Happy and ladylike.
Smart little win-win.

-- Jessica Baran

Adam Patric Miller Featured Reader on Monday, April 28, at Tavern of Fine Arts


Adam Patric Miller will be one of three featured readers at •chance operations• at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 28.

Buzz Spector and Jessica Baran will be the other featured readers.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Musical guest: David Parker, jazz piano.

Adam Patric Miller's Greater Monster was selected by Phillip Lopate as the winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. Miller has also won a Pushcart Prize and received a Notable Essay Selection in the Best American Essays Series. His essays have been published in Agni Magazine, the Florida Review, and Blue Earth Review. During his years of teaching in an inner-city high school in Connecticut, Miller was twice voted Teacher of the Year. For his outstanding contributions to classroom teaching and for improving the quality of secondary education in Ohio, Miller was named a Jennings Scholar. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Miller took a two-year leave to play the violin professionally. A highlight of those years was the chance to perform in Carnegie Hall. Miller lives with his wife and their blended family in St. Louis, Missouri.
The Blood Orange

How do you get ideas for your poems? The
visiting poet says he goes into the woods to
catch a deer, but always comes back with a
rabbit or a handful of berries. I sit, with
selected students, in Lab C, in the library. We
sit in a circle. What was it like for you growing 
up? The government, he says, gave out machetes
and guns and said, “Go kill the Chinese people.” He
and his family had to flee the country. The visiting
poet: black hair, thick-framed glasses, jeans, black Doc
Martens. The visiting poet’s voice sounds like the wind
that rises around you when you are alone in the woods.
Will you read one of your poems for us? He will not
read any of his poems aloud. Our librarian, who asked
if he would, holds his book to her chest and stiffens.
The poems, he says, are not that good. Reading poems
aloud is increasingly difficult. He wants to conserve
breath. One winter morning, years ago, as I drove south
on I95 towards Bridgeport, a big deer leaped onto the
highway. He dodged commuter traffic, headed west
for the center partition. I thought, yes, he’s going to make
it. On hall duty, and later that night in New Haven, not far
from Harold Bloom’s house, not far from the other side
of Prospect Street, where teenagers like my students sold
crack and nightly gunfire popped and faded into familiarity, I
wrote my deer poem. After the visiting poet left, I talked to
John, how good it was to talk like that to a poet, to consider a
poem as a score of music, and when it is read aloud, it is the
breath of death, and how the deer is still out there, alone, shivering,
early morning, in March, but he knows spring is close. He lifts
his head up toward a branch. He munches a bud. I tell John
about the fate of my deer, how the two stanzas were lost. I could
resurrect them, make a new poem, toss in a blood orange like
a grenade: John had shared one, yesterday––the skin spattered darker,
not hunter’s orange. Cut open, the partitioned flesh is like the red
when you kill a flea with your nail, blood comes out, or it is like the
red moon a deer hunter might see. The visiting poet wanted to
get back to western PA, to live where he was raised, where everyone
had wanted to lynch him because so many in town had fought
in Vietnam and, you know, they thought he was the enemy. When
the visiting poet smiled, his teeth shone black.

-- Adam Patric Miller

Thursday, March 27, 2014

"In Short, a Memory of the Other on a Good Day" Book Launch on Monday, March 31


The official launch of In Short, A Memory of the Other on a Good Day by Allison Cundiff and Steven Schreiner will be the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, March 31.

Allison and Steven will have copies of the book for sale and will be signing copies.


Jim Mrockowski will also be a featured reader.

Musical guest: David Parker, solo jazz piano.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Allison Cundiff Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, March 31


Allison Cundiff will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, March 31.

Other featured readers will be Steven Schreiner  and Jim Mrockowski.


Musical guest: David Parker, solo jazz piano.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Allison is a graduate of Truman State University (BA English Literature) and the University of Missouri (MA English Literature). Her previous publications include articles in the Pragmatic Buddhist and Feminist Teacher. She is the co-author with Steven Schreiner of In Short, A Memory of the Other on a Good Day. Allison lives in St. Louis.

Novinger, MO
there were four cans lined up on that hollowed mossy log
that had always been there it seemed
and we stood before it not talking the other woman and I,
quiet aside the men not because they made us
but because they would not hurt us we knew
and sometimes when men talk evenly
and they are all the same with beautiful shoulders
and denim cuffs over boots that have been resoled
and drops of paint dried on top
but those are the shoes they wore after work too.
and I had brought cold lunch for the hunters
but it was nearing sunset and the sweet feeling
of cooking for a really good man,
one who would grow to love me back,
oh but love at 19 was looking up and catching,
seeing his pain as he saw the run in my tights
or the too young face he shamed himself for loving.
and they all had guns
their fathers had taught them to shoot
and I held my boss' baby
whose teeth were aching and my pinky finger in his mouth
all those pink ridges, poor thing,
and judy had the toddler who kicked her belly with his boots
and the beer was in a can in my lover's brown fingers.
and all I could have been was there at that log,
a good man's wife,
my belly taut and sweetly pregnant over and over
too young, making love over and over to a man
who wouldn't have squinted his eyes shut
and instead would put his hand on the small of my back
ohgod a man's hand there.
A man who smiled when he pulled inside of me,
as to say, this is right, no one is getting hurt,
I know this woman loves me. I'll smile with crooked teeth
and know she will think me beautiful.
I was behind with the reading for class
but said yes so I could help just with the babies
while the men of course had guns but in my backseat
I kept a notebook and once he asked,
did I write about him?
and I told him, baby, I have poems about you
but I won't show you till you keep your promise
to take me on that motorcycle to the desert
where you'll hold my cold burned skin
in some tent and his eyes were blue
and he was taller than me and he looked down then
but a good Catholic girl can't give those things away completely.
and his hands were tired after a day,
deep occasional cuts through coarse skin.
You know the shaking like the Elgar cello concerto opening
chords?
 I won't talk about the falling away,
but I want to tell you that once
on a thursday sunset,
I handed over a teething baby
to his mother, lifted a rifle to my cheek,
and shot off two cans from a log in Novinger
under the eye of a hunter
eating the cold dinner I had made him,
his hand low on my back to steady my aim.
-- Allison Cundiff

Steven Schreiner Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, March 31


Steven Schreiner will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, March 31.

Other featured readers will be Allison Cundiff and Jim Mrockowski.

Musical guest: David Parker, solo jazz piano.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Steven teaches at the University of Missouri-St Louis. He is the author of Too Soon to Leave and Out of Egypt (forthcoming 2014), and the co-author with Allison Cundiff of In Short, A Memory of the Other on a Good Day.
Darkroom

That rain is falling,
that rain we always talk about
that never falls on us.
I see you with your skirt hiked up
with your sandals in your hand
to avoid getting wet in the deep puddles.
Or maybe you are playing
with the rain
running down your face and your arms
and dragging your hair down, weighing
as water will
heavy on your clothes. Your shirt
is a man’s dress shirt you kept
when your lover died
and which you wear like Georgia
O’Keefe waiting for Alfred Stieglitz
to arrive from his city
to her Pueblo. She’s been painting
in a wide hat; he’s been dodging taxis
in the dark Manhattan evening
on a day that revealed
only black and white figures
swimming up to him from the chemical baths
of his darkroom. With the red light on
everything was smoke, as in war.
All day the sun stood by her, her only true
lover, and lit the calyx of her lily.
What large petals, and what a demented,
pollinated stamen among the swelling sepals.
Then the bone-white afterlife
she sought in a skull. What has this
to do with you, or the rain?
It’s just that, when I was away
in my lonely, vexed vigil
to my mother’s late flowering
I was unable, it felt, to touch
anything—not the past, not you, not
myself. I so wanted to be awakened
by beauty or stirred by desire
instead of anguished and cold,
unlike after a death
when one is bereft and maddened
with urge, the great, unfulfillable
hunger after the end. This, this
state I was in, was all prelude
filled with ire and the insistence
to remember to be kind that one must practice
constantly among the frightened, greedy
dying. So it was that I imagined
because I could not touch anything
(nightly I simply sat in a dark room
I returned to after she had been put to bed,
letting the phone emit this or that
message, yes one was yours, no one was not . . .)
that I wanted to approach you
but not touch you, not permit you
to reach for me, not take off what
had gotten wet, not fall upon one
another as lovers do who’ve been apart
when they meet on an all-afternoon rain
but to stand beside you in the sunlight
that strips away everything we are, leaving
either a wet, willing flower’s mouth
or a bleached, wide-eyed death’s head.

-- Steven Schreiner

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Dwight Bitikofer Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, February 24


Dwight Bitikofer will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, February 24.

Other featured readers will be Ryan Krull and Mallory Nezam.

Musical guest: Raven Wolf, solo jazz saxophone.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Dwight Bitikofer has involved himself with St. Louis poetry events for the past decade or so. His poems draw from experiences and places as far flung as driving taxicabs in St. Louis to harvesting wheat in Kansas to exploring castle ruins in Sicily to perspectives of life and earth from the windows of airliners. Bitikofer emcees a couple of local poetry events. He puts together PoJazz shows with local spiritual jazz musician Raven Wolf C. Felton Jennings II. He has been published in Natural Bridge, Untamed Ink, Mid Rivers Review and several other journals. His poem “Interrupted Crossing” won first place in St. Louis Poetry Center’s 2013 James Nash Poetry Contest.

Bitikofer’s day job is as publisher of Webster-Kirkwood Times, South County Times and West End Word community newspapers.
Interrupted Crossing

In the light of headlights
a couple of car lengths distant
I saw the movement, the form,
the familiar low profile amble
and before a wisp of a prayer
could form, I saw it flop contorted
from below the wheels of the car ahead.

In a split second I might have flicked
my steering wheel to crush its body,
to make certain its life ended abruptly
and without more pain, but neither could I
play two tons of God quite so quickly,
nor could I bring myself to stop,
an action that could require more actions:
to examine, to find out if the animal
still lived or whether it would quickly die –
decisions, morality plays
for the sake of an opossum

Instead, I felt tears. Were they triggered
for an ancient marsupial brain
not yet adapted to dangers of trafficways?
Or for something unrelated,
some latent sorrow over missed connections,
over hopes that missed their mark?
Some old, old need ignored, run over –
some unrequited expectation receding,
left to flop, contorted -- alive or dead.

-- Dwight Bitikofer

Mallory Nezam Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, February 24


Mallory Nezam will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, February 24.

Other featured readers will be Dwight Bitikofer and Ryan Krull.

Musical guest: Raven Wolf, solo jazz saxophone.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Mallory Nezam is a public artist who provokes creative civic engagement and brings to life public spaces of her city. She is Founder & Director of STL Improv Anywhere and Co-Creator of the Poetree Project. In addition to public art, Nezam has been publishing short fiction, non-fiction and poetry for years. She published her first (and arguably her best) poem at the age of 10. Nezam's work can be found in P I E C R U S T Magazine, the Occidental Review, and Art Animal Magazine. She has won awards for her creative non-fiction and short fiction.

Predpriyatie

The light filtered in in a dirty way. The windowsill was dusty and pale walls hugged light around the room as though it were steam. This was the kind of light you could see.

Ivelina’s wrist and watering can were illuminated as she stood arrested, staring out onto the rooftop patio. For a moment, this image held still until a house fly flew into focus and Iva’s gaze moved. She looked down at the empty watering can in her hand and then back out the window.

Zachary came home that night with the sound of a door slamming. The sound triggered her animation as if he himself was nothing more than a door slam. A thump in her chest, and it went deeper. It was the first time she’d heard her heartbeat like this. It was the first time she had truly felt her heart beat. There were wisterias crawling up the gate grate, the slowly aging rust adding a decided charm to the roof. Rooftops like these were hard to find in Chelsea. They were even rarer for those making a living off of little more than hope, which for Zachary and Ivelina came in the form of naïveté and in accidents they couldn’t confront. Hanging trellises, wrap-around vines, potted plants and rows of gardenias made the roof seem simple and old. This is where Iva usually stopped for an 8 o’clock visit: water, rest, regain. The quiet communion with plants followed long days as a cocktail waitress. Most nights Iva continued on to Zachary’s studio, helping with boom mics, holding ladders, coffee runs. Thursday afternoons she was the pianist for the Vitrolics’ private parties. She is far more exceptional than anyone there ever notices, and more exceptional that she can comprehend herself.

And then she heard him in the stairwell, a mixture of sounds, a hazy recognition of the corresponding movements. But today, she couldn’t envision these familiar gestures, losing the memory as though he were slowly disappearing. There are only so many sounds you can hear within a person: a stomach gurgle, a jaw click, a deep cough, a heartbeat. But this heartbeat was different. Have you ever felt a heartbeat within yourself and realized it was not your own? Have you ever felt a stranger’s heartbeat within your own body and realized it was a part of you?

“Nie ne obichame tuk zaedno,” Ivelina’s mother would always say. “Why aren’t we loving here together?” She would say this when she was mad or when there was a disagreement between the two of them. Iva never used this with Zachary when there was a disagreement. She chose to keep silent. Iva’s low-leaning gaze focused on Zachary’s foot, his tattering blue Converses faded from the sun. He’d made his way into the kitchen, kept still at the entrance with one foot draping the border. Iva raised her eyes to scale his torso, identifying his structure.

. . . .

When his face came slowly into focus she could see in his gaze plain bewilderment. She followed his eyes to the puddle of water underneath her feet, her house shoes soaked through to an entirely different hue. She looked back up to Zachary, the watering can still in hand.

“Well,” he uttered. “Did you fall asleep or something?” He looked at her. She felt him looking at her in the way that people watch news segments of things perturbing—concernedly, but distant. Iva moved her eyes to the watering can in her right hand, rust eating the edges near where the handle touched the base. A banjo struck up across the apartment alleyway and Iva’s hairs vibrated to the hum. Zachary looked disturbed and then began to speak, but didn’t. He only opened his mouth and inhaled. Iva’s head had turned slowly to the window.

“I love strings.” The statement started emphatically and waned toward empty, toward solemn. She stood again facing Zachary with the watering can still clutched in her right hand. “Well, I would love it if you would get out of that puddle, Ivelina. What did you do to yourself?”

“I—...” Iva lowered her eyes towards her feet again, turned toward the can. She looked back up to Zachary who never wore shoes indoors and who never understood her culture of house slippers.

She carries the weight of her past life undetected. Ivelina is from a place where trains run slow and where the grace of a woman is in her silent curves. It wasn’t silence that made her leave home; it was the fear of it. On cold winter evenings, if she kept her breath low, she could uncover the sound of Nothing. There are some people who strive to find this. For others, for Ivelina, it is obscene and violating. When her grandfather closed her palm around an envelope full of money and the ticket, she heard that silence again.

Her mother was waiting for her on the edge of the pond, half obscured by cattails swaying wantonly in the breeze. She touched Ivelina’s hand; they made a paper boat out of the envelope and she asked Ivelina if she wanted to jump in. Her mother smirked slightly as Iva turned to her, questioning.

She realized she was moving toward noise.

Noise was busses screeching, accents, accidents. It was cleaning someone else’s bathroom. Forgetting. It was hospitals and watering cans. It was not knowing enough English to get a job; but you didn’t have to know English to fuck.

Zachary filled a cup with water and walked towards Ivelina. He wanted to say, “Neither of us will be all right.” She wanted to say, “I will plant flowers in your shoes. I will hang them on a telephone wire and plant flowers in your shoes.” Zachary took a sip of water and set it down on the table.

“Are you going to help me tonight?” He brushed her arm, avoided her spill. He manufactured a grin to counter his earlier honesty and she imagined potting soil, digging holes in Bulgarian terrain and dropping soil in his shoes. She could see his look of pure and utter fear. She could feel his hand tremble. Where she could have trembled, too, the baby kept still.

....

The difference between who we are and what we become is a chasm that can echo like canyons until we construct our own solid ground. Ivelina left with two suitcases in hand, Zachary’s shoes tied to one. She walked down the road during the 8 o’clock evening lull. There were telephone wires overhead that she didn’t even notice.

Zachary had expected that she would go home. But she went south. At a rest stop, she played piano for an empty bar. Mid-song she stopped, closed her eyes and imagined the baby taking over for her in the way that some trees can grow back from nothing. She sees their branches reaching up over the ledge of the window despite the hot, dry heat. Despite the dead wind that presses the walls of the room. This new home is a transition. It is not an instant; it is a length of time. They close their eyes and they are swaying like the trees.

-- Mallory Nezam

Ryan Krull Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, February 24


Ryan Krull will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, February 24.

Other featured readers will be Dwight Bitikofer and Mallory Nezam.

Musical guest: Raven Wolf, solo jazz saxophone.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Ryan Krull is a native St. Louisian, currently in his final semester of study for a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He works in academic advising for the aforementioned school, lives in Tower Grove and is a reader of the slush for Boulevard magazine. His fiction and journalism have appeared online and in print.

The Yogini Spinster

Yoga for these women is always followed by chitchat over lattés and today Lisa is the one doing most of the talking. She’s been on vacation the last few weeks and is dying to tell her friends this story she heard out west.

The story concerns a woman from the Bay Area who isn’t exactly fat but, especially out there in California, has always felt like she’s had to be twice as good at everything else just to make up for the fact that she’ll never be one of those girls you see jogging through Noe Valley in shorts and a sports bra barely breaking a sweat and owning everyone’s gaze.

She’s the sort of girl who carries her baby fat with her into adulthood even though she’s following diet fads and counting calories before she can even drive -- the sort of girl who goes the whole summer between high school and college without ingesting a single carb. But no matter what she does, her cheeks only soften and unlike the chubby boys her age she can’t just grow a beard to cover up her sagging chin. By her midtwenties it’s abundantly clear that the fleshy pounds aren’t going anywhere. What she’s carrying is immune to everything that’s ever worked for anybody else.

And the woman knows on some level that that's not really important -- her weight, her frame, whatever -- she’s always told herself it’s not defining, not half as defining as her full ride scholarship or getting hired right out of college or, later on, her being named the youngest junior VP in the history of her firm. But still.

Then in her early thirties she meets a guy through one of those dating sites, a guy who’s a professional in her field and who’s smart enough to see in her what she’s accomplished, how good of a friend she’s been to so many people, how she really does care about others and at her core is a good person. So this guy who’s pretty handsome and, though he’s not as successful as she is, has still done OK in his own right -- so this guy really hits it off with her and she seems to really hit it off with him and a year or so after meeting on that first date they’re engaged. Everyone in the woman’s family is breathing a sort of sigh of relief and is just absolutely thrilled. And together the two of them -- 30s, no kids, him pulling in close to six figures, her pulling in well over six figures, six figures in San Fran is still six figures -- they have a good amount of disposable income to spend on nuptial pomp and circumstance.

And this is when it gets interesting.

A month or two before the wedding he comes clean to her. He tells her that he knows it’s dumb and it’s 2012 and they’re a modern couple and everything, but he’s uncomfortable that she’s higher up in their field, and he feels like his coworkers and other colleagues at industry-type functions are going to spread the word about him and all that chatter might turn into a stigma. He tells her all this casually in the middle of their movie night at home, without even pausing the DVD. So she finds the remote and turns on the lights in the room. He tells her to wait and hear him out. Nothing’s going to change, he says, but there is a big promotion coming up at his firm in a few weeks -- and remember these are the same weeks leading up to them saying their ‘I do’s’ -- and he says if he just buckles down at work, if he puts some elbow grease into it and shows that he’s the type of person really willing to put in the hours, then he’s a shoe-in. And he’s doing it for her, he says, because he doesn’t want her to marry some guy she’s going to have to support and if they have kids down the line then the last thing they need to be worrying about is the money factor of her maternity leave.

She’s uncomfortable, obviously. But this guy’s about to be her husband, and she says, sure go for it. Get that promotion. He kisses her and grabs the remote, presses play, and thinks that’s that.

Over the next few days that whole interaction -- combined with all the other run-up-to-the-wedding craziness -- gets the woman thinking about ways in which she might not quite be bringing her share to the table. Ways in which she, well you know, might not be pulling her weight. Her mind takes off to that body-conscious, mirror-gawking place that she’s probably no stranger to by this point in her life. Six weeks out from the wedding she starts thinking like it’s not a marriage she’s supposed to be getting ready for but the Miss California Swim Suit Contest or something.

Anyway, she calls her sister who lives in Austin and her sister of course hears the stress oozing out of the phone, so she naturally suggests her poor sibling try some yoga, if it helps her get into shape, great, but what she actually needs to lose is some of that tension. The woman takes her sister’s advice and the very next day she’s at her first class, signed up for thirty sessions over the next thirty days. She’s into it full-bore.

And of all the hundreds of places in San Francisco, she happens to walk into the one studio with the one yogi who is all about the om and the breath of yoga, but not so much about the moving around. Her first class she spends mostly in Savasana and maybe moves into Child’s Pose once, and the whole time she’s being told to try to find her breath. Focus on your breath, the yogi keeps saying. Everything is just energy, it all moves through you and it is neither good nor bad, it only depends on how your body chooses to interpret it.

The yogi is like this sixty year old guy from India who doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him and, when he does actually move, moves like a teenager; the kind of instructor who when he’s just casually sitting Indian Style in the front of the class is actually in perfect Full Lotus.

She leaves that first class a little perplexed and thinking that she’s had some serious misconceptions about yoga. But she’s signed up for thirty classes and she hasn’t gotten where she is by giving up on things or quitting after just one day -- she went like three months without eating a piece of bread, for god’s sake. So she goes again, and again, and again on the next day, the next day, and the next.

The woman’s fifth class is when the old yogi first walks in with the bell. He sets it down in the back of the studio, not saying anything about it, and the class he leads that day is practically motionless. The woman’s in Child’s Pose for over an hour, her back and neck are filled with that pulling type of heat -- that’s when the yogi rings it. It sounds like one of those church steeple bells, but sharper and with more sustain. And there in the darkened silence of the yoga studio it’s the clearest sound the woman’s ever heard. In between the first and second ringing the yogi tells the class to imagine that sound as a personal bubble, completely protecting them from all those other petty noises that try to invade. Notice how, he says, well after the bell has quieted you can still hear its sound, it's still protecting your space and anything that comes inside that space can only do so with your blessing. And that’s when the woman has her realization: the man she is about to marry she doesn’t love.

When she gets home from class that night her fiancé asks her how it went and she says she’s probably not going to go back. She gave it a try and yoga’s just not for her. But, in a mere five days, her husband-to-be has managed to fall in love with the idea of a sleek and flexible, shiny, brand new wife. He tells her, no, she can’t quit. She’s not even a week in. He’s been working ten-hour days trying to get that promotion. He’s planning on working both Saturday and Sunday. ‘Don’t let me down, babe,’ he says. ‘Don’t let yourself down. Let’s not start the marriage by backing out on something.’ He talks to her like he’s her middle school softball coach or something. So just to shut him up she goes and throws her yoga clothes in the wash so they’ll be clean for tomorrow. She goes to class the next day, her sixth, and then the following. And her fiancé’s all of a sudden like super interested in her yoga now that he feels like she’d have quit if not for him. Every night he asks her about class and every night she tells him she’s not into it. ‘You’ll warm up to it,’ he says. "Ok," she says. And with each class’ meditation it becomes clearer to her that marrying this man will make her profoundly unhappy, despite how good she felt about it just a month ago, despite how much she’d still like to see it work. She can’t ignore the error she’d started making back on that first date: she was so distracted by this man’s acceptance of her, she never stopped and asked herself if she accepted him. She goes to her ninth class, her tenth. After her twentieth class, about three weeks in, she finally calls the wedding off. She comes home from class and whoever would’ve thought a ringing in your ears could be a good thing, but she uses that bell’s sound to stay calm and cool and immune while she breaks the news to him and he cries on the kitchen floor right where she’d broke the news to him -- he can’t even make it into the living room to a couch or a chair. Then he calls his mother, right there in front of her still in the kitchen, saying that everything is F'ed and calling the woman an F'ing B. And then he says -- he’s actually talking to his mother but of course the woman can hear -- he says that the whole promotion thing was a lie and actually his firm has brought in outside efficiency consultants and he’s confident they’ll recommend his termination despite all the extra work he’s been putting in. His words and his crying are all just petty noise to the woman though, unfortunate that it has to take place in her kitchen but none of it's getting past her bubble. She even helps her now ex-fiancé pack up all his stuff that’s made its way to her place in the past year.

Word spreads. The woman’s phone starts ringing that night and keeps ringing for weeks. There are emails and text messages too, of course. She replies to everything promptly and with a yogic calm. Her standard response is: that’s the cost of illumination.

The cups at Lisa’s table are fist crumpled and teeth marked around the brims. One of Lisa’s friends asks how she heard that story.

"After a class in San Fran," Lisa says. "Someone came up to me and was like ‘Do you know who you just practiced next to?’ I said ‘No’ and they said, ‘That was the yogini spinster. Aren’t you from around here?’ Her story’s fairly famous out there in yoga circles. The woman who jilted her man for the mat."

"What’d she look like? When you were next to her for the class?"

"Well before she even had her mat down I thought this woman looked melancholic. But after about thirty minutes I realized that was wrong. She looked like a woman with light around her, like no matter what happened to her in this life it wasn’t going to cause even a scratch."

-- Ryan Krull (Note: "The Yogini Spinster" first appeared in Whisky Island, Issue 61

Monday, February 17, 2014

Raven Wolf Musical Guest on Monday, February 24



Raven Wolf, solo spiritual jazz saxophone, flute, and hand drums, will be the musical guest at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, February 24.

Featured readers will be Dwight Bitikofer, Ryan Krull, and Mallory Nezam.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Friday, January 24, 2014

David Parker Musical Guest at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, January 27

David Parker, solo jazz piano, will be the musical guest at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, January 27.

Featured readers will be Sean Arnold, Jim McGowin and Brett Underwood.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

David Parker says:
I was born 1959, the same year Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), and John Coltrane Plays the Blues were recorded, Ornette Coleman arrived in NYC that year as well. Improvising on the piano as early as 5 or 6, with 2 or 3 years of classical lessons around 8th grade. In my high school years, I took extremely valuable music theory classes at St. Louis University High and I also studied composition with Michael F. Hunt.

Taught myself jazz in the years after high school, played cocktail piano at Duff’s for a few years (’79, ’80, 81). Informal studies with poet Shirley LeFlore. Workshop in Woodstock with Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland and Pat Metheny.

Since around “81, I did many concerts and gigs with trumpeter/poet Floyd LeFlore (one of the founding members of Black Artist Group). Studied with Anthony Braxton at Mills College (Oakland, California) in 1990.

In the early ‘90s, I played and studied with Joe Charles (master drummer, teacher and mystic) and Jimmy Sharrod (saxophonist, composer). My record label (Vid Recordings) has released 10 albums over the years.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Jim McGowin Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, January 27


Jim McGowin will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, January 27.

Other featured readers will be Sean Arnold and Brett Underwood.

Musical guest: David Parker, solo jazz piano.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Jim McGowin tries to write and paint and take pictures when he isn't at his day job. He is particularly fond of the fusion of art and beer, and has thus read at locations such as Duffs (Chance Operations), Dressel's (Poems, Prose, and Pints), Sandrina's, Atomic Cowboy, and quite possibly some other places he forgot about. He also read on KDHX FM 88.1 once, which he thinks is pretty cool. One of these days he plans on organizing his poems into a book of some sort and giving copies away, because probably no one will want to pay money for one.

something... 2/12

an unintended summer day
an unencumbered florid display
of rationale

an approach, like a roach,
cautious and bearing
gifts of antenna rubbings

the thought bubbles
     twisting

like partially deflated balloons
hanging from a mailbox
with a sign
announcing a party
that has already passed

loose thoughts for a rational man
wouldn't you say?
or maybe you wouldn't

seeing as how we have
already started our
trajectory to tragedy

the tragedy of gas giants

close
but never to be

     a star

-- Jim McGowin

Brett Underwood Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, January 27


Brett Underwood will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, January 27.

Other featured readers will be Sean Arnold and Jim McGowin.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Musical guest: David Parker, solo jazz piano.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Brett Lars Underwood is a bartending gadabout who writes, promotes and produces happenings and mishaps in St. Louis, Missouri. He's quicker with the stink eye than verbal reprimands and favors the brushback pitch over preemptive warfare. He has the wingspan of an albatross and would prefer cash.

Man's Crisis of Identity

A)
Button the lip but for a daft witticism
disinfecting citified minivan stories
stewed in knotted midsection oven
mittens telling the ancient news networks
with finger signals that fry the nothings and
insist incidents jumped the fence
dense but the dang boss (trafficker of snores)
in the picture was gone dripped off the smile
of the moneymaking pep in the step, fuck the
criticism splatter jism
amidst nomads and their lawn furniture
sin and wetted with snorts from a
sweaty bottle of brown glass flew
over a confirmed tiny sister sitter
on the facelessness of the worker
who poured the gravity of labor and Santa
gave his lumbago to the slelves
yep—slave elves---
not to mention tiny sirs and philanthropic
yuppies gifting guppies to a shark.

B)
Social lacing never quite hinders unseen
in the hump fields of the nevermind.
The stripping of hazy ids that couldn’t
begin to lend abstraction to the expected
bocce ball precedent pretending when
that ditzy sixball’s scent drips on a coerced ditz.
Or maybe the next hit spy rallying for the
invite of a possibility that the Moondaig to drizzle
Mussolini sugarnecktard on the rim of your grinchole low
the cloud working a lunch shift on Wednesday.
Weep easy. Weep long. Wipe the drips from your gentle smirk.
Loosen the reins of your worksteady belch, ye
clodhoppers, ye Gophermenz.
Then, there came at last,
“Old crayon, you grizzle”, from near
the space needle of no syringe.
At the end of the day, his back
aches and she still smells like onions
muttering gravely into the whiskey
and half drunk ales.
Misery in the tea asks, “Why, mystery?”
at the rust in his socks.

C)
Ice Cream, a time void forcing you,
willing you to believe that you're an angel
to let that pouty dictator melt over the cone
to your cunning fingers of bliss that hold the
magic…oh! The magic!
The magic to render that mourning skeleton
into a man who no longer regrets having
butchered his mother’s tongue... or letting you slip
Cheerios into his guitar hole.

-- Brett Lars Underwood

Sean Arnold Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, January 27


Sean Arnold will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, January 27.

Other featured readers will be Brett Underwood and Jim McGowin.

Musical guest: David Parker, solo jazz piano.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Sean Arnold lives in St. Louis across the street from the Botanical Gardens in an apartment with his lovely girlfriend and their dog and cat.

He recently published his fourth chapbook “Soliloquy From a Freight Yard: An Open Fall Window”. This is the final season/book in his “Soliloquy From a Freight Yard” series based around the seasons and freight yard romanticisms.

Sean is taking a final attempt at his undergrad in creative writing at Webster University. He is the former host and co-organizer of Voices From the Underground and Casinotown poetry readings. His poetics have been set to folk music, electronic music, hip-hop, and everything in between.

OH! The Wheat!

all those dates
and pictures
and apps.
-- weird the way myths have always reinforced and combated the hyperreal.
all those screenshots and toocool avatars
like bob marley playing from a youtube page
on a tv hooked up to a bluray player and
pandora.

and a department store in wichita kansas
with kevin kidwell
or a steak n shake in ofallon beside the blockbuster
across from the gasmart
with my old friend who joined the marines.

--and so i think, all
the st louis anarchists
were out of touch
with folks who ride motorcycles.

somewhere the wolves are howling
in an unfettered wilderness. i know,
for i have been there.


ill text you soon homie,
--here we stand

like germs of wheat
blown by the wind.

-- Sean Arnold