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.
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 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
