Julia Gordon-Bramer Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, January 26

Julia Gordon-Bramer will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, January 26.

Also featured will be Jane Ellen Ibur and Robert Nazarene.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Julia Gordon-Bramer is a professional tarot card reader, writer, and scholar of Sylvia Plath. Her book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath will be out this year with Stephen F. Austin State University Press and can be ordered on Amazon now. In 2013, the Riverfront Times called her St. Louis’ Best Local Poet.

Anthony Bourdain, I hate you.

You, and your layovers, the sixty-
minute getaways to the farthest
limits of Somewhere with no reservations, surrounded
by all the hippest people I will never meet.
Dude, your steely curls are bringing me down,
mussed just right, you are a head and shoulders
higher than everyone, donning shiny
suits, or casually rumpled in Ralph Lauren.
Oh, Anthony, Arbiter of Taste, I hate
your punk rock background,
your Discovery budget, your street cred,
your throaty cleverness, the savage
similes off your tongue. I hate
your Boys’ Club as you bite
underbelly bits and parts unknown
of poor skewered beasts. You: flesh-eater,
bone slurper, booze sucking snob,
with your glory stories of hangovers
fueled by foolish foreign women
smiling from back in the kitchen, stirring
mixing bowls close against their ample hearts.
Anthony Bourdain, I hate
your cigarette smoke as it jets off and away
like curls of skywriting from your pouty lips.
You are not pretty, yet the world is your mirror,
flattering as you simulate your spicy jerk
chicken adventures. Oh, Satan of gravy,
grease, and cheese curd. Sipping scummy broth,
an oily smile hides those white shark teeth.
Goddamnit, Bourdain! Why do you fascinate me?

I am as guilty of watching as the rest, and yet
I have been on the other side of reality
TV. I see the cameramen coaching
its suave illusion toward the next visual lie:
I see the retakes with more oomph; the pretend
sleep and pseudo-conversations; the false
temporary friends. Let’s get confidential,
Anthony Bourdain: if I confess I love your life,
does this mean I must love you?
Will you tell me who you really are, and
am I cool enough
to come along too?

--Julia Gordon-Bramer

Jane Ellen Ibur Featured Reader on Monday, January 26, at Tavern of Fine Arts

Jane Ellen Ibur will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, January 26.

Also featured will be Robert Nazarene and Julia Gordon-Bramer.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Jane Ellen Ibur is the author of Both Wings Flappin’, Still Not Flyin’ published by PenUltimate Press. Her award winning poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has won much recognition as an Arts Educator with over 30 years experience teaching writing in public schools, jails, museums, residential schools, social service agencies, veterans, homeless men. Lead Faculty for the Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute, she is one of its founders. She directs Poets & Writers Ink for emerging young writers. For 19 years she co-hosted and co-produced "Literature for the Halibut" on FM 88.1 KDHX.

Cancun

In Mexico, I see your face
waning, shaded by cataracts
you rise above me, a watchful eye,
lid nearly drawn, 25 years between
us now passed like so many waves
against the shore. I gather bits
of broken sand dollars or pieces
of moon you throw down to me,
lunar coins washed on the beach
for me to cash in at low tide.

-- Jane Ellen Ibur

Robert Nazarene Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, January 26

Robert Nazarene will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, January 26.

Also featured will be Jane Ellen Ibur and Julia Gordon-Bramer.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Robert Nazarene founded Margie/The American Journal and received a publishers' National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. His first book of poems is Church. A new collection, Idyll, is forthcoming in 2015. Educated at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown, his work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Iowa Review, African American Review, Salmagundi and elsewhere.

Dolor

I have known the ineluctable grief of waiting,
the desolation of fluorescence and its quiet
accompanist: the low drone of vending machinery.

The sadness of the silent switchboard;
of sleeping pushcarts, empty reception areas;
the unending
tunnelry of immaculate public spaces; the odor
of antiseptic, the pale standard face of nightshift
workers; the grey duplication of mornings;
the quiet

clatter and clink of the cafeteria -- slowly
regaining consciousness.

Out the window,
on the street below, the clamor of children
filling the crosswalk, crowding the playground.

The baby got sick.
The baby
never woke up.

My baby: wrapped in linen,
stiff, still--
perfect,
in her box.

-- Robert Nazarene

Note: Originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.