Howard Schwartz Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, October 26

Howard Schwartz will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, October 26.

Other featured readers will be Allison Creighton and Jeff Friedman.

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

Allison Creighton Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, October 26

Allison Creighton will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, October 26.

Other featured readers will be Howard Schwartz and Jeff Friedman.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Allison Creighton holds an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She teaches part-time at Washington University in St. Louis and serves as a contributing editor for River Styx. Her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Natural Bridge, The Mochila Review, and two anthologies, and she received first prize in the 2010 Wednesday Club of St. Louis Original Poetry Contest. Her first book of poetry, Drawing Down the Moon, was published by Turning Point in 2015

On a Night Too Hot for a Sheet

Now that you have entered
the space that surrounds me,
we shall be as one.
I will pull you inside with such a touch
that the finest light will waver.
Your lips are bittersweet
as the root of love itself.

One by one
I hand you my secrets.
My fear of the color orange
and all its bold laughter.
A secret buried in a meadow
where no one goes.
How I tried to bind
two distant souls.
Each way I struggled
to force another to speak.
The stark night
when childhood vanished
in an instant.
Days my tires spun
in lost rotations
down a gravel road
far from home.
The shrinking blackout windows.
Shadows of a phantom figure.
The thorn caught in his beard.

A tremor shifts across my body
as I start to tell the secret
too scared to breathe.
Your eyes unblinking,
hover above me.
As you come closer,
for a kiss,
I can’t feel the soft wind
of your breath on my lips.

You wait and wait.

You press yourself
hard against me,
a ghost.

--Allison Creighton

(published in Winter Harvest: Jewish Writing in St. Louis, and in Drawing Down the Moon)

Jeff Friedman Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, October 26

Jeff Friedman will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, October 26.

Also featured will be Howard Schwartz, and Allison Creighton.

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.

Jeff Friedman has published six poetry collections, five with Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Pretenders (2014), Working in Flour (2011) and Black Threads (2008). His poems, mini stories and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, The Antioch Review, Poetry International, Hotel Amerika, Flash Fiction Funny, Missouri Review, Agni Online, The New Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poets, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Smokelong Quarterly, Boulevard, Natural Bridge, The Vestal Review, and The New Republic and many other literary magazines. He has won numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and two individual artist grants from the New Hampshire State Arts Council. Dzvinia Orlowsky’s and his translation of Memorials by Polish poet Mieczslaw Jastrun was published by Lavender Ink/Dialogos in August 2014.

Bear Fight

When Liza fell in with the bear, I was more than disappointed as I had been in love with her since childhood. “What’s he got that I don’t?” I asked as we walked past the diner together. “He’s a bear.” She let go of my hand. “He gets a little jealous when I’m out with my friends.” “Why do you want to be with a bear anyway?” Two teenagers pushed past us with their skateboards. Balloon floated above Main Street, announcing a sale at the furniture shop. “Why do you want to be with me?” she asked. We parted ways when the light changed, but later I went to her home dressed as a bear. She opened the door. “Come in,” she said, putting her arms around me. “You don’t smell like a bear,” she said, Then in walked the bear, with a fierce look on his face. He growled and so did I. He cuffed me, so I cuffed him back. Then we grappled with each other, bear hugging until Liza stepped in between us and held out her hands. “I’m sick of bears,” she said. “Get out of here.” I ripped off my bear mask. “I’m not a bear,” I said. The bear ripped off his. “I quit this game,” he said. “I’m not a bear either.” Liza removed her mask, and she wasn’t Liza. We ran away as fast as we could. I made it back to my place and locked the door, turning on the outside light, but all night I heard her huffing.

(Published in Spillway)

-- Jeff Friedman

Buzz Spector Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28

Buzz Spector will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28.

Also featured will be Eileen G'Sell and another reader still to be determined.

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.

Buzz Spector was born in Chicago and was educated at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and then the University of Chicago, where he received the master of fine arts. Internationally recognized as an artist and critic, his work has been exhibited in museums throughout the United States and Europe, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Mattress Factory Art Museum (Pittsburgh), and the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art (Prato, Italy).

Buzz is also a highly accomplished teacher who received the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art Award in 2013. Having taught previously at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he is currently Professor of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

The subject matter of Buzz’s art typically involves an exploration of the idea of the book, the text, and the individual experience of perception through wide-ranging media including sculpture, photography, the artists’ book, printmaking, and installation. In 2012 Sara Ranchouse Publishing issued Buzzwords, a collection of new page art and interviews with Spector spanning thirty years of his work and ideas.

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

Eileen G'Sell Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28

Eileen G'Sell will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28.

Also featured will be Buzz Spector and another reader still to be determined.

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.

Eileen G'Sell's nonfiction and poetry have been published in Salon, the Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Conduit, Ninth Letter, and other journals. Her chapbook Portrait of My Ex with Giant Burrito is available from BOAAT Press. Since 2004, Eileen has mentored with Mentor St. Louis, now a division of Herbert Hoover Boys & Girls Club. She teaches writing and film at Washington University in St. Louis.

Portrait of My Ex with Giant Burrito

Men have died for less, and I, for one, never asked for more. In the Pacific Northwest are a thousand restaurants, healthy girls, and slutty food. Trees that shade new money humbly greet you on the interstate; intricate tattoos peek from sturdy cotton sleeves. “I consume five thousand calories a day,” he said the day he met me. We spoke about weddings and Sly Stallone; we ranked our favorite dogs by breed. In the morning he kissed my forehead before leaving me for hashbrowns. But he didn’t. Or he couldn’t. And the trees never changed a thing. “Endings are my expertise,” I whisper to the ushers. They are bored with their professions. They are picketing our aisle. In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.” It was the first—and best—joke ever told.

-- Eileen G'Sell

David A.N. Jackson Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, August 31

David A. N. Jackson will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, August 31.

Also featured will be Cheeraz Gormon and Treasure Shields Redmond.

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.

David A. N. Jackson is a multidisciplinary performer who's graced local, regional and national stages at a number of venues. He is an actor, visual artist, wood carver, drum carver and percussionist as well as a poet.

Known around the city and throughout the region as D'Poet, David A. N. Jackson has long been appreciated as a profound and enlightened artist of multiple gifts, talents and abilities. He is an ever-evolving and accomplished percussionist, wood sculptor, artist, poet, and vocalist, just to list a few of his skills, as well as an avid community activist and teacher.

Imbalance of the Spirit

like the breath of stagnant water
family should not be
upbringing
And not just on memories
instantly sensed
It is not true, after all,
to be born.
toward evolution
listen with attention
for an initial rendezvous
This creature is called a
Heart Chakra
make very careful study
loosen heavy soil and leave it
Planted beside peach trees
Deep-rooting
at the heart

-- David A. N. Jackson
(c) D'POET 07.03.2015

Cheeraz Gormon Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, August 31

Cheeraz Gormon will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, August 31.

Also featured will be David A. N. Jackson and Treasure Shields Redmond.

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

Treasure Shields Redmond Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, August 31

Treasure Shields Redmond will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, August 31.

Also featured will be David A. N. Jackson and Cheeraz Gormon.

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.

A Mississippi native, Treasure Shields Redmond is a St. Louis based poet, performer and educator. She has published poetry in such notable anthologies as Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Breaking Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade; and in journals that include the Sou'wester and the African American Review.

She has received a fellowship to the FineArts Works Center, and her poem, "around the time of medgar" was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. Treasure is a Cave Canem fellow and has received an MFA from the University of Memphis. Presently, she divides her time between being an assistant professor of English at Southwestern Illinois College, and doctoral studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

caveat

the celluloid vision of jackie o
reflexively reaching for kennedy's brains;
too fast for even her
aristocratic hands.
did she think
she could put it all back together?
her archival papers
(now cool to the touch)
reveal she knew of his philandering --
her mother counseled her to stay .
so maybe that reflexive jump
on the back of a motorcade
was not as mothers flinch,
watching deathless sons
in football games.
but more as a runner,
anticipating the crisp gun shot.

-- Treasure Shields Redmond

Marisol Ramirez Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 27

Marisol Ramirez will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, July 27.

Also featured will be Matthew Freeman and Jennifer Goldring.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Marisol Ramirez came to her sense in the fall of 2011 and found the courage to call herself a poet. Earlier, she had tentatively been the future lawyer, the future teacher, the future marketing manager—never the writer. She took her first-ever workshop senior year of undergrad simply for pleasure. The problem with dabbling in passionate hobbies is that they might become careers. After graduating from the University of Arizona with a Bachelors in English, she moved across country, away from her Arizona border town, taco stands, open range, rattlesnakes, chorizo con huevos, purple mountain ranges, and flaming sunsets to join the MFA writing program at the University of Missouri St. Louis. In 2014, Ramirez was named the third UMSL poet laureate.

Jennifer Goldring Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 27.

Jennifer Goldring will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, July 27.

Also featured will be Matthew Freeman and Marisol Ramirez.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Jennifer Goldring, originally from Arizona, received her MFA in Poetry at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.  She was the University of Missouri - St. Louis's Poet Laureate for 2013.  Jennifer has her BA 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.  When she isn’t writing or taking photos she is Managing Editor for december magazine.  She lives in St. Louis with her two children and their small menagerie of pets.  Her poetry can be found in Tar River Poetry, Architrave Press, and the anthology Poetry with a Dash of Salt.

Matthew Freeman Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 27

Matthew Freeman will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, July 27.

Also featured will be Jennifer Goldring and Marisol Ramirez.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Matthew Freeman woke up and found he was falling when as a teenager his football coach got him into Dylan Thomas and a dear girl friend introduced him to the romantics. So began a wild journey which would leave him expelled from school and committed to an asylum, and diagnosed with schizophrenia. After bouncing in and out of hospitals and drunk tanks he finally began his recovery. He has had four books published and has graduated from Saint Louis University, where he was awarded the Montesi prize, and is now an MFA student at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where he was awarded the Graduate Prize in poetry.

Finally I admit It: Yes, I Am a Bum 

Clear and terror filled my days I
walked as a living affront to realities
not bound,
a thousand miles from my home,
my cap pulled down over my eyes, 

watching the freight trains roll by.
(when you were sitting on the porch
you could vaguely hear your
father finally cry
from the front room
and you felt like—you
didn’t know—maybe like you
were made out of glass
and could be broken
by a conductor’s baton)

And now I sit all day with the innocents,
smokinging a cheap cigar,
strumming on my gay guitar,
singing with Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too,
when THAT GUY comes in
wearing a disguise
and it is the PHONE AGAIN
but star 69 does not work,
the yellow birds gather round me,
I look toward the dumpster for redemption
and only beg the Lord
to cast me out amongst the poor. 

-- Matthew Freeman

All Open-Mic at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, June 29

Open-mic readers will be featured at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, June 29.

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

Brett Underwood Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, May 25

Brett Underwood will be one of the featured readers at the Chance Operations reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 25.

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

Also featured will be Raphael Maurice and Cheeraz Gormon.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic throughout the evening.

Brett 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.

Autumnal Delusion

Funny racism or runny fascism while
ye prisoners of hope and fall colors eat
pumpkin-spiced cold meds and mucous to avoid
neti pot death hot dogs and waitresses flying
in every direction.

Put wastoids in your gravitas.
Load ether with lead-ladened muchmuck.
Cough up gravy into your designer tissue.
Oh, and Ichabod's head is off the top of the
visitor’s dugout and kagarooing up
the aisle in that horse's ass.
van hit the soybean head shoot dead boy.

Root for the one percent in your muumuu.
Chug aluminum –bottled water and hoot.
Live it up.
Toss lewd verses to garbage. Your days are few.
Your wool is worthless.
Replay these days and they’ll go back
and look at it stored on yourtube or
reflected in a mirror coffin or
another threat to the environment
babbling DADA in a six-wheeled stroller.

-- Brett Underwood

Raphael Maurice Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, May 25

Raphael Maurice will be one of the featured readers at the Chance Operations reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 25.

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

Also featured will be Brett Underwood and Cheeraz Gormon.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic throughout the evening.

Raphael Maurice is a translator and poet. His work appears in the UCity Review, Likestarlings, River Bluff Review, Piecrust, and Monkeybicycle. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, where he studied poetry. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, Jill Elizabeth Maurice.

Rectitude

The police caught me near these weeping willows
creeping up lakeside. I gave up under dawn’s
wrack and ribbon. They took what little I had.

And I was long gone, babbling my season’s luck
and miscarriages.

The county jail. Silent as a brick, stiller than God.

I crashed out on the bunk’s logic, its rectitude. Rectitude.
What a strange word for dead monks to thrash about.

And I dreamed the horse-faced sheriff was reading
from a sacred book. His boots propped on the desk.
His words scattered by an oscillating fan.

It was litany. It was the liturgy at my father’s funeral,
reverent as the edges of morning glories, a reckoning.

It was a catalogue of tender girls I’d loved,
their terrible fates blowing against these crooked trees.

-- Raphael Maurice