Richard Newman to Read at Duff's on Monday, August 2

The next Chance Operations reading will be Monday, August 2, at Duff's in the Central West End. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Cover is $3.00.

Featured readers will be Richard Newman, editor of River Styx, James Weber; Prison Performing Arts board member Danny Kohl reading poems by Patricia Prewitt; Chance Operations co-founder Tony Renner reading poems by Stephen Crane; and Lew Prince, co-owner of Vintage Vinyl, reading poems by the late Arthur Brown.

Richard Newman is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books, 2009) and Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005), as well as several poetry chapbooks, including 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Snark Publishing/Firecracker Press, 2007) and Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets! (Snark Publishing, 2005). His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, The Sun, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He lives with his wife and daughter in Benton Park, edits River Styx, and co-directs the River Styx at Duff's Reading Series.

Little Fugue of Love and Death

We talked of the end of the world and then
We sang us a song, and then sang it again.

-- Woody Guthrie, "This Dusty Old Dust"
The sky is gray. My joints are old.
The terrorists will nuke us.
I cannot shake this summer cold.
My head’s a hive of mucous.

Our dog is old. He cannot shake.
He collapses in the iris.
Dead birds litter the alleyway,
a wave of West Nile virus.

We drink beneath the new flight path
the clouds can’t hope to deaden.
We can’t see T-birds, Raptors, Blackhawks,
but it sounds like Armageddon.

And you and I sit on our porch,
drenched head to toe in Deet.
We swill the High Life, holding hands
despite the record heat.

The dog has grayed. The sky has grayed.
The grass and shrubs have browned.
Our life is high. The sky is low.
Our love goes round and round.

-- Richard Newman

(from Domestic Fugues, Steel Toe Books, 2009, originally appeared in Boulevard)