Eric W. Schramm To Be Featured Reader on Monday, January 28, at Duff's

Eric W. Schramm will be a featured reader at the •chance operations• reading at Duff's, 392 N. Euclid, on Monday, January 28.

The other featured readers will be Raphael Maurice and Stefene Russell.

Doors at 7:30 p.m.; admission $3.00.

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

Eric works at Webster University as the development officer for the Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Emerson College.

His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, the Literary Review, New Zoo Poetry Review, the Potomac, the Louisville Review, and Wisconsin Review, among others.

Masaccio's La Cacciata

I.

The hot breath of God,
in splintered light,
needles their backs.

An angel hovers above
and wags his sword,
herding them to new pasture.

Naked, Adam
cries into his hands,
and will not look.

It was Eve -—
with the sticky gin
of the apple dried in runnels

down her thighs —- who acted,
started time as what moves away
from what it seeks -- innocence:

time of believing
in a world made of order,
time before the core fell to seed.

The ruin of free will
still tints her skin
with a petulant flickering --

this cannot be taken.


II.

Masaccio covers up his Eve:
one hand over each, breasts
and vagina. Expelled,

her body is now succulent
and available
to his eye.


He must have created her first.
Her body a study in arousal:
dome of her breasts,

the gentle curve inward, so much
like where he has rested
his face and breathed deeply.

How easy to have felt lust
well up before paint made flesh.
And to punish it with shame.


III.

She has no free hand,
so she must, is left to, glimpse --

the light—the future.
Hunched and burning, she sees
the bitter work of their Lord -—

the world as it is.

But Adam persists. He has no will
to see the world as a desert,
but, behind closed eyes,

as the lush valley of God’s palm.
He has no will to see
their suffering is a place.

For Eve, though, each thing
is clear and draws her forward
with the inevitability of her future -—

that she will give life
upon life, from her body,
to the jaw of this world.

-- Eric Schramm