Catherine Rankovic Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts Monday, September 30

Catherine Rankovic will be one of three featured readers at the debut •chance operations• reading at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, September 30.

Also featured will be Matt Freeman and Eileen G'Sell.

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

Catherine Rankovic says, 

Formerly a full-time newspaper reporter and magazine editor, I taught creative writing at Washington University from 1989 to 2010, currently teach in the online MFA program at Lindenwood University, and developed a following as an independent book and manuscript editor. 

I've written and published five books, including Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis (PenUltimate, 2010), nominated for a President's Award from the Missouri Writers Guild, and have worked with large and small publishers and Kindle Direct ebook publishing. Awards include the Missouri Biennial Award, an Academy of American Poets award, first place in the 2009 Midwest Writers Center poetry competition and first place in the 2010 St. Louis Poetry Center competition.

I have been honored to be a judge for many literary contests. My poems and essays have appeared in Boulevard,Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, River Styx, Delmar, UCity Review, Umbrella, many newspapers and magazines, and several anthologies including Flood Stage (Walrus Publishing, 2010) and Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America (PenUltimate, 2008).

You Weren't There

You weren’t there when I killed ’em in Vegas
with my “open the door Richard damn you or kiss
my white booty” routine. You were – I dunno – drinking
Boone’s Farm Strawberry with some easy nonthinking
airhead underage blonde while I was up for
the Grammy for best comedy record of the year,

nineteen-seventy-nine, I believe, and only Richard 
Pryor had released a better album: Was It Something I Said?
In nineteen-eighty I recorded a underground hit 
with Marianne Faithfull; that’s me on the drum kit,
you didn’t know? My mentor Ringo, I call him Rich,
taught me at Apple and told me what a bitch

Paul laying down the drum tracks on Let It Be
had been. I engineered his cover of “Act Naturally”
and produced it, and where were you, dickhead,
when at twenty-three I was already a celebrated
ghostwriter for Norman Mailer, and had a cameo
in a Woody Allen movie; you didn’t see it, I know,

too busy tripping on Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum
with fellow burnouts, dousing your buzzard breath with gum
so your parents wouldn’t kick your pitiful natural rear.
While I was toasted as the Little Richard of literature
and modeling Guess, you, fool, were choking your chick-
en, and when I was in a limo refusing to partner with Mick,

because I was busy buying stocks with MacArthur 
grants, and reviving Keith Richards with a fire extinguisher
every other day in palaces and Learjets,
your TV showed you me, through your haze of pot and Cheezits,
and now through a haze of video games and Internet porn 
you send an E-card with regards and regrets. Get born,
                                                                               jackass.

-- Catherine Rankovic