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.