Catherine Rankovic Featured Reader on Monday, February 23, at Tavern of Fine Arts

Catherine Rankovic will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, February 23.

Also featured will be Matthew Freeman.

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

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Catherine Rankovic is the author of five books including Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis, Fierce Consent and Other Poems, and the new chapbook Hide and Sex, her first poetry collection in ten years. Catherine has an M.A. from Syracuse University and an M.F.A. from Washington University and has taught poetry and creative nonfiction writing in St. Louis since 1989, currently in the online M.F.A. program at Lindenwood University. Her essays and poems have appeared in December, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, River Styx, Umbrella, The Progressive, Natural Bridge, Gulf Coast, other journals, and four anthologies.

Micropenis

I pretended not to notice.
It wasn’t a lot to work with.
We worked with it insofar
And with energy and compensatory strategies
Already in his repertoire.
We worked the sheets off the bed.
Near checkout time when he wouldn’t be offended
I said, “This is Klaus. He was made in Germany.
This is Buzz. This is Skippy the Second,
And this is The Bunny. He was very expensive.”
He said, “Do you have a preference?”
I should have said right then
"Let's go out for fried catfish" and ended this.

-- Catherine Rankovic