Tony Renner Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, April 27

Tony Renner will be one of the featured readers at Chance Operation's 5th anniversary reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 27. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Also featured will be Sean Arnold, Julia Gordon-Bramer, and Stefene Russell.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic between our featured readers.

Tony Renner is a late bloomer. He returned to writing poetry in 2009 when, after he ran out of the poems he had written as a high school student in 1978 to post on a blog, he began writing new poems so that he could post a poem-a-day for National Poetry Month. He has been published in Bad Shoe, A Handful of Stones, and Troubadour 21.

The Wedding Dress

He had moved his mother's wedding dress
time after time, from apartment to
apartment, city to city

Friend to friend, lover to lover

Until we found him hanging
A white apparition in a candlelit room
Acrid myrrh failing to mask the death-stench of shit

"A fruit on a loop," the cop called him.

-- Tony Renner

Stefene Russell Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, April 27

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Stefene Russell will be one of the featured readers at Chance Operation's 5th anniversary reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 27. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Also featured will be Sean Arnold, Julia Gordon-Bramer, and Tony Renner.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic between our featured readers.

Stefene Russell is St. Louis Magazine's Culture Editor and a member of Poetry Scores, an arts collective that translates poetry into other media. She is also the author of Go South For Animal Index (2007) and Inferna (2013).

Keyhole: Emergency Mockingbird

She sings one thousand songs a night.
She sings the blurry fretting of night doves.
She sings stuck hinges, worrying in their own way,
and the dog testing his bark in the cold dusk.

She’s all small gray birds, the ones you spy
peripheral
tail seesawing the fence-line
as you sift through mail on the porch.

When the summer climbs its sine curve
of heat, and the lawn begins to singe—
the season you can never sleep—she
sits on the roof, singing to you, the same tune
over and over: that one
about someone stealing your car.

She remembers your face, even on days
when you don’t. She is up on the phone pole,
watching you curse your garbagey life
when you lock keys in the car.
Maybe she cares. Maybe she’s afraid
you’ll trash the whole world,
and her, unlucky enough to be around
when you do it.

-- Stefene Russell

Julia Gordon-Bramer Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, April 27

Julia Gordon-Bramer will be one of the featured readers at Chance Operation's 5th anniversary reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 27. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Also featured will be Sean Arnold, Stef Russell, and Tony Renner.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic between our featured readers.

Julia Gordon-Bramer is a professional tarot card reader, writer, and scholar of Sylvia Plath. Her book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath will be out this year with Stephen F. Austin State University Press and can be ordered on Amazon now. In 2013, the Riverfront Times called her St. Louis’ Best Local Poet.

Anthony Bourdain, I hate you.

You, and your layovers, the sixty-
minute getaways to the farthest
limits of Somewhere with no reservations, surrounded
by all the hippest people I will never meet.
Dude, your steely curls are bringing me down,
mussed just right, you are a head and shoulders
higher than everyone, donning shiny
suits, or casually rumpled in Ralph Lauren.
Oh, Anthony, Arbiter of Taste, I hate
your punk rock background,
your Discovery budget, your street cred,
your throaty cleverness, the savage
similes off your tongue. I hate
your Boys’ Club as you bite
underbelly bits and parts unknown
of poor skewered beasts. You: flesh-eater,
bone slurper, booze sucking snob,
with your glory stories of hangovers
fueled by foolish foreign women
smiling from back in the kitchen, stirring
mixing bowls close against their ample hearts.
Anthony Bourdain, I hate
your cigarette smoke as it jets off and away
like curls of skywriting from your pouty lips.
You are not pretty, yet the world is your mirror,
flattering as you simulate your spicy jerk
chicken adventures. Oh, Satan of gravy,
grease, and cheese curd. Sipping scummy broth,
an oily smile hides those white shark teeth.
Goddamnit, Bourdain! Why do you fascinate me?

I am as guilty of watching as the rest, and yet
I have been on the other side of reality
TV. I see the cameramen coaching
its suave illusion toward the next visual lie:
I see the retakes with more oomph; the pretend
sleep and pseudo-conversations; the false
temporary friends. Let’s get confidential,
Anthony Bourdain: if I confess I love your life,
does this mean I must love you?
Will you tell me who you really are, and
am I cool enough
to come along too?

--Julia Gordon-Bramer

Sean Arnold Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, April 27

Sean Arnold will be one of the featured readers at Chance Operation's 5th anniversary reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, April 27. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Also featured will be Julia Gordon-Bramer, Stef Russell, and Tony Renner.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic between our featured readers.

Sean Arnold lives in St. Louis across the street from the Botanical Gardens in an apartment with his lovely girlfriend and their dog and cat.

He recently published his fourth chapbook “Soliloquy From a Freight Yard: An Open Fall Window”. This is the final season/book in his “Soliloquy From a Freight Yard” series based around the seasons and freight yard romanticisms.

Sean is taking a final attempt at his undergrad in creative writing at Webster University. He is the former host and co-organizer of Voices From the Underground and Casinotown poetry readings. His poetics have been set to folk music, electronic music, hip-hop, and everything in between.

OH! The Wheat!

all those dates
and pictures
and apps.
-- weird the way myths have always reinforced and combated the hyperreal.
all those screenshots and toocool avatars
like bob marley playing from a youtube page
on a tv hooked up to a bluray player and
pandora.

and a department store in wichita kansas
with kevin kidwell
or a steak n shake in ofallon beside the blockbuster
across from the gasmart
with my old friend who joined the marines.

--and so i think, all
the st louis anarchists
were out of touch
with folks who ride motorcycles.

somewhere the wolves are howling
in an unfettered wilderness. i know,
for i have been there.

ill text you soon homie,
--here we stand

like germs of wheat
blown by the wind.

-- Sean Arnold