Brett Underwood Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, May 25

Brett Underwood will be one of the featured readers at the Chance Operations reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 25.

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

Also featured will be Raphael Maurice and Cheeraz Gormon.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic throughout the evening.

Brett Underwood is a bartending gadabout who writes, promotes and produces happenings and mishaps in St. Louis, Missouri. He's quicker with the stink eye than verbal reprimands and favors the brushback pitch over preemptive warfare. He has the wingspan of an albatross and would prefer cash.

Autumnal Delusion

Funny racism or runny fascism while
ye prisoners of hope and fall colors eat
pumpkin-spiced cold meds and mucous to avoid
neti pot death hot dogs and waitresses flying
in every direction.

Put wastoids in your gravitas.
Load ether with lead-ladened muchmuck.
Cough up gravy into your designer tissue.
Oh, and Ichabod's head is off the top of the
visitor’s dugout and kagarooing up
the aisle in that horse's ass.
van hit the soybean head shoot dead boy.

Root for the one percent in your muumuu.
Chug aluminum –bottled water and hoot.
Live it up.
Toss lewd verses to garbage. Your days are few.
Your wool is worthless.
Replay these days and they’ll go back
and look at it stored on yourtube or
reflected in a mirror coffin or
another threat to the environment
babbling DADA in a six-wheeled stroller.

-- Brett Underwood

Raphael Maurice Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, May 25

Raphael Maurice will be one of the featured readers at the Chance Operations reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 25.

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

Also featured will be Brett Underwood and Cheeraz Gormon.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic throughout the evening.

Raphael Maurice is a translator and poet. His work appears in the UCity Review, Likestarlings, River Bluff Review, Piecrust, and Monkeybicycle. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, where he studied poetry. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, Jill Elizabeth Maurice.

Rectitude

The police caught me near these weeping willows
creeping up lakeside. I gave up under dawn’s
wrack and ribbon. They took what little I had.

And I was long gone, babbling my season’s luck
and miscarriages.

The county jail. Silent as a brick, stiller than God.

I crashed out on the bunk’s logic, its rectitude. Rectitude.
What a strange word for dead monks to thrash about.

And I dreamed the horse-faced sheriff was reading
from a sacred book. His boots propped on the desk.
His words scattered by an oscillating fan.

It was litany. It was the liturgy at my father’s funeral,
reverent as the edges of morning glories, a reckoning.

It was a catalogue of tender girls I’d loved,
their terrible fates blowing against these crooked trees.

-- Raphael Maurice

Cheeraz Gormon Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, May 25

Cheeraz Gormon will be one of the featured readers at the Chance Operations reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, May 25.

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

Also featured will be Brett Underwood and Raphael Maurice.

Open-mic readers will step up to the mic throughout the evening.

Cheeraz Gormon is a North St. Louis native, life-long activist, internationally touring spoken word artist and published poet, documentary photographer turned award-winning advertising copywriter.

Her deep passion for humanity and issues affecting various communities provides the fuel for her dynamic spoken word performances, and in her first published book of poetry, In The Midst of Loving, a collection compiled and edited down over 14 years, Cheeraz opens her heart for the world to connect with her story.

Click here to listen to "Words" by Cheeraz Gormon; music by Brothers Lazaroff (Maurice Mo Egeston remix of "I Could Stay Here For the Rest My Life").

Beautiful Boy

In loving memory of a young man I never met... for Terrence Sands

Beautiful boy
No one told you
That this world would be so cruel
That the cold would brush against your soul
And chafe it
Exposing you to pain
That your mother dreamed of protecting you from
As she watched her belly expand
And that your father
Upon seeing that you were a reflection of him
A manchild
Perhaps swallowed a deep breath
Held it for as long as he could
In hopes that the empty space would make a path for you

I am a stranger to you
But not to the ways of this world
That you faced
Until your eyes drifted

Beautiful boy
You have become an ancestor way too soon
Your meeting with manhood
Too short

Beautiful boy
I hope you know that your skin was Black
But you were never soiled
As this world may have made you believe
Know that you were beautiful, boy

You are now free
To be what you may have always known you were

Beautiful boy
Fly
And be
Beautiful

-- Cheeraz Gormon

"Sandra Lee Scheuer" by Gary Geddes

(Killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, May 4, 1970.)

You might have met her on a Saturday night,
cutting precise circles, clockwise, at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, or walking with quick step

between the campus and a green two-storey house,
where the room was always tidy, the bed made,
the books in confraternity on the shelves.

She did not throw stones, major in philosophy
or set fire to buildings, though acquaintances say
she hated war, had heard of Cambodia.

In truth she wore a modicum of make-up, a brassiere,
and could no doubt more easily have married a guardsman
than cursed or put a flower in his rifle barrel.

While the armouries burned, she studied,
bent low over notes, speech therapy books, pages
open at sections on impairment, physiology.

And while they milled and shouted on the commons,
she helped a boy named Billy with his lisp, saying
Hiss, Billy, like a snake. That’s it, SSSSSSSS,

tongue well up and back behind your teeth.
Now buzz, Billy, like a bee. Feel the air
vibrating in my windpipe as I breathe?

As she walked in sunlight through the parking-lot
at noon, feeling the world a passing lovely place,
a young guardsman, who had his sights on her,

was going down on one knee, as if he might propose.
His declaration, unmistakable, articulate,
flowered within her, passed through her neck,

severed her trachea, taking her breath away.
Now who will burn the midnight oil for Billy,
ensure the perilous freedom of his speech;

and who will see her skating at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, the eight small wooden wheels
making their countless revolutions on the floor?

-- Gary Geddes