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
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