2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, May 8

The Mothers Day edition, & my co-host Nancy Klepsch was back in her usual form. 

The proprietor of Collar City Mushrooms where we were, Avery Stempel, started off the open mic with a piece inspired by recent performances of Maria Diotto, right here, “The Wind’s Heart Beat,” musical, with a regular beat & a recurring “do you hear it?”

Tim Verhaegen showed up with copies of his new (& first) chapbook, Visiting the Art Gallery When You’re Seven, from Tom Corrado’s swimming in happenstance press; today he did something he doesn’t usually do at readings, he played a recording of music behind his performance which he did from memory of a piece about his mother, how hearing the sound of geese overhead reminds him of his boyhood. If you want a copy of Tim’s chapbook, ask him about it the next time you see him at a reading.

Ray Reuter was new here & read 2 personal pieces, the first a short essay about nightmares & dreams, then reflections about being in a sepia-colored world.

Nancy Klepsch built her poem “The Story of a Working Class Lesbian” around images of a heart, then a poem I enjoyed hearing again “My Mom Was Effortlessly Cool.”

It was fitting that I followed Nancy, I read an anti-war piece “Mothers Day Meditation” (Mothers Day was conceived as an observance for Peace), then a poem that was short enough to become one of my “Poem Cards” about seeing a sad person in the Park “Whose Mom is That?”

Rhonda Rosenheck read a piece titled “I will” playing on grammar & being in the Now, then talked about her crime fiction poems that are usually revenge snapshots using various forms, read one using the Fibonacci sequence for the number of syllables in the lines.

Laura Ellzey read “My Blue Heron” a rhyming sonnet about a painting, then stayed on that image with “The Herony” a description of a next of herons.

Julie Lomoe read a piece on the abortion issue, her personal experience in 1973, gets interrupted by a phone call from her daughter, the very one she was reading about — strange things happen sometimes at poetry readings, but then it was Mothers Day.

Come join us among the mushrooms in Troy at Collar City Mushrooms, 333 2nd Ave, on the 2nd Sunday of the month at 2:00PM for this open mic, poetry + prose — surely we don’t know where the line breaks are.