2nd Sunday @2 - Poetry + Prose, October 9

Back among the mushrooms, our co-host Nancy Klepsch is now working here at Collar City Mushrooms, not just on the 2nd Sunday. There were many of the “regular” folks here, but also a couple of 1st timers, even the return of a “rare-timer.”

Joel Best was first on the list with one of his classic stream-of-conciousness pieces, titled “Bad Saturday,” starting with light, moving through a Church, to bad wine, then one titled “A Cross Beyond.” I followed with a pastiche of T.S. Eliot’s first part of the first section of “The Waste Land,” mine a baseball poem for the season titled “Octoberland,” then one for a birthday today “John Lennon.”

Bob Sharkey is a long-time member of the board of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild, helping to support the work of area writers; his first piece was “Heat Wave,” a descriptive piece of observations in his backyard written this Summer, & a piece he said “has no context” titled “Poem for September 19, 2022."

Nancy Dunlop said she has been battling mental illness since she was a child, read from her new book Hospital Poems (Indie Blu(e) Publishing, 2022) & read 2 pieces from it, “Spilled Milk” & “The Woman in the Grey Sweater.” Anthony was not scared off by his last time here read from his journal about hiking in the High Sierras, an entry from June 29, 2022, & one from the next day June 30.

Emily was here for the first time, perhaps encouraged by the reader just before her on the list, read about her favorite hiking food “Frosted Animal Cookies,” then another hiking-food poem that I anticipated would have a disastrous ending based on its title, the rhyming “Hiking with an Apricot Tree.” My co-host, Nancy Klepsch, read an eco-poem that brought historical shivers to me, “Ronald Reagan Removed Jimmy Carter’s Solar Panels.”

Milo was also here for the first time, read a poem about “a needy dog” titled “The Dog Whines Under a Blanket Pulled Over Her Head,” then the interestingly titled “Zonnet.” Rhonda Rosenheck finished out the afternoon with selections from 2 new books, one under a pseudonym, The Five Books of Limericks: A chapter-by-chapter retelling of the Torah, under her own name, & Tongue Twisters for Terrible People by Bud Rose, both apparently available through Amazon.com

& that was it it for this month. But we will be back at Collar City Mushrooms, 333 Second Ave., on the 2nd Sunday of each month, at 2PM — check your calendar.