2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, March 10

It was a full house at Collar City Mushrooms for our monthly open mic, having to add spaces to the sign-up sheet. 

It was most appropriate that co-host Nancy Klepsch was the lead-off reader; she read 2 epistolary poems, “Dear Taylor” (as in Swift), & “Dear Nex” to Nex Benedict, a trans student who died after a fight in a school bathroom in Oklahoma. David Gonsalves read a couple of seasonal pieces, “Spring Song” (“a day to make things up”), &, as we had just “sprung ahead” our clocks, “Marigold Standard Time.” Julie Lomoe read about herself, her weight, in a piece titled “Excess Baggage” responding to a prompt.

I haven’t seen Karen Fabiane at an open mic in quite a while & it was good to hear her read 2 poems from a 2022 book Between Canal & Ida, “I Fucked St. Joan” (which I recall from an earlier chapbook Seeing You Again), then “Goddess Park” (like a theme park). Tom Bonville read “Morning Coffee,” instructions/family recipe for how to serve it, including a raw egg in the mug. Sally Rhoades said she was reading 2 of her husband, Hasan’s, favorite poems, both about cemeteries, the first about a military cemetery “White Crosses,” the second “Don’t Put Plastic Flowers on My Grave.”

Tim Verhaegen read a piece of fiction, a saga set in 1940 of a rich widower & his careless children. It being almost Spring I read 2 related poems, “The Lilacs” & “The Lilacs, Again.” Tom Corrado has been writing his “Screen Dumps” for quite some time now, & publishing them in give-away chapbooks, today read number “Screen Dump 745” !

Rhonda Rosenheck read what said was (& indeed sounded like) an “abecedarian” titled “Names for Snow,” & a seasonally related Haiku titled “Lost Scarves." John Mason read what sounded like an eco-poem, “The Flaming Rain” angry rain on his porch roof, then he too read an abecedarian poem about playing ball on Valentine’s Day “Winter’s Fall.”

Anne Hohenstein started off with anaphoric poem where the phrase “Are we brave enough…” repeated at the beginning of each line, then “Requiem” (for Patricia in her grave, she said). We ended with the proprietor of Collar City Mushrooms, Avery Stempel, who read a rhapsody of fungi “Always Something New,” then briefed us on recent activities in the advocacy for psilocybin accessibility. 

We meet each month on the 2nd Sunday @ 2 for poetry + prose at Collar City Mushrooms, 333 2nd Ave., Troy, NY — all you need to know.