2nd Sunday @ 2: Open Mic for Poetry + Prose, September 8

It’s been a bunch of months since my co-host, Nancy Klepsch, & I have been able to be together at this monthly open mic, it’s one thing or another, but I guess a good reason to have 2 hosts. This day we ended up with 6 poets on the sign-up sheet, 2 who were here for the 1st time.

Billy Stanley was the afternoon’s 1st “virgin;” his 1st poem was titled “Langston’s River Whip,” richly descriptive, side-by-side images of the Hudson River with a river in Louisiana where he grew up; then a poem of looking back, “Instead of ‘I Am,’ ‘I Was’.”

Rhonda Rosenheck read from her mss. “If I Dared in Circus Silks” a very short poem she described as an “ars poetica” titled simply “Poets,” then a piece titled “Wedge Cut” that plays on the word “wedge.”

David Gonsalves is a master of the short poem & he read 2 this afternoon, “School Days,” & “Luck,” a meditation at a tavern after the death of his father.

The proprietor of Collar City Mushrooms, Avery Stempel, gave us a brief update on local/regional meetings & panel discussion around New York State Assembly Bill A10375 to decriminalize the use of psilocybin & on New Yorkers for Mental Health Alternatives; then he read an article he wrote about the experience of people with chronic cluster headaches who have found relief with psilocybin titled “Treating Cluster Headache with Psilocybin-containing Mushrooms” to be published in The Mycophile Quarterly Winter issue.  

Ellen Rook was the other “virgin” & began with a critical piece (from her own experience) “Notes on Online Therapy,” then a piece that blends past experience with the question, “can The Muse be male?” with the title “The Muse Was Wild But I Was Wilder.”

I was the last reader of the afternoon with 2 recent poems, “True Story” inspired by observing birds at my backyard bird bath, then “Books Not Bombs” which is a re-write of an older poem “Buttons Not Bombs.”

Join us any 2nd Sunday of the month at Collar City Mushrooms, 333 2nd Ave., Troy, NY at 2 (like the Man said, 2nd Sunday @ 2: Open Mic for Poetry + Prose), & you can even buy some mushrooms to take home.