2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, January 11

On to our 16th year doing this, it was only fitting that the co-host, Nancy Klepsch, led off the signup sheet. She read the poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” written some years ago by Renée Good (her name was Macklin at the time the poem was initially published), who was murdered this week by an ICE agent in Minneapolis — I want my City neat: no ICE.

Graydon, who read here a couple times last year, read 2 untitled pieces, the first beginning “Every person has a poem …,” then a piece musing about wanting to be forgotten.

Eric Russell was new here & began with an untitled piece in one long line about a dream hotel (The Dream Hotel is a fascinating & scary novel by Laila Lalami, who read this past year at the NYS Writers Institute); Eric’s 2nd poem was titled “When You Hold On To the Egg Too Long” which was also the poem’s first line. I read my poem titled “2 Dreams,” which was commissioned & inspired by Mark Tremont, who sadly died last January, then a poem based on a sticker on my car, “Fire Elon.” David Gonsalves also read a poem inspired by Renée Good, his own titled “Last Words.” 

Anne Hohenstein returned to the dream theme with a sad, grim memory of her brother & her mother titled “Signal Dreams,” & a workplace piece titled “Confident in the Office of Zombies.” Sally Rhoades read about being in her mother’s 2nd wedding, “My Mother Used to Pray,” from a new poetry manuscript she is shopping around to publishers.

I sometimes have a hard time in understanding what Karen Fabiane says as she tends to swallow some of her words, so I may be wrong about the title of her first poem, “But” a portrait of a friend, then a second poem I’m not sure has a title about mermaids as porn stars, or the other way around. Julie Lomoe read the introduction to her prose memoir about being a painter in the art scene in Soho in the 1960s.

Nancy returned to bookend the afternoon with a poem she wrote with her wife Lauren Pinsley, “George Floyd is There to Receive Renée Good into Heaven.”

Please join us for this open mic for poetry + prose on the 2nd Sunday of the month at 2:00pm at Collar Works, an arts collective, at 50 4th St., Troy, NY — Free! & open to all.