The Friday Influence

Just a quick post to share some of the work from the poets who will be reading at this Saturday’s event. Here are the details for the event including the link to register:

Event: A Virtual Celebration of National Poetry Month with Readings by Julia Koets, Meg Day, and Jenny Johnson
Date & Time: Saturday, April 24th, 6-7pm EST
Registration Link: https://suffolk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAodO-sqD4uH9y_aL0QrfL_Rq9ELsQ9oonQ
Note about accessibility: ASL interpretation will be provided by Emily Phipps

I do hope you consider joining us. As a sort of sneak peek, here are poems from each of the featured readers. Looking forward to seeing y’all there!

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Julia Koets

A Villanelle for Jodie Foster

In Contact, you wait for sound. Radio
            static in deep space keeps you awake
long into the night. How small this globe,

Ellie Arroway thinks. Miniscule, close
            to insignificant.  It’ll likely take
lifetimes to hear the farthest star, radio

frequencies scientists debate. History’s slow,
            the way some satellites in space
appear to stand still, orbiting the globe.

Small moves, small moves, your father’s canto.
            They should’ve sent a poet, you say,
witness to another galaxy. Without radio

proof, no one believes what you saw. No
            future, they say, is quite so opaque.
When you come out at the Golden Globes,

your silver dress glittering, all the stars aglow
            in the audience, you speak about privacy,
but also wish, in your own brave voice, a radio
            wave, to be not so very lonely on this globe.

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Meg Day

Once All the Hounds Had Been Called Home

When the grapevine had thinned
but not broken & the worst was yet to come
of winter snow, I tracked my treed heart
to the high boughs of a quaking
aspen & shot it down.
                                    If love comes fast,
let her be a bullet & not a barking dog;
let my heart say, as that trigger’s pulled,
Are all wonders small?  Otherwise, let love
be a woman of gunpowder
                                         & lead; let her
arrive a brass angel, a dark powdered comet
whose mercy is dense as the fishing sinker
that pulleys the moon, even when it is heavy
with milk. I shot my heart
                                         & turned myself in
to wild kindness, left the road to my coffin
that seemed also to include my carrying it & walked
back along the trampled brush I remembered
only as a blur of hot breath & a howling in my chest.

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Jenny Johnson

Late Bloom       

The name of the spotted apple
on the leafy floor in the woods

outside the white-walled bedroom
where the FM stereo was always

tuned to the same country
station my girl crush loved

was gall, name for an outgrowth,
a shell withering under leaf rot

near a spot where the surprise lilies
might remember, might

forget to bloom. Touch a weevil
and it will fall, legs and antennae tucked.

Blink and the artic fox becomes snow.
The gecko, toes spread wide

on a tree trunk, passes for lichen.
Of all the ways a creature can conceal itself,

I must have relied on denial.
There were the Confederate bumper stickers,

pressures from seniors to tailgate,
the spindly legs of a freshman

scissoring out of a trash can,
how just the smell of Old Spice

could make my muscles contract
like a moth, wings folded

the color of a dead leaf in October.
So that she might hear her favorite song

my voice would drop, and if the DJ answered
I would be Tim, Charlie, Luke, Jason

every name but my own.
Truer than gold.

Wasn’t I the stripe in a tiger’s eye?
The dapple in the flanks of an Appaloosa?

In daylight, how could I possibly explain:
A heart hunting after a body?