The Wake

University of Minnesota MFA Reading
Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m.
The Loft Literary Center
1011 Washington Ave. S., MinneapolisThe University’s Masters of Fine Arts students will share their work with the literary world. The reading will offer fresh work by fresh authors. It’s also a great way to hear the creative efforts of instructors.Bill Holm
Nov. 11, 7:30 p.m.
Magers and Quinn Booksellers
3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis
(612) 822-4611Minnesota poet Bill Holm traveled and taught in China, which inspired his book “Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of Chinese Essays.” The book won the Minnesota Book Award in 1991. Holm has also written “The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere On Earth: Minneota, Minnesota” and focuses on his hometown of Minneota, MN making him a voice for the Midwest. Jay Mickowiec
Nov.15, 2:00 …

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I am Silent.In my head I hear
preaching I wish I could
Hear.In my head I fear
cautions that I wish I could
Fear.In my heart I feel
love, but I know it’s not near.So I feed the silence
until nothing seems
c l
e a r.

Gravity tends to act
Immediately
Except when relationships are involved.Atomic shivers probed my fingers and arms
As my fingers probed
The helmet’s hole.This belonged to the German my grandfather killed.I turned it over again in my
Young hands. I
Picked up swastikas, a toy tank, a bank,
A ring, such things as this.
This box wasn’t going to auction.Neither were the guns.But the rest of his life…
I had been to auctions. I know the sounds
They make and the smell of blue collars and pine.
Eighty years
And now he just sits confused in a chair
(We kept that from the auction too,
Along with a dresser and most of his tools.)As I said before, I hadn’t known all this at the time.
All I knew then,
Running between homes,
Was a deep molecular …

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The story takes place in Swindon
and my thumbs hold the pages back.
Sun’s glaring and the familiar rhythm of
the tracks are punctuated by loud, dark
train stations. Sheep-speckled hills blur
by in the windows. What would happen if I spoke to the girl
sitting across the aisle from me?
Would she laugh when I say elevator
instead of lift? Or line
instead of queue? Would
we make love
in some British way and
get married in a 421 year-old church?
Would we laugh at the Americans together?Swindon is the next stop. Fiction and
non-fiction colliding.
I should leave the train. Explore
the town for myself. I should step through
the wardrobe into reality.I don’t. In the story, a boy boards
a train for London and hides
in the luggage rack. …

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That ware day in October
when oil seeped into our soil
streams shriveled not flow
mouths dry, scrambling for dews drops
yams turned blue not brown You spat me out
Left me without hot sand, and gravel
Bare breast, bare feet and hands, made it coldwhen you bullied your way through my heart
made it cold, again.
staged a tribal domination, and caused elders
to rid themselves of dignity, and flee from huts,
their homestained perfect sand with innocent blood
writing in my memories – I don’t belong.
Now, you’ve left me helpless in a strange land
singing – I don’t belong, again
I am a woman neither here nor there
A woman without country.

I am not dressed like a salad and I don’t prefer to be held inanimately. I wish I didn’t
have to consume so much cranberry product and more
importantly my bad circulation was not an excuse
for you to keep me warm. I think at one time
the moonlight meant danger, like trouble rising
and I can’t shake off this mist irony hanging over everything. I can’t shake it
like a woman should and there are many things that
I cannot explain, like the different models of bathtubs
but sometimes I scream underneath the water of myself and it’s not what’s on the surface
I have to tell myself, but the shape. And people around here eat hamburgers with forks
and I have yet to explain why the folds of your stomach reside unpleasantly in …

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Open Poetry Night
Monday Nights
Artists’ Quarter
408 Salut Peter St., St. Paul
(651) 292-1359Ever wanted to read your own work? Then check out the Artists’ Quarter open poetry night, where anyone can read and enjoy jazz music until the wee hours of the morning.Chicano and Latin Writers Festival
Oct. 25th - Nov. 15th
Various LocationsThe festival, sponsored by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, offers an opportunity to see and hear from both local and national Chicano and Latin writers. Events and topics include a celebration of the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), a discussion of cultural tensions and personal history, spoken word, and memoir readings. For more information on specific events, visit the festival’s website: .Faith Sullivan (Happy Hour Book Club)
Nov. …

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I watched it grow through the years
Like his temper and shame.
I thought maybe his pride was there
Hiding beneath the bulging waist.It began youthfully slender;
He smiled a lot.The accumulation of beer and failure
Began slowly to push at his belt,
At me.
I considered it was possibly my fault:
Before birth
My mother carried the burden
Of an enlarged belly.
Now maybe it is his turn.He goes to the gym now,
Gradually trimming back my childhood.
Secretly
I hope my father’s gut
Never
Disappears.

Green and slimy,
Contently croaked he,
Sitting near the well.Flying fast past,
Beyond her grasp,
A ball of gold down fell.Weepfully cried she
An open inquiry,
“Help me get my ball!”Suddenly sprung he,
Rather righteously,
Over the well wall.Victorious returned he!
So ecstatic was she;
“I shall give thee a kiss!”Smooched she and dwell
Now two croakers near the well -
A frog and his princess.

After much thought
Much weight on each side
A life decision was madeI would not drink coffee anymoreInstead of percolating
I would be bound to a life of steeping
Loose leaves were my bean
And the spirit had gained precedence
The body was freeAnd I would caffeinate my bloodstream
With much more potent solutionsVodka
Coffee liqueur
Milk
And a splash of CokeI was on my way to the spiritual and bodily freedom that Siddhartha
had only dreamed of
I was on my way to the whole farm co-op
Viva consumptive revolution!

This break has launched newly created struggles into my lungs.
Your appetite for curiosity forms scabs on my knees, sore and
Shaken from plummeting to them for support in a sobbing convulsion.
Words suffocate to death in my throat when you force down pearly
Gates with your reason of irrationality, preventing the escape,
Escape of these bleeding shouts.
They bleed for you, an aqua hue that you’ll recognize in your backstroke
Away from me through an ocean of forgetfulness. I feel like dying
Whenever we talk on the phone. More like, you talk, I just listen.
You won’t allow the
Words I need to let go of into the air. Let them fly, and
Maybe I will too. The longer I conform
To this rule of yours the …

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I check my mail: storied blues, jazz & pop singer Maria Muldaur Tonight. And I Picture
her face and I wish today was Friday, not Monday. Monday is when rock
and roll swallowed my mother’s
guarantee—quoting lyrics to a scrabble
board of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Blues he remembers,
began with not Guthrie and not Johnson, but his Devil—dancing on his pedestal fiddling as I burn, plucking strings crafted from my gut
at the crossroads.
I remember it, the deal
I made in the sepia south, what his
pigmented pale hand
took from mine—the memory at that corner, when I heard his mandolin player howl
her freckled name,
but the strings bent tune, melting in with grazed strokes
of the Devil’s quill—signing
on my …

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“Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.” – Paul Engle “The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.” – Jorge Luis Borges“More than kisses, letters mingle souls.” – John Donne

My forte is …
My forte lives. MY, forte climbs higher than the crescendo and resonates as the fermata takes on delivery, force, and division. That’s my forte.Roman Victory Celebration:
Ovation: History an ancient Roman victory ceremony for a returning military hero: Ovation.

But the dark night accomplishes more
The love mislaid like sabotage, like only passion can.Ending significance, the moon winks on and
assumes the happy night, unaware. The savage inky sky wrote treason
there, blending promise and sacrifice.Woman is Mr. and Mrs.
Woman is Man, by default, tangled.Man is a flat table, a suitcase, a nightstand
Man is Mr., abbreviated, abridged.Of nothing unborn, their breasts like postage
stamps, clearly unwritten.Knowledge forewarned, like children’s
cunning. Dad’s footsteps and knocking:like slow poetry, spoken till the morning bleeds blue.
Mother bleeds because the moon watercolors the night.The white ink milks a magic cast
future, fingers a longing prescribed.Saboteurs untangled, the night star-spangled
the necessary firebrand, revolutionized,penned in fluorescent combat ink, the sudden
economy of compromise; but the night accomplishes more.