Thursday, May 2, 2013, at 7:00 pm, poets Karina Borowicz and Ivy Page will celebrate the Massachusetts Poetry Festival here in western Mass. as part of the sixth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Karina Borowicz

Karina Borowicz’s collection The Bees Are Waiting (2012) was selected by Franz Wright for the Marick Press Poetry Prize and has been named a 2013 Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared widely in journals, including AGNI, The Southern Review, and Columbia Poetry Review. Her translations have been featured in Poetry Daily.

Ivy Page

Ivy Page lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with her husband and two daughters. She’s the author of Any Other Branch (Salmon Poetry, 2013) and holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Her work has appeared in journals such as Night Train, Poetry Quarterly, Grey Sparrow Press, Boston Literary Magazine, The Houston Literary Review, Midwest Literary Magazine, and New Plains Review, among others. Her work has also been anthologized in Knocking at the Door: Approaching the Other. She is the editor and founder of Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine. She works to keep her local poetry community active by running a reading series for poets. Ivy teaches writing, literature, communication, publication, web publication, and history at colleges throughout New Hampshire. For more information visit her website: www.poeticentanglement.com

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IN MEMORY / Karina Borowicz

When she was still able she walked
for miles, covering the same ground each time,
staking her territory. The border collie
just ahead of her, two figures slipping
in and out of the sea fog that banked
the roadside most mornings.

I saw her for the last time
in her garden, ripping handfuls of weeds
and cutting back all the spent blooms.
She’d spend hours out there, browned by the sun
but never really warmed by it. Yet this was how
she needed to remember herself, fingers
black with dirt, bare arms plunging to the shoulders
into the phlox and tangled poppies.

(First appeared in Columbia Poetry Review)

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ROOSTERS / Ivy Page

We had four
shipped to us in a bunch
from the hatchery. At eight
years old, on a farm
it happens…

The hatchet went through
the neck of the first, smooth and easy.
Blood spurted out
the body flew to the top
of my mother’s car
parked halfway across the yard.

It flopped and sputtered then suddenly…death
on the cream colored roof.
A bright red gush running down
the windshield.

You can only have one rooster.