Thursday, May  7, 2015, at 7:00 pm, poets Peter Marcus and Diana Whitney will continue the eighth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Peter Marcus

Peter Marcus’s first poetry collection Dark Square was published in 2012 by Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press. His poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Mudlark, New England Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Spillway, Witness, and others. He has poems upcoming in Nimrod, RATTLE, and UPSTREET. He’s been a recipient of a Connecticut Fellowship for the Arts grant and residency fellowships at Vermont Studio Center and The Quarry at Marble House Project. He is Academic Program Coordinator for the Elms College Accelerated Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology at Mount Wachusetts Community College.

Diana Whitney

Diana Whitney‘s first book of poetry, Wanting It, was released in August 2014 by Harbor Mountain Press and became a small-press bestseller. Wanting It was recently nominated for the Vermont Book Award and short-listed for the 2014 Julie Suk Award for best book of poetry published by an independent press. Diana graduated from Dartmouth College and Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and attended the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and many more. Her irreverent parenting column, Spilt Milk, was syndicated for four years, ran as a public radio commentary series, and is currently being collected into a book. A yoga teacher by trade, Diana blogs about the darker side of motherhood for The Huffington Post and runs a yoga studio in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and fourteen chickens. www.diana-whitney.com

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WANTING IT / Diana Whitney

Wasn’t I beautiful, wasn’t I desperate,
didn’t I give a shit about world peace, inner peace,
only wanting it, wanting it, secret graffiti

spelled out in lip gloss on the locker-room wall?

The new underwire bit into my ribs, pushed
me up and I caught the mirror, wanted it, cocked a hip,
wanted it— front seat, back seat,

down on the floor, brag of bruises
blooming like plums on my neck, tender,
bad and legitimate. I wanted

to ditch it, wanted to drive, alone

in the car for the first time, silence, such
concentration my hands tongued the wheel. I could see
the brush-stroke of each yellow line, could feel

my tires crush pieces of gravel, and my ten toes
alive inside my shoes, firm and quick
on the pedals. There was an orange

lodged underneath the clutch. Squeeze it and shift,
squeeze it and there. Those boys

who juiced the halls with slouch
and threw their bodies around the field— they watched
when I punched it to second, third, burned my tracks

along the high school tar. They looked at me
as if I could kill them. They wanted to kill me
back against a locker. I could feel

my body jammed up on metal, my skin
in ridges where the grates dug in,

my skirt hiked up, my muscles like fish,
my third eye watching from the outside in.

I was some other girl.
I was anyone’s candy.

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