Thursday, May 5, 2016, at 7:00 pm, poets Daniel Hales and Kevin Pilkington will continue the ninth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Daniel Hales

Daniel Hales is the author of the chapbooks Blind Drive (White Knuckle Press) and Tempo Maps (ixnay press) and has two more chapbooks forthcoming. He was the 2015 winner of the Poet’s Seat Contest. His poems, flash fictions, and hybrid writings have appeared in many journals, including Verse Daily, Conduit, H_NGM_N, Sentence, Quarter After Eight, and Booth. He’s released three eps with The Ambiguities and three full-length albums with The Frost Heaves, most recently “Contrariwise: Songs From Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.” www.thefrostheaves.com. Sometimes he also hangs out at: www.danielhales.com.

Kevin Pilkington

Kevin Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of six collections: Spare Change was the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner; Ready to Eat the Sky was a finalist for an Independent Publishers Books Award; In the Eyes of a Dog won the 2011 New York Book Festival Award; The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree was a Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award finalist. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind, and Contemporary Poetry of New England. Over the years, he has been nominated for four Pushcarts. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including: The Harvard Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review, etc. He has taught and lectured at numerous colleges and universities including The New School, Manhattanville College, MIT, University of Michigan, Susquehanna University, Georgia Tech. His debut novel Summer Shares was published in 2012 and a paperback edition was reissued in summer 2014. His collection Where You Want To Be: New and Selected Poems was just published. He recently completed a second novel and is working on a new collection of poems.

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LATE FUTURE / Daniel Hales

1.

The stamp is a sepia-toned lighthouse
on one of the lesser great lakes
somewhere past upper peninsula’s
Most Photographed Falls.

The letter’s from a stranger whose driveway I turned around in
once I stopped pretending to know where I was. About to
turn back on the road, and her quick face appeared between
blinds, her quick hopeful face asking who has come and why.

2.

Maybe you can relate to this. Maybe in third grade
you picked another kid’s juicebox off the sill
drank from it, and everyone saw.
Maybe it was a new flavor you’d never even heard of.
Or the same flavor, and you had to know
if everyone’s tasted the same.
Maybe winds are scudding leaves across
the crusty exoskeleton of snow outside your window.

I thought by now I’d have something more,
climbed up the statue of liberty’s skirt
or crushed a wasp’s nest with my bare hands.
Instead, I was running through the woods with a friend
who may not exist, she said something
that made me laugh, and I got a spider web in my mouth.
And when we got back to the campsite
the adults were folding up the tarps and packing the car.

(First published in Red Flag Poetry)

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LONG AS A QUART OF MILK / Kevin Pilkington

Once I undressed a tree,
got a splinter in my thumb
and decided that was it
for one night stands.

The woman next door who
dresses in clothes that make her
look like the English countryside
keeps yelling at her son
about being spoiled.

I wish I could help him,
tell her of course he’s spoiled
it’s hot out so she should keep
him in a room with the a.c. on.
It would keep him fresh longer
or at least as long as a quart of milk.

I rent a small studio in the tenement building
next door that looks like Lou Reed.
I’ve lived here for awhile and have no plans
of moving. There really isn’t any point now
that I know this neighborhood so well I can
recite any street by heart to anyone
who will listen.

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