Thursday, December 1, 2016, at 7:00 pm, poet Tim Mayo will continue the tenth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Tim Mayo

Tim Mayo holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars.  Among the many places his poems and reviews have appeared are Barrow Street, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, Poet Lore, River Styx, Salamander, San Pedro River Review, Tar River Poetry, Web Del Sol Review of Books, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.

His chapbook The Loneliness of Dogs (Pudding House Publications) was a finalist in the WCDR 2008 Chapbook Challenge in Ontario, Canada, and his first full length collection The Kingdom of Possibilities (Mayapple Press) was a semi finalist for the 2009 Brittingham and Pollock Awards and a finalist for 2009 May Swenson Award.

His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation, has just been published by Phoenicia Publishing (Montreal) and was twice a finalist for the Quercus Review Poetry Book Award as well as twice a semi-finalist for the Word Works Press Washington Prize.

A six time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a top finalist for the Paumanok Award, he is also the recipient of two Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center. Mayo lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he was one of the founding members and organizers of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

*

TAXONOMIES / Tim Mayo

In the Bible, one of them names the animals,
and to tell you the truth, I’d always assumed
that Adam really had. That’s the first mistake
about being on top, you just assume the position.

So when a woman I knew, a poet, published how
Eve was the one slipping under the apple boughs,
turning over the leaves of grass, walking out,
pen in hand, into the open fields, to scribble

down the names each would carry for the rest
of Man’s specious reign on Earth, I suddenly knew
that was how myth changes: first, a deep
annunciating thump arrives in your ribcage,

then, you twist the smooth pages of the old story,
crumpling them up and flattening them out, scratching
their surface until the ink relinquishes its authority,
and the words tell it the way you’ve always felt

it should be.

–– from Thesaurus of Separation, first published in Tar River Poetry