Please join us in launching our eleventh season!

Thursday, October 5, 2017, at 7:00 pm, poets Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Jennifer Militello will read for the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen, 2012), was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Benjamin Saltman Award. She is also author of Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen, 2016), and a chapbook, cutthroat glamours (Phantom Limb, 2013). She holds degrees in creative writing from the University of Utah, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Carnegie Mellon University, and is now assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts – Boston.

Jennifer Militello is the author of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), Body Thesaurus, named one of 2013’s top ten poetry books by Best American Poetry, and Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award. She has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award from the New England Poetry Club, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award from Red Hen Press, and the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review, as well as grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Militello teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

 

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MUSIC FOR MONSTERS: A CURTAL SONNET / Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Though possessing no skill
I grew a horn from my head. Say
despite himself every beloved boy
goldens properly. I reach for his
soft metal to make it a rock star
but in me he grew who’s that,
praxis & frisson. The meridian
automatic in my clench, my thrills.
It may well be real. Suddenly
from my every layer
. . . . . . . . horns grew themselves.

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A DICTIONARY OF FAITH / Jennifer Militello

Like wind, God eavesdropped in the doorway.
His hybrid anatomy broken. His structured body loose.

God flew, as the last small moths of his lungs and larynx
gave like willows in a basket filled with red birds

where once there were dozens of roses.
As it rained, God’s every dry eye trembled.

The moon’s fronds of empty grew tentative then,
like what stands in for reason when reason is maimed.

An epidemic of eyes, God flew like a surge collapsing,
divided in the listening like a simple skein of wheat.

His most ferocious hounds were fettered,
predators sheltered in the henhouse of the heart.

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