Please join us Thursday, May 3, 2018, at 7:00 pm, when poets Janet MacFadyen and Anna M. Warrock will read for the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Janet MacFadyen

Janet MacFadyen is the author of two full-length collections, Waiting to Be Born: American ghazals & other journeys (Dos Madres Press 2017) and A Newfoundland Journal (Killick Press, 2009), along with a Slate Roof Press chapbook, In the Provincelands. Her work has been nominated for the Forward Prize and two Pushcarts, and has appeared in numerous journals, including The Atlanta Review, Crannóg, Malahat, Osiris, Poetry, The Southern Poetry Review, and Terrain; and has work forthcoming in the QuillsEdge 50/50 anthology. In addition to a nine-month fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, she has had residencies at Cill Rialaig (Ireland) and the Fowler and C-Scape dune shacks in Provincetown. She is a freelance editor and is currently the managing editor of  Slate Roof Press.

Anna M. Warrock

Anna M. Warrock’s publications include From the Other Room, winner of the first annual Slate Roof Press chapbook contest, and the chapbooks Horizon and Smoke and Stone. Her work appears in the anthology Kiss Me Goodnight, Poems and Stories by Women Who Were Girls When Their Mothers Died, Minnesota Book Award Finalist, for which she also wrote the introduction. Besides appearing in a number of literary and interdisciplinary magazines, such as The Madison Review, Harvard Review, The Sun, Phoebe, and Poiesis, her poems have been set to music, performed at Boston’s Hayden Planetarium, and permanently installed in a Boston-area subway station. Anna has held seminars on understanding grief and loss through poetry. She is a 2018 recipient of a Somerville Arts Council Literature Fellowship.  www.AnnaMWarrock.com

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WAITING TO BE BORN / Janet MacFadyen

I don’t want to see a mountain lion or feel it
watching me, but the long grass parts for the lioness
until I lay down and bare my neck to her.

Sometimes you look straight at a thing and know
that it is calling you, and know it is time
to leave your first life behind.

Was that me, sleeping in my own mind’s eye?
Was I waiting again to be born? Through the window
of a ruin, the sea is so blue I could dip my brush in it.

A spider reels out a lifetime of silk; a honey-like
sap comes from the maguey tree. The Maya
made paint from flowers and licked the brushes clean.

Oh Janet, you need one more line about the sweetness
of things. The carpenter only has one last nail
to drive into the sea, and then it is his.

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HE SAID THEY ARE THE DEAD YOU KNOW / Anna M. Warrock

No, in the dream I hear voices
in the other room so

I walk into that living
room but they—a man in a dark

business suit listening to a
woman in a blue dress and pumps—

are just standing up
from the sofa turning away

plans made toward the door-
way at the back and

they start toward
the other room where also

voices conversations
they are taking

their papers and leaving the
room I entered through another door

I never saw their faces
the plans and they are going

should I yes I’ll follow
unconcerned they do not

call or look back might not
even known I am

I never see it—the other
room—I am anxious

and go to the door
that opens into an unlit hall

and their backs spread like ink
into the dim

.

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