[IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to icy conditions, this month’s Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic has been postponed until January 19. Please help us share this news, and stay safe.]
Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington
Featuring Jen Coleman and Mike G
7 pm
Thursday, January 19
Open mic sign up begins at 6:30 and closes at 7
Angst Gallery
1015 Main Street
Vancouver, WA 98660
angstgallery.com
Food and libation provided by
Niche Wine Bar, 1013 Main Street
Sound provided by Briz Loan & Guitar: http://briz.us/
LGBTQ-FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004
https://www.facebook.com/events/1353896004672477/
Jen Coleman is the author of Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerers from Trembling Pillow Press, winner of the 2013 Bob Kaufman Book Prize selected by poet Dara Wier, and We Denizens from Furniture Press in 2016. Originally from Minnesota, Jen received her BA from Beloit College and MFA from George Mason University in Virginia. She spent eight years in New York, where she co-edited the journal POM2. She now lives in Portland, OR. Coleman’s set will include one poem accompanied by drummer and songwriter Cat Minor.
Let’s Be Tarsiers by Jen Coleman
It’s too cruel to be a bloody human.
Let’s be a boom-slang, viper or hippo.
Let’s be tarsiers born with fur and eyeballs
big as our brains. Let’s have the long, long feet.
Let me call you tarsier like the long long
bones in your feet. Let me be a tarsier
and balance eye with eye and stay silent.
Take your third tarsier finger and touch my
third finger as long as your upper arm.
Touch your two tarsier toes to my two toes.
Eat bugs and lizards and know me, tarsier
As I know you, tarsier, feasting on bats.
Be awake in the night with me, tarsier,
and leap, and be quite quiet and quite shy.
Mike G: I’ve been writing for my sanity for quite some time now. It’s the most fun, and the most serious thing I do. For me, performing is the public celebration of this sanity. Now and then I’ve read my poems on KBOO radio. Now and then my poems get published. To say it another way: I oozed from the womb in Michigan with hardly more life than a manikin, then the Muse infused me with madness, inspired my wordplay of rage and sadness, or sometimes funny, so it’s said; I’ll clown and rant until i’m dead.
After the plague of boils Job scalded his secret patience formula upon my soul. That’s me lounging on the rotting log spitting a protest melody into the unwashed harmonica. The cold sun is a kind of food. I watch the leaves eat. Eyes fierce and blue in the whiteout blizzard. That’s me, the keeper of memory, not buried yet, heart still beating.
PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER 