Loose Leaf Notes

Sometimes I worry that my bad poetry…like a nude photograph…will come back to expose me. ~ Colleen

Sally, Café Del Sol owner and our gracious MC for the evening welcomed everyone to the June Spoken Word Open Mic wearing a purple horned headdress. “A variation of the purple poet’s beret some of us wore last month,” I said to my friend Mara when I saw Sally approaching the stage.
The sign-up sheet of performers read like a “Who’s Who” of our Floyd Writers’ Circle. Five of us, all women, read pieces that we had work-shopped together just 3 nights before. And didn’t our final work sound so much improved? “We did our homework,” I said to fellow circle member, Kathleen, at the end of the evening. But Writers’ Circle members weren’t the only ones who read.

We initiated Jack, a painter and poet from Norfolk, by fire by making him go first. “Getting it over with” was the line I used to spin the idea to him. In town to visit Writers’ Circle member, Jayn, Jack was a good sport. His poem about meeting women (or not) in cafés was appropriate considering our venue, and his poems about snakes having sex, and painting in a dream, while wondering if Paul Simon writes poetry, kept the audience intrigued and engaged.

Mara’s girlfriend, Leigh, had been to several of our previous Spoken Word events, but had never read her own work before. She pleasantly surprised us with her rap inspired poem with a “take your metaphor and shove it” theme, and then with a tender tribute to her mother.

Attach the end to the beginning … The life of flowers is finite … once gathered … expect no more than eight to twelve hours before wilting… After her poetic recipe for making a daisy chain necklace, Mara read an essay about a Hollins College writing assignment she once had, titled “What Have you Learned?” She was failing miserably at the task when a giant sequoia pine cone fell from her shelf in a Newtonian sort of moment and caused her to bleed. Maybe we don’t learn without a little discomfort, Mara wondered out loud.
The crowd turnout was good. Seats were filled with some regulars and some new supporters cheering us on. Several couples found their way to the event by way of the Floyd Press and Museletter ads, I learned at the end of the evening.

I sat in my regular front row seat, the big comfy couch, and bantered (not heckled) with the readers, sort of the way sports players psych each up other with encouraging cross talk. When it was my turn to read, I was thrilled to discover that my powers to ad-lib had returned. Last month, on stage I couldn’t seem to form a coherent unscripted sentence, probably due to the fact that the event was rescheduled and took place at 4pm, the time of day I’m usually napping, rather than our regular 7 pm.

“Maybe poetry isn’t meant for broad daylight. I like to read in dimmed lighting that casts reflections on my amber filled glass of beer,” I told my husband when I figured out what went wrong last month. Of course, as one who has been healing from public speaking trauma for most of my life, I don’t need a reason to be nervous. But I wasn’t on this evening, at least not abnormally so.

From the creased and fading underlining …of the mind’s lived-out stories … I summon them up … to soothe a new hurt … I touch my own cheek … to feel his phantom kisses … Even though earlier in the day I experienced an emotional breakdown related to posting the poem about my father kisses on my blog (more on that in a future post), I got through the reading of it without choking up. I did enough bawling while writing the piece, after all.
My reading (which Joe made a mini-movie of, but I don’t know how to post those) was followed by the rest of my Writers’ Circle fellow-members. The sharp beaked, sweet talking, opportunistic malingerer cowbird, bullying for food and out-competing the young thrush reflected the human world as a ferment of human malevolence in Jayn’s poem, titled “Face-off.”
Rosemary reminded us that Mother’s Day was not originally intended as a day for women to pat themselves on the back and receive flowers. It was meant to inspire women to get out and change the world. If anyone could stop the loss of innocent lives in man made wars, it would be women, she stated in a piece about raising bi-gender children, which at its conclusion brought on rousing whoops and applause.
Kathleen, a historian and archivist, is known for her descriptive poetic prose. She wove a story about a large quartz rock to the beat of a repetive line … And India told me this story… years ago … Too big to dig up, on the property she now lives on, it had to be buried. And India told me this story … years ago… When a large rock stopped her while mowing, she asked ‘could it be the one?’
The June Spoken Word Open Mic night was like a home game that everyone who participated in won. When it was over, some of us stayed to dance to the music of the Winged Heart Band in the back part of the building.
Post Notes: You can read a

bout more Floyd Spoken Word events here. Photos: Sally, Jack, crowd, and Colleen.