D'Alzon Arts Past Poetry Readings

September 18
VICTOR D. INFANTE is an award-winning poet and journalist living in Worcester, MA. His poems have appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, journals and anthologies internationally. He is the editor-in-chief of "The November 3rd Club," and online literary journal of political writing, and his first full-length collection of poems, City of Insomnia, is available from Write Bloody Publishing. He fully admits to being a fan of Dancing with the Stars.

15 Ways to Leave Your Labyrinth
By Victor D. Infante

Coat your tongue with nitroglycerin. Speak softly.

Book a vacation online. Request paper tickets. When the mailman arrives, follow him home.

Challenge the minotaur to Texas hold ‘em, but be careful. It cheats in the final hand. Above all else, don’t lose.

Converse with houseplants. Trust when they whisper directions to the exits. Trust they are willing to wilt for your happiness.

Take scissors to the Bible. Re-arrange phrases until they form a map.

Shrink small and befriend the ants. Their catacombs are just another maze, but the pay is better.

Offer the minotaur a gold ring. It fears commitment and will run.

The whole bread crumb thing’s played out, and string’s a mug’s game. Spray perfume at the threshold when you enter. You’ll remember freedom’s scent.

Surrender to childhood memories of striking matches and singed hair.

Redecorate. A fresh coat of paint makes an old labyrinth brand new, and the dust mites have conquered the sofa anyway.

Turn to television as religion.

Lie to your journal, creating an alternate universe where you stumble casually upon the exit. Write with enough conviction and it will become the truth.

Come to an accord with the minotaur, but remain wistful and aloof at quiet moments. Don’t return its calls right away. It will long to see you smile and offer to show you the sky.

Chip small slices off the walls and swallow them. Soon, you, too, will become stone.

Remain motionless. The walls around you will become dust. Eventually.

Dorinda Wegener holds a MFA from New England College where she was a Joel Oppenheimer Award recipient. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Antioch Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, The Marlboro Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and The Bitter Oleander. She is actively seeking a literary press for her first poetry collection, All I’s and O’s. As a child, Dorinda lived in Robert Frost’s first NH home prior to his famous farm. She currently resides in Wilton, NH.

Noun : Adjective : Idiom : Verb
By Dorinda Wegener

It’s the sound of ice from a tumbler: small
and round, but sure of how to care for itself— <>

It is a river of ink soft-seeping into the page.

It arrives in early morning; breaks
night down to shards of history—

It floats like a corpse: bobbing up, bobbing up.

It’s a slim paper-cut kiss upon fingertip.
A stone passed from tongue to tongue—

It is held in the left hand as the right takes fire.

First Published in Mid-American Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, Spring 2009

October 16

David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College. As an undergraduate at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, he studied fiction writing with J. F. Powers and Jon Hassler. He later earned an M.F.A. in creative writing (fiction) at Bowling Green State University and, even later, a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Stony Brook. Winner of the Worcester County Poetry Association’s annual contest in 2006, Thoreen’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Diner, The Worcester Review, Natural Bridge, Confrontation, The Alembic, Great River Review, and Slate.

Photo by Tom St. John

Release from Hiroshima Hospital

Carried to the far side of Demerol

I dreamed a thousand cranes ascending

or silent, suspended—motionless—on strings,

origami decoys, paperweights

begotten, not made, by a saintly child whose lungs

hung half-inflated, like balloons in moonlight

struggling. So, at last, her skeleton.

Somehow the girl remains—her bowl of rice

and fish, her fingers birthing birds. She haunts me.

Her body lingers in the mind’s tight corners,

as if to say that faith alone could suffice,

as if to say that we could know what we want,

as if to say All this could be yours.

from Great River Review, fall/winter 2008

Dan Lewis lives and works in Worcester, Massachusetts. Old enough to know better, he still finds himself walking in the world agog. Publication credits include The Worcester Review, The Cortland Review, Diner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Paper Street, Segue, Poemeleon and others.

The Landscape at Two O’clock

… the look in her eye
when… or the color of the wind
on your cheek—a negotiable
fiction; everything
imagined already—wallpaper
peeling from the wall; a kitchen
in too much sunlight; the child
home from school, believing
everything. There are no dogs
in this story, or cats either, although
there might be a goat, standing
quietly in the next room, eating
the furniture. Coins spread
like lies across the table. Words
line your pockets like spent
kleenex. You still don't know
what to pack for the journey.

November 20, 2009
Jonathan Blake lives and writes in Fitchburg Ma. He teaches in the English Department at Worcester State College, has published poems, essays and book reviews in a wide variety of journals both big and small and has read his poems throughout New England. Some of his poems have been anthologized in Intimate Kisses and Cadence of Hooves.

TOTEM

Some mornings my wife kneels in the bed
Of flowers close to the stone porch,
Believing he sings to her. Like all music,
His is written into the silence we carry with us.
His dark and weathered face a spirit
Carved into walnut grain.
When our neighbor moved away
She was filled with sorrow.
We found him leaning against
The granite cornerstone, a note left
Pinned to the door.

“He belongs here with you.”

My friend mistakes his expression
For eternal pain, eyes half closed, lips
Twisted as if just before some terrible
Song of mourning. I explain it’s not the ruin
Of the soul he sees, not among the stargazers
And the wild mint, the tulips and the iris;
I tell him my wife believes a different story,
One older than the myth of our exile;
She says each garden is passage
Into paradise, this face – reminder
Of our rapture.

Bill O'Connell makes his living as a social worker and teacher in Western Massachusetts . Poems have appeared or will appear in The Sun, Poetry East, Colorado Review and many other publications. A chapbook, On The Map To Your Life, is available from the author at billoconnell@rocketmail.com.

AFTER ADAM

The whole lifetime of Adam was nine-hundred and thirty years. Then he died.
Gen 5:5

For the first time, I am alone;
the mourners leave me to my tent.
Two lambs mew in the corner—
I haven’t the strength for sacrifice.

Adam held his grief like a load of stones
to build the wall he lived within,
each child’s memory sheathing over
any memory of Paradise.

When Yahweh stopped speaking to us,
We stopped saying His name. Adam
defended me when others had already
sung my fate.

He kept a garden: a small spring
with a few olive trees in the center.
He grew cucumbers and melons,
berries and figs.

We will be remembered for our youth
and how we failed. No one
imagines us old.

I have outlived love.


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