David Koehn and Ann Keniston

David Koehn and Ann Keniston

Monday, March 24 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at SPC
Host: Tim Kahl

David Koehn has been published in a wide range of journals including The Bitter Oleander, Chain, Diner, Artful Dodge, Painted Bride, Poems and Plays, Permafrost, Aethlon, Calapooya, Birmingham Poetry Review, Wisconsin Review, West Wind Review, Southern Indiana Review, Confluence, Oxford Magazine, Whiskey Island, Snake Nation, Cutbank, Apalachee Quarterly, New Millennium Writings, Euphony, Waterways, Alaska Quarterly, The New England Review, The New York Quarterly, and VOLT. Before winning the 2013 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, he won the Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest, held by Permafrost of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for his chapbook, Coil. David has an MFA from the University of Florida, a BA in Professional and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon, an M.Ed. (equiv.) from the University of Alaska, and was a Breadloaf Rural Teacher Fellow at Middlebury College’s Breadloaf School of English.

THE PETTING ZOO

The alpaca named Dean gave my daughter a rash.
The frizzled chickens peck away at the toenails
Of a young woman from St. Louis as she splatters
Some feed about hoping to attract the biggest cock.
Caging these beasts seems appropriate, their spectacled
Ideas of ducks a big part of their departmentalization.
They graze in the fields scarfing up their discovery
Of a new way to insert flora into a thimble, gobbling
Up their latest inventory of syntactical mash.
Slightly paranoid, the alpaca whispers his latest uncertainty
And no matter how he spits I will not disabuse him of it.
A plastic fork becomes chewing gum. A mirror
Makes the chickens feel haunted. Walt Disney assures
Me that my children will remember the names of
Shakespeare’s characters. Wittgenstein is not poetry.
Seventeen angstroms is a distance crossed quickly
But is interminable. Three brothers from San Ramon
Place their mother’s newborn in a washing machine
At the Laundromat. Outside, a beggar begs for 50 cents.
The libretto we recall is a St. Louis sandwich shaped
Like the gateway to the west. The alpaca is well paid
And is grateful to lick the salty shavings from my hand.

— David Koehn (previously published in Maverick Magazine)

Ann Keniston is the author of the poetry collection The Caution of Human Gestures and coeditor of The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology; her new chapbook, November Wasps: Elegies, was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Interim, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is also a scholar of contemporary American poetry and associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She lives in Reno with her husband and two sons.  

Last Night

Again I saw her, we embraced. I held her near
and felt her breath against my face, too warm.
We lingered, spoke and touched, and then

at last took leave. Again she gave me time
to recognize, anticipate, protest, and grieve.
And then she tore from me what was already

torn. After we said goodbye and walked,
not touching, toward our separate cars,
I was bereft too soon, although she stayed

ahead of me, at arm’s length, then farther off.
And when I woke, breathless and afraid,
she was there and not, still dying though she’s dead.

— Ann Keniston