26. S. Main Street Travelers Rest, SC

Come early to eat dinner at Leopard Forest and chat with local artists.

$5.00 at door/$2.00 students

6:30 Open Mic Sign Up. 7:00 Featured Poet

Open Mic: three poem limit.

Please note this is a PG-13 event.

Now: Musicians welcome at open mic!

(left: Michele Merrigan reads from her Chapbook at Open Mic at Poets in the Forest in September)

This project is funded in part by The Humanities Council SC, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanties.

*Gil Allen and Michele Merrigan will join other Kakalak 2007 poets to read at Malaprop's in Asheville on Saturday, October 20th at 7pm.

*Nancy Taylor will be teaching a poetry workshop on Saturday, November 10th from 10am-noon at TRAM. You must pre-register. The cost of the workshop is $12. Participants of the workshop get a free ticket to hear here read on Friday, Nov. 9th.

November 9th:

Nancy Dew Taylor

The woods give up their secrets:
Decrepit sheds and shacks,
Disintegration of stump and chimney,
Tangle of trees toppled together, patchwork
Of briars, leafy nests of squirrels high in junctions,
Hummingbird cone deserted in bare crook
Of branches, secret lair of deer and hare.

Then the lay of the land is revealed:
Bulges and boulders, declivities
And creek beds, deep cleavage
Between slopes, bold slant
From roadside to ridge:
Beauty like the body's

Whose secrets are also unseen,
Skin concealing what crumbles
Within:
Limb caught in a stream,
Backing up wet leaves and mangled sticks,
Mold and mushroom awaiting the moment to grow,
Rip in the root that will expand and crack,

And, lurking, the unexpected:
Beneath leaf and fern clutter,
Baby ivy leaves, dead white,
Waiting their time to grip and climb.

Being one contrary oak
Assembled by the twisted logic
Of piedmont weather; being all scab bark
And roots, like the legs of demented
Uncles; being cotton field edge,
Long vanished, marked by presence;
Being one vast and worthless
Sap monger; being one tall
And knobby crone of the young woods;
Being one blade duller, one timber
Cruiser's worst board feet nightmare;
Being one skidder's hunker;
Being all this and more, luck, fate,
Providence, deer piss, raccoon spittle,
Pig grunt, sparrow feather, vulture void,
Being what matters most
This moment to us, oak, place.

January 11th:

Laurel Blossom and Starkey Flythe

you were dead, people are always
talking, implication everything-
what you died of and how-drugs
plaque, smoke-death as consequence,
shock and surprise nothing. So why
should your ghost appear next to me
at the Xerox (Greek for shadow)-
Hamlet, Sr., copying, copying,
Remember! You couldn't
stop talking, the single man
who lives alone, your mother's burial,
how Jews do, inter the day,
monument a year later. I heard
every word-when the dead speak-
nota bene-push the arrow left,
back space unraveling every yesterday.

Office Max-computers smalling all
We know-Newton, Jesus,
Leonardo-insecticized. You aren't
Dead, appear exact, no ghost, quoting
Mark Twain-"Reports of my death…."
Go, live down your reputation. Clear
(the green button), the unpaid
life you spent or were paid for, run,
before the paper tops the trees.
How to tell those who told me?
They gave me your death, a gift; I
withhold your life, the antidote.
How many others don't know?
We should make sure before we say
But that this world would be silent.

February 8th:

Bill Aarnes

One last afternoon
With the wiggling wakes

Of whirligigs
Above those many minnows

And their mini shadows.
The six-year-old

In her sunflower two-piece,
Legs and stomach

Prone on the dock
So she can stretch out,

Spread her arms,
Hold her lips

Just over the lake,
And perfect pronouncing

With perfect gravity
Smithereens.

Where nothing is certain, we awaken
To another night of delicate rain
Falling as if it didn't want to
Disturb anyone. On and off
Foghorns groan. The lighthouse beacon
Circles the island. For hours, melancholy
Waves tear whatever land we're standing on.
Listen to the sea-rain dripping
Through fog, suspended at the edge of earth
On a circle of sand where we are always
Moving slowly toward land.