From left to right: Laura Romeyn, Keegan Lester, Jeanann Verlee, Peter LaBerge, & Joseph Fasano.
Yesterday, in the sunny nook of a Sunday afternoon, The Adroit Journal shared work from four contributors at the New York City Poetry Festival for the third year in a row. Despite nerve-wracking reports of rainfall for the day, we’re happy to report that our reading was a success! Thanks so much to everyone who came out to the reading, and of course, to the wonderful folk at the Festival. We hope to return in 2016!
If you couldn’t make the festival, don’t fret. We’ve managed to bring the reading to you, courtesy of prose mentee Shannon Sommers’ iPhone (Thanks, Shannon!).
Joseph Fasano
The moon, who has been away so long now, the lost moon with her silver lips and whisper, her body half in winter, half in wool. Look at her. Look at her, that drifter. And if no one, if nothing comes to know you, if no song comes to prove it isn’t over, tell yourself, in the moon’s arms, she is no one.
— Joseph Fasano, from “Testimony”
Laura Romeyn
It rained once / they say, not a flood, but a bucketing. / I think of how my body takes on water, / how my body leaks it out and off. / How I’ll reach for a glass when I need it, / when I want it.
— Laura Romeyn, from “Slab City“
Keegan Lester
If we continue with what we should, / we all stand to lose / getting naked and swimming in lakes. / Everyone will be doing it then. / They will name it something paradoxical / like natural hibernianism.
— Keegan Lester, from “The Topography of Woody Allen“
Jeanann Verlee
Maybe it was the tequila, / the salt licked off a neck. Or the way / the first boy in Juarez slid under my skirt in a back room. / The way the point guard unbuttoned my shirt / in the stairwell after practice. Or how the kid / with the teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye / gripped my hips, how he never uttered a word.
— Jeanann Verlee, from “Grime“
