Princeton Makes’ Second Sunday Poetry Reading returns with featured poets Lynn Levin and Sandy Solomon on Sunday, April 10, at 4 p.m.
Levin is a Bucks County-based poet, writer, translator, and teacher with poems in Artful Dodge, Hopkins Review, Boulevard, and Washington Square Review. The following work appeared in her book “The Minor Virtues”:
Buying Produce from the Marked-Down Cart
I rescue them at times from the back of the store—
cellophaned oranges and apples
packaged good-side-up.
I imagine them as little brains
thinking of the days when they were on the tree
and full of promise.
Mostly I leave the rusty beans, blotched pears
to the gleaners, calling to mind my days
as a gleaner at Dominicks and Star
when I approached with furtive hunch
the scratched and bruised, bought them
with my meager pay. What a bounty of salads and pies
they made me who saved them from the heap.
More than anything I hate waste
and yet how much
of my own life have I let go unused.
Solomon’s work has appeared in a number of magazines, journals, and anthologies in the U.S. and the U.K., most recently in the New Yorker, Plume, and Moment magazine. She currently is staying in Princeton. The following work appeared in Vox Populi:
Praying Mantis
Brown twig with a scored, russet skirt of wings,
you cling to the side of the garbage can
where the lid fits, and, except for a slight twitch
of your pointed mandible, hold wholly still.
When you finally move, it’s just to shift
your strandlike, green back legs
one at a time, each leg tapping to find
the next foothold, the way a blind man tests
with his stick, seeming to feel your way
towards a next meal that is nowhere evident.
Unlike the lion as it inches through the grass,
for you the hunt is never in pursuit
but in opportunity—what comes to you
as you wait, forearms set for the next
approaching life: bluebottle, fruit,
even horseflies might do if only they’d appear,
swoop down and so, by accident, choose you,
drawn by the stench of refuse—coffee grounds,
rinds, all the sticky, fleshy things.
How can you stand the suspense?
I cannot stand the suspense, and yet
as the morning sun moves imperceptibly forward,
I sit on the piled newspapers I came to throw away,
I sit at your feet, so stilled that in time
the air breaks into hums of many registers
as it swirls and startles and catches with flies.
The monthly poetry reading is cosponsored by the Princeton Makes artists collaborative and the Princeton-based Ragged Sky Press.
The free reading will be held at Princeton Makes, located in the Princeton Shopping Center, next to Metropolis Hair Salon. The event includes an open mic limited to the first 10 readers to sign up, and COVID protocols are in effect..
For more information, contact Jim Levine: princetonmakes@gmail.com.
