Princeton Makes, the arts cooperative at the Princeton Shopping Center, and Ragged Sky Press, the Princeton-based independent press, presents its Second Sunday Poetry Reading on December 12 at 4 p.m.
The free event features poets Shannon K. Winston and Michael Simms and a limited open mic session.
Winston is a Princeton-based poet whose work has been printed in RHINO Poetry, Crab Creek Review, The Citron Review, and the Los Angeles Review. Her book, “The Girl Who Talked to Paintings,” was published in 2021 by Glass Lyre Press.
Simms is a Pittsburgh-based poet, the lead editor for more than 100 published books, including the bestselling “Autumn House Anthology of Poetry,” and founder of Vox Populi, an online forum for poetry, politics, and nature.
His newest book is the Ragged Sky Press publication “Nightjar,” also the name of the following sample of his work:
Why should I care
whether automobiles carry dead drivers
off the empty highway into the forest?
Should it bother me
If influential briefcases
no longer swing
through the canyons?
Or empty suits forget
how to climb the stone stairs
of the courthouse? Should I feel sad
when the giant steel cages
hold only the bones of men?
I’d love to watch
skyscrapers collapse from within,
each floor heavy with the years,
windows widening to let the wind
blow the important pages away
like so many lies.
Shouldn’t we rejoice
when great ocean liners no longer
plow the plastic sea to unhappy islands
but lie in the coral dark, mollusks
building calcium palaces on their hulls?
God who once loved us
no longer requires our praise,
delighting Himself alone
with the meadowlark.
A crow lifts an unseemly voice to heaven,
and a nightjar flies over the ruined houses
carrying a soul, passing it
from one bird to the next,
never content with its song.
Nightjar, Michael Simms, 112 pages, $17, Ragged Sky Press.
Second Sunday Poetry Reading, Princeton Makes, Princeton Shopping Center, 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton. Sunday, December 12, 4 p.m. princetonmakes@gmail.com.
