Adrian Blevins
Adrian Blevins: The Brass Girl Brouhaha was published by Ausable Press in 2003 and won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (Bright Hill Press, 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Utne Reader, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Drunken Boat, Salon.com, and many other magazines and journals. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Amy Barone
Amy Barone: her latest chapbook, Kamikaze Dance, is from Finishing Line Press, which recognized her as a finalist in the annual New Women’s Voices Competition. Her poetry has appeared in Gradiva, First Literary Review–East, Impolite Conversation (UK), Paterson Literary Review, Sensitive Skin, and Standpoint (UK). Foothills Publishing published her chapbook, Views from the Driveway. A native of Bryn Mawr, PA, she lives in New York City.
Who Hasn’t
by Jennifer Juneau
had a love-affair with a shooting star
as it explodes over midtown manhattan
squeezing the night into its flexible heat
saxophone song at sunset
who hasn’t broken jesus yet
who hasn’t weathered a band in a frenzy of drumbeats
like rainbeats
lovestruck & dumb
in this beautiful city of dirty bliss
you reign high all over the place
it’s 5 a.m.
you take what you can get
In Some Café on the Upper West Side
by Jennifer Juneau
she said she’d never sleep with a man she’d known less than six months
she’s afraid she’ll bruise the virgin mary, she said
& all she’d been taught in a plaid skirt it wouldn’t be smart
to talk about first dates, i thought, or the fact that life’s too short
so i ordered a dirty martini
she drank holy water from a paper cup
who hasn’t died of ecstasy one time or another
you know what i’m talking about i hope
later the sun broke through clouds
and i took the F train to the lower east side
she hopped a taxi to her f light at jf k
(or maybe to newark i wasn’t sure) back to the west coast
i thought of van gogh and what he once said:
something about dying of passion & i’d rather & boredom
and i assembled a poem & sent it to myself by text
and read it on stage to a lively crowd in a dim & happening place