Live on Zoom
Sunday, May 17th
4 PM Pacfic / 7 PM Eastern
90 Minutes
[ZOOM REGISTRATION LINK]
About the Poem After Poem
Round Robin Reading Series:
“Every poem different but / Telling the same story.” —Gregory Orr
3 randomly selected poets. Each poet reads poems from their new collection that feel connected to poems from the other 2 poets' collections and talks about those connections that exist.
Poetry is a universal expression of what was,
what is, and what can be.
Join us!
Hosted by Lana Hechtman Ayers
Last night a dream
Meditation on a painting by Meg Reilly
The trees become blue
at the foot of a snowy mountain.
Fill the landscape with western wind
singing through branches.
Walk through the cold
as your breath becomes mist,
frozen crystals
over bears curled in winter sleep.
On white birch branches
two snowy owls
hooting their mating call.
In a new season, three eggs
wait to crack open.
How much of you has been waiting
for the earth to thaw?
For your emotions to spin into water wheels?
A Ferris wheel in your dreams
delivers the wild purple
of morning glories through an open window
where the world waits for you.
Winter trees, owls and stars
sing the music waiting inside you
as the black bear dreams
of a river cascading down the mountain.
Calla lilies swirl out of a fractal
in a flood of amazement,
where a symphony
like the stars of a new constellation
is waiting to be born.
—Diane Frank, Prayer to the Invisible
On Our Tenth Anniversary in Colorado
The water on the window slides sideways, hushed voices talking about Lustre Pearl and margaritas, a small voice that asks if airplanes use gasoline. Mask diffusing my breath, glasses slipping down my nose, skyscrapers golden in the morning light slant. We are here. Snow’s light touches on the matted grass. Dandelions spring up, the scent of aspen and pine, skinny trees with branches hanging down like lashes. Right angles of mountain tops coated in snow. The sun is low and quiet in the off season when the cars leave and the voices stop. All I hear is wind and wingbeats. If I stay on a silence of drifts and tree limbs, maybe I’ll fall out of this floundering world into another one, bloodless like snow.
—Melissa McEver Huckabay, Girl Filling the Sky
Once a Raven
—after Beth Moon, Flight of the Raven
In another life, we flew together,
sheltered in the boughs
of ancient bristlecones, rich with seed.
Our voices rose, loud and raucous.
But that was long ago, almost
beyond memory. From the ground,
I watch the flocks assemble on the wires,
the stunted eucalyptus. They call to one another
in a tongue I no longer understand.
Seeker of bright things, there is only
one way back to harmony.
With you at my back, like a quiver,
I become a corvid angel, hunting nothing
but the sense of flight,
intimate with clouds and wind.
My human bones are clumsy,
far too heavy for this feat, yet I rise
unencumbered on borrowed wings,
adept in ways forgotten long ago.
—Robbi Nester, About to Disappear
Diane Frank is author of nine books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. Her new book of poems, Prayer to the Invisible, was an overnight bestseller – #3 for American Poetry, #3 for Poems by Women. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. Diane teaches poetry, flash fiction and memoir workshops at San Francisco State University and Dominican University. Her first novel, Blackberries in the Dream House, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Melissa McEver Huckabay is a poet whose work has appeared in SWWIM, Poetry South, The Minnesota Review, Phoebe Journal, SweetLit, Writers Resist, Thimble Literary Magazine and elsewhere. She was a past finalist for the Phoebe Journal Poetry Contest and her short fiction won the Spider’s Web Flash Fiction Prize from Spider Road Press. She has an MFA in poetry from Texas State University and teaches high-school English in Cypress, Texas, where she lives with her husband and son.
A retired college educator, Robbi Nester is the author of 5 books of poetry and editor of 3 anthologies, the most recent About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025).She currently hosts 2 monthly Zoom poetry readings. Her poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Vox Populi, Thimble, MacQueen's Quinterly, OneArt, Jackdaw Review, Sheila Na Gig, Keystone Poetry Anthology, Women in a Golden State Anthology, The Nature of Our Times Anthology. Learn more at http://www.robbinester.net.