As this evening’s featured reader at Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic in Stamford, John Sakson, past editor for Salt Hill, has taught writing at various colleges and universities throughout the New York region and has frequently shared pieces in his distinctively leisurely-paced and absorbing style at Curley’s over the years.The following piece is nicely representative of the simultaneously relaxed, yet thorough, focus on setting, texture, mood and implication characteristic of his work from his page on the website of the Ploughshares Literary Boroughs Series:
Daylight Savings
In the drunk’s elevator, late,
on the wall next to the floor panel:
a note reminding us to advance our clocks.
And near the top, near the pretentious
hotel letterhead: the red-hot imprint of lips.
Someone (probably a woman, and probably not
the person who drafted the message) pressed
herself to the paper, drafted her own
message, an intimate seal of approval.
Maybe she was just very grateful
for the reminder. Maybe there was no
tissue to be found and this served
as an impromptu blotter. Perhaps
she told her blind date, when he tried to mix
his whiskey breath with hers: Charlie,
I’d rather kiss this damn paper, and then did.
Not likely. And better anyway to imagine her
silent with her own unknowable thoughts
at the moment, and now in her sleep, deeper
somehow, after what she really must have done:
kiss away in peace an hour lost, let the doors close
without looking back at the compartment that now
had held us both in turns
as it descended or rose.
on the wall next to the floor panel:
a note reminding us to advance our clocks.
And near the top, near the pretentious
hotel letterhead: the red-hot imprint of lips.
Someone (probably a woman, and probably not
the person who drafted the message) pressed
herself to the paper, drafted her own
message, an intimate seal of approval.
Maybe she was just very grateful
for the reminder. Maybe there was no
tissue to be found and this served
as an impromptu blotter. Perhaps
she told her blind date, when he tried to mix
his whiskey breath with hers: Charlie,
I’d rather kiss this damn paper, and then did.
Not likely. And better anyway to imagine her
silent with her own unknowable thoughts
at the moment, and now in her sleep, deeper
somehow, after what she really must have done:
kiss away in peace an hour lost, let the doors close
without looking back at the compartment that now
had held us both in turns
as it descended or rose.
A graduate of Syracuse
University’s MFA program, he has contributed poetry to many literary magazines,
including Rattle, Pearl, The Marlboro Review, The Worcester Review and Sierra Nevada College’s The Sierra Nevada Review. Most notably, he has also placed work in Poet Lore, which, now in its
125th year of publication, is the oldest poetry magazine in the
United States.John currently resides and teaches in Connecticut.
Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.
For more information,
contact:
Barnes & Noble
100 Greyrock Place,
Suite H009
Stamford, CT 06906
203-323-1248
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