Monday (!!!), July 27th at 7:30 in the PM: Joel Bettridge & Joseph Mains

INFK once again bringing you the freshest locally grown poems!

This month on a very special Monday (not Tuesday) come join us in listening to Joel Bettridge and Joseph Mains read their poems aloud. There is also a pretty good chance we will have a special musical guest.

When: Monday, July 27th at 7:30 pm

Where: 3968 SE Mall St., Apt A

All are welcome, donations totally not turned out.

Also, if you're into selling or buying poems, etc., everyone is invited to bring anything they made, and everyone is invited to bring some extra cash.

Joel Bettridge is the author of two books of poetry, That Abrupt Here (The Cultural Society Press, 2007) and Presocratic Blues (forthcoming from Chax Press). He co-edited, with Eric Selinger, Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation) and his critical study, Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith is forthcoming from Palgrave in Fall 2009. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University.

Courtship in the Age of Youtube

Inevitable, the time clock that hangs around in your sinus cavities, the tension of

inhaling and exhaling and checking your inbox, at

a customary stage, not, steady enough, to take your jeans off

not, at ease enough, to refrain from it,

your words as to the vagueness of an end game.

I’ll send you a clip from a popular sketch-comedy television show, and one of a man

who injures his ankle in a gruesome way;

in between I’ll watch a hot girl do something, Saddam hanged until dead, and

trade you one kind of unfreedom for another,

and act toward your border states as if they were the developing world,

but a team of scientists finds a gigantic ring of invisible material left over from

the ancient collision of galaxy clusters; they announce it as this most

convincing evidence for the mysterious stuff called dark matter; but an

online social network popular with teenagers shares with state attorneys

the identities of members who are known sex offenders.

I’ll send you a clip of the gayest weatherman ever,

I’ll send you a clip of Japanese people, and a drunken kitten.

Let me treat you like a sparsely inhabited or virtually unsettled land—

let’s do what robots do.

***&***

Joseph Mains was born in the Sonoran desert and lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Portland. Having taken his MFA in Poetry, he now fries pies for a living. His poems appear in places physical and online.

Cleave

It rains.

The pain is temporary but it fits like the shirt with the hole in the elbow.

Have we all had enough? Yes the mountains are beautiful and

yes we can drive through them without getting out.

I ripped through a breastbone and ribs to get outside

the meaty swaddles and when I woke up I was glad that they were yours.