Blatant Affection

If this were your audience, how could you not love them back? 

Some members of 29th Street Writers, including Ellen Goldberg, whose face and words I have posted before, read poems charged with fresh and surprising imagery, powerful politics, and laughter. The venue was Broadway Books, one of the few independent bookstores left in Portland. I was there to make photos of the readers, and I did, but I fell in love with the expressions on faces in the audience. They savored every word. See Extras for more happy listeners and the face of Ellen Goldberg.  

Here’s one of the reasons why the audience was so happy.

Redemption in the Year of Inert Gases
by Ellen Goldberg

It was May and I was failing.
Still, xenon, neon and argon appealed to me.
They lit up a grocery storefront
in the deserted neighborhood
of the periodic table
where it was always midnight,
and the streetlamps had been shot out,
and I’d been dropped off alone,
my thin coat of brains no match for the cold.

The teacher, Mrs. Mishalove,
took pity, gave me a string to hang
in a liquid she’d stirred something into,
not bothering to explain. By the next day,
a stack of clear shiny wafers had crawled
up the string. When I tasted one,
the body of the lord of salt, I knew that
making solid tears would be my project,
and might earn the precious credit I needed.

I guessed that while growing crystals
I had wandered into another class,
the one on weeping--where
I would be happier.