Quills and Frills - 8/16/14 Ally Malinenko, Aleathia Drehmer, Kristofer Collins

Ally says:

Emma Sings in Church

We take our seats in the church,

here for the noon day free concert

that they’ve been offering for 75 years.

It makes me wish the churches back home did this sort

of thing and then I remember that if they did

I wouldn’t be free at noon on a Tuesday anyway.

My weekdays belong to someone else.

I fidget, squirming in my seat

like a child,

behind me the pipes of the organ shine.

When the musicians come in I start.

They are all so young,

long hair and nervous smiles.

You can see the energy wafting off of them.

I look around the packed church,

my husband and I are the youngest people here

but we are not young,

not like these girls

who tuck their violins under their chin

fingers quivering with so

much potential.

When the soloist comes out,

her voice otherworldly

exactly the way Handel would have wanted

I feel something shift in me,

and for a moment I wonder if I will make it home

or if my plane will fall out of the sky.

I look at the program.

Her name is Emma,

this small girl full of so much sound

that I can feel myself breathe it in.

It tastes like buttermint and time.

It tastes like all that life

still ahead of her

begging to be filled.

For a moment I remember what that felt like

and then I close my eyes

and beg it to stop.


John says:

I’ve known Kristofer Collins for twenty-four years.  To put that on an understandable level I’ve known only my parents, brother, and intimate family friends for as long.  Kris and I met outside our geometry class in 1990.  Ah, to be wee lads again.  At the time he was on the staff of our high school literary magazine (he would eventually become the editor), and I was a fat and lonely kid with literary dreams.  What makes the stuff of friendship?  I don’t know.  But Kris and I formed a bond in high school that was solidified into a lifelong chum-hood in college, and has managed (albeit with some lumps along the way) to last into our 40s, that glorious time of family sickness, prostate exams, gray hair, and sore bones.  Here’s a sample of his work from the book Make-Out Party, an experiment in poetry where the last line of a poem is suddently the first line of the next:

i

pomes popping out all over

town infested with summer

jump my bones like a feud of

flowers are mondays all over

the world the same as my monday

is the earth just jelly

between yr weepy toes

sometimes writing pomes

is strange as this strange

as yr heart's lub dub

ii

as yr heart’s lub dub
speeds yr soles purple
is the new sky my good
friend a foreigner
you don’t speak the
language of office supplies
you don’t know the artist
but his name is hanging
west of the crumbled town

One of the great parts about knowing Kris for so long is that I’ve got to sit back and watch the guy develop as a man and as an artist.  What had once been dreams to him back when we were skipping classes to drink coffee, wander Pittsburgh, practice our Beatles impressions, and think we were the only people ever to discover Jack Kerouac, have now become realities.  Kristofer Collins is a true indie/small press renaissance man.  He is the owner of DesolationRow Records in Pittsburgh.  Kris is the author of six books of poetry: King Everything (Six Gallery Press 2006), The Book of Names (Low Ghost Press, 2008), The Liturgy of Streets (Six Gallery Press, 2009), Last Call (Speed and Briscoe), Make-Out Party (Coleridge Street 2013) and Pennsylvania Welcomes You (Coleridge Street 2013), which can be found in bookstores in Pittsburgh as well as HERE. He is also the publisher/editor of Low GhostPress and its smaller offshoot Coleridge Street which has published yourstruly, as well as The Trolleyman by Bob Pajich and The River Underneath the City by Scott Silsbe

Aleathia says:

Here is a poem from last November's poetry a day challenge:

Redacted Ideograms

We are born
into these slips of flesh—
a self-containing casket
taking a possible century
to decompose.

All the while
remora taking from us
silently leaving us
unawares .

The one life we have
eclipsed by daily minutiae
and bills to pay.

We miss the bigger picture.
We miss it all.

Aleathia Drehmer 2013