UU Service Will Share Poetry

Sunday, April 8, 11:30 a.m., Benson Hall

— from Suzanne Olson —

Happy National Poetry Month! Please join us for our annual poetry service. Everyone is invited to bring some poetry to share – your own or published works. See below for a taste from my stream …

Please bring finger foods to share following the service.

All are welcome. Please let us know if you need a ride, or have other needs that the Fellowship can help with.

The Feed
BY M.L. SMOKER
Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way—addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips are still simmering in a pot on the stove.

M. L. Smoker, “The Feed” from Another Attempt at Rescue. Copyright © 2005 by M. L. Smoker. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press. Source: Another Attempt at Rescue (Hanging Loose Press, 2005.