Five Colleges, Incorporated: PoetryFest 2009

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Seventh-Annual Five College Student PoetryFest

The seventh-annual Five College Student PoetryFest will be held on Monday, February 23, 2009 at 7 p.m. in Pruyne Lecture Hall at Amherst College.

The fest was originally conceived and planned by a faculty committee in 2003 as a vehicle for celebrating the art of poetry by giving recognition to student poets. Each year, two students from each campus are chosen by a selection process determined by their own school. Those invited to read their works receive a gift certificate, courtesy of a local bookshop. Their poems are then assembled as a collection and presented to them. The fest is supported by funding from Five Colleges and from the hosting institution.

The student poets to read from their works this year are:

Amherst: Rachel Edelman and Catherine Champion
Hampshire: Unique Robinson and Cassandra de Alba
Mount Holyoke: Sarah Coates and Emily Yates
Smith: Kate O'Connor Morris and Stephanie Woodruff
UMass Amherst: Sarah Levine and Susan Thorpe

[Click each name above to read a poem from each author. Each poem displayed is copyrighted © by the individual authors.]

Members of the PoetryFest Committee for 2009:

Amherst College: Daniel Hall
Hampshire College: Deborah Gorlin
Mount Holyoke College: Robert Shaw, Sara London
Smith College: Anne Boutelle
UMass Amherst: Lisa Olstein

Here is a sampling of poems by the participants:

Southern Lights by Rachel Edelman

This restless solitude lends itself
to an open sort of wilderness.
Mountaintops breaching a frozen ocean.
Disarticulated snow palaces
cast into the Aurora austrialis’
spectrum: shadow of a turret here,
caved-in ballroom floor to the west
where the greenest shades collect.
Light’s too dim to spoil contrasts,
leaves most of the landscape
rippling in shivers of grey.
The tundra mutes all but the wind,
holds my body still in protest
against journeys of self-searching,
dances between ice and sky. I sink;
in the nest of green reflection,
I burrow in to watch the stars.

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Migration by Catherine Champion

The road to the promised land has no signs, no measures
of distance. It is wider than vision and as good as a fire.
When you leave the past, you must leave it all or drag it
behind you, bear its dense expiration. I have learned this
too well and now I don’t want any of it. The world ahead
is a small, hollow vowel I release and breathe back in,
hold like an orb inside my lungs. There once were stories
of a land that gave years like corn, but this dust is not new;
it clouds behind each step and clings to my sweat. My back
is naked flesh under a carnivorous sky and I am the brother
of these scarce trees, their tender spines and vertebrae bare.
This is a path of ash. The land takes itself back from me.

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I OWN ME
AND MY BODY
FROM MY BONES UP TO MY NAPS, WENCH
by Unique Robinson

u cannot determine
how my life will be
cuz while u scream i should keep this child
u ain't the one in poverty
yeh this baby might discover the cancer cure
but more than likely
u’ll just doubt his needs
write him off as one more black boy
one more forgotten mouth to feed
lead him to the streets
wit’ death threats before he gets out his teens
and u ain't the one that’s gotta raise him
when u leave this property

so move up outta my way
unless u gon’ pay to help me get this outta me.

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List of Objects Found in the Attic by Cassandra de Alba

Three hatpins.
Baby blanket, moth-eaten and faded.
Cardboard box of newspaper clippings
and Chinese dolls.
Porcelain saucers.

Diplomatic photos, typewriter-labeled
with foreign names.
Braid of brown-red hair in plastic bag,
elastic still attached.
Polka records.

Bronzed baby shoes, with mouse droppings
rattling sadly around inside.
Books in Portuguese, water-stained
from that year with the flood.
Empty mason jars.

A photo album,
crumbling at the edges
full of dead Spanish women
with dark eyes
and no names.

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Rhetorical by Sarah Coates

Your ears are dove soft, like the flight of cranes
skimming slight cracks across a smooth glass
body. Liquid velvet. They are the candy tipped nipples of Venusian
models-- or the buzzing neon lights in a coffee house
window. They scoop up resonance like the right hand pitcher
of Italian Love -- her open palms of rhetoric.

Your ears, orifical, official, ornamented in the wet rhetoric
of an illogical kiss, are painted by shedding lips poised like cranes
crying fumes to a listless sky. Melted sound. Pouring from a pitcher
of parted shivering skin. Your brow, shouldering the porcelain-white glass
of darting eyes, curves like two harmonious fingers. They house
the viscerality, the physicality of your thoughts clouded in Venusian
light. Under your beaded brow I wear down to false regalia – my lips Venusian,
despite their many cracks, spout those tin notes of wordless rhetoric,
sipping love from your lips like apples, molding your body to a house
of disturbing design, where (in it [in you]) I deign to couch my lies like cranes
lusting for a fish that never comes. I peep out through the windowed glass
of your will and find myself a revolting loafer, a voided pitcher

spraying air into the universe instead of a dove. An empty pitcher,
stark against the violet-petal breath of your Venusian
sex. Where once I was a preened feather, a sliver of stained glass
dancing prismed on your soul, now I am simply stained rhetoric
spewing carnal waste from dumb-locked lips-- a scissored pair which cranes
spoiled fat to kiss your foiled brow. Such bristled shutters house

in darkness your knowledge of my world. I house
nothing but the fault. The subterranean divide between your pitcher,
full, and mine full of dust mulling disparate fate. Softly my neck cranes,
long and white again to kiss you. No longer Venusian
we are but conflated balloons of self-absorbed rhetoric--
and your brow, your lips, your eyes, your ears break like frozen glass

under the sharp beaky thrusts -- the plastic pecks. I am speared by the glass
that separates our hearts with a diamond edge. Your house
bubbles in the disease of our melancholy. Our opposing rhetoric
poisonously paired. My body, like the mouth of night, is a pitcher
which refuses to be plugged. Instead I am full of Venusian
flight. Forgive me for my appetite, for my will that cranes

for more. It cranes for blown glass,
a Venusian temple, a godly house-
not one leaking pitcher of rhetoric.

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Lightning by Emily Yates

The night you went crazy we walked beneath
streetlamps in sticky June heat and
I counted the cracks on the sidewalk
and the dim flashes of lightning bugs.

You had followed me into the bathroom,
gotten me out of the shower and so
as I walked with you my hair hung limp and
the water dripped down the backs of my legs.

The grass that had once reached to my knees
was cropped short and sterile, or it seemed
that way, but maybe I had just grown,
which was hard to believe when beside you.

But I walked there, solemn and soldiering,
like a line leader on a fieldtrip to the zoo,
except that this time the cage was for you
and there were no elephants or giraffes.

There were people out on the streets
and some laying in the grass on blankets,
eating watermelon and playing guitars,
their lusty fingers drifting in the wind.

The lightning bugs led the way
and I was playing with the hem of my shirt,
humming to myself, as I brought you
to a yellowing room with rows of beds.

There they took you with a blanket and hot tea,
which was strange, since you were sweating,
and I walked back through the streets
without you, barefoot and barely sixteen.

And later, when that boy caught a
lightning bug and threw it to the ground,
smearing its light on cement, I had never
seen anything so horribly beautiful.

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House of Collections
N. 3rd St. and Berry Ave. by Kate O'Connor Morris

I am six stories high
over the East River’s oily evening landscape
with the help of an elevator,
(and my millennium coattails).

Saturday a loft a party
an unexpected night
to excavate petrified treasures
proving preconceived movements
of art and death
and circus.

Foghorns of lost voyages beckon
driftwood tusks of ship skeletons hanging overhead,
omnipotent chandeliers
that enable this lurid gathering.

Bedpans in these chambers brim
with toiletries, formaldehyde dissolved
from a community of mason jars,
preserve rotting freak-show findings.

Lace billows from breasts and sleeves
like flames tonguing faggots,
the burlesque dancer
shimmies from satin,
removes new noses from her sex,
gifts her collection to those
refusing to see past their own.

The subway pulses by our sides,
strings pluck the quickstep rhythm of electric pores,
interrupting the slam of commercial construction
as the House of Collections
shelves us in ancient display,
christening this gothic age
of scaffold and incessant machinery
sprouting in my unfamiliar home.

Bones of mammals, taxonomy of birds,
stretch across walls
like maps of extinct empires.

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Equinox by Stephanie Woodruff

The sun will set due west today,
a radiant compass across the expanse of earth,
true-north line drawn right down the middle
across you and me, a meridian of halves,
the distance between us we have evenly gauged.

We have mapped our loss through bloom and harvest
and have been left separate in our grief; the silver birch
beginning to deepen in color -- open wounds
on swaths of green, the season of losing our first child
turning red.

Driving down the ribbon of dirt road
our motorcycle lurching
over canals of shale and brush,
haybales stacked like loaves, a vee of geese
gathering overhead having chosen their life-mates,
we stare hard at the equidistant horizon
wondering where the divide will leave us,
how the light will splay on our parted bodies,
and on which side we will be found.

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Legend Has It by Sarah Levine

Who made this grilled cheese sandwich?

The bread’s forehead slick with calorie infested perspiration.

Holy matrimony between two plush Challah slices and an acre of

Mozzarella spinning mellifluous spells upon your stomach’s sense of sanity.

I see the way his boneless anatomy respires, the desperate bubbles, gulping for air until destiny interrupts causing the seizure to subside leaving a puddle of viscous goo imprisoned by two watchmen of the carbohydrate clan.

Who made this grilled cheese sandwich?

Compelling me to genuflect upon this cold kitchen floor and taste the salty residue of tears collecting behind my sight sockets.

"That’s mine," a boy, no more than nine, declares. And without another word this artifact of my child hood is gone, subject to a life among crater like molars, sandpaper tongue, and a blink of glory.

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Feast by Susan Thorpe

The hardwood floor is clean and will remain that way until the great dane tramps through. But oh well. Silly you forgot the canned peas. I sneak a peak at him basting the bird and almost pour the merlot too high. "Trying to get tight tonight?" lieutenant wonders. I stick out my tongue. "Go let the dane out. She hasn’t peed in a while."

I put too many marshmallows on the yams. And what, really, does spaghetti squash taste like? For a moment I remember my aunt had a turkey for a pet and that’s why she willnotcannot eat turkey.

We sit and enjoy our company and have more fun than the suburban family who lives across from us. The great dane pees on the floor anyway, and someone says "it’s okay" and gives her a hunk of dark meat.

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