By GEORGE FJELD
BRANDON–Bianca Stone of The Ruth Stone House in Goshen brought two local poets to our Red Clover Ale Company, a community gathering place on Sunday evening for a reading. According to Bianca, “Poetry is the event, poetry and the poets together and the mind combined with emotion and consciousness.”
“It is an outlet to learn more about what it is to be human,” she continued.
Stone introduced Todd Colby, poet and visual artist, to read first. Colby works in text and image, collage and paint. “His work confronts me like a surreal billboard ripped from my psyche,” Bianca emoted. Colby is the author of 6 books of poetry, contributions to Ruth Stone House poetry magazine, Iterant, The Boston Globe, Bomb, The New York Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. Colby started with “Ken and Kathy,” a convoluted mobius strip of a poem about having twins that seemed to have no beginning or end but was filled with humor. His audience, which included a handful of elementary school students, was entranced.
Jessica Fjeld, poet, teacher, and lawyer followed, no less captivatingly, reading from Redwork, as well as a number of recent unpublished pieces. Fjeld has authored Redwork (BOAAT Press, 2018), multiple chapbooks, appeared in many literary magazines and received Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook fellowship and The “Discovery” Poetry Prize from the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center and the Boston Review. She moved home to Brandon last July with her husband and children. Fjeld’s poetry demonstrated her fun and innovative spirit and her serious wordsmithing.
Following Jessica’s reading, a short question and answer session was held. Earlier in the evening, while assembling, the crowd was entertained by the dulcet tones of Jay Fickes, on Irish Bouzouki. They’ve appeared at Open Mic at Red Clover in the past and demonstrated a real jump in presence this time out.
Wet halo by Jessica Fjeld
What malfunction of the human mind
makes every honey bee appear frantic
I have been a pedestrian on many continents
I have worn a belt for power
Every time I stepped into a rut I either
stepped out of it or else got to my knees
nestled down and felt my body split
along the midline desiring
to become dirt I have become
habituated to speed The data
I was given I used to shore up my mind
It melts in the sun even now as the sun
draws south and away
The house has the cold toes of a cold body
Imagine
how a bee’s own full breath feels to the bee
