Excitement! Poetry! Prose! Friends! Mood lighting! How rare that we get two Fridays in a row of such high caliber loveliness. Join us. Eman and Ian will read. We’ll all listen.

Here’s a taste of what you’ll hear from:

Eman Hassan, excerpted from “Red Brocade Obscures my View”

Buff Guy isn’t the only one
who knows this trick –hawk-eyed vendors
sonically vying to snag my eye
– something free for you?
they murmur as their jewelry jingles.
But this is really about a simple rock,
how its water-buffed glisten compels me
to pick it up, marvel, there really is
something free for me
other than what those men hock.
Even birds know this hook,
keep quiet around humans
when they must. Be careful
of us, dears, I boomerang
the thought.



Ian Rogers, excerpt

Annette did not know what happened to all the work she passed on to others. In all likelihood, these people were also passing it on to others, who passed it on to still others in different forms until all the deadlines had passed and the work had been forgotten, absorbed into other projects, or accomplished by someone (probably a new hire) naïve enough to actually get it done. Or maybe the work was being passed on forever, and the vast majority of the time occupied by the sixty-eight employees of the building code inspection office was spent in a neverending endeavor to maintain the appearance of strict productivity.