Alex Frankel reads in Ventura 5/8/14
May 6, 2014
This Thursday, May 8, poet Alex M. Frankel features at the EP Foster Library in the Topping Room at 7:30pm. Located at 651 E. Main Street in downtown Ventura, the free reading will be hosted by Dane Baylis and an open mic follows where I and many of my students will be reading from our class publication! Here’s another sample poem by Alex M. Frankel:
Ode to 7-Eleven
How are you tonight, 7-Eleven? with your smell
of departure and annoyance, your white bread, your drain cleaners,
your puddings, your cockroaches fanning out over the parking lot
like glossy marzipan soldiers lugging fearsome shadows.
It must be lovely to watch for dawn
coming over the EverTrust Bank and the Chevron station,
it must be trying
for the lively man with the turban (sales associate #33323)
to hang out with the seven moving objects of the sky,
the eleven ounces of the heart
and the sturdy sixteen-year-olds
picking their noses by the soda fountain.
7-Eleven—benign, broad-minded firebrand of night—
the great inward journey begins with you,
inexhaustible Christmas of green red orange HELP
WANTED Do we think we understand you, 7-Eleven? How sweet
the industrious freezer, the implacable milk,
the pounds of glaze, fritters, muffins,
“freedom of choice,” Hispanic, Hmong, Chinese,
the painful joy of brainfreeze,
10,000 pots of coffee for Tarzana
apotheosis of the hot-dog-loving state
that stares at Popular Mechanics and Soap Opera Weekly
when all at once a man looks up, catches
his own image timid in the window
and a girl examining her nails in an idling van HELP
and beyond that a string of bungalows and porches
and flagrant Union 76 balls WANTED
from here all the way to Downey, Bell Gardens, City of Industry,
past where the freight trains jangle and yelp
though perhaps no one can say for sure where they’re headed
or what they’re freighted with.
Future featured readers include:
May 15 Rick Smith
June 5 Kevin Patrick & Patti Sullivan
June 12 Paula C. Lowe
June 19 Perie Longo
July 17 Sandra Hunter
No readings on the fourth Thursday of the month.
One Comment
leave one →
art predator 
Reblogged this on whisper down the write alley and commented:
Gwendolyn Alley’s Ventura College students will be reading in the open mic which follows Alex Frankel’s featured reading 730pm Thurs. May 8 at the EP Foster Library in Ventura. Join us!