WCW – Emari DiGiorgio

Wednesday, December 6, 2017, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018), the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She’s the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She’s received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

Mudflap Girl Speaks

My hot minute as a pin-up: the golden hour’s
slick ruse. More likely, Stu drew the thin frame

of a girl downtown, feral dame I feared as a newly
housed wife. Or a wisp of the she before me,

untethered Amazon freewheeling the countryside.
Her body’s open road, long haul, radio static,

bellowing semi horn her call. Maybe she was
a goddess of his dreams: the slope of spine

a dangerous curve at night, dark crease along hip,
one-way bridge, flashing lights. Change gears

too fast, and areolas’ inverted potholes will shred
thread, send a rig skittering sideways across

Highway One, a full cache of beer and glass
crashed. I prayed that he’d come home, wanted

to bang the road from his bones, but I tired of his
crass jokes, how he thought time stopped when he

was gone. I sundialed in sheets, pined for a woman
who went braless at the post office, the peaked

grottos of her tits in the cool dark of an old cotton
shirt. My breasts were a roadside attraction, though

the toots and whistles were for a phantom sexpot
they dreamt of bending over, never kissing.

 

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com