I visited the Siena College LGB Literature class again a couple weeks ago. Much like last time, we talked a lot more about my family structure, and queer politics in general, than we did about the poetry itself. And like last time, they were much quicker on the uptake than most folks. It was fun, even if I feel like I should have pushed the discussion more literary-ward sometimes. I was also intrigued to have one student pop up and talk about the paper she'd done on polyamory. The times they are a changing.

Note to self, however: Your standard line about how your parents thought you and Becca were too young to get married (21) and "Looking back, I can see their point, even though it worked out well" is not going to make sense to college students. Smart as they are, they don't yet know what they don't know.

(The poem I read out for the first time yesterday. It's an exercise in flirtation with a little more intentional rhyme and rhythm than I usually use, which makes it really quite fun to read, without feeling sing-songy. I think.)

Mezzuzah on 181st Street

Nineteen layers of paint
each one latex plus
five sticky years’ dust

The color of stars and skin
flakes into universal gray
coating this angled way

station, yellow no more
five floors up and still the Spanish words
sound strange, dusty, absurd

as the vertical island did
to those who bent back to see
and nailed themselves there, leaning

in the door frame
promising to protect their next
from what the Lord expects

of his chosen. humility and
hunger. a meaningless vow
the scroll knows now

You are temporary, it whispers
The melody will vary
The language matters not—

Only that as you pass through
you leave a blessing
to those who replace you

This Monday was my first feature poetry reading in nearly a year. It's been a somewhat stressful year, shall we say, as well as just a busy one, and my writing of poetry has slumped. I was flailing around trying to figure out what to read and somewhat stressed about it. I didn't actually make myself plan and practice my set until Monday morning.

I decided to skip almost all of the crowd-pleaser-ish ones that I'd started to feel like I was wearing thin and instead read a set that was almost all very old or very new, including one that had been sitting around unfinished for several years and I finally finished it (or at least brought it to a sharable stage). And I finally remembered to include a poem that wasn't my own, which I'm always saying is a practice I like and then forgetting to do.

And it went really well. I mean it was a small crowd, but it included several poets whose opinions I respect, and I felt good about delivering things that have often felt more like "page" poems in a way that worked. And I'm inspired to get back to it all, which is of course one of the best parts of giving (or really just going to) a reading after a hiatus.

Worth remembering.

If you're in the area and not going to the peak oil discussion group in Delmar . . . I've got a featured poetry reading tomorrow (that would be Monday, 10.27), the first one I've actually done in nearly a year. Geez how time time flies. Would love to see you if you're up for something last minute...

Details:
Poets Speak Loud
Tess' Lark Tavern
453 Madison Ave., Albany
7:30pm (7pm open mic signup)

Welcome, May
for Melanie and Laura

In their whites and their bells,
the Morris dancers call in the May
at crystal daybreak
knocking their flower-laden sticks
in echoing unison,
tracing with their steps and humble hankies
the intricate pattern of a flower opening.
They celebrate the
bold, brash perfection that is
creation's details,
echoing in genetic tradition
down the ages.

I glory in their steps
but I have never lived a May
that achieved the golden mean
half as well as the humblest apple blossom,
never mind the trumpet of an iris or
the soft suggestions of a rosebud.
No, when the lens pulls back,
it finds these little miracles of new life
piled up at unplanned angles,
tripping over each other's ankles.
The new baby rips up the dandelions,
the creeping charlie makes way for the garden plot.
the cat beheads a baby bunny, and
a carpet of tiny maple trees spreads
futilely in what will soon be total shade.

So I join the unpracticed maypole dancers
chattering in the less-pure late morning air,
our multicolored ribbons
dripping with fertile hope.
No matter which way the pattern we are to follow is described,
some are befuddled, drunk on sunshine,
wondering what they got themselves into.
One—there is always one. I have been the one—
grumps at those who are slow to catch on
and those who are not explaining well
and those who are not listening.
This may seem to be interrupting the ritual
but this is the ritual.
If there are musicians, they start off too quiet
or with an undanceable tune.
If we sing, we sing too slowly for some,
a key good for none.

Still, we step gamely forward,
over and under, over and under
(sometimes, it's true, over and over and under)
a motley, uncertain crew.

Until someone looks up and finds she is dancing
and everyone passing her is smiling
and a child giggles
and his father notices that around the pole is growing
a chaotic braid
its splendid glyphs found in no one's pattern book
a meadow of wildflowers,
unnamed beetles and the tracks of weasels
and someone's eyebrows relax as the ribbons become taut
and she feels her skirt brushing the legs of her fellow dancers
and the punctual contrarian passes his ribbon
to an eager latecomer
and the singing turns to hoots and hollers
as we run the too-short-to-keep-braiding ribbon ends
in ecstatic, goofy circles
and tie them off in a sweaty, pregnant knot.

May is here.
From flower to field to season
From dance to disorder to worship
From precision to chaos to fertility
We welcome May.


Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License, 2008.

My more formal write-up of the Cristin and Shappy show.

"We were a little nervous about reading here,” Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz told the crowd last Thursday (April 3) at the Frequency North event in the College of Saint Rose’s Neil Hellman library. “Usually our audiences are a little more drunk" ...

I have been known on more than one occasion to say that the only things I miss about New York City are the subway, Ethiopian food, and the slam poetry scene.
So I got myself out the door Thursday to Frequency North, the reading series at St. Rose, which was hosting slammers Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz and Shappy Seasholtz (it was news to me that Shappy had a last name. Or at least that he used it).

Slam poetry is really its own thing, nearly it's own genre, poetry crossed with theater, or sometimes comedy. To get and keep the attention of a bunch of random judges in the audience at a bar (usually), and then get them to give you a high score in the 10 seconds after you're done, you need to be intense, loud, emotionally gripping, and not too subtle, and funny doesn't hurt either. When the dust settles you find that some people also managed to be insightful, lyrical, and/or moving along the way. Others didn't.

Cristin and Shappy don't take my *top* slots for combining message and craft and performance, but they're certainly good, and definitely fun to listen to. I'd really had missed the brash 3-minute ride of a good slam poem. Cristin in particular had a knack for throwing in a little curveball of meaning in at the end of something to show it hadn't been just glam. And they brought a really nice combination of genuine emotion and not-taking-themselves-too-seriously. (Cristin included a poem she'd crafted out of the handwritten notes on rejection slips.)

I could do with out Shappy's zombie poems, frankly, but everyone over the age of 17 who's still writing bombastic, navel-gazing "deep abyss of my soul" poems should be forced to listen on repeat to his The Infinite Darkness (mp3 link).

I was surprised to see no one I recognized from Albany's poetry community there. I certainly make it to a small enough number of events not to be about to criticize anyone in particular for not showing, but it was striking that there was no one. Their loss. And it was fun in a way to be in the midst of a large audience of mostly college students who were noticably awed by the quantity of unapologetic cursing, sex, and general good natured defiance that was suddenly present in their very own college library.

Anyhow, I was very glad I went. I should remember that colleges often host cool things for free.

Nadia says (after taking off her sock, declaring "Piggies!" and then refusing when parents tried to comply with what they thought was a request):

"Piggy, mah-ket
piggy, apple
piggy, flop
piggy, puppy
piggy, tofu"

(I might have the order wrong. She did it twice.)

Dear Poets and Writers editors,

I agree that Roger Bonair-Agard's first full-length book is an exciting thing, but I must admit that I find it a little hard to swallow seeing someone who was first the National Poetry Slam champion 10 years ago, has co-authored another book, has made frequent TV appearances as a poet, and has easily had more people pay to hear him perform poetry than many "established" poets will in their lifetime called a "debut poet." That's so academe-centered it hurts. Perhaps next year, "Twelve poets and their print debuts?"

Sincerely,
Miriam Axel-Lute

I had my first feature in quite a long time last night at Don Levy's Live from the Living Room series at the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Center. I was actually nervous and uncertain about my set, but that made me practice (the amusement of the construction guys working on the fire house next door as they walked by my office window).

And then it went great. Some friends who had never heard me read showed up, which was great. I had a good memory night, and ended up feeling like I'd packed a nice little whirlwind of religion, sex, and politics into my 20 minutes. I should do this more often. Yeah.

I heard some folks at the open mic whom I'd been reading about on Dan Wilcox's blog but hadn't heard yet, Chris Brabham and Matt Galletta, and that was a treat. (We missed you, Dan! I was looking forward to seeing my name in bold over on your blog. But as the most faithful poetry-event-attending poet in the region by a factor of 50, I suppose you deserve an evening off now and again.)

Bob Sharkey opened with a moving poem about his wife. I found it amusing that Tim Verhaegan announced that he "mostly writes gay poems because he's a gay poet" (does that follow?) and then read three poems with no apparent gay subject matter at all. I think he was surprised that I didn't take offense to his "response" to one of my peace protest poems, and instead just recommended that he might like Ed Tick's War and the Soul.

Having been talking about my New Jersey chip on my shoulder earlier in the evening, it was neat to hear Don share a poem about the "Making of New Jersey" to close out the night. It's a poem I'll want to look up again, I think.

My column this week was about how parenting has unexpectedly gotten me out of the house more, on account of Nadia being a social critter.

Appropriately, on the Thursday it came out, I finally made it to the annual reading of "Song of Myself" on Walt Whitman's birthday, which is organized by Dan Wilcox and held in Washington Park. It was fun. About a dozen people, including me, Robin, and Rebecca, took turn reading section by section. I enjoy reading aloud, and it was challenging material to do some justice to without having practiced. It was also
 neat, and unexpected, to get hear my partners reading poetry—I hear them read novels aloud all the time, but I'm usually the one doing the poetry.

I must admit that this was probably the closest  I've come to actually reading "Song of Myself" all the way through. (I say closest because we were taking turns with Nadia, which sometimes involved wandering out of ear shot to watch dogs, frisbee, bikes, etc.) I own a copy of Leaves of Grass, but I'd not read much of it. It was fascinating, historically and poetically, and had some wonderful bits, but I'm not sure I quite get how it hangs together as a whole. Robin said it reminded him of William Blake in parts. I actually felt myself thinking that an English class discussion on it, putting it in context and hearing other people's interpretations, might be interesting and useful. For someone who has always detested English lit classes, that's saying something.

But at base, I think it's pretty awesome to get together in public and just read good poetry not written by anyone present.

Friday, Robin and Nadia and I walked down to Vestuary Operatics, the art installation at St. Anthony's Church, which Grand Street Community Arts is working to restore and make into an arts space. It was crowded and hot inside, but still quite worth it. There were some wonderful pieces that interacted directly and specifically with the space: Things painted directly on the walls, a projection on the ceiling the same size and shape and border as the plaster medallions on either side of it with a series of old portraits in the center. I almost thought of going back today when it would have been less crowded, but I got caught up in garden and yard projects. It was the only part of First Friday we got to. I'm sad to see that we missed the Albany Public Schools Student Exhibition; I hadn't realized that was happening. But we got a late start and Nadia was getting cranky.

Tonight we pushed it a little too far, I think, and went to a friend's birthday party that started around Nadia's bedtime (after their kids were asleep). I was hoping we could just settle in a quiet corner and get her to sleep, but she wasn't having it. She'd been cranky all day. Oh well. Good to have stopped by at least.

So this is where the lower commercial value placed on poetry helps us a little. UPenn has been able to amass a large collection of poetry audio files—mostly well-known poets reading their own work, including a bunch of rare historical recordings, and has permission to offer them all for download, in mp3 form, for free. The website is called PENNsound. (Hat tip to Michael Eck, via Dan Wilcox.)

Now, most of my favorite poets—contemporary slam folks, more obscure writers—aren't there. I'm not sure all slam folks will want to be there—they actually do (or can) make money from CDs and live performances more than books, so the economics are likely to be different.

But it's completely awesome to have this available for the segment of the poetry world it does cover, especially if it makes poetry more accessible to new audiences. Even non-performance-oriented work is different out loud. I expect I'll find some new favorites here myself.

I'm also very impressed by the manifesto underlying the project: This sounds like the work of someone who actually knows how the web works and has really thought about how to make this user friendly. And it might be working: It supposedly has had 8 million downloads in the past year. A hopeful thought.

I visited a senior seminar on gay & lesbian literature at Siena College today to read some poetry and talk about being a queer poet/journalist. Remembering some of the questions that I had felt unprepared to answer last time I did this, several years ago, I actually prepared some thoughts about different types of poems that may be influenced by the sexuality of the writer such as: response/political poems, outing/explaining poems, and poems where you want to write about something else and the gender of the person you were marrying/dating/fucking is incidental but likely to come up and you have to think about whether it's going to distract your reader from your other point and whether you care.

After some conversation, prompted by the professor, about that latter point, the class proceeded to illustrate it amusingly by asking me only questions about my family and related issues, and practically nothing about writing. What did I expect? It was a group of students at a Catholic college, whose professor partially teaches this class so there is a space to talk about queer issues at all, and they'd just heard about their first poly family.

Luckily, I'm just as happy to talk about that as I am to talk about poetry. Their questions were intelligent, and interestingly quite different from the ones that my peers inevitably ask. Not a single question about either jealousy or who sleeps where. Lots of questions about parenting, legal custody, marriage, and biphobia. (And the exclusivity as a triad question, which is rarer than you might think.) Good on them.

Of course I was also probably inadvertently mean. In the context of talking (very briefly) about our restricted level of openness, I wrapped up by noting that a party like the one referenced in the poem that had raised the question would probably be fine, but that we didn't have so much access to that anymore, not being on a college campus any longer.  It was clear from the looks, and the not-long-later question about where I went to college, that if Siena is having those parties, which seems doubtful, no one told these folks about them. See above. Catholic college, even if a fairly tolerant one. Not Oberlin. Duh, Miriam.

But that was a side note. Overall, I got to read some stuff that I hadn't dusted off in a long time (including one that I had revised largely based on the class of hers I visited last time being confused by an earlier draft), have a good conversation, and get out of the house into the beautiful weather. Good times.

They say geckos can walk
straight up walls
using quantum physics.
They don’t so much stick as bond,
their touch so fine
it coaxes electrons from their orbit
and then sends them, overwhelmed,
swinging away again
a plus and minus dance where
atomic eyes stay locked
until the gecko’s toes curl up
and the angle of its attention shifts

When you were five months old
I suddenly became obsessed with
the softness of your hands
It was weeks until I realized
this was because you had
begun to touch me—
the fist on the end of your
windmill nursing arm
had melted to a stroking palm
resting like a kiss on my breast.
Your grabs for thumb or nose had become
flavored with intention, not just reflex.
Like a stone wall under a gecko’s pad
I bent every time toward the impossible
expanse of your fingertips,
organs lurching out of place
lead foot pumping out the oxytocin
trying to pin you to me with subatomic force.

You are nine months old now
and today I realized your dalliances
with floorboards and stacked plastic crates,
alphabet blocks and the pages of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
have brought your body out of Eden:
Your palms have roughened.
    What an absurd thing to say!
    There is no trace of roughness in them.
And yet, they are rougher.
They have become matte with identity,
boundaries forming across the fractal tenderness,
edges the eyes can focus on and say
That is where I end and you begin.

I think I will be very glad
that you cannot climb walls.
I think we will both spend the
rest of our lives pressing our palms
to what we love.


----

Apparently I like to mix science and parenting in poetry. I don't even have a title for this yet, and it probably still wants some refining, but it's been so long since I completed anything and it was making me happy, so I thought I'd share. (Amusing process note: I first wanted to put the gland where oxytocin is stored, but "pumping the posterior pituitary" was just wrong. Even without "pumping" it would have been bad. In fact, gratuitous use of the word "posterior," pretty much always trouble.)

These poems were selected by Enid Dame for an anthology several years ago, before her death, and Bridges has rescued the collection by making it into a special issue. It looks like it'll be good. I am honored to be included.

Here's the message from Bridges:
*********

This Passover, give yourself, your friends and family, a gift:
Miriam, as you've never read her.

Excerpts from Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal
(Spring 2007) Volume 12 Number 1:

My grandmother watched fire
explode her house in a shtetle

and like Miriam One followed smoke
west to a dream.

Someone else's grandmother follows
this Monarch butterfly. I name her
Miriam Three as she and her children
walk the stones of the Rio Grande,
the sands of the Chihuahan Desert

while people who stuff butterflies into jars
wait for them.
Helen Papell
from "Miriam Three" p. 49

*******************

while he was on the mountain receiving God's ear
I was on the ground sweating in my toe-length
robe,
the stretch of burlap & the back of my neck wet
under the badly tied hair.

while he put aside his sandals to walk on sacred
ground
I walked in mine through manure to pen the cows.
smelling
like a horse. soothing thousands of anxious
wanderers
who left their slave-homes to come where? here?

he was so far away at the head of the column. he
never
seemed to notice we were getting older.
dying. I cleaned each
body. shaved their heads. clipped their
nails. shrouded
them in sheets. & covered them gently in sand.
Kazim Ali
"from the Book of Miriam
the Prophetess" p. 35

*************************************

Miriam, I'd like to call on you
to heal these wells, this common water, this
community.
May I invite you to the next meeting
along with the EPA people the engineers the
local officials?
This is Friday morning.
Tonight all rivers connect, and belong to you.
Dare I ask for a miracle,
a blessing,
some good advice?
Enid Dame
from "My Relationship with
Water" p. 43

********************************

"In the old days," she says,
"I danced at the defeat of those
who tried to keep us in chains.
Now I weep, even though
they want us dead.

"We manage to survive.
But we are all mingled
in the salt water
that once served
only to divide."
Karen Alkalay-Gut
from "Miriam" p. 41


This 148-page issue of Bridges is organized into
six interlocking sections: Miriam's Birth, Miriam
and Baby Moses, Miriam and the Exodus, Miriam in
the Desert, Miriam Confronts Moses, and Mourning
Miriam.

The issue includes Hebrew and Yiddish
translations, a short story and three reviews that
do not mention Miriam at all, yet relate to themes
raised in the Miriam work. The subjects of reviews
include books by Adrienne Rich (The School Among
the Ruins) and Bettina Aptheker (Intimate
Politics)-and Marla Brettschneider's The Family
Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish
Lives.

To order today go to:
http://www.iupjournals.org/bridges
or call 800-842-6796

Contributors to Bridges 121.1, Spring 2007
Kazim Ali, Karen Alkalay-Gut, Rebecca T. Alpert,
Sarah Antine, Miriam Axel-Lute, Cathleen Cohen,
Melissa Cooper, Enid Dame, Julie R. Enszer,
Rachael Freed, Pesha Joyce Gertler, Debbie
Goldman, Jill Hammer, Anne Kleiman, Diana Miriam
Jacobs Komisar, Blume Lempel, Julia Wolf Mazow,
Haviva Ner-David, Helen Papell, Yosefa Raz, Lia
Lynn Rosen, Joy Ellen Rosenberg, Yiskah Rosenfeld,
Shelley Savren, Mary Harwell Sayler, Nita
Schechet, Joanne Seltzer, Ruth Knafo Setton,
Steven Sher, Susan Sindall, Pete Wolf Smith, Gail
White, Lisa Yanover

I have sold hundreds of copies of my poetry chapbooks, and actually even turned a (tiny) profit on them, but this week was the first time I ever got an order for one through my web site. (Not counting the one made by a co-worker when I first put the site up to make sure the Paypal links worked.)  It took six years.

I'm not reading anything deep into this. Mostly I'm just posting it because it was an amusing little happy thing. Otherwise it's been a pretty miserable week, and I'm trying not to dwell.

slate that falls two stories
breaks like glass
chiseling men’s voices
rip holes in your scalp in the name of
water tightness
casting off good gray slate
made brittle by Ohio’s acid breath
indignant on an anonymous blue tarp
the scars of 105 Albany winters
mingle and swear
under the look-away mourning
one gives a limb that couldn’t be saved

close the shade
to avoid the sight of falling

So my non-poetry reactions to April 27th's Take Back the Night rally can be found here. As for the poetry part, I'm glad we were there, even though it felt a little daunting for us to follow right after the stories of all the survivors.  On the other hand, the poems were a little better as rallying cries to head off to a march to, so there was that.  I believe I was also the only queer voice represented, and I felt a little odd critiquing the primacy of the idea of "safety" for women right after some of the survivors had spoken about how learning a certain amount of ambient fear had been crucial to their survival. But in many ways I was speaking to women at large more than people already in actual danger. But ya'll don't know what I'm talking about without the poem. So I leave you with it:

The Same Dark

Camping in the woods every summer
we’d sit still in the dark
my little mother, and even littler me
backs to a tree, waiting for visitations –
moose, possums, coons.
Once a buck deer with a burden of antlers
came so close I thought he might step on my toes.
It never occurred to me to be afraid
when he melted out of the dark or after he’d gone.

I stand in the same dark now, lover at my shoulder
car instead of tree trunk at my back.
Familiar night smells beckon me into
this little patch of woods and swamp
where I used to trail my foot over the boardwalk edge
kicking the tops of the skunk cabbage and listening for owls.
We came to see stars.

But I inherited a fear of the dark with my love for a woman.
Even though I refused to read 8 Bullets in women’s studies
the blurb on the back was enough –
lesbians camping, man, gun, murder, excuses –
I knew how it went.
I knew that I now flashed like a neon target
drawing danger into previously empty spaces.

We leave again.

Nothing is different today.
I still know in my bones how freedom begets danger.

Nothing is different today.
I also know freedom begets joy and more freedom,
and giving up freedom for safety
begets nothing but a need to be even safer
nothing but a desperate search for a deeper corner to back into.

Today I choose again
to go into the streets
to go into the woods
to go into the night
The world needs more joy
and fewer corners.




This work is licensed by Miriam Axel-Lute under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License

Adapted, Not Designed

I am feeling for heel holds
places to brace against
a mountain of adjustments
a million years deep
adaptations of the crudest sort—
death or life, brood or loneliness

On the good days
my feet find spots worn
to baby-stomach-smooth nuance
by time and repetition
cervix thickening to hold its cargo
oxytocin sending me to rest
for the long journey,
gently sliding my
brain toward nesting
intention cushions each step
as if tailored to the terrain

On other days
I stumble, retch, and bellow
oversleep, overeat
grab for the saltines
the hot-water bottle
a box of tissues
and the rough hides of biological imperative
scrape at the soles of my swollen feet

Fate sings a sweet song
Even the atheist in this foxhole
speaks of magic as he caresses
my growing belly
Even the scientist in me nuzzles up
to the teat of design
sucking down fearlessness

I have compromised with my selfish genes
They may pace the waiting room muttering predictions
but I will surround myself with singing

“Your body knows what it’s doing.”
My blood is swelling like bread rising
“Your body knows what it’s doing.”
Hieroglyphic hormones are directing traffic
“Your body knows what it’s doing.”
My hips are unscrewing themselves
“Your body knows what it’s doing.”
My sacrum is tipping out of the way

“Your body knows what it’s doing.”
“Your body knows what it’s doing.”

I am not the product of a god
but of a committee of lovers
My body knows what it’s doing
I don’t need to know its teacher
I don’t have time to learn all their names.



More poetry: www.mjoy.org/poetry.html.

***
This was, I think, going to be included somehow in the art exhibit "Bellies, Babies, and Breasts: A celebration of mothers and midwives through art" which opened last night at the Beekman St. Artists Coop in Saratoga Springs (79 Beekman St.). The show supports Birthnet, and awesome group devoted to promoting better approaches to birth in New York state.  If you're in the area, check it out, even if they didn't figure what to do with the poem. I am completely lame for missing the opening, but I've also been a little skeptical about car rides even that far recently.

I've been meaning all along to jot down stuff about my April poetry escapades, but got caught up in the ending of work and other such... So, a little catching up: House reading number three was great. It was the first one in the Albany area, and the first one not hosted by family members--so it felt like a step in a few ways, and I continue to love doing them. Rachel, the host, is an English Prof at Siena College, and a contra dancer. I met her when I gave my poetry service at the local UU fellowship, but we bump into each other in other circles all the time. She's part of 20-year-old (!!) book group called the Crazy Ladies, and they were the majority of the invitees, but there were also some folks I knew from contra dancing circles, and someone I'd interviewed for a recent article and knew her husband in person but had never met her. Smalbany strikes again, but in a good way. There was also a group of Siena students, one of whom provided my first ever "opening act". Having left this entry for nearly a month, I have totally lost her name, however. Tsk tsk. I'll have to go find it. She was the winner of Russell Sage College's Audre Lorde poetry prize this year, I remember that much. It was neat to be reminded by seeing the interactions how important an interested professor can be to a student--especially, say, a young dyke at a Catholic college. So it was a swollen feet day, and I actually found myself reading from stool rather than standing for a good half of my set, up and down. Very strange. Even stranger, though, was how out of breath I was for the first five or so poems. I was really running out of air in a very noticable way, as if I'd been running instead of chatting beforehand. Everyone was very sympathetic (I do have a critter poking northward and reducing my lung capacity), but when it went away after a while I began to wonder if that was what was going on. I didn't feel nervous, but sometimes you don't actually notice. I debuted my so far one-and-only complete pregnancy poem, being determined to get to perform it once while pregnant, and generally felt good about the set, especially considering that I'd flash-memorized a few I'd never done off the page before in order to keep the percentage of memorized ones up where I like it. Got  much more reaction to "Remembering Popcorn," my simple little ode to my mother's making popcorn in a saucepan, than I ever have before. Perhaps it was the demographics of the crowd--there was actually a call for a show of hands after the poem for how many people had grown up in a house where there was a pan that was just for popcorn, and there were three. Much fun. Thanks Rachel!