I’ll be reading for the Carmine Street Metrics series at Bowery Poetry Club with local favorite Rick Mullin, this Sunday, 5:45PM. Stop by, say hi, grab a drink, hear some poems. There are worse ways to wind down a weekend.

Carmine Street Metrics Presents
Ernest Hilbert with Rick Mullin
Sunday, November 3, 2013, 5:45pm
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Click here for the FaceBook event page. 

Ernest Hilbert is the author of two collections of poetry, Sixty Sonnets and All of You on the Good Earth, as well as a spoken word album recorded with rock band and orchestra, Elegies & Laments, available from Pub Can Records. He hosts the popular blog E-Verse (www.everseradio.com) and the E-Verse Equinox Reading Series at Fergie’s Pub in Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review as well as in anthologies, including the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). He works at Bauman Rare Books in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife Lynn Makowsky, the Keeper of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology Anthropology.

The Fast

Eating never seemed such a miracle,
Rest never so lonely or bathed with dream.
Never before, never such air and sky.
Eating—the word is luscious, rich, lyrical.
Snowy nerves are blurred, crave soft drops of cream.
The cayenne dust smolders and corrodes like lye,
And the lemon pressings I swallow wreak
Havoc below. I laze, lax, without doubt.
I have learned that a fast makes the world clear—
Sentenced to stay still, with no urge to speak,
Brought on by myself, not tyrant or drought.
Everests of stubbornness put me here.
Rituals of glut and wealth melt to air,
Through scoured-white days, to a thousand-year stare.

* * *

Rick Mullin’s epic poem, Soutine, was published in 2012 by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio. His book-length poem, Huncke, was published in 2010 by Seven Towers, Dublin. His chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, was published in 2008 by the Modern Metrics imprint of Exot Books, New York City. Another chapbook, The Stones Jones Canzones, was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky.
from Coelacanth

Under Glass

Mythology has reached a sorry pass
when “-ologists” start bringing out their dead.
The Coelacanth is burping under glass

expressing common bottom-feeder gas,
and look at this—a Chupacabra head.
Mythology has reached a sorry pass.

Leviathan? That looks more like a bass—
a large mouth cast in aldehydes and lead.
The Coelacanth is burping under glass

and Chupacabra’s coming off bad-ass,
a Mexican vampiro. But its dread mythology
has reached a sorry pass—

let’s call it phylum Pitbullshiticass
or just forget its legacy instead.
The Coelacanth is burping under glass

unlikely in the future to harass
our dreams. and Draculito has been bled.
Mythology has reached a sorry pass
when Coelacanth is burping under glass.