Join Tyler Barton on Zoom!
When: Thursday, December 2nd, 2021, at 6 pm EST
Where: TinyURL.com/VirtualBard to reach us on Zoom
And below is a sample piece from our featured poet:
Eternal Night at the Nature Museum, a Half-Hour Downriver from Three Mile Island
On the roof grows a tree Facilities kills every summer. Killed, rather. As the men from Facilities are gone. As everyone—staff, faculty, public—is gone, gone for what Harrisburg still calls temporary. The museum belongs to no one now. Or rather, belongs to that tree, or to the animals and their chewed-through glass, or to the time we lost a snake, every time we lost a snake we couldn’t find for days and stayed open for visitors anyway. What I mean is the museum belongs to, I don’t know, some kid? The one I sensed hiding in every building I ever closed down for the night. The same kid I imagined stowing away inside the tree trunk, or the shark’s mouth, or the trash tote in the mop closet—this milk-mouthed kid with nothing to lose, too spooked to say uncle after having chosen hiding, now living out what was never a Disneyland fantasy but rather the lesser of two let-downs. Life, alone in a building full of owl eggs, appeal letters, revisionist archeology, and arctic wolves who leap like puppies, glass eyes gleaming through their taxidermy. The building belongs to, yes, this starved sapling of a person. And the minute the kid finishes the fish food, cracks two teeth on hematite, retches up the crickets, licks all the pollen from the dead bees legs—the climbing begins. Up stairs. Up stories. Learning from the lizards who clawed away their cages, this kid will bore with whittled obsidian and patience a hole through the 3rd floor utility door. Behind which lies the ladder, and so, the roof. And so, the tree. And so, the fruit.
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Below is a video of poems written by residents of the Hamilton Arms Long Term Care Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Tyler ran a 12-week workshop with these late 2019 and early 2020, and together, he helped them to make a chapbook of their work. Many residents died from COVID-19 just before the project was completed.
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There will be an open mic segment following the featured poet; those who are interested in participating in the open mic can sign up for it in the chat on Zoom, once the main monthly event starts.
