April's Featured Poet is Vernita Hall
Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color, winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize and of the Robert Creeley Prize from Marsh Hawk Press; and The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians, winner of the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest. She has been a finalist in the Salem College Rita Dove Poetry Award, Paumanok Poetry Award, New Letters Patricia Cleary Miller Award, Bellingham Review 49th Parallel Award, Witness Literary Award, Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and Arts & Letters Rumi Prize.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Barrow Street, Solstice, The Common, River Styx, The Hopkins Review, Arts & Letters, and Obsidian, as well as other journals and anthologies.
With fellowships from Ucross and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Hall holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Rosemont College, a B.A. from La Salle University, and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.
Chauvet Cave: Divination
If God is the skull of a bear
on a rockpile altar
then you can be Buddha
in half a million years
for evolution charts in mortality
the path of least resilience
for the slow learner.
Ask the auroch (an erstwhile steer),
the mammoth, the woolly rhino,
ask the cave bear Godhead
the secret of longevity.
Their laughing scattered bones here
echoing to dust will whisper:
Brevity
Vernita Hall
The Common Online
April 2021
Open Mic to follow the reading.
