Featured Poet: Vernita Hall April 6th at the GoggleWorks

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 49^th 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.