Photo by Vic Burkhammer

Marged Howley read at the W.Va. Book Festival the second weekend in October. She has a B.A. in creative writing from Marshall University, and is working on a master’s at Ohio University. She has participated in the spoken word and poetry community in Seattle, WA, where she lived for about five years. Her work has appeared in Black Bear Review, Adirondack Review, Wild Sweet Notes II, Red Weather, Snowapple, and other publications. 
 
I inadvertently erased a few hours of sound I recorded on the second day of the West Virginia Book Festival. There went audio of Harry Gieg, whose poetry is strong; his demeanor, professional – he has a way of singing his poems. There went Marged Howley’s reading, and others, which I lament losing.

After I stopped fretting about that, I called Howley and asked her to read a poem from her first chapbook, “Stupid for Dreaming of Alligators,” out this year from JKP Publishing. She said she doesn’t have demo tapes and that sort of thing, but here she is, reading over the phone (not something she usually does)…a short poem, a snippet of sound, to tantalize people interested in her work:
56 seconds

The Cutting Board

The sky gets dark
enough for electricity,
and it rains, hard.

I’m in the kitchen,
separating, chopping.

By the window:
a cutting board, a mixing bowl,
two knives and a baking pan.
The sky peels back like integument.

It passes as it begins.
What happens now is chemical,
the crackle of lightning, the sting of lemon.

Fish scale wedges into my finger bed,
the window looks onto a still emptiness.

Air comes back
as I “pop, pop” vertebrae between my fingers.
The electricity dissipates
into the mixing bowl, into the margins,
and everything now
from green onion
to trout
is dead.

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