Three Poems
Me & My Shadow
We have this daily drill we do.
You follow me, I follow you
Strolling down the avenue,
Led on by Orion or a streetlamp or the sun.
You know me well enough to take a walk with.
The only time I get a look at you,
You’re side-stepping
Or knee-high on the run.
Do you grow up as I walk away,
Or fade out into another world?
I don’t recall you saying much about it.
Silent type, all small talk
I’m with you: a word about the weather
Will almost always do.
Then I step inside and disappear
And you do too.
The Vest
for S.E.
Reaching out for yesterday, five of my
Ten fingers plunge through language,
Through dated dialogue and thick description,
Cyrillics hen-scratched in the snow
Under the rails that sped the sleigh
Down Tolstoy’s final drift,
Where Ivan Ilyich pulled up short
And crashed into the hard bank—
Melted now. (I can’t even read Russian.)
Reaching out to touch tomorrow,
The tale looks the same.
Today is the only day not made of words.
Even so, for any place I go,
Much like any place you’ve ever been,
I dress up in my vest of wordy patches
Pieced together from the days of yore.
Not from habit do we do this. Out of friendship.
This is the vest we’ll both have on next Tuesday.
Come and meet me.
Twelve noon at Picante’s on the terrace. Let’s
Try the fish tacos and talk about old times.
I Go to the Museum
for Bill Berkson
Ciao Bill, as in Hi or See you later—
A word we used a lot over the years
Before and after lunch, or when we met up
At a gallery show or parted after
Visiting the Modern. The words remain,
But I can’t phone you now to meet for lunch
Or take another stroll through Kline or Guston.
How to shed some light on our situation —
This scene I mean, with all these extra people
Packed in rooms who crowd around the frames
And block my view and seem to be alive still,
While you and all your liveliness are missing.
Michael Wolfe
I was born and raised in Cincinnati. I’ve been writing poetry all my life. In the early 1970s, after taking a degree in Greek and Latin, I lived in North and West Africa for about four years on an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. After returning to the U.S. I lived in Bolinas, California for 15 years, where I owned and ran a bookstore and started a publishing company, Tombouctou Books. In 1997, I co-founded a nonprofit media company (Unity Productions Foundation) and began making documentary films with a focus on Muslims. I stopped being a publisher in 1999 when it became too expensive, but I still write poems and stories and produce films. My last published book (2014) was a collection of translations of ancient Greek Epitaphs, called Cut These Words into my Stone, from Johns Hopkins University Press. It was shortlisted by PEN. I’ve published several chapbooks with Blue Press (Kevin Opstedal, Santa Cruz, CA), but I’m definitely overdue for a new book. Happily married, I live and work in California.
Mason Owens
STATEMENT
I’m particularly drawn to experiences that I share with friends and loved ones, and those that are imbued with a warm sense of nostalgia, humor, or childlike curiosity. Those moments persist in my memory and act as the initial inspiration for many paintings. Through the course of developing a work I often end up changing the elements completely. With a playful trial and error mentality, I will paint over sections and scratch others. I will pursue interesting lighting, a particular landscape, or add narrative elements and objects from other moments. I will change colors and characters until I feel the painting more truthfully translates the magic of the original inspiration, despite sometimes having less in common with it in reality. Ultimately I feel like I am making paintings for the friends and family who are depicted in them, or those who are familiar with the places, objects, and sentiment that is involved. My paintings are journal-like objects that visualize moments I cherish and are meant to share a familial bond that is created through shared experience.
BIO
I am a multidisciplinary artist working in Baltimore, MD. I received my BFA from the University of the Arts in 2013 and studied abroad at The Glasgow School of Art, in Glasgow, Scotland. After college I completed Maryland's Beginner Farmer Training Program and worked as a farmer, gardener, or landscaper for the next seven years. In my free time throughout this period, I slowly developed an art practice focused on drawing and painting. In 2022, I began working with egg tempera, finding its naturalness and beauty an apt extension of my previous interests and have continued using it exclusively.