February 28, 2020: A Friday night at the City Lit bookstore for “The Filling Station” reading series, which local poets Willie James and Matt Kelsey host monthly. Near the back of the not-terribly-large bookstore is an open space the size of a small dance floor with a stool in the middle and a flanking fireplace (warm and active at the time) and surrounding shelves labelled “FAMILY/INSPIRATION,” “COOKING,” and “HOBBIES/INTERESTS.” Two poets are reading tonight. There are 25–30 chairs, and after people stop arriving and the seats are pretty much filled, the reading organically decides to get started about 15 minutes after the stated start time, which my companion, who was about 10 minutes late, greatly appreciated.
The first reader, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, is introduced by Willie James, who reads both the standard third-person bio, which identifies Ojeda-Sagué as a Leo, and an original intro. Ojeda-Sagué starts reading without banter or much eye contact, reading from his phone while standing in front of the stool. “I have many bad memoirs / memories…I have written many bad photographs.” Afterwards, while taking out his newish book, Losing Miami, he explains that the first poem he read is part of a “fake selected poems against autobiographies,” and also that the book he’s about to read from is a different kind of autobiography. He says, “a bird is full of egg whites,” and there are some lines about walking through a mall whose stores keep changing. He then decides on the spur of the moment to read an unplanned poem (with the line, “my heart is sweet like veal”) before returning to his original setlist, which includes poems with lines like: “give me the gulf in a paper bag,” “here in the cock state,” “search a symphony for the absence of everything,” and “I am trying to mourn.” He holds the book in his right hand while his left arm emotes, and his left shirtsleeve has two pockets on the bicep, one zippered, one not. His last poem alludes to a conversation with a friend about whether or not it’s OK to have kids, and his reply is, “I can do nothing but rear.”
David Welch is the second reader, and he is affably introduced by Matt Kelsey, who characterizes Welch’s poetry as including “strange frogs held in the mouth.” Welch gives Kelsey a big hug before Welch semi-sits on the stool and gives a little banter before reading. One of the first poems has a line about how “you meet someone and inside of them you know there swells a small country brimming with steel and beasts of labor.” He reads from loose sheets of paper; he wears clear-framed glasses and the top three buttons on his shirt are unbuttoned. There’s some pleasing repetition in lines like, “a country proud of its countryside,” and portentous whimsy in lines like, “you know you can reach the bear, you know the bear is dying of loneliness.” One of his poems is about an old man who says, “I wish to be pregnant,” and whose wife replies, “you don’t have the stomach for it.” Some of the later poems he reads belong to a project about Tourette’s, ventriloquy, and echolalia (the repetition of others’ words). He mentions another Greek word, which means dirty talk during sex, that I do not quite catch. These poems have lines like, “the jaw, like the heart, is a simple machine,” “a yell able to outyell itself,” “how one lingers in echolalia,” and “the sky itself was snowed upon.”
Willie James and Matt Kelsey adjourn the reading and invite everyone present to join them at a bar around the corner. They briefly attempt to provide directions before saying, “If you guys come, you’ll see other people going.”