September 14, 2021: The Cactus Flower reading series happens just off Addison, west of the Brown line, on the second floor of a house with a neon cactus duct-taped to the window, which is apparent from down the block. The reading is in a living room with three or four comfortable chairs, a long couch, pillows on the floor, some stools, miscellaneous other chairs, and a staircase to the third floor optimally placed to provide additional seating at house left. A few people went in for the “balcony” seating at the top of the stairs and later spoke of their satisfaction with the view. I was on the couch.
Jeff Sherfey lives in the house, serves as the evening’s host, and manipulates a playlist piping out of a small Bluetooth speaker. He stands in front of the living room’s east window, which faces the street and is decorated with the neon cactus and a big towel (or rug) with a wolf on it. He offers brief words of welcome but no involved introductions to the readers, other than names. He also offers the readers the choice of standing or sitting on one of two stools of differing height, and he encourages the audience to snap their fingers at the end of poems or in response to striking lines. This is indulged for most of the reading until, about two thirds of the way through the night, the audience relapses into standard applause. The reading order was determined by a twenty-sided die.
Edie Roberts is the first reader; they live in Detroit and have almost totally covered the kitchen table with small, attractive-looking chapbooks of varying size and design, mostly from Pitymilk Press, which they co-organize with Chelsea Tadeyske. They switch between reading from a few of these chapbooks and from their phone. Roberts has a thigh tattoo reading “THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH,” and their first poem begins: “I saw a cat die today.” Standing, they deliver this first poem from memory and with hands free to gesture, which lets them pet the house’s cat, Dizzy, when he walks through Roberts’s legs midway through their recitation. This poem also has the line, “If I were a bird I would sit where I couldn’t be reached.” Other lines I noted: “God asked, ‘what do you want to be doing?’ like a tired waitress”; “I say let’s get high and die a few times a week—but I think it all the time”; “What is the consequence of successful deceit?” and “Baby meat stuffed with diplomas.”
Jeff adopts this last phrase to introduce the next reader, Stephen Williams, who perches on one of the stools and begins by reading from his new, very good book, Earth Enough, his first. Next, he reads from a binder with a new long, collaged poem that includes reflections on the problem of representing the everyday (because “words are meant for what’s remarkable”) and critical comments on Frank O’Hara’s attempt to “outrun” this problem “by filling the everyday with remarkable moments.” When he reads the line “you lift everything into yourself,” the cat replies with a clear and resonant “Mrkgnao!” Other lines noted: “The poor traveler laughs in the thief’s face”; “oblivion is at work in us”; “O makeshift life the erotics of time passing”; “we wanted better images and had money to burn”; “What is it to grieve forever?” For some reason I particularly enjoyed that he ended his reading with a description of a gorilla walking on all fours but half-upright, “as gorillas do.”
The next reader is Annie Grizzle, who moved to Chicago a year or so ago. She reads with a rhythmic tonal arc akin to an auction chant while leaning forward and back on a stool, which means lines follow fast upon each other and I do not write as many things down. Grizzle’s poems circle around lines and words repeated and worried with variations; the foci of the first two poems are larvae and forms, “forms I’ve forgotten.” Other lines noted: “larvae is not sinister, is DK sexy?” “if I could be saved I would”; “I am a malleable bucket”; “I cannot pull longing from my throat.”
After a ten-minute break, Chelsea Tadeyeske reads. They are from Milwaukee, they are traveling with Edie Roberts, and they read standing up, with facial expressions and gestures complementary to the lines being read—sometimes as if delivering a monologue and sometimes as if they found their own words alarmingly naughty or mischievous. Every so often Tadeyeske acts out something as if playing charades, including “a cactus” or the line “imagine holding a knife to a tree and carving a dick.” Other lines noted: “It’s funny that your body doesn’t know what world it’s in”; “imagine mourning the living parts”; “I like when you rub my warming genitals”; “I am a person a clit a sailor a cloud…a buttplug.” Certain lines are delivered laughingly, as if in conversation, including: “My dad puts ketchup on all his meat / I can only process tragedy in the abstract.”
Jacob Stovall, the last reader, moved to Chicago within the last few weeks. He starts reading poems from September 2016 and he moves away from the window farther into the middle of the room than the other readers did. He almost paces back and forth, though he doesn’t turn his back to the room. His first poem also includes a couple of dramatic sighs, convincingly delivered. The 2016 poem includes the lines: “the next song better be a protest song” and “I don’t trust the sublime.” One poem ends with the line: “open tabs on a tablet device.” He then reads some work from May 2019, which has a lot of repetition of the word “stone” and irregular rhymes. One of the poems is titled “all my memories of snow are warm.” Other lines noted: “there is something out of nothing”; “it’s an unconscionable act to have a body”; “we try to remind each other to inhabit a body”; “nothing is sacred, but it could be.”