A note from the editor:
Kristine Esser Slentz, a queer poet from Northwest Indiana, wrote this week’s Culture Journal.
Interested in submitting a Culture Journal? Please email Jennifer Delgadillo, arts & culture editor, at jennifer.delgadillo@mirrorindy.org
“I will bring you a whole person and you will bring me a whole person and we will have us twice as much of love and everything.” ― Mari Evans
Day One
9:35 a.m. I arrive at Salon on 65 to see Sara so she can give me a blowout and wax my mustache. This is my first full day in Indy for my poetry book tour. I didn’t grow up here, but this is home.
6:25 p.m. The first reading event begins at Dream Palace on 16th Street. I’m reading with Chantel Massey, Devon Ginn and Sophie Salerno. We get wasted on words, iced coffee and then ice cream. LiftOff makes a mean lemon Oreo vegan option.
Day Two
6:25 a.m. The home I am staying in slowly wakes up with sheltie yelps, a coughing coffee maker and a toddler sighing. My best friend’s baby is two and a half and only knows the emotional language for “happy” and “no happy.”
This SoBro block’s birds sing as we sit on the porch looking for our favorite neighborhood cardinal. “Happy.”
6:30 p.m. The poetry reading I have with Sylvia Thomas ends with a craft conversation in the new (to me) IndyReads in Fountain Square. Sylvia says her works are all a part of the same front yard, just separate sections.
We trot across the street to the Red Lion to sit in a circle of five from all phases of my life — for pork tenderloins. I think on the earlier statement, “Aren’t all relationships trauma bonds?” We pass around a picture of my beloved.
Days Three through Five
5:05 p.m. Today/I sat on the/porch in the rain//and got acquainted with/the church brick/across the/street
Day Six
6:55 a.m. They open the doors to me at Invoke Yoga Studio for the reformer class. I remember that just a few days ago the instructor, Elizabeth, attended my reading at Dream Palace.
She recognized Devon who also works with singing bowls for sound baths at yoga studios around the city. This is how home is.
7:05 p.m. The Indianapolis’ slam team, Volta, arrives at The Spot in Lafayette. Long-time friend and father figure to the team, Corey Ewing, recites, “In hopes the next generation continues their work/The blood may/fade but it/is there nonetheless.”
Day Seven
9:35 p.m. We rush from a reading at Second Flight Books in Lafayette back to Indy, where I meet Corey again to feature in the locally legendary Vocab reading series at The White Rabbit Cabaret. The audience is quiet yet responsive in the way that the beloveds in my poems are portrayed for this tour’s set.
Day Eight
11:55 p.m. I close down Loom’s bar on 46th Street with poets and the friends of poets. This is my friend John and mine’s last reading in Indianapolis for the book tour. Bree Jo’ann joined us along with a new-to-us host, Dante Fratturo.
We end the night talking crap about the zodiac, sharing photos of the Mediterranean in hopes of falling in fornication for the night, and the knowledge that tomorrow is the day before Indy Pride, where we will all be the most powerful version of poetics possible.
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