Poetry Slam!
It was great fun! I can speak for myself along with “Surfer Dude” (we judged the audience participation) that there was great poetry and all was diverse in its content. Many people inquired as to how often The Book Nook & Java Shop will host Poetry Slams and we will definitely host a Poetry Slam more than the two times in five years that have been the standard! 
We hope to host a Poetry Slam quarterly and will keep you updated via email blast and our website.
Special thanks to all who participated and to the audience. Special thanks also to
Richard Ballard for emceeing the event and to “Surfer Dude” for judging.We have three winners:
1st Place Winner: Nicole Birkett - $50.00 Gift Card to The Book Nook & Java Shop
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a Beautiful Day to Do a Neighbor: A poem beginning with a line from Charles Bukowski’s “we’ve got to communicate”
“he was a very sensitive man,” she told me, “and after he split with Andrea he kept her panties under his pillow and each night he kissed them and cried” (Bukowski).
I wondered if he kept a pair of his wife’s panties under the pillow too, and maybe dabbed them with his nose, a couple of times a week, just to be fair. because he was fair, in fact, he was the King of Fair, and as far as the rest of the Dutch-Protestant community was concerned, Dave Rogers was no more the harassing-adulterer than the young Pole-Vaulter who had accused him was a decent Catholic, especially since there was no such thing.
and Dave Rogers’ humming knew this, and it also knew that he wasn’t a pedophile, not in this state anyway, and that was a good thing, pedophilia might have been the one thing that wouldn’t have been hard to make the Neighborhood believe in. and his humming was as familiar with the state’s statutory law as it was with the “Oh Susannah” that it currently flung around his old office as he filled a cardboard box that now welcomed his counselor’s desk plaque and occasional poster motivation, after having done most of its work three weeks before, when all of its thought had been folding in on retirement. and at the time he’d thought it’d crush itself under the weight of files, he refused to leave, names and figures he wished he’d explored further.
but now he’ll be able to relax in a shared fifth with his wife, pleasant memories carefully filed away under “escape,” with his I-care-more-about-you-than-me beard reclining on that sulfur cardigan above brown corduroys and tennis white shoes.
2nd Place Winner: Jim Stewart - $25.00 Gift Card to The Book Nook & Java Shop
Still waiting for Jim’s Poetry
Third Place Winner: Julie George - $15.00 Gift Card to The Book Nook & Java Shop
Belly Button Lament
Britney’s naughty buttoned tummy
created a sensation.
Innocence with sex combined
changed the thinking of a nation.
A symbol new of sex it seemed,
though why it was, there was no hint.
I thought this twisty-centered flesh,
was only good for catching lint.
Amid the would-be swain’s old paunch
buried in distended pot,
observe the awesome button bounce,
looking anything— but hot!
I’ve seen it move with awesome grace,
the belly dancer’s sensuous pride.
It peeks from veils seductively,
with bells a-tingle on each side.
The belly button used to be
a simple remnant left from birth.
Decorating— undercover,
my taut and flat, more slender girth.
My oldster’s button disappears
in folds and drapes of saggy skin.
I won’t be flat or taut again—
no matter how I suck it in.
My button pierced with ring of gold?
The wasted cost would be a shame.
Lost in all these belly folds,
it’s much too late bring me fame.
Julie George
