Andrei Codrescu & Don Yorty

*PROSE PROS*: hosted by Martha KIng & Elinor Nauen

at the SideWalk Café: 94 Avenue A at 6th Street, NYC    212-473-737

F to Second Avenue (exit at First Avenue)

Andrei Codrescu (codrescu.com) writes poetry, novels, stories, essays and more. He will be reading for the first time from his latest not-yet-published novel, I Never Complained: Mother Part Two, and prose poems from no time like now: notes from the red pipe. Here is one:

From Andrei's most recent work: flat is dead

New Orleans late night zen pickup reroutes me gently above molly's where a motley crew of gutter-punks are drawing cross-legged on the tilted floor, writing with colored chalk on blackboard walls, making paper birds and rag dolls to place in uneven boxes nailed to the same walls, lying down on the hardwood floors reading. their dogs, mostly rottweilers, but also german shepherds and dachsunds, lie quietly beside their busy owners, some of them chained to tattooed arms. It's 4 am in the French Quarter. It's not flat. 

Louise Nevelson rumbles up a hill watching cows come home tired at dusk their dull bells fading. She watches them walk into their stalls below the people they keep warm at night. Their bellies are full. They watch some TV. Then in the frozen morning she hears the ice crunching under the boots of sleepy children coming to milk them. They leave with sloshing buckets of milk and walk into the warm kitchen where the fireplace is already blazing and the bacon is sizzling. The pancakes turn like Bucharest girls at a Black Sea beach, brown on one side, still white on the other. Louise is in her studio making models of cows, girls, and pancakes. The bucolic and the modern fit when they go home to their coffins. This is the past. It isn’t flat. —from flat is dead