First Tuesdays Presents Jared Beloff

When: November 5, 2024
Where: Espresso 77 Café, 35-57 77th Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372.
Time: 7:00 — 8:30 PM (open-mic sign up at 6:30)
Cost: $5 minimum purchase at the food counter.
More Information: Richard Jeffrey Newman

Jared Beloff is the author of the Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the editor of the Marvel comics inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses (Daily Drunk, 2021) and Poets of Queens 2 (Poets of Queens, 2024). He is now the Poetry Editor of The Weight and the Managing Editor of Porcupine Literary. His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, Image Journal, Terrain and elsewhere. He earned degrees at Rutgers University (BA in English) Johns Hopkins University (MA in English Literature, specializing in the novel and Romantic/18th Century Literature). Jared was an adjunct professor at Queensborough Community College for six years and is currently in his 18th year as an English teacher and teacher mentor in NYC public schools. He lives in Forest Hills with his wife and two daughters. You can find him on Twitter @Read_Instead and on his website.

Here is Jared’s poem “Animal Crackers:”

My daughter pulls animals out of the head of a large plastic bear like a magic trick, holds them up, asks “What’s this?” A large cat slopes its shoulders, front paw extended as if to find proper footing between her thumb and forefinger. We begin with names: Snow leopard? Tiger? The plastic bear’s smile is wild. Isn’t this nice, he seems to say, teeth tight with grit and grin, isn’t this sweet? But then I remember the palm oil fires in Borneo, a cluster of orangutans pushed in a wheelbarrow, or the handful of bears emerging from the Russian Taiga’s open maw, fur matted, gummed to a dull brown, come to rummage through the town’s leftovers: wraps and rinds fished from metal dumpsters torn open like paper bags, need pushing us past margins of loss. Giant panda. Sea otter. Perhaps, the difference between accumulation and loss is a matter of proximity and scale, animals you can’t fit in your palm, two dimensional as an endangered list. Asian Elephant. Lowland Gorilla. At what point do I stop her, tell her this is enough, knowing we will not be satisfied, that even our naming, since Adam, is an attempt to live in an unrecognizable world?

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.