Lisa Vihos is the Poet Laureate of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Since the beginning of the annual 100 Thousand Poets for Change (100TPC) in 2011, Lisa has hosted the event in Sheboygan. This year’s reading takes place on Saturday, September 25 at 11AM, at the Mead Public Library in downtown Sheboyan. It is free and open to the public. Poets who wish to read at the open mike are asked to bring along one or two short poems with the theme of community, peace, justice, etc. The featured reader will be the current Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, Dasha Kelly Hamilton. If you’ve never been to a reading by Dasha, I promise that this will be a reading you will remember. I blogged about Dasha’s poetry and other accomplishments in Favorite Poem post #6.
But the poet featured on this installment of the blog is, Lisa. One thing I really like about Lisa’s poetry is her ability to take the common, the very familiar and turn and turn it on its head, creating inventive and entertaining poems. Two of my favorites are posted below. Find out more about Lisa at https://lisavihos.com/
Advice Dyslexic
Straighten right and up fly.
Tide high in morning
and broke for go.
Lamp the lights
and harvest the gather.
Let no unturned go stone.
Hearth the sweep
and bread the butter.
Be neighbor to your good.
Then, let no island be a man
and avoid making molehills
out of mountains. Beware
the teapot in a tempest
and remember, people living
in glass stones should not throw houses.
Take yourself with a salt of grain,
for there is nothing sun
under the new.
Up wake and give day
for the thanks. Fandango
the dance and go peace in forth.
Tread earth over this good lightly.
Dear X
Dear X,
Let me be your Y
and wherefore.
Let me be before
and after (a subset
of desire).
Let us find the sine
and cosine of our wave,
heading toward infinity.
Measure
yourself inside
my angles,
both acute
and obtuse.
Carry out
the same function
on both sides
of the equals sign.
All theorems
and solutions aside,
there is no lowest
common denominator.
There is only now,
where X and Y
multiply and divide
all night long.