MY KENNEDY CENTER (1982-2026)

by Robin Stevens Payes

Alvin Ailey Dancers * American Ballet Theatre * Beautiful * Book of Mormon * Cabaret * Cyrano de Bergerac * Dear Evan Hansen * Placido Domingo * Suzanne Farrell * Anthony Fauci * Renee Fleming * Ben Folds * Hair * Hamilton * Les Misérables * Long Day’s Journey Into Night * Millennium Stage * Moulin Rouge * National Symphony Orchestra * Noises Off * On Your Toes * Ragtime * REACH * Shear Madness * Side Show * You Can’t Take It with You 

I DREAMED A DREAM

the dance

the plays

the musicals

the orchestras

the opera

our brains on music

 

the costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props, the audience  that lifts you when you’re down

the rising talent, since 1997, free at 5 p.m. on the Millennium Stage

Not a REACH: Revelations

Come to the Cabaret, 

old chum, in The 

Room Where It Happens

Hello, you’re gonna die someday!

You Can’t Take It with You, they say. The KENNEDY CENTER canceled before our eyes. 

Shear Madness!

OPENING SOON: the madcap whodunnit you will definitely want to miss: 

DEMOLITION ON THE POTOMAC 

Author’s note: Having lived in the DMV since 1982, the survival of this treasured cultural institution feels personal to me and my family. I hope we can keep alive—in person and in print—the tragedy of what is happening there. Noted in the poem are KenCen highlights our family has experienced over the years.

Robin Stevens Payes is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, storyteller, and cultural steward whose work braids ancestral memory, science, myth, and moral imagination. She is the author of the YA time-travel adventure series Edge of Yesterday and creator of [re]member the world, a multi-genre project retrieving and reweaving the silenced history of her grandmother’s flight from Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. As the ancestor telling a new story so her grandchildren and theirs may thrive, she writes about memory—what is lost, what survives, and what we must carry forward—on her Substack, Releasing Memory.

DEAR GAG ORDER

by Susan Vespoli

The New Verse News originally published several of the poems that appear in this collection:  "Before I Knew Adam Had Died,”  "My Ex-Husband Calls… ,"   … In Reverse,” “I Am Finally Handed… ,” “Under Investigation… ,” “Dear 2022,” “Poem for My Middle Finger.”

“Do not speak of the loss or the case,” 

my lawyer’s email upon learning I sent copies

of One of Them Was Mine to President Biden,

Governor Hobbs, Senator Mark Kelly, 

Terry Gross, and a local NPR podcast host.

Dear tight strand of puka shells,

tiny beads and a flat silver OM sign,

my neck skin cinched.

Dear SHUT UP. Zipped lips.

Stage fright.    My mom’s, 

“Only say nice things.” 

Dear voice, found in my mid-forties

after a bout of cancer, the therapist

telling me later when I answered

FINE to every question, she knew

I had a lot of work to do. Dear Speak

the truth. Dear I can’t figure it out 

if I don’t write about it. Dear canceled 

poetry readings at Peregrine Bookstore

in Prescott and Changing Hands in Tempe.

Dear emotional eating, peanut M&Ms, kettle corn, 

asiago bagel, Voodoo Ranger IPA in an orange can. 

Dear “Do not speak of the loss or the case.”

Dear silenced.     Dear Adam, I am here 

to follow the thread to give you a voice. 

Susan Vespoli continues to write poems about the loss and the case, even though she wasn’t able to publicly share them for many months. She was finally able to read her book One of Them Was Mine about her son Adam's murder by a Phoenix police officer at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on January 5, 2024, because the book's poems (and the ones from Blame It on the Serpent) were already in the hands of the cop’s lawyers who were using her poetry books as evidence against her son's value as a human being.