Part 2 - Mark Smith-Soto reading

Let's close the work week with part 2 of Mark Smith-Soto's reading at the Glenwood Community Book Shop held on February 21, 2009. But first, here is one of my favorite poems by Mark published in Our Lives are Rivers.

Café of Mirrors

Here it is again, one of those moments
when human beings seem beautiful to me,
even their flaws touching, a mouth too large
on that woman, a bald spot on a boy

named Roberto, my perceiving renders
them tender, I know that they are not so,
but a knowledge within that knowledge
argues for them, gauzes each dot or blot

with a kind of love, and I myself am bettered
by this flare of neon from my head,
lighting the mirror so that I am flattered
into a grin, though I catch at the next table

a man just staring around, his goatee
diving off his chin into the rest of our lives

--Mark Smith-Soto