About the Artist

Joe Nardoni is an iconoclast, dreamer, activist, step and adoptive father, grandfather 5x over,

wool-gatherer, vegetable picker, eye popper, egg-dropper, bee-bopper, tree-topper, paint

glopper, bottle stopper and floor mopper, who once ate French Brie while in Wisconsin; drank

California Cabernet on the Left Bank; ate blue ox steak in a diner outside of Elko, Nevada; stole

a salmon from a Grizzly Bear; sank Mike Fink’s barge; cut Pecos Bill’s lasso, setting the tornado

free; played matchmaker for Cyrano de Bergerac and J. Alfred Prufrock; gave the typewriter to

the chimp who wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays; and beyond that, is a poet and professor of

English and Creative Writing at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, where he

helped create the classes for and designed the Creative Writing Concentration in the MCC

English Department. He has had his poems published in Memoryhouse, The Syzygy Poetry

Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Vagabonds: An Anthology of the Mad Ones, by Weasel

Press (2016). He is one of the faculty founding editors of Dead River Review, the online

magazine of MCC, whose eighth edition will be published in May of 2023, and performs his

poetry at the yearly Poetry Convergence at the Western Avenue Studios in Lowell, MA.

Featured Poem -

Homage

For Everyone’s Julia

Driving home, stuck in red light

purgatory, I know the artist’s muse.

I see the painted bird

suspended in my mind’s flight,

gossamer wing echoes behind,

God’s peace leaping into flight,

or fluttering onto foreground twigs,

and I think of you, student

who sends me emails

and would buy me drinks,

patroness of my poetry,

your long white hair lifting in the wind

like a dove’s wing, your kind soul

gliding over, swooping into, dipping around,

and sometimes even landing in our

tangled human jungle, wings wide,

warbling your broad brogue in delight.

None of us deserve you.