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SPARTA — Bring a lunch, bring a poem, but leave the inhibitions at home. This is a talent show for grownups.

Four times a year, anyone who wants can come to the Deke Slayton Space and Bicycle Museum to share their work. They sing, play music, read poetry, display sculptures or just watch and listen.

Kindergartners from St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Sparta, WI, recite poems for various artist attending the luncheon at the Deke Slayton Space and Bicycle Museum.

“You never know when you come just exactly what you are going to see,” said Kay Bender, the museum’s director, who started “Take a Poem to Lunch” in 2001. “It’s a forum for our local talented people.”

Thursday a class of kindergartners in snowsuits on a field trip from St. Patrick’s School tromped in and recited prayers, songs and poems they’d learned.

About 15 people ate sack lunches and listened, occasionally pouring tea from teapots on each card table, in the former Masonic temple where 19th century velocipedes sit alongside NASA spacesuits in the museum’s attempt to marry the city’s two claims to fame — as the unofficial bicycling capital of America and the birthplace of the Apollo project astronaut — in what Bender calls a transportation continuum.

It was a day of poetry without pretense.

On a stage below a suspended hang glider, flanked by a replica space capsule and a life-size statue of Slayton, wearing sideburns and looking like pudgy Elvis in a spacesuit, Julie Allshouse read rhymed couplets about her creative outlets.

Permanently disabled, Allshouse writes poems and makes collages from costume jewelry and other recycled trinkets — “the creative way I make a dime.” That and volunteering at the museum and an animal shelter give her life purpose, she said. Since moving to Sparta two years ago from California, the 49-year-old Allshouse has been a regular at “Take a Poem” and even put together a spinoff women’s poetry group and a jewelry swap.

Mahlon Denter talked about how he wrote his self-published autobiography — “something I never thought I’d do.” The 86-year-old retired feed sales manager from Wilton, Wis., said when he realized how little people knew about World War II, he decided he needed to write about his experience as a solder.

Sparta native Toni Yeske, who left for college in 1965, has been a regular since she moved back to the area about two years ago. She brought along a chapbook of her poems, published back when she was an English major in Milwaukee, but read from newer work, descriptive free verse about hiking with her dogs and an elegy for her husband, who died nine years ago.

Shirley Cox, a self-described “homespun poet,” read from some of her autobiographical poems, mostly rhymed verses about lost family members and memories, like how her mother used oatmeal boxes to make cradles for her dolls. “That’s the kind of thing I want to remember,” she said.

Cox said she’d been nervous about reading her work for others for the first time, but once she started, the 71-year-old great-grandmother from Leon, Wis., couldn’t seem to stop.

After several others read, she even came back with an encore to end the program.

"Take a Poem to Lunch" takes place at the Deke Slayton Space and Bicycle Museum, at 200 W. Main Street in Sparta, on the first Thursday of March, June, September and December.