February 2013 – As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HEARTWRECKS

Posted on February 23, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

FROM HEARTWRECKS
By Nicolas Destino

RESURRECTION

Back in the city they were erecting the moon every night with ropes, pulling, as everything needed to rise to reverse what fell. In an upstate kitchen, amid the languid, flat dough, they got the news that there would be no more bread, not until the moon was back up and pulling of its own accord.

INDIGENOUS

Miraculous to be part of the snow globe with the penguins on the icebergs and the icebergs with the cold shock and miraculous to be inside the dome with the curvature of the dome and the penguins’ head and the cold shock far from the city where this is not taking place and to be apart from the towers and a part of interiors with the curve of the moon made from clay.

SLEEP THERAPY

Things like giraffes, that’s all, and catalogue items, ordinary things; driving in the snow in the repetitive shapes of snowflakes, and things like fruit markets and police activity activating the amalgams of scriptures inscribing all the checklists that qualify a city, but the real story is the flashing number right in a waiting room, outside of which people have held doors in restaurants for strangers, or have stolen their pocketbooks or parking spaces, or have let doors slam on strangers, but the real story is that I would give up all these dirty thoughts for healthcare.

Heartwrecks: In this debut collection, musical notes, paint pigment, and lives of the heart converge in fantastical worlds of invention. Nicolas Destino’s adventures through relationship, music, and visual art revitalize the lyric and re-imagine the ordinary.

Nicolas Destino’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Barge Journal, 580split, 322 Review, and others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Goddard College, and his first full-length collection of poems, Heartwrecks, was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013.

Editor’s Note: Nicolas Destino’s Heartwrecks is one of the best and most original books of poetry to be published in recent memory. The poet himself has said, “These are not poems” because these vignettes are so imagistic, visual, and painterly that they are more akin to waking dreams than to the written word. Not only does the poet embrace the visual and painterly, but Heartwrecks is rife with musicality and deeply interested in the language of music. The book also contemplates urban life, marriage, partnership, natural disasters, weather, and life as seen from within the curved glass of the snow globe. All of these concerns are wrought from the finest materials, the poet’s masterly handle on the lyric guiding the reader through an incredibly deep, thoughtful, stunning, humorous, and intensely pleasurable book of poems that ought to be read from start to finish. And then again. And then again and again.

Want to see more by Nicolas Destino?
Nicolas Destino Official Website
Buy Heartwrecks from Sibling Rivalry Press
Buy Heartwrecks from Amazon

Lesson Plan

Posted on February 21, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

Lesson Plan

Michael T. Young

A gun came to school
and taught the children how to think.

It blew their minds
and tested them
on how to take a last breath.

It sent home lessons
to parents on loss and pain.

A gun came to school
to speak and tell the teachers
how to teach and how to hide

and how to take a shot.
There’s always someone

who doesn’t try, who won’t
put in the time to learn,
who won’t listen or do the homework.

But a gun is dedicated;
it aims to come to school every day,

it will instruct us all.
There is so much to learn:
fire drills, duck and cover.

A gun will lay down the law
even if it kills us.

***

Michael T. Young has published three collections of poetry: Transcriptions of Daylight, Because the Wind Has Questions and, most recently, Living in the Counterpoint. He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He received a Chaffin Poetry Award and was runner-up for a William Stafford Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including Coe Review, Fogged Clarity, Iodine Poetry Journal, The Potomac Review, and The Raintown Review. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, and In the Black/In the Red. It is also forthcoming in Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JESSICA BIXEL

Posted on February 16, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Jessica Bixel:

PRAYER FOR THE BROTHER

Tell him something new today—that we remembered the sharp lines of his body and loved him anyway. The open ruins of Old Sheldon Church letting in the sky. A dry wind or insect wings. Give him the good word—war renders murder into stone. There is something reassuring in that, lilacs blooming like a bell curve and then shrinking away into summer. The heat exhausts itself—there is nothing else to understand.

POEM

I never promised to write you into meaning. That’s what lying is for. Like this: the moon is made of soap. I’m telling you a story. I should have been there to say goodbye.

Yesterday, I unnamed you. It was easy enough to pull at your long body and think this is a warning. The moon is a thumbnail.

If you’d let me, I’d start all over. I promise to write you into anything. I promise, the moon is made of sorrow. Yesterday I looked up and the sky was empty.

(Today’s poems originally appeared in Midway Journal , and appear here today with permission from the poet.)

Jessica Bixel writes and works in Ohio, where over 200 minor earthquakes have occurred since 1776, most of which have gone unnoticed. Her work has recently found homes with Fortunates, Red Lightbulbs, and Leveler. She edits Rufous City Review.

Editor’s Note: The confessional nature of today’s poems collide in a lovely maelstrom of both the fantastical and the dark depths of the real within concentric circles of form and lyric. The moments that cut cut quick and deep. Jessica Bixel holds up a looking glass to the reader wherein we can see both our own world and a world from which we cannot look away.

Want to read more by and about Jessica Bixel?
Leveler
Floorboard Review
Mon Review
Red Lightbulbs
Rufous City Review

Electromagnetic Compatibility

Posted on February 14, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

Electromagnetic Compatibility

Kelly Davio

I am the conduit of all transmission.
The basebands of noise radiate from my skull.

I hear the faint buzz when I bend a knee
all the way to one hundred and eight megahertz.

My right hand taps the cool rhythm
of amplitude modulations; between the joints

of my smallest toes, a call-in talk show
pushes along my connective tissues.

Top-forty hits in mono and stereo
bisect my stomach, love handles jiggling

the fifty-two stories from local news breaks,
three weather reports, and a sponsorship message

from Lucky Charms. Their delicious magic
pulses, circumnavigates my navel.

A teleconference connected through my veins’
satellite rattles the back of my neck.

I shimmy shoulders, show my displeasure
when I tire of rasp in a haggler’s voice,

cast a web of white noise through my spine.
When I’m through with public broadcast pledge drives,

I listen for the red giants’ white signal,
static issued from billions of years of brilliance

from the center of the molecular bang.
All of it vibrating, all of it humming in bones.

***

Kelly Davio is Managing Editor of The Los Angeles Review, Associate Editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal, and a reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been honored in Best New Poets, and she has published poems in journals including Gargoyle, The Cincinnati Review, Bellingham Review, Pank, and others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, Whidbey Writers’ Workshop, and teaches English as a second language in the Seattle area. The above poem originally appeared in the Cincinnati Review and is included in Burn This House.

Medusa Song

Posted on February 12, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

Medusa Song

Mary Akers

She scrambles the eggs while the baby howls at her knees. To drown out the racket, she hums as she jabs her fork into the yolks. She enjoys the way they spill their yellow color and swirl into the whites. She matches her tune to the schook, schook, schook of the fork against the bowl, then does a quick side-step when the baby lunges for her legs.

His little fat hands grasp the air, throwing him off balance. He totters on his heels for a moment then sits hard and rolls back sideways, bumping his head on the floor. He stops crying abruptly and flails his arms in the air like a big bug stuck on its back.

Cynthia knows she should pick him up, comfort him, but she’s too deep in her own need. She won’t look down, even, because if she looks at his face all twisted up and desperate for her, she’ll have to pick him up, and she just can’t do that motherhood stuff right now.

She used to love the feeling, everyone needing her so badly. She would peel and seed John’s oranges when she packed his lunch. She cut the crusts off his sandwich out of pure love. And when the baby fell asleep, she’d sit and hold him just as long as he would let her.

But John Junior is walking now—into everything—and he’s gotten so clingy. Her friend Alice says that John Junior is feeling separation anxiety. Every time Cynthia leaves the room he thinks she’s gone forever, just disappeared. Secretly, Cynthia wishes it could work like that—two steps into the bedroom, and poof, she’s in another life, another world.

She used to love her life. She looked forward to every day. Cynthia can’t even say when things changed. Maybe it was back when she suspected John of sleeping with his secretary. Maybe it was after John Junior was born and she couldn’t seem to do anything right.

John and she had never fought before. Well, sometimes, but it was always more of a disagreement and once Cynthia apologized it would be over. It never spilled out into the rest of her life.

Now things seem to get all tangled up, till she can’t separate them, one from the other. She feels like that woman with snakes for hair, only all her problems are tangled up there too, squirming and writhing around, hissing on top of her head.

She figures that must be why John isn’t home yet—imagine living with a woman who can’t comb her hair for the snakes. She tries calling his office, but that snooty Angela answers, so Cynthia puts on a different voice and pretends to be one of John’s clients.

“Mr. Albee promised to show us a home today, is he in?”

She smiles because she knows Angela is too dense to figure out it’s her. She’s careful to keep the smile out of her voice.

Then Angela says, “Mr. Albee hasn’t been in all day, Ma’am, may I give him a message?”

She says it real sly-like, with extra emphasis on the ma’am, until Cynthia is really getting sick. The eggs look disgusting and she feels so nauseous. Then she’s throwing up again, retching in the toilet, and thinking, God, please don’t let me be pregnant, but she’s known it for a while. Add another snake.

When she’s wiping her face, John calls and she thinks he says he’s at work, but it’s hard to hear for sure over the baby. Liar. She just called there. Cynthia doesn’t want to yell at him, but she feels it rising up in her throat like bile, and she wants to stop it but the words are pouring out all over the place like vomit, sour and steaming.

She hangs up and tries to finish supper, even if it is just eggs and toast. After John sells a house they’ll have steak. She puts the baby in his crib, and over the monitor she can hear him banging his head against the bars. She goes to the door and watches, fascinated. His eyes roll back in pleasure. She tries banging her own head once on the doorframe before she remembers the snakes. No sense getting them all riled up.

Then she hears the eggs frying too hard, and sure enough, they’re brown when she stirs them, and the toast needs scraping. Schook, schook, schook, the crumbs fly all over the sink, sticking to the sides. She thinks about that woman who drove her kids into the lake and cried about it on national TV. What a terrible person, a horrible mother. But the snakes hiss, “Yessss.”

She’s barely gotten the toast buttered when John Junior starts up again. He’s poopy, too. She can see it rimming the edges of his diaper. What with the snakes and the baby it’s really all just too much for her and she carries him out to the pickup and puts him squish onto the seat and she leaves supper unfinished and she’s really going to do it this time because she just can’t take it any more.

Halfway to the lake it starts raining. John Junior is sitting in the floorboard playing with his toes and the wipers are keeping time in the dark, schook, schook, schook, marking off the seconds till it’s done.

Cynthia pulls right up to where the lake meets the road, and there’s no one around, so she gets out and goes over to the water’s edge. The baby watches her; his face against the window, nose flattened, big eyes shining white through the dark.

The water smells dank and fishy and it’s way too cold when she sticks her head in. Cynthia is on all fours holding her breath and she thinks about how she must look—rear in the air, head in the lake. She doesn’t get up, though, and her chest starts to ache from needing to breathe. Her head is throbbing, and her throat spasms, her body trying to force her to breathe. But she won’t, she won’t, and she can hear the schook, schook, schook of blood in her head, looking for oxygen.

When her body starts to relax and she’s feeling like she could stay down there at the bottom of the lake forever, she jerks her head up hard, throwing back her shoulders, landing on her back at the muddy edge of the lake.

And possibly the baby is crying in the truck, but he’s safe enough, and she remembers that his diaper needs changing while she watches drops of rain fall silver through the night and feels them sting her cold lake-water face as she listens and waits and hopes the snakes have drowned.

***

Mary Akers’ debut short story collection, WOMEN UP ON BLOCKS, won the 2010 IPPY gold medal for short fiction and she co-authored a non-fiction book (ONE LIFE TO GIVE) that has sold in seven countries. She is Editor-in-chief of the online journal r.kv.r.y. and co-founder of the Institute for Tropical Marine Ecology. She received a Pushcart 2012 Special Mention and has published a book of short performance pieces for use in high school dramatic reading competitions (MEDUSA’S SONG AND OTHER STORIES). She blogs at http://www.maryakers.blogspot.com

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEN SILVERMAN

Posted on February 9, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

BATH 5 (NEW HAMPSHIRE)
By Jen Silverman

If it’s one drink, it will be two. Wisteria tangling
around your wrists. Here is where you buried your

father. Here is where you buried your brother.
Here is where they will bury you, when the

time comes. No wonder you drink yourself down
toward the earth. Home is where the shovels lie.

Earth and earth and earth. Stones crowd your sleep.
Granite and salt, sand giving birth to

the fortress where even your lovers sigh. Silent
underfoot. You dream yourself toward them.

You are foxfire, you are phosphorescent. Your
mouth like whiskey. Your eyes like whiskey.

You baptize yourself in sorrow, again and again.
You baptize yourself with bourbon and brandy.

You swim downward, fast salmon, heedless, handsome,
death is in you, it has captured your ear. You have your

father’s jaw, your brother’s chin. When you were born
they bathed your small body with their fears.

Each scar they’d earned became manifest on your skin.
Their love aches like a badly set bone. When the river takes

you, it will be no new baptism. Just that same, ancient sacrifice.
Just that rush, that rushing, and then you are gone.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Ploughshares , where Jen Silverman was the Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner for Poetry, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Jen Silverman is a playwright and poet based out of New York. Her play CRANE STORY was produced off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre (2011), AKARUI received its World Premiere at Cleveland Public Theatre, and her short play THE EDUCATION OF MACOLOCO won the Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival and was published by Samuel French. She has held residencies at Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony, MacDowell (two-time Fellow), with an upcoming residency at Djerassi. She was a US Delegate for a China/America Writers Exchange in Beijing (2011) and the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Poet Award (2012). Her creative non-fiction piece “Six Bright Horses” won the Orlando Prize and was published in the LA Review (2011). BA: Brown. MFA: Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

Editor’s Note: Jen Silverman approaches her subject with blunt honesty. The rawness of the picture she paints “tangles around your wrists.” She calls it like she sees it, sparing nothing, and in so doing gives the reader a rare feeling of eavesdropping on the intimacy of another life. That which we are privvy to as outsiders “aches like a badly set bone.”

Want to read more by and about Jen Silverman?
Jen Silverman’s Official Website

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DARA BARNAT

Posted on February 2, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

WALT WHITMAN
By Dara Barnat

Walt Whitman walks with me
down the street, holds
doors open for me, whispers

in my ear: You can do nothing and be nothing but
what I will infold you.
Whitman, how good it feels, your

love, the perfect love of poets and
fathers, after they’re gone. Illness
outran my father’s

mind, so he could not hold
doors open for me.
Whitman grieves with me. The father,

he says, holds his grown or ungrown son
in his arms with measureless love.
But did he, Whitman, did your father hold

you in his arms? Together
we decide nothing
is more desirable than love from the dead.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in diode and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Dara Barnat is an American poet who lives in Tel Aviv. Her work appears in diode, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, The Collagist, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Dara’s chapbook, Headwind Migration, was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. The same year, she received a poetry scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Dara teaches poetry and creative writing in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Editor’s Note: February 26th will mark the first anniversary of my father’s death. In my early grief, in my inability to comprehend, I found my path to acceptance, to understanding, to processing my father’s passing, through poetry. One year later I find myself still drawn to that community of voices who are able to speak of loss, to create beauty from immeasurable ache.

Today’s poem had me at hello. At “the perfect love of poets and / fathers, after they’re gone.” “[N]othing / is more desirable than love from the dead,” and nothing makes the burden we carry in the wake of loss more bearable, more understandable—nothing makes us feel less alone—than poetry.

That being said, above and beyond what it offers me in my personal journey, today’s poem is a stunning piece of artisanal craftsmanship. A lyric tour de force that resonates on aesthetic, emotional, and intertextual registers and beyond. A beautiful song that carries beyond that which gave rise to it, taking on a life and power of its own.

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Lesson Plan

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Electromagnetic Compatibility

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Medusa Song

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