Sentience Matters: What Is a Zombie — Meat Consumption and the Advent of the Automobile

Posted on October 19, 2014August 3, 2019 by asitoughttobemagazine

What Is a Zombie: Meat Consumption and the Advent of the Automobile

by Gabriel Gudding

The zombie begins its life in western letters as a post-colonial comment on the history of slavery in the Americas. But it has recently been revived and repurposed both as a worryingly obstructive pedestrian and as, I contend, a parody of the meat-loving human.

History of the Vehicle-Deprived Human as Impoverished and Sexless

Newspaper op-eds in Indiana during the 1920s characterized automobiles as morally threatening to families. They were written about as mobile rooms inside which private touching and pillow talk could be brought into public spaces from houses and barns without sufficient ethical censure.

The automobile menaced a host of customs about adolescent and post-adolescent touching, pre-marital sexuality, and religion. Adults realized on a broad-scale, maybe for the first time since the advent of horse usage, that they did not want children to move too quickly, or too far, across a landscape. The anxiety expressed in Indiana newspapers around the rise of the automobile centered generally around the sexualization of the public atmosphere and in particular on the increased possibility of rape. A new kind of room, a mobile one, could now escape the orbit of parental censure. By 1930 57% of American households had an automobile.

There were even fears that novel kinds of underwear were being produced for this new modality of privacy. These fears do seem to have been founded: the union suit, a single-piece undergarment and the mainstay of Hanes for decades, gave way for men in the early ‘30s to a two piece arrangement: the singlet and the boxer. The men’s brief was created on January 19 1935 by a guy named Arthur Kneibler, complete with the y-shaped overlapping fly, which I marvel that any man ever uses, I haven’t, and manufactured by Coopers Inc as the “Jockey.”

By the 1930s bloomers gave way to “step-ins,” the forerunner of the modern panty: in 1928 Maidenform began mass-producing brassieres. Thank you, Ida Rosenthal, American, émigré from Russian.

The fear infusing parents maybe went something like this: One could now grope and kiss anywhere, and be discretely unclothed, so long as one was wrapped in an automobile, the top half clothed, bottom naked – hurtling as a demi-nude away from farms, parents, churches, pastors, and obstructive siblings at new and alarming speeds while cupping a breast or fondling a penis, one’s lascivious enjoyment amplified by the novelty of blurry ditches and the roaring of air in retractable windows on otherwise windless days. In sum, the nature of embodiment, and the nature of the out-of-doors, changed markedly with the rise of the automobile.

Consider this embodiment in light of the concurrent advent of the zombie in popular culture: the first pulp novel to make mention of zombies was W. B. Seabrook’s Magic Island of 1929, Seabrook being an American “occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist.” “At this very moment, in the moonlight, there are zombies working on this island.”

There is an uncanny and I think not coincidental correlation between the rise of automobiles and the advent of the portrayal of zombies in popular culture. I mean, you have to ask: how is it that zombies are so thoroughly pedestrian?

They do not bicycle, jog, run, drive, ride, skate, skip; they lumber, stagger, limp, stumble thru flat piazzas, avoiding even inclined pavement until a little wall stops them. They engage in no machinic transfer. We are fascinated with them, I feel, because they somehow underscore the lumbering and dead (indeed the asexual and non-somatic) nature of the non-driver in the automobile’s new ideology of motion. In the context of the automobile’s new motile ideology, the pedestrian is a zombie – a diminished human, past death, incapable of both speed and sex. The human is the only mammal that can be a zombie, Moby-Dick notwithstanding. (Certain ants do have zomboid qualities. The arrythmic gait and absent-minded halting of some crocodilians is reminiscent of a zomboid ataxia.)

The Zombie as a Parody of the Carnivorous Human

Beyond its vehicle-deprivation and ataxia, the other major characteristic of the zombie is its carnivorous nature.

I contend the zombie is a parody of the meat-loving human, a subaltern and lumbering being so fixated on its appetite as to be uninterested in sex and incapable of dealing with machines, one who eats no greens, no vegetables, no fruit, and is so rapacious for flesh that it devours bloated rats, rotting beavers, and its own lips. The chief characteristic of the zombie is then not that it is a metonym for the cannibal, but that it parodies the human who can’t conceive of a meal that doesn’t have meat in it, the one who, when you sit down at the table with a plate of kale, avocado, and quinoa, asks snidely, “Where’s your food?” This dimension of the zombie is not about death, Halloween, graveyards, and shotguns: it is the carnist human allegorically facing the ethical and ecological realities of its own apocalyptic appetite.

“Apocalyptic” in two senses. First, that greenhouse emissions are now driving the sixth mass extinction of species in the natural record, and that animal agriculture is the single greatest source of greenhouse emissions. And, second, that animal farming (both factory farming and supposedly small-impact locavore farms) is the root cause of global malnutrition among human animals, such that the United Nations has called for a switch to a vegan diet.

Something in us knows that just as animal farming is driving tens of thousands of species into extinction, we’re also eating ourselves into a state of global malnutrition. The allegory of the zombie suggests that something in us can see our own blindness about meat, and that the appetite for it is grotesque and threatening to all of us.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NOMI STONE

Posted on October 18, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Nomi Stone:

WAR GAME, AMERICA

The war scenario has: [vegetables stalls], [roaming animals],
and [people] in it. The people speak

the language of the country we
are trying to make into a kinder country.
Some of the people over there are good
others evil others circumstantially

bad some only want cash some
just want their family to not
die. The game says figure

out which
are which.

WHAT IS GROWING IN THESE WOODS

Green in here, gleaming like
being inside a fable but with
stalls of fruit you can’t eat.
To go home, leave crumbs.
When the wood circles you
back here instead, let the lost
and the impossible ripen in
you, ripen and go.

US AND THEM

“I would make love to one of our

whores before I
would fuck one of their
bourgeoisie.” There was a proverb,

like this: Don’t trust a         if
he becomes a         even though
he remains a       for

forty years. And the sister opposite
proverb: Don’t trust a even
though he has been in the grave

for forty years. It was a difficult day,
a bomb had spun open
a bus, and children

had been crushed down by
a machine. Each wondered if he was born
too soon, if later would have been better, if 40

+ 40 + 40 + 40

“War Game, America” and “What is Growing in these Woods” previously appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, and “Us and Them” previously appeared via The Poetry Foundation. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.

Nomi Stone is the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008), a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University, and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson. She previously earned a Masters in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford and was a Creative Writing Fulbright scholar in Tunisia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Memorious, The Painted Bride Quarterly, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, at The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She is currently researching and writing a book of poetry as well as a book of non-fiction about combat simulations in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America.

Editor’s Note: Nomi Stone’s poetry is a veritable minefield of experience. Politics, war, violence, history, proverbs, culture, peoplehood, nationality, borders, mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and biblical referentiality lie in wait for the keen and unsuspecting reader alike. The unsaid is as present and powerful as what is written, so that her poetry echoes the Bible’s black fire written on white fire. This is a poetry rich and blooming. Thick with the sights and smells of Near Eastern markets, yet heavy with human tragedy. Herein lies the old world. Herein lies the Levant. Herein lies the wild woods of our imagination set against the all-too-real world of war. If you cannot find your way out, “let the lost / and the impossible ripen in / you, ripen and go.”

An Unnecessary Defense of William T. Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories

Posted on October 16, 2014August 3, 2019 by asitoughttobemagazine

An Unnecessary Defense of William T. Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories

by Jordan A. Rothacker

Despite all the sensational attention William T. Vollmann gets for writing about prostitutes or smoking crack (which often neglects his reasons for doing so and his other work with and on the poor, homeless, and other marginalized groups), or the warranted attention involving his run-ins with the FBI, what is often neglected, sadly, is Vollmann’s prose and the aesthetic value of his literature.

His most recent book, the 704 paged, Last Stories and Other Stories, is his first fictional works since 2005’s National Book Award winning, Europe Central. Often called a novel (in the vein of Danilo Kis’s, A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch, which the book is dedicated to), Europe Central is thirty-seven stories that come together with a wide and masterful vision of World War II focusing on the two opposing totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. This new book, Last Stories and Other Stories, is certainly more of a short story collection. If there is any theme that groups or connects them it is the most ancient and important of human themes, death, and more specifically, death in regards to love, the thing that makes death’s opposite worth anything at all.

I’ll admit; I’m a fan. I gobble up everything Vollmann writes and have since I first discovered him in 1999 with a bargain bin copy of The Atlas, still one of my all time favorite books. What I realized that first night reading The Atlas was that I was in the presence of literary, artistic, genius. Here was a Steinbeck, a Dostoevsky, a Melville, a Plutarch for my own time and I could read interviews with him and go to readings to experience him in person. This was a true and shockingly brilliant voice able to tackle many subjects and literary modes. Astute, eloquent, and always going for both the heart and jugular. I’ve done a lot of proselytizing the good news in regards to Vollmann’s writing for fifteen years and have had to try many different tactics to get people interested. Friends have read him, some after enough eye-rolling at my enthusiasm, and some have even come to love his work. The easiest defense I can ever give for my love of Vollmann’s work is that he is just really, really good. When Vollmann won the National Book Award in 2005 it was hard not to have a “told you so” attitude, and one day when he gets the Nobel maybe I’ll rest my advocacy a little bit.

After some poor reviews of this newest work of fiction (one reviewer I won’t name called his prose “boring,” but maybe that reviewer is a jaded fifteen year old), the good reviews have come rolling in and I’ve found myself wondering what more I can add. On the level of “what more could you want from literature,” Last Stories and Other Stories should seem like an easy sell. It’s a long book; but that’s okay, it’s short stories and people read long books like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones all the time. In some stories it involves ghosts, vampires, and/or supernatural erotica; alright, that actually sounds like it would make it more commercially viable today. The stories take place in locations as far-flung as Stavanger and Lillehammer, Norway; Vera Cruz, Mexico; Sarajevo, Mostar, and Trieste of the Balkan region; Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and ancient Palestine. The time periods for the stories are pretty wide in their range too with each writing style following suit to distinct location, theme, time, and folk tradition evoked.

Writers working like this are rare today, especially in this country. As the prose shifts through each story and setting, what remains consistent is Vollmann getting back in touch with his roots and some of his earliest influences, namely the Comte de Lautreamont (born Isidore Ducasse, 1846-1870). Lautreamont was influenced by Baudelaire, was an unbeknownst-to-either contemporary of Rimbaud, and himself influenced the Dadaists and the Surrealists. From Lautreamont to Vollmann goes the love of the long, gorgeously bursting, sentence of corkscrews and bubbles of color and cutting descriptions; along with an over-indulgence in darkness, often to conquer that darkness through mocking and excess. In stories about death, ghosts, vampires, and hallucinatory shape-shifting scenarios, Vollmann gets to flex those literary muscles and pump all his mid-life wisdom and knowledge through his youthful exuberance for in-your-face pyrotechnic prose. In stories set in 19^th century Norway, the sentences might not be as long or bristly as those in the graveyards of contemporary Tokyo, but they are no less haunting or striking. His short sentences can be just as dark and brutal, as they evoke the Norse sagas and Eddas. It could be said that this collection brings together the best of young and old Vollmann.

The book is dedicated to Vollmann’s father who passed away in 2009, a life event that led Vollmann to write an essay in Harper’s Magazine about end of life rights (“A Good Death,” Nov. 2010). Being about life and death, there is an aspect to the book that is not only supernatural but also religious. The stories in Last Stories are meditations and reflections on death, what it takes away, and where that leaves us, the mourners, those left behind, pumped through the filters of a wild imagination with the world and its history at its fingertips. That is often how the greatest mythologies, legends, and sacred texts were composed.

This is not new territory for Vollmann, he recreates myths of European conqueror and Native American Nations in his Seven Dreams series of novels. His 1991 story collection, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, featured, “Grave of Lost Stories,” both about and in the gothic style of Edgar Allan Poe. 1996’s The Atlas retold the Battle of Masada in a biblical style in “The Hill of Gold,” took readers to the Heavenly Spheres in “Fortune Tellers,” and creeped-out every reader in “Incantations of the Murderer,” with its contemporary urban gothic flavor. What is new here for the Vollmann fan or idle reader is one big thick book, a world in a text, getting to delve deeply and unflinchingly into this dark, dark territory. I dream of a next generation of goth kids growing up on this book, because, back to my original point, it is gorgeous.

The first story in the collection, “Escape,” is a retelling of the “Romeo and Juliet” story of Sarajevo in 90s wartime. Nothing supernatural happens—except romantic love, which has its own atheists and agnostics—and the story is more akin to poetic war-correspondence than fiction; and yet at the close of those ten pages I was at tears. The shortest story, “The Answer,” is only six sentences (seventy words) and can still haunt its reader. The longest story, a ninety-page novella, “When We Were Seventeen,” is dense in heart-wrenching descriptions of nature and human interaction. Some of the stories make one feel what it would be like to actually live in a Grimm or Andersen fairy tale. It could be said that the writing is “difficult” or “challenging” but I would prefer not to talk down to a reader. The stories can provide escape, but like all great literature, they should also teach you something, even if it’s just to be a better reader. You might not know the painter Leonor Fini, but her surrealist work illustrates the covers of the book and she is a historical fiction character in the story, “Cat Goddess,” one of my favorites. Those who have run into me while out in the world reading this book have often been encouraged to read another favorite of mine, the story, “Defiance,” a mere three pages. “Defiance” starts off retelling the story of Abraham and Isaac—a life, death, and love story important in the three biggest “western” religions—until Vollmann gives it a turn that might make even D.H. Lawrence blush. My friend, Joey Carter, a brilliant PhD candidate in philosophy—after being forced/encouraged by me to read the story in a coffeeshop one evening—described its message as “sacrifice as training for love.” I quickly related this critique to Vollmann and it sparked an hour-long phone conversation about Abraham and Kierkegaard and the true meaning of faith and belief and love.

Poe, Lautreamont, Norse sagas, Japanese Hentai, surrealism, mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and the dark chaos of war are all influences and points of departure for Vollmann to direct and fire his own true voice like a weapon at death. With enough words in enough cultural voices maybe Vollmann will win; or die trying. It’s possible that this book just needs more word of mouth exposure, so I guess that’s what I’m doing here. Maybe this will be the book to make Vollmann a household name; people do like to be creeped-out and titillated from beyond the grave. You should read this book, it’s beautiful, and like the creeping vines of the story “Widow’s Weeds,” it will touch you everywhere.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HILA RATZABI

Posted on October 11, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Hila Ratzabi:

"Sedna the Arctic Sea Goddess" broadside, designed by poet and visual artist MaryAnn Miller — “Sedna the Arctic Sea Goddess” broadside, designed by poet and visual artist MaryAnn Miller.

SEDNA IN SPACE

             “Our newly discovered object is the coldest most distant place known in the solar
             system, so we feel it is appropriate to name it in honor of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of
             the sea, who is thought to live at the bottom of the frigid arctic ocean.”
                                                                                                                     ––Mike Brown, astronomer

Now you’re nothing
but a dwarf planet at the edge
of the asteroid formerly known as Pluto,

neighbor to demoted planet,
atmosphere-less,
stunted.

When the scientists ran out of Greek and Roman gods
they settled on you, “Big Bad Woman,”
as one tribe puts it.

You are made of water,
methane, nitrogen ice,
frozen all over.

It takes you
more than ten thousand years
to orbit the Sun.

I want to place a blanket
around your shivering surface,
tuck you in surrounded by stars.

Where I’m from, we’ve released
so much heat into the sky
it’s burning us back.

But I can’t turn up the heat
at your edge of the solar system,
can’t drag you any closer to the Sun.

From your corner the Sun
Is a wink of a star, so small
you could block it out

with the head of a pin.
Just look what a nothing it is
next to you, big girl.

“Sedna the Arctic Sea Goddess” was previously published in Alaska Quarterly Review and “Sedna in Space” was previously published in Narrative. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.

Hila Ratzabi was selected by Adrienne Rich as a recipient of a National Writers Union Poetry Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the chapbook The Apparatus of Visible Things (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry is published or forthcoming in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Drunken Boat, About Place, The Normal School, H_NGM_N, Cortland Review, and others. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Philadelphia where she founded the Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop.

Editor’s Note: In Hila Ratzabi’s Sedna poems the Inuit goddess becomes a symbol of the trauma of climate crisis as explored through the lens of feminist response.

In “Sedna the Arctic Sea Goddess” we are introduced to Sedna’s creation myth. So, too, are we introduced to the misogyny and violence inherent in her tale. She is a “bitch goddess” whose father throws her to the sea and then cuts of her fingers when she tries to save herself.

In “Sedna in Space” we see Sedna rise again when a dwarf planet is discovered and named for her, but still she is “nothing / but a dwarf planet at the edge / of the asteroid formerly known as Pluto, // neighbor to demoted planet, / atmosphere-less, / stunted.” Through poetry, Ratzabi seeks to reclaim Sedna, to save her from the grips of oppression: “I want to place a blanket / around your shivering surface, / tuck you in surrounded by stars.” By shifting perspective, the poet empowers Sedna, making her grander than the sun: “From your corner the Sun / Is a wink of a star, so small / you could block it out // with the head of a pin. / Just look what a nothing it is / next to you, big girl.”

Want to read more by Hila Ratzabi?
Read recently published poems on climate change by Hila Ratzabi in About Place and Drunken Boat.
Learn about Hila’s poetry workshops in Philadelphia at The Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop.
Purchase “Sedna the Arctic Sea Goddess” broadside (pictured above).
Purchase “Sedna in Space” broadside (poem above).
Purchase The Apparatus of Visible Things chapbook.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RESURRECTION PARTY

Posted on September 27, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

From RESURRECTION PARTY
By Michalle Gould:

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A SERIES OF PREPARATORY STUDIES FOR A NUDE BY MATISSE

The breasts hang low like fruit hoping
to be picked yet still on the branch,
While the body largely reclines, a letter K
lain on its side and slightly bent,
or in a less common pose, my back faces the viewer
so I resemble a pushed in O, my arms and legs drawn in,
like a turtle withdrawing far into its shell
to escape some predator that has come to suck;
We are become a rock. Our hearts lie hidden far
Below its skin. The artist scrapes my flesh onto his brush
but cannot touch what lies beneath, whatever he thinks—
nor can you, my dear, even as you read me.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE MAIDEN OF ATHENS

That day, I went forth to kill the Minotaur.
Since Theseus, they sent us all naked;
I had no ball of string; I had no sword.
For tools, instead, I had only the instruments
of my body: my nails for daggers, my hair for thread.
I had heard of his legendary cruelty;
I had heard how he killed without a word.
Then I came to the center and saw him.
His strong arms beckoned—and I cut the cord.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A PAIR OF LOVEBIRDS

Opening their beaks, they thrust
their tongues out for one last kiss
before the long journey south—
like worms they each intend to drop
into the other’s hungry waiting mouth.

RESURRECTION PARTY concerns itself, almost to the point of obsession, with the question of how the imagination grapples with the fear of death. The collection intertwines religious and mythical subjects and themes with more fleshly concerns about the body and decay, presence and absence. It has been described as containing poems of “almost exquisite refinement, illuminated by the taut glow of sensuous prosody and imagery” and as “a deeply meditative collection at once intelligent, tender, and utterly human.” (From the Silver Birch Press website.)

Michalle Gould has been working on the poems that constitute Resurrection Party for almost 15 years. In that time, her poems and short stories have appeared in Slate, New England Review, Poetry, American Literary Review, The Texas Observer, and other journals. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a librarian, and is in the process of researching and writing a novel set in the North of England during the 1930s.

Editor’s Note: Michalle Gould has a deep and fearless understanding of the self. In her quest to write poems that grapple with life’s big questions—life and death, self-awareness, relationships—she is bold and unafraid. She views her own body as honestly as an artist would. Yet she understands truths about the self that no other can reveal: “The artist scrapes my flesh onto his brush / but cannot touch what lies beneath, whatever he thinks— / nor can you, my dear, even as you read me.”

In “Self Portrait as the Maiden of Athens” the poet re-examines the Greek myth of the minotaur from a female perspective. Here she notes that, unlike the male hero in the story, when the maiden faces the beast, “I had no sword. / For tools, instead, I had only the instruments / of my body: my nails for daggers, my hair for thread.” This concept translates into the larger role of women in the world, and the question of what few tools and resources we have traditionally been allowed.

SPS-beloved poet Louise Mathias writes that the terrain of Resurrection Party “is somewhere between body and spirit, life and death, intimacy and solitude, elegance and intuition. Possessing a sly humor coupled with a laser sharp awareness and assertion of how all is ephemeral, Resurrection Party accomplishes the rare: it makes even the big questions fresh.”

Want to see more from Michalle Gould?
Michalle Gould Official Website
Buy Resurrection Party from Amazon
Resurrection Party on Goodreads
More Excerpts from Resurrection Party

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEN CAMPBELL

Posted on September 20, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

Vaginaland
By Jen Campbell

“Vaginaland” was previously published in English Pen “Poems for Pussy Riot” and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Jen Campbell is an award-winning poet and short story writer. She’s also the author of the bestselling Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops Series. Her poetry collection, The Hungry Ghost Festival, is published by The Rialto and her latest book, The Bookshop Book, will be published in October by Little, Brown.

Editor’s Note: What is a girl? What is her mouth, her body, her words? Who is that girl when the world tries to hold her down and shut her up? When “She has been baked / as a blackberry pie and / now everyone wants a piece / of her”?

“Vaginaland” was originally published by English PEN as a political act. In an act of solidarity. In support of three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, who were then in prison for their outspoken feminism, LGBT advocacy, and opposition to the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Who — and what — does a girl become when she stands up, breaks free, and fires out the words that are deep inside of her? When those words are political? When her voice is political? When “She says: this is the capital of me”?

Gordon Massman: An Interview and Four Poems

Posted on September 19, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

Gordon Massman is the author, mostly recently, of the companion volumes Death and Love, both out from NYQ Books this year. His work has appeared in Antioch Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, and RATTLE, among others. He teaches writing and literature at The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. The poems below are reprinted from 0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle (NYQ Books, 2011) with permission of the author.

***

Okla Elliott: 0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle represents over twenty years of working on a single project. How did the project present itself to you? How did it mutate and grow over the years? And, with a project like this, I have to wonder how you can know when it’s done. The numbers could literally go on ad infinitum.

Gordon Massman: I was around forty when I lost faith in formal titles which to me monumentalize a work into a monolith, looping the last line up to the title in a never-ending closed circle, removing the work from relationship with past or future pieces. Freeing the work of the conventional title in favor of numbering it in the order written among cohorts places it in a context and continuum—as a step in an evolutionary process. So, this project presented itself, consciously and philosophically, through an intellectual callisthenic. Suddenly I liberated my pieces from standing alone and allowed them to be part of something larger than themselves. I think of 0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle as a single—I hesitate to use the word for reasons stated below—poem.

Spiritually my subject—making visible my subconscious longings, urges, fantasies in naked, visceral, glaring terms—came to me in the way a seed is naturally programmed to become a tree of its species. I was a hyper-sensitive child in the hands of monsters who compressed me into a certain kind of seed programmed to blossom into a raging twisted tree. I did not select my lineage; my lineage selected me. During and for ten years following an emotional crisis which occurred at age thirty-five, I pursued Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis which opened a crucial field of examination—the subconscious. I felt then that my writing, heretofore consisting of stale programmable subjects was derivative and lacking. To my mind, all frontiers had been written by past masters to perfection save one: the human interior turned inside-out. In this, there are few, in any, antecedents. (Only Ted Hughes’ magnificent book Crow comes to mind with Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, wonderful writers though they were, following tepidly behind.)

All that remained for me–the most difficult part of this project–was to find the courage to strike genuine ore regardless the consequences. The mutation you speak of is the mutation of gazing more and more deeply, bringing up in particularized imagery that which drives me, and presumably, what drives most human males. Oddly, women like my work more than men as I think it confirms what women have always known about men, but which men want to deny.

The four hundred pages of 0.174 represent a handful of the entire project which is over three-thousand pages. It could, indeed, go on ad infinitum as you suggest, and I think that I will take it up again after I finish the third volume in a trilogy of books NYQ is publishing (Love, Death, and God.) I would like this numbers cycle to extend into late middle and old age—I am sixty-five—to record what maturity brings.

OE: I see an affinity between your poems and the fiction of William H. Gass. Both are experimental and postmodern in certain ways, and both seem interested in delving into the uglier and more uncomfortable or untoward aspects of human life and thought. What drew you to the formal aspects and contents of these poems?

GM: This is a core question and forces a hand. The term “formal aspects” implies non-porous walls between genres, a concept I reject for my own writing. The truth is that I do not believe in the concept of poetry distinct from prose as if each contained a separate circulatory system, an exclusive blood flow. I believe that “poetry” and “prose” are the same being named writing, and that some writing is more powerful than other writing. Some writing which we commonly call prose is the highest order of what we commonly call poetry I have ever read—Virginia Woolf, George Konrad, Hermann Broch, William Faulkner, Victor Hugo, come to mind. While some writing which we commonly call poetry is the lowest order of prose I have ever read, sanitized—I won’t name names. I consider myself a writer, not a poet, who formalizes on an instinctual level and who believes more in the power of words than in the power of form. Honesty will design and occupy its own vessel. We have evolved past what once served us well: strict academic boundaries. We are past the notion of fortress identity. The messages in 0.174 made square brick-like formations that cracked off lines jarringly to maintain smooth edges. They just wanted it that way for no rational reason.

I dislike labels such as “experimental” or “postmodern” because they imply the critical world’s lack of imagination. Writing is experimental or postmodern only because the reader/critic before encountering it could not imagine it. The terms essentially arise out of a failure in the public imagination and are irrelevant to the creating artist.

Likewise, what are untoward and ugly but a culture’s failure to include them in what they want to believe beautiful in human existence. Rage is beautiful. Envy is beautiful. Self-hatred is beautiful. Shame is beautiful. These terms “ugly”, “untoward”, “uncomfortable” and the like, (“vulgar”) accept as justifiable a mass lack of imagination, an unwillingness to accept as intrinsically valuable, even beautiful, the many facets within us. I am not speaking, of course, of what causes harm to others, of psychopathologies, but of the commonplace and universal egotisms which rampage through all.

I am, therefore, comfortable making visible and owning publicly that I possess these turbulent virtues which drive me and interest me more than the placid ones. By doing so, I reason, I can baptize and make them legitimate upstanding citizens. To closet and cloak them in shame is to deny fundamental truths about one’s self and to create a flammable pressure in the heart.

OE: Your newly released companion volumes, Love and Death, are also a large project. Could you tell us a bit about them and how they came about?

GM: One of my legs is filled with death, the other love. When I walk they flash and cut like scissors. Death was easy. Since an early age I’ve hated the reality of death and every day I awake with its heaviness on my chest. A few years ago within the span of nine months both my parents died with me standing helplessly bed-side. When death has one’s throat death is implacable. A few months after the second death the poems poured forth, immediate present tense snapshots and long contemplative incantations, the final being a twenty page rock riff. Death required from me this exorcism. During this process my psychotherapist dared me to write a book on love, romantic and otherwise. But being heavily invested in despair I balked for a long time until finally grudgingly writing a love poem, then grudgingly writing another, then grudgingly another until an avalanche happened and I found myself mirroring death with love: immediate present tense snapshots and long rock riff incantations. The two books were published as companions, or perhaps as scissoring legs. On the rare occasion I do a reading I alternate death with love, love with death until the two blur into a single experience, which they are. Each compressed the other into a rich and tragic existence.

I am now finishing the third book making this project not twins but triplets, this last one titled God. Now I have three legs, or perhaps, more accurately, two legs with that smaller one in the middle!

***

43
Am I more like steel or fruit inside? If you drilled deep
through me would I fi nally break your bit or ooze pear-meat
and weep like a godless Jesus of Nazareth? I want to know.
Drill me to the core. Screw out big chunks of me in your deep
steel grooves and spit me free, you with your blindness and
vulnerability. Make me spasm and curl with your all-nighters
and narcomania my teenage son. Find my vanadium or peachpear-
plum blood. You have drilled through my fl esh, it fl ew
apart like a burn, and several inches into the beams in my
bones, but I’m still steadily beating. Push hard on your tool.
Drill through my collar past my lungs into my heart pushing
with all your weight, feet off the ground, grinding out meat;
fi nd what’s there. Get to my mettle. Drop out. Coke up.
Fuck the syringe. Find your own gore in vehicular winter. Am
I cold? Am I mechanical? Can I walk through closed windows?
If you peel back my surfaces do I glisten? This is your mission.
Let me see from a distance the crack pusher’s wing fold
over your shoulder and usher you forward, your two backs
fusing. Let me witness dissolution. It is the father’s privilege. To
strip off my sirloin like meat off a prey to fi nd what’s lying
inside my cage. Let me see graphically what your brain isn’t
getting: high school teacher’s spittle, orange lunch room chile,
that geeky conventional gangly camaraderie, auditorium pep
rallies, an appropriate foreign language, stupidity, time, time, time.

***

56
And this little piggy squealed “no,no,no,no,” all the way home.
And then all the toes were accounted for: the big, the middle, the
nondescript, nondescript’s neighbor to the East, the itty-bitty
which made baby laugh like a nautilus. And then the toes blinked
out like a disappearing photograph, and baby went on a miniature
vacation to Puerto Vallarta where a lion almost devoured
him like a fortune cookie, but he escaped and wind rattled the
blinds like dangling bones, and he whimpered and whispered a
prayer-precursor to the Divine Death Overture, something about
soft protrusions and blue rain. And baby Carroll decided he
was having none of it and shattered two panes in the living
room belonging to Daddy and his entourage one of whom played
the Ace of Spades and raked in the kitty while on the artery a
fl ying mechanical scream engulfed horizontal human moans
in a white steel cube smudged with a red intersection and far,
far away two events happened simultaneously: an imaginary
Holstein jumped over an idiot moon keeping constant vigil on
the continuous catastrophe, and in the silo accompanied by
secret platoons of yellow arthropods Jack fi nally found Jill’s
gooey ooze representing nucleic acid’s undeniable invincibility.

***

134
Testimony of the best pig in the sty. I’m king mounter. I
shove it in. Gertrude craves me. Matilda moans for me.
I grunt and eat slops pushing away others. I get mash.
Dark splotchy pink, stout nose, neckless, number 77
tagged to left ear, luckiest number around. Rump like
a cement mixer nobody kicks, squiggly fi rm tail, blood
to tip. Super Pig, pig literati, nineteen hundred twenty
six pounds, hog literally, the Indiana hogs, borne of
Chester and Duchess, Chester Iowa State Fair Champion
Derby Hog, Duchess six hundred pound 4-H Purebred
Champion, daddy shot me into her like a roman
candle. I burst forth like Ben Hur. Sunburnt from so
much fucking, out from mud, into mud, ear tag jangling
like revolutionary, Illini nights reclining under
stars, contemplatively smoking, pink eyelids, lavish
lashes, back legs crossed, I love everything, fences,
twigs, friendship, water trough, soft breezes drawing
across skin, the smell of piss, I, Davy Crockett pig,
adventuresome, undaunted, courageous, proud, out
to farthest post, to gate, scratching along wire, sniffi
ng earth-untrodden, snorting intoxication-liberation,
left-and-right pig, pig of The Nation and The New
Republic, chest-out puffed-up herd-guardian wise
warrior pig, pugnacious purple irremovable squealer.

***

247
The whole thing goes kablooy, hypochondria torments sister;
dementia creams Daddy; mortality frightens but cruelty
out Mother’s skin; forty years of tolerance collapse under
Larry; BDD splinters me in circus mirrors; preemie lungs
asphyxiate Kevin; Depakote sloshes Bradley’s brain; Hep
C like a rabbit nibbles cabbage of Allan’s liver; genocides
cook and serve severed leg; have another chilled eclair,
sweaty chocolate, chewy shell; oh baby; testicles strike
like factory workers, tongues fall mute; rocks clog urethra,
plaque arteries; well, smasheroo; brisket, lamb, claw, stew
slide off table into Magical Mystery Tour performed by
nutcases at Unity Church; refugees land in black fog of
dereliction and fl ies bite beautiful faces near McFadden’s;
Witcomb crawls into death’s bomb shelter everything rips
through: guilt, shame, dejection, despair, paralysis, rage.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALLIE MARINI BATTS

Posted on September 13, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Allie Marini Batts:

breeding, trumpet flowers out of the dead ash

a cautious unfurling, petals, these fragile fingers,

extended through layers of silt and salt,

the battle-blown lands where once a city stood.

these vines, they labor furiously,

expanding and dividing beneath the dust of nations

nightshades in mitosis, their toxins lovely, bright and narrow

set against a land destroyed.

likewise myself and my skin,

a playground for dead things

and invasive plants to rise from,

a phoenix, in botany.

the mythology of the night skies

you were once a man

square but bright

incense in the dark

your story, told by Greeks

naïve, the way we

lit sticks of incense and prayed

wantonly to false hopes and square gods

and stars, naïve offerings

and devotions meant to keep us safe

protections and punishments

remembered in the

rotations of the planet

naïve, how we thought

you loved us

and would keep us safe

“breeding, trumpet flowers out of the dead ash” previously appeared in quarter after and “the mythology of the night skies” previously appeared in Symmetry Pebbles. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.

Allie Marini Batts holds degrees from both Antioch University of Los Angeles and New College of Florida, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has been a finalist for Best of the Net and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is managing editor for the NonBinary Review and Zoetic Press, and has previously served on the masthead for Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, The Weekenders Magazine, Mojave River Review & Press, and The Bookshelf Bombshells. Allie is the author of the poetry chapbooks, You Might Curse Before You Bless (ELJ Publications, 2013) Unmade & Other Poems, (Beautysleep Press, 2013) and This Is How We End (forthcoming 2014, Bitterzoet.)

Editor’s Note: “breeding, trumpet flowers out of the dead ash” is so stunning that the poem speaks for itself. I am loathe to feature a favorite line in the face of so many beautifully wrought images emerging one after another. The subject matter is as rich as the soil the poem’s flowers rise from. The world revealed is post apocalyptic, brimming with nature’s resilience and with death nurturing new life, “a phoenix, in botany.”

“the mythology of the night skies” turns our eyes upward to the heavens and our minds to the gods. While pressing against the idea of worship in antiquity, the poem’s echo seems to question deity worship altogether. “naïve, how we thought / you loved us / and would keep us safe.”

Want more from Allie Marini Batts?
Find her on the web
Follow her on Twitter @kiddeternity

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PAPER COTTON LEATHER

Posted on September 6, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

From PAPER COTTON LEATHER
By Jenny Sadre-Orafai:

RETRACT OR RECANT

This accordion love expands or exhales,
retracts or recants. It is only as much
as we allow. It squeezes out warnings
of cardboard walls closing in.

Its wheezing fills a willful tide
with dread. I turn to this gone
love. I was taught curve into the slide
when spinning on frozen road.

CUTTING YOUR HAIR

When I was done, a ring of hair
or a halo curved your hunched
shoulders. Your broad back didn’t
flinch when the scissors’ legs twitched,
when I wanted to cut more than you mimed.

PREMATURE OBITUARY

I pretend you’re dead.
I don’t let them say your name.
I was taught it’s impolite
to talk behind a dead man’s back.

I wear black four months and ten days.

I smell your clothes before
hand washing, bagging,
and then giving them away.
I don’t give your mother a thing.

I pray for what’s left of you.

I stack the wedding ring, all the rings
you gave me on my right hand,
my proclamation that you are no longer
with us or like us, the living, listening.

I tell myself what I tell myself
to keep from going back.

PAPER COTTON LEATHER: “The specter of divorce haunts Sadre-Orafai’s debut, although Paper, Cotton, Leather is much more than a lyrical response to loss. Paper, Cotton, Leather is an instruction manual for the amateur anthropologist, the domestic ghost-hunter, and the doomsday prepper. In ‘Retract or Recant,’ Sadre-Orafai writes: ‘I was taught curve into the slide/when spinning on frozen road.’ This is exactly what Paper, Cotton, Leather can teach us: how to navigate the heart’s switchbacks, how to survive a spin-out on its loneliest back roads.” —Shelley Puhak, author of Guinevere in Baltimore (From the Press 53 website.)

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of four poetry chapbooks—Weed Over Flower (Finishing Line Press), What Her Hair Says About Her (H_NGM_N Books), Dressing the Throat Plate (Finishing Line Press), and Avoid Disaster (Dancing Girl Press). Her poetry has appeared in H_NGM_N, Gargoyle, Rhino, Redivider, PANK, Mount Hope, Sixth Finch, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, and other journals. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Los Angeles Review, South Loop Review, and The Rumpus. She co-founded and co-edits the literary journal Josephine Quarterly. She lives in Atlanta and is an Associate Professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

Editor’s Note: Reading Paper, Cotton, Leather is like reading a diary written in achingly executed lyric. The compact, controlled poems function almost ironically; tiny scaffolding straining beneath the pressure of massive weight and breadth. The poems are honest. Fiercely, unapologetically honest. Surely it took no small amount of courage for the poet to sift through the wreckage of her failed marriage and catalogue its failures for us in verse.

In the poem “Fortune,” Sadre-Orafai writes, “Our pictures live in a box marked / THE PAST in my parents’ garage.” Each poem reads like its own discreet picture from that box. Vignettes of trying, failing, moving on, and learning to let go. Together those pictures—these poems—tell a story. This book is carefully held by a narrative arc that gives the illusion that we might piece together the end of this marriage like a puzzle. And yet, You know nothing, Jon Snow. This is an expertly crafted book of poems, not a memoir. We are left only with what the poet chooses to reveal. With what poetry is perhaps best at conveying. A selection of life’s moments as if through lens and shutter. Emotion. Regret and loss and heartache. Experience that finds a kindred spirit in the reader. This is a book that one reads to remember that life’s trials are universal, that we are not alone.

We are not alone. So many of us know, or have known, love like an accordion, squeezing out warnings, wheezing and transforming into gone love. “Cutting Your Hair” recalls Delilah, in all her power, destroying her lover. So, too, does that recollection call forth Regina Spektor (who is quoted in one of the book’s epigrams) in her song “Sampson”: “I cut his hair myself one night, a pair of dull scissors in the yellow light.” In this manner one can read Paper, Cotton, Leather like an archaeologist, dusting away layers to discern history, or, as Shelley Puhak suggests, like an anthropologist, observing humanity, past and present. So how does the poet pick herself up, dust herself off, and move into the future? In the most human way imaginable: striving and imperfect. “I pretend you’re dead. / I don’t let them say your name.” “I smell your clothes before / hand washing, bagging, / and then giving them away.” “I tell myself what I tell myself / to keep from going back.”

Want to see more from Jenny Sadre-Orafai?
Buy Paper, Cotton, Leather from Press 53
Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Official Website
Jenny Sadre-Orafai on As It Ought To Be

Daniela Olszewska: A Micro-Interview and Three Poems

Posted on September 4, 2014 by asitoughttobemagazine

Okla Elliott: What difficulties did you encounter writing a book entirely centered around one character?

Daniela Olszewska: I started making the poems that became Citizen J while I was an undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago (so, somewhere around 2005). Originally, the character of J was known as Jane Doe and she was an autobiographical-ish twentysomething who lived in Chicago. As I became older and (slightly) less solipsistic, I became more interested in making Jane/J less a reflection of myself and more of an Etch-a-Sketchable character I could ab/use to show off the images in my head associated with my concerns over gender, sexuality, citizenship, careerism, and terrorism. Poetry gave me the permission to ignore linear narratives; it allowed me to essentially re-write the character of J whenever I wanted. This story had to be in poem form; I could not have showed all the things I want to show if I was trapped in a novel.

OE: Did your Polish heritage play into the creation of Citizen J? Did it inspire the Soviet-style atmosphere of the book?

DO: Absolutely. I was born in Wrocław, but I was raised in Chicago by my American mom. Growing up, I would see my Polish father and his maniac ex-Solidarity nationalist friends 3-4x a month. This was just enough exposure to ingrain some sense of the horrors of Soviet Satellite Statehood, and these terrors have definitely stayed with me in adulthood and spilled into most of my writing. Also, while I was in the process of writing Citizen J, I had this misfortunate notion that I should get a masters degree in Slavic Languages and Literature, so I was also consuming a shit ton of Soviet-era media during the writing of these poems. After finishing Citizen J, I became aware of the work by this Russian fashion designer named Ulyana Sergeenko. Her Fall 2012 collection is basically Citizen J in couture form: http://www.style.com/fashionshows/complete/F2012CTR-ULYANA I wish I had known about her while I was writing the book; I would have tried to include pictures of her dresses at the start of each new chapter.

OE: What current projects are you working on or that are forthcoming?

DO: I’ve been doing a lot of writing with/about/against the Internet. In June, I had an e-chap come out from NAP. Its name is THIRTEENZ and it chronicles my attempts to run my favorite parts of Emily Dickinson through an LOLCats translator. Interested and/or concerned citizens can find it here: http://napnapnaps.com/post/88325873183/thirteenz.

Last month, a book of prose poems I co-wrote with the awesomepants Carol Guess came out from Black Lawrence Press. The book is called How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents and its writings are inspired by articles from the user-generated content advice site, WikiHow. Curious citizens can trade their dollars for a hard copy of the book by going here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781625579041/default.aspx.

I’m currently working on two projects. One is a small collection of confessional-ish poems about a bad break-up (groundbreaking territory for a poet…). The poems are formatted to look as if they have been written in Tumblr’s text post box and I’ve been having a lot of fun coming up with hashtags for each of the pieces. I am also working on a collection of short fictions “narrated” by various Men’s Rights Activists (it’s a comedy…).

***

from CITIZEN J

in the midst of dressing
up to go messing up

the magistrate’s new
motorcade, j takes to

the motion that the insides
of her toasters are miked.

she goes to consult her pet
magic mirror, but he looks

miked too—wired to heads
that can store more than

the traditional three minutes’
worth of incriminating

soundbite. thus, j resolves
to take distance, to make

haste w/ignition
+ several cans of firewerks.

***

from CITIZEN J

we caught j w/the help
of earnest accessory,

we made certain to make

eye contact. when j saw
the sheriffs ranging down

in zealously-patterned
ties, she tossed
her free lunch +++

++=instructed the fire
escape part of her

brain to shrink
to a little bigger

than miniature,
a little bigger than cell.

***

from CITIZEN J

j rendezvouses with him in public restroom and mid-sized luxury sedans. he is all gussied in ascot and champagne cork heel. speciously complimenting j’s proliferation skills as he slides a stirrup around her hot hot holster. nobody is giving anybody a heaveho tonight. casually, j twists his loose mammal skin into a party favor shape. an heir to a tin can telephone empire, he has always been an expert at getting his people to the front of the breadline. they have so many levels and layers in common. tenderly, he suggests they hire someone to hold her hair back while she’s working. it was never nothing personal. yet j aspires to one day be on his side of the business. she wants ambulances to chase her for a change. she wants, she says, to be able to act as if she is at least as infamous as him.

What Is a Zombie: Meat Consumption and the Advent of the Automobile

by Gabriel Gudding

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An Unnecessary Defense of William T. Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories

by Jordan A. Rothacker

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