Author: asitoughttobemagazine

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: UNDRESSING

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from UNDRESSING
By Nicole Steinberg


BEAUTY

is a ritual, passed
along in slow drags
of the fingers—foundation
swept across cheekbones
in runny smears, stark
beige until it blends.
Salt, pepper, and ashtrays;
we keep the kitchen
warm with smoke and
sweet, still-wet hair.
A silver lipstick tube
rolls ribbed between us.
One day I’ll carry
your bones in sacks.
I’ll remember cotton
pressed into your eyes
and up your nostrils. I’ll be
sorry they ever listened,
when I said I wanted
to see you that way.
You switch to violet
lips after some years,
which clash with your
bleached hair. I miss
the old burgundy outline.
Draw lines to prevent
bleeding, you once explained.
Hold back the color
of your mouth and
every careless thing
it wants to say.


MY DARK, SEMITIC WILES

I took my dark, Semitic wiles on the road.
The train was empty and that was lovely,
everywhere an open space. En route to Berlin,
I held the bathroom mirror and spoke
to my mother, foreign leaves of foreign trees
and the conductor’s garbled nothings
blurred above my head. She thinks I’m going
to get myself killed. Lost forever. I remember
a straight-haired little girl at the kindergarten
table with eyeglasses as petite as her pink
Polly Pocket. I crushed them in my fat hand,
arranged the lozenge lenses next to the legs,
purple plastic bird femurs. Like chicken,
I picked it apart. My fellow passengers,
the unwed Jewess rides among you, come
to tour your capital of tragedy. Love me
out of guilt like an unborn sister, a mother’s
final scowl before death, the very nose
on your face you’d hack off just to belong.


THERE IS NO ROMANTIC

Truly, everything is monstrous,
even wild horses and especially
their heads. The tree trunk necks
of boys who finish sandwiches
in three bites and the impatient
lumps that harden in their freshly
bleached briefs. We’re all so warm
and pink, it’s obscene. I don’t want any
part of it. It took me years to learn
simple tasks: how to snap my fingers,
tie my shoes. My mother’s early gaze
full of worry that love would escape
me, too. If I peel back my breast, I’ll find her
passport heart, stamps still smeared
from all the quailing in Queens, the tears
in Tel Aviv. She taught me this: the way
a woman travels, under a moving
shadow of small panic; all too aware
that even a plane about to crash,
for one bright, myopic moment,
will fill completely with the sun.


Today’s poems are from Undressing, published by dancing girl press, copyright © 2014 by Nicole Steinberg, and appear here today with permission from the poet. “There is No Romantic” previously appeared via 30 x Lace, and “My Dark, Semitic Wiles” previously appeared via Leveler.


Nicole Steinberg is the author of Getting Lucky, now available from Spooky Girlfriend Press, Birds of Tokyo (dancing girl press, 2011), and two new chapbooks in 2014: Undressing from dancing girl press and Clever Little Gang from Furniture Press, winner of the 4X4 Chapbook Award. She is also the editor of an anthology, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011).

Editor’s Note: I love chapbooks. And small presses. And books that are little works of art to hold in your hands, open, and immerse yourself in. Undressing is such a book; one of 200+ books made to date by dancing girl press, which publishes titles “by emerging women poets in delectable open-run handmade editions.” Delectable. Yes. From its beautiful cover art to its textured binding and hand-cut pages, this is the kind of creation that can never be replaced by an ebook.

Within its pages, Undressing is just that. The poet sheds her veils like Salome, stripping off not only clothes, but skin, revealing the raw bits of flesh and bone, organ and memory, that comprise an inner life. At times Nicole Steinberg looks at herself critically, as a woman does when considering her reflection in a mirror, her point of view filtered through a smog of American cultural misogyny. At other times Steinberg puts on the dress of her mother, of illness and loss, of the guilt and introspection and distortion that remains.

Amidst a maelstrom of pop culture, feminism, religion, sex, relationships, and memory, there is something hectic in these poems, like the pile of clothes at the foot of a bed. But amidst the torrent there are moments in which the poet forces us to slow down and face the reality she unveils head on. There are lines so poignant they wash over their more topical surroundings, forcing us to breathe and remember we are engaged with an artifact: “Draw lines to prevent / bleeding, you once explained. / Hold back the color / of your mouth and / every careless thing / it wants to say.” “She taught me this: the way / a woman travels, under a moving / shadow of small panic; all too aware / that even a plane about to crash, for one bright, myopic moment, / will fill completely with the sun.”

Want to see more from Nicole Steinberg?
Nicole Steinberg’s Official Blog
Buy Undressing and Birds of Tokyo from dancing girl press
Buy Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens on Amazon

Poem to My Boyfriend’s Immunodeficiency Virus

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Poem to My Boyfriend’s Immunodeficiency Virus

by Chip Livingston

you are not related to the bowerbird
nor crow nor any bird noted for magnificent plumage
you are not paradisaea apoda, not paradise minor
the king you are not
you are not a place where you can hear live jazz
seven days a week
you are not an island native

you are a shy bloomer
with neither petal nor sepal
not tough, not easily grown
not tolerant of his soil

you are not a family resort
dedicated to making a truly pleasurable vacation
not prized for dramatic display
you are not a charming villa
located on the hillside of bordeaux
you are not a small bird very near the beach

you are not a must
you are not fast growing
you are not a boat

you are forgotten, sterile
not licensed or insured
to cater our parties
you are not more of a bush not even a seed
you are not wild and free
you are not the cinematic equivalent
of one of those island falls

you are closed until further notice
you are not poised to soar
to heights in joyful praise
you are not driving ma crazy
not the scene for the morning breakfast buffet
you are not easily seen from a treetop
you are not reliably evergreen

***

Chip Livingston is the author of the story collection, NAMING CEREMONY (Lethe Press, 2014), and two collections of poetry, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK (NYQ Books, 2012) and MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS (Gival Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, New American Writing, Court Green, Mississippi Review, and on the Poetry Foundation website. Chip teaches creative writing in the low-rez MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts. Visit his website at www.chiplivingston.com. (The above poem initially appeared in Art and Understanding, is included in CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK, and is reprinted here with permission of the author.)

Taking Shade with Buddha

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Taking Shade with Buddha

by Mark Murphy

Of all the dense vegetation in this wild country
I have come to take shade with Buddha
(though he is equally at ease in sun or shadow)
under the bent branches of the Bodhi tree.

Frankly, it is not the best spot to make camp,
break the night’s fast,
or break the habits of a life-time
but Buddha seems at home, like a man who has lived

irreverent aeons alone – he makes a welcome as only he can –
confident of my comings and goings, naked
as one new born, sure that living is its own answer,
he offers figs for my hunger.

Slowly then, Buddha savours the morning air
as though it were sustenance enough
while the first light bakes the land
and each man and beast in the field is busy with the crop.

Already, I am in at the deep-end with my questions:
what if the knowledge of trees is no knowledge at all –
and if the trees should support the sky no more,
and the deliberate hush in the night really is the end, then what?

But Buddha is having none of it. And indeed, why should he trouble,
being at one, as he is, with forest, sky and the hallowed ground.
And by and by a talkative brook bothers the shadows
and Buddha is smiling – pleased at the sound of water on stone.

For an instant, he is like a child who has found his mother’s hand
in some crowded place and then a moment later
he is old all over again like a being who has lived many lives.
Buddha breathes deeply. He breathes in the universe.

 

***

Mark A. Murphy is the author of two chapbooks, Tin Cat Alley and Our Little Bit of Immortality. Murphy’s poems have been published in over 100 magazines and ezines in 17 different countries world wide. His first full length collection, Night-watch Man & Muse was published in November 2013 from Salmon Poetry (Eire). He is currently working on a new play, Lenny’s Wake for which he is looking for a publisher.

A Review of Jade Sylvan’s Kissing Oscar Wilde

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Slyvan_Kissing Oscar Wilde

A Review of Jade Sylvan’s Kissing Oscar Wilde

By Ashley Paul

Kissing Oscar Wilde by Jade Sylvan is a collection of essays that will cause readers to lose their breath in wide-eyed expression. in particular because of Sylvan’s excellent use of tongue-in-cheek writing within each piece in this collection.

The essays in Kissing Oscar Wilde detail Sylvan’s life after college and the reading of her written work at various clubs and cafés across Europe. The essays create a visual of crashing couches at the home of new friends along with the progression of Sylvan as an artist. What is the allure of artists leaving the Midwest? A question most curious because of Sylvan’s Midwestern roots and inspiration to travel the world to immerse herself in what is being offered. A question also answered in her search to attain creative ability.

Whether delivered in the form of poetry, play, or prose, each essay is well written and showcases Slyvan’s unique voice. The poems are a stream of consciousness pulled deep from her mind. She does not have an airy approach to life and is more of artistic, experimental, thrill-seeker alongside friends Caleb and Thade, who are integral parts of each essay.

In the prose piece, “We’ll Always Have Paris,” contemporary meets modern. Internet. Nicholas Chauvin. Casablanca. Patti Smith. In the piece, Sylvan talks of her need to leave the Midwest and her conservative parents who said she was “confusingly artistic at the best of times and embarrassingly perverse at the worst.” She would sit with Caleb under a graffitied bridge and talk about their fears and every artist’s doom: having to work a 9-5. It was there, under the bridge, that she gained the desire to visit “different famous people’s graves.”

Sylvan’s awkwardness is beguiling, leaving the reader with an image of Sylvan shrugging her shoulders as she tells her stories, of telling us, “Eff it.” But spirits can’t be much more free than Sylvan’s. These essays become the words of an older sister telling us what or what not to do, which mistakes we want to make. Her words are a comfort, too, because maybe we’ve already been there.

Sylvan is not shy in disclosing to readers her fear of becoming suffocated by not being able to create art. Plenty of people can look back on their twenties and tell the same stories, but the decisions Sylvan makes and recounts for readers here present a twist on that recognizable narrative, an inspiration for trying something new. In “Halloween 2011, Boston,” Sylvan goes on a semi-rant after losing a job she never wanted. She does not even tell us what the job was, but she explains the context of her disappointment in this way: “Because I’d woken up again sweating bourbon into unwashed sheets in my ten-foot by ten-foot occupation in a house rented to me dirt-cheap by an entrepreneurial acquaintance out of pity/patronage….” Sylvan writes here with hardly any punctuation, showing readers the unfiltered fluidity of her thoughts that lead to her eventual decision to take half of her $1500 savings and buy a plane ticket to France, where she goes on to read most of her written work.

The essays have the commonality of not being rooted in plot. There is a reflection that comes through where the work does not follow the standard of fashioned essay writing. Her footnotes are an afterthought to a life well experienced. The essays detail everything from Patti Smith to how to be a “proper slut,” where Sylvan’s writing crescendos to worldly living. Patti Smith was of inspiration because of her book Just Kids and Sylvan’s subsequent emotional response. Sylvan writes of a joke between her and her friend Caleb that she was the Patti Smith to his Robert Mapplethorpe. Sylvan even brings her idolization into her physical appearance, with a “shoulder-length Patti Smith-inspired shag.”

Sylvan, who founded a group for queer artists in Bloomington during her college years, writes of her pansexual history and gender nonconformity as a vehicle that highlights her growth as an artist. In “An Epically-Abridged Catalogue of the Author’s Major Romances, Revealing the Young Midwestern Author’s Odyssey Through Fluid Sexuality,” Sylvan memorably shares her intimate experiences within the context of how her own identity is thus established.

Sylvan explains her connection to Oscar Wilde through the kisses people have put on his grave. Later in the collection, she writes of her own experience with kissing the grave. Sylvan delves even more into these ideas with “The Poem I Wrote For Louis and Later Gave To Adelaide,” as well as with the poem “Kissing Oscar Wilde.” The title of the collection does not quite compliment the corresponding essay, but maybe there is an irony to that. The title is romantic, a side-step from the tone of the essays themselves.

With in an intriguing title illuminating a work of nonfiction that fits fantasy and downright rearranges all forms of comedy, primarily sarcasm, readers will find many spontaneous moments of laughter make the lungs feel harmonious. This book could be finished in a single sitting, but readers will want to savor each word, marinating in the details. The chronology of Jade Sylvan’s story hits in small ripples that are uniquely brushed with tender attention, asking readers to lend that same attention as they take in her excellent work.

Jade Sylvan, Kissing Oscar Wilde. Write Bloody Publishing, 2013: $15.00.

***

Ashley Paul lives for a dried ink pen. Her blog, Harvey Dntd The Milk, details her love of film in all its glory. She is passionate about working with students on their personal development through education. Soon to begin pursuing a Master’s in School Counseling at New York University, Paul currently happily volunteers to help first graders spell “home” and third graders tackle shapes. Through 826LA, a non-profit writing organization, Paul works with high school students in under-resourced schools to help individuals develop reading-comprehension and writing-expression skills, and it makes her feel spectacular.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: THE BURDEN OF LIGHT

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from THE BURDEN OF LIGHT: POEMS ON ILLNESS AND LOSS
Edited by Tanya Chernov
Selected Poems From the Anthology By Sivan Butler-Rotholz:



ELEGY FOR THE STILL LIVING:
FATHER CANNOT STAND STILL

[My father taught me] every time you breathe in,
say thank you. Every time you breathe out, say goodbye.
                                                                             —Li-Young Lee

The thing about my father is I wear my sadness like the inside of a jar.
How can you not see inside of it? How the slightest bit of air destroys me.
How I love him so much          I struggle

                           to love him

                                                                    at all.



GENESIS

i. The thing is, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and in this way the world was created.

ii. Definitions

“Wife”:           The person I love most
                         in the world.

“Death”:         He is not here
                         in this hole
                         in the ground
                         piled with dirt
                         and seashells.

“Mother”:       Inlaid tongue.

“Wedding”:    When I was young I liked to play ‘wedding’ and my father would walk me                          down the aisle and it’s a good thing he did then because
                         Flowers are like that.

“How”:            We go on

“Flowers”:      Are not stones.

“One God”:     Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.



Today’s poems are from The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, available by donation on Smashwords and Amazon. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.


The Burden of Light: Part poetry anthology, part field guide, part multimedia art collection, The Burden of Light offers its readers companionship through the darkest days. With work by artists who have confronted serious illness or grief in their own lives, the poems and artwork in these pages hold the power to touch the heart, stir the mind, and heal the spirit, each in its own way. These pieces illuminate the vital force of our humanity, while encouraging us to reach out to others in need.

With 100% of the proceeds benefiting the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, even a small donation from one has the power to affect change when added to the contributions of others. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in America, yet this cancer is largely preventable when detected early. By supporting the groundbreaking work of the NCCRA, we’re all helping to promote regular medical screening and fund the research needed to develop better tests, treatments, and ultimately, a cure. Just as The Burden of Light is designed to help readers move forward from trauma, so too will donations help those currently experiencing serious illness.


Editor’s Note: Yes, yes, today’s poems are a first here on the Saturday Poetry Series in that they are written by your faithful editor. I am honored to be featured in this anthology alongside a plethora of talented artists, including SPS-beloved poet Peggy Shumaker. But beyond sharing a little of my own work with you here for the first time, I wanted to share with you this important collection.

Whether you purchase it for your Kindle or download it as a PDF, you get to decide how much you want to pay for this anthology, and 100% of the proceeds benefit the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance. Via the Kindle edition or PDF you will find links to listen to the poets read their poems aloud, for an added layer of experience and immersion. This is a thoughtful, powerful, philanthropic endeavor with the power to both move the reader and effectuate change.

Check out the full anthology for more poems by yours truly and many more talented poets writing through their own experiences with illness and grief. Please donate what you can, and then go forth and read!


Want more from The Burden of Light?
Download the PDF via Smashwords
Purchase the Kindle edition from Amazon
Listen to “Elegy for the Still Living: Father Cannot Stand Still”
Listen to “Genesis”

Because Misogyny

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Because Misogyny

By

Kirsten Clodfelter

 

Because misogyny: Elliot Rodger.

Because misogyny: Every man who Elliot Rodger calls to mind. Every man who has let the whistled catcall of hot momma morph in his mouth to stuck-up bitch when that tried-and-true method of objectifying a complete stranger fails to get him laid. Every man who has complained of being friend-zoned as if the act of being decent – as if the act of simply treating a woman like a human being – is all it might take.

Because misogyny: Equality as radical. Empowerment as weapon. Feminist as feminazi. At some point, doesn’t a lifetime of incidents of domestic violence, of rape, of murder, of torture, of withholding count as its own Holocaust? The terror George W. was hunting to finally justify that war?

Because misogyny: Filmmakers Woody Allen and Roman Polanski are lionized as their own type of victims. Misunderstood. Brilliance over ethics. Over empathy. Art as disassociation. As inculpable.  Steubenville mourns ruined football careers. Playboy lauds Neko Case only as a woman in music.

Because misogyny: A talented, well-meaning poet attempts to process trauma through art and gifts a new voice to the wrong protagonist of this story.

Because misogyny: A friend posts an article on Isla Vista, and someone comments, “Come on, ladies, take one for the team,” as if women weren’t just murdered over a man’s sense of entitlement. Have ever been murdered over a man’s sense of entitlement. As if a person’s right to humor obviously trumps a person’s right to safety. To comfort. But actually, not really person. Woman.

Because misogyny: A comedian co-opts #YesAllWomen at our expense without bothering to be subversive or challenging or even funny, and when these jokes fall flat, are returned in echo, these men recoil at the thought of reflection and rush to fill the silence with their own extraordinary reasoning, take solace in the certainty that they are the exception, never the rule.

Because misogyny: An older male colleague whose name I don’t know finds me in an adjunct office one afternoon, my belly ripe and low-hanging and nearly ready for the picking as I organize papers before class. He takes a long look at my ring finger – bare – before he asks, Is the father in the picture? I am too stunned to smile, to extend my hand for a strong shaking, to chirp through my teeth that, where I come from, we usually just start with hello. Instead I nod and choke the yes from my throat to his brightening. That’s good. His approval offered as a talisman, the balloon of relief inflated almost to bursting, as if the whole of my daughter’s personhood, her very legitimacy, is tied to this. As if there is nothing worse he could imagine for my child than the thought of me raising her on my own.

Because misogyny: My kind-hearted, pro-equality father comes to visit and still occasionally says things like, Sometimes you just have to shut up and let a woman pick the curtains, like there is one secret, and this is it. Nevermind that in our cramped apartment, curtains are a luxury. Nevermind that a blanket – gifted to me a decade ago for my high school graduation – hangs covering our daughter’s bedroom window. Nevermind that it’s my partner, the dad, who most often sits with our toddler to fix her hair, who possesses the fashion expertise for best pairing her cute, coordinated outfits, who successfully executes DIY home-décor projects he scores from Pinterest while my own crafting attempts usually disintegrate rapidly into unrecognizable piles of hot glue and yarn.

Because misogyny: That my partner does these things for our daughter, that he makes pancakes good enough to put your favorite hole-in-the-wall diner breakfast to shame, that he doesn’t hesitate to run the vacuum, that he asks my opinion and considers my feelings in front of others – sometimes earns him less-than-favorable labels. Whipped. Weak. Pussy. Because that’s the greatest insult we can think of: To tell a man he’s acting like the lesser sex – like a fucking woman.

Because misogyny: We are asked often if we’re going to try for a boy. Not if we’d like to have more kids, but specifically this, because no matter how hilarious or adorable or delightful our daughter is, no matter how much love we lavish or how big our hearts swell or how soft our voices go when we talk about her, that pronoun must in some way indicate that she might still not be enough for us.

Because misogyny: Men who meet the minimum expectation of how to treat other human beings feel charged to speak up for themselves when these daily injustices finally grow into too heavy a burden for us to carry quietly, as if it’s they who are oppressed, rushing to remind us it’s #NotAllMen, because it’s easier when there’s distance, easier to step back or away than to lean in, easier to act as aggressor than ally.

Because misogyny: I’ve heard, But he was drunk, as if it is an absolution.

Because misogyny: I’ve heard, But she was drunk, as if it is an absolution.

Because misogyny: Before there was a sweet baby or a partner who lifts me up with his kindness, a man who was once my husband felt entitled to hide our car keys or laptop from me during arguments. To throw dishes or destroy my things as if this was a fair compromise for keeping his hands off of me. As if there was still so much for which I should have been grateful. And it was this entitlement that finally called our friends forward to share – with concern, hesitation – that from the mouth of the man who had vowed his love, and always, I was a worthless waste of space, dumb, a child. This entitlement is pervasive, endemic, impossible to escape. It is here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. So many heres that there isn’t enough time or space to name even the smallest fraction. So many heres that my own barely make a dent. Are hardly worth blinking an eye over.

Because misogyny: A mutual friend once visited in the middle of the day and told me to pack a bag and come with her, worried that I was no longer safe living with the husband. Of escalation. Days later, she explained that his mother – a woman I both trusted and adored – had heard the charge of verbally and emotionally abusive in my kitchen and waited until I’d left the room to whisper her own solution: I needed to grow up, to stop acting like such a baby. C’mon, ladies. Take one for the team.

But I won’t.

***

Kirsten Clodfelter holds an MFA from George Mason University. She has contributed writing to The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, storySouth, and The Good Men Project, among others. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last year by RopeWalk Press and is now available for Kindle. Clodfelter writes and lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and their awesome, hilarious daughter. KirstenClodfelter.com, @MommaofMimo

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MEGAN MORIARTY

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Moriarty Author Photo

LOOKING AT US LIVING
By Megan Moriarty

Through the binoculars, we saw us
moving through the foliage.

The world was on rewind:
a herd of horses ran
backwards across a field.

Yellow leaves kept climbing back
to their branches.

“What’s the opposite of fall?” I said,
and he said “Spring.”

Then it was August, then July,
then June. The sun kept
leaving and coming back

like a boomerang that no one
ever had to throw.

Snow appeared
on the ground, then it started
unsnowing, the flakes
travelling upwards.

I knew that soon
we wouldn’t know each other

so I asked him
what the opposite
of stay is.

He stood there,
his hands on his hips, thinking.


Today’s poem was published in the Summer 2011 issue of Rattle, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Megan Moriarty grew up surrounded by water in Staten Island, New York and currently finds herself surrounded by mountains in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech and is the author of From the Dictionary of Living Things, a collection of dictionary definition poems.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is magic, full of fantastical invention and a vivid, playful story life. I am reminded of the work of Nicolas Destino, a beloved poet here on As It Ought To Be. What wonder, what imagination, what playfulness of concept, what love of ideas mirrored in the written word.

Want to read more by Megan Moriarty?
Buy From the Dictionary of Living Things from Finishing Line Press
Indiana Review
Vinyl Poetry
Jointed Autumn

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LOUISE MATHIAS

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Louise Desert headshot

THE PROBLEM OF HANDS
By Louise Mathias

And how to fill them
is the problem of cigarettes and paint.

First time I felt my undoing
was in front of

a painting—Sam Francis, I believe.

Oh, his bloomed out, Xanax-ed California.

I liked the word guard, but you know

we made each other
nervous, standing too close

for everyone concerned. All art being

a form of violence
as a peony
is violence.

Here you come

with your open hands.


Today’s poem previously appeared via the Academy of American Poets and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Louise Mathias grew up in England and Los Angeles. She is the author of two books of poems, Lark Apprentice, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize, and The Traps, released in 2013 from Four Way Books. She lives in Joshua Tree, a small town in California’s Mojave Desert.

Editor’s Note: As my faithful readers of this series know, I am a sucker for a poem with a killer ending. In today’s piece, it is the penultimate moment that takes my breath away: “All art being // a form of violence / as a peony / is violence.” What a stunning phrase. Followed by the gift of release, of promise: “Here you come // with your open hands.”

Once again I have Dr. Poet Jenny Stella to thank for bringing today’s poem to my attention. Viva la poesia!

Want to read more by Louise Mathias?
Verse Daily
The Traps from Four Way Books
The Rumpus
The Offending Adam
Everyday Genius

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ROSE NIELSEN

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theresa1


WATER-WITCH
By Rose Nielsen

As April mist blew chill against the rocky beach,
the wishing pines, the trembling birch and cedars
leaned out as if to catch a glimpse of Mary Lake’s
ice petticoat swept to shore on last night’s tempest.

Divining rod in hand, stem pointing at the lake,
Y hugging at my hips, I felt no tug;
I thought the misty air, the soggy forest floor
must be too drenched to dowse a single source.

But when I looked again and saw the leaning birches
reach out their limbs, each one a pair of arms
held out to greet the lake, I turned the stem to point
toward me and felt the tug as it divined a hidden spring.


Today’s poem appears here today with permission from the poet.


Rose Nielsen is a writer, poet, musician, and a physical therapist in a small mountain town in British Columbia, Canada. She also teaches biology and English at the local community college. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared or will be appearing in RiverLit and CV2; and she is working on a novel and on a collection of poems about water and the bonds humans hold with it.

Editor’s Note: Rose Nielsen’s poetry reminds me of Alaska’s Poet Laureate, Peggy Shumaker, a favorite here on this series. These poets share a love of the interconnectivity of nature and the written word. Simple, yet rich, and working on the micro level, with sounds lulling and inspiring us, with images clear as if painted by brushstroke.

As tomorrow is Mother’s Day, I dedicate today’s selection to my Mama. The woman who taught me the wonders of water, witchcraft, nature, and poetry alike. For my mother, and for Mother Earth, the Great Mother of us all.

Want to read more by Rose Nielsen?
River Lit

Sentience Matters: Farmed Animals as Hypothetical Beings — A Thought Experiment

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Our Fellow Drivers As the Analogs of Animals

by

Gabriel Gudding

 

We project onto our fellow drivers some variance or subset of deficiency: a malignancy, a stupidity, a naivety, a cognitive primitivism, an imbalance of emotion – even a subjectless egoism and a moral insufficiency. And sometimes just a flatness of being: such that when they are not malign or annoying or stupid, other drivers are to us simply drab, ignorable.

If at a stop sign our fellow driver delays too long, it’s as if he somehow becomes responsible for damaging a part of our datebook. If he broaches his turn too early, moves out of order, causes gridlock by the selfish insertion of his car into the crux of an intersection, or if he otherwise does this or that selfish thing to ensure his own timely departure from a tangle while deepening the entanglement of others, what does he become for us?

The being in the car becomes more or less stupid. And since the creature is somehow both mindless yet competent enough to drive, she has to be cunning; and as she’s cunning she must be greedy, impatient, and petulant. The driver, in short, becomes a jackass. And though she’s freighted with her own disability, and her car is anchored by the weight of the gargantuan idiot inside it, her automobile somehow moves. Eppur si muove.

And despite the fact that these idiots manage to fare forward, reverse, accomplish the turn, and are able, while piloting a shining 3,000 pound craft at great speed, to not strike my car or thunder onto someone’s lawn or burst through a store front, off a bridge, or smear children across a schoolyard – we still think them dense. Despite their being, in short, preternaturally skilled at least at avoiding that always potentiate cascade of errors that’ll result in the taking of life, despite their being human and in many cases able to afford cars far more expensive than ours, they are still base, stupid, and selfish. And how much patience must these drivers possess immersed in a clanking river of flat metallized beings? It has to be substantial, each one of them melded in by a funneled herd of imbeciles with whom she cannot communicate except by an occasional, desperate hand gesture, or the monotone blat of a horn. So even though the being piloting the vehicle has a strong measure of personhood, has a not insufficient modicum of patience, has a calendar, an appointment, a disease, a watch, a family, a conviction, an income, and certainly a mind, this driver whose face and body we cannot see, has a flatness, has an existential drabness, is stupid, an annoyance, an obstacle, a thing.

How is it that by merely cloaking the human body in sheet metal, hiding the shapes and movements of this person’s body and face, we can so readily animalize members of our own species?

Is that question not instructive? If we can with such facility do this to members of our own species, famed (among ourselves anyway) for our brilliance, by erecting a painted sheet of shaped metal between us, think about how easily — and how erroneously — we’ll do this to others who are hidden behind the varying shapes of their very bodies, their skin kinds, their fur types.

Consider how many cognitive and biographic characteristics we cannot perceive about nonhuman animals but know they must have. Think about the astounding things they can do and make, the kinds of courage and types of awareness they must possess, the pains and sorrows they must suffer, but for which we give them so little credit. And now consider how many characterizations we project onto those nonhumans who are most exposed to our brutality, farmed animals, who suffer under us in their supposedly foreign and unfortunate shapes, with their supposedly dim and uncaring minds, and whose worries and hopes are hidden even deeper in the cognitive shadows behind their brows.

We treat other animals like we do our fellow drivers: as flat and hypothetical beings. A hypothetical being is one that we can see exists but whose existence is insufficient in itself to merit full inclusion in our attentional space, insufficient because it does not to us have an interesting mind. And it does not have an interesting mind because it stands in the way of our wants. Instead of recognizing our chauvinism, we would rather fill the entire world with hypothetical beings who are outright mindless, dull and stupid.

We are, in short, stupid about the stupidity and beauty of others. We well know there is something in us that can reduce our study of others, whether human or nonhuman, to the contemplation of their outer shape and locomotion. Small things of the human body have for us a colossal algebra: furrows in the lips, skin around the eyes, pigmentation in the cornea, translucence of the hair, smells of the torso and throat, thickness of the adipose tissues, the depths of the muscles, shapes of and on the skull, sounds made by the body, and the way a body creates meaning in its movements and via marks made by its hands. These minute differences can often determine which of these beings are for us merely hypothetical and which are friends and family and lovers. Isn’t that astounding? And though it is an algebra that has nothing to do with the worth of others as beings with bodily and mental sovereignty, we allow ourselves to be ruddered by flecks of skin and color, such that the ridiculous clutter of small forces arrayed across even the image of a human face or a human body is irresistible to us.

After being vegan for now four years, I still marvel at how readily humans underestimate the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhumans. This capacity for diminishing the inner lives of other beings has of course a material and ideological purpose in our contemporary world. Dairy farmers, for example, rationalize the practice of stealing newborn calves from their mothers by insisting that cow mothers, as one put it recently, “don’t give a second thought to their calf once it is out of their sight. We as dairy farmers, on the other hand, put a lot of thought into calf care.”[1] The effortlessness and triumphalism necessary to ascribe apathy to a mammalian mother while declaring, “on the other hand,” to care more for that calf (a calf he intends to kill) than her mother is as shocking as it is stupid.

If we can occasionally glimpse that we are this stupid and this erroneously begrudging about members of our own species, I wonder if we could consider how selfish and inane we are when we knowingly put our own pleasures before the needs, families, horrors and sorrows of the other beings whom we refuse to see as fellow travelers.

[1] David Heim. “Calf Care Part 1: Why Do Dairy Farmers Separate Calves from their Mothers?”

http://heimdairy.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/why-dairy-farmers-separate-cows-and-calves/