Author: asitoughttobemagazine

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: EMMALEA RUSSO

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from HINTERLAND + HEX
By Emmalea Russo

barefoot
+ hovering above

false dandelion
like a mother

say: women in
your family
are witches





the garden is winter-still at lunchtime          i fill the hours with something like hiding



         make order
from what was
bracken
                  glean
sheaf after sheaf
send them to the
clearing behind
the house which
is filling up fast





a neighbor painted her red barn white          how what’s under will seep through



between
mountain
garden                                                                                                                + wild field



metal fence
deer-proofed
hoof resistant





say:           we are small inside the fenced-in green          even deer think so



a weed isn’t

          “supposed to be there”

but what we dig out space for

          is

i’m not convinced        but you are

begin :                 to paint seeds

(summer’s over)           on canvas

someone says



couldn’t anyone
paint a seed
isn’t it a circle



i say

yep.



Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Emmalea Russo is a poet and visual artist. Recent work has appeared in ILK Journal and Wicked Alice and is forthcoming in Ambush Review and Yew Journal. She lives in New York City.

Editor’s Note: I was first drawn to today’s poem by Emmalea Russo’s invocation of women witches. Those women who are cloaked in the magical and the incantatory, who suffered historically at the hands of Christianity, patriarchy, and empire, and who have been avenged and reclaimed by feminism and the Feminine in modernity. But after reading and re-reading today’s piece, after allowing its seeds to sprout in realms both conscious and subconscious, I now know that the poet sums up the experience of this poem best when she writes, “how what’s under will seep through.”

Want to see more by and about Emmalea Russo?
Wicked Alice
Vinyl Poetry
em:me magazine (Editor: Emmalea Russo)

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KAT DIXON

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THE STREETS MAY TURN TO PAPER SUDDENLY
By Kat Dixon

I am neither shadow nor wife. I have no hand for painting
flowers nor how they fill any room or bedspread or plate

of meats for guests who come to fill my house and how
that happens. How unlucky to have a secret, women, how

unlucky it is to have. I have one broken finger
still but am no wife. Check through these windows at my

winter leaves: they are green with life. This pill-by-pill makes one
book and cowers. And so we are at home together, after hours.



Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Kat Dixon is the author of the poem-book Temporary Yes (Artistically Declined Press 2012). She lives in Atlanta, where she is currently completing her MA in American Studies. For more information, visit www.isthiskatdixon.com.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is rife with mysteries and darkness hidden just beneath its surface. I am fascinated by the two sides of the coin the poet offers—that one is either shadow or wife—and by the notion that a broken finger might be akin to wifely status. The cryptic and Gothic nature of the content of the poem is corroborated by its form, by the sing-song quality that invokes for readers a nursery rhyme—that same marriage of dark and light belonging to the Brothers Grimm and Mother Goose.

Want to see more by and about Kat Dixon?
Purchase Temporary Yes from Artistically Declined Press
Kat Dixon’s Official Website

Wolf-Sense Sonnet

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Wolf-Sense Sonnet

by Okla Elliott

 

I will walk you through the desert, all wolf-
wolf and blood-sandy paws. O smooth rapture
of elegant neck—O underwear hanging
on comic cactus—water-plant, prick-plant
of need. I will lead you through strange danger,
one million nights of apocalyptic lust.
Gone giddy, I’ll lick lasciviously
your Lilith lips, lunge, leap, and lie back down.

What am I saying? All sense has left me.
There’s a zero at the bottom of this pit.
There’s a note of desert music in us.
There’s no need of sense, only our senses.

You will walk me wolfily into new need,
and our oasic images will mirror-mirage.

***

This poem was previously published in South Dakota Review.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JUSTIN BELOTE

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ELEGY WITH NO ONE SPEAKING
By Justin Belote

Now that all the wasps are gone
and the hive is a silent town,
I can sleep out under this elm again.

*

I would like to explain how a house
someone has just been found hanging in
becomes different, as if the rooms widen and gape
yet hold less air. Outside
the gardenias darken in late afternoon
and sag in the rain. The light
landing on their petals is somehow unlike the light that lands
on the dead, but I don’t know why.
And above the white flowers a spider
can continue breathing quietly
and never know the difference.
its web, strung in a dogwood, waits for flies.

*

In 1981 my parents graduated from college.
Everything on the east coast
seemed quieter and heavier and naked.
All through August it was ninety and raining and I think
if my father had then stood perfectly still
before a tunnel full of wet leaves
and looked far into that darkness, he would never speak
again. But what I need to know is
when I’m fifty, will I remember how it felt
to be twenty-three and lonely in Boston?
Will I think of that park bench
and how all summer I counted the lights going out
in the apartments that surrounded me. The Charles
river to my back, dark and blind.

*

And, now, in this kitchen with its white curtains
and sink I watch an ant crawl on the table,
then up the window, and all I can be certain of is that
if I lean close enough to anything and close my eyes,
I can smell the dead. By winter
the snow will quiet everything
and teeth will blacken in their skulls
like mirrors that reflect the night. A night
that nobody owns, where the stars are a voiceless
closet that I could walk into thirty years from now,
folding a hanger carefully, and never walk out of.
And if you were to find me then
and turn and leave without ever looking up,
you would not notice the sky
and the black hole that opened and yawned over everything
as if it is a cold house that even silence
cannot escape.


Today’s poem previously appeared in The Cortland Review and appears here today with permission from the press and the poet.


Justin Belote is currently a MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. Some of his favorite poets are Larry Levis, Li-Young Lee, Ilya Kaminsky, Virginia Slachman, and Georg Trakl. He has been published in Adroit Journal and The Cortland Review, and has a poem appearing in Meade Magazine shortly.

Editor’s Note: I think if you were to type the word “lyric” into the search box in the upper right corner of this page the results would yield hundreds of entries in this Saturday Poetry Series. Why? Because I love the lyric. I am a defender of the lyric. Viva la lírica! Long live this tradition with tendrilic roots stretching back back to the first musical utterances of man and with gardenias blooming on the lips of poets like Justin Belote.

What do I love about the lyric? “I would like to explain how a house / someone has just been found hanging in / becomes different, as if the rooms widen and gape / yet hold less air. Outside / the gardenias darken in late afternoon / and sag in the rain. The light / landing on their petals is somehow unlike the light that lands / on the dead, but I don’t know why.” Need I say more?

Want to see more by and about Justin Belote?
Hear Justin Belote read today’s poem aloud at The Cortland Review
Justin Belote’s Official Blog
Some poems by Justin, featured on his blog

Andreas Economakis

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“Wall” (Photo by Andreas Economakis ©2012)

To A Deaf Person From A Blind Person

I thought I needed to gesticulate loudly
confusing my blindness with your deafness
no matter how much I danced
my suggestions fell on deaf eyes
blind ears
so I decided I’d sleep in the kitchen
the refrigerator hum my evening lullaby
a soft wooden bed
my milk bottle filled with beer
empty of beer
awake to the sound of my inner voice
and the sting of cold sweat on hot skin
the torture of tap water dripping
down my cardboard throat
running to catch up to something
I just can’t place my finger on
a boat that never reaches port
a plane I should be on
afraid
brakes that don’t seem to work
a dark ominous room
confused
and I wander outside and listen
to the harmony of dissonance
to the reason of chaos
the silence of sound
and nature
nature
not much to qualify there
and I come to realize
darkness flows on the inside
not the outside
like a molten river under rock
insipid
adding to the hardness up above
but laughter
laughter boils to the surface
along with happiness
but only
only if you’re fast enough to catch
the sly fucker

Nisyros (July, 2012)

Andreas Economakis

 
This piece is part of a collection of words on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life. The author is not a poet.
 
Copyright © 2012, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.
 
For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SABRINA HAYEEM-LADANI

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By Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani:


BATHROOM AT EAT-IN DELI ON 52ND STREET

He leaned against the porcelain sink
while I reached for him in the dark,
one hand on the cruddy tile wall, the other
at the root of it. A novice, I didn’t fall to my knees
as I had been told it was done, but instead
bended over at the hip, marionette puppet
with her jaw agape. I don’t remember asking myself
if I had wanted to do it—choice was not a language
my mouth had learned, but still I took him in
again and again. Took in everything
I itched to become, raced to the tower
of some blazing city, curled myself
around its lighthouses, morphed
like a strange creature keeping itself alive.
Then suddenly—
taste of copper, salty tip
blooming on my tongue,
alchemy of sweat and spit.
I took and took, labored
over what was broken, loved
what had been cast aside.
And in the taking,
there was reparation,
the shards of glass
finding each other
after the breaking.



HURRICANE IRENE

1.

I wake the morning of, run my hands
over the still water of my lover’s skin.
He tells me the story of how when he was a child
in the Philippines, the monsoon pulled him into the air
by his feet, lifted his miniature frame like a paper bird.
All I can do is turn into him, wonder
if the weight of my own body is enough to hold him.
But I am older now, and understand that gravity, not burden,
is necessary to love. Instead, I place wooden beads around his neck,
kiss his temple, send him out into the storm.

2.

All night the wind is a wolf.
The tree outside my window
knocks three times, scrapes her fingers
on the glass and waits. Come morning,
the stagnant air hovers like a fly stopped
above grass. The end or the eye of the storm?
It’s all relative they say.

3.

Irene, you left sixteen inches of water in my father’s wood shop, making him leave my mother alone with you while he went to pump the basement dry, caress the machines back to life and I imagine that instead of water, the basement is filled with all the whiskey and beer he has ever drunk in his life, and he is standing there waist-high in it, pumping the liquid onto the street, pumping for his life until there is nothing left but the machines, into which he places the engines he had removed the night before and they are humming again, and he is sawing wood and building new things, and the chips are flying and he is covered in sawdust and he can’t build fast enough, he can’t keep up with this newly found hunger to create which is now driving him and there is no more whiskey and there is only my father, his machines, his humming.

4.

The day after the storm mother calls
three times in one hour. When I finally answer,
her voice is an old 45 crackling before the next song.
Last night the pots and pans fell to the ground, she says.
Your father slept through the whole thing.



Today’s poems appear here with permission from the poet.


Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani: A native New Yorker, Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani has been a poet and performer for more than 15 years. She was an invited author at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica and is a former member of the louderARTS Project. Her work was published in the anthology, Parse (FriendlyFire Press), and she was most recently published in the anthology So Much Things To Say: One Hundred Poems of Calabash (Akashic Books). Sabrina is an original member of the Hot Poets Collective, a group of diverse poets who have been writing and performing together since April 2011. They recently published their first collection, Of Fire, Of Iron.

Editor’s Note: In reading Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani’s poems I am reminded of the work of Ocean Vuong, one of my favorite poets of all time. And it is no wonder; these two are both graduates of louderARTS, a force to be reckoned with and an endeavor that has gifted us with some of the most talented poets of our day.

Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani’s poetry takes my breath away. Not with a soft exhale, but with a force that is at once violent and blooming. Her grip is as solid on the lyric as on the sexual and the narrative, and she maneuvers effortlessly between these realms with the skill of a true artist. This innate talent is coupled with moments where finely-tuned language and imagery exist as pure delight for the reader: “choice was not a language / my mouth had learned;” “But I am older now, and understand that gravity, not burden, / is necessary to love.”

Want to see more by Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani?
louderARTS Project
The Hot Poets Collective

BARRY McGEE

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Crushing the Non-State!

Matt Gonzalez questions Barry McGee

Editors note: This interview took place at a secret location on York Street in San Francisco during 2005.

Q: Let’s start off with an easy one – how would you describe your sexuality and the sexuality of your ideal lover?

A: I think I’m mostly gay but act straight when I need to. I sometimes think my tags are the sexiest things on Earth. As for an ideal lover, I have one, Lydia Fong.

Q: Many octogenarians have tips for how to stay young as they get older – so a related question – how do you maintain street credibility in the midst of your success?

A: Um…I try to surround myself with kids that are making a lot of noise on the streets. Also I lost my street credibility about 15 years ago so credibility and respect are both concepts that have become somewhat foreign. I’m a bit weary of the idea and preconceptions of success. I mean a etch tag on a Nordstrom window has a certain feeling of achievement and success also.

Q: Most artists return to familiar images or signature elements in their work as they go from one work of art to another. Are you comfortable with that or do you try to unlearn aspects of your style that have become safe for you?

A: This is a bit tricky. I think a person can develop a style that people become familiar with and can recognize at 65 mps on the freeway. In a gallery setting it becomes a bit more safe and controlled. I have been in a rut for sometime with certain images, but have buried others. I am fascinated right now removing images altogether.

Q: Do you think success in the art world is accidental like getting hit by lightening – or is it based on talent or something else? What advice do you give to young artists trying to find their way in galleries and on the street?

A: I’m uncomfortable with this society’s idea of success. Look at commercial radio or what I’ve heard is successful television. If that is what is success I want nothing to do with it. I believe it is a bit accidental and luck. I’m not quite comfortable with the notion of doing graffiti or street art or whatever it’s called for two months then go marching into the galleries, trumpeting success. Like I mentioned before, success is defined by the individual not by the art world or gallerist. How do you define success? As for the younger generation, I would say build with a group of friends a world that no one has ever seen then destroy it.

Q: Do you care what young people think of your work? Do you want to stay connected with or relevant to the next generation of graffiti writers?

A: Yes, this is very important to me what young people think. At the same time I would like a 65 year old to understand and appreciate my work also. The next generation of kids doing graffiti and whatever should make work that confuses and upsets the older generation of writers. I applaud the outcast in the subculture, stirring the pot of crap and making the elder generation uncomfortable.

Q: When do you know a work of art is finished? Have you ever looked at a piece you did years ago and wished you could do more on it?

A: Finished is when its smoldering in a pile of embers. I myself have trouble with finishing. It can be ten minutes before an opening and then I will understand the meaning of finished. I have many pieces from the past that I would buy back and burn to the ground – whereas there’re many things on the street that I wish were still running. I recently had the opportunity to rework some pieces I did from the mid nineties, that belong to the SFMOMA. It had so many pieces that needed reworking. I would sneak pieces into my bag at night and returned them the next day finished. Until we meet again.

Q: Does the role of the artist change during wartime?

A: I’m not sure what wartime means anymore. Most of my life we, or our country, has been involved in some covert activities and meddling in other countries. I was in high school during Reganomics. Wartime is constant as far as I know it. And rocks have been thrown as long as I can remember.

Q: Does your daughter Asha influence your work? Do you ever watch her draw? Take ideas from her?

A: Yes. She pops and deflates the bubbles and complexities of both the art world and life. The eye and hand are at the purist they will ever be in both directness and complexity. Kids are fantastic for creative blocks.

Q: How do you think you’ll respond when your teenage daughter comes home in police custody after crushing the city – in the way you have?

A: Okay, this will come up. I can only imagine the political landscape at that point, but I hope she will be on our team. If not, she will need to post her own bail. Ray Fong Bail Bonds will certainly be used.

Q: Hey, maybe you’ll finally meet Lydia as a result!

A: I’m already married to her, Peggy Honeywell, and Clare Rojas.

Q: One final question, what will we do after the state is smashed?

A: We will swim in our clean ocean and drink water from our unpolluted streams – then crush the non-State, Matt. Smash the system!

The end.

Femme Savage

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Femme Savage by Billee Sharp

I am at my absolute worst when I’m ill, even a minor cold will deconstruct the reasonable persona I possess in the full flush of health. My husband knows this well, he tries not to take it personally when I weep uncontrollably because the honey and lemon drink he has brought to my sick bed is either NOT HOT ENOUGH or TOO SWEET or  sob, ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME WITH THESE CHUNKS OF GINGER??  He quickly deposits my supplies: that imperfectly concocted beverage, the nose-blowing toilet roll etc and escapes my under-the-weather-breakdown. Usually I’m a stalwart and I’ll keep pretty upbeat even if things are really grim: I can be cheerful even when I’ve spent the piano lesson money on Frontline and the dog still has fleas, or I get a final warning from management for talking too much, but even a slight snivel and I’m wrecked. I know this irrefutable truth about myself and so I do try and isolate my loved ones from the onslaught of my immune deficient humors: I take to bed and let them fend for themselves. This can be a good time for a teenager,  last weekend the sophomore in the house ate Chinese take-away three times in two days and managed to silently turn his bedroom into a garment-strewn flophouse for three other teen boys (boys also have fashion attacks and try on all of each others clothes) without so much as a single bollocking from nasty bedridden mom.

So I stay in bed, drinking cold honey and lemon, blowing my nose and reading. I read a lot and sleep in between, when I’m not doing one or the other I’m weeping and berating anybody who comes close. The reading really helps, it distracts me from my neurosis that I am probably dying (the recent news story about the deaths from mouse-transmitted hantavirus didn’t help, the first symptoms being akin to low-grade flu) In seventy-two odd hours, propped up on every pillow in the house I read: (predictably) Northanger Abbey, (proudly) six chapters of The Secret Life of Trees, (guiltily) the long-unfinished tomes A Year in Provence, Bel Canto and a Nero Wolf mystery. Also many articles by Cat Marnell, Caitlin Moran and weirdly all five hundred and eight pages of Shirley Conran’s “Savages”.

I missed Conran’s furious output of fiction in the eighties, I was too busy trying to read Derrida and Lacan for christsakes. My friend Adam told me that Lace was the Conran of choice but demurred from lending it to me. No matter, “Savages” kept me busy and amused for at least five hours.  Basically the story is about a group of pampered executive wives who witness their husbands’ execution by dastardly insurgents at a luxurious resort on a remote Polynesian island. The wives secretly hate their bossy husbands anyway and openly despise each other, they are all miserable spoiled cows even though they don’t have to work or worry about money. After their husbands’ demise they are left with the captain of the day-tripping boat they’ve spent a boring afternoon with, they have no supplies to speak of  and have to survive in a terrain inhabited by cannibals. I don’t think that Conran is a great writer, but she certainly did her homework on how to eat weird shit in the jungle and make huts out of leaves and other bits of nature. Less than half way through I started laughing phlegmatically and underlying lines like , How fast could insects travel up your vagina? And making perhaps delirious notes, “Carey is still wearing a pale-blue bra!”

Why was I doing this? Perhaps to assuage my guilt about reading a trash  novel instead of  being diligent and dipping into Henry Miller’s glistening text “On Writing” where he goes on about writer’s block and all the French philosophy he read in the original. My  notes, naughtily made in ink, were to convince myself that I could make some smart contemporary remarks about feminism by gorging myself on her lengthy adventure story: after all, Conran was sort of writing feminist tracts she just wasn’t  using long words, except “inexorably” which is longish and she uses it  a lot.  The feminism of “Savages” is about how the patriarchy makes women merciless rotten bitches to each other and this is illustrated by how relentlessly they harsh on the pretty one, the lazy one, the downtrodden one and the athletic capable one. This is no rosy tale of  sisterhood, the ladies  do survive and develop a modicum more empathy and self-esteem but they definitely do not become significantly nicer. I started to do some meandering internet research on Conran but I could not find synopses of her other blockbuster publications (Lace I & II, Superwoman, the Superwoman Yearbook, Futurewoman etc) but I did find a clinically brief Wikipedia entry and discovered she has a website and she twitters! The website was not enticing, she uses “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom” as her by-line which was a turnoff for me even though she meant no insult to psilocybin. Basically her twenty-first century output is like reading a temperance granny’s diary compared to Cat Marnell or Caitlin Moran.

I just recently started reading Cat Marnell and now I think I’m done. The beautiful and  verbose Marnell, who writes mostly about her drug intake came to my attention because of an article Sarah Hepola wrote in the NYT mag, ostensibly about confessional tendencies in journo-land, blah blah, but really its an excuse for her to harp on about how she too has always wanted to be confessional about her own boozing-writing experiences. I missed chortling at Marnell’s output as Beauty Editor for xojane because I waste my online time elsewhere but now I’m up to speed ( no pun!) and I see her stuff  is a great read. Perhaps she is a better writer than hard drugette, she obviously has  so many brain cells left one has to wonders if her dealers sell her real angel dust or if its just reconstituted  Johnsons Baby Powder. She asserts her right (and all womens rights!) to do hard drugs and never rinse out  hair conditioner but it’s a bummer for me that she doesn’t elucidate what its actually like to be on angel dust or snort-cocktails of xanax and whatever. I would like to know because I’m sure as hell not going to do it myself.   She now makes a living working for the uber-cool Vice writing exclusively about  “pills and narcissism” instead of getting sent to rehab by xojane but unless she starts getting more descriptive re. the exotic highs  I’m out.

Moran is hilariously palatable, like Tina Fey but English, and I like that she is so brazen about wanking and thinks feminism should be funny. I’ve ordered her bound to be brilliant “How to be a Woman” and I’m glad that she is unabashed about how the incoming troves of  royalties are paying to make her house nicer. I tried to read some of her columns for The Times but it’s a pay site and there is no way I’m paying Murdoch for so much as a paragraph. I loved Moran’s piece about hanging out with Gaga, and now I get why dress-up girl is the pin-up for pubescent feministas. Moran is super clever too but hello no sympathy from me for having been home-schooled by “insane hippie parents” in a council house in Wolverhampton, no wonder she is so jolly, I save my tears for Jeanette Winterson’s miserable homelife growing up with uptight Baptists or whatever they were.

Feminism has struggled so hard for a workable public image, Moran, Marnell and Fey are its just desserts, and Gaga should probably be in that list too. These women  are smart, funny and honest about  the female condition without any lip-service to the evil empire of patriarchy.

Mrs. Fifty Shades of Grey, on the other hand, is the empire’s creature, she doesn’t do a lot of publicity because she was in TV for years and finds it all boring (at least that’s what her husb wrote in the Gruniad while hyping his own recently published novel.) Mrs Fifty is the antithesis of these formidable aforementioned  femmes, her writing is awful and her sex message is droopy. The good news is that erotica has surged in hipness and sales since she wrote her S & M saga and I’m a wannabe Buddhist so I’m trying to be  happy that she too probably has a new kitchen with  a bondage Jacuzzi next to her top-o-the-line dishwasher. It’s the least she deserves considering she did confess that her book didn’t spice up her own sex life.

Women are mostly savvy as well as savage and contrary to Shirley’s advice will probably get more satisfaction out of stuffing a mushroom than imagining that their spouses are cruel and handsome like Christian Grey.

Image: Wild Woman of the Woods” Wayne Alfred, ( alder, horse hair)

Billee Sharp’s book “Lemons & Lavender: the eco guide to better homekeeping” Viva Editions, 2012 is available at bookstores and on amazon.com.

American Cliché

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American Cliché

by Seth Michelson

His body skinny but for the horns
of cancer bulging from his chest
like thorns jutting from the trunk
of this older man, a lifelong rose-
lover. So he waters and whispers to them
each morning, his broken body
bent to the earth, joyful duty, as it blooms
into pink white red fireworks.
After cooing to them, he jumps
into his golden cage, motors to work,
beep-beep!, a two-hour commute
he keeps to religiously. He has to
or he’ll forfeit: the job,
health insurance, chemotherapy,
yet he leaves for work happy,
sun-lit from within, the silent prayer
of roses lingering on his lips,
a sweet perfume, smear of nectar
on the hummingbird’s miraculous beak-tip.
Like this he smiles, stuck
in traffic, engines and neighbors overheating,
while he hopes, quietly, for his roses
to be consumed: for a deer or three
to descend the hills, drift
into his backyard, trampling
its false limits with soft hooves
as, noses down, they collect fallen petals,
each a miniature silken feast, communion
wafers on famished tongues: a god
dissolving into mouths
hungry to taste and see that the earth is good,
even strewn as it is with shards, with
shattered beauty everywhere.

***

Seth Michelson is the author of the chapbooks Maestro of Brutal Splendor (Jeanne Duval Editions, 2005), Kaddish for My Unborn Son (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and House in a Hurricane (Big Table Publishing, 2010), and he translated Tamara Kamenszain’s internationally acclaimed book of poetry El Ghetto (Point of Contact, 2011). He currently resides in Los Angeles. The above poem is from Michelson’s collection Eyes Like Broken Windows and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KILIAN MCDONNELL

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ON HEARING THINGS MALE
By Kilian McDonnell

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . . a wind from God swept over the face of the waters . . . Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. Genesis 1:1-3

Did the author of Genesis hear Yahweh’s voice
like the rumble of thunder over Mount Zion?
And did the man say to himself, as though spitting
against the wind, this boom must be male?
Male ears hear things male. Even medieval giants
decreed, Whatever is received, is received
according to the mode of the receiver. And if
Yahweh drops her hairbrush in the desert,
who can hear it? And write it in the book?


(Today’s poem appears in God Drops and Loses Things, and appears here today with permission from Liturgical Press and the poet.)


Kilian McDonnell, osb, born in Great Falls, Montana in 1921, has been a monk/priest of St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, MN since 1945. He began writing poetry seriously at the age of 75. He will be 91 in September of 2012. His poems have appeared in America, Minnesota Monthly, Theology Today, American Benedictine Review, ISTI Bulletin, Christian Century, and The National Catholic Reporter. In 2000 Park Press—of Waite Park, Minnesota—published some 30 poems in a promotional volume entitled Adam on the Lam. In 2003 St. John’s University Press published his first book of poetry, Swift, Lord, You Are Not, which also contained a personal essay, “Poet: Can You Start at Seventy-Five?” His second book of poetry, Yahweh’s Other Shoe (St.John’s University Press, 2006) was a finalist in the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. In 2009 he published God Drops and Loses Things, and in 2011 Wrestling With God. For the larger portion of his life Kilian McDonnell has been active as a professional theologian and a university professor. He has taught in the graduate school of theology of St. John’s University and has written, edited, and been published in numerous theological publications and works.

Editor’s Note: During the writer’s residency I recently participated in, “Believing in Writing,” at The Collegeville Institute in Collegeville, MN, I submitted a number of poems from my current project to be workshopped. I am writing a book of poetry that explores and contemplates the feminine in biblical literature. During the workshop, one of my fellow writers asked if my poems are an homage to Father Kilian McDonnell. I had never read “Father Kilian,” as the man lovingly referred to him, and so he pulled all four of his poetry books off the shelf and suggested that I take a look.

I began with Yahweh’s Other Shoe, and within twenty-four hours I had read all four of Father Kilian’s books. I could not believe what I had read. Of all of the poets I know of who are contemplating Judaism in their work, who are contemplating the Torah, who are writing or exploring midrashic literature, I found that I have more in common as a poet with a ninety-year-old Catholic Priest than any other poet I’ve read. I returned my borrowed books to the Collegeville Institute and walked over to the Liturgical Press to buy all four for myself.

Father Kilian truly inspires me. To come into poetry so late in life is impressive in and of itself. But to be a male, a Catholic male, a Catholic priest no less, and be asking questions about the role of women in biblical literature takes an admirable amount of courage and humility. Today’s poem asks one of the most essential questions about the inception of the sublimated role of women in Judeo-Christianity, and I thank Father Kilian for his talent, for his bravery, and for sharing his own questions with the world.

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