asitoughttobemagazine

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DECENCY

Posted on March 19, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

Decency

From DECENCY
By Marcela Sulak:

selections from SOLIDARITY

vi. Virginity

It’s not that you get tired, it’s that it starts to be the only thing,
starts to disappear you.

Your parents phone you at college to ask: how is your virginity
doing? Did your virginity have a good day?

What does it want to be when it grows up? Your virginity sounds
a little sad this morning. What kind of cake does your virginity want

for its birthday? your girlfriends saw the most amazing shoes
that your virginity would look terrific in!

Want to go shopping? your boyfriends—would your virginity like to see
a movie? What about dinner?

ix. witches

My daughter is named for my grandmother, a midwife
who attended the births of 90 babies in rural Texas

before they had cars and after they finished having witches
but before there were doctors. Now you may understand

what I mean when I say another woman
gave my daughter a book called “The witches and the rabbi”

for her birthday. Here is the plot: a village is terrorized by a plague
of witches who fly from their cave when the moon is full,

on brooms through the sky except when it’s raining. I’m not sure
what the witches actually do to the village, since no one

actually goes outside on those nights. Gary, Indiana, could use
an infestation of witches—no stabbings

or gunshot wounds on evenings of full moons.
But one full moon when it is raining the rabbi shows up

with twenty townsmen. The witches
are so delighted they make them a feast of all the good things

they have. The rabbi tricks them into dancing with him and
the vigilante men, out into the rain,

which kills them. I knew her father’s mother was secretly
glad when I started to hemorrhage. She didn’t want me

to have a homebirth with a midwife.
“What kind of rabbis are these?”

Says my rabbi, stopped by for a quick hello. My daughter
wanted to show him that we had a book about rabbis. “They’re

engaging the poor witches
in mixed dancing and leading them astray,” he says.

This is the broom which sweeps the sky of the stars you have
to be too drunk to write about, as Daisy put it.

This is the housework the princesses do disguised
as village maidens. These are the constellations that form

in the shadow of the stars.
Silent are the women in the village

who took their cloth packets of herbs and were silent
when their husbands rushed off to kill the witches in that story.

CHOCOLATE

The day I won the custody case my lawyer gave me a bitter chocolate
in black and silver paper. Once I saw cacao pods
drying in a Venezuelan village square

during Easter week; through the open church doors, peeling saints sniffed
and were carried
like colicky children through night streets. The local hot chocolate
was thickened with cornmeal and canella bark

somebody tore from the trees. To reach that village we found a fisherman,
plowed
through rows of porpoises, then hiked five kilometers
inland through banana and cocoa trees,

which like shade. Once only men could drink
chocolate. Women were permitted cacao beans as currency,
to buy meat or slaves or pay tribute. It feels good to imagine a single seed,

hidden in the forbidden mouth, the tongue
curled, gathering the strength to push. The Aztec king discarded
each gold-hammered cup after its initial use; his chocolate was red as fresh
blood.

He was a god to them. It was frothy,
poured from great heights. When we bathed in the village river, girls
gathered around me, whispering, why is your skin so pale? Why is your
hair so straight?

Can we braid it? Dime, eres blanca?
The judge, our lawyers, her father, and I decided the fate
of my child. The dark liquid we poured was ink, initialing our little
negotiations.

Who can know the heart of another, the blood
spiced with memory, poured from one generation to the next
over great distances? The Mayan word for chocolate means bitter. The
village

used to be a plantation; now it is a co-operative, owned by descendants
of the former slaves. At Easter Vigil the women lined up
behind the most beautiful, in a long sky

-blue dress adorned with gold stars. Between the decades of the rosary she
called out,
while we shuffled our feet in merengue beat, bearing the saints
through the streets, someone shot off a Roman

candle. The men’s procession paused for rum. I know I’ll be paying for it
the rest
of my life. The Mayan word means bitter water. The cacao
tree was uprooted from paradise.

HOW TO USE A NAPKIN

Understand the napkin
has been unnecessary
for most of human history.

Understand the world is filled with people
eager to bend
things to their will.
We shall practice on the napkin.
When you have finished eating
place your napkin loosely
next to your plate.

It should not be crumpled or twisted,
which would reveal untidiness or nervousness;
nor should it be folded,

which might be seen as an implication
that you think your hosts
might reuse it without washing.
.
It is a delicate affair.
Don’t argue with me
said my husband

who had called for my advice
about the apartment he was renting
when he didn’t want to live with me.

It is largely
symbolic today
except for barbecues.
Lightly dab the lips.

I suspect the word
argue is the space
in the mouth for things
to come apart in.

The napkin must not be left
on the chair, it might seem
as if you have an inappropriately

dirty napkin to hide
or even that you are trying
to run off with the table linens.

It takes great trust
to use a napkin.
It takes an act
of faith to leave
the table.

Decency: Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women’s Studies. Decency celebrates the spunky wenches, the unfortunate queens, the complicated translators, the wistful wives who have been hustled off the spotlit stages of history. Through the lens of Victorian manuals of etiquette, through the unfolding of religion from the Middle East to the American Southwest, Decency thinks through the brutal things we do to one another, recording the ways the individual operates in relation to society’s mores and harms. From the Sumerian queen Puabi to contemporary female recruits to the Israeli intelligence’s “Honeytrap” operation, Decency is a mix of the documentary and the lyrical, the wrathful and the joyful.

Marcela Sulak‘s poetry collections include Decency (2015) and Immigrant (2010), both with Black Lawrence Press. She’s translated four collections of poetry from the Czech and French, and, most recently, the Hebrew: Orit Gidali’s Selected Poems: Twenty Girls to Envy Me (University of Texas Press, July 2016). She’s co-edited the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.

Editor’s Note: If there is a question driving the poems in Marcela Sulak’s sophomore collection, it is a question of the ways in which we are and are not decent to one another. As individuals and as countries. As intimates and strangers. Both within and across the (real or artificial) divides of race, creed, culture, and nationality. Sulak pursues the answers to this question with the keen eye of an academic and a researcher, then relays her observations and discoveries with the skilled and deliberate abandon of an artist. These questions of decency are considered and depicted through the lenses of history, relationship, and etiquette. The result is a brave yet dainty collection. A powerful yet vulnerable collage. A work that charms the reader with its quaintness so that its harsh truths and difficult revelations go down like chocolate–bitter yet sweet, delicate yet bold.

Among the many long poems in this collection is one that stopped me in my tracks when I heard the poet read it aloud at the book’s New York launch last year. “Solidarity” is a stunning inquiry into rape–its ramifications and its afterlife and the endless experiences that collide with sexual violence in concentric circles. Today, for example, are Sulak’s reflections on misogyny and witch hunts, virginity and agency. Of virginity she writes, “It’s not that you get tired, it’s that it starts to be the only thing, / starts to disappear you.” Determined that her daughter know the truth about the history of hysteria, misogyny, and women healers, she considers witches through the skewed twin lenses of history and scaremongering: “Silent are the women in the village // who took their cloth packets of herbs and were silent / when their husbands rushed off to kill the witches in that story.” If I could have, I would have reprinted this long poem in its entirety. But then, you really ought to buy the book so that you can read this breathtaking work for yourself.

Throughout this masterful collection the poet’s own experiences are coupled with the larger lenses of the book–history and etiquette, for example–so that what is gleaned by the reader is at once deeply personal and delightfully educational. “The day I won the custody case my lawyer gave me a bitter chocolate,” Sulak writes of her unique experience, then later, in the same poem, writes of the history of chocolate: “Once only men could drink / chocolate. Women were permitted cacao beans as currency, / to buy meat or slaves or pay tribute.” Yet these ideas are not disparate; they are finely woven together by the poet’s skilled hand. The genius of this interrelation is beautifully evidenced by moments like this, in a poem that appears to be about the history of the napkin, but is equally about the poet’s leaving her husband: “It takes great trust / to use a napkin. / It takes an act / of faith to leave / the table.” The art of the poem–like the collection that houses it–is enriched beyond experience and information by a powerful lyric: “It feels good to imagine a single seed, // hidden in the forbidden mouth, the tongue / curled, gathering the strength to push.”

Want to see more from Marcela Sulak?
Marcela Sulak Official Website
“Jerusalem” in the Cortland Review
“Decency” and “Raspberry” in Haaretz
Buy Decency from Black Lawrence Press, Book Depository, or Amazon

Sarah Freligh: Two Poems

Posted on March 18, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

A Letter to You About Myself

I still do bad things. Sometimes I bite my fingernails, not down
to the quick, but only to even out the rough spots. Last week my
thumb snagged a new pair of tights. All day the run laddered up
my thigh, displaying beige leg flesh in each little window. I’m always
in a hurry, an hour ahead of the here and now, a refugee from my own
life. I hope I didn’t give that to you. My teeth are bad, maybe yours
are too? My dentist says I’ll be lucky to keep the teeth I have as if he
knows what my future will be: me in a hospital bed cranked up high
enough to see outdoors: the birds fighting for the last bit of seed
in the feeder. The drone of a TV across the hall, a soap opera whose
characters I no longer recognize. The names are the same, the actors
different. Every day is like this. The girl who brings my tray is not
the one from yesterday though she says she is. Her hands are hard
and strong. Here’s your boiled egg, honey, she says. I don’t answer
to that name anymore.

***

Saudade

—From the Portuguese: A kind of intense nostalgia or a constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist

Like the time your train
tooted out of Utica
three hours late past

a grove of trees wrapped
in white lights, past
the neon signs of a bar

as the last car left
the parking lot,
a black sedan you see

yourself riding in, thigh
to thigh with the blue-jeaned guy
you hooked up with over

whiskey shots and shells of Pabst
at last call, the bass player
for the rock band whose

big hands you’d admired
all night plucking
at his stringed crotch, even

as the jukebox spins out
its last song, even as
a waitress wipes down

the sticky tables with a frayed rag
soaked in club soda, listens
to the train whistle

out of the station, wishing
she were where you are
moving away from her life.

***

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, winner of the Editor’s Choice award from Accents Publishing, and Sort of Gone, a book of poems that follows the rise and fall of a fictional pitcher named Al Stepansky. Her work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Rattle, Barn Owl Review, on Writer’s Almanac, and anthologized in the 2011 anthology Good Poems: American Places. Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.

[The above poems appear in Sad Math and are used here by permission of the author.]

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RIVER ELECTRIC WITH LIGHT

Posted on March 12, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

river-electric-with-light

From RIVER ELECTRIC WITH LIGHT
By Sarah Wetzel:

A WORSHIP OF RIVERS

If I must choose a word for you,
let it be river. Not the river’s smoothed banks
that, like skin, give form
to breath and blood, the throb
of twenty trillion red cells wildly
ferrying their burdens.
If I must choose a word for you,
let it be the word
for what flows. Down one river,
a ruined house, down another,
eight empty boats bobbing. Inside a ninth,
there is a girl on her knees, knife
in hand. A kind of river
is running through her.
Because the worship of rivers
is also the worship of a chimney
for smoke, the needle its thread
as it closes the wound, of the wire
for its extra electron.
Because all three are worships
of motion, which is why
I race after rainclouds and trains, the postman
and bicycle messengers. Why I think
wind speaks to me. You,
you don’t speak. Yet you take
whatever I throw in. Which is why
I will always live close to water
but never again by the sea
from which everything eventually
finds its way shore again—
arthritic driftwood, the bones
of dogfish and dogs, and Mr. Levi,
the wristwatch still on his wrist. Which is why
I believe the girl puts down the knife
and she rises, the river
electric with light.

THIRD VERSION

The rain leaves fingerprints
in last summer’s
window dust,

while just off shore, anchored
and waiting,
the barge that will ferry the lucky.

In one version of my story,
I sell my hair
and the good skin of my stomach.

In one version, I carry you
from the burning car
and this time you don’t die.

The sea with the rubber hose of a river
down its throat
is swallowing as fast as it can.

If you watch long enough, you’ll see that rain
shapes a path in the pane
for what falls behind it—

yet if you put a hand
to the glass,
the water will fall toward you.

Our lives are always half over.
There’s still time.

SAYING JERUSALEM

It’s become tricky to talk about Jerusalem
these days. Tricky, that is, without saying
cinnamon trees and narrow alleys, overfed
sparrows, or Hasidic boys in metal spectacles.

I’ve nothing to say about trees or sparrows
or quaint Jerusalem characters, mustached men
selling talismans. Why don’t you like Arabs,
one asked, when I tried to bargain. Some Israelis joke

all we really need is Tel Aviv and the freeway
to Ben Gurion airport. Let the Arabs and fanatics
fight over everything else. From the roof
of my Tel Aviv house, I can sometimes glimpse

Jerusalem, the gleaming tip of al-Haram ash-Sharif.
Let them have everything else. Everything.

River Electric With Light: Sarah Wetzel’s stunning second collection of poems, River Electric with Light, is a work of pilgrimage, a work in search of the sacred and the spiritually significant. Touching down in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Kabul, New York, and Rome, Wetzel’s poems, ranging from lyric meditations to discursive drama, weave themselves from her life as wife, lover, stepmother, and traveler. She names the force propelling her River—“If I must choose a word for you, / let it be the word / for what flows,” she writes. At times joyful, at times grief-ridden, Wetzel’s poems accumulate associatively pulling slivers of secular solace from a world where violence infuses the body, the landscape, and even dreams, recognizing that while: “Our lives are always half over. / There’s still time.” – See more at Red Hen Press

Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010. Sarah currently teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome, Italy. She still spends a lot of time on planes, however, dividing time between Manhattan, Rome, and Tel Aviv, Israel. Sarah holds an engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology and a MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. More importantly for her poetry, Sarah completed a MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College in January 2009. You can read samples of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com.

Editor’s Note: Sarah Wetzel’s River Electric With Light is enigmatic, transversive, transformative. There is a motion within its pages–between sections and poems, between concepts and experiences–that is reminiscent of the Italian notion of attraversiamo; crossing over, moving on, getting to another place. Be it that of the smallest rain drop or the greatest ocean, be it that of trains, planes, or automobiles, this collection is electric with movement, even in its deepest and most sacred moments of quiet contemplation.

There is water–and the life water ensures–running through this book. Rivers that carry words, ideas, people. “If I must choose a word for you, / let it be the word / for what flows.” And along with this motion comes an unsettled feeling underlying the life of these poems: “Which is why / I will always live close to water / but never again by the sea.”

This collection hums with a delicate, thoughtful lyricism that lulls the reader so that we float along easily–though shifting locales, through political commentary, through mindful meditations on religion, relationship, life and death. Never set or singular–because life is never as black and white as one experience or perspective–we are reminded that “Our lives are always half over,” but, in the same breath, “There’s still time.”

Want to see more from Sarah Wetzel?
Superstition Review
Poetrynet.org
Ilanot Review
Recours au Poeme

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEN LAMBERT

Posted on February 20, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

JenLambert

DINNER FOR THE DYING
By Jen Lambert

When the boy comes inside
with blood on his ripe hands
and a quiver of pointed explanations
on his back, I’m chopping yellow onions.

When he says it’s a doe, that she lies
on the edge of the wood, and that he knows
she was pregnant, my skin tightens.
The scar on my belly, that battered, barbwire grin
that opened like a window for him, twitches
for the dying mother and the calf like a love note in her womb.

When he hangs his knife on his belt
and heads toward the wood, I boil water, crush garlic.
I remember when the doctor pulled him, screaming,
from my belly. I remember the howl in my womb
as he sewed me shut. I remember my first meal
as a mother. Nothing could satisfy.
I salt the vegetables. Crush the mint.

Today’s poem was originally published in Boxcar and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Jen Lambert is a founding editor of Spark Wheel Press and burntdistrict magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Nebraska, and her work has appeared in journals such as Pank, The Los Angeles Review, Sugar House Review, and Redactions, among others.

Editor’s Note: As a new mother, I recently began a search for today’s best poems about motherhood. Jen Lambert’s “Dinner for the Dying” came highly recommended and does not disappoint. And so today we kick off a series of poems within this Saturday Poetry Series that will consider motherhood and hopefully leave their mark upon the reader as today’s poem has left its mark upon me.

There is something of Naomi Shihab Nye in this work. In the salted vegetables and crushed mint. In the intersection of the natural, the familial, and the body. This is a poem of quiet power, wherein tragedy is gently stitched to memory, where life and loss are depicted as two sides of the same coin. Moments of radiant lyric emerge from the subtlety and strength of today’s poem: “a quiver of pointed explanations,” “that battered, barbwire grin / that opened like a window for him, twitches / for the dying mother and the calf like love note in her womb.”

Want more from Jen Lambert?
Official Website
Heart Journal
Tahoma Literary Review

High School Poetry Series: Gender, Identity, & Race — Kerri Stewart

Posted on February 17, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

A note from Series Editor Sarah Marcus: Born from a powerful in-class discussion we had about gender, race, and the role of masculinity in rape culture, these poems are an analysis of gendered personal experience and a study of our intersectionality. This poetry series was inspired by a HuffPost essay I wrote called, “Why I Teach Feminism at an Urban High School.” The poets featured here are students from my 12th Grade Creative Writing class whose work I found to be brave, fearless, and progressive. Please help me support their crucial and influential voices.

Kerri Stewart is a 17-year-old senior poet in my Creative Writing class. She is the youngest child of six children. In her free time she likes to read scifi books, watch Netflix, and play sports. Stewart believes that playing sports keeps her busy and “helps keep students like me off the streets and out of trouble.” She spends her school breaks helping other people in service. She’s active in her school and larger community in order to encourage others to do the same. Stewart writes: “I don’t like hanging out with people that can hold me back from my dreams. I want friends that have the same aspirations as me, that fight for success.”

Stewart’s poem addresses many of the conditions of coming from a place riddled with indiscriminate violence. She describes survival in Cleveland as “you better be weaving,/
because people don’t care who they kill/ so we’re gonna be grieving.” Within this three part poem, she also imagines a different world, a “Peaceland,” where families have picnics outside and where “guns are silenced.”

I chose this poem because it is as much about thought and memory as it it about action. Her rhyme is strong and heavy and mirrors the battle for hope: “believing that [living in Cleveland] is something to believe in.” This poem is about belonging somewhere complicated. A place that had a brighter past. As Stewart so aptly points out how initial inaction led to current circumstance and the danger of becoming “those,/ whose lives will be foreclosed,/ and the world would be froze.” I proudly present to you this brave new voice.

Living in Cleveland
by Kerri Stewart

Living in a place full of disgrace,
people put down for their race.
Heads down because they don’t want to show their face,
they decide to lay low, until they know it’s safe.
Living in Cleveland it’s never a safe place.

What happened to this place?
I took a vacation and came back to a fake state.
No shoes on kids’ feet, but their parents walking around in deep beef,
sitting in the backseat of the car, the kids eating something sweet
never knowing their life could be over in a heartbeat.

You see some people put their kids in daycare, but beware it’s rare.
They trust other people to watch their kids,
and then they are put on the police grid.
I have the memory of kids being able to play outside,
running and soaking up the sun,
dirtying new shoes and clothes.
Parents not caring about the material things,
because the kids are smiling and having a great time,
enjoying the nice hot summer breeze as they played tag,
then they stop to see a nice G wag ride past,
never knowing that there’s a gun and they’ll be bagged and tagged,
and it’s sad, because they weren’t even being bad,
but the society we lived in could never be fulfilled again.
The paramedics continuing to give CPR
but knowing he would never come back to life.
I could taste the salty tears of the mother
holding her son in her arms as he bleeds out and dies,
seeing the mother cry and saying bye bye,
will make you realize that living in Cleveland
you better be weavin,
because people don’t care who they kill
so we’re gonna be grieving.

I know they feel the defeat,
but they fall from their feet and repeat a prayer
as they look into the air and ask God to care,
because you’re living in Cleveland.

The Memory of living in Cleveland

Living in this place
running a relay with the human race.
Seeing the kids play like a paper chase,
the smile and the laughter,
everyone on the block who looks after.
The birthday parties and the gathers,
the decorations and the platters,
kids scattered.
Watching the puppet show theme
while eating cake and ice cream,
dirty faces and smiles as they gleam,
playing yard games, riding bikes and getting strikes.
The grass stains from the ballgame,
what a shame to call his name.

Seeing those who matter
everyone was so flattered.
Family and friends make amends
after hard times in the end,
they see the stems in their roots and call a truce,
then they give their kids apple juice.
The screams of joy as they play with their new toys,
even in the end with all the girls and the boys who annoyed,
they all enjoyed.

This is the past
we thought the world would grow
but it all went below.
Since some families will never let go
of the past, they end up on death row.
There will be no more puppet shows.
They will undergo the status quo,
and become those,
whose lives will be foreclosed,
and the world would be froze,
because you’re living in Cleveland.

The Thought of Living in the Peaceland

Living in Cleveland
the skies are blue and the grass is green.
There’s no one there to be mean
just like out of a movie scene.
There is no violence,
because guns were silenced.
Kids go to school,
there will be no fools,
making the society a stepping stool to a better life.

Husbands and wives
making sandwiches for the kids with butter knives.
At the park playing around,
listening to the sound of kids running on the ground.
The red-checkered blanket,
the brown basket,
tasting the jelly and butter,
all the things from the cabinet.
Kids screaming, dogs barking,
not thinking of bullets sparking.

Living in Cleveland
is not like living in the peaceland,
believing that this is something to believe in.
The future of Clevelanders
will be the builders, of a new familiar
because you are not living in Cleveland.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING YOU LOVE

Posted on February 13, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

Louder_Cover

From LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING YOU LOVE
By Nicole Rollender:

SCATTERING

I remember your clavicle pressed like a blade
under your skin, the moon

pooling in your cheeks’ hollows. You wanted
to be buried in the green dress

you always wore with pearls. We’d sit outside your back
door, watching bats swing over the lake.

Once you were like a weather vane twisting
at the edge of a field as you watched tornados spin

toward your house, your mother asleep on the couch.
I suppose you couldn’t tell me you wanted

her dead. But now you’re gone like she is.
I listen for your voice in the church

inside me, where a priest’s hands outline the shape
of a death. Yes, he believes vertebrae have ghosts.

This luminous pew, where a bird can earn a spot
in paradise—but I’m told the earth

can’t perform the miracle of giving you back.
I know the music your bone shards

make in the urn. You could be an old woman
shaking fish skeletons to conjure the dead.

You could be this fish skeleton.
I should know when a body need not be resurrected—

when the ways we said our names between us,
quietly near the azaleas, trying not to startle

robins (now, now they’re singing on your spine),
stop being music I can hear in my mind,

but become something other: how I scatter
the notes, adagio, pianissimo, and what answers

as the wind scatters white feathers into the lake.

PSALM TO BE READ WHILE MY DAUGHTER CONSIDERS MARY

A swaddling, a manger: but what happened before all this, my
daughter says: when Mary was a girl: I said yes: did she feel an
undersea tug on her spirit: did she think she might be able to move
jugs of water with her mind: I said yes: to birth a man who would
walk on water: a man who would tattoo his image in blood and sweat
on a shroud: did she, in the night fields, look for a star that would
lead seven shadows as colors into her life: what is wine: what are
these fishes, these loaves: for, he entered and exited her as light: her
waters stayed intact: yet, she swaddled a baby who would nurse, laid
him in prickly hay next to goats’ stiff fur: I said yes: listen to this: your
great-grandmother saw Mary appear next to my mother’s crib: my
mother caught measles as a baby: your great-grandmother was a seer:
she walked with Mary back to the stable: comets circling as angels in
a flock overhead: Joseph, wondering: I said yes: Mary, whose baby
pierced through her as light: holding a boy who’d be lanced with a
sword: who would bleed, pee, sweat and groan: who contained God:
who contained her blood: who contained everything in the world:
yet, held out his hand and cried for her milk.

THE LIGHT MAKES MY GRANDMOTHER CRY

Her stories still smoke up the kitchen, a dead woman
cooking peasant soup. Pigeons, lightning boiling

for the living. What kind of truth-telling do we expect
to fall off bird bones? Her death was supposed to be

a leaving, except it wasn’t. Her mutterings clack on
the backs of my teeth. She’s learning what dead women

do: swim the blood of their daughters, spread themselves
on ceilings like giant moths radiating light. The solstice

lights the halo-less among us. Her gap-teeth swallow ashes
in the urn. The coffee grounds won’t settle. She pushes

her hands up into mine, slides her ghost bones under
my skin, and watches my fingers dance the shadow-

-woman-waltz-grasping-at-spoons. She remembers
the day Pinky the poodle was nabbed from her front

yard, pretends to pet his wooled head. That’s why you
need fences to keep the dark ones out. She uses her skull

as a pot, hissing up, Give back the life I gave you. The sink
runs red angry water. She tiptoes up my spine in her

old slippers, knocking on every vertebra she sees.
It’s true that the dead get younger. Some nights she’s

a skinny girl waking from a bad dream, calling for
a winged mother, the saint of lost dogs, to come down

from a parapet. It’s this girl I let stay, because she also
cries at the stars, whose light goes right through her,

for the dead woman she will grow up to be. That new
blaze, coming from as far away as blue stars going nova,

the lesson in the death-light: The dead learn
to smell what’s sweetest among all the rotting.

Louder Than Everything You Love: Nicole Rollender’s poems balance on the uneasy boundary between third eye and communion wafer. Beside an “old woman shaking fish skeletons to conjure the dead,” the poet as body becomes a conduit for the generations in both directions, such that her “body is full of holes the dead / look in and out,” while of her daughter she says, “my ribs / were her scaffolding.” Rollender alternately glories and suffocates in her holy entanglement with her lineage, with her God. And when she comes up for air, she ululates a hauntingly familiar song. —Jessica Goodfellow, author of Mendeleev’s Mandala

Nicole Rollender’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, Memorious, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word Riot and others. Her first full-length collection, Louder Than Everything You Love, was published by ELJ Publications in 2015. She’s the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio, 2015), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press, 2016). She has received poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine and Princemere Journal.

Editor’s Note: Nicole Rollender’s first full-length collection is haunting and haunted, tender and tendrils, eye of newt and mother’s milk. The poems contemplate generations and generation. Death and little deaths. The ways we go on, the ways we are remembered. How birds alight on our remnants after we are gone. Its pages are rife with the inheritance of seers and magic, wisdom and sight. With what is passed down amongst women through the ages, from mother to daughter again and again and beyond.

The book’s moments of stunning lyric are interwoven with its major themes so that they become “the music… bone shards // make in the urn.” On the theme of death, the poet writes: “I listen for your voice in the church // inside me, where a priest’s hands outline the shape / of a death” and “I’m told the earth // can’t perform the miracle of giving you back.” When contemplating Mary as mother, she notes the real miracle, that Mary birthed a god “who contained her blood: who contained everything in the world: / yet, held out his hand and cried for her milk.”

Want to see more from Nicole Rollender?
Author Website
Author Blog
Order a signed copy of Louder Than Everything You Love and get a bonus broadside
“How to Stop Drowning” in Muzzle Magazine
“Aperture” in A-Minor Magazine

High School Poetry Series: Gender, Identity, & Race — A’bria Robinson

Posted on February 12, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

Poet and teacher Sarah Marcus with her high school students.

A note from Series Editor Sarah Marcus: Born from a powerful in-class discussion that we had about gender, race, and the role of masculinity in rape culture, “Be A Man/Be A Woman” poems are an analysis of gendered personal experience and a study of our intersectionality. This poetry series was inspired by a HuffPost essay I wrote called, “Why I Teach Feminism at an Urban High School.” The poets featured here are students from my 12th Grade Resistance Writing class whose work I found to be brave, fearless, and progressive. Please help me support their crucial and influential voices.

A’bria Robinson is a senior poet in my Resistance Writing class. She is involved in our school’s recruiting force, Volleyball, and Campus Ministry. She participated in Cleveland’s Effective Leadership Academy, is a recent graduate of the college preparation program Minds Matter, and is a committed advocate with the Cleveland Renaissance Movement community activist group. I chose A’bria’s poem, “Lady,” for its passionate rhythm, its clear message, and its use of deeply personal and relatable experiences.

A’bria’s commitment to impacting our community is nothing short of inspirational. She says, “I lost a friend freshman year to violence, so I’m a huge advocate for raising awareness for youth violence and expressing the importance of education, because that is the key that will change the world.” The advice that she offers to young writers is to “be open to having different experiences, especially allowing something uncomfortable to happen, because it can inspire great art.”

See A’bria read her poem here.

Lady

I be damned if you walk out my house looking like somebody’s prostitute
I never did understand how the way I dressed would constitute
I be damned if you walk out my house looking like a tramp
How in the world is my self worth proclaimed by my style, my stamp?
Cross your legs, what is wrong with you?

You are a female
Pregnant at 16 and addicted to retail
Single black woman addicted to retail
Pretty faces always sell
Sex in the magazines always sells
What were you thinking?
Dye your hair back black
I’m already black
Police don’t respect our pact
Supposed to serve and protect
Instead they keep going back

Curls all down your back
You look classy like that
Forget ponytails
And snap backs
You are a lady,
You would never wear that

It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it
That’s just the way that it goes
When you were a child
I mean, you will always be my child
You’ll always be mommy’s baby
And daddy’s maybe
But at the end of the day
You better remember you are a lady
And I’ll be damned if you walk out of my house looking like somebody’s prostitute

When Daddy’s never home
No one to teach me right from wrong
Boys disrespect me
If I never let them get it
They ask how much do you love me
But to them I’m nothing
I’m nothing but my body

Daddy’s never home
Man this life is rough
Like Loretta said,
Somebody walked in my house

Tried to take all my stuff
And yet I still walk with class and grace
Still feeling like I’ve been a disgrace
Confused and misguided
My beauty was a threat

Addicted to retail
Single black woman addicted to retail
Pretty faces always sell
Sex in the magazines always sells

In Answer to Your Question About Who Won the Sports Ball Competition

Posted on February 11, 2016August 3, 2019 by asitoughttobemagazine

In Answer to Your Question About Who Won the Sports Ball Competition

A joint project by Karen Craigo & Karin Barbee

Super Bowl Sunday, 2016

I want to start a list: If you’ve ever enjoyed a corn dog, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you know the names of at least two characters on General Hospital, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever asked for a side of ranch with your fries, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve made a sincere attempt at the claw game, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve purchased a shot glass with your name on it, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you have ever rocked the chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve sniffed the armpit of a shirt to see if it’s still wearable, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve issued a significant look to suggest that a particular fart does not belong to you (when it really does), you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you’ve ever given your significant other a birthday or valentine’s day card that featured an outdated and possibly sexist depiction of a busty female, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you get excited about limited time only sandwiches at Wendy’s, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever voluntarily done a shot that curdled in your mouth, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you’ve ever seen Ernest “go” ANYWHERE, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve worn your husband’s underwear, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve driven a month or more on your donut tire, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you’ve ever Google mapped your old boyfriends/girlfriends to see what their houses looks like, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever worn tights with such a horrendous crotch tear that you can’t comfortably take the steps, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you grind it into the carpet instead of wiping it up, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’re swayed by celebrity political endorsements, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If your artificial dairy product displays shock or dismay at its relationship to butter, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve pretended to be on the phone because someone in the next car caught you talking to yourself, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve lied about how far you got when reading Moby-Dick, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you’ve ever rocked out to a $6 musical card in Walgreens, closed it, rocked out again; you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever kept a dictionary on your desk because it seemed like it should be there, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever used a panty liner as a Kleenex, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve purchased and eaten a box of Luden’s cherry cough drops for the flavor alone, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever searched for the appropriate gif to represent “disgruntled,” then abandoned it for “shrug,” you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you’ve ever cut the last custard pączki at work in half, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever consumed both of the last two custard Pączkis at work, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve created a bookmark folder for PLACES THAT GIVE BIRTHDAY DISCOUNTS, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve described your desired meal by degree of crunchiness, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve used duct tape as a lint roller, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

If you’ve ever, as an adult, found yourself stunned to learn that a pony is not just a young horse, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you ever sniffed markers to see what the hubbub was about, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve used the word scaffolding when describing your own teaching, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl. If you’ve ever engaged in a euphemism battle using only references to Barney Miller, you’re not too good for the Super Bowl.

***

KARIN WRALEY BARBEE, a native of Ohio, has lived (reluctantly) in Michigan since 2011. Her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Swerve, Fjords Review, Columbia Review, Found Poetry Review, The Diagram, Whiskey Island, and Sugar House Review.

KAREN CRAIGO is the author of the poetry collection No More Milk, forthcoming in the summer from Sundress Publications. She maintains the daily blog Better View of the Moon.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OLAM, SHANA, NEFESH

Posted on February 6, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

Etching on chapbook cover by Andi Arnovitz

From OLAM SHANA NEFESH
By Jane Medved:

SIRENS

They think it is the young girls singing
you see, we pull them to us as smoothly

as oiled rope uncurls into golden braids.
It only takes a few minutes before everything

they see is woman. The pale skin of the sails
spreading like thighs, the thick knots

that tie the anchor turning to strands
of dampened hair held by a lover

before she shakes it free. The salt tastes
as sweet as sweat and soon the ship’s thrust

into the sea becomes unbearable.
This would be enough for galley slaves,

soldiers who tattoo fortunes on their scars,
the simple, parched sailors. But they are not

the ones we want. When we see the heroes
whose fierce deeds fall like hammers, we lay

aside our nocturne of desire. We sing instead
as a mother holds a dying child until

the horizon is the circle of our arms, the wind
a cloth wrapping them in its whisper, the waves

a gentle hush upon each creaking of the deck.
“Do not be afraid. You will be remembered and reborn.”

WHITE FIRE

There is a cable and it reaches
from the side of loving kindness

to the cold window across the room
taking over the function of your heart

which is tired of trying to make blood
out of air. Some days it’s just too hard

to keep on lifting, to appear in a robe
which keeps on falling, exposing

all sorts of intimate matters and the
little whispers beneath. Do not worry.

You are the hand, the page, the white fire
and you cannot be erased. The black letters

will burn and sing and declare themselves
but they are nothing without your silence;

which is not the absence of words, empty
as the howl of a bowl, but the promise made

between all words before they are spoken,
that they will reach across the black lines

and know each other again, even
if they no longer recognize themselves.

LEAVING A NOTE AT THE WESTERN WALL

There is a splintered door leading
nowhere and a lot of women crying
today I can’t even get near the wall.
Luckily I have my own tricks.
I place my arm over a young girl’s shoulder,
sigh sympathetically as she bends
her head in prayer, then edge myself
into her space. Everyone wants to touch
God’s face, to press their forehead
against his slippery cheek and brush
the pitted marks beneath, thank you
for my eyes, my legs, my arms, my breath.
Herod did a good job, the ancient stones
hold solid. They outweigh the base
of the great pyramids and nothing moves
them, perhaps they are even held up
by pleading, since every crack is filled
with scraps of blue-lined paper, torn
index cards, a piece of yellow legal pad,
a folded napkin, sealed envelopes, airmail,
express, please, listen, thank you for my eyes,
my legs, my arms, my breath, excuse me,
a woman pushes past me, excuse me please,
when she reaches for the wall a handful
of notes loosen and fall at our feet.
The chair behind me is piled with prayers
as morning, evening and darkness
make their requests, songs from the sons
of Korach even though their father moans
in the earth thank you for my arms,
my legs, my eyes, my breath, women beg
the matriarchs and children press letters
into fists of stone while God sends back his answers
– No and no and no.

Olam, Shana, Nefesh: “‘Olam, Shana, Nefesh’ is a Kabbalistic phrase used to describe the three dimensions of Place, Time and Person. Olam is most commonly translated as ‘world.’ But in Hebrew olam comes from the root of the word ‘hidden.’ This implies that place always has an unrevealed element to it; that we are surrounded by a reality beyond what is immediately visible. Shana literally means ‘year.’ It invokes an image of repetition, re-visiting, return, a never -ending cycle of months. In the Jewish calendar time is not a passive backdrop to human endeavor, but an active force whose windows of opportunity open and close, blossom and die just like the seasons. Nefesh can be translated as ‘person’ but it refers to the spirit as well as the body; the infusion of the divine into the physical. This is an inherently volatile combination, since a human being always contains a push and pull between the material and the spiritual, the body with its appetites and fears and the spirit. This is ‘person’ as the container of the animal and the divine.” – From Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press, 2014)

Jane Medved is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review, the on-line literary magazine of Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv. Her chapbook, Olam, Shana, Nefesh, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2014. Her recent essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lilith Magazine, Mudlark, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly and New American Writing. A native of Chicago, Illinois, she has lived for the last 25 years in Jerusalem, Israel.

Editor’s Note: Olam, Shana, Nefesh is an absolutely stunning collection. A rare assortment of meditations on myth and history, religion, spirituality, sensuality, gender and place. The questions posed are epic, the answers as small and as critical as breath. The poems themselves are absolutely gorgeous in their own right; lyric delights that any reader would feel indulgent slipping into, with moments like “The salt tastes / as sweet as sweat and soon the ship’s thrust // into the sea becomes unbearable,” “The black letters // will burn and sing and declare themselves / but they are nothing without your silence,” and “Everyone wants to touch / God’s face.” But this book is even more rewarding for those readers familiar with the rich landscapes the poems call and respond to. How rewarding is “Sirens” for those well-versed in Greek mythology, how brilliant “White Fire” for those who know and love midrash, and how masterful “Leaving a Note at the Western Wall” for students of religion and history, for Jewish women, for those who have been to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, who have “press[ed] their forehead[s]/ against [God’s] slippery cheek and brush[ed] / the pitted marks beneath, [saying] thank you / for my eyes, my legs, my arms, my breath.”

Want to see more from Jane Medved?
Tinderbox Poetry Journal
Lilith Magazine
Buy Olam, Shana, Nefesh from Amazon

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KEETJE KUIPERS

Posted on January 30, 2016 by asitoughttobemagazine

30_DSC5432

GETTING THE BABY TO SLEEP
By Keetje Kuipers

Sometimes the baby can’t reconcile
the self with the self: too hungry
to eat, too tired to sleep. I know

the feeling. O, America, on those nights
when you are too beautiful for me
to continue to forgive you any longer—

for allowing us to kill each other
with your graceless bullets, or exile
our neighbors across your fictitious

border, or argue over the ownership
of each young girl’s body as if its freedom
is a lie she must stop telling herself—

I go out into your radiant embrace.
The baby and I drive through your streets,
over the bridge and its light-chipped

waters, under a moon so big, so full
of itself that though I know it belongs
to the world, it can’t be anything but

American. I hang my arm out the window
and skim the air like touching skin.
I breathe you in, and the baby sleeps.

Today’s poem was originally published in Blackbird and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Keetje Kuipers has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail, was published by BOA in 2014. Keetje is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University where she is Editor of Southern Humanities Review.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem absolutely blows me away. It is too powerful to contain, and yet it is perfectly wrought as if chiseled from marble. It is metaphor and life, politic and country, as near as a closely-held infant and as far as the moon. It is the American affliction: needless gun violence, our backs turned and hearts hardened against immigrants and refugees, our deep seated fear of women’s sexuality, freedom, independence. “O, America, on those nights… you are too beautiful for me / to continue to forgive you any longer.” Absolutely stunning. Heartbreaking. An outcry in the form of a quiet, contemplative drive, cruising America in an attempt to get the baby to sleep.

Want more from Keetje Kuipers?
www.keetjekuipers.com

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In Answer to Your Question About Who Won the Sports Ball Competition

A joint project by Karen Craigo & Karin Barbee

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