As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: VALERIE BACHARACH

Posted on December 19, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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GENESIS
By Valerie Bacharach

I flew across the international
date line to yesterday.
Stayed on the plane,
circumnavigated the world,
arrived at time’s beginning.

A garden of wildness.

No need of that man
whose rib I stole,
no need of knowledge,
or apples,
or snakes,
or God…

Only this—
solitude
grace
pure air

before pain found me.

Today’s poem was originally published in Poetica‘s “Poem of the Week” series and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Valerie Bacharach is a poet and teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic poetry workshops and has attended Chatham University’s Summer Community of Writers. In 2015, she participated in Chautauqua Institution’s Writers Festival, and worked with the poet, Tony Hoagland. She conducts weekly poetry workshops with the women of Power House, a halfway house for women in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Voices from the Attic, Pittsburgh City Paper Chapter and Verse, Uppagus, U. S. 1 Worksheets, and Poetica.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is epic in its sparse simplicity. Rife with the unsaid, with what does not need to be written. At the same time, the poem is laden with intertextuality, the Bible doing the heavy lifting of connectivity and association, allowing what appears on the page to be ripe with the weight of ancient tales. Amid these rich layers, a lyric beauty emerges: “[I] circumnavigated the world, / arrived at time’s beginning,” “A garden of wildness,” “before pain found me.”

Want to read more from Valerie Bacharach?
Uppagus
Pittsburgh City Paper

High School Poetry Series: Gender, Identity, & Race — Naudia Loftis

Posted on December 17, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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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.

Naudia Loftis is a senior poet in my Creative Writing class and the Vice President of our high school’s Poetry Club. Her passions include writing, high stepping, and helping others. She recently organized a local anti-violence Cleveland youth rally.

Loftis’s poem addresses the inescapable topic of gun violence. Cleveland has had a deadly year. In recent months, we have seen indiscriminate shootings take the lives of at least three children. Loftis explains: “It is important for me to be an anti-violence activist in my community because I am a part of the next generation that will soon run the world, and I feel it is my responsibility to help move my community on a better path. I believe in change, which is not common in my neighborhood. So if it takes me saying something, I will.”

I chose this poem for its beautiful awareness of breaking. Loftis’s careful consideration of line breaks, her masterful rhyme, and her ability to capture Cleveland’s grief is surely worthy of much more than our attention and reflection. In this midst of this holiday season, I am reminded of how grateful I am to have the opportunity to work with such talented young poets.

A Dead City

On September 23, 2009, my cousin, Reginald Fain, was shot a week before his 26th birthday by a boy he grew up with (and on the street they grew up on). It’s hard to imagine such tragedies happening so close to you, but this is our reality in Cleveland.

I’ve seen baby boys in gangs, sagging, cussing in slang
Following role models who show them which way to bang
Mommas crying in shame, media ripping their names
And after they get locked up, the hood is taking the blame
Nobody wants to speak up, but everybody wants change
I’ve watched my city die
‘Cause of street signs that we claim
The knife is in our heart
While the blood is leaving stains
And we’re witnessing bodies drop like we’re stuck in a Hellraid
My summer filled with gang shootings
Police sirens in the breeze
Holding hands like precious pearls
Not knowing who’s next to leave
‘Cause shooters just want the praise
And I’m stuck out in the rain
Contemplating the beast the city needs me to tame
Shards ripping our fabric smiles
And looping us on a chain
Holding us tied together and leaving our bodies slain
It’s hard for me to be sane
In a land that’s acting strange
Moving beyond murders and savages playing games
I’m pushing in hope to gain people who are brave
To help reclaim our city
‘Cause we’re the ones who remain.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALAN TOLTZIS

Posted on November 28, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

FORTY-TWO PLACES
By Alan Toltzis

As time passed,
they didn’t need to study love,
pray for it,
or even speak its name.

Instead,
they lived their love
silently.
Secrets remained secret

as love sank into unbending bones,
fused with supple corpuscles,
and seeped through soft skin
beneath their fingernails.

Only by looking back
and naming each
of the 42 places (in order)
they had journeyed

did they realize they had grown
into an old couple
who survived a long-forgotten stopover
of bickering and concession

and the should-
and should-not-have-saids
they should never
have crossed

leaving only unspoken love
perpetuated by the comfort and intimacy
of taking each other
for granted.

Alan Toltzis is the author of the book of poems, The Last Commandment (Poetica Publishing, 2015). His work appears in print and online publications including The Provo Canyon Review, Poetica Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Soul-Lit, and Red Wolf Journal. Alan is working on his second book of poems and is developing The Psalm Project, to teach poetry to middle- and high-school students.

Editor’s Note: There is something of a prayer in today’s poem. A thanksgiving. Something quiet, humble, and honest. Something lived, understood, known. What it is to journey throughout a lifetime of relationship. What it is to look back and reflect upon “the should- / and should-not-have-saids … leaving only unspoken love / perpetuated by the comfort and intimacy / of taking each other / for granted.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DERRICK TYSON

Posted on November 21, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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POEM
By Derrick Tyson

My eyes
are so green that when

I look at you, your face
becomes an emerald,

or like a meadow
that is so completely absorbed

in its color that
it catches in your throat.

Flowers never need
alterations.

Sometimes
the sky is so beautiful

that even the windows
are in awe,

not letting me
see it clearly.

Windows
built into us, into our limbs,

my feet have bricked wells
built into them,

Thus
I fall into myself.

Today’s poem was previously published in SHAMPOO, and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Derrick Tyson is a a Visual Artist/Poet currently residing in the Atlanta-area. He has been published in various online and printed magazines nationwide, and has several books of poetry out. As an artist, he has been exhibited internationally in four different countries (Israel, China, Australia and Italy) and has had many of his photographs published in online and printed magazines. He loves co-mingling, cross-pollinating Fine Art with his love of Poetics, Literature, World Cinema and the Oneiric. He refers to this as Visual Poetry. He believes that all things are interconnected, whether or not we can visually render the connections. Since “Time” is inelastic, he cherishes every second with a passion. He’s easily-amused and takes nothing for granted.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is full of moments of stunning, impactful surprise. In the instant of connection, is it the watcher or the watched who becomes transformed? How perfect the flower, created by the hand of science or Mother Nature, that it never needs alterations. How beautiful the sky that not even the transparency of windows will allow it to be truly seen. How deep or burdened we are, that we fall into ourselves? Built moment by moment, each its own deep thought, each its own discreet image, today’s poem asks us to slow down, to reflect, to envision and imagine and contemplate. There is layer upon layer to consider and play with, if we will open our minds and take the time.

Want to see more from Derrick Tyson?
POETRY:
      Lispy Whispers
      Isolated Lightships
ART:
      flickr
      Artitbe

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: FALL POEMS

Posted on November 14, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Someone35 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons — By Someone35 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

AFTER APPLE-PICKING
By Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

AUTUMN: A DIRGE
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling.
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black and gray;
Let your light sisters play–
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.

AUTUMN LEAVES
By Juliana Horatia Ewing

The Spring’s bright tints no more are seen,
And Summer’s ample robe of green
Is russet-gold and brown;
When flowers fall to every breeze
And, shed reluctant from the trees,
The leaves drop down.

A sadness steals about the heart,
–And is it thus from youth we part,
And life’s redundant prime?
Must friends like flowers fade away,
And life like Nature know decay,
And bow to time?

And yet such sadness meets rebuke,
From every copse in every nook
Where Autumn’s colours glow;
How bright the sky! How full the sheaves!
What mellow glories gild the leaves
Before they go.

Then let us sing the jocund praise,
In this bright air, of these bright days,
When years our friendships crown;
The love that’s loveliest when ’tis old–
When tender tints have turned to gold
And leaves drop down.

Today’s poems are in the public domain, belongs to the masses, and appears here accordingly.

Editor’s Note: Today we celebrate another change in seasons. As the leaves turn red, yellow, orange and gold, as they fall from the trees and blanket the ground, as Mother Earth sheds her summer splendor and Persephone prepares to go underground, may we bid farewell through poetry. And may we meet again in spring when life blooms anew.

Want to read more fall poetry?
Academy of American Poets
The Poetry Foundation

When Hillary Clinton Plays the Victim We All Lose

Posted on November 10, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

by Lynn Marie Houston

After the first Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton began leveling false accusations of sexism in attempts to damage the credibility of her opponent, Bernie Sanders (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ4wiAZevec). As a woman and a feminist, I am appalled that a potential future President of the United States could stoop to such low-blow tactics.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff seem so frequently to make her gender the focal point of her campaign, that they have forgotten that there are people out there, like Bernie Sanders, who respectfully take issue with her platform, not with the fact that she is a woman. This is a problem in a campaign which is, at its root, one based in an argument about gender. I’ve heard it from many Clinton supporters, who claim “we’ve had a black man in the White House, now we have to get a woman in there.” This is not an argument advanced by a theory of equal rights, a theory that would argue for the best person in the White House, regardless of gender, a theory that would also argue for a certain kind of ethics in campaigning that gives equal access to all candidates, despite their race, class, or gender.

It’s as if Clinton and her staff have self-hypnotized. By making Hillary’s status as a woman their primary argument to women voters, they see any attack on her as being sexist. And when every attack is cast as sexist, then it is actually disturbing the equality of the campaign process, preventing the male candidates from engaging a woman on her ideas. It’s undemocratic. The Clinton campaign strategy seems to be that Hillary is exempt from being called on any of her beliefs by the other opponents or it is automatically sexist, shutting down policy debates which are an important part of the national process in shaping our next President. When Hillary cries wolf about attacks of sexism, no one wins. Certainly not women who experience real sexism, whose experiences are trivialized by Hillary’s false accusations.

Sexism is a very serious issue with very real and negative ramifications. It goes without saying that Hillary has surely experienced her fair share of it in her career. However, it is clear from her recent spin of the exchange with Bernie Sanders that she is inventing claims of sexism where none exists, and that doing so hurts other women just like false claims of rape make it more difficult for survivors of rape to be believed.

If I could offer some advice to Hillary campaign staff and her supporters, it would be some simple test to help them understand when sexism is legitimately occurring. In the field of linguistics, we often use what are called “frame sentences” to determine how a word is acting in a sentence. For example, the frame sentence used to test whether a word is an adverb is as follows, “The woman told her story _________.” If a word in a sentence makes sense in the blank, then it is functioning as an adverb. The word “slowly” fits in the blank, for example, so it fits one of the linguistic criteria for an adverb.

I might offer a comparable frame sentence for sexism: “My opponent claimed that I ____________ because I am a woman.” If filling in the blank with something an opponent said accurately represents the situation as it occurred, then yes this is an issue of sexism. However, if the claim is not linked to Hillary Clinton being a woman, and is, instead, a criticism of her political ideas, then no, sexism did not occur. Attacks on Hillary’s ideas are not necessarily sexist unless they attack her for having them because she is a woman.

Let’s examine Bernie Sanders’ words to see if they fit the above test. Sanders basically claimed that regarding gun control, actions are better than words. The exact quote was, “All the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns and end this horrible violence.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/10/hillary_clinton_is_smearing_bernie_sanders_as_a_sexist_it_s_an_insult_to.html)

Can Hillary legitimately claim about the above that her opponent claimed that she should stop shouting about gun control because she is a woman?

No, she cannot. Nothing in Sander’s response makes a direct attack against Clinton because of the fact that she is a woman. Others have pointed out that this idea of “shouting” is a refrain that has synonyms like “yelling” and “screaming” in almost every one of Sanders’ speeches on gun control and never with any reference to Hillary Clinton. Because unlike Clinton, Bernie Sanders is trying to keep this race about the issues, not about the personalities. And in offering that, he is doing a great service to the women of this country who deserve the best candidate and the most equitable selection process a democracy has to offer.

***

Lynn Marie Houston holds a Ph.D. in American literature from Arizona State University. Her poetry and essays have appeared in a number of journals and websites, including The Good Men Project, Full Grown People, Alyss, S/tick, Lumen Magazine, The Fem, and Painted Bride Quarterly. In her first poetry collection, The Clever Dream of Man, she explores relationships between men and women. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. at Southern Connecticut State University.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LANDON GODFREY

Posted on November 7, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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By Landon Godfrey:

INKWELL

When the antique inkwell arrives after making the journey from its dead owner’s estate, the other objects in the atomic ranch house observe it with cool attitudes. Clearly, they think, those curves and etched filigrees bespeak an affection for philosophy or power. Therefore, they shun the inkwell, keeping their own straight lines and unadorned exteriors to themselves. What they never guess: the lonely inkwell is illiterate. Only the masterful sterling silver pen can read.

RECIPE

A moment: when the dough, formed into a ball with greased hands, rests to rise, it exhibits what seems possible in the stone—expansion into space like a star exploding into the full spheroidal grandeur of a self-luminous celestial body. But the mundane violence of the next step overtakes our recognition of energetic brilliance—when we punch the dough and put its deflated body into a furnace, where it will grow again. The stone can grow only smaller and smaller, eroding. It keeps its opinions secret. But hoping to abrade the delusion that traps us in fantasies of an ideal past, sometimes the stone whispers our own noxious monologues to us: I was young and beautiful, my grandmother a princess, her father courageous, our vast estates filled with people who served us, suffering in a gorgeous absence of justice.

SUBTLE HORROR MOVIES

Monster

An immense lizard standing on two legs does not devour the city. The creature nibbles on it at night, while we are sleeping, but we never notice.

Pathogen

Some of us are not immune. We cough and sweat. Our hero is immune. To what, we do not know.

Visitor From Outer Space

We argue about the existence of God. Evidence for both sides: a church that fills with prayer only when it is empty.

Today’s poems are from the chapbook In the Stone, copyright Landon Godfrey 2014, and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Landon Godfrey’s collection of poems, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review, 2011), was selected by David St. John for the 2009 Cider Press Review Book Award. She is also the author of two limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, In the Stone (RAPG-funded artist’s book, 2013) and Spaceship (Somnambulist Tango Press, 2014). Her poems have or will appear in Slice, Bombay Gin, The Collagist, Beloit Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Verse Daily, and other places, and her fiction has been published in Waxwing. A lyric essay is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly. Also an artist, she co-edits, -designs, and -publishes Croquet, a letterpress postcard broadside poetry journal. Born in Washington, DC, she lives in Black Mountain, NC.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poems are surprising and full of wonder. Bringing to life the inanimate, telling fantastical stories of that which can only be born of boundless imagination, what unfolds in the storylines of these poems is tempered by carefully wrought syntax, by painstaking word choice, by a sonic soundscape that mirrors and illuminates the worlds it is creating. There is a beauty and a heartbreak to the lyric that is so carefully interwoven with the poems’ narrative that one must be careful not to miss it. But a reader who slows down and savors today’s poems will be treated to moments such as “The stone can grow only smaller and smaller, eroding. It keeps its opinions secret,” and “a church that fills with prayer only when it is empty.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LITTLE SPELLS

Posted on October 31, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From LITTLE SPELLS
By Jennifer K. Sweeney:

LITTLE SPELLS

We are not witches as fable stoops us
hunchback over caldrons, not women
hobbled sinister by absence though we know
there are tides in our blood that lean us
toward some ancient clock. Still
if ox marrow soup is suggested, the pot readies
and if we return from the Chinese market
with a rough bag of earth tea, our house steep
in the dank reduction of bark and root,
cold air cut heavy with mist.
We may have eaten goose eggs, raw
garlic and sweetbreads, charged our bathwater
with carnelian and held our noses as we threw
back shots of chlorophyll and kombucha.
We may have made closet altars,
placed bowls of royal pollen beneath our beds
and because someone swore it worked,
our underwear may have all gone orange, pockets
filled with quartz turtles, a moonstone at the throat.
If we turn out to be the end of the line,
there are other circles that will flare
like a small cosmos, we know that
creation is a field and a cave and we will be there
churning some broad-winged flurry from the ether.
We know we are not dying but we are
wading in a time-out-of-time
kept afloat by little spells. When will we again
be so studious with our will, omnipresent
of spark and silence and all the rough
honey it takes to set a life in motion?
We are not witches but we know
how to flick the last seeds
of air from a needle
and ease it into the womb
with reverie and we know magic
is its own making,
the power, if there be one,
not in the sung pot or expelled frog
but the fastidious busying
through the terrible
artistry of so fierce a care
as did my dear friend when her boy was born still,
secretly pumping milk through the spring
so that daily she poured a blue cup
over her garden until the blooms ached through.

RAPUNZEL

               beware witches with opulent gardens/be fair wife of increased longing/come
               back to the hunger that undoes/come back to pleasure always the woman/in
               once-upon towers braiding the consequences/be unborn/eat/grow your own rope

TORNADO SIREN

I will remember clutching the ice packs
to my breasts, the way the milk came in,
throttle and burn, so suddenly present
it was a kind of action lunging my body
forward and how the Midwest sky was swollen
with humidity, the cumulonimbus gone
green-black by evening. Four days old,
your body all liquid and howl I gathered
awkwardly in my arms and rocked
past midnight which meant nothing to you
tornado sirens spinning blue circles
across the city and the ground churned
beneath our dilapidated craftsman.
I will remember how we carried you
down to the rickety cobweb dark where you nursed
next to the hundred-year boiler
as the sky wailed and the bare bulb cut
on and off. To have given everything we had
to get you this side of earth and the wind
funneling up a destruction with no god in it,
how terribly small we became
in a throwaway lawn chair
waiting for a freight train
to snatch the house like a dry husk
or pass us by indifferent. I never rested easy
in your pre-life and here, throbbingly new, the world
continued to bleat forsake nothing.
I saw the way anyone would scream
after what they loved in the moment
before the roof fell up or in
as I later watched the faces of Joplin, Missouri
of those who had stashed themselves in salvaged
corners peering out in the wrecked silence
of morning. I will remember
how I understood nothing of what I saw,
the splayed neighborhoods and flattened depots,
love spared or taken,
and how we were raw with beginning, the sobriety
of motherhood anchored me inside
where a white fortress of love and milk
began to shudder into place.

Little Spells: “Perhaps the physical and metaphysical are most perfectly one in a woman’s desire to have a child. Jennifer K. Sweeney’s Little Spells makes a stunningly powerful lyric journey into the realm of this desire in poems that engage language, image, myth, medicine, fairy tale and potion as tickets to the depths. She is a poet wooed by the abstraction of transformation and she finds for it a local habitation in the figure of the egg: chicken, ostrich, loon, rotten and that most remarkable totem of all, the human egg as the source of us all. At the level of image, line and vision, this book resounds with ‘the terrible artistry of so fierce a care.’” —Alison Hawthorne Deming

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Little Spells, newly released from New Issues Press, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Hedgebrook residency, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Award from Passages North and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards. Recent poems have appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, and Verse Daily. Visit her at www.jenniferksweeney.com.

Editor’s Note: It was by sheer coincidence that today’s feature appeared here today–on Halloween. But it is the happiest of coincidences. For today’s collection is rife with magic. Brimming with little spells. Filled with witches and fall leaves turning. Deep-rooted with gnarled and potent tendrils that tap into longing and power. This is a collection that reclaims women’s voices and stories from history, fairy tale, personal and shared experience. Its tales are vivid, its lyric riveting, its essence enchanted. This book is a phenomenal read, and today, on Halloween, it rises from the page, stunning, as if conjured.

Want to see more from Jennifer K. Sweeney?
Jennifer K. Sweeney’s Official Website
Poems With Audio Recordings
Interview about Little Spells
Poem in the Kenyon Review
Interview

Notes Toward a Politico-Sexual Psychology of Consuming Animals

Posted on October 25, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

Notes Toward a Politico-Sexual Psychology of Consuming Animals

by A. Marie Houser

[The following is part one of a two-part essay that begins to articulate, in halting and preliminary ways, a psychology that underpins the consumption of nonhuman animal bodies. Part one articulates that psychology. Part two turns to the ramifications of our efforts as activists and advocates to undo it.]

“The crypt itself is built by violence.”

—Derrida, in the foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok

Black sites & crypts

The black-site pastoral of the farm. Waves of veal stalls, and calves lying on forelegs in segregated patches of grass. There is a specific scene of violence: the farm, its pasture, the slaughterhouse. There are bodies rendered, the vomiting, defecating bodies of sentient chickens hung upside-down, throats slit. These are the physical spaces of the known unknown, where scenes of interrogation play out. Who am I that I am human? On the bodies of animals[1], the question[2] is hammered, filleted, the double question: Who am I that I am human doing this? Who am I that I am not animal?

Follow the question back: a cloud floating inside the cranium of every carnist and former carnist. There is another, closed pasture there. It is a crypt. This crypt precedes consumption of bodies; it exceeds consumption; it accompanies consumption. In the parlance of psychoanalysis, the crypt denotes a space within the ego in which repression buries its desire. The pastoral is a sunshattered crypt.

The crypt is the repository of incorporation. In The Shell and the Kernel and The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, Abraham and Torok, following Ferenczi, define incorporation as a pathological inability to mourn; more, an inability to acknowledge that a loss has occurred in the first place. Incorporation happens when cathexis, of which the loss serves as a reminder, feels so shameful that the only alternative is to secret away the “objective correlative”: the effigy of the beloved. Rather than synthesize aspects of the beloved into the self, the beloved is ejected from consciousness and entombed within the unconscious self.

We are all ghost ships.

The dead cling like confection.

Experiencing other beings is a pleasure—the pleasure of love, care, vulnerability, precarity—the carnist turns from, ashamed, only to resurrect that pleasure in the mutated phantom of cooked flesh. But the suggestion of the libidinal that accompanies any psychoanalytic concept references other pleasures, pleasures with which even advocates and activists are sometimes uncomfortable: aggression, sex. To be animal is to experience both, as Freud said, articulating a human psychology that is at home with and in tension with its animality. The aggression of carnism is itself a phantom form of aggression, distributed through the political and the economic, erecting politico-economic crypts outside the self: the very pastures and sheds and chutes that articulate a vast geometry of suffering, the very rostrums and halls from which flow the laws and economic subsidies that underwrite and perpetuate the shit-and-ammonia-tinged crypts.

There can be no repatriation of cows and other farmed animals. There is only removal to other pastures; safer, we hope, kinder. But there can be no repatriation. That is the saddest fact of all our efforts at activism—a fact known and unknown, both; we keep that fact both known and unknown, removed and at a distance, as we must. Removal is from a space within the human to another space within the human, itself more domestic, itself more pastoral than the pastoralism of the strawbale lie and tractor entendre.

Their homeland is yet human.

Spindles of animals we wind around and around as thread.

***

[1] Shorthand for “nonhuman animals.”

[2] We might say, keeping in mind that the laborers working in slaughterhouses often do so as a last resort, enduring abominable conditions, that the question was placed at the end of the hammer and the knife for them, though undoubtedly, such questions emerge in the course of having to kill and dismember, often with sorrow and regret if not with dissociation and denial, lives and bodies so anatomically close to our own.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MOVEMENT NO. 1: TRAINS

Posted on October 24, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From MOVEMENT NO. 1: TRAINS
By Hope Wabuke:

and when she waits, knowing its coming by the movement of light
across rusted metal, the dirty white tiles of tunnel wall almost
beautiful in the light sliding closer through darkness, approaching
rumble and tearing, metal wheel against track, gears shifting; halt.

in the loud echo still, vibrations pulsing—the only thing. she
imagines the sound she hears is breathing.

it is only when she thinks of him that her body becomes soft; she is
so conscious, then, of the movement of his body pressed against
hers’. so now she slides slightly, left, right, with the swaying motions
of the car. the train is stopped on the bridge, a windy day. the
intercom voice presses through static and she lifts arms above head,
stretches out her body to touch fingertips light to metal pole in
aisle’s center. the violence of the train’s starting and picking up, of
speed. in the meeting of the many tiny bones in her wrist against the
cold hardness, in the press of fingers soft against metal pole. she is
understanding pain in increments of waves, the pulsing slow
softening in rhythm with the traincar, rocking—her body, pushed
backwards, against scratched plexiglass window.

and in the moment of the train’s descent underground, her last view
a mirrored body, lines like chain links against grey sky, grey water.
the shape of their structures, repeating, suspended: a half-circle, a
half-closed eye .

and on the day after his leaving. she notices his absence in the
awkward stillness of her legs, the way her arms hang stiffly at her
sides. this is when she will remember how, as he would touch
drumsticks to upside-down white buckets to make beats, she would
see sound touch tile in tunnel walls and touch heels to ground.
rocking upward in tiny motions, she would lift hands lightly; she
would move her body in tiny circles of his rhythm.

Movement No. 1: Trains is a city symphony of New York, where the author lived for many years–the daily rhythm of riding the subway and dancing between people walking the streets. Blurring the lines between past and the present, these prose poems explore the movement between love, loss and longing in a young woman’s memory.

Hope Wabuke: Born in exile to Ugandan refugees, Hope Wabuke is a writer, essayist and poet based in California. Hope is a contributing editor for The Root and a contributing writer for the Kirkus Reviews. Her poetry has also appeared in Lit Hub, The North American Review, Potluck Magazine, Ruminate Magazine, Fjords Literary Journal, Salamander Literary Journal, NonBinary Review, JoINT Literary Journal, Weave Magazine, Cease Cows, Kalyani Magazine, Split this Rock and Literary Mama. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Newsweek’s The Daily Beast, Salon, Gawker, Guernica, Dame, The Root, Ozy, The Hairpin, Ms. Magazine online, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Magazine and The Feminist Wire. Her fiction has been featured in the anthology All About Skin. Her chapbook Movement No. 1: Trains was published in June 2015 by dancing girl press. Her second chapbook, The Leaving, will be published in 2016 by Akashic Press as part of Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani’s New Generation African Poets series.

Editor’s Note: Part train ride, part memory, Movement No. 1: Trains takes the reader on a journey through which narrative blends with past, history is distorted by the present, and the tracks of the mind become one with the train lines of the New York subway system. Disjointed in a halting motion that mirrors the jerky movements of an underground train, the sway and lurch of this collection is tempered by moments of clarity and thoughtful reflection: “she / imagines the sound she hears is breathing;” “it is only when she thinks of him that her body becomes soft;” “she / would move her body in tiny circles of his rhythm.”

Want to see more from Hope Wabuke?
Hope Wabuke’s Official Website
Hope Wabuke’s Twitter
Buy Movement No. 1: Trains from dancing girl press
Literary Hub
The Hairpin

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Notes Toward a Politico-Sexual Psychology of Consuming Animals

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