Five Thoughts on Cecil the Lion—Or: How the Internet Really Botched This One

Posted on August 4, 2015August 3, 2019 by asitoughttobemagazine

Five Thoughts on Cecil the Lion—Or: How the Internet Really Botched This One

by Okla Elliott

I had initially decided to ignore all of the Cecil the Lion outrage and counter-outrage, thinking it one more oddity of the internet, but as the debate continues on, I feel compelled to offer a few thoughts on the matter. Thoughts 1 & 2 below basically sum up what I see as the salient factors of the initial internet outrage over Cecil’s death and the internet backlash to that outrage. More importantly, to my mind anyway, are thoughts 3, 4, & 5, which I hope offer ways we might have a more productive conversation and move forward beyond reductive memes, Twitter quips, and zero-sum/binary thinking.

1) How often do humans have empathy for animals? Very rarely, so I suggest we applaud this instance of trans-species empathy. That being said, I often imagine a majority of the people expressing outrage over this one senseless act of killing which led to great suffering in an animal were eating a cheeseburger while posting their outrage. I am glad we are seeing empathy toward an animal, but now we have to train ourselves to feel that same empathy and outrage for the hundreds and hundreds of millions of animals we consume every year after offering them nothing but a torturous existence before their slaughter. And here I am optimistic, because a recent statistic shows Americans are slaughtering tens of millions fewer animals a year for their sustenance. May we continue this trend.

[Side note: I discuss part of why we feel more empathy toward Cecil the Lion than other animals in thought #3.]

2) I want to discuss the outright empirical inaccuracy of the claims going around the internet that people are showing outrage over Cecil the Lion’s unnecessary and excruciating death yet are ignoring other ethical issues. Take the popular meme suggesting that no one showed any concern for the Iraq War or the war on drugs. It would require about a minute of honest research to know this is just factually inaccurate. Tens of millions of people protested the Iraq War, and many people have been criticizing the war on drugs for decades now, including but not limited to presidential candidates in both major political parties, thousands of lawyers, many celebrities, and millions of concerned citizens.

But the real issue here isn’t that all of the quips, memes, op-ed pieces, and meta-moral outrage are empirically inaccurate (though they are), but rather that ethics is not a zero-sum game. I bet you a hundred bucks that 90% or more of the people who have posted about the murder of this lion have, at some point, also posted about racism, sexism, wealth inequality, the environment, etc. – and I bet you another hundred bucks that they’ve posted more about these things throughout their time on social media they have about than the death of one lion.

It is entirely possible to have multiple political convictions and to be an activist for more than one issue. We have got to jettison this zero-sum thinking from our ethics and politics if we’re going to solve more than one problem at a time.

In short, the issues you think are important are still getting millions of posts and certainly have and will continue to receive more attention than one lion’s horrific death. In particular, some have suggested that people have cared more about this one lion’s death than the murder of black Americans at the hands of the police. Here a simple Google search will suffice. There have been literally over ten thousand times more posts about #BlackLivesMatter than #CeciltheLion. Of course, these posts have not solved the heinous problem of systemic racism in the United States any more than posts about Cecil the Lion have solved all animal rights issues, but if your metric for caring is online posts about a subject, it is clear that many more people care about the rampant racism in this country than Cecil the Lion—which is exactly as it should be, since it affects millions of sentient beings suffering unnecessarily, as opposed to just one lion.

[Side note: I want to be as emphatic as possible here when I say that all of these movements—#YesAllWomen, #BlackLivesMatter, and many others that don’t yet have hashtags but have many supporters—are absolutely important and even necessary if we are going to move our culture toward a more empathetic and therefore just society. I am merely criticizing the idea that posting about one might diminish someone’s support for another.]

3) There are of course entirely different angles of inquiry that are being flooded over by all this outrage and counter-outrage. One such angle is the way aesthetics shapes our ethics. Lions—especially healthy, robust ones—fit most people’s definitions of “beautiful” or “majestic,” whereas an emaciated, disease-ridden cow would not. We are therefore much more likely to show outrage over the murder of a healthy lion than a sickly cow, precisely because the former meets our aesthetic requirements for beauty. This is a question rarely discussed, but it is equally important when we discuss ethics and the law in the human realm.

What role does aesthetics play in our legal system when we see that a white woman (the standard of Western beauty) is the least likely of all demographics to be convicted of a crime, and when our culture views the violence (sexual or otherwise) toward a white woman a more heinous crime than the violence toward a woman of color or a male of any race? Practically no one discusses the connection between aesthetics and ethics/law, and the current quips on Twitter and the evidence- and logic-poor memes going around the internet are adding nothing to the conversation, simply going back and forth in a zero-sum ethical game that reinforces bad thinking about ethics.

I propose, therefore, a long discussion about how our aesthetics informs our ethics.

[Side note: There are of course other issues at play here. People will also often get more outraged when a member of an endangered species is killed than when another more abundant animal is killed, thus the disparity in public outrage between a rhino (not usually considered beautiful in the classical sense) being poached in Africa and a cute bunny rabbit being killed by a hunter in rural Pennsylvania. We also have to take into account the fact that Cecil had a name, which individualized him for many and thus increased the emotional connection. The aesthetics angle I propose here is by no means the only angle by which we could approach this subject to find a more fruitful conversation, but I think it is one of the most productive since aesthetics plays such a huge role in much of our ethical thought without us realizing it.]

4) Tolstoy once said that the best stories aren’t good versus evil, but rather good versus good, and this is certainly a story of good versus good. Everyone seems to be outraged about legitimate ethical wrongs and want to see these wrongs corrected. I simply argue that the best way to do this is to develop omni-directional empathy, allowing us to empathize with animals not of our species and with members of different demographics and beliefs within our own species. It is not a binary or zero-sum game; every ethical impulse becomes a habit of mind that we must foster to the fullest, aiming toward feeling as much empathy for as many sentient beings as our finite minds can manage.

5) I am a great believer in the powers of the internet to raise awareness for issues and political candidates and literary endeavors, etc., but that is not to suggest that it is without its flaws. One of the biggest ones is that discussion on the internet is often reduced to memes and the sadly reductive space of a Twitter post. We must make use of social media to raise awareness of issues and to promote good ideas and good books and underrepresented thoughts. We must also, however, remain ever-vigilant against the possibility of shrinking the complexities in these arenas. I beg everyone to take a step, or a few steps, back and re-assess everything going on around these series of issues and make more complex analyses thereof. We should also endeavor to take greater action than merely posting online and criticizing the posts that we see online.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MONOZYGOTIC | CODEPENDENT

Posted on August 1, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From MONOZYGOTIC | CODEPENDENT
By Stephanie Bryant Anderson:

LONELINESS CAME INSIDE MY HOME, UNPACKED ITS
THINGS

I sat on the floor
in a blue room choking

on emotions, confessing
sadness to the cake falling

down my throat, wondering
how I have come to hate winter

when it snows
such beautiful white flowers.

But—

it’s the way I’ve neatly folded the laundry
over and over.

It’s the way fear visits me twice,
and courage once.

It’s the way I move alone at night
from the couch to the door

to the curtains,
back to the couch.

It’s how you catch me dreaming
and step over my body.

LIKE THE BLACK HOLE CARTOGRAPHER WHO WENT
HUNTING FOR WALNUTS

When the door closed this time, she knew it
would be different. She saw his eyes—
emotionless ticks that had grown into the plural

patterns of empty walnut shells. Someone once
star-mapped Aries the Ram, and generously
gave him horns. I am strong as an Ox—

he reminded her as she stood to leave. Reminded
her that she was the Year of the Rabbit with closed
curtains.

Safety over risk, she recalled looking at the door,
but her body lied, it could not carry her there.
You cry too easily— he said, after the first hit

into her eye-bone crunched, sounding the way
the nutcracker sounded when breaking open
walnuts. He stood over her

using the same angle God used to look down from.
But, here, for her,
there was no longer a down—

ANXIETY WHILE CROSSING THE TENNESSEE-ARKANSAS
BRIDGE

Last November my sister got married.
My heart cropped, carried

for months in my handkerchief. At night
it would cry out from extinction.

This amputation being no small ache, I left
Tennessee, my heartbeat slow.

Memphis with her strange spell
filled my piano-ribs

with a slow blues loaded
with heavy bees and suicide ghosts.

The road tasted like salt. I drove until
I couldn’t see the shape of us,

until my heart could again beat
on its own.

In Monozygotic | Codependent, Stephanie Bryant Anderson’s poems are concerned with splitting the self and uncovering the woman beneath the familial myths. Yet the essential paradox for Bryant Anderson: when the self has a twin—a ‘shadow,’ a ‘dark-haired mirror girl’—what then of the split? These poems ache; in the style of Southern gothic, these poems are ‘filled [with] piano ribs, a slow blues loaded with heavy bees and suicide ghosts.’ Bryant Anderson’s are poems of survival, built in fragile and beautiful shell casings, stanzas deceptively elegant and delicate, for what pinions each graceful couplet is a fierceness of spirit, a deep-seated desire for life, always life, even in the midst of pain and memory, ‘shaped as an open field plagued by black irises.’ I am broken and remade by these poems. —Jennifer Givhan, 2015 Winner National Endowment for the Arts fellowship

Stephanie Bryant Anderson is author of Monozygotic | Codependent (The Blue Hour Press 2015). Recent or forthcoming publications include Vinyl, burntdistrict, Rogue Agent and The Blueshift Journal. Besides poetry she enjoys kickboxing and math. Stephanie is founder of Red Paint Hill Publishing.

Editor’s Note: Monozygotic | Codependent opens with a quote from Sylvia Plath: “I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.” And so Stephanie Bryant Anderson sets the stage for this brave, vulnerable collection. The journey the poet takes us on is deeply confessional, beginning in loneliness and ending in leaving, with panic, regret, abuse, anxiety, divorce, codependence, death, and God doggedly pursuing the I in-between. This is not the story of a light at the end of the tunnel; it is a story of survival. But there is so much beauty in the words, in their brutal honesty, in the intimacy of what is revealed, in the shared experience that arises when one speaks up about that which is too-seldom talked about. In this way, this book is Plathian, reflecting the intersection between lived suffering and staggering art.

Following the Plath quote, Monozygotic | Codependent welcomes us into its world with “Loneliness Came Inside My Home, Unpacked Its Things.” Here we sit on the floor. Here we are choking. Here we are eating our feelings. Here we are “wondering / how I have come to hate winter // when it snows / such beautiful white flowers.” A line so beautiful, it hurts to confront it. Like the idea of stepping over a woman dreaming.

From stepped over to stepped on, “Like the Black Hole Cartographer Who Went Hunting for Walnuts” takes us deep into the reality of a woman abused. She is not safe. She cannot leave. She is looked down on by man and God alike, only “here, for her, / there [is] no longer a down.”

In “Anxiety While Crossing the Tennessee-Arkansas Bridge” we encounter one of the major themes of the book: twin-ness. What it means to be a twin, to have been born into that level of codependence and to have to survive that conjunction into the individuality of adulthood. The result is a heart that must be “cropped, carried,” that has to learn to beat again on its own.

Want to see more from Stephanie Bryant Anderson?
Stephanie Bryant Anderson’s Website
Buy Monozygotic | Codependent from The Blue Hill Press
Follow Stephanie Bryant Anderson on Twitter

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOANNA CHEN

Posted on July 25, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

A STRANGE VITALITY
By Joanna Chen

I saw a body fly through the air
last night on the highway—
a tiny Chagall figure, arms
belonging to a diver, legs
to an astronaut, his helmet a halo
of blue, catapulted into a swirling
sky edged in thunder. Before he landed
I thought of my father-in-law
born in Belarus, a gentle wisp
of a man whose eyes, pale
gray on his death bed, tore
through the frame of life.

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

Joanna Chen is a British writer currently living in Israel. Her essays, poems, and literary translations have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poet Lore, Asymptote, Guernica, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast, among others.

Editor’s Note: A brilliant, devastating little poem. A poem that contains the human body, sky and thunder, memory and death within its twelve short lines. And those lines! Their movement, their lyricism, their power. How epic the body, “catapulted into a swirling / sky edged in thunder,” how soft the repose, the “gentle wisp / of a man [with] eyes, pale.” And from that softness, the final throe–of the poem and of the life it recalls–the man who “tore / through the frame of life.”

This poem is an impactful experience on the page, and it is another experience to hear it read aloud by the poet. I suggest you hop over to Radar, click the play button, and read along as Joanna Chen adds another dimension to this work.

Hedy Habra: A Micro-Interview and Three Poems

Posted on July 16, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

OE: The poems in Under Brushstrokes are ekphrastic, but they don’t always announce themselves as such. How do you conceive of ekphrasis and how do you mobilize it as a technique in these poems?

HH: I do not aim at giving a purely ekphrastic rendition of the artworks through a mere description, but rather use the image as a point of departure for a surreal or oneiric recreation that may depart from the original. In Under Brushstrokes, poems often engage in a dialogue with the artist or his model, eliminating the boundaries of time and space, or offer an imagined version of what might have happened before or after the portrayed scene, oftentimes from the point of view of one of the characters in the paintings.
Although some of the poems in Under Brushstrokes are intrinsically connected to the artwork, I gradually wanted poems to stand on their own. With time, I decided against using epigraphs, and most poems were submitted to journals and published without acknowledging the source of inspiration. When I compiled the collection, I listed at the end the artists’ names and titles with their corresponding poems, in order to offer readers an additional perspective along with a different layer of interpretation. I chose to write many of the poems without knowing the identity of the artist, to be freed from preconceptions; although I also enjoy writing with a conscious knowledge of the artist and his work.

OE: You make use of myth in various ways in your poetry. Could you tell us in what ways you funhouse-mirror the contents of myth to create your own work?

HH: We find echoes of these allegories in our daily lives, and one of the roles of poetry is to highlight these similarities, which mirror archetypal patterns of the unconscious. I was always fascinated by the fissures between the oftentimes contradictory versions of a given myth or legend. It is tempting to enable a character–stilled within pigments–to tell his/her story. In Under Brushstrokes, writing a poem from Europa’s point of view, for example, ironically subverts the accepted version, because it aims at revealing that she wasn’t raped but participated in Zeus’ seduction. The painting that inspired this poem suggests a sensuous interaction and complicity between the young woman and the sacred bull. In another poem, as she is being encircled with bark, Daphne laments having refused Apollo’s advances, and reconsiders her former decision to escape. Although myths have their own sacred time linked to the present, the mirroring between their different artistic depictions reveals that they aren’t frozen in time but open to reinterpretations and re-appropriation.

OE: You also work with Spanish-language literature. How does this influence your work, either directly or indirectly?

HH: I love magical realism and the way some fabulist authors incorporate dreamlike and surreal elements in their work. I favor texts that mix levels of reality and blur boundaries between genres. My favorite Latin American poet is Octavio Paz, who has vastly experimented with form and genres, and wrote superb prose poems. I greatly admire Borges, Cortázar, Lorca, and the Neruda of Residencia en la tierra, among many others. In Under Brushstrokes, prose poems alternate with verse, as though each poem seems to dictate a particular form.

There is a myriad of authors that have affected me as a reader and as a writer. I grew up with French literature, with an early love for Baudelaire’s and Rimbaud’s verse and prose poems. I also love Italian literature, namely Montale’s poetry, and lyrical fabulists such as Buzzati, and Calvino, whose Invisible Cities I constantly revisit. It is difficult to pin point influences but my profound admiration for all these authors’ œuvre has undoubtedly influenced my writing, consciously as well as unconsciously.

***

Brushstrokes

Without any sound, waves permeate the floor, algae cover the curtains with an insidious verdigris patina, and she watches herself, complacent, looking awry in the mirror while she unbuttons her black evening dress, a mirror that remains empty like her own life. Seated in a sofa, back turned, he drowns in his indifference into the surge, and surely, it is his face that is seen reflected in the portrait hanging on the wall, an immersed look, barely visible behind the wide-open newspaper. Waters rise to the rhythm of the notes resounding from the rear window, in which a man with a white wig plays the piano, as though it were Mozart composing his Requiem. The painter raises inexorably the level of the waters, and the woman knows that even in that last moment, she will only be fulfilled by drowning in the torrent furtively surrounding them.

***

Broken Ladder

I am no longer this little boy who ran away at night to milk the moon and stars. What am I to do if the ladder is broken, leaving golden threads dangling in broad daylight, braided rays of hardened light yet fine as silk spun by a silkworm, once linking me to that lost site of fearless joys? But I will send back the stardust I fed on for so long. Now you know why I study the Almanac, awaiting for the right day and time when wheat is ripe, reaching high into those rays of light. You know why I’m here, in the midst of this field, dressed in my Sunday clothes: I will pull these gilded chords as those of a tower bell ringing above beckoning a gift filled with the substance of dreams, wrapped with Queen Mab’s veils. Don’t fear it is too heavy: it weighs less than a breath or a sigh. Let the wind blow softly, watch it rise to the top with your eyes closed.

***

The Memory of Unspoken Words

She has landed on the deck of an abandoned wreck, fails to remember how she swallowed the fiery ball that pulled her like a tidal wave into the stillness of a metallic sky steeped in lavender where angry clouds hover around the drowning sun suffused with coral. Her pillow is a melted cloud filled with birds that forgot how to fly and now swim in a pool that overflows the deck, washing the souls of dead sailors from every leak and corner. She presses on her eyelids to find a different ending to their story, sees her body glow with scales and the fish in the pool grow wings. She knows every drop of water will vanish at dawn, erasing with black ink her luminous shape, alive only in the formless night, and the rainbow will soon shine over a boat with discarded bags heavy with the stained memory of unspoken words and broken planks.

***

[The above poems initially appeared in Danse Macabre and Pirene’s Fountain and are reprinted here by permission of the author.]

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SARA JUNE WOODS

Posted on July 11, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

& SOMEWHERE THE SUN
By Sara June Woods

Somewhere there is a clearing
in a forest where the world is
not a lonely place.

Somewhere there is a mountain
I have written on in forest fires
that says I am sorry I am not

the one you were looking for.
I wanted to be so badly.
But I am just this one person.

& it says all this
spiraling across
below the tree line.

& somewhere the sun
looks the same coming up
as it does going down.

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

Sara June Woods is author of three books, Sara or the Existence of Fire (Horse Less Press, 2014), Wolf Doctors (Artifice Books, 2014) and the forthcoming Careful Mountain (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Her poetry is published widely in journals such as Guernica, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly and Salt Hill. She is a trans woman and a Scorpio and she lives in Portland, OR with her girlfriend she is married to.

Editor’s Note: What do you do when a poem is heartbreaking? When its simple, honest revelations break your heart? When its line breaks break you? What do you do with a poem that devastates you with its simple, brutal truth? With a poem that’s so good, it hurts to read it? Why, you share it, of course. Here, you say to the world. You’re welcome.

Want more from Sara June Woods?
Healthy Dog Poem – Writing by Sara June Woods
P(r)o(bl)em – saramountain tumblr

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MARIANNE KUNKEL

Posted on July 4, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Marianne Kunkel:

A SLOTH FIRST HEARS ITS NAME

But why should it care? It munches
a cecropia leaf. It probes the air
with its blunt snout, detecting
a waft of sour coconut. It lumbers to a branch,
grabs hold with its claws, drops,
dangling upside down like a knapsack.
It doesn’t know to feel ashamed
that its name means lazy and sinful.
Like my little sister
after her abortion, when our father
changed her name from Molly to Molly.

Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Marianne Kunkel is the author of the chapbook The Laughing Game (Finishing Line Press), as well as many poems that have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre Dame Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. A former managing editor of Prairie Schooner, she is an assistant professor of creative writing and publishing at Missouri Western State University, where she edits the undergraduate literary journal The Mochila Review. Follow her on Twitter @mariannekunkel.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is awesome for a myriad of reasons. Because it is about sloths (sort of). Because it is about words, about labels, about judgment and ignorant bliss. Because it vibrant both with images and with sound. Because it houses epic proportions in eleven short lines. Because its advocacy relies on neither a soap box nor a sense of superiority. But what is most striking about today’s poem, perhaps, is its volta. The way it turns the world of the poem on its head. The way it leaves the reader staggering, contemplative, changed.

Time for the Professoriate to Lead the Way

Posted on June 28, 2015August 3, 2019 by asitoughttobemagazine

Time for the Professoriate to Lead the Way

by William Trent Pancoast

It’s about time for working folks to stand up for themselves. Walmart workers haven’t been able to get it done. The old line unions are still reeling from the ongoing attacks begun by Reagan and continued by the right wing.

It looks to me like it should happen on our college campuses, and it should for starters be about adjunct instructors having a chance to make a living wage with benefits. That will require that tenured faculty support adjuncts. Much of the bargaining success of the United Auto Workers resulted from skilled and unskilled (high wage and low wage) belonging to the same union. Tenured faculty, making $50,000-$175,000 annual pay with health care and retirement, and adjuncts, making piecework of roughly $400 to $1000 per credit hour taught with no benefits, must join together. They need to form unions, bargain, and be willing to go on strike if necessary. If the brightest group in our country can’t take on the right wing corporatists, who can?

I’m calling out the Professoriate. Folks who spend eight to twelve years in undergraduate, masters, and PhD programs and are respected for their achievements, intelligence, and contributions to our society and civilization. Someone needs to take on the global corporations killing the planet and demeaning the humans on it. Someone needs to take on the corporatization of our universities that has resulted in up to 75% of college instructors serving as low paid temps. Who is better positioned to fight this war than the best educated and most intellectually capable group among us?

The middle and working classes continue to be stunted. They need raises. Benefits. Retirement. Some hope for the future. While the middle class needs to regain its losses, the working class needs its ladder put back.

Walmart seemed like the Great Labor Hope. Its employees have organized in some areas and done informational pickets and strikes. A nationwide strike by Walmart employees would result in a good contract within 48 hours. Once Walmart’s bean counters told the brass that what the striking employees wanted was what the company had lost in two days, the middle class would be on its way back. But the national momentum is not there for Walmart workers to organize. Many are ignorant of unions and scared for the minimum wage jobs they need. Maybe just like adjuncts.

The industrial unions in steel, auto, glass, and rubber have been decimated by off-shoring and never-ending attacks on wages and benefits. The Big Three, after the 2008 collapse of capitalism as we know it, is finally profitable again with workers perhaps getting raises after seven years of givebacks. (Please don’t tell me about Ford. The only reason they didn’t go bankrupt is that they borrowed every nickel of equity in the company before the depression began in 2008.) The United Auto Workers can’t even organize the transplants, most of which are in the south, even though the foreign factories are sweatshops with 50% temps making low wages with no benefits.

Lately refinery and port workers have gone on strike and improved their situations. The United Auto Workers were recently in Detroit at their Special Bargaining Convention, an event that not long ago set this country’s social agenda through what it decided to bargain for—vacations and sick leave, retirement and safety, apprenticeships and worker training, unemployment compensation and civil rights, family leave and health care, always health care, always trying to negotiate a one payer system for every citizen. Labor set the agenda after World War II to develop and protect our middle class. It is now next to powerless and nothing has so far taken its place.

The college Professoriate should be the group to take on the corporatism in the university system by addressing the adjunct crisis and securing good pay, benefits, and job security for all college instructors. The ruckus they make in accomplishing this task will help move the discussion, and our middle class, forward. They have the brain power, work ethic, and hopefully the moral compass to get the job done.

How would they do it? A lot of frustration has been moldering in the ranks of the adjuncts. They are the institutional temps whose low wages and lack of benefits are carrying the load in higher education. The tenured faculty should also be open to the chance to lead the way in saving our middle class. They surely understand that unless the bottom ranks are protected by labor unions, they themselves, or their successors, will become adjuncts. As tenured professors retire, many will not be replaced. Then a day will come when none are replaced.

Everything about higher education and the Professoriate is involved in this social venture of taking back our universities from the education corporatists: economics and law, literacy, every science, the humanities, government, personal injury lawyers, medicine, religion. No segment of academia would get a by. Of course they would need to acknowledge their own dire conditions. Academia would need to step up to organize and educate.

It is not difficult to tap into the framework of unionism today. Call the United Auto Workers at Solidarity House in Detroit. Invite the office professionals (OEPIU) in. The unions will respond big time. They can have the infrastructure for adjunct organizing in place quickly. Start a new union. Use the brave adjuncts who led the recent walkout and informational pickets on Adjunct Day last February. They have a framework in place.
Maybe I’m a crackpot, some kind of dinosaur pushing for a solution from the past. Maybe I’m generalizing that Solidarity is even possible in such diverse ranks as the Professoriate. Maybe I’m crazy to suggest such an idea—that the best educated, but also the most exploited, group in America today should go to war against global corporations, and specifically corporatism in education, in order to redefine and strengthen our middle class so that it can survive another generation.

But nothing will change the truth of the matter at hand. The corporatists are trashing our economy and educational system by taking more resources for themselves at the expense of the workers on the bottom. If our country’s Professoriate will not step forward and engage the enemy, who will?

***

William Trent Pancoast’s recent fiction has appeared in Night Train, Revolver, Steel Toe Revue, and Fried Chicken and Coffee. His novels are Wildcat and Crashing, with a third, Valley Real Estate, soon to appear. His story collection Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam is looking for a publisher. Pancoast spent 25 years as a labor newspaper editor and is a 1972 graduate of the Ohio State University. He lives in Ontario, Ohio.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DEVIN KELLY

Posted on June 27, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

FEAR OF
By Devin Kelly

We are discussing the roots of things. How phobia
means fear of, and we make them up. Bookaphobia.
Classroomaphobia. Girlaphobia. I say there will be
a quiz. They laugh. It is evening in a small room
in Queens where the desks are miniatures
of the things they should be and the children
sitting in them too close to me and my coffee
so soon done. Then I ask them if they are afraid.
Then I ask them of what. The word penis. Spiders.
The people who hate me for my name. How a moment
turning stills to a moment stilled. How silence,
even in silence, breathes. Their pages of homework
loiter upon their desks. Fifteen words they had
never seen before, and fifteen meanings, written out
beside. Benevolent. Ailurophile. I spoke, upon the hearing,
of opposites, to think of words as people, rooted,
experimenting with different prefixes. To think of words
as lovers, hungry for what it might be they want.
What is her name? It lingers a moment before
it hassles its way out of my mouth. The shape it takes,
unfamiliar, awkward. A word I have never spoken before.
And her skin brown. How she taught me the way
to count to ten in Arabic. The people who hate me
for my name. The people who hate me. The people.
Across an ocean, a man kneeling does not see the hand
that holds the gun that fires the bullet that splits
his head in two. Across an ocean, someone laughs
at a fence of severed heads. I do not know
what to teach anymore. Graphophobia. Philophobia.
Fear of writing, fear of love. And all these children
who do not have a name for their sorrow. At night,
in bed, I turn her name for the hundredth time
and find its beauty. The soft grace of wanting
to be held. A child, scared, moving in dark
from room to room to find the mother who named her,
the father, too, and their reasons why.

Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. His collaborative chapbook with Melissa Smyth, This Cup of Absence, is forthcoming from Anchor & Plume Press. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Armchair/Shotgun, Post Road, RATTLE, The Millions, Appalachian Heritage, Midwestern Gothic, The Adirondack Review, and more, and his essay “Love Innings” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in Manhattan, teaches Creative Writing and English classes to high schoolers in Queens, and lives in Harlem. You can find him on twitter @themoneyiowe.

Editor’s Note: June 26, 2015 was a day of imperative progress in American history. A day of change. A day when love triumphed. I celebrated this historic event in the most wonderful way I could have imagined, at the wedding of two women whose love is beshert. But when one of the brides gave her speech, she reminded us that there is still more to be done. “Today we celebrate,” she said, “but tomorrow, we keep fighting.” Even amidst a joy so great she shared it with the entire country, the blushing bride reminded us that we can—and should—always be working to make the world a better place.

Today’s poem was written in response to Islamophobia. A Muslim girl in a classroom. What is she afraid of? “The people who hate me for my name.” The families of the victims of a racist hate crime—a terrorist act—in Charleston, SC have what to teach us about love and forgiveness. But what are they truly the victims of? “The people who hate me. The people.” We speak words today that carry with them the chalk outlines of the hatred that flows from fear: Black Lives Matter; I can’t breathe. “I do not know / what to teach anymore,” writes the poet, but he knows “all these children / who do not have a name for their sorrow.”

Let us shout our joy from the rooftops and dance in the streets because yesterday love won. And today, tomorrow, and in the days to come, let us fight until love triumphs over fear and hatred, until there is justice and equality for all.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Posted on June 20, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

MOONRISE
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

(Today’s poem is in the public domain, belongs to the masses, and appears here today accordingly.)

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and a Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially sprung rhythm) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse. (Annotated biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem appears here on the recommendation of my mother, a faithful reader of this series. As this coming Monday is her birthday, and the moon her ruling planet, I wanted to share this poem with you today in her honor. Happy Birthday, Mama! May you forever shine as brightly as the moon.

Want to read more by and about Gerard Manley Hopkins?
The Poetry Foundation
Academy of American Poets
Bartleby.com

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PATTY PAINE

Posted on June 13, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

ANTIPHONY
By Patty Paine

Go back to that stream, touch
your lips to the cold, clear quivering,
draw into yourself a time when it was simple
as this to be quenched, to draw in what was
needed. Walk back over the dewed grass
of your past, past the water tower you filled
with dark imaginings, feel
the air crisp & clean on your skin, call
this hope, and carry it
to these moments when a photograph
can send you spiraling, your husband
now six months gone, waiting at the bottom
of an escalator in some airport
or another, everyone hurrying to be somewhere
else, except for this one man, waiting
for you to descend. How a face can be
indelible, yet fade so quickly, is an alchemy
best left unknowable. Hold that sting
of hope, and call out
the name of one who ministered
to you, over & over, until from the dark
you hear your own name return
to you, wild, and rising and clear.

Today’s poem originally appeared in Thrush and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing), The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Gulf (Berkshire Academic Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, Verse Daily, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and many other publications. She is the founding editor of diode poetry journal and Diode Editions. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is Interim Director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is one I encourage you to read over and over. For each reading is like opening the next layer of a Russian doll, and there is always more waiting to be discovered within. While one reading simply does not do the poem justice, you honor yourself, dear reader, each time you slip deeper into these words.

Start in media res. Start in motion. Begin not at the beginning, but by turning back. The world of the poem is visceral. Go on, touch the stream, feel the “cold, clear quivering.” Go deeper now. “[D]raw into yourself a time when it was simple / as this to be quenched, to draw in what was / needed.” Move backwards; a poem—a life—in rewind. Let the story unfold in this way—cinematic, emotive, devastating. Let the reverse motion be what propels you forward. You are Lot’s Wife. You are Orpheus. There is only looking back, but looking back leaves you alone in the dark, “hear[ing] your own name return / to you, wild, and rising and clear.”

What a fraught landscape, yes, but what a gift to have been taken on such a journey by such a guide.

Five Thoughts on Cecil the Lion—Or: How the Internet Really Botched This One

by Okla Elliott

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Time for the Professoriate to Lead the Way

by William Trent Pancoast

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