Femme Savage

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Femme Savage by Billee Sharp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Cliché

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American Cliché

by Seth Michelson

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

***

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

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KILIAN MCDONNELL

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ON HEARING THINGS MALE
By Kilian McDonnell

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

Want to see more by and about Kilian McDonnell?
Purchase Kilian McDonnell’s poetry books from Liturgical Press

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANYA SILVER, PART DEUX

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STRAWBERRIES IN SNOW
By Anya Silver

Belief comes too easily to the ill.
Miracles fall from their lips like gems,
are worn like secret amulets. A woman,
I’m told, brushed her steps of snow
and found the very thing she craved
to eat, strawberries fresh as summer,
dimpled sweet and red beneath the rime.
Pink climbed back to her ailing cheeks,
the way new blood makes the body sing.
And yet, no one talks of her sister,
who also searched, found nothing there.
She swept and swept until she fell.
I’ve been so good, she wept, the wind
remorseless over earth that wouldn’t bear.


(Today’s poem previously appeared in the Belleview Literary Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Anya Silver’s book of poetry, The Ninety-Third Name of God, was published by LSU press. She teaches at Mercer University and lives in Macon, Georgia with her husband and son.

Editor’s Note: Last week I featured Anya Silver’s “French Toast” on this series. It is one of the most successful love poems I have ever read, and it was the poem that needed to be shared on that particular Saturday. But I accidentally stumbled upon “French Toast” after securing today’s poem, and so I want to treat you to another entry by this very talented poet.

Today’s poem contemplates faith, that intersection between humanity and the unknown with which so many of us struggle. It asks the logical questions that one asks when facing illness and death with little more than hope to go on.

Want to see more by and about Anya Silver?
Buy The Ninety-Third Name of God on Amazon
Anya Silver Featured as Image Journal’s Artist of the Month: October 2010
Poetry Daily

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANYA SILVER

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FRENCH TOAST
By Anya Silver

Pain perdu: lost bread. Thick slices sunk in milk,
fringed with crisp lace of browned egg and scattered sugar.
Like spongiest challah, dipped in foaming cream
and frothy egg, richness drenching every yeasted
crevice and bubble, that’s how sodden with luck
I felt when we fell in love. Now, at forty,
I remember that “lost bread” means bread that’s gone
stale, leftover heels and crusts, too dry for simple
jam and butter. Still, week-old bread makes the best
French toast, soaks up milk as greedily as I turn
toward you under goose down after ten years
of marriage, craving, still, that sweet white immersion.


Today’s poem was previously published in The Ninety-Third Name of God (LSU Press, 2010), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Anya Silver’s book of poetry, The Ninety-Third Name of God, was published by LSU press. She teaches at Mercer University and lives in Macon, Georgia with her husband and son.

Editor’s Note: I am not usually one for love poems. This week the love of my life proposed, and—in my nerdy, poetry-loving way—I scoured the internet for a love poem worthy of commemorating the event. My search dragged me through the stick of syrupy pieces, insulted me with poems of the butterflies-and-rainbows variety, and meandered through poems of antiquity that incited sleep instead of expressing in a visceral way this moment of elated love. And then I read “French Toast.”

I find myself unequipped to elaborate on why today’s poem is an example of expert craftsmanship. Unequipped because Anya Silver is a master of words, and my own seem slack in comparison.

As I read today’s poem aloud, I savor the feel of the words in my mouth. Words that mimic the sweetness of the dish they describe. A dish that is not a food, but a metaphor. A metaphor that is so successful, so unexpected, that it nearly redefines the idea of metaphor itself. At the very least, it becomes the standard against which metaphor should be held, and it sets the bar incredibly high.

All that, and it is a love poem! And not a poem inspired by the fleeting passion of new love, but a poem that speaks to what it is to make a life with someone. To love and desire someone as sincerely ten years into a committed relationship as you did when you first felt “sodden with luck” for falling in love.

This is a poem of optimism. A poem that inspires me to love my man fiercely for the rest of my life. This is the poem to express my heart’s desires for our impending union. I thank Anya Silver for this gift, and I dedicate today’s poem to Matt Teitelman, my soon-to-be husband and the love of my life. May our love be like french toast forever.

Want to see more by and about Anya Silver?
Buy The Ninety-Third Name of God on Amazon
Listen to “French Toast on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (Listen at 3:05)
Anya Silver Featured as Image Journal’s Artist of the Month: October 2010

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ERIN LYNDAL MARTIN

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AT BUCKFAST ABBEY: AFTER THE BEE BURNINGS
By Erin Lyndal Martin

I know they were here.
Their vertigo twists around
the wind.      It is my sickness too.

I play blind, smooth over tree trunks with my palms.
I smell the soot of brimstone, the dangling of a hive.

Daylight hard as leaves.   I smell the smoke.
Skeps still burn like witches.

              They used to harvest honey by burning up the hive.
              Bee bodies and a single rhubarb leaf
              kindled the flame for beekeepers
              to mine with bare hands.

                            The rest of the comb
              they melted down cell by soggy cell
until the wax was useful light.

                            And honeybees, they say,
              were the first tears
                            cried on the cross.

              ~

              Ghost bees shiver,
                            here a leg stuck in resin,
              here a wing in the grit of pollen.

                            I can feel their flight
              trying to make these woods
                            warm again.

              I’m asking for the bees back.
              If it’s in your power,

make the stark and sketchy treetops
              look less like junkie tourniquets
and more like apologies.

                                           Make the trees say they’re sorry
                                                   they kept growing
                            after thirty thousand hearts
                                           were burned.

                                           If it’s in your power, make me say
                                                   I’m sorry too.

              ~

                                           There’s still the scent of smoke
              in the air, maybe from a bonfire,
                            maybe not, and beneath it is the
              sticky hum of amber, and somewhere
                                           beneath that is me—notebook,
                                                   cigarette lighter, plastic bag.

              I can hear the vespers next door.
              The living are praying,

                            but I need the ash
              and the burned-out bees,
              the brimstone to be wise.

                          I want to ink out
              the taste of charred honey
                                           so I can be glad when there is no fire.

                                           Learn this lesson for me.   Tell me what
                            not to do, how to keep without taking,

                                           how to do better,
              here, now, my hair in my eyes,
                                           a pencil in my hair.



(Today’s poem previously appeared in Diode, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)



Erin Lyndal Martin is a poet, fiction writer, and music journalist. Her work has recently appeared in Guernica, InDigest, and Crowd. She is associate fiction editor for H_ngm_n and runs the music website Euterpe’s Notebook.

Editor’s Note: I have had today’s poem in my arsenal for a few weeks now, but something told me to save it for today. I write today’s entry from my own Abbey, St. John’s Abbey at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN. I am at the end of a week-long writer’s residency titled “Believing in Writing” at The Collegeville Institute, a workshop centered around writer’s contemplating faith. There could not be a better moment for today’s poem to be featured.

I have had the pleasure of featuring Erin Lyndal Martin’s writing before on this series. When I came across today’s poem in Diode, I was so vividly struck by its story, by its imagery, that I knew I needed to seek the writer out and ask permission to share this startling, beautiful piece. As I searched for the poem’s author I thought, “Erin Lyndal Martin… I know that name… I have loved her work before.”

It never ceases to amaze me how the heart yearns for the same beauty time and again. How I can search the Internet for poetry week after week, month after month, year after year, and then, completely out of context, fall in love with the same poet time and again. So it was with Ms. Martin, a poet whose work I love no matter where in time or space our paths cross. It is as much a pleasure to share her poetry with you today as it was to have her steal away my breath when I read today’s poem.

I dedicate today’s post to Michael Dennis Browne, our fearless leader on this past week’s journey, and to my fellow workshop participants, a group of people whose thoughts and words on faith have reshaped my view of the world.

Want to see more by and about Erin Lyndal Martin?
The Offending Adam
The Diagram
The Collagist

Tolerating the Intolerable? (Or: Why We Should Not be Tolerant of Chick-fil-A)

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Tolerating the Intolerable? (Or: Why We Should Not be Tolerant of Chick-fil-A)

by Lindsey Mason

In our cosmopolitan society, what does it mean to be tolerant?  Should we always be tolerant of others’ opinions?  Or are we sometimes required to be intolerant?  I believe not all tolerance is morally required.  I believe there are opinions of which we ought not be tolerant.  I believe there are opinions we ought to criticize, reject, and discourage.  Below I will argue for which kinds of opinions we ought to tolerate and which kinds we ought not to tolerate.  The conclusion of my argument is that we should not be tolerant of Chick-fil-A.

This essay on tolerance is spurred by recent remarks by Chick-fil-A’s Dan Cathy.  Recently in the news, Cathy said the following two things: (1) “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit.”[1]  For many, this implied that Cathy was taking a stand against any non-traditional marriage, including gay marriage.  Cathy also expressed his belief on the matter in a radio show, saying, (2) “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,'” Cathy said. “And I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”[2]  This second quotation clarified the first, thus making it obvious that Cathy is against gay marriage.

Cathy’s comments have sparked interest from conservatives and liberals.  The predominant conservative line seems to be in agreement with Cathy for the “traditional” and “biblical” definition of marriage, and the common liberal line seems to oppose Cathy in favor of gay marriage.  Liberals are vowing to boycott the restaurant in protest, sometimes going too far as when mayors of Boston and Chicago said they would not allow Chick-fil-A business into their cities.  Conservatives are gathering support for Chick-fil-A, and they are even calling for a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” on August 1st.

But the most troubling—and frankly confused—part of this whole debate is over the notion of “tolerance.”  Throughout the World Wide Web, I’ve read several authors accuse liberals of committing the very crime of which they’re accusing conservatives.  Liberals are accusing conservatives of being intolerant of homosexuality; conservatives respond by accusing liberals of being intolerant of their biblical-based definition of marriage.  For example, an article by Denny Burk is entitled, “Chick-fil-A and the Irony of the Tolerance Police” to suggest that liberals are supposed to be policing tolerance, but are here showing their very intolerant hand.  Ken Coleman (the host of the radio show on which Cathy talks of “God’s judgment”) points out a similar “irony” when he writes: “Increasingly, we see a well-oiled publicity machine that is redefining tolerance as, ‘either you agree with me or you need to button your lips.’ Those who throw the labels of intolerance and bigotry at those who share an opposing opinion are ironically modeling a glaring lack of tolerance.”[3]  So the objection to liberals in this debate seems to be that they’re being hypocrites.  They’re accusing Chick-fil-A of being intolerant, and yet showing their own intolerance—the very thing they’re against.

I believe that this diagnosis of the problem is incorrect.  There are certain differences of opinion we ought to be tolerant of, but that does not mean we ought to be tolerant of anything someone else believes, says, or does.  Consider two kinds of disagreements.  Suppose Sally believes in God and Joe does not believe in God.  Because of Sally’s beliefs, she acts in certain ways: she prays regularly, she attends church services, and she congregates with fellow believers, etc.  Because of Joe’s beliefs, he doesn’t engage in any of these activities.  Sally and Joe disagree about whether God exists, and their disagreement affects how they each live their own lives.  But notice: Sally’s belief that God exists doesn’t interfere with the way Joe wants to live his life.  Simply believing that God exists doesn’t harm Joe in any way; it doesn’t take away any of Joe’s freedoms, and it doesn’t make Joe’s life worse in any way.  Similarly, Joe’s belief that God doesn’t exist doesn’t interfere with Sally’s life.  In such a case, Joe ought to be tolerant of Sally’s different belief.  He also ought to continue to let her go to church, pray, etc., if that’s what she wants to do.  Similarly, Sally ought to tolerate Joe’s belief.  She ought to continue to let Joe live his life without praying or going to church.  Sally ought to be tolerant of Joe’s different belief.  The point of the example is this: in a situation such as the one encountered by Sally and Joe—where the disagreement over whether God exists does not harm anyone or take away anyone’s freedoms—everyone ought to be tolerant.

Now consider a different kind of case.  Suppose Jefferson believes that it’s morally permissible to own slaves.  Because of this belief, Jefferson in fact owns several slaves, and he treats them as if they are animals.  He buys them and sells them like cattle; he beats them; he impregnates their wives.  In general, his belief that slavery is morally permissible entails that he believes that a certain class of people are subhuman, deserving fewer rights and privileges.  Tubman, however, disagrees with Jefferson.  She believes owning slaves is morally impermissible—we shouldn’t do it.  So, Tubman does not engage in any of Jefferson’s activities of owning slaves, beating them, buying and selling them like cattle, or impregnating their wives.  Instead, she believes that all people deserve equal rights, and that no human being should be treated as subhuman.  Jefferson and Tubman disagree about the issue of slavery, and this disagreement affects how they live their lives.  But notice a difference here compared to Sally and Joe above: Jefferson’s belief does interfere with the way Tubman wants to live her life.  Jefferson believes he should be allowed to capture and enslave Tubman, thus taking away her freedoms.  He believes that Tubman is subhuman, deserving fewer rights than he enjoys.  Should Tubman be tolerant of Jefferson’s beliefs?  No, she should not.  She should fight against people who believe and act as Jefferson does.  She should be intolerant of anyone who believes that another human being could be his slave.  Tubman’s intolerance of the differing opinion is not only morally acceptable—it is morally required.  When someone has a certain belief, and that belief takes away the life, liberty, or property of another, then that belief ought not to be tolerated.  Jefferson’s belief takes away the liberty of others.  And so Jefferson’s belief ought not to be tolerated.  Sally’s belief from above does not take away the life, liberty, or property of anyone else—not even Joe—and so her belief ought to be tolerated.  That is, we ought to be tolerant of others’ beliefs so long as those beliefs do not take away the life, liberty, or property of others.

Now back to Chick-fil-A.  When Cathy expresses his opinion that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, is his belief more like Sally’s or Jefferson’s?  What I mean by that is, does Cathy’s belief attempt to take away anyone else’s liberty?

I think Cathy’s belief is more like Jefferson’s (while obviously to a lesser degree).  By saying that marriage is only between a man and a woman, one is taking away another person’s liberty.  One is denying a gay man the right and privilege to join in marriage with another man.  One is denying a lesbian woman the right and privilege to join in marriage with another woman.  One is denying a bisexual man the right and privilege to join in marriage with another man.  And so on for bisexual women and for people who are transgendered.  There is a whole population of people here who are denied something—marriage—so that Cathy and others in agreement with him can hold a belief.  Cathy’s belief is not the kind of belief that calls for tolerance.  We should not stand by, idly tolerant of others’ beliefs when those beliefs take away the liberty of someone else.

Notice, however, that when someone believes that gay marriage is morally permissible, that does not take away anyone else’s liberty.  I’m not saying that every minister/priest/preacher has to actually marry homosexual couples.  They can choose not to participate in the actual marrying.  I’m not saying that every man has to go out, divorce his wife, and marry another man now.  That would be absurd.  Allowing gay marriage is not to demand gay marriage for everyone.  It is time to acknowledge that allowing Ben and Shaun to get married does not take away anyone else’s life, liberty, or property.  In fact, it doesn’t affect anyone else’s life at all.  So, if tolerance is ever called for, it’s called for in the case of proponents of gay marriage, and not for those who argue against it.  We ought to be tolerant of people who believe gay marriage should be allowed because that belief does not take away anyone’s liberty.  We ought to be intolerant of people who believe gay marriage is wrong because that belief takes away someone’s freedom to marry whomever he or she loves.

My goal here is quite narrow.  It is to show that the liberal position of criticizing Cathy is not hypocritical.  Tolerance is called for only when the belief or action being tolerated is different from your own, yet it is not taking away anyone else’s life, liberty, or property.  The belief that gay marriage is wrong should not be tolerated since it takes away other people’s liberty.  The liberal can hold this position—the position of not tolerating beliefs that take away others’ liberty—while agreeing that many other instances of tolerance ought to be encouraged.  One need not be tolerant of unjustified intolerance.  Cathy is the one being intolerant in the morally objectionable way, not the liberal.

Mr. Frost (an excerpt from the novella Life After Sleep)

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Mr. Frost (an excerpt from Life After Sleep)

by Mark R. Brand

“This frigging thing.”

Frost knew without looking that Mary had gotten blood on the hemocrit analyzer lens again. She started pulling out drawers at the nurse’s station looking for a box of individually-wrapped alcohol pads. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Some of the other nurses, and especially the medical assistants, loved stealing them and hiding them. The stock room guy was a blatant slacker and he just nodded like a bobblehead at the office manager’s suggestion that they only keep on hand the supplies they’d need at any given moment.

This of course meant that there were never enough of three-dozen random things at all times. Some days there’d be disposable gowns but no needles, other days there’d be five times as many bottles of peroxide as they could use, and if he wanted sterile gauze he’d need to barter half a box of iodine swabs for it with one of his associate’s staff members.

The supply black market was an unforgiving quagmire of ugliness and the instant a shipment of replacements came in, they’d vanish to wherever everyone was squirreling them away. They hadn’t had enough alcohol pads to go around for about a week and a half and nobody had extras to beg, borrow, or steal.

The hemocrit analyzer had a lens on the inside that was meant to read a little plastic disposable slide with a drop of blood on it. The chief flaw of this was that if jiggled even the slightest bit while inserting the slide, the blood droplet would contact the convex lens and smudge, rendering the machine useless.

“We going to get that reading?” he asked, just trying to light a fire under her a little. She pursed her lips but didn’t frown.

Three drawers later, Mary began hauling shit out and tossing it onto the desktop. Old versions of intake forms and script pads with one or two sheets left on them, loose drug samples on their cardboard blister cards, the caps for eighteen disposable pens that patients had wandered off with in their pockets and purses, and a seemingly bottomless pile of high-quality marketing materials shoved at them endlessly by the drug reps that haunted their office during clinic hours. After un-bending the last of these, Mary thrust out her hand silently in triumph. Behind all of this detritus she had found a dusty, forgotten box of alcohol wipes. An entire box! They were rich.

“Got it,” she said, busy using a slide to push the alcohol pad into the tiny space beneath the lens and swab it clean. Minutes passed. Finally it was ready. She grabbed her tackle box, took out another lancet and a fresh slide, and set off down the hall. Frost could hear her voice come muted from the other room. “Okay, Mrs. Healy, we’re going to have to jab you again, sorry about that.”

Mrs. Healy was a good sport, hopefully. He heard a beep and the analyzer flashed up her hemoglobin count. Frost hadn’t seen Mary return with the blood. He glanced up. There were still lights on in the rooms, but all was silent.

“Mary?” he called. No response. He walked back toward the rooms at the far end of the hall and found them empty.

He picked up the phone and dialed the office manager’s extension, thought twice, hung up, and dialed the extension for Greenstein’s nurse.

“DiLeccio,” she answered.

“Kelly?”

“Mmm hmm…is this…?”

“Doctor Frost.”

“Oh, hey Dr. Frost. I didn’t know you were still here.”

“Hey. Listen, do you know where Mary went?”

“Pretty sure she hit the road.”

“Really?”

Silence. He glanced at his watch. It was an hour past their last scheduled patient.

“Umm…”

“Right, sorry,” he said, choking on the awkwardness. “Have a good one.” He hung up.

*

X-ray machines consist of a large power generator that converts wall current to high-voltage output, a stabilizing arm, and a cylinder shaped like a large beer can. This cylinder contains an electrical anode and a rotating tungsten cone inside an airtight bath of coolant oil. This is the “tube.” The tube is encased in lead, except for the small aperture where the x-rays escape and travel at physics-class speeds through flesh, organs, and bone, finally striking a photosensitive crystal screen that imprints a negative image of the patient’s anatomy on a piece of multi-layered emulsive plastic. The rooms are generally lined with a layer of lead sandwiched in the walls to contain the photoelectric ionizing radiation that occurs when various milliamps per second course from the anode to the tungsten cone, creating a God-like arc inside the tube. All this happens in darkness, as most feats that harness the power of the building blocks of the universe do.

The doctor bounced a golf ball off of the tube in the x-ray room while the radiographer scoured the table beneath it with a disinfectant so strong it came in a glass bottle rather than a plastic one. The room smelled vaguely of feces.

“Do you get much Sleep?”

“About three hours, usually,” Andy replied. Andy had a kid at home, he knew, and another on the way. A girl named Stephanie and an unborn fetus named I Will Never Again Own a New Car. “Sometimes I get two and a half, but I don’t like cutting it quite that close. If I don’t get the full three hours, I just don’t feel right. Pretty soon I’m going to have to start Sleeping here because of the baby.”

“That sucks. You ever take naps?”

“Shit,” he said, looking sideways at the doctor. He stacked up x-ray films on a desk and started marking left and right on the corners with a black Sharpie.

“What?”

“You’re a lazy motherfucker.” He could always count on Andy for the truth. “Just turn up your Bed. Try maybe three and a half hours. You won’t be able to sit still after that much Sleep. You’ll be bouncing off the walls.” The golf ball continued to bounce off the x-ray tube.

The doctor wanted to tell him that he’d already thought of that, but didn’t. He picked this little strategy up at some conference or another in Arizona in the middle of the winter. A study was done by some focus group of vicious, slobbering medical office managers who had been let out of their cages long enough to compare notes about squeezing the last ounce of productivity out of their underpaid drones. They discovered that if the support staff think the boss is ignorant or empty-headed, they tend to work harder, a motivating force not unlike that of a child overcompensating for their well-meaning but chronically helpless parent.

He missed a catch and his golf ball rolled under the generator. He didn’t go after it. He had an entire bag of miscellaneous golf-related shit in his locker that his patients had brought him. Someone even gave him a putter shaped like a foot with a laser pointer attached to it. He didn’t know what was more insulting, his patients assuming he had time to play golf or the fact that they thought he was a bad enough player to need a laser-guided putter.

*

At some point, he realized he was in the middle of surgery on what used to be a young woman who had been dragged on a chain behind a sport utility vehicle over a mile and a half of gravel back-road.

“I think I’m hallucinating,” he said to no one in particular.

“That’s what she said,” came a reply from someone in a mask and scrubs. He gestured to the woman, whose anesthesia had sunk in enough that she could barely manage a whimper.

“Fuck you, I’m serious,” he said. His face shield fogged slightly when he exhaled.

“So is she, apparently.”

The unfortunate ingénue of that evening’s tragedy let out a “huhnnn” that was less than heroic as he scrubbed flecks of gravel out of her rectus abdominis muscle, which was open to the air given that the flesh of her torso above it had been taken off as if by a belt-sander. Cleanliness, right next to Godliness.

“What’s the time loss threshold for narcolepsy?”

“Huh?”

“It can’t be that, though. No cataplexy…”

“Focus, man.”

Frost wheeled on him, snake-like and covered in blood from sternum to knees. Whenever challenged, escalate.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

“Hey,” Dr. Nobody said, hands coming up, “I’m just here to help.”

“What are the risk factors for hallucination?” He had forgotten the patient on the table entirely. He picked up an emesis basin full of flesh and blood, intending to fling it at the resident if he flinched. Evidently the kid had been in operating rooms full of flying metal before, though, and held his ground.

“Uh… psychoactive drug therapy, alcohol and drug withdrawal, dementia, sleep deprivation, head trauma…”

Frost glared at him for another moment and the corners of his eyes flickered. Something like minutes went by. “That’s what I thought,” he said at last. He handed the resident the emesis basin and headed for the door, pulling off his mask as he went. Blood sloshed onto the floor, but he ignored it.

“Where are you going?”

“I need a nap,” he said over his shoulder to no one. As he hit the door he looked up to see another door. He opened this one into an identical hallway with another door at the end. And another, and another.

*

“Hi – this is Sandy at St. Augustine’s. We’re calling to make sure everything’s okay with our favorite doctor! Call us back when you get a minute. I’ve got a few messages for you.”

He thought he had turned the phone off, but he didn’t really remember. He had a vague vision of putting the key into his condo door and hearing it grind loudly as he turned it, and then soft blackness. Apparently he’d been unconscious for hours. The inside of his mouth felt like indoor/outdoor carpeting, and he had urinated on himself while he slept.

He hadn’t missed a day of work in seven years, twelve if you counted residency. He thought they’d be a lot angrier than they sounded. Sandy seemed nice. He made the call to the hospital and told them he’d be in later.

“Oh, that’s fine. Dr. Greenstein covered for you. He did leave a message that you should try the office Bed next time, whatever that means.”

“I know what it means.”

“You feeling okay?” she asked.

“Sandy…”

“Lisa.”

“…you’ve been more than helpful.”

He hung up. For all his lack of good taste in music, Greenstein didn’t miss much.

Every nerve cell in the human body consists of a long cable with a synapse at each end. The cable part of the cell is made up of fatty membranes that conduct electricity in the form of tiny, single-electron currents called action potentials that occur between sodium and potassium. When the current reaches the end of the cable, it jumps to the next strand by secreting a chemical that helps the current flicker across the gap. These chemicals have familiar names like serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, and acetylcholine. When these currents jump to muscle fibers, you get a contraction. When they jump to a gland you get secretion. When they jump to your brain cells you get a boner, and so forth.

In the end, he thought, that’s all we are. Just electricity sizzling down cables made of fat and squirting across a little space between. This was another of those cases where knowing things didn’t improve on an otherwise blissfully ignorant life.

Tony Barker had this thought well in hand when he positioned the first TMS patient’s pre-frontal brain directly between the poles of an MRI electromagnet. Barker was doing this in the ’80s, so he was very progressive that way, but not so far removed from the old days that he flatly dismissed the gains made by psychiatrists in the ’50s and ’60s, when similar treatment modalities involved plugging people right into the wall current and putting a rubber block between their teeth so they didn’t snap them off. This was a kinder, gentler era. MRI was safe, as far as anyone knew. TMS was just a little current change. Hardly noticeable. The first two letters of MRI stood for Magnetic Resonance, and that’s exactly what TMS did. It caused the electrons on a molecular level to resonate. Instead of blowing the fuse entirely, the TMS just flipped the breaker on and off, on and off, thousands of times per second.

All Dr. Sid Merriweather did was discover the frequency, the note played across what amounted to a two-million-dollar electric guitar string, that reset the right sequence of synapses. Do Not Pass Go – head directly to Stage-4 REM sleep.

*

“There were a few pieces of ferrite dust on the magnet’s face, but not enough to throw off the cycle.”

“What is it, do you think?” Frost asked the repairman on the phone. He disliked people being in his apartment when he was not, but this could not be avoided.

“Hard to tell. You may want to just try another Bed if you have access to one.”

This bit of diagnostic wisdom was becoming tiresome, he thought while hanging up. He considered that it might be a while still before he went all the way over the high side, but he could feel it coming. Mary, prescient soul that she was, had started hiding his car keys. “Where the hell are they?” he asked her.

“What, doctor?”

“My keys.”

“Haven’t seen them.” As she walked away, the pocket over her left tit jangled.

“Mary,” he said, rubbing the blur out of his eyes, “I believe in the sanctity of the workplace and all that high-minded bullshit, but there’s only so much a professional can take.”

She shot him a look that pretended she had no idea what he was talking about.

He grabbed a random chart off of the wall and headed into the adjacent room. “That lung has to come out,” he announced firmly while walking in. There was no point being wishy-washy with these people. He gave them the straight news. The ten-year-old boy on the exam table looked up at him in terror over the cast on his leg. His mother, a woman who inexplicably wore yellow eyeliner, looked up from last April’s issue of TIME and gave him a shitty look.

“Excuse me for just a moment,” he said. “Mary!”

A medical assistant that he was firmly against hiring from the start looked up from a handful of used needles as the doctor passed him. He tried to scurry out of the way, but was too slow. The doctor grabbed the front of the assistant’s white coat and shoved him into the nearest room. The sound of hard muffled scrabbling against the shallow carpet was the only sound the kid made, as he attempted to keep his feet and failed. The doctor didn’t as much as look back. If you can’t stay out of your own way, at least stay out of mine.

The hallway overhead fluorescents started to pulse with his heartbeat. “Mary,” he bellowed down the hall, “the doctor needs you!”

She rounded the corner in a pretty flourish of professional crispness. The clean lines of her uniform threw her figure into maddening shapelessness. Only he knew that she had not taken her scrubs home to wash in over two weeks. Her filthiness was mildly arousing.

“I wonder about those armpits of yours,” he said.

She gave him a smile that said he was one charming dog. “Is there something you need?”

“I need my lung. Where did he go?”

“She.”

“Where did she go?”

“Room ten.”

“No,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulder. They walked toward room ten and on the way she walked him straight into a wall. He backpedaled awkwardly. It was a long hallway suddenly. “I was just in room ten, and my lung was definitely not in there.”

“Try again,” she suggested, helpfully. It was hard not to notice how round she was in her scrubs. Even with a lab coat on top. She made him think of a mesh bag of oranges shifting around in a big white grocery bag. She had enough smoke scent on her to keep her from ever smelling clean, but freshness wasn’t everything.

He took a deep breath and pulled down the lever-action door handle. Hospital door handles are regularly cited as the filthiest surfaces in the building. “That lung will have to come ou…” Sitting at a card table were three large greyhounds counting a stack of money. They peered up at him with lively, suspicious eyes. The one on the far left gave him a look like he might owe the dog a favor.

“Pardon me,” he said, closing the door quickly. Mary arched her eyebrows and her hair seemed to straighten and re-curl in front of his eyes. “Did you do something different with your hair?”

“Room ten is at the end of the hall.” Mary motioned with a seven-inch index finger. Lids with an unbecomingly cheap brand of eyeliner flicked up slightly.

“We’re going to have to have a talk about your bedside manner,” he told her as he proceeded onward. Suddenly, the medical assistant sprung on him like a trapdoor spider.

“Sorry doctor, I have Dr. Neely on the phone for you…”

“TELL HIM TO GO FUCK HIMSELF!” he screamed, buffeting the little bastard about the head and neck with a clipboard. He smiled as he walked away, secure in the effectiveness of his intuition. The escalation principle had once again steered him clear of time-consuming negotiation.

***

Mark R. Brand is a Chicago-based science-fiction author and the online short fiction editor of Silverthought Press. He is the author of three novels, The Damnation of Memory (2011), Life After Sleep (2011), and Red Ivy Afternoon (2006), and he is the editor of the collection Thank You Death Robot (2009), named a Chicago Author favorite by the Chicago Tribune and recipient of the Silver medal 2009 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) in the category of Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is the producer and host of Breakfast With the Author and lives in Evanston, IL with his wife and son.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOHN REPP

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Photo by Katherine Knupp


THE LETTER
By John Repp

In the letter,
             she says she doesn’t

want to end
             the letter so I’ll

never stop reading
             this scrap light

as ash in the pit
             where I’ve sworn

for thirty years to burn it



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


John Repp is a widely published poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book critic. Since 1978, he has taught writing and literature at various colleges, universities, schools, and social service agencies. A native of southern New Jersey, he has lived for many years in northwestern Pennsylvania with his wife, the visual artist Katherine Knupp, and their son, Dylan.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem contains the joy of the unsaid. It enables the reader to invent a world—a relationship—from a few fragments of speech. There is so much joy in the power of the small poem, and in language that teases, that alludes to something larger than it shares and enables us to choose our own adventure.

Want to see more by John Repp?
John Repp’s Official Website
Buy John Repp’s Books

Rolling Stone

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Rolling Stone

by Steve Davenport

Takes a flood to turn a bottom, make hell
of the houses on stilts and the ones squat
as toads hugging shore dirt. Tree-float and sop’s
the least of it. Takes more than a boat line
to drag a failing body from that noise,
the sucking into the long pull. River’s

anything but solidity of things,
no riprap of rocky words for footing.
River brings flow, flood, and alluvium.
Bottom was never saved by a song. Levee’s what

a river makes of it.

***

Steve Davenport is the author of Uncontainable Noise, which won Pavement Saw Press’s 2006 Transcontinental Poetry Prize. His New American Press chapbook Murder on Gasoline Lake is listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007, and a story of his, published in The Southern Review, received a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize Anthology 2011. His second book of poems, Overpass, is published by Arsenic Lobster/Misty Publications. The above poem is reprinted from this book by permission of the author.