American Poetry – Page 61 – As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ROBERT FANNING

Posted on September 21, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

WATCHING MY DAUGHTER THROUGH
THE ONE-WAY MIRROR OF A PRESCHOOL
OBSERVATION ROOM

By Robert Fanning

Maggie’s finishing a portrait
of our family, gluing googly eyes
onto a stately stick figure

I hope is me. Now she doesn’t know
who to play with, as other kids,
pockets full of posies,

all fall down. She wears my face
superimposed. I almost tap
the glass, point her toward

the boy with yellow trucks.
Lost, she stares out the window
toward the snow-humped pines

beyond the playground.
When I’m dead, I hope there’ll be a thin pane
such as this between us. I’ll stand forever

out in the dark to watch my grown children
move through their bright rooms.
Maybe just once they’ll cup

their hands against the glass, caught
by some flicker or glint,
a slant of light touching their faces.

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

Robert Fanning is the author of American Prophet (Marick Press), The Seed Thieves (Marick Press) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, and other journals. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. He is also the founder and facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI., where he lives with his wife, sculptor Denise Whitebread Fanning, and their two children. To read more of his work, visit www.robertfanning.wordpress.com.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is dedicated to my father, who I know is watching me through the glass. I see you in every flicker and glint, now and always.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NOEL SLOBODA

Posted on September 14, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A RACCOON
By Noel Sloboda

It would be the same
without this mask:
nobody would be glad

to see me naked, slicing open
bulging bags of garbage,
shoving my snout into rotten tree trunks

after sweet vermin within.
It would be the same—
my icy eyes piercing

the gloaming, only to be
melted away by the fires
of dawn. Every time

I look ahead, I see myself
splashed across some roadside
or starved while I remain

caught in a steel trap,
always dying too young
to go completely grey.

So I leave my face
swathed in darkness
that is not sleep.

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

Noel Sloboda’s work has recently appeared in Redactions, Salamander, and Modern Language Studies. He is the author of the poetry collections Shell Games (2008) and Our Rarer Monsters (2013) as well as several chapbooks. Sloboda has also published a book about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. He teaches at Penn State York.

Editor’s Note: “It would be the same / without this mask.” What a brilliant entry into today’s piece, following the setup of the poem’s title. How much we have to think about as soon as we enter, even before the vivid picture the poet paints, even before his masterful coupling of image and alliteration. How deeply we are set within the scene, and how thin the veil between animal and man.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SAGE COHEN

Posted on September 7, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Sage Cohen:

WHAT’S WRONG WITH

making love to your
husband who no longer

lives with you the night
before you leave for your

weekend retreat just
because he, having

agreed to overlap your
early departure to care

for your small son, appears
in the bathroom naked

and erect as you sit steeping.
What’s wrong with slipping

under the lifted wing he has made
of the covers, against the breastbone

of the bird your two bodies make.
What’s wrong with finding him

more beautiful at this distance:
lens adjusted to the immediate

taste of his tongue that has become
its own language since leaving you.

What’s wrong with taking him in
the way you would a galaxy

on a moonless night, this
pattern you have traveled by

dipping its cup
and spilling light.

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

Sage Cohen is the author of the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World from Queen of Wands Press and the nonfiction books Writing the Life Poetic and The Productive Writer, both from Writer’s Digest Books. She has published a variety of articles on the writing life in Writer’s Digest magazine, Poet’s Market and Writer’s Market. Sage holds an MFA from New York University and a BA from Brown University. Visit her at pathofpossibility.com.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem artfully masters the element of surprise. Surprise in the story, in the words, in the phrasing. It makes beautiful what is socially censured and forces us, from the title onward, to question and to reconsider what is acceptable at the individual level. And as it asks us to rescind judgment, it delights in a lyric as delectable as the “sin” in which it engages. “What’s wrong with slipping // under the lifted wing he has made / of the covers,” it asks, and then leaves us to ponder the “taste of his tongue that has become / its own language since leaving you.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SARAH PEMBERTON STRONG

Posted on August 31, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Sarah Pemberton Strong:

ANOTHER THING THAT AMAZES ME

Is how, on the rush hour subway, everyone
harbors beneath their dripping coats
a set of genitals. No one can look

anyone else in the eye, so obvious
is our nakedness under the clothes.
Though it’s only October,

there’s a blizzard dumping sleet
across Manhattan, and the streets are full
of people anyway, some wearing nothing

more than sweatshirts, their hunching shoulders
caked with fallen slush. It’s amazing
some people will stand

outside for an hour in this weather
just to see the de Kooning retrospective at the MOMA—
myself, it turns out, included.

Also that the same shade of paint
can make some people happy but give others headaches.
When I get home, I’m going to paint

my living room orange
against the six months of winter
that’s just begun. The Platonic ideal

of a raincoat is bright yellow,
and though I can’t see one beyond
all the crotches on the Lexington Avenue Local,

it’s comforting to think there will be an appearance soon,
little rite to remind us of the sun’s assured return.
It amazes me that I still want God to be more

than a perfect metaphor for loving,
that I still want to fall to my knees
for something other than this woman swaying above me,

her fingers knotted to the subway strap,
the folds of her labia just a couple inches from my mouth
while our bodies fly through a tunnel under the city,

and high above us, a deluge of gray crystal
blots out the gold of trees all down Fifth Avenue.
Amazing that the light of the sun makes us open

our eyes in the morning. And that when
there is no light, our eyes open anyway:
searching for it, then for each other.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle, was published in Tour of the Breath Gallery (Texas Tech University Press, 2013), and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Sarah Pemberton Strong’s first poetry collection, Tour of the Breath Gallery, is the winner of this year’s Walt McDonald First-Book Prize (Texas Tech University Press, 2013). Sarah is also the author of two novels, The Fainting Room (Ig Publishing, 2013) and Burning the Sea (Alyson, 2002). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, Cream City Review, Mississippi Review, RATTLE, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Sun, and Southwest Review. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she is the recipient of the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review and a Promise Award from The Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a poetry editor at New Haven Review. Sarah lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her spouse and daughter. She holds a Master Plumber’s license, and earns her living running a one-person plumbing company.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem shifts our perspective so that the world is viewed as if through a stereoscope. One image turns over into the next so that we view both the closeness of flesh and the starkness of winter. We move not only on a train and along an avenue, but underneath the clothes of our fellow commuters and into the inner workings of the mind, then into the perfect beauty of language, where “It amazes me that I still want God to be more // than a perfect metaphor for loving,” where it is “Amazing that the light of the sun makes us open // our eyes in the morning. And that when / there is no light, our eyes open anyway.”

Want to read more by and about Sarah Pemberton Strong?
Author Website
Rattle
Review of The Fainting Room in Publisher’s Weekly

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOHN GUZLOWSKI

Posted on August 24, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

THE WORLD AFTER THE FALL
By John Guzlowski

Eve stood there
for a moment
and watched her grace
dry up like water.

Whatever sunshine
had lingered on her skin
was gone

and when
she looked at Adam’s face
she wondered
what she could say
to him.

They had words
of course—
They learned them together
but neither spoke.

What could
she say?

Sorry?

Next time,
it’ll be different?

I didn’t understand?

She just shook her head
and he did too.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in The 2River View, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

John Guzlowski’s writing has appeared in Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, The Ontario Review, The Polish Review, Exquisite Corpse, Manhattan Review, Modern Fiction Studies and other journals both here and abroad. Czeslaw Milosz wrote that Guzlowski’s first book of poems, Language of Mules, “astonished” him and that he had “an enormous ability for grasping reality.” Guzlowski’s poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem participates in the ancient tradition of midrash, the questioning of and commenting upon what is written in the Bible. I have been engaged in midrashic studies both in my academic and creative pursuits for many years now, and whenever I come across poems that take part in this ongoing discussion I am drawn to them. The Bible is the foundation of Western civilization, but despite an unconscionable number of narrow-minded of readings and prosthelytizations, The Book is not a static enterprise, not a fixed proscription, but is a living, breathing entity, the questioning of which leads to an understanding of modern (wo)man.

On this series we have seen Betsy Johnson-Miller question the story of the fall, Father Kilian McDonnell question the patriarchal authorship of Genesis, William Kelley Woolfitt explore the story of Samson, and today John Guzlowski joins the mini-midrashic tradition being written within the pages of As It Ought To Be. May the questions be relentless and the conversation never end.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: TOUCAN NEST BY PEGGY SHUMAKER

Posted on August 17, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

FROM TOUCAN NEST
Poems of Costa Rica
By Peggy Shumaker

STRANGLER FIG

Cousins, then,
the myriad orchids
of the mist forest
and this towering
strangler fig.

Both start
tenuous life
as stowaways
tossed aside
by wind or wing

dropped
without anyone’s
noticing
high above
the forest floor.

Air plants,
epiphytes, bromeliads
plastered so heavy
some branches
crack, tumble.

But the fig’s patient.
It settles in,
sucks what it can
from leaf rot, from
breaks in bark,

drinks deep
from fine mist.
Then into air
fig tentacles
unfurl, aiming

toward the host’s
small patch of soil.
Fig leaves above
cover all else.
Not out of modesty.

Each fig takes its own
special wasp
to carry on,
wasp that swaps
pollen for protection.

Nearly gone,
the host lingers
within the fig
like the memory
of a difficult parent

who never knew
what she was taking on
when she got you,
mother who resented
being tied down,

mother whose face
you can’t quite
picture, mother
who changed so much
those last years

you barely knew her,
broken mother
asthmatic, wheezy,
who gave her all
so you might live.

HOWLER MONKEYS

The parents, like most parents, yell.
A lot. But little ones hang
by the tips of their tails,

sail off into space, misjudge
the next branch,
crash through

limbs and leaves,
catch
themselves,

carry on
as if they’ve got a lifetime
maybe more.

Mangoes ripe
right now
drip down their elbows.

Tomorrow
has yet
to occur to them.

Río Sarapiquí

ANHINGA DRYING HER WINGS

Purely practical, we know,
her need to hold herself open

to let what sun she can catch
ease the river from her wings.

And yet. And yet.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

See Peggy Shumaker Read in New York 8/20/2013:
Tuesday, August 20th
Word for Word Poetry welcomes Red Hen Press
Bryant Park Reading Room
7:00pm – 8:30pm | Bryant Park Reading Room, 41 W. 40th St.
42nd Street & 6th Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Featuring Peggy Shumaker, Ron Carlson, Evie Shockley, and Tess Taylor

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Today’s poems are from Toucan Nest (Red Hen Press, 2013), and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Praise for Toucan Nest: “This is a book of burnished, lapidary attention. Its poems—vibrant with seeing, quickened with soundwork, subtled by insight—peel open landscapes both outer and inner. The costs of our human presence and extractions are in these pages, but also the radiant return of human awareness. Toucan Nest is a unique account of encounter, imaginative inquiry, and expansion.” — Jane Hirshfield, author of After and Given Sugar, Given Salt

Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Toucan Nest grew from an eco-arts writing workshop in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press. Please visit her website at www.peggyshumaker.com.

Editor’s Note: Having had the pleasure of both sharing Peggy Shumaker’s work on the series before and seeing her read, I could not pass up an opportunity to both feature some pieces from Shumaker’s latest collection and to strongly encourage those of you who are in the New York area to go see her read on Tuesday. Red Hen Press is a fantastic publisher renowned for the quality of the women writers they publish, and Shumaker’s reading on Tuesday promises to be both powerful and moving while taking you, as Toucan Nest does, on a vibrant journey.

Want to see more by Peggy Shumaker?
Come see the poet read this Tuesday, August 20th, in Bryant Park
Poet’s Official Website
Author Page at Red Hen Press

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PAUL NEMSER

Posted on August 10, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

MEETING YOU AFTER CHERNOBYL
By Paul Nemser

The last frozen day had come and gone, and we were
sleeping in the elbows of trees in the elbow of a town,
our sutures all sunken together as if we shared one wound,
as if we had climbed from a single pit

like a race of dinosaurs grown from a fused lump of eggs
that had slept in valley ice for three shifts of the North Star,
as the leaves undecorated the last few branches
which were skinny as bat bones or the bones of a squirrel.

There were cattle blotched with waning alphabets.
And there were eyes that had seen too many lights,
so we didn’t recognize the wells
we had drunk from all our lives, nor

the creek that flowed with clothes and flesh,
nor the seeds brought from all over the countryside,
from knived sacks in waterlogged barns, from pods
trembling on grotesque grasses.

We talked to each other until we could not talk.
It was gobbledygook, was joy, nothing to remember:
We would not be overrun like ants by a larger horde of ants.
The darkness would not come closer.

A dog would lift its howl to where the wind left
the tablecloths—crumpled, clawed up, drying in the sun.
A phalanx of trucks that had jostled our vertebrae
would sound like bubbles in a bottle.

I never missed you so much as waking from that sleep.
And I dream of you now lingering barely below ground,
all your twenty fingers warbling together as on flutes.
My pores open to you as to rain.

Years give way to lakes of white dust, to unyielding dirt-land.
The snouts of oxen stain pale as marble
when the beasts haul blades through the hardness that remains
of what decades ago had been garden.

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

Paul Nemser’s book, Taurus, chosen by Andrew Hudgins as winner of the 2011 New American Poetry Prize, will be published by New American Press in November, 2013. His chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, will be published by Mayapple Press in summer, 2014. Nemser’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Blackbird, Fulcrum, Per Contra, Raritan, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Rebecca and practices law in Boston. Some of his family came from Chernobyl.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is one of those thoughtful, emotive, beautiful lyric poems that better expresses itself than I ever could. Some days the poems just speak for themselves. Are you listening?

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RAUL GUTIERREZ

Posted on August 3, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

LIES I’VE TOLD MY 3 YEAR OLD LATELY
By Raul Gutierrez

Trees talk to each other at night.

All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.

Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.

Tiny bears live in drain pipes.

If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

I will always be there.

(Today’s poem originally appeared on Heading East, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Raul Gutierrez, Founder and CEO of Tinybop, is an entrepreneur with a 20-year history in technology and the arts. Tinybop was born out of a belief that all kids are explorers. His hope is to build a company where ideas, design, and engineering come together to delight, inspire, and educate children. Raul was born in Monterrey, Mexico, grew up in Lufkin, Texas, and now lives in Brooklyn, with his wife and two young boys.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem has universal appeal. It captures the magic of imagination, and of love, before ending with a turn that both surprises and speaks to the heart. It is the kind of work that one reads, and shares, until it takes on a life of its own. It has been translated into over ten languages; just this week it was translated into German! (Check it out below.)

Today’s post is dedicated to my husband, who found and shared it with me, and to Natasha and Darren Brown. It is your inspired parenting that Matt and I both thought of when we first read this piece.

Want to read more by and about Raul Gutierrez?
Heading East – Mexican Pictures
Read today’s poem in Deutsch (German)!
Follow Raul Gutierrez on Twitter

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LET’S GET LUCKY!

Posted on July 20, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

MANUELA

In the bleak hours of an afternoon in Spain,
I sprung free from my grandpa’s kitchen,
the smells of peppermints and pears, and headed
to town for an afternoon of people watching.
The streets were hand-cut paper forests, flush
with tawny kids in flat sandals and psychedelic
friendship bracelets. Feminine footwear obsessives
in custom-made minis smoothed on rice vapor
lotion, delicate contessas fit for a summer wedding,
see-through and filigreed. I dreamed of leaving home
for an evening at the Tropicana, sexy and dazzling
in a glamorous dress—understated, ethnic girl
plucked from an under-the-radar haven; someone’s
graceful holy grail, soft ephemera on his fingers.

SUMMER

I could write a paper on the topic of lip balms,
groovy grandma that I am. With ’60s playfulness
and a flapper’s flounce, I stick to the Great Gatsby,
intensive scalp treatments, and statement-making
tchotchkes. Cat boxes and flea markets don’t
satisfy me; I roll around in sea foam suede, take my
Rolls Royce on an unexpected trek around Morocco.
I’m more of a jump-or-you’ll-miss-it haute hippie,
a sucker for patent trim and embroidered-in-Bali
sequined corsets. I’m looking for a biker-gone-boho
grandpa—rugged but genteel, with an air of London
street-cool—for stomping through exotic gardens,
splurging on tie-dyed wedding cake. Two spicy,
rock-and-roll piglets rubbing bohemian noses.

VANESSA

How often can you wear a bleeding heart
and get away with it? I spend most of my time
getting calls from complete strangers who want
to run around with a Fitzgerald heroine, architectural
and sweet, unbearably twee—or an unstoppable
rock star, a morbid candy-colored centerpiece,
loose and right at home in a disheveled bed.
I step into another world and feel like nothing;
off-hours, I’m a timid violet with a limp handshake
that peeks out of my coat sleeves. No one ever
detects the potential of a wispy girl lost in her clothes,
so I audition for drama, slip on some sugar. The line
between adorable and alarming gets thin, thin, thin.
I slouch and watch the layers flutter, lit from within.

Today’s poems are from the forthcoming Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, Fall, 2013), and appear here today with permission from the poet and the press.

About the Book: Getting Lucky is a collection of sonnets culled from the editorial copy of Lucky, a newsstand publication about shopping and style. By adopting the magazine’s gendered and glossy language, Nicole’s poems explore contemporary ideals of beauty and femininity, as well as female-specific narratives we see in media, culture, and everyday life.

Editor’s Note: Let’s Get Lucky! It’s a beautiful love story. A small press dedicated to publishing women poets meets the kind of witty, thoughtful, cheeky gal whose poems literally step out of the pages of a fashion magazine. Both are determined to give voice to the underrepresented. In seeking out a luminary to spearhead today’s female poetry contingent, the publisher finds a poetess who brings the cultural misogyny inherent in today’s society to its knees. While wearing a fabulous pair of heels.

The arts, in America today, are in grave peril. Poetry in particular is under-read and scathingly underrated. A Corporatocracy is on the rise, and the core of humanity is being marginalized. There is no money in art, and less money for the arts. Those of us who write poetry, who publish poetry, do so out of pure love and unwavering passion. We depend on our community for support—to read our work and to enable its very existence.

Getting Lucky is a fantastic, cutting-edge book that critiques the culture of fashion and shallow materialism by giving feminism a whole new meaning. Spooky Girlfriend Press is a self-described “tiny two-person operation” with huge vision and an impressive track record of publishing forward-thinking, critically-acclaimed works. The two have come together to make magic, to make dreams come true, and they need your help.

Via Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform that empowers ideas, Spooky Girlfriend Press has started a campaign to fund the making of Getting Lucky. Take a stand for art today. Show the world that poetry matters. Help the voiceless sing from the rooftops. Our government is not going to do it. Big corporations are not going to do it. It is you—readers of poetry, writers of poetry, lovers of the underdog, believers in vision and heart—who are going to make the difference. Donate to this campaign today and let’s Get Lucky!

Nicole Steinberg is the author the forthcoming collection Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013) and Birds of Tokyo (dancing girl press, 2011), and the editor of Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011). She is also the founder and former curator of Earshot, a New York reading series for emerging writers. She hails from Queens, New York and currently lives in Philadelphia.

Help Nicole Steinberg and Spooky Girlfriend Press Get Lucky!
Donate to Getting Lucky‘s Indiegogo Campaign

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: AMANDA AUCHTER

Posted on July 13, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

THE PINK CHANEL SUIT
By Amanda Auchter

She said
don’t wash it, when asked

if she wanted to change, to take off

the wool skirt, the blue

lined jacket. I want them to see,

she said. Kid gloves, a blood bloom

on her wrist,
stockings. Swipe of hair

across her mouth.
In the car, she remembers

a scatter of yellow

roses, black birds rising
from the Live Oak. How the children

ran alongside as they drove past, waving.

The open windows. A man with a camera,

an umbrella
that opened. A raincoat. In the car,

her body covered with bone,

hair. The bright pink suit against the gray
November. And all that red inside her hands.

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

Amanda Auchter is the founding editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2012 Perugia Press Award, and of The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches creative writing and literature at Lone Star College. She is currently at work on a memoir about adoption and the foster care system, What Took You So Long.

Editor’s Note: There is a certain ease in the presentation of today’s subject matter that makes the devastation somehow more powerful. A softness in the notion of “The bright pink suit against the gray / November” that at once heightens and dulls the impact of the poem’s final blow. It is as if the poem is a grenade exploding flowers.

Want to read more by and about Amanda Auchter?
Author Website
Author Blog
Pebble Lake Review

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: