contemporary poetry – Page 43

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LANDON GODFREY

Posted on November 7, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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By Landon Godfrey:

INKWELL

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

RECIPE

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

SUBTLE HORROR MOVIES

Monster

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

Pathogen

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

Visitor From Outer Space

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

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

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

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

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MOVEMENT NO. 1: TRAINS

Posted on October 24, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From MOVEMENT NO. 1: TRAINS
By Hope Wabuke:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HISTORIES OF THE FUTURE PERFECT

Posted on October 17, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From HISTORIES OF THE FUTURE PERFECT
By Ellen Kombiyil:

CERBERUS AND PERSEPHONE

It’s audible to the three-headed dog:
her fear a high-pitched shriek

held in her throat. Pre-unleashed. The thought
of the shriek and not the shriek itself.

It’s freaking her out, this mind-reader dog,
how he tracks muscle-twitch, her intent to act,

pre-synapsed. He demands to know the before,
before the before: she was plucking flowers,

yes, when the ground opened its mouth,
but how she arrived at this exact spot,

how slowly she chewed and what she ate
for breakfast, how she slipped, stepping

onto the bathmat, her precise existence
at this particular moment—the two-, no

three-second pause at the four-way stop.
Indelible decisions. The luck

of the draw. The dog deciphers
eye-flicker, delves past thought in search of

the anatomy of thought, which moves
like starlight, born but the reaching delayed,

which moves like the gorgeous dark.
He’s doing it again, she thinks,

and he reads that, too. In his pupil-black,
black surrounded by gold flecks, she sees

the pre-patterned repetition
of next and next and next: her mouth, stained red;

she will not be leaving this place, not yet.
This future splits away like a cannon-

boom of sound. Calla lilies, held fast,
she lets drop. The great winding of a clock.

WHILE SIPPING LEMON TEA ON SATURN’S ICE-CLOUD DECK

The distant sun rises, the size of a dime.
Red light looks warm but is cold, the opposite of what I know.

What can’t be unknown: encrypted DNA, curling inside me.
What I google: Orbit: 29 years, 167 days. Rotation: 10.233 hours.

Dizzy days and sleepless nights—elongated years.
I’ve forgotten the outline of my body against you

how I’d reach across your warmth to the nightstand for water.
I am an untethered moon, unloosed from the sun.

Now is no time to panic: remember Sherlock Holmes.
He discards the superfluous, keeps room for important truths.

Human contact is what I’m lacking, so far from home.
Can you see me on the cloud deck, waving my arms?

I’m calling out for connection, any Watson will do:
It’s elementary, my dear; come here. I need you.

JULIET DREAMS OF THE CRYPT

Is it joy, waking to tall ceilings
painted white, inlaid with the smell

of almonds? The blind see colors,
cool heft of objects hand-held.

They do not see what is tarnished.
I’d be lying if I said I knew how

to get to the other side of my heart.
I rehearsed my speech as a child—Love

is a heavy wheelbarrow crushed with
hibiscus—before pretending to plunge

the knife into my chest. My mouth
at the moment of loss unbinds a thousand

mouths all making the same sound. I practiced
for the day I am blind, when

I will trade myself for one
dram of bottled summer, a lawn

that tickles my neck when I lie down
next to you without expectation.

Histories of the Future Perfect by Ellen Kombiyil is a book of poetry inspired by concepts in astrophysics. Canvassing across time and space to provide a luminescence unafraid of the big ideas, the book itself has what Kombiyil calls a quantum structure. Here we find Galileo’s thumbprint, Kurt Cobain Las Vegas, and Mary Lincoln communing with the dead. The poems themselves are never narrowly historical but rather cosmic in their inflections, taking on subatomic particles, DNA, and black holes, not simply as scientific props but as the very impetus for lyric motion.

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015). She is a recent transplant from Bangalore, India, where she lived for nearly eleven years, teaching creative writing and yoga. A fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2013, Kombiyil’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many journals, including BOOTH, Spillway, Cordite, and Poemeleon. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has read, performed or taught workshops at the annual Prakriti Poetry festival in Chennai, the Raedleaf Poetry Awards in Hyderabad, and Lekhana in Bangalore. She is the co-Founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model poetry press, publishing innovated voices from India/Indian diaspora. Originally from Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Editor’s Note: Ellen Kombiyil’s Histories of the Future Perfect is an absolutely stunning collection, from its opening image to its closing word, soaring and shining with every star and feather in-between. In truth, I am like “the tarot-reading parrot” in the gorgeous cover image by Kalyani Ganapathy, selecting today’s poems by divination rather than choice, because there is far, far too much that is worthy of sharing in this book.

Enter a world where nothing is off limits for exploration: history, mythology, love. Dive to the deepest depths of the ocean and travel as far as the imagined reaches of outer space. Slip into the skin of the philosopher, historian, astronaut, necromancer, classicist, adventurer–all as imagined by the contemplative mind and lyric lilt of the poet. Give yourself over to moments as beautiful as they are thought-provoking–“My mouth / at the moment of loss unbinds a thousand // mouths all making the same sound”–and know that these are the ripples circling out across the waters of this one-of-a-kind collection.

Buy this book. Revel in its beauty. Let your mind drift, weightless. Be carried away.

Want to see more from Ellen Kombiyil?
The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective
Buy Histories of the Future Perfect on Amazon
POEMELEON
Booth

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KAREN PAUL HOLMES

Posted on October 10, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Karen Paul Holmes:

VISITOR

A bare branch lounges
in my Adirondack chair
under the Japanese maple–
gray, elegant:
Comforting to me,
now without a husband,
a good omen
in my walled garden
cocooned by snow.

LIFE, ACT 3

Time knows its lines
has spoken them
across our foreheads.
In this stage of living
we censor the critic,
applaud the comedy,
watch the script unfold.
Gravity plays upon
these bodies, while
souls move inward,
heavenward.
The star in me
celebrates the star in you.

“Visitor” first appeared in Town Creek Poetry. Today’s poems are from the collection Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press 2014) and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Karen Paul Holmes is the author of the poetry collection, Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press, 2014), which tells a story of loss and healing with a voice that “pushes readers forward into the unknown with confidence, precision, and empathy,” according to Poet Dorianne Laux. Karen received an Elizabeth George Foundation emerging writer grant in 2012 and was nominated for Best New Poets 2014. Publishing credits include Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Caesura, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Every Day Poems, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol 5: Georgia, and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poems are full of dichotomies: simple and complex, small and epic. They contain all at once the quiet contemplation of nature, of meditation, of breath, yet their gentile reflectiveness is balanced precisely by the weight of a life lived. This is a life–and a poetry–as simple as a bare branch under a Japanese maple, yet as complex as the comfort of being “now without a husband,” and that being “a good omen.” This is a human experience as small as the lines time “has spoken… across our foreheads,” and as epic as the idea that “The star in me / celebrates the star in you.”

Want more from Karen Paul Holmes?
Blue Fifth Review
Verse-Virtual
Extract(s)
Amarillo Bay
See inside Untying the Knot

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEN KARETNICK

Posted on October 3, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Jen Karetnick:

ON THE WAY TO SEDER, MY HUSBAND ANSWERS

phone calls from patients, their parents or partners,
repeating what he has already said half-a-dozen times

in the office—“I know the auras are uncomfortable,
but they’re better than grand mal seizures, and that’s

what the meds will help to prevent”— and dispensing
predictions no one wants to hear—“No, I don’t think

he’ll come home; the stroke was catastrophic”—but
are asked for over and over in the hopes they will change,

while I shush the kids in the backseat, stop them from shouting
with too much apparent joy in their voices, keep the radio

playing Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” turned down. Soon
we will dissect the Seder plate, digest the bitter

herbs, finger the salt dried on the easily torn skin
of faith. We will recite the plagues: boils, murrain,

the lice we have been visited by several times this year.
On this night, we will open the door for a rogue spirit

who might drink our wine but not heal vertigo; on this night
we will recline on a pillow that can’t fuse a broken

spine. On this night, the cell phone chirps and sings,
and there are no miracles beyond what can be doctored.

THE INVENTION OF AMNIOCENTESIS

Mother, in your womb I am an experiment.
You pass on not immunity but its silvery underside,
give permission for the needle like an arrow to
birth holes in this temporary home, sip the fluid
like a taster of fine wines without the benefit of
a visible image. No bigger than a black widow
spider, the doctors must guess where I am,
and agree there is nothing to be done.
I am poison to both of us. Unsafe
harbor, you insist on mooring me to
your designated slip, tossed by rash after
rash of storms. I will remove myself early. Still ill,
of course you will not care for me right away. Of all the
eggs you might have nourished, I am the one who breaks you.

WOMEN ON THE VERGE DISCUSS VIAGRA

Stamina. From the Latin stamen,
meaning thread of woven cloth. Plant parts
resemble the warp and woof, but old farts?
The boost was designed for the impotent,
not the young at heart. They can’t afford
to see the blue of detached retinas
when the sky has already claimed those hues
and the days for viewing them are numbered.
How ‘bout a pill to make them remember
to take out the garbage or mow the lawn?
One to defoliate the nose hairs grown?
Or better: to spark conversational vigor.
No chance of that? Then don’t bring it on.
This is the last thing, the last thing we want.

“On the Way to Seder, My Husband Answers” was previously published in The Healing Muse. Today’s poems are from the forthcoming collection American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing), and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Jen Karetnick is the author/co-author/editor of 14 books, two of them forthcoming: American Sentencing (poetry, Winter Goose Publishing) and The Treasures That Prevail (poetry, Whitepoint Press). In addition to poetry, she writes lifestyle books, the most recent of which is the cookbook Mango (University Press of Florida, 2014). Her poems, prose and playwriting have been widely published in literary and commercial outlets including TheAtlantic.com, Cimarron Review, december, Miami Herald, North American Review, Poet’s Market 2013, Poets & Writers, Racked.com, River Styx, Spillway, Submittable.com, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Virgin Atlantic Airlines. Based in Miami with her husband, two teenagers, various rescue pets and 14 mango trees, she works as the Creative Writing Director for Miami Arts Charter School and as the dining critic for MIAMI Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Jen Karetnick expertly catalogues the vast and startling spectrum of life, from the mundane to the monumental, from humor to horror. Amidst the stories that unfold are stunning and heartbreaking moments of lyric: “Soon we will dissect the Seder plate, digest the bitter // herbs, finger the salt dried on the easily torn skin / of faith;” “Of all the / eggs you might have nourished, I am the one who breaks you.” And that beauty is balanced by the hilarious and the absurd. Of viagra, a group of women posit, “How ‘bout a pill to make them remember / to take out the garbage or mow the lawn? / One to defoliate the nose hairs grown? / Or better: to spark conversational vigor. / No chance of that? Then don’t bring it on. / This is the last thing, the last thing we want.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: EMMA LAZARUS

Posted on September 12, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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By Emma Lazarus

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”

Today poem is in the public domain, belongs to the masses, and appears here accordingly.

Emma Lazarus (1849 – 1887): A descendant of Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States from Portugal around the time of the American Revolution, Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22, 1849. Before Lazarus, the only Jewish poets published in the United States were humor and hymnal writers. Her book Songs of a Semite was the first collection of poetry to explore Jewish-American identity while struggling with the problems of modern poetics. (Annotated biography courtesy of The Academy of American Poets.)

Editor’s Note: I wanted to share with you today a poem for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah is a celebration of newness, ushered in by sweet wishes of the year to come. But we spend the days that follow in contemplation of those regrets we have from the year past, in asking for forgiveness, and in letting go. When I came across today’s poem I thought of the Syrian refugees, of how the plight of exile has plagued my own people in the past, and how others are suffering from it today.

5776, the Jewish year that begins at sundown on Sunday September 13th, will be a “two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate” for countless Syrian refugees. That fate that my own people have suffered in the past is today their reality: “The West refused them, and the East abhorred. / No anchorage the known world could afford, / Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.”

Emma Lazarus is most famous for penning the words that appear at the base of the Statue of Liberty, wherein the “Mother of Exiles” declares, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” As we celebrate a new year, may the words of the Mother of Exiles find their way into the hearts and minds of ports and borders across Europe and throughout the world, “Saying, ‘Ho, all who weary, enter here!'”

Want to read more by and about Emma Lazarus?
The Academy of American Poets
Jewish Women’s Archive
The Poetry Foundation

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALL DAY, TALKING

Posted on September 5, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From ALL DAY, TALKING
By Sarah A. Chavez:

DEAR CAROLE, I FINALLY DID IT

I cut it all off into a trendy bob
that fades up the back. You told me
not to, said you loved my hair long.
Well, you’re not here anymore.

DEAR CAROLE, TODAY I’M WEARING THAT RING

you stole for me at the art fair
on the green at Fresno State.
God, was I such a baby!
Poor me, I don’t have any money
to buy things. I kept whining.
I never get to have anything nice.
And most of what we’d seen
iron sculptures, clay dishes fired
for ornament, I was only just
discovering, but still, I thought
I deserved them.
That’s another thing age teaches you –
you ain’t owed shit. There is nothing
on this flying water rock that anyone deserves.
You should’ve smacked me, echoed
my father and told me to suck it up.
But you didn’t.

It was the third time we’d circled
back to that booth. Everything
about it was pretty: the rainbow
canopy, the sunlight glinting off
the semi-precious gems and hued
glass, the hot hippie without a bra
telling every passer-by about Gaia.
I fingered a large red and black
swirled ring, slipped it over
the callouses on my middle finger,
and spread my hand flat to admire it,
its heft impressive for something so lovely.
The hippie told me, the ring
wants to be a ring. I never take
from the Earth without her permission.
I spoke to the stone, told her what
she’d be
and she gave me her blessing.
The hippie looked so sincere
when she spoke, looked into my eyes
with her large cobalt irises, the pupil a pinprick
in the blue with the sun glaring
behind me. I’m sure I said something
stupid. I always get so nervous
around people like that, who walk
through life like an open wound, their blood
and tissue exposed to the elements,
their insides shining on the outside.

I probably said, Cool and behind me,
you probably rolled your eyes.
I put the ring back on the organic
hemp cushion with the other
metamorphisized rocks, then spun
the color-tinted glass of the wind chimes
hanging from the canopy’s aluminum
frame to hear their tingle-tangle
and submerged my hand into the basket
of oddly-shaped beads, feeling what I
imagined the quiet core within a fossilized
stone felt like. As we walked away,
you said Thanks, which was weird, but
I thought maybe it got to you too –
so much unattainable beauty,
the reminder of all the things
we didn’t have and all the things
we couldn’t yet know we wanted.

Walking to 711 for cigarettes,
we stopped at the crosswalk light.
You took my hand and pressed
the weight of the ring into my palm.
I looked up at you, squinting in surprise,
but you just shrugged, said The stone told me
to take it. It said it wanted you to wear it.

DEAR CAROLE, FOR HOURS, IT’S BEEN BURNING

a hole in my gut, the shame
of never saying thank you
twelve years ago for that fucking pizza
you bought with SSI back pay.
It tasted so good: the grease,
the sweet of the tomato sauce,
the salt from the olives prickling
my tongue – I could actually taste it.
They don’t say on those Cymbalta commercials
depression takes away taste.
Sleep, yeah, sex drive, focus, but not taste.
I never told you
how for those months, alone
in my one-bedroom apartment I tried
to eat just about anything,
but it was all so thick and waxen . . .
one night, ravenous and wretched
I tried to eat an entire loaf of bread.
Cross-legged on the kitchen floor
the light from the street lamp cast ghastly
shadows against the apartment blinds
while I took slice after slice
of Wonder Bread from the Hostess overstock
warehouse on Weldon Street and bit
into each one wanting desperately
for the next to taste
like summer,
like 1998,
like the smell of patchouli
in your room, like rain water,
like mud-stained carpet, like midnights
on the front porch,
like lying to our mothers and never getting caught.
Slice after slice – mutilated, the impression
of my teeth embossed on each one’s cottony
flesh – lay scattered
on the linoleum. I couldn’t bring myself
to swallow even the smallest
bite. Just kept spitting
slobbery hunks onto my naked lap,
into my tangled hair, until
I laid down, the floor clammy and smooth
like the palms of your hands.

All Day, Talking: “A stunning, gritty, and beautifully irreverent collection of poems, All Day, Talking repeatedly and necessarily corrupts the conventional elegy. Chavez mourns Carole, yes, but she also mourns herself—and all of us, the tragedy of how we see (or don’t see) one another in our contradictory identities and bodies. If you want to know the honest truth about what it means to grieve and to survive, keep these poems close and listen to this ‘all day, talking,’ which is both deeply personal and profoundly political.” — Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), which was featured on Sundress Publications’ book spotlight, The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed. She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly, Stirring: A Literary Collective, Spoon River Poetry Review, Luna Luna Magazine, among others. Her manuscript, This, Like So Much, was an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Contest. A selection from her chapbook manuscript All Day, Talking won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship in 2013. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

Editor’s Note: There is a refreshing honesty to the poems in All Day, Talking that is, in equal measures, surprising, laugh-out-loud funny, and deeply touching. In this collection grief is portrayed–and love remembered–through a lens of realism that mirrors the very real and very unstable experience of loss. Memory is the vehicle through which a life lost is a life recalled, and the speaker addresses the absence with a candor and wit that seems to honor the relationship that gave rise to it when Carole was still living. Amidst a text thick with engaging and humorous stories, within the world of deeply confessional admissions and recollections, there exists the heartbeat of the lyric, “the reminder of all the things / we didn’t have and all the things / we couldn’t yet know we wanted.”

Want to see more from Sarah A. Chavez?
Sarah A. Chavez’s Official blog/website
Buy All Day, Talking directly from the poet
Buy All Day, Talking from the publisher
Rogue Agent
Broadside of “The Day the Alligators Feasted on Time” from Stirring: A Literary Collection
The Poetry Foundation: Irene Lara Silva in conversation with Sarah A. Chavez

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: CONFLUENCE

Posted on August 29, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From CONFLUENCE
By Sandra Marchetti:

THE RETURN

               “figurations of mist
               at the turn of the corner,
               figurations of time
               at the bend in this pause,”
                              ~ Octavio Paz, trans. Eliot Weinberger

Beyond the body itself
is the thin blue line,
the sky folding back on its spine.

I saw today the paper gold mists,
the terrible last burnings off of morning;

I have an idea that you ate me then,
and slid belching through the fog—

you slicked my breast
on past your teeth and tasted
my unsalted skin.

I’m small; I know when I’ve been
swallowed whole, been rounded out
gold and beaming,

become a curve in your smile,
the element of light—broken on the tide—
the start of day.

FISSURES

By night
my body disconnects, falls,

lies on the bed in bones
and curls of hair.

There is nothing
to join it.

Skin flicks off
through shudders, and furls—

I lay and am unhitched,
unrolled.

I see what is done darkly,
between shadows and the neatest black.

The low lake below
lets go its nets,

from joints I wash toward confluence,
dissolved in a room of night.

MIGRATION THEORY

The womb a tent,
lit from within, flutters
golden on the wind.

I’m given to pregnancy
dreams again.

Sleeping, the world becomes round once more—
sleeping atop my midriff. Sleeping in
silence and veins and skin—a globe, a missive.

I’m told the child
is ghost; instead

the sleep is lifted into,
alight with curiosities
curling out from the hand.

Sleep. The light sheet ruffles within.
White moths in flight
lift from the body—the skin.

Confluence: “’Roam the ground where you are’ writes Sandy Marchetti in Confluence, her impressive debut. Mediating the world in between—lover and beloved, day and night, lost and found, now and then—this lyric poetry celebrates the intimate as ebullient, charged. The lyrics, read through imagery and felt through sound, ‘riff in bits and licks.’ Sandy Marchetti has convincingly made us a world.” —Sally Keith, author of The Fact of the Matter and Dwelling Song

Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications, and a co-author of Heart Radicals, a collaborative chapbook of love poems. Eating Dog Press published an illustrated letterpress edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Sandy’s work appears in Subtropics, Sugar House Review, Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Blackbird, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at Aurora University outside of her hometown of Chicago.

Editor’s Note: Sandra Marchetti’s Confluence is incredibly vivid, electric with unique imagery, and rife with moments of depth and contemplation that force the reader to slow down in wonder. “Beyond the body itself / is the thin blue line, / the sky folding back on its spine;” “I’m small; I know when I’ve been / swallowed whole.” The body is at times singular, existing in pieces, dissolved: “By night / my body disconnects, falls, // lies on the bed in bones / and curls of hair.” The I is the ever-observer, seeing the world as one only can from the lone darkness: “I see what is done darkly, / between shadows and the neatest black.” The lines are blurred between life’s joys and devastations: “I’m given to pregnancy / dreams again;” “I’m told the child / is ghost.” No matter the consideration or the angle of the reflection and the poet’s gaze, forever driving these poems is a rampant lyricism, steady and rhythmic as a heartbeat, fervently alive.

Want to see more from Sandra Marchetti?
Pre-order Confluence from Sundress Publications
Appalachian Heritage
Thrush Poetry Journal
The Rumpus
Words Without Borders

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MY FRIEND KEN HARVEY

Posted on August 22, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From MY FRIEND KEN HARVEY
By Barrett Warner:

MY FRIEND DAVID BOMBA

MY FRIEND KEITH MARTIN

My friend Keith Martin is dead. He died in early April.
It’s kind of a busy month to die. The ground is softening—
rows raked and sown—jealous hues emerging like rye.

It’s weird that he died the same month I was born.
Now the ghost would be forever Aries, the passionate one,
the one who gets things almost right, who gets in his own way.

A friend is a brick against the sweet hereafter. Lose a friend
and you lose a brick. Lose Keith and you lose a wall.
It’s just a matter of time until the roof falls down.

Marsha his wife sat cold on offers coming quickly on his land.
I don’t blame her holding out for more, but suffered lifetimes
are always cheap. I gave away anything I ever tried to sell.

No one ever wants to buy what you don’t love.

Their house is a quarter mile away, through dense spite trees
planted by our neighbor so he wouldn’t have to look at Keith getting out of his car.

I can’t imagine hating someone so much I’d plant trees.

One dog’s not enough, and two dogs are too many.
That’s how Keith would talk, like Ben Franklin.

He wanted me to feel better, but I never did.

MY FRIEND LARRY MCKEE

My friend Larry McKee notices each leaf in an oak forest.
I see firewood, fence boards, squirrels, squirrel stew.

I hustle through life’s minor beauty to make myself sweat,
wearing work on my face like khol.

I am trying to say I don’t belong here, don’t deserve
this world. I need to earn every second of it.

If I stop sweating I’ll stop earning.
It’s why I’ll always have a job, and Larry, a passion.

Someone ate this, he says.
He holds a 175-year-old raccoon femur.

Someone knelt here in 1841 and prayed for something.
Maybe, yes, there was singing. Listen! Sobs and singing.

I have been sweating all day and all night and all year.
It’s only a matter of time before I exile myself.

It would be nice if Larry could learn from me too
but I have nothing to teach, even about drinking.

Larry grows the mint, makes ice from spring water
collected in caves, smokes the bourbon over apple wood.

He has a special black basalt rock that fits his hand
to crush the beautiful ice into manageable debris.

He takes so long to make a two minute drink
that I’m drunk on beer and hung over before his first sip.

Still, it’s the best I ever tasted.
And of course, the next day, I steal the rock.

The things I’ve bashed. The cars. The lives. The dogs.
The sweat that flew off my brow. The wasted muscle.

One night I pound some lamb into burgers, smother it
with sheep cheese, and I think, Larry would have admired this.

I call him up to brag about the recipe. His wife Hannah
passes over the phone. Sounds delicious, he says.

We haven’t spoken in thirty years. Leftover enchiladas for us,
Always better the second night, filled with grilled chicken cut up

Small mixed with salsa and corn cut off the cob. On the patio,
Watching fireflies and hummingbirds until dark.

Couple extra chairs at the table if you’re ever in the neighborhood.
The things I learned from Larry. The things I never learned.

My Friend Ken Harvey: “Nostalgia and sentiment were dirty words in poetry until Barrett Warner’s My Friend Ken Harvey came on the scene. Here we have a chapbook that shows us the many forms of love, how relationships can be measured as ‘not enough war or too much war in someone’s life,’ and how the simplest moments can be transcendent, all while dipping in and out of the sepia tint of memory.” —Dakota Garilli, Book Review: MY FRIEND KEN HARVEY by Barrett Warner

Barrett Warner’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in newsprint, paper and online since 1982, and most recently in Entropy, Revolution John, and Four Chambers. In 2014 he won the Salamander fiction prize and the Cloudbank poetry prize. He has a website where he blogs about bathing, medication, gardening, Proust, and Kalamazoo.

Editor’s Note: Struck by the unique nature of this collection, I asked the author if he would share a few words on his vision and process. “To me,” he replied, “the biographical poem is an ekphrastic poem, but instead of writing about a Hopper painting or a Grecian urn, I’m writing about everyday people with whom I’ve had some moment of fantastic empathy.” What is “fantastic empathy,” and how does it translate from lived experience to poem to reader, I wonder. I find my answer in my own experience in reading these poems. “I’ll have the starfish, Bomba says,” because “Everyone should be allowed to order what they want / even if it’s not on the menu.”

This collection is at times hilarious, at times touching, at times lyric, simple, and stunning. “A friend is a brick against the sweet hereafter. Lose a friend / and you lose a brick. Lose Keith and you lose a wall,” Warner writes of the death of his friend Keith Martin. “I am trying to say I don’t belong here, don’t deserve / this world. I need to earn every second of it,” he writes, from some honest place between existentialism and a search for meaning. In a way, these poems are–as the poet says–ekphrastic, biographical, minute in their reports of human interactions. Yet in another way they are meta, like staring up at the night sky and trying to truly grasp what you are seeing. From the minutiae to the horizon, I suggest reading and rereading these poems and seeing where the experience leads you.

Want to see more from Barrett Warner?
Entropy
Cultural Weekly
Lines + Stars
Quarter After Eight
drafthorse

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JAIMIE GUSMAN

Posted on August 15, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Jaimie Gusman:

BABY

The baby carriage on top of the roof is too much. The husband says to his wife, it has to end here. Years before they were in love, the kind of love that was quiet but infectious. The kind of love that made their friends feel all the complexities of love with great jealousy and excitement. Now, the baby carriage is on the roof again, even though he brought it back inside just yesterday, after 13 hours of work at the shed. He was driving home when he saw it – navy blue with periwinkle-ruffled trim.

She sewed that trim herself. He remembered her pregnancy, her sewing. She made sure the detail was just right for their little boy. Her friends all said ooh and ahh and complimented her dedication and creativity. He remembers being proud of his wife, how that pride filled him, heated him up and up where the atmosphere was tempered by a soft breeze.

When they lost the blue baby she held him close. She sang him the lullabies she practiced late at night when she couldn’t sleep. She put him in the carriage and showed him off to the other mothers in the ward. And after even that, she did not want to let her blue baby go. Friends and family were worried. She sang lullabies all the time.

One day, her husband came home to a dozen watermelons swaddled in a bright cerulean celestial covered fabric. Our blue baby is safest at night. His wife put her head against the cloth of one melon. She looked bright. Sweet boy, she sang, dissolving into the fabric. And he thought that was enough, this tone, this textile. That she could be happy with this.

BIRDSONG

I hold my wedding dress tight,
the bottom, like tissue paper
prepped for plastering to a mannequin.
All the other brides, too,
hold white birds
against their thighs.

When we get to the altar,
the men pour forth.
They step up, one by one,
and point to a dress. A dress!
The man then opens his mouth,
and a bride crawls right inside it.

None of the brides are terrified,
but I can’t help but be disturbed.
These are swallowed women,
women that cling to rhinestones,
while layers of organza and silks
sway with an effortlessness numb.

When a man chooses me
I blush, but try not to.
He grabs my hand, lifting me
to the altar. I know what’s next,
I know I must get in position
and drop the dress so the train
makes a trail of feathers. I do.

What happens inside the mouth?
Nothing! A dark wet corridor
leads to another dark wet corridor.
I find a cool bench and listen
to his echoing thoughts.
I love this man, I begin feeling
and then saying out loud.

Where are the others?
Where are the glistening waistlines
that so briskly walked down
aisles before me? History?
I search my own wet echoes.
Hello, is this thing on?

Today’s poems are from the chapbook Gertrude’s Attic (Vagabond Press, 2014, © Jaimie Gusman ), and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Jaimie Gusman’s work has appeared in The Feminist Wire, Moss Trill, Sonora Review, B O D Y, Trout, Mascara Review, Unshod Quills, LOCUSPOINT, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Hearing Voices, Hawaii Women’s Journal, Tinfish Press, Spork Press, Shampoo, Juked, Barnwood, DIAGRAM, and others. She is the 2015 Rita Dove Poetry Prize winner, and has three chapbooks: Gertrude’s Attic (Vagabond Press, 2014), The Anyjar (Highway 101 Press, 2011), and One Petal Row (Tinfish Press, 2011). She lives and works in Kaaawa, HI.

Editor’s Note: What I love about today’s poems is the stories they tell. The lives–both inner and outer–they reveal. Stories reminiscent of beloved favorites like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “The Story of an Hour.” Brimming with social commentary and strong with the struggles we don’t always speak of, these are the stories that must be told. And how brave, moving, and enchanting they are when Jaimie Gusman tells them.

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