Tag: Nature Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HEARTWRECKS

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Heartwrecks


FROM HEARTWRECKS
By Nicolas Destino


RESURRECTION

Back in the city they were erecting the moon every night with ropes, pulling, as everything needed to rise to reverse what fell. In an upstate kitchen, amid the languid, flat dough, they got the news that there would be no more bread, not until the moon was back up and pulling of its own accord.


INDIGENOUS

Miraculous to be part of the snow globe with the penguins on the icebergs and the icebergs with the cold shock and miraculous to be inside the dome with the curvature of the dome and the penguins’ head and the cold shock far from the city where this is not taking place and to be apart from the towers and a part of interiors with the curve of the moon made from clay.


SLEEP THERAPY

Things like giraffes, that’s all, and catalogue items, ordinary things; driving in the snow in the repetitive shapes of snowflakes, and things like fruit markets and police activity activating the amalgams of scriptures inscribing all the checklists that qualify a city, but the real story is the flashing number right in a waiting room, outside of which people have held doors in restaurants for strangers, or have stolen their pocketbooks or parking spaces, or have let doors slam on strangers, but the real story is that I would give up all these dirty thoughts for healthcare.


Today’s poems are from Heartwrecks (Sibling Rivalry Press, © 2013 by Nicolas Destino), and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Heartwrecks: In this debut collection, musical notes, paint pigment, and lives of the heart converge in fantastical worlds of invention. Nicolas Destino’s adventures through relationship, music, and visual art revitalize the lyric and re-imagine the ordinary.


Nicolas Destino’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Barge Journal, 580split, 322 Review, and others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Goddard College, and his first full-length collection of poems, Heartwrecks, was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013.


Editor’s Note: Nicolas Destino’s Heartwrecks is one of the best and most original books of poetry to be published in recent memory. The poet himself has said, “These are not poems” because these vignettes are so imagistic, visual, and painterly that they are more akin to waking dreams than to the written word. Not only does the poet embrace the visual and painterly, but Heartwrecks is rife with musicality and deeply interested in the language of music. The book also contemplates urban life, marriage, partnership, natural disasters, weather, and life as seen from within the curved glass of the snow globe. All of these concerns are wrought from the finest materials, the poet’s masterly handle on the lyric guiding the reader through an incredibly deep, thoughtful, stunning, humorous, and intensely pleasurable book of poems that ought to be read from start to finish. And then again. And then again and again.


Want to see more by Nicolas Destino?
Nicolas Destino Official Website
Buy Heartwrecks from Sibling Rivalry Press
Buy Heartwrecks from Amazon

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NICOLAS DESTINO

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

FANTASY
for Jeffrey
by Nicolas Destino


We loved wind so much that we
talked about buying kites. When we
finally bought kites, we continued to
talk about flying them on windy
days.

We talked about disasters, where the
kites would tangle into wind, how far
into things we loved, upward and
away from the sticky beach.

When we reviewed all possible
outcomes for disasters, we went
there, to the sticky beach, with our
kites, to the boardwalk where a sign
alerted us that all wind was cancelled
until we were ready to lose one
another.


(“Fantasy” will appear in Heartwrecks (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013) and is printed here today with permission from the poet.)


Nicolas Destino’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Barge Journal, 580split, 322 Review, and others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Goddard College, and his first full-length collection of poems, Heartwrecks, was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013.

Editor’s Note: The Eastern Seaboard is struggling through the aftermath of disaster. ‘Superstorm Sandy,’ as the powers that be have dubbed her, has devastated New England and neighboring areas, hitting hardest in New Jersey and New York City. Your faithful editor of this Saturday Poetry Series has been without power, internet, and cell phone reception for days. But in times of crisis people come together and rise to the challenge. On the micro level, this poet and editor has been taken in by her neighbors, poets and artists with electricity and mean Italian cooking skills. Nicolas Destino and his husband Seth Ruggles-Hiler have opened their home to me and mine, and in the process of this disaster-togetherness I have had the opportunity to read Nicolas Destino’s Heartwrecks from cover to cover. I am humbled in the presence of greatness.

Today’s poem, from Destino’s forthcoming debut collection, was chosen for the ways in which it resonates with the disaster at hand. The power of the wind, the survival and destruction of the beach and boardwalk, the contemplation of possible outcomes of disaster, and the fact that, in the end, it is our human bonds that matter most. A deeply personal poem in nature, “Fantasy” speaks not only to love and loss between two souls, but to that which is far more powerful than us, from the heart through the forces of nature.

Want to read more by and about Nicolas Destino?
Bellevue Literary Review
322 Review
Verse Daily

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: EMMALEA RUSSO

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

from HINTERLAND + HEX
By Emmalea Russo

barefoot
+ hovering above

false dandelion
like a mother

say: women in
your family
are witches





the garden is winter-still at lunchtime          i fill the hours with something like hiding



         make order
from what was
bracken
                  glean
sheaf after sheaf
send them to the
clearing behind
the house which
is filling up fast





a neighbor painted her red barn white          how what’s under will seep through



between
mountain
garden                                                                                                                + wild field



metal fence
deer-proofed
hoof resistant





say:           we are small inside the fenced-in green          even deer think so



a weed isn’t

          “supposed to be there”

but what we dig out space for

          is

i’m not convinced        but you are

begin :                 to paint seeds

(summer’s over)           on canvas

someone says



couldn’t anyone
paint a seed
isn’t it a circle



i say

yep.



Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Emmalea Russo is a poet and visual artist. Recent work has appeared in ILK Journal and Wicked Alice and is forthcoming in Ambush Review and Yew Journal. She lives in New York City.

Editor’s Note: I was first drawn to today’s poem by Emmalea Russo’s invocation of women witches. Those women who are cloaked in the magical and the incantatory, who suffered historically at the hands of Christianity, patriarchy, and empire, and who have been avenged and reclaimed by feminism and the Feminine in modernity. But after reading and re-reading today’s piece, after allowing its seeds to sprout in realms both conscious and subconscious, I now know that the poet sums up the experience of this poem best when she writes, “how what’s under will seep through.”

Want to see more by and about Emmalea Russo?
Wicked Alice
Vinyl Poetry
em:me magazine (Editor: Emmalea Russo)