Poetry of Loss – Page 13 – As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JESSICA BIXEL

Posted on February 16, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Jessica Bixel:

PRAYER FOR THE BROTHER

Tell him something new today—that we remembered the sharp lines of his body and loved him anyway. The open ruins of Old Sheldon Church letting in the sky. A dry wind or insect wings. Give him the good word—war renders murder into stone. There is something reassuring in that, lilacs blooming like a bell curve and then shrinking away into summer. The heat exhausts itself—there is nothing else to understand.

POEM

I never promised to write you into meaning. That’s what lying is for. Like this: the moon is made of soap. I’m telling you a story. I should have been there to say goodbye.

Yesterday, I unnamed you. It was easy enough to pull at your long body and think this is a warning. The moon is a thumbnail.

If you’d let me, I’d start all over. I promise to write you into anything. I promise, the moon is made of sorrow. Yesterday I looked up and the sky was empty.

(Today’s poems originally appeared in Midway Journal , and appear here today with permission from the poet.)

Jessica Bixel writes and works in Ohio, where over 200 minor earthquakes have occurred since 1776, most of which have gone unnoticed. Her work has recently found homes with Fortunates, Red Lightbulbs, and Leveler. She edits Rufous City Review.

Editor’s Note: The confessional nature of today’s poems collide in a lovely maelstrom of both the fantastical and the dark depths of the real within concentric circles of form and lyric. The moments that cut cut quick and deep. Jessica Bixel holds up a looking glass to the reader wherein we can see both our own world and a world from which we cannot look away.

Want to read more by and about Jessica Bixel?
Leveler
Floorboard Review
Mon Review
Red Lightbulbs
Rufous City Review

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEN SILVERMAN

Posted on February 9, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

BATH 5 (NEW HAMPSHIRE)
By Jen Silverman

If it’s one drink, it will be two. Wisteria tangling
around your wrists. Here is where you buried your

father. Here is where you buried your brother.
Here is where they will bury you, when the

time comes. No wonder you drink yourself down
toward the earth. Home is where the shovels lie.

Earth and earth and earth. Stones crowd your sleep.
Granite and salt, sand giving birth to

the fortress where even your lovers sigh. Silent
underfoot. You dream yourself toward them.

You are foxfire, you are phosphorescent. Your
mouth like whiskey. Your eyes like whiskey.

You baptize yourself in sorrow, again and again.
You baptize yourself with bourbon and brandy.

You swim downward, fast salmon, heedless, handsome,
death is in you, it has captured your ear. You have your

father’s jaw, your brother’s chin. When you were born
they bathed your small body with their fears.

Each scar they’d earned became manifest on your skin.
Their love aches like a badly set bone. When the river takes

you, it will be no new baptism. Just that same, ancient sacrifice.
Just that rush, that rushing, and then you are gone.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Ploughshares , where Jen Silverman was the Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner for Poetry, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Jen Silverman is a playwright and poet based out of New York. Her play CRANE STORY was produced off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre (2011), AKARUI received its World Premiere at Cleveland Public Theatre, and her short play THE EDUCATION OF MACOLOCO won the Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival and was published by Samuel French. She has held residencies at Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony, MacDowell (two-time Fellow), with an upcoming residency at Djerassi. She was a US Delegate for a China/America Writers Exchange in Beijing (2011) and the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Poet Award (2012). Her creative non-fiction piece “Six Bright Horses” won the Orlando Prize and was published in the LA Review (2011). BA: Brown. MFA: Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

Editor’s Note: Jen Silverman approaches her subject with blunt honesty. The rawness of the picture she paints “tangles around your wrists.” She calls it like she sees it, sparing nothing, and in so doing gives the reader a rare feeling of eavesdropping on the intimacy of another life. That which we are privvy to as outsiders “aches like a badly set bone.”

Want to read more by and about Jen Silverman?
Jen Silverman’s Official Website

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DARA BARNAT

Posted on February 2, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

WALT WHITMAN
By Dara Barnat

Walt Whitman walks with me
down the street, holds
doors open for me, whispers

in my ear: You can do nothing and be nothing but
what I will infold you.
Whitman, how good it feels, your

love, the perfect love of poets and
fathers, after they’re gone. Illness
outran my father’s

mind, so he could not hold
doors open for me.
Whitman grieves with me. The father,

he says, holds his grown or ungrown son
in his arms with measureless love.
But did he, Whitman, did your father hold

you in his arms? Together
we decide nothing
is more desirable than love from the dead.

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

Dara Barnat is an American poet who lives in Tel Aviv. Her work appears in diode, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, The Collagist, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Dara’s chapbook, Headwind Migration, was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. The same year, she received a poetry scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Dara teaches poetry and creative writing in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Editor’s Note: February 26th will mark the first anniversary of my father’s death. In my early grief, in my inability to comprehend, I found my path to acceptance, to understanding, to processing my father’s passing, through poetry. One year later I find myself still drawn to that community of voices who are able to speak of loss, to create beauty from immeasurable ache.

Today’s poem had me at hello. At “the perfect love of poets and / fathers, after they’re gone.” “[N]othing / is more desirable than love from the dead,” and nothing makes the burden we carry in the wake of loss more bearable, more understandable—nothing makes us feel less alone—than poetry.

That being said, above and beyond what it offers me in my personal journey, today’s poem is a stunning piece of artisanal craftsmanship. A lyric tour de force that resonates on aesthetic, emotional, and intertextual registers and beyond. A beautiful song that carries beyond that which gave rise to it, taking on a life and power of its own.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEHANNE DUBROW

Posted on January 26, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Jehanne Dubrow:

EROS AND PSYCHE
Sculpture by Antonio Canova, 1787

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

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside (Northwestern UP, 2012 and 2010). Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an assistant professor in creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Editor’s Note: There are some days when I can’t help but think, “This is a damn good poem.” Today is one of those days. Today’s piece is rich and multi-layered. A poem which functions like Pandora’s Box—which it references—letting its good and its bad out with each lift of its carefully wrought lid. There is love and there is death. There is the threat of violence and the reality of violence. And all of this is enrobed in visual art—in painting and sculpture—and then again in a reportage style that nearly conceals the poem’s confessional nature. There are beautiful moments of lyric: “and both of them gone marble;” “Bodies make a space for gods to intervene,” and there is the myth which informs the piece like a hidden puppetmaster who knows exactly when to remind us of the strings. Dubrow even gets away with using the word “butterflies,” proving herself a powerful enough master of her craft that she can get away with what most of us cannot. This is a damn good poem.

Want to read more by and about Jehanne Dubrow?
Author Website
Poem on American Life in Poetry
Poem on Verse Daily
Poem on Poetry Daily
Reading on NPR

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JACKSON HOLBERT

Posted on January 12, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

KITSCH WITH RUPTURED RHYTHMS AND PRESENT TENSES
By Jackson Holbert

Perfection, of any kind, is not what we are after,
And the poetry we invented hasn’t been invented yet;
We know human folly like the backs of our hands,
And, because of this, we want to discard armies and fleets;
When we laugh, respectable senators dismiss us with laughter,
And when we cry the little children are already dead in the streets.

* a response, in admiration, to W.H. Auden’s Epitaph on a Tyrant

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

Jackson Holbert is a senior at Lakeside High School in Nine Mile Falls, Washington. His work has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal and A-Minor Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Today’s is a poem that considers, in a few short lines, the quest human beings find themselves on, the struggles of the poet, politics, and violence. An honest poem that does not try to be more than it is, and yet speaks to all that comes before it and the realities we are faced with. The last line functions much in the same way as a sonnet’s volta, and I find myself reminded of a line from a Pablo Neruda poem: “and the blood of children ran through the streets / without fuss, like children’s blood.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OSIP MANDELSTAM

Posted on December 29, 2012 by asitoughttobemagazine

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“HEAVINESS, TENDERNESS . . .”
By Osip Mandelstam
Translated from the Russian by Eugene Serebryany

Heaviness, tenderness—sisters, your traits are alike.
Honeybees drink a rose that is tender and heavy.
Someone passes away. Once-warm sand cooling down . . .
They are carrying yesterday’s sun in a shroud.

Heavy honeycombs, webs of tenderness—
Lifting boulders is easier than repeating your name!
All that remains is one care in this world,
A golden care: how to flee from the burden of time.

I drink clouded air; I drink it like dark water.
Time was plowed up, and a rose became earth.
Like a slow-moving vortex of soft tender roses,
Heaviness, tenderness—sisters—prepared the wreaths.

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

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) was born into a Polish-Jewish family in what was then the Russian Empire. He became one of the great poets of the Russian Silver Age, with a keen sense of the melodies of spoken language. He often spoke a finished poem before, or even instead of, writing it down, and many of his lines became proverbial. He was persecuted in the Soviet Union for his political views, especially a 1933 poem satirizing Stalin. He died in Siberia while being transferred between prison camps.

Eugene Serebryany grew up in Moscow, Russia. He attended Yale University, where he studied translation with Peter Cole. He is currently a graduate student in biology at MIT.

Editor’s Note: It is not easy to translate poetry, to capture the lyric, the sonic, the original meaning and the hidden. But in today’s translation Eugene Serebryany has done a masterful job translating not only the words, but the essence of Mandelstam’s heartbreaking lyric. Serebryany studied under one of modernity’s greatest translators, Peter Cole, and his natural gift coupled with superb training shines through in today’s piece. As for the poem itself, Mandelstam captures the experience of loss in a way that exemplifies the gift international poets often have for wrighting art from mere words. At once loss is both devastatingly beautiful and devastation itself.

Want to read more by and about Osip Mandelstam?
AGNI Online
Prague Writers’ Festival

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: WILLIAM KELLEY WOOLFITT

Posted on December 22, 2012 by asitoughttobemagazine

Joyland photo 1_0

SHE REMEMBERS THE WEDDING OF SAMSON AND HER SISTER
By William Kelley Woolfitt

From my hiding spot, what I saw of him
was as I thought the lion dying and torn,
or the bees—flitting from the carcass’s
dark cave—might see, buzzing with the mad
desire to make honey, replenish the stores

he emptied to bring combs to my older sister,
sweet and glistening, in the bowl of his hands.
What I saw, my sister would grease on the seventh
day of their wedding feast: feet of the destroyer
and judge, her groom, who yielded to the siege

of her tears, parleys, and cajolements,
unlocked for her the secret of his riddle.
Feet she would wash, pamper, and oil; feet pale
and blue-tinged as a ewe’s cloudy milk.
I heard in the clamor of his footsteps

and did not believe the convulsing of pillars
that was to come, the crack of flame.

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

William Kelley Woolfitt teaches creative writing and literature at Lee University. He has worked as a summer camp counselor, bookseller, ballpark peanuts vendor, and teacher of computer literacy to senior citizens. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem engages in the ancient tradition of midrash, of questioning and interpreting what is written in the Hebrew Bible. This piece explores the biblical story of Samson, that fierce Jewish warrior who was brought to his knees by love and who went on to destroy his enemies, bringing down their temple with his bare hands. Kelley Woolfitt re-imagines Samson as a husband, using that template to foreshadow a volatile marriage. This Samson is a man who will bring his bride honey combs fresh from the hive in the cups of his hands on his wedding day, but who will later bring about “the convulsing of pillars” and the ominous “crack of flame.”

Want to read more by and about William Kelley Woolfitt?
Draft Horse
Cerise Press
Literary Bohemian

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BRETT ELIZABETH JENKINS

Posted on December 1, 2012 by asitoughttobemagazine

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FAILED HAIKU
By Brett Elizabeth Jenkins

My hip bones carry/ around the names of the dead/ like sagging parentheses./ When I sit they heavy me./ When I stand, they pull/ down my shoulders. When/ it rains, they tender/ and swell until I’m full/ of an air that goes in my bones./ I go to meetings/ and stare. I go to the store/ and buy the wrong salad dressing./ I turn off all the lights/ and unplug all of my appliances./ I walk quietly to the edge of a cliff.

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

Brett Elizabeth Jenkins lives and writes in Saint Paul. She is the author of Ether/Ore (NAP Chaps, 2012), and in 2012 was nominated for Best of the Net. Look for her work in Beloit Poetry Journal, PANK, Potomac Review, RHINO, and elsewhere.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is working on a number of levels, from its title that echoes both personal and formal failure to its ability to capture a sense of loss and locate it within the body. Moments of unique lyric imagery and quiet contemplation come together so that the poem reads like a deep breath and a sigh.

Want to read more by and about Brett Elizabeth Jenkins?
PANK Magazine
Brett Elizabeth Jenkins’ Official Blog – The Angry Grammarian
Buy Ether/Ore from Nap

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: STEPHANIE KARTALOPOULOS

Posted on November 24, 2012 by asitoughttobemagazine

FERTILE
By Stephanie Kartalopoulos

Somewhere after the houses burning from
beneath their heaviest frames, after

the red that rises in the wake of a recessed heat.
Somewhere after the third time

you told me to find my own hell
because I am too small to enter yours.

I am searching for the things that a younger you
begged me to depend on,

the implement to help me throw open every sallow curtain.
The issue of daybreak is important;

I am looking for what has left me here,
the something more

or less that rides out beyond
the tumbled light,

the color of river water after
the stones have been rinsed.

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

Stephanie Kartalopoulos teaches writing and literature and is completing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Missouri, where she was the 2008-2012 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Stephanie’s poems appear and are forthcoming in a variety of journals that include Barn Owl Review, So’wester, Thrush Poetry Journal, Pebble Lake Review, 32 Poems, Harpur Palate, Phoebe, and Laurel Review.

Editor’s Note: The experience of today’s poem lies, for me, in the world underneath. In the story behind the story that we, as the poem’s spectators, can only speculate and wonder about. I was first drawn to this piece in the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s Breezy Point fires, to the idea of excavation and the uncovering of lives in the wake of destruction. What I found in my own experience of pulling remnants from the aftermath of this poem was not only a haunted quality, but also the strength of a poet who rebuilds her own scarred story with lines like, “Somewhere after the third time / you told me to find my own hell / because I am too small to enter yours.”

Want to read more by and about Stephanie Kartalopoulos?
Pebble Lake Review
Waccama Journal
Barn Owl Review

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NICOLAS DESTINO

Posted on November 3, 2012 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

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