Poetry – Page 100 – As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOANNA CHEN

Posted on October 26, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

I WILL ALWAYS GO BACK
By Joanna Chen

I will always go back to my brother’s voice, not yet fully broken, counting to ten,

the leaves crackling underfoot, the snag of an oak branch on my old red coat

as I search for a place to hide from him. The smell of damp bracken

from late summer showers, a shudder in the warm air, a whirring of bees,

hundreds of them, whose hive my clumsiness has violated, hunting me down,

swarming full throttle from the depths of the glade, catching up with my awkward

sprint, poison throbbing in their little bodies. They capture me swiftly, clinging

ecstatically to my face, invading my nostrils, attacking my ear lobes, covering the

cuffs of my coat with their rage. When I reach the driveway of our house, I stop

batting my childish hands, stop resisting. I just stand there and let them do it

to me. My brother, hearing my animal screams piercing through the glade,

finds me. He fights them off with his beautiful bare hands.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Poet Lore Volume 107, Number 3/4 and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Joanna Chen is a British-born poet, journalist and translator. She has written extensively for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Marie Claire and the BBC World Service. Her poetry and poetic translations were most recently published with Poet Lore, The Bakery, and The Moon Magazine, among others.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem pairs pace with alliteration, image with language, and scene with nostalgia to whisk us away to another place and time. Every sense is enlisted so that we are on high alert, in the throes of the events at hand. We are one with the girl, at the mercy of the bees; we, too, know the salvation of a brother and his beautiful bare hands.

Want to read more by and about Joanna Chen?
Joanna Chen’s Official Website
The Ilanot Review
Haaretz
The Bakery

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ORIT GIDALI

Posted on October 19, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

KOHELET
By Orit Gidali, Translated by Marcela Sulak

I, Kohelet, was king of Jerusalem,
I really was.
Treading over a thousand flowers on my way to the white bed
where my wives waited to remove the crown from my head–
made of marzipan in the biting of sweet tongues–
my silk rubbing against their silk, my flesh would choose among
them, and my flesh was already sweet in their flesh.
Kohelet, I held a thousand women
and I didn’t have a single one
I could recognize by smell
or by her skin or her feet,
her steps as she walked away from me: David’s lament.
Her steps toward me: his song.
I am Kohelet, Solomon,
my linen is the mystery of shrouds
and my bitten crown is above me.

קוהלת

אני קוהלת מלך הייתי בירושלים
באמת הייתי
דורך על אלף פרחים בדרכי למיטה הלבנה
שם חיכו נשותי, שהסירו את כתר ראשי
העשוי מרציפן בנגיסת לשונות מתוקות, משיי
מתחכך במשיין, והייתי בוחר מתוכן לבשרי,
ובשרי כבר מתוק בבשרן.
קוהלת החזקתי אלף נשים
ולא היתה לי אישה יחידה
לזהות את ריחה
ועורה ורגליה
צעדיה ממני: קינת דוד
צעדיה אלי: שירתו
אני קוהלת שלמה
סתרי תכריכים של סדיני
וכתרי הנגוס מעלי.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Bakery, was published in the collection Esrim Ne’arot LeKane [Twenty Girls to Envy Me] (Sifriat Poalim, Tel Aviv, 2003), and appears here today with permission from the translator.)

Orit Gidali is an Israeli poet. Her first poetry collection, Esrim Ne’arot LeKane [Twenty Girls to Envy Me], was published by Sifriat Poalim in 2003. Gidali is also the author of Smikhut [Construct State] (2009), and the children’s book Noona Koret Mahshavot [Noona the Mindreader] (2007). She is married to poet Ben-Ari Alex, and is a mother, writing workshop facilitator, and lecturer in the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University.

Marcela Sulak is the author of two collections of poetry and has translated three collections of poetry from the Czech Republic and Congo-Zaire. Her essays appear in The Iowa Review, Rattle, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is senior lecturer in American Literature.

Editor’s Note: Kohelet is the original Hebrew name for Ecclesiastes, one of the Writings that comprises a portion of the Hebrew Bible. The book is an autobiographical account of Kohelet’s search for the meaning of life and the best way to live. Kohelet introduces himself as “son of David, king in Jerusalem,” and is therefore sometimes believed to be Solomon. This book, however, was written anonymously and is believed to have ben penned late in the 3rd century B.C.E., while Solomon’s reign was circa 970 to 931 B.C.E.

In today’s piece the poet associates Kohelet with King Solomon and explores the notion that “heavy is the head that wears the crown.” To get to his marriage bed the king must trample a thousand flowers. He has “held a thousand women” (Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines and may have had an affair with the Queen of Sheba), but “didn’t have a single one / [he] could recognize by smell / or by her skin or her feet.” His wives remove his crown from his head—perhaps an allusion to his wives’ polytheism which influenced Solomon and displeased God—and at that his crown is “made of marzipan” and therefore vulnerable to “the biting of sweet tongues.” In the end he is left shrouded in mystery with a bitten crown.

As fascinating as the midrashic element of today’s piece is, it is the vibrant and lyrically explicit language that brings the scene to life. The beauty of the lyric is itself almost biblical: “my silk rubbing against their silk, my flesh would choose among / them, and my flesh was already sweet in their flesh.” It was no small effort on the part of the poem’s translator, Marcela Sulak, whose original work was featured on this series last week, to translate today’s poem from Hebrew into English while still maintaining elements of rhyme, meter, and lyric beauty. This is a piece as rich in English as in the original Hebrew, and which carries as much depth and beauty in both languages.

A Marvelous Mosaic: A Review of Budget Travel Through Space and Time

Posted on October 15, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

A Marvelous Mosaic: A Review of Budget Travel Through Space and Time

Vincent Czyz

Albert Goldbarth has been regaling us with his unique experiments in verse for more than 30 years and has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award—the only poet to do so. Budget Travel Through Space and Time, published in 2004, is perhaps the single best of all of his collections. In other words, if you want to give Goldbarth a try, this is the place to start. A hefty 162 pages, Budget Travel is neutron-star dense (the neutron star is one of those celestial impossibilities likely to show up in a Goldbarth poem: a sphere of crushed-down matter a cubic inch of which weighs tons). Loaded with eye-poppers and jaw-droppers—that is, stunningly pulled-off metaphors and images—his poems also tend to stretch ingenious analogies the length of a three- or four- or even a nine-page poem and leave the reader with the equivalent of that blank, retinal ghost after a camera flash.

My mouth runneth off a bit, perhaps, so a few examples … the Moon in “Budget Travel through the Universe” is described as “the huge,/round resume of the career of light” and as “a curd of afterglow.” In ‘ “Far”: An Etymology’ Goldbarth writes

That handful in our skull might hold more distance
than the lights from the edge where our telescopes
shrug hopelessly and turn around for home.

In “The Sign” he takes as a central image

[…] geese across the sky
at the end of a day—the second when
its brightness is stubbed out on the horizon line.
Now there’s more sun on the bellies of these geese
than anywhere in the world altogether. Incandescent.
Freshly smelted ingots—flying.

In “Hoverers” when he wants to convey the tenor of “circling,” he instructs, “Think of the birds/that migrated back to Atlantis, circling the empty sea.” The image and the language are simple enough and yet the comparison is a perfect fit.

But this is Goldbarth at the micro-level where the skeptic can say, “Yeah, but does he have anything to say?” Herein also lies the beauty of a Goldbarth poem; whereas many are the anthologized poets who made me wonder why they bothered versifying rather trivial observations, Goldbarth is a kind of Samson who, if he doesn’t always bring down the house, at least leaves the columns we’ve come to rely on most—whether erected in the name of science, philosophy, religion or anything else—quivering. He makes us rethink, re-experience, and reassess; taken collectively, a sine qua non of the best art. The fact is, his poems have so much inner resonance, it’s difficult to pull out a few lines and stand them up on their own; a lot of the luster is worn off by this sort of detournement. Any one of the majority of the longish poems in this book—“The Feelers,” “The Sign,” “Into That Story,” “Where the Membrane is Thinnest,” “A Gesture Made in the Martian Wastes” among others—is worth the price of admission. The latter, perhaps my favorite in a book of favorites, begins with an epigraph from a science fiction novel (Goldbarth, with his omnivorous palate, doesn’t spit out comic books or aliens, the futuristic or pulp from the past; it all gets composted in). The poem opens with the image of a “svelte seductress” who is able “to feel her way among the walls and statues of a city/that no longer exists.” This metamorphoses into a scene in Vietnam in which a soldier is

“[…] feeling
gingerly over the ground with one arm
for his other arm, that had been torn off the in darkness. Only seconds
had gone by but already he reached out into that past
of himself as if it were countless centuries.

It ends up with Goldbarth recalling himself as an adolescent enamored of interplanetary adventures:

“…and I reach out
toward that sixteen-year-old boy from forty years ago,
who’s only a hole in the air now, that the wind blows through,
the wind of Mars, in it immemorial quarrel with stone
and skin and the scurf of the planet itself
and our on-loan solar resplendence.

It’s thoroughly refreshing to read poems that end, not obscurely or tritely, but with a line that almost always leave the air humming—sometimes as loudly as a whacked gong, sometimes as subtly as two gold coins touching rims. Equally refreshing that Goldbarth is not afraid to use words that encompass phenomena that generally surpass our ability to comprehend them (universe, supernova, singularity), of made-up words (telecyberfiber, uberglobal, terra mysterium), of rare words (suzerainty, cumulonimbus, ziggurat). He doesn’t feel the need to dumb-down his language so as to admit to his fabulous verbal theme park the so-called “common man” (who is much more likely to read a cereal box than a collection of William Carlos Williams), and yet he can be as colloquial as a blue collar worker sitting down to his beer at Miller Time. His poetry, full of wit and humor—both earthy and sophisticated—shrinks from nothing.

A marvelous mosaic of images, insights, ruminations, erudition, mundane details, quantum leaps of intuition, artifacts of pop culture, and historical anecdotes (Paul Revere and da Vinci both put in appearances), this collection proves you don’t need a machine to travel light years through space and time in the blink of an eye, all you need is a singularity like Albert Goldbarth.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MARCELA SULAK

Posted on October 12, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Marcela Sulak:

THE CASTING OF LOTS

Dear Ahasuerus, it is eleven-thirty am and my number is one hundred and eighty-six. I feel the lack of communion striving for a higher purpose in this government assistance office, and it is beyond sadness and feet and the distance of aircraft and tires and inner-tubes on turgid rivers in midsummer with aluminum cans of beer. It’s not just the ones who pick discarded numbers from the floor and say they missed their turn. The flower-selling prepubescent children sniffing glue in paper bags outside the margins of the magazine I’m reading remind me of the laundry I hung up that must be dry by now, filled as they are with warmth and wings and snapping.

This office is a fine line. The wind from the open window rustles the pages of my magazine, pumps the lungs of paper bags, lifts the plastic shopping sacks discarded in the fields, fills the vacant sheets.

When God withdraws, we all must breathe a little harder.

Are these hosts the kind of people who refrigerate red wine? I wasn’t breastfed, I smelled different. I never learned to desire consolation prizes. The water hisses from the tap, sliced by the tips of lettuce leaves. The cut-crystal conversation turns on the tiniest incisions. So little of it is about you, you have to address yourself as one of your second persons. At the click of one of our host’s glances, each woman at the table presses forward, like a bullet into the chamber. It goes without saying, this is how I see myself among the women, Dear Ahasuerus, you fuck.

One of the trafficked prostitutes in the Tel Aviv shelter always carries a book with her. When she’s fucked up she reads it upside down. It’s a best seller, a thriller, a romance, so it doesn’t really matter the order of the events. She can describe them in detail afterwards, which she’ll do for you when you ask about her life.

HEBREW LESSONS: LESHALEM
To pay, to bring to a conclusion, bring to perfection, to make peace.

I am not a piece
of cake—sometimes
the eternal á
la mode, which is
to say, I am
your mouth, not your whole
mouth, just the part
that, when full, worries
about its next meal.

ii.

The eggs must first come
to room temperature,
which is to say for
everything there is
time. While the cotton
opened white fists at her
window, one by one
my grandmother beat
six eggs by hand till
they were stiff. The hands
of the kitchen clock
tapped each fat minute,
the ready spoon curved.
The frothy batter
she poured herself into
the tube pan steadied itself
in the wood-fueled oven
and lifted. Those who ate
a single bite were filled
with an inexplicable
happiness. Sometimes
that was enough.

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

Editor’s Note: While living and working in Israel for the fall semester I have become inspired by the local English-speaking writing community, as well as the plethora of work being done in translation. I hope to be able to share some of the gems the local writers and translators are creating here with you on this series, beginning today with Marcela Sulak.

Of course I am interested in Sulak’s work, in part, because of its biblical interests and midrashic tendencies. Ahasuerus, for instance, from today’s first piece, was a Persian king and husband of Queen Esther. He chose Esther for his queen after kicking out his first wife, Queen Vashti, for refusing to display herself naked before his guests. The process of choosing Esther as Vashti’s predecessor was more like a casting call; all of the eligible virgins were gathered together, put through months of rigorous beauty rituals, then paraded around for Ahasuerus to choose his favorite from among them. Today, Sulak’s bent on this tale has her channeling these young women on display, noting the lack of communion among women under such competitive circumstances. Sulak eloquently sums up the experience: “It goes without saying, this is how I see myself among the women, Dear Ahasuerus, you fuck.”

But beyond the biblical explorations lie moments of brilliant lyric and philosophy. Moments that stop you dead in your tracks: “When God withdraws, we all must breathe a little harder,” “I am / your mouth, not your whole / mouth, just the part / that, when full, worries / about its next meal,” “which is to say for / everything there is / time.” Sulak’s is writing that considers the historical, the human, and the astronomical through the lens of the day-to-day. Her vivid imagery brings to life the scenes she paints, while the ideas she plants take the reader from the microscopic to the telescopic.

Want to read more by and about Marcela Sulak?
Marcela Sulak’s Official Website
Guernica Mag
Drunken Boat
The Cortland Review
Verse Daily

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DANUSHA LAMÉRIS

Posted on September 28, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

ARABIC
By Danusha Laméris

I don’t remember the sounds
rising from below my breastbone
though I spoke that golden language
with the girls of Beirut, playing hopscotch
on the hot asphalt. We called out to our mothers
for lemonade, and when the men
walking home from work stooped down,
slipped us coins for candy, we thanked them.
At the market, I understood the bargaining
of the butcher, the vendors of fig and bread.
In Arabic, I whispered into the tufted ears
of a donkey, professing my love. And in Arabic
I sang at school, or dreamt at night.
There is an Arab saying,
Sad are only those who understand.
What did I know then of the endless trail
of losses? In the years that have passed,
I’ve buried a lover, a brother, a son.
At night, the low drumroll
of bombs eroded the edges of the city.
The girls? Who knows what has been taken
from them.

For a brief season I woke
to a man who would whisper to me
in Arabic, then tap the valley of my sternum,
ask me to repeat each word,
coaxing the rusty syllables from my throat.
See, he said, they’re still here.
Though even that memory is faint.
And maybe he was right. What’s gone
is not quite gone, but lingers.
Not the language, but the bones
of the language. Not the beloved,
but the dark bed the beloved makes
inside our bodies.

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

Danusha Laméris’s work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, The Sun and Crab Orchard Review as well as in a variety of other journals. She was a finalist for the 2010 and 2012 New Letters Prize in poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times. Her first book, The Moons of August, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry contest, and is set for release in early 2014. She lives in Santa Cruz, California and teaches an ongoing poetry workshop.

Editor’s Note: What riches lie within today’s poem. How alive the market of the poet’s memory. Reading this piece is like walking through a souq; the corridors are buzzing and vibrant, but be aware. Keep your eyes wide open. In the caverns below the language lie both treasures and warnings. Both the language and the bones.

Want to read more by and about Danusha Laméris?
Author’s Official Website

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.

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A Marvelous Mosaic: A Review of Budget Travel Through Space and Time

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