Tag: Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEN SILVERMAN

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Jen Silverman Headshot

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 by asitoughttobemagazine

DaraBarnat

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.

Want to read more by and about Dara Barnat?
Dara Barnat’s Website
Dara Barnat’s Blog
Interview with Dara Barnat
“Grief’s Language” in The Collagist
“Highway” in The Collagist
“Teaching Walt Whitman in Tel Aviv”

Open-Air Cinema in Heliopolis

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Tea_in_Heliopolis_cover

Open-Air Cinema in Heliopolis

by Hedy Habra

You used to say, mother:
“Let me see your face when lit
by a crescent moon:
every day of the month
will smile the way you do.”

We saw double-feature movies
in open-air theatres.
The cool breeze ran through our hair,
over our necks, lifted our skirts,
swayed us in a magical carpet.

Tempted by vendors chanting
Greek cheese and sesame breads,
we often stayed, sipping icy lemon
granitas through replays, the lift
and pause of cascading light.

Characters entered our own
camera obscura.
We never agreed on their age:
you added a few years,
I wanted them closer to mine.

I remember a recurrent scene,
fading now into a sepia cameo,
where a woman—always the same
yet different—slaps a man
before falling in his arms.

I watched your face then,
as stars outlined the sky,
the slight opening of the lips,
the Gioconda’s elegant smile
you allowed yourself,
befitting the sfumato of the late hours.

Arm in arm, we walked home,
following the trail of the moon.

 

***

Hedy Habra was born in Egypt and is of Lebanese origin. She is the author of a short story collection, Flying Carpets, and a book of literary criticism, Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa. She has an MA and an MFA in English and an MA and PhD in Spanish literature, all from Western Michigan University, where she currently teaches. She is the recipient of WMU’s All-University Research and Creative Scholar Award and a Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship Award. She writes poetry and fiction in French, Spanish, and English and has more than 150 published poems and short stories in numerous journals and anthologies, including Drunken Boat, Cutthroat, Nimrod, Puerto del Sol, The New York Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Poet Lore, Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, Inclined to Speak, and Dinarzad’s Children Second Edition. For more information, visit www.hedyhabra.com. The above poem is reprinted from her 2013 collection Tea in Heliopolis.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEHANNE DUBROW

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Jehanne&Argos_b&w

By Jehanne Dubrow:


EROS AND PSYCHE
Sculpture by Antonio Canova, 1787

Picture 3











(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

Her Body Desires the Instrument

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Eating_the_Heart_First_Cover

Her Body Desires the Instrument

by Clare L. Martin

She elongates herself;
presses the instrument

against her body,
as in the dream

that comes to her
and comes to her—

The old guitar crumbles.
Strings fall in tonal

disarray. The wooden
neck becomes chalk,

and is crushed in her grip.
She longs to be soothed

by melodies which flutter
from her mind

to her lips,
to her fingertips.

She feels percussion in her spine,
reverberating in muscles,

charging them.
A rhythm resounds

that could vanquish
the dark spell.

Her body desires
the instrument

and she despairs
without accompaniment.

 

***

Clare L. Martin’s debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, was published fall 2012 by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Selection. Martin’s poetry has appeared in Avatar Review, Blue Fifth Review, Melusine, Poets and Artists and Louisiana Literature, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web, for Best New Poets and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net. Her poems have been included in the anthologies The Red Room: Writings from Press 1, Best of Farmhouse Magazine Vol. 1, Beyond Katrina, and the 2011 Press 53 Spotlight. She is a lifelong resident of Louisiana, a graduate of University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a member of the Festival of Words Cultural Arts Collective and a Teaching Artist through the Acadiana Center for the Arts. Martin founded and directs the Voices Seasonal Reading Series in Lafayette, LA, which features new and established Louisiana and regional writers.  More information about her work can be found at clarelmartin.com

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JACKSON HOLBERT

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Accompanying Photo

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: “THE ALL BLACK PENGUIN SPEAKS” BY ROGER BONAIR-AGARD

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

THE ALL BLACK PENGUIN SPEAKS
By Roger Bonair-Agard

Courtesy of UrbanaPoetrySlam’s youtube channel.

Editor’s Note: I had the pleasure of seeing Roger Bonair-Agard read at a recent poetry salon, and I was blown away. This man is an incredibly talented poet and a dedicated human rights advocate. Influenced by everything from hip hop to steel drum music, from American Culture to Caribbean, from racial tensions to human sexuality, this passionate performer is an inspirational boundary-pusher who schools poets on both the page and the stage. Keep an eye out for his forthcoming book, which is sure to be epic.

Want to see more by and about Roger Bonair-Agard?
Roger’s Journal
Blue Flower Arts
“Like” Roger Bonair-Agard’s Page on facebook

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OSIP MANDELSTAM

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

o.-mandelstam-4d3403af1e999_360x225

“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 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: STEPHANIE BRYANT ANDERSON

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

sba


SOMETIMES THE BLOOD GOES COLD
By Stephanie Bryant Anderson

My sleeping bones live, like snow on snow,
I hear them speak: another day, another night.

Another. Another.

Sometimes
                                   (in the hours that you’re gone)

the blood goes cold.



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

Stephanie Bryant Anderson lives in Clarksville, TN, and is pursuing a Bachelor degree in English and Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry. She is currently shopping for an MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her work has been published widely in both print and online journals; she has recently been nominated for Best of the Net, twice for the Pushcart Prize and storySouth Million Writers Award. Stephanie is one of the founding and managing editors at Up the Staircase Quarterly. A few of her publications include The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Connotation Press, and THRUSH Poetry Journal. She is currently working on her first full-length poetry manuscript.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem brings us love and longing through the haunted lens of the otherworldly. There is something of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale in Bryant Anderson’s lyric, in “sleeping bones” that “live, like snow on snow.”

Want to read more by and about Stephanie Bryant Anderson?
Stephanie Bryant Anderson’s Blog
Up the Staircase Quarterly