Tag: Poetry

Lesson Plan

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

michtyoung

Lesson Plan

by

Michael T. Young

 

A gun came to school
and taught the children how to think.

It blew their minds
and tested them
on how to take a last breath.

It sent home lessons
to parents on loss and pain.

A gun came to school
to speak and tell the teachers
how to teach and how to hide

and how to take a shot.
There’s always someone

who doesn’t try, who won’t
put in the time to learn,
who won’t listen or do the homework.

But a gun is dedicated;
it aims to come to school every day,

it will instruct us all.
There is so much to learn:
fire drills, duck and cover.

A gun will lay down the law
even if it kills us.

***

Michael T. Young has published three collections of poetry: Transcriptions of Daylight, Because the Wind Has Questions and, most recently, Living in the Counterpoint.  He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  He received a Chaffin Poetry Award and was runner-up for a William Stafford Award.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including Coe Review, Fogged Clarity, Iodine Poetry Journal, The Potomac Review, and The Raintown Review.  His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, and In the Black/In the Red.  It is also forthcoming in Rabbit Ears: TV Poems.  He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JESSICA BIXEL

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

2df3450a766711e2bd9a22000a9f14ba_6

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

Electromagnetic Compatibility

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

front BurnThisHouseCVR

Electromagnetic Compatibility

by

Kelly Davio

I am the conduit of all transmission.
The basebands of noise radiate from my skull.

I hear the faint buzz when I bend a knee
all the way to one hundred and eight megahertz.

My right hand taps the cool rhythm
of amplitude modulations; between the joints

of my smallest toes, a call-in talk show
pushes along my connective tissues.

Top-forty hits in mono and stereo
bisect my stomach, love handles jiggling

the fifty-two stories from local news breaks,
three weather reports, and a sponsorship message

from Lucky Charms. Their delicious magic
pulses, circumnavigates my navel.

A teleconference connected through my veins’
satellite rattles the back of my neck.

I shimmy shoulders, show my displeasure
when I tire of rasp in a haggler’s voice,

cast a web of white noise through my spine.
When I’m through with public broadcast pledge drives,

I listen for the red giants’ white signal,
static issued from billions of years of brilliance

from the center of the molecular bang.
All of it vibrating, all of it humming in bones.

***

Kelly Davio is Managing Editor of The Los Angeles Review, Associate Editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal, and a reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been honored in Best New Poets, and she has published poems in journals including Gargoyle, The Cincinnati Review, Bellingham Review, Pank, and others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, Whidbey Writers’ Workshop, and teaches English as a second language in the Seattle area. The above poem originally appeared in the Cincinnati Review and is included in Burn This House.

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