Tag: Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KENDRA GRANT MALONE

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A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN BE ALONE
by Kendra Grant Malone

WHEN I GOT OFF THE TRAIN TONIGHT
I WANTED TO BE
BACK IN THE MIDWEST
THERE WAS NO REAL PROMPT
FOR IT
MY BRAIN WAS SUDDENLY
FLOODED WITH IDEAS
OF LAYING IN FIELDS
AT NIGHT ALONE
AND BEING ABLE TO SEE VERY FAR
A PLACE WITH NO HILLS
I WANTED TO BE
IN A PLACE
WHERE YOU COULD BE
ALONE AT NIGHT
AND HEAR THE INSECTS
SWARMING ABOVE YOU
AROUND YOU
A PLACE
WHERE YOU CAN SEE
THE WHOLE MILKY WAY
I DIDN’T WANT TO BE
IN NEW YORK
THE SMELL
IS AWFUL HERE
AND SO IS
THE CROWDING
I WANTED TO BE ALONE
LIKE YOU ONLY KNOW
WHEN YOU ARE FROM THE MIDWEST
WHERE IT IS POSSIBLE
TO DRIVE TWENTY MINUTES AWAY
AND BE THE ONLY HUMAN BEING
FOR MILES AND MILES
I WANT TO SPOON
THE CORN STALKS
TO SLEEP TONIGHT

(“A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN BE ALONE” was originally published in The Offending Adam and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Kendra Grant Malone lives with her cat Delores Grant Malone. Her first collection of poetry, Everything Is Quiet, is available at scrambler books. You can also visit her website to read more about her work and her cat at kendralovely.blogspot.com.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is dedicated to all of my Midwestern friends, particularly those of you who hail from the quiet sparse spaces. While so many of you have been eager to leave the stillness of that life behind for more urban pastures, I think you know what this poem is speaking to. How one might, in a moment overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of city life, long “to drive twety minutes away and be the only human being for miles and miles,” “to spoon the corn stalks to sleep,” “to be alone like you only know when you are from the Midwest.” Perhaps you’re back in your Midwestern home today for the holiday, and perhaps this poem will help you to better appreciate your return.

Want to read more by and about Kendra Grant Malone?
Buy her book!
Kendra’s Blog
The Offending Adam

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OKLA ELLIOTT

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By Okla Elliott:

THE IDIOT’S FAITH

Three lanterns floated in the dream she told him, but he didn’t want to hear about lanterns. He wanted factories unbuilt, windows smashed open. He wanted libertine wailings. She denied being a builder of factories, but he knew her reputation. A wind blew in from Montreal, or she said it was from Montreal, said she could smell the bars of Rue St Laurent. He was skeptical but didn’t want to argue. What good are arguments on a Saturday night? What good are arguments at all? She told him again about her love of the French language, and he thought maybe they were getting somewhere. The modern sunset outside her window was spilled wine tinged with pollution. They went down the mountain to town, found the trouble she had decided they wanted. She called a homeless man a fallen Chinese god, and they mourned his sad descent, forgetting (almost) their own. That is the power of generosity, one use of our idiot faith in human love.

 

THE LIGHT HERE

It sets a mood
of clownish tragedy,
of ecstatic failure waiting to happen.

It is not a static blue light
nor the throb of a strobe.

It is not a light to read by
nor to be naked in,
unless you are desperate
or barbarously horny.

I would use it to look for you
in a cave or catacomb
or an ossuary crowded by the famous dead–
that is, if you were in such a place,
I would use this light to find you.

It is a light that yellows the periphery.
It is not a light that brightens the center.

It is mixed from an overcast morning
and the electric urban dusk.

It is a light I could live in
if I came to terms with certain failings
in my character
and the character of others.

I know you have light where you are,
better light even,
but I wanted you to know
about the light here.

 
Okla Elliott is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he studies comparative literature and cultural theory. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. For the academic year 2008-09, he was a visiting assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review, among others. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks–The Mutable Wheel and Lucid Bodies and Other Poems–and he co-edited (with Kyle Minor) The Other Chekhov.

Editor’s Note: Today I am honored to present to you the work of As It Ought To Be‘s managing editor. His work speaks for itself, as does the significant body of publications in which his work has appeared. Okla is an impressive scholar, a fearless leader, and a wonderful person to know in the writing world. He believes strongly in the idea of building and sustaining a community of writers, and I am honored to be a member of that community. Regarding today’s pieces I will say that Mr. Elliott effortlessly combines vignettes of straightforward narrative with crisp images and moments of simple yet brilliant language such as “What good are arguments on a Saturday night? What good are arguments at all,” “if you were in such a place, I would use this light to find you,” and this kicker of an ending, “It is a light I could live in / if I came to terms with certain failings / in my character / and the character of others. / I know you have light where you are, / better light even, / but I wanted you to know / about the light here.” Simple. Elegant. Stunning.

Buy Okla Elliott’s new book, A Vulgar Geography.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RUTH DEBORAH REY

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CHANGE OF ADDRESS
by Ruth Deborah Rey

If it is true that only
five hundred thousand
people died in the camps
and that the others,
the other Jews, that is,
moved away to Israel,
the States, or to the East,
I do not understand why
not even one of them
sent a change of address
to those they left behind;
the ones that still, even
today, weep over the
loss of them and the horror
they were subjected to
that – supposedly – is not true.
I wonder why, if she was one
of those who simply moved
to the East and did not die,
my Mother … why my Mother
never even sent me a pretty
postcard from where she
is living now.

(“Change of Address” was originally published in Raving Dove. This poem is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Ruth Deborah Rey, born in Amsterdam in 1938, has from the time she was a little girl worked in radio, (later) television, publicity and the theatre, as an actress, broadcaster, entertainer, scriptwriter, translator and editor in the Netherlands, Canada, and the USA. Today, retired, she finally has the time to be a full-time writer and editor. She lives at the French Atlantic coast with her husband, two dogs, and five cats. Rey is recognized by the Dutch Foundation 1940-1945 as a participant in the Resistance during the German occupation.

Editor’s Note: When I asked Ms. Rey’s permission to publish today’s poem she said she was glad to let me publish it, “even though the poem is one of the saddest I ever wrote.” I think this response says a lot about the kind of person, and poet, that Ms. Rey is. Living a life touched by the Holocaust, some might succumb to darkness, and their poetry might be reflective of such. But Ms. Rey lives a life of light, and her writing outshines any darkness that has touched her. She is quoted as saying “I speak my soul. I write.” I am inspired by Ms. Rey’s optimism, her shining light, and the adept way in which she speaks her soul.

Want to read more by and about Ruth Deborah Rey?
The Blue Blog
Raving Dove
Author’s Den
LitList

Two Poems by Letitia Trent

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Landscape Featuring Oklahoma

Our story is broken only
when the tent preachers land,
giving grandma a use for that fancy fan,
making all the bad women
vomit up money. Otherwise, I spend
most days pulling ribbon from the kitten’s
belly. Sometimes the husband
takes up hobbies, like disassembling
radios, and scatters the wire-furred
pieces on every empty surface.
I hammered one of his stray dials
to the cupboard and now
I can imagine the creamed corn
talking to me without
looking crazy. I tuck away
the hope that this is just
an independent movie—
the bad teeth bleach clean,
spackled pockmarks peel.
Times like these, the idea
of children  plays double-duty
as wish and shiver. They never work,
but people keep making them anyway,
like hand-held sewing machines
and herbal lozenges. Even the lawn,
sun struck mid-summer, wants to die
a little quicker but can find nowhere
high enough to jump from.

[“Landscape Featuring Oklahoma” first appeared in Black Warrior Review]


Ju On (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000)

Mother, when I return
you are still here, scuttling in the rafters, knees
busted, blue, blood
in your teeth, just like in life,

like after a fight, when you’d yawn
to pop the fluid
from your ears. Your mouth

snaps opened
and closed. You do now
the things you did

while alive, only slower,
the chores you hated, now over
and over, your hands

around an invisible broom,
sweeping the spotless floor
or crawling

down the staircase
on your palms and shins
toward the mailman’s knock and shuffle
of envelopes in his satchel

or a car in the driveway, the sound
of gravel and small rocks popping. You always wanted
to catch any movement

out of the house. Remember the cricket
in the well between oven
and wall? It was small and slipped

away when you cupped
hour hands to keep it. You stomped,
you shoved
the broom handle

and never caught it to stop it
from coming or going
without your permission. Now,
I always know

where to find you. Under the floorboards,
in the cupboards, in the pink
insulation. I can call you

when I need you, like a cat
you’ll come to a kiss
or your name, Mother,

Mom, Ma, come
down. I don’t want
you to miss this. You

cannot get
past the Welcome
Mat, you hiss

at the long knife of light
from the warm outside, but I
can get away now, look

I am half
in the doorway and half
way out.

[“Ju On (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000)” first appeared in Folio]


Letitia Trent’s work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Fence, Prick of the Spindle, and Juked, among others. Her chapbook The Medical Diaries is available from Scantily Clad Press and her newest chapbook, Splice, will soon be available from Blue Hour Press. She currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MAYA ELASHI

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IN A BIBLICAL GARDEN
by Maya Elashi

i saw the messiah this morning.
He was wearing a white kaffiya and riding a donkey
southeast, towards Jerusalem.

He didn’t look at me
though he knew i was there with two cameras: moving and still
He didn’t want any pictures taken
and i, in dissappointment, respected that it’s

not an everyday experience i said to myself as he faded into the multitude

now, my heart alone holds the image developing
still
i’ll keep walking the path they followed up and over the hill.


Maya Elashi is an Irish Jew. A Kabbalistic Hebrew Pagan Priestess to The Goddess. She is a gardener/herbalist, as well as a teacher of English and Hebrew. Maya plays and prays for peace in the Middle East (and worldwide).

Editor’s Note: Just in time for the Hanukkah holiday, and the holidays in general, comes this piece from Maya Elashi. A piece that, in both its brilliance and simplicity, captures both a moment in time and a spiritual experience. I recall seeing Maya read in a barn in Santa Cruz many years ago. She shared an exceptional long poem that was very well received by the audience and that ended with her singing a line from Tom Petty, “Oh my my, oh hell yes, honey, put on that party dress!” Maya has been one of the most influential people in my writing life, and was the first person to be completely thrilled that I was leaving the law to pursue a career as a poet and teacher. It is a true honor to share her work with you here today.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NATHAN WISMAN

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Photo by Joshua Band.

BURRS
by Nathan Wisman

Your one, your only,
that grinning face.

For you, the cold dew
smears his arms.
The thickets of shivering weeds
part around his determined body.

Strips of cloudy sky traversed again and again
by the sun.
It is never warm enough.
Strips of pinpricked black tread upon again and again
by some moon.
The wait for an echo becoming impossibly long.

Burrs do not stick to wetness.
Turn your shivering back.
Because to burrs, wetness
means death.
Grasping for you, along the hedgerows.

Echelons of rings surrounded again and again
by echelons of rings.
All so artificial.
Squads of leaves piling upward again and again
by shoving winds.
The tree’s rocking impossibly slow.

Tendrils of steam rise from beneath steel lids.
Feel lumps beneath your skin.
Because to steam, rising
is all there is.
Reaching upwards to you, from limestone basins.

A soulmate, a lover,
your ultimate, your final,
those hands tangling endlessly.


Nathan Wisman lives in San Francisco, California where he writes in a number of mediums and imagines he has a cat named Fitzgerald. His favorite authors include Cormac McCarthy and Bret Easton Ellis, and he strongly encourages you to read Catch-22 and Eating Animals.

Editor’s Note: Sometimes there is an “it” factor in poetry. That inexplicable dust that shimmers over a poem. Natural raw talent apparent from the words and equally from between them. The work of today’s poet strikes me in such a way, and my personal poetic landscape has been forever altered by the words “to steam, rising is all there is.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALLYSON KWETT

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Two A.M.
by Allyson Kwett

But there’s no darkness, at least
No Country Darkness
No Fords on Highway One
No tires packing salt into pavement
No dim headlights shining back off yellow signs

But the glow is the same
                          Toxic orange
And the same weeping strings
             Cries of smoke and whiskey
Leech through headphones
Leech into the sky

Yellow streetlights and
Endlessly blinking neon
Bounces off slick wet pavement

             And the bay
Is white and yellow
With Atlantis sunk
Office buildings and sky-rise apartments
Bleeding to the shore

No stars, no moon
Under a ceiling of burnt fog
And the porch light is off
But still I wonder

Wonder if the smoldering ash
Faint red glow and
Release of gray smoke and flesh
Covers the stratus and cosmos of night
Behind sheets of melancholy

Fighting to bleed through the edges
With violent ferocity


Allyson Kwett is a San Francisco Bay Area native currently completing her BA in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She enjoys parlour games, trivia, crosswords, and cucumber-flavored soft drinks, and abhors people who say “for all intensive purposes”.

Editor’s Note: Allyson Kwett has a nice handle on the use of sound in poetry. Moments like “No tires packing salt into pavement” hit the ear in the same way the mind’s eye pictures the tires packing salt into the ground. Beginning the poem mid-moment, “But there’s no darkness, at least,” we as readers experience the poem as a scene carved from time. We are dropped in, a world opens up for us, we inhabit it in all its detail, and we exit “with violent ferocity.” It is a quick and intense experience, alive with images and sound along the way.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JESSE LOREN

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CONSIDER ICARUS
by Jesse Loren

Consider Icarus as a woman pasting wings on
Testing her harness and the snugness over breasts
And think of that flawless moment before the yawn
When she tires of waiting for the rest.

Think of her there above obelisk and spruce
Coasting above the small men scything down below
Her latched bindings slip and become loose
Her internal timing races and then slows.

She is circling above the town picking out the strong
Glancing to the corners of every lawn
A trickle of blood spills out between thighs
The blind sun melts wax into her eyes

Consider Icarus as a woman pasting wings on
Consider the tedious boredom of kite string and tumbling down.



Jesse Loren is originally from East Los Angeles and is currently rooted near Davis, California with her family and chickens. Her poetry can be found in Exquisite Corpse, Yawp, New Virginia Review, and Screamin’ Meme, her first book of collected poems. Ms. Loren co-edited two anthologies of poetry; Mourning Sickness, a collection about miscarriage and infant death, and Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront, a collection of homefront tales spanning from WWII to the present. Loren is a graduate of UC Irvine, and MFA graduate of UNO, and is a frequent columnist at iPinion.


Editor’s Note: Typically I don’t go in for rhymed poetry, but when Ms. Loren sent me poems for consideration for As It Ought To Be, this poem struck a chord with me. In Judaism the term “midrash” is used to describe a story that is created by opening up an existing story. With this poem Loren creates a midrash of sorts – opening up the story of Icarus to allow for another new tale. The tale of Icarus as a woman, a story that has feminist undertones, that explores the trials and tribulations of being a woman under the lens of a beloved mythological tale. This poem is clear and imagistic, and takes us on a journey on the wings of one who both has the opportunity to fly, and learns what it is to fall.

Want to hear more by Jesse Loren?
Buy Screamin Meme at Amazon.com
Jesse Loren’s Blogspot
Exquisite Corpse

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: GEORGIA KREIGER

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By Georgia Kreiger:

HE COMES

For a time he lived between my legs
where our urgent collisions seemed more
than the common fuck, more like he wanted

to break through the boundaries of skin
and mind and dissolve himself in the depth
of a woman who, he insisted,

did not remind him of his mother. A woman
more pliant and yielding than the clumsy
young girls who offered themselves cocooned

in their own interests, a woman who knew
that his sickness drove him to seek
shelter on the inside of someone

who provided herself like an abandoned cabin,
whose heat was seasoned by distant fires,
hard nights, needs beaten to a sheen.

And when his breath caught
and he breached, almost, the sovereignty
between him and me, filling the space with sound,

my emptiness echoed his cry: the purr of wind
through loose windows, thrash of deer through brush,
the call of faraway trains at night.


POCKET KNIFE

What struck me most was how gently
his left hand cupped the elbow to steady
the arm and turn out the white expanse
near the wrist where the veins are visible.
And how slowly, tenderly, he positioned
it, held as one would when cutting a steak
for which one felt only the mildest hunger,
his thin wrist bent slightly over his work.
The almost translucent flesh dimpled
under the pressure and formed two plump
ridges on either side. I told him once
that I would be willing even

to bleed for him.
And when the flesh split, and the line
he drew down my arm turned scarlet
and welled up and ran thickly toward
my hand, I felt the bloodless despair
that cutters describe
rush out of me
and the room swirl almost
with the rhythm of his breath.
And weightless I rose
toward a beckoning twilight
as we sat leaning over
the slow flow that startled us awake.

(“He Comes” and “Pocket Knife” were originally published in The 2River View. These poems are reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)


Georgia Kreiger lives in Maryland and teaches creative writing. Her poems have appeared in The 2River View, poemmemoirstory, Literal Latté, Poet Lore, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Outerbridge, Backbone Mountain Review and others.

Editor’s Note: In truth I am at a loss for what to say about these striking poems. Thoughts fly through my head like cars on a freeway, crossing one another at record speeds. Of course I would love these poems. How brilliant, how honest, how raw. How painful, and how beautiful the pain. Kreiger wastes no time in cutting deep, in sticking her arms in up to her elbows as if midwifing or keeping a heart beating with her bare hands. Sex, violence, mental illness- there is no subject taboo, no aspect of the human/female/relationship experience that is off limits. I am inspired and humbled by Kreiger’s grasp on the art of the poem.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NATHAN REICH

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SOMEWHERE IN COLORADO
by Nathan Reich

I see it here
In the way the leaves are moving
A hurricane will be coming
Though I don’t know how soon

I close the window and try
To get some sleep ’til the morning
While the clouds outside are forming
Will I ever feel prepared?

Somewhere in Colorado
I am drowning in a bottle
I see the sun
But I know it don’t see me
Somewhere in Colorado
I am drowning in a bottle
I see my home
But I know it don’t see me

A thousand miles
Could I make it any farther?
I don’t want to be a martyr
Is there something I could trade?

And there was a time
When I thought that we were something
But now we’re a little more than nothing
So can you blame me for my fears?

Somewhere in Colorado
I am drowning in a bottle
I see the sun
But I know it don’t see me
A thousand miles
From the edge of California
I see my home
But I know it don’t see me
Oh I know it don’t see me
Oh I know it don’t see me

Nathan Reich was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and began studying guitar in earnest at the age of 12. At the age of 22 Nathan was accepted at the Berklee College of Music as a guitar performance major, where his unique style of playing predominately with just his thumb earned him the nickname “Thumb Kid.” In 2006 Nathan began songwriting, and later that year wrote and recorded his first EP “Paper Planes.” Just before graduating in May of 2009 he released his first full length record entitled “Arms Around A Ghost.” He now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Editor’s Note: Recently a friend of mine played me some songs on his iPod as we ambled through the streets of New York in search of a decent bar. Instantly I was taken with the music – singer/songwriter music that was guitar-centric and full of meaningful powerful lyrics – exactly my cup of tea. I was in love with Nathan Reich at first listen. A few days later my friend shared a YouTube video of a cover of Nathan Reich’s “Somewhere in Colorado,” and I’m pretty sure I haven’t listened to anything else since.

Today’s post continues our ongoing discussion on where the lines are blurred between poetry and music. For me, what makes a song fall within the realm of poetry is its lyrics, which is why most of the songs I love are lyric-based with lyrics that hold their own on paper. Today’s post is no exception. A story of heartbreak, of unrequited love and longing, the lyrics to this song fall square within the realm of those elements that, for me, make up a great poem. The lyric that kills me most in today’s post? “And there was a time / When I thought that we were something / But now we’re a little more than nothing / So can you blame me for my fears?” It’s moments like this that set Nathan Reich apart from the pack and earn him his reputation as not only a fantastic musician and songwriter, but as a talented poet. When it comes to lyrics of this caliber I think Mr. Reich says it best when he asks “Will I ever feel prepared?”

Want to hear more by Nathan Reich?
Nathan Reich’s Myspace page
Somewhere in Colorado (Nathan Reich cover)