Poetry – Page 88 – As It Ought To Be

High School Poetry Series: Gender, Identity, & Race — Naudia Loftis

Posted on December 17, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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A note from Series Editor Sarah Marcus: Born from a powerful in-class discussion we had about gender, race, and the role of masculinity in rape culture, these poems are an analysis of gendered personal experience and a study of our intersectionality. This poetry series was inspired by a HuffPost essay I wrote called, “Why I Teach Feminism at an Urban High School.” The poets featured here are students from my 12th Grade Creative Writing class whose work I found to be brave, fearless, and progressive. Please help me support their crucial and influential voices.

Naudia Loftis is a senior poet in my Creative Writing class and the Vice President of our high school’s Poetry Club. Her passions include writing, high stepping, and helping others. She recently organized a local anti-violence Cleveland youth rally.

Loftis’s poem addresses the inescapable topic of gun violence. Cleveland has had a deadly year. In recent months, we have seen indiscriminate shootings take the lives of at least three children. Loftis explains: “It is important for me to be an anti-violence activist in my community because I am a part of the next generation that will soon run the world, and I feel it is my responsibility to help move my community on a better path. I believe in change, which is not common in my neighborhood. So if it takes me saying something, I will.”

I chose this poem for its beautiful awareness of breaking. Loftis’s careful consideration of line breaks, her masterful rhyme, and her ability to capture Cleveland’s grief is surely worthy of much more than our attention and reflection. In this midst of this holiday season, I am reminded of how grateful I am to have the opportunity to work with such talented young poets.

A Dead City

On September 23, 2009, my cousin, Reginald Fain, was shot a week before his 26th birthday by a boy he grew up with (and on the street they grew up on). It’s hard to imagine such tragedies happening so close to you, but this is our reality in Cleveland.

I’ve seen baby boys in gangs, sagging, cussing in slang
Following role models who show them which way to bang
Mommas crying in shame, media ripping their names
And after they get locked up, the hood is taking the blame
Nobody wants to speak up, but everybody wants change
I’ve watched my city die
‘Cause of street signs that we claim
The knife is in our heart
While the blood is leaving stains
And we’re witnessing bodies drop like we’re stuck in a Hellraid
My summer filled with gang shootings
Police sirens in the breeze
Holding hands like precious pearls
Not knowing who’s next to leave
‘Cause shooters just want the praise
And I’m stuck out in the rain
Contemplating the beast the city needs me to tame
Shards ripping our fabric smiles
And looping us on a chain
Holding us tied together and leaving our bodies slain
It’s hard for me to be sane
In a land that’s acting strange
Moving beyond murders and savages playing games
I’m pushing in hope to gain people who are brave
To help reclaim our city
‘Cause we’re the ones who remain.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALAN TOLTZIS

Posted on November 28, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

FORTY-TWO PLACES
By Alan Toltzis

As time passed,
they didn’t need to study love,
pray for it,
or even speak its name.

Instead,
they lived their love
silently.
Secrets remained secret

as love sank into unbending bones,
fused with supple corpuscles,
and seeped through soft skin
beneath their fingernails.

Only by looking back
and naming each
of the 42 places (in order)
they had journeyed

did they realize they had grown
into an old couple
who survived a long-forgotten stopover
of bickering and concession

and the should-
and should-not-have-saids
they should never
have crossed

leaving only unspoken love
perpetuated by the comfort and intimacy
of taking each other
for granted.

Alan Toltzis is the author of the book of poems, The Last Commandment (Poetica Publishing, 2015). His work appears in print and online publications including The Provo Canyon Review, Poetica Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Soul-Lit, and Red Wolf Journal. Alan is working on his second book of poems and is developing The Psalm Project, to teach poetry to middle- and high-school students.

Editor’s Note: There is something of a prayer in today’s poem. A thanksgiving. Something quiet, humble, and honest. Something lived, understood, known. What it is to journey throughout a lifetime of relationship. What it is to look back and reflect upon “the should- / and should-not-have-saids … leaving only unspoken love / perpetuated by the comfort and intimacy / of taking each other / for granted.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DERRICK TYSON

Posted on November 21, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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POEM
By Derrick Tyson

My eyes
are so green that when

I look at you, your face
becomes an emerald,

or like a meadow
that is so completely absorbed

in its color that
it catches in your throat.

Flowers never need
alterations.

Sometimes
the sky is so beautiful

that even the windows
are in awe,

not letting me
see it clearly.

Windows
built into us, into our limbs,

my feet have bricked wells
built into them,

Thus
I fall into myself.

Today’s poem was previously published in SHAMPOO, and appears here today with permission from the poet.

Derrick Tyson is a a Visual Artist/Poet currently residing in the Atlanta-area. He has been published in various online and printed magazines nationwide, and has several books of poetry out. As an artist, he has been exhibited internationally in four different countries (Israel, China, Australia and Italy) and has had many of his photographs published in online and printed magazines. He loves co-mingling, cross-pollinating Fine Art with his love of Poetics, Literature, World Cinema and the Oneiric. He refers to this as Visual Poetry. He believes that all things are interconnected, whether or not we can visually render the connections. Since “Time” is inelastic, he cherishes every second with a passion. He’s easily-amused and takes nothing for granted.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is full of moments of stunning, impactful surprise. In the instant of connection, is it the watcher or the watched who becomes transformed? How perfect the flower, created by the hand of science or Mother Nature, that it never needs alterations. How beautiful the sky that not even the transparency of windows will allow it to be truly seen. How deep or burdened we are, that we fall into ourselves? Built moment by moment, each its own deep thought, each its own discreet image, today’s poem asks us to slow down, to reflect, to envision and imagine and contemplate. There is layer upon layer to consider and play with, if we will open our minds and take the time.

Want to see more from Derrick Tyson?
POETRY:
      Lispy Whispers
      Isolated Lightships
ART:
      flickr
      Artitbe

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: FALL POEMS

Posted on November 14, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Someone35 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons — By Someone35 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

AFTER APPLE-PICKING
By Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

AUTUMN: A DIRGE
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling.
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black and gray;
Let your light sisters play–
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.

AUTUMN LEAVES
By Juliana Horatia Ewing

The Spring’s bright tints no more are seen,
And Summer’s ample robe of green
Is russet-gold and brown;
When flowers fall to every breeze
And, shed reluctant from the trees,
The leaves drop down.

A sadness steals about the heart,
–And is it thus from youth we part,
And life’s redundant prime?
Must friends like flowers fade away,
And life like Nature know decay,
And bow to time?

And yet such sadness meets rebuke,
From every copse in every nook
Where Autumn’s colours glow;
How bright the sky! How full the sheaves!
What mellow glories gild the leaves
Before they go.

Then let us sing the jocund praise,
In this bright air, of these bright days,
When years our friendships crown;
The love that’s loveliest when ’tis old–
When tender tints have turned to gold
And leaves drop down.

Today’s poems are in the public domain, belongs to the masses, and appears here accordingly.

Editor’s Note: Today we celebrate another change in seasons. As the leaves turn red, yellow, orange and gold, as they fall from the trees and blanket the ground, as Mother Earth sheds her summer splendor and Persephone prepares to go underground, may we bid farewell through poetry. And may we meet again in spring when life blooms anew.

Want to read more fall poetry?
Academy of American Poets
The Poetry Foundation

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LANDON GODFREY

Posted on November 7, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

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By Landon Godfrey:

INKWELL

When the antique inkwell arrives after making the journey from its dead owner’s estate, the other objects in the atomic ranch house observe it with cool attitudes. Clearly, they think, those curves and etched filigrees bespeak an affection for philosophy or power. Therefore, they shun the inkwell, keeping their own straight lines and unadorned exteriors to themselves. What they never guess: the lonely inkwell is illiterate. Only the masterful sterling silver pen can read.

RECIPE

A moment: when the dough, formed into a ball with greased hands, rests to rise, it exhibits what seems possible in the stone—expansion into space like a star exploding into the full spheroidal grandeur of a self-luminous celestial body. But the mundane violence of the next step overtakes our recognition of energetic brilliance—when we punch the dough and put its deflated body into a furnace, where it will grow again. The stone can grow only smaller and smaller, eroding. It keeps its opinions secret. But hoping to abrade the delusion that traps us in fantasies of an ideal past, sometimes the stone whispers our own noxious monologues to us: I was young and beautiful, my grandmother a princess, her father courageous, our vast estates filled with people who served us, suffering in a gorgeous absence of justice.

SUBTLE HORROR MOVIES

Monster

An immense lizard standing on two legs does not devour the city. The creature nibbles on it at night, while we are sleeping, but we never notice.

Pathogen

Some of us are not immune. We cough and sweat. Our hero is immune. To what, we do not know.

Visitor From Outer Space

We argue about the existence of God. Evidence for both sides: a church that fills with prayer only when it is empty.

Today’s poems are from the chapbook In the Stone, copyright Landon Godfrey 2014, and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Landon Godfrey’s collection of poems, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review, 2011), was selected by David St. John for the 2009 Cider Press Review Book Award. She is also the author of two limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, In the Stone (RAPG-funded artist’s book, 2013) and Spaceship (Somnambulist Tango Press, 2014). Her poems have or will appear in Slice, Bombay Gin, The Collagist, Beloit Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Verse Daily, and other places, and her fiction has been published in Waxwing. A lyric essay is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly. Also an artist, she co-edits, -designs, and -publishes Croquet, a letterpress postcard broadside poetry journal. Born in Washington, DC, she lives in Black Mountain, NC.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poems are surprising and full of wonder. Bringing to life the inanimate, telling fantastical stories of that which can only be born of boundless imagination, what unfolds in the storylines of these poems is tempered by carefully wrought syntax, by painstaking word choice, by a sonic soundscape that mirrors and illuminates the worlds it is creating. There is a beauty and a heartbreak to the lyric that is so carefully interwoven with the poems’ narrative that one must be careful not to miss it. But a reader who slows down and savors today’s poems will be treated to moments such as “The stone can grow only smaller and smaller, eroding. It keeps its opinions secret,” and “a church that fills with prayer only when it is empty.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MOVEMENT NO. 1: TRAINS

Posted on October 24, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From MOVEMENT NO. 1: TRAINS
By Hope Wabuke:

and when she waits, knowing its coming by the movement of light
across rusted metal, the dirty white tiles of tunnel wall almost
beautiful in the light sliding closer through darkness, approaching
rumble and tearing, metal wheel against track, gears shifting; halt.

in the loud echo still, vibrations pulsing—the only thing. she
imagines the sound she hears is breathing.

it is only when she thinks of him that her body becomes soft; she is
so conscious, then, of the movement of his body pressed against
hers’. so now she slides slightly, left, right, with the swaying motions
of the car. the train is stopped on the bridge, a windy day. the
intercom voice presses through static and she lifts arms above head,
stretches out her body to touch fingertips light to metal pole in
aisle’s center. the violence of the train’s starting and picking up, of
speed. in the meeting of the many tiny bones in her wrist against the
cold hardness, in the press of fingers soft against metal pole. she is
understanding pain in increments of waves, the pulsing slow
softening in rhythm with the traincar, rocking—her body, pushed
backwards, against scratched plexiglass window.

and in the moment of the train’s descent underground, her last view
a mirrored body, lines like chain links against grey sky, grey water.
the shape of their structures, repeating, suspended: a half-circle, a
half-closed eye .

and on the day after his leaving. she notices his absence in the
awkward stillness of her legs, the way her arms hang stiffly at her
sides. this is when she will remember how, as he would touch
drumsticks to upside-down white buckets to make beats, she would
see sound touch tile in tunnel walls and touch heels to ground.
rocking upward in tiny motions, she would lift hands lightly; she
would move her body in tiny circles of his rhythm.

Movement No. 1: Trains is a city symphony of New York, where the author lived for many years–the daily rhythm of riding the subway and dancing between people walking the streets. Blurring the lines between past and the present, these prose poems explore the movement between love, loss and longing in a young woman’s memory.

Hope Wabuke: Born in exile to Ugandan refugees, Hope Wabuke is a writer, essayist and poet based in California. Hope is a contributing editor for The Root and a contributing writer for the Kirkus Reviews. Her poetry has also appeared in Lit Hub, The North American Review, Potluck Magazine, Ruminate Magazine, Fjords Literary Journal, Salamander Literary Journal, NonBinary Review, JoINT Literary Journal, Weave Magazine, Cease Cows, Kalyani Magazine, Split this Rock and Literary Mama. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Newsweek’s The Daily Beast, Salon, Gawker, Guernica, Dame, The Root, Ozy, The Hairpin, Ms. Magazine online, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Magazine and The Feminist Wire. Her fiction has been featured in the anthology All About Skin. Her chapbook Movement No. 1: Trains was published in June 2015 by dancing girl press. Her second chapbook, The Leaving, will be published in 2016 by Akashic Press as part of Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani’s New Generation African Poets series.

Editor’s Note: Part train ride, part memory, Movement No. 1: Trains takes the reader on a journey through which narrative blends with past, history is distorted by the present, and the tracks of the mind become one with the train lines of the New York subway system. Disjointed in a halting motion that mirrors the jerky movements of an underground train, the sway and lurch of this collection is tempered by moments of clarity and thoughtful reflection: “she / imagines the sound she hears is breathing;” “it is only when she thinks of him that her body becomes soft;” “she / would move her body in tiny circles of his rhythm.”

Want to see more from Hope Wabuke?
Hope Wabuke’s Official Website
Hope Wabuke’s Twitter
Buy Movement No. 1: Trains from dancing girl press
Literary Hub
The Hairpin

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HISTORIES OF THE FUTURE PERFECT

Posted on October 17, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

From HISTORIES OF THE FUTURE PERFECT
By Ellen Kombiyil:

CERBERUS AND PERSEPHONE

It’s audible to the three-headed dog:
her fear a high-pitched shriek

held in her throat. Pre-unleashed. The thought
of the shriek and not the shriek itself.

It’s freaking her out, this mind-reader dog,
how he tracks muscle-twitch, her intent to act,

pre-synapsed. He demands to know the before,
before the before: she was plucking flowers,

yes, when the ground opened its mouth,
but how she arrived at this exact spot,

how slowly she chewed and what she ate
for breakfast, how she slipped, stepping

onto the bathmat, her precise existence
at this particular moment—the two-, no

three-second pause at the four-way stop.
Indelible decisions. The luck

of the draw. The dog deciphers
eye-flicker, delves past thought in search of

the anatomy of thought, which moves
like starlight, born but the reaching delayed,

which moves like the gorgeous dark.
He’s doing it again, she thinks,

and he reads that, too. In his pupil-black,
black surrounded by gold flecks, she sees

the pre-patterned repetition
of next and next and next: her mouth, stained red;

she will not be leaving this place, not yet.
This future splits away like a cannon-

boom of sound. Calla lilies, held fast,
she lets drop. The great winding of a clock.

WHILE SIPPING LEMON TEA ON SATURN’S ICE-CLOUD DECK

The distant sun rises, the size of a dime.
Red light looks warm but is cold, the opposite of what I know.

What can’t be unknown: encrypted DNA, curling inside me.
What I google: Orbit: 29 years, 167 days. Rotation: 10.233 hours.

Dizzy days and sleepless nights—elongated years.
I’ve forgotten the outline of my body against you

how I’d reach across your warmth to the nightstand for water.
I am an untethered moon, unloosed from the sun.

Now is no time to panic: remember Sherlock Holmes.
He discards the superfluous, keeps room for important truths.

Human contact is what I’m lacking, so far from home.
Can you see me on the cloud deck, waving my arms?

I’m calling out for connection, any Watson will do:
It’s elementary, my dear; come here. I need you.

JULIET DREAMS OF THE CRYPT

Is it joy, waking to tall ceilings
painted white, inlaid with the smell

of almonds? The blind see colors,
cool heft of objects hand-held.

They do not see what is tarnished.
I’d be lying if I said I knew how

to get to the other side of my heart.
I rehearsed my speech as a child—Love

is a heavy wheelbarrow crushed with
hibiscus—before pretending to plunge

the knife into my chest. My mouth
at the moment of loss unbinds a thousand

mouths all making the same sound. I practiced
for the day I am blind, when

I will trade myself for one
dram of bottled summer, a lawn

that tickles my neck when I lie down
next to you without expectation.

Histories of the Future Perfect by Ellen Kombiyil is a book of poetry inspired by concepts in astrophysics. Canvassing across time and space to provide a luminescence unafraid of the big ideas, the book itself has what Kombiyil calls a quantum structure. Here we find Galileo’s thumbprint, Kurt Cobain Las Vegas, and Mary Lincoln communing with the dead. The poems themselves are never narrowly historical but rather cosmic in their inflections, taking on subatomic particles, DNA, and black holes, not simply as scientific props but as the very impetus for lyric motion.

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015). She is a recent transplant from Bangalore, India, where she lived for nearly eleven years, teaching creative writing and yoga. A fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2013, Kombiyil’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many journals, including BOOTH, Spillway, Cordite, and Poemeleon. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has read, performed or taught workshops at the annual Prakriti Poetry festival in Chennai, the Raedleaf Poetry Awards in Hyderabad, and Lekhana in Bangalore. She is the co-Founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model poetry press, publishing innovated voices from India/Indian diaspora. Originally from Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Editor’s Note: Ellen Kombiyil’s Histories of the Future Perfect is an absolutely stunning collection, from its opening image to its closing word, soaring and shining with every star and feather in-between. In truth, I am like “the tarot-reading parrot” in the gorgeous cover image by Kalyani Ganapathy, selecting today’s poems by divination rather than choice, because there is far, far too much that is worthy of sharing in this book.

Enter a world where nothing is off limits for exploration: history, mythology, love. Dive to the deepest depths of the ocean and travel as far as the imagined reaches of outer space. Slip into the skin of the philosopher, historian, astronaut, necromancer, classicist, adventurer–all as imagined by the contemplative mind and lyric lilt of the poet. Give yourself over to moments as beautiful as they are thought-provoking–“My mouth / at the moment of loss unbinds a thousand // mouths all making the same sound”–and know that these are the ripples circling out across the waters of this one-of-a-kind collection.

Buy this book. Revel in its beauty. Let your mind drift, weightless. Be carried away.

Want to see more from Ellen Kombiyil?
The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective
Buy Histories of the Future Perfect on Amazon
POEMELEON
Booth

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KAREN PAUL HOLMES

Posted on October 10, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Karen Paul Holmes:

VISITOR

A bare branch lounges
in my Adirondack chair
under the Japanese maple–
gray, elegant:
Comforting to me,
now without a husband,
a good omen
in my walled garden
cocooned by snow.

LIFE, ACT 3

Time knows its lines
has spoken them
across our foreheads.
In this stage of living
we censor the critic,
applaud the comedy,
watch the script unfold.
Gravity plays upon
these bodies, while
souls move inward,
heavenward.
The star in me
celebrates the star in you.

“Visitor” first appeared in Town Creek Poetry. Today’s poems are from the collection Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press 2014) and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Karen Paul Holmes is the author of the poetry collection, Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press, 2014), which tells a story of loss and healing with a voice that “pushes readers forward into the unknown with confidence, precision, and empathy,” according to Poet Dorianne Laux. Karen received an Elizabeth George Foundation emerging writer grant in 2012 and was nominated for Best New Poets 2014. Publishing credits include Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Caesura, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Every Day Poems, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol 5: Georgia, and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poems are full of dichotomies: simple and complex, small and epic. They contain all at once the quiet contemplation of nature, of meditation, of breath, yet their gentile reflectiveness is balanced precisely by the weight of a life lived. This is a life–and a poetry–as simple as a bare branch under a Japanese maple, yet as complex as the comfort of being “now without a husband,” and that being “a good omen.” This is a human experience as small as the lines time “has spoken… across our foreheads,” and as epic as the idea that “The star in me / celebrates the star in you.”

Want more from Karen Paul Holmes?
Blue Fifth Review
Verse-Virtual
Extract(s)
Amarillo Bay
See inside Untying the Knot

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEN KARETNICK

Posted on October 3, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Jen Karetnick:

ON THE WAY TO SEDER, MY HUSBAND ANSWERS

phone calls from patients, their parents or partners,
repeating what he has already said half-a-dozen times

in the office—“I know the auras are uncomfortable,
but they’re better than grand mal seizures, and that’s

what the meds will help to prevent”— and dispensing
predictions no one wants to hear—“No, I don’t think

he’ll come home; the stroke was catastrophic”—but
are asked for over and over in the hopes they will change,

while I shush the kids in the backseat, stop them from shouting
with too much apparent joy in their voices, keep the radio

playing Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” turned down. Soon
we will dissect the Seder plate, digest the bitter

herbs, finger the salt dried on the easily torn skin
of faith. We will recite the plagues: boils, murrain,

the lice we have been visited by several times this year.
On this night, we will open the door for a rogue spirit

who might drink our wine but not heal vertigo; on this night
we will recline on a pillow that can’t fuse a broken

spine. On this night, the cell phone chirps and sings,
and there are no miracles beyond what can be doctored.

THE INVENTION OF AMNIOCENTESIS

Mother, in your womb I am an experiment.
You pass on not immunity but its silvery underside,
give permission for the needle like an arrow to
birth holes in this temporary home, sip the fluid
like a taster of fine wines without the benefit of
a visible image. No bigger than a black widow
spider, the doctors must guess where I am,
and agree there is nothing to be done.
I am poison to both of us. Unsafe
harbor, you insist on mooring me to
your designated slip, tossed by rash after
rash of storms. I will remove myself early. Still ill,
of course you will not care for me right away. Of all the
eggs you might have nourished, I am the one who breaks you.

WOMEN ON THE VERGE DISCUSS VIAGRA

Stamina. From the Latin stamen,
meaning thread of woven cloth. Plant parts
resemble the warp and woof, but old farts?
The boost was designed for the impotent,
not the young at heart. They can’t afford
to see the blue of detached retinas
when the sky has already claimed those hues
and the days for viewing them are numbered.
How ‘bout a pill to make them remember
to take out the garbage or mow the lawn?
One to defoliate the nose hairs grown?
Or better: to spark conversational vigor.
No chance of that? Then don’t bring it on.
This is the last thing, the last thing we want.

“On the Way to Seder, My Husband Answers” was previously published in The Healing Muse. Today’s poems are from the forthcoming collection American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing), and appear here today with permission from the poet.

Jen Karetnick is the author/co-author/editor of 14 books, two of them forthcoming: American Sentencing (poetry, Winter Goose Publishing) and The Treasures That Prevail (poetry, Whitepoint Press). In addition to poetry, she writes lifestyle books, the most recent of which is the cookbook Mango (University Press of Florida, 2014). Her poems, prose and playwriting have been widely published in literary and commercial outlets including TheAtlantic.com, Cimarron Review, december, Miami Herald, North American Review, Poet’s Market 2013, Poets & Writers, Racked.com, River Styx, Spillway, Submittable.com, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Virgin Atlantic Airlines. Based in Miami with her husband, two teenagers, various rescue pets and 14 mango trees, she works as the Creative Writing Director for Miami Arts Charter School and as the dining critic for MIAMI Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Jen Karetnick expertly catalogues the vast and startling spectrum of life, from the mundane to the monumental, from humor to horror. Amidst the stories that unfold are stunning and heartbreaking moments of lyric: “Soon we will dissect the Seder plate, digest the bitter // herbs, finger the salt dried on the easily torn skin / of faith;” “Of all the / eggs you might have nourished, I am the one who breaks you.” And that beauty is balanced by the hilarious and the absurd. Of viagra, a group of women posit, “How ‘bout a pill to make them remember / to take out the garbage or mow the lawn? / One to defoliate the nose hairs grown? / Or better: to spark conversational vigor. / No chance of that? Then don’t bring it on. / This is the last thing, the last thing we want.”

HAPPY HIGH HOLIDAYS FROM THE SATURDAY POETRY SERIES

Posted on September 19, 2015 by asitoughttobemagazine

The Saturday Poetry Series will be on hiatus for the Jewish High Holidays while your faithful editor takes a much needed vacation. We will return on Saturday October 3rd.

In the mean time, enjoy some Israeli-Palestinian peace poetry!

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