Category: Poetry

Marilyn’s Pose

Marilyn's Pose- Illustration by Chuka Susan Chesney.jpg

Illustration by Chuka Susan Chesney

I haven’t heard back from you yet,

though I’ve carved your eye into paper fifty times.

                              

If you had been born in 1959 and lived up the street,

we could have been friends.

I know you better than I did

before I dampened your eye, smudging it into nothingness

next to your flash of hair.

Your mother came over and swam in our pool.

She had pubic hair that grew

next to her bathing suit. She taught me how to swim.

The lips, now that’s something.

Lips that curve up into a saucer at one end, but at the other

spill into darkness and a cup of caved-in hand.

One time I saw you getting changed in the dressing room.

I saw how big your breasts were, and I didn’t want to be your friend.

I am sorry I felt that way.

Now that we’re headed down your body,

let’s talk about that quiet, purple world next to your arm,

next to the most vulnerable lines, fragile lines.

 

Is it a lie,

or are you just as human

as any woman with your big wooden elbow that works

its way into the shadowed bed sheet?

We put naked Barbies in a bucket and said it was a hot tub;

I played with Stacy and you played with P.J.

Did he spray the room with Chanel #5 to get it ready for you?

X beauty out with something beautiful, something red.

Now X is gone, and all we have left is this piece of paper.

A graduate of Art Center College of Design, CHUKA SUSAN CHESNEY is an emerging artist who lives in Los Angeles. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States. Recently, she collaborated with Laura Madeline Wiseman, a poet, on a book called People Like Cats. In secret, often very late at night, Chesney has been writing poems. She often uses her own art as inspiration for her poetry.

Interview with Kazim Ali

“If one has to look into Kazim Ali’s work, what is most evident in his poetry is the feeling of homeliness and how answers arise out of the most mundane of situations. There’s a beauty echoing in the simple verse, the way the words come together to dance and quiver on the page. This search for homes gives us poetry which is diverse and rich, both in terms of language and the cultural experiences it seeks to pull together for the reader – and how all of this comes together to define Kazim Ali as a writer singularly unique for his time. Given the fact that Kazim Ali grew up in UK, to Muslim parents of Indian descent, these themes of his writing are not surprising. Equipped with this legacy, his work brims with a raw urgency that calls to readers belonging to all ages, time and place, and feeds the fire in all of us.”

–Smriti Verma, Poetry Editor

How did you seek to assimilate your diverse heritage, and the experiences it provided you, in your work? What kind of effect did it have on your writing?

KA: My writing has always been driven by twin notions of sense and sound and the way they treat and overlap and diverge from one another. These come deeply from my twin South Asian lineage of Islam and Yoga. The devotions and scriptures of the Kasmiri Shaivites have been as important to me as the Islamic philosophy and art of my South Indian family. It’s a family that has since been scattered– to Hyderabad, Telangana, to Karachi, to England, Canada and America. Very few of my family remain behind in our ancestral homes (in Vellore and Chennai) yet India feels an inextricable part of my life and my writing.

The forms I choose, the way abstraction interacts with the concrete, the roles that vowels and sound play in my poems– all these come from devotional music of India and Islamic concepts of art and architecture. I also studied sacred chanting and nada-yoga as part of my yoga training. PUT_CHARACTERS_HERE

What are the fundamental differences between prose and poetry, according to you? If there are any, what different approaches due you adopt to writing each?

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KA: Prose and poetry both follow the rhythm of language, breath and the body. In prose you rely more on syntactical and grammatical rules of the language you are working in but even these can be bent or transformed or done away with. The sentence is usually meant as a complete thought but can com in a fragment too. I do not always know the difference between an essay or a poem as it begins. Not until the thought starts to spin our does a form present itself. And sometimes (like in my books, Bright Felon and Wind Instrument) the text actually quivers between poetry and prose and does not choose. PUT_CHARACTERS_HERE

Since our theme for this issue is ‘Growing Up,’ we’d like to know what influenced you the most growing up.

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KA: I grew up in a lot of different places. I was born in the UK where my parents had migrated, but I spent a lot of my early childhood in Vellore. Then I was raised in Canada and finally the United States. So I don’t really feel like I have a single origin or “home.” Or more accurately I have had many different homes and I can’t always choose between them. This maybe gave me access to multiplicity as a broader context in which to live my life. Different languages, different cultural experiences– I don’t feel defined by a single culture or language. This is an “American” experience but it is also an “Indian” experience. I am sad beyond measure that in both America and India there are political forces who are seeking to define in singular (and narrow) terms what it means to be “American” or “Hindustani” for example. PUT_CHARACTERS_HERE

You’ve said previously that ‘everyone knows how much easier it is to write a poem in form and meter’. Would you still stand by it?

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KA: I believe this because form and meter give you rules to work with. They also make the music of a poem much easier to achieve and make it easier to construct an architecture and a mood. But having said that, I do not necessary believe that one starts out with an intention to work in a particular form. I think the relationship to form in a poem has to be organic, meaning it is uncovered during the writing process. One reason to read a lot of poetry in form is that you then learn the patterns of sound and thought and the emotional valences of (for example) a pantoum vs a sestina vs a sonnet vs a ghazal. Once, when I was a young writer I took one specific episode from Islamic history (the attempted arrest of Imam Zayn by the troops of Yazid immediately following the battle of Karbala) and wrote a poem about it in 22 different forms and meters. I wanted to know what the forms itself brought to the episode and what various forms and metrical patterns would bring out of the episode itself.

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You’ve experimented with the couplet very often, in many ways. How does it, as a style, manifest in your thinking process?

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KA: I’ve tried and tried to get away from it, with limited success! My newest book, which is coming out at the beginning of 2018, has a greater variety of stanzaic patterns. But the couplet has a deep attraction, in terms of a “call and response” but not necessarily between a writer and his audience but a writer and himself. A thought answers a thought and not always logically or completely. Often the response contradicts or redefines the original thought. This is an attractive pattern for me, who is a restless thinker.

There is an explosion of poets of colour, especially, writing in blank verse. Does a lack of structure lend to a certain democratisation of poetry?

KA: I think it is a wonderful thing to have a broader range of people from differing educational, economic and social backgrounds writing and creating poetry. Poetry is meant to communicate human experience, all of it. There are a number of registers and ways to approach a poem that do not always involved the received and historic forms. But I do believe that thinking about language, its qualities, the sound of a poem, the way it resonates and echoes–these all build and make beautiful the utterance of the poem. Rhyming meter, blank verse, free verse, and even chaotic outburst– all these can make a powerful and incisive poetry. But as a writer I think it was good for me to practice and explore as wide a range of poetries as I could in order to find my own path in language and literature.

cassisprofileKAZIM ALI is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and translator.

His books include several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre text Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He has also published a translation of Abahn Sabana David by Marguerite Duras, Water’s Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri, Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri, and (with Libby Murphy) L’amour by Marguerite Duras. His novels include Quinn’s Passage, named one of “The Best Books of 2005” by Chronogram magazine,and The Disappearance of Seth. His books of essays include Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence and Fasting for Ramadan. In addition to co-editing Jean Valentine: This-World Company, he is a contributing editor forAWP Writers Chronicle and associate editor of the literary magazine FIELD and founding editor of the small press Nightboat Books. He is the series co-editor for both Poets on Poetry and Under Discussion, from the University of Michigan Press.

Ali’s forthcoming titles include: Uncle Sharif’s Life in Music, a collection of short stories; The Secret Room: A String Quartet, a novel; and Anais Nin: An Unprofessional Study, a new book of essays.  Ali is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College.

Quartz Hunting

For years we kept the quartz stones you found,

placed them in rows upon the window sills 

of your room like teeth along a weathered jaw.

After a spring rain in the garden,

past the wood chips at the playground’s edge,

at the gravel inlet of our driveway,

 

you’d rush to seize each alabaster knot,

as if it might sink back under the soil–

the bedrock rippling with that milky droplet.

 

Obvious and common, its hold on you

was charming, although I was the one

to ferry your finds, happy to bear

the clattering pull of full pockets.

 

Our last good hunt before the snow,

we walked the bank of a late fall stream–

two bundled figures floating above

the cobbles like frozen smoke, our bodies

nearly translucent in the clear autumn air.

KEVIN CASEY is the author of And Waking… (Bottom Dog Press, 2016), and the chapbooks The wind considers everything (Flutter Press) and For the Sake of the Sun (Red Dashboard). His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Chiron Review, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column ‘American Life in Poetry.’

How Wrinkles Were Invented

after Bob Hicok 

 

Hands folded into empty. The need

to press & iron. Lines to read between & history

 

pried from each furrow. Once,

you laughed so bright the dry heat

 

mistook you for its maker, chased you across oceans

& back, the spray of sunlight playing hide & seek

 

among the seams of your forehead. Head

forward & your skin retreats within itself

 

the way a house collapses:

loosening. Rusty jawbone dried, eyelids

 

shuttered & weathered, the squeak of knees folded

into obsolete. The skin retreats

 

within itself, but new hills always manage

to worm their way out of the creases.

 

Note: “How Wrinkles Were Invented” is titled after “How Origami Was Invented” by Bob Hicok.

MARIE UNGAR is a writer from Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Co-Founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sooth Swarm Journal. Marie’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Words Dance, and Moledro Magazine, among others.

How Catholic School Was Invented

deskins_-plaid-2-2

Illustration by SD

the color plaid

how to fold hands into one another

nail polish remover

 

ordinary time lenten

stomachs how fast

knees learn the right angle

of bend and break

 

the difference between men and amen

is only alpha

 

to pray

and still be prey:

how to praise a man            

without asking why

ERIN JIN MEI O’MALLEY is a poet who lives in Germany. She has previously served as a Genre Editor for Polyphony H.S. and is the Co-Founder of Sooth Swarm Journal. Erin has attended workshops run by the University of Virginia and the Kenyon Review. Her work been recognized by Hollins University, Columbia College Chicago, the National YoungArts Foundation, and others. She blogs at www.explorationsoferin.com.

SD is an artist, writer and curator. All of her work focuses on women, feminism and curating issues in art. She is founding curator of Les Femmes Folles, an organization for women in art.

Valencia Rain

Blackbirds sit

on a telephone line like

a string of beads. I stand on the

corner of 18th and Valencia. A

small woman covers the

clothing hanging

on a chain link fence: two

sweaters, a velvet coat,

a floral dress— with

a tarp. She doesn’t

hide from the rain. Neither

do I. Water

 

runs down my nose

over my lips

into my mouth.

 

I am kissing god with

tongue.

 

I have never owned a rosary

but I count: cars, black umbrellas,

my wet fingers, every time I swallow—

 

I touch my mouth

my chest

my damp shoulders, one after

the other.

 

The birds are so still—

dripping. I am only catholic

when it rains in the mission, when

I feel like I could fuck god— bear

a child of divine sin. I want to tug

on his

rosary. Kiss his chin. Hold

him. Tell him a story about

a king

and a blackbird pie.

BAYLEY VAN is a young freelance writer and illustrator living in San Francisco, California. Her work explores instability through nature and interpersonal relationships. She has been previously published in Synchronized Chaos, Umlaut, Em, Aryis, Calamus Journal, and Golden Walkman Magazine. Inquiries about writing, illustrations and upcoming publications may be sent to bayleyvn@gmail.com.

Inventory

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sea-greens shilly

in the barter of tide

 

one tiny eel flips

the letter “c” in a child’s palm

 

logs loosened by storms,

freed from rafts, afloat

 

beach asparagus, bull kelp, ficus

rockweed, black ribbon, sea-lettuce

 

once-coiled rope segmented

for crab pots, anchor lines, buoys

 

bottle caps, hermit crabs

scuttling from upturned rocks

 

pottery shards, beached sea-glass,

marbles:  jagged, worn smooth, pitted

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broken toys, corroded pennies, lost keys –

no Japanese floats

 

8,000-year-old petroglyphs, sharp rock, stones

for curve and skip:  stacked, grained, metamorphic

 

stone steps, one upon another, pathways

to and from the shallows of tears

 

deadheads chainsawed, cut, split,

stacked for firewood

 

a rusted tangle of bicycles, crippled

chains, reflectors fragmented

 

board swing droops

from a spruce branch

 

Mother crying cross-

legged on a mattress hauled

to a sea-facing window

KERSTEN CHRISTIANSON is a raven-watching, moon-gazing, high school English-teaching Alaskan. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry through the Low-Residency Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2016. Her recent work has appeared in Cirque, Tidal Echoes, Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, Inklette, On the Rusk, We’Moon, Sheila-Na-Gig and Pure Slush. Kersten co-edits the quarterly journal Alaska Women Speak. When not exploring the summer lands and dark winter of the Yukon Territory, she lives in Sitka, Alaska with her husband and photographer Bruce Christianson, and daughter Rie.