Category Archives: Online Projects

What Rough Beast | Poem for January 25, 2017

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Elizabeth Jacobson
Perfectly Made

Northern Flicker you woke me from dark sleep, your head
slammed into my window, neck snapped as you dropped
to the frozen ground. I had been dreaming of Gettysburg,
can you imagine? Our fathers brought forth a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
So perfectly made, I put my nail between the split of your beak, pulled
out the long worm of your tongue as if it were a measuring tape
coming out of its case, let go and watched it coil back, then
my fingers in your spotted under-down, a marvel, so
warm, so warm, in the bitter morning; I felt history
toying with itself as I stretched your stiffening
wings as far as they would spread and plucked out the stunning
bright orange tail feathers, one after the next, each quill spilling
a black ichorous ink onto my palms.

 

Elizabeth Jacobson is the author of A Brown Stone (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), and Are the Children Make Believe? (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Orion Magazine, Hinchas de Poesia, Ploughshares, and Plume. Jacobson is the recipient of the Mountain West Writers’ Award from Western Humanities Review, The Jim Sagel Prize for Poetry from Puerto del Sol, a grant from New Mexico Literary Arts, and residencies from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Herekeke. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. Jacobson is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project which conducts poetry classes at local shelters. She teaches in the Creative Writing program at the Santa Fe Community College.

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If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

What Rough Beast | Poem for January 24, 2017

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Robbie Gamble
As a White Man in America

I try to remember these two things every day:

  1. That this beautiful land
    I get to walk upon each day,
    all got commandeered
    by my ancestors, violently,
    from the people who were here
    before them.
  2. That this wonderful economy
    I enjoy, humming with material comfort
    and strewn with shiny things,
    all got jumpstarted
    by over two centuries
    of free labor provided
    by the people that my ancestors
    indentured and brought over here
    violently, against their will.

Two simple facts
so hard to register in my heart
as a white man in America.

Robbie Gamble lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is currently completing an MFA in poetry at Lesley University. When he is not preoccupied with image and line breaks, he works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston.

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If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

What Rough Beast | Poem for January 23, 2017

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Judith Terzi
The Punchman Takes Us Back

to commedia dell’arte. Back to makeshift
booths clothed in Neapolitan stripes.

Imagine the Punchman as he maneuvers
the strings of marionettes, one in his

very own image: Pulcinella. He is jester,
he is Lord of Trickery, he is Master

of Manipulation. He carries batons to knock off
nemeses: the foreigner, the diplomat,

the donkey, the ghost of discretion. And often
the devil & the dinosaur. “That’s

the way we do it,” squawks the Punchman.
Addio! È cosí che si fa, brutto maiale!

(People say he speaks through a kazoo which
limits his vowel capacity. And linguists

swear he practices glossolalia, which is hardly
equal to speaking in tongues.)

Audiences anticipate the wrath, the staccato,
the brio, they revel in the braggadocio.

They are “pleased as Punch” as the Punchman
dangles Pulcinella, jitters & jangles

& jumbos his strings in a digital delirium
across a slapstick stage. As he

choreographs a tarantella like no one has
ever dared to dance before.

 

Judith Terzi’s is the author of If You Spot Your Brother Floating By (Kattywompus Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Atlanta Review (International Publication Prize, 2015), Caesura, Columbia Journal, Raintown Review, Spillway, and in anthologies such as Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle); Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo); and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Pacific Coast Poetry Series). Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Web.

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If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

What Rough Beast | Poem for January 22, 2017

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Daniel Sokoloff
Coronation

I watched the boldest,
the richest fools our country had to offer
gather in their moot,
all to declare to each other, and maybe to us,
why they should lead us, and no one else.
Hypocrites and sociopaths the lot of them,
business as usual, but something unexpected happened:
a goblin snuck in.

Grey clouds gather,
and I try to tell myself
that they are just the envoys of winter.
All this, the freezing winds,
the threat of cities buried in snow like powder,
the absent sun,
it’s just winter as usual.

There’s a part of me that wants to relax,
just take it easy and ignore the news
the way so many ignored the election
but the politics don’t feel abstract now.
The goblin has dredged up the nastiest
ideas, set the politics of identity to war,
and now even looking in the mirror
reveals a complicated spiral.
I’m bisexual, but I’ve got white skin,
maybe that means I’ll make it through this era alive;
But then again, most Jews pass for white, until the men
robed like ghosts remind us that
no, we aren’t white after all.
I never thought I would be like this, so
political.

Fear is corrosive,
and we’ve all caught it,
even those who cheered as the goblin
shouted down the career politicians,
and danced the fiery dance that so many angry people
felt for their common man.
Fear is the reason we’re turning on one another;
I would say it’s like a wildfire, but that isn’t right.

It’s more like a catchy tune you hear,
one you hate, but it’s so simple and persistent,
so prevalent, there’s really no avoiding it, and eventually
you can’t get it out of your head, no matter how hard you try,
and before you know it,
when some goblin steps forward to accept
a crown that is far too heavy for his neck to support,
and they play that catchy tune,
you find yourself nodding along with it,
a touch of warmth.

 

Daniel Sokoloff is a poet from Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in The Basil O’Flaherty and Anti-Heroin Chic. For more about Daniel and his work, visit Lokepoet.weebly.com.

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If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

What Rough Beast | Poem for January 21, 2017

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Ada Limón
Killing Methods

Outside, after grieving for days,
I’m thinking of how we make stories,
pluck them like beetles out of the air,

collect them, pin their glossy backs
to the board like the rows of stolen
beauties, dead, displayed at Isla Negra,

where the waves broke over us
and I still loved the country, wanted
to suck the bones of the buried.

Now, I’m outside a normal house
while friends cook and please
and pour secrets into each other.

A crow pierces the sky, ominous,
clanging like an alarm, but there
is no ocean here, just tap water

rising in the sink, a sadness clean
of history only because it’s new,
a few weeks old, our national wound.

I don’t know how to hold this truth,
so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down
in case, later, no one believes me.

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Transition Poem 73 @ Jan. 20, 2017

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Lynn Schmeidler
All Our Karmas Bear Fruit Without Exception

Nobody saw it coming but the florist whose data—
she loves me she loves me not—presupposed the peaceful
transfer of affection. Despite the heart in my cris de coeur,

elections are not love songs. I come from the country of
what happens to me happens to you. We might have coupled
on a ballroom floor strewn with ceiling shards

in the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment in herstory,
but we refused to consider the desire of pavement
to crack. We might have recited The Book of Shadows

or broken flesh with one another in a ritual
of witches had there been more play in our defeat. As it is,
one more binge of fatal choices and I might split open

in a gutted mess of slogans at the profane communion table
of a felled future. America, bikini-craving brain
doused in dopamine, when it comes to a free vacation

giveaway where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips,
you’re an easy mark. With each exhale let go of your
attachments, one by one. We might have given birth to a butterfly,

fed a forest at our breast, lived and been counted. Once,
I was swaddled in footed pajamas, now tomorrow
comes up as unavailable on my caller ID.

And what’s with the daily news, breaking like a rogue wave
over the ocean liner of my guided meditation?
Hope has a shyster’s face printed in blood on its wings.

I hold out my begging bowl to this new now.

 

Editor’s Note: This poem includes in its entirety Mina Loy’s “Love Songs to Joannes,” section 3, which is in the public domain and reads as follows:

We might have coupled
In the bedridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings

 

Lynn Schmeidler‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awl, Barrow Street, Boston Review, Fence, Cider Press Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Delta Review, SLAB, Saw Palm, Comstock Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and White Stag, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press), Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen Press), Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed (Parlor Press), and Bared (Les Femmes Folles Books). Her chapbook Curiouser & Curiouser won the 2013 Grayson Books Chapbook Contest. Her chapbook More Than One Burning was a finalist for the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize.

Transition Poem 72 @ Jan. 19, 2017

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W.P. Osborn
Autumn Poem

A gap between the eave and roof showed smoke.
I went to look; perceived an attic flame.
Emergency: Your help is on the way.
Just time to get the cats into their cage
and listen for a distant siren’s wail.
It didn’t come; my lungs could draw no air.
I phoned again; the woman said she’d failed,
would send a rig to help without delay.
The smoke grew thick, the flames consuming all,
blue and orange flaring through the eaves
and seeping out the downstairs window frames.
I smelled it now, the stink of tires and leaves.
I heard the wind roar; fire makes that sound.
I dreamed our little house was burning down.

 

W.P. Osborn‘s Seven Tales and Seven Stories won the 2013 Unboxed Books Prize in Fiction, selected by Francine Prose. His short work is in Chicago Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Texas Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, Gettysburg Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Gargoyle, and other journals.

Transition Poem 71 @ Jan. 18, 2017

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Denver Butson
the aforementioned scarecrow

is not holding his head down because it is autumn and because the weight of the year has weakened him. he is not bent over because it is time to acquiesce to gravity at last. he is not disintegrating into himself as is the custom of scarecrows come October come November. the aforementioned scarecrow is not simply doing what scarecrows have always done and dissolving when the days grow short and dark comes f a s t . n o . t h e aforementioned scarecrow is weeping like he has never wept before. angry like he has never been angry before. and he is gathering his sadness and his rage into power he has never known before. the aforementioned scarecrow is mustering up all his straw and mud and crumpled paper and dust. to lift his head for once in his long life of standing still. and to scare the falling sun from falling. and if not that to scare the fallen sun to pull itself back up and rise again.

 

Denver Butson is the author of triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999), Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews College Press, 2001) and illegible address (Luquer Street Press, 2004). His work has been in anthologies edited by Billy Collins, Garrison Keillor, and Agha Shahid Ali, has been regularly featured on NPR’s Writers Almanac, and has earned him a individual artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the arts. He is a frequent collaborator with artists in other disciplines, most recently visual artist Pietro Costa, grammy-nominated violist Mat Maneri, chef Antonio Migliaccio, and Emmy-winning filmmaker Eric Maierson. He lives with his wife, actress Rhonda Keyser, and their daughter Maybelle in Carroll Gardens.

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Transition Poem 70 @ Jan. 17, 2017

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Walter Holland
The Ship of State

changes course,
doors swing right and left unhinged
and on a dark sea and in a dark room

the engines come to halt. Slowly
lights go out, one by one
shimmer and die

while faint voices sound
alarm and huddled on the top
deck, the men in tuxedos

women adorned, chatter on;
a pause in the music,
a respite from the dance

a tinkling of crystal
while the great silence below ensues
where immigrants in steerage

cower on half-knees and
in the vast hull of the ship
the water seeps in

to the cries of workmen
soaked in sweat. A captain
half-distracted, half-amused

calls from his tower room,
as the ship begins to list,
his assistants bark their orders

with absurd futility;
they argue about the chain of
command, their loyalty

and then the creak of iron,
to stairways thronged, the half-awake
driven from their sleep

wait to climb to higher ground;
and the compass merely spins,
as the great bow plunges down.

 

Walter Holland is the author of three books of poetry including Circuit, Transatlantic, and A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 as well as one novel, The March. His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Assaracus, HazMat, Redivider, Rhino and other journals and anthologies. He lives in New York City and is a regular contributor to Lambda Literary and Pleiades. For more info check out walterhollandwriter.com. He holds a BA from Bard, and MA from City College, and a PhD in English Literature from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

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Transition Poem 69 @ Jan. 16, 2017

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Sarah Van Arsdale
Ethics

In a future I cannot imagine
will we say to each other,
remember that afternoon,
that thing with the ethics committee,
that was when everything changed?
 
Will we say,
was that before the inauguration,
and puzzle it out, tethering from Christmas
to Joan’s party the day after New Year’s
yes, it was early in January
yes, it was between the election
and the inauguration

Will we say,
remember, we drove up to the Catskills
it was raining
and we stopped for gas
and I bought a Times because the headline
was so alarming

and we kept driving north on the Taconic
and it was that stasis
between late fall and true winter:
raining, but just after Hopewell Junction
the pond that forms there between the northbound
and the southbound lanes
was frozen over with a skin of ice
and the desperate trees, bare of leaves
scratched against the fog-­heavy sky
and the apron of woods
banking up from the parkway
lay littered with leaf meal
and patches of early snow.

Will we remember this afternoon,
the rain, the Times tossed into the back seat,
arriving at last, the clumps of snow
heaped by the trunks of the trees,
the warm purr of the furnace,
the roses resting, wrapped
against the coming freeze?

 

Sarah Van Arsdale’s fourth book is a collection of novellas titled In Case of Emergency, Break Glass (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016) and her next book, The Catamount, a long narrative poem, is forthcoming in 2017 from Nomadic Press. Both are illustrated with her watercolors. Her novels are Grand Isle (SUNY Press 2012); Blue (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel; and Toward Amnesia (Riverhead Books, 1996). She serves on the board of the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction, and teaches in the Antioch University MFA Program and at NYU.

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