December 6, 2014

ADVENT DAY 6 * LINDSAY TURNER!

SONG OF THE MEN



In a field of flowered grains
many men held guns
or cameras making tiny flowered
pictures on the screen.  


The sun was shining on the beach
and some men were looking
at bodies drying in the sun,
slivered into living.


And on the street the man
stopped me and said, I need
to see you; when I come up to you
like this, you should be used


to this. Now in a suburb close at hand
their eyes are orange like suns
and when they shine on what they need
“no man should be embarrassed.”






Lindsay Turner
LINDSAY TURNER'S poems, criticism, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Lana Turner Journal, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, WebConjunctions, FIELD, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.  She's a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia and lives wherever she can.










Curatorial note: The following poems are a response to a call for poetry about rape culture for the annual Delirious Advent Feature; the call is in turn an immediate response to the Rolling Stone story “A Rape on Campus” about rape culture at the University of Virginia. However, they are also part of a larger conversation about rape in poetry communities. Curated by Jessica Smith and Susana Gardner.

December 5, 2014

DAY 4, Feminism and Fitness - Elizabeth J. Colen



Learn something well enough to be tremblingly aware of what you cannot do. Let it break your heart. - Lightsey Darst


WHAT I CANNOT DO
Elizabeth J. Colen

The treadmill is mindless and feels the way I feel when I’m worrying a point with myself I’m never going to win, some tautology that winds itself deeper and deeper into the generalized anxiety I move through the world with. For instance:
I need to do yoga so I get more flexible and do not break my hip at a youngold age—old people are always breaking and dying of a broken hip—and I don’t want to do yoga because I’m not very flexible and don’t like to do things I’m bad at.


When I said die of a broken hip you heard heart, right?

The treadmill is mindless and I can watch TV.
Judge Judy Judge Judy Judge Judy. Judy let down your hair.

Before I work out I hold three things in my head:
**Dictionary.com’s word of the day
     (flit, verb, to move lightly and swiftly; fly, dart, or skim along),
**a random article (half-read) from Wikipedia
     (Eupithecia nagaii is a moth in the Geometridae family; it is found in Japan),
**and an image from the next poem in whatever book I’m reading
     (There is no time but the light remains, from Gillian Conoley’s “Schools of Thought”).

It is no good if I do something rote if I do not direct myself and my thoughts. Judge Judy can colonize,
      Fox News can,
      repeats of Roseanne.

I am a heel runner.

Without direction I fixate. Without—

Bees flitting flower to flower .
2. To flutter, as a bird. Flutter, nutter, butter, better, go-getter, banana-fanna-fo-fetter. Fetter, mo-better. 
3. The hours flitting by. I say I will be there by ten, I say I will be there by nine, I say I will be there at noon.
4. To depart or to die or to move.

To depart or to die or
to move it or lose it.

My mother never ran. She never exercised at all. And how were her hips?
My mother never ran. How were her hips?
She never exercised at all.
My mother never ran. She never exercised at all.
My mother never ran / is dead now / never broke her hip / never ran.
My mother never ran. My mother never got old enough to break a hip.
Flutter, nutter, mo-butter, fo-fetter, go-getter.
She never ran. She never exercised at all.

One good thing about chemo—my aunt said my mother said—
Fo-fetter. Go-butter. She ate two whole pies a day—key lime—the last two months of her life.

A fly flits in the tin before the meringue goes in.
I can eat anything, she said.

At the motel I eat carb upon carb upon carb for breakfast. My key card jams the workout room’s slip lock. That hairy guy is in again, looks up with a grinwhatwantstobegroan. At the bar across the parking lot he will buy me a drink later. My my my my whiskey. Yellowbrown swirl in a glass.

Heel-toe heel-toe: thud thud thud thud

I should take a tip from you, neck hair says. The orange light the orange mahogany light the light like strange and streetlight across the street a gun emporium, advertised as Alabama’s biggest. I let him buy another. What’s that, I say. What tip. There’s too much sugar in this, he taps with the shredded toothpick umbrella. Daiquiri daiquiri dock. I want him to be more attractive, I want him to be younger, I want him to be more my type, that is: a woman.

Do you… are you… he says. No I will say to his anything. No I don’t
come here often.

My mother is dying and I feel none of it.

A moth has a long chambered heart that runs the length of its body, pumps hemolymph (not blood), not red.

Thankgodforthegym, he says. When traveling—

When I think about any of it—

It’s really just an old motel room emptied of beds and filled with machines. The shower has been filled in, closeted. The walls mirrored.
I would have the most elegant sex in a room like this. I would have the most dramatic sex in a room like this. The most cautious sex. This most cautious. Every angle. Angle. Every. Every up and down. Every side ways. In a room like this, I think every time.

There was that boy in high school with a mirror over his bed. Howdoesitnotfall I thought every time. His ass looked good up there.

And the parts of me.

When I think about any of it, my heart just races for no reason I can account for and I have trouble breathing. And I wish Judge Judy was on.

The moths in Japan.
Arthropoda Insecta Lepidoptera—

They are not mirror images,
one side to the other.

But close.

Something happens in translation.

Eupithia? Eupithia?

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
I never knew what that meant.

It is a light brown moth like all the others, leaves dust too like all the others, it has antennas that never look straight inside any picture. It’s body is

a body is a meaty thing, a weighty one
it lugs itself around, beats on glass, destroys itself in what light remains

I start up the machine it is like the other machine and I know how to use it each time.             I watch in the mirror, mirror to mirror to mirror as he slips and clinks the key to add the weight and then he sits down. I know in some mirror he’s looking at me.

Sometime in the streetlight orange light there is no time
I know but the light remains.

Later I will look at my notes and know I left something out. Later he will remove his belt in one motion and roll it up on the desk.





Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010) and Waiting Up for the End of the World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), and the long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014). She lives in the Pacific Northwest and is editor for Jaded Ibis Press’s Bowerbird series.

ADVENT DAY 5 * ANNIE WON!
























 


Annie Won
ANNIE WON is a poet, yoga teacher, and medicinal chemist who resides in Somerville, MA. Annie is particularly interested in spaces of mind, body, and page. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Juniper Writing Institute scholarship recipient. Her chapbook with Brenda Iijima, Once Upon a Building Block, published with Horse Less Press this summer, and her chapbook, so i can sleep, is forthcoming from Nous-Zot Press. Her work has appeared in Shampoo and RealPoetik, and is forthcoming from EAOGH, TheThePoetry, TENDE RLION, and New Delta Review. Her critical reviews can be seen at American Microreviews and Interviews.









Curatorial note: The following poems are a response to a call for poetry about rape culture for the annual Delirious Advent Feature; the call is in turn an immediate response to the Rolling Stone story “A Rape on Campus” about rape culture at the University of Virginia. However, they are also part of a larger conversation about rape in poetry communities. Curated by Jessica Smith and Susana Gardner.

December 4, 2014

DAY 3, FEMINISM AND FITNESS - Marisa Crawford



Flip Turn
Marisa Crawford

When I wanted to die in San Francisco but instead I went for a walk, and I found myself in a bookstore just as the first meeting of a Baby-sitters Club book club was about to begin.

When I would listen to Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral while I did crunches in high school/    the heat of the music makes you hate yourself.

When I’d walk around the neighborhood barefoot in the summer. I’d wear Emilie’s grainy cardigan sweater, eat green beans from a can, feel “healthy.”

When I swam 50 free and I’d try to imagine my boyfriend at the other end of the pool. But not just my boyfriend, not my actual boyfriend.

The idea of having something tragic to live for/         something to swim for.

When Laura said you burn six calories a minute from dancing rigorously so we tried it in my bedroom/      decades of it not occurring to me that my brain was part of my body.

Fields and fields of dandelions and flasks filled with Peachtree and my brain was a part of my body.

My mom tells me I’m so lucky I have a flat tummy. But I don’t have a flat tummy anymore.

It’s round like a pink-haired troll doll, like the ones I lined up on my windowsill
when I was a “girl”                 when I was a “cutter”             when I was “lucky.”

I haven’t read any books about cutting though sometimes late at night I google books about cutting.

I read online that many cutters find they can achieve the same rush of endorphins from running or other rigorous exercise.

I read that to Michael and he found it laughable/      I felt like I should have been laughing.

Like life should be funny.
Like life could’ve been funny.
Like if anyone had ever told me.
Like “exercise” can save your life.

Things that saved my life: Hole, Ani, Tori. Not the hole that I cut in my arm or the one in my jeans or the ozone like I was a planet.

“I hurt myself today/ to see if I still feel”
but I always thought that was putting it really tritely.

My Holly Golightly Barbie Doll but ironically, but beautifully.
The “writing graffiti on your body.” The “pieces of me you’ve never seen.”

The absence of exercise. Like what, so what it’s the absence of exercise.

Sylvia Plath on the elliptical.
Rainbow butterflies.

Kurt Cobain on the elliptical.
Janis Joplin crying in her bed / working full-time.

I never saw feeling as feeling. I never saw poetry as an “exercise.”

That you could do it alone. The “can I run” and the coming. That being in touch with yr body is boring                is bloody             is cryptic & lonely.

Searching my doc for “a room of one’s own.”
Searching Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Emily Dickinson at the end of the pool/        
meeting me at the gym, pushing me in.


Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collection The Haunted House (Switchback, 2010), and the chapbook 8th Grade Hippie Chic (Immaculate Disciples, 2013). Her writing has recently appeared in Fanzine, The Hairpin, and Bitch, and is forthcoming in Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2016) and The &NOW Awards 3: Best Innovative Writing (&NOW, 2015). Marisa is founding editor of the feminist blog WEIRD SISTER, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
 

ADVENT DAY 4 * GILLIAN DEVEREUX!

GillianDevereux.jpg

gillianbw.jpg
Gillian Devereux
GILLIAN DEVEREUX received her MFA in Poetry from Old Dominion University and directs the writing Center at Wheelock College in Boston, where she also teaches creative writing. She is the author of Focus on Grammar (dancing girl press, 2012) and They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights (Aforementioned Productions, 2011), and her poems have appeared in numerous journals, most recently The Midwest Quarterly, The Rain, Party, and Disaster Society, Sundog Lit, Boog City, and Printer’s Devil Review. Follow her on Twitter (@fromthistles) or Tumblr (http://neomodernmix.tumblr.com). These poems come from a book length erasure manuscript which uses letters and journals written by women in Bram Stoker's Dracula as source texts.







Curatorial note: The following poems are a response to a call for poetry about rape culture for the annual Delirious Advent Feature; the call is in turn an immediate response to the Rolling Stone story “A Rape on Campus” about rape culture at the University of Virginia. However, they are also part of a larger conversation about rape in poetry communities. Curated by Jessica Smith and Susana Gardner.