Posts Tagged: poetry

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Listen to Raena Shirali read “tristesse”

 

Raena Shirali’s great poem “tristesse” appears in Indiana Review 38.1, Summer 2016 Ghost theme issue. In this Bluecast, we have chosen to feature the poem both as text and recording; we believe that it is an especially unique opportunity to experience both the sonic and textual qualities of this poem.

Listen to Raena read her poem here.

 

tristesse

girl with paisley hands sobs like a cherub. the courthouse has no lashes but we call it a person anyway. what we associate with smeared mascara. to say, “her expression was soft.” quiet girl children. mural on the elementary school wall of a single stick figure. smiling + looking down. looking like the girl you knew / saw on the news: missing: girl with training bra. girl with nude bra—nipples painted on. the question of breasts. her areolae goosebumped at your touch. girl with pot leaf for a mouth. every building shorter than the church steeples. sky fading gray to gray. how many men do not know where the girls have gone. something sticky, viscous on her glitter heels. heels not made to run from / in. tight leather & all that bullshit about straight teeth. take this woman to be especially not his in white, red, tell power how you really feel. tell him what she was wearing when you last saw her. communicate. you’re hysterical in your yellow room—a mind doesn’t just sail away. the sails on the horizon line look like a line of cocaine / you mean ghosts. you mean a line of cartoon girls in triangular dresses, just outlines floating up the coast—

 

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raenashiraliheadshot

Indian American poet Raena Shirali grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where she currently lives and teaches English at College of Charleston. Her first book, GILT, is forthcoming in 2016 with YesYes Books, and her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, Indiana Review, Muzzle Magazine, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and many more. Her other honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She will also be the Spring 2017 Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center for Poetry.   

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Online Feature: “Some Advice for Both of Us” by Keetje Kuipers

 

Just once, let the glossy body lie in its own
tangled grasses. Admit the doors uncoupled
from their latches to allow us through were ones
we shouldered open. This is not the way—

forcing fruit to sugar in our hands. When our mothers
told us to love, they meant that we should wear
warm socks to bed. Look at their beds. If the garden

is not a garden, and if its tiny lamps illuminate only
their own darknesses, we must hold ourselves inside
forever. This is what oceans are for. This is why 2am.
Because now that touch is less of a medicine—less touch.

This poem appeared in Indiana Review 35.1, Winter 2013.

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30_DSC5432Keetje Kuipers has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail, was published by BOA in 2014. Keetje is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University where she is Editor of Southern Humanities Review.

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Online Feature: “In a Time of War” by Hannah Gamble

 

That was the period when our daughter
would come crying into our bedroom
whenever the grackles began mating on the roof.
It isn’t hurting them, my wife would say,

birds have tiny penises. Then two cats would
find their way into our bushes and start howling
like their skin was being peeled off. Oh, our daughter
with the endless tears. I brought my wife wine

every night for a week, hoping I’d arrange for us a son.
The cats aren’t killing each other, sweetness,
said my wife’s purple lips, it’s just that all male cats,
not just the wild ones, have barbs on their penises.

What what what, sobbed my daughter, is a penis?
A son, a son, a son, I thought, as I held my wife
at the hips, both of us on the floor to avoid hitting
the wall with our bed; our daughter had cried herself

into unconsciousness, and maybe I was sure
she wouldn’t hear when I yelled my way farther
into my wife, my mouth still in a “son” shape.
Our daughter woke herself up with a howl

she didn’t know the reason for, and my wife
turned back at me with several reasons to scowl
texturing her red face. We were covered
when our daughter came in, tears and snot

curling her hair against her cheeks. It’s ok, lovely,
my wife said I was just on the floor looking
for something and I was caught by a tiny barb.
I took it out, and now I’m going to go to sleep.

This poem appeared in Indiana Review 32.1, Summer 2010.

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Screen Shot 2015-10-18 at 7.33.30 PMHannah Gamble is the author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast (Fence Books, 2012), selected by Bernadette Mayer for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She has performed her work at the Pitchfork music festival, the Chicago Art Institute, The Chicago MCA, and as part of the Clark Street Bridge arts series in association with FCB Global.

Gamble’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Believer, jubilat, and Pleiades, and she has written for the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the culture magazine Fanzine. In 2014, Gamble was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

She lives in Chicago.

 

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Online Feature: “Bucolic Calling” by Rebecca Lehmann

 

These were the times to fear. We were already falling. And had been. What we wanted were purple slugs, a slime to sing to. Give us the pretty girls, the pretty boys, the little child dead and mossy at the bottom of the well. Our hands against the stones were pounding, were pounding and bloody palmed. Look at us, at the bottom of the false wooden bottom, playing a joke on Mom. Look at her face, twisted with terror. But such was the age of us. We with our sunburned cheeks, with our frostbitten toes. We didn’t care if they fell off. We wanted them to. We begged for it: Please, please, God of the Toes, take ours as sacrifice and bring us a field of moist corn stalks and pig shit. In the apple orchard the sticks stung like meanies. We unzipped ourselves and climbed the stout trunks. I had an apple in my hand and it was bruising as I threw it, the air pushing its skin in. Yours was a rotten one, already bruised and flying apart in the apple leaves, depositing its brown and mushy flesh in splatters. This was the way we came and Mom was in the gravel road crying and we laughed at her. We laughed and we laughed at her silly poor-person jacket and we laughed at her face, and at her silly tears.

This poem appeared in Indiana Review 31.1, Summer 2009.

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Rebecca Lehmann is the author of Between the Crackups (Salt, 2011). Her poems are published or forthcoming in Fence, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and other journals. She teaches creative writing at SUNY Potsdam.

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IR Editors’ Poetry Wish List!

 

Winter is coming, and 2015 is winding down. For us, that means submissions are closed, and we have the honor to read the deluge of great poetry sent our way. Selecting work is no easy task. And in the spirit of the upcoming holidays and the upcoming 2016 Poetry Prize judged by Camille Rankine, three MFA Poetry Candidates on Indiana Review’s staff weigh in on what they value–and what they might want to see in the poems that make them want to say Yes!

Read more…