Krysten Hill teaches and writes poetry in Boston. Her first book, How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions), gives us a whole batch of poems as rich with family as this one, with its wrecked pie and found tenderness. You can feel the burn here as it happens: it feels like your own “wrist catches / on the metal lip of the rack.” I think that sudden physical vulnerability opens us up to what happens next, what has happened before, and all the tragedies big and small that we move through “like it’s no big thing.”
In this poem, as in so much of her work, Hill helps us feel the rich texture of real life—its hot stoves, fresh pies, and grieving. If we look carefully, we might even learn by example how to let our own minds “go into another room where it can be / unbothered.”

FEAST

Never felt like my hands belonged anywhere
near my aunt’s kitchen unless
the food was already made
and I was fixing myself a plate.
When she trusts me with a job
as important as the sweet potato pie,
of course my hand shakes pulling it out
the oven, trying to make it look as easy
as she does, and my wrist catches
on the metal lip of the rack and I drop
what took me too long to peel
and boil and season in the first place.
There are worst things to fall to your knees for,
but I don’t know, in a black woman’s kitchen
this feels like a sin. Instead of casting me out,
she steps over the mess on her floor
and sets her eyes on my injury,
turning the puckering skin of my wrist
over in her hands, saying it don’t look that bad
like she’s done all my life when I broke
my face on the sidewalk or cut my own hair.

She starts over on another pie like it’s no big thing,
like she did when my uncle went into a bedroom closet,
and bit down on the barrel of his revolver. After
the funeral she stayed in the kitchen
even when company came and tried
to take over her grief. She just kept making
her own mourning feast, pulling heavy
pans out the oven. Like then, I watch her
mind go into another room where it can be
unbothered. While I nurse my burn with
the aloe she grows on the windowsill, she hums,
blending brown sugar and butter
to the soft boiled bodies of sweet potato,
her brisk cinnamon hand turning orbits
of gold in the cracked clay bowl
that stays steady on her hip.

Illustration by Kevin Alves

The post A Poem by Krysten Hill appeared first on Take Magazine.

Nancy won’t let me take her picture. She says she doesn’t look cute enough. I tell her no one has ever been cuter in the history of the world, and she laughs her particular laugh that is too hard to describe because words like “barking” don’t sound ladylike or pretty but her laugh is so loud and sudden and earned that it fills me with tenderness and makes me happy all at once.

There are chainsaw-carved bears on a bench outside, where people smoke. Linda painted their eyes gold. She tells me sometimes she talks to them. She is one of the owners, has a gold necklace that says DRINKING FOUNTAIN. I take a photo of the necklace, say “It’s lopsided.” “Like the owner,” she says. She doesn’t want me to take pictures of her face. I reach out to straighten the necklace, pretending I am pulling her shirt open. She laughs and goes to unbutton her blouse, tilts her head to say “that’s extra.”

photo by Josey Packard

Lala takes your food order. Her hair always looks beautiful. It makes her happy to see you eat. She brings enormous grilled chicken salads out in a take-out container, because there’s no way you can eat the whole thing. The burgers are like the ones your gramma made but bigger. After you order them, you start rolling up your sleeves, because the burger is going to run down your arms, drip to the bar off your elbows. They will give you extra napkins. You don’t have to ask.

The Drinking Fountain, photo by Robert Maloney

In the afternoon the bar is open and the TVs are on. People watching westerns or Family Feud, calling out the answers together. In the early evening it’s local news, a black lady subway driver and a older white guy plumber hanging out together talking about crime or traffic. A woman named Isabella taught me to salsa dance with her on St. Patrick’s Day. Nobody cares that we are gay, nobody asks us what we do in bed. Everybody wants to talk about taxes, cable bills, shout at the TV: “SHUT UP! JESUS CHRIST!”

The author with Patricia Adams and John Demeter

The other night we meet a black guy with blonde dreds, Jacob, who says he’s in town from Connecticut to fetch his girlfriend from Amsterdam when she arrives at Logan. He buys us shots of Jameson and introduces us to the white lesbians who he is staying with. They live on the street. Then a white biker gang comes in and starts fighting with each other until Nancy, wearing the sparkle butterfly hair clips from The Christmas Tree shop, says “THIS IS NOT THAT KIND OF BAR. TAKE IT OUTSIDE AND SOLVE IT AND THEN I’LL SERVE YOU.”

So the bad element leaves and the sweet leather-vested bikers that are left take selfies with the laughing black regulars.

It’s always like that—people sharing pizza or wings or dancing or singing along or giving each other a ration of shit. Patti cashes out the scratch tickets, hugs us sometimes, made us corned beef sandwiches for St. Patrick’s Day, shakes her head when she sees us, saying, “There’s Trouble and Trouble.” We loaned Albert our shop lights so he could see to re-tile his bathroom.

Rosie, photo by Jill McDonough

Gina knew my book got reviewed in the New York Times Book Review because we went in there to celebrate, take pictures of the print copy. And she remembers, asks the next time we see her, “How you doing with your book published?” “Good! Yeah! People are saying nice things.” She nods, shrugs: “Well, you got the brains.” Which is the nicest thing anybody has ever said to anybody. Thank you, Gina.

Gina, photo by Jill McDonough

We all feel ownership of the bar, feel like it belongs to us, which is hard for Linda, who is sick of people asking can I have the fire hydrant, can I have the ladder now that the place is closing down, taking it apart piece by piece. I told her that we all love the place so much we feel like it’s ours. The way you see a famous person on TV and feel like you know each other, like you’re friends.

The photos fall short, like any photo of the Grand Canyon or the moon. But I’m still glad I have them.

Top image by Robert Maloney

The post Drinking at the Fountain appeared first on Take Magazine.

Our country’s gone off the rails. Absurd, bizarre, fantastic, foolish, nonsensical, preposterous, unreal, wild. Our country’s gone so far over the edge that tweeting the correct spelling of “hereby” is enough to clown on the POTUS.

The grown-ups at Merriam-Webster—and all the words tucked away in their Springfield, Massachusetts offices—are here to help. Merriam-webster.com gets 100 million page views a month, allowing them to see which words Americans are reaching for most, and when.  Like “surreal,” the word of the year for 2016, which just barely beat out “fascism.”

Merriam-Webster, Springfield, Massachusetts

Is it trolling to simply point out a spike in folks looking up “feminism” after Kellyanne Conway says she’s not a feminist? Can a definition be snarky? Is it throwing shade to post the definition of “fact” when your government keeps offering alternative ones? Does it make me happy to answer “yes”?

Lauren Naturale got the job running the Merriam-Webster Twitter account when the company tweeted a call for a social media manager: “I saw the job and I stayed up all night working on my application,” she says. “I was thrilled when I got the phone call saying M-W wanted to hire me. My wife bought me flowers, we drank sparkling wine out of IKEA champagne flutes, and two weeks later, I started work.”

Peter Sokolowski, Editor-at-Large, gave me a tour of the foxed wonders in the Springfield office. Card catalogs there are filled with 17 million words as they are used—an uncontested record of the greatest number of words in one spot.  Just raw dictionary.  Uncut. Another cabinet contains all of the words spelled backward, for, say, making a rhyming dictionary back before the world was digitized. This fills me with wonder, makes me want to roll around in perforated index cards like they’re autumn leaves.

Merriam-Webster, Springfield, Massachusetts

Merriam-Webster is doing what it’s always done: telling the truth about words. “This is not us being progressive,” Sokolowski says. “This is just us being accurate.” The earnest precision of the dictionary in its earlier print versions informs the trustworthiness of the current digital voice.

Look how hard the New International Third edition works to let you know what “puce” looks like: “dark red that is yellower and less strong than cranberry, paler and slightly yellower than average garnet, bluer and paler than average wine.”

Come ON.

Merriam-Webster – publishes reference books, especially dictionaries.
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The post Did You Know? Behind the Scenes at Merriam-Webster appeared first on Take Magazine.

Here’s what I love in art: made things, and mash-ups of high and low culture, and things that make me think. Sacred/profane, everyday/elevated. I’m a poetry professor, best job in the world. When I’m teaching poetic meter I like to point out that “kaPOW” is an iamb, as in iambic pentameter. And “MOtherFUCKer” is two trochees, like in trochaic trimeter. Big words students don’t know yet and little words they didn’t know they were allowed to use in art. My job is awesome because I get to be the one to give them permission. KaPOW!

So I was 80 percent in love with Roberto Lugo just from looking at his website. There are images of Lugo himself, beautiful self-portraits, his body big and legible in its baseball caps and musing open mouths. There are pandas that loom like his spirit animal, pandas that look like him. One patchwork panda is aiming two guns, an Eats Shoots and Leaves joke. His paintings are beautiful, detailed, accomplished, and look like graffiti—the drip marks, the defiant fonts. My favorite says “TO THAT ONE GUY WHO SAID I SUCK YOU LOSE.” (Five iambs, by the way; iambic pentameter. This line is part of a sonnet I want to read. Can I write it? Can I write it and give it to Roberto Lugo as an artist-crush mash note?) When he talks about the difference between teaching little kids at summer camp and teaching college students, he says, “Kids at camp feel limitless and have to be taught very little, as their imaginations are boundless. College students often have to be taught to be as fearless as their childhood selves.” He’s giving them permission!

Photo by Kenek Photography, courtesy of the Wexler Gallery

Roberto Lugo’s email address is thismachinekillshate@gmail.com. There’s a kind of earnest tenderness there, and it translates to his work—affectionate portraits of real faces with sideways glances, on jars and teapots loaded up with color, pattern, ornament, crowns, touches of gold. They glorify, deify everything they feature: Bernie Sanders, Trayvon Martin, chubby sparrows breathing puffs of visible vapor, Abe Lincoln, Ghostface Killah, Frida Kahlo, Bert of Bert and Ernie, Biggie Smalls.

Lugo refers to himself as “a ghetto potter,” adding, “The word ‘ghetto’ can be seen as a negative, but I equate ‘ghetto’ with the word ‘resourceful.'” His dad used to take old washing machine engines, MacGyver them into massive food processors with tin can lids, make a shit-ton of masa, and sell it for cash money. One recent show included a video, “Ghetto is Re-Source-Ful,” that shows Roberto Lugo walking around garbage-strewn streets in Philadelphia, finding a shovel in a trash heap. We see him use it to dig up some soil to sieve to make clay, see him tagging a wall with a chunk of broken brick as a marker, drawing one of his signature crowns. The video shows him making a potter’s wheel out of a trashed tire hub, a Goya can, a tree trunk someone has tagged “SPIC,” and a lot of duct tape and rope. Then he uses it, makes a new pot on the spot.

His 2015 show at Ferrin Gallery, “Ghetto Garniture: Wu Tang Worcester,” isn’t talking about Worcester, Massachusetts, but Royal Worcester, maybe the oldest English porcelain brand that’s still making stuff. By creating a Royal Worcester style of decorative vessel with street graffiti looks, pairing traditional Turkish patterns with the colors and symbols of Puerto Rico, he highlights “beauty in integration and tolerance.” He also makes some crazy pots. Like “Food Stamp Ware:” a blue and white vase with images from a food stamp. Lincoln’s on the five dollar food stamp, so there he is: the reverse side is a landscape from the same bill.

“When I grow up, I want to be a ceramics professor” doesn’t occur to most of us—not Lugo, either. When he was a kid in Philadelphia, playing in the abandoned cars and tagging the neighborhood with his brother, he got work at a Christmas wreath factory. He worked there every year from the time he was 13 until he was 19. He also worked as a doorman, a security guard, a death claims specialist, a call center receptionist, a shop clerk, and a bus boy.  The first thing he ever made in clay was a fire hydrant soap dispenser, “to commemorate my father and I showering in the fire hydrant.”

Photo by Kenek Photography, courtesy of the Wexler Gallery – “Ol’ Dirty Bastard (ODB) and Dr. Cornel West,” 2015

Now he’s got a sweet job teaching ceramics at Marlboro College in Vermont, a wife and baby, and a solo show up at Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia through June 11. The video diary entries he posts on Facebook are short raps about whatever’s going on. The one about getting to go back to Philadelphia, his hometown, includes: “They used to hate me, but now they pay me … I tell them what I do and people be like, ‘Really, dog?'” 

This kind of generosity and transparency comes through in Lugo’s teaching, too. He still remembers the first person who told him he was a good artist: Professor Jay Spalding at Seminole State College. Lugo is finding fresh ways to honor that memory. One of his videos is a sort -of how-to for his students, after Biggie Smalls’ “Ten Crack Commandments”—“Ten Pot Commandments.” Number Nine: “No, that glaze is not fine. You need to sieve that shit twice so it come out nice.” He shakes a finger at the screen. Who doesn’t want to take a ceramics course with this guy? “Follow these rules you’ll have mad fun making stuff, less time breaking stuff.”

His life, his voice, his body, is at the center of these beautiful, surprising pieces. I kept thinking about his body, why it is important to me—how he dresses, his face, big human-loving eyes. So often they’re featured on the pots themselves—these fancy urns with a portrait not of a duke or the queen of England, but some guy who looks like he lives in my neighborhood, and we smile when we run into each other at the bodega.  

That fixation I had with seeing this real guy on these fine things made me ask myself why I was so surprised and delighted by it, what that meant. What ideas was I carrying around about what ceramic artists look like, or whose faces deserve to be on a pretty teapot? Do I just figure they’re all white? All dead? 

Photo by Kenek Photography, courtesy of the Wexler Gallery – “All about the Benjamins Century Vase,” 2016

I realized I had some ideas about the hands that make simpler pottery, the coffee cups I use every day—my dad is a potter, after all. But this kind of high-end, decorative, gilded porcelain, things that belong in vitrines in museums, they seem to me unworldly, sui generis, untouched by human hands. Not something I deserve access to, something anyone is allowed to touch. They come out of a fancy factory in The Europe, and rich people get them for getting married.  

But there he is, a guy from Philly with a backward baseball cap and a Puerto Rican-flag bandanna, humanizing these beautiful objects. They are delicate and real, claiming status and fame for their maker, giving us access to their kind of perfection. Roberto Lugo makes dirt into delicate machines that are very busy exalting us all.

The post Crushing Out on Roberto Lugo appeared first on Take Magazine.

I love Major Jackson. He has a big laugh, he’s a good drinker, and he’s an accomplished poet. We met 15 years ago, when he was my downstairs neighbor at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Back then, he was coming from Philly by way of New Orleans; by now, he’s been everywhere. His new book of poems, Roll Deep, takes us with him as he leaves, again and again, his home in Burlington, Vermont—its “ticking clocks” and “darkened policies of snow.” In these poems, we travel with Jackson via SEPTA, taxi, or the Aegean Speed Lines; “on a crowded matatu”; with a “UN Somali driver”; by “lifting up and away from the airstrips’ macadam”; by “walking along a narrow country road past Relais / San Bruno”; “on a plane above / Buenos Aires”; or by deciding to just “jog through this suburb at a blue hour / when bliss blows over dewy lawns / and neighbors walk suspicious dogs.”

Imagine what it’s like to jog again in Burlington, jetlagged from your trips to Greece, Spain, Brazil, Kenya, and Italy, the sites of Roll Deep’s second section. He says that when he first moved to Vermont he thought he was “dreaming in green.” Now Burlington is where Jackson is when he gets home, his “obedient rolling bag / like a pet” beside him. This ambitious, worldly book of poems looks open eyed at how when food relief arrives in Kenya, “they wait for the First / of the Month like the poor in Detroit”; it recognizes “how in Congo Square / on Sundays, African dances kept six hundred slaves alive.” And it’s open to more than the hurts and near misses of the world—the speaker in some of these poems talks to himself about “the major / hurts you’ve caused in loving too many women,” saying, “I want to kill the polygamist in me.” But alongside those flashes of regret, this history of hurt, are so many wonders: “dice in dreams,” “my brown face in a glass of rum,” and “two nonchalant giraffes” are all right there by “the girl who sells her limbs for all her body can take.”

I asked Jackson what it was like to come home to Vermont between all this globe circling, and he had a typically beautiful, thoughtful answer: “Its rich history [and] moderate-to-leftist-leaning politics; its breathtaking, natural views of mountains and lakes; and the people’s ecological awareness are what keep me planted such that adventures in other lands might be exercises in reaffirming my belief that Vermont rivals places like Ireland or the Pyrenees in beauty. Vermont is almost savage in its sublimity. Save for mud season, one can nearly almost always walk outside and lose one’s breath. Writers—well, this writer—almost require some daily reminder of the grandeur of existence. As William Blake states, ‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet.’ Burlington has views of both the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. I feel fortunate to return home after long days of travel. It is here that I most calibrate toward clarity and meaning.”

We can feel fortunate this terrific writer is here, and almost as young as I am, and so prolific.

Enchanters of Addison County

by Major Jackson

We were more than gestural, close-listening,
the scent of manure writing its waft on the leaves
off Route 22A. By nightfall, our gaze flecked
like loon cries, but no one was up for turnips
nor other roots, not least of which the clergy.
Romanticism has its detractors, which is why
we lined the road with tea-lit luminaries
and fresh-cut lemons. We called it making magic,
then stormed the corners and porches
of General Stores, kissing whenever cars idled
at four way stop signs or sought Grade A maple syrup
in tin containers with painted scenes of horse-drawn
farmers plowing through snow. The silhouetted, rusted
farm equipment gave us the laidback heaven
we so often wished, and fireflies bequeathed earth stars,
such blink and blank and bunk-a-bunk-bunk.
And of course we wondered if we existed,
and also too, the cows in the ancient pastures,
and the white milk inside our heads
like church spires and ice cream cones.
Even after all of that cha-cha-cha, we still came
out of swimming holes shivering our hearts out.

The poem appears in Roll Deep, which is available now from W. W. Norton

Photo by Erin Patrice O’Brien

The post When Men and Mountains Meet appeared first on Take Magazine.

Josey and I get girled a lot. People like us, want to be

our friends. They say Hi, girls or What’ll it be,

girls, when they’d never call dudes boys, call some

straight couple kids. But don’t worry about it. It’s fine.

We’re girls at the Auto-Rite; diners; toll booths;

The Drinking Fountain, our favorite secret bar.

You can tell a secret in a poem and it will stay a secret

forever. No one reads poems except for me and you.

The Drinking Fountain’s by the car wash, for after

the thud and squeak of cozy suds, jolt of correlator,

conveyer belt nudging us like baggage. We’re lugged

as groceries, not up to us anymore. The car wash

is sexy—tugged into now languid, now hurried slaps

of fresh blue sudsy rags, taken over, into the private half

light, a tunnel of suds. So there is kissing, sudden happiness,

still. I google, learn mitter curtain, part of the pre-soak arch.

I knew I’d love the lingo, knew there was more than undercarriage,

hot wax, tire bright. Albert ladies us. But Hi girls! calls Gina

or Linda or Nancy when we walk in to the dim din, Brian Williams

on one tv, Law and Order SVU on the other. Josey gets a G&T

and a Black Pearls scratch ticket, or Cash Blast, spondees

that make me laugh. I get the beach of a five-count Bacardi

on ice with Coke, lime wedge in an eight ounce glass. A white guy

tells Josey she looks like Michael Jackson. A black lady regular

rolls her eyes. The guy says I’m not saying she looks like a man,

and I shrug But she does. Or, more than grown-man Michael, right?

We all talk Michael’s noses, Jackson Five to death, determine

when Josey’s nose comes in. Gina tells us come back

St. Patrick’s Day, her conned beef sandwiches, free

for everybody after three. If I have one more I’ll cry, so in love

with the car wash, bar, with Josey, Boston, you. We go to the Drive-Thru

Car Wash whenever there’s salt. Because our red Ford Ranger’s

chassis rusted so you could see sunlight shine through. And the guys

at Morrison’s Auto-Rite said, all sad, you girls can’t drive it anymore.

Jill McDonough‘s poetry has been described as “a gift for those of us who think the poet’s profession is to invent a new language for a singular vision.” The winner of three Pushcart prizes and a 2014 Lannan Literary Fellowship, McDonough is the author of Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008), a collection of sonnets about U.S. public executions; Oh, James! (Seven Kitchens, 2012), poetry inspired by James Bond films; and the autobiographical Where You Live (Salt, 2012). Before becoming a professor of poetry at UMass-Boston, she taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for 13 years. “Car Wash” is part of her forthcoming book, Reaper (Alice James Books).

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