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"Notes on a Mass Stranding"/Split This Rock Poem of the Week

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Kamilah Aisha Moon  Photo by: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Notes on a Mass Stranding       I. Huge dashes in the sand, two or three times a year they swim like words in a sentence toward the period of the beach, lured into sunning themselves like humans do-- forgetting gravity, smothered in the absence of waves and high tides. II. [Pilot whales beach themselves] when their sonar becomes scrambled in shallow water or when a sick member of the pod heads for shore and others follow III. 61 of them on top of the South Island wade into Farewell Spit. 18 needed help with their demises this time, the sharp mercy of knives still the slow motion heft of each ocean heart. IV. Yes--even those born pilots, those who have grown large and graceful lose their way, found on their sides season after season. Is it more natural to care or not to care? Terrifying to be reminded a fluke can fling anything or anyone out of this world. V. Oh, the endings we swim toward without thinking! Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders and sirens forever sexy                                             land or sea. The unequaled rush and horror of forgetting ourselves   -Kamilah Aisha Moon        Used by permission.   Kamilah Aisha Moon's poetry collection She Has A Name is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Her work has been featured in Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou'wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo and Villanelles, among other journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships to Cave Canem, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and The Vermont Studio Center. Moon received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.         Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

"barreras"/Split This Rock Poem of the Week

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  María Luisa Arroyo                                                                      barreras      para Martín Espada (1993) Mami called us away from the roach trap line where novice factory workers, fresh from the island, and I, fresh from Germany, poked protruding yellow chunks of roach bait into black traps with long-stem Q-tips we dunked in alcohol. Another safety meeting. My first. El jefe de la factoría faced us and heard nothing by the silence of women hablando y bochincheando in Tidy-Bowl blue uniforms. "Safety shoes should.... Factory goggles are .... Hairnets must...." All the Spanish he knew could have fit into one of those trampas, too little to translate what Flora, Aida, and Teresa needed to know. A heavy box fell and crushed a few of Flora's dedos del pie. Alcohol splashed into Aida's ojos. The uncovered motor yanked out one of Teresa's trenzas. I broke rank and stood. "If safety is first, then why aren't your updates translated into Spanish?" How all uniforms blue shrank away from me, from my nasal twang, from that language that sounds as if I were chewing papas calientes o mucho chicle. For once, though, my mother was proud of my English. El jefe told me I could have been promoted to the shampoo line. -María Luisa Arroyo     Used by permission. Originally published in Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Press 2008)   Multilingual award-winning poet María Luisa Arroyo enjoys facilitating poetry workshops and has performed her poems widely, including in Chicago and Puerto Rico. Academically trained at Colby, Tufts, and Harvard in German, Arroyo has published poems in many journals, including CALYX, andPALABRA. Her publications include the poetry collection,Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Press 2008) and the multicultural anthology about bullying:Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, Catharsis(Skyhorse Publishing, 2012) co-edited with Magdalena Gómez.      Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

In Memory of Joshua Casteel: Conscientious Objector to the Iraq War

Joshua Casteel died from cancer that he believed was due to exposure to toxic fumes during his service in Iraq. 




Some of you may know his story.  From the Pax Christi website:

he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves at age 17 and received an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at 18; after training as an interrogator and studying Arabic, he served at the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, from June 2004 to January 2005, as a member of the interrogation units sent to overhaul the prison after the prisoner abuse scandal; during his time at Abu Ghraib, hecame to realize he was a conscientious objector and was honorably discharged from Active Duty as a conscientious objector. Josh wrote and spoke on his experiences during war, served on the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and published Letters From Abu Ghraib in 2008.

Solmaz Sharif's "Mess Hall"/Split This Rock Poem of the Week

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Solmaz Sharif                                                                    Photo by: Arash Saedinia   Mess Hall    Your knives tip down in the dish rack of the replica plantation home, you wash hands with soaps pressed into seahorses and scallop shells white to match your guest towels, and, like an escargot fork, you have found the dimensions small enough to break a man-- a wet rag, a bullet on the back of the cup the front like a bishop or an armless knight of the Ku Klux Klan the silhouette through your nighttime window a quartet plays a song you admire, outside a ring of concertina wire circles around a small collapse. America, ignore the window and look at your lap: even your dinner napkins are on fire. -Solmaz Sharif     Used by permission. Previously appeared in conjunction with Craft and Folk Art Museum's "Ehren Tool: Production or Destruction" exhibit.    Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif's first published poem, included in A World Between (George Braziller), was written at the age of 13. Since then, her work has appeared in jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, and others. Between 2002-2006, Sharif studied and taught with June Jordan's Poetry for the People. She is a winner of the "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a former Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012-2014.   Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

Zein El-Amine's "How to write a poem"

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Zein El-Amine                                                                    How to write a poem, according to Souha Bechara        Sit in their circle. Don't let your eyes linger on any object in the room. Extract yourself from your body. Watch the man with the hairy hands describe the rape of your body to the body. Watch him as he begins to beat the body. Focus on the arc of your liberated lower molar and make it everything: try to guess where it landed, crawl to it, find it, save it for later. Think about putting it back in one day. Ignore the wheeling of the cart. Ignore the stripped cable dangling above you. Find the tooth. Make solitary confinement your longed-for-solitude. Climb the walls: Press your palms on one wall, fingers pointed to the ceiling. Press your feet against the other wall. Build the pressure, step up with one foot and up with one hand. Repeat until your back is to the ceiling. Now survey the room. Do this once at mid-morning and once at mid-afternoon. Repeat daily. Do this for a decade. Make that crack under your door your world: Lie down and face the door. Look past the roaches, the fleas, and the lice, into the compressed light; wait for it to be interrupted. Study the soles of your captors. Match the voices with the soles match the soles with the names. Catalog them: the pigeon-toed, the limping soles, the canvas ones, the wooden ones. Delight at new soles. Now find a piece of graphite. Separate your toilet paper into plies. Stretch your scroll on the floor. Prostrate yourself. Grab the graphite between thumb and forefinger. It will feel crippling at first, your words will be undecipherable, but you will eventually write your tiny words with smooth curves. Set your intentions. Don't think of meanings, think of the time it will take to write your microscopic epic. After all, this is about time not about metaphors or similes or such. It's about rhyme and meter. So limit hope to the word, then extend it to the line, then to the stanza, then reach out for the winding night. Now write your first faint line. -Zein El-Amine   Used by permission. Zein El-Amine was born and raised in Lebanon. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland where he teaches Global Literature and Social Change and Arabic. His poems have been published by Wild River Review, Folio,Foreign Policy in Focus, Beltway Quarterly, DC Poets Against the War Anthology, Penumbra, GYST and Joybringer. His short stories have been published by Boundoff and Uno Masmagazines. Zein lives in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC and is a member of the Ella Jo Baker Housing Cooperative. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

Susan Briante's Utopia Minus

Utopia Minus is a haunting and haunted collection of post-industrial lyrics, what landscape painting would look like in the early 20th century, whereabout East Dallas.  And more than that: it's what happens to the self in such places, in this time, where all buildings are ruins in reverse, as Robert Smithson proposes.  In this sense, it feels very much like a post-9/11 book, where the apocalypse is not just the destruction of the Twin Towers, but the economic collapse as a result of rampant greed, unhinged capitalism, market meltdown.  Imperial hangover.


But somehow, the book offers a kind of wry hope--that beauty exists, that love is possible, that somehow we map ourselves a home. 
To whet your appetite for the book, read here.  And then get it.  Here's "Nail Guns in the Morning" :

Nail Guns in the Morning



Nail guns in the morning from the street behind my house,
Outside: tin roof, cement tabletops, “vast maw of modernity” (Sontag),
the UPS man, someone has painted all of my windows shut.

The study of trauma comes shortly after the steam engine,
an affliction known as “railway spine,” characterized by headaches, fatigue,
difficulty in breathing, reduction of sexual potency, stammering, cold sweats.

Report from Charles Dickens, June 1865, after train wreck:
.............Wakes up in sudden alarm,
..............Dreams much.

Storms this afternoon in Dallas
in the parking lot of the Target/Best Buy/Payless Shopping Center,
big chalices of rain, contusioned sky over the east, big yellow bus moving north
toward the dark end of—what?—

this weather, this fiscal year, this end of empire during which I am reading
the circulars stuck in my screen door, ice waiting
in the highest breath of atmosphere.
It will get to us.

I am patient on the living room couch,
let water drain from the kitchen sink.
Last night over dirty dishes, I told Farid
I would never write a poem that just said: Stop the War.

So frequently, I want a witness. Sit with me,
C. Dickens, let me tell you how bad
the food is on Amtrak, how a Pullman position
was a plum job for freedman, how stevedores once owned the city
hall, how Indians shot at us through the windows of the smoking car.

Stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war.


And another poem, "Other Denver Economies":

Protestors "Drummed" out of Drone Warfare Convention

Isn't it time we had a national conversation about the use of drones in warfare?  Medea Benjamin and Father Louis Vitale are trying to do their part to start that debate.  Vitale recently appeared on Democracy Now.

Check out the activities of peace activists around the issue of drone warfare:

"...To many, this is part of the price paid to defeat a treacherous enemy and maintain our national security. To Vitale, Benjamin and their colleagues, it's too great a price. And then he asks, "What is the impact on the people, what is the impact on our own people?"

The priest believes the incidents of predator operators suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder will be epidemic. His own experiences are anecdotal, he admits, but his conversations with British and U.S. military drone operators have been deeply troubling. Those onboard cameras not only spot suspected enemy targets, he notes, but they also reveal the damage wrought in unprecedented detail.

One Air Force veteran he spoke with talked of going from the "soccer part of his day (with his schoolchildren) to the killing part of his day," Vitale recalls. "He said the civilian casualties really bother him. 'When that happens, I don't sleep,' he said. You're bombing people, and it turns out to be civilians.

"What is the impact on our people?"

Vitale's cause may be spiritual, but to his critics, every step he takes is political. To be a devout practitioner of nonviolence is to ask questions about America's role on the world stage."

Split This Rock Poem of the Week: Cathy Linh Che"

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Cathy Linh Che                                                                                   Split         I see my mother at thirteen in a village so small, it's never given a name. Monsoon season drying up-- steam lifting in full-bodied waves. She chops corn for the hogs, her hair dipping to the small of her back as if dipped in black and polished to a shine. She wears a side-part that splits her hair into two uneven planes. They come to watch her, Americans, Marines, just boys, eighteen or nineteen. With scissor-fingers, they snip the air, repeat cut, point at their helmets and then at her hair. All they want is a small lock. What does she say to her mother to make her so afraid? Days later she will be sent away to the city for safekeeping. She will return home only once to be given away to my father. Her hair was dark, washed, and uncut.   -Cathy Linh Che   Used by permission. Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles, CA. Her first book of poems, winner the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2014. She has received fellowships from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, and Poets House. She is also co-editing an anthology of poetry and prose from the children of the Vietnam War called Inheriting the War. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

Paul Chappell's "Peaceful Revolution"

Earlier this summer, I got the chance to read Paul K. Chappell's Peaceful Revolution. It's well worth the read, even if much of his research is familiar to those who have read Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman's study On Killing (which he quotes here) and know many of the arguments about what war does to the human brain. "If human beings were naturally violent, why would every army in history have to expend so much effort in order to train people how to kill?" We need more Paul Chappells in the world.