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Chute by Alicia Jo Rabins

Chute

Each time a baby is born
the universe squeezes itself
through a chute,
the same chute
into which
suicides squeeze themselves.
Its mouth
is lined with small iron teeth.
When you bathe your father
who has become like a child,
you feel the teeth
on your fingers.
When your father asks
who you are,
it means his legs have been
sucked in.
For you the tunnel’s
mouth is closed;
for him it is open
and oiled.

 

 

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Alicia Jo Rabins is a Brooklyn-based poet, performer and composer who received her MFA from Warren Wilson. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, 6 x 6, Boston Review, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press) and Horse Poems (Knopf). As a musician she tours internationally; her original art-pop song cycle about Biblical women, Girls in Trouble, was released in October 2009 and she is the violinist in Golem, NYC’s punk-klezmer band.  She also holds a Masters in Jewish Women’s Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary and tutors bar and bat mitzvah students online.
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4 Poems by Sharmila Cohen

Augury likes to think of Telephone as our sister journal. Therefore, it is our honor to present 4 very small poems by one of the co-editors today!

 

4 Poems

The iron gates kept us out of the city
for weeks. When we finally broke through,
giant moths burst from the chimneys of every home.
When the sky cleared, our eyes burned
and all sight of the present was lost.
*
We are following the horn-tips
through the wilderness. Someone will be cursed
on behalf of goats. The walking stick broke
and scrambled down the mountain. This appeared
to be a prophecy. A fainting spell.
A mandatory sleep.
*
We galloped through the tunnels and tunnels led
to more tunnels. Sometimes fires would light
on the path ahead. During that era,
we were made of water. Those of us who evaporated
returned fully-formed in the cold evening.
*
The expedition failed
when someone tripped over a crate
of dead birds. We covered the body in feathers,
but blood could not be stopped. A dark trail
of wings rivered around the campsite.
*


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Sharmila Cohen lives in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of The New School’s M.F.A. program and co-editor of Telephone, a translation-based poetry journal. Her work can also be found in Harper’s Magazine, The Cortland Review, Shampoo, and Juked, among other places.
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Poetry at the Rubin

Augury Books is co-curating an evening of poetry at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.

150 W. 17 St., NYC 10011

Wednesday January 26, 2011 @ 7:00 PM
Price: $12.00
Member Price: $10.80

Poets Kimiko Hahn, Saskia Hamilton, Noelle Kocot, David Lehman, Ben Lerner, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Stacy Szymaszek read poems by themselves and others on the themes of absence, emptiness, and…nothing.

“if there’s nowhere to rest at the end how can I get lost along the way?”

–Ikkyu

For more information and to buy tickets in advance please visit the Rubin Museum website.

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Augury, Defined

The Sacred Wood (Arnold Bocklin, 1882)

An augur, in the classical world of Rome and Etruria, was a priest who interpreted the will of the gods by studying the patterns made by flights of birds and other animals. After observing the animals’ actions (whether silent or making sounds, solitary or in groups, in which direction and if they stopped to rest), the augur would then divine what message the gods intended to convey so that the proper sacrifices could be made.

In modern parlance, the term has shifted from meaning a person who uses the natural world to interpret the super-natural or supra-natural to mean an event that indicates important things to come, similar to an omen.

We at Augury Press like the word, as well as divination and birds.