#syracuse mfa program

[scicchitano]

and did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

i did.

and what did you want?

to call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

[scicchitano]

lights in the twilight, lights of Solvay over the expanse of frozen snow-covered lake, orange lights of the refineries, yellow and green and red lights of the neon along the strip, lights as if undersea, the argon just coming to exist, all lights in the cold moisture of the grounded wind staggering across the lake at twilight are blurred, are meaningless, they call, together, with a sound unintelligible and of no interest; but in the slate sky above the imagined horizon like an old lantern left long ago on top of a heap of slag the evening star alone is bright and clear and alone responds to this knowledge of death too soon that comes in the loneliness of twilight and dying wind, the loneliness of decayed and useless and ragged fear and the soundless cry for a thing that has no name. . . .

Onondaga, Early December, Hayden Carruth

[scicchitano]

You don't always have to be the boy. Just today. Don't ask me to make a fist when I am not angry. After all, it isn't what you say or how you say it, so much as I am the kind of person who will be weather if you ask nicely.

Being The Boy, Gina Gail

[scicchitano]

There is a good reason I am not God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten. I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite your best efforts you are every second alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.

Mary Karr, Suicide Note: An Annual

[scicchitano]

my introduction, bruce smith, graduation, today

S, CI, CC, HI, TANO. 3 C'S, ONE SHICK,

SCICCHITANO. All honor to her name.

Jessica was born in Syracuse, and shares the unacknowledged legislator of the world/poet laureateship with Chris Kennedy. Her mother thought she had birthed a poet, the legend goes, and she was right. By three she was reading the newspaper, which unfortunately was the Syracuse newspaper, the "Sub" Standard, which explains her mixture of gritty social realism and surrealism and social destruction. After years of spending her teen years listening to Tori Amos and Massive Attack on the boom box, Jessica has the revelation that words and poetry were the only route for her. She charted a course into the infinite, or at least into Onondaga County. She came to SU at 21 when her professor at OCC, an MFA graduate, told Jessica her essays "read like poetry." She spent seven years at SU, and this explains in her words, "where my incoherence comes from."

Where did she come from? She's hard to figure out by the terms of nurture or nature. Some say she's the creation of Lou Reed and Terri Zollo. She is authentic, aboriginal, bona fide, hip fashionista, Platonic demiurgic jukebox.

And she can write a lick or a shick

4 Summers in New York City Jessica spent interning for Women's Wear Daily, Bullett, and Vanity Fair where she lived between fashion and writing in a place that would accept her strange vernacular.

One of the formative memories for her was when Stephen Dunn said he didn't understand her work. Not understanding is the beginning of new survival strategies and sounds and meter making arguments and meaning making and sonnets.

She is a poet on whom nothing is lost, which is to say she can only use anything, everything. The new poems are emergencies not in the waging of taste only, nor the exercise of argument, but like love the experience of imminent revelation. Her poetry is a war between excess and conclusiveness. It pitches a tent somewhere between hysteria and haiku, or "panic attack and artifice." There is always a stylish attack, as the jazz musicians say, the manner in which the tone is articulated. There is beauty and style, always style, a Syracuse baroque, as a way to modify the exigencies of life. There are patterns and there are gaudy variations.

They are surprising and new and about to get all Scicchitano on you.

[scicchitano]

the dream of a friend, sent by text post-blood moon

"all morning you were in my dreams. our families were close. we were all criminals and kept getting caught and arrested. bill murray was the head of the crime ring. you typically got off because of your health. and, you acted insane when you needed to. you were always holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder and wore black in mourning when anyone was in jail. we had several younger and older brothers between us and we loved them fiercely. you were in love with a man and we all wondered why because he was a fuck up, but you were so devoted to him it was scary. we lived in a stone house by the sea. we got messages by boat. it was always cloudy and raining but you liked the sea birds. you were always worried about your mother and sending your brothers to check on her. you had a temper and took it out on everyone but me. you held my hand a lot. in general, you were very protective of me. your red lipstick got all over everything. even the walls."

[scicchitano]

The reason this is community’s best definition is because it is the ubiquitous response to the exhalations of the metropolis. This is why every effort answering homeward is a deviation from a straight line. The reason that efficiency is transferable has to do with how even lingering here under your window names a way in which I recreate myself. If it’s not too cliché to say so, the reason I didn’t whisper all my details into the delicate cavity of your ear was to manipulate my credit rating. Our love also wants to accumulate a narrative. The reason I reacted with restlessness is thus a structural flaw. Thus, the reason that I imagined my fatigue was to arrest sleep a little longer. That this ending will outperform even itself is reason enough for it to be necessarily repeated.

Michael Aird, In Successive Over-Relaxation, Salt Hill Journal 33

The nonfiction we have found for this issue is just.

[scicchitano]

1 The other day my wristwatch came apart – not the time but the band, not the beginning but the end. The sun did not shine, but it had not shown itself for a handful of days. Night came on early, but it is that part of the year, at least here, where night does that. One friend says “you can take my word for the sun,” misunderstood this as: some sentences are like sun and the moon, some moon or sun, some night only but near night or far night – consolation in either case. 2 Wish friend had said “take my friendship for the sun” Am missing the sun – but the orbit or a human closeness over time begins to resemble the misshapen stand of a watchband, or the case of moonlight held only in the hands of illusion / accompaniment - the moon is moving a few feet (or is it inches) away from the earth every year – whether “it” collided with us (thus forming) is beside the point. The moon moves away like our lives from ourselves.

The Other Day, Michael Burkard