Alicia Jo Rabins
Workspace 2009-2010
Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet and musician living in Brooklyn. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, The Boston Review, 6 x 6, Court Green, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press), and Horse Poems (Everyman's Library). She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and received a waiter scholarship at Bread Loaf Writers Conference. As a violinist, singer, and composer, Rabins tours internationally; her most recent release is "Girls in Trouble," an art-pop song cycle about women in the Old Testament (Jdub Records). She also studies and teaches ancient Jewish holy texts, and chirps regularly at @ohaliciajo.
Excerpt from A Book of Manuals:
How To Cross Country Ski
Bring whiskey. The snowflakes are tiny pillows; the snowflakes are white dots. Together they add up to a field for you to plow with your feet. You are a giant. You are in another country. Your thigh muscles are newborn mice. Listen: it is the silence of a houseful of sleepers. It’s a moon silence. Read the poem while it scrolls across the hills. It's in the static. You'll never get it again exactly like this.
Long Division
Long division left me alone and in pain. Nobody to take me to the ER or tell me it will be OK. Don't let this happen to you.
How To Make A Girl Come
Think of friends who died young. In other words, a candle hangs in the dark womb. Your job is to light the candle with your deepest match. Your deepest match is a string connecting your heart to your fingers. Along this string, thoughts of death seep into her. The ends of your fingers become four little skulls, and her vagina becomes a grave. This is the grave of winter, when spring moistens the soil. Once that happens, it is easy to let go of winter.
How To Be A Fish
It takes a long sharp knife. Throw the guts back in the water. Cannibal minnows gather and flutter. Sailors shelter here in hurricane season and visit the local girls. Susanna is nineteen and works in the kitchen. Her eyes are like minnows full of fear. When you challenge the bill, the head chef comes at you with a knife. Whose eyes you are looking out of, yours or the fish's? And then you ask: would I die underwater? And the fish, how did he learn to breathe?
A Mistaken View Of Angels
Perhaps they are beings a wave passed through once. This one, pale lady, perfect form stretched out on a plastic pool-chair in late morning like a white shark on a bed of lettuce, plated for the eyes. It’s forever ten o’clock on the sundial of the pool, and a woman turns into an angel with a single click. I believe her shoulder would be warm against my hand if I came to surprise her. I wouldn’t move my hand from that shoulder. She’s waiting for me.
