Follow these fourteen poems through the brine of memory’s streetlights and locker rooms, tenderly prodding the edges of early grief as Tas Tobey looks unflinchingly into the fist of urban adolescence. Each line crackles with friction as our speaker tunes himself to each threat and mercy, ultimately coming to rest in the promise of a hard-won future.
From our contest judge, Alicia Mountain: Rough Cut brings readers into a reflective and confessional reckoning with manhood, sonically and imagistically alive. This chapbook is equal parts rough cheek and clean-shaven, muscle and softness, mumble and holler, benediction and doubt and knowing. Through its wholehearted and clear-eyed speaker, Rough Cut makes the case that even the grown are still growing. We readers are given permission to be in process, too, with a bold, earnest voice as our companion.
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Tas Tobey is a writer pursuing an MFA in poetry at the City College of New York. His poems have appeared in Ghost City Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, The Carson Review and elsewhere. His criticism and reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Complex. He lives in Brooklyn.
the thing about not watching my father grow old
is I’m never sure what I’m gonna get, cuz
if you don’t have your folks around
to look at––if all you have to look at is a picture
of a man standing at the edge of a meadow
lined with chicory holding a shotgun––you
don’t have a good idea really of where
you’re headed. What I like most about rage is not
its teeth-gritted warmth but the way it soars thru
the bones clear into the swing of our shadows &
what I like most about death is the smoothness
with which it muffles & blurs the outside world
like a rain-beat windowpane
while inside an entire orchestra moans
catastrophe & everywhere you go
all you can hear is this chorus of violent so after
a while you don’t go anywhere anymore you
just sit in a parking lot in your used up ride &
chainsmoke Parliaments & you
don’t bother rolling down the window cuz
you actually like the smoke––how it swirls
& hangs in the still air like an answer
& the whip fills up like a soul & your jagged breath
slows & the world too & all becomes background
noise & there’s this cozy distance separating you &
every other organism on earth
& in the strange arms of this new quiet
eyes you’d forgotten snap open & from here
you see everything––poplars swaying
like teenagers in the dark, breeze rustling them
towards song & it’s been said that singing is the
closest some men come to crying & who can
resist the beauty in that?
that unlike my father most of these trees
will die standing.
Some, if you can imagine it––even
while dying, even dead––will dance.
