Alicia Casey

ON THE DAY OF TRANSLATION WORKSHOP

Oscar is gone. He is gone. Lost to speed
on a highway we never saw him dare
in daylight. I repeat: He will never come home.
I see him as a kitten, fitting inside my palm,
a comma, growing into his question-mark tail.
He lapped the lips of bottled beers. I can’t write
those nights spent buried in the ease of his fur.
My husband shovels him from the road, exhausts an hour
deciding the best truth to tell: he was mangled beyond
recognition, or he slipped into the horse field
and never returned. I get the facts because he knows
nothing’s worse than a closed casket, a bodiless funeral.
How do we quantify loss? The Russian interpreter
translates the word “elegy” wrong. First, eulogy, then sorry,
further abridging our inadequate language of grief.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

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Marcus Cafagña

LAST MEAL

In spite of doctor’s orders, she ate meat
and greasy fried potatoes after weeks of eating
nothing but miso and rice for a bleeding colon,
hiding her meds, most nights curled at the edge
of oblivion. Or she would rise from bed in terror
until I flicked on the light, opened the closet door
wide enough to see no jewel thief inside,
her one black boot overflowing with diamonds
and gold where she’d left it. I wanted to think
of our sharing a booth at the Burger King,
wanted to think of her hunger as the opposite
of depression. How could I forget stories
of the little girl her father called Cotton
singing and twirling on top of a bar table
for his drunken friends? I didn’t think
of the undercooked meat she’d been raised on,
the fatback cured in salt. Even strung-out,
Dianne dressed up, painted her lips
a deep red the way she would for Daddy.
She put gravity to the test, told me
she tried to hang herself with a belt
too flimsy for the job. I didn’t believe her
even after she gave our cats away,
convinced the white one was a witch,
even after the bad cut and dye job
seared the cotton-candy blonde to orange.
So long as that caustic wit of hers burned,
I thought she’d be okay. The more she chewed
and swallowed, the better she began to look.
The next day coming home with the Times,
I found her, hanging by the neck. Screaming,
I cut her down, tried to break her fall
with outstretched arms. My last moments
with my wife were spent shouting Come back,
giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
But, Lord, so help me, there was a second
when, I swear, her eyes opened and looked
back at me, when her lips unclenched,
as though startled awake she was on the verge
of speech, as if, even then, she had a choice.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

Ted Gilley

THE TULIP TREE

If you were lucky enough to live in Henry County, Virginia,
in 1962, when the knitting mills’ softball teams lifted red dust
as fine as smoke into the lights of Brown Street field
          on Friday nights;

where the wives of veterans sewed a thousand miles of waistbands
into a million pairs of underpants they tossed into the piecework bins
and bent over the hot machine to do it again before the whistle blew
          its breath down their throats;

and where children charged through the elbows and knees
of faded homemade clothes that couldn’t last long enough
to get passed down to their brothers and sisters,
          racing to catch up,

you would have seen a landscape bruised by the wheels of bicycles
left lying in the red dirt in the rain to rust overnight,
children hurtling down paths through the scrub pines
          all summer long,

some of them letting go, Daniel Simmons one of these,
shot by a friend in the woods as they hunted squirrels
and laid to rest in the green of the new graveyard,
          who never got the chance

to lie or to love or to learn the difference on the hot nights
when the girls who were almost women and distantly available
pressed their lips unceremoniously against yours
          in the dark car

to taste the breath of smoke and Coke and then come in late,
mesmerized in the light of the kitchen’s fluorescent halo
like an animal in a stall and go on up to bed
          and dream

of becoming a human being and to imagine, at breakfast,
that their parents were going the other way
when in fact they were just going to work,
          gathering again at the mill’s gate,

which lay in view of the school with its antique entrances
for boys and for girls—one each, for the purpose of keeping apart
those who could not be kept apart and knew it, who chewed pencils
          and spit blood

and wrote in their yearbooks of their forever-love, if girls,
and It’s been nice knowing ya, asshole, if boys,
who together fumbled the refined cotton and the elastic
          into something that would hold

until it gave way and who, when that moment came, were so
quieted the pale dye ran out of their eyes. The mills moved south,
the young turned away and the old reached out too late to hold them,
          and the whole cloth

emerged, neatly folded and forgotten—almost as if it had never existed—
until it lay at last in the bottom drawer of a dresser
at the top of the stairs where I lifted out, molted back almost into
          its constituent threads,

my sister’s blanket, from which as a child she was inseparable
and which, like her nature, was of a flannelling softness,
this agreeable and defeated blue fragment
          so covered with years

it could not bear that it absorbed them the way the red clay
wrapped its legs around the rain and shook with its pounding,
the scarlet pigment seething brightly beneath the sky, the wet hills
          vivid as a dream

the tulip tree—drowsy in captivity, clever in the way its black fingers
sifted starlings from the air—shook its head to awaken from, opening
the throats of its extravagant white and golden flowers to speak
          its single perfumed word.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

Robert Peake

ROAD SIGN ON INTERSTATE 5
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

They are holding hands, or rather, their silhouettes
are joined at the arms like a chain link fence.

Their bodies lean forward, like italic letters.
They are running: the man is pulling the woman,

the woman is pulling what must be her child,
and the child is lifted, by the speed, off her feet.

It is the same type of sign that might contain
the antlered shape of a generic black buck,

or tell drivers that the road could be slippery when wet.
It is a warning sign, it says: watch out for this.

Every time I pass, I scan both sides of the freeway,
expecting to see a family of three, gathering

up loose belongings, timing the cars, preparing
to run across eight lanes of high-speed traffic.

I have never seen them, this desperate family.
I only know their shadows, how they tilt toward

the bright yellow space in front of them, scrambling
to reach the outlined edge of the thin metal sign.

I have never wanted anything this much, for myself,
let alone to pull those closest to me into flight.

There is so much I could say about growing up
on the border of Mexico. It is not the corrugated

fence, or even the river of sewage, that defines
the scar that joins one world to the next,

but a one-hundred-foot width of sun-soft asphalt,
streaming with commuter traffic, day and night.

The man is pulling the woman, the woman is pulling
her airborne child, whose pigtails flail back.

On the other side is the ocean, salt marsh and a beach
that stretches north, into the source of the wind.

They are holding hands, and smelling the salt in the air.
At night, their pupils contract as the headlights expand.

What begins like a distant starlight grows to a spotlight,
a floodlight, a wash of whiteness, and engines made of wind.

Then reddened, like coals, like dying suns, the lights
recede, a river of cherry redness, a syrup of taillights.

The man is pulling the woman is pulling the child,
who rises as though winged in a blaze of light.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention