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

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

DANCING AT THE DEVIL’S PARTY: ESSAYS ON POETRY, POLITICS, AND THE EROTIC
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

University of Michigan Press
839 Greene Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-3209
ISBN 978-0-472-09696-1
2000, 136 pp., $14.95
http://www.press.umich.edu

I devour books like this. I live across the world from Alicia Ostriker and my education barely touched on poets in the USA–even less on their women poets–so I need engaging and accessible essays like these to learn what more I want to know. Dancing at the Devil’s Party, as the subtitle suggests, comprises six essays that explore aspects of love and politics, the politics of love, and most interesting to me, the politics of gender. The essays look in the main at the works of Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Lucille Clifton and Allen Ginsberg. I’ll touch on four of them here.

In the opening essay, “Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Some Notes on Politics and Poetry,” Ostriker asks and answers her own questions about poetry and politics and whether or not poetry can change the world we live in. She ends up in the exciting world of feminist writing:

What then is important in contemporary women’s poetry? What follows from women’s cultural marginality and their equivocal relation to a canon that they appropriate, resist, and transform? First of all, there is the discovery that marginality, however painful, may be artistically useful.

Fighting words indeed! And in another essay, about the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon Olds, “I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon Olds,” Ostriker takes that feminist approach to the way the poetry of those two women is often misread, misunderstood–perhaps “pigeon-holed” is a better word–by patriarchal readings. She looks at marginalisation and argues and illustrates her points with lines of poetry in a way which is both inviting and accessible for a lay reader like me. Perhaps the cornerstone of this essay is her point that:

Bishop mostly evades, Olds mostly asserts erotic connection – but for both, the erotic is a power preceding and defining the self; for both, it exists at the liminal border between language and the unsayable; for both, it abuts on a realm we may call spiritual. Technically, however cool the voice of Bishop, however seemingly overheated the voice of Olds, the metaphors of both poets enact the erotic.

I have just recently encountered eco-poetry and its underlying (quite startling, from a western point of view) philosophy of living things. And from Alicia Ostriker I now find that these ideas can be traced back into the poetry of Maxine Kumin. Of her essay on the poetry of Kumin, “Making the Connection: The Nature Poetry of Maxine Kumin,” Ostriker writes that it is the result of:

a sudden hunch that Kumin’s nature poetry was not merely sane. It was revolutionary in the history of nature writing – merely by virtue of refusing to imagine that anything (including ourselves) could possibly be superior to nature.

But the essay that introduces the work of Lucille Clifton, “Kin and Kin: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton,” is the one that has resulted in a number of additions to my wish list at my favourite online bookstore. Ostriker begins by saying:

I would like, in this essay, to show how spiritually complicated an apparently “easy” poet can be – and how a gentle voice can be both revolutionary and revelatory.

Here I learn from Ostriker about a strong black woman poet who (to refer back to the opening quote of this review) has yoked marginality and pain to serve her artistry. South Africa is home to many such women–women who have been marginalised into invisibility for decades and who are now appropriating their rightful place in their homeland. Lucille Clifton’s poems seem to be writing the women of my country who are:

turning out of the
white cage, turning out of the
lady cage
turning at last
on a stem like a black fruit [pg 86]*

Ostriker continues with an exploration of various aspects of Clifton’s biography and her work, covering not only her assertion of herself but the sources of her strength, of her pain and her smoulderingly understated anger. As here:

i got a long memory
and i come from a line
of black and going on women
who got used to making it through murdered sons [pg 92]*

Alicia Ostriker’s enthusiasm and knowledge of this poet and her poetry is really infectious and as I said, the essay has made me hungry to read more of what Clifton has written. In the last lines of the afterword of her Dancing at the Devil’s Party, Ostriker writes that:

From each of the poets discussed in this book I have learned something immeasurable. The essays are by way of thanks.

To which I’ll add that what I’ve learned from Alicia Ostriker through her book is also immeasurable and this review is by way of thanks.

* Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (Brockport, N.Y.: Boa Editions, Ltd., 1987). Page numbers refer to Ostrika’s book.

David M. deLeon

NOT EVERYTHING I DO IS MAGIC

Consider, Sally: the way the sun shines laterally
below stormclouds. And the clipped exuberance of green.
And there’s everything that passes by in a single
still moment, there’s the messy kanji of branches,
the superscript of birds. There’s that warmth that someone
you don’t mind sitting there left on the seat before
you sat on it. Lots of little things not worth talking about.
If I said it’s all crap I’d be lying. But I’m lying anyway.
I didn’t do any of that. Someone fell off the rafters
of an imaginary barn and he wore a robe of clean red
and he landed in a daze and, having been sleeping, woke up.
He walked around the imaginary barn and counted the timber
supports and heard the wrens in their hidden nests. Why
did he fall from the rafters? Magic. What were the wrens?
Magic. Who is he? Not magic. The barn falls away
and we can see fields of both green and red and the sky is blue
bordering grey, a color that contains its own promised
color. Sally, there just ain’t enough words to tell even one
story, to tell you even who you are in this, or who I am, or
why the wrens seek warmth and not freedom and are now
trapped in one man’s red-cloaked imagination. I ask you
why are you here? and you just listen, listen on, because
you know more than I do. You know that the little upward bend
of the voice at the end of a question isn’t a waiting pause,
it’s a little hill cliff where we stop and look around and wait
for some clue from the landscape to tell us soon where oh where
oh where are we now that we are here, please tell me.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

Christine Gelineau

BREAKING BABIES

Nobody breaks ranch stock the old way now,
leaving those youngsters wild till two or three
then snub ’em down, cinch ’em up, and pow,
spring to the saddle and set ’em free.

They’d sunfish, crow-hop, leap and roll, frantic
to lose the catamount hooked to their back.
The cowboy had to ride out the antics,
a feather in the storm—some had the knack

but it was hard on leather, broncs, and men.
You didn’t need to come off to get hurt;
when a bronc pile drives you, the jolt can
rattle your bones even without biting dirt.

Mostly these days we leave the rodeo
riding to the rodeo cowboys, let them
win their buckles and busted bones—you know,
ease a youngster in, avoid a problem.

Nowadays we gentle ’em while they’re foals,
teach long yearlings commands in the round pen:
jog, lope, whoa, some even get ’em to roll
back and reverse in lines, soften and bend

with the long lines, make ’em bridlewise
’afore you ever climb aboard that first time.
Trained, not busted, the way to go in my eyes.
They’ll steer soft as butter, stop on a dime.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry

Thea Gavin

COTTONWOOD BLUES
          Somewhere along Highway 395

In the pasture over west—
when cottonwood shimmer fills the air
the lizard in me wants to rest
up on a silvered fence rail; there,
twitchless between red dirt and sky,
I’d blend into the wind-carved wood,
let the dark birds circle, try
not to blink until the hood
of stretching shadow catches me
open-mouthed in the hay-green breeze—
looming blue mountain gravity
draws down the sun, darkens the leaves.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry