October 31st, 2008
TO LEVITATE…
My mother swears she saw
my baby brother rise from his cot
one stormy night when
we were living upstate.She was awake, checking the shutters,
when she saw him levitate,
a foot or more, covers rising
with him the way they doin carnival shows, so you don’t see
the wires. But, he lay soft and pliant,
a floater, weightless as
a shadow on the wall.“Something in the air,” Mother said,
because she believed in such things,
and reminded us often that most
children know how to fly.And I do remember running down a hillside,
breathless, the ground rising to meet me,
my heart lifting my blood
so effortlesslyI knew that if I stepped out onto the air
that it would hold me.
I may even have done it
without realizinghow easy it is, before doubt takes hold
and weds you to the ground.
Odd that we should forget
such things.Odd, too, when I tell the story
how no one believes exactly,
but the room gets quiet
and everyone listens.
–from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
October 30th, 2008
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Review by Lo Galluccio
DARK CARD
By Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
English Department
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, TX, 77341-2146
ISBN# 13: 978-1-933896-14-4
2008, 36 pp., $8.95
www.tamu.edu/upress/
In Rebecca Foust’s first full-length poetry book, Dark Card, she creates a prism of experience, imagery and episode through which to describe and honor her relationship to her son’s struggle with Asperger’s Syndrome. The poems span in time from his bloody (almost mishap) of birth, to schooling traumas, to his rather triumphal eighteenth year when he has finally taken rational charge of things which enable him to function with others smoothly in the world. Far from a mere object lesson, Rebecca’s son is like a strange, wondrous and unruly kite that she must learn to anchor and let fly with the winds of existence. The book is also a reflection of her own transformation as her sense of her son deepens and their bond matures.
In a poem called, “No Longer Medusa,” she states:
When I had you I gave birth
to my mirror
the chink in my armor.
October 29th, 2008
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Colette Inez
ADVICE TO A WRITER IMAGINING
CONCEPTION AND BIRTHLook for a tree stump in the woods. Compare it to love,
examine the particulars, how your mother mounted
your father on Labor Day in a bungalow, Liberty, New York.Describe a snowfall before your parents met. Take your time.
Leave out myth and literature. Relate it to life in an American
town, one with a rotating cocktail lounge.Now imagine yourself as a parchment worm
wedged into a crevice to avoid attack. Liken your fear
to a clamp. How does it resemble the opal clamfrom New South Wales? Speak up. Check it out.
Write a poem of departure in which you use the color blue,
a hue like the glow of fish cast ashore by a stormy sea.Your parents are leaving town. They’ve rented a bungalow
in Liberty, New York. You’re not around to say: after dark,
exact change. You’re not even a tiny moonlet in a microscope,a bluet in the woods. Contrast your nothingness to words
that start with “k”: killjoy, kisscurl, kelp. Are these words
comical in any special way? Say how you feel about kale.Will you grow to leave it on your plate?
Your parents sit in a trance. They have just made love
and are counting snowflakes: uno, dos, tres…Are they from Bogota, Colombia, and in New York on
a whim? You are about to divide. Say something about the
intricate coil of DNA. Double helix. Double Dutch. Jump in.Make the leap. Now you’re a nation newly emerged.
Dispense with history, the transitory passions of people’s wants.
Words are dropping fast.
–from Rattle #25, Summer 2005
October 28th, 2008
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Frank Hughes
AN ACT OF PROCREATION
what beatings we have taken—
gavewhat we have endures:
poverty, hunger, sickness,
spinal taps,
seizures,
stripped of privacy,
independence,
dignitymy rage
your vengeance
our dissemblingthe gods against us
the void’s wide swallow
beneath usthe weight we lost to it
the nerves, stomach, and teeth
we lost to itthe you and me we lost to it
and i did unforgivable things
and you perfected a certain crueltyand when the end came screaming at us
we fed it fresh, new years
our best years,
our prime of life years
they call themso we sit here tonight
locked in the silence
our long crafted and patient
hatred built
with its own hands
with nothing to show
for all our duesbut this resentment we
killed ourselves
creating
it sits herebetween us
like a dying child
waning
without cure
–from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
October 27th, 2008
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Lola Haskins
HALFWAY DOWN THE BLOCK, YOUR FATHER
Stops. It’s just congestion, he says.
I have congestion, not naming it—
his lungs as gauzy as a party dress—
explaining instead how the medic
at the VA had told him his heart
was as strong as any fullback’s.
We wait while he musters the air for
the next few steps, refusing the car,
with the stubbled pride of an old man
whose frayed shirt collar has been
turned by his dead wife, and, having
no third side, cannot be turned again
–from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
