July 16th, 2009
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Rebecca Lehmann
WATCHING THE WIZARD OF OZ, SUMMER 1988
Such was the summer of repetition:
I lived in a purple one-piece swimsuit.
The humid slats of the painted wood floor
stuck like chewed gum to the backs of my thighs,
as I watched Dorothy’s blanched Monopoly house
fall again and again on the Witch of the East.
Bam! The Witch of the West’s kodachrome
fireball exploded, a dusky orange plume
announcing her arrival, as I rewound and replayed
the dubbed video tape each new morning.
This was the summer my father walked out,
then snuck back in through a loose window
at night for several weeks to use the shower,
until, in August, my mother found him,
naked and dripping in the dark bathroom—
the summer after my grandfather
killed himself. Imagine him in the old farm shed,
the used-up garden hose snaked
from the tailpipe of his rusted car
through a crack in the window. Imagine the fumes
swirling around his head, a noxious storm
not unlike a plague of locusts.
Imagine this, two summers after he swung
a hunting gun around the farmhouse
angling for my young aunts,
the County SWAT Team circling
the lilac bushes and clotheslines,
shouting demands through bullhorns.
These were the things I was too young to understand.
While my mother laid in bed upstairs,
I fast-forwarded through the sepia tones of Kansas,
all the rickety despair of the dust bowl.
Dorothy fell into and out of the farm’s pigpen quickly—
I was interested in Oz, and knew exactly
when to press play, just as Dorothy opened
the front door, just after the tornado dropped
the farmhouse, that’s when sepia bled into color,
and the soundtrack switched to a series
of lilting angelic voices climbing up to high E.
I never wanted Dorothy to want to leave Oz.
At the end of the movie, There’s no place like home
clicked three times in her plump mouth,
a suffocating incantation. I didn’t understand
the pull to return to the place you hate,
the ability to look at life and not want to fall in reverse.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2009
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
July 15th, 2009
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Review by Marilyn McCabe
ONEIROMANCE
by Kathleen Rooney
Switchback Books
PO Box 478868
Chicago, IL 60647
ISBN 978-0-978612-3-3
2007, 62 pp., $14.00
www.switchbackbooks.com
The poems in Oneiromance, the 2007 Gatewood Prize winner from Switchback Books, may be dreams, as many are designated by their titles, but Kathleen Rooney is wide awake to the comic and terrifying possibilities of life in an institution – the institution of marriage, that is. There is little divine in these divinations, little romance in this oneiromancy; and yet these songs do honor the bride and the bridegroom, two brave individuals casting aside all fears to clutch each other’s sweaty hands and enter the chamber of “’til death do us part.”
In five sections plus an epilogue, Rooney presents the dreams and “scrapbooks” of a bride and groom in their abundance of weddings and honeymoons, a wedding in Brazil and one in the Midwest, and honeymoons in Brazil and Niagara Falls, plus the simultaneous weddings both in Brazil and the US of the bride’s sister. The characters are awash in weddings. No wonder their dreams are full.
The unruly and vivid dreams and lively scrapbooks are contained in neat poems that run down the page like church aisles, or ribbon across the page in couplets. The lines pulse with three and four beats. The language is rich with internal rhymes and word play, such as this, from “Brazilian Wedding: Dream No. 3” :
Ambulatory sisters—
sister somnambulists—
sorority of sleep-hikers—
we are crossing a bridge.
July 14th, 2009
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Megan Collins
MY GRANDFATHER ONLY WEARS BROWN
And he hasn’t told anyone he loves them
since the war (the real one, as he calls it,
when he shook on the coast of Normandy).
The closest we ever got was when he built us
a dollhouse—beige shingles, brown shutters,
green carpet in the bedrooms.
He inscribed it To K & M From Gramps
With Love,as though love, like living room or hallway,
was another feature.
He collects vacuum cleaners,
picks them up off the side of the road
before the trash men arrive, fixes them,
speaks of plans to sell.
He’s taken out all the furniture in his dining room
where the twenty or more vacuums
now stand like soldiers.
My grandmother’s thimble collection
he keeps.
He has never eaten seconds,
not even on Thanksgiving or Christmas
when most of us reach for thirds or fourths.
When waitresses ask him how he’d like
his burger cooked, he says,
Burn it.
My grandfather hates the taste of meat.
Lasagna he’ll eat and call “edible.”
Food is food, he says,
but the clerks at the Route 1 Burger King
know him by name.
He admits that the French fries
make his ankles swell,
but then claims that eating his entire
birthday cake in two days
actually lowers his blood sugar.
He has the numbers to prove it.
Like a suicidal, he threatens
to stand in front of a bus
or stop taking his insulin.
It’s all talk: my mother says she grew up
in fear that he would die by forty.
Over the hill means under the ground,
he’d say over spaghetti.
Now, at 86, he’s even bought his own casket,
shows us the picture in the catalogue
like it’s a new car or a time share he’s considering.
I picture it locked in the basement
among the aisles of canned food
that should have been thrown out
long before my grandmother died.
My mother rolls her eyes at the pamphlet,
but later says she is relieved that he’s given up on
Just bury me in a bag, or
When I go, I want a drive-thru wake.
When my grandmother was alive,
the two of them would argue in front of us,
right over the potato chips.
His voice would be unyielding:
I didn’t say that, Lucille.
But as soon as she was gone,
the first day after her last night
in the last nursing home,
the pictures began to go up—
her cutting the cake on their 50th anniversary,
her face at 25.
He tells us that during the war,
he bought two bottles of Chanel No. 5,
shipped one to his mother, the other to his girlfriend.
The one to the girlfriend broke
on its way to America, he says,
and glances at a wedding photo
that I have never seen before,
guilt glimmering like shrapnel in his eyes.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
July 13th, 2009
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D.W. Groethe
WHEN THERE’S FROST UPON THE PONIES
When there’s frost upon the ponies
an’ snow drift on the ground,
an’ that yeller sun comes creepin’
through the cedars all around,
a feller gets to thinkin’
maybe winter ain’t so bad,
starts shuckin’ off the mem’ries
of the blizzards that we’ve had.
The squeakin’ an’ the crunchin’
of yer boots on mornin’ snow,
when dawn’s a-risin’ easy,
an’ ol’ time’s a-movin’ slow,
makes a feller sorta settled
in the choices that he’s made.
How he coulda wandered elsewhere,
now, he’s mighty glad he stayed.
Most folks don’t understand it,
but he knows just what he’s found…
when there’s frost upon the ponies
an’ snow drift on the ground,
an’ that yeller sun comes creepin’
through the cedars all around.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry
July 12th, 2009
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Douglas Goetsch
NAMELESS BOY
1.
My friends didn’t name their third child
until they got to know him, far better
I think than parents naming children
from a Bible or a daydream or a relative
who died an untimely death, or worse
after themselves, a sad and selfish act.
But unless they planned to give him
an Indian name like “Weeps at Daybreak”
or “North Facing Duck” or one of those
celebrity child names designed to ruin
a perfectly good noun like Apple or Sailor,
I didn’t understand how they’d recognize the word
when the stork brought it to their door.
2.
But I liked the thought of this boy
gazing at the world without concepts
as newborns do, yet somehow in a purer
state of suspension, which I try to attain
each morning in meditation, counting
breaths until I’ve forgotten my name.
When I went to see the nameless boy
his sister, Maya, named for a Russian skater,
told me she was a snow faerie
and I told her I was a polar bear
and she said she was the queen of the moon
and I said I was the boss of Canada
and she said YOU’RE JUST DOUG!
A triple spondee so gorgeously executed
I felt strangely honored and aptly named.
3.
My first name seems to go with every girl I’ve met
or might—Doug and Margie, Doug and Mary,
Janet and Doug—while Goetsch goes with none.
Some girls in college decided to call me Doug Wonderful,
perhaps to tell themselves there was a Mr. Right.
Are you really Doug Wonderful? said Wendy
as she took off her clothes. There was a time
I entertained changing my name to Gatsby,
though how to avoid the diabolical caesura:
DougGatsby? Any name but mine
for a poet, which sounds like a clerk.
When a writing student put me in a list
of those he saw on higher mountain slopes—
Auden, Bishop, Lowell, Kinnell, and Goetsch—
he didn’t insult me, but my name did.
“Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,”
said Denis Johnson in a poem and the darkness
said, “That’s good, as long as you’re not
Douglas Goetsch.” “Who the fuck is he?” said
Denis Johnson, and they had a good laugh.
Even if I were a rebel in history
I don’t think I’d make the litany
in William Yeats’s “Easter, 1916”—
after Connelly, McDonough and McBride
who wants to visit the slum of Goetsch?
4.
