August 31st, 2011
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Lauren Schmidt
WHY I AM NOT A TAXIDERMIST
I am not a taxidermist, I am afraid of John Wayne.
A guest at Uncle’s house, I slept in The John Wayne Room.
It was called The John Wayne Room as if a room
such as this could have another name: a life-size
cardboard form of John Wayne in the Western
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The plot not to be confused
with that story where the woman’s head falls off
as her husband unties the ribbon’s silky knot secured
around her neck. The secret she kept her whole life
from the man she loved, a private strangeness
such as having, in your home, The John Wayne Room.
Egyptians dehydrated the human body by extracting
soft tissues. The torso, left intact so the soul, an airy thing,
could find its likeness in the afterlife. In this room,
John Wayne’s soul would have a number of likenesses
to confuse for the original John Wayne. The most alarming
of which is the John in a Box which is just as it sounds
except that it was not a box but a buck with a tail
for a crank, then: Pop goes the John Wayne.
Who thought of this is less disturbing than who would
buy this except I know the answer. I would have
John Wayne stuffed and mounted in The John Wayne Room
to look at when I’m an old man, Uncle declared.
I am not a taxidermist because I read “A Rose for Emily”
in high school and I know the need to keep something,
everything, long after it is gone, like youth, like love,
the longing to take it all with me because what is memory if not
the cadence of colliding, forgotten things, cymbals
that tempt a tremor from the body’s core and wake
that thing inside? I am not a taxidermist because I would stuff
my dog the time he got his head stuck in the railing
of our stoop. His leather tongue lapped happily at his dish
as sparks darted around his head from the iron cutters
like the squirrels he was about to chase, mad with desire.
I am not a taxidermist because I would pull the skin
off the kind of sleep I got as a kid, drape it around me
so I could remember what it’s like to be ten again.
I would freeze-dry the first time I let music move inside me
like a sinuous being, fit to romp for days. Yes, the sadness
of these things gone, but I am not a taxidermist
because how do I find the exact eyes Tracey had,
shiny with tears, shaking, when she looked at me,
her father’s fist blued into the knob of her chin?
Or her body the night she huddled beneath my porch light
over a spread of Gin Rummy at midnight, that terrible hand
just across the street. Then the girl with the strange name
in ninth grade, the girl with those cheeks, pocked and red
and puss-capped, that frantic hair, I would mount her
on a shelf so I could look at her, wonder why I wasn’t nicer.
I am not a taxidermist because I would cast all the women
from now that I might never get to be, shake my fist at them
and demand a list of failures. I am not a taxidermist because
one day I would sit surrounded in my John Wayne Room
of All I Wished Forgotten. People in town would wonder
about me, rumor what they don’t know. And I,
an old lady in a rocking chair, would stare stolidly
at the hybrid creature of trauma and whiskey sickness,
the griffin myth of if I woke to her groping me
the way I swore she did while I stirred from sleep
in my dormitory bed. Too afraid then, to confront
that beast, now I’d stuff it, I’d give it back its teeth.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Neil Postman Award Winner
August 30th, 2011
Review by Jessica Varin 
DIWATA
by Barbara Jane Reyes
BOA Editions, Ltd.
250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306
Rochester, NY 14607
ISBN 978-1934414378
2010, 88 pp., $16.00
www.boaeditions.org
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to speak my mother’s first language.
Would I seem more Chinese and less white? Would I feel less fractionated? Would I blend into Asian-America with ease?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. I could spend a lifetime speculating; instead, I have chosen to create a new culture for people like me. There is no instruction manual, so I look to the creative work of those who stand at the intersect of two cultures.
Barbara Jane Reyes is busy (re-)creating a culture. In Diwata, she dreamweaves what is and isn’t remembered through prose and line broken poems. Her third collection explores metamorphosis amid two cultures and tongues.
In “Polyglot Incantation,” Reyes code-switches between Tagalog and English:
What twine or serpent skin binds
Silangan at kanluran
Pearl of the Orient
Este punto del embarco
Fractures archipelago
Ang mga anak mo ay nakakalat
Your children have scattered
Cielo el color de perlas negras
Do not forget that they have names
May sariling pangalan ang aming diwata
Diwata, the muse, is ever present. Reyes’ poems arrive wrapped in cedar and sinew. The natural world and the female body are inseparable. In “Again, She Tells The First Story,” the sea gives rise to Diwata:
Once, when there was no light, the wind danced with the sea, whose glassy surface became untamed funnels and silver-crested waves as she leapt and spun. The wind also spun and let out a mighty roar. You have heard this before, no? How earth convulsed as if laughing. How seafloor forced her fingertips upward. How she freed her body from the silent, murky depths.
Reyes is a storyteller. Her motifs are intricately woven and the arc is unmistakable. Half of me wants a loose end to grapple with; the other half is in awe of Reyes’ ability to carry such a cohesive, full-length collection.
In “Duyong 2,” she writes:
You are the girl whose new tail mimics a silver slicing razor.
Throughout the collection, Reyes uses sharpened knives as a metaphor for cultural dismemberment. Often, the cleaving is physical. In “Aswang,” the final poem, a woman’s body is separated into pieces:
I am the opposite of your blessed womb; I am your inverted mirror. / Guard your unborn children, burn me with your seed and salt, / Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.
This is not the first measured taking. In “Call It Talisman (If You Must),” she recalls the way Filipina women bore the consequences of war. Once more, the female body is resigned to violence:
When the soldier came with his vulgar words, I leaned farther over the edge than I should have. But so venomous, his words. Upon the banks of the river for which my father was named, there, the soldier took me and took me, and the river could do nothing. I knew my brothers too could do nothing. There he tore me in two.
My child, your father’s eyes. My child, one day you will curse his name.
I expected a woman left choiceless, but I was simultaneously distraught by the powerlessness her male relatives endured. Reyes’ diverse and well-executed syntax also elevates the impact of this poem. The rest of the collection also benefits from her ability to turn language into itself.
Reyes’ attention to detail is sharp as the cinnamon and ginger she invokes. Where past yields to present, she carefully describes the metamorphosis:
Elders once brought her tobacco rolled and bound with hemp; now we bring bulk carton Marlboros. Once, spirits fresh in glass jars; now Spanish brandy, limes guava, and yams in baskets, salted fish in bundles. Now she is old but this firelight glows upon the face of a woman whose skin is sunned and taut; in her wide eyes we see sharp Lawin gaze, in her eyes we see sky.
“The Fire, Around Which We All Gather” is one of my favorite poems. Although the Philippines are cleaved by colonialism, the stories still hold.
This poetry collection provides a platform for the mythologies of a glorious and not-so-glorious past. In Diwata, creation happens time and time again.
____________
Jessica Varin is a scientist and poet. She lives in Oregon or anywhere gainful employment can be found. You can follow her on Twitter @jessicavarin.
August 29th, 2011
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Laura Read
THIS TIME WE’LL GO TO KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN
for Tom
You were the one with the body
that could balance on a skateboard,
dive into a pool, the water
closing behind you.
And you could hold your breath
at the bottom, watch the sunlight shatter
on the tile.
Your eye marked where to send a ball
and it would hit
the backboard, the mitt—
you could chart a trajectory
from the boy in the doorframe
who stood next to me and looked at our mother
not getting out of bed
after our father died,
his bed made, all the stripes pulled up vertical
under the pillow
where his head would never leave
another dent.
You said, If she dies too,
we’ll go to Kentucky Fried Chicken
not Wendy’s
where we went after the funeral
which you spent driving your matchbox cars
up and down the lines of wood
in the pews, steering the small wheels
around the knots underneath
the soft polish.
You tried to be quiet, but I could hear you
making your car noises
in your throat.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
August 28th, 2011
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Doug Ramspeck
ONE TRUE POEM
The deer this time of year are gray. I see them
near the railroad tracks. What I like about them
is how they flee at the first sign they are observed.
But the one today is full-sized, on its side in the bar
ditch, with a white belly, its neck bent, smudges
of red in the snow like dropped handkerchiefs.
I have been thinking about how often my students
arrive at my office to show me poems they have written.
How often they tell the background story, how they
dressed up experience in the skin of a dead deer,
how they splayed themselves in a bar ditch for everyone
to see. Occasionally they weep, wiping their noses
with their fingers, their insides spilling raw at
the roadside, their necks lolling. Sometimes a single
salty drop falls to the handwritten page and stains it,
leaving a blue ink splotch, as though all sorrow
is a smudge. They want to be that poor deer
where the snow is coming down, dropping out
of the sky, making of the body a mound to be buried
in white, the smooth belly the same white as the snow,
as though a deer might enter the landscape, become
the landscape. To be that one true poem, the one
where you bleed a little on the snow. But tomorrow
I will remind my students that there is a weak sun
in this January sky, an old woman with b.o. they stood
behind once while taking the Sacrament, these Ohio
factories with their broken windows and the grass
in summer spilling through the cracks in the cement.
Please, I will say, there is more to write about than dying
grandmothers, a boyfriend who left you, a winning shot
in the state finals, a first sexual experience, an alcoholic
father who made your mother jump once from
a rowboat into Grand Lake St. Mary’s because she’d
forgotten the buns for the hotdogs. Just once let
your poems run wild into the night, like deer rushing
across the road, to feel the aloneness of the body, the way
the legs move and carry us. One last true poem, the one
where the deer is forever by the roadside, the cars
speeding past, how cold and hard the ground feels,
the snow covering us until the rains arrive come spring
and the body transforms gradually to mud. Together,
I will tell them, we will lift that deer from the bar ditch
and tumble it over the edge into the river, like in that
Stafford poem I assigned last week, though my
students all asked the same thing, over and over,
the same thing they always ask: is the story true?
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
August 27th, 2011
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Renee Podunovich
THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT ME
Because not everything I write is
about myself. I used the word “she”
not “me.” “he” not “you.” this is
fiction. made up. which is different
than fantasy. that myopia
that funnels the infinite potential of awareness
through a skinny garden hose
into a blow-up kiddie pool
in a tiny backyard of the mind.
one thought. only one. over and over.
it’s about you. I mean him. I mean she
always thinks about him.
and when that pool gets too full it floods.
runs over. moodiness. not satisfied with things
as they are. she likes to swim with a pair of fantasy
goggles. everything takes on that tinge. that blur.
but she always tires eventually of bathing her adult
body in that ridiculous little pool. annoyed
that her limbs hang over the sides. her weight
pulling them flat so the water escapes
onto the grass. that’s when she takes
those goggles off. and things are
just like this. just now.
she is suddenly a huge deity. Kwan Yin.
hovering above the entire ocean. light
reflects on its surfaces. buoyed by waves
and that need. that longing. those fabrications
are now a dime that fell out of someone’s
swimming trunks. just like that.
surfs and settles in the sand. now forgotten.
and the water is so large. unimaginable.
and remember. I was just a swimmer nearby.
it didn’t happen to me.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Tribute to Mental Health Workers
