August 16th, 2011
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Peter Nash
HAVE YOU SEEN MY SON?
Have you seen my son?
He is everywhere.
You have seen him
on the Metro stair,
at the Greyhound Station,
in the park beside the fountain,
you have seen my son.
His dark eyes stare,
his chicken hand,
his lanky hair,
the reddened nose,
the soiled vest,
the plastic bag of lettuce
pressed against his chest.
You have seen my son,
his lips, my son’s lips
flecked with spit,
pursed against a gush of words—
Fire and God,
War and Shit.
His Safeway cart filled with cans
rolls slowly towards The Center.
In The Center all is clear—
the offal of our lives is here
in neatly labeled bins: green glass,
brown glass, plastics. Endless trash.
He stands in line, they weigh his cans,
drop some quarters in his hands,
then lightly, lightly
he strides away
to buy a box of vin rosé.
Beside the fountain
in the park, my son sleeps.
Until the dark.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
August 15th, 2011
Review by Katie Kingston
JUNIPER
by Nancy Takacs
Limberlost Press
17 Canyon Trail
Boise, Idaho 83716
ISBN 0-931659-60-4
2010, 26pp., $15.00
www.limberlostpress.com
Once again Limberlost Press has lived up to its reputation in bringing to the foreground a poet who emerges with a fresh voice, as well as a deep understanding of western landscape and the resilience of the self. Each of the poems selected for this limited edition of hand-sewn, letterpress print is a literary work of art resonating with the strength and fragility of desert that exists inside each of us.
Nancy Takacs takes us for a drive in her red jeep to explore and reconsider high desert as a metaphor for the intricacies that make us human. In her title poem, Juniper, the keen eye of the poet, always observant, reveals to us the “shaggy-body universes of dark blue-berries/ that know deep in each green center/how to pine the air, how to/ curry the tongue.” Desert light shimmies up through these poems, scattering through branches of juniper, cottonwood, even old American elm. Her attention to brilliance is evident in the “The Yellow Tree” where she takes her reader into a spectrum of visual bliss:
All along the desert horizon,
they’re cadmium,
ochre,
pumpkin,
saffron,
hardly any green now,
in stands and circles that spray
yellow-blossom.
Through imagery Takacs continues to transform not only the desert cottonwoods, but the human potential, as she continues to integrate landscape with self “You take on
their huge translucence . . .You can’t help but look at them,/carry leaves/in your pocket,/ smell vanilla wood.” Takacs’ last lines have always earmarked Takacs poetry for their resonance, and here again they stun: “You who are/not rooted enough in your life.”
With unflinching steadiness, a woman in a red jeep travels through the gullies and rock panels of landscape harvesting the beauty and resilience of willows, cottonwoods, spruce, crows, badgers, and lynx. Occasionally she diverts through memory to her cityscapes. Surprisingly this does not come as a contrast to her immersion in desert landscape, but rather as a root, a tap source from which she has learned to appreciate and internalize her environment, so that when she draws on landscape images, the resonance of desert, cityscape, and self merge seamlessly. This is evident in the opening of the poem “The Deer” where she begins, “They’ve become part of the city-desert like the magpies,/moon-lit fruit trees, hard lights, the diesels, our voices.”
Takacs allows memory to take her back to her childhood without stepping out of the rugged landscape she now wears like another of her many jackets as revealed in her poem “The Great American Jackets.” With descriptions like “your Catholic school’s dark/green wool, which forested you,” and “spring jackets your mother bought,/all pale yellow and repellent,” the poet meanders through personal history, drawing on clothing as a hinge to swing open the gate to memory and metaphor.
Through this litany of jackets, a type of shelter that protects us as well as defines us, Takacs brings us to the present: “Now harmless in canvas, denim, or down,/your jackets lean more to the mountains.” Moving through these revealing images, she arrives to the last lines that again pose landscape and self as integral to each other:
The sky would lead to that first bitter tinge. To fire, where you could
open in front of the flames in the plain spruce dark, unsnap, unzip.
Many of Takac’s poems begin by placing the reader in ordinary situations as in “Blasphemy,” where she begins the desert journey, “It’s early in Wellington, Utah./This time I bump the jeep/up onto the shoulder and walk to the fence.” As each stanza builds with imagery and appeal to the senses, she moves away from the ordinary toward the unexpected.
But I get colder and colder.
If I stepped out
of my body, I would be
split into kindling
What transpires between these direct, concrete opening lines and the resonating last lines are sheer transformation for the reader, the realization that the fragility of desert is an extension of the fragility of self.
Katie Kingston has published two chapbooks, In My Dreams Neruda, which placed as a finalist in the Main Street Rag Press Chapbook Award and El Río de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, which won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Award. Her poem, “History of My Body,” appeared in Rattle #31.
August 14th, 2011
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Glenn Morazzini
WHERE DO YOU GO?
Raising a shroud of dust in the dirt driveway,
relatives drove over soon as they heard:
Mary Ann, the one they nicknamed Maysie, thrown
from the back of a colliding motorcycle. Snapped
necklace of her nineteen-year-old bones.
But John, her father, wanted nothing of the praying
and cursing, air humid with tears, in that farmhouse.
He walked across the yard toward the woods, where
a June sunset blistered orange and red
as bittersweet in autumn. He said, to no one,
he’d stumbled upon enough winter-starved deer,
his share of chickens snuffed by heat, rat, fox.
Said nothing brings a body back. Cry all you like,
his face scrunched as a wrinkled handkerchief.
As I stood on the lawn, a twelve-year-old boy,
seeing my cousin on the motorcycle, clinging
to her boyfriend, brown hair blowing out of control,
I heard the farmhouse, where my parents stayed,
wailing like the siren of a nearing ambulance
going nowhere, and John, who slowly withdrew
into a curtain of white pines, repeating, I’d rather walk.
I did not want to enter either world.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Tribute to Mental Health Workers
August 13th, 2011
Link • Audio, Awards, Poems • 1 Comment
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Devon Miller-Duggan
OLD BLUE
for my father
A thing that’s named “Old Blue” should be a dog,
some flop-earred, lazy hound. Your Blue was
just a car. Okay, not just a car—an Oldsmobile
from back before we believed fuel was scarce,
from back when men made cars for men with lots of kids
and fathers piled their kids into their cars and
spent their Sundays on back roads, going
nowhere other than to see what could be seen from roads.
Your Blue drove like a frigate cut the waves,
and you loved Blue enough, and roads enough,
and seeing what was out along the roads
enough that you and Blue took trips alone—
you’d head out west or north, just you and Blue,
and stop to read the paragraphs on signs—
“PITTSBURGH: Gateway to the West,”
“HENRY M. LELAND: Designer of Cadillac and Lincoln cars…”
“The Haven peach varieties were developed here by…”
“Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota…”
You’d rise at dawn and drive to dark
and eat the buffalo or chowder in the diners
by the secondary roads. Gone for
weeks, alone except for strangers you’d
charm into friends-along-the-way,
pocketing their stories and then sharing
one or two with us when you came home.
They took your body out, the hearse parked
right behind Old Blue. It’d been months
since you could drive—the cancer in your skin
turned inward toward your brain. I haven’t asked
who gets Old Blue. Your wife would think
I wanted it. You’d think my not asking meant
I didn’t know how much it meant, or didn’t care.
Here’s my wish: you at Blue’s wheel,
your elbow on the open window frame,
unpoliced and doing 80 on a rolling road toward mountains.
The sky’s almost as blue and shining as Old Blue, and
up ahead a marker by the road retells a story you will
laugh at, and a diner waits. The locals love your stories—
you tell the one about how many ways you invented
to peel potatoes when you had KP as a private—and
the waitress flirts and looks like Mitzi Gaynor,
and the peaches in the pie you have with breakfast
hit your tongue with all the buttered sweetness you can bear,
and Blue runs like a mythic athlete, and
every state you cross takes you away from me.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
August 12th, 2011
Michael Miller
THE INVISIBLE LIFE
My very old dog continually licks
The floor for crumbs that are
Not there, the instinct to live
Drives his bent body from stove
To sink to table. He is trying to lick
The invisible life from the floor
As he wobbles from room to room
Before his crooked legs give out.
I lift him so he can continue,
Oblivious, as the life seeps
Out of his bewildered body
That I stroke every night
And the first thing each morning.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
