January 31st, 2012
David D. Nolta
TWO PANELS BY MEMLING
from the Brukenthal Collection
The dog loved the boy and the boy is dead.
The man—his father—could not allow
His son to be buried inside his head
As if he had never lived. That’s how
The artist, Memling, entered the picture
(Figuratively speaking). The man let fall
His coins and condition, one sly little stricture:
“Paint all of the story, or nothing at all.”
And so, by the wellhead, his wife—the man’s—
Assumed the pose in which Time would own her;
She knelt, she joined her empty hands,
As moving an image of mother and donor
As the Pietà in the churchyard, where
She last had her child. Across the divide
Her husband, more literal, reads his prayer,
Which Memling grants, for at his side
His son resumes the familiar station
Like the dog to the right of the woman’s knees.
The result is less a conversation
Than so many stopped soliloquies.
Is grief what this man and woman were made for?
Their reasons vanished with their names.
But not the point—that’s what they paid for:
The boy and the dog in their separate frames.
–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
January 30th, 2012
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On Sunday, January 15th, Rattle held a reading for issue #36 at the Church in Ocean Park, in Santa Monica, CA. Eight poets from the issue read samples of their work:
Teresa Chuc Dowell
Alan Fox
Sonia Greenfield
Bruce McBirney
Peg Quinn
Diana M. Raab
Ephraim Scott Sommers
Craig van Rooyen
Teresa Chuc Dowell, a Fellow and teacher consultant of the Los Angeles Writing Project (a chapter of the National Writing Project), teaches English literature and writing at a public high school. Teresa has a bachelors degree in Philosophy, a Professional Teaching Credential in Education, and is currently a candidate for a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (poetry) at Goddard College. She serves as a poetry editor for the Pitkin Review. In 2011, Teresa founded Shabda Press. Teresa is also an organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. Her first book-length collection, Red Thread is forthcoming from Fithian Press (2012).
Alan Fox founded Rattle in 1994, turning what began as a class chapbook into one of the largest and most prestigious literary magazines in the world. In the process, he has interviewed over 60 contemporary poets, a selection of which appeared as Rattle Conversations (Red Hen Press, 2008), and published over 40 of his own poems. He’ll be reading from his new manuscript of eight-line poems, Being There.
Sonia Greenfield is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Washington. Her poem “Passing the Barnyard Graveyard” appeared in Best American Poetry 2010.
Bruce McBirney earned his J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley, and has been practicing in Los Angeles since 1979. He received his B.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University. McBirney’s poems have appeared in America, Measure, Spillway, The Formalist, The Lyric, and other journals, and anthologized in Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets (University of Evansville Press, 2005).
Peg Quinn is a painter and an award-winning quilter and Pushcart-nominated poet and has been designing and painting murals in homes, offices, schools and institutions for over twenty-five years. She holds a BFA in Education from the University of Nebraska and an Elementary Teaching Credential from Cal. State Northridge and currently serves as Art Specialist at a local, private school.
Diana M. Raab, MFA, RN was born in Brooklyn, New York and received her undergraduate degree in Health Administration and Journalism in 1976. In 2003 she earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University’s low-residency program. She is the author of eight books. Her most recent release, Healing With Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey (2010) is a memoir/self-help book which includes reflections, experiences, journal entries and poems all emphasizing the healing power of writing. She has one poetry chapbook, My Muse Undresses Me and two poetry collections, Dear Anais: My Life in Poems For You, winner of the 2009 Next Generation Indie Award for Poetry, and The Guilt Gene. Currently, Raab teaches creative journaling and memoir in UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
Ephraim Scott Sommers was born in Atascadero, California and received his MFA from San Diego State University. A singer and guitar player, Sommers has produced three full-length albums of music and toured internationally both as a solo artist and with his band Siko. Most recently, his work has appeared in Afterimage, Barnstorm, Blue Earth Review, City Works, The Coachella Review, The Columbia Review, New Madrid, Philadelphia Stories, San Diego Poetry Annual, and Verse Daily. His poetry is forthcoming in Grasslimb, Harpur Palate, Paddlefish, and Rougarou. He is the managing editor of Flashpoint: A Journal of Literature and Music, and he teaches writing at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and Cuesta College.
Craig van Rooyen is a lawyer living in San Luis Obispo, CA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Willow Springs, The Christian Century, Boxcar Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and The Fourth River. He is a finalist for the 2011 Rattle Poetry Prize, and has another poem forthcoming in Rattle #37.
January 29th, 2012
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Leah Nielsen
TEACHING SLANT RHYME
I have always wanted to write a poem in which lavender
rhymes with vendor or scavenger but mostly cadaver,
but the image—imagine a literary journal’s response —
seems inadvertently humorous—and there seems no nonchalant
way to pair them, to rhim them, as my students
say, which is a marked improvement
over their DO NOT RHYME policy
and their almost comic cacophonies
composed confidently through alliteration,
and when they get it, it becomes an addiction—
one kid rhims porridge with dirigible,
another, having fallen in love with Prufrock’s dreariness
and his own cleverness suggests fellatio and go,
and another student, in earnest, asks what’s fellatio,
and I try not to laugh, to let
another student
say it, but no one does—a blow job,
I blurt, having reached an all-time teaching low,
and another, seeing I am losing control
suggests go and polka dot
and they go down the cananendwordbetwowords path
and come back to craft,
which kind of goes with Pabsts, which one argues
is not that bad a beer, and so the impromptu
debate on the virtues of PBR,
which one declares sells well in this recession—or so he heard
on CNN—a connoisseur, he also notes the virtues
of Natty Light and when I ask for a 50% rhyme for virtue
he says river, rivet, turtle, true—here I should note that I stole
the percentage concept from an old
mentor who does not like to be called old. But never mind.
What do you say to a twenty-year-old who hears Kevlar
and thinks larva, lava, valley, ale, and just because
he can, adds vulva and uvula and pauses dramatically for guffaws?
I’m sorry, kid, but you’re going to be a poet.
And poet
is an orphan,
a word for which there are no pure rhymes, like orange.
I’m sorry you have a gift for words.
I’m sure your parents would have preferred
even geology over writing,
but here you are spiraling
spite, rips, lipid, dalliance, nascent, land,
and pyrrhic, hiccup, puce and pedal.
–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
January 28th, 2012
Rachael Lynn Nevins
HOUSEKEEPING
Well, kiddo, we’re the only parents you’ll ever have, I’m sorry
to say: your father, the artist, and me, the poet
and oft-enraged student of Zen, sitting up in bed and yelling
at your father, “Nirvana is not somewhere else!”
An hour later you were conceived. And now, just look
at the mess we’ve gotten you into!
Clumps of cat fur drift along the edges
of the hallway, and drippings from last month’s tomato sauce
turn black on top of the stove. Again, your father
has left the dish towel on the kitchen counter, and again
I am picking it up, throwing it at him, and wondering,
Who am I? What do I think I am doing?
Mice scurry in the walls, and last week
a chunk of the living room ceiling fell
onto the living room floor. I tell you,
things fall apart, and then they fall apart
some more, and there are days
when the very thought of the boxes still unpacked
a year and a half after our move is enough
to get my tears going. But I’m not talking only about our apartment,
your father’s bad back and bum knee, how all my new hair
is growing in gray, the boarded-up shops around the corner,
or the plastic bags blowing down Ocean Avenue and out
to the Texas-sized pile of junk
collecting in the middle of the sea. We are all
heading toward a future of white dwarves and black holes,
and goodness knows even your cells
have plans of their own. I’m sorry, kiddo,
we’ve got nothing else to give you.
Just this cold and falling apart universe, this cat
sleeping with his face tucked in my sneaker, and your disheveled
father and me, sitting on the bedroom floor and trying to sort
the laundry in heaps all around us, while merrily
you pick up your socks and toss them
onto the wrong pile.
–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
January 27th, 2012
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Mathias Nelson
I ONLY DANCE FOR MY MOTHER
She gives me the wine
and I take the wine.
I mop her floors
and she walks on them
while they’re still wet
so I begin to dance
to warn her of how
easy one can slide.
She watches
grinning in her old green jacket
before going outside
to see the moon on the snow.
–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
