September 8th, 2012
Link • Awards, Poems • 3 Comments
Maya Jewell Zeller
HONESTY
It’s true I drove an SUV once
through Fresno with a backseat full
of college boys to whom I found myself
having to explain you could still catch herpes
even while wearing a condom. One of them
in particular was incredulous, he was listening to his iPod
and he removed his headphones and said he had
a few more questions. These were my husband’s
varsity runners, and I was a volunteer, so I was awarded
the new rental with only four miles on it when we left
the lot. I’m not going to lie—
I liked driving it. It was nothing
like riding coach or making love
with protection. There were so many buttons
to push, and they all did something satisfying,
like drop from the ceiling a DVD player
for passengers or warm the driver’s legs
in just the right places. The seats were leather,
the kind you feel guilty just sitting on,
the good kind of guilty when you can’t help
but imagine parking somewhere with someone
so you can watch the stars rise over the city,
take time to check out all the automatic features.
The boy you’re with will want to know
how things work, and you’ll end up showing him,
because he is young, because he has a bag of sour apple
or peach fruit rings he’s willing to share, because his face
can look so becoming in the streetlights.
But mostly it’s because you can no longer remember
where you were going. Was it to dinner?
Were you taking him back to his hotel, where
he’ll sleep, dream of winning?
Or maybe it was a nighttime snack
run. The SUV is black
and the night is blacker. You can feel it
closing, like a fist around a steering wheel.
You’re not the fist. You’re the wheel.
–from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
September 6th, 2012
Link • Awards, Poems • 4 Comments
Bryan Walpert
OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
Start with a bird.
A petrel. No, a shearwater.
Whatever. You start with a shearwater,
then add a backdrop. An ocean, but not
too close, just close enough to hear it.
Not too much information, but a shearwater,
an ocean, and a house. Who’s in the house?
Two people. Well, one person. The other’s
on the deck, in a chair, writing a poem
about a shearwater, an ocean, a house,
and two people, one of whom is on the deck,
the other coming out to ask him what
he’s writing about. He explains about
the shearwater, the ocean, the house,
the man writing, the woman asking
this question, who is gone before he’s finished
the sentence, gone meaning her eyes are off
toward the ocean, which is fine because he
can get back to writing about a shearwater,
a woman looking out over the ocean at a boat
rising and falling on the surf, a fisherman
out alone under a hat, working in good faith
under a sun that shines in equal measure
on the ocean and house and the man writing
about a woman staring into the distance
of the past, thinking of someone important
she gave up for a house, an ocean,
and this man whom she can see now walking
down the path from the house to the ocean
to take a long run on the sand, as long as his body
will allow him, which is not the body it once was,
the body that drew her to a house near the ocean,
but what that body has become, a familiar
body, and though what is familiar can replace
youth and strength and mystery, it is no
substitute for it, and of course she’s thought
to leave, he thinks as his shoes slap the sand,
a hundred silent decisions in favor of
a commitment she made once to a house
near an ocean and the child that until
now was not going to be in the poem,
is not quite yet in this world, so
of course, she thinks, that explains the run,
and no doubt he’s thinking about the poem
on the pad he left on the chair on the deck
to take the run on the sand to chase a body
he is leaving, little by little, thinking
as he runs that it should be a petrel,
after all, can’t see her pick up the pad
to read about the house and the ocean
and the shearwater that might be a petrel
and the woman, who is not inclined to offer
an opinion on the matter because to live
with someone in a house by the ocean is
to take each suggestion as something more
than what it means, hence it occurs to her
to wonder why the bird at all, why
the fisherman, why alone, wonders as well
for the first time whether a fisherman thinks
about the necessary sacrifices the ocean makes
for his hunger, the generosity of it—she wonders
this as she comes out of the house to watch
the boat bob its way through another afternoon
at the noisy ocean and to listen for a bird
she could identify absent the shushing of the surf,
if the house were somewhere else, would wonder,
too, about the poem’s odd displacement—
she finds his choice of word interesting,
a Freudian word, and a literary one—
of their lives to an ocean, would wonder
this, too, were her mind not already on the dinner
she plans to prepare, a piece of something for herself
and a man walking the last bit up the sandy path
from the ocean to the house, curious
whether she picked up the pad as he’d planned,
whether she understood what he meant by the boat,
the fisherman, whether it might elicit from
the woman a revealing comment, something,
she thinks, they might have split along with
a nice white, were she allowed to drink it,
to open while he ices his knee, while the ice
does what it does, the boat does what it does,
as the house and the woman and the man
(and the wine she can’t drink) breathe
in the salty air wafting through the poem
in the hand of a woman on a deck watching
the fisherman wait patiently beneath his hat
for the fluid world to deliver itself up
as the bountiful flesh, that it might be divided
into equal parts mercy and remorse.
–from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
September 2nd, 2012
Link • Awards, Poems • 1 Comment
Craig van Rooyen
THE MINSTREL CYCLE
is a group bike ride involving guys in tight pants
and floppy hats with feathers, I tell my daughter.
They play flutes and lutes and flageolets
and recite poetry while they pedal.
She asked—shyly passing a note in her 2nd-grade script.
I didn’t misspell anything. Plus what am I supposed to say
about training bras and tampons—still years away?
Ok, for reals, I say, laying next to her in the dark:
There’s a whole frickin’ peloton of these guys.
They decorate their bicycles with cowslips, primrose,
foxglove flowers. They ride (no hands) into town
with the breeze on a warm summer evening.
And the frogs and crickets go quiet just to listen
to them tell knock knock jokes. They ride in circles
around the Mission square, long hair blowing back.
There will be time enough for the rest. To tell her the part
about how they stop their bikes and pull out
their horns. There will be time for her to hear the music—
how they play the sound of summer—the heat of it,
the ice-cream sundae smell of it; how they play
sun on wild rye, barefoot prints in the key of oak tree
shade—how they play it lazy like a shallow creek
on Mississippi mud; how they play it quick
like a lizard tongue or thumping like a dog’s tail.
There will be time for her to hear them play it loud
like the Fourth of July then gentle like a mama duck.
And when the sun is down and the bats come out—
specks in a darkening glass—she will hear them play
“We’ve Got All The Time in The World,” and know
that they are lying—lying in their floppy hats,
lying in their funny pants, lying with every last breath
they let out of those beautiful sad horns.
–from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
September 1st, 2012
Link • Awards, Poems • 1 Comment
Jeff Vande Zande
THE DON’TS
(An Incomplete List)
Don’t let your cell phone rest
against your ear or any other body part. Don’t use the same ear
for every conversation. Don’t use your cell phone
while you’re driving
since it must continually reconnect with antennas,
which uses more power,
and the signal is reflected by the metal around you.
All of the above doubles the chances for salivary gland anomalies, gliomas
and acoustic tumors.
Don’t own a cell phone.
Never leave the house
without a cell phone
because you never know when you’ll need someone.
Digitally Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECTs)
constantly emit radiation.
Try never to use one while you are using one.
Don’t use computers, printers, iPhones, iTouches, BlackBerries, etc.
Wireless signals are a source of electromagnetic radiation.
Don’t doubt the truth of this; Google it for yourself.
Don’t ever use the Internet.
Every search you execute exposes you to viruses.
Even if you don’t have wireless
service, don’t leave your Wifi setting in the on position;
the device will emit electromagnetic energy
in a continuous search
for the nearest available router.
Don’t own a computer.
Try never to breathe on Ozone Alert days.
Don’t stand within twenty feet of an operating microwave.
Don’t believe you’re safe.
Set your cell phone inside your microwave
to test it for radiation leakage. Call it
with another cell phone. If you can hear it ringing,
it means that microwaves can pass through the walls
of your microwave oven.
Don’t microwave
your cell phone.
Don’t own a microwave.
Don’t forget to microwave leftovers to kill bacteria. Try not to eat leftovers.
Don’t waste food.
If you can help it, don’t eat.
Don’t own a plasma TV
which generate high levels
of dirty electricity,
linked to fatigue,
headaches,
difficulty concentrating
and cardiac symptoms
in sensitive people
(known as electrohypersensitivity).
Don’t forget to watch programs on your plasma TV about household safety.
Don’t, if you can avoid them, own a television or a home.
Don’t put your feet up while relaxing; we don’t know why yet, just don’t.
Don’t forget to try to relax.
Don’t do anything stressful.
Don’t forget that stress is a sign that you are probably living.
Don’t wake up; don’t sleep.
Don’t do anything that feels good.
Don’t do anything that feels bad.
& Don’t do anything.
Don’t forget to breathe. Don’t forget to eat vegetables.
Don’t forget to remember that the fertilizers they use to grow vegetables can leave
trace amounts of carcinogenic nitrates in those salads you eat.
Don’t forget there’s nothing you can do about any of this.
This poem is already outdated.
This poem will never get old.
Don’t try to avoid reading this; it could save you.
Don’t ever read this poem…it’s a proven killer.
–from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
August 14th, 2012
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Diane Seuss
WHAT IS AT THE HEART OF IT IS A VORACIOUS CLINGING TO WHAT IS CALLED LOVE
I always gripped that thrill, that fuchsia carbonation, swarm of blush-colored
butterflies colonizing the gut, and I believed it meant something beyond
a temporary flush of feeling; it’s what I knew of theatre, of God. I wanted
the play to never end, red curtains permanently drawn back like the lips
around the smile of an actress, dead before her time. I wanted God to never
rise into the air and return transparent and desexualized, resolved in his own
narrative, at peace with himself, because his peace meant I was no longer
necessary. It began early, when I was a girl, wandering the village seeking
Jesus. I loved the mechanics of salvation. Some churches made you squeeze
shut your eyes and raise your hand if you wanted to invite him into your heart,
and I could see the thick oaken door, hear the rusty hinges squeaking open
and Jesus walking into the hot burgundy room, my blood roaring like Niagara
when you walk behind the falls. Other times you were asked to stride to the front
of the church and publicly hand over your life to God, so the congregants could
witness your ecstasy, more intimate than a lover watching your unguarded face
during orgasm because in church there were no sexy conventions to hide behind,
no poses learned in movies or magazines; they would see the raw, unwieldy
moves of a body in the throes of desire without pretense. I can’t for the life of me
remember how I transferred that largesse to a boy as frail as Danny Davis,
whose family lived in a low gray shack on Bertrand Road. When he walked
onto the school bus, so early in the morning the world inside the bus was dark
as the church broom closet, I trembled like a newborn. When he exited at the end
of the day—in winter, the sky having already darkened again, a strip of pale orange
sunset running behind his house like the shabby ribbons we’d tie into our pony’s
mane if we’d had a pony—I’d feel more bereft than I had the day my father died,
as the day my father died I was numb, I needed a template for how to feel, a map
for how to walk, now that he was dead, to my Brownie meeting, or my best friend’s
house, whose toddler brother proclaimed, when I finally made my way through
the door, “Your dad’s dead!” like he was announcing a victory, like I had won
something, a cake, or a beauty pageant. I would like to end there, as what
comes later is adulthood, where thematic iterations throb like pulsars, metrical
as the contractions of an orgasm. What I can’t neglect, though I’d like to, is Sammy’s
Roumanian, a restaurant on Chrystie Street, in the Bowery, on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan, Sammy’s, on the Vernal Equinox in 1979, filled with laughter,
the tinny music from an electric keyboard, and faded red balloons. Sammy’s,
with its small pitcher of chicken fat—schmaltz—throbbing gold at the center
of each table. It’s where and when Kevin and I were to be married, and how
smart we were, to want to stop time when we were at the zenith of our beauty.
I wonder now, had we done it—and I want to bash my head against the wall,
thinking of it—could we have thwarted the rest? How he would die young,
and I—well, here I am, alive, it is so early in the morning all of the windows
on my street are dark, just me here in this house, facing west, where the sun goes
to die, and, all things being equal, the wind is born, and wanders east, and bears
down, and uproots everything that has not been nailed to a wooden cross.
–from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
