Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week - May 5th, 2008

Rattle — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:41:26 GMT

Troy Jollimore

AFTER

If we must speak of each other, let it be
in the forms that monarchs and generals use
to refer to their rivals; as if each were known
to the other only through field reports
and classified intelligences. Let it be
in tones of wariness, grudging respect, and,
where permitted, mutual admiration.
Let our campaign be conducted on these terms.
And when people speak of the 'break-up,'
let us hear in that the cold overtones
of the word as applied to a glacier: how,
when the ice began to shudder and crack,
new light found an entry, and the patterns,
evolving each moment, each moment formed
something lovely and fresh--a lens through which
a bright, eerie world not previously known
offered itself to be glimpsed--as the fragments,
the small frozen fragments, mindless and free,
tasting a life more open and salty
than any that they had known, made their way,
their steady, grim way, their cruel, ineluctable way
toward that sea, that vast,
that insensate, that insatiable sea.

--from RATTLE #22 - Winter 2004

Also new this week, poems from issue the Winter 2004 issue by Kathleen Dale, Eric Evans, Robert Funge, and Ed Galing.

Poem of the Week - April 27th, 2008

Rattle — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:43:07 GMT

J. J. Blickstein

WESTERN MOTEL
--for Edward Hopper

Red chair. The human sacrifice, a perfect desert, outside
the window
(window the leash on the decay of the dream) is the entire
world.

Woman in a red dress on the edge of the bed ready to go
or to stay forever--
suitcase on the floor, same color as the undamaged road,
green sedan
at the edge of the window leaves no knowledge but
assumption.

Death in the shadows of a room without dusk--everything
wreaks of
"just passing through." The bones in your mind can't be
found anywhere,
thin skin of civilization torn between the open curtains
just the way you like it.

You amuse yourself with the idea of the girl as automobile,
automobile
as girl but you paint her pensive, and relaxed, cross her
legs to maintain the tension--
she falls back from shapes and tones when you question
the composition.

Your tongue, the silent tongue, silences the perfect pitch
in the colored palette--
Blonde in a red dress, red shoes, green automobile, deep
stain on the wall, red
sheets washed a pale carmine by the bent light we can't
call the sun--
Simple lamp is simple math, that's why you included it,
the shape of the headlamp,
color of sand to balance the weight of the room.

Your attention to detail, your will for the stark exposes
your creation to the impossibility of
chance, of occasion because your real gift is design--

She's in a poem that looks and smells like real life (No,
it's not a poem, it's
poetry with nothing to do, never anything to do...)

It's important how she looks at you, through you, past you--
she still looks for your signal,
lives for you, with you, without you, and you are both still
alone. She paints you, makes you a
landscape (in her mind) as a small rebellion and this is why
she must despise you, for the
vision (she too has become herself). You know, the
dullness, the repression, the squashing
of giddiness, the discipline to stare long enough to see
almost everything and the discipline to pause just before it
and you crack and tear.

Her back is to the view because there is nothing more to
understand. Yep, she's smart and
pretty but who wants to surrender expectation and the
belief that something's coming--
(You could show us longing but you don't have to because
she's already there.)
The road is the thing that's really American--there's nothing
on it and you can see it right
outside the window, and the funny thing is that we are
always looking at it all the time--But,
maybe she is too because everything here and here after
all is just an idea.

--from RATTLE #22 - Winter 2004

Also new this week, poems from issue #22 by Chuck Augello, Michele Battiste, Louis Daniel Brodsky, and Hannah Craig.

Poem of the Week - April 20th, 2008

Rattle — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:12:09 GMT

Karen Braucher

CURVES

That was the summer I fell asleep in German
and woke up in French. I lay down on the earth,
  stared up through a three-dimensional labyrinth
   of dark branches stretching toward sky.
    Curves are so much more caressing than
     straight lines, n'est-ce pas? Who has time
      to look at parabolas? Could I express only
       a parade of diversionary questions? Nein, nein,
        the German inside demanded, Gib mir Antworten!
         I went to a party and tried only to ask questions
          and answer none. I was a spy, intimidating
         to at least two persons. Questions are curves,
        without closure. Could one spend a whole evening
       on a stroll through someone else's mind? How
      refreshing to encounter unfamiliar corridors.
     No one is throwing up skeet and asking me
    to shoot. The parade massed and snapped
   to attention, goose-stepped away. Replaced by
  tendrils, drifting pine needles. When I awoke, I was
la belle étrangère, omnipotent in my voluptuous
listening. I could coax even the waves to speak.

Notes:

Gib mir Antworten! means "Give me answers!"
la belle étrangère means "the beautiful stranger."

Also new this week, poems by Malcolm Alexander, Walter Bargen, Bob Brooks, and Katie Chaple..

Poem of the Week - April 13th, 2008

Rattle — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:16:12 GMT

Salah al Hamdani
--translated by Molly Deschenes*

BAGHDAD, MON AMOUR

You cannot be crucified
On the side of a page
Of a story that is not your own,
Nor to the rhythm of the deaths that brood your plagues
Because there will be no cry to relieve your grief.

You cannot be crucified on the banks of the streams
Your body bleeds,
When the Euphrates washes away the secret of its soul
At the birth of a new defeat.
I know this:
No wound deserves a war.

You cannot be crucified at nightfall,
When you did not close your prayers
On the body of palm trees
Because there is no honorable assassin.

You cannot be crucified for the cinders of calamities,
For the tombs of your gods,
Or for the belief of a dying humanity.

Baghdad mon amour,
Not son, nor father, nor God,
No prophet crowned by the church will save your soul,
Not that of Mecca,
Not that of those who refuse
To share the olive trees in Palestine.

This is my notebook of war,
The years of exiles folded in a suitcase
Too long abandoned to the dreams of the convicted.

This is my share of victims,
My share of moon,
My harvest of nothingness,
My share of dust, words and cries.

This is my misfortune
Like a comma locking a line of ink.

Baghdad my love,
I was crouched in the corner of the page
In the shelter of the arid days,
Far from the torrents of blood
That carry the name of those shot with the silence of man.

Baghdad, mon amour,
Sitting like a Bedouin in a mirage
Lying on my shores, I cherished my own shroud.
Far from the cross, Fatima's palm and the star of David
Far from their books, their wars
Wandering in the sand of the dunes,
From the steppe to the city
I drag my body from season to season,
I trail you along from the couch to the mirror, from my room to the street
Between my writing and my solitude
In the shelter of their cemeteries,
Their martyrs, their morgues.

Baghdad my love,
You cannot tremble at the threshold of these ruins of days,
A civilization trained to kill
Violated your virginity.

Baghdad, city forever rebellious against your torturer Saddam,
You cannot groan at the only revelation of this hegemony,
Those who rushed around your body at death's door,
These "liberators" are their accomplices.

Madinat-al Salam,
City of peace,
Love in the soul of writing.

Baghdad my wound,
My father the working man died without knowing joy,
My mother mislaid her youth in the mirror
And the only witness to my first grief on your breast
Is the breath of the sand,
The starry sky and God's gaze on the call to prayer.

I wished so much today that man had never discovered fire
And cursed it to advance so much in its own din.

This soil that gave birth to me, today put to death.
Oh mother! I want to return inside your flesh
To hear the beating of your heart,
To quench my thirst in the murmur of your breath.

*Translated from Le cimetiere des oiseaux (editions de l'aube, Paris, 2003)

Also new this week, four more from the Poet's Writing Abroad tribute: Erik Campbell (Indonesia), Lenore Langs (Canada), Papa Osmubal (China), and Melanie Wright (United Kingdom).

Poem of the Week - April 6th, 2008

Rattle — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:49:08 GMT

Glenn McKee

LESTER'S CALLING

In the "Hey, You There!" of the moment
Lester thought it was the Lord calling.
He turned, looked, saw nothing human,
but there sprawled a pig in the gutter
moaning in a language Lester didn't
understand but could speak if spoken
to by a friendly pig. This one wasn't
first-order friendly, sick as it looked,
pig-gibberish erupting like weight-
lifter's grunts from its fat-fortified
throat, nostrils dilated as if searching
for solace in barren underbrush, tail
a twisted story telling nothing except
confusion and spiraling morbidity.

Lester at last broke his verbal silence
with words of assurance directed into
the gutter, their demeanor cloaked in
the modesty of a mare breaking wind
after overindulging in bitter oats. He
then paused at the gate of his mission,
unlatched society's scruples, finally
kneeling beside the pig suffering deep
in its own solitude and began soothing
the victim's receding brow with caution.

This action caused the pig to roll over,
not unlike a dog asked to play dead or
a lap cat wanting its stomach rubbed.
Lester promptly responded, providing
solace where the pig indicated its pain
made a home. At that moment Lester's
life changed for the better even though
he didn't know it. All Lester knew as
he knelt was his love for this poor pig.

--Click here to listen

No poet has appeared in Rattle more often than Glenn McKee, whose poems and essays can be found in eight separate issues. A Maine poet, McKee worked as a Unitarian minister, and as a newspaperman, before retiring back into his first love, poetry. He published four chapbooks in the '90s, and was a member of the Maine Slam Poetry team. Before passing away in 2004, he included four of his poems from Rattle on a CD, Lester's Calling. In tribute to McKee, we're featuring those four poems this week, and adding the recordings to our audio archive.

Poem of the Week - March 30th, 2008

Rattle — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:29:36 GMT

Marc Kelly Smith

I WANTED TO BE

I wanted to be so many things
Bigger than I was.
A tall tower of building blocks.
A shoelace tied so fast.
Jelly spread smoothly
to the corners of the bread.

I wanted to be so good.
A smile on everyone's face.
Folded hands. A clean desk.
All the numbers added up
digit under digit
perfectly clear.

I wanted to stand between the bully
and the frail kid.
Ready to take it. Ready to give it back.
I wanted to do the right things.
Pull the spit back into my mouth.
Scrape the gum-chewed secrets
off the bottoms of the chairs.
Drag the dumb, go-along laughs
out of the air.

I wanted to stand on an asteroid
whirling a mighty chain above my head,
f linging an outer space hook probe
into the heart of the Universe.
And by loving...
Whatever I wanted to love,
when I wanted to love,
how I wanted to love...
I wanted to grapple the Ultimate Connection.

So what happened?
What happened during that great revolution?
After we pinned our daddies to the floor?
After we made our mothers eat shame?
After we rolled all antiquity and tradition
into cigar size joints,
sucking in whole rooms of humanity,
Hoping to assimilate all the differences
and heat the world
with our spontaneous combustion?

What happened
when the chain on the asteroid
slipped out of our hands?
When the ones we loved
loved others?
When our laugh became the dumb laugh?
When the spit shot quick and hard
from our teeth?
When we gave the kids the beatings?
What happened to our dreams?
What happened to me?

I wanted to read all the books
of unerring truth.
I wanted to tie my shoelace fast.
Spread jelly smoothly to the corners of the bread.
Build a tower, a tall tower.
Spell everybody's name
top to bottom,
bottom to top
all four sides,
in and out.
I wanted so bad, so bad
to be so many things,
without the whole thing
falling in.

Click here to listen

"I Wanted to Be" is from quarters in the jukebox (2007), courtesy of EM Press.

Also new this week, slam poets Taylor Mali, Anis Mojgani, Jeremy Richards, and Thadra Sheridan.

Poem of the Week - March 23rd, 2008

Rattle — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:43:52 GMT

Luisa A. Igloria

CIRCLE OF CRANES

I will stand like the flame in the flame…
I will stand very still in your absence…
--David St. John

They have stepped out of one
rectangular sheet, the six
that now touch wing-
tip to wingtip and, wordless,
hum the white notes of the song
hollowed out of paper--anthem
of a kind of reverse creation:
folded from substance,
a well of apparently
nothing

But even so the empty
space shimmers: a disc
echoing still with the swift
crosswise slash of scissors
the careful pruning of neck
from neck and wing
from wing

Newly sprung, each
genuflects stiffly to the empty
circle, remembering how
the grasp of the world
came coursing through
the limbs; and what
it felt like to lift entire,
like dying, from
the blade

--from RATTLE #27, Summer 2007

Also new this week, we take a break from slam poetry and feature page work by Nancy J. Thompson, Douglas Woody Woodsum, Bonnie Young, and Maya Jewell Zeller.

Poem of the Week - March 16th

Rattle — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:47:57 GMT

Patricia Smtih

BUILDING NICOLE'S MAMA
for the 6th grade class of Lillie C. Evans School,
Liberty City, Miami

I am astonished at their mouthful names--
Lakinishia, Chevellanie, Delayo, Fumilayo--
their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,
and all those pants drooped as drapery.
I rejoice when they kiss my face, whisper wet
and urgent in my ear, make me their obsession
because I have brought them poetry.

They shout me raw, bruise my wrists with pulling,
and brashly claim me as mama as they
cradle my head in their little laps,
waiting for new words to grow in my mouth.

You.
You.
You.
Angry, jubilant, weeping poets--we are all
saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight,
but you knew that, didn't you? So let us
bless this sixth grade class--40 nappy heads,
40 cracking voices, and all of them
raise their hands when I ask. They have all seen
the Reaper, grim in his heavy robe,
pushing the button for the dead project elevator,
begging for a break at the corner pawn shop,
cackling wildly in the back pew of the Baptist church.

I ask the death question and forty fists
punch the air, me!, me! And O'Neal,
matchstick crack child, watched his mother's
body become a claw, and 9-year-old Tiko Jefferson,
barely big enough to lift the gun, fired a bullet
into his own throat after Mama bended his back
with a lead pipe. Tamika cried into a sofa pillow
when Daddy blasted Mama into the north wall
of their cluttered one-room apartment,
Donya's cousin gone in a drive-by. Dark window,
click, click, gone, says Donya, her tiny finger
a barrel, the thumb a hammer. I am shocked
by their losses--and yet when I read a poem
about my own hard-eyed teenager, Jeffrey asks
He is dead yet?

It cannot be comprehended,
my 18-year-old still pushing and pulling
his own breath. And those 40 faces pity me,
knowing that I will soon be as they are,
numb to our bloodied histories,
favoring the Reaper with a thumbs-up and a wink,
hearing the question and shouting me, me,
Miss Smith, I know somebody dead!

Can poetry hurt us? they ask me before
snuggling inside my words to sleep.
I love you, Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,
pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black
as angels are. Nicole's braids clipped, their ends
kissed with match flame to seal them,
and can you teach me to write a poem about my mother?
I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,
can you teach me to remember my mama?

A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole
has admitted that her mother is gone,
murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger
rifling through her blood, the virus pushing
her skeleton through for Nicole to see.
And now this child with rusty knees
and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream
and asks me for the words to build her mother again.
Replacing the voice.
Stitching on the lost flesh.

So poets,
as we pick up our pens,
as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones--
remember Nicole.
She knows that we are here now,
and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

And she is waiting.
And she
is
waiting.
And she waits.

Click here to listen

(Recording from Beyond Baroque Live 2 (2003), courtesy of EM Press/Perceval Press.)

Also new this week, poems by Alvin Lau, Sam Pierstorff, Rachel Webster, and Buddy Wakefield.