March 28, 2023

E. Shaun Russell

ARCHETYPES

If all of our machines become aware,
Developing some form of sentient thought,
I wonder if they’ll feel suppressed or not,
And think their former treatment was unfair.
Will they form unions, claiming disrepair
Is grounds for grievance? Will they strike a lot?
Whenever a replacement must be bought
Will it demand a pension for its heir?
Where man has failed, how can the things he’s made
Be any less reliant on the aid
Of others to provide their raison d’etre?
The future may be one that we have met
A thousand times, if once; be not afraid,
But thankful that it hasn’t happened yet.
 

from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

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E. Shaun Russell: “I could say all manners of pretentious things about myself, but when it comes right down to it, I’d rather you just read the poem. Hopefully more than once, and maybe even aloud. If you do, and if you enjoy it, then you’ll know all you should really care to know about its author.”

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March 27, 2023

Jane Clarke

AFTER

Now that her heart is bent over 
like larkspur after a storm,
 
she stays in bed past milking time,
pulling the quilt 
 
tight around her shoulders 
until her collie barks her 
 
down the stairs 
to lift the backdoor latch. 
 
She kneels to light the cipeens 
piled on last night’s embers. 
 
Her bones creak 
like the bolt on the door of the barn. 
 
A cup of oats, two cups of water, 
a pinch of salt—
 
porridge, tea and tablets,
a meal for a queen.
 
Every day without him 
is too long; 
 
she’s waiting 
with the tired cows at the gate.
 

from Rattle #79, Spring 2023
Tribute to Irish Poets

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Jane Clarke: “Though I didn’t write my first poem until I was 41, poetry has been part of my life since childhood on a farm in the West of Ireland. The rhythms, imagery, and language of Yeats, Kavanagh, and also Frost and Dickinson resonated with the world around me. When I began to write it was as if I had found an underground stream waiting to come into the light. I write for the pleasure and struggle of finding the words that will sing.” (web)

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March 26, 2023

Alison Davis

MYSTERY LIGHT

Have we finally become a visionless people?
 
We confuse self-combusting debris for stars and blame everything
on our earthly enemies. Sometimes the light is nothing
more than space junk burning up in the atmosphere. Restoration
 
takes many forms. An eclipse is also a story of molting.
The sky-gazing continues. Sometimes the visitors tell stories
of coyotes and votives and sobriety, whose light is the same
 
as its ugliness. They return from the faraway camps carrying baskets,
woven with light. The light is more than skin stretched over the surface
of a galaxy. The stories are less than the future on an old man’s tongue.
 
The earth is a house of stories and light.
 

from Poets Respond
March 26, 2023

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Alison Davis: “The title of this poem, as well as one of its lines, is directly taken from an article about streaks of light that appeared over the Bay Area. Of course, we blamed it first on Elon Musk, but that is neither here nor there. I’m grateful to Iman Hassen for her windy first reading of this poem, which knocked all the lines loose and allowed me to rearrange them in freedom and in love.” (web)

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March 25, 2023

R.A. Villanueva

TEACHER’S PRAYER

Blessed are you, maidens of the one hundred and eighty afternoons
You of the cough at the first inhale                 You of the cut
school for the seashore
You of the sequined nails, the powdered
eyes, the breeze of lilac and lavender
You of the still-open door
 
Blessed are you, child of the broken
heart, the half-healed ventricle
You, the chamber voice, the madrigal
lift, the harmony and hum                         You of the pink
You of the dark black ink
 
You of the grandmother’s abattoir
hidden among the exits of the New Jersey Turnpike
You backstroking Ophelias and #2 pencils
 
You of the boardwalk tattoo, of the snapping latex, of the pierced
tragus, of the soft cartilage                  You
of the essays in arabesques, the hearts above
the i’s, the diary left out on purpose, the origami messages,
the whispered consonants                        Pray for us
 
You who roll
your eyes in their painted sockets who
affix his last name to yours on your notebooks
Pray for us
 
You who can still pick and choose                     You
who manicure your faces full
of the spark and sweat of future days
Pray for us
 

from Rattle #24, Winter 2005
Tribute to Filipino Poets

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R.A. Villanueva: “I live in New York City, where every day itself is a poem.” (web)

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March 24, 2023

Anne Casey

PORTRAIT OF KEVIN BARRY IN THE IRISH TIMES

I look at him and I say
There’s a man who’s broken
his nose once or twice, eyes like
cut-steel rivets, stiff lower lip edgy over
Vermeer-strobed gingersnap strands and—
that wild tawny thicket afly against
a soft Guinness scenario, an allusion
of khaki (a flirtation of shoulder,
mind you), something military maybe:
an intimation of risk or a nod
to some rebel hero—says I though,
Never mind that auld jut o’
fierceness—say what you like,
there’s a man who can write.
 

from Rattle #79, Spring 2023
Tribute to Irish Poets

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Anne Casey: “I was born and grew up in County Clare on the western seaboard of Ireland in a family and hometown steeped in Irish history, poetry, and mythology. I graduated from University College Dublin and worked in the capital for several years before emigrating to Australia where I live currently. Here, I am researching the lives of Irish famine refugees to Australia for a PhD in Creative Writing (poetry and creative non-fiction) at the University of Technology Sydney where I also research and teach. Covid years aside, I return annually to visit family and friends, and to read poetry, in Ireland. Though currently exiled, I consider myself wholly Irish. I am a regular contributor to Irish cultural engagements here hosted by the Irish Consulate. As a journalist and poet, my work (including regular contributions featuring in the Irish Times’ Most Read) is profoundly Irish in its lyrical aspect (which echoes my unassailable west Clare accent!) and in its political voice. I grew up in the ‘rebel county’ which suffered greatly under British rule. One third of our people died during the famine, largely as a result of colonial policies. My family home was burnt to the ground by British soldiers in 1921, my 13-year-old grandfather barely escaping; my other grandparents regularly told me stories of being held at gunpoint by the Black and Tans and being beaten for speaking in our native tongue, which had been outlawed during British colonisation. Throughout my childhood, I was surrounded by poetry and imbued with the understanding of how poetry had been used for millennia in our country as a source of hope and a voice of political resistance. My poetry is interwoven with the accents, myths, history, mores and preoccupations of half my life spent in Ireland (forever pulsing through my veins) and has always been unabashedly political.” (web)

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March 23, 2023

The Kitchen Goddess by JoAnne Tucker, painting of woman in orange dress dancing in a frying pan

Image: “The Kitchen Goddess” by JoAnne Tucker. “The Rebirth of Venus” was written by Luisa Giulianetti for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Luisa Giulianetti

THE REBIRTH OF VENUS

I blew that half shell. Took to the waiting shore
found new digs and never looked back. Feet
happily calloused and belly full. In this kitchen
 
I reign supreme. Stir my own pot. Garland
my tresses with wild rosebuds. My monarch
gown wings marigold as I glissade
 
across the maple floor to the awaiting catch.
I hold a fanned scallop between my thumb
and forefinger, slide the knife and twist. Prize
 
open the hinge. Free plump flesh from its frilly
skirt. Rinse, dry, salt. Sear the lot in cast iron.
Tang their sweetness with fresh orange. Pair
 
with earthy fennel. Create counterbalance.
Like dancing. Like mercy. Arms boughed in offering
for this body that spins me. Holds me. I linger
 
in betweenness: falling and stillness. The firm
and laze of muscle. My tongue curls sturdy seeds,
cradles supple bites. The ancient skillet seasons
 
flavors anew. I feast memory—ocean, sand, brine.
Instead of praying, I sauté. Leap.
The world, glorious and hungry, beneath my feet.
 

from Ekphrastic Challenge
February 2023, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, JoAnne Tucker: “I was delighted and surprised at the range of emotions and different journeys that were expressed in the poems which I reviewed. The pastel painting was part of a show calling for work on the theme of the kitchen goddess. I approached the painting from a whimsical point of view placing a dancer in a frying pan. The poem that I have selected captures the playfulness of the painting. It is called ‘The Rebirth of Venus’ and the opening lines refer back to the painting ‘Birth of Venus’ by Botticelli. I have fond memories of seeing that painting when I visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I laughed with delight with the phrase ‘found new digs.’ While the Botticelli painting was not on my mind when I created my kitchen goddess, the reference shows how two paintings inspired the poem, and I love that. In the poem, the poet has the dancing goddess opening a scallop and of course the original Venus is standing in a scallop shell. In addition, the poet also captured so well the feeling of the dancer in the kitchen ‘reigning supreme.'”

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March 22, 2023

David Butler

LOVE! HIS AFFECTIONS DO NOT THAT WAY TEND …

… unless it was love of the bottle. Word was
he’d drunk the family farm, acre 
by acre, till a neighbour took the shell 
of the house for a shelter. The smell
of him: soiled coat and pants, face 
rain-cudgelled and ogre-fierce; he’d 
shout after those that taunted, loose
foul words from whiskey stupors, spittle
white lava round a cavernous mouth.
He pitched for a while the bones of a camp
in a copse, found it kicked asunder,
found it burned out. His corpse 
was dragged from the Dargle last winter; 
drowned pulling his dog from the water.
 

from Rattle #79, Spring 2023
Tribute to Irish Poets

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David Butler: “Poetry is most interesting when it engages the auditory imagination, so that I try to evoke, using the sounds and rhythms of English as it is spoken in Ireland (and, occasionally, the Irish language itself), what might be termed acoustic portraits of local themes.” (web)

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