September 20, 2024

“So God Will Know You” by Brendan ConstantinePosted by

Brendan Constantine

“SO GOD WILL KNOW YOU”

after Miroslav Valek

Go out, get us some money
and kill a dog. Take this coat,
this book of matches, a knife
from the wall to kill a dog
on the way. You need medicine;
if not now, you will—aspirin,
quinine, a packet of God.
These things are still strong
enough to heal the country
and kill a dog. Sulfur traps
in their intestines, from fruit,
toad stools; any limb off
a chocolate rabbit is death,
as it happens. This happens,
we spread a newspaper, cut
an onion, wait with each other.
You kill a dog; a shepherd, a bull,
a fool hound. Tell whoever
complains the dog has killed
your dog first, your older dog.
They won’t persist. The earth
is fed on the incorrigible. People
here worship this about the land;
that it is made rich by eating
thieves: the rabbit, the crow,
the pale gopher. Thus and so
we light a fire in a fireplace
and read half our book. Or sleep
in our beds and wake standing
by the window. If we call out,
the dogs inside us run away,
then creep back. They can
never come under our hands,
their softnesses. You must
keep the right things with you,
the family spoons, good spoons
to trade, to dig, to attract a dog.
You must expect to lose these
or not get enough for them. Have
some tea or ginger in your pocket
to offer the hermit, the widow
who takes you in against night,
the wild boy-man who thinks
he must be alone. Have a way
to mention us so they know
you cannot linger. At dawn
come home with money;
on the way, kill a dog.

—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

__________

Brendan Constantine: “I grew up in a house where poetry was a tradition, something read at bedtime, something framed on the wall. I was such a part of my environment I didn’t notice it until I was 27. I was sitting in a cafe in London and I began to write on a napkin. The next day I bought a notebook.” (web)

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September 19, 2024

“Brushscape” by Samuel ErteltPosted by

Forage by Tammy Nara, mixed media watercolor of a thistle on an expressive blue and brownish pink background

Image: “Forage” by Tammy Nara. “Brushscape” was written by Samuel Ertelt for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, August 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

__________

Samuel Ertelt

BRUSHSCAPE

A man is stuck between
        two dreams in a patch
of thistle. Reaching
down, he picks a spiny brush
and dips it in the sky dark as indigo
before it bleeds. In front of himself,
he paints a lake         a memory
a kind of dusk lingering
       around the edges of
how reflections appear lavender
when still. The evening blots and runs.
He wipes the brush clean
       and turns, turns to steal
some white from the cloud
he’s imagined above his head. The man kneels
and paints         the ghost of a snowbank,
but the ghost keeps disappearing
       before he can make it solid
enough to melt, and he can only
imagine so many clouds.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
August 2024, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Tammy Nara: “I’m transported inside the painting as it is created. The artist creates his world. The evening blots and runs. (Yes, it does!) Stealing the white from a cloud. The ghost of a snowbank that disappears before he can make it solid. The other poems connected to the metaphor of the thistle, this poem is connected to the act of painting.”

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September 18, 2024

“Dear Proofreader” by David HernandezPosted by

David Hernandez

DEAR PROOFREADER

You’re right. I meant “midst,” not “mist.”
I don’t know what I was stinking,
I mean thinking, soap speaks intimately
to my skin every day. Most days.
Depending if darkness has risen
to my skull like smoke up a chimney floe.
Flue. Then no stepping nude
into the shower, no mist turning
the bathroom mirror into frosted glass
where my face would float
coldly in the oval. Picture a caveman
encased in ice. Good. I like how
your mind works, how your eyes
inside your mind works, and your actual eyes
reading this, their icy precision, nothing
slips by them. Even now I can feel you
hovering silently above these lines,
hawkish, Godlike, each period
a lone figure kneeling in the snow.
That’s too sad. I would like to send
search parties and rescue choppers
to every period ever printed.
I would like to apologize to my wife
for not showering on Monday and Tuesday.
I was stinking. I was simultaneously
numb and needled with anxiety,
in the midst of a depressive episode.
Although “mist” would work too,
metaphorically speaking, in the mist of,
in the fog of, this gray haze that followed me
relentlessly from room to room
until every red bell inside my head
was wrong. Rung.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

David Hernandez: “I finished writing ‘Dear Proofreader’ on December 15th, 2010. On that same date, the mummified head of King Henri IV was found inside a retiree’s garage in France. In Tokyo, a science professor announced that a Japanese salmon species thought to have been extinct since 1940 was discovered in a lake near Mount Fuji by his research team. Also on this date I took a nap.” (web)

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September 17, 2024

“Roadside” by Ted KooserPosted by

Ted Kooser

ROADSIDE

Someone has picked up after it, but it was there,
a half mile north of the interstate highway
where the paved spur ends and the gravel takes over,
a patch of waist-high weeds where what was once
a trailer park has since gone back to pasture.

It was never much more than a start, and it
never got anywhere close to a finish, just a half dozen
second- and third-hand cheap aluminum trailers
with windows glaring on their kitchen ends
and doors pulled shut on any hope of welcome.

They sat yards apart, like dice rolled out and left
where they’d stopped, and a few ambitious saplings
had pushed up under and worked their way in
and were leafing out over the roofs, and the lanes
which once led in, led in and under and were gone.

I suppose the trailers went for scrap, but if you and I
were to step over that wire with its dirty white rag
of surrender knotted dead center, we might just find
some part of something left behind by something
left behind, enough to show you what was there.

—from Rattle #55, Spring 2017

__________

Ted Kooser: “I don’t want anything on the page to call attention to itself; I want the writing to be completely transparent and all of the revision I do is from difficulty toward clarity, and toward economy as well. I pare out a lot of things as I go, but, again, transparency is the issue with me. I want my reader to just simply go right through the screen of the words into the experience.” (web)

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September 16, 2024

“As Fire, My Father” by Michael P. McManusPosted by

Michael P. McManus

AS FIRE, MY FATHER

My father as fire melts December snow
with each step he takes through a Pennsylvania field.

But there is no field there is no snow,
only a mud-rutted road where my father walks

as fire under a sky filled with molten geese,
which now know the horror of too much heat.

My father as fire sits in a flat-bottomed boat.
He poles across the water, looking down into it,

where he sees a glowing town a city & pillows,
on which ashes shape themselves into children’s faces,

& friends & former lovers & joyful leaps from remembered pets.
My father as fire believes in string theory & chaos,

convenience stores & muscle cars & the fly rod
abandoned to the cellar because fire & water no longer mix.

Some days the old rivers run through his eyes.
Some days his old eyes run through the rivers

like facets on a diamond like fangs on a snake,
like seven white horses drinking from a flaming trough.

My father as fire at seventy believes in the laying of hands,
an act which brings him both pleasure and pain,

the moment the father sees the son
close his eyes & begin to burn.

—from Rattle #24, Winter 2005

__________

Michael P. McManus: “Twenty years ago when I was in Yorkoska, Japan, I met a Zen Master while I was dabbling in Aikido. He sensed I was very cocky and he was right. One day he asked me, ‘show me your ego and place it in your hand.’ Now each time a poem comes to mind, I try to write it by that lessen learned.” (web)

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September 15, 2024

“Trump Says My College Town Has Immigrants Who Are Eating Their Pets” by Shuly Xóchitl CawoodPosted by

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

TRUMP SAYS MY COLLEGE TOWN HAS IMMIGRANTS WHO ARE EATING THEIR PETS

We used to dance at the Regency Room in downtown Springfield on some
Thursday nights on Fountain Boulevard, all of us getting a ride
 
from whomever had a car and would take us there. We didn’t drink
back then but ordered pop or ice water and pretended we were older
 
and I would act like I was not looking for the RA I had a crush on
who had dated me then dropped me abruptly for another girl down the hall
 
even though in the years to come he would tell me how much he liked me
still, how he regretted the break, and I would look for him in so many
 
places—the Union, the pathway between Thomas Library and Firestine Hall,
and at every party, every gathering where students danced or smoked weed
 
or drank from the barrel juice someone had concocted of every alcohol-filled
green or brown or clear bottle. I found him, once or twice, and he had a way
 
of lying—to himself or to me, I’ll never know—and it would pull me back
into his orbit, or I threw myself into it. You get too close to some things
 
and they burn. A lie is kindling. Belief is the paper, sticks, all the wishes
for a thing that isn’t. Someone who builds a bonfire must be careful with the flame.
 
Someone who acts like the sun must tell people not to look directly into his eyes.
I looked for so long, I learned about a lie’s brightness. One day I saw him,
 
years later, and he seemed so easy to find. My eyes had adjusted, and I
understood darkness: how to touch it, and then how to walk away.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood: “In the debate, Trump says that immigrants in Springfield, OH (where I went to college) has immigrants who are eating pets. I was thinking about how people believe lies, get swept up in charisma, so I wrote this poem about how that happened to me.” (web)

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September 14, 2024

“Life Lessons from an Anxious Cheerleader” by Sarah ParmetPosted by

Sarah Parmet (age 15)

LIFE LESSONS FROM AN ANXIOUS CHEERLEADER

1. If a flyer hits the ground, we do fifty burpees.
Yes, the entire team.
Today, I was that flyer. They threw me
Into the air. They were supposed to
Catch me in a cradle, but it was the track
That caught me instead—hard, ice cold
As it met my shoulder and my cheek.
 
I grazed my elbow; for three days, my shoulder hurt.
“I’m ok,” I said.
One, we chant. Two, three …
My vision ping-pongs between the bleachers and
Twenty-five …
The peeling white line on the track.
Fifty.
 
2. Do not forget bug spray.
Mosquitoes will swarm your legs.
They will itch like crazy.
 
3. You always know when the coaches talk about you,
But you never know what they’re saying. You will
Stand there, wondering if they know
You can hear them. Cycling through
Every possible scenario, you hope
What they’re saying is good. It is
Probably not, but they refuse to say it to your face.
 
4. The dance team will talk shit about you
Behind your back. Don’t let them
Get away with it. You’ll catch the captain
Call you JV in front of all her friends, because
A sport with the highest rate of injury
For female athletes obviously doesn’t count
As varsity.
 
Pro tip: If this upsets you like it upsets me,
Imagine them messing up their halftime routine.
Spoiler alert: they messed up their halftime routine.
 
5. When doing cheer jumping jacks, always
Hit a high “V” and slap your thighs
On the way down. (I know it sounds weird.)
This will annoy the dance captain
And she’ll say, “That’s disgusting.”
Maybe it is. So slap your thighs
As loud as possible.
 
6. A high ponytail means right on top of your head.
Your hair follicles should feel yanked out
Of your skull, and if you’re debating
The prospects of early-onset alopecia,
You did your hair right.
 
7. Pain is pain no matter where you feel it.
But some kinds are worse than others.
My toes still cramp every time
They boost me into an extension—
6 and a half feet in the air. But the feeling of
Falling out of my teammate’s hands—
That’s worse.
 
8. You’ll doubt whether you’re even cut out
To be a flyer. The coach compares me
To Ellie Liou. In front of everyone, she tells me
To do it more like Emma Cohen.
“Try pushing your shoulders back more.”
“Make sure to lock out.”
I know they just want to help, but it’s hard
To accept that you are the one
Bringing everyone down.
 
9. Do. Not. Be. Late.
Do you want to run for twelve minutes?
 
10. Everyone can see you.
Hands stained red from the pale track, I hold them
Up to the setting sun, as if they block out
The light that tricks and deceives. I’ll start
Hyperventilating before each stunt—I cannot
Hide when I touch the sky—what is worse?
Knowing how to disappear or never being seen at all?
 
11. No matter how difficult cheer is,
Your teammates have your back. Literally.
 

—from 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

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Why do you like to write poetry?

Sarah Parmet: “For me, writing poetry isn’t a choice—it’s an instinct. It’s a way of sorting out complicated emotions, but also remembering my experiences. Sometimes, I’m going about my day and I just have the urge to drop everything and write all my ideas down. Obviously, this is not possible when I’m in the middle of a physics test, so I end up writing a lot at 12 a.m. I love being able to look back at my old work and see not only how I change and develop as a writer, but as a person as well.”

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