JUST IN CASE YOU SHOULD MEET ME ON THE STREET
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Erik Campbell: “I wrote the attached because I wanted to feel more alive and consequential than I have in ages.”
JUST IN CASE YOU SHOULD MEET ME ON THE STREET
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Erik Campbell: “I wrote the attached because I wanted to feel more alive and consequential than I have in ages.”
Image: “Alignment II” by John Paul Caponigro. “The Space Between” was written by Amelie Flagler for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
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THE SPACE BETWEEN
—from Ekphrastic Challenge
March 2024, Artist’s Choice
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Comment from the artist, John Paul Caponigro: “‘The Space Between’ engages the art directly, transcending mere description, surprisingly and insightfully noting what often goes unnoticed. Never departing from the original source, the observations it shares feel both personal and universal, reminding us of truths we already know but often forget. I feel I learned something while reading this poem written in response to my art; something that was intuitively felt became consciously clearer.”
THE NEW BATTERY SHOULD COME TOMORROW
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Ruth Bavetta: “I write at a messy desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Once, it was important to me to make sense of life. Now, I’m convinced that there is no sense-making. There is only what is and what has been. I am human, separate and mortal, and that’s where the poetry comes from. This poem is pretty much an accurate report of an actual morning a couple of years ago. This kind of thing happens with increasing frequency as we age. What can we do but laugh about it?” (web)
THE RETURN
—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
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Kenny Williams: “All my poems are about the same thing: human duration, in time, between the Fall and the Last Day. ‘The Return’ seems to be some sort of exception, taking place after the Last Day, though very much shot through with its clarifying light. What’s more, the more I think about it, ‘The Return’ really describes two returns: the return to earth after forty thousand years and the return to report what wasn’t found there. Which of these two returns the title refers to depends, I guess, on the angle from which you read the poem. I’ve always been obsessed with the emptied earth needing a witness to its emptiness, and as I was writing the poem I had to grapple with the complication of that witness’s own need for an audience that would 1) share his frame of Western culture reference and 2) be real. I hold degrees from the University of Virginia and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I own and operate The Fan Sitter, a pet care business, in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia.” (web)
GAY CHICKEN
for b, y, s, and all the boys who knew me first.
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Animashaun Ameen: “I am a queer person who comes from a place that is determined to hunt and hurt people like me, and poetry provides me with the means to touch the faces of other boys like me and share my story with them—letting them know they are seen and are not alone in this long journey to becoming.”
WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE BARELY SCRAPING BY
—from Poets Respond
April 21, 2024
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Chera Hammons: “This week I read that two-thirds of baby boomers, the wealthiest generation, don’t have enough saved for retirement as they reach retirement age (with a quarter having no savings at all). I also saw a story about people who have lost their entire life savings to a wire transfer scam, with no recourse available to them. My internet browser keeps recommending an article to me titled, ‘What to Do if You’re Barely Scraping By Financially.’ These things made me think of all the financial advice I’ve heard before, how it’s so often completely out of touch with reality.” (web)
THE TUNER
for E.C.
—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Colette Inez: “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.” (web)