October 9, 2024

Jeff Knight

DON’T STOP

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
It’s about a dark night, a path, thick woods.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
 
The cabin you found had a hard dirt floor,
cobwebs, an old guitar made of plywood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
 
Sometimes the pictures change, sometimes the chords
sound strange as time. But once you understood
the light was nailed shut, it opened like a door
 
into the next verse you’d been walking toward,
a verse about spring, cool water, boyhood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
 
There’s a bridge leading you to the new shore
where daybreak came the way you thought it should.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door
 
into the last verse there was to explore.
Were you going to say you understood?
Don’t. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
 

from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Jeff Knight: “I have played bar band and coffeehouse gigs in Austin (including with my old band Blue Haiku), have made money busking, worked for almost ten years as a professional songwriter for an educational curriculum company, and recently signed a contract (and got a paycheck) with Fervor Records to place some country-rock songs I co-wrote. I’m just a ham-and-egger on guitar but find that writing, arranging, and performing songs is satisfying in a similar way to poetry: you mess with it and mess with it until you think it’s done and then hope it will connect with people’s hearts and heads. And sometimes it does.” (web)

Rattle Logo

Katie Beswick

RUDERAL

Freddie, at last! We’ll take our secret to the grave.
—last words of Frances Weller, my great-grandmother

It was a life spent, mostly
stooped over things.
The counter at the butcher’s shop
her parents owned,
all through both wars,
wrapping bacon in brown paper parcels
as bombs fell
and far away, men she loved
were shot at;
sometimes blood from the steaks
would stain her dresses.
An ironing board,
straight-backed
perfect perpendicular;
she’d smoke as she ironed,
barely touching the cigarette,
pressing
all her weight upon each garment,
erasing the possibility of a crease.
And babies’ bottoms—
because babies came
and wouldn’t stop,
two at a time,
and the men were locked away or fighting
and anyway, wiping was woman’s work.
Then knitting needles
with their insistent clacks.
It’s good to know that in the cracks
between duties
she sprouted secrets,
like tufts of grass grow on wasteland,
just when you’re sure there is nothing fertile left.
I think now of her hardness—
the thick, sun-worn skin
folded over the bones of her face,
her hands’ dry crevasses,
that mouth, set in its unsmiling line—
as bark to a tree,
covering what’s tender beneath.
 

from Prompt Poem of the Month
September 2024

__________

Prompt: Find someone’s last words, and use that as an epigraph in a poem where “death” is not mentioned by name.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “____”

Rattle Logo

October 8, 2024

Frances Klein

WHEN MY STUDENT WHO WANTS TO BE A WRITER SAYS THEY DO NOT READ

Why would you build a house with no nails?
 
Why plant, till, harvest a crop
in whose taste you find no savor?
 
The bees of the field scan the dances of their sisters
before penning a path to the lavender patch—
 
The forest produces a new body
of work only after absorbing volumes of cedar trees,
each bear bread and blueberry bush in the Tongass
standing on the shoulders of giants—
 
The incoming waves read each stone and shell
on the shore as they sketch the high tide line—
 
Inside you is a curled fern yearning for light.
 
Inside you is a fire lit beneath a capped chimney.
 
Smoke fills your rooms; there are no doors
or windows to air them out.
 

from Poets Respond

__________

Frances Klein: “There has been a lot of online discourse this week about an article in The Atlantic lamenting that students no longer come to college prepared to read full books. Although I disagree with the author’s chosen villain (she blames high school teachers) I related to the experience of having students enter creative writing classes with an expressed distaste for reading. I have been teaching creative writing to high school students for many years, and in the last five years or so I have noticed a major shift in the ‘influences’ students identify for their writing. More and more, kids who claim they want to be writers are open about disliking reading. When asked to talk about the influences on their writing, they identify TV shows, musicians, and online influencers. In real life, I try to be patient and understanding, to help guide students to texts that sparks their interest and draw them in to loving reading. This poem, however, was written from my knee jerk reaction of frustration, from the ‘what I wish I could say,’ point of view.” (web)

Rattle Logo

October 7, 2024

Jennifer Hambrick

MY DADDY WAS AN APPALACHIAN FOLKSONG

a harmonica-breathing picker of tunes,
wayfaring stranger, foot-stomping pilgrim
of sorrow unseen in honeysuckle and wildwood
flowers high on a mountain his daddy
 
and his daddy and his and his knew by heart.
Sunday mornings he sings off key and so loud
the brethren in front look back over their shoulders
and smile at us that smile of sweet charity.
 
Quiet down, Mama sizzles, and he swallows
the song deep into his belly till the organ stops
playing and the choir stops singing and the afterglow
of stars in our crowns lingers in the circle
 
unbroken. And the stories those songs tell—
the one about the carpenter’s wife who left him
and her baby and ran off with a man who said
he’d buy her more than biscuits and grease gravy.
 
When the song ends, she’s crying. I expect she still is.
Learned the words from Daddy with his whompy-jawed
tune and I wonder now what happened to that baby—
did he grow up and build houses like his pa?
 
Did she fail to thrive? On the overnight shift
the police scanner wails of a body in a dumpster,
and Daddy’s sent out, reporter’s notebook cornering
through a hole in his pocket, to get the story.
 
Heat hovers like a fiddle’s dying note as he
looks over the edge, steps away, loses his
stomach. You’d think the baby was sleeping,
he tells Mama later, except for those blue lips
 
and all the world’s dirges bury fire in his gut,
round his shoulders into a weary refrain. Time comes
years later and Daddy moves on to the by and by,
the baby’s ballad stuck in his throat, the rhythm
 
of her name unsung, not once lined out at a
summer evening hymn sing, never whispered
to shape notes washing like Jordan over the pews.
Some tunes, they say, are just too hard to carry.
 

from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Jennifer Hambrick: “In my first career, I performed as a professional flutist with major orchestras and in studio recording sessions. Classical music got under my skin during my tender years through an intense study of dance, and pop radio was the soundtrack for my adolescence. That musical immersion helped prepare me for all of my work with music, including my current career as a professional singer, classical music broadcaster, multimedia producer, and cultural journalist. I don’t often write poetry about music, but I do always write poetry—whatever the theme or subject—musically, by ear. The word-rhythms and vowel and consonant sounds I hear in my mind’s ear guide me through the creation of every poem I write. In this sense, the process of writing poetry is, for me, nothing short of making music with words, and the most important ingredient in my writing process is second nature to all good musicians: listening.” (web)

Rattle Logo

October 6, 2024

Christiana Doucette

WHEN THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD HITS HOME

There is a gapping
in the chest when the water
outside pours indoors.
 
A continental
shift shuts down the panic that
will only drown me.
 
As the first tree gives
with a rush of wind and that
ground-shaking thunder
 
and then another
and another pound the house
next door. The roar as
 
oak folds shed like its
an old slice of bread around
raw celery spear.
 
There is clarity
of who must do what
to get where safely.
 
A laser focus
on further up and further
in gathering speed.
 
The wind whips razor
blade sheets of rain sideways as
everything roars. Doors
 
slam. My youngest’s hand
holds tight, as I urge older
sisters not to stare
 
but to move move move
to the house up the hill with
no trees and no creek
 
where yellow light pours
from storm-fogged windows like
freshly buttered toast.
 
Then the door opens.
We’re pulled inside where it’s warm.
Where it’s dry. Where it’s
 
safe. I look back home
just as the storm plants a tree
on my bedroom roof.
 

from Poets Respond

__________

Christiana Doucette: “This poem was written as my phone battery depleted last night. We are on day four of no power, post-Helene. And I am so very grateful for good neighbors and bodily safety. I think we of the South Carolina upstate, and Western North Carolina will be carrying the terror of this storm for a long long time.” (web)

Rattle Logo

October 5, 2024

Alba Payton Valencia (age 4)

BIG HAT

I like a big hat
to sit on my head.
 
I carry teddy bears
and blankets inside.
 
How does it all fit?
Because I made it up.
 

from 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Alba Payton Valencia: “I like to write poetry because it makes me feel happy and also because I like to write it with my papa. And because it makes me think of my home.”

Rattle Logo

October 4, 2024

Vince Gotera

LETTER TO BOB BOYNTON, MUSIC PRODIGY

Dear Bob: I find myself hearkening back
sometimes to those old days when you and I
were playing in garage bands, way way back
in high school. You were the drummer and I
 
was the guitarist. Remember that time
when we tape recorded a practice song?
It was The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” A damn fine
recording, that was. Rickrock channeling 
 
Morrison, John doing Manzarek, and
me wielding Krieger’s solo note for note,
with you and Steve, best damn rhythm section.
But, you know, Bob, we never really did
 
justice to your skills, not only were you
an excellent drummer; you also played
the flute and, I think, the saxophone too.
Guitar, bass—you were a quintuple threat!
 
Whatever happened to that demo tape,
do you know? We were really kicking ass
that day. But you, old friend, you were excep-
tional: rolling fills and cymbal crashes,
 
keeping time with your strong foot on the kick,
crisp attack on high hat and snare, a prince
on the drum throne. Each time we played, you shook
the stage like a damn earthquake. Thank you. —Vince
 

from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Vince Gotera: “I play bass in the band Deja Blue and also guitar in the duo Groovy News. I’ve played in bands for several decades. Music has been a crucial theme in many of my poems, focusing most often on guitars and guitarists as well as on the act and feeling of performance.” (web)

Rattle Logo