May 13, 2024

“Fresh” by Rasma HaidriPosted by

Rasma Haidri

FRESH

I think I heard a joke one time
about a woman who ironed her sheets.
This was in America, the Midwest
in case that explains why it was
funny. I didn’t laugh. Never ironed
a thing in my life, hardly ever
washed a sheet, and when I did
they came from the washer flat,
nearly folded, material wrinkle-free,
some kind of plastic I guess.
That was in that other life,
the one that ended the day I
visited your apartment, suddenly
craving to place my bare foot
on your bare calf, while you sat
in a cat-scratch chair, stitching
a bedsheet for your godson, some kind of
anti-embroidery, a Norwegian craft
involving removing threads
from cloth. I didn’t lift my foot
to touch your leg. I had a husband
and you were a woman
I only sort of knew from choir,
but around the room your fresh
laundry hung on racks, impossible
sweetness drugging my senses,
so when you stepped out, I acted,
no forethought or plan, no inkling
of the consequences, I lifted a pair
of your underpants to my nose,
inhaling the shocking premonition
of today—eighteen years on—
the sweet laundered scent in our bedroom
as I slip between cotton sheets
you have ironed so smooth and crisp.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Rasma Haidri: “My poems are like snapshots, a moment in freeze-frame that shows the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. I never forgot the moment when I shocked myself by picking her underwear off the drying rack, but I didn’t think to write about it in my collection of poems that covers the trials and triumphs of that year we fell in love. I think all never-forgotten moments are poems in the waiting. I try to stay alert and notice when a memory is ready to tell me, in a poem, the reason it sticks. This memory is from the year we met, but its significance is for the 25-year anniversary book of love poems.” (web)

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May 12, 2024

“Mother’s Day Unsonnet” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

MOTHER’S DAY UNSONNET

To think that I was once a germ of light
in the belly of another being,
and that this fact is unremarkable
in the vast plod of human existence,
 
renders me heavy with the headiness
of so much unsaying, and to reflect
on the fact that it’s difficult to praise,
in a single sentence sonnet, the guise
 
of that first miraculous animal
the new animal of my own body
was once tethered to by a cord of
 
meat and need, and how by snipping this tie
a deeper chord sounded from the organ
of my own mouth, my first sacred wailing,
 
and how the world splits open every time
a son tries to tell his mother simply:
thank you for this one strange and shining life.
 

—from Poets Respond
May 12, 2024

__________

Dante Di Stefano: “My mother is an exceptional woman, who has done more for me than anyone. And yet, for some reason, I find it difficult to write poems for her. This poem started as an attempt to write a single sentence sonnet like Frost’s ‘The Silken Tent,’ only for my mom. Hopefully, it gets at some of the unbounded gratitude I feel for her and have a hard time articulating on the page and in every day life. Also, I hope it expresses my profound reverence for all mothers, and my gratitude to my wife for being such a great mother to our two children.”

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May 11, 2024

“Confiding with a Hen” by Chloe OrtizPosted by

Chloe Ortiz (age 14)

CONFIDING WITH A HEN

I tell her 
the rye truth.
We sit in the morning,
dew the soil staining.
She cocks her head, 
I can tell she is listening.
Her small eyes 
fill with tilled earth. 
When I leave,
she pecks the ground,
searching.

—from 2014 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Chloe Ortiz: “I like to write poetry because when I read a good poem, it makes me feel good and I smile. I would like to make other people feel good too.”

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May 10, 2024

“Resurrection” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

RESURRECTION

When I was five my brother convinced me
to perform mouth to mouth on a catfish
floating belly up in the scum that gathered
in the lake behind our house. He said I had the power
 
to bring it back, though it was my choice.
I followed his directions, leaned over the dock,
pressed my lips against the stiff ridge of its mouth
(while keeping its bloated body submerged
 
beneath the oily sheen) and began to breathe in
and out as I opened and closed the bony folds
of its gills. At first, my brother held my ankles, to steady me
so I wouldn’t fall off the dock. I kept breathing
 
in through my nose­—­sting of creosote and pond rot—
and out through my mouth—a soft exhale of prayer.
You already know I did not bring the fish back to life,
though it wasn’t for lack of trying. I kept breathing
 
into that dark opening long after my brother said to quit,
long after he got bored and wandered off,
and the setting sun bathed the brackish water in gold.
I kept breathing in and out, long after the night cooled,
 
and the stars rose, and my mother found me asleep
on the dock, her voice calling me back from that place,
where the fish turned its rapturous eyes away from the moon,
and dove back to its sanctuary of darkness.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez: “My childhood home was on a small lake in Kansas. I spent many happy hours there fishing with my brother. But I was terrified of the catfish. They looked like nightmares dredged up from a bad dream with their slimy, mottled skin, wide-set, gelatinous eyes, mouths open and groping and all those tentacle-like whiskers. I don’t know if my brother ever convinced me I could bring a dead thing back to life. Perhaps I have mis-remembered it. But ‘Resurrection’ is an attempt to capture my child-desire to believe in myself.” (web)

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May 9, 2024

“I Guess” by Marianne KunkelPosted by

Marianne Kunkel

I GUESS

Right after my parents’ divorce,
people blurted the single question
they’d been dying to ask for years.
How’d they last a day?

Great sex, I was tempted to respond,
as if the thought of my sour mother
fondling my father’s new rebellion,
a ponytail, wasn’t joke enough.

I guess long ago they made
each other happy. What a sad
thing to have to guess. Once my mother
spoke of a nightmare in which
she walked to our front door;

in pitch dark, she twisted the knob
and a hand from outside twisted back.
I imagine if I shined a flashlight
on that intruder’s face, I’d see
my ever-frustrated father.

Proximity without loving
was their creed, him plucking
a guitar in a room off the kitchen,
her clicking a noisy blender on,

and so I couldn’t believe it when my father said
Enough after all those nights
he laid in their waterbed, flirting
with escape but drifting nowhere.

—from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

__________

Marianne Kunkel: “My high school English teacher dropped a Marianne Moore poem on my desk after class one day. At the time I liked reading poetry, but it took realizing I shared a name with a famous poet for me to see myself in it. I started writing.” (web)

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May 8, 2024

“How to Forget” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

HOW TO FORGET

I am lining my memories up against the wall.
They are begging me for reprieve. Here is the night
I found you on the floor, folded
 
like laundry. Here are the bloody towels,
the smell of ammonia and rotting fruit.
Once I was a wife. Now
 
I am a wilderness. I am the grove
of aspens. All that’s left of you
are candle stubs and carpet stains.
 
All your goodbyes have turned into horses.
They are grazing peacefully. Your words
are blades of grass, our last argument
 
a pasture dotted with poppies.
That night I watched you wash
your bruised hands in the sink. Now,
 
I see two fish diving into a stream.
I am re-remembering the last time
we spoke. I have turned it into a holiday,
 
marked it on the calendar
with an asterisk. A day to eat cake.
A day to enter the cellar
 
and retrieve the special vintage
with its sweet notes of smoke and honey.
Lush on the tongue. Easy to swallow.
 
The golden crowned sparrows
have returned from their long summer
singing of loss. Three notes.
 
One for the knife, one for the cut,
one for all I have
forgotten.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez: “According to Michael Anderson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, with ‘motivated forgetting’ you can forget with intentionality and sculpt your painful memories into something beautiful. In a New York Times article, Anderson says you can get better at this with practice. ‘How to Forget’ grew out of a thought exercise where the narrator is lining her memories up and making choices about which ones to kill off, and which ones to keep and reshape.” (web)

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May 7, 2024

“Credit” by James Washington Jr.Posted by

James Washington Jr.

CREDIT

As son
& mother.
 
Welfare.
 
State surplus
peanut butter, 
cheese, & smiles
for Mr. Sullivan’s
monthly inspection
to certify our poverty.
 
Our couch
couldn’t stand
by itself,
all lopsided on
prosthetic legs:
 
The Yellow Pages,
upside-down
cast iron fry pan,
 
cushions ravished
raw to cotton entrails.
 
Mr. Sullivan
made it look hard, 
whether we even
needed a cheap
new sofa, while I,
taught to please,
complimented
his same-same tie, 
offered him water,
respectful, “Sir.”
 
Mother of a million
thanks, thespian.
 
& Mr. Sullivan
nodded fedora,
as if high courtesy.
 
You’re a credit to your race!
 
he said to me,
& decades later,
still stuck in my throat,
thicker even than
bitter government
peanut butter & cheese.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
April 2024

__________

Prompt: Write a poem with a single word as the title, in which
our understanding of that word shifts by the end of the poem.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “The brilliant economy of language in ‘Credit’ helps this poem knock on our door with authenticity. James further weaves us into the narrative with bold images, such as the upside down Yellow Pages and the cotton entrails of the cushions. When the dialogue hits and is allowed to hang in the air without much exposition, we too feel the slap, which reverberates with the transformative title.”

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