February 13, 2025

Todd Robinson

YEAR SIX

The horizon rebuffed
our hopes.
 
She stopped going outside.
Her bedroom blinds
 
became tourniquets
tightening light to slits.
 
Neighbors’ homes
were caves aflame
 
I counted with the owl.
People still walked
 
their snuffling dogs.
Migrating doves
 
brought record heat,
red flag warnings,
 
winter down to one
snow as she ate, slept,
 
ached, suns setting
like alien things behind
 
the house we painted
hospital white,
 
the blue bedroom
where she fell and fell.
 

from Rattle #86, Winter 2024

__________

Todd Robinson: “Six years ago my favorite mortal came down with a cluster of shipwrecking symptoms. She’s still mostly herself, but hasn’t been able to work or do much living since. Poems are where I stow much of my grief. Or are they machines of language that distill fear to something potable? Or are they ground for wonder to grow in spite of drought? Yes, yes, everlasting yes.” (web)

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February 12, 2025

Aaron Poochigian

CLUB ESCAPE

The long line leaning toward the doorman’s crossed
and tattooed arms, the stamp of stymied heels,
the sighed frustration of the vape-exhaust,
the outright bribes and liner-eyed appeals
 
are beautiful because they mean belief
the thudding dazzle in that box is worth
steep anxious ache, belief that even brief
bottomless freedom can be found on earth.
 

from Rattle #86, Winter 2024

__________

Aaron Poochigian: “I live in New York’s East Village where nightlife is very lively. Just walking through the Friday-night excitement revives in me the infinite possibilities a club or rave used to hold for me—you know, like what is happening in there might well change your life. I think I want that feeling back. And so this poem.” (web)

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February 11, 2025

Jeff Worley

HOW TO BECOME A PROFESSIONAL FOLK SINGER

at the newly opened Ambush Club, Wichita, 1971

There I was: lemon-tinted Lennon glasses,
paisley shirt like ironed vomit, corroded
toenails dangling from Kmart sandals …
 
And when Otis Redding was cut off mid-chorus
from the juke, the three dozen dressed-to-the-max
black couples gazed up at me, each mouth a rictus,
 
as I tuned my Yamaha in a circle of light.
Close enough for folk music, I declared
and began to strum my three-chord version
 
of “Dock of the Bay,” a clever segue and nod to Otis,
I thought. My fingers meated through the song.
I sat on that dock watching the waves come and go
 
through three choruses, then plunked the final major C
with all the majesty of a hammered thumbnail.
And I saw I had stunned the crowd to silence.
 
Did these fine people think I was a novelty act?
If I’d expected applause, I got a voice in the back saying,
Whoa, Momma—turn on the fire hose.
 
And poor Dennis, the new owner and dead-ringer
Ozzie Nelson who’d heard me strum “Stewball”
and “Puff ” at the Riverside Park Folk Jamboree,
 
who thought I was good and knew he needed music,
was frozen behind the bar, lava lamps auguring his future:
purple bubbles rising and breaking apart
 
like the opening-night crowd. The juke erupted
with Otis, back on his dock. The stage lights dimmed.
Drinks on the house! I heard a voice say, Dennis’s voice,
 
and he pressed a twenty into my right palm. Just go,
he said. OK? I slung the guitar over my shoulder.
He opened the back door to the parking lot,
 
and I took my rightful place among the stars.
 

from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

__________

Jeff Worley: “Readers are sometimes curious about just how autobiographical a poem is. My folksinger poem is, unfortunately, a faithful rendition of what happened on this evening. The poem is set near the beginning of my three-year stint (grad school) as a folksinger in Wichita, something I did because I thought I knew how to play guitar (I didn’t), and I thought my playing music on stage would attract impressionable young women (it didn’t). But at least a few of these experiences have become fodder for poems.” (web)

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February 10, 2025

Alma Olaechea

SEVERE ATYPIA

I know you feel like an old, sad dog, the doctor says,
But I think you’re still worth saving.
I’m on my stomach, shirtless,
It’s bright and cold outside, snowing again.
His brow is furrowed in the medical
Light as he makes the first incision to remove
A one-by-one-inch patch of skin between my shoulder blades
That frames a precancerous spot,
Severe atypia, he calls it, a small death storm that
Threatens to rot my core.
 
I mean you’re no waxed apple, he says,
But you’ll still make someone a decent pie.
At least we caught it early,
You still have so many groceries to lug in the house,
A young daughter with a hole in her sock,
Waiting for your permission to
Just throw it away.
You have assignments to finish,
Dreams to discern,
Just think of all the sauces and dips you haven’t tried,
The smell of grass on your dog’s feet.
Just because you can’t get the sound of
Someone’s last breath out of your mind
Doesn’t mean it’s your turn.
You still have time.
Time to ask Alexa if it’s raining outside,
Time to take it all back.
 
Now, to be safe, we will send this new sample to the lab for analysis
Where they will watch your mistakes multiply and
Mutate under a microscope,
All the times you’ve felt small,
All the times you’ve been burned,
Fooled by the gray Ohio sky.
But, no worries,
We’re gonna get you fixed up,
Back in the game,
I’m starting the sutures now,
Two layers, one on top to hold together
What’s left of your middle-aged skin,
One below to keep the fear
From reaching the surface.
 
You may feel some tugging.
What’s that?
It feels like someone’s buttoning your dress too tight?
Yes, it might feel strange to
Bend over and breathe, but
Do what you can.
Understand that this changes things for you now,
Get yourself a good mineral sunblock,
Buy a nice hat,
Stay in the shade,
And don’t let the sun see you smile.
Only come out when the puddles
Threaten to swallow the cars.
The incision might itch or feel numb,
You might feel the weather change
When you say something wrong,
So keep it dry and covered,
To seal the dread out,
Especially in the shower.
Keep it clean and let it breathe,
Hold it together, enough to muddle through the day,
Enough to spread the peanut butter
On the bread as you stare out the window.
 
But know that this won’t kill you,
Not now at least.
It will be some other slow hell,
Like your blood sugar sneaking up on you one night
As you gaze into the light of a vending machine.
What does the rest of your day look like?
You’re making biscuits? I love a good biscuit!
With grape jelly.
It has to be grape.
 
Well, nice to meet you.
We will see you in a few weeks to get the sutures out.
My assistants will be in soon to get you cleaned up,
Pop your tires on, and get you back on the track.
You’ll speed off and slam into something else in no time.
Perhaps a bleacher filled with onlookers
Eating hotdogs in the sun as
Their abnormal cells divide.
 

from Rattle #86, Winter 2024

__________

Alma Olaechea: “I write in an attempt to capture and share what it means to be human. I am at peace with not getting it quite right. I find inspiration in science and go from there.”

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February 9, 2025

Abby E. Murray

TWO-HOUR DELAY

It’s February                                 and already
I’ve overspent my budgeted bewilderment
 
for the year, most of it on deep & constant
sorrow: war, deportations, deployments, hatred
 
forged into policy, theft, dead phone lines
and locked doors. I’ve seen more planes fall
 
from the clouds this winter than snow. So,
for less than an inch of scattered flakes across the city,
 
our superintendent delays schools for two hours,
and before I fill them with what I have in excess—
 
lack of amusement, a backlog of worry, and work—
my daughter runs outside, gloveless, hatless,
 
and all I can think is how lucky she is, at least,
not to be named after industry or my assumptions
 
about her purpose on this planet. When I read
about the young couple practicing eugenics
 
in preparation for an apocalypse, the mother’s
ridiculous straw bonnet and father’s smug face
 
don’t make my jaw drop. My eyes don’t widen.
Belief is the new disbelief. Grief, not shock,
 
is this year’s renewable resource, and baby,
the harvest looks plentiful. My daughter returns
 
to show me how she scraped together
just enough sidewalk grit and ice to sculpt
 
a snowman the size of a pigeon. She props it up
in the weeds we call a yard and it stays for days,
 
long after the sun revokes what’s left
of the frost and glitter. It delights us without
 
the burden of surprise, which has never improved
anyone’s life, or built a single beautiful thing.
 

from Poets Respond

__________

Abby E. Murray: “This poem happened instead of the incredulity I once felt as I stayed informed about what was happening in the U.S. There’s so much disaster to witness (such as the recovery of the wreck of flight 5342 in the Potomac, or this rising ‘trend’ of fascistic pronatalism), and many of us are in this strange new place of no longer losing time to the experience of shock—but we aren’t desensitized either. We’re feeling everything, just without the delay of disbelief. It’s simultaneously disorienting and intensely revealing.” (web)

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February 8, 2025

Ron Offen

AUBADE FOR ONE DISMAYED

Half-Alice in her milky, silky sheets
almost awake to the ache of another day
rebounding from her beaming ceiling,
grieved leaving the comforts of the night—
the snuggled pillow and the shy bedfellow
a fuzzy dream had borne and then withdrawn
at the intrusion of the hooligan light.

She closed her eyes once more to place the face,
so familiar and, yes, similar
to that of someone she had always known.
Perhaps she’d find a name if once again
she slipped into the deep warm sea of sleep.
And then a voice called Alice and she saw
a woman waving, craving her return.

from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Tribute to the Sonnet

__________

Ron Offen: “One day, sitting in my high school library writing doggerel to pass the time, my best friend whispered suddenly, ‘You know what we should be? Poets!’ It was one of those revelations one instantly knows is momentous and right; and I have not stopped writing poems since. A few lines of the poem presented here arrived about 3 a.m., forcing me to get out of bed to set them down.”

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February 7, 2025

Amy Newman

ABANDONED FAIR

Our love is an abandoned fair:
the lights all broken on the midway,
some glitter still hung in the air.
 
We strolled like kids. We weren’t aware.
We satisfied ourselves all day.
Our love is an abandoned fair,
 
though painted horses galloped there,
beneath—I cringe at the cliché—
some glitter, still hung the air,
 
those sparkles of our wear and tear,
silver distractions. What did I say
our love is? An abandoned fair,
 
an image of what mattered there—
gold, right? (See in a tossed bouquet,
some glitter still.) Hung in the air
 
like a promise? Nope. Nothing there.
Just sparkly garbage and decay.
Our love is an abandoned fair.
Some glitter still hung in the air.
 

from Rattle #86, Winter 2024

__________

Amy Newman: “One summer after graduating from college, I was working as an assistant to a stylist in Manhattan, dressing models for photo shoots and television commercials. It sounds glamorous, but I felt very alien in that world. One morning, I was on location in an apartment on the Upper West Side, surrounded by people bustling about and by shopping bags full of items to collate and eventually choose to dress the talent. I noticed, on the coffee table, an issue of the The New Yorker, opened it, and turned to ‘In Passing,’ a poem by Stanley Plumly. I had studied poetry in college, and I had thought all of that—reading and drafting poetry—was behind me. But as I read the poem, everything changed for me: the studio, the bustling, the feverish atmosphere, all fell away. After I read the final line, I looked up from the poem again, and I was surprised to be back in that studio. I felt so moved, and so found for that moment, that I decided to go back to college to study poetry.” (web)

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