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a fuzzy dream had borne and then withdrawn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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February 6, 2025

Jan LaPerle

SHE RINGS LIKE A BELL THROUGH THE NIGHT

Yesterday my husband bought a Lincoln Town Car.
As we were driving to pick it up he said how it was once
the longest car in America. Sometimes I don’t have to imagine
what he’ll be like when he’s old. I can see,
clearly, tonight, the moon.
 
To the moon and back
is how I love you, I said, and what I say now
to my month-old daughter. But that’s not right;
that’s not enough. To the moon and back and back and back
when I was first getting to know my husband I lied,
told him I only wanted to be friends. I remember his eyes,
a ship through ice.
 
Ship-fronts scare me, and that is what I felt like pregnant—
so big and capable of so much: so much good; so much bad.
It was the bad I dwelled on. I watched videos of babies
with two heads, many legs, nothing at all for eyes.
I was sure I was ruining her, somehow, someway:
the fluffernutter, too many tuna fish sandwiches.
 
I thought once I gave birth I’d be relieved if she was okay.
I could sleep through the night and stop dreaming of her
sleeping in my arms, a pole for a head.
 
One fear replaces another. Each night now I wake
in fear that I’ve crushed her in bed. Sometimes it’s so bad
I wake the husband and the two of us, in the slight light
of the streetlight, are in there, in the king bed digging,
through pillows and sheets, looking for our baby.
Digging and digging as if our bed was the terrible ground
beneath the floorboards. We sweat, breathe heavy;
I’m crying.
 
The power to kill something is so strong up in me,
and so strange to be right next to the part of me
that can love something this much. It’s the sort of love
I want to tell people without children about,
as mothers and fathers once told me. But this is impossible.
 
And it’s impossible to think of my life before her
(as they said it would be)—to think of how it was when
I first saw my husband, how I imagined our life together
even then, even when he was someone else’s.
 
How quickly life can change direction. I wonder
if all couples imagine their husbands or wives old,
themselves old. I wonder if my parents had done so
when they were first married, decades before their divorce.
They couldn’t have known where their lives were going.
I wonder about the ease of a U-turn in our Lincoln Town Car.
A U-turn over the highway median: illegal. Sad.
 
I do not want my husband to leave me.
 
There are so many fears in me. When I try to fall
asleep I can hear a knocking against the headboard.
Someone is already at my door with the big, bad news.
So I sleep for a little while until the baby wakes me.
Sometimes I’m so tired when she wakes I get
so damn mad at her. Last night I set her
little screaming body on the countertop,
simple, like a set of keys. Her little hand was hitting
against the lever on the toaster. I think now it might
have looked like she was making toast. She had to hit
against something to wake me, to tell me
I was being a bad mother, selfish for wanting sleep
more than wanting to care for her, her little belly
empty as the streets (terrible when they’re empty).
 
The lake sits at the end of our street.
The sad boats float. One going this way, one that—
that’s how I see our marriage going sometimes.
As if our love will turn into something obligatory—
something to maintain like the lawn,
or a loosening shutter.
 
Something in me is loosening.
I dream each night of flying. Once, years ago,
I pranked my father, told him his house in Florida
had been hit by a storm. Pieces of his house were loosening.
I disguised my voice, made it old and cranky. The funniest part
is that he believed this voice.
 
Inside of me is the old fuddy-duddy I will someday be.
I feel her in there, like a pregnancy. Aren’t there so many
parts of us? Young, old, our children, parents.
Luckily, now, we have a big car—it stretches
across our driveway, ready to hold us, like a big, big hand.
 

from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

__________

Jan LaPerle: “I’m a new mother. There’s hardly much to say after that (and a whole lot more, too). I write this in the springtime, which means I’m feeling like buying new clothes and cutting off my hair. Daffodils are blooming outside my kitchen window. My husband and I just moved into a new (old) house, which we’ve been working on. We are a team, and I love that about us (and everything). He cooks for me; all I have to do is watch the daffodils. I love watching the top of my daughter Winnie’s fuzzy head when she eats. Poetry comes in the smaller moments. My baby smiles at the dog. The dog smiles at my husband. I just smile at them all.”

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February 5, 2025

Steven Monte

ON THE MEANING OF WALLS

for David Rosen

The Great Wall of China couldn’t hold back
every invader, or angle of attack:
 
the forces of the Mongol khaganate
galloped around it; others used the gate.
 
Antonine’s Wall wouldn’t hold, Romans knew.
Hadrian’s would—till the legions withdrew.
 
Constantinople’s Theodosian Walls
stopped everything, till Mehmet’s cannonballs
 
fell on them, smashing them to smithereens—
call it “diplomacy by other means.”
 
Jerusalem’s “Western Wall” gained renown
for standing; Berlin’s Wall, for coming down.
 
From Babylon to blitzkrieged Maginot,
walls came to mean things their makers couldn’t know.
 
Walls signaled virtue, or the gravest wrong;
a pointing toward who did (or didn’t) belong.
 
They could be power, pragmatism, art;
everything holding us together, apart.
 
Regardless of what they were fashioned for,
time would reduce each wall to metaphor.
 

from Rattle #86, Winter 2024

__________

Steven Monte: “This poem came to me as a wall—a line of separated rhyming couplets. That’s often the way it is for me: content suggests a form to me, and then the form influences the content in turn. Starting with the idea of ‘The Wall of China’ and Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ along with the notion of separated rhyming couplets, the poem wrote itself, as strange as that may sound. The stricter the form, the quicker the result—assuming that there is a result. It happens or it doesn’t happen.”

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February 4, 2025

Hayden Saunier

POEM IN SEARCH OF A HORSE

Time is not reading the poem as you
read the poem, but rest assured he’s slipped
inside the room in his soft, polished shoes,
with his little cough, his bowler hat in hand,
so sorry to disturb. It isn’t that he doesn’t like
to read, he loves to lean across your shoulder,
let you feel his breath, a delicate subzero
on your neck, but he’s impatient with anything
but haiku. Ignore him. He’ll pretend
he doesn’t care, proceed to wind the clocks
with tiny keys or stretch out on a sofa, tap
a tree branch on a pane and wait you out.
Meanwhile, the poem persists in its solitary
business of resisting being made, trying
the usual tactics: silence, tantrum, argument
over rules of play until the stuck mind panics,
a tarantula in hot tar, shouts words out
like charades: moon! anapest! plumage! boat!
desperate to drown out that silence accompanying
the figure in the well-cut suit who’s polishing
the gold case of his pocket watch, remarking
how words pile up like big rigs on a fogged-in
freeway: apple! rainfall! pasture! bell! and even
when the poem finds some purchase, scrambles
up a narrow footpath through a field and stands
inside a grassy insect buzz, holding out
a shaky palm of sugar to conjure up a horse,
a distant train will whistle, spooking anything
half wild. You’re back exactly where you started.
Cough-cough. Soft shoes. Tick-tock. No horse.

from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

__________

Hayden Saunier: “I had lost my bearings inside the poem I was working on and needed something to power and ground it, but I’d made too big a mess. I’d ruined it. So I let the search take over. The tarantula image is an echo from a poem called ‘Fence’ by Janet Poland and became an apt figure for the mucked, grasping mind.” (web)

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February 3, 2025

Charlotte Matthews

THE WORLD I CANNOT CATCH

Last week a woman sued Kraft  
claiming it takes longer to microwave  
their mac n cheese than advertised.  
 
She’s in a hurry, so much to get done.  
Not enough hours in the day.  
And the box said it only takes three  
 
minutes to make a single cup.  
She says they’re wrong, says they 
didn’t account for stirring the water,  
 
letting the cheese thicken. So, a lawsuit.  
Because she would not have bought  
the stuff if she’d known the truth.  
 
Across the road, my neighbor’s wife  
is dying. The hospice car’s logo reads 
home care forever. At the mailbox 
 
he tells me she might have a couple more days,  
if that. When I go see her, she holds my hand, 
and hers is warmer than I’d expected, softer. 
 
Like she’s just had a bath. Like she’s all ready 
to get tucked in for the night, flannel gown 
with pink roses, Goodnight Moon waiting. 
 
But there’s the click and puff of the oxygen  
concentrator at her side, and January’s afternoon  
light throwing shadows on the wood floor. 
 
None of us can ever know what we don’t know,  
all the miracles that go unseen fall away,  
what labyrinth has brought us to this moment.  
 
She and I sit for a long time until she breaks 
the silence, lifts her hand to the chickadees who flutter  
at her window feeder, declaring she hopes they’ll  
 
keep on coming back long after she is gone.
 

from Rattle #86, Winter 2024

__________

Charlotte Matthews: “Since the pandemic, life seems chopped into little shards of time. I write poems to try to capture some of the mishmash and glue it all back together, to make something whole that cannot be broken apart. Thanks for reading.”

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February 2, 2025

Dante Di Stefano

THE SKATERS

At the rink, they whoosh, these little bundled
Beings, their scarves graffitiing the air
My daughter weaving among them, her long legs
Pumping, the bright pink kitty earmuffs, a blur
 
& I imagine those other skaters this week
Their blades asleep in their stowed luggage
Their ankles describing triple toe loops
& double axels above the twilight Potomac
 
We parents know what it is to be afraid
Of the uncertain, the incendiary, the whirring dark,
Deviations from flight plans, the unconfirmed
Reports of whomever, whatever wasn’t supposed to
 
Happen, but the fact is it is always happening,
What we most fear & feared & glide away from,
But never escape, & still the faith that these feet
Ours & our children’s, will trace something
 
Beautiful, an arabesque on ice, the perfect cursive
Of a name that will melt away, but the memory
Of which we might trace, so delicately like this line
Right here, whirling away into the dear humming dark
 

from Poets Respond

__________

Dante Di Stefano: “This poem is about the horrible plane crash this week. I send my thoughts and deepest sympathies to the families of all the victims.” (web)

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