Lexi Pelle: “When I read the story about bats having non-penetrative sex in a church I knew it needed to be in a poem. It made me laugh, but also made me think about the lengths (pun intended) scientists will go to understand the world’s mysteries, which feels related to the process of writing poetry.” (web)
Joshua Mensch: “Like many people, I’m anxious about the current state of the world, and climate change ranks high among my worries. It’s not a new concern, though. Scientists have been predicting doom since I was born. As a child, I was diligent about picking up litter, turning off lights, not wasting food, and by the time I was a teenager, I had become somewhat radical in my outlook. I believed sabotage and eco-terrorism were a viable path to saving the planet. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that such acts do little to change the policies and behaviors of governments and corporations, but can cause dramatic, personal harm to the individuals who work in targeted industries. So, what response makes sense, then? As an individual there’s not much I can do; my political and consumer power is limited. And yet, as an individual, I still consume a tremendous amount of resources. My climate footprint is huge. Imagine taking a tank’s worth of gas and lighting it on fire in your backyard. It would feel like such an unbearable crime, all that pollution. And yet, for years I’ve done just that, filling my car up once a week and then sending it into the sky, which I need to do to earn a living and go about my life. So my quandary remains unresolved. This poem, which is based on true events—I met these people, they really existed—is an attempt to work through that, though the realization the poem enacts took longer in real life, and in many ways, is still something I struggle with.” (web)
“The Addiction Bird” by Agnes Hanying OngPosted by Rattle
Image: “Shadowland” by Arthur Lawrence. “The Addiction Bird” was written by Agnes Hanying Ong for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
Agnes Hanying Ong
THE ADDICTION BIRD
In a dream
someone calling your name
from a far sea. A sign
from Allah. Says the book
of which, oriole, people.
To Allah, I pray everyday
that you will find the way and live
a life without the drink. It is
the only speaker of an
anguish, anguish of
idyllic geese. How do birds say good
bye to their chicks? When
the black birds came, they wore
colors of a rainbow and
the colors fell off on
everything. Live like a bird I keep
having this dream of
school shooting, no, it takes
place in a drugstore, where
the usual girl, who is there, says
Look, look, that guy is
coming. Do you hear gunshots. What’s
that? Flickering in the distance?
Wait, that’s gunfire. Okay, so
what now? Are we supposed to
run out? He is outside. So
should we run in? In this literal
drugstore rimmed with aisles
of bottles to be
walking, where you
might think this is holy
temple of genies, we are
running past: genies or, jinn
or jaan, sentenced
to life as numerous
drinks in bottles all full, same
place where I once witnessed a
bird die, having flown
into glass, less than a minute
ago. Here, we arrive at: an empty
room, which has a lock, on the
metal door. So we ought to
be safe here. Just lock the door, lock
the door. I lock the door, realizing
there is another room inside this room
which has no windows. The room is
walled with just cold, concrete
surprising in this town, like it is a miniature
medieval castle. It is like, nightly, we can
warm our hands here, stay low and close
to the ground, while setting a pile of
silverfish on fire and say: This is living. This is
Comment from the artist, Arthur Lawrence: “This poem is chock-full of poetic imagery and delightful word play like ‘the usual girl, genies or, jinn or jann.’ The line spacing is purposeful and not stressed. The painting that I provided is somewhat nightmarish and surrealistic, qualities this poem elicits. The poem begs the question, what are we addicted to … guns, war, drugs, mindless violence, mindless adherence to doctrine? From the war in Gaza to the war in our schools, and on our streets, this is the nightmare our children and grandchildren live with every day. Just ask the young and they will tell you that you are too old to understand.”
“For Years, I Believed That” by Conan TanPosted by Rattle
Conan Tan
FOR YEARS, I BELIEVED THAT
You were my biggest mistake. In the yard,
our second son gave way to a shard
of glass and still, you did nothing. Kept mum.
Knife to air and he was taxing the sum
of his being and still, you let the night sky
slit his throat into a scarf a father’s eye
has to weep itself to sleep with. Tell me, how can
these hands wager a life without seeing the man
his boy would have become? The answer: they
have to. So you’re never coming home. So I’ll replay
the lost reel in my head, forgetting, if only for
a second, about the real loss ten years is still sore
from carrying—that grief is nothing but a debt
of shared skin I wish we had not lost its bet.
Prompt: “This poem was written in response to SingPoWriMo 2022’s Day 1 prompt. The prompt was titled ‘The Beginner’s Luck Prompt’ and asked writers to write a poem committing all the mistakes they made as a new poet. It also featured optional poem bonuses such as the #FortuneFavoursTheBoldBonus which asked writers to include end rhymes, the #YoureSoLuckyBonus which required writers to include a gambling reference, and the #InTheBeginningBonus which asked writers to make the poem an origin story of themselves as a poet. When I first started writing poems at 13, I loved sonnets and ended virtually every poem with an end rhyme. While my writing has changed since then, I wanted to have a good laugh and merge the style I write in now with the incessant rhyming and clichéd images my 13-year-old self used.”
Conan Tan: “Sometimes, I end up writing about the same theme, which makes poetry repetitive. Writing prompts are great because they provide me with a goal to write toward, but I’m able to filter the prompts through my lens and write something that I might not have written without the prompt. Some of my favourite prompts are form prompts because they expose me to the variety of different poetic forms there are, even the seemingly forgotten ones like the empat perkataan.”
Francesca Moroney: “Kenya’s plan to plant 100 million trees strikes me as an act of both great optimism and great mourning. The fact that our earth is in such dire need of replenishment merely underscores the extent of all that has been stripped from it. Sometimes it feels like that on a personal level, as well. No matter how much we plant, we will never find a way to compensate for all that has been lost. ” (web)
Michael Meyerhofer: “The first time I read the poems in What the Living Do by Marie Howe, I was so blown away that I said something like ‘Holy shit…’ after pretty much every one. This was followed, naturally, by a desire to share those poems with everyone—and to try and pull off the same miracle, if humanly possible. There’s a lot to be said for making somebody so stunned (hopefully in a good way) by something as seemingly innocuous as writing that all they can do is raise their eyebrows and swear like a sailor.” (web)
“My Dad Loves the Smell of Asphalt” by Lisa SticePosted by Rattle
Lisa Stice
MY DAD LOVES THE SMELL OF ASPHALT
He’d work in the summer with steam
rising from new roads, climbing up
and down from loaders and scrapers,
fixing whatever needed fixing then
he’d come home to us smelling of
oil with his arms dirty, clean up to his
t-shirt sleeves, and he’d wash with
green Lava soap in the utility sink,
gray water swirling down the drain—
his nightly ritual before dinner and
TV and sometimes he’d fall asleep
on the couch, his snores so loud we’d
have to nudge him to be able to hear
the sitcom, and he always went to bed
far earlier than us anyway because he
would be gone again before we woke.
Prompt: “From The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano (Two Sylvias Press, 2013): April 13—‘In honor of Seamus Heaney’s birthday … write a poem about your native land … focus on details about … what your parents and/or grandparents did for a living.’”
Lisa Stice: “There are 365 prompts in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano (Two Sylvias Press, 2013), and I have actually revisited the book several times, and so written two or three different poems per prompt. It’s a lot of fun!” (web)
