Awards

August 3, 2023

“Of You” by Wendy VidelockPosted by

Wendy Videlock

OF YOU

You’ve been the wolf, you’ve been the bear,
you were the grass when I was air,
the hush of the lake, eyes and lips,
a shyness at my fingertips,

a motion that knew when to slow,
the forest where I always go;

and now you are the windowsill
I rest my elbows on until
the night grows dark and I can’t see
these silhouettes of you and me.

—from Rattle #42, Winter 2013
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Wendy Videlock: “I know nothing about poetry except that it is good medicine for what ails us, gives meaning to what shadows us, and adds weight to what assails us. I am grateful it is persistent.” (web)

Rattle Logo

June 15, 2023

“Why I Am Not a Taxidermist” by Lauren SchmidtPosted by

Lauren Schmidt

WHY I AM NOT A TAXIDERMIST

I am not a taxidermist, I am afraid of John Wayne.
A guest at Uncle’s house, I slept in The John Wayne Room.
It was called The John Wayne Room as if a room
such as this could have another name: a life-size
cardboard form of John Wayne in the Western
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The plot not to be confused
with that story where the woman’s head falls off
as her husband unties the ribbon’s silky knot secured
around her neck. The secret she kept her whole life
from the man she loved, a private strangeness
such as having, in your home, The John Wayne Room.

Egyptians dehydrated the human body by extracting
soft tissues. The torso, left intact so the soul, an airy thing,
could find its likeness in the afterlife. In this room,
John Wayne’s soul would have a number of likenesses
to confuse for the original John Wayne. The most alarming
of which is the John in a Box which is just as it sounds
except that it was not a box but a buck with a tail
for a crank, then: Pop goes the John Wayne.

Who thought of this is less disturbing than who would
buy this except I know the answer. I would have
John Wayne stuffed and mounted in The John Wayne Room
to look at when I’m an old man, Uncle declared.
I am not a taxidermist because I read “A Rose for Emily”
in high school and I know the need to keep something,
everything, long after it is gone, like youth, like love,
the longing to take it all with me because what is memory if not
the cadence of colliding, forgotten things, cymbals
that tempt a tremor from the body’s core and wake

that thing inside? I am not a taxidermist because I would stuff
my dog the time he got his head stuck in the railing
of our stoop. His leather tongue lapped happily at his dish
as sparks darted around his head from the iron cutters
like the squirrels he was about to chase, mad with desire.
I am not a taxidermist because I would pull the skin
off the kind of sleep I got as a kid, drape it around me
so I could remember what it’s like to be ten again.
I would freeze-dry the first time I let music move inside me
like a sinuous being, fit to romp for days. Yes, the sadness

of these things gone, but I am not a taxidermist
because how do I find the exact eyes Tracey had,
shiny with tears, shaking, when she looked at me,
her father’s fist blued into the knob of her chin?
Or her body the night she huddled beneath my porch light
over a spread of Gin Rummy at midnight, that terrible hand
just across the street. Then the girl with the strange name
in ninth grade, the girl with those cheeks, pocked and red
and pus-capped, that frantic hair, I would mount her
on a shelf so I could look at her, wonder why I wasn’t nicer.

I am not a taxidermist because I would cast all the women
from now that I might never get to be, shake my fist at them
and demand a list of failures. I am not a taxidermist because
one day I would sit surrounded in my John Wayne Room
of All I Wished Forgotten. People in town would wonder
about me, rumor what they don’t know. And I,
an old lady in a rocking chair, would stare stolidly
at the hybrid creature of trauma and whiskey sickness,
the griffin myth of if I woke to her groping me
the way I swore she did while I stirred from sleep
in my dormitory bed. Too afraid then to confront
that beast, now I’d stuff it, I’d give it back its teeth.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Neil Postman Award Winner

__________

Lauren Schmidt: “I often worry that I am a lousy poet since much of what I write about comes from the shit I couldn’t possibly make up on my own. There is, then, nothing clever for me to say here. Boo.” (web)

Rattle Logo

June 10, 2023

“Whale Bone” by Steven BrownPosted by

Steven Brown

WHALE BONE

In this field of fireweed and wild oat
that leans for ten thousand mornings to the east,
I see the wind coming
from miles and miles away
like wakes at the back of an unseen boat.

At first, it seems an incredible distance
between the wind and where I stand, but then
as if it knew my time on earth
unpredictable as lightning path,
as if it knew that for love to work,
it must catch up, it must travel fast,
it blows over me, its body an enormous swimmer.

It is in this place I know the truth of things:
that whales, when they die, swim out of the deep water
into the bright blue, their heavy bones forgotten
with effortless glide, that is to say, with grace.

They know and are a part of what is always,
what is true in the wind and the long grass.
I watch as the whales go by, all breath,
touching the things that cannot last.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Steven Brown: “VW vans, pickup trucks, El Caminos. I often wonder about them, parked on the side of an interstate, abandoned or broke-down. Nothing but fields of dry grass or dark pine. Where did the owners of the vehicles go? There are cows everywhere and crickets. I like to think they’re out there somewhere—the permanently fed-up—thousands of them in the woods who’ve got it all figured out.”

Rattle Logo

May 4, 2023

“Fight” by John W. EvansPosted by

John W. Evans

FIGHT

Pick up, I said, and talk to me, you said, come
home and talk to me, I said, not until we can talk, you said,
what, I said, like fucking human beings, you said, I won’t talk
to you, I said, until you come home, you said, I won’t call back,
I said, then don’t, you said, I can’t come home until
we talk, you said, who does this, I said, talk to me, I
said, no one does this, you said, someone is doing it, you said,
right now, you said, people don’t, you said, act like this, I said, I’m
trying to talk to you, I said, just come home, I
said, can’t we talk, you said, come home
first, I said, I left home, you said, so we can talk,
you said, no one talks, you said, not like this, I said, just
talk to me, I said, I am, I said, talking to you, you
said, what did I just say, I said, it matters how you say it,
you said, this is how I said it, I said, pick up, you said, come home.
 

—from The Fight Journal

__________

John W. Evans: “I wrote the poems in The Fight Journal to make sense of an experience about which I felt strongly biased: my divorce. I wanted to recognize the humanity of all involved on the page because this was something I struggled to do in real life. I hoped to find closure, healing, and an answer to two questions. Why had my marriage failed? How had I been complicit in that failure? Adrienne Rich’s ‘From An Old House in America’ was the formal model for the long title poem. Marta Tikkanen’s ‘The Love Story of the Century’ was a precedent for writing about these dynamics. Both poems are personal favorites.” (web)

Rattle Logo

April 25, 2023

“Spin” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

SPIN

I don’t remember if the bottle was a Coke or a Fresca,
just that the glass was cool against our hands
in the warm, empty tool shed. Where we’d gathered
after swimming all afternoon at Debbie Worthman’s
eighth grade pool party, everyone’s skin damp
and blue in the shadows, the boys’ chests bare,
the other girls wearing cute, peek-a-boo cover-ups
that matched their demure suits. And me with a frayed

blue shirt of my father’s, its tails tied fetchingly
around my first bikini, a homemade job I’d stitched
up in pink and red paisley from a Simplicity pattern,
the bottom half barely on because I’d run out of elastic.
I don’t know what Debbie’s parents thought when we slipped
away, leaving the pool. Or whose idea it was as we trudged
up the hill between her father’s prize-winning roses,

their scent filling the air like primitive attar,
their metal name tags chinking in the breeze. That seemed
to have come up from nowhere, pushing at us with invisible
hands as we locked ourselves inside the half dark
that smelled of wood chips and compost, our eyes dilating
like cats’, faces suddenly pale beneath Coppertone tans.
I wasn’t sure why I’d been invited to this party
or why I’d come, except that he was here, the boy
who’d pushed me into the pool more times than any other girl,

and who, when the guys “rated” the girls during a lull
in Mr. Tallerico’s “Classical Music Experience,”
had given me a “9,” Beethoven’s booming, making me feel
almost good enough, almost deserving of his attention.
Which, when it fell on me, when our eyes caught
and locked, threw out a tensile, silk line that hooked
my breath and heart as easily as he made jump-shots at games,
the ball teetering on the orange rim—then bingo, in.

While the sweaty mascot pranced in the moth-eaten tiger
suit, and cheerleaders scissored their perfect legs,
and I’d held my breath, hoping he’d look my way, his hand
dribbling the ball as if he was touching my body.
All that, pressurized and pushed down inside as someone
twirled the bottle and it spun, blurring as we held
our breath like fourteen-year-old yogis and (thank God)
it pointed at someone else. From whom I had to look away

as their lips met, my stepmother’s injunctions—Don’t
stare; cross your legs at the ankles—loud in my head.
Though I would have liked pointers, one dry, chaste peck
the year before from Bruce Colley all I had to go on.
But I gazed down until the bottle whirled toward me,
its opening like the little “oh” of surprise that undid
a slipknot inside my body, something not quite desire,
but what I’d soon call anticipation, singing along

with Carley Simon’s song, a fist in my solar plexus
opening and closing like a Luna moth’s wings.
As he moved across the circle and tilted my face up,
his palm cupped beneath the curve of my cheek,
then fastened his silky, Doublemint-scented mouth
over mine, everything in the room disappearing
in the plush wriggle of his tongue, the slight
thrust of his cock stirring beneath cut-off jeans.

And my tongue moving back. As if I had been born
knowing this, as if we were back in the pool,
his hand water on my skin, the rest of the kids gone,
the inside of my eyelids spangled with paisley swirls.
As I leaned further and further into this kiss that would
sustain me all summer, practicing for the next one
with my pillow or the fleshy part of my palm, enlisting
for life to the lure of the male’s hard, angular body,

the taste of mint everywhere like clean, green rain.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Alison Townsend: “I write poetry to make discoveries, to articulate what feels (at least initially) beyond words, to find out what I don’t know I know.”

Rattle Logo

April 6, 2023

“Fireline” by John W. EvansPosted by

John W. Evans

FIRELINE

And when I heard the two cabins might burn down
at the same time, on maybe even the same day,
I rooted for the fire. Like many Californians
 
I followed with great precision and attention 
the interactive, up-to-the-minute digital maps
that showed a progression of devastation past the water’s edge 
 
of the popular tourist destination
where my ex-wife’s family
had leased summer cabins since the 1920s, 
 
where even that spring they had gathered to enjoy 
the beautiful, pristine wilderness
of land the state said belonged to no one.
 
It was a technicality, that
outrageous claim renewed every ten years
by legacy, a claim I had once enjoyed
 
in an elaborate festival of coming together
we called a marriage: ten years,
then somehow faster and less forgiving
 
the controlled burn of divorce
that took it back. It only took a few months 
to reach the woods and the lake. 
 
The second cabin was half the size of the first 
and much closer to the fireline.
All it had to do was catch
 
one spark near the composting toilet
and the surroundings cabins would tremble. Unfair,
that spark that every day kept not catching,
 
as fist-sized embers crowned the trees.
It was the old growth. I knew they’d fight the hardest.
I had fought against it for years, the impossibility 
 
we might still love each other. We might reclaim together 
the thing she did not want me to have. So
I imagined it myself. Every day the fire took a little more: 
 
Great-Grandma Pummie’s game trophies,
Uncle Chum’s Turkish rugs, Puck’s first editions,
all swept up into the pyro-cumulus and out across state line,
 
with every last remnant of these families and what they cherished.
But the redwood decks and lead-glass windows, 
the rockfalls and surrounding acres of old-growth forest
 
hung in, as sturdy as my dog’s chin on my knee.
He watched me watch the screen. When it was time
to walk, the sky had changed to orange, then blue. 
 
Then, the wind shifted, capricious and weary of the granite. 
The people returned. Their cabins were there. 
In the city around the lake bears had broken in
 
and filled their bellies
with syrup and thawed steaks,
an early hibernation, a carcass every few yards
 
stuck in the mud with singed or infected paws. 
Who is left to love what is gone 
if it belongs to no one else;
 
who dares warm his hands over the ash
or rub his chest with the spite-tongued black, 
murmuring, Mine, still mine. You do not belong to someone else.
 

—from The Fight Journal

__________

John W. Evans: “I wrote the poems in The Fight Journal to make sense of an experience about which I felt strongly biased: my divorce. I wanted to recognize the humanity of all involved on the page because this was something I struggled to do in real life. I hoped to find closure, healing, and an answer to two questions. Why had my marriage failed? How had I been complicit in that failure? Adrienne Rich’s ‘From An Old House in America’ was the formal model for the long title poem. Marta Tikkanen’s ‘The Love Story of the Century’ was a precedent for writing about these dynamics. Both poems are personal favorites.” (web)

Rattle Logo

March 6, 2023

“Shoes” by L. RenéePosted by

L. Renée

SHOES

Bluefield, West Virginia, 1961

First time I watch my sister set a fire
she’s twelve & I’se eight. Mama & Daddy leave
fa a card party, which mean Rosie & Billy
flee fa they secret flames, which mean
the middle kids—Harold & Velma & Lois—
ain’t too far behind em spyin. Foot knowledge can learn
ya faster than books. Dirt & rock & branch & bush
be as kindred as kin. Then, the house empty
of all our beloveds, and it’s just my sister
& me, my sister & her school saddle shoes,
which she did not love. They ain’t had no scuffs,
but brown specs caked em like dirty powdered sugar,
tintin white leather pee yella lye could neva
make clean. My sister say her shoes too ugly to be redeemed.
She say reee-deeemed like it cost five whole dollas,
slow & careful like Mama puttin milk & butter
& bacon & bread on account at the comp’ny store,
hopin Daddy tagged enuf coal cars,
haulin loads large enuf to break
even. Bein that she had reached fa that word & found
she could afford it, my sister tried to free herself
from three years of ugly ducklin livin, three years
of wearin the same shoes to school, since our folks
would not replace what they could repair.
 
She seized what she sized up as her only chance
to waste leftovers. First I thought she was kindlin
the stove’s coal & wood chips to warm up pintos
from last night’s supper, but when heat hovered
hot as a pissed spirit a horseshoed doorway couldn’t
keep away, when a hankerin fa new shoes flickered
in her peepers like a just-struck match, by the time I
noticed her knowin strike a-ha lightnin fast, it was
too late to redeem her. The stink of meltin skin
& rubber blew threw our kitchen. A groan
slid slow & careful like it was calculatin
a bill that ain’t add up: burner plate lid lifted,
lard slathered leather, the fiery tongue tested
and still clutched in her blistered
fingertips, my sister’s disbelievin.
 

—from Rattle #78, Winter 2022
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner

__________

L. Renée: “I am a collector of my family’s stories. Sometimes, we gather for oral history interviews and I am prepared with an audio recorder and a listening ear. Other times, we’re just having conversations around the dinner table or on the phone and somebody says, ‘Well don’t you remember when …’ and my hand reaches for a pen. On this occasion, my aunt was telling me and Mom about the time she tried to burn her school shoes on an old coal stove in West Virginia, where my granddaddy labored as a coal miner for 43 years before ultimately dying of black lung disease. After she shared this story, I kept hearing a little girl’s voice. She was a witness to my aunt’s attempted destruction of those shoes and I wrote down what she told me exactly the way I heard her tell it—dialect, diction, and all. This was a challenge—to honor this character’s authentic voice and allow her to tell her version of the narrative, but to take care that her voice was not misunderstood as caricature by readers. I spelled some words the way I heard them to celebrate the embedded music in her speech. Here, again, I tried to emphasize the multiple meanings of the tongue: the shoe’s tongue, the sister reaching toward an ‘expensive’ word like ‘redeemed’ (which comes with an implied cost), and the speaker’s own tongue in sharing this story. I am a believer in the power of storytelling and the ways in which Black folk have passed down knowledge, experience, and wisdom through the spoken word. When I write, I know I am not writing alone. I know all my ancestors, Black Appalachians who called dirt and mountains home, are with me.” (web)

Rattle Logo