Chapbooks

December 7, 2023

“Punishment” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

PUNISHMENT

They used books as weapons.
This is not a metaphor.
Because there were no blankets and they were cold,
the men in cell block L threw books
with intent to do bodily harm.
They rained down from above.
Rained down from the cells.
Guards shielded themselves
with dinner trays and mop buckets.
The men tossed entire libraries. A rage of books.
Lobbed in high arcs like footballs,
or pitched overhand like grenades.
Hardcovers shattered on cheekbones
or exploded on the back of someone’s head.
Paperbacks spiraled down, loose pages fluttering.
Thin ones skipped across the shiny tile like stones on water.
There was mayhem. There was blood.
Words littered the floor. Guards ran for their lives.
The men had spent years collecting—
biographies, mysteries, histories, science fiction,
even poetry books, their spines fine and reedy,
or thick with free verse.
One man threw his grandmother’s leather Bible.
Inside the front cover in elegant script
she’d noted the date and time of his birth.
Now it lay face down, back broken.
Another man hurled his family album.
It fell from the third floor, the photos scattering
on impact. His wife, his son, his daughter
smiled up from the chaos.

—from Punishment
Rattle Chapbook Series Selection

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez: “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand.” (web)

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October 12, 2023

“In America” by Diana GoetschPosted by

Diana Goetsch

IN AMERICA

“Why don’t you go to Japan and ask the cats?” I said
to the TSA agent when she asked if I was Amish,
because I believe in answering a non-sequitur

with a non-sequitur. I only said it
after I’d been cleared, after I’d been strip-searched
behind frosted glass, and then posted

the bitch’s face on Facebook along with her name.
Maybe being trans is like being Amish,
or maybe I went pale when I missed my flight

as Security Agent Pamela E. Starks
conferred with Explosives Expert Gary Pickering
to discuss, based on the “soft anomaly”

picked up by the body scanner, which of them
needs to search me (at one point she
suggested they each take “half”).

I suppose I could have come from Amish country,
a place so deep in the heart of America it can’t be seen,
and delivered to the airport by horse and buggy—

an Amish horse, oblivious to traffic. Maybe
it’s because of my long black dress, or makeup
that makes it look like I’m not wearing makeup—

a goal whose purpose used to elude me,
though I totally get it now, but please don’t ask.
You could go and ask the cats in Japan,

though it’s bound to earn you a contemptuous frown,
by which they mean to say, “Eat my ass
in Macy’s window.” How do cats in Japan

know about Macy’s? you must be asking.
Beats the hell outta me. They have
no tails—did you know?

Neither do the Amish. Just kidding.
I’m still waiting to hear about
the complaint I filed, the one that,

along with the viral video of them
repeatedly calling me “it,” shut down
the TSA website for three days

while they rewrote the rules about me.
“You could be charged for this,”
friends warn me, but in America

it can’t be libel if it’s true. I learned that
from the cats in Japan, who you can ask—
though it’s best not to disturb them.

—from In America
2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize Selection

__________

Diana Goetsch: “I’m basically a love poet. I’ve started to understand that after all these years. No matter the subject, I think my mission has something to do with redemption. And I just go for the hardest thing to redeem.” (web)

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September 26, 2023

“Summer Afternoon” by Arthur RussellPosted by

Arthur Russell

SUMMER AFTERNOON

With a bucket of sealant and a spent mop on a slow day,
my father sent Prince McMichael and me to muck the buckled seams
 
along the carpet rolls of pebbled roofing winter freeze and thaw left leaking.
I watched him swab the tar around the skylights and scuppers,
 
and asked him about his life, what he wanted, why he worked at the car wash.
It was my boss’s son privilege to do so.
 
He said he didn’t care what work he did, the older men were drunks
who wasted their money on the numbers. He jabbed his blackened mop
 
for punctuation. He called women bitches, but it was women
he cared about most. He lived with his moms, his sister, and her son.
 
When the sealant was used up, we sat on the parapet where the roof
looked out over Konwaler’s Drugs to the white brick row houses on East 8th.
 
We smoked unfiltered cigarettes. Below us, the cars turned into the car wash.
I asked him why he hadn’t come to work the day before.
 
He said he’d hung out with his moms, his sister, and her son all morning
and waited for a girl all afternoon at the entrance to the Union Avenue station.
 
He’d talked to her the night before, but he didn’t know where she lived,
only that she worked in Manhattan and got off at five.
 
It seemed to me an inconceivable romantic strategy to take a day off from work
on such a thin hope, and yet I could imagine him in the guayabera he changed into after work,
 
with his hair picked to a smooth dome and a cigarette dangling from his mouth,
passing a calm hour with one foot up on the rail around the subway entrance.
 
I started to tell him about the woman in Syracuse who’d cheated on her husband
with me, but he showed no interest.
 

—from At the Car Wash
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

Arthur Russell: “I thought I could escape my father and his car wash in Brooklyn, run away to Manhattan and succeed as an actor or as a writer and never have to reckon, as an adult, with his cruel opinions of people and the world, but I fell back into his orbit and worked closely with him for many years, and when I did escape, it was only through the door that led to law school, the profession he had chosen for all three of his children, possibly because he had dropped out of law school himself. At the Car Wash is a book of poems written over the last eight years, poems that I continue writing beyond the work between these covers, dredging, sorting, reordering and sometimes celebrating, but always reckoning, almost forty years on, with the reckoning that made me.”

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September 13, 2023

“Message from Goldberg, the Landlord with Crutches” by Arthur RussellPosted by

Arthur Russell

MESSAGE FROM GOLDBERG, THE LANDLORD WITH CRUTCHES

1.
 
When you are old and I am dead,
keep this rent-producing property,
and please, collect the rents.
 
Go out, if you must,
in your house slippers
with pink fur on the instep
and your shepherd, Gaia, on a leash;
mutter at the bus stop
that stuff about your mother;
pick up empty bottles from the street,
and do without combing your hair,
 
but, please, Sarah, stomp up the stairs
on the first of the month so they hear you coming,
shave-and-a-haircut knock and call out Landlord
with your eye against the peephole.
 
Don’t trust Grudin the plumber—
he’ll sell you your own toilet—
but Harold, the attorney, is reliable,
and, Sylvia, at Citibank, is good for munis,
but don’t buy an annuity from her.
 
So much has gone wrong
in the kitchen and the crutches
and Elliott with his asthma,
and the physical miss between us,
and I am so bitter that
the books in the back bedroom are strangers to me now.
 
Remember the Kandinsky,
that skinny book of Kandinsky prints?
 
It’s in the back bedroom,
in the shelves under the window.
 
Now I’m only Goldberg, the landlord with crutches,
and you are Goldberg-the-landlord-with-crutches’s wife.
 
 
2.
 
When you die, Sarah,
Russell, the guy
who owns the car wash next door,
will buy this building from your estate,
and then he’ll send his son, that pretentious prick,
to clean out our apartment, and he will
smoke a cigarette in our back bedroom
and look out through the accordion gates
down Church Avenue towards Boro Park,
where we first met outside the candy store
when you asked me to buy you a cigarette:
two cents for a loosie, and it came with a match.
 
He’ll find the Kandinsky book,
sit on the bookcase, smoke his cigarette,
look out our window, read the introduction,
admire the pictures, and keep it for a souvenir
of how he suffered working for his father,
or as some kind of perverted proof
that he’s superior to all the mercantile idiots
like his father and me, who worked for what we have.
 
He’ll keep the Kandinsky on his bookshelves
when he goes to school in Syracuse;
keep it in his apartments in Brighton Beach,
Park Slope, Greenwich Village, Chelsea;
keep it when he gives up his stupid dreams
of becoming an artiste—he never had talent—
to become a lawyer, get married, move to Jersey,
have a kid and bookshelves, bookshelves everywhere,
twenty, thirty years boxing the same books,
college books, grad-school books, his wife’s mysteries,
 
until, one day, after his wife leaves him,
he’ll remember you, Sarah, and your scruffy shepherd,
and me, with my two amputated feet
lost in a trolley car accident,
swinging on polio crutches from one property to the next,
shave-and-a-haircut knocking, calling out Landlord,
and he’ll reimagine us as icons
of the fashionable style and aching loss
he likes to think he understands,
the way that what you wanted as a kid
can be shunted into tedious commerce,
 
and he’ll go down to his basement
and pull out the Kandinsky book,
and see how the show was mounted in May of 1945
just months after Kandinsky himself had died,
and he’ll picture us, Sarah,
when we were young and hip,
how we went up to Harlem
to see Lucky Roberts play stride piano,
how we went to see Kandinsky
at the Museum of Non-Objective Art
before it was called the Guggenheim,
 
when we were in love, before the trolley,
before Elliott and his asthma made me a bitter puss,
buying that book on the last day of the show,
which was such a big deal for you—
 
you said, Please, Elias, please let’s get the book,
in my ear you said it, your lips on my ear
so it hummed in my head,
and what would later be your stiff, gray hair
was beautiful brown, and down to your shoulders,
in waves I compared to Barbara Stanwyck’s,
and you said, No, I don’t look at all like her,
 
but you did.
 

—from At the Car Wash
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

Arthur Russell: “I thought I could escape my father and his car wash in Brooklyn, run away to Manhattan and succeed as an actor or as a writer and never have to reckon, as an adult, with his cruel opinions of people and the world, but I fell back into his orbit and worked closely with him for many years, and when I did escape, it was only through the door that led to law school, the profession he had chosen for all three of his children, possibly because he had dropped out of law school himself. At the Car Wash is a book of poems written over the last eight years, poems that I continue writing beyond the work between these covers, dredging, sorting, reordering and sometimes celebrating, but always reckoning, almost forty years on, with the reckoning that made me.”

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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)

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March 2, 2023

“Musicians at the Wedding” by John W. EvansPosted by

John W. Evans

MUSICIANS AT THE WEDDING

All week at the wedding
the musicians keep practicing
 
over the garage, during the rehearsal,
in the basement at night,
 
on the back porch while it rains.
Even the grass after the rain
 
worries someone in the kitchen.
The tables and caterers, the flowers
 
and the muddy road to the barn
are covered in lights. This is a good time,
 
someone says, to take five, guys,
or fifty. The musicians are soggy, too.
 
They start again: five or six bars
of the bridal march, the chorus, the last encore.
 
On the porch a bartender is humming
the first dance as he bins the ice and juices,
 
orange and lemon. His cherries
are staked on tiny plastic swords
 
the wedding guests will make a great show
of plucking hilt-first.
 
They stand en garde,
a warning term in fencing,
 
the first sport played in the Olympics.
In the original en garde position fencers
 
held their back hand in the air
to lift lanterns during duels.
 
Back and forth to the bar the guests
litter the grass with broken promises.
 
This is what happens when you fall
in love: you dance all night, you collapse
 
for one reason or another
into the wet grass.
 

—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)

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January 12, 2023

“The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky” by CooXooEii BlackPosted by

CooXooEii Black

THE MORNING YOU SAW A TRAIN OF STARS STREAKING ACROSS THE SKY

five years and you forgot
the excitement of being on a mountain.
early morning, before the hunt, blurred hours
between night and day. the crickets chilled
in silence. sheep ridge lay in front of you.
you forgot the sensation of waiting on the sun.
when its light-blue floods over the mountain
and mixes with the dark, everything seems
to ask for the lead.
 
for the first time, you drove your own truck
with your uncle in the passenger seat. you remember
your first gun shot, elk drop,
sip of beer, fish caught, and war-whoop.
your uncle present for all.
a small moment, sure, to be driving him
but you’re proving your coming of age.
 
he’s told you about your dad.
said he’s a cool dude. that they text from time to time.
he told you about cali and you can’t imagine
your uncle in the city. you can’t imagine
being with anyone on the mountain except this man
who used to parachute into smoke for a living.
 
those mountains are ruthless to the clueless.
you ask your uncle how he learned his way
around them. you asked and you asked and you asked.
he said be prepared to see anything.
so from that moment forward you fixed your eyes
onto the barely warming sky, your family,
your people, younger siblings,
your reservation, and every figure
that has become a father, and you wait
for the coming miracles.
 

—from The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky

__________

CooXooEii Black: “I’ve always been interested in emotionally compelling stories, whether it was music, movies, or tv. I constantly got into trouble in elementary school for telling stories, singing songs, and acting. Then in high school, I watched a spoken word video, and for the first time, I found a medium that incorporated everything I love to do. So I put a few images down on a page, and I haven’t stopped since. Because it was God who gave me the ability to write, I daily return it to Him as a form of worship.” (web)

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