February 1, 2024

Ruth Bavetta

THE FUN

was always where I wasn’t,
in the other room, behind the paisley curtains,
on the bigger Ferris wheel,
out in the backyard while I was washing cups.
It was always just before my Currie’s Mile Hi cone
or just after I left the party.
It was while I was leaning over the toilet,
throwing up a bad tuna sandwich
when my boyfriend went out alone and got drunk
with a girl he barely knew
and ended up fuzzy-diced into marrying her.
It was in the sixties, with love and pot
and rainbows over the radio,
while I was bricked under lawns and tricycles
and dirty sheets, scrambled with the eggs, broken
over and over and over again.
Now the sixty turnings belong, not to the century,
but to the mirror,
and I’m still here, waiting for amber earrings.
 

from Rattle #4, Fall 1995

__________

Ruth Bavetta: “I was a visual artist for years, until I found I also wanted images that could be painted with words. I wanted to use words, as I used images, to help me make sense of my life. Now, I’ve become convinced that neither words nor images will suffice, because there is no sense-making. There is only what is and what has been. It’s enough to know I am human, separate and mortal, and that’s where I find my poems.” (web)

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January 31, 2024

Erica Reid

THE RAFT

I approach every poem I write
as if I’m going to save a life.
—Aaron Abeyta

It was no small feat to locate a phone book—but I did, 
and Angela Winston from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 
I have chosen your name at random and I have come 
to save your life. I recognize that it is a huge swing
on my part to assume that you need saving—but then
we are all drowning these days, are we not? Don’t you wake up
feeling you’ve reached your limit, that the worst must be past, 
only to discover you’re at the top of a spiritual Guggenheim,
a cool, white spiral of descent still awaiting you? Or 
perhaps you are bearing the betrayal better than I am, 
the dark regime we’ve invented, the great American 
miscarriage, the mockery this country makes of itself, 
the arc bending away from justice. Maybe you have a friend 
or sister to help you shoulder the burden of your complicity. 
It is possible you are thriving in 2021, in which case
please write me a poem—but if not, Angela Winston, 
if you’ll have me, I would like to write you a life raft—
if not to save you, at least to buoy you until a better poet
comes along. I inflate the raft with my breath, and it sounds
like this: (hff) No matter who you are, your very life
is rebellion, your love is a fist in the air. (hff) Your name
matters. It is right here in the White Pages, surrounded
by relatives and potential accomplices. (hff) You can begin 
today, Angela, the work you could not bring yourself to do 
yesterday. You have not missed your chance to pluck 
the shrapnel from your heart; there is time yet to (hff) carry
the sign, or throw the brick, or fashion the song 
from your fear, your hurt, your fury. And finally (hff), a secret 
about this raft: that it is built for two. It carries me 
as much as it carries you.
 

from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

__________

Erica Reid: “Poetry and breath are intimately connected. Is it any great exaggeration to imagine a poem as a life raft, one we inflate with everything we have inside us?” (web)

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January 30, 2024

Salah al Hamdani

BAGHDAD, MON AMOUR

You cannot be crucified
On the side of a page
Of a story that is not your own,
Nor to the rhythm of the deaths that brood your plagues
Because there will be no cry to relieve your grief.

You cannot be crucified on the banks of the streams
Your body bleeds,
When the Euphrates washes away the secret of its soul
At the birth of a new defeat.
I know this:
No wound deserves a war.

You cannot be crucified at nightfall,
When you did not close your prayers
On the body of palm trees
Because there is no honorable assassin.

You cannot be crucified for the cinders of calamities,
For the tombs of your gods,
Or for the belief of a dying humanity.

Baghdad mon amour,
Not son, nor father, nor God,
No prophet crowned by the church will save your soul,
Not that of Mecca,
Not that of those who refuse
To share the olive trees in Palestine.

This is my notebook of war,
The years of exiles folded in a suitcase
Too long abandoned to the dreams of the convicted.

This is my share of victims,
My share of moon,
My harvest of nothingness,
My share of dust, words and cries.

This is my misfortune
Like a comma locking a line of ink.

Baghdad my love,
I was crouched in the corner of the page
In the shelter of the arid days,
Far from the torrents of blood
That carry the name of those shot with the silence of man.

Baghdad, mon amour,
Sitting like a Bedouin in a mirage
Lying on my shores, I cherished my own shroud.
Far from the cross, Fatima’s palm and the star of David
Far from their books, their wars
Wandering in the sand of the dunes,
From the steppe to the city
I drag my body from season to season,
I trail you along from the couch to the mirror, from my room to the street
Between my writing and my solitude
In the shelter of their cemeteries,
Their martyrs, their morgues.

Baghdad my love,
You cannot tremble at the threshold of these ruins of days,
A civilization trained to kill
Violated your virginity.

Baghdad, city forever rebellious against your torturer Saddam,
You cannot groan at the only revelation of this hegemony,
Those who rushed around your body at death’s door,
These “liberators” are their accomplices.

Madinat-al Salam,
City of peace,
Love in the soul of writing.

Baghdad my wound,
My father the working man died without knowing joy,
My mother mislaid her youth in the mirror
And the only witness to my first grief on your breast
Is the breath of the sand,
The starry sky and God’s gaze on the call to prayer.

I wished so much today that man had never discovered fire
And cursed it to advance so much in its own din.

This soil that gave birth to me, today put to death.
Oh mother! I want to return inside your flesh

To hear the beating of your heart,
To quench my thirst in the murmur of your breath.

Translated by Molly Deschenes from Le cimetiere des oiseaux (editions de l’aube, Paris, 2003)

from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
Tribute to Poets Writing Abroad

__________

Salah al Hamdani has lived as an Iraqi exile in France for nearly thirty years. He left Iraq after a stay in prison, and continues to fight against the henchmen of Saddam Hussein, as well as the Anglo-American occupants. The actor, director, and poet is author of several books, both in Arabic and French.

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January 29, 2024

Hanna Pachman

WELCOME TO MY DATING PROFILE, PLEASE COME INSIDE

In this photo of me air kissing a mural
you will find the living room. 
Look at those curves and high ceilings. 
I do not have a lifelong disease.
 
In this photo of me practicing yoga
you will find the bedroom. So many outlets. 
Look how flexible I am. Imagine us 
trying positions together. 
I am not in chronic pain.
 
In this photo of me pushing off a wall
you will discover that when I laugh,
it ricochets from my gut to your gut, 
a trick of light. We have reached the balcony.
I am not on antidepressants. 
 
I am not here. I am just an experiment 
for you, an example of wanting.
 
I am not tears. I am a myth, 
like love or astrology or hell.
 
I am a room of stasis, without real plants.
 
I am waiting to be cut short 
from growing, from breeding, 
from going off and on
the house, the pills, your body. 
 
Come play with me.
My heart is a stuck sled in 
the middle of a sand mountain.
 
I am whatever pill I try asks me to be,
whatever spot you could find is yours.
 
There is no parking.
 

from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

__________

Hanna Pachman: “A man from a dating application asked me to send him one of my poems. I wanted to share a poem about my chronic illness, but didn’t want to scare him away. My friend suggested writing a poem, in which I only aired all of my dirty laundry. This poem is for Claire Gavin.” (web)

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January 28, 2024

Dick Westheimer

A SKEPTIC’S GUIDE TO RELATIONSHIP SCIENCE

Deb and I lay in bed last night skin to skin. I think my hand was on her thigh and hers caressed my chin, maybe thumbed my earlobe like she sometimes does. We talked, again, about “love languages,” how she likes to give little treasures and wants me to be more attentive to her lists. Like today, her cellphone wouldn’t sync. She needs help with it. She reminds me I still haven’t hung Jeff’s picture in the rec-room. I know Deb’s notebook is full of to-dos for me, all dated, some starred in red pen. There are too few checked off. I tap my fingertips, one by one, feather-light on the small of her back. She sighs.
 
I love
her touch
typing
 
Today I read to Deb from a new study. “Love Languages,” it says, “are not supported by empirical data.” (One of my Love Languages must be “empirical data.”) She tells me about a conversation she had with our friend Claire. They were walking along Barton Pond in Ann Arbor. Deb recalls wearing new blue walking shoes, the ones she now dons to work in the garden. It must have been thirty years ago, she says. Claire’s man Paul hadn’t read the Love Languages book either.
 
growing old
we remember
different things
 
I always wake later than Deb. This morning I find a note taped to my computer keyboard: “Kitchen Counter,” it read, written in aqua-marine script. I’d left the remains of my dinner fixings and now they stuck like glue to the old Formica. We often prepare and eat different meals—mine always with brown rice and beans and cooked greens, Deb’s according to her mood. On the table where I sit to eat there’s a note rubber-banded to the tamari bottle: “PLEASE, Return Me To The Shelf” it reads in bold black marker. As I clean the counter, Deb squeezes by. Her bottom brushes mine, comfortably, for sure.
 
our kitchen too small
to miss her
 

from Poets Respond
January 28, 2024

__________

Dick Westheimer: “The headline, ‘Fans shrug off study debunking love languages,’ was catnip for me. My wife was an early reader of Gary Chapman’s best seller and a believer, and more than occasionally speaks of our differences as measured by the ‘love languages’ construct. Of course I had to read the study! (She might say that referring to ‘studies’ is one of my love languages.) And, of course we both know after 44 years of what Pastor Chapman would call ‘incompatible’ love languages that they are not predictive of a long-sustaining relationship—like the study shows.” (web)

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January 27, 2024

David M. deLeon

NOT EVERYTHING I DO IS MAGIC

Consider, Sally: the way the sun shines laterally
below stormclouds. And the clipped exuberance of green.
And there’s everything that passes by in a single
still moment, there’s the messy kanji of branches,
the superscript of birds. There’s that warmth that someone
you don’t mind sitting there left on the seat before
you sat on it. Lots of little things not worth talking about.
If I said it’s all crap I’d be lying. But I’m lying anyway.
I didn’t do any of that. Someone fell off the rafters
of an imaginary barn and he wore a robe of clean red
and he landed in a daze and, having been sleeping, woke up.
He walked around the imaginary barn and counted the timber
supports and heard the wrens in their hidden nests. Why
did he fall from the rafters? Magic. What were the wrens?
Magic. Who is he? Not magic. The barn falls away
and we can see fields of both green and red and the sky is blue
bordering grey, a color that contains its own promised
color. Sally, there just ain’t enough words to tell even one
story, to tell you even who you are in this, or who I am, or
why the wrens seek warmth and not freedom and are now
trapped in one man’s red-cloaked imagination. I ask you
why are you here? and you just listen, listen on, because
you know more than I do. You know that the little upward bend
of the voice at the end of a question isn’t a waiting pause,
it’s a little hill cliff where we stop and look around and wait
for some clue from the landscape to tell us soon where oh where
oh where are we now that we are here, please tell me.

from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

__________

David M. deLeon: “I don’t know anyone named Sally. Yet there she is in more than one poem, not doing anything but listening to me while I throw things together, trying to cobble up some sort of ladder to see out with. And I keep apologizing to her, over and over, because she knows me well enough. Everything’s magic but the magician.” (web)

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January 26, 2024

Al Ortolani

LEAF REMOVAL

I listen to my wife on the phone
explaining to Leaf Removal, Inc. 
how we just can’t 
pick up the leaves anymore.
It’s getting to that point she says
that we need someone, which really
isn’t true because we could slide
down the hill on our heels, rake
the leaves into piles, douse them
with charcoal lighter, and set
them ablaze. Then we’d just need
a metal tined rake to lean on,
a little luck to keep the house
from going up in flames, and with
the garden hose uncoiled, nozzle
dribbling like a mouth, watch
last year turn to smoke, 
a slip, an ass tumble. Instead, 
two rabbits leap out of the leaves,
zig zagging ahead of the dog
who forever believes he’s a hunter
with sharp white teeth and 
the speed to stay stride for stride
with the memory of himself.
 

from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

__________

Al Ortolani: “Lately, whenever I invoke the Muse for inspiration, she gives me poems from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Way back to childhood. Even if I don’t want to go in this direction, since the past is the past, old hat as they say, I know that rejecting the Muse can end up in something like poetic impotence. So I follow her lead, and dig around through images I should have sold at garage sales. Probably, there’s a lesson here about knowing thyself, remembering and learning, even when you’ve tried to forget.” (web)

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