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)
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)
Image: “Cold Sun” by Jeanne Wilkinson. “Watch This!” was written by Tristan Roth for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
Tristan Roth
WATCH THIS!
You captured the whole thing on the flippy-est dumb phone,
before you got smart. Fourteen felt like the un-freest zone
of youth: can’t drive, can’t drink, can’t rub two nickels,
can’t march to the beat of your harmonious own.
That winter of fourteen, you three trudged through snow,
pushing a Safeway shopping cart up the bunniest slope,
where the interstate goes under the canyon road. With temps
in the teens, you played Rochambeau, with the runniest nose.
Chomping at the bit, Jake always threw rock.
You always threw scissors. You were the cunningest one.
But Tristan was a lame-o poet, who lived life on paper.
“Me?” he said, voice squeaking in the jumpiest tone.
You were complete dicks back then, scared shitless of being
called chicken, charlatans strutting around the unknown,
your cockscombs uncolored by the foghorned winter sun.
Jake did a DX crotch chop. You were the scummiest clone,
You said Suck it! like Triple H and called him a pussy.
You mocked him like girls with your honey-est moans.
He climbed in, then dropped, the doppler sound of his voice.
“Watch this!” Tristan said, before breaking his funniest bone.
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “There are so many elements of ‘Watch This!’ that I enjoyed, admired, and was moved by. The voice feels true to the way teenagers actually think and speak, and this is reinforced by the repetition of creative ‘-est’ words throughout the poem: ‘the flippy-est dumb phone,’ ‘the un-freest zone.’ I had to read some of the phrases a few times because they were so unexpected and satisfying: ‘cockscombs uncolored by the foghorned winter sun.’ The scene works well placed into Jeanne Wilkinson’s bleak, evocative image–one can imagine a trio of directionless teenage boys, riddled with hidden insecurities and secret fears, scattered across Wilkinson’s desolate winter landscape, ‘pushing a Safeway shopping cart up the bunniest slope.’ And finally, there’s the encompassing fact that this is simply a gorgeous poem. It’s no small feat to write a ghazal that flows naturally and feels entirely authentic (believe me, I’ve tried), and Tristan Roth makes it look easy.”
Laren McClung: “Lately I’ve been reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. She was part of a movement called Acmeism, which formed as a reaction against symbolism. The movement was concerned with poetry that moves through the use of association. Association opens ways between worlds, like the intersection of consciousness and subconsciousness, how one sound or image or thought conjures another entirely unrelated, like montage, like dreaming.”
Rachel Mallalieu: “As an emergency physician, I am forever hoping for things to go back to ‘the way they were.’ The pandemic, however, exposed and exacerbated longstanding issues such as emergency room boarding and the lack of a medical safety net for many. Now we are also severely understaffed. Many days, we do not have the nurses and techs needed to safely staff an ER. Medical staff is burning out at alarming rates and patients are suffering. I don’t know the answer, but something has to give.” (web)
P.H. Crosby: “A response to yet another story about school shooting, this time a story about law enforcement itself apparently frozen, seemingly incapable of acting, just as we as citizens seem incapable of taking the measures needed—and proven—to reduce gun violence.”