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September 24, 2023

“Exile is No Country” by Lisa Suhair MajajPosted by

Lisa Suhair Majaj

EXILE IS NO COUNTRY

for Sabra and Shatila

The trees burned first, ablaze in the inferno of exile.
The tsunami of death drowned the ones washed up by exile.
 
Soldiers surrounded the camps, then set up flares for the killers.
Knives shone in the dark, a steely passage to exile.
 
The killers hated them because they were in their land.
They came because they were refugees, forced into exile.
 
The alleys were littered with bodies, knifed, machine-gunned.
The corpses twisted in choreographed despair: oh exile!
 
Dust settled thick on the broken stones. Flies clustered everywhere.
Wrecked buildings marked the camp’s collapse into exile.
 
The reporters stopped counting bodies after they reached a hundred.
Children and grandparents sprawled in death’s terrible exile.
 
The orchestrators watched through binoculars as the murderers worked.
They wanted the victims dead, not just in exile.
 
Youth taken by surprise fell like crumpled puppets, limbs outflung.
Blood pooled beneath their bodies, staining the dirt of exile.
 
Pregnant women lay with their bellies slashed open—
babes torn from their wombs, condemned to a lifeless exile.
 
The bodies piled up in stacks: horses and corpses.
Bulldozers scooped the dead to rubble-filled exile.
 
Word traveled across oceans in time for the evening news.
TV corpses brought the dead to their families in echoes of exile.
 
Hands flung wide, mourners still clutch at the broken air.
Their lungs struggle for breath in the vacuum of exile.
 
Who will comfort the children of Sabra, the mothers of Shatila?
What light can they find in the ravaged lanes of exile?
 
At the port there is no boat waiting, only sailors with dirges.
Memory sinks to the depths, carrying the grief of exile.
 
The days and the years glided away with my loved ones.
Oh Palestinians, it is a departure without return from exile!
 

—from Poets Respond
September 24, 2023

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Lisa Suhair Majaj: “In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, led by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. In September, as Israeli soldiers watched through binoculars and lit flares to light the dark, Christian militias friendly to Israel massacred thousands of Palestinian civilians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. Palestinian fighters had already been evacuated and the camps were defenseless. A UN commission of inquiry found Israel and several individuals, including Sharon, bore responsibility for the massacres. I was a college student in Beirut 1978-1982, and evacuated out during the invasion (our refugee boat was arrested and taken to Israel by an Israeli navy ship for interrogation). By September I had settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for graduate school. When the massacre happened I was stunned by the images of bloated bodies on the TV screen. There was no context for my grief on that calm campus of grass and squirrels. Later I learned that someone I knew learned her uncle had died when she saw his corpse on a pile of bodies in the lane of the camp on the evening news. This year marks 41 years since the massacre. News agencies in various places in the world marked the anniversary. Reading the news from the distance of decades, now on the island of Cyprus—the place my refugee boat brought me to at last during my evacuation in 1982—I found my anguish rising potent as ever: over the massacres, and over the fact that Palestinians are still exiles. The italicized lines in the poem are from a lament by a Palestinian woman after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, quoted in Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration, 2007.”

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December 1, 2022

“Anesthesia” by Sarah Pemberton StrongPosted by

Sarah Pemberton Strong

ANESTHESIA

After the anesthesia, I didn’t know
it was after. It was not like
having slept. It was not at all
like having slept, a state you wake from

having logged some knowledge
of time’s passage: twenty minutes
feels different from two hours, or eight.

But I woke from anesthesia
asking when the anesthesia

would begin. The operation’s
over, someone said. It can’t be,

I thought, no time has passed.
I had to put my hands
over the bandage to believe it.

At home I threw up for twelve hours
what seemed like gallons
of bile mixed with darkened blood.
Try giving chips of ice, the doctor said

when my roommates called at midnight
because I couldn’t stop. Try peppermint.
How far I’d gone beyond that.

Outside my window
I was dimly aware

of something happening.
The usual midnight things
on Sixteenth and Albion in 1991:

a bartender smashing empty bottles
in a dumpster behind the corner bar, people
shooting up or turning tricks in doorways
or sleeping, dark shapes to step over later

when the sweet light of morning
filtered down through the street’s acacia trees.
I always left my car unlocked so no one
would break the windows

to get in; someone I never saw
used to climb in the back and sleep there,
leaving candy wrappers on the seat.

At last the sun came up and burned
my room to life again. It was only then

I began to feel
something was wrong—the way you’d feel
a draft of air, and looking for its source,

discover a window had been broken.
Somehow a window had been broken
while time was stopped.

Or perhaps it was the act of breaking in
that had stopped time in the first place,

the way the smashed glass
of a wristwatch
arrests the movement of its hands.

—from Rattle #49, Fall 2015

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Sarah Pemberton Strong: “When I look at these two poems—‘Anesthesia’ and ‘Stalin’—placed side by side, I realize that they are both interested in the relationship between memory, consciousness, and violence. It was Joseph Stalin who said, ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.’ I look to poetry to wake me up from the stupor of statistics; to help me reconnect, through empathy and close attention, with the singularity of each life—and with all life on this imperiled planet.” (web)

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April 6, 2024

“Hart Crane in the Islands” by Anthony SeidmanPosted by

Anthony Seidman

HART CRANE IN THE ISLANDS

He kept a rum bottle on the mahogany desk. All day, the rhythm, like calibrated pistons pumping, as the Victrola blasted Ravel’s Bolero, while the white curtains rippled from the window facing a plantain grove. In his reveries, the salt of a sailor still stung his lips, as his tongue licked for that taste, the dark phallus in a rocking hammock, tears, and teeth; while composing, the rigging of metaphors pulled palms and flotillas, the parlors of Ohio, and the smoke and lachrymae of the Americas into his blue estuary.

Mornings spent on the sun dazzled shore. Late afternoons peeling mangos in an esplanade beneath the green shade of trees; and then, slowly, the colors of the aquatic dusk. There was a lover, a cane-cutter tart with liquor and sweat, and bonfires on the sands. At night, he would correct sheaves containing Voyages and The Bridge, then sleep like a Faust cleansed of all knowledge-lust, shadows of birds passing across his face with the softness a boy feels as he sobs against his mother’s apron. And for the first time his body felt as if it was weightless, as the sea opened her dark drapes, revealing her bones.

—from Rattle #22, Winter 2004

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Anthony Seidman: “Often I come home after teaching middle school Spanish, & revise my poems. I visit Jean Toomer in the South where tawny women burn in his sleep; or Byron, bloated & hung-over, witnessing beheadings & the heat of carnivals in Italy. Not blind to my own purlieus, I also emulate Ruscha & Andreas Gursky, and write about the Valley: mini-malls, gas stations, and the natural history of parking lots.”

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April 2, 2024

“My Brother Buries His Dog” by Chris GreenPosted by

Chris Green

MY BROTHER BURIES HIS DOG

He moves furniture for a living, oversized bureaus and beds for the rich. He is big now and dumb with love that animals sense—cats, dogs, squirrels, birds, his pygmy turtles and rabbits, tree frogs—they all take him in, nuzzle his childhood scars, forgive his bad jobs and girlfriends. The middle child who grew up telling us all to fuck off—now a grown man, calls me crying, Why my puppy! (His Great Dane is dead.) He sobs, and I remember how we beat him—Mom, Dad, nuns, coaches, teachers—I know I did. And like animals before a storm, he has premonitions—this time a dream of me crying over Nina’s corpse. He says, I want you to think about that. He says it because I’m the godless eldest son who knows everything. So we carry his huge dead dog from the vet to his truck to his backyard. He digs a hole all day then lays her black body in the dark. Weeping, he seals her in with a last block of sod, and between the kiddy pool and the garage we embrace. He whispers, I love you. And in that moment I knew what animals know.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

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Chris Green: “I began writing poetry without knowing it. I feared poems my whole life, until I spent six months after graduate school writing a horrible essay about my grandfather. I read and reread trying to see what went wrong—then I realized there were poems embedded in the prose. I soon learned that poetry was in me, and bad essays can make great poetry.” (web)

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January 2, 2022

“Frozen America” by Zinnia HansenPosted by

Zinnia Hansen

FROZEN AMERICA

I imagine my brand-new copy of The Best American Poetry 2021 lying silent after the apocalypse. I’d like to remain conservative a little longer. save seed for winter. watch it sprout in the spring. I break bread by myself, sitting on the floor, hunched over by the fire, like God’s lap cat, watching it snow. I’m hoping another ice age will give us room to thaw again. our Christmas tree this year was thirteen feet tall. I was just grateful that I couldn’t reach the top. sometimes I want God to step out from the center of the sun. but other times I want Him to stay there, pinned, the tallest branch stuffed up His ass. this winter, I’ve noticed how the sky grows blue every young night, how it’s growing, inching that much closer to everything. I’m thinking about how close blue is to orange. I’m thinking about how the snow hasn’t stopped falling, about how I want to make a perfume out of all our empty orange peels, about how the mountains will melt into mud. on the unfinished walls of the century-old hardware store my grandparents turned into a home are portraits of the salmon they caught. more than alive, the fish tread water in their frames; open mouths, a gateway to heaven. glorious iconography. a paint brush, a pen, a knife. as I walk through the storm, I look back and see the windows tinted red with light. holy. the flags are flying, flopping like dying fish as they learn how to breathe. who is going to cut a hole in the horizon and let out the frozen smoke?

—from Poets Respond
January 2, 2022

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Zinnia Hansen: “This past week, western Washington was hit by a severe cold snap, leaving me stranded at my grandma’s house for four days after Christmas. It was incredibly beautiful, romantic even. But as a member of Gen Z, unusual weather, even if it’s a snowstorm, always makes me think about climate change, which makes me think about the apocalypse.” (web)

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May 13, 2023

“Love Song with Plum” by Diane LockwardPosted by

Diane Lockward

LOVE SONG WITH PLUM

I take what he offers, a plum,
round and plump,
deeper than amethyst purple.
I lift the fruit from his palm.
Like Little Jack Horner, I want it in a pie,
my thumb stuck in to pluck
out that plum.
I want it baked in a pudding,
served post-prandial,
drenched in something potable,
and set on fire, to sit across from him and say, Pass
the pudding, please.
Spread on our morning toast, dollops of plum preserves,
and when we grow old, a bowl of prunes,
which, after all, are nothing more than withered plums.
But today the air is scented with plumeria,
and at this particular fruit stand, I’m plumb
loco in love with the plumiest
man. Festooned with peacock plumes
and swaddled in the plumage
of my happiness, I want to stand at the perimeter
of this plum-luscious
earth, sink a plumb
line for balance, then plummet
like a bird on fire, placate
all my desires, my implacable
hunger for the ripeness of my sweetheart’s plum.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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Diane Lockward: “This poem began as an experiment, an attempt to enter a poem via sound rather than subject. The lead word ‘plum’ was used to create a vertical list of rhymes and near rhymes. The words in the list then became line endings.” (web)

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January 16, 2023

“Infidel” by Stephanie H. FallonPosted by

Stephanie H. Fallon

INFIDEL

When your friend breaks up his marriage
it hits your own like aftershocks, an affair
the kind of coastal earthquake that triggers
tsunamis, sending waves to crash all the way 
across the ocean to another country, another 
continent, another woman, to you.   

 

To be a feminist in this scenario, I can’t drag
the other woman like I’d like to, but I do a deep
dive of her Instagram anyway, sneering at her 
endless videos singing and playing guitar, 
the cheap floral dresses billowing on beaches, 
her bio with some precious reference to islands

 

and mainlands framed by too many emojis. 
She uses hashtags like #fallfashion and #bookstagram.
She’s posted a photo with her husband, dressed
for Easter at their church, accepting compliments
about them as a couple in the comments. That night, 
we learn this woman has been fucking our friend 

 

for a third of his marriage. That night, we sit on the phone 
while his wife drives until she runs out of gas, stranded 
after midnight on the highway. That night, we look at each
other while she tells us about the money, the confrontation,
how, in a moment of panic, she hit him across the face 
with his phone, fending him off. “You better be careful,”

 

he said, chillingly composed. “It wouldn’t look good
for you if I had to call the police.” I try to remember why
I thought he was a good person—did someone tell
me that? Was it my husband, who introduced us all those
years ago? Was it in actual words, or just the way 
I noticed my husband light up around him, enriched 

 

and full of faith? I think of the way he looked 
when we found out—not just deflation, not just sadness, 
but the kind of grief that confirms your deepest fear:
that all the things you insisted on believing in—that dear
and precious hope, that doubtful, tender thing—
were never actually there after all. 
 

—from Rattle #78, Winter 2022

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Stephanie H. Fallon: “The way we tell love stories are too often focused on the early, personal stages: coming-of-age, sexual awakenings, first heartbreaks. We are trained to think of love in the first person singular, and that the story ends with the wedding. So it comes as a shock how deeply we can believe in the love stories of others—our family and friends, the people we hold most dear. This poem is about the faith we build through our promises to each other, a reminder that the vows we make root into each other, beyond just a partner, beyond even ourselves.” (web)

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