October 14, 2024

“We Gig” by Sue Fagalde LickPosted by

Sue Fagalde Lick

WE GIG

We throw the word around like gold coins:
got a gig, come to my gig, gigging tonight.
We are cool, we play music for money,
not that boring classical shit, oh no,
the kind where the audience gets
hot, where they sing along, jump up
and dance because they can’t
sit still, because we’re doing our gig
and you should hear us Sunday night
’cause we are gigging and we are good.
 
At Kathy’s gig in a sticky-floored
warehouse full of beer, hot dogs,
and noise, she sweats on stage,
tearing out her vocal cords,
ripping up her fingertips,
overamped, a little drunk,
singing songs she wrote in tears
to heathens who will never hear,
and almost no one tips the jar,
but it’s a gig, she’s having fun.
 
Jason sings in the hotel bar,
playing soft tunes in a soft room
where the aging patrons sip
cabernet and whisper-talk,
clapping softly between songs
while Jason mutters to himself
and fiddles with his beatbox.
Bald and bearded, he sings
like a man sentenced to gig
for three hours every night.
He needs those wrinkled dollar bills.
 
Gig. Funny word. A performance,
a shortening of gigabyte,
a carriage in the olden days,
a whirling toy, a flighty girl,
a harpoon used to murder fish,
half of a giggle, don’t you know?
I’m giggling cause I’ve got a gig,
but when I say I’ve got a gig,
I want everyone to be impressed.
I’m more interesting than you,
you with your nine to five,
even if I’m singing in the rain
to three drunks and a dog.
It’s a gig and I am cool.
Come feed my tip jar, please.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Sue Fagalde Lick: “I have been playing music as long as I have been writing poems. I have lugged my guitar to theaters, clubs, galleries, senior centers, and street fairs, offering my original songs and covers of others. I have sung and played piano at weddings and funerals. I led the choirs at church for pay and for free. The rhythms and sounds can’t help but seep into my poetry. It’s a good line, but can I sing it?” (web)

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October 13, 2024

“How to Tell a Right-Trunked Elephant from a Lefty” by Lexi PellePosted by

Lexi Pelle

HOW TO TELL A RIGHT-TRUNKED ELEPHANT FROM A LEFTY

check for the side with ruffled whiskers
and wrinkles, elephants tend to tilt
their trunks to scoop fruit so one half’s
always a bit shabbier than the other. The end
of my husband’s left eyebrow is sparse
because of the direction he faces
while sleeping. All those beat-up tractors
heaving diesel across our fields,
the fluorescent smirk of strip malls
I see as I speed down Route 22,
the Canada geese—those trucker swans,
those bootlegged angels—if god’s
got a rumpled, favored side
we’re it. We’re the word
that’s been written with a dominant
hand. Is it because we longed for more
legible script? A world we’d slide
our sorrows down as long as it was written
in smooth cursive. We’re ready
to unknow now. When we place Bibles
in roadside motel rooms, slide
flowers into the spokes of white bikes,
when a woman calls the cops
and orders half pepperoni half
mushroom while her husband goes to
give her daughter a goodnight kiss,
we aren’t asking for answers
we’re asking god to switch hands.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Lexi Pelle: “Frank X. Gaspar wrote, ‘It’s never the aboutness of anything but the wailing underneath it.’ This poem, although based on a relatively uncharged article, was a slow settling into that wailing.” (web)

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October 12, 2024

“Congratulations” by Ruoyu WangPosted by

Ruoyu Wang (age 15)

CONGRATULATIONS

You got the tattoos you always wanted. The two betta fish on your arm, sunk in red, the black spider lilies across your stomach. You love the kids you teach now. First graders who will do anything you want as long as you say, you really disappointed me last time! but you love them so much & know that they can do so much better. I saw online that you finally learned how to do liquid eyeliner. No more smudging, no more muddy brown eyeshadow. Every photo of you featuring just a flick upwards like another eyelash. Maybe you finally started writing people back, even though I’m not included on this list. Maybe you finally told your parents you changed your major—do your cousins at church know? Does your mom love you now in the way you want, now that you’re baptized? Can you live with yourself? I know you don’t pray to God. I know you don’t believe in yourself either. I know it’s been a while since you said anything real, following every shot by the rule of thirds. Do you remember when we first met. Two years ago             right before summer came down on us hard. April a prologue to our sleeplessness. Our regret, the correspondence of it, how it multiplied, we said a lot of things like, please try therapy, and, basically, think like a social media safety guideline. I’m still downing three fistfuls of melatonin every night. Still stripping back hangnails like wallpaper, hoping for the raw of it. I keep running myself into the direction of your house but that’s nothing now. Isn’t it. I’m so glad you’re doing well now. You and your dog and an impossible view, the way Phoebe Bridgers sings it, even though you still forget to eat. Even though us. Even though you don’t remember             don’t you remember / don’t you still want us? Do you even need to think about how it felt? 4am, trading messages back and forth until our typos began tripping into themselves, dawn just another alarm to shut out. Every confession that curdled in our arms. The truth was, our parents could both get better. They could have been nicer. Picked us up from school and came clean. You could have loved me, and I would’ve let you.
 

—from 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Ruoyu Wang: “I like poetry because it allows the intimacy for me to create a transitional space where these fragments from my life and my identity and the people I love are able to emerge into a fuller, lighter truth.”

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October 11, 2024

“I Love My Neighbors but Hate When They Barbeque (Radio Edit)” by Miseong KongPosted by

Miseong Kong

I LOVE MY NEIGHBORS BUT HATE WHEN THEY BARBEQUE (RADIO EDIT)

POLKA FOR EIGHT FREAKING HOURS,
my daughter cries out as she cowers,
taste in this music is not ours.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
 
Polka for eight freaking hours,
for no other channel he scours.
Change the station? I lack the powers.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
 
Polka for eight freaking hours,
the accordion groans betwixt towers,
the tuba is killing my flowers.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
 
Polka for eight freaking hours,
no response to my stares and glowers,
the forecast says sadly no showers.
POLKA FOR EIGHT FREAKING HOURS.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Miseong Kong: “I once lived to play classical guitar to the best of my ability, to the scrutiny of the masters, and that life produced some beautiful sounds but sacrificed my love of the guitar. Then I tried living to take small moments of life into poetry and that life produced some beautiful poetry but sacrificed too many small moments. Prompt poetry sacrifices the joy of freedom and, of all joys, maybe that is the easiest to let go? Let then the music flow in response, as words, constrained.”

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October 10, 2024

“Ruderal” by Katie BeswickPosted by

Katie Beswick

RUDERAL

Freddie, at last! We’ll take our secret to the grave.
—last words of Frances Weller, my great-grandmother

It was a life spent, mostly
stooped over things.
The counter at the butcher’s shop
her parents owned,
all through both wars,
wrapping bacon in brown paper parcels
as bombs fell
and far away, men she loved
were shot at;
sometimes blood from the steaks
would stain her dresses.
An ironing board,
straight-backed
perfect perpendicular;
she’d smoke as she ironed,
barely touching the cigarette,
pressing
all her weight upon each garment,
erasing the possibility of a crease.
And babies’ bottoms—
because babies came
and wouldn’t stop,
two at a time,
and the men were locked away or fighting
and anyway, wiping was woman’s work.
Then knitting needles
with their insistent clacks.
It’s good to know that in the cracks
between duties
she sprouted secrets,
like tufts of grass grow on wasteland,
just when you’re sure there is nothing fertile left.
I think now of her hardness—
the thick, sun-worn skin
folded over the bones of her face,
her hands’ dry crevasses,
that mouth, set in its unsmiling line—
as bark to a tree,
covering what’s tender beneath.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
September 2024

__________

Prompt: Find someone’s last words, and use that as an epigraph in a poem where “death” is not mentioned by name.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “All too often with epigraphic poems, the quote is more interesting than the poem itself. Here, the shocking last words of Frances Weller are immediately juxtaposed to the micro-memoir first line of the poem—and that brilliant contrast propels us through her life full of struggles. Instead of speculating as to her secret, Beswick explores empathy through the motion of her great-grandmother’s ever-moving hands during two world wars. Beswick’s tactile details are so well-crafted that we don’t just read her poem, we feel the heat of the iron and smell the smoke of her cigarette. The title both reveals the poem to be an extended metaphor for growth in the midst of adversity, and speaks more directly to the eventual fate of all of our secrets.”

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October 9, 2024

“Don’t Stop” by Jeff KnightPosted by

Jeff Knight

DON’T STOP

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
It’s about a dark night, a path, thick woods.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
 
The cabin you found had a hard dirt floor,
cobwebs, an old guitar made of plywood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
 
Sometimes the pictures change, sometimes the chords
sound strange as time. But once you understood
the light was nailed shut, it opened like a door
 
into the next verse you’d been walking toward,
a verse about spring, cool water, boyhood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
 
There’s a bridge leading you to the new shore
where daybreak came the way you thought it should.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door
 
into the last verse there was to explore.
Were you going to say you understood?
Don’t. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Jeff Knight: “I have played bar band and coffeehouse gigs in Austin (including with my old band Blue Haiku), have made money busking, worked for almost ten years as a professional songwriter for an educational curriculum company, and recently signed a contract (and got a paycheck) with Fervor Records to place some country-rock songs I co-wrote. I’m just a ham-and-egger on guitar but find that writing, arranging, and performing songs is satisfying in a similar way to poetry: you mess with it and mess with it until you think it’s done and then hope it will connect with people’s hearts and heads. And sometimes it does.” (web)

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October 8, 2024

“When My Student Who Wants to Be a Writer Says They Do Not Read” by Frances KleinPosted by

Frances Klein

WHEN MY STUDENT WHO WANTS TO BE A WRITER SAYS THEY DO NOT READ

Why would you build a house with no nails?
 
Why plant, till, harvest a crop
in whose taste you find no savor?
 
The bees of the field scan the dances of their sisters
before penning a path to the lavender patch—
 
The forest produces a new body
of work only after absorbing volumes of cedar trees,
each bear bread and blueberry bush in the Tongass
standing on the shoulders of giants—
 
The incoming waves read each stone and shell
on the shore as they sketch the high tide line—
 
Inside you is a curled fern yearning for light.
 
Inside you is a fire lit beneath a capped chimney.
 
Smoke fills your rooms; there are no doors
or windows to air them out.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Frances Klein: “There has been a lot of online discourse this week about an article in The Atlantic lamenting that students no longer come to college prepared to read full books. Although I disagree with the author’s chosen villain (she blames high school teachers) I related to the experience of having students enter creative writing classes with an expressed distaste for reading. I have been teaching creative writing to high school students for many years, and in the last five years or so I have noticed a major shift in the ‘influences’ students identify for their writing. More and more, kids who claim they want to be writers are open about disliking reading. When asked to talk about the influences on their writing, they identify TV shows, musicians, and online influencers. In real life, I try to be patient and understanding, to help guide students to texts that sparks their interest and draw them in to loving reading. This poem, however, was written from my knee jerk reaction of frustration, from the ‘what I wish I could say,’ point of view.” (web)

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