March 14, 2023

Wendy Barker

STUFF

Who brought these pieces here? Somebody making the shift
to assisted living? Someone’s sixty-something kids after
Mom or Dad had finally “gone aloft,”
as my English granny would have said? The tchotchkes
cramming this antique shop I stroll through with my son:
ivory-handled button hooks, cameo pins,
tureens with porcelain peacock tails for handles. Before she died,
my husband’s mother begged him to take the claw-footed,
eight-foot-tall armoire he hated. At seventy,
my mother labeled every object in her house, color-coded
for each daughter. She wanted to know which one of us
would wear her ruby ring, jade necklace,
turquoise bracelet. Where will my granny’s silver trays,
salt cellars, tea pots, go? What about my mother’s copy—
tattered, water-stained—of Just So Stories,
“O Best Beloved?” The 1924 collection of poems my father
cradled when he read aloud at dinner—will those end up
on my son’s shelves? At Half Price
Books? A garage sale, eBay, landfill? A friend says we spend
the first three-quarters of our lives accumulating, the final
quarter, disposing. As a kid, I treasured
my doll-sized china tea sets, which, packed with crumpled tissue
in a taped box, fell off the back of our truck while leaving
one house for another. Like my photo albums
of the ’60s the movers never found. No pictures left of my black
mascara eye-lashed, mini-skirted, leggy self, no images
of my tennis-playing lover. I’ve read about
the bower birds, who attract their mates with shiny
pebbles and trinkets rescued from trash bins. Did one
of my tiny tea cups end up in some
bird’s bower? Sometimes I crave bare walls, windows open
wide to sky, the oaks, mesquite, and sumac. But who
am I without my journals of the past
twenty years, my embroidered needle case, the filigree
glass vase my husband gave me? Empty as if coming
into this world? Or preparing to leave.

from Rattle #58, Winter 2017

__________

Wendy Barker: “I can’t not write poetry. I’ve written essays, even scholarly work, but it’s poetry I always come back to. If I’m not working on a poem, I’m in trouble. Something about placing the words, the phrases, the lines, the images, the sounds on a page brings me alive. Alive in the moment. Writing poetry is also a way of examining conflicts or trouble in my own personal space and in the wider world. I’d like to think poems can make a difference. I guess I’m always in thrall to Rilke’s great line: ‘You must change your life.’ And I like to think of Auden’s lines in his poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’ I guess I keep on going because of all those mouths that came before me and that surround me, continually feeding me. And I long to provide a little something for those who are also hungry, so that we can feed each other.” (web)

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March 13, 2023

Ayelet Amittay

WANDERING WOMB

Ancient texts named
hysteria the source
of bodily ills. The womb
an animal inside
an animal. The littlest
Irwin has been studying
animals again,
this time her own. Cells
migrating from the uterus
like a great flamingo flock
through the tissues. Blood
fattening the growth. The pain
like a great cry,
or singing. Let us speak
of blood, of the wringing out
of the lining that fed
each one of us. Don’t you
know how a woman
pours herself
like a jug of wine? I mean
each of us
an enchantress
pulling ourselves through
the sleeve of ourselves
in our own birth.
 

from Poets Respond
March 13, 2023

__________

Ayelet Amittay: “I was moved by this article on Bindi Irwin’s struggle with endometriosis. As a nurse practitioner I work with many patients who have this condition, which is rendered invisible by society’s refusal to talk about periods and other ways women’s health affects us all. I wrote this poem as a testament to those patients, including Bindi Irwin.” (web)

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March 12, 2023

Sarah Snider

CHRIS ROCK FINALLY RESPONDS TO WILL SMITH’S SLAP: A KINDOF MEMOIR

What happened last awards season
Last season when the “it” colors were
Different
Zendaya was amazing, is amazing,
I am in love with her
My father was unwell
As usual unwell, is always unwell
Maybe more than unwell but we
Were ignoring it
No, we were not ignoring it, he was
Did you know that you can get addicted to
Oxygen?
You can
Everyone gasped
When that man’s hand
With a man’s anger
Hit that man’s face
With a man’s shock
He gasped too, getting up to pour another glass of cheap Chardonnay
Gasped the way a bullfrog gasps
Deeply and from some cavernous place within
The buzzing about what to do
Who should do it what do you say
Oh shit! On live TV no less
The spectacle of seeing him on the stretcher
So helpless looking in the daylight
An emergency of red and blue lights
Haloing his confusion, his embarrassment
The cameramen have no idea where to point
Cut to commercial
God, what the fuck was that, why do I feel
Like I got hit?
My brain is screwing up the past with right now
Right now is not when he got hit
That was the past, now it is all
We’re talking about because we secretly hope
It happens again, even though now
There are rules and procedures
They had to remove his toe
It had gotten so bad they took it and
I am thinking about it now and I think
That I hate that they took his toe
Will they take my toe when the time comes?
That was last year and this is this year
And it’s almost awards season again
No, it is awards season again
Zendaya is still amazing, I am still
In love with her
And my dad is still dead.
 

from Poets Respond
March 12, 2023

__________

Sarah Snider: “I read this headline and thought to myself, has he not responded enough? Have I not heard enough? Did I want to hear more? At the time my dad was very ill, and over the next few months became so ill that he passed from it. I thought of the comparison of importance, and blended the shocking absurdity and violence of one with the shocking pain of the other. With the Oscars rapidly approaching, I felt compelled to share.” (web)

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March 11, 2023

C.K. Williams

GRAVEL

Little children love gravel, kneeling to play in gravel,
even gravel covering dry, meaningless dust.

It’s not, “Look what I found!” it’s the gravel itself,
which is what puzzles adults: nothing’s there, even beneath.

But that’s just what Catherine, watching children at that,
especially loves: that there’s no purpose, no meaning.

So, that day in the metro when the pickpocket
she’d warned a tourist against knelt, glaring at her,

a hand at his ankle, I wonder if one layer of that instant
of her mind had drift into it, children, children and gravel?

It didn’t come to her until later, telling it to me,
that the thief may well have been reaching into his boot

for a knife, or a razor; only then was she frightened,
more frightened even than when the crook, the slime,

got up instead and shoved her, hard, and spit at her face,
and everyone else stood there with their eyes attached,

only then did she lean against me, and shudder, as I, now,
not in a park or playground, not watching a child sift

through her shining fingers those bits of cold, unhealable
granite which might be our lives, shudder, and shudder again.

from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

__________

C.K. Williams: “About my poem: The thing that interests me about it, and what made it really possible to write, was the great disparity between the poem’s two themes, children playing in gravel, and men aggressing my wife on the subway. I wanted to write about what happened to her, but wasn’t able to until I found that frame to give some emotional distance from me. Maybe that’s what poetry is all about, pretty much?” (web)

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March 10, 2023

Robert Cooperman

I SEE HIM

I see him everywhere,
our friend who died at twenty-five;
as if it’s his young ghost
protesting, before
he disappears, forever.
 
Once, in a snowstorm,
there he was, head down,
fighting wind, tiny nails of frost,
but with such a smile,
as if he were in the middle
of a snowball fight
when school was closed
for a blizzard.
 
Another time,
he sat behind the wheel
of a sports car,
something sleek as a cheetah.
He had always talked of owning such a car,
so fast, nothing would catch him.
 
And I saw him with a woman
beautiful as biblical Ruth,
as the first petal of spring
opening wide as the arms of angels
when they praise God
and gaze down upon the world
going along, for once, splendidly.
 
Each time, I’m about to shout,
to open my arms and hug him.
But his ghost rushes past,
too hurried by death
for a short chat with an old friend.
 

from Rattle #7, Summer 1997

__________

Born and raised on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life.

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March 9, 2023

Robert Cooperman

YARD SALE CHAIR

There’s not a yard sale
I can just drive past.
At this one, I’m hooked
by an easy chair: $3.
What, I ask, is wrong with it?
The woman shrugs, half
caveat, half come-on,
so I sit and test it out.
 
My God, I could rest
weary bones forever.
Only later, do I smell it:
like a horse
that’s pulled a junk wagon
the length of America.
Still, my wife observes
after she’s sighed, content
as a woman awakened by a kiss,
the covers can be cleaned.
 
I ease myself into it again,
wonder when it’ll crack,
collapse like an exhausted camel,
or if moths in the thousands
will flutter from a tear
in the fabric: an orange lurid
as a high school team jacket.
 
But Lord, it’s comfortable,
books more enjoyable
while I’m curled in it:
a kindly grandfather
with a soothing voice
and more stories
than the Arabian Nights.
 

from Rattle #7, Summer 1997

__________

Born and raised on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life.

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March 8, 2023

Jeanne Yu

SCINTILLA

One of the reasons I fell in love 
with my husband is every once 
in a while, he uses a word I read 
somewhere, but I had never heard 
out loud.  
 
It wasn’t I was so impressed with 
his vocabulary as I was impressed
that I felt he was very ordinarily 
valiant in trying to rescue these 
words, those that were harder to 
say, or had more nuanced meaning 
or because it often took effort to
think of them, and through no 
fault of their own, had lost their 
way and were fading into 
obsolescence.
 
Never was he boastful about this 
gallantry, nor did he overthink it, 
he just in no extraordinary way 
hunted momentarily and rather
than offering his handkerchief 
as he often did, he would instead 
gently pull out a salvaged word 
and place it in that perfect 
moment before sunset 
so we could hear it aloud
together, one more time.
 

from Rattle #78, Winter 2022

__________

Jeanne Yu: “I write to make sense of life in this world … and to make sure I am paying attention to the little things that matter as well as the big things, because I have come to know they are all connected. I’m an engineer, mom, and environmentalist, every day trying my best—some days are harder than others—to live from a place of my hope for the world.”

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