Search Results for: in my mother's things

July 23, 2023

“Barbie Manifesto” by Alison LutermanPosted by

Alison Luterman

BARBIE MANIFESTO

I’m gonna see the Barbie movie tonight
because I had a feminist mother who didn’t buy us Barbies
and when I said I wanted to be a nurse, she said why don’t you be a doctor,
but I really did want to be a nurse
because of the perky hats they got to wear,
bobby-pinned to their sleek, shiny hair,
and I’m going to wear pink to the Barbie movie,
hot pink, the color of cheap candy,
like the chalky sugar cigarettes we pretended to smoke
with their fake red tips,
and I’m going to squeal like a cheerleader on Ecstasy,
I’m going to be silly and girly and super excited,
and all the things you were never supposed to be,
because doing anything like a girl–running,
or throwing, or thinking or writing or talking,
is the worst insult—
an icky, sticky, oozing, bleeding, shrill, smelly girlie-girl.
It means you’re not smart, or cool.
You cry when they throw footballs at your chest
which my boyfriend did in high school
because he wanted to help me toughen up.
It means you’ll be laughed at and dismissed,
so I’ve acted serious and intelligent
and tough for about a thousand years, just to prove them all wrong,
but now I’m begging to be dismissed—please! Dismiss me,
so I can lounge by the pool in a bright pink bikini
while some Ken bring me drinks with little umbrellas.
Because I’m tired of proving my point.
I don’t remember what my point is anyway,
or the point of this whole thing in the first place—
men, women, who cares? I just want to hide under the bed
with my best friend and a flashlight, constructing secret worlds
we can live in forever. I want to grow old on Planet Girl,
painting each of my stubby fingernails a different color of neon.
I have pretended I sprang fully-grown
from the forehead of my father, bristling with armor.
I have worn olive drab and camouflaged the delight I once took
in smearing myself with Vaseline and admiring my new little breast-buds
in the midnight mirror. I have done all the right things,
I have feigned interest in what bored me,
I have feigned politeness. I have pretended that my inner organs
are not all glistening pink, my heart and my liver and my lungs.
Pink as your own tongue, or the pads of your feet, or your palms.
 

—from Poets Respond
July 23, 2023

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Alison Luterman: “Like so many women of my generation, I’ve wrestled with the contradictions of who I’m supposed to be, and who I am, what I’m supposed to enjoy, and what I actually do like. I think the Barbie movie is arriving in our world at a great time for all of us, men and women, to start looking at these questions in a new, playful way.” (web)

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September 12, 2023

“What I Didn’t Learn in School” by Maria Mazziotti GillanPosted by

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

WHAT I DIDN’T LEARN IN SCHOOL

I didn’t learn geometry, except for the shortest distance
Between two points is a straight line. The rest was a blur
 
Through which I stumbled, confused and uncertain,
My mind tuning out when poor bald-headed Mr. McGinn
 
Tried to explain geometry to all the Alpha class
Math students who caught on right away.
 
Mr. McGinn was going to fail me that first semester.
I walked up to his desk, held out my report card,
 
The marks all written in neat black fountain-pen ink,
And his head snapped up in shock. On my report card
 
My marks, 95, 100, 95, 100, 100, 100. Is this your
report card? he asked, and I saw his pen hesitate
 
While he thought it over. Slowly, he wrote in a 75.
I went back to my desk, knowing I didn’t deserve to pass,
 
But knowing too that nothing would make me learn geometry,
Not Mr. McGinn with his big, shiny head, not the pity
 
In his blue eyes when he looked at me. He never called on me
Again. I did the homework each night, struggling to understand,
 
And for the first time, I knew what it was like for those kids
Who always had trouble in school. I was an Alpha kid.
 
We were the brightest kids in the school. Our classes were held
On the third floor, a symbol that we deserved the top.
 
How humiliating, then to watch the other Alpha kids learn
All those lines and angles without effort. I sat, still as a beaten dog,
 
Tears trembling in my eyes, while I tried to wrap my mind
Around theorems but always failed.
 

—from Rattle #15, Summer 2001

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan: “Poetry is my passion—writing it and sharing it with others through my own books, setting up readings for other poets, editing a magazine and anthologies, and organizing prizes. My mother always said, ‘The more I gave away, the more I had to give,’ referring to food, and I have tried to do the same thing with poetry.” (web)

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January 16, 2024

“First Responders” by Francesca BellPosted by

Francesca Bell

FIRST RESPONDERS

The day I finally rose staggering
from our bed of kryptonite,
gnawed free from the anchor
that dragged its own boat down
with it, and walked out,
you stopped me in the drive
to set one thing straight:
were I to sleep, even once,
with anyone else, you would never,
ever, ever take me back.

It wasn’t hard to arrange that very day
and many, many days after,
that whole long spring and summer,
and sometimes more than once a day
when I felt like it, to take a man,
pretty much any man, to bed
or the shower or the high-rise
office building floor. Having been,
despite years of accusations and interrogations,
as steadfast and inert as a corpse,

I began slowly to revive, each man’s hands
on me like a paramedic’s feeling
for a pulse, their mouths bent
on resuscitation, their bodies thrusting
up inside me insistently the way a doctor
pushes and pushes on a stopped heart
trying to turn it back on, every stroke
powering a stroke of my own leaden arms
fighting, struggling from down deep
through thick, sucking water
as I fucked my way upward,
one man at a time, and came
bursting, breathless, back to life.

—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

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Francesca Bell: “As Stephen Dunn says, and as I tell my mother, the fact that something actually happened would be the very worst reason to write a poem about it.” (web)

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June 7, 2023

“Poem in Which the Word Is Not Spoken” by Tanvi RobertsPosted by

Tanvi Roberts

POEM IN WHICH THE WORD IS NOT SPOKEN

There was never any evidence of it, between 
them: my parents slept with their door wide open, in case 
we should call, my father’s breath so close 
I could hear the scrape of his snoring, which he would deny 
in the morning. I heard how my mother woke early and turned 
her body again and again, like a dog 
trying to rest. When things were given—at birthdays and 
Christmas—they would stumble, tilt forwards 
and clasp their arms around each other, 
like putting on a necklace. The only time the word was spoken, 
beneath a winter skylight, the stars hid their faces, and my father 
said I’m sorry, it was a joke. Sweat prickled thistles 
into my armpits, which were growing hair before 
everyone else, and I was at the worst stage of puberty, 
all hair and no breasts, which meant girls at birthday parties 
called me monkey. The only time I heard of it, 
from my mother, was when I was grown, and had 
a boyfriend—I knew she had seen, 
sometimes, like a child who does not know yet, 
me sitting on his lap, on the far-off sofa, the shag 
tartan blanket thrown over us—she had heard, through the paneled 
glass window, small moans, and asked why 
cuttings of pubic hair wrapped in tissue—as if 
they might grow into flowers—appeared 
in the foot-closed bins before I left 
home. So she sat me down in my bedroom and asked 
how far I would go with this boy, as if there was an answer 
apart from no. Well obviously I wouldn’t—I said—she stopped me 
before the word was spoken—I was 
glad—she had protected us both. In her life, 
there had been no one to guide her before that first night, 
and even the loss of blood each month was a trauma. When it happened, 
I wanted to go to her with jasmine in my hair 
and in my hands pulihora, the roar of curryleaf in oil. I wanted to go 
after headbath, shoes left at the door, and tell her 
how soft my skin was, afterwards, how little 
could not be washed away. I wanted to take her and hold 
her, not flinching, but I knew 
that was not the way in our house, where we dealt in everything 
except. So I stitched my mouth shut and found 
I was hers—I had made myself her daughter 
by my denial of it.
 

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

__________

Tanvi Roberts: “Once I was at a reading by the English poet Lavinia Greenlaw. An audience member asked her why she wrote poetry, and she answered elliptically, ‘Poets are often people who have difficulty with words.’ Several years later, I can’t find any better reason than this: Poetry allows us to struggle and play with words, to devote our attention to trying to capture the ones that cause us less difficulty, and to create an alternate world populated by those words.” (web)

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March 29, 2023

“Gonzo” by Éanlaí P. CroninPosted by

Éanlaí P. Cronin

GONZO

the gonzo mug, the first thing for which i reached 
that night when i was twelve and i returned
to the cubicle in the convent i called home 
where one hundred and thirty girls 
shuffled along the marble corridors of this once 
british landlord’s manor, the irony of such a gaggle 
of indigenous women speaking nothing 
but our native tongue in a place where once we 
would have been cailín aimsires, no more than scullery maids, 
no less than always available to the whims and wants 
of some hungry force tossing his occupying seed into unwelcomed 
furrows, here now our victory. our time. irish clambering back 
into the molecules of memory. day by day. phrase by 
repeated phrase. were i there again, it would be 
more than enough, the daily baptism 
of language resurrecting from the bones. back then, its loss 
sauntered along in the blood, the brutality of one native 
against another. who had words for damage done? who dared 
begin the job of that unraveling? the month february. 
the day valentine’s. just told by mother 
superior that the senior girl i adored (let me tell you here 
that this was a love that lasted all of fifteen minutes, beginning 
to finish, no idea in me of its great need, just one embrace 
in the darkness of a music room while others 
scurried past on their way from evening supper to study hall 
so that she and i arrived late and my heart knew 
something it had not known before, someone had claimed 
me entirely as their own). the hooked finger of mother 
superior beckoned from the dais. she whispered in my ear 
in the quietness of that once banquet room 
that this liaison was to cease. 
some snap undone. 
night prayers in church singing 
to a god i hated. climbed the spiral staircase, unearthed
the hidden envelope among my white knee socks. 
emptied the contents of my father’s heart 
pills into the saucer of my palm. filled the gonzo mug 
half way with freezing water. swallowed the lot. watched my reflection 
in the darkness of the window. smiled. 
i remember that. 
smiled at her authority. 
climbed into bed. 
waited. counted each breath. just as i had done 
months before. on the surgeon’s table. count backwards, 
the masked man had asked. 
ten to one, good girl. 
i did the same. 
i can’t remember 
where i stopped.
 

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023
Tribute to Irish Poets

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Éanlaí P. Cronin: “Born and reared in a small, Irish-speaking village in the southwest of Ireland, I learned, early in life, that language and land were intertwined. Indeed language and life itself were married in such a way that the singular incantation of a proverb or prayer evoked the nature of the Gael inside the blood, no matter how cold or indifferent one had become to one’s own native origins, no matter how deep a schism history had created in the marrow of the Irish psyche. An Irish verse or a psalm could bring a grown man or woman to tears in our winter kitchen. And I, as a child, could spend hours weeping in a quiet corner at something I didn’t fully understand but knew to be true and real. As real as the thinning carpet on which I sat. Or the small footstool upon which I perched at my mother’s feet by a roaring range. It seemed, back then, in the 1970s, and still to this day, that to hear the native tongue, to sing a traditional song, to recite an epic verse, ‘as Gaeilge,’ was to rebirth within the Irish skin something nearly dead and gone. To make room, not for the terrible beauty Yeats mourned, but for the trembling truth of the savage restored. Savage because we had, even in my childhood, come to view ourselves, through the eyes of long oppression, as mongrels of a kind, uncivilized, shameful, wanting in some way. Yet, not a word of such a thing ever spoken or dissected. As though to be Irish and to be broken were the common weather through which we moved. All of us flawed tokens. My task, as an Irish child, is to pen whatever I can that will rouse the Irish soul in my beloved homeland, and in me. To make sound that which has been silent and dying. To become once more unbound, her and I, in all our original splendor.” (web)

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March 3, 2024

“A Kaddish for Aaron Bushnell (1998-2024)” by Micah Ackerman HirschPosted by

Micah Ackerman Hirsch

A KADDISH FOR AARON BUSHNELL (1998-2024)

after Father Daniel Berrigan

Praise beyond all conception of praise the things we cannot understand,
this thing that doesn’t want to be praised, this tragedy laid over tragedy to stir the watching,
misunderstanding crowd from their pulpits. From their bedsides. From their phones.
Praise my shaking hands in the California light, praise the shaking light that soars to Washington,
praise I can’t comprehend, what I can’t comprehend, what we cannot comprehend, praise
the hands of Gaza’s fathers and its mothers’ sweat. Praise beyond capacity for praising
things that cannot be, that will not be, that stand before what is and cry peace to the heaven all
around us, made from the praising of our hands around one another, around the sidewalk and the
gate, around the world you would speak into being. I am tired of understanding praise in this
house of heaven built on shining shores, built on shining hills, built by shining states—must we
again praise the shining city and its shining bombs? Must my children? Must yours? Praise the
hands that must be God’s in the darkness, that must be light, that must see you on every street
corner wearing the face of the peace come down to where it cannot understand. Praise beyond all
conception, or mourn, or scream, or swear. Gaza’s children, praise them too, you who praise the
voice of thin silence. Praise the driven that cannot understand, praise the way you cannot
understand them, praise the way you can. Praise understanding renewed, the speaking out against
this multiplied a thousand-fold, praise only understanding what is left to do in city halls in city
streets in conversations in protest signs in graffitied signs in holy signs upon the remaining days
that repeat themselves how we can never hold down. And I praise. I cannot understand. I praise.
 

—from Poets Respond
March 3, 2024

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Micah Ackerman Hirsch: “As a Jew opposed to the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza, I struggled with how to commemorate Aaron Bushnell. Judaism has very little to say about concepts like martyrdom, theologically valuing existence and struggle in this world over seeking the next. So much do we focus on this Earthly life over Heaven that our prayer for the dead, the Kaddish Yatom, says nothing about death at all. Instead, it asks the mourners to praise God beyond all humanly conceptions of what it means to praise something, and expresses our longing for the day when the peace embodied by divinity exists permanently in our world. And so, following Father Daniel Berrigan’s poetry of protest and the long Jewish tradition of rewriting prayers to meet our contemporary trials, I wrote this Kaddish, a mourning prayer, a poem, for Aaron.”

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May 10, 2023

“It Kept Always Being Sunday” by Benjamin S. GrossbergPosted by

Benjamin S. Grossberg

IT KEPT ALWAYS BEING SUNDAY

Before my mother died, and after.
I thought of Paul: before Jimmy died, and after.
The narratives of hope grew irksome.
I’m almost fifty, my body well on its way to ruin,
what are a few chemicals more or less?
Pandora, kneeling at the box, having let loose
all the pharmaceuticals.
The experiment that each generation is,
the experiment that each generation is
loosed on the generations before it.
In this new America, we don’t really get old
until just before we’re dead.
How can I write about PrEP without writing about love?
Go back to Romeo and Juliet, go back
to the Greeks, no one can write about love
without writing about dying.
No way but this, etc.
An outboard motor on my Ship of Death.
At what age does having ambition
become something younger people praise you for?
Before my mother died, her concerns
fell away, importance redefining itself in tighter
and tighter circles around her body.
Just a few weeks before her death, she felt
well enough to get a haircut; she wanted a haircut.
All the conventional wisdom told us to find meaning
in the moment. All the advertising told us we could buy it.
Biologically, we just wanted to sleep in piles
with other mammals.
There was a fire. Somewhere far off
a howling from which we felt insufficiently insulated.
When a stone sounded three times against
the cave wall, when smoke from way back
smelled of a pleasant roasting, we came forward
salivating. I told a man I loved him only a month
after we’d stopped speaking, and only by email.
But, I note in my defense, I used to touch him in line
at the supermarket, my hand against his shoulder.
The problem of too little may be a problem
of too much too quickly, like a crowd
trying to get through a door without first forming a line.
The last time I remember eating meat:
A Sunday. I am at a barbecue
with my brother and his friends.
I am twenty-two, I have just come out,
it comes off the grill in strips,
more sauce than meat, and I put it in my mouth.
The tang of tomato sauce and vinegar.
Does everyone here know I am gay yet?
We are all enjoying the meat.
 

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

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Benjamin S. Grossberg: “More and more these days, I find it hard to write about one thing without writing about everything. In ‘It Kept Always Being Sunday,’ I tried to ride that impulse, rather than resist it. I’ve been writing poems for as long as I can remember, but the first time I was really transported by a poem was hearing a literature professor read ‘Lady Lazarus’ aloud in class.”

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