April 12, 2024

“Courage” by Ansuya Patel & Batya WeinbaumPosted by

Ansuya Patel & Batya Weinbaum

COURAGE

When I wrote a check for fifty dollars, 
that’s all I have I said to the taxi driver
 
who locked the doors of his black Mercedes.
He drove like a maniac down a dirt road.
 
Shall I drive, I asked. Don’t you trust me.
I’m not going to kill you, he yelled like 
 
he was doing me a favour. This is where 
you hang up faith, watch it somersault into air. 
 
He placed a hand on my thigh. You don’t want 
to touch me, I may have some awful disease. 
 
His fist hit the steering wheel. Crazy bitch, 
shut up. Give me all the money you have.
 
I swallowed my curses he unlocked the door,
I got out fast, fear he’d run me down. I walked 
 
for what seemed miles. A car passed by 
and stopped. You ok? I need a cab, I said.
 
Not around here. Get in, I’ll drop you. I talked 
music, he said he was off to steal wheels.
 
He turned up the music to electro beats. My feet 
tapped courage, I prayed all the way to neon lights.
 
Once home I picked up a pair of scissors, cut off 
my hair, it fell like a curtain at the end of the show.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

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Ansuya Patel & Batya Weinbaum: “We chose the theme courage. We both wrote a draft initially and used couplets to weave our experiences into one story. We had both been attacked by a stranger in a car many years ago. Writing in couplets allowed us to create the journey that changed us forever and remind us that courage has no gender. We have reclaimed our lives and the open road, proving that resilience is a formidable force in the face of adversity, and that no experience however dark can define the boundless potential within every individual.”

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April 11, 2024

“The Wedding Doll” by Nancy BeaglePosted by

Nancy Beagle

THE WEDDING DOLL

She boxed me—saving me, she said, for the wedding.
She shall be my centerpiece, stand next to the cake.
That was when she was twelve.
 
I was a birthday gift to a girl who loved dolls. A girl who had
dreams, pictured herself, apron-clad, in a sunny kitchen
fixing pot roast for a husband, four children.
 
It is now 65 years later, and I’m stuck up in the attic,
like a child’s cradle outgrown or a rocking horse
no longer needed. And I am still in the turquoise box
 
with magenta lettering proclaiming Madame Alexander.
We, the most cherished dolls of the era. This was
before Barbie, Cabbage Patch kids, and American Girl.
 
My box itself has begun to collapse, its corners broken,
its top dented from move after move. The wedding dress
I wear now is tainted—tea brown with age. The lace
 
delicate, ready to dissolve at the touch. My face, too, is
cracked, but my blue eyes are still open. She takes me
out now and then and witnesses time, acknowledges
 
that I never got that center spotlight—nor did she.
How do I feel having been boxed for decades? How does
she feel never having had a man to hold at night,
 
children to embrace? She, too, has been in a box. Hers
constructed of societal expectations. No less imprisoned
than I. Do I pity her? Not really. She had choices whereas
 
I had none. She could have, at any time, lifted her lid,
flown over the edge.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
March 2024

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Prompt: Write a poem from the perspective of one of your childhood toys.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “The twirling between the doll and the speaker in Nancy’s poem invites us to get lost in the ruffles of regret. At once exploring our need to cherish and to be cherished, as well as to love and to be loved, the honesty in this poem unboxes a trove of emotion.”

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April 10, 2024

“The Old Stove” by Herb Kitson & Ray-J NelsonPosted by

Herb Kitson & Ray-J Nelson

THE OLD STOVE

I hope the sun won’t ever burn out.
Some things seem to last forever.
Our old stove still heats up
the solar system of the kitchen.
Nana says it’s been blazing
for about 40 years.
She loves to cook on it.
We love to eat.
When she cooks, she’s beautiful.
She revolves around the stove
like a planet in her very own solar system.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

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Herb Kitson & Ray-J Nelson: “We have been working on projects together for a long time and enjoyed working on poetry collaboration for Rattle. Ray-J (age 13) is the content/ideas man, and I’m the form-style-structure man. To borrow from Robert A. Pirsig, Ray-J is the Romantic mode of understanding; I’m the Classical mode. He either wrote down or told me what he wanted to convey, and I assisted him in putting the material in ‘poetic’ form. We had lots of fun trying to use metaphor in each poem. Each of us contributed two metaphors. He wants to be a great writer someday; I’m pushing him toward medicine because we poets are poor. Maybe he’ll be another William Carlos Williams.”

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April 9, 2024

“Abandoned Bicycle” by George BilgerePosted by

George Bilgere

ABANDONED BICYCLE

A bicycle—a nice one—
has been locked to the lamp post
all summer and fall.
 
Tires gone flat.
A congregation of leaves
worshipping the wheels.
 
And on the brake levers
and the tiny bolts
that held the seat exactly
where someone wanted it to be,
rust is constructing
its sprawling embassies.
 
Maybe a drunk drifted
over yellow lines. A clot
formed in the thigh
and moved north.
Or somebody just got
sick and tired.
 
Anyway, the bike is waiting.
Its metals gleam urgently.
 
Soon the scavengers will come.
The pedals—unable to live
without each other—will vanish
into a fresh new marriage.
 
The seat will disappear
into a seat-shaped abyss.
 
One night, someone
will help himself to a wheel.
Not quite a bicycle,
but a start.
 
And the bike,
like an abandoned person,
will become a clock,
calibrated to measure
the precise duration
of loneliness.
 

—from Cheap Motels of My Youth
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

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George Bilgere: “When I was eight years old my parents got divorced. My mother packed her three kids into an old Chevy station wagon and drove us from St. Louis to Riverside, California, looking for a fresh start. She had visited there when she was an Army nurse stationed in LA during the war and fell in love with the place. That cross-country car trip, full of cheap diners, cheap hotels, and desperation, changed my life. I fell in love with the vastness and beauty, the glamor and tawdriness, of America. I’ve travelled all over the country since then, on that ancient and deeply American quest, the search for home.” (web)

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April 8, 2024

“Hubris” by Mariko Kitakubo & Deborah P. KolodjiPosted by

Mariko Kitakubo & Deborah P. Kolodji

HUBRIS

through
the distorted
glass
he smiles to me
from the white limousine
 
 
blue green shimmers
a peacock struts
his stuff
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

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Mariko Kitakubo & Deborah P. Kolodji: “We started writing ‘tan-ku’ sequences and sets during the pandemic when neither of us could travel. Mariko is a tanka poet and I am a haiku poet. We started having poetic conversations via Facebook Messenger where Mariko would write a tanka and I would respond with a haiku and vice versa, often at odd hours due to the time zone differences between Tokyo and Los Angeles. Some of these poems are only two verses, but others are six, and sometimes more. We were born the same year and have common experiences, but also cultural differences which has been a learning experience for both of us. We have found that sometimes our poems take unexpected turns.”

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April 7, 2024

“What Will We See When the Lights Go Out?” by Ryan McCartyPosted by

Ryan McCarty

WHAT WILL WE SEE WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT?

My neighbor, near me on the bus, moves his lips
while looking at his phone. They’re like two
little birds whispering to that tiny sunrise he holds.
He will finish, snap out, look up, and laugh with me
at the empty roads, I know it, because we’re speeding
reckless in the wide open streets. The whole
world flew south to find a place to watch
one unimaginably distant body come
between us and another even more
distant body. If we believe the old stories,
they’re men and women, our mother
dancing, shielding us, hiding our father’s glare.
If we believe the new stories, roads will turn
to parking lots and children will forget
the names of their families, wandering lost
in a sea of empty gas stations and dehydration.
If we believe only the story that something
inevitable is happening, we will marvel
at the precision, at our predictive powers,
at the blurred lines between chirping crickets
and the notifications ringing in our pants.
Or, instead, on the roads, in our yards, high
behind windows built for silence, ludicrous
in our magical glasses, could we just lose
the tale? Know what the end might look like?
In the momentary darkness, fumbling
for our offerings to coax the daytime back—
our multitools and battery-powered radios,
our spare cash and backup maps, will we breathe
in that chill air, when everything purples,
when the birds change key, when millions
of us look, not to the sky but left and right, and see
each other, gone out of our way to stand,
together, where the light disappears.
 

—from Poets Respond
April 7, 2024

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Ryan McCarty: “I’ve been so struck by all the people I hear talking about their plans to watch the solar eclipse. Everyone is traveling, planning, convening. Thirty-one million people are supposed to be traveling to get somewhere within range. I love cosmic phenomena, but I love the way people obsess about them even more. I find myself wondering exactly what they hope to see—what they imagine—and if there’s any chance that one of these hyped-up celestial flickers might just one day change everything while we’re all standing around staring, together. Add in the almost apocalyptic warnings that accompany these kinds of events – communications breakdowns, gas shortages, traffic pileups, snack shortages—and I can’t stop imagining. That’s where this poem started.”

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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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