December 10, 2023

“Gravity in Jerusalem” by Arthur RussellPosted by

Arthur Russell

GRAVITY IN JERUSALEM

I wanted to grow up to be a raincloud over an upstate reservoir during a draught.
Then it was my ambition to become a slender woman, or a book cover cut from a grocery bag,
or a trumpet, or a garden rake, or a handkerchief embroidered with a strawberry heart.
 
The evenings were much longer then. I wanted to be a satchel with latches that slid sideways
to open, a cutting board bearing the wounds of nutrition on my back, the scratchy absolution
of a dollar bill passing through the coin slot of a charity tin at the cashier of a candy store.
 
Like the colors in comic books when comic books were printed on foolscap, my irises
would dilate for the dishwasher light in the darkened kitchen, and contract at the open
refrigerator door. The brass drain in the kitchen sink, scrubbed with persistence
 
to a low brass glimmer was my art school; it whispered, we are brass kin, and you are me
in human form. I wanted to grow up to be the lavender soap in a lingerie drawer
or the handgun under the cable knit tennis sweater on the top shelf of the hall closet.
 
I envied the moldings around doorways, and wanted, more than friendship, to crawl
inside a mezuzah, to read its scrolls in seclusion, and to emerge from my cell
like morning in Manhattan with muted light on the brick façade of an apartment house.
 
I wanted to marry a book of matches once, to have children like misaligned wallpaper seams,
and teach them how to blow their noses and spit up phlegm, and how to fit a square god
in a round soul, and how to see all fathers as bags of donated clothing waiting by the door.
 
There is more light in a glass doorknob than gravity in Jerusalem.
 

—from Poets Respond
December 10, 2023

__________

Arthur Russell: “I have been preoccupied since October 7th with the tragic events in Israel and Gaza, preoccupied, sometimes embattled, and sometimes collapsing into a conflicted form of despair. I hear little bits of news and my emotions swing one way, and then other news, not necessarily conflicting new, that urges my heart and my rage and my despair in a new direction. Often, too, I feel disqualified by my distance from the reality, from having any feelings at all, and retreat to the emblems of my own spirit, my own morality, and my inheritance.” (web)

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December 9, 2023

“The Ordinary Man” by Trent BuschPosted by

Trent Busch

THE ORDINARY MAN

The ordinary man sat at a table
in the darkness. Not that he didn’t
like the music, not that he didn’t
like the red dancers in the light.

The truth is he liked them very much;
he sat in his dark shoes and kept
time with his fingers on his glass.
He smiled and nodded approval.

The ordinary man didn’t mind
the green hair of the dancers, the thin
legs and deep skirts, the creased pants
in limbo below the simple bar.

It was a dark table where he sat.
He smiled and drummed his fingers,
nodding approval, as if he
didn’t care what part he was of the show.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

Trent Busch: “It seems to me it takes great courage to be comfortable in being ordinary. I don’t mean an ordinary person; I mean an extraordinary person who is comfortable being ordinary. It seems to me there might be worse things.”

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December 8, 2023

“Barely 40, Your Brother Is Dying of a Brain Tumor” by Brent SchaefferPosted by

Brent Schaeffer

BARELY 40, YOUR BROTHER IS DYING OF A BRAIN TUMOR

So we make carnitas for the family. 
Ten pounds of pork shoulder carved into chunks
big as clenched fists split between two crock pots
set to slow cook for hours. You can see how big 
your brain is, teacher says, but I don’t know. 
Fore-knuckles together, I have small hands. 
 
Your hands mix the oregano, black pepper, cayenne, 
cumin, cinnamon, and salt. We’re expecting our first.  
Glioblastoma is your brother’s diagnosis. 
Remember visiting Bryan in Oahu? We got coffee: cold brew 
with a lotus flower tidy in the latte top. We ate musubi
then bought aloha shirts and denim at a thrift shop—
all left behind now in his apartment with the big straw hat
and ukulele, his Kazakhstani soccer jersey.  
 
Today your mother digests she’ll outlive her son, the pressure
building in his skull cavity. Now six centimeters, 
the tumor constricts his spine. It’s almost time.
The carnitas break down to meat juice, amino acids 
and salts. A week from now at the rec center,
like a proud wife tucking in a tail, straightening a tie, 
your mother will arrange the lei on his photo, 
her hands slow in the sun-heavy light.
 
Yesterday the midwives said the baby was fifty centimeters.
Even your maternity jeans don’t fit. We’re accidentally 
pregnant: living in a liminal breadth 
between experience and experiencing, life—
and all its unacknowledged risks. Shake the toy globe. 
The big picture is hidden in the flurry of this:
carnitas, cumin, fenugreek, and the ginger tea 
you drink every night to settle the baby.
 
At the memorial, you will wear green like the light
in the leaves. A fractal of pastel, 
almost paschal: the hunks of dead meat, 
the guitar, the light, the singing.
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

Brent Schaeffer: “Lying belly down on the grey rug after church one Sunday, I fell in love with the big words from comic books (uncanny, expatriate, macabre). On camping trips, I’d play with those words telling stories to thrill my friends. Autumn, decay, woodsmoke, hot cocoa: words are still my favorite toys and poetry the best game.”

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December 7, 2023

“Punishment” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

PUNISHMENT

They used books as weapons.
This is not a metaphor.
Because there were no blankets and they were cold,
the men in cell block L threw books
with intent to do bodily harm.
They rained down from above.
Rained down from the cells.
Guards shielded themselves
with dinner trays and mop buckets.
The men tossed entire libraries. A rage of books.
Lobbed in high arcs like footballs,
or pitched overhand like grenades.
Hardcovers shattered on cheekbones
or exploded on the back of someone’s head.
Paperbacks spiraled down, loose pages fluttering.
Thin ones skipped across the shiny tile like stones on water.
There was mayhem. There was blood.
Words littered the floor. Guards ran for their lives.
The men had spent years collecting—
biographies, mysteries, histories, science fiction,
even poetry books, their spines fine and reedy,
or thick with free verse.
One man threw his grandmother’s leather Bible.
Inside the front cover in elegant script
she’d noted the date and time of his birth.
Now it lay face down, back broken.
Another man hurled his family album.
It fell from the third floor, the photos scattering
on impact. His wife, his son, his daughter
smiled up from the chaos.

—from Punishment
Rattle Chapbook Series Selection

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez: “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand.” (web)

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December 6, 2023

“Killing the Snake Plant” by Shannon Connor WinwardPosted by

Shannon Connor Winward

KILLING THE SNAKE PLANT

after “Reupholstering a Chair” by Jenn Givhan

This used to be the tallest living thing
in the house without legs. What happened?
You can’t remember if it was over-water
 
under-light, death-by-cat—just that
you read somewhere the limbs, sleek and stiff, once 
damaged, would never recover. Best to amputate, make room
 
for the new. Your scissoring left only two fingers 
poking out, a desert of husks 
tiny and curled
 
on themselves as if flinching. You left them
by the sliding door—full afternoon sun—and you stayed
your lust, your watering can. You trusted
 
time would do its work. But then you touched one
and it broke. You watch the other, now
worried it too is illusion
 
that beneath that dry earth lies the loss
of the plant entirely, its leaves, majestic, green
as serpents rising to the ghost of a charm 
 
that you no longer possess. 
 
 
 

Prompt: “When my children were young, when I was tired and sick all the time and struggling to write, I felt Jennifer Givhan’s ‘Reupholsteringa Chair’ like an unvoiced scream. I tried to learn from what Givhan does with space, and the brutality of lines like ‘Your love will no longer / unclog drains or screw in light bulbs / or replace the hydrangeas you’ve suffered / death in the tiny plot you vowed to protect.’ I challenged myself to start with an ‘after’ to echo those invocations—the quiet desperation of trying to patch together chaos with a staple-gun—but from my own lived experience. That cutting voice of self-doubt became my inadvertent murder of the thing I was trying to save in the poem, and over time the scissoring of couplets became the undulating lines of that long-suffering plant that may or may not be dead in the corner of my kitchen.”

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023
Tribute to Prompt Poems

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Shannon Connor Winward: “My creative process is a cycle of productive highs and lingering lows. Over a lifetime, I’ve learned ways to navigate a dry spell, such as the use of prompts to encourage words to start flowing again. When I am struggling to find my own voice, it often helps to engage with the voices of poets I admire. I might start with a poem that speaks to whatever it is I feel unable to say, looking closely not just at what the poet says, but how, and also what they leave out.”

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December 5, 2023

“The End of Hurt Is Not Healing” by J.B. PennamePosted by

J.B. Penname

THE END OF HURT IS NOT HEALING

after Jamaica Baldwin

Whose bright idea was it to start tearing
out pages of poetry and wadding them up
to plug our wounds? The poems I like don’t
even come when you call them. As though
 
they’ve forgotten their masters, lost the sound
of their own names. They bear no antiseptics,
cannot cauterize you clean, but the way they
lick themselves is still good for a laugh. Is that
 
what I aspire to? Five years ago I nicked my finger
slicing a carrot. Five years and I can’t even watch my
father carve a turkey without getting second-hand
please-don’t-lose-your-goddamn-fingers syndrome.
 
But sure, when he’s done I can sit at the counter. In the
quiet of the kitchen, I can eat the turkey. Man what a turkey.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
November 2023

__________

Prompt: Write a sonnet with the title “The End of _____ Is Not _____” after Jamaica Baldwin’s American sonnet, “The End of Sorrow Is Not Happiness.”

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “As someone that has been plugging my wounds with poetry since childhood, I found the humor in J. B. Pename’s poem as refreshing as it is powerful. These fourteen lines have caused me to redefine what it is to heal. Man what a poem!”

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December 4, 2023

“From the Inside” by Paulette A. PashibinPosted by

Paulette A. Pashibin

FROM THE INSIDE

we have no need to know if we are loved 
or that love exists. 
 
No worry whether sky is blue or gray
or even sky.
 
We float in a darkened drum
tethered to echoes
 
No need of need 
nor dream of self.
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

Paulette A. Pashibin: “I fell in love with poetry sometime between reading Noyes’ ‘The Highwayman’ and watching a televised Air Force recruitment ad that featured Magee’s ‘High Flight.’ I was young, bookish, and quite melancholy. I spent as much time at my grandmother’s as I could get away with and ‘High Flight’ always aired during the Fulton J. Sheen show, so it became the first poem I memorized. The internet makes it easy for me to read poetry every day, but I’m an undisciplined writer. Sometimes I toss words in my head for weeks before putting them to paper; other times they spill over the keyboard in a fever. Writing poems—no matter how they turn out—allows me still to ‘slip the surly bonds of earth and dance the skies.’ Like magic.”

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