November 22, 2023

“For Years, I Believed That” by Conan TanPosted by

Conan Tan

FOR YEARS, I BELIEVED THAT

You were my biggest mistake. In the yard,
our second son gave way to a shard
 
of glass and still, you did nothing. Kept mum.
Knife to air and he was taxing the sum
 
of his being and still, you let the night sky
slit his throat into a scarf a father’s eye
 
has to weep itself to sleep with. Tell me, how can
these hands wager a life without seeing the man
 
his boy would have become? The answer: they
have to. So you’re never coming home. So I’ll replay
 
the lost reel in my head, forgetting, if only for
a second, about the real loss ten years is still sore
 
from carrying—that grief is nothing but a debt
of shared skin I wish we had not lost its bet.
 
 
 

Prompt: “This poem was written in response to SingPoWriMo 2022’s Day 1 prompt. The prompt was titled ‘The Beginner’s Luck Prompt’ and asked writers to write a poem committing all the mistakes they made as a new poet. It also featured optional poem bonuses such as the #FortuneFavoursTheBoldBonus which asked writers to include end rhymes, the #YoureSoLuckyBonus which required writers to include a gambling reference, and the #InTheBeginningBonus which asked writers to make the poem an origin story of themselves as a poet. When I first started writing poems at 13, I loved sonnets and ended virtually every poem with an end rhyme. While my writing has changed since then, I wanted to have a good laugh and merge the style I write in now with the incessant rhyming and clichéd images my 13-year-old self used.”

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

__________

Conan Tan: “Sometimes, I end up writing about the same theme, which makes poetry repetitive. Writing prompts are great because they provide me with a goal to write toward, but I’m able to filter the prompts through my lens and write something that I might not have written without the prompt. Some of my favourite prompts are form prompts because they expose me to the variety of different poetic forms there are, even the seemingly forgotten ones like the empat perkataan.”

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November 21, 2023

“Kite Weather” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

KITE WEATHER

I drive Miss Carr to her kidney dialysis
in my taxi at 5 a.m.

She’s 43 and clutches
a ratty blanket.

At the clinic she lays back
on a gray vinyl bed-chair

with several other liver-lidded pilgrims
who look like they’ve been raped

three days a week for years and years.
The machine reaches in

to her with its deep breathy hum
and the cruel tubes slurp

out her blood and pump
it back in purple, sterile

and cold. 5 hours later
she is released

and I take her home.
At a red light there is a city park

kitty-corner. A boy holds a string
leading to a yellow kite

a mile up in the blue sky.
Look at that, I say.

Miss Carr smiles and
lifts her head from her chest

like an anchor.
Her mouth is a taut line

which slackens for a moment,
a flash in the sun, and then the light

changes and we move on,
everything

getting smaller and
smaller

behind
us.

—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

_________

Mather Schneider: “I am a 40-year-old writer who has been published in the small press since 1995. I live in Tucson, Arizona, and drive a cab for a living.” (web)

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November 20, 2023

“Bésame en Español” by José MedinaPosted by

José Medina

BÉSAME EN ESPAÑOL

Kiss me in Spanish.
Grab my waist and squeeze me
 
against you. Wait
a moment. Let silence
 
open space for language.
Let words 
 
populate
what is 
 
expanding
between us. When 
 
the dictionary of our 
understanding’s
 
about to burst,
lean 
 
forward 
slowly.
 
Close your eyes.
Part your lips.
 
Invite me to the country
where I don’t need to be
 
translated.
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

José Medina: “I wrote this poem while translating famous German poems. I don’t speak German, so it was an experiment to translate a language that I did not understand at all. The result is this poem about translation and cross-cultural living.”

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November 19, 2023

“In Today’s Fantasy: Trees, Poems, and Sex” by Francesca MoroneyPosted by

Francesca Moroney

IN TODAY’S FANTASY: TREES, POEMS, AND SEX

Before you died, you promised me
a book of poetry. It was the day
 
we planted the maple. We sprawled
in the dirt beside our newest sapling.
 
You asked what I wanted for
my birthday. A pair of wooly socks?
 
Vial of sandalwood oil?
Tube of rose-scented cream?
 
I watched you smile, waiting
for me to decide. On the street
 
over your left shoulder, passing cars,
a dog and its human, pollen
 
painting everything green.
Perhaps some sonnets?
 
I grew warm, anticipating
thinly-veiled eroticism
 
oozing from each sestet. Oh!
Free verse! I declared, excited now,
 
wanting poems a bit subversive,
poems as unafraid as you and I,
 
poems loud enough to declare
our most basic desires: fuck, cum,
 
on your knees. What is it that I miss
the most? The feel of your mouth
 
moving over me while I
read Neruda to you beneath
 
the duvet? Or the way we loved
to lie beneath the trees?
 
In today’s fantasy, you have lived
long enough for us to lounge
 
again in the yard. You teach me
Cornus florida and Aesculu pavia.
 
We have already identified
Acer palmatum, with leaves
 
so red I sometimes tremble
in the presence of all that heat.
 
In today’s fantasy, we unwrap
the book you have given me,
 
and then we take the poems
to bed. We tear them
 
with our teeth. We suck
each stanza and caesura
 
until the poems glow
rich and red, as fierce
 
and fiery as the bloom
of Japanese maple.
 
In today’s fantasy, you and I
are the leaves blazing through
 
this late autumnal light,
moments before we fall.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 19, 2023

__________

Francesca Moroney: “Kenya’s plan to plant 100 million trees strikes me as an act of both great optimism and great mourning. The fact that our earth is in such dire need of replenishment merely underscores the extent of all that has been stripped from it. Sometimes it feels like that on a personal level, as well. No matter how much we plant, we will never find a way to compensate for all that has been lost. ” (web)

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November 18, 2023

“Pasteurization” by Michael MeyerhoferPosted by

Michael Meyerhofer

PASTEURIZATION

Poetry keeps wine and milk from spoiling
and has prevented countless deaths
since its invention in 1892. It works

by heating substances to just a bit
below the boiling point—not enough
to curdle but still hot enough to kill off

most of the bacteria that can hurt you.
Some health nuts blame poetry for disease,
saying a natural vocabulary is better,

though modern doctors disagree.
Other foods saved by poetry include juice,
syrup, vinegar, and canned foods.

Poetry was invented by Louis Pasteur
who lost three children to typhoid.
While working on a vaccine for rabies,

he once impressed onlookers
by extracting saliva from a crazed dog
without armoring his hands.

He also made a vaccine for anthrax
though some accuse him of plagiarism.
The poetry process involves lots

of pipes and vats and rapid cooling.
Poetry doesn’t seem all that complicated
to us, more like common sense,

but our ancestors didn’t have it
which is why so many of them died,
young and beautiful and always afraid.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012

__________

Michael Meyerhofer: “The first time I read the poems in What the Living Do by Marie Howe, I was so blown away that I said something like ‘Holy shit…’ after pretty much every one. This was followed, naturally, by a desire to share those poems with everyone—and to try and pull off the same miracle, if humanly possible. There’s a lot to be said for making somebody so stunned (hopefully in a good way) by something as seemingly innocuous as writing that all they can do is raise their eyebrows and swear like a sailor.” (web)

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November 17, 2023

“My Dad Loves the Smell of Asphalt” by Lisa SticePosted by

Lisa Stice

MY DAD LOVES THE SMELL OF ASPHALT

He’d work in the summer with steam
rising from new roads, climbing up 
and down from loaders and scrapers,
fixing whatever needed fixing then
 
he’d come home to us smelling of
oil with his arms dirty, clean up to his
t-shirt sleeves, and he’d wash with
green Lava soap in the utility sink,
 
gray water swirling down the drain—
his nightly ritual before dinner and
TV and sometimes he’d fall asleep
on the couch, his snores so loud we’d
 
have to nudge him to be able to hear
the sitcom, and he always went to bed
far earlier than us anyway because he
would be gone again before we woke.
 
 
 

Prompt: “From The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano (Two Sylvias Press, 2013): April 13—‘In honor of Seamus Heaney’s birthday … write a poem about your native land … focus on details about … what your parents and/or grandparents did for a living.’”

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

__________

Lisa Stice: “There are 365 prompts in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano (Two Sylvias Press, 2013), and I have actually revisited the book several times, and so written two or three different poems per prompt. It’s a lot of fun!” (web)

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November 16, 2023

“Almost” by Mark JarmanPosted by

Mark Jarman

ALMOST

Almost grasped what Grandmother Grace knew
Last Sunday sitting in church, almost knew
What Alexander Campbell grasped when, confronted
With the desolate orphan, he told her, “You
Are a child of God. Go claim your inheritance.”
Almost got it. There it was in the sunlight,
Squared in the clear glass windows, on the durable leaves
Of the magnolia outside. Almost grasped the weather
That turns clear and crystallized in Hans Küng’s brain.
Almost held it in the ellipses and measure
Of my almost understanding. I see the moment
There in my notebook, then the next day’s anxiety
Spilling like something wet across the ink.
I almost put in my hand a vast acceptance
And almost blessed myself, then it slipped away.
All that colossal animal vivacity—smoke
Of the distant horizon, most of it, haze.
But to have known in any place or time
What they knew is worth a record, a few notes.
Almost knew what they knew. Almost got it.
 

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006

__________

Mark Jarman: “It took me years to figure out that one of the biggest influences on me as a writer had been the fact that I lived in a house with someone who had to write something every week, get up in front of bunch of people, and basically perform it. It was my father writing sermons.” (web)

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