Search Results for: after

January 24, 2024

“Nicest” by Michael MarkPosted by

Michael Mark

NICEST

Mindy didn’t like me like me, I knew. 
Even when she put her hand on my thigh, 
slid it close to my dick, squeezed it in 
front of Brian—I forget his last name 
but not his face, some beard straggling 
his chin, sideburns already, diseased 
leather jacket, garbage truck voice, 
his 6 inches on me, his shoving me, 
and all his—then everyone’s—names 
for me. She liked him that way. I knew 
they’d been to second and were heading 
to third, his dirty fingers sliding under 
her jeans, her panties, her writhing, moaning, 
digging her nails into not me—she rubbed,
slung her arm around my shoulders when 
he called me that, like my father did, 
and my mother, though she’d say it worried, 
her voice like cried-in tissues, Are you …? 
You’re not? Mindy leaned her head to mine, 
her hair on my cheek, pushed them into me—
her woman breasts—voted best in 8th grade, 
including the teachers, according to me 
and my friends. We voted on everything 
from the cheap seats—smartest, dumbest, 
worst, most hated, nicest—pushed them 
into my side, chest, by my chin. They 
were strong and soft and it made Brian 
pull back from us like he’d been punched 
in his face. I knew she gave him a look: leave 
him alone or you aren’t touching kissing 
sucking on these, which made him want to 
kill me more, made him scream animal 
in the yard. I saw him push her against 
the fence. I did nothing—biggest pussy-
coward in the world award—watched her 
shove him back, flip her finger and pull 
her shirt up then down fast and laugh 
and they hugged and kissed long, hard 
and soft like in the movies and I thought 
he’s such a stupid loser who’ll wind up dead 
in the gutter after high school. I knew 
she liked him liked him. She couldn’t help it. 
 

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

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Michael Mark: “I get lost all the time. Poems are my compass. That’s not a metaphor, okay, but only half.” (web)

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March 22, 2022

“You Wonder If You Can Write Something” by Susan BrownePosted by

Susan Browne

YOU WONDER IF YOU CAN WRITE SOMETHING

that has hope in it.
Today, you read, there’s a big rush to buy
bomb shelters.
Normal people are buying them,
not just millionaires.
There is some hope in that:
thinking life will go on after.
If you go shopping today
it won’t be for a bomb shelter
but a beautiful anything
you can find: a soft pair of socks,
a necklace that catches the light
although nothing will get your mind off
of the mass grave in Ukraine,
the jaw-bones & eye sockets,
the pregnant women running
from the destroyed maternity hospital.
Your friend said she doesn’t read the news
because what can she do, what can any of us do
to stop the butchers
because we have to be butchers
to stop them, a hopeless logic.
You could put a pear in your pocket
& pretend you have a horse to slowly feed it to.
You could build a ramshackle hut
for the dandelions before the spring wind
blows through.

—from Poets Respond
March 22, 2022

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Susan Browne: “I wrote this poem after reading the story in the New York Times about Europeans buying bomb shelters, iodine pills, and survival guides.” (web)

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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

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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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November 28, 2019

“After the Extinction” by Susan Carroll JewellPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2019: Editor’s Choice

 

portrait of figure drawn in a mess of colorful lines

Image: “Brainyo” by Dana St. Mary. “After the Extinction” was written by Susan Carroll Jewell for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2019, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Susan Carroll Jewell

AFTER THE EXTINCTION

And when you pass,
an unfamiliar drip and splash
globule in space, know

that we are your arrogant
twin, newly cosmic and drifting
through the galaxies, vibrating

strings of collective energy blown
into the heavens from Earth,
remnant strands of humanness

formed from the streams of birthday
leftovers and nests of ribbons
unboxed. A face on a backdrop

of starlight declares who we were,
closed lips and a pointless nose,
a hollow ear and open eyes startled

not at the speed of light but of extinction.
Our brain still circles with inescapable
science, our art left behind, the Gothic

glass and Pollack paint of a wasted
culture. And if you see these colored
cords wiggling like conceited wires

through the universe, know that they
hold badges of mistakes, a neck
that connects to nothing but a lanyard

with a label—Hello, My Name Is—
like a poet grasping for a last line,
a saving grace.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
October 2019, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “As you might imagine, the entries this month ranged from dark to disturbing, as poets wrestled with what must be described as a portrait of cosmic madness. Susan Carroll Jewell took that task the farthest, imagining a feature in which we only exist as the echo of our emptiness. It’s a poem rich with images, each strong line more haunting than the last.”

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November 1, 2023

“Portrait of the Father as an Alcoholic” by Karan KapoorPosted by

Karan Kapoor

PORTRAIT OF THE FATHER AS AN ALCOHOLIC

The first thing I notice about him
is the expression on his face baring
his sobriety is a bubble one can pop
with a blow. He is a unicorn—a horse
of addiction with a horn of dedication
to quit. The days he chooses not to drink
flake off his shoulders like cracked paint.
By the time he was my age, he’d burned
alcohol into his skin. He’s not guilty
of all he’s accused, but still guilty
of so much else. Why should I draw
his portrait in third-person when I
can in second- which is to say why
should I paint you in blue when I can
in sky? For decades, you have smelled
like areca nut and slaked lime.
We have amassed wrinkles begging
you give up. Ma doubts you
will die a delighted man. As do I.
As do you. Diamond wounds
diamond, you say. Why does water
not wash away water? Poison remedies
poison, why does wind not blow away
wind? The despair of not raising a glass
to despair is an essential precondition
of despair which echoes higher
than cheer that comes by confessing
cheers. Long after you, we will boast
bruises on our chest to show you
were here. Now we bathe
stone in milk, bury a sitar
in a tree for the wind to strum,
praying the music will urge you
to seek help. You’re God,
you sing.
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

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Karan Kapoor: “This poem is the faux title-poem of the collection I’ve been working on for three years: Portrait of an Alcoholic as a Father. Writing about a troubled external subject is as much an excavation of their deepest flaws as it is a revelation of the writer’s biases. Leonard Cohen, at whose altar I worship, says ‘poetry is merely the evidence of life.’ I think this means that not only is a poem rooted in real life, but that much of real life is understood through a poem.” (web)

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February 11, 2022

“Come Back” by Dave NielsenPosted by

Dave Nielsen

COME BACK

After the disaster a few years ago, my friend Victor and his fiancé, Amalia, invested in a year’s supply of toilet paper. In their little two-room apartment there was no place to store it, so they had to find ways, other purposes, for which the rolls of toilet paper might serve. 
 
For example, they got rid of the twin nightstands that lined their small bed and built two small platforms of toilet paper instead. Victor asked to borrow my saw, and he sawed off the legs to the kitchen table, which he then replaced with the appropriate number of toilet paper rolls, balancing the table part of the said table on top of the rolls. 
 
Amalia, for her part, proved her creativity by dismantling her eyeglasses and placing the lenses in the dual ends of two rolls, which she then held to her eyes like binoculars. 
 
Life pressed on. Before any of us knew it, the next disaster was upon us. Soon we were all asking the two lovers if we could borrow just one more roll of toilet paper. I hesitated to do so, however, for each time that I did, some piece of furniture or spectacular invention of Amalia’s had to be dismantled. 
 
As luck would have it, this was Armageddon, and to make matters worse, none of us could stop wiping our asses. I remember the last time I visited. The front room was entirely bare, not even a TV stand. I had a small vase of flowers that I meant to bestow upon them, a sort of thank you for their many kindnesses. 
 
I had only a few minutes. According to the radio, the world was scheduled to end at 10 PM. Quickly I moved to place the vase somewhere out of the way, in the corner of the room, I supposed, except that I could never quite get there. Each time I stepped toward it, the corner retreated backwards, deeper into the shadows. 
 
This went on for quite some time. Step by step, deeper into the shadows. At last, I looked back toward the middle of the room, and it was like looking through the wrong end of Amalia’s binoculars. I saw her and Victor standing there—I could just barely make out the sound—alternately shouting at me and pointing at their watches.

—from Rattle #74, Winter 2021

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Dave Nielsen: “One day early in the pandemic, I visited the grocery store with my 15-year-old daughter, Rosie. I don’t remember what we were shopping for. I think we just wanted to see all of the empty shelves. There was something strange and amazing about it. We had never seen entire aisles utterly empty like that. Then suddenly—I wouldn’t have noticed it myself—Rosie pointed out a display pyramid of hummus, little packages stacked one on top of the other. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ she said, ‘but at least we have hummus.’ According to Rosie, the best poems don’t make anything up. She’ll be a little disappointed this one isn’t something about hummus.”

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September 16, 2022

“Poem for Myself” by Elizabeth SpenstPosted by

Elizabeth Spenst

POEM FOR MYSELF

after Gwendolyn Brooks & Lucille Clifton

Abortions never let you forget 
what it means to choose a life. 
 
Who you may be and who you could be. 
What is a few months, and what is forever. 
 
We talk about people like they 
could be separate from us. This life vs. 
 
that one, what is mine and what is yours. 
We are here only for each other—there is nothing else but time. 
 
And I say, if I am ever less than a mountain 
for myself, what could I seek to be for the ones who are coming? 
 
Selfish. We spend our whole lives explaining why we are this way.
Mountain breath. Baby blues. There is a space that is just for you. 
 

—from Rattle #76, Summer 2022

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Elizabeth Spenst: “My first year of college, I took a class on African American poetry with Elizabeth Alexander. My world opened up and blossomed into being, and I have been a poet ever since.”

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