November 8, 2023

“Always Tender in the Wrong Places” by Laura RubyPosted by

Laura Ruby

ALWAYS TENDER IN THE WRONG PLACES

after Audre Lorde

I.
 
Two bears and an owl walk into a bar—
the beginning of a joke, maybe, 
or a dream. 
 
 
II.
 
Say the bar is not a bar but a hospital. The bears,
—one brown, one white—linger over a carcass
on the operating table. The grizzly claws away
the breasts, the polar bear stitches up the wounds. 
 
 
III.
 
The owl puts the carcass on a rotisserie, roasts
it over a fire. The carcass must be cooked 
before it is done, low and slow, till the meat 
is charred on the outside, pink all the way 
through.   
 
 
IV.
 
This will take weeks. 
 
 
V.
 
Sometimes, the carcass weeps. When the carcass 
weeps, the owl spits up a pellet of fur and bones. 
 
Look, clicks the owl. It could be worse.
 
 
VI.
 
It is.
 
 
VII.
 
A year later, in another hospital room, the carcass 
waits. Polar bears aren’t much for formalities, 
but it’s still a surprise when he whips aside the 
curtain, whips aside the gown. He scrawls all over 
the no-longer-breasts breasts, gnashing yellow teeth
in black gums. The meat is like rubber, he growls.
There are no leaves on these trees, no blooms on
the flowers, no give in the hide. 
 
 
VIII.
 
The bear says: this isn’t reconstruction 
but resurrection, grr grr. 
 
 
IX. 
 
The carcass has forgotten its own language,
speaks in grunts and clicks. It wants to kiss 
the lethal beak of the owl, lay its bald head 
in the mouth of the grizzly. Take the paw 
of the polar bear, smooth the spiky fist flat. 
Pluck the marker from his claws, draw them 
huge and primeval on the curve of a cave 
wall, restore them all to the wild ones 
they once were. 
 
 
 

Prompt: “I wrote this poem in response to Rick Barton’s ‘hermit crab poem’ prompt suggested by another poet in my workshop. According to Barton, the ‘hermit crab’ is a type of poem in which one finds another type of writing—a recipe, a field guide, lab reports, etc.—and uses the form to ‘contain’ your own poetic material. I chose to write a poem in the shape of a list.”

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

__________

Laura Ruby: “The good thing about poetry is that subjects are everywhere. The bad thing about poetry is that subjects are everywhere; how do you catch a poem before it flies away without you? I find that writing to prompts helps me focus when I’m overwhelmed, when I’m having trouble sorting out what I think, when I’ve been circling and circling a subject but haven’t been able to capture any particular truth about it. Sometimes just challenging myself with a prompt—write a poem from the most incredible newspaper headline you can find!—can shake me out of a slump. Sometimes, the prompt has to come from someone else, someone who is better able than I to see what I’ve been missing.” (web)

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November 7, 2023

“Boundary Conditions” by Sneha Madhavan-ReesePosted by

Sneha Madhavan-Reese

BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

who but men blame the angels for the wild
exceptionalism of men?
—Sam Sax, “Anti-Zionist Abecedarian”

Along the border of any governed region, there exists a value which must
satisfy its laws. This is a rule I learned for solving differential equations.
 
Math seems like it doesn’t exist, my newly graduated kindergartner declares.
It’s just rules that someone made up. She’s brilliant beyond her years.
 
On the surface of the ocean exist propagating dynamic disturbances;
in other words, waves. In other words, the boundary between air and water,
 
between the requirements for life, between dark and light, wrong and right,
between what can be held and what can only be imagined, between dreams
 
and the realities that shatter them, the things that keep us awake at night,
at every boundary there are laws, and sometimes these laws make no sense.
 
Of course it’s made up, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. There is math
in the air we breathe, I tell her. People die for made up reasons every day.
 
There is math in the shuddering earth. Find equations that govern its motion,
whether by earthquake or explosion. Try and fail, try again and fail, to solve.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 7, 2023

__________

Sneha Madhavan-Reese: “Nothing I can say about current events seems sufficient.”

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November 6, 2023

“Mark” by Katherine LoPosted by

Katherine Lo

MARK

Not everything hard will break you, but it will 
probably leave a mark, 
 
like the scratch on the front bumper 
from a ladder propped against the garage wall,
 
the one you didn’t even know you’d touched 
until it started moving. Even then
 
a brief moment of bewilderment at this spontaneous 
wobble before your brain understood 
 
and your foot stomped the brake. That we don’t 
always feel the damage 
 
is a kind of grace, the reprieve of a door pushed 
against an overstuffed closet, 
 
solid restraint to the chaos waiting to fall 
on your head the minute you forget 
 
and pull it open. You need to deal with it, 
some might say, and they may be right. But first 
 
there’s laundry, and groceries, and teeth 
to floss. Some Saturday, after you’ve said goodbye 
 
to friends in some parking lot, you’ll head to your car
and squat in the space 
 
and light you never have in the garage, 
and take a look. Long black scrape, white paint 
 
crimped at the edges. But not bad. Nothing worth 
the trouble of fixing. 
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

Katherine Lo: “This poem came out of a conversation with a friend about the coping mechanisms we all have and how they help us move forward, even with some damage.”

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November 5, 2023

“This Again” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

THIS AGAIN

The recommendation from some website quoted on the news
is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews
off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca
from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing
is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car,
are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body
to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off?
And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address
the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing
to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews
without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone
when loving everyone is an option. A difficult one, I admit,
impossible even, but in a process sense, it requires no knives
or cars or evil and can be conveyed in a simple phrase:
See someone, love someone. Or, Love thy neighbor
as thou loves apple pie. Or, love thy stranger
as thou loves starlight for touching us
without knowing our names. Have you ever felt
as brittle as kindling shattering to pieces
just under the shower curtain of your skin?
It’s a rhetorical question because I know you have
and will, as I have and do right now.
So screw every cult of hate. Every bullet and knife
and bomb and shitty thing said under the breath
or with the full conviction of the lungs. If you see a Jew,
be a Jew. If you see a Muslim, be a Muslim. If you see a human,
be a human. The lend-an-ear or a hand kind.
The “how’s it going” kind. The kind kind. No one chooses who
or where or when to be. We just sort of collectively are.
So hating you for being you makes no more sense
than you hating me for being me. And I don’t want to be raped
or have my throat slashed or get thrown off a cliff,
hard as that is to believe. I want to see the cliffs of Ithaca
in moonlight. The Kaaba in Mecca circled by a crowd
pulsing with faith. The Ice Hotel in a snow storm.
I want a really good pizza with an egg on it.
To kiss my wife on top of the Eiffel Tower.
All the parts of her that are Jewish
and all the parts that are human
and all the parts that make her sigh and moan.
Being human means understanding that being human
is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
That we’re all partisans in this struggle,
fellow teamsters in not knowing
what the hell is going on, brothers and sisters
stuffing our befuddlement every morning
into pants and dresses we hope
don’t make us look fat and stupid and lost.
Everyone I know feels lost. The trick is
to feel lost together. Maybe you have a map
and I have a canteen. Certainly someone
has a pogo stick or cyclotron. We need food
and light and harmonicas and theremins
and stories about monsters
who decide not to eat the child
or stomp the village or fly over the night
with death on their wings. Lost together,
our nowhere becomes our somewhere. Lost together,
the dream of home never dies.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 5, 2023

__________

Bob Hicok: “Don’t know what to say about this, other than what the poem does.”

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November 4, 2023

“Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” by Marsh MuirheadPosted by

Marsh Muirhead

ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, AND FIREARMS

Haibun

The blued barrels of the shotguns stuck out over the hood of the station wagon, pointing away from the men who were smoking, the smoke rising in the breeze, drifting into the corn field. The corn stalks rustled in the breeze. Two pheasants lay on the roof of the station wagon. The dogs were somewhere out in the corn, looking for the other downed birds. The men shared a bottle in a brown paper bag and waited for the dogs.

jokes about women
the scent of whisky
on every word

—from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms

__________

Marsh Muirhead: “Haiku and haibun are a great place to store and flex the notions and images that come to us all the time and everywhere. They are sometimes starts to longer pieces, or as finished writing they serve as a kind of journaling, whether as fact or fiction, about our own lives or others we imagine.”

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November 3, 2023

“Diet Coke” by Lexi PellePosted by

Lexi Pelle

DIET COKE

All I saw my mother drink 
for years. In the diner, served 
with a striped straw and shredded
paper beanie or sometimes 
at Stop & Shop just before checkout, 
its perfect plastic body pulled from 
the squat fridge that sits underneath 
the conveyor belt—but most often 
sipped from a silver can on the porch. 
She never asked for ice. Never dared 
to dilute the fizzy pollution of artificial 
sweeteners. The first time I tried it 
I thought it tasted like a backhanded 
compliment, surprisingly good, 
the dark dizzying lake like a cactus 
burped Splenda into my mouth. 
The flavor so far from milk or juice, 
like a fresh-squeezed robot, a supermodel’s 
saliva. My sister and I sat around her 
like the students of Socrates and watched her 
succumb to the only sweetness she ever allowed
herself. A true mother, listening 
to the questions it spat into the air,
voice lifted at the end of every swallowed
sentence. Let’s play the quiet game? 
she suggested on long car trips
to Hershey or to one of Kate’s soccer 
tournaments and only then could we all hear it
whisper to her from the cup holder
as a speed bump puddled the lid
and she brought the spill to her lips. 
 
 
 

Prompt: “This poem was written in an Ellen Bass workshop. Bass asked us to write poems with ‘thingitude’ or poems that use and celebrate the observation of the real. We looked at Thomas Lux’s poetry, with a focus on his poem ‘Refrigerator, 1957’. Bass asked us to pay close attention to the sounds, humor, and asides in Lux’s poem and, afterwards, to try to incorporate some of that vibrancy into our own work.”

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

__________

Lexi Pelle: “Years ago I read The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. In it she says, ‘Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.’ Prompt poems give me that box. Like poets who use form to aid their ideas, I sometimes need a good prompt to get me writing.” (web)

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November 2, 2023

“Salt” by MPosted by

M

SALT

In this room down a hall
at the Hopewell House
every Wednesday
from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.,
the widowed have agreed to meet
to lick the salt block.
My name tag reads
Albino deer (recessive rarity): widow at 35.
Dun-colored Helen and Marie
mistake me for a sheep or a goat
as we draw our chairs into a circle
of circumstance. Muscles in their aged faces
twitch with greed and suspicion.
In the larger world,
Jean and I would sit in adjoining streetcar seats,
read our newspapers,
and never share a headline.
Even Doris, who drags the remains
of a personal god at the bottom
of her purse, tucked next to non-prescription
reading glasses she bought on sale at Walmart,
shrinks from my pink eyes.
Louise has ten grandchildren,
three she and Harry were raising
because her daughter is, well, you know,
she doesn’t want to say. She won’t tell you either
that when Harry up and died like that,
some small part of her wished
he’d had the decency to take those kids with him,
but he never even took them to the park.
Betty lost a husband and found
a lump. Elsie says when the ambulance
comes to the Ridgewood Nursing Home,
they don’t turn on the sirens
for fear they’ll incite a riot
of dying. Ida says yeah, she knows.
She’s lost two of them that way. I nod.
Judith’s raised eyebrow asks
What could one with hooves so pale know of loss?
A marriage must be long
to be 40 years deep,
and grief is a black market business
best kept to themselves. If I taste it,
others will want it.
Young bucks will be dying in droves.
In war, in the streets,
in flaming buildings.
Or quietly in a bed next to me at night.
That sting in the wound, that particular tang
on the tongue, are theirs.
Keep me away from the salt.
Their old ones are sanctified,
their sorrow is sacred,
denial alive in the hide.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

__________

M: “I was widowed at a very young age. My therapist suggested I attend a grief support group to share with others in similar circumstances. When I walked into the room, I was struck by the realization that everyone was at least 25 years older. And while we shared grief in common, the concerns of these older widows were very different from mine. On many levels, we just couldn’t connect. I also read stories online of other young widows who experienced similar feelings of alienation in grief support groups filled with older women. I wanted to write about this disparity, but didn’t know how to approach it. Then about a year ago, I attended a reading by Lucille Clifton. She told an unrelated story about driving through a forest with a friend, and their joy upon catching a glimpse of a rare albino deer. The more I thought about that misfit deer, the more I realized Ms. Clifton had unknowingly offered me a perfect metaphor for my experience. I became the albino deer, and I hope that my poem will speak to other young widows who find themselves lost among the elders of the herd.”

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