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

__________

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)

Rattle Logo

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

__________

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.”

Rattle Logo

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

__________

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.”

Rattle Logo

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

__________

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.”

Rattle Logo

April 5, 2024

“The Double Image Redux” by Julie Kane & Erica ReidPosted by

Julie Kane & Erica Reid

THE DOUBLE IMAGE REDUX

Turn the photo of your mother in its frame
so she can’t tsk her tongue against her teeth:
the cold eyes will follow you just the same—
 
a trick of perspective like Mona Lisa’s gaze.
Covering her mouth can’t stifle its critiques
when you turn your mother’s photo in its frame.
 
Drape her face in silk, in rich brocade,
or swaddle her in lambswool. Under the sheath,
her cold eyes will follow you just the same.
 
Crown her in rubies as the Queen of Shame,
who made you lie in it like piss-drenched sheets
(and no use telling her that you were framed).
 
You look nothing like her. She stakes no claim
on your nose or brow, your how-may-I-help-you cheeks—
or do her cold eyes follow you just the same?
 
So hang her image in the Hall of Fame
where you can still gawk up from underneath.
It’s no use turning the photo in its frame—
her cold eyes will follow you just the same.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

__________

Julie Kane & Erica Reid: “We messaged back and forth over the course of three days as the villanelle grew a few lines at a time. One of us wrote the first 2 lines, tercet 3, tercet 5, and the second line of the quatrain. The other one wrote the third line, tercet 2, tercet 4, and the first line of the quatrain. That gave us one refrain line each; or, as Theodore de Banville put it, the gold thread and the silver thread of the villanelle. We both find collaboration joyful, as it restores the element of play to poetry when we start to get too serious about it.”

Rattle Logo

April 4, 2024

“Summer Job” by Michael ChitwoodPosted by

Michael Chitwood

SUMMER JOB

At the end of the work day
you could tell exactly how far you had gotten
and how much farther you had to go.
Of course, it was just a ditch for a pipeline
to carry the reeking slop
that a neighborhood of toilets
would put together to be drained away
but it was clean, the trench,
the slick walls the backhoe bucket cut
and the precise grade of the bottom.
My job was to sight the transit.
I gave a thumbs up or thumbs down
or the OK sign if the pitch was right
so that some future day shit would flow
just as it should, downhill,
but you knew where you stood,
what you had done in a day,
and what more there was to do
and every meaningful thing I had said
I had said without a word.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
Tribute to Southern Poets

__________

Michael Chitwood (North Carolina & Virginia): “Several summers I worked for my uncle’s construction company and my job, because I was under-age, was to read the grade transit. It was solitary work, standing behind the tripod. It’s like writing poetry now, huge machines rear and grind all around you and you are quiet and alone.”

Rattle Logo

April 3, 2024

“Zombies in Paradise” by A.M. Juster & Deborah WarrenPosted by

A.M. Juster & Deborah Warren

ZOMBIES IN PARADISE

with a title donated by Dana Gioia

Today they’re recruiting for the Corps of the Undead;
in fetid cubicles they anticipate more dead.
 
The Wagner Group has left, so they hit the Taco Bells.
Salmonella casualties lead to eight more dead.
 
They prowl the pics on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram;
black-eyed houris comb their hair as they await more dead.
 
They break into a lobbying firm, but find no souls;
new voodoo ops endeavor to liberate more dead.
 
They quit their day jobs making phony calls from “Amazon”;
mute or gurgled robocalls don’t generate more dead.
 
Dancing now to their anthem, “The Way I Feel Inside,”
they wobble—and when they tried to roller skate? More dead!
 
In the end they grow weary of the blood and havoc,
and HQ says it’s hard to accommodate more dead.
 
Dark Lord, this is a just war in paradise for you;
it takes a horror show to assimilate more dead.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

__________

A.M. Juster & Deborah Warren: “Dana Gioia contributed the title to get us going. Dana envisioned a pantoum, but we decided a ghazal would be better for a first try at collaboration. Although we live fairly close to each other, Boston traffic is an issue, so we did this by phone and email.”

Rattle Logo