December 30, 2024

“After Rain” by Michael PfeiferPosted by

Paradigm Shift by Morgan Reed, abstract painting of people walking in the rain with umbrellas

Image: “Paradigm Shift” by Morgan Reed. “After Rain” was written by Michael Pfeifer for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

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Michael Pfeifer

AFTER RAIN

She appears as blue
shadows across the market
dust at Adiba
where the umbrella-makers rattle
and shape their ephemera,
confident as a mystery
waiting to be told.
Holding a ticket
for a train of sand and fear.
Pale resurrection sisters
surround her. Their dark
umbrellas eclipse the sun
to hide her face. Her face
a streambed of fog
and remembrance,
a collapsing umbrella after rain.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
December 2024, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “For a relatively short poem, ‘After Rain’ speaks volumes, using brief imagistic phrases to create a narrative that feels real and multifaceted. Morgan Reed’s image does this, too—the use of color and sense of movement allow the viewer to imagine the scene coming alive with sound and motion. The poet packs a great deal of meaning into illusorily simple phrases like ‘shape their ephemera,’ ‘confident as a mystery,’ and ‘a train of sand and fear.’ That one of the women in the painting—all of whom have their backs turned to us, in an artistic decision that seems significant—is described as having a face like ‘a collapsing umbrella after rain’ is both a beautiful, evocative piece of imagery and a congruous summation of the main themes of the painting.”

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December 29, 2024

“Functional Convergence” by Eliza GilbertPosted by

Eliza Gilbert

FUNCTIONAL CONVERGENCE

If a taxi is untaxied outside
the Herald Square Macy’s
on Christmas Eve like a kind of post
-modern Vitruvian centerpiece,
a kind of heavy metal suckling
pig, how much will the damage
—assuming no insurance coverage
—how much will the damage damage
the cabby’s next one hundred afternoons?
 
Assuming no insurance coverage,
assuming 15k as the average cost
of a medical mystery, assuming MRI
and BMI and smoking history and a 45%
chance of rain, is the cabby’s episode
diagnosable by robot? Pin-downable
by vector? Bio-statistically sound?
 
If the flash-dancing club that owns
the taxi’s topper is displeased
with that night’s great yellow flay,
and if there is positively no returning
the gut-naked bits steaming beneath
the hood to canonical form, how much
income chugs to the scrap yard?
Is the car crusher’s operator whistling
Lou Reed? If so, reconfigure
the golden ratio of screech to symphony.
Reconsider aftermath as an act
of orthogonal decomposition.
 
If three out of six of the pedestrians
struck refuse medical attention, what is the exponent
of ache, and does it carry? How long? How far?
How many times do the blue-and-reds
HELLO across their shock-sparkled eyes
before they return to their bodies and calculate
the net hemorrhage of twenty minutes
to Lenox Hill, fifteen in X-ray, ninety-two
thumbing holes in the exam table’s fleshy crepe?
Determine the half-life of the half-life
of a pill called UNLUCK. Wrap it
in cheese like you would for a Labrador
and feed the world—it’s Christmas time!
All regression is linear if you have eyes
in the back of your head. My hair
is falling out so soon I will see everything.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Eliza Gilbert: “A taxi crashed outside the Herald Square Macy’s on Christmas day. Six pedestrians were struck, but three refused medical attention. I imagine they must have partaken in a kind of life mathematics we all know.” (web)

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December 28, 2024

“I Can’t Sleep So I’ll Tell You a Story” by Tom C. HunleyPosted by

Tom C. Hunley

I CAN’T SLEEP SO I’LL TELL YOU A STORY

Every cricket chirping sounds, to me,
like my son’s garage band must sound
to the neighbor who calls, twice a week,
and threatens to call the cops, but never does.
You can’t call the cops on crickets.
You can’t even call their parents.
I can hear a train in the distance.
In the distance, people are making
even more distance
between themselves and this place.
Years ago, when I was teaching poetry
at a prison, miles away
from the nearest bus stop,
I used to hitchhike right in front of the prison.
I was always surprised when anyone stopped.
I wondered if my thumb screamed
“not the thumb of an escaped convict!”
Once a blonde picked me up
on her way back from visiting her husband.
She was beautiful like a sunset, if a sunset
had been raised in a trailer park.
Her husband had burned down their house
with her in it, her and her mother.
Change of heart, he rushed back in
for her, but left his mother-in-law to the flames.
The blonde shrugged that he still excited her,
said he asked her to wear skirts with no panties
on visits. I don’t know what my face said,
but she flipped her skirt up, just for a second,
said “Now you believe me.” My face
said I was embarrassed, and she laughed.
I lie here thinking of all the places
people are going where I haven’t been,
thinking of the place where that prisoner had been,
a place where I gawked at the doorway,
but didn’t knock, and never mind the moon,
never mind the stars, I lie here
in the noisy darkness, thinking
of all the places it could take a person.
 

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

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Tom C. Hunley: “When I was a teenager, I was captivated by Kevin J. O’Connor’s portrayal of a teenage beat poet in Peggy Sue Got Married. Shortly thereafter, I picked up Allen Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror and read ‘I am flesh and blood, but my mind is the focus of much lightning.’ I felt that way about myself. Every decision I’ve made since then has been impacted by my desire to hang onto that feeling.” (web)

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December 27, 2024

“Blue Sky” by Penny HarterPosted by

Penny Harter

BLUE SKY

On weekends when the woman walks up hills, she does it to see the sun. At sea level, thick smog obliterates the sky, a gray and toxic smothering. Despite the altitude, once she gets above it she breathes easier. She has not seen such a blue sky from down below since childhood.
 
masquerade party—
strangers crowding into
a downtown loft
 
When she tries to get some of her co-workers from the factory to climb with her, they merely laugh. “But you can see the sun,” she exclaims. “And the sky is blue!” Her friends prefer the mall or the movies, so she climbs alone.
 
shooting star—
how briefly its wake
marks the dark
 
Years pass, and she has to climb higher and higher. Having retired, she can climb more often, but it’s slower going now. One day when she arrives above the timber line, stumbling among rocks shining with lichen, she is breathing in stabbing gasps. Soon she will be too old for this, she thinks. Head spinning, she clings to a nearby boulder and stares up into the blazing heavens. Then she looks down at the tide of gray creeping up the slopes. She knows it is only a question of time until she will be forced to go up and up.
 
moon colony—
again, the supply ship
arrives late
 

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

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Penny Harter: “One late winter afternoon in the early 1960s, while sitting in the Douglass College library, I happened on a Conrad Aiken poem capturing a similar late winter afternoon, and time stood still. I was transfixed. I did not yet know I would be a poet, although the following spring I chose Emerson’s essay ‘The Poet’ for an American literature paper. Then, in the late 1960s, while waiting in a school parking lot for my then-husband to come out from an after-school meeting, I grabbed a dry-cleaner slip from my purse and began to write on the back of it a poem about how quickly the brilliant sunset was fading between the dark branches of a winter tree. It was the first poem I had to write—and when I held the finished poem, I felt something I’d not felt before: a passion! From that time on, I’ve never stopped. I write about what matters most to me, hoping that my poems can reach out and touch others. I write poems for the Earth and our planet in the cosmos; poems of memory and family; and poems probing the riddle of time, hoping to capture our shared experiences of love, and loss. I have written, and still am writing, work to process my grief at the loss of my husband in October, 2008. Above all, I write because I must.” (web)

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December 26, 2024

“NASCAR” by Mike WhitePosted by

Mike White

NASCAR

Not rolling in liquid fire
or pulled apart by physics.
Not between commercials.

But the way an old dog
half-blind
noses around and around

some quiet
apple-scented
chosen ground.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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Mike White: “I’ll often begin writing a poem on a subject about which I know little or nothing. This is the ‘mucking around’ phase, and sometimes (usually) the poem founders quickly. But at other times, a poem about, say, rodeo clowns, will take a sudden and unexpected turn for the personal, and then I know I have the bull by the horns.” (web)

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December 25, 2024

“We Three Kings” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

WE THREE KINGS

I slide myself under our tree
like a mechanic in a body shop
& look up through the lights
& ornaments
& artificial limbs
to the tin angel tied by yarn to the top
like a drunken sailor in a crow’s nest
 
& I am done with similes
& I put aside the possible shutdowns
& mysterious drones
& the wars
& the horrible rape trial across the Atlantic
 
& I remember what it was like
to do the same thing
when I was a kid in ’89
not quite a teenager
the year the Berlin wall fell
the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre
the year my father was committed
 
there is so much in the world
we don’t know & block out or forget
 
but I am still looking up
past the delicate bric-a-brac of a life
the popsicle stick & pipe cleaner ornaments
fashioned by my two small children
the candy canes they not so secretly pluck from the boughs
the few glass ornaments that have survived the dog & kids
& I am thinking of how grateful I am
 
how grateful how grateful
 
looking past the spot where another angel should be
looking for a god in the straw
looking past the infant loneliness squalling in my heart
holding the gift of my own ever unfolding naivete
in the manger of my saying
 
o star of wonder.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Dante Di Stefano: “This is my Christmas poem. Happy Holidays!” (web)

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December 24, 2024

“Snow” by Seido Ray RonciPosted by

Seido Ray Ronci

SNOW

On my way out the door, my son says,
“Dad, I have to poop.”
After all the work of bundling him up,
“Go ahead,” I say.
He sheds his parka, drops his snow pants,
and mounts the high white seat of the toilet.
I unbutton my coat, loosen my scarf,
let it hang from my neck, and wait.
Almost immediately he calls from the bathroom:
“Papa, check my bottom.”
I lean over the small of his back as he bows,
lost in the flurry of my overcoat and scarf.
I wipe the crack of his ass. He hops off
the toilet and pulls up his pants, I flush,
and see shit on the fringe of my scarf;
disbelieving, I hold it up to the light,
“There’s shit on my scarf!”
He puts on his coat, mittens, and hat.
I’m reminded of the young monk Ikkyu
wiping Kaso’s shriveled ass with his bare hands,
washing his master’s frail body, rinsing
the soiled sheets, wringing them out
day and night till the old man’s death.
I think, too, of the stains on my father’s bed,
the nurses drawing the curtains to clean him,
his sunken eyes, looking into mine, ashamed.
“It’s all right, Dad,” I say.
“It’s not all right,” he says.
My son tromps to the door, flings it open;
a blast of cold air rushes through the house.
I wash the fringe in the sink, tighten
my scarf and raise my collar.
He’s making angels in the snow.
 

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

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Seido Ray Ronci: “I am the director of Hokoku-An Zendo and an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia.” (web)

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