March 28, 2024

Graphing Uncertainty V by Christine Crockett, abstract painting of lines and triangles in red and black

Image: “Graphing Uncertainty V” by Christine Crockett. “Shoulder MRI” was written by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

SHOULDER MRI

It doesn’t hurt it is
abstract.
 
The pain
is toothaches, but
 
displaced.
A refugee. There is
 
a word.
It’s like a hammer
 
and a nail, how everything
 
becomes your
pain. It sleeps and wakes.
 
It wakes you up. It goes all
 
egg-shaped, tastes
of blood. You
 
picture pain
in little threads, tender
 
as clams. Papier maché. You see
 
the torn part. No
 
one knows that it is there. It hates
this too.
 

from Ekphrastic Challenge
February 2024, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “Even the title of this poem alone seems to me to resonate with the enigmatically compelling image—the abstract, angular, black-and-white tone reminiscent of an MRI scan. As the piece unfolds, I see an even stronger connection between the two: There’s an objectivity, a detachment, to the way the speaker describes pain, and yet also a vulnerable rawness that comes through, a contrast that reflects the distinction between the black-and-white angularity and the rounded red shape in the center. I love the way the poet writes in mostly clipped, staccato phrases—‘A refugee. There is / a word. / It’s like a hammer’–that don’t bely any feeling, and then the last line is the first time emotion is explicitly introduced, a surprising ending that renders the poem suddenly personal. In image and words alike, there is a beating heart under all this abstraction.”

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March 27, 2024

Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton

SHORTHAND 6-PAK RONDELET

TL;DR
 
Too long; didn’t read
Didn’t want to miss Stranger Things
Too long; didn’t read
Watched Batman on YouTube instead
Of reading about men with wings
Or women having flings with kings
Too long; didn’t read
 
 
 
STFU
 
Shut the fuck up
Can’t you see I’m taking a nap?
Shut the fuck up
I’m dreaming of a hot hookup 
I made through my X-rated app 
I’m awake now in her jockstrap
Shut the fuck up
 
 
 
FWIW
 
For what it’s worth
I can’t make up an alibi
For what it’s worth
There’s nothing on this big old earth
Makes me weep worse and wonder why
I microwaved a butterfly
(For what it’s worth)
 
 
 
IMHO  
 
In my humble opinion
Joaquin Phoenix is a dreamboat
In my humble opinion
he became vegan—vermilion  
blood from a hook, a fish’s throat
that day dad took him on a boat 
That’s my humble opinion
 
 
 
TBH
 
To be honest
I prefer my GRNS FRSH, my STK
(To be honest)
BBQ or BRSD or BNLESS
Nothing tastes BTR than a GR8
Big SAL with a SD of BF
To be honest
 
 
 
WDYT
 
What do you think?
Is the planet going to shit?
What do you think?
I say we’re standing on the brink—
but is our disaster moonlit
so sweetly we keep missing it?
What do you think?
 

from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

__________

Denise Duhamel: “We had several memorial readings for Maureen, and my joke is that we had an open relationship and we weren’t monogamous. If you were there and ready to write, and you were a sweet soul, Maureen would write with you. She loved collaboration so much, and often collaborated with her students. Neil de la Flor and Kristine Snodgrass and Maureen were one set of collaborators (a triad), and then she had a foursome collaboration group with Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Holly Iglesias. She also collaborated extensively with Sam Ace. Both Aaron Smith and I completed whole collaborative manuscripts with her while she was ill. She had all these different collaborations going on even through her illness and treatment.”

Maureen Seaton (October 20, 1947 – August 26, 2023) authored fifteen solo books of poetry, co-authored an additional thirteen, and wrote one memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, which won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. She frequently collaborated with many poets, including Denise Duhamel, Samuel Ace, Neil de la Flor, David Trinidad, Kristine Snodgrass, cin salach, Niki Nolin, and Mia Leonin.

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March 26, 2024

George Bilgere

CHEAP MOTELS OF MY YOUTH

They lay somewhere between
the Sleeping In The Car era
and my current and probably final era,
the Best Western or Courtyard Marriott era.
 
The Wigwam. Log Cabin. Kozy Komfort
Hiway House. Star Lite. The Lazy A.
 
Just off the interstate, the roar
of the sixteen-wheelers all night long.
The dented tin door opening to the parking lot,
the broken coke machine muttering to itself.
 
“Color TV.” “Free HBO.” “Hang Yourself
in Our Spacious Closets.” A job interview
at some lost-in-the-middle-of-nowhere
branch campus of some agricultural college
devoted to the research and development
of the soybean and related by-products.
 
Five-course teaching load, four of them
Remedial Comp. Candidate
must demonstrate familiarity
with the basic tenets of Christian faith.
Chance of getting the job
one in a hundred. Lip-sticked
cigarette butt under the bed.
Toilet seat with its paper band,
“Sanitized for Your Protection,”
dead roach floating in the bowl.
 
As the free HBO
flickers in the background,
you stare in the cracked mirror
at a face too young, too full of hope
to deserve this. And you wait
for the Courtyard Marriott era to arrive.
 

from Cheap Motels of My Youth
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

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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)

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March 25, 2024

Gail Dawson & Richard Garcia

TABLETOP PANTOUM

The calendar is on the table
next to the three-hole punch.
The coffee is cold in the cup.
There is a jar holding pens.
 
Next to the three-hole punch
two Aztec jars are sitting.
There is a jar holding pens.
A woman is writing on a computer.
 
Two Aztec jars are sitting—
did the jars once hold ashes?
A woman is writing on a computer,
searching for something lost.
 
Did the jar hold ashes?
One jar with a coupon sticking out.
Searching for something lost,
a woman turns her gaze inward. 
 
One jar with a coupon sticking out.
There is a magnifying glass on the table.
A woman turns her gaze inwards. 
She sees a maelstrom of blank pages.
 
There is a magnifying glass on the table.
A little girl is at the computer.
She sees a maelstrom of blank pages.
She needs her mother’s help.
 
A little girl is sitting at the computer.
The table is her life raft.
She sees a maelstrom of blank pages.
There is a calendar on the table.
 

from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

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Gail Dawson & Richard Garcia: “We wrote this poem based on the objects on the table right in front of us. Richard wrote the first stanza and Gail wrote the next stanza. We proceeded writing alternate stanzas until we felt it was finished. We were surprised how a poem could be written just using the objects right in front of us.”

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March 24, 2024

Pamela Manasco

ABECEDARIAN FOR ALABAMA LIBRARIES

Alder to ash: what can be sacrificed,
boned, defanged, let it be. Burn it to
cinders to keep children civil.
Don’t end until not only paper’s
extinguished, but cards & computers, too.
Florida can’t win this heat. Don’t forget
gardens—sensory, learning—the kids’ tract,
hay mulched over marigold seeds
in the beds too early, and inside,
juried tables of books for belonging.
Keep matches to snuff out even
labels, hands that write, seed-like ideas—
maybe then it will be enough.
Never fix the broken down bridge
over Selma, unwalkable routes to food
pantries, potholes blowing tires, unfeeling,
quiet. Never pay the school lunch debts
rolling month to month. Why must we feed
starving children? Make sure they’re born,
that’s your job done. Do all in your power
until you have it all, so we look back with
vertigo at everything you took from us with
white noise. Don’t pay for college, for
Xanax, for unkillable hospital bills, and
years from now, we will not be 50th but
zero, praying daily at your altar.
 

from Poets Respond
March 24, 2024

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Pamela Manasco: “This poem responds to the recent firing of several employees at a Prattville, Alabama, library, which itself is related to the recent decision of the Alabama Senate to pass SB10, a bill which allows local city councils to fire library board members. After Prattville library director Andrew Foster publicly shared emails from a board member who requested that some juvenile library materials be moved or removed from the library, Foster was fired without the board of trustees providing information about which library rule he supposedly violated. Later, four librarians closed the library in response to the firing—and they were also fired. It’s a messy story and a scary one which shows the future Alabama’s Republican government members want: remove any library material which violates ‘Alabama values’ (good luck finding a definition for those, by the way), and fire anyone who disagrees.” (web)

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March 23, 2024

Claire Fields

STRAY INSTRUMENT

The secretary has announced
over the intercom that
there is a stray French horn
in the building
and will you please
keep your eyes open
for it.

As the teacher resumes her
lecture, I wonder if
the instrument has escaped
from its black case, tough
as avocado skin,
and has joined a secret band
of stray instrument outcasts:
the ridiculed tuba,
the skittish viola,
the brooding bassoon.

Perhaps, in the winter months,
when sleepy-eyed heaters clang so
loudly from deep below the school
that the teacher must
stop
mid-sentence,
perhaps the clanging is really
the forgotten triangle,
calling the stray band
to attention, saying in his thin voice
“Beethoven’s Fifth, everyone,
on three.”

from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

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Claire Fields: “Last spring I took a walk and ended up horribly lost. Eventually, after an hour of reading street signs with foreign names, I found my house again and collapsed on the couch, shaken by the experience. Yet, when I think back to that afternoon, what I think of first is how the leaves being swept from the sidewalk by wind looked so much like a flock of sparrows, spinning into the air on brown wings. This is why I write poetry: to be comforted by the beautifully mundane when I find myself lost.”

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March 22, 2024

Brendan Constantine & Andi Myles

WHY AM I / BECAUSE YOU ARE

ACT I
Questions by Andi Myles / Answers by Brendan Constantine
 
Why do birds love blackberries?
Because I never make decisions at night.
 
Why does the color green make me happy?
Because fire can be kept on a shelf and forgotten.
 
Why is the ladybug always alone?
Because no one is more beautiful than when you tell them they are.
 
Why are you sad?
Because my mother still carries me.
 
Why does fire entrance?
Because of a Sunday in 1975 when no one could find the sky.
 
 
ACT II
Questions by Brendan Constantine / Answers by Andi Myles
 
Why are there so many falls?
Because horses always know their way home.
 
Why can’t I see the castle?
Because it is impossible to see both sides of the moon.
 
Why do the dead talk all night?
Because the endling is on the precipice of death.
 
Why is a snake always needed?
Because I have a weakness for women named Maria.
 
Why are the stars still waiting?
Because even gods die without love.
 

from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

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Brendan Constantine & Andi Myles: “We both wrote our five questions/answers on our own before seeing the other’s and texted them to each other. First, Andi provided the questions and Brenden supplied the answers and then we switched roles. This was not edited to be anything more than it was—an exercise, a reaching out across thousands of miles sharing the answers without questions that plague us. It might seem like we cheated (the recurrence of fire in Act I? The dead and the endling? Stars and gods?) but we were equally surprised and delighted at the themes that emerged.” (web)

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