August 22, 2018

Laura Kolbe

CALISTHENICS

Hold your own hand. See how you can
crinkle or stretch it, add years or pull them off.

Mystic tango, rubber bracer, tourniquet
of time point unverified. Those are starter words.

Look past the frozen garden to the woodpile—
how like a hand, hot-burning irresponsible

pine, silent stacked and tarped. Run to the mailbox.
Run back. To hear a voice, speak or count.

Mystic tango, iron weight plate, time point
missing—Call your muscles by their names,

hidden comrades, make them miss
the light you see—gracilis, adductor magnus,

sartorius, teres—they all adore you terribly,
like bramble that hopes for your white ankle, like sand

that follows you years off a beach. Hold your own hand.
Run past the mailbox. Skip the letters.

What could they say? Carry dumbbells.
Carry your legs. Your spotter is a brute and swollen

cloud bearing wet snow and a way of marking time
in ticks of lawn to lawn. It hovers, gives

no help. Hold your hands. Control your breath.
Iron weight plate, tango missing, respiratory

tourniquet. Or court hurt and danger for
the changes they will bring. Lift with your back

and not your legs. Twist as you lift. Move without
grace. Run to the mailbox and back, its empty curve

a black smile or a stroke sign—too dark to say. Soon
your lawn is struck-dumb sodium streetlight,

the dusky yellow flutter helpless, almost shy
as it leaves the rigid lamp. Hold your own.

Missing missing. Time point time point.
Weight and brace. Look past and hold.

When your belly tightens and your hands
twist up, you are a tree self-semaphoring

in the first lone shock of night. Count back
to human. Hold. Your hands meet above

your head, and the cold they pull down creaks
over you like a jersey made of bone.

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Laura Kolbe: “Before I became a poet and before I became a doctor, I became an athlete. Which wasn’t so very different than either of those—waking at four in the morning to train for track-cycling ‘nationals’ at the local velodrome, or later waking for the university cycling team and marathon team, I entered into days of laps and circles. ‘Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise,’ as Elizabeth Bishop had it. Meanwhile, I was having all the same moods and experiences as any other young person, and I remember how strange and necessary it felt to engraft those feelings onto form itself, trying to distill them into pure power of the legs. This was maybe my first awakening to poetry: seeing how life could be transmuted into something other than itself, be it racing or language, and feeling the shock of accomplishing that change.”

Rattle Logo

August 20, 2018

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

FALL

Barberry bushes have been trampled all day
and some boys along the creek
pretending it is the barbed wire of an Indian prison
lay prone clutching nickel-plated revolvers
imaginary of course. Unlike our Reservations
about choosing the wrong side of this battlefield.
Cowboys gallop red across the stripped horses
of their pink legs embarrassing Indians
into a shirtless whoop of bows and
arrows falling dead BANG BANG
barbs fired from prepubescent lips.
Swimming in the music of a clear October
morning eagles handcuff the sun
bald as our understanding
of war never ending ever was.

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley: “I am an elite level powerlifter (meaning top 1% of all competitors in the United States). Powerlifting consists of the bench press, squat, and deadlift. I love this sport because it’s you against yourself. Your opponent is an inanimate piece of metal, just as the poet’s opponent is perhaps—forgive the cliché—either the blank page or themselves, and certainly not other poets: both forge a strong community of fellowship around their craft.” (web)

Rattle Logo

August 17, 2018

A.M. Juster

HEIRLOOM

I know that I was suckered in:
firm curves bulging, olive skin,
perfectly well-rounded cheeks
rubified with port-wine streaks,
the saffron crown with one deep crack,
an eggplant-colored nob in back—
a touch of tumor. It would still
be sunning on my windowsill—
art illustrating daily life—
except I took my carving knife
and slowly sliced five slabs of fresh,
soil-sweet, yet vaguely bitter flesh.

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

A.M. Juster: “I was a three-sport letterman in high school (albeit a tiny high school) and was recruited by Yale to play soccer, where after three weeks I gave up the sport for the great books program and other distractions of college. Although my basketball letter was a charity letter, in my early 40s I did shoot for one minute at the halftime of a Celtics-Cavaliers game as part of a five-man team that defeated 32 other teams in the Red Auerbach Charity Shootout.” (web)

 

A.M. Juster is the guest on Rattlecast #62! Click here to watch …

Rattle Logo

August 15, 2018

Alex Hoffman-Ellis

MODERN DAY GLADIATOR

he lies awake
open-eyed nightmaring
white knuckle gripping vertical green bars
in the name of chasing a dream
that never bloomed.

drops of blood trickle from his urethra
dyeing portions of his urine cherry red.
left hand bracing the wall
supporting herniated discs
and confidence eroding depression.

he slowly shuffles over
his parents’ creaky floorboards
back to a bed
in a room he doesn’t own.
in a home no longer his.

how does one bring the crowd to their feet
when struggling to stand
upon their own two?

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Alex Hoffman-Ellis: “I have been playing professional football both in the U.S. (St. Louis Rams, San Francisco 49ers) and in Canada (B.C. Lions, Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Edmonton Eskimos) since 2012. I started playing football at the age of seventeen, earned a full scholarship at nineteen to Washington State University, where I started for three years. While playing this physically and mentally unforgiving game, I fight the culture associated with football daily. Football culture has always been of a ‘macho’ nature—suppress your sensitivities, endure as much physical pain as you can while staying on the field at any and all costs, eat, sleep and shit meatheadedness, pump iron and party in your spare time, sleep with as many women as possible (this is not limited to single players, either), etc. This is a sport where teams have chaplains, there’s regular, unabashed advertising for armed forces recruitment, and sexual assault offenders deserve second chances over those who protest what the national anthem represents (or doesn’t) to them. It’s not the forum you’d expect to find a free-spirited Jewish dude raised by liberal parents from L.A. But nonetheless, here I am, in all my sensitive, kind, laid back, highly opinionated, jewelry making, globetrotting, spearfishing, nature photographing, book reading, poetry writing, unapologetic glory.” (web)

Rattle Logo

August 13, 2018

Tony Gloeggler

SOME LONG AGO SUMMER

I once slept with a woman who worked
a few months at the group home I run,
but only after I fired her for a no call
no show weekend that left the shifts
severely undermanned. Next day,
we ran into each other on the subway,
rode through Manhattan together,
hugged goodbye. Four days later,
Denise waited for me outside work, went
all the way home with me. After fucking
the night away, we went to the diner
for breakfast. Grits for her, home fries
for me. We ended up at the schoolyard.
She took me down low, bumped me
with her lovely ass, while I tried
to ignore my hard on. I kept the score
close, but always won. She was younger,
I was older. I had money, she had none.
I was lighter, she was darker. She was
beautiful, I was not. We never could agree
on a radio station. We both liked Al Green,
but never the same songs. She loved
the back-to-back black shows on NBC
Thursday nights, I preferred Law
& Order. She never read my poetry.
I felt her rap rhymes silly and forced.
She liked things rough and hard, I liked
to watch my cum slide slowly down
her dark inner thighs. I didn’t know
if she was hoping to get her job back,
looking for some kind of love or a few
weekends of outside-the-neighborhood
fun. I wasn’t doing any thinking at all.
Just last week, she was standing in line
at the corner bodega. Coffee for her,
Snapple for me. She still looked good.
Me, worse than before. Once, she said,
she saw me walking by in some long ago
summer as she sat in a shady park rocking
her baby for an afternoon nap. She said
I never looked her way, but she knows
if I did I would have stopped, leaned
down for a soft quick kiss and told her
that her daughter was as beautiful
as she is. I smiled, knew she was right.

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Tony Gloeggler: “Is a ballplayer an athlete? My identity as a kid was being the best baseball player in the neighborhood. It was the one place I connected with my dad playing catch after dinner, him in a crouch and me with a Juan Marichael wind-up or hands on my knees at third base and him trying to hit one through me. The local hoods gave me a free pass because they played in the same leagues as me, and they knew I was better than them and respected it. I still hate running and exercising and when I went for my high school try out, the blue-eyed blonde senior captain laughed at me when I couldn’t figure out a four count jumping jack and my arms started shaking at my fifth push-up, but in my first intra-squad game, I threw one behind his head, stared him down, then struck out the side on nine pitches and was the only freshman to make the team. Also real good in schoolyard basketball and football, and I played all kinds of softball until I was 50. I think my poetry is affected by it in the sense that I work at it with the same kind of focus, and that time I no hit the rich kids school in the eighth grade CYO Cham-pionship game still means more to me than the time I got a poem in the New York Times. And even though I don’t do shit now, I’ll always feel more like a ball player than a poet or artist.” (web)

Rattle Logo

August 10, 2018

Daniel Gleason

SHADOW BOXING LATE AT NIGHT

With fists raised high and jaw clenched tight,
sweat dripping down from worn out clothes,
you’re shadow boxing late at night.

You practice punches left and right—
slip then jab now counter and pose
with fists raised high and jaw clenched tight.

Past battles, all the pain and spite,
the final round’s about to close.
You’re shadow boxing late at night.

Recall the end of every fight:
adrenaline and bloodied nose
with fists raised high and jaw clenched tight.

Your prime is gone—can’t get a fight—
knees ache and creak; your movement slows.
You’re shadow boxing late at night.

This is all you know; you clench it tight
unable to block the unseen blows
with fists raised high and jaw clenched tight
you’re shadow boxing late at night.

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Daniel Gleason: “I started playing soccer at age eighteen when my family moved back to Tennessee from the Philippines, and ever since I have been smitten with sports. In college, I played goalkeeper and coached the team’s ’keepers after a chest surgery sidelined me. When I taught high school English, I coached the school’s soccer teams for eight years. Now I coach my six-year-old son’s team, and I have taken up a new sport, as well: boxing. For the last two years I have trained and sparred, and I have started doing some coaching, too. The discipline and creativity required for sports runs parallel with writing, and boxing in particular has so much in common with writing. I like to joke that I can’t tell the difference between them, that I literally don’t know if I’m boxing or writing.” (web)

Rattle Logo

August 8, 2018

Michael Estabrook

GRAND ILLUSION

After 50 years of responsible adulthood
careers and family, education and financial planning
I am pumping iron again
pressing pulling pushing
through bench presses curls pull-downs
shrugs squats deadlifts
sets and reps, warm-ups and cool-downs
calluses strained hamstrings cold packs heating pads
lifting belts wrist straps muscle magazines
my wife scratching her head biting her tongue …
and all for what? Seriously what?
To realize my illusion that somehow
I can stop time reverse it
even returning to being 17 once more
so I can experience again the mysterious flush
of first love, the power of athletic prowess
the grandeur of intellectual discovery
the vigorous confidence of self-realization
and mastery over all things earthly and beyond.

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Michael Estabrook: “I’ve pursued athletics my whole life from being on the swim team in college and taking kung fu at age 60. Never a professional athlete, but in one form or another, sports have always been an integral part of who I am: swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting, baseball, karate, Kung fu, tai chi, even yoga! Setting physical goals, and working hard to attain them, is critical to me feeling good about myself. In particular, feeling stronger produces greater energy and confidence, not only in athletics but in life in general, including writing poetry.”

Rattle Logo