B.A. Van Sise

March 3, 2023

“Baseball” by B.A. Van SisePosted by

B.A. Van Sise

BASEBALL

My mother hated it. Everything
about it: the field, the players,
the ads, the incessant America.
 
The smell of hot dogs. The dust
of peanuts. The way her son,
a good Italian made of Italian
 
ingredients by her Italian body,
would reduce himself to a blue
hat, blue jacket, blue shirt, and
 
go with that man who did all
this to her to see it with a smile.
She had an obligation, she was
 
certain, to stop this, and one day
pulled me aside and said what
were to her, surely,
 
the most necessary words
in the American language: you
should care about the

New York Mets as much as
they care about you. The New York
Mets did not care about
 
me. Still, thirty years later,
I like to see a game. Once a
year, I’ll sit in the warm sun,
 
covered in peanut dust, and
think, gently, about the
soft uncut grass of her grave.
 

—from Rattle #78, Winter 2022
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

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B.A. Van Sise: “I spent most of the pandemic on the road, working as a photojournalist covering a crumbling nation. I wrote this on a little blue notebook while sitting on the lawn at a Memphis Redbirds game; you pay them five bucks, you get to lie out on the lawn while little kids run around in circles around you, and bigger kids run around the bases somewhere off in the distance. Put more simply: it’s Eden before the apples.” (web)

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August 29, 2019

“Naming the Beasts” by Elizabeth MortonPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2019: Editor’s Choice

 

Photo from Elsewhere by B.A. Van Sise, two cows with jet flying overhead

Image: “Restricted | U.S. Air Force” by B.A. Van Sise from his “Elsewhere” series. “Naming the Beasts” was written by Elizabeth Morton for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2019, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Elizabeth Morton

NAMING THE BEASTS

The planes went down the same day Romulus and Remus
were butchered.
And I walked barefoot through the cattlegrass,
mooed to Romulus and Remus
and they said how do you do?
as though it were an ordinary Tuesday.
As though the stock truck
parked outside the old schoolhouse
were just a metaphor for everything
thrust into double digits. The sky was cheesecake.
Sweetgums were bald to skin and bone. Wind licked
the bluegrass, retelling comedies
only the weather sees. What world is this?
Romulus and Remus were the hot breath
rising from the schoolhouse kettle,
the two sparrows that knocked against the car windshield
on that lonely highway. They were a pair of headlights.
They were possums spent on nightfall, giddy
with the casual light of passing tankers.
Romulus and Remus loped onto the truck ramp,
Said how do you do? And I. And I. And I.
I walked barefoot through embers only to turn back halfway,
to shrug at the ordinary Tuesday, to let what happens
happen. I hid from the bellowing, under husk and chaff,
in the noise of harrower and winnower.
Later, I sat in the diner, watched two planes go down on a city,
into the stubble of people and places
just doing what people and places do.
As though little men falling from windows
were just a metaphor for everything haunted
by what we never fix.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
July 2019, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “That Tuesday being such a gorgeous late-summer day in New York, I was surprised at how many of the poets thought of September 11th when looking at this photograph. I assumed I wouldn’t select one of them—it just doesn’t fit. But then I fell in love with the turns and turns of phrase in this poem, and those two cows loping toward their fate, and I realized that it would have been late-winter in the southern hemisphere, the first buds of spring not quite appearing on the trees. That thought opened something up for me—something about the combination of vastness and interconnectedness of the world—and I’ll never think of 9/11 in quite the same way again. Eighteen years later now, I wouldn’t have thought that possible.”

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August 22, 2019

“Time Travel” by Alida RolPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2019: Artist’s Choice

 

Photo from Elsewhere by B.A. Van Sise, two cows with jet flying overhead

Image: “Restricted | U.S. Air Force” by B.A. Van Sise from his “Elsewhere” series. “Time Travel” was written by Alida Rol for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2019, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Alida Rol

TIME TRAVEL

We served our sentence
under the city’s insomniac glare,
by the racket of garbage trucks
and the screams of all-night sirens,
racked up paychecks and overtime
to the smell of pissed-on
asphalt baked in swampy heat.
After the punishment
of never alone but too often
lonely, we left for the country, took
custody of a glowering sky,
the withering glances of bare trees,
a house full of dust and
crumbled hope. We
have no idea what to do
with the silos, their stern
concrete, or how we’ll feed
the sheep in snow. Feral cats
possess the outbuilding, so we’ve kept
its one door closed. When a pair
of cow-eyed Herefords, the docile
bulk of them, stares at us
like aliens, we understand
we are. We gawk in awe
at their foreignness and
see ourselves. Tonight
we make love in the barn
despite the dark, our animal
scent in the air, ears already
callousing to the growl
of planes overhead. Contrails
spike our dreams, but we vow
by day to tread a gentler and less
breathless path. We will warm
to the neighbors despite
their reminders that Herefords
are raised for slaughter. Come
spring we’ll spin our wool, bring
the neighbors fresh laid
eggs, tomatoes in the summer.
We will often be alone.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
July 2019, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, B.A. Van Sise: “Alida Rol brought a sense of visual thinking to the piece that was, as an artist, hard to pass up, building an interior world that feels palpable, rowdy to all senses: you can smell the asphalt, you can feel the dust on your fingers, you can hear the city disgorging its noise, sirens raising Cain as they bring people you don’t like to places you don’t want to be. It tells a tale we all know already—we scorn our mundane, seek out something better, something different, try to find beauty elsewhere. But it also gives the reader a lesson, surely unwanted but sorely needed: the grass isn’t always greener. In fact, the grass isn’t even green, and maybe there is, in the end, just no grass at all.”

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