Best of Rattle

March 18, 2012

“After I Die” by Melody LacinaPosted by

Melody Lacina

AFTER I DIE

Sell everything. Promise me
an auction, an old guy hollering
prices in a broken yodel,
his voice so rough you’d swear
he used to shuck corn
with his throat. Better yet
a yard sale. Strangers can finger
bowls and coats and wonder
why I ever bought them and whether
they would like them any better
marked a couple dollars down.
Don’t let the quilt go cheap—
Amish ladies in Iowa went blind
stitching it. The bedframe still folds
reluctantly into a sofa,
and anyone who wants a hard
mattress will not mind
how stiff the futon has grown.
Be sure the labels
on the sweaters from Venice
are showing. You know how
people will buy anything
Italian. Give away the books.

Burn the body. Keep the ashes
in a mayonnaise jar,
the way we used to hoard
lightning bugs until they stopped
glowing. When no one is watching,
tap out a handful of the ashes
on the beach at Limantour.
A slow crooked line
behind the tide, as if I were dragging
my toes, complaining how cold
the water leaves the sand.
Then buy plane tickets
with the yard sale money.
Pack the mayonnaise jar
carefully. Unwrap it in what was
my parents’ backyard to scatter
bone shards beneath the lilac bushes.
After that go to Spain, and don’t forget
the jar. Open it on the first
stone street above the cathedral
in Granada, where an old woman
fierce with her broom will not
look up. Drop what you have
left of me in front of her.
Ashes to dust. And always
someone sweeping.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
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March 17, 2012

from “Autobiography of My Alter Ego” by Yusef KomunyakaaPosted by

Yusef Komunyakaa

from AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY ALTER EGO

I can’t press a fingernail
into the President’s name
till a jay cries from its tower
of green leaves, a fortress
of springtime branches,
because he didn’t go to Nam.
But sometimes I wish that Silver Star
never came out of its velvet-lined
box. They can melt it down
for a boy’s tin whistle
at a crosswalk, a lucky charm
for a guy burning his draft card
in Canada or Sweden. I know men
who did more than I dreamt
& only received an image of blood
on bronze because of black or brown
skin, shortchanged by a silhouette.
Sometimes I can’t stop
thinking of Oliver, a paratrooper,
just eighteen, who threw himself
on a VC’s hand grenade
to save his squad, who turned into mist,
something less than gopherwood.
For weeks, for months,
I could taste him in the dusty air.
Do you know how it feels
to have your tongue shaped
from a dead man’s name?
Suppose that grenade
hadn’t fallen like jackfruit
from a heavy branch,
& Oliver walked in here
today, took a seat beside
Nancy, & began to talk….
I have played the scene
over & over in my head:
the grenade, the three hundred years
of silence, the air filled
with nothing but our voices. The others,
where are they now, what
are they saying about Oliver?
If he had fathered children
would song or lament open
in their dark mouths? Today,
what kind of man would he be,
is that sound still traveling
out into space? I told you,
if you start me talking,
I’ll tell everything I know.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
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March 14, 2012

“To Women Named Emily” by C. Joseph JordanPosted by

C. Joseph Jordan

TO WOMEN NAMED EMILY

What kind of men am I? This question floats
through my mind now and then. It is different
than, What kind of man am I? What kind of
men am I? I suspect that I am one of those men
who will live his life to discover at the age of
forty that he has been teaching senior English to

Catholic kids for the last fifteen years. One of
those men who end up married to women
named Emily, who were pretty in college and now
are a little heavyset, and somewhat grumpy.
One of those men, you know the sort, who tried
right after school to hit Paris, and Athens, and

Florence, but discovered that he was really more
comfortable in Portland or Seattle. One of
those men who has seen most of the movies,
read most of the books, who tries hard to be a
good papa, and still ends up feeling, sort of, like
he’s failed. I am men of Irish descent who have

had to quit drinking because it’s bad for their
heart. I am men who will guess one day that
they should’ve married a thin girl named
Sophia, and moved to Madrid with her. I am
men who vote every November, but usually
write in Mickey Mouse. I am very sleepy men.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
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March 13, 2012

“Cheap Talk” by Karla HustonPosted by

Karla Huston

CHEAP TALK

While talking to students about aging
and sex the other day, I read disgust on their lips
when they considered parents and grandparents
having it. One kid said he couldn’t imagine
an old guy actually getting it up, not to mention
getting it in as if in were a destination on a wrinkled
map—hotel no-tell in a dusty town in Ohio. All that
cheap talk, their snortling and knowing smiles. Like sex
was only for the young and beautiful and doing it
was beautiful to see which, of course,
it isn’t. All those upended parts, privates
exposed, the inside body smells, the playground
between two sewers, the plunge and grunt, posturing
for position. The worry about fit and flattery,
performance and         review.
The act so animal like, ball and socket,
tab and slot push and shove         bang and
cushion. Of course no one thinks
about that—the acrobatics, the open mouths,
the hard wetness, the way it feels when man enters
the deep slice, the filling vessel         the hopeful work
to get to where it feels so damned right.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
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Karla Huston: “Reading poetry is like a walk in a prairie: Black-eyed Susans bobble in a sea of green, Queen Anne’s Lace doilies float above the leather tongues of burdock. There is a surprise in every turn of word, and in every phrase and line, something new grows.” (web)

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March 8, 2012

“On the Anniversary of Her First Marriage” by Naomi Ruth LowinskyPosted by

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HER FIRST MARRIAGE

had i never leapt across the yellow grasses
of that meadow near Point Reyes to the sound
of the Hallelujah chorus     never wound my adulterous
legs around my flute playing lover     never been so blatant
so lewd     i might still be married to that boy
from high school     still be small and hidden in the pocket
of his green corduroy jacket     peering out at other people’s
lives     had i never danced to the bongos and the setting
sun at Big Sur     never almost run away with that ferryman
masseur who could transport me to the land
of naked bodies and temple whore lore     had i never been
such a bitch such a floozy     never danced topless
in a bar     never known the lotus flower
to blossom in my own goddess body     never lived alone
with three children     fed them eternal
soup of the week     never been apprenticed
to a witch     studied spells and incantations     never sat on a wooden
floor howling with what came to me out of a cave     never seen yellow
bellied death sitting on my bed forcing me to face
my real life—     get up     wash face     bring fever down     stay alive
to raise the children—     would i have found my place     in this sweet
bed     where wanton and wild are loved by a man
who has light in his eyes     where tigers and lions roam     yellow hills
in my dreams     and both sun and moon shine upon me?

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2005
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Naomi Ruth Lowinsky: “One June, many years into a happy second marriage, a poem began tugging at me, reminding me it was the anniversary of my first marriage. The poem insisted on making me look at what a ‘bitch and a floozy’ I’d been on the way out of that marriage, and how essential it was that I made such a mess. It came as a whoosh of memories, which I gathered unto a strand. It helped me gather myself. Often my poems do this for me, like a good analyst would. They confront me, tell me my own story, make sense of my life, free me as only the truth can.” (web)

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March 7, 2012

“The Prisoners Have Gone Back to Their Cells” by Philip LevinePosted by

Philip Levine

THE PRISONERS HAVE ALL GONE BACK TO THEIR CELLS

This morning I sit in the open-air cafe
reading yesterday’s newspapers full of ads
for wrist watches, jeweled and silent,
with cases carved from solid blocks of gold.
Time means nothing. I can read and reread
the travel notes and guides to vintages
while the dust drifts upward toward
a hazy sun dragged across the usual sky.
I sip my cold coffee and milk, I look
about me at the others so intent
on their breakfast pastries or the day’s
first order of business. Out of nowhere
a young woman asks if I am done. “Done
with what?” I ask. “The table,” she says.
Handing her the classifieds I note
there’s work to be done by all of us,
cooks’ helpers, solicitors by telephone,
bakers of Wonderbread. Turning her back
she lets the pages flutter to the ground
which is only a blank slate of cement
on which nothing ever has been written
and nothing will be. Mondays like this
frequent this time of the year. I taste
them slowly and let the taste linger
long after. Yesterday morning I drove
due west of here past the truck farms
the Asian immigrants have taken over,
then the junk yards of heavy equipment,
earth movers, school buses, jeeps rusting
back to earth. Before the coastal hills
with their hints of salt winds, the land
flattens into miles of grapes and cotton.
Out there where no one ever goes
the state raised a new prison to house
the children once they’ve grown, and tracts
for the workers half circle a duck pond
that looks the other way. “America,
America,” I sang, and turned for home.
My brother writes from New York City
inviting me to share his wealth, to gaze
as he does on these long June evenings
into the East River’s filthy depths
or across to Brooklyn when the lights
transform the ruined shoreline into fire.
I don’t go. I don’t even write back,
for someone has to stay if only to mark
these hours that never matter, to say aloud
as the others at their tables turn away
something about the century we lost.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2005
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March 26, 2011

“Fast Gas” by Dorianne LauxPosted by

Dorianne Laux

FAST GAS

for Richard

Before the days of self service,
when you never had to pump your own gas,
I was the one who did it for you, the girl
who stepped out at the sound of a bell
with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back
in a straight, unlovely ponytail.
This was before automatic shut-offs
and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,
I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas
backed up, came arcing out of the hole
in a bright gold wave and soaked me—face, breasts,
belly and legs. And I had to hurry
back to the booth, the small employee bathroom
with the broken lock, to change my uniform,
peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin
and wash myself in the sink.
Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt
pure and amazed—the way the amber gas
glazed my flesh, the searing,
subterranean pain of it, how my skin
shimmered and ached, glowed
like rainbowed oil on the pavement.
I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,
for the first time, in love, that man waiting
patiently in my future like a red leaf
on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty
that asks to be noticed. How was I to know
it would begin this way: every cell of my body
burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me
a nimbus of light that would carry me
through the days, how when he found me,
weeks later, he would find me like that,
an ordinary woman who could rise
in flame, all he would have to do
is come close and touch me.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006

__________

Dorianne Laux: “I came to poetry—this is almost a quote from my autobiography—through the doors of a novel called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Not so much the novel itself, although I loved the novel very much, but there was a little quote at the beginning of the novel which was much like a poem. I mostly read novels as a child growing up, but there was something about poetry, the idea of rhyming and rhythm and language and the music in language that attracted me. And so I began to write poems that rhymed, and were in a meter and form, and then eventually broke out of that when I started reading contemporary poets and realized that they did no longer rhyme. But that’s how I came to it, through novels. Sometimes I think that’s why I ended up choosing to be such a narrative poet.” (web)

 

Dorianne Laux is the guest on episode #44 of the Rattlecast. Click here to watch!

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