Robert Funge
ON THE DEATH OF GRANDFATHER
When the grandfather dies
there are tears of sadness
from his family. Why is this?
If he has led a life
of happiness and smiles,
then be happy and smile.
If he has had a life
of sadness and unhappiness,
be grateful he is at peace.
If he has seen both
he has been among the blest,
to whom a full life has been given.
—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
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Jeffrey Franklin
EXCITEMENT OF GETTING A ROOM WITH A MINIBAR
If you were Gidget or Gigi or Glorianne from Kansas,
you might kick both feet up behind like a miniature pony,
sending the pleated skirt too high, squeal and run
to bounce on the bed with flipped cockroach legs.
But instead you are tired after the happy disaster, the bad
fantasy, the aging family members and mirror phobia,
not to mention the failed restaurant. This isn’t Daytona
Bike Week, nor your first time in Paris, and you are
all too aware what they charge for those dinky bottles.
No, you’ve brought your own fifth, picked up
at Dino’s Liquor and Car Wash before you checked in.
Today was not the day your happy childhood predicted.
You are sad with a sadness only a single room matches.
This is your reward, this view of curtained windows
exactly like yours, these industrially sanitized towels,
this generic solitude… You slip off your shoes
and click on the scrolling menu of tonight’s movies:
a meteor the size of Cleveland, or sadistic murder
justifies the most thorough revenge ever quenched.
Things are looking up. You amble over to the minibar,
lift the white fluted paper cap from the cafeteria
and crack your bottle of Sky. For just one moment,
your heart soars: there, in the plastic bucket,
still smoking with cold, perfect lozenges of ice.
—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
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Teresa Mei Chuc
PLAYGROUND
Happiness is a ball after which we run
wherever it rolls, and we push it with
our feet when it stops.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The tank was the color of desert sand,
it rolled by like a slow-moving beetle
and dropped a glove gently to the ground.
The glove was a baseball glove.
A few boys huddled around
and one of them picked it up.
Inside the glove was a metal ball. A glove and a ball.
Another boy suggested taking the ball apart
and selling the metal pieces.
The boys began to hammer it.
One of the boys held the ball in his hand
and threw it against the wall.
The ball bounced back and exploded in his abdomen.
The dead boy was brought to the morgue.
Women gathered to identify the mutilated body.
The boys who survived walked around with furrowed brows
and a deep silence that only such shock could induce
surrounded by wails—a room full of people without furniture,
drowning in a sea of sand, sand they had believed held water.
from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
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THE KEEPERS
from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets
__________
Louisa Diodato: “One night last winter, like most nights I spent during my two MFA years in Madison, Wisconsin, I found myself curled up in my grandmother’s old armchair in an even older apartment with three walls worth of drafty windows, a whole pot of tea, and a whole book ahead of me. One night that book was David Wojahn’s Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems. It turned out to be the very book I had been waiting for a long time to find—and after reading and rereading the phrase ‘the cellblocks of the dead’ in his poem ‘The Shades,’ I knew I wouldn’t be able to move on until I’d written a poem with his line in it. ‘The Keepers’ is that poem.” (web)
Toni Cameron
MY THOUGHTS
We are the spirit
Vaster than the sky
We are one
So unique in each expression
We are the truth
How can it ever be hidden?
—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
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DECOMPOSITION
__________
SMALL TALK
—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
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__________
John Brehm: “I started writing these short, six-line poems as a counterpoint to my longer, talkier poems. They’re very much influenced by the 12th century Japanese poet Saigyo, a captain of the imperial guard who abandoned palace life to become a wandering Buddhist monk.” (website)
Karen Benke
JOY RIDE
I tell my son I wish I didn’t have to go to work today
and he says he wishes he didn’t have to go to school.
He’s tired of darkening in right answer bubbles.
I ask what we’d do if we could play hooky and he says
we’d go through the tunnel and pick up Nana Friday,
wondering if people who died can come too.
You know, like Grandpa Don and Auntie Toots?
So we pile into the VW and veer over the center line
of what reality doesn’t allow. I accelerate past the turn off
to his school, my father cautioning me to slow down
while my aunt sings a Lou Rawls song she knew.
Traveling an unnamed highway of light,
no longer concerned about getting anywhere on time,
we pass around baggies of sliced apples and almonds,
my father nodding his handsome face at the grandson
he never knew who wants details about where he’s been.
So I lean in to listen—Oh, pretty much everywhere, Angel,
he assures, explaining there aren’t any tests or distance
where he is now. You just love who you love.
And that’s the right answer to everything.
—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
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