Poetry Prize

February 24, 2023

“Your Hands” by Shannan MannPosted by

Shannan Mann

YOUR HANDS

Like coals they ashed me bit by bit, your hands.
The open fire thrilled me, I admit—your hands.
 
A panther only sees white food at night. It is natural,
then, that against my cheekbone you hit your hands.
 
I crumbled into the sour milk of your tears as you begged:
So deep is my pain, save me. With this ring, commit your hands.
 
You called me priestess, whore, my half, my sin, my soul.
I sang bastard, bewitcher infidel, hypocrite, your hands.
 
Great men become bone, their names given to stars, but stars too
burned when they learned how piety and lust lit your hands.
 
I unearthed my cremains from the ghats of the Ganges;
a beggar tithed me a coin, along with it, your hands.
 
I discovered a woman created in my own image. I lifted her veil.
Behind it: dead birds, zephyrs, a faded palette, your hands.
 
You said, love achieves glory when lovers take up arms.
Yet no matter what I killed I could never outwit your hands.
 
Who has not made love to beasts in wild wastelands?
Shannan, it is not gold, it is gore, it is shit: your hands.
 

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

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Shannan Mann: “I wrote for several hours a day until I was 17. Then, I ran away from an abusive home and wound up in an almost-worse place. I didn’t write for 8 ½ years. After a near-death birth experience (for both my daughter and me), I was inspired to begin writing again. The first poem I wrote was for a Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge. Through that, I connected with previous challenge winner, Karan Kapoor, who encouraged me to read Agha Shahid Ali’s collection of English ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight. He also challenged I write a better ghazal than the master. I’m not sure if I’ll ever come close to Shahid, but this poem is now part of a growing collection of ghazals that deal with my experience as a woman, person of colour, and a mother. All poetry is community, but the ghazal especially so. And I don’t think I’d be exaggerating one bit if I said that Rattle helped me to be a part of this community once again, long after I thought I’d exiled myself beyond return. My sincere gratitude for this magazine and every single poet who graces these pages.” (web)

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February 20, 2023

“Slut” by Elizabeth HillPosted by

Elizabeth Hill

SLUT

In the parking lot of Churchill’s Garden Center, my mother
turned to me and said, I found the pills. I asked What pills?
though I knew. The birth control pills. Are you having sex? 
Yes, I said, with pride. She whipped the words out,
fast as a striking snake, 
You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re too young. Are you in a relationship? 
Though I was, I said, No.  
Her face cinched tight and she turned in profile, considering her options.
And I could see her jaw shifting, slowly. She turned to face me 
and blurted, Who the hell are you having sex with? 
Different people, I said, though there was only one.
She flushed red and sound issued from deep in her throat. 
You … stop … now. Don’t you have any self-respect?! 
Do you want to be a slut?!
Do you want people to call you a slut?!
I’m going to tell the pharmacist to stop giving you the pill.
Then I’ll get pregnant, Mom, and people will certainly talk about that, 
I said with internal glee. Why are you doing this? 
she demanded, with fury closely held behind her teeth. After a long silence, 
I said, to play the field, Mom. To see what’s out there. 
Her face stiffened, tighter. Her lids clamped closed as she turned the ignition. 
Gripping the wheel tightly, she drove the AMC Pacer the twenty miles 
to our home, as I began to describe the boys who came to my mind
and the fantastical circumstances of our sex. 
I gave Red a blow job in the woods near School Street. 
I had sex with Daniel in our biology classroom after school … 
I struck out for myself, for a realm independent 
of my mother’s strictures, her angry enforcement.
And Miles, I said, (my actual boyfriend, who I adored), 
We’ve had sex a few times. And it was so good, I thought, 
our bodies straining, reaching for more, and more. 
I did not share this particular delight with my mother,
as it came close to an admission that there was only one boy. 
Her face was heavy with sadness and rage. 
Giddy, I leaned out the window of 
the obsolete Pacer and yelled out the names of 
my purported partners. I sang them out,
past the white Colonials on Walnut Street, 
prudish with their tiny windows and doors, 
past the dilapidated candy store on High Street 
whose charms I had outgrown, 
past the seamy, doldrum Seabrook dog track 
where I was not old enough to place bets,
and oh, so far past the home of Ann Fieldsend, 
the actual town tramp, who was currently pregnant.
Finally I sat, satisfied.
I remember my mother’s livid, punitive face, her roiling silence, 
her crippling grip on the wheel.
And it dawned on me, I’ve won,
and I resolved never to tell her the truth.
 

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

__________

Elizabeth Hill: “I am a retired administrative law judge who decided suits between learning disabled children and their school systems. I live in Harlem, New York, with my husband and two irascible cats. I write poetry because I love words, and because I hope to connect with others’ emotions.”

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February 17, 2023

“Augury” by Jennifer GriffithPosted by

Jennifer Griffith

AUGURY

I’d been bleeding for a year when we unsexed the frog. 
Cold and pungent from formaldehyde, it lay with limbs 
splayed and pinned to the tray. The science teacher 
lectured about the arrangement of a frog’s organs, how 
similar they are to ours, that dissection helps us learn
 
the way our bodies work too. We’d been studying 
frogs for days; my lab partner and I were sick of them, 
so, we relieved ours of its reproductive parts, flicked 
them out the window, chipped pink nails launching 
tiny gray entrails to the snowy pavement outside
 
the decaying junior high that looked like a penitentiary.
Inside, biology was wild; boys dumped bottles of fox lure
in the radiators, stole a Fiesta Barbie from the Spanish
lab, denuded her and hung her from the cafeteria blinds. 
Someone in homeroom had a crush on me, but he smelled 
 
like cigarettes and dirty socks, was in the slow courses,
and went around with sticky streaks of pot resin down 
the legs of his jeans. It’s called “amplexus” when a male 
amphibian wraps himself around the female and releases 
his sperm on the tapioca pearls of her eggs. In French class,
 
our teacher smeared crimson lipstick on her mouth like a wound. 
She came to school sick most days and taught us the language 
of the body: maux de gorge, maux d’estomac, la jambe blessée,  
Or, like a certain frog, malade dans les trompes de Fallope,
malade dans les ovaires. In the third-floor bathroom, I watched 
 
a tall, blonde eighth grader pound an anxious, primitive 
rhythm on the broken Kotex machine. A scarlet Rorschach 
bloomed across the ass of her white pants, the red blot shaped 
like West Virginia, or maybe a human heart, la coeur.
When tadpoles turn into frogs, their external gills move 
 
inward and evolve into lungs. In water, frogs breathe 
through their skins, but they cannot feel love. My own body 
had become a violin; some days I thought if I drew a bow 
across myself, I could cry a concerto. During study hall, 
the boy behind me arranged my long hair in a pile on his desk, 
 
lay his head down in it and slept. I listened to the soft 
sounds of his breath while I did algebra problems—oxygen, 
nitrogen, variables, and equations mingling in the air. 
 

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

__________

Jennifer Griffith: “I began writing poetry when I was a child and have always been fascinated by why we remember some things in our lives and totally forget others. ‘Augury’ came from my exploring various moments I recall from middle school, and, through writing the poem, I discovered that those seemingly random memories, whose commonalities appeared to be only time and proximity to one another, were actually topically and symbolically analogous and revealed a body rather than just an assortment of parts. So I guess you could say I write poetry to galvanize fragments into flesh.” (web)

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February 15, 2023

“Basic Needs” by Sarah EdererPosted by

Sarah Ederer

BASIC NEEDS

Listen,
I could tell you about the hot cat shit
That lay in the hallway
Just outside of my mother’s bedroom
Nestled into itself on the floor
Like a sleeping dog.
 
I could tell you that,
Like a sleeping dog,
We stepped over it carefully.
Like a sleeping dog,
We walked past it every day and
Most of the time
We ignored it.
 
I could say that we treated it like a part of the backdrop
A landmark of home
Hanging in the air under our noses
Like a soft-baked pretzel
Comforting and familiar
And you might think that I’ve said enough
For you to understand just how outrageous the situation was
But I haven’t.
 
The truth is,
The cat shit never bothered me that much.
Not at first.
There was a brief moment of disgust,
Sure,
But that moment would end
As quickly as I could take one step
And get over it.
Then I was in another room and,
As far as I was concerned,
The cat shit was gone.
 
What bothered me
About the pile of cat shit in the hallway
Was what I suspect would bother anyone:
How shameful it was
To be living that way.
But that shame wasn’t something I could access
In the folie-a-quatre
That was my childhood home.
 
I became aware of the shame much later in life,
Found it wafting over me one night,
When my own family’s dog
Had an accident
At the foot of my bed
And I got up to clean it
without thinking.
It was an automatic response:
There’s shit on the floor
It must be removed
Remove it.
 
It struck me like a freighter
That I had been robbed for sixteen years
Of something I felt that I was entitled to,
But never received.
I couldn’t quite put that thing into words,
But it amounted roughly to
“The right to not have to step over piles of cat shit
Every goddamned day of my life.”
 
Then the shame arrived
In its fullest form:
A revelation
About the burden of secrecy.
I had spent sixteen years of my life
pretending that the pile of cat shit wasn’t there
Waiting for me
When I got home from school.
I got so good at pretending
That sometimes I wasn’t even aware
That there was a pile of cat shit
Waiting for me,
For my mother,
Outside of her bedroom door.
But the cat shit was always there,
Lingering,
An ornament of a broken home.
 
The cat shit was there
When I kissed my first boyfriend.
The cat shit was there
When he fingered me in the car outside
And I lied and said my parents were home
So he couldn’t come in.
I stepped over the cat shit
And fell into my bed
And dreamed of him kissing me,
Touching me,
Touched myself to the thought of it
All while the cat shit,
Sun-dried and brittle,
Shifted with the floorboards,
With the weight of the house,
With its damned foundation,
Settling lopsided into the hole
Where the previous owner’s septic tank was
Until it eventually collapsed.
I spent sixteen years
Falling into someone else’s shit.
 
They kept twelve cats I never wanted
And they asked me
“How could you not want them?”
As if I was cruel
They called me Bob Barker
I repeated it so many times:
Spay the damn things.
You can be buried alive
By a certain kind of love
One that I’m not so convinced
Is kind at all.
But the cat shit wasn’t what bothered me.
Not really.
What bothered me
Is what I lost under the hordes of cheap, dysfunctional garbage
That my mother compulsively lifted
From flea markets,
Dollar stores,
Yard sales,
And clothing exchanges.
A book of nursery rhymes,
A keyless trumpet,
A mummified tangerine,
And a dressmaking dummy,
Buried under soiled laundry,
Buried under moldy dishes,
Buried under childhood photos
In frames with broken glass.
Buried somewhere under
The junk that nobody wanted
Was my family.
It became difficult to distinguish between the two.
 
I wondered to myself,
Standing next to a puddle of cleanser
At the foot of my adult bed,
Why I had never cleaned the cat shit
In my childhood home,
Why I stepped over it every time.
A form of protest, maybe
A sinking sense that it would never end
That twelve cats could shit faster than I could clean it,
That flea markets,
Dollar stores,
Yard sales,
And clothing exchanges
Never ran out of junk,
That I was a child
Who had a right to something
That I never received.
 

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

__________

Sarah Ederer: “To me, writing poetry feels a bit like lancing a boil and sending a ‘thank you’ card to the pus. I tend to use free verse narrative fiction to tell the untellable stories of people marginalized by the taboo nuances of a life lived under oppressive domestic conditions. I hope to help make experiences that might make one feel unintelligible to the world a little more easily understood by emphasizing the humanity and dignity of the protagonist.”

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February 13, 2023

“Palimpsest” by George BilgerePosted by

George Bilgere

PALIMPSEST

We’re bicycling through the Tiergarten
on a summer morning in Berlin,
my wife and I, our son in his bike seat,
and it really is a lovely day, except
someone has spray painted in red,
dripping cursive on the marble pedestals
of the statues of the great poets
and composers scattered around the park, 
Juden Raus, Jews Out, and my first thought 
is, hey, my German is getting better, 
I figured that out right away, 
even though the handwriting is poor,
but of course the author was working
in the dark, and under a certain pressure, 
so really, you can’t blame him, and besides,
the quality of the handwriting isn’t
the point here, nor is my progress
in German, which in most respects
has been disappointing. The point
is that we have a bottle of wine
and some ham and cheese sandwiches
and we’re going to make the best of it,
we’re going to spread the blanket
and have a picnic here in the not entirely
new Germany, that bad last century
still bleeding into this one, blood
still soaking the feet of the poets,
while our little boy, new to history,
runs laughing under a blazing sun 
through the green illiterate meadows.
 

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

__________

George Bilgere: “One day last summer my five-year-old son walked in from the backyard and dropped a pill bug on the dining room table where I was eating my scrambled eggs. ‘Pill bugs are the dinosaurs of the backyard,’ he told me gravely. And I thanked him, because now I had an idea for a new poem. As anyone who has kids knows, they are born poets. The trick is to help them hold onto it as the distractions of adulthood loom.” (web)

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February 10, 2023

“Conduction” by Francesca BellPosted by

Francesca Bell

CONDUCTION

The man drives as closely to my car 
as he can without making contact. 
His truck window is down. 
He is taking my right of way,
and I’m driving home, already crying,
from the audiologist’s office. 
I’ve turned on the music 
and have just been thinking
that somewhere in Denmark, 
an engineer lays her head
on a pillow filled, perhaps,
with eiderdown, her mind stuffed
with equations she mastered
in order to write the code
for the music setting on my 
new hearing aids. They cost me
as much as a used car 
and will not rejuvenate
my cilia, cannot rebuild
this foundation that gradually
crumbles, but they have
resurrected, for this moment, 
the voice of the trumpet 
and polished its bright tones.
I cannot conceive 
of how the years she bent 
to her math books resulted
in this flashing beauty,
but I lean on it
the way a person leans
on a crutch when her knee
has given out, the way
I lean on Telemann who wrote
this concerto almost 300 years ago,
each note big enough
to compensate—across time—for loss, 
for the man passing slowly by,
menace blaring from his eyes, 
as, triumphant, he raises
his middle finger like a baton. 
 

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

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Francesca Bell: “I write poetry in order to record the world’s strange symphony of abundance and loss, so I can play it back and try to make sense of it.” (web)

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November 17, 2022

“Baby Love” by Courtney KampaPosted by

Courtney Kampa

BABY LOVE

Gregory had a mole below his left eye
and sometimes kids in our 5th grade class 
would tease him, saying he had chocolate 
on his face. I was the girl who knew it 
was his left eye and not his right. Who listened 
in secret to Oldies 100—music like Baby Love by the Supremes 
and knew every Patsy Cline song by heart. Gregory 
didn’t backpack pocket blades to school like Richard 
or look up girls’ skirts beneath the monkey bars 
the way Kenny did, whose mom let him watch 
all the Late Night TV he wanted. He was nothing 
like Vinny who’d steal the grape juice box 
off your desk when you weren’t looking.
And he didn’t mock William, whose dad worked hard
for a gasoline company—gasoline has the word gas
in it, which all the cool kids thought 
was pretty funny; really classic. Gregory had immaculate 
Ticonderoga erasers and he made my knee-socks droop 
and he made my weak bony ankles 
weaker. At recess before summer a soft piece of sidewalk 
tar was thrown at my feet and I looked up 
and there he was, skipping backwards, a rocket wanting 
me to chase him. Mrs. Rivers led him off to suggest 
alternative ways of procuring
female attention and in those awful green uniform pants
he looked back at me and winked—which is not 
something the average 5th grader does
to another 5th grader. Three weeks later his winking face was fed
into the teeth of a triple car wreck. Eleven years 
and I’m still mouthing the triple syllables 
of his name. Not because he needs me to
but because I have no alternative way of procuring 
his attention. At school I quit talking, Colin inches 
from my face taunting SAY-SOME-THING
but I didn’t, so now I will say something, I will say 
that I cried at our class talent show, watching Gregory’s mom 
out in the audience, shirt mis-buttoned, camera readied,
looking for him, and seeing him
nowhere. I will say that with Gregory gone there was no one 
to stop the boys from snapping 
Stephen’s stutter like a twig across their knees. I’ll say ours 
was a misfit purity. That after art he gave me 
his scissors and I swapped 
him mine, both blades aimed forward, looking at each other 
like we’d just done something 
dangerous. Handles inked with initials 
in handwriting not his, marked the way mothers mark us carefully
when we walk into the world. I’ll say that I still 
have them. Gregory, ask me to name a thing 
as indestructibly beautiful as you, and I cannot. Time disfigures 
those who breathe and those of us who no longer can
but none of that has touched you. Not the cruelty 
of children. Not the gravel and glass
that pushed their way into your green 
restless legs. Not the ugliness of an ambulance
come too late. Not the small grass square 
that mothers and quilts you. Not even the skid marks 
below your brother’s eyes, tire treads 
red across his chest. Love is nothing
if not what takes its time. It takes sweet 
time and it took tar but was taken 
by tar and it’s taken eleven years of not trusting 
the pitch of my voice or the shamed 
insufficiency of what I have 
to say—that at your service I got no further 
than taking a holy card from the altar boy; picture 
of an angel as dark-haired as you: an angel I’d soon shred 
to ribbons, my hand around those handles for the first
and only time. Gregory, think of me 
in St. Joe’s parking lot in July in a sweaty cotton skirt. 
Think of my confession to that angel, in his headband 
of light, how much I liked 
him too. Hoping you had stopped a moment 
in the beatific beating of your wings; in the now-familiar strumming 
of that strange, beseeching harp.
 

—from Rattle #42, Winter 2013
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Courtney Kampa: “I wrote ‘Baby Love’ four years ago while attending the University of Virginia.” (web)

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