December 23, 2011

Christopher Crawford

SO GAY

How gay is it
for two men
to stroke
the same dog
at the same time.

What if they’re both
sitting on a sofa watching
When Harry Met Sally.

How about two men watching
the same gorgeous sunset
from the same high ridge.

And if a man daydreaming
on a bus ride finds his eyes when focus returns,
quite accidentally, on the crotch
of the man seated opposite.

How about two men riding
a bus into a gorgeous sunset
or two gorgeous men watching
a sunset in silence. How about
two men daydreaming and stroking
a gorgeous dog and the dog makes
a strange deep sound of pleasure.

What if the men are old friends.
What if they’re brothers.
What if there’s music playing.

from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

__________

Christopher Crawford: “How gay is it to write poems? I like to make people uncomfortable with my poetry; I like to make myself uncomfortable. I like to use the truth to provoke, to handle strong themes in a contemporary manner. Once the opening stanza entered my mind from wherever these things come from, the rest of the poem came without too much trouble. I pinned ‘So Gay’ to the bathroom wall of my old apartment in Ho Chi Minh City in July 2010, perhaps it’s still there.” (web)

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November 23, 2011

Rattle is proud to announce the following nominees for the 2011 Pushcart Prize:

  • Patricia Lockwood – “When We Move Away from Here, You’ll See…” (#35)
  • Jan LaPerle – “She Rings Like a Bell Through the Night” (#35)
  • Christopher Crawford – “So Gay” (#35)
  • Heather Bell – “Love Letter to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill” (#35)
  • M.L. Liebler – “Underneath My American Face” (#36)
  • Dick Allen – “Knock on the Sky and Listen to the Sound: On Zen Buddhism and Poetry” (#36)

For more information on the Pushcart Anthology, and the nomination process, visit www.pushcartprize.com.

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August 19, 2011

Andrew Nurkin

THE CONTEST

Most mornings, even in the wet starvation covering everything
after the third snow in ten days, and for reasons I suspect
but am in no position to confirm, my neighbor comes out back to piss
on his garbage can in the small paved space between our houses
just below the window I stare out while pretending to read
but really trying with coffee and first light to melt the sleep,
the sense of already having blown the whole day, wasted the minutes
before they’ve even happened, though the municipal garbage truck
is just now beginning its arachnid climb up the street.
The birdbath in the middle of his yard still topped with snow like a
coconut crème on a cake service, the ones you see in diners down south,
delicious from this distance, and the tacky little cupid flag
his wife staked by the fence for Valentine’s Day now thankfully obscured
by a solid twenty inches of compressed erasure. I hear his screen door
slam and look up hoping to see his Tsi Tzu, whom he calls Terry Theresa
in his gruff mutter, the vocal illustration of enmity for the whole world,
even his damn ugly dog, as in “Terry Theresa, get the fuck out there and pee,
you turd,” hoping to see her bolt out the door, skid and slide
across the frozen yard, yapping in distress, this at least a moment of humor
at their expense, which is, I can only assume, what my neighbor
is searching for, a comedy of canine perturbation, when he flings
spoiled cold cuts over the lilac bushes lining the fence into our yard,
which he does often, slices of ham and bologna my dog gobbles down
with glee behind my back, barks for more of, scratches at the door to get,
this platter of salt and meat so unlike the dry kibble and occasional carrot
he’s used to, so new to his stomach that he vomits it up a little later
on the kitchen floor. And this is why the vengeful part of me, the raging part,
longs to see Terry Theresa yap for help as she careens
like a failed figure skater into the fence. But my neighbor follows her
out in his bathrobe, sidles up to the city-issued garbage bin
to relieve himself, and as I stare somewhere between the window
and the top of my screen, trying to take in the scene for its pure absurdity
but also revolted, for my neighbor must weigh almost three hundred pounds,
so full a man that if he were not dead I would swear I lived next door to
Marlon Brando in the later years, but it is just my enormous sonofabitch neighbor
pissing while I watch and don’t watch at the same time until he looks up
and somehow finds my gaze, and, knowing he has caught me
though I still refuse in the fragments of second that pass to meet his eyes
straight on, spreads a smile across his coldcut jowls, waves
with his one free hand, which he then lowers and uses to pull back his
bathrobe to show me his dick in full stream. It is then that I lose my nerve
and look away completely, an action I later interpret as defeat, though
what triumph would have been I have no clue. Perhaps triumph
would have been opening the window and pissing on his head,
or tossing chocolate-dipped milk bones over the lilacs, which would be the end
of Terry Theresa, or having lots of extra loud sex with strange men
right next to the window at all hours, which might be what pissed him off
to begin with, but these are just fantasies of triumph,
so all that is left to me is to write this poem, and there, now I’ve done it,
written a poem about my fat neighbor who feeds my dog deli meat,
urinates in the snow and exposes himself to me in the raw cold,
which is exactly what I needed to have done to get on with my day.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Andrew Nurkin: “Though I like going to poetry readings as much as anyone, occasionally my mind wanders. But the thing I love most about poetry, and poetry readings, is the dialogue a poem can open up between different points in time. The best poems I know are ones that knock me out of my lemming linearity into the free-form expanse of memory and experience.” (website)

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December 13, 2010

Ed Galing

NURSING HOME

this morning when i
got up
they had to change
the bed sheets again
because i had wet
myself during the
night
like a baby who can’t
control his bowels,
my helper, miss jones,
a nice young black
girl didn’t mind doing
it,
i just sat in a chair
when she changed the
dirty wet sheets with
new clean ones, and
i said, i am sorry,
and she said, with a smile,
it’s alright,
i used to do it for my
own father when he had
prostate cancer,
in this nursing home
everyone is good to me,
at ninety i don’t
have much chance of living
too long, my hands are
now mostly bone, without
much flesh on them,
i can hardly walk without
a walker, or wheelchair,
and each day the pain gets
worse,
they say nursing homes
like this one are your last
step before death,
and I see lots of that going
on,
the guy in the other bed
has alzheimers, a nice black
man who mumbles and shouts
and thinks he is in a palace
somewhere, when he is awake
he sings old man river,
and he looks at me, and says
do you like my song?
sure, sure, I tell him,
old man river, that’s both
of us,
and then we both laugh,
when my wife died and
my kids skidded wherever
they went to, I was alone
my home got sold, and my
social security was taken away,
just enough money they said
to keep me in this god forsaken
nursing home long as I live,
listen,
i am not angry at anyone,
i lived a full life,
i had young days when i
rolled around in bed
with many a woman
but married none
but the last,
the army took a piece
outta me too, when
world war two came
along,
christ, most of us
are now dead,
not too many vets alive
my age, bless em all,
what good did it do?
we still are at war,
afghanistan, iraq,
all phony political
wars,
in this nursing home
the dining room
is full of people
men and women like
me,
we are the remains
of a good supper,
with the bones
left over,
wheelchairs everywhere,
and screams in
the night,
do you need to know more?
the building?
what can i tell you …
it’s a prison
a large compound
surrounded by trees
so no one from outside
can see us dying
in here,
we eat in the dining
room,
no one laughs, but
everyone screams,
attendants push
the food in front of
us, lousy food,
same old staples,
most can’t eat it
some are fed by others,
their mouths drooling
as the spoon goes in,
I sit across from
three others at
my table and watch
people who are
without hope, their
eyes stare at
nothing,
they fall asleep at
the table,
not me,
i can still move my
arms,
the cancer hasn’t
reached that far
yet,
and anyway, what’s
a bit of a piss bag
that i wear day and
night?
better than pissing
in my pants,
and they change me
and don’t mind
and wipe my ass
too
cause i can’t reach
and push my wheelchair
into the main room
so i can sleep the rest
of the day
my nurse miss lilly
gives me a bath
once a week,
she submerges me in the
warm bath water,
and I am naked
and she tenderly washes
my scrotum and penis without
shame, don’t worry, it won’t
stir, i laugh at her,
and she grins and says,
you are one fresh guy,
but it feels so good the
way she massages me
all over, the warm water
is good for me,
don’t you mind doing this
kind of work, i ask her,
no, she says quietly,
we are all human beings,
later, scrubbed,
dried,
she dresses me and
pushes me and the
wheelchair
into the main
dining room
where they are
having bingo
today …
she leaves me
there and says
she will come
back for me
later
i sit around
and play the
game with the
few others
and all I hear
is numbers
going
around and around
in my head,
round and round,
round and round

from Rattle #33, Summer 2010

__________

Ed Galing: “Although I am not in a nursing home (yet), my life was, before my wife died. I spent lots of time with her there, through her last days (three years and still in mourning). Sadly, many do wind up in nursing homes at the end. We all have friends and family who end up in one. I tried to show the way it could be for those there who cannot express themselves, and I only wish that none of us ever have to go there. As for myself, at 93, it’s a chilling thought.”

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June 18, 2010

Lynne Knight

TO THE YOUNG MAN WHO CRIED OUT “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?” WHEN I BACKED INTO HIS CAR

I was thinking No. No, oh no. Not one more thing.
I was thinking my mother, who sat rigid
in the passenger seat crying, How terrible!
as if we had hit a child not your front bumper,
would drive me mad, and then there would be
two of us mad, mother and daughter, and things
would be easier, they said things would be easier
once she went to the other side, into complete total
madness. I was thinking how young you looked,
how impossibly young, and trying to remember
myself young, my body, my voice, almost another
person, and I wanted to weep for all I had let
come and go so casually, lovers, cities, flowers,
and then I was thinking You little shit for the way
you stood outside my window with your superior air
as if I were a stupid old woman with a stupid old woman
beside her, stood shouting What were you thinking?
as if I were incapable of thought, as I nearly was,
exhausted as I’d become tending my mother,
whom I had just taken to the third doctor in so many
days, and you shouting your rhetorical question
then asking to see my license, your li-cense, slowly,
as if I would not understand the word, and the lover
who made me feel as if I never knew anything
appeared then, stepped right into your body saying
What were you thinking? after I had told him, sobbed
to him, that I thought he was, I thought he was,
I thought we would—and then my mother began
to cry, as if she had stepped into my body, only years
before, or was it after, and suddenly I saw the whole
human drama writ plain, a phrase I felt I had never
understood until then, an October afternoon in Berkeley,
California, warm, warm, two vehicles stopped in
heavy traffic on campus, a woman deciding to make way
for a car trying to cross Gayley, act of random kindness
she thought might bring her luck then immediately—
right before impact—knew would be bad luck,
if it came, being so impure in its motive,
and then the unraveling of the beautiful afternoon
into anger and distress that would pass unnoticed
by most of the world, would soon be forgotten by those
witnessing the event, and eventually those experiencing it
while the sun went on lowering itself toward the bay
and ginkgo trees shook their gold leaves loose
until a coed on the way home from class, unaware
a car had backed into another car, unaware of traffic,
stopped to watch the shower of gingko, thought of Zeus
descending on the sleeping Danaë in a shower of gold,
and smiled over all her own lover would do
in the bright timeless stasis before traffic resumed.

from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner

__________

Lynne Knight: “My mother sang to my sister and me when we were babies, poems she’d memorized (Lewis Carroll and others), poems she made up as she went along. I’m sure my desire to write started with her singing, but she was influential in other ways. When I was wild and rebellious in my 20s, my mother observed that maybe if I stopped living what I thought was a writer’s life and actually sat down and wrote, I’d get somewhere. This stung, but slowly, I heeded her counsel; more slowly, I got somewhere. So it seems fitting for my mother to be such an essential part of the poem that won this award. Most deeply, the honor is hers.” (web)

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January 6, 2010

Patricia Smith

MOTOWN CROWN

The Temps, all swerve and pivot, conjured schemes
that had us skipping school, made us forget
how mamas schooled us hard against the threat
of five-part harmony and sharkskin seams.
We spent our schooldays balanced on the beams
of moon we wished upon, the needled jetblack
45s that spun and hadn’t yet
become the dizzy spinning of our dreams.
Sugar Pie, Honey Bun, oh you
loved our nappy hair and rusty knees.
Marvin Gaye slowed down while we gave chase
and then he was our smokin’ fine taboo.
We hungered for the anguished screech of Please
inside our chests—relentless, booming bass.

* * *

Inside our chests, relentless booming bass
softened to the turn of Smokey’s key.
His languid, liquid, luscious, aching plea
for bodies we didn’t have yet made a case
for lying to ourselves. He could erase
our bowlegs, raging pimples, we could see
his croon inside our clothes, his pedigree
of milky flawless skin. Oh, we’d replace
our daddies with his fine and lanky frame,
I did you wrong, my heart went out to play
he serenaded, filling up the space
that separated Smoke from certain flame.
We couldn’t see the drug of him—OK,
silk where his throat should be. He growled such grace.

* * *

Silk where his throat should be, and growling grace,
Little Stevie made us wonder why
we even needed sight. His rhythm eye
could see us click our hips and swerve in place
whenever he cut loose. Ooh, we’d unlace
our Converse All-Stars. Yeah, we wondered why
we couldn’t get down without our shoes, we’d try
and dance and keep up with his funky pace
of hiss and howl and hum, and then he’d slow
to twist our hearts until he heard them crack,
ignoring what was leaking from the seams.
The rockin’ blind boy couldn’t help but show
us light. We bellowed every soulful track
from open window, ’neath the door—pipe dreams.

* * *

From open windows, ’neath the doors, pipe dreams
taught us bone, bouffant and nicotine
and served up Lady D, the boisterous queen
of overdone, her body built from beams
of awkward light. Her bug-eyed brash extremes
dizzied normal girls. The evergreen
machine, so clean and mean, dabbed kerosene
behind our ears and said Now burn. Our screams
meant only that our hips would now be thin,
that we’d hear symphonies, wouldn’t hurry love,
as Diana said, Make sure it gleams
no matter what it is. Her different spin,
a voice like sugar air, no inkling of
a soul beneath the vinyl. The Supremes.

* * *

That soul beneath the vinyl, the Supremes
knew nothing of it. They were breathy sighs
and fluid hips, soul music’s booby prize.
But Mary Wells, so drained of self-esteem,
was a pudgy, barstool-ridin’ buck-toothed dream
who none of us would dare to idolize
out loud. She had our mamas’ grunt and thighs
and we preferred to just avoid THAT theme—
as well as war and God and gov’ment cheese
and bullets in the street and ghetto blight.
While Mary’s “My Guy” blared, we didn’t think race,
’cause there was all that romance, and the keys
that Motown held. Unlocked, we’d soon ignite.
We stockpiled extra sequins, just in case.

* * *

We stockpiled extra sequins, just in case
the Marvelettes decided that our grit
was way beyond Diana’s, that we fit
inside their swirl, a much more naughty place.
Those girls came from the brick, we had to brace
ourselves against their heat, much too legit
to dress up as some other thing. We split
our blue jeans trying to match their pace.
And soon our breasts commenced to pop, we spoke
in deeper tones, and Berry Gordy looked
and licked his lips. Our only saving grace?
The luscious, liquid languid tone of Smoke,
the soundtrack while our A-cup bras unhooked.
Our sudden Negro hips required more space.

* * *

Our sudden Negro hips required more space,
but we pretended not to feel that spill
that changed the way we walked. And yes, we still
couldn’t help but feel so strangely out of place
while Motown filled our eager hearts with lace
and Valentines. Romance was all uphill,
no push, no prod, no shiny magic pill
could lift us to that light. No breathing space
in all that time. We grew like vines to sun,
and then we burned. As mamas shook their heads
and mourned our Delta names, we didn’t deem
to care. Religion—there was only one.
We took transistor preachers to our beds
and Smokey sang a lyric dripping cream.

* * *

While Smokey sang a lyric dripping cream,
Levi tried to woo us with his growl:
Can’t help myself. Admitted with a scowl,
his bit of weakness was a soulful scheme—
and we kept screaming, front row, under gleam
of lights, beside the speakers’ blasting vowels,
we rocked and screamed. Levi, on the prowl,
glowed black, a savior in the stagelight’s beam.
But then the stagelight dimmed, and there we were
in bodies primed—for what we didn’t know.
We sang off-key while skipping home alone.
Deceptions that you sing to tend to blur
and disappear in dance, why is that so?
Ask any colored girl and she will moan.

* * *

Ask any colored girl and she will moan
an answer with a downbeat and a sleek
five-part croon. She’s dazzled, and she’ll shriek
what she’s been taught: She won’t long be alone,
or crazed with wanting more. One day she’ll own
that quiet heart that Motown taught to speak,
she’ll know that being the same makes her unique.
She’ll rest her butt on music’s paper throne
until the bassline booms, until some old
Temptation leers and says I’ll take you home
and heal you in the way the music vowed.
She’s trapped within his clutch, his perfumed hold,
dancing to his conjured, crafted poem,
remembering how. Love had lied so loud.

* * *

Remembering how love had lied so loud,
we tangled in the rhythms that we chose.
Seduced by thump and sequins, heaven knows
we tried to live our looming lives unbowed,
but bending led to break. We were so proud
to mirror every lyric. Radios
spit beg and mend, and precious stereos
told us what we were and weren’t allowed.
Our daddies sweat in factories while we
found other daddies under limelight’s glow.
And then we begged those daddies to create
us. Like Stevie, help us blindly see
the rhythms, but instead, the crippling blow.
We whimpered while the downbeat dangled bait.

* * *

We whimpered while the downbeat dangled bait,
we leapt and swallowed all the music said
while Smokey laughed and Marvin idly read
our minds and slapped us hard and slapped us straight,
and even then, we listened for the great
announcement of the drum, for tune to spread,
a Marvelette to pick up on the thread.
But as we know by now, it’s much too late
to reconsider love, or claw our way
through all the glow they tossed to slow our roll.
What we know now we should have always known.
When Smokey winked at us and then said They
don’t love you like I do, he snagged our soul.
We wound up doing the slow drag, all alone.

* * *

They made us do the slow drag, all alone.
They made us kiss our mirrors, deal with heat,
our bodies sudden bumps. They danced deceit
and we did too, addicted to the drone
of revelation, all the notes they’d thrown
our way: Oh, love will change your life. The sweet
sweet fairy tale we spin will certainly beat
the real thing any day. Oh, yes we own
you now. We sang you pliable and clueless,
waiting, waiting, oh the dream you’ll hug
one day, the boy who craves you right out loud
in front of everyone. But we told you,
we know we did, we preached it with a shrug—
less than perfect love was not allowed.

* * *

Less than perfect love was not allowed.
Temptations begged as if their every sway
depended on you coming home to stay.
Diana whispered air, aloof and proud
to be the perfect girl beneath a shroud
of glitter and a fright she held at bay.
And Michael Jackson, flailing in the fray
of daddy love, succumbed to every crowd.
What would we have done if not for them,
wooing us with roses carved of sound
and hiding muck we’re born to navigate?
Little did we know that they’d condemn
us to live so tethered to the ground.
While every song they sang told us to wait.

* * *

Every song they sang told us to wait
and wait we did, our gangly heartbeats stunned
and holding place. Already so outgunned
we little girls obeyed. And now it’s late,
and CDs spinning only help deflate
us. The songs all say, Just look what you’ve done,
you’ve wished through your whole life. And one by one
your stupid sisters boogie to their fate.
So now, at fifty plus, I turn around
and see the glitter drifting in my wake
and mingling with the dirt. My dingy dreams
are shoved high on the shelf. They’re wrapped and bound
so I can’t see and contemplate the ache.
The Temps, all swirl and pivot, conjured schemes.

* * *

The Temps, all swirl and pivot, conjured schemes
inside our chests, relentless booming bass
then silk where throats should be. Much growling grace
from open window, ’neath the door, pipe dreams—
that soul beneath the vinyl. The Supremes
used to stockpile extra sequins just in case
Diana’s Negro hips required more space,
while Smokey penned a lyric dripping cream.
Ask any colored girl, and she will moan,
remembering how love had lied so loud.
I whimpered while the downbeat dangled bait
and taught myself to slow drag, all alone.
Less than perfect love was not allowed
and every song they sang told me to wait.

from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Tribute to the Sonnet

__________

Patricia Smith: “As a kid growing up on the west side of Chicago, my ideas about life and love were pretty much defined by whatever Motown song was out at the moment. I began working on a manuscript about the formidable sway Motown music held over me, which was particularly timely because the label had just celebrated its 50th anniversary.” (web)

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January 5, 2010

Alison Townsend

THE ONLY SURVIVING RECORDING
OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S VOICE

I’m not expecting to hear her speak, stopped as I am
at a red light in Stoughton, Wisconsin, on the daily, desperate
dash home from work, my fractured spine throbbing
as if it housed my heart not my nerves, this snippet
on NPR as unexpected as recent November warm weather.
But here she is, sounding husky and a bit tired, her plummy
accent drawn out as she speaks about words, English
words … full of echoes and memories, associations
she does not name. It’s still 1937 in her mouth
and later I’ll learn that she’s not really talking at all,
but reading a talk called “Craftsmanship” on the BBC’s
program Words Fail Me, the script held up before her,
like a tablet of light in her long, white hands. Or a window
the sound of her voice opens in my head, her deliberate
phrasing a kind of eulogy to words and the way
They’ve been out and about on people’s lips, in houses,
on the streets for so many centuries, time passing in the hiss
and skritch of the tape. As I imagine her in the studio,
a bit tense perhaps, her hair in that dark knot, dressed up,
though no one will see her, though years later her nephew
will describe the recording as too fast, too flat, barely
recognizable, her beautiful voice (though not so beautiful
as Vanessa’s, he’ll add) deprived of all resonance and depth.
But I don’t know this as I listen, nothing to compare her to
but the sound her words made in my American head, as I lay
on my narrow dorm bed in my first November in college,
underlining phrase after phrase from To the Lighthouse
in turquoise or fuchsia ink, not because I understood
what they meant but because they sounded beautiful
aloud and my teacher had her photograph up in her office.
After my mother died, the first thing I forgot was the sound
of her voice, nothing to preserve it but a moment or two
on tape where she speaks in the background, saying
“Not now, not now,” as if no time would ever be right, even
that scrap vanished somewhere in the past. Though I recall it
as I listen to Virginia Woolf, her voice—which is nothing
like my mother’s, which my Woolf-scholar friend tells me
she “needs some time to get used to”—drifting on for eight
entire minutes, a kind of dream one could fall into, as words
stored with other meaning, other memories spill like smoke
from her throat and the light changes, and I drive on
through the gathering darkness, thinking about voices
and where they go when we die, how to describe pain
then leave it behind, her lamp in the spine
glowing, briefly lighting my way.

from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Alison Townsend: “This poem arrived for me in almost exactly the way it is described in the piece. I was on my way home from work, in pain from the effects of a long commute on a healing broken back. I was stopped at a light in my small, Midwest town, when I happened to hear a clip on NPR about the only recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice that has survived. Woolf’s writing has always been important to me, and I was stunned by the sound of her living voice. That set off a stream of associations and I made the leap from Woolf ’s voice to that of my own mother, who died when I was a young girl and whose voice I have forgotten. When I got home, I listened to the clip again, sat down, and wrote the poem. Knowing more than I did (as our poems always do), the poem made the connections and circled back to Woolf ’s concept of the ‘lamp in the spine’ of female intelligence. I felt lucky to have had that moment, where something that felt so difficult in the moment was transformed. All the italicized words are from the recording, except for the phrase, ‘the lamp in the spine,’ which appears, famously, in her writing.”

 

2020 Rattle Poetry Prize winner Alison Townsend is the guest on tonight’s Rattlecast! Click here to watch live …

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