Rachel Custer

June 17, 2019

“The Grand Dragon of the KKK is Buried Near My House” by Rachel CusterPosted by

Rachel Custer

THE GRAND DRAGON OF THE KKK IS BURIED NEAR MY HOUSE

They let him down, four local boys
with faces valleyed by years,
and eyes that skitch away sideways
like outdoor dogs. He’d never miss a piece
o’ blueberry pie says the one, agreement
hanging between them like long years,
like all the black mornings through which
they’d staggered home, drunk as a man could get
if he drank from overtime to closing time.
They were men in various stages of falling down.
They lowered him home, and it’s a good thing
he died young, thought at least one,
my strength ain’t what it once was,
I don’t know how much longer I’ll hold up.
He was somethin’ says the guy
whose shoulder hurts worst, remember
the summer we was all on TV? and he lifts his eyes
upward toward memory: himself at 19,
his muscles coiled ready inside his skin.
He really was a man to be reckoned with.
Nobody says nothing, but they’re all agreeing,
rubbing the young back into their joints,
his name like a balm that burns away the years.
And again, as if somebody had disagreed:
His name means something here, everybody
knowed him for somebody, and they lift
their eyes again, to bodies before pain,
to the value of a name, here, where every
grave is a pauper’s grave, off this nowhere
road, where every car is a car from here.

—from Rattle #63, Spring 2019

__________

Rachel Custer: “I like to write poems that challenge me. Sometimes, I challenge myself to write about people or situations that elicit strong reactions. I like to write against my own emotions, thoughts, and judgments. Sometimes it teaches me something about myself, or about what it means to be human. Sometimes it cements in me what I already knew. Sometimes it shows me what I don’t.” (web)

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April 21, 2019

“Notre Dame de Paris Catches Fire” by Rachel CusterPosted by

Rachel Custer

NOTRE DAME DE PARIS CATCHES FIRE

And everybody becomes a poet, seeing
meaning where there is no meaning,
seeing metaphor in the destruction
of metaphor. A house of God on fire
is a poem. Listen: it is saying nothing
stands forever, nothing you love will
not be burned away. Good Friday
has come again, and somewhere men
nail themselves to wood to feel like God.
Somewhere a man sets fire to a girl.
A crucifixion is a poem, saying nothing
dies forever. Even a woman who burns
will rise again. Notre Dame will rise again,
says a man on a Paris street, and he
is crying. Paris is not the same without
her. A man crying on the street is a poem
saying nothing feels like holiness, the fire
that burns away everything but what is
good. What is good? This day, a man
coming down from his cross, a girl
walking forth from a fire, raising again
her voice to sing the good news.

—from Poets Respond
April 21, 2019

__________

Rachel Custer: “Gospel means ‘good news.’ The good news is that, despite the hard news this Holy Week, we can be redeemed through the saving blood of Christ. Notre Dame will rise again. So will we.” (web)

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November 8, 2017

“Kid” by Rachel CusterPosted by

Rachel Custer

KID

The thing about living here: even a child can know things.
I know every shortcut, every bike path through the park,
every street between every house. I know every kid who lives
in each one. Every crack in every sidewalk that can possibly
catch a toe or a skateboard or bike. Who is cousins with who.
Whose parents the police don’t like. Whose parents the priests
don’t like. I’m kinda kidding, but not really, you know? It’s
like that. Kids know more than adults, anyway, and in a small
town, everybody talks. I know where spring comes to the park
first, and when, and how. (In the back part, behind a certain tree,
a small patch of lenten roses. Mr. Hower, the older man who
cuts the grass, planted them. To remember his wife. You know.)
Living here, a kid knows things he shouldn’t know. He can
go anywhere, because he has a town full of adults who are
sure he’s being watched by other adults. And he is, but a kid
learns how to blend in. A kid learns early that adults will
never really see us unless they believe that we’re not safe.
And they believe this town itself is safe. So here we are, kids,
standing outside the window where Mrs. So-and-so cleans
the kitchen in her skimpy underwear. Here we are, on the
corner, planning a fight. Kids are behind the liquor store,
sipping cheap wine, and kids are in your bedroom drawer
stealing joints. Because we know every house where the
parents hold drugs. A small town is a place where everybody
watches out for everyone else so they have something to say
Monday at work. A place where each person knows the
name of each other person’s kid, but rarely knows exactly where
his is. A small town is more seduction than truth, like a trick
coin in the hand of a con. Please don’t tell any of this to my Mom.

—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
Tribute to Rust Belt Poets

__________

Rachel Custer: “These poems are part of a collection of ‘rural voice’ poems on which I’m working. The Rust Belt is, in some ways, the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, married to rural America as an identifying philosophy. These voices are so often overlooked for big-city slick and the fashions of the day. There is a sense about rural America that nothing ever changes, and simultaneously that everything is always changing elsewhere. That we are losing ourselves. We are grounded by earth, the change of the seasons, and by work. In this sense, Rust Belt is an apt name.” (web)

 

Rachel Custer is this week’s guest on the Rattlecast! Click here to watch live or archived.

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July 28, 2017

“Color Study While Withdrawing” by Rachel CusterPosted by

Rachel Custer

COLOR STUDY WHILE WITHDRAWING

The new couch is gray. Or it’s a color
called, in the inflated language of glossy ads,
puffed musk. Which, to be more precise, 
looking more closely now, is a shade of mushroom 
somewhere between morel and portobello. Why 
do I keep thinking it’s gray? 
          My daughter’s eyes
are hazel, but tend, certain days, toward gray.
If you’ve ever seen a foal just birthed, that 
so-fast tremor of skin new to air, my daughter’s
eyes are like that—the sense of being wholly
alive. My daughter’s eyes are gray.
                      Sometimes
I feel the pull, magnetic, of the time I almost
managed to escape this life, and that, too, is gray,
like if you ever mixed papier-mâché. Which
is wet newspaper covered in a flour and glue
paste. That pull is like this, holding a cold glop
of that grayness, when your only real desire
is to have clean hands.
My only real desire
is to look at the couch. That gray, textured,
tactile, so here. To avoid the too-alive gray
of my daughter’s eyes. To ignore the sick-
wet pull of the in-between.
        I swallow it all
and stare at the couch’s back. My daughter
watches mine.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

[download audio]

__________

Rachel Custer: “Mental illness (depression and anxiety) both inform and breathe life into my work, while simultaneously making it difficult to actually get work done. I write to escape fear, and to process trauma, and in a sometimes desperate attempt to purge the dank, poisonous landscape that is clinical depression. I write because I am compelled, and also because I love to write. Sometimes it’s hard to know if writing helps me stay sane or just adds to the negativity of my thoughts when I am in the grip of a depressive episode or panic attack.” (book)

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April 6, 2017

“Togetherness in the Age of Terror” by Rachel CusterPosted by

Rachel Custer

TOGETHERNESS IN THE AGE OF TERROR

After my father yells for the third time from the living
room to close the door, we’re paying to heat the world!
my mother looks at me and we all laugh. When is a door
not a door? she widens her eyes at the grandbabies, one
by one. When, Grandma? When? When? When it’s ajar!
And we laugh again, not because it’s funny, but because
the grandbabies can’t understand, and screw their faces
up trying to cram one thing into the wrong-shaped hole
of a whole other thing. This is us: bad jokes as ubiquitous
as open doors. Two men walk into a bar. You’d think
one of them would have seen it. HAR HAR HAR life
is funny that way did you hear about the priest and the
rabbit? And the children begin: knock knock who’s there
nobody nobody who nobody cares if you fall backward
off your chair and how they throw their heads back and
laugh is the best kind of heaven there is. Dad says what’s
so funny in there? Don’t make me get out of this chair,
come over here so I can hit you. And this is a joke, too,
as old as the other. Older than the joke we all make of
our youngest brother. (Hi, Josh!) If you can’t laugh,
what do you have left? So we laugh, and joke, and laugh
some more, and somebody says hey did you hear about
the man who blew himself up on a bridge in Russia
and, anticipating the punchline, we laugh. But our
brother has his phone in his hand, and his face has
gone still and his eyes are like rabbits trembling
beneath a fox. The children are late to silence, for
the same reason they couldn’t understand the door,
couldn’t fathom what was funny about a jar. Mom
pushes my brother’s plate closer: have some more
food, you’ve barely touched your food. And from
the other room, where he has been watching the news,
and taking our silence for a chance, my father says,
a smile like a whip in his voice: Hey! When is a man
not a man? When he’s a bomb! And we laugh. God
help us, we laugh, because this is us, and because
there is nothing else to do.

—Poets Respond
April 6, 2017

[download audio]

__________

Rachel Custer: “Human beings weather traumatic stress in varying ways, one being laughter. My family has always loved to laugh, and used laughter to get through tough times. Family get-togethers are a raucous time. Laughing can serve to distance us from the horror of the terrorist attacks that are taking place increasingly throughout the world, and which we now seem to read about in the news at least weekly. That distance is helpful, of course, but there is a sense that things are reaching a level of hopelessness when it begins to seem like we are no longer even emotionally moved by these attacks. People walk by the actual bodies looking at their phones; people don’t even read the news stories in detail anymore; people can’t maintain that level of fear for that long. So we laugh, then wonder if it’s okay that we laughed, then we cry, then we laugh some more.”

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October 18, 2016

“How I Am Like Donald Trump” by Rachel CusterPosted by

Rachel Custer

HOW I AM LIKE DONALD TRUMP

for D.T. and other lonely people

Yesterday I said the thing
I was trying to say

perfectly to myself. I am something
astounding, I am like the Grand

Canyon, I said, by which I meant
I sometimes feel hedged in

by those who would sweat in hot cars for days
just to stand and look at me. And people think

I am saying I am a spectacle, a wonder
surrounded by nothing

as huge as me, and people think I am
claiming majesty. People travel for days

to look at the most important canyon, which is to say

the biggest empty space. Sometimes
I might as well kick pea gravel over the side

rather than try to explain who I am
and wait until I hear it hit the ground.

What I am trying to say
in small, hard words that always fall away

from what I mean,
is I am not the canyon, the immense

perfection of its depth, I am more
the missing earth dispersed,

trying to feel whole, to believe
that God makes sometimes

by taking away.

—from Poets Respond
October 18, 2016

__________

Rachel Custer: “Pretty much every news story right now is about Donald Trump. Except that they’re all negative, and this poem is not. Poetry can do so much, and one thing my partner and I were just talking about is the fact that these candidates are human beings, both of them. I try to imagine how it would feel to only hear myself derided and hated all day long.”

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