Rattle Poetry Prize

August 8, 2023

“Remember It Wrong” by David HernandezPosted by

David Hernandez

REMEMBER IT WRONG

Everyone’s memory is subjective. If in three weeks we
were both interviewed about what went on here
tonight, we would both probably have very, very
different stories.
—James Frey on Larry King Live

My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my
cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen
nearly shut.
—James Frey, from A Million Little Pieces

But I was there, 12C, window seat, and there
was no blood anywhere except the blue kind
making blue roots under the skin of our wrists.
From what I recall his teeth were all present,
ivory and symmetrical, one pristine incisor
flushed against the next like marble tiles.
Teeth other teeth aspire to be. I saw no hole
in his cheek but a razor nick or new pimple,
some red blip on his otherwise unblemished face.
Boyish. Babyish, even. The only holes
were the two he breathed from and the one
called a mouth that demanded another pillow,
headphones, club soda, more ice.
His nose was intact, straight as the tailfin
dividing the sky behind us. There was turbulence,
the plane a dragonfly in a windstorm.
My cup of Cabernet sloshed, my napkin bled,
a bag rumbled in the overheard bin like a fist
pounding inside a coffin. I was calm, I fly
all the time, but the man in question
was quivering and paler than a hardboiled egg.
Eyes swollen open, eyes skittering and green.
Or brown or blue. Memory is a murky thing,
always changing its mind. Interview me again
in three weeks and maybe I’ll remember
his wounds, the way my grandmother
gradually put down the knife after she spread
butter on her napkin. Slowly the disease worked,
slowly erasing slowly what her brain slowly
recorded over the slowly decades. Memory
is a mysterious thing, shadow of a ghost,
nebulous as the clouds we pierced on our descent,
Chicago revealing itself in my little window
like dust blown from a photo of someone
it takes you a moment to recognize.

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

__________

David Hernandez: “You wrote ‘Remember It Wrong’ in July of 2007. You don’t remember much from that experience other than typing ‘babyish’ for the first time in your life. You wonder why ‘babyish’ isn’t used more often in poetry and why ‘honeysuckle’ stays in fashion despite wearing the same pair of bellbottoms year after year. You remember Toughskins. Their durability. Your grandmother removing grass-stains with a scrub brush.” (web)

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June 10, 2023

“Whale Bone” by Steven BrownPosted by

Steven Brown

WHALE BONE

In this field of fireweed and wild oat
that leans for ten thousand mornings to the east,
I see the wind coming
from miles and miles away
like wakes at the back of an unseen boat.

At first, it seems an incredible distance
between the wind and where I stand, but then
as if it knew my time on earth
unpredictable as lightning path,
as if it knew that for love to work,
it must catch up, it must travel fast,
it blows over me, its body an enormous swimmer.

It is in this place I know the truth of things:
that whales, when they die, swim out of the deep water
into the bright blue, their heavy bones forgotten
with effortless glide, that is to say, with grace.

They know and are a part of what is always,
what is true in the wind and the long grass.
I watch as the whales go by, all breath,
touching the things that cannot last.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Steven Brown: “VW vans, pickup trucks, El Caminos. I often wonder about them, parked on the side of an interstate, abandoned or broke-down. Nothing but fields of dry grass or dark pine. Where did the owners of the vehicles go? There are cows everywhere and crickets. I like to think they’re out there somewhere—the permanently fed-up—thousands of them in the woods who’ve got it all figured out.”

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June 2, 2022

“Beginner’s Lesson” by Malcolm AlexanderPosted by

Malcolm Alexander

BEGINNER’S LESSON

If you wish to be wealthy, duck beneath
the topcoat of a well-dressed river
until you come up with a mossy boot
filled with shiners. Spend them wisely.

To tread lightly on the earth,
first breathe in and out slowly
to sense how oxygen walks barefoot,
then observe butterflies, so weightless
even our poetry burdens them.

Avoid mistaking sadness for blueberries,
but if this happens, remember only one
of the two tastes like a somersault.

Make nothing more of the moon
than what it is, a great big pebble
hunting for a shoe, not to be confused
with the heart, likewise a vagabond.

Inside of every stray cat lurks a person
who discarded love. Remember this
when you bend over to wind them up.

If you feel compelled to fly a flag,
note how it struggles in vain to be a rainbow
and how envy will make it twist and flap
like a tongue. Consider instead a kite.

If you desire to reach heaven,
have your body buried in an aspen grove.
In time, all of you will wick up
into a loud version of it.

If the noise of the human world overwhelms you,
trace the voicebox of an orchid with your finger.
When you get to the aria, listen.
But beware, for beauty can be a lacewing
or a meteor, and lands wherever it pleases.

When you finish reading a poem,
bend it around so you can see
yourself in it. Then laugh out loud.
Everything else now should come easy.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Malcolm Alexander: “I began to read poetry and then later attempted to write it, not only while in prison, but on account of it. Ironically, I don’t have to struggle like most folks to find the time to write. On the other hand, this place sure as hell ain’t Yaddo. Though the idea of ‘Beginner’s Lessons’ came to me as a quirk of wordplay and image about an old boot filled with golden fish, the various stanzas went through three years of revisions in an attempt to make each one just offbeat enough to make a person think about its underlying truth.”

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April 1, 2020

“Cathedrals: Ode to a Deported Uncle” by Daniel Arias GómezPosted by

Daniel Arias Gómez

CATHEDRALS: ODE TO A DEPORTED UNCLE

Tío, you learn there’s always
a border—I imagine

a poor family in Jocotepec takes you
in. You work as a gardener at the club
across the lake where rich people
vacation. The town’s children run
shoeless on the dirt roads, stare
at the people on the other side
sun-tanning on the decks of their
boats, riding their jet skis, and
if the children smile, it’s because they don’t
know where the lake begins
and where it ends. And maybe one
night you find a guitar, and you press
your fingers to the strings, and the music feels like

the desert.
Michelle and I drive

to Robertito’s at one in the morning
to buy tacos de asada, carnitas, a churro,
a small coke. It’s freezing
cold, and a dense fog covers
the streets. We see the fog as it froths around
the street lamps, almost like the fog is pouring
down along with the light. Other than that we
see nothing but the double darkness
of fog and night. Our kitchen flooded recently,
and a chunk of our carpet got water
damage. The carpet guys are coming over
tomorrow, so we had to move all
the furniture into the kitchen to clear
the carpet. We eat our tacos squeezed
in, all cluttered up by the dining room table
propped against a wall, chairs stacked
against bookshelves, a cathedral of pots, pans, flower

vases filled with dried roses.
You mow the grass

at the club, you trim their bushes and keep
their orange trees. At night, you play
guitar in a small house you manage to buy, your fingers
full of blisters because of the strings. And maybe
you buy a used bocho, and you fix it up
on your free days and paint it blue
and then drive an hour to Guadalajara
and walk around downtown and buy
pepinos con chile y limón and tacos
de lengua and sit outside the cathedral
eating some tejuino. And then you mow
and mow grass and go back at night
and learn a few more chords on the guitar
and learn that you love playing. And maybe you
meet someone you like. You tell her about Arizona,
the desert, and she tells you about the time
one of the rich couples were riding their boat around
drunk and crashed into one of the town’s
houses, and the children gathered and stared
at the boat sticking out of the small living
room, and the woman who owned the house
fell to her knees and cried while the couple walked

away bent
with laughter. And maybe your friend

stays over one night, and you play guitar for her,
teach her a couple of chords, and you
sit outside and smell the rain in the air and feel the cold
wind against your skin, and if
you smile it’s because you feel the weight
of an arm around your shoulder and because
rain is a cathedral too and your

skin a prayer.
As Michelle and I eat, cramped

in our kitchen, we look over a used car magazine
we picked up from Robertito’s. I tell
Michelle to close her eyes, then I
open the magazine at a random page and tell her
to point her finger at it, and whatever
car she lands on, that’s the car we’ll buy
for her. We do the same for me, laughing
all along because we have no money
to buy a car. Then we lay some blankets
on the carpet and we lie down. Sleeping on the floor
makes my neck and shoulders hurt
in the morning—but tonight I’m thinking about kissing
every part of Michelle’s body, licking every inch of her
until she comes, fucking on the carpet until we fall
exhausted on the blankets, sweat glistening
on our skin, our legs spreading
like a cathedral, and sleep

until it’s morning,
and we have to go to work.

—from Rattle #66, Winter 2019
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Daniel Arias Gómez: “During the last year of my MFA, I read Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec, a book that made a deep impression on me because of the way it blends a contemporary narrative with mythological elements. After that I became fixated on the idea of the crossing of the underworld as a parallel to the crossing of the immigrant and what that might mean within the context of our mundane day-to-day lives. This poem is part of that exploration.” (web)

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March 30, 2020

“Foreign-ness” by Maya Tevet DayanPosted by

Maya Tevet Dayan

FOREIGN-NESS

1.
“I’m not obsessed,”
Violette says, “just really passionate
about you trimming your side of the hedge.”
In translation from Canadian: she is about to report us to the city.
My husband responds immediately: “Gladly!”
The sorrow of the penalty starts sprouting in his throat.
He would gladly trim Violette’s head 
instead of standing on a ladder
with a rusty pruning hook in four degrees Celsius.

2.
From the top of the ladder, Violette’s yard unfolds
precise as a map. Two tanning chairs dripping
of April showers, rows of flowers saluting 
the grass. My husband waves the pruning hook 
to say hi, as Violette appears with the black dog,
screams “Cody!” and apologizes for the umpteenth time:
“The dog is deaf.”
At home, my husband whispers to me, “The dog can hear fine!
I’ve heard her speak to him in a regular tone.”
The thought sticks to my mind,
why pretend a dog is deaf?

3.
My husband is an avid believer in conspiracies; traffic jams
are an economic plot run by governments. Russian oligarchs 
keep the state of Israel from collapse. Clouds
are chemical trails that will bring humanity to destruction.
“Trust me,” he whispers,
“she’s out to get us.” Through the trimmed trees,
Violette can see us better now—
red poisonous mushrooms popped up after the rains.
The bushes grow wild, the girls’ toys
still scattered on the garden path since summer.

4.
I’m missing Sasson and Galila, my childhood neighbors 
who lived across a tangled fence that no one ever trimmed.
At lunch, I ate chicken and potatoes with their daughters
right out of the pan. I helped sort folded laundry into their closets,
I knew Galila’s lingerie drawer and her fights
with Sasson. They screamed like crows
and made up like rabbits—mouth, tongue,
all of it. “That’s what a happy marriage looks like,” Galila said.
“Not a single day goes by that you don’t want a divorce.”

5.
The day we moved here, Violette extended her hand to me
tall and wrinkled
and introduced herself: “I’m separated,
don’t feel bad about it.” I agreed.
“Good,” she said, “when you’ve had enough 
 you’ve had enough.”

6. 
She introduced the neighborhood: her three dogs,
the raccoon that tips the garbage pails, the rats,
the squirrels that nibble at the rooftops. She told me
what calms her: gardening and spreading traps for the squirrels.
She has to calm down. Her husband
still hasn’t removed his things from the house,
the neighbors won’t stop sighing 
about the separation,
and her daughter stopped eating.

7. 
My best friend in high school stopped eating. Retreated
quietly from meals
while we gossiped, studied, watched movies.
Her body shrunk
as though offended. Why did she hide it? 
Why from me?
Still, I nod in understanding
every time Violette tells me
about her daughter. In my mind, she is dark skinned
like my friend, black hair, thick lips. Violette’s daughter
lies on the carpet in her room in Raanana,
leaning over our history notebook,
always in those 501 Levi’s jeans from the ’90s.

8.
Galila said: “Those miserable girls 
whose jeans hang on them like on a scarecrow.
Be proud that you have something to grab!”
And when I slouched, she announced,
“It’s those with flat breasts that should be ashamed!”

9.
Violette and I talk about gardens, never about “territories.”
About animals, never about “terror.”
When she leaves a note on our front door
with the Baptist church logo,
I don’t tell her that I was born
where the Jordan River extends from the Sea of Galilee,
where John the Baptist cast water on the head of Christ,
and how, as children, we peeked at the pilgrims
coming out of those same waters, with their sheer gowns: bellies
bosoms, hips, thin bums
and big bums.

10.
The note said: “I have Build-a-Bear teddies for your daughters.”

11.
My daughters don’t play with Build-a-Bears.
I thank Violette for her good intention. 
She figures I’m excited about the teddies, hands me 
a heavy sack and apologizes:
“My daughter demanded all the accessories.
She never took no for an answer.”

12.
In a better world, Violette’s daughter 
would have taken no for an answer, felt shame
for being as thin as a scarecrow, eaten something right out of a pan 
and babysat my daughters. 
Instead, she is my dark-skinned friend from high school,
and I’m walking on eggshells speaking to her mom. Weary
but not sure of what.

13.
I allow my girls to go to Violette’s house
to pet the dogs. I stand behind the trimmed trees 
and listen. I pray she doesn’t ask them
about the teddies we gave to charity,
and that they’re not too loud, too Israeli.
She might tell them something that sounds nice
like, “Maybe you want to be 
more quiet.” In Canadian want means have to.
My daughters get that by now.

14.
What my girls really want is to play
every day with Violette’s dogs.
What Violette wants is for her husband
to get his things out of the house.
What my husband wants is to crack
her internet passwords.
“What for?” I ask. “We have our own wifi.”
“For fun,” my husband says. 
“It’s easy to guess dog-owners’ passwords.”
I ask him if he has nothing better to do.
“There you go!” he cheers. “Curby111, Gina222, Poppy333.”

15. 
Galila said: “Love is something 
you give a man anyways. 
So you may as well give it
to a rich man.”

16.
Violette gave her love to a rich man. She says
he didn’t do badly in business. 
She lives in an aubergine-coloured house
four stories high, with a wooden balcony and a waterfall
in the yard. She arranges pebbles
in the shape of a stream. Places a bench. Shoves gas
into holes in the garden, runs after a mole-rat
through the thick fumes ascending from the ground,
measures the heights of trees with a ribbon.
The two wrinkles between her eyebrows deepen
like dimples in the soil.
The three short dogs follow her
like a gaggle of goslings.

17. 
I read that goslings always follow
the first creature to move in front of them when they hatch.
It’s usually the goose. Her march imprints them,
like a secret password, like hypnosis. 
The goose never needs to look back.
Water imprints the salmon, who always return to their native stream
in order to spawn. 
Foxes, guinea pigs, chickens—all imprinted
to identify the one who brought them into this world
and to survive.

18.
In late spring, I see Violette’s daughter for the first time
stepping out of their gate, floating onto our street
tall and thin as a lone ghost. 
Her hair is long and ginger.
Her face fair and blurred like the afternoon moon. 
If she were to step out now 
from the Jordan River,
through her gown you’d see twigs and branches.

19. 
Sometimes an imprint goes wrong. 
A row of goslings follows a human. A kitten nurses 
from a female dog. I once had a lover
whose palms imitated my hand gestures
as he spoke. When we broke up he said, “How can you leave
when you are already imprinted in my body?”

20.
Galila said: “Don’t ever feel bad for men; 
they’ll never feel bad for you.”

21.
Violette doesn’t feel bad for her husband. She speaks of him
and the words whistle from her mouth in a whisper,
like a match before fire ignites. 
She does feel bad for the cyclamen flowers
and spreads ice around them when the air gets warm.
She shifts rocks in the garden from side to side,
and at the start of summer, she plants
right in the Canadian chill
a palm tree that arrives on a boat from Madagascar. 
“I’ve tried everything,” she says.
“The girl won’t eat.”

22.
I wonder if anyone ever researched 
what came of mothers 
whose offsprings were imprinted by others.

23.
My daughters return from Violette’s with a bouquet of purple flowers.
They tell me they’re called dahlias. They distinguish between the leaves
of silver maple, red maple, and sugar maple.
They tell me the raspberry bushes need lots of light,
and that’s why Violette asked us to trim the fence.
Their botanical knowledge expands
like an ocean between my childhood and theirs.
I ask my husband if we shouldn’t go back to Israel.
Risk the chemical clouds, the terror,
the high gas prices, the crumbling democracy
so that our girls will eat chicken at the neighbors’.
My husband reminds me that we don’t even eat chicken
and asks what it is I actually want.

24.
“You want your husband to come home with cheer,” Gallila said. 
Sasson always honked three times
when he slid into the parking lot of their home.
Gallila said, “That’s what a happy man sounds like.”

25.
One summer night, Tim is standing at my door.
Violette’s separated husband.
His head high, his hair white, like a cloud in an unconspiring sky. 
He has just removed his things from the house. He smiles softly. 
He nods and shakes the girls’ hands. 
He lingers on the family photos on the fridge.
Suddenly I feel bad for Violette. It’s too late.
He’s going back to his birthplace in the east. His car is packed. 
He’s standing at the entrance to the kitchen, looks at the onions
frying in the pan, and asks, “Maybe you have an idea for me 
to help my daughter?” 

26.
My friend’s parents hospitalized her.
I haven’t seen her since. Did she ever eat again?
Tim’s eyes hang on to me as if I was a last resort. 
I want to imprint my girls, if it’s not too late,
like goslings, like salmons, foxes. Like Galila imprinted me.
I want them to hear the inaudible sound 
of our blood, to identify the smell of my palms, to belong to me
in the endless foreign-ness of this country.

27.
Tim bends over the kitchen counter and writes his number on a note.
Then signs: “Tim, Amy Anorexia.”
He says, that way you’ll remember me. He’s right.
I remember him even when I forget
other things. I remember the note
and his floating walk towards the door
in tall steps, careful, as if in a moment he’ll trip
over a pulled rope in the hall, and how instead of extending
my hand to him, I held onto the wooden frying spoon.
I remember all of those, and his embrace,
all that height
folding above me like a stalk, and the question 
he asks before leaving
standing in front of me and waiting for an answer:
“What is with you women? Why do you all at once
stop being happy?”

—from Rattle #66, Winter 2019
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Maya Tevet Dayan: “I wrote my first poem the night my mom died. She was 64. I picked up my phone to call her, to tell her the news, that she had just passed away. Instead I sent her a text which came in the form of a poem. After a year of texting poems to her mute phone I published my first poetry book, a one-sided dialogue with my dead mother. That year we left Israel and moved to Canada. Orphanhood made me feel like a stranger in my own home. I thought it will be easier to be a stranger in a place where I don’t even expect to belong. That I will feel less orphaned in a country my mom had never even visited. Being in Canada was supposed to make the distance from her more logical. It didn’t. Poetry is that ocean of fire I step into every time I’m desperate for some logic. It’s obviously hopeless. But for those moments when it seems to almost work, I keep on trying.” (web)

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March 23, 2020

“Punch Line” by Kathleen BalmaPosted by

Kathleen Balma

PUNCH LINE

One night I was the first dancer in the bar.
My shift hadn’t started.
I had time to get ready.
I had the dressing room to myself.
I was in the right frame of mind for work.
The owner was a biker named Van Zandt.
He was a 50-something strawberry blonde, short and beardless with long hair.
The bar was called Changes.
Van owned another bar, a biker bar, called Van Zandt’s.
I had the dressing room to myself.
I had my pick of chairs.
I was getting into my good money head.
Van came downstairs with a green-handled broom.
He was trying to look serious.
He was serious and trying to look dire.
He did not want sex.
He had karate on his mind.
He was drunk.
I was in stilettos.
We stared at each other.
We knew each other’s names—his full name, my stage name.
I don’t remember my stage name then.
Van laid the tip of the broom handle on the counter and held it out like a limbo stick.
I’m really good at limbo.
I made a joke about it.
He stared at the handle and made slow chopping motions.
“Hold the broom,” he said.
I didn’t know this man.
The dressing room was at the ass end of the building.
The building was huge with a maze of halls and empty side rooms.
How fast could I get up the stairs?
I would need to get out of my heels first.
They weren’t the kind you could just kick off.
They had long straps that wrapped around the ankles and tied.
“I don’t want to hold the broom.”
“Hold the broom.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to chop it in half with the power of my hand.”
“You’re too drunk.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“You can barely walk.”
“I’m not drunk! I can do this. Hold the broom.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Hold it!”
“No.”
Van loved on the unbroken broom with his eyes.
“I’m not going to hurt you. I know what I’m doing.”
“I just want to get dressed here, man.”
“I’ve done this before. I’m good at it.”
“Find somebody else.”
“You’re the only one here.”
“Cherry comes early. She’ll help you.”
“I need to do this now!”
“Dude.”
“Just. Just hold it.”
“No sir.”
“I’ll fire you. I can fire you.”
“There are other bars.”
“I’m not going to fire you, okay? This’ll be quick. You won’t even feel it.”
“Hell. No.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Splinters.”
A titty bar is a funny place.
You don’t think it gets funny in there?
You don’t think it’s hysterical fun?
It was a slow night.
I made four hundred dollars.

—from Rattle #66, Winter 2019
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Kathleen Balma: “This is one of those things I had to write. It represents a decade of my life, and it mostly wrote itself. It’s for all the women in my night family—you know who you are, hosebeasts.”

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February 1, 2020

“Self-Portrait By Someone Else” by Courtney KampaPosted by

Courtney Kampa

SELF-PORTRAIT BY SOMEONE ELSE

The afternoon we traced our 2nd grade bodies
with poster paint, legs V-shaped on paper
like the outlines of victims at a crime scene,
I was the only girl stuck partnered with a boy—
his fists filthy from prying back scalps
of onion grass, bug shells crushed up in his teeth
because he’d liked the sound. He refused
all paint-colors but blue. Leaned over me,
complaining loudly to his friends. Then his lip,
heavy with focus. And the red wing
of his tongue. Dragging his paintbrush
like a match in a room of gasoline. The week before
Debbie Kaw passed a note saying babies
came from standing too close to a boy,
or if one sweat on you, or spat
in your direction. So the girls called it brave, what I did,
letting one trace me. And I let them think so—
let them run ahead in the carpool line,
the blood still returning to my knees.
Let my mother hang it full length on the refrigerator.
The white space something I’d stepped from.
Its thick blue line sort of wobbly
between my thighs, where his hands shook.
In the mornings my little sister would stand
on one foot, looking at it. Her groggy pajamas.
Her hands playing in her lunatic hair.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Courtney Kampa: “One of the many 23-year-olds in New York City, I’m from Virginia and miss it.” (web)

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