August 6, 2012

Charlotte Pence

PERFECTLY WHATEVER

Only in 1998 did astronomers discover that we had been missing nearly three-quarters of the contents of the universe, the so-called dark energy—an unknown form of energy that surrounds each of us, tugging at us ever so slightly.
—from “The Universe’s Invisible Hand” by Christopher J. Conselice

Now that you’re finally sexed-up, you notice
how sexed-down your friends are. One leaves
post-it notes on your office chair ordering
you to stop shaving your pubic hair. Another

with fourth-stage breast cancer tells you once
this is done, she never wants to be touched again.
Another admits whenever she has sex
with her husband, she cries, his body “perfectly

whatever.” What can you say? These conversations
gnaw at the moments in-between your next
great fuck. How can you concentrate on their currs?
Oh, but you did at one point. It’s as if you’ve woken

to a new universe in need of different equations
since the discovery of this so-called dark energy.
You can no longer read Milton, so you masturbate
instead. You see a therapist about these desires,

and she, a virgin, a Baptist, a good-girl, says, “Enjoy.
Enjoy. You’ll one day be an old lady on a bike
with plastic flowers, so do it now.” And you want
to know about this bike, these flowers,

that old woman, but you cannot concentrate.
Now that your desires are certified sane, you go
full force into this one man you’ve wanted.
Fucking in the hall, against the wall, on the carpet

spotted with NASA-neon stains that are you,
your fluids changed from drugs you take for constant
UTIs. You suspect friends disapprove of this new you.
And you can’t blame them. You know the messiness

of calculating new variables and constants. Still, you,
a vegetarian, gorge on KFC. You and this dude
fuck and eat and fuck and sleep and fuck, and
you pick up Milton’s Paradise Lost, yet again,

and look for connections. Is this world beginning
or ending? Does dark energy signify anything dark?
“World expanding,” is what you read in Scientific American.
Dark energy, the creator of us. Maybe the destroyer

that will pluck the sun like a football from our solar system,
separate atoms from atoms. Who knows? Who
cares? What is known is Nothing is now Something,
and you read the name for it: the Cosmological Constant—

and you confuse that with the air from your couch
to the wall, the air he pushes you through
to reel you back in, the air through which Satan
and the warring gods fell from one world to the next.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Charlotte Pence: “I’ve been increasingly interested in extending the circle of subjects that we bring to poetry. Science articles, which are often full of little poetic gems like ‘human flesh smells brown,’ have been my source of inspiration for the last few years. This poem lassos together a woman’s sexual peak and dark energy’s discovery, which is a combination I hope adds complexity and tension to both subjects.” (website)

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July 31, 2012

Andrew Nurkin

THE NOISES POETRY MAKES

I had zoned out, at first counting the numbers
in Fibonacci’s sequence, then considering
the idea of California as a kind of limit
that approaches infinity, and then
measuring my pulse the way my father
used to in church, and then remembering
a meatloaf sandwich I had one time as a kid
at a roadside café somewhere near Big Sur.
To this day, the best sandwich I ever had:
lightly toasted sourdough, ample slice of meatloaf,
just the right amount of mayonnaise.
And my whole family was there in the sunshine
on a road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway,
my brothers cutting up in their windbreakers,
my mother making little oohs and ahhs as she
gestured toward the ocean with a potato chip,
my father opening a Diet Coke and rolling his eyes
because I couldn’t shut up about that sandwich,
which I was just now having again in my mind
for the umpteenth time when the woman
at the front of the room finished reading
her poem about her difficult father and a rusty can opener,
which apparently had picked up some symbolic meaning
in the several minutes since I had stopped paying attention
so that the last line was pregnant with
charge and emotional resonance, causing,
after a pause, a chorus of audible exhales and low sighs,
the noises people make at poetry readings
to let each other know they have been moved,
that they love and can have their breath arrested
by poetry, the same sounds people make
when they sit in the electronic massage chairs at the mall,
exclamations of unexpected sensation that cannot be
suppressed and yet are muted for fear
of seeming uncouth, half stifled chortle, half
guttural sex groan heard through a hotel wall.
It must have been a damn good poem
because everyone seemed to be giving off
sympathetic cries and muffled moans
struggling toward articulation, a room
momentarily full of Meg Ryans in the throes.
And I, too, let out a little sigh, a soft but
audibly approving coo,
not because I wanted to go along with
the crowd, though everyone around me assumed
my noise, like theirs, owed to the difficult father,
but because I had been thinking about that sandwich,
could still almost taste it—sourdough, grease, mayonnaise,
picnic table in a gravel parking lot, penny sun
over the Pacific Ocean—and just the memory of it
gave me more pleasure than I could silently bear.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

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.” (web)

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July 27, 2012

M

TO A HUSBAND, SAVED BY DEATH AT 48

You will not see me, now
older than you are.
You will not watch my toenails
harden into turtle shells.
You will not complain about my face
creams costing more than most people
spend on groceries in a month.
Nor see me apply them to my hands
because no matter how young a woman’s face looks,
it’s always the back of her hands
that give her away.
You will never think of me as a suitable gift
for a toddler on Christmas,
shrunken to doll size, wrapped in skin
as thin as bargain paper. You will not be the one
to drive me home wet
from the Lloyd Center Mall
where restrooms are hidden away like exclusive resorts
down remote corridors.
You will not need to remind me
to take my umbrella when it’s raining,
nor find my car keys
in the refrigerator next to the eggs I bought yesterday
and we will not laugh about it.
You will not hear me struggling with nouns.
You will never be awakened late on Friday evening
by a ringing phone, wife gone from your bed,
Detective Copeland saying she was found asking people
to help her find her husband
at a Taco Bell on Burnside
that stays open from 5:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m.
every day but Sunday.
Someone else will sit with me in the ER on New Year’s Eve
listening to an alcohol poisoned teenage boy
vomit in the next room while we wait for news
about the golf ball on my temple, received for nothing more complicated
than slipping off a curb.
You will not see me without my teeth
or my gallbladder.
Never need to learn I’ve been sexually inappropriate with Paul
in The Pearl Memory Care Residence at Kruse Way
where I live apart from you for the first time in fifty years.
You will not be the one to close my eyes.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalists

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June 28, 2012

Kim Dower

WHY PEOPLE REALLY HAVE DOGS

People really have dogs so they can talk to themselves
without feeling crazy. Take me, for example, cooking
scrambled eggs, ranting about this dumb fuck
who sent naked pictures of himself to strange women,
a politician from New York, I read about it in the paper,
start telling my nervous cock-a-poo, blind in one eye,
practically deaf (so I have to talk extra loud) all about it
and he’s looking at me, poor thing, like he thinks I’m
the smartest person he’s ever heard and I go on, him
tilting his head, and when he sees me pick up my dish
of eggs he starts panting and wagging his tail, I tell him,
no, they’re not for you, but then I break down and give
him some knowing full well that feeding from the table
is rule number one of what you don’t do with dogs,
but I do it anyway because he wants them so bad,
because it makes me feel good to give him what he wants,
and I expound more to make sure he’s aware of the whole
political scandal, the implications for the democrats,
the hypocrisy, tell him dogs are rarely hypocrites, except
when they pretend to be interested in you when all they want
is your food, take him, for example, right now pretending
to love me so much when all he wants are my eggs, me
talking to him when all I want is to say my opinions with no one
interrupting, feel my voice roll out on a clear Saturday morning,
listen to it echo from the kitchen to the bath, up through the ceiling,
out to the sky, the voice from within, all alone in the morning
as the light outside catches the edge of the silver mixing bowl
where the remaining, uncooked eggs sit stirred, ready to toss
into the pan, cooked, eaten by whomever pretends to want them.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

___________

Kim Dower: “It’s important to note that my poem, ‘Why People Really Have Dogs,’ lists only one of the reasons why people really have dogs. There are many other reasons. To find out what they are, watch your dog while she sleeps and you will know.” (web)

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June 9, 2012

Tony Barnstone

WHY I’M NOT A CARPENTER

Each time the carpenter with a sharp rap sets a nail
then whangs it head and shaft into the tan flesh of the wood
and slips the hammer back into the leather belt,

I think of Achilles casting his spear so fast
it pinned the Amazon queen and her horse together
“as a man might impale some innards on a spit.”

Each time he sinks a nail he says below his breath,
“mmn-hmn,” as if to say, “Yes, that will do,”
then sets and sinks the next. Yes, he’s my brother,

but it’s enough to make me want to whack him one
as I jag my cuts, and ding the wood,
and warp the nail, and skew the screw.

His rhythmic hammerings make perfect stress,
tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, but half my mind’s
trying to write a poem, so my hammering’s a mess,

like the failed lines I mouth below my breath
—until a hopeful phrase sends me scrabbling
for the flat, fat-tipped carpenter’s pencil and a square of plywood,

something about swimming at Spy Lake after work,
white flashes diving from the canoe
and concentric moonlight like rippled music,

the lakewater turned to black vinyl and my body
the needle that moves within the groove.
I wanted to write something about the shout

ripped out of the mouth by joy, the strangeness of being
a being channeled through time,
pierced by the needle of right now, and the way

we kill our life by living it, and the song of
all we were unraveling behind us, the song that plays
as a record spins to its end, and the sorrow

of that, and how I still sing in the shower.
That’s the poem that I wanted to write
but that was twenty years ago,

and every line I wrote that summer
went into the scrap and sawdust pile,
and all that sun-moist morning I hoisted

the pickaxe and made it sing on asphalt,
sank post holes, fucked up cuts with the SkilSaw,
thought literary thoughts, and screwed up.

And since I was more a poet than a man,
my brother sent me to buy studs at the yard
ten blocks off, and when I got lost in Boston

and dragged in hours later like a bedraggled sailor,
the crew just laughed and went back to their tasks,
And it’s time to tell the truth:

that was thirty years ago and I’ve gone on
to other crafts, the way today I take the pen shaft
in my hand and cast my mind into the void

and with each line I give a little “huh!” of joy.
And you don’t have to tell me how after he bragged
about his feat Achilles removed the queen’s helmet

and her blonde hair spilled free in strands of light,
and her goddess face shone, and, pierced himself,
he fell to his knees and mourned

the beauty he’d killed with his great shaft.
I know it’s not heroic to fix my mind to the page
in lines like a butterfly pinned and dried,

and I know just this of carpentry:
once the house is built the rot sets in.
But since making is what I have,

I make what I can out of this long unmaking
with what tools I have at hand
now that my power tools are powered down

and covered with a powdering of dust,
now that my yellow leather carpenter’s belt has stiffened,
its pockets stuffed with nails long turned to rust.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Tony Barnstone: “‘Why I’m Not a Carpenter’ was a poem I wrote inspired by a dinner I had with Yusef Komunyakaa, who is editing an anthology of carpenter poems. At that dinner, I promised Yusef a poem, and so wrote this one to order. My brother Rob is a former carpenter who is now an architect and professor, and I spent many of the summers of my youth working with Rob renovating houses in Greece and Boston, in Vermont and Indiana. In our unusual crew, the working class grunt sinking post holes or wiping his sawdust-covered brow was most likely a Harvard architecture student, a brilliant painter, or, in my case, a graduate student at Berkeley writing his dissertation on William Carlos Williams, and I strongly felt the way these different kinds of craft still carried gender biases and constructions of masculinity and femininity. I decided to reference my insufficient skills as a carpenter and as a poet in part by alluding to the title of Frank O’Hara’s wonderful poem ‘Why I’m Not a Painter,’ in which he shows the parallel and yet divergent skill sets and mind sets that go into painting versus poetry. Another element in the poem, the story about Achilles killing the Amazon queen, comes not from The Iliad, but from the 4th century epic poem by Quintus of Smyma that I happened to be reading. Quintus’s epic, titled Posthomerica, is a Trojan War poem that creates some new Homeric stories and puts a new spin on the familiar ones. The final element that I blended in was a failed draft of a poem that I had tried to write while working on a crew in Boston in 1988 or so. I am particularly happy that that failed draft, one that I worked on for years without success, has finally been crafted into the poem that I like. Thank you, Yusef!” (web)

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June 1, 2012

Pia Aliperti

BOILER

The radiator clanked and banged all night,
clattering coins and glass boots.
The bedroom was still cold.

Sometime after 3 a.m. I fall back into bed,
read Vincent’s letters.
It is 1881, nine years before his death,

and he has just been rejected
by his pretty, widowed cousin (“Never, no, never!”).
His feelings for her have smoldered unspoken

and now he is white-hot. He writes his brother Theo
If I did not give vent to my feelings every so often,
I think the boiler would burst.

I call my brother whenever I walk
from Flatbush Avenue to my walk-up apartment.
We talk about his girlfriend who moved to Seattle,

his feral cat, the flocks of birds
falling to earth in tandem.
I am not naturally forthcoming. I wait

until I need to make an adjustment,
loosen a bracket, twist a knob counterclockwise
before I spill that I am miserable,

or defeated
or wildly optimistic: I am almost pleased
with my ‘never, no, never.’

Vincent saw in Kee Voss a woman who knew
grim days, and fear, and worry.
She already had a child. He glimpsed an interior

swashed in yellow, so he pounded on the door.
I imagine she was shocked
for “never, no, never” beats with intent.

The groundhog was not released last week;
there was no room for shadow.
But Vincent thought, if this is truly over,

Wouldn’t she say something worse
to me than ‘never’?
They are questioning me about my intentions

to turn on the light.
My appointments bore me.
I despise my punctuality.

Let the lights burn out. Let the laundry grow
larger. I will write about toothbrushes if I want to.
I check my e-mail once a day and wince.

This is not a yellow life.
I get very cross when people tell me that it is dangerous
to put out to sea.

Did you know when he wrote those words
he hadn’t yet sketched out The Potato Eaters;
where was his little ship then?

Eager as ever
my brother enters poker tournament after tournament
until the site kicks him off or he cashes

his next birthday check.
My brother is passionate about poker.
This man-child, my mother says

and she cuts off his tuition.
My brother asked me for money, only once.
A handshake in my thoughts! I told him,

which is also Vincent’s sign-off in letters to Theo.
He is always asking to be remembered.
They seem to forget that there is safety in the heart

of danger. I just want him to get to Arles
to the little yellow house,
where there is no shadow or shade,

to the woodcut room
where every thing points to rest.
Vincent tells his brother that he spends his days

fiddling with paints, thinking about paints
but still the ‘never’
riddle is by no means solved.

The door is now shaking
to the heavy drone of the radiator.
I’m sure the ceiling moved. I will not

call you. There is no home
in white-heat. Only yellow
in an open shutter.

It is not here yet, but it moves
like a season.
It walks like a soul.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

___________

Pia Aliperti: “Reading poetry makes me want to be wild and turn others wild with me. How can you read something like Gregory Orr’s ‘Love Poem’ or Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God and resist the urge to answer? I write because the goose-bumped, prickly pleasure I get from reading demands more strange music.” (website)

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May 18, 2012

Devika Brandt

WHAT MY PARENTS WANT

At 86 Dad wants a new silver Mercury with heated seats.
Mom wants whatever Dad wants. We’re on the phone,
and I’m scrubbing the kitchen floor with my headset
on, scratching at the black sap marks that stick and
spread before finally letting go. We’re all tired of talking.
So I don’t ask them about moving closer to their kids;
I don’t mention the nurse they fired; I don’t say I think
they’re making a mistake. I breathe hard and tackle
a tough wad of sap. They tell me how cold it is in Las Vegas
in the winter; how the mountains turn purple in their rise
toward the sky. I don’t ask them if they’re eating. I keep
myself from mentioning their many medications. They
want me to love them; they want me to leave them alone.
They want to fumble along the walls of their stucco
house until one falls down, cheek to the cool tile
of the floor, bones so heavy, joints stiff, life blood
thick and unwilling. I hope the other one will lie down too,
pull an afghan over them, the one with squares her mother
made. I hope in the accumulating heat of the desert
they will gasp into each other’s arms and give themselves
away. I hope they can do it without breaking. I hope
they can do it in the clean sweet heat of the day, an open
mouthed entry, the last ripe fruits of breath released.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

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