December 13, 2017

Karen J. Weyant

WHERE GIRLS STILL RIDE THE BEDS OF PICKUP TRUCKS

The wind is always warm here. Breezes snap
through their T-shirts, hot metal and sun burn

their arms and bare legs. They stand
near the cabs, kneel by the rattling tailgates.

It’s here where they learn how to catch maple seeds
in their teeth, and how to spit them out.

Here, they learn how to dig pebbles
and bits of gravel from beneath their skin.

Some say that their bodies turn hollow,
that one can hear wind whistling through their collar bones

and shoulder blades. Some say they almost sprout wings.
But they never fly. They only learn how to balance.

Even now, you will know them, these girls
who survived quick trips to grocery stores,

wrong turns on narrow one-way streets,
even moving days, when they sat propped up,

steadying chipped coffee tables and couches.
Their ponytails are tangled with knots

that never unraveled from the way the wind
always combed through their long hair.

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

__________

Karen J. Weyant: “Born and raised in the Rust Belt, I know that rust runs through my veins. Rust coats my work, my studies, and my car. Even now, as an English professor in a small Rust Belt community college, I tell my students not to be ashamed of rust. It can make the world look at things in a different way.” (website)

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December 11, 2017

Laszlo Slomovits

AFTER THE READING BY THE FAMOUS POET

He sat at a table in the bookstore signing autographs.
We stood all around, awkward, clinging, fawning,
and he was kind, quite patient, understanding,
and separate as a sun that keeps its planets in orbit,

until she walked in. Tall, gorgeous, not looking for
our attention nor shielding from it. He stood up, said,
“Excuse me,” and walked to meet her. When they
embraced it was clear they’d once been lovers.
Long ago. Neither of them hid or flaunted it.
They stood pressed together for a long time.

Stepping back, they held each other at arm’s length,
without hunger, regret, or words. Then they both
let go, turned and walked back, she to the door
and he to the table. And we continued standing near,
even more awkward, smiling, warmed throughout,
while he continued signing his name in our books.

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

__________

Laszlo Slomovits: “Born in Budapest, Hungary, I left after the 1956 Revolution with my twin brother and Holocaust-surviving parents, lived in Israel for three years, then moved to Kingston, New York, at age eleven. I went to college at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where as a senior, I met my wife. She was accepted to grad school at the University of Michigan, so we moved to Ann Arbor thinking we’d be here a year or two—and never left. Perhaps because of all my traveling as a child, and learning three languages early on, inner regions of memory and imagination have often been more important to me than outer locales and their dialects. I’ve thought often about the effect of living here on my writing; so many writers talk about the value and even necessity of a sense of place. But all I’ve arrived at after 44 years, is that something of the grounded, pragmatic nature of this region and its people has combined with my underlying sense of rootless everywhere-ness. Voices and subjects that attempt to weave the secretly symbolic with the down to earth are what I’m always looking for. Throughout these years, working as a folk musician with my twin brother, I have traveled throughout Michigan, nearby Rust Belt states, and many other regions of the U.S. and Canada. At some point I recognized Ann Arbor as a place I could call home, for which I feel very grateful.” (web)

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December 8, 2017

Ed Ruzicka

PALIMONY

That winter I lived with a woman on a hill hit hard
by winds off Lake Michigan as it sat and thrashed
and spat. Jammed mammoth slabs of ice one atop another.
Formed a frozen shelf wide and jagged as wave-works
themselves and run over by razors, sirens, blasts of wind
that tore into flesh and against which our heater
rattled out its weak defense. We huddled together
under quilts to read and make love in the ambergris
glow of shallow lamp light. She rose to steam the kitchen
with soups and teas we took in half lotus on the bed.

I worked in a factory made of cinder blocks and racket.
Men, women stood eight hours at machines tall as elevators,
gun-metal grey and dripping oil. Machinists cut, drilled,
punched, formed, joined steel, aluminum, tin. Each
to the same task weeks on end at machines precision
set by foremen that skulked about, growling or
quietly absorbed. A dim cast relieved only by what
eked out of florescent tubes or wafted down from
high-set panes no one had ever been paid to clean.

I was hired to move parts station to station.
A “trucker” who shared my weekly check with
barkeeps while the Blackhawks or the Packers
blared above. She bought the vegetables, cubed beef,
seven-grain loaves of bread that kept us going.

There was a tiny gas heater beside the tub that
had to be lit to flame for twenty minutes. She
always bathed by candle light and had an oval
daguerreotype hung in there showing a bare shouldered
belle who tucked her chin demurely.
Next to that her gray cat would perch to stick its paw
out and catch drips of silver from the leaky spout.
Which was then and is now more beauty
than I could hold or ever hope to deserve.
When I left, streets were still walled with snow
that city plows had mashed to the curb. I hitched
out I-94 toward El Paso. She kept my books and
a few LPs because I was going to come back.
It wasn’t much, that palimony of freezing sheets.

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

[download audio]

__________

Ed Ruzicka: “When, where I grew up, factories and foundries stood as the inveterate core of American industry, behemoth maws consuming hours, lives. Men, women did work by the back, muscle, hand. No one relied on anybody but themselves. I learned that by dad’s absence, by how mom darned socks. At twenty I went to work to find America, write America. I left. Leaving was part of it. I go back. Especially in the poems I go back. I hope like hell I’ve got sweat in these poems. And loss. Lust and bewilderment. An honest day, an honest word.” (website)

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December 6, 2017

Christine Rhein

IN DETROIT, WHAT COUNTS AS GRACE

Trees growing from the roofs
of empty factories and houses,
birds nesting deep inside.

Children at their desks
without breakfast, busy adding
and subtracting, the lunch bell
not ringing until 12:45.

The teacher, mid-morning,
with snack mix from home,
pouring a little extra
into the shyest cupped hands.

The men who stand and fish,
casting lines into the river,
office towers soaring at their backs.

New farmers, in their agri-hoods,
watering and weeding, growing
peas, beans, Motor City Kale,
making Wild Detroit Honey.

The cooks who serve up
Coney Dogs, burritos,
shawarma—even at 3 a.m.—
singing out the orders.

And the woman at Cass and Forest
dancing by her boom box
every afternoon, her feet 
sliding on the sidewalk, 
trailing through the snow.

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

[download audio]

__________

Christine Rhein: “I grew up in Detroit, and I’ve always lived in southeastern Michigan. When I began studying and writing poetry, in my mid-30s, I discovered the work of Philip Levine. I was inspired not only by his poems, but also by the circumstances of his early life. As a daughter of immigrants and as an automotive engineer, I suddenly saw, through Levine, that I might dare write poems.” (website)

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December 4, 2017

Ken Meisel

ART INSTALLATION

after Ryan Doyle’s Dragon Gon Krin, “Save the Arts”

The artist had constructed from Midwest metal
a dragon, fire flaming from its gaping mouth,

and a group of evening radicals, tramping around,
had hauled the beast in a truck, unpacked it

and hoisted it up together in one piece,
in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

This was in the first dissonant, hard press
of autumn, where the midnight moon—

glowing like a halo above the cut of rooflines
and the feudal turrets of the neighborhood—

seemed to furnace-burn the yellow and the orange
tree leaves hanging limp there, waiting to fall.

What makes us dream? What touched me
as I stood out there in the noisy cold,

gazing at this iron dragon transforming art
into passion, the night’s darkness into heat,

the literal, back into metaphor, and then back?
The ardor of love, like a negation of death,

accessible, mysterious, where the image
is suddenly set free, in an influx of fiery flames.

Where werewolves or just kids roam free—
arriving here on bicycles, some of them

in couples, embracing one another
in a contagion of similarity, arms wrapped

over each other’s necks, their sleeves
becoming scarves as the dragon lit up

the night. Monomania of the artist, now
becoming all our mania, this rust belt I am.

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

__________

Ken Meisel: “To grow up here was to grow up in glory and ruin. In the ’70s, this was a weirdly glorified place—you’ve got Motown, the autos, Jackie Wilson, this music legacy, jazz clubs, Miles, Ella Fitzgerald—there’s this glory, but it was also this post-apocalyptic ruin of burnt out buildings and heroin addicts in the streets. It was a horror, really. And so, even then, when I lived down there and was fumbling with writing mostly as a student, I was transfixed with that juxtaposition. How can it be this but also that?”

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November 29, 2017

Cade Leebron

NEW GUIDE TO THE QUASI-POLITICAL

The Coca-Cola truck on fire was
not quite a symbol of our now-dying
capitalist system. And the buzz
on the street is it’s not worth trying
to find a hose. The guy got out a long
time ago, and the sugar might burn for
the next sixty years. So go grab the bong
and a picnic blanket, lock the back door
on your way out. I plan on sitting here
until it’s over. You don’t have to stay
for the whole thing. I just want you near
-by. I’m gonna toast marshmallows and lay
back, watch some stars. I’m gonna get a Coke
burn. The soda on fire’s the whole joke.

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

__________

Cade Leebron: “I grew up in south central Pennsylvania, which is in the Rust Belt, and is also part of the region occasionally referred to as Pennsyltucky. Specifically, I grew up in Gettysburg, which is both a tourist town and a college town. These two ‘industries’ helped to keep Gettysburg a bit more afloat than the surrounding area, though the town still has a lot of issues with poverty (and a floundering public school system, and racism, and anti-Semitism, and misogyny, and a list that could continue on). Mostly when I tell people I grew up there, I say that there are more dead people than alive. I suppose this could be said of anywhere, though it tends to get a laugh in the context of Gettysburg ghost tours. Growing up, Gettysburg often felt like a trap (and sometimes it was a trap that I didn’t want to escape) and I think that both this sense of confinement and being surrounded constantly by death have influenced my poetry. Often when I build a poem, I’m replicating that feeling, I’m building a trap. And the speaker is stuck in there and has to somehow figure it out. Growing up in the Rust Belt also gave me a sense of awareness when writing of never wanting to make fun of people stuck in poverty, or stuck in tiny towns, or stuck in circumstance. It’s not that these communities shouldn’t be critiqued, just that having grown up where I did, I don’t think it helps to make rural people the butt of all our post-election think-piece jokes.” (website)

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November 27, 2017

Nancy Krygowski

WEED WHACKER

Weed whackers do solve a problem, just like smacking
a two-year-old’s face makes him startle quiet for a second.
Smacking is a good thing to hate, but if you’re honest,
you understand the desire—then remember right is right.
On the bus, I watched a young mother playing Give Me Five
with her little boy, a smacking game. Later, he wanted something
he couldn’t have and smacked his mom’s breast. What happened
next. A weed’s roots weave close to the surface,
so when you pull them up, it’s like roads lifting off a map
and suddenly we go back centuries to when this country was new.
People tramped prairie grass and navigated with the sun.
And the roots of weeds can dig down deep, so deep
you spend hours on the ground, arm in the earth,
loosening and pulling. This small, deep killing feels good,
it feels right. I read about a six-year-old wandering the highway
while her mom was at work. She wanted Twinkies,
Twinkies from the store. There wasn’t a store for miles,
and there’s so much shit in them they’re barely food.
But she wanted spongy sweetness, wanted a glass of milk,
wanted a mom who has a way not to leave her at home alone
while she works. Whack rhymes with smack, and in some ways,
right rhymes with wrong. Forgive us, we say to our hands.

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

[download audio]

__________

Nancy Krygowski: “I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where I came to consciousness as the steel mills closed and the downtown emptied and boarded itself up. I moved to New England (because, I thought, that’s where poets come from). Then San Francisco (again, poets). But those places were too easily, too obviously, beautiful—blue skies and candy colored houses, little bakeries with happy hippy-haired workers. I missed having to search for beauty, missed, also, how emptiness breeds, needs creation. So I came back—to buildings that still hold the mills’ smoke, to potholes and aproned church ladies who sell pierogis during Lent. This sensibility—how to find the beautiful in the grit, in the destruction—guides my writing.” (website)

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