Sonnets

April 6, 2019

“Unholy Sonnet Number One” by Mollycat JonesPosted by

Mollycat Jones

UNHOLY SONNET NUMBER ONE

My bowl of lamb and gravy from the can
appears each morning when at last you rise.
An hour ago I batted at your eyes,
and it’s been two since first the birds began.
My brother has already fouled the pan;
you slept right through his scratching and his cries
(their tone suggesting something oversize
and fetid, for which you’d require bran).
Your feet are on the floor. That’s a relief.
Your awkward fingers soon will pop the lid
I yearn for, giving proof to my belief
that God made humans well the way He did.
You Big Ones, lacking claws and feline verve
were clearly planned to open cans—to serve.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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__________

Mollycat Jones (Christine Potter): “Once I believed that poetry was something to distract my human companion, so I could knock the pens off her desk and swish my tail under her nose. That was before I discovered metrics and rhyme. Christine mostly writes that ridiculous vers libre, for Big Ones as silly as herself. I write for felines everywhere! And I write in form because the anarchic spirit of all cats is an explosive force that needs something powerful to contain it.” (web)

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August 17, 2010

“The Venturi Effect” by Donald Mace WilliamsPosted by

Donald Mace Williams

THE VENTURI EFFECT

You may have thought, from visiting art shows,
that canyons squeezed together on their way
downstream. No. That’s only perspective. They
in fact, as any hiker my age knows,
spread out and vanish. Their canyonness goes.
Their vital currents pool up, slacken, splay,
their tall red hoodoos melt into flat gray,
the bankside cottonwoods go, nothing grows.
This one the same. Far downstream now, my feet
have brought me where I see the end. No foam
from water straitened, focused one last time
by rock walls aping art, trying to meet,
but alkali-white flatlands, killdeers’ home,
walls gone, speed gone, all low that was high prime.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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__________

Donald Mace Williams: “I couldn’t remember the name of the effect that has to do with the speeding up of water when its conduit is narrowed (and therefore the slowing down when the conduit is widened), but a niece of my wife’s who is a hydraulics engineer helped me with the term. Other possibly pertinent facts are that I live close to Palo Duro Canyon in Texas and am 80 years old.”

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August 14, 2010

“Rumpus, Cohesion, Mess” by Thom WardPosted by

Thom Ward

RUMPUS, COHESION, MESS

The bed sheet knows the vices I’ve slept.
How quickly it nooses my feet. Someone said,
we’re wrong men in a right world, all that
zigzag anger. Not quite—that’s another movie.
We’re wrong men who’ve built a wrong world,
each with a knapsack full of crushed glass,
cigarette butts. Photos of our children march
off the walls to a music only the dog can hear.
Rumpus minus cohesion equals mess. So many
weapons, I’m waiting for the plunger to make
the first move. Why should the water play fair.
Is that a cross around your neck or the last bird?
Things forgotten scream out for help in dreams
but not as loudly as things remembered.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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August 9, 2010

“To a Hurricane” by Catherine Esposito PrescottPosted by

Catherine Esposito Prescott

TO A HURRICANE

At the right speed wind sounds like a train
straining its brakes as metal grates metal;
but before you imagine sparks raining
circles around the wheels, its voice changes
to a throaty hush. In the early stages, you may
mistake it for the neighbors laughing, then crying.
As doors and windows tremble, as locks labor
to stay closed, you’ll hear the cry of the mother
burying her child by the river, and of widows
who have lost everything to war. And in that moment
what remains of your sense of order is supplicant
like the spine of a palm tree bowed toward earth, fronds beaten, torn,
and the sweet cord of belief that holds your life together
fights like hell not to snap: the tree’s trunk, your back.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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__________

Catherine Esposito Prescott: “So much life goes into one poem. This was written after a hurricane in 2005. As my family and I took shelter in the bathroom, we heard trees moaning, pots falling, cars tumbling. Not two years later, I revised the poem after a gun was put to my head during a robbery. After both experiences, I arose amazed to be standing—and grateful that most of my world remained intact, but I saw how quickly all I cared about could be stripped away—and this thought still shakes me.”

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August 7, 2010

“Panophilia” by Jessica PiazzaPosted by

Jessica Piazza

PANOPHILIA
          Love of everything

Today this weather’s better than itself:
all background clamor, siren song, our schemed
and ill-conceiving strategies. This shelf,
chaotic and precariously leaning
next to your appalling bed, a trove
of wonders hovering over us. But love
itself I never deigned to love; all give
and giving in. So I don’t understand
my drunkenness on scribble scrawled above
the mirror in the ladies’ room: You’re doomed.
Ecstatic that it’s almost true. And though
I should not love you yet—obliged to slow
and genuflect to sense or self-defense—
because of you, I’ll love everything else.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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August 4, 2010

“Aubade For One Dismayed” by Ron OffenPosted by

Ron Offen

AUBADE FOR ONE DISMAYED

Half-Alice in her milky, silky sheets
almost awake to the ache of another day
rebounding from her beaming ceiling,
grieved leaving the comforts of the night—
the snuggled pillow and the shy bedfellow
a fuzzy dream had borne and then withdrawn
at the intrusion of the hooligan light.

She closed her eyes once more to place the face,
so familiar and, yes, similar
to that of someone she had always known.
Perhaps she’d find a name if once again
she slipped into the deep warm sea of sleep.
And then a voice called Alice and she saw
a woman waving, craving her return.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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__________

Ron Offen: “One day, sitting in my high school library writing doggerel to pass the time, my best friend whispered suddenly, ‘You know what we should be? Poets!’ It was one of those revelations one instantly knows is momentous and right; and I have not stopped writing poems since. A few lines of the poem presented here arrived about 3 a.m., forcing me to get out of bed to set them down.”

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August 2, 2010

“Costume” by Jessica MollPosted by

Jessica Moll

COSTUME

Our game’s a cross between A Chorus Line
and Fame. Rehearsals, here in our backyard.
Pretend the lawn’s the stage. The tutu’s mine,
but I let David pick a leotard.
I’m ten, he’s five, he’s used to all my rules.
He gets to be a girl, but has to choose
a neutral name like “Chris.” Summer fog rolls
in. We swirl our glitter scarves to music
in our heads. He’s got it down, the girl
pose: hips, hands. He’s not a boy. He won’t play
out front, racing Big Wheels. Instead, he twirls
barefoot with me. But what about the place
my fingers found, underneath my clothes?
The grass is cold. Plié. And point your toes.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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