Matthew Wimberly: (North Carolina): “I wrote my first poem after reading ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ in the seventh grade. That poem changed the rest of my life. Growing up on top of a mountain meant I’d often have to entertain myself alone. I loved running down trails and skipping stones in the creek behind my house, and it became natural to entertain myself by writing poetry. To this day I love to play with words, to see how a poem can provide a new lens for looking at the world. If anything, I want other people to find something as alive in poetry as out in the wild.”
Kenny Williams (Virginia): “I hate it when poets pretend they don’t know anything about their own writing processes and get arty and mysterious when asked about it, claiming in a zillion different ways that they ‘receive’ their poems from the Beyond, or that the poems already exist in the abstract and that they, the poet, just ‘discover them,’ etc. I’ve been hearing a lot of this kind of thing lately. I think it comes in waves. The writing of poems remains, as ever, the manipulation of linguistic materials toward an artistic end residing in form. Never trust anyone who denies this or tries to talk around it. I live in Richmond, Virginia, hold an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and have a website with pictures of dogs and cats on it.” (website)
“The Movie Star’s Secret” by William WalshPosted by Rattle
William Walsh
THE MOVIE STAR’S SECRET
A man from Heartland Plumbing surveyed my postage stamp of grass
this morning,
searching for water, a modern-day dowser
looking for a leak in the system, any reason
why a million gallons flushed through the pipes
last month to drop a $6,522 bill in my lap.
Like all of us, he searches for the answer, but rarely
finds what he’s looking for. He keeps at it, water-witching
his way through a lonely job, a divining rod
of uncertainty pointing toward the heart of the matter.
God knows
man is alone, a defective
temperament walking the Earth forever.
I followed behind the meter man, bending his ear,
kicking up dew as we wedged between the azaleas and Steed Hollies,
watching the gauge’s nervous jiggle.
I worried he may need to dig up the yard. I realized
my chatter was irritating
to this rebel of Virgula Divina, as Sebastian Münster
would call him.
Muck-caked boots on the porch,
inside, I channel-surfed—until snared by her lonesome face.
* * *
Chicago, late winter 1991,
for twenty minutes I barely noticed the woman cheering for Duke,
until her high-five on a critical Christian Laettner three-pointer,
and perhaps because I had paid so little attention,
she found me interesting, maybe even attractive, somehow
through a shower of potato skins, burgers, and beer,
a happy hour of solitary people laying-over in a snow storm …
… but not as isolated as the “Lone Woman of San Nicolas”
who, first discovered in 1853 by an unlikely otter hunter, died just weeks later,
or the “spider-monkey man” choosing
to be left alone, the last survivor of his anonymous Brazilian tribe.
Thirty miles deep, he knows there is no God
in the jungle, no woman
named Eve—he waits for a new journey.
I have been poor and lonely
most of my life, no money for the smallest bauble …
… at O’Hare I’d planned to sleep in the terminal, scrunched up
with a duffle bag for comfort, alone with strangers
claiming a corner or tight angle of wall, a carved-out plot
of relief for the ugly who stare, singular
in laughter for the disaster in our lives.
It is loneliness that drives us
to make small talk
because as Mother Teresa understood The most terrible poverty is loneliness.
… no one will admit
to being alone as they jabber about their hometown
and what waits for them back in Blissville.
What else do we have to travel on if not faith
that eternity holds the comfort of others.
* * *
Clapping and cheering college basketball on Saturday,
big-screen TVs scattered throughout
the airport bar, I paid no attention to this woman,
completely disengaged
in the clean, clear lights of waitresses humping it for a good tip.
How could I
or anyone
have recognized the Hollywood glamour through the dark hair,
baseball cap, and rimmed glasses of disguise? How could any one
of the world’s beautiful people compete
with college basketball? One bar stool away,
she spoke first, casually—who’re you cheering for?
… Duke, of course.
She was visiting, returning to California
after her childhood friend’s wedding—now a school teacher
in the same high school where they kissed in the library.
She bought the first round of Hamm’s Winter Stock.
So many years have passed—my withered heart
has a hard time
recognizing that I’m even alone anymore—just a natural extension
of the thickening crust—to most people I am just a stick,
a thrown rock, kicked away dirt on a shoe—she and I talked. I never considered
anyone would be interested
in anything about me.
I think of Octavio Paz, who understood
how only man knows he is alone—
which must mean the other animals
each think they are a powerful God.
Still, unaware, I asked
if we went to school together—it’s possible—I once lived in Chicago
for a few laps around the calendar.
I had no idea
she was six months removed from a tabloid divorce, laying low
into a quiet life, her new film starting in a month.
What draws people together …
… some magnet of curiosity?
We like to imagine ourselves being the center
of some universe
where we can be anyone from anywhere
in our imagined lives when traveling to foreign countries
or just across town, the excitement of pretending
to be someone else …
… but the truth is … no one knows
or cares who we are.
I was six weeks away from meeting my wife on a blind date.
* * *
My grandfather walked his backyard with a witch-hazel branch
shaped like a Y, gripped loosely in each hand, bent
as crooked as a politician.
He searched for water
the City told him didn’t exist—the well had dried
and for more money than God has they would connect him at the street.
“Billy-boy, I know there’s water here. See this!” as the divining rods x’ed
like magnets over the aquifer of Biblical proportions.
We rabbit-crossed the backyard, his nagging wife
in tow, passed the McIntosh
and Granny Smith trees, leaf-full and sweet canopy of drooping fruit
hanging on slug branches, low enough for a boy
with a baseball bat.
* * *
She dropped a dime to her agent, “I’m staying
one more night,” then she whispered in my ear
her name
—removed her glasses, ball cap, shook her hair
like some wild thing
then quickly back on as her soft breath
brought the marquee lights alive, lifting high
in big Marilyn Monroe letters, the dazzle
and glitter of Rodeo Drive.
Isn’t this why we explore the world, to find what makes us whole?
… another person to tumble down the hill with.
Two hours from O’Hare, she usually traveled with a bodyguard, but not at home
where family laughter echoes from the kitchen, where
she’s still her parents’ little girl, the unsophisticated
expectations of farm life, how she can walk downstairs
in her flannel pajamas, kiss her mother,
scold her father for eating too much bacon.
Later, in the garage, pumping her bicycle tires
she rides down a gravel road to visit old friends
who work their family farm. Her sisters still tease her,
a perpetual initiation into the club of womanhood—how she dyed her hair
midnight black for the junior prom …
… to earn money for an acting class
she delivered sixty-four newspapers over the rambling back roads
of cinder stone,
seventeen miles on a second-hand Huffy
before quitting after three days.
What was I to do?
I could only smile and laugh
at my ignorance, because
I have always been just a man
who needed a marquee sign the size of the HOLLYWOOD billboard
or a woman standing naked in front of me
to understand my next move.
I’d seen most of her movies
because she’s the kind of woman men desire …
… but fear
talking to—there’s no way
to compete with whatever is out there
in her other world, men
with so much money
it’s as if I’m drowning
on a raging river
and the cure for my loneliness is a tow-line
of barbed-wire.
* * *
At our quiet table she sat with her back to the crowd,
a position of vulnerability—she hadn’t been kissed in more than a year,
the dark cloud of marriage holding her
inside her Malibu home, retreating
into a quieter world—reading movie scripts
and novels … some traveling.
Next morning, after room service,
she asked me
to covet our secret time
together—she did not need any publicity.
… what courage must be drummed up
to curb the desire there is
not to be alone in the world.
There was a boy in high school
she had a crush on,
but now, being famous
it’s difficult to call, because what if he’s married—how
does his wife with curlers in her hair
and babies spilling food on the floor
compete with a movie star calling her husband.
… if just to say hello—how’ve you been doing?
* * *
The man from Heartland Plumbing drove a ten-foot metal stake
through the heart of my Bermuda grass, through red clay
and builder-grade landfill refuge, searching
for moisture underground, seepage, but found none.
My grandfather, never to be misled or cheated, refused
to pay the City, and for years
the water petered out the tap.
* * *
When she kisses a leading man on screen, a man
who is tall, with an ivory smile, abs and pecs of Adonis
with hair bouncing in wild abandon, lucid syllables
flowing from his lips,
does she think of me?
I know a secret,
how an ordinary guy
sitting in a Chicago airport bar can bump into
a glamorous Hollywood actress and forever
fold up into a little square of memory
everything we have always wanted
to brag about to our buddies,
that one of us broke through
to that mysterious island, if for just one moment.
“Tripping at the NC Agricultural State Fair” by Sarah SweeneyPosted by Rattle
Sarah Sweeney
TRIPPING AT THE NC AGRICULTURAL STATE FAIR
Just as neon lights sputtered on,
shining pink and yellow mayhem
across Coliseum grounds,
the mushrooms kicked in.
I imagined this spectacle from space
like the spot of cherry slush vomit—
bright, on the sole
of my sandal.
October, summer’s lasting rim.
Short-sleeved, we sat on the curb
holding our noses, chasing
the taste with warm beer.
As we climbed the dinky Ferris wheel ramp,
I thought of Jesus descending—
with each revelation
we yelled, Hey Jesus!
lifting our arms over our heads,
waving to him above while
workers hurried to fix the switch
that halted us for an hour in the air.
From the top, our little city
seemed finally on the map—
I think, I am someone, somewhere,
and so strange to be alive, zigzagging
through mazes and mirrors,
the Gravitron and Ring of Fire.
It’s like that
when you’re young or stoned,
and the world is ripe and yours,
like standing on a hundred-foot platform
to tandem bungee with the boy
who’s just a phase.
The sky opened and all we heard
was clown music hammering below.
Picture that exalted, scared look
on my face,
the one that said, Not yet, not yet,
and the hand pushing us
over the ledge,
the fall sweeter not knowing when
it would happen,
that I’d lose the urge to throw myself
into the night.
But it all seemed so clear:
ricocheting for minutes into the crowd,
jolting back towards the sky in a trail
of tobacco and spun sugar.
I could see over the clouds.
I could see children crying,
stumbling off the fast rides
into their mothers’ arms.
Lolita Stewart-White (Florida): “In 2007, I read a haunting newspaper article about the FBI reopening 100 unsolved Civil Rights cold cases. These cases, entitled ‘The Forgotten,’ involved black people who were murdered during the Civil Rights movement. Their stories moved me to write a series of poems. It is my small way of preserving the memory of Willie Edwards and others.”
“Newton Township” by Philip St. ClairPosted by Rattle
Philip St. Clair
NEWTON TOWNSHIP
A bitter homestead close to the Interstate: boxes stacked
all along the porch, fifteen or twenty acres of field corn
too stunted for July, cheap asphalt siding sagging at the eaves,
and I remembered Granddad, who never wanted to farm.
He left home in the eighteen-nineties for work as a lumberjack:
days in the first-growth forests, nights in the bunkhouse
drinking rye whiskey, playing slap-down euchre by a coal-oil lamp.
When his father died, they sent for him to come back home
and settle down. He liked to chop down trees and stack firewood,
Mom said. He didn’t care for much of anything else.
When the Germans surrendered, she was five: They were always
going to kill the Kaiser but they never did, she said.
That winter she saw sparks shoot past rust holes in the ductwork
hung under her bedroom ceiling, and the first summer
she could work the fields she got her left hand caught in the baler:
all they could do was flatten out its little bones and bind it
on a scrap of board. Once she told me that her mother, sleepless
from chronic sore throat, dug out her pus-flecked tonsils
with a darning needle: Nobody had the money for a doctor, she said.
They lost the farm from back taxes halfway through
the Great Depression: Granddad was in his sixties and moved in
with his eldest son. From then on it was Argosy magazine,
the daily crossword puzzle, the Philco radio with the yellow dial.
I was almost seven when Truman fired MacArthur
and we lived in town, next to a steel mill: every other week or so
we drove out in the country to my uncle’s farm, past
the Ravenna arsenal, where they made bombs and mortar shells
for the war going on in Korea. Mom told me not to gripe
about the fishy-tasting milk: They never clean the cream separator,
she said. My older cousins never talked to me—too busy
forking hay to cows and toting feed to chicken coops, too sullen
to bring them out and let me give them each a name.
R.T. Smith (Virginia): “Last year, as I was looking at a photo in the local newspaper of a boy and his first deer kill, I thought of my own first hunt, which seemed hallucinogenic, and still does. The older I get, the more I wonder if I learned the lessons about manhood that my elders wanted me to learn, or if I learned others that would disappoint them. I know I wanted to belong, but I did not want to kill that deer, despite the promise of acceptance, breakfast, whatever. I did it then and have done it since, both proud and a little ashamed of being blooded. It’s a paradox that won’t leave me alone, and maybe the title, which is anything but visceral and immediate, and euphemizing the actual shooting at the end, constitute my attempt to insulate the violence.”
