Southern Poets

November 6, 2013

“Scent and Bones” by Mike SayePosted by

Mike Saye

SCENT AND BONES

I once watched my father pull a .30-30 from his truck,
lever a slug, and shoot a German Shepherd on a dead run,
open-sighted, through a hundred yards of trees.

It had killed a pullet from our lot
and tracked blood through the skeletal frame
of the new home we were building—
our first house—just up the hill
from the trailer I’d always known.

Daddy hit it high up in the rear leg
and it scrambled away—yowling, screaming.

A day later we found it by scent
beneath the joists of the new place.

My father dragged its body
to the woods where the smell
hollowed out a home all its own,
staked a claim for apathy,
and left its bones.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
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November 4, 2013

“Mr. Rescue” Larry RogersPosted by

Larry Rogers

MR. RESCUE

When I forgot the words
to a song I could always
count on Bob for help.
It was like breaking down
on a musical highway
and calling Mr. Rescue.
He would mouth the next line
and I wouldn’t miss a beat.
For 20 years we railed in
harmony against the ruling class.
The joints we played weren’t
the minor leagues of the music industry;
they were the sandlots.
What sparse crowds we did attract were
usually too drunk to appreciate
3-chord missiles fired at their masters.
Once in Dallas we asked
a club owner how much longer
he wanted us to play
and he actually said, Until
the SWAT team arrives.
You should have died on a tiny stage,
Bob, not in a tiny apartment,
a reminder to call Affordable Dentures,
for a good reason to smile, tacked on
the wall you were found leaning against.
You should have died on a stage
behind the chicken wire that
protected us from our adoring fans
and which you rightly pointed out
also protected them from us.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
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November 3, 2013

“Drive-In Church” by Liz RobbinsPosted by

Liz Robbins

DRIVE-IN CHURCH

My mother wakes early every Sunday, pulls on black
hose even in June, and drives forty minutes to put on
a choir robe and sing in a crowd for a crowd. Such is
the nature of her faith. Mine was held for too many
years thrashing under water, burbling, silent-screaming
for air. My faith may be, however, growing toward that
church in Daytona Beach, where you don’t even have to
get out your car and therefore your pajamas, just tool
right up with your ciggies on the dash and a 12-pack
of Krispy Kremes, reggae on the tape deck. Where you
can snooze mid-sermon, curl up with a blanket and
nobody’d see. With only your license plate showing,
you’d still get credit for going. That’s what I mean, it’s all
about the redeemer card for me, where 999 church visits
means a trip to heaven is free. My mother says, It’s not
for God you go, for you. But I’m still that teen in black
eyeliner and dress, scowling in the back pew, stinking
of last night’s beer, wondering what’s in it for me. Which
doesn’t add up, if my mother’s to be believed. Here’s what
I think. One day I’ll die and maybe it’ll be true, my mother
wearing wings, drinking martinis, laughing in the golden
sun beyond a big locked gate, and I’ll be staring in, feeling
sorry and alone, yet knowing I’m exactly where I’m meant
to be. And my mother says, How is that unlike now and
how you’ve felt your whole life? Maybe if you’d go to
church, you’d feel different. And I say, Doesn’t someone
have to be the crazy, the heathen? What if everyone went
to church? She sighs, Oh if I know God, He’d just find
another way to up the ante. To which I think, the next
time I go looking in the paper for drive-in times, it’ll be
to see what film’s playing. But she knows I’m listening.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
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__________

Liz Robbins (Florida): “One of my earliest and fondest memories—and earliest recording—is of me and my twin sister at age four? five? singing loud and proud as my dad (an organist, choirmaster, and composer) pounded out sea chanties on the piano (‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ was a favorite). Our parents filled our lives with music all the time, from singing hymns in church and letting us take piano lessons, to Cole Porter on the record player and singing with us on bike rides around the Berkshires. My sister and I were influenced early and consistently with the power of language through song—the importance of repetition, rhythm, and rhyme—for which I thank my folks! My sister went on to become a speech pathologist and I became a poetry professor. She and I both help people articulate thoughts through the music of language.” (web)

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November 2, 2013

“Apotropaic of Giving Good Ole Boys Roadhead” by J. Phillip ReedPosted by

J. Phillip Reed

APOTROPAIC OF GIVING GOOD OLE BOYS ROADHEAD

I’ve been ogling the maintenance men again. I wonder about their faces, about the weather, whether anyone else eyeballs them, and who? The one with the belly, I think, was once a hottie. He’s got that post-hottie face, and in making sure the steel doors swing shut as they should, he goes back in his weathered head to his hottie times, when—

Her name had to be something like Trisha, call me Trish. She could bar brawl. She could bedroom brawl. Beer-drinkin tiny-waisted plate-chuckin bitch Trish. When they were together, they only ate off of paper. One night she took to chewing the styrofoam, but it didn’t burn going down. So then Trish dammit chewed him, and between them both they chewed the windows out of walls.

That’s why he’s here, grinding gravel to dust beneath a college-owned pickup now the doors are done. He catches my eye as it paws at his brow, that brow that sags like a gas station bag full of beer, like Trish’s tits probably do at some anonymous outskirts address. I fake an interest in any sudden little thing. I hope he knows I can’t help myself, can’t maintain a rocky face or an inflexible wrist or bang a bitch named Trish. But oh god, put me in a pickup, pop a can of hopelessness, and watch me watch him go to town.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
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November 1, 2013

“Learn to Sail with Your Dad” by Melissa QueenPosted by

Melissa Queen

LEARN TO SAIL WITH YOUR DAD

1. Just because the sign beside the boat launch cautions to beware of alligators does not mean there are alligators in the water for certain. Even though you are four and can’t yet read the words on the sign, you can pick up on the significance of the bright red lettering and the black silhouette in the shape of an alligator with a wide, gaping mouth just the right size for swallowing four-year-olds whole. But just because your father tells you there are no alligators does not mean there are no alligators for certain. Fathers have a tendency to say these things with confidence because they think that is what is required of them.

2. When it is your turn to steer the tiller, pick a point on the shore and aim the bow of the boat at that spot. Do not pick for your point of reference your mother, who is at this very moment standing on the shore waving. Instead of remaining a fixed point, she will soon resume pushing your little brother in his stroller up and down the shore.

3. When it is time, your father will take the tiller from your hands and say, either, “We’re coming about” or “We’re going to jibe,” and because you don’t yet understand the difference, you will duck your head regardless of the command in order to avoid getting hit by the boom.

4. But your father won’t settle for this. He will want you to learn the difference between jibing and tacking, when and why either is called for, as well as the principles of physics that move the wind through the jib and main sails to make it possible for a boat to sail both up and downwind. He is, of course, taking for granted that you are four. But for years to come he will hold you to these same high standards of the full comprehension of principles governing science and mathematics—like when you will be cramming for your Advanced Placement exams in chemistry and calculus and he will be dissatisfied that you can tell him the answer is A but cannot articulate why.

5. Try to remember when your father raises his voice, he is not yelling at you. He’s getting excited at you. He holds firm that there is a difference. That he does it because he doesn’t want you to get hurt, especially not by the boom that can suddenly and violently swing across the cockpit of the boat if there’s a change in the direction of the wind.

6. Today you are four years old. You are learning to sail, learning about tidal currents and sandbars. You believe what he says about the moon pulling the tides. You want to believe him when he says there are no alligators, but you know he has plenty of practice saying with confidence things even he is uncertain of.

7. In a few months he and your mother will sit you down and try to explain words like tumor and lumpectomy while pointing to human anatomy illustrations in a World Book Encyclopedia. These words will not convey ideas like sand dollar or horseshoe crab, and you will already have learned to read signs even if you can’t understand their words. Still, you will try to be reassured by him telling you everything’s going to be ok, as hard as he’s trying to be reassured himself.

8. So on the night of your mother’s surgery when you will find her side of the bed empty and have to tiptoe across to his side of the room to wake him to tell him you’ve wet the bed, remember that he is not yelling at you.

9. Remember today, how after the small boat capsized, he managed to right the boat while you, in your Sesame Street life jacket, grasped at his neck and screamed at the tops of your lungs, and how, as scared and vulnerable as you might have felt there in the water, there weren’t any alligators.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
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__________

Melissa Queen (Alabama): “Growing up, my grandmother had a basement filled with the remnants of what was at one point her dressmaking and fabric shop. As a child, my siblings, cousins, and I spent hours in that basement playing among the tall bolts of fabric twice our size, rummaging through the jars and tins of loose buttons and left behind notions. When a child’s imagination is supplied with the small and otherwise inconsequential objects—these notions—mixed in with the mysteries and artifacts of the lives that were lived before her own, how could she not grow up being drawn to poetry?”

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October 31, 2013

“After My Copy of Levertov’s Life in the Forest” by Jeremy Dae PadenPosted by

Jeremy Dae Paden

AFTER MY COPY OF LEVERTOV’S LIFE IN THE FOREST

I bought Life in the Forest
young, in love with Levertov’s
essays. I had not yet read
her poems. And Life remains

unread, not for lack of want,
but the blindness of the press,
the machine and proof-reader,
left blank every other page.

Some poems never end, some
do not begin, and some like
Talking to Grief and Emblems
One and Two only exist

in name. We work in the dark,
James tells us, we do what we
can. And questions, Denise writes,
they walk beside us, waiting.

This is life in the forest,
all ends without beginnings,
emblems lost. How do you talk
to grief, except in fragments?

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
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October 29, 2013

“Labor” by Annie MountcastlePosted by

Annie Mountcastle

LABOR

We pull the skin off Jeremiah
as he hangs upside down
from the tractor. His mother
paces, stomps her feet, calls out
to him from the other side
of the barn wall, but he is dead
already, blood spilling across
new snow. Her child is one year
old, little steer horns poking
through his furry temple.
The great-grandmother whose
farm we’re visiting can’t
afford to feed all the animals
this winter. She keeps the mother,
kills the son. Save the tongue,
she says. We’ll save everything
we can. It’s so cold, and the work
is hard before us. We carve
through the carcass, and still
the pieces are almost unbearable.
On three we bend and lift, gloved
hands against bone, to make
our way down the cellar steps
while the white Scottie laps up
the loss, body-deep in blood,
matted coat stained, eyes
happy and alive.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
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