August 2, 2013

“The Creature” by Aimee ParkisonPosted by Rattle

Aimee Parkison

THE CREATURE

It became a part of me, somehow. I felt it

Moving inside me, the way an unborn child moves

Inside its mother, in a way only a woman can feel.

It flutters. It leaps. It kicks. It churns. It grows.

I feel its tentacles growing longer, stronger. Remember

Its violet translucent blood flowing up my legs, the way

Blood dried velvety, and then turned into fine black

Powder blown away on winds? We both breathed

It in, this little tiny and dainty pink thing now swimming

Inside of me to swallow my heart—why wound it?

We don’t even know what it is and now we’ll

Never ever know. No one will find a way to study

The creature. It wasn’t its fault that it washed up

Along the shore. Why do you want to hurt it? What’s

The use in destroying what we can’t understand?

When it first happened, I couldn’t believe what you did.

I wanted to take pictures. You destroyed my camera.

I wanted to set the creature free, back to the waters.

You slapped it out of my hands, crushing the creature.

I wanted the creature. Because it was dying, again, I

Helped it become a part of me, a woman moving inside,

Inside a woman, in a way only a woman can feel

Flutters, leaps, kicks, churns. Now, it grows tentacles

longer, stronger. I carry its violet translucence

Like my heartbeat as blood dries velvety, turning

Into fine black powder blowing away on the winds.

I ate it as it shivered. You tried to confiscate it. I won.

Now, I carry it behind the rocks and into the shadows

As it shudders in my naked arms. You’re a man unable

To kill me when it crawls out of my mouth, as if to die

In my arms. You clobber it. Crush it. Smash it. Stomp it.

Hurt it. Torture it. After you try to kill it again, I hide it

The best way I know how, the one place you’ll never think

To look. You’re still so angry, afraid that I’ll put it inside

Of you. Why not? Why don’t I do to you what you did

To me when I was so afraid, so close to the water?

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

__________

Aimee Parkison: “A poem is a creature with its own conscience, enlightening with secret philosophy, speaking with its own voice, reaching with rhythm, breaking boundaries with cacophony, and entertaining with the diction of paradox. The anatomy of the creature is a rhetorical structure fighting to make an aesthetic statement into a song worth singing. Ambiguity and irony are the lifebloods that flow through the creature’s new music. Only the poet knows why the creature muses as it sings.” (website)

July 31, 2013

“Police Report” by Dave NielsenPosted by Rattle

Dave Nielsen

POLICE REPORT

Walking the kids to school my small fry asked
would I carry her bag. Truly the weight
of the world has been assigned the first-graders
at Sherwood Elementary. Each book
is a rock hewn from the dawn of the world.
She had her lunch in there, too, a couple
of crackers spread with cream cheese, a carrot.
These are dark days, I told my little one,
darker than the Dark Ages.
At the corner I could go no further.
The bag was like a sack of titanium.
Perhaps if this were the moon, and gravity
weren’t such a bitch. I felt my heart ticking,
next thing I was face up on the sidewalk,
staring into her eyes. The crossing guard
had run over waving her flag. Man down,
I thought. I made an effort but the books
had me pinned. Next the sky was spinning, and I
heard my daughter quoting Assisi, all
of the old masters. Next she was emptying
the bag, handing the books one at a time
to the sweet children gathered on the grass.
They strewed them into the air like flowers.
Augustine hovered momentarily
above my face. When I stood, it was not
without dizziness. I took my daughter’s hand.
In the end she led me like a lamb, straight
into the horns of oncoming traffic.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

July 28, 2013

“Reminiscences” by Ken MeiselPosted by Rattle

Ken Meisel

REMINISCENCES

Freud speaking with Breuer, in Lower Manhattan,
New York City, September, 2001

They’d completed their rounds of patients at the hospital and walked
through the damaged city for about one hour, before returning back

to the clinic. “All the world’s psychological traumas can’t be resolved
by the Talking Cure—” Breuer said to Freud as they strolled past

the railway of the Hudson River where a man, drunk on yellow bullets,
Nembutal, rocked back and forth like a Bedouin, a crazed orphan.

The park was full of young mothers and children, and the restless river,
punctured with refuse from the recent terrorist attacks, glistened

with floating glassware and plastic. Scrap wood and debris rippled lazily
over the sordid currents, and above them, swallows from a bombed-out

brownstone up the hill rose and fell in haphazard, drunken reenactments.
Someone played a saxophone under a tree, and a boy, his thin mouth

full of lipstick, his face painted in clown, did silent mime like a fragile doll.
The media had issued warnings about toxic debris in lower Manhattan,

and the police warned of other possible terrorist attacks and that citizens
in all parts of the city should maintain a calm alertness, wherever they went.

The two medical doctors paused, fed the ducks at the river’s edge
of the park before proceeding across the busy streets of New York.

“Oh, let me tell you of the woman I spoke with yesterday,” Breuer
said to Freud, nudging the latter on the elbow as they walked beyond

the park onto the street where the crippled clubs hosted dinner music.
“The woman had spoken to me with specific complaints of losing

the smile on her face, that it had been torn off, really, after the tragic
unfortunate death of her child, just a boy—a sixteen year old boy

with freckles and piercings, by suicide, by leaping, she said to me,
recklessly from an overpass north of here and high on hallucinogens

and too much Metallica.” “And that he’d been obsessively viewing
sociopolitical material about the East-West divide in our world, on the web,”

Breuer added, while pulling out a cigar, “and that his mother couldn’t
stop him from the torment of his obsessions.” And Freud, responding

to Breuer, said, “Oh that woman—I saw her shaking quietly on a hospital
bench, her little nose bleeding, her small mouth torn in half like red leafy

lettuce. That’s what she said to me, ‘my torn mouth like red leaf lettuce,’ ”
Freud said to Breuer, shaking his head back and forth like a pondering

clock. “Her father suicided, right?” “And she was of ‘mixed blood,’ yes—?
She was part East, part West, all of it, and so was her boy, isn’t that right—?

Wasn’t he a product of love and divorce, one of those children
hopelessly divided—?” Asked Freud, and Breuer, aware of it, “Yes.”

III

“The present is a reenactment of history,” Freud said, pondering
the piles of ash throughout the area, and Breuer, seeing this, reached out,

touched Freud’s shoulder, said, “Too bad about the brownstone buildings
that were demolished in the attacks, and also about the ruined hopes

for human peace.” And the sun, setting behind them, froze in their mouths
for a second, then burned. All of Manhattan glowed in dusk’s frontier.

“Do you think the world will ever be the same?” Breuer absently asked Freud,
“Do you think we will ever resolve the factual elements of our

experience?” They walked on, passing the Trade Center’s crumbled debris.
Pigeons rose from a bronze lamppost that had collapsed in a pile of rubble.

“No I don’t think we shall ever be the same,” Freud answered. “Not ever.”
“The origin of Hysteria Trauma,” said Freud to Breuer, the both of them

strolling along the frenetic grounds of The Roosevelt Hospital now,
“is one of inescapable shock.” And Breuer to Freud, “Hysterics, all of us,

suffer mainly from reminiscences. And reminiscence is the inevitable longing
for what’s been before, and for what can never be the same again.”

“It’s the perfect mix of rapture and mourning, our strange dilemma.”
“No talking cure can ever cure it,” he said.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

July 27, 2013

“In Case of Unrest” by Ben McClendonPosted by Rattle

Ben McClendon

IN CASE OF UNREST

You will walk
on the sidewalk. You will
place refuse in approved containers
  to be picked up at
      the appointed time. You
will close doors   behind you, turn off lights.
  You will sleep—eight hours, precisely—
      dress within the confines of
acceptable taste and drive the speed limit
  and carry exact change.
You will earn diligently yet modestly
  to provide for your dependents. You will
      purchase consumables
          at approved outlets
during posted hours of operation. Your respiration
  and metabolic processes will fall
within established norms. There is no standard
      deviation.
          It is for your own good,
you among millions.
          You will conform.
          You will not
skip meals,
skip steps,
skip lines. You will not skip.
You will not waste resources unless directed
or convenient. You will not read
  what you scrawl in the small hours
except to yourself— by yourself—
  in subdued lighting that casts no dramatic shadows.
You will not
      listen to what rumbles outside,
          and if there are
shouts arcing through the grid, the city’s synapses,
you will not hear them,
          or you will not notice.
Pay no attention to what isn’t televised.
  You will not support
what threatens security
  and abundance in the life which
you have been
taught to know
      so long. You will protect
      your
material wellbeing. You will save your voice
for when it is asked of you.
      You will not indulge
in difficult colors or savor food or flesh
      longer than required.
          You will not
sit up at night thinking
          about asterisms or
the cold or debris from cosmic collisions
spiraling toward the sun
over long centuries. You will wait, always wait, for it all
to get better. And it will—
  it is. Getting better.
So much better all the time.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

July 22, 2013

“The Taking of Lead” by Michael LeePosted by Rattle

Michael Lee

THE TAKING OF LEAD

1.
There are more color receptors in the human eye than are used,
thus the colors of the world as they are seen are not the true colors.
The true colors have no names, and so they are impossible to imagine.
The failure of language is not that something can only be described
with a limited number of words, but that it can only be perceived using those words.

2.
Holding his fingers to the light the man said to his son,
“this is a hand,” it is good for breaking, for building,
the hand is a machine, and like language, a machine is a means to an end.
Now, imagine you do not know the hand’s name, tell me then
what is it not capable of?

3.
The occurrence of war outside the boy’s window
was as frequent as the birds. Each night
he watched from behind the blinds
as soldiers emerged from the thicket
smooth and quiet as apparitions or memories
climbing down from the skull and into the tall grass.
The starving steel rods they carried burst with sparks,
and tore each other down at knees and necks.
His father told him these were the inventions of lesser minds
demented by baseness and old magic. These burning branches
could swallow the stare of a man, and drive him
straight into the ground.
It was a time when, amongst the villagers,
there was not such familiarity with guns
that they were discussed by name, or even during day,
only by description, and behind doors where it was believed
they could not enter. To the boy and his father
the nameless guns were capable of anything.
They did not know why they were only used to kill.

4.
The boy knew nothing but the bodies next to the garden,
the crows discussing the rites of flesh. In the morning
he would wade through the pints of men
wandering dizzily about them as if he too were bloodless,
drifting off into the smells of carnage.
One by one with a silver spoon he would remove the lead
musket balls from the skulls and chests and legs of the dead men,
and carry them to his father to be melted down and turned to gold.
When the man was finished he would bring a vat of burning gold
back to the field and pour a spoonful of the molten metal
into each of the wounds from which the lead was taken.
Time and time again the boy watched the eyes roll back
from the depths of the skull, shine in the waning light of day
like lanterns along a river and then the soldiers would rise
as fog does. They would empty the grass and return to the forest.
Come nightfall they would re-emerge to kill each other again.
And again. Like blood thirsty hounds of fire and gore.
Automatons clad in blood.
Every day the boy asked his father why
he would reawake the soldiers, and each time he said,
“These instruments of war are doors to an end.
After a war the side with the most land and least dead
always dances and makes love inside the sound of drums.
It seems to me this is all the body has ever wanted.
“I wish to see if there will ever come a time where upon reawakening
they will each forget their language,
and not know the name for the those terrible burning snouts
they carry, and thus not know what they are used for.
These are dangerous men not because they carry a weapon,
but because what they carry is named,
and so it has only one imaginable purpose.
“Imagine, the whole field of soldiers forgetting their language,
and being possessed only with what their bodies want most in the end:
to dance, and to love. I wonder then, if we would see the field break
into a brilliant cavorting where the branches fire upward,
and those steel rods peel back the dark cowl of night. Oh,
how they would all be illuminated like cathedrals, empty
of language, and teeming with sound.”

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

July 21, 2013

“The Poetic States of America” by John LauePosted by Rattle

John Laue

THE POETIC STATES OF AMERICA

The demand for poetry suddenly multiplied.
Dealers paid big bucks for original manuscripts
while the country’s readers clamored for more.
Garrets and attics went out of style:
poets lived in mansions. Anyone who could write
gave it a try and most sold whatever they scribbled.
Poetry factories sprang up. Dozens of new MFAs
had desks in giant rooms with supervisors
patrolling the aisles to make sure they were producing
eight hours a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year,
with two weeks off for inspiration. If a son or daughter
wished to be a poet parents raised their eyes
from the newest volumes, nodded yes, a wise choice,
much better than doctoring or lawyering.
Just be sure to get your education, they said,
so you can be hired by Random House
or another of the 50 better publishers.

Those with talent made it to the highest levels:
some went into quality control, others marketing,
or sales. On the stock exchange the happy publishers
made fortunes for delighted investors.
Boeing Aircraft converted all its factories
to produce high-flying poems.
The newest TV serial was called The Poet.
There were poet detectives, poet trashmen,
financial poets, athlete poets. Presidential candidates
toured the country reading their works.
Poets became Presidents of General Motors
(now called General Poetry) General Electric
(Electric Poetry Plus).

But all wasn’t right in the poetic world:
there were still the homeless
(those who couldn’t or wouldn’t pen poems);
the hacks in boiler rooms writing lame clichés.
The Poets’ Union fought for better contracts
and succeeded. A thriving black market grew
where one could buy original manuscripts
verified by DNA at tremendously inflated prices.
There were those who hoarded poems;
those who consumed inordinate amounts
thereby beating others to the most important writings.
Not to mention people who spent entire lives
addicted to poetry, sacrificing peace of mind
often spending till they starved.
Poetry Anonymous was created for them,
but most were content to be the way they were.

Then came the great crash of 2089.
The best poems lost over half their value;
others weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.
This brought suicides by the thousands
with investors and authors jumping out of windows
staining with blood the worthless poems
that littered downtown streets. The President
was impeached because he’d covered up
his writing block, had had a staff of ghosters
producing what he called his crucially important works.

All was as it had been: schools stopped admitting poets,
turned out scientists and soldiers by the thousands
in the United (no longer the Poetic) States of America.
We invaded several sovereign countries,
bombed a few others. Only those who’d been poets
all their lives, and always would be, kept producing
odes with broken lines, odd-shaped stanzas,
while they either starved or did manual work to eat.
Intellectuals cited Plato who had said no crazy poets
would be allowed in his peaceful perfect state.
TV news proclaimed A VICTORY FOR SANITY.
Only a few madmen and eccentrics
wondered if it really was.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

July 17, 2013

“Seraph” by David Kutz-MarksPosted by Rattle

David Kutz-Marks

SERAPH

Some winged thing with no duende
hovering over the crowd

and everyone tonguing a duduk or plucking a bass,
hoping to bring the thing down

because it doesn’t understand
what a dirge is

or why the woman in the red slip
sips red wine every night for her heart,

how she feels for her neck as she does it.

It is like being rejected by meaning
now that it hovers above you

bored in your presence,
and the wing bones float like batons

over the scrolls of the wings
which tell us we must play

a dirge in E minor, a very flat one,
to make ourselves feel good.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

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