Rattle: Poetry (original) (raw)
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HOW TO BECOME A PROFESSIONAL FOLK SINGER
at the newly opened Ambush Club, Wichita, 1971
There I was: lemon-tinted Lennon glasses,
paisley shirt like ironed vomit, corroded
toenails dangling from Kmart sandals …
And when Otis Redding was cut off mid-chorus
from the juke, the three dozen dressed-to-the-max
black couples gazed up at me, each mouth a rictus,
as I tuned my Yamaha in a circle of light.
Close enough for folk music, I declared
and began to strum my three-chord version
of “Dock of the Bay,” a clever segue and nod to Otis,
I thought. My fingers meated through the song.
I sat on that dock watching the waves come and go
through three choruses, then plunked the final major C
with all the majesty of a hammered thumbnail.
And I saw I had stunned the crowd to silence.
Did these fine people think I was a novelty act?
If I’d expected applause, I got a voice in the back saying,
Whoa, Momma—turn on the fire hose.
And poor Dennis, the new owner and dead-ringer
Ozzie Nelson who’d heard me strum “Stewball”
and “Puff ” at the Riverside Park Folk Jamboree,
who thought I was good and knew he needed music,
was frozen behind the bar, lava lamps auguring his future:
purple bubbles rising and breaking apart
like the opening-night crowd. The juke erupted
with Otis, back on his dock. The stage lights dimmed.
Drinks on the house! I heard a voice say, Dennis’s voice,
and he pressed a twenty into my right palm. Just go,
he said. OK? I slung the guitar over my shoulder.
He opened the back door to the parking lot,
and I took my rightful place among the stars.
—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012
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Jeff Worley: “Readers are sometimes curious about just how autobiographical a poem is. My folksinger poem is, unfortunately, a faithful rendition of what happened on this evening. The poem is set near the beginning of my three-year stint (grad school) as a folksinger in Wichita, something I did because I thought I knew how to play guitar (I didn’t), and I thought my playing music on stage would attract impressionable young women (it didn’t). But at least a few of these experiences have become fodder for poems.” (web)
Alma Olaechea
SEVERE ATYPIA
I know you feel like an old, sad dog, the doctor says,
But I think you’re still worth saving.
I’m on my stomach, shirtless,
It’s bright and cold outside, snowing again.
His brow is furrowed in the medical
Light as he makes the first incision to remove
A one-by-one-inch patch of skin between my shoulder blades
That frames a precancerous spot,
Severe atypia, he calls it, a small death storm that
Threatens to rot my core.
I mean you’re no waxed apple, he says,
But you’ll still make someone a decent pie.
At least we caught it early,
You still have so many groceries to lug in the house,
A young daughter with a hole in her sock,
Waiting for your permission to
Just throw it away.
You have assignments to finish,
Dreams to discern,
Just think of all the sauces and dips you haven’t tried,
The smell of grass on your dog’s feet.
Just because you can’t get the sound of
Someone’s last breath out of your mind
Doesn’t mean it’s your turn.
You still have time.
Time to ask Alexa if it’s raining outside,
Time to take it all back.
Now, to be safe, we will send this new sample to the lab for analysis
Where they will watch your mistakes multiply and
Mutate under a microscope,
All the times you’ve felt small,
All the times you’ve been burned,
Fooled by the gray Ohio sky.
But, no worries,
We’re gonna get you fixed up,
Back in the game,
I’m starting the sutures now,
Two layers, one on top to hold together
What’s left of your middle-aged skin,
One below to keep the fear
From reaching the surface.
You may feel some tugging.
What’s that?
It feels like someone’s buttoning your dress too tight?
Yes, it might feel strange to
Bend over and breathe, but
Do what you can.
Understand that this changes things for you now,
Get yourself a good mineral sunblock,
Buy a nice hat,
Stay in the shade,
And don’t let the sun see you smile.
Only come out when the puddles
Threaten to swallow the cars.
The incision might itch or feel numb,
You might feel the weather change
When you say something wrong,
So keep it dry and covered,
To seal the dread out,
Especially in the shower.
Keep it clean and let it breathe,
Hold it together, enough to muddle through the day,
Enough to spread the peanut butter
On the bread as you stare out the window.
But know that this won’t kill you,
Not now at least.
It will be some other slow hell,
Like your blood sugar sneaking up on you one night
As you gaze into the light of a vending machine.
What does the rest of your day look like?
You’re making biscuits? I love a good biscuit!
With grape jelly.
It has to be grape.
Well, nice to meet you.
We will see you in a few weeks to get the sutures out.
My assistants will be in soon to get you cleaned up,
Pop your tires on, and get you back on the track.
You’ll speed off and slam into something else in no time.
Perhaps a bleacher filled with onlookers
Eating hotdogs in the sun as
Their abnormal cells divide.
—from Rattle #86, Winter 2024
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Alma Olaechea: “I write in an attempt to capture and share what it means to be human. I am at peace with not getting it quite right. I find inspiration in science and go from there.”
Abby E. Murray
TWO-HOUR DELAY
It’s February and already
I’ve overspent my budgeted bewilderment
for the year, most of it on deep & constant
sorrow: war, deportations, deployments, hatred
forged into policy, theft, dead phone lines
and locked doors. I’ve seen more planes fall
from the clouds this winter than snow. So,
for less than an inch of scattered flakes across the city,
our superintendent delays schools for two hours,
and before I fill them with what I have in excess—
lack of amusement, a backlog of worry, and work—
my daughter runs outside, gloveless, hatless,
and all I can think is how lucky she is, at least,
not to be named after industry or my assumptions
about her purpose on this planet. When I read
about the young couple practicing eugenics
in preparation for an apocalypse, the mother’s
ridiculous straw bonnet and father’s smug face
don’t make my jaw drop. My eyes don’t widen.
Belief is the new disbelief. Grief, not shock,
is this year’s renewable resource, and baby,
the harvest looks plentiful. My daughter returns
to show me how she scraped together
just enough sidewalk grit and ice to sculpt
a snowman the size of a pigeon. She props it up
in the weeds we call a yard and it stays for days,
long after the sun revokes what’s left
of the frost and glitter. It delights us without
the burden of surprise, which has never improved
anyone’s life, or built a single beautiful thing.
—from Poets Respond
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Abby E. Murray: “This poem happened instead of the incredulity I once felt as I stayed informed about what was happening in the U.S. There’s so much disaster to witness (such as the recovery of the wreck of flight 5342 in the Potomac, or this rising ‘trend’ of fascistic pronatalism), and many of us are in this strange new place of no longer losing time to the experience of shock—but we aren’t desensitized either. We’re feeling everything, just without the delay of disbelief. It’s simultaneously disorienting and intensely revealing.” (web)
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
Tribute to the Sonnet
__________
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.”
Amy Newman
ABANDONED FAIR
Our love is an abandoned fair:
the lights all broken on the midway,
some glitter still hung in the air.
We strolled like kids. We weren’t aware.
We satisfied ourselves all day.
Our love is an abandoned fair,
though painted horses galloped there,
beneath—I cringe at the cliché—
some glitter, still hung the air,
those sparkles of our wear and tear,
silver distractions. What did I say
our love is? An abandoned fair,
an image of what mattered there—
gold, right? (See in a tossed bouquet,
some glitter still.) Hung in the air
like a promise? Nope. Nothing there.
Just sparkly garbage and decay.
Our love is an abandoned fair.
Some glitter still hung in the air.
—from Rattle #86, Winter 2024
__________
Amy Newman: “One summer after graduating from college, I was working as an assistant to a stylist in Manhattan, dressing models for photo shoots and television commercials. It sounds glamorous, but I felt very alien in that world. One morning, I was on location in an apartment on the Upper West Side, surrounded by people bustling about and by shopping bags full of items to collate and eventually choose to dress the talent. I noticed, on the coffee table, an issue of the The New Yorker, opened it, and turned to ‘In Passing,’ a poem by Stanley Plumly. I had studied poetry in college, and I had thought all of that—reading and drafting poetry—was behind me. But as I read the poem, everything changed for me: the studio, the bustling, the feverish atmosphere, all fell away. After I read the final line, I looked up from the poem again, and I was surprised to be back in that studio. I felt so moved, and so found for that moment, that I decided to go back to college to study poetry.” (web)
Jan LaPerle
SHE RINGS LIKE A BELL THROUGH THE NIGHT
Yesterday my husband bought a Lincoln Town Car.
As we were driving to pick it up he said how it was once
the longest car in America. Sometimes I don’t have to imagine
what he’ll be like when he’s old. I can see,
clearly, tonight, the moon.
To the moon and back
is how I love you, I said, and what I say now
to my month-old daughter. But that’s not right;
that’s not enough. To the moon and back and back and back
when I was first getting to know my husband I lied,
told him I only wanted to be friends. I remember his eyes,
a ship through ice.
Ship-fronts scare me, and that is what I felt like pregnant—
so big and capable of so much: so much good; so much bad.
It was the bad I dwelled on. I watched videos of babies
with two heads, many legs, nothing at all for eyes.
I was sure I was ruining her, somehow, someway:
the fluffernutter, too many tuna fish sandwiches.
I thought once I gave birth I’d be relieved if she was okay.
I could sleep through the night and stop dreaming of her
sleeping in my arms, a pole for a head.
One fear replaces another. Each night now I wake
in fear that I’ve crushed her in bed. Sometimes it’s so bad
I wake the husband and the two of us, in the slight light
of the streetlight, are in there, in the king bed digging,
through pillows and sheets, looking for our baby.
Digging and digging as if our bed was the terrible ground
beneath the floorboards. We sweat, breathe heavy;
I’m crying.
The power to kill something is so strong up in me,
and so strange to be right next to the part of me
that can love something this much. It’s the sort of love
I want to tell people without children about,
as mothers and fathers once told me. But this is impossible.
And it’s impossible to think of my life before her
(as they said it would be)—to think of how it was when
I first saw my husband, how I imagined our life together
even then, even when he was someone else’s.
How quickly life can change direction. I wonder
if all couples imagine their husbands or wives old,
themselves old. I wonder if my parents had done so
when they were first married, decades before their divorce.
They couldn’t have known where their lives were going.
I wonder about the ease of a U-turn in our Lincoln Town Car.
A U-turn over the highway median: illegal. Sad.
I do not want my husband to leave me.
There are so many fears in me. When I try to fall
asleep I can hear a knocking against the headboard.
Someone is already at my door with the big, bad news.
So I sleep for a little while until the baby wakes me.
Sometimes I’m so tired when she wakes I get
so damn mad at her. Last night I set her
little screaming body on the countertop,
simple, like a set of keys. Her little hand was hitting
against the lever on the toaster. I think now it might
have looked like she was making toast. She had to hit
against something to wake me, to tell me
I was being a bad mother, selfish for wanting sleep
more than wanting to care for her, her little belly
empty as the streets (terrible when they’re empty).
The lake sits at the end of our street.
The sad boats float. One going this way, one that—
that’s how I see our marriage going sometimes.
As if our love will turn into something obligatory—
something to maintain like the lawn,
or a loosening shutter.
Something in me is loosening.
I dream each night of flying. Once, years ago,
I pranked my father, told him his house in Florida
had been hit by a storm. Pieces of his house were loosening.
I disguised my voice, made it old and cranky. The funniest part
is that he believed this voice.
Inside of me is the old fuddy-duddy I will someday be.
I feel her in there, like a pregnancy. Aren’t there so many
parts of us? Young, old, our children, parents.
Luckily, now, we have a big car—it stretches
across our driveway, ready to hold us, like a big, big hand.
—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
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Jan LaPerle: “I’m a new mother. There’s hardly much to say after that (and a whole lot more, too). I write this in the springtime, which means I’m feeling like buying new clothes and cutting off my hair. Daffodils are blooming outside my kitchen window. My husband and I just moved into a new (old) house, which we’ve been working on. We are a team, and I love that about us (and everything). He cooks for me; all I have to do is watch the daffodils. I love watching the top of my daughter Winnie’s fuzzy head when she eats. Poetry comes in the smaller moments. My baby smiles at the dog. The dog smiles at my husband. I just smile at them all.”
Steven Monte
ON THE MEANING OF WALLS
for David Rosen
The Great Wall of China couldn’t hold back
every invader, or angle of attack:
the forces of the Mongol khaganate
galloped around it; others used the gate.
Antonine’s Wall wouldn’t hold, Romans knew.
Hadrian’s would—till the legions withdrew.
Constantinople’s Theodosian Walls
stopped everything, till Mehmet’s cannonballs
fell on them, smashing them to smithereens—
call it “diplomacy by other means.”
Jerusalem’s “Western Wall” gained renown
for standing; Berlin’s Wall, for coming down.
From Babylon to blitzkrieged Maginot,
walls came to mean things their makers couldn’t know.
Walls signaled virtue, or the gravest wrong;
a pointing toward who did (or didn’t) belong.
They could be power, pragmatism, art;
everything holding us together, apart.
Regardless of what they were fashioned for,
time would reduce each wall to metaphor.
—from Rattle #86, Winter 2024
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Steven Monte: “This poem came to me as a wall—a line of separated rhyming couplets. That’s often the way it is for me: content suggests a form to me, and then the form influences the content in turn. Starting with the idea of ‘The Wall of China’ and Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ along with the notion of separated rhyming couplets, the poem wrote itself, as strange as that may sound. The stricter the form, the quicker the result—assuming that there is a result. It happens or it doesn’t happen.”