Elizabeth Volpe

BREWING IN EDEN

Okay, so it shouldn’t be a huge deal
when I open the cupboard and notice
the coffee lids not quite secure. But
both lids have sidled practically off the cans,
like toddler twins scampering off their beds
on the way to mischief.

I no longer want coffee.

Rather, I no longer want
this coffee. My husband looks at me as though
I have grown a tail and patiently assures me
that the small animals I envision breaking into our cupboard
while we were away for the weekend—oh
how they had bided their time, rubbing their small paws
in anticipation—could not possibly have pried
tight lids from Costco 3 lb. coffee canisters. See, he says,
sifting through the grounds, making the coffee
even more unacceptable, there’s not a single thing
wrong with this coffee.

But at this point it has become a matter of aesthetics.

The coffee no longer pleases, and I choose
not to have any. Yes, I agree, it will be a waste to throw away
mostly full cans simply because I have let my imagination poison
my morning coffee. I don’t know how long we stand there,
me disgusted by the thought of the coffee, he disgusted
by my squeamishness.

It is the kind of battle we wage.

The Coffee Wars. The That-Milk-Is-Still-Perfectly-Good
Wars. The Do-You-Really-Need-All-Those-Lights-On
Wars. I scowl and he growls. I notice he’s chewing
his corn flakes more noisily than usual, so I rattle the morning paper,
as if shaking snakes from the newsprint. Then I inch the pages over
until they are ever-so-slightly on top of his placemat,
just barely touching his plate.

–from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

Richard Vargas

AND YET, ANOTHER NATURE POEM

maybe it’s me
but when sticking something
up my ass i like to know
what are the ingredients
so imagine my surprise
when flipping over the box
of preparation h and reading
that it consists of 3% shark
liver oil

it’s one thing to end up
fillet’d on some celebrity chef ’s
cooking show who screams
BAM as he orgasmically rubs
you down with rich aromatic
spices

there are worse ways to go
if you know what i mean
like being hunted down
chopped up and processed
as vital organs are wrung and
squeezed for the precious oils
coveted for the relief they provide
a baby boomer’s itchy anal orifice

so the next time you’re
on a cruise
riding the glassy surface of
a calm, romantic sea under
a full Bahaman or Mexican moon
holding your significant other’s
hand as you snuggle on deck
making one of those memories
that will give you comfort in
your old age–

at the same moment just a
few feet below the surface
like a pack of nazi submarines
waiting for the right moment
to strike
they are watching
waiting for you to fall in

don’t flatter yourself
you don’t taste good
for them it’s the practical
thing to do
ripping you apart
just means

one less asshole
in the world
to worry about

–from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

Glenn Morazzini

SONNY’S SONG

“Someday, they’re gonna write a blues
song just for fighters,” he once said.
“I’ll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet,
and a bell.”
—Sonny Liston, in King of the World by David Remnick

As a kid I carried fields on my back,
sharecropper’s black cotton, when daddy
wasn’t hoeing welts on it with a strap.
Ran away, at 13, traced mama’s
roadless map of hope, to St. Louis,
an assembly line, shoe factory,
her heart, a piece of stitched leather.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

On the streets I sold ice. I sold coal.
Slaughtered chickens under a blood-leaking
roof. But hunger is a hard habit to kick,
so I packed 200 pounds, 6 feet,
into fists and cashed their threats
in strangers’ faces for money’s meat.
By 22, same fists cuffed me
to the Missouri penitentiary, where,
gloved in the gym, Father Stevens
taught me to hurt others, legally.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

17 straight wins, then Floyd Patterson
sucked canvas at my feet, but whose champion?
No mayor handed me the gold key,
or kid’s marching school band played
when I stepped off the plane in Philly.
I was still the gorilla in the ring,
a cage, white bars of stars and stripes
made in the U.S. of A.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

Though Geraldine, her body a silk robe,
waited at home, and James Brown
screamed “Night Train” refrains
on the gym’s stereo, pumped me
to hit the speed bag, skip rope, spar miles—
something inside quiet, before Clay,
seventh round, Miami, jabbed me still.
Thought he was all mouth, but the man’s
hands backed up his flashy lip. Now,
I’d unslave his name, call him Ali.
soft guitar, slow trumpet, and a bell

The rest you know you don’t know:
did the mob, or a bad cop, tie
my arm to the white balloon of heroin
I finally rode out of Vegas-town,
or did I off myself, like an old felon.
You didn’t care if I lived,
why do you care how I died?
I’ll tell you when I see you in hell.
soft guitar, slow trumpet, and a bell

–from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

Lynn Shapiro

SLOAN-KETTERING

One thing they don’t tell you about Sloan-Kettering
is how beautiful the workers are, shepherdesses, sirens,
brawny football players, ready to lift the heaviest bodies. One,
rosy as a mountain child moves like the most even glare of light,
never turns away till you have risen to follow her.
She holds your paper file near her breasts, but not too tight.
Walls are paved with photographs, scenes of mountains, forests
carved by light. The chemotherapy suite is a skylight, a bubble.
You pass posters for support groups presented on easels like paintings
in progress. There are private rooms for each patient with chairs
and blankets and a straight-backed chair for a companion if you have one,
and a little television with its snake arm, riveted into the wall.
In the center of all these private rooms are gatherings of high stalked flowers,
magenta, purple, amber, bursting higher than churches, in golden vases
everywhere, and the carpet is gold, too, so padded you can hear
no sound of walking. There are so many workers here,
and your surgeon, Alexandra, is the most beautiful worker of all.
Her office where you wait is the color of cool green and mountain cream.
A computer pulses out deep blue insignias, next to it
is a magazine, half the cover missing, torn, or half-eaten,
waiting for you to touch it in the same place as the person before you.
You don’t and this decision, its stillness, its inability to reverse is profound
and stagnant. Outside, in the hallway other doctors stand leaning, writing
with the concentration of animals eating food, whose only purpose
is to become blind to everything but their own sustenance.
And she is the Sun. She is beautiful when she enters, says How
are you? You lean on her are. She opens your robe like the earth,
and you say, I used to have beautiful breasts, and she says, You still
do, and she cups your breasts. This is her special way. She cups
each one, then combs down, down with her fingers as if down
the side of a mountain she is scaling tenderly so as not to fall
once. She half-closes your garment and you close the rest.
You watch her fingers leave your robe how they arc in the air
to papers on her desk, and you realize that at various times
in the past five years you have thought of her fingers, their short
nails, and how she called you and said into the mouth of her phone,
really as an afterthought, that in the site of the malignancy we found
a little milk. A little she said, like the purr of a cat, and you could see
her fingers, her surgeons fingers holding her own children’s milk bottles,
and then as you will always, you will want to be like her, to save lives
during the day, then go home, feed your children at night.
You remember the way out on the soundless carpet.
Your husband is with you, murmurs, your husband,
the lobby, just as you remember, in subtle shades, tones of green and gold.

–from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Pushcart Prize Winner

Scott Withiam

THE PETTY SNOW

Winter’s first snowflakes stuck together on their way down.
There were so many people upon which they fell who were not
sticking together. There was an unsnapped driving glove
fallen to the wet slop, looking like a tired tongue hanging out.
People awkwardly slipped away from each other, bodies taut.
Meanwhile, they looked up, higher up, anticipatory almost,
for the highest mountain hidden in a blizzard. It was almost
religious. No one knew that up there was an English-as-a-Second-Language
teacher. Her car had just spun out and ditched. She sat there.
She could not see the towns or people below, but considered how
the snow at higher altitude dumped in looser, world-torn tongues,
and thought how she had formerly thought how this horribly descended
upon the race. But here, she said, “Beautiful as it is, why do I try
to control my students’ writings? Why, when life is, as one student
had written of heavy snow, ‘like door after door shutting behind like,
real life getting more and more earily quite?’” The teacher got out
of her car, stood in it, what her student called “the petty snow,”
and following one snowflake, the complexity possible in each structure,
each phoneme, each situation or moment, said from then on what
she would correct would be her pettiness, so that there was prettiness.
Could that make a big difference? Remember the driving glove?
Attempting to drive over the mountain was that man wearing
his other, himself petty obsessed with a question: “What good is one?”
Not the deep question, What good is one flake or person? but What
good is one glove? Given the visibility, he mostly saw his numb hand
steering, till perched on his naked hand, superimposed like the sharp-eyed
hawk hunched on a dead branch and disappearing under snow, voila:
the teacher. He too stopped, ditched, but could not see how she saw
the snow as a huge blank piece of paper, out of which now opened
the only door for miles, his door, and how suddenly—suddenly,
the word she warned her students never to use—a red, rare hand
reached out—his hand—and helped her into the knew. Suddenly,
she jumped in, shook herself off, kissed and blew warm his cold hand.
And very unlike him, he made a claim: human feeling—maybe even love—
did not come back with pricks but arrived like talons, because his glove,
the one she had slipped off and now dangled between them, what was that
but some small beady-eyed screaming being carried off to be eaten
so that the bigger being could live? She wondered, she said, how long
it would be before someone below found it, the other.

–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention