Hayden Saunier

POEM IN SEARCH OF A HORSE

Time is not reading the poem as you
read the poem, but rest assured he’s slipped
inside the room in his soft, polished shoes,
with his little cough, his bowler hat in hand,
so sorry to disturb. It isn’t that he doesn’t like
to read, he loves to lean across your shoulder,
let you feel his breath, a delicate subzero
on your neck, but he’s impatient with anything
but haiku. Ignore him. He’ll pretend
he doesn’t care, proceed to wind the clocks
with tiny keys or stretch out on a sofa, tap
a tree branch on a pane and wait you out.
Meanwhile, the poem persists in its solitary
business of resisting being made, trying
the usual tactics: silence, tantrum, argument
over rules of play until the stuck mind panics,
a tarantula in hot tar, shouts words out
like charades: moon! anapest! plumage! boat!
desperate to drown out that silence accompanying
the figure in the well-cut suit who’s polishing
the gold case of his pocket watch, remarking
how words pile up like big rigs on a fogged-in
freeway: apple! rainfall! pasture! bell! and even
when the poem finds some purchase, scrambles
up a narrow footpath through a field and stands
inside a grassy insect buzz, holding out
a shaky palm of sugar to conjure up a horse,
a distant train will whistle, spooking anything
half wild. You’re back exactly where you started.
Cough-cough. Soft shoes. Tick-tock. No horse.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

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Michael Salcman

THE NIGHT BEFORE

The ex-husbands were the worst; not one showed up
to discuss whether a wife’s head should be shaved
the night before or asleep on the table.
Ex-girlfriends and wives were better, always there
to stake out their territory and proclaim undying devotion.
A patient’s room the night before was like a temple
a moment before the service starts, everyone chatting
and catching up, the pews in front of the Ark
filled with noise, the children of blended families
forced to attend, in loud debate
about what should be done. Each of them had their reasons:
father was much too young or old to get the new drug,
he was otherwise healthy, his heart was strong,
if he knew he would fight to the end or
he wouldn’t want to live as less than a man.
Like this they broke into camps, some still wishing
to keep up the fight by another attack on the tumor,
others in favor of (usually unsaid) adjusting the respirator
and pulling the plug. Unless the man in the bed was deep in coma
or paralyzed by drugs, we took it outside to the hall
and made our decision in that outer courtyard of the temple
where nurses walk their silent carts
and monitors wink like distant stars.
I stepped just far enough away he wouldn’t hear them trembling
to know what I would do in the morning.
Even if he never spoke, I always assumed he listened.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

Mark Rich

INTO THE FOG

Whiteness over this village and hill
obscures everything from view until
you are right on it—if in a car
with someplace to go. Having not far

to go, by foot, to a household sale,
we wonder how forecasters could fail
so completely to see this coming,
mute folds draping over everything

so that what we see is never quite
what we know is there, in proper light.
A tree mistily looming, gray stain
against gray stain, lets droplets fall: rain

from white-washed boughs, falling so lightly
it touches our faces just barely
more strongly than the touch of this mist.
We go on, wondering if we missed

the house—then see someone’s furniture
ghostly in a yard. The departure
of the owner is followed by this—
that of her things. No one now will miss

whatever vanishes in whiteness.
To buy things being our morning’s business,
we do—then fight down the urge to roam
deeper into fog. We turn our way home.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

Tera Vale Ragan

SUNDAY PICNIC ON THE VLTAVA

The waves of air along the water
soothe the chapped spines of young
Czechs who’ve sheared their hair
to hawk it up and away from sweat
that pearls along their skull lines.

They gather clinking Pilsner bottles,
punk among the mosquito weeds and silted
rock the flood has left on the Ostrov strip.
They know the embankment well,
each grass stain and joint

drag, another hip conversation
raveled with the island boles.
Their black Levis, tied with ropes,
are cut at the knees, and dragged down
to moon the Jazz boats and ducks they feed

with hard baguettes. And where they lose
their footing in the muddy under-ledge
of the river, they meet their reflections
in water. Wet-handling their girls,
they pull them down deeper

into the darkness until their body parts
are obscured, the only light reflecting
like cracked beer bottle bits along the ripples
the paddle boats leave behind. One emerges
wearing his girl’s swim top—leaving her

on display—to ask if it looks good
on his broader shape. Beside him, a boy
scraping up earth to build a mud
fort, protecting the bank from swans,
looks on and learns how to be a man.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

Charles Rafferty

OHIO

The state quarter celebrates our love
of sky, minting the Kitty Hawk and the man
on the moon together: the first step
and the first flight growing improbably
from that same Ohioan soil. If I had
my own quarter, I’d stamp it with a girl
who sung me to glass that glittered to bits
and the wife who glued me back.
Or with the skyline of Derby
and a wasp-filled cupola at Fairfield Hills.
Or with the Beatles and the darkened dial
of my car radio. Or with a Gemini capsule
and a jetliner slamming itself to marigolds.
It’s possible to love the ground too much.
Before I’d ever flown I had a fear of flying,
which is really a fear of falling, which is also
a fear of pain—and how can a life be lived
except by accepting pain? So once
when I was twenty, I stepped off a Cessna
at three thousand feet above a field
of daisies and goldenrod. I remember letting go,
then nothing. Then a stillness, a floating,
the motor of the plane receding like a bug.
I hung there clutching a dandelion plume—
my legs in a dangle above the field
that kept on rising to where I was.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009