Arthur Vogelsang

ENVIRONMENTAL

Unfortunately rather than grass there was white paste
Or rather than an orange tiger lily there was white white out,
And a lime tree or an outfield? No instead there was white medicine
In a normal tube which over and over had to refill
Itself to cover the whole major league outfield
And on nice brown and black checked sheets with brown pillowcases
There were without mercy each night snow and white glue mixed
With snow in my spot in the bed.
In the morning, we fully awake, the glue was fifty percent
Of the snow that was shoveled from the walk. Each day such snow
Was waiting outside and of each day the first five hours
I shoveled. Tell me yours.

OK. The pets whose names you know well were dead, all fourteen,
The ones who are six years old and the ones who are fifty-two,
Or they were all lost, we could not find out which it was. The people
We know, or knew (and that’s the hard part)
Were also hopefully lost rather than decayed
With no consciousness, and we searched for the creatures and humans
Every waking minute in the endless cities then went to sleep
And as we slept we hoped they were hopelessly lost not dead.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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John L. Stanizzi

S-PLAN

Bacon Academy
Colchester, CT
October 31st, 2001

1.

Shortly after 9/11,
a boy who had been stealing pick-up trucks
from a local dealership
and hiding them in the woods
so he could sell them later,
decided to fashion a fake bomb
and place it on the loading dock
outside the cafeteria
on Halloween morning.

We, of course, were all still
emotionally threadbare
and sent into a frazzle.

The first order of the morning
was to stop the buses
before they got into the parking lot,
and not let the kids into the school.

As each top-heavy yellow clunker
pulled its plume of blue smoke into the drive,
we stopped it and tried to explain
what was going on,
without freaking out the vampires,
witches, monsters, and ghosts,
12 buses,
each filled with high school kids
all being something else for the day.

We sent the buses to the elementary school,
where all 800 ghouls
would hang out in the tiny gym
until the danger had passed.

Take a moment here to imagine that.

2.

I thought of my own youth—
different time, same fear—
the old days of “duck and cover,”
air raid horn baying at the spring sky,
and all of us either balled up under our desks,
or standing, boy girl boy girl
against the cool, cool
painted cinder block walls
in the shadowy hallways of St. Mary’s,
the perfume of lilacs
in the breeze that breathed there,

or before me, in England,
the shelters in underground tubes,
railway arches, subways,
and my Auntie Elsie,
staring in dread at the ceiling
in the shelter in her cellar.

And later,
after the Russians did their bomb,
and Yuri Gagarin swirled around in our sky,
General Foods and General Mills
sold dried war rations,
and the nuclear protection suit was a hot item.

Wall Streeters even claimed
that the bomb shelter business
would gross billions in the coming years,
if there were any.
And every day
the radio sizzled warnings
that a shoddy, homemade shelter
would get you broiled “to a crisp”
or squeezed “like grapefruit,”
as in American neighborhoods
people built “wine cellars,”
or else the contractors worked
under cover of night.

I cried into our couch
for 14 days straight in 1962,

and I didn’t even really know why
beyond the fact that all the adults
seemed quiet and scared,
and I understood the word annihilation,
and saw, over and over again,
the documentary where the house
gets blown away sideways
by a speeding cloud of nuclear winter.

But the bomb never fell,
even though everyone,
including me,
kept fear in their hearts,
and spent years
practicing for the end,

3.

and it’s the same now.

When the kids returned to school
later that morning,
we tried to resume a
typical Halloween
in a typical American high school,
the kids dressed to kill,
the sugar-high higher
because they were back on familiar ground.
But the party didn’t last long.

Soon a voice filled with urgency
squawked over the perpetual loudspeaker
that we needed to immediately
go into the “S-plan.”

Ignore all fire alarms and bells.

Students in the hallway
should run to the nearest classroom.

Teachers lock your classroom door.
Do not let ANYONE in.

If students ask to be let in,
do not let them in.
Direct them to the office.
Do not let them in.

Cover the windows
with the black paper
that you’ve put aside
for this occasion.

Huddle all your students
into the corner,
away from the windows and doors.

Do not use the school phone
or your cell phone.

Stay there until you receive instructions.

And we did. For two hours,
me and the bum,
the Ninja Turtle,
the Queen of Hearts,
fear in the eyes behind the masks,
fear in the tears of the ballerina.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

Read by Author

Charlie Smith

THE CASING

For years I sat in bars lying about everything,
concealing my limp, offering vinyl
suitcases for sale and proposing to women
who’d overlooked themselves. I gave away

folding tables and threatened
species like lopsided turtles and misused
harness bulls. I wasn’t as speedy as I claimed to be
or as galled by those without

a purpose in life. I sold three-day
vacations to resorts that existed
only in your mind. I liked to watch the breeze
take leafy boughs in hand.

The limits to man’s ability
to reach the stars were no problem for me.
I sank my nose in foreign papers
looking for tiny lots I might build

my dream house on. I said I owned
hotels and racks for smoking arctic char.
I claimed to notice something burning
in the kitchen. A leaf seemed at times to urge

a change in plans. Probably the winds
were coming from the east. I gave away
my watch and told the time by the degradation
of building materials. I spelled the stuporized.

The sun, an old friend, eased
onto the brickyard wall. I sensed an era
drawing to a close. Something told me,
so I said, to gather up my things. Smoothed-

over ideas, frets, a capacity for change
unremarked on by others, a boarding house
menu I used for a text, my bindle, palpebral musings,
a burial suit of lights

and a jar of brandied apricots—all these
I said I’d send a van back for and never did.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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Paul Siegell

06.25.00 – PHISH – ALLTEL PAVILION, NC

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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Lee Sharkey

BERLIOZ

Now let us praise Hector Berlioz
who found himself one night composing
a symphony as he slept who woke
lucid remembering the entire
first movement in A minor he could
have sat down at his desk and begun
transcribing as during the first hours
after a great destruction we see
in detail each small thing that was lost
as after my house went up in flames
carrying with them all of my poems
I sat on a mattress on a cold
floor and began to reconstruct them
found I could remember all of them
if only the night were long enough
but Berlioz willed himself not to
pick up his pen his wife was ill if
he wrote the first notes he knew himself
too well for months nothing would exist
except poured silver he would not write
the articles that sustained them how
would he pay for her medicine how
would he buy food he willed himself not
to pick up the pen yet the next night
the symphony visited him once
more it called him to service it called
him to adoration it took all
his strength to lie back down until he
finally fell asleep and the spurned
muse left him just as I fell asleep
laying my head on my journal and
the poems I had not transcribed left me
with only my child and my mate and
the spring where I knelt and chopped through ice
to draw the blessing of water let
us praise Berlioz for his unsung
symphony of medicine and bread

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009