Molly Peacock

THE EX-WORLD

Death had seemed so abrupt to X,
like a TV show she loved being cancelled,
or a pet lipstick color discontinued.

Of course X knew these were minor examples!
Their minority let X think about death.
By now she’d lived through so many

new shows just a hue different from old ones
and new lipsticks causing a shade of mourning
for colors that would never be made again,

at least in her lifetime, she thought,
the end isn’t sudden at all—
why, it begins back with the first x-ing out.

Death wasn’t an ending, it was a transfer!
Cancellation by discontinuation,
she was crossing into the next world.

Disappearing through the border was
a bit like a passport check.
“What does the X stand for?”

the officer usually said at her customs-of-the-mind,
and she made up all sorts of names:
Example, Exonerate, Exfoliate.

Then the officer would point to the Exit
and watch her go. She seemed to dematerialize,
but instead made an entrance on the other side

in an alternate shade of her self.
X cared just a bit less about this world
each time some little thing she loved got crossed out.

Some tiny cells of her own disappeared
with the end of “Zoom Maroon” and “Toast of New York.”
Like Get Smart and The Avengers

her re-makes were never quite the same.
Yet fading piqued her curiosity:
Ex means examine, too,

each layer peeling off
its own thinny-thin translucency
like values of moonlight.

Which do you prefer, the sun or the moon?
Which one, LIFE or DEATH?
The thing clearly seen—or the thing in mystery?

Well, it’s time for mystery, X thought,
even though you’ve always moved past the spot
by the time you’ve marked it.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

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Todd Outcalt

ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF HIS WIFE’S DEATH

He thinks that time will heal. But this is fable.
He tries to call her friends. But is not able.
He wants to venture out. But is not stable.
Her photograph remains upon the table.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

David D. Nolta

TWO PANELS BY MEMLING
          from the Brukenthal Collection

The dog loved the boy and the boy is dead.
The man—his father—could not allow
His son to be buried inside his head
As if he had never lived. That’s how

The artist, Memling, entered the picture
(Figuratively speaking). The man let fall
His coins and condition, one sly little stricture:
“Paint all of the story, or nothing at all.”

And so, by the wellhead, his wife—the man’s—
Assumed the pose in which Time would own her;
She knelt, she joined her empty hands,
As moving an image of mother and donor

As the Pietà in the churchyard, where
She last had her child. Across the divide
Her husband, more literal, reads his prayer,
Which Memling grants, for at his side

His son resumes the familiar station
Like the dog to the right of the woman’s knees.
The result is less a conversation
Than so many stopped soliloquies.

Is grief what this man and woman were made for?
Their reasons vanished with their names.
But not the point—that’s what they paid for:
The boy and the dog in their separate frames.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

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Leah Nielsen

TEACHING SLANT RHYME

I have always wanted to write a poem in which lavender
rhymes with vendor or scavenger but mostly cadaver,

but the image—imagine a literary journal’s response —
seems inadvertently humorous—and there seems no nonchalant

way to pair them, to rhim them, as my students
say, which is a marked improvement

over their DO NOT RHYME policy
and their almost comic cacophonies

composed confidently through alliteration,
and when they get it, it becomes an addiction—

one kid rhims porridge with dirigible,
another, having fallen in love with Prufrock’s dreariness

and his own cleverness suggests fellatio and go,
and another student, in earnest, asks what’s fellatio,

and I try not to laugh, to let
another student

say it, but no one does—a blow job,
I blurt, having reached an all-time teaching low,

and another, seeing I am losing control
suggests go and polka dot

and they go down the cananendwordbetwowords path
and come back to craft,

which kind of goes with Pabsts, which one argues
is not that bad a beer, and so the impromptu

debate on the virtues of PBR,
which one declares sells well in this recession—or so he heard

on CNN—a connoisseur, he also notes the virtues
of Natty Light and when I ask for a 50% rhyme for virtue

he says river, rivet, turtle, true—here I should note that I stole
the percentage concept from an old

mentor who does not like to be called old. But never mind.
What do you say to a twenty-year-old who hears Kevlar

and thinks larva, lava, valley, ale, and just because
he can, adds vulva and uvula and pauses dramatically for guffaws?

I’m sorry, kid, but you’re going to be a poet.
And poet

is an orphan,
a word for which there are no pure rhymes, like orange.

I’m sorry you have a gift for words.
I’m sure your parents would have preferred

even geology over writing,
but here you are spiraling

spite, rips, lipid, dalliance, nascent, land,
                        and pyrrhic, hiccup, puce and pedal.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

Rachael Lynn Nevins

HOUSEKEEPING

Well, kiddo, we’re the only parents you’ll ever have, I’m sorry
to say: your father, the artist, and me, the poet
and oft-enraged student of Zen, sitting up in bed and yelling
at your father, “Nirvana is not somewhere else!”
An hour later you were conceived. And now, just look
at the mess we’ve gotten you into!
Clumps of cat fur drift along the edges
of the hallway, and drippings from last month’s tomato sauce
turn black on top of the stove. Again, your father
has left the dish towel on the kitchen counter, and again
I am picking it up, throwing it at him, and wondering,
Who am I? What do I think I am doing?
Mice scurry in the walls, and last week
a chunk of the living room ceiling fell
onto the living room floor. I tell you,
things fall apart, and then they fall apart
some more, and there are days
when the very thought of the boxes still unpacked
a year and a half after our move is enough
to get my tears going. But I’m not talking only about our apartment,
your father’s bad back and bum knee, how all my new hair
is growing in gray, the boarded-up shops around the corner,
or the plastic bags blowing down Ocean Avenue and out
to the Texas-sized pile of junk
collecting in the middle of the sea. We are all
heading toward a future of white dwarves and black holes,
and goodness knows even your cells
have plans of their own. I’m sorry, kiddo,
we’ve got nothing else to give you.
Just this cold and falling apart universe, this cat
sleeping with his face tucked in my sneaker, and your disheveled
father and me, sitting on the bedroom floor and trying to sort
the laundry in heaps all around us, while merrily
you pick up your socks and toss them
onto the wrong pile.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011