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John Yohe

THE GHOST OF FRANK O’HARA

The ghost of Frank O’Hara taps me on
the shoulder whispering
                                                and what about
the humor what about talks with the sun
and things that happen at the movies out
of sight of parents don’t forget the thirst
of being in Manhattan in the heat
and Coke the drink
                                      remember too your first
love passion music though it might not come out
in words it’s there in you but I was sad
and said what good is humor in a poem
when people die Manhattan Fire Island
we
      bought falafels which we thought weren’t bad
and walked to Central Park for space and some
children were laughing and he said ask them

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Donald Mace Williams

THE VENTURI EFFECT

You may have thought, from visiting art shows,
that canyons squeezed together on their way
downstream. No. That’s only perspective. They
in fact, as any hiker my age knows,
spread out and vanish. Their canyonness goes.
Their vital currents pool up, slacken, splay,
their tall red hoodoos melt into flat gray,
the bankside cottonwoods go, nothing grows.
This one the same. Far downstream now, my feet
have brought me where I see the end. No foam
from water straitened, focused one last time
by rock walls aping art, trying to meet,
but alkali-white flatlands, killdeers’ home,
walls gone, speed gone, all low that was high prime.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Thom Ward

RUMPUS, COHESION, MESS

The bed sheet knows the vices I’ve slept.
How quickly it nooses my feet. Someone said,
we’re wrong men in a right world, all that
zigzag anger. Not quite—that’s another movie.
We’re wrong men who’ve built a wrong world,
each with a knapsack full of crushed glass,
cigarette butts. Photos of our children march
off the walls to a music only the dog can hear.
Rumpus minus cohesion equals mess. So many
weapons, I’m waiting for the plunger to make
the first move. Why should the water play fair.
Is that a cross around your neck or the last bird?
Things forgotten scream out for help in dreams
but not as loudly as things remembered.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck

FREEDOM
        Haight Street

The realtor claimed the flat was lived in once
by Janis Joplin, a quite common claim,

we later learned. The tactic worked on us.
We learned to overlook—that hint of fame!—

the smell of gas, an awkward floor plan, soot
that never scoured. We dwelled not there but on

our plum address and, when fall came, we bought
dark Goodwill coats, the nights much colder than

we had foreseen. Through that long year, we read
Jacques Derrida, and smoked, and grew fresh thyme

on the one sill with light. We baked wheat bread—
well, one loaf anyway—and drank red wine,

and each day died a bit—twenty, confused—
two other words for nothing left to lose.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Catherine Esposito Prescott

TO A HURRICANE

At the right speed wind sounds like a train
                   straining its breaks as metal grates metal;
but before you imagine sparks raining
                   circles around the wheels, its voice changes
to a throaty hush. In the early stages, you may
                   mistake it for the neighbors laughing, then crying.
As doors and windows tremble, as locks labor
                   to stay closed, you’ll hear the cry of the mother
burying her child by the river, and of widows
                   who have lost everything to war. And in that moment
what remains of your sense of order is supplicant
                   like the spine of a palm tree bowed toward earth, fronds beaten, torn,
and the sweet cord of belief that holds your life together
                   fights like hell not to snap: the tree’s trunk, your back.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Jessica Piazza

PANOPHILIA
          Love of everything

Today this weather’s better than itself:
all background clamor, siren song, our schemed
and ill-conceiving strategies. This shelf,
chaotic and precariously leaning
next to your appalling bed, a trove
of wonders hovering over us. But love
itself I never deigned to love; all give
and giving in. So I don’t understand
my drunkenness on scribble scrawled above
the mirror in the ladies’ room: You’re doomed.
Ecstatic that it’s almost true. And though
I should not love you yet—obliged to slow
and genuflect to sense or self-defense—
because of you, I’ll love everything else.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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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
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Jessica Moll

COSTUME

Our game’s a cross between A Chorus Line
and Fame. Rehearsals, here in our backyard.
Pretend the lawn’s the stage. The tutu’s mine,
but I let David pick a leotard.
I’m ten, he’s five, he’s used to all my rules.
He gets to be a girl, but has to choose
a neutral name like “Chris.” Summer fog rolls
in. We swirl our glitter scarves to music
in our heads. He’s got it down, the girl
pose: hips, hands. He’s not a boy. He won’t play
out front, racing Big Wheels. Instead, he twirls
barefoot with me. But what about the place
my fingers found, underneath my clothes?
The grass is cold. Plié. And point your toes.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Mary Meriam

THE ROMANCE OF MIDDLE AGE

Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers
at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim
in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours
and days and decades, head to foot, and slim
is just a faded photograph. It’s strange
how people look away who once would look.
I didn’t know I’d undergo this change
and be the unseen cover of a book
whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker.
One reaches for the pleasures of the mind
and heart to counteract the loss of quicker
knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind,
although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer,
in case I might attract another geezer.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Read by Tim