November 20, 2024

Philip Metres

THE ELDERS

already are starting to retire. First
the color of their hair, then their hair,
their once-smooth gait now upgraded
 
to gimp. Then their quick quip, the witty
banter, with friends whose names,
like the titles of books, are cities
 
now surrendered. Their hawkeyed sight
is losing its feathers, perched in the fog
of an ordinary day—early evening, say—
 
forgetting suddenly where it was
they were heading, what they were
looking for—and sometimes even a foot
 
retires, sometimes a lower leg
right up to the right knee, which ached
every time they had to get out of bed,
 
and wasn’t much use anymore
anyway, really. Now the smooth clarity
of their voices is drying to a bag
 
of gravel, now their crystal hearing’s
cracked, stuffed with leaf fall—they’re
retiring, seceding, disappearing before
 
our very eyes, magician’s assistants in a box
we can’t get back
open, now we’re here
 
and now we’re snowbirds in a distant
land marooned and it will never—
not ever—turn spring again.
 

from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

__________

Philip Metres: “This is a poem of a certain age about noticing that I’m occasionally (suddenly! inexplicably!) the elder poet at certain gatherings. Writers and teachers I thought would work and live forever suddenly become citizens of the land of retirement, or light out for the lands farther than that. We would be lucky, one day, to join them. Time is undefeated. Dust to dust, earth to earth, life’s lust, death’s dearth.” (web)

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November 19, 2024

Timothy Liu

INDEMNITY

Mudslides aren’t covered.
Nor jewelry over fifteen-hundred dollars
 
unless you have a rider.
 
A live tree taken down by a storm
and falling through your master bedroom?
 
Covered. But a dead one?
 
Not. You’ll have to give the assessor
access in order to make a full
 
determination. Mice chewing up
 
old wiring underneath the floorboards
and ushering in a pity party
 
of epic proportions? Tots!
 
Walls of flame on the next ridge over?
Nope. Tell me. Is an angry voter
 
flicking a cigarette butt
 
out of a Range Rover just an idiot
or are they a bona fide
 
act of God—adept at doing the Lord’s
 
mysterious work? I haven’t
cracked open John’s overblown account
 
on the island of Patmos
 
for quite some time, but I miss
that mildewed smell seeping through
 
our family Bible. It gets me
 
thinking about all the things I can’t
control. Flood insurance
 
more retro than Noah going off
 
the grid. Grandpa’s vintage
porno stash but a conflagration on VHS
 
no one can bear to watch.
 

from Poets Respond

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Timothy Liu: “Looks like the wildfires on the West Coast and Southwest have now made it to the East Coast where we’re in the middle of a flash drought.” (web)

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November 18, 2024

Campbell McGrath

JIMSONWEED

Cloudless solitude of the dog days.
Sparrows vexing grasshoppers,
cicadas droning in the limbs,
and ho, a box turtle
trundling over pine needles in the shade.
The dog knows this thing is alive,
poking the shell gently with her nose,
but can’t figure out how, or why.
Ornery marginalia in the tractor ruts,
pokeweed, jimsonweed—
who gives them
these grit-spangled American names?
August 17th: a day you’ve seen before
but wouldn’t recognize
if it stopped you on the corner
to say hello.
 

from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

__________

Campbell McGrath: “This poem was written by my grand-dog, Magnolia.” (web)

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November 17, 2024

Abby E. Murray

HELLO, I AM NOT A SOLDIER

And yet I wear caution like a uniform
now, pulling myself into its rough sleeves
 
and old boots each morning
before I even think of coffee or how
 
the me who returns to this bed will not be
the me who left it. There is no flag,
 
mark, pattern or pin I can carry to convince
a person of what I will or will not do,
 
who I love or what I care about.
If I am kind, I must prove it by risking
 
kindness. I ration false comfort by knowing
it has never not been this way:
 
each day armed with infinite opportunities
to fail, and the chance of failure’s alternative
 
always racked like an ordinary bullet
within tens of thousands of identical seconds.
 
Wherever I go, I cling to my hope
like a weapon I have been trained to love.
 

from Poets Respond

__________

Abby E. Murray: “As the next administration unveiled its picks for senior leadership and cabinet positions this week, I was especially struck by the terrible choice for a defense secretary: a man who has a history of demonizing any life that doesn’t closely mirror his own. Most of my daily work involves examining and bridging the canyons that divide military & civilian populations, and I am imagining how much harder it’s going to be next year. I wrote this poem as a way to connect my pacifist life to the lives of service members in danger. Happy veterans day indeed.” (web)

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November 16, 2024

Jim Daniels

THE DARK MIRACLE OF INSOMNIA

Chimayó is home of the Santuario de Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas. Local residents walk miles, often barefoot, to visit the sanctuary… Many take away “tierra bendita” (holy dirt) from a hole in the floor, claiming miraculous healings. Sometimes referred to as “Lourdes of America,” the golden adobe church with its twin bell towers attracts close to 300,000 visitors a year.

for Demetria Martinez

She handed me a baggie of holy dirt—
a gift from a new friend. Back at the motel,
it reminded me of various drugs I’d ingested

in various ways. I wondered if airport security
would sniff it out the next day. That night
in a curtain-less room, I watched darkness

swallow the random lights of Albuquerque
while the freeway whisper faded to a nearly
inaudible hiss. I could not sleep because
an alarm was set or I had eaten too much

or not enough or I hadn’t stretched or I was almost
cold and faintly overheated, over-hearted
with longing for my family back in Pittsburgh,
back in Detroit, back in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

and Paw Paw, Michigan, and in the deep dark
ground or drifting forever away from me.
The tremble of panic strummed taut strings
till all was rigid and brittle, the hair-

line crack of sanity spreading with each blink,
each heart thud, each dry swallow. Finally.
I grabbed the baggie and spread the red dirt
in an arc around my bed.

I did not have pills of any kind. Cold turkeys
gobbled at my sliding door, steaming the glass.
I felt like I was spreading salt across
the icy sidewalk back in Pittsburgh

where my children slept, their soft breath holy
as all get out. This is the part of the song
where the gospel choir sways into action,

kicks it into the high gear many of us die trying
to find, burning out the clutch of the heart,
the soul, the faint smell of burning rubber,
and we’re stranded forever.

I woke up to the alarm
of a truck beeping in reverse
and morning’s definite light. When I rose,

I wept at the faint red half-circle in the faded green
carpet. The smirking genie. The shame
of the bargain. The broken hourglass.
The wall of abandoned crutches.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

__________

Jim Daniels: “I don’t get many poems out of being on the road giving poetry readings, but this is one of them. I think a lot of writers suffer from insomnia, but it’s not something we talk about a lot. I’ve always felt vaguely ashamed of having sleep problems. But, when you can’t sleep, what else can do you but write?” (web)

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November 15, 2024

Bob Lucky

PORTUGUESE LESSONS

When we retired, I told my wife if we’re going to live in a city,
I want to be in the midst of it, not stuck in a high rise on the outskirts
near a megamall. So,
we found a small apartment on a run-down street
in an up-and-coming neighborhood.
Across the way is a grumpy seamstress, a florist with a permanently
molting parakeet, and a barber, more about that later.
On the corner: a café-bar, a butcher’s shop, and a dry goods store
specializing in tablecloths, socks, and women’s underwear.
 
My urban idyll, but the barbershop is a reminder
the sidewalk is always cleaner one block over.
When it first opened, it was a 24-hour party until neighbors complained
and the police came round to explain the difference
between a license for a barbershop and a disco, especially
the hours of operation. After that the pool table arrived.
It took months to block out the click-clack of billiard balls.
 
I still have issues with the clientele, high school and college-age boys
with a fondness for bad haircuts
hacky-sacking a football in the street and shouting their conversations,
most of which are about pussy and beer.
My Portuguese slang is getting better, but it’s not easy
finding the right conversation partner, even online.
 
This afternoon, my nap ruined, I wanted to step out on the balcony
in my wife’s panties and say, “Please shut the fuck up.
We’re trying to have an orgy in here. I was about to cum
on someone’s face, two faces, but you ruined my concentration.”
Of course, I didn’t because I remembered that I too used to be
an idiot and an asshole and didn’t need to prove it at my age.
And my Portuguese isn’t that good.
 

from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

__________

Bob Lucky: “I love sound. I love languages, which may not be evident from the way I mangle them. For most of my adult life, I lived throughout Asia, from Japan to Saudi Arabia. And for a time in Ethiopia. Now I’m settled in northern Portugal. I’ve learned to get by. At my age, fluency is a rabbit I’ll never catch. This poem deals with that, obliquely. I suppose I write poetry to work on my English, and I’m pretty sure every word I use has been in someone else’s mouth before.”

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November 14, 2024

Eric Kocher

MOUNTAIN LAKE

The next day I wake up and my wife
Is coming into the hotel room
 
And the first thing she tells me is that she found
A secret garden, which are her actual words,
 
Where she sat and absorbed as much sunlight
As she could, and then the second thing
 
She tells me is that she is pregnant, again,
That assuming nothing goes wrong,
 
Our daughter, who is on the other side
Of the country, is going to be a big sister.
 
I say I think I am still dreaming, probably,
But not in that cliché sense
 
Of life being somehow hazy or surreal,
But rather that words she is saying,
 
The order of them, seem more like something
Someone would say in a dream,
 
Especially the secret garden thing,
But minus me now saying
 
That I felt like I was dreaming,
Which is a near guarantee that I am awake.
 
As we say this, I realize I had already known
On some level but I had been trying to pretend
 
Like I didn’t know, partly because I didn’t want
To get my hopes up,
 
And partly because I knew that when I actually knew it,
When I knew it for real
 
It would lead me to knowing
Too many other things,
 
And then, when we knew it together, when we started
Saying it out loud, the meanings would snowball
 
Into bigger meanings, and then we would
Have to start making real decisions. First,
 
We decide the best thing to do with this new
Information is to go for a hike, as we had planned,
 
So, we drive to a trail called Mountain Lake
Which, we agreed, are two of the best
 
Geological features, independent of each other,
So what better place could we be without compromise.
 
After we decide this, all around us
Are these dizzyingly old trees,
 
western redcedar, Douglas fir, western hemlock,
All climbing one, two hundred feet
 
Into the air, and the air itself so very quiet,
Soft almost, making space for whatever
 
We have to say, which is a lot, so we say everything
We can, starting with the obvious stuff
 
Like who we think this new person might be,
What we might call them,
 
How tired everyone is going to be again,
Before moving onto the other stuff,
 
The fragility of it all, how the little patterns
We’ve managed to summon will change,
 
That our daughter’s world
Will simultaneously expand forever
 
And collapse inward, both a new galaxy
And a black hole, and that neither of us
 
Know how to say any of this to her.
Beside us, we can’t decide if the lake
 
Is green or blue, nor what determines
The greenness or blueness of any given lake.
 
Its chemical composition, maybe,
The algae and other organisms living in the lake,
 
Their eating and shitting
And synthesizing each other, maybe,
 
The trees blanketing the surrounding mountains,
How the light is refracting and diffusing
 
Among them reciprocally, maybe,
Some or none or all of these things together.
 
The guide on the whale-watching tour
Explained that orcas live in matriarchal
 
Societies, that they are among the few other
Beings on the planet who experience menopause,
 
Which is important because it creates space
For matriarch to teach the new mothers
 
And their babies how to hunt and play and be.
Explained this way, everything seems very clear,
 
As if we live within some order or logic that permeates
The way that life unfolds, like we are surrounded
 
Always by helpful explanations
Of what it is we are doing here,
 
If only we have the time and attention
To understand them.
 
When I ask my wife what kind of matriarch
She wants to be, she says a fancy one
 
Who surrounds herself with fancy things.
I know that this isn’t what she means,
 
But for a moment I feel very fancy, or that maybe
I might one day be a fancier version of myself.
 
The forest seems fancier, now,
And the quiet air, and the mountain, and the lake.
 
And I remember this pattern, too,
That a small thing can radiate outward, change
 
Everything around it.
My wife touches her hand to her stomach
 
And says that this trip was supposed to be her break
From being a parent,
 
And we keep climbing up along the ridge
Until somewhere below us
 
Is that other life we lived, so small now
That it must have always been gone.
 

from Sky Mall
2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

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Eric Kocher: “A little over ten years ago, my friend Mark made a joke. He said that I should try to be the first person to publish a poem in Sky Mall Magazine. There was something about shopping for the most inane, kitschy stuff on the planet while flying 30,000 feet above it, just to avoid a moment of boredom, that seemed to be the antithesis of poetry. The words “Sky Mall” got stuck in my head—lodged there. This is almost always how poems happen for me. Language itself seems to be in the way just long enough to build tension before it can open into a space that pulls me forward. These poems finally arrived while I was traveling, first alone, and then the following year with my wife, as a new parent in that hazy dream of the post-pandemic. Writing them felt like going on a shopping spree, of sorts, so I tried to let myself say yes to everything.”

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