April 24, 2024

“The New Battery Should Come Tomorrow” by Ruth BavettaPosted by

Ruth Bavetta

THE NEW BATTERY SHOULD COME TOMORROW

Got up this morning thinking about going to see my daughter.
Which led to thinking about the remote for the garage door opener 
which had stopped working when I replaced the battery.
 
Which led to searching online for garage door repairmen. Which led to
wanting to check the remote again before I called a repairman.
 
Which led to getting dressed so I could go outside. Which led to 
remembering to brush my teeth. Which led to discovering my Waterpik 
wasn’t working. Which led to researching online to find out 
what the problem could be. Which led to
 
scrabbling around to find the extra tips that came with the Waterpik 
and figuring out which was which and how to replace the tip. 
 
So with Waterpik repaired I went outside and tried again
to make the garage door opener work. Which led to
my discovering that the little red light in the remote wasn’t on. 
 
Which led me to fiddle with the batteries again. Which led to 
my discovering I had ordered the wrong battery for it. Which led to 
a protracted Amazon session looking for the proper battery 
 
and figuring out which were in stock and would come soon
and didn’t come only in a pack of fifty. 
 
So now I’m exhausted and I’m not going anywhere. 
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Ruth Bavetta: “I write at a messy desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Once, it was important to me to make sense of life. Now, I’m convinced that there is no sense-making. There is only what is and what has been. I am human, separate and mortal, and that’s where the poetry comes from. This poem is pretty much an accurate report of an actual morning a couple of years ago. This kind of thing happens with increasing frequency as we age. What can we do but laugh about it?” (web)

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April 23, 2024

“The Return” by Kenny WilliamsPosted by

Kenny Williams

THE RETURN

When I returned to earth after forty thousand years
there were no more graves, no more cathedrals.
No public parks, no public. I looked everywhere
and couldn’t find a single statue of a hero put up
by a committee. There was simply none of that sadness
that can only be satisfied by a dose of dry-eyed Mahler,
sex in a sand trap or hunters in the snow. There were,
understand, no elevators. There were no jailbirds
to be prayed for, no thieves broken backward
across the tops of their crosses, no city walls or citadels
hung by a thread over the pit of the sky.
There had been a Russian documentary film
about a man gone in search of the birthplace of the wind,
but I couldn’t find it. There wasn’t the hospital garden
where, one cold Sunday morning, a man came to cut roses
in the face of all prohibitions, posted and implied,
for his wife, a girl he’d married ages ago, out of revenge
against the woman he loved, whose throat he feasted on
while her husband was in Honolulu with his lover,
who was working on her PhD in there’s-nobody-left-to-know-what,
probably something to do with marine mammals,
not a single specimen of which could I track down
to confirm or deny the rose-garden scene in its strange
un-hearable tongue. You must understand:
when I returned to earth after forty thousand years
there was not one single traffic circle or comic strip,
no Lucy diagnosing Charlie Brown or throwing
Schroeder’s piano in a tree. No one to take mental notes
on how a black-haired bitch handles competition.
No competition. No Darwin taking it all back
on his deathbed. No rest cures, glory holes, horsefly bites.
Not so much as a scrap of Brussels lace I might describe
in this report, in pointless triumph. Not so much
as a girl dressed like a garden statue, raising a birdcage
with no bird in it, like a lantern in the light of day.
In my mind and yours that cage tapers up into a copper nipple
with a ring through it. My friends, hear me when I tell you
there wasn’t so much as a dog to sniff me out.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Kenny Williams: “All my poems are about the same thing: human duration, in time, between the Fall and the Last Day. ‘The Return’ seems to be some sort of exception, taking place after the Last Day, though very much shot through with its clarifying light. What’s more, the more I think about it, ‘The Return’ really describes two returns: the return to earth after forty thousand years and the return to report what wasn’t found there. Which of these two returns the title refers to depends, I guess, on the angle from which you read the poem. I’ve always been obsessed with the emptied earth needing a witness to its emptiness, and as I was writing the poem I had to grapple with the complication of that witness’s own need for an audience that would 1) share his frame of Western culture reference and 2) be real. I hold degrees from the University of Virginia and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I own and operate The Fan Sitter, a pet care business, in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia.” (web)

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April 22, 2024

“Gay Chicken” by Animashaun AmeenPosted by

Animashaun Ameen

GAY CHICKEN

for b, y, s, and all the boys who knew me first.

We were nine and eleven with no concrete name
to christen the hunger in our loins. Fire,
then brimstone: wingless birds impatient
to fly the coop. We knew the face of the monster
waiting patiently under our beds. We knew
where to find it—how to feed into its fire
and touch it in all the right places so it would leave
us be when around the girls. We knew the essence
of music—of wrapping our secrets carefully
around our fingers and showing them to no one
but ourselves. We were fourteen, and then sixteen,
and then a little more alive than any of us could handle.
Hushed breaths, then stifled moans. Hungry, and then alive.
We played with the fire to the best of our abilities;
mastered the mechanics of doors and got better
at hiding this secret of ours: We took this hunger
and locked it in—behind the blackboards
at Boys’ Academy. Simpson Street. The dormitory.
The one-room apartment in Ilorin so tiny it nearly spilled
our secrets. But we locked this madness behind
our doors never to be found again. And we lived
because there was nothing else to do. And we lived
because there was nothing else we could have done
with the rest of our lives.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Animashaun Ameen: “I am a queer person who comes from a place that is determined to hunt and hurt people like me, and poetry provides me with the means to touch the faces of other boys like me and share my story with them—letting them know they are seen and are not alone in this long journey to becoming.”

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April 21, 2024

“What to Do if You’re Barely Scraping By” by Chera HammonsPosted by

Chera Hammons

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE BARELY SCRAPING BY

Have you tried paying down the balances of your debts?
That’s always the first step to financial freedom.
Have you tried having a savings account?
Here’s what you do. Start by saving a penny,
then double what you save every day.
On the second day, set two pennies aside.
On the third day, four. Soon you’ll have
pennies coming out your ears.
Have you tried making more money?
Have you tried filling out online surveys in your spare time?
Have you tried changing your career?
If none of these work for you, there’s always
something you have right now
that you could live without.
Have you tried living in your car?
You’ll save on rent. Have you tried
not having a car? You’ll save on maintenance.
Have you tried not having a cell phone?
Connection is a luxury. Have you tried giving up
your daily latte? Oh, you don’t have
a daily latte? In that case, have you tried
not eating out, or in, or around?
But don’t forget the importance of self-care. Stress
is a killer. Have you tried yoga?
Have you tried not being depressed?
Have you tried growing an insulating undercoat
and becoming an animal?
Have you tried running soundlessly
through the forest unclothed,
drinking from chilly mountain streams
and startling at sudden noises?
Have you tried lying softly on a bed of moss?
Have you tried needing nothing,
except what the world gives to you?
 

—from Poets Respond
April 21, 2024

__________

Chera Hammons: “This week I read that two-thirds of baby boomers, the wealthiest generation, don’t have enough saved for retirement as they reach retirement age (with a quarter having no savings at all). I also saw a story about people who have lost their entire life savings to a wire transfer scam, with no recourse available to them. My internet browser keeps recommending an article to me titled, ‘What to Do if You’re Barely Scraping By Financially.’ These things made me think of all the financial advice I’ve heard before, how it’s so often completely out of touch with reality.” (web)

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April 20, 2024

“The Tuner” by Colette InezPosted by

Colette Inez

THE TUNER

for E.C.

Choose how the forest
was deprived of a tree.
Blight, wind, fire?
I once lost a cantankerous man,
who tuned pianos.
Tall, an oak to me,
he goaded music from the keys.
I almost see him biting on his pipe,
tamping down the London Dock.
Blown back leaves, birds, moths,
the gestures here.
Pendulum, tool box auctioned off.
Summer roars another blast of green.
“I like to see a piano perspire,”
he’d say to me, slamming the lid
of the Baldwin.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

__________

Colette Inez: “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.” (web)

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April 19, 2024

“Something Fishy” by Michael Dylan Welch, C.R. Manley & Tanya McDonaldPosted by

Michael Dylan Welch, C.R. Manley & Tanya McDonald

SOMETHING FISHY

a rengay written on a Washington State Ferry

salmon time—
the path to the creek
free of cobwebs
mdw
 
he warns us again—
don’t eat the pufferfish
crm
 
field trip—
the cold stare
of the passing shark
tm
 
the guppy circling
down the toilet
mdw
 
motionless angelfish—
still waiting
for my order
crm
 
one fish, two fish
I switch off her bedside lamp
tm
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

__________

Michael Dylan Welch, C.R. Manley, & Tanya McDonald: “‘Something Fishy’ is a rengay we wrote mostly on the ferry between Edmonds and Kingston, Washington. Fish seemed like a natural theme to write about while we crossed the Puget Sound. Michael wrote the first rengay with Garry Gay, its inventor, in 1992, and has been promoting the form ever since, with essays and my website. Renku always links and shifts between the verses as it seeks to taste all of life, but rengay deliberately focuses on a single theme, which we had fun exploring in various fishy nuances.”

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April 18, 2024

“Who Breathed in Binders” by Patricia SmithPosted by

Patricia Smith

WHO BREATHED IN BINDERS

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.
—Mitt Romney

Strange we should forget. Once between the covers of a worn leather binder
a black girl languished, her limbs linked by iron, her feet and breasts
and muscle measured, written. Back then, white men underlined her
name, then dared her price. They bellowed their gold, tried to combine her

with cattle or grain or another child to make her worth their while. Behind her,
a hundred hard eyes teared at the mere sweet of her bound landscape.
The maybe buyers stretched open her mouth, peered in, calmly assigned her
a number. For hours, in the hissing Carolina sun, they confined her

to the block, demanded she succumb, pirouette on cue. They fought to mine her
for treasure, computed the width of her bare hips with their chapped hands,
predicted her belly tight with child and child and child and child, declined her
a cure for thirst. Out loud, their spittle a wall in her face, they redesigned her,

scribbled her arithmetic on crammed pages, tried hard not to mind her
father, a foot away, grimacing as his penis was handled, as he was pronounced
too old for anything and led away. There was absolutely no need to remind her
to swallow that scream. This is merely business, they said. We are not unkind. Her

father, after all, was mercifully allowed a backward glance. Resigned, her
future now screeched in numbers, she scanned the men’s faces, the unbridled pink
of foreign skin. One locked a wet gaze, saw their bodies already intertwined. Her
purchase slipped the heat from her shoulders. He grinned, wrote her new name,
and closed his binder.

—from Rattle #42, Winter 2013
2013 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Patricia Smith: “‘Women in binders’ became an infuriating and unintentionally hilarious catchphrase during Mitt Romney’s hapless presidential campaign. Once my feminist furor died down (which coincided, incidentally, with the realization that Mittsy had a Tea Partyer’s chance in heaven of being prez, I remembered a time when a black woman’s entire worth was could be written in a single line of text.” (web)

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