Search Results for: this living hand

March 31, 2017

“This Living Hand” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

THIS LIVING HAND

Tom Mannarino defends his MFA thesis brilliantly, but when
I stick my head in his office door to say so, he’s slumped
in his chair and staring at the floor, and when he looks up,
there’s no other way to describe him than horror-struck.
Tom’s thesis is a novel about his escape from a crushing

religion and the freedom he finds in the love of men, and now
that it’s written and we’re all telling him it’s brilliant,
he realizes that he’s at a turning point, that his story isn’t
academic any more, that it will be published and people
will see it, his family included. It’s so hard to connect

with others sometimes. Keats wanted to: Leigh Hunt remembered
that his young friend looked often at his hand when he was
near death, a hand “faded and swollen in the veins, and say
it was the hand of a man of fifty,” and then Keats turned
from one of those long poems he was no good at to write

in the margin a fragment that begins, “This living hand,
now warm and capable,” and ends, “see, here it is,” and
“I hold it towards you.” In Celtic theology it’s said that heaven
and earth are only three feet apart, but there are thin places
where the distance is even smaller: “The door between this world

and the next is cracked open for a moment,” wrote one mystic,
 “and the light is not all on the other side.” When soldiers
at the Battle of Little Bighorn realized the jig was up, they shook
hands with one another. Goodbye, Calhoun! Goodbye, Ross.
And the Arikara scouts kissed their horses and told them they loved

them. Tom, you try to live your life, but home calls you back.
On a beautiful May morning, your parents are away.
You mow the lawn, put the mower back in the garage,
pick up the gas can, pour its contents over you,
strike a match. Tom, it should be a better world. It isn’t.

Why didn’t you just leave? 200 years ago in Philadelphia,
wise men wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal.” Why couldn’t you believe them?
Jefferson had originally written, “We hold these truths to be
sacred and undeniable,” but Franklin struck the three words 

that made the claim religious, changing it to a claim based
on reason instead. Tom, you weren’t thinking, were you?
Maybe religion could have saved you, though not
the kind that says people who are different from us are evil.
Paul McCartney was fourteen when his mother died of cancer.

Later, she came to him in a dream: “It was great to visit with her again,”
he said, and then he wrote “Let It Be” because in the dream,
his mother told him, “It will be all right, just let it be.” Keats’ hand
was faded and swollen, but his skin is clear now, his fever cooled.
Can you see? It’s just here, Tom. He’s holding it out to you. Take it.

—from Rattle #54, Winter 2016
2016 Readers’ Choice Co-Winner

[download audio]

__________

David Kirby: “I connect Keats’ early death with that of a student and friend, though as I worked on ‘This Living Hand,’ I began to wonder if I was telling too much and betraying an intimacy. So I asked my wife, the poet Barbara Hamby, who said, ‘You have to write that poem—people are already forgetting Tom, and you will keep him alive.’” (website)

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July 13, 2023

“Making a Living” by Brent FiskPosted by

Brent Fisk

MAKING A LIVING

I’m dreaming of the place in the woods
where the deer sleeps, the hole in the grass where it hid.
Mother dreams of coffee cups rimmed with lipstick,
of white plates, knife-marked, stacked along a counter.
And father has gone to the factory,
leaves only a space in the snow where the car covered gravel,
leaked oil, a few paw prints where the cat kept warm.
My father banging on the beaten hood
scared the cat to safety and me from sleep.
I float at the fringe of dawn,
sense my mother’s still sleeping, my father not long gone.
Sleep has the warmth of blankets.
Years of scraped ice accumulate,
and decades of cars fighting movement like cold knuckles.
Even in his sleep my father works,
dreams of snipped wires, of clocking in,
of waiting for the whistled shift change,
that stream of pot-bellied men gray with wolfish beards,
their safety glasses and steel-toed boots,
their rough hands clutching time cards like lottery tickets.
More ice scraping, the mailbox stuffed with bills,
all the bad news at six o’clock, a tough pot roast, a ratty afghan.
The water heater ticks away like a clock.
Today pulls out, a punctual train,
and already tomorrow triggers the crossing gate.
Hours pass like cattle cars, and way at the end—
retirement’s sad caboose.
This train flattens men like worn pennies.
This train waits for the end of my father.
The hole of him sitting at the end of my bed,
waiting for me to wake and take his place.

—from Rattle #24, Winter 2005

__________

Brent Fisk: “I try to nail down a time and place with words. I want an image to walk down a dark hall with just the tip of a cigarette to let you know it’s coming. I want the right words to rise like moths from the grass. Sometimes when you get close enough to accomplishing that readers tap into a poem. They hear the floorboards creak. They hear the window rattle. They see the moon exactly as I describe it. Getting that close is like finding a wad of money in an old shirt’s pocket.”

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April 13, 2023

“Hay Elote” by Michael Jon KhandelwalPosted by

Michael Jon Khandelwal

HAY ELOTE

Hay elote, he shouts
outside my window; I have wondered for years
what message he was bringing. Today,
I learned: there is corn.
I remember growing
up, seeing rows of cornstalks,
sampling the first of the harvest,
smothered in butter and salt.
Hay elote, the man sings out;
corn, it seems, exists here, too. Perhaps
I am not far from the eastern sunrise,
not far from corn,
feeding us all, in the communion
of hunger for food. The sun is huge
over a field; stalks bristle
in the wind. This man knows,
brings corn to my house, offers
me my mother’s hands
in a crowded street.

—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008

__________

Michael Jon Khandelwal: “When I lived in Los Angeles, every day, a man would walk by my house shouting—I investigated and found he was selling fresh corn. Something about that touched me, reminded me of my days living in Virginia, days when I would explore the cornfields. I was astonished by this man, and how his words—in a language I didn’t know—sparked my memory so vividly. Of course, I wrote a poem about this man and his corn, as poems, for me, come from the astonishing experience of living.”

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February 15, 2018

Mather Schneider

« 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize Selection »

A Bag of Hands by Mather SchneiderWhen Mather Schneider met Josie she was an illegal immigrant from Mexico working at McDonald’s in Tucson and he was a cab driver who went to McDonald’s to buy coffee each day. One day she poured his coffee, then placed a small piece of paper over his money and slid it back to him on the counter. With that gesture she gave him a reason to get up in the morning. She also gave him more trouble than he wanted, more bliss than he could have imagined, and a coupon for a free Egg McMuffin.

Note: A Bag of Hands is included free along with the spring issue to all Rattle subscribers. Visit our purchase page to subscribe for just $25/year.

Now Available!

Praise for A Bag of Hands

This twelve-poem, thirty-one-page collection layers a cross-border love story, battling the absurdities of immigration policy, into a hope-giving romance that illuminates daily epiphanies. Economic and minimal, while sweeping the micro into the macro, Schneider’s writing lands somewhere between a Tom Waits’s lyric sung by a ranchero who has read Bukowski, and a Californian rom-com. Avoiding the possible pitfalls of cliché, such as the white American as savior complex; the bitter, working class, underdog syndrome; or sappy melodrama, A Bag of Hands holds up ignorance and love side by side, leaving a heart-rendering optimistic aftertaste.
—DM O’Connor, on NewPages

I love the poems in this contest-winning chapbook. They’re all about Mather’s life as an American cab driver married to an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He writes about their love, her struggle to stay in the country, his passengers, flat tires, bigotry, and a bag of severed hands found in Mexico. The poems are easy to read but deceptively powerful.
—Sue Fagalde Lick, in Goodreads

Sample Poems

•“A Bag of Hands” in the Adelaide
•“Chasing the Green Card” in Rusty Truck
•“Hot Iron” in Rattle online

Other Poems

• “Our Morning Train” in Rattle #53
• “The Roofers” in Rattle #46
• “Free-Form Bolero” in Rattle #43
• “The Mermaid of South Mark Road” in Rattle #38
• “Kite Weather” in Rattle #35
• “Between Us and It” in Rattle #32

About the Author

Mather SchneiderMather Schneider was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1970. He attended several colleges but never attained a degree. After living in Washington State, he moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1997, where he married a Mexican woman and began traveling in Mexico. Schneider has worked many jobs and for many years drove a taxi. He has published several hundred poems and stories, and is author of four full-length collections, most recently Prickly from New York Quarterly Books.
 
 
 

Details

Cover art by Mather Schneider

Author photo by Mather Schneider

ISBN: 978-1-931307-36-9
Cover price: $7.00
Chapbook: 32 pages
Size: 6″ x 9″

 

July 28, 2012

“Flu Season and a Living Will” by Charles ManisPosted by

Charles Manis

FLU SEASON AND A LIVING WILL

 
I.

I have a scratch in my throat—they say that’s the first sign.

Or the flutter of the sphincter, the sweat that smells of green onion,
singed cuticle, shed eyelashes.

I climb up the stone stairs from my apartment
and my nostrils blister dry, the wind flinging ice in my eyes.

I wake to frost each morning. I wake
to my rattling radiator. It dry heaves tepid air. My cinder block walls
ice my apartment—I open my books with a pick.

My mother’s living will names me “executioner,”
she and my sisters joke. I have forsaken scarves and gloves, hot tea and soup.

I walk in the traffic-grey slush alongside the road and it soaks me to my knees.

 
II.

The motherfuckers don’t wash their hands, is the problem.
Shit-stained doorknobs and jism-stroked water fountains, is the problem.
Snot wiped on the bottoms of tables and spit-palmed handshakes.

Twice a week they fuck a stranger in the shower
and neglect to brush their teeth.

I am sick of your breath in the corridors.
I am sick of your hot crotches and beating eyelashes in the waiting rooms.
I am sick of your yellow-fungused tongue and your marbled skin.

Here comes our staph infection, our pink eye, our strep throat.
Here comes our cancer, growing on its platter.
My stomach strains for bile.

 
III.

All my loved ones have white blood cells gnawing on their ligament.
They are all chemically imbalanced. Their veins crumble. Their skins spot.

Let me rave with you.

This year I give up green vegetables,
eat gizzards fried in a high-walled cast iron skillet over my open mouth.

I eat tubers besotted with yellow clay.

My dozen sisters make for me wreaths of fingernails, a sand box full of my dry skin.
They bless me with fine ornaments.

They would like to know my medical history.
They scold me for the lumps I never told them I had, mark each aberration with red ink.

They would like a scalpel now.
We will take another glass of wine, the one with the poppy aftertaste.

Let me prod the oak carcass smoldering in the fireplace.
I steal another log from the spiders.

 
IV.

By February everybody coughs up bricks of ice.
They scrape the frozen spit from the corners of their mouths.

There is a four-inch heel frozen in a pothole gritty with exhaust and gravel.
I chop the whole block free with my squared palm and carry it home,
where it stays frozen on my mantle.
I sleep with my feet uncovered and wait for a chill to take hold of me.

I would cough up blood.
I would beat my swollen hands against these perforated walls.
I would eat through the connective tissue that holds my muscle in the shapes that pump blood.

Let my marrow ravage me until I can’t walk, until I must crawl on my elbows, drag my ribs,
worm my way to the hospital bed, and I would still pull the plug,
but I would do it from the floor—I would do it choked on mucus.

 
V.

I’ll pull your plug too, Darling. Tell me where and when.

This is what I can do for you.
I believe in your right to die.

This is love, say my dozen sisters.
This is love, croons a stray dog in the long-frozen yard.

Where is my black hood? Where is my piano wire?
It is my deep love for you—the way it cuts my hands and your chafed throat.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011

__________

Charles Manis: “My first semester in college, I crowded into an auditorium full of students, faculty, and various other folks around town who had come to hear Charles Simic read. After we filled up the seats and the floor, a line formed through the doors and into the hall outside the auditorium. That night I walked back to my dorm trying to hold onto lines that Simic had read to us, and the next semester I enrolled in my first courses in writing and reading poetry. I hope only to write something that somebody will want to remember.”

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March 29, 2012

“Notes for Living in NOLA” by Susan B.A. Somers-WillettPosted by

Susan B.A. Somers-Willett

NOTES FOR LIVING IN NOLA

Learn to hate the tourists
who booze up, who cruise the one-ways
the wrong way and ask
for the Café du Monde the Jax
the Cat’s Meow the Preservation Hall—

on Bourbon Street they fall for
I bet you a dollar I can tell
where you got those shoes.

Sleep till noon, your belly
deep and soft; deal cards
and convince others you
once shot the moon.

Stay above water.
Throw parties when there is weather.
Vacation during Mardi Gras
or do Mardi Gras every other day.

Practice the aesthetics
of getting out of bed,
chasing the cat, the beauty
in wavy views of traffic.
Note the poetics of a
shirt stuck to your back.

Baby, you in jazzland
but don’t show the blue
notes, the thin ropes
of hate and self-hate
that hold the place together
that cable the soft banks
that sing red cypress, black wire—

here,
murder walks slowly,
demands you hand over
your wallet and things;
don’t make no fuss and perhaps
he might pass or ax you
out for a beer.

Cultivate a dull eye
like the black boys on Bourbon
who slide and clack! for change,
who tap! tap! parabolas, who tack
bottlecaps on their Nikes to jump back
to where someone said
they from.

Acclimate to the smell
of exhaust and the canal.
Pick up the perpetual
gifts of beads and cups that wash
onto your lawn year-long.
Eat the food you are most afraid of.
Don’t drink the water.

Learn to hate the tourists
who rip Mammy’s face off the sweet
sweet pralines that mark
their journeys South,
who buy posters of the jazz man
whose pearly teeth match
the whites of his Mac-the-Knife eyes
(but never go into the park
named after this man:
it is dangerous: perhaps
you will die by that knife).

Find people to love
who tell you suspicious histories.
Wash dishes and know there is no end
to roaches. Celebrate obscure holidays
and master riding a bicycle
with a buzz.

And this:
daily rain at four, torn green fans
of saw palmetto rapping at the screen,
steam moving from your shoes,
the slip of a cool bottle in hand—
you grip it
just before losing it.

Wake up early for Zulu.
Leave before Rex. Regret
has moved to some other country
so dress, make bets, burn, do nothing.

Get on a bus named Cemeteries.
These cemeteries are beautiful things.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006

__________

Susan B.A. Somers-Willett: “It is the music of language—the odd and perfect run of phrase, the rhythm of it ringing in your head for days—that compels me to write. I believe that how you speak the poem is just as important as what you say in it. Which means, of course, that Aretha Franklin is my favorite poet.” (website)

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January 26, 2012

“Look at Us Living” by Megan MoriartyPosted by

Megan Moriarty

LOOKING AT US LIVING

Through the binoculars, we saw us
moving through the foliage.

The world was on rewind:
a herd of horses ran
backwards across a field.

Yellow leaves kept climbing back
to their branches.

“What’s the opposite of fall?” I said,
and he said “Spring.”

Then it was August, then July,
then June. The sun kept
leaving and coming back

like a boomerang that no one
ever had to throw.

Snow appeared
on the ground, then it started
unsnowing, the flakes
travelling upwards.

I knew that soon
we wouldn’t know each other

so I asked him
what the opposite
of stay is.

He stood there,
his hands on his hips, thinking.

—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

__________

Megan Moriarty: “For me, a poem is a place where everything is possible. Life can be stopped and rewound. Through writing, you can look at that possibility, and see what impossibilities—what human things—keep showing up anyway.”

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