Author: Rattle

August 6, 2024

“Switch Plate” by Al OrtolaniPosted by

Al Ortolani

SWITCH PLATE

The day moves by me, and I’m still
at the same old desk that was two-wheeled
into my room by the custodian. The lights
run on some kind of motion detector.
If no one moves, let’s say, in ten minutes,
they blink out, and I have to raise my arms
and wave them like crazy. Possibly,
they click back on. Possibly, they don’t.
At this point, I have to get up and walk
the room in the dark until the shadow of me
is recognized in the recesses of the switch
plate. Once in a while I’ll have a class
of high school kids writing essays,
and the lights will suddenly black out,
and they will all look up astonished
like they’ve really done something cool.

—from Hansel and Gretel Get the Word on the Street
2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

Al Ortolani: “These poems represent connections to others, sometimes dark, sometimes light, often quirky. A fellow teacher, and mentor to the poet, once said that one of the most difficult measures of the career public school teacher is their ability to stay positive and elevated by interest, if not always in the subject matter, then in the hand raised outside of the T zone.” (web)

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August 5, 2024

“Full of It” by Mary KeatingPosted by

Mary Keating

FULL OF IT

The moon swallowed the sun in one mouthful;
kept her maw open wide—spit him out full. 
 
On the days she feared he’d devour her,
she fed him sweet treats to keep his snout full.
 
On empty, they crossed over the border
to the States promising to be fruitful.
 
No one using a wheelchair came inside—
accessible parking always doubtful.
 
Motel owners didn’t announce their hatred;
Just let their no vacancy lights shout full.
 
Caretakers wondered how many more wars
till graveyards complained they were about full.
 
He asked to be buried with his husband;
his parents suddenly turned devoutful.
 
Most children rarely notice what parents
give up to make their kids’ lives bountiful.
 
The police shuddered when the school shooter
headed to classrooms they just counted full. 
 
How do you comfort parents of a child 
who didn’t have a chance to make them proudful?
 
One day a year, we give thanks for our gifts—
stuffing ourselves to prove we are grateful.
 
I’d write more couplets about falling short,
but the sun’s grumbling this day’s chockful.
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
Tribute to the Ghazal

__________

Mary Keating: “I love how ghazals make the poet omniscient. I can view a subject from all points of view, all disconnected, but somehow connected. This is how I imagine God views the universe and all the lives passing through time. To me the ghazal is a microcosm of the vast machinations of temporal existence. Magically, we gain a better understanding of life when we read or write a ghazal.” (web)

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August 4, 2024

“Paragon” by Katie HartsockPosted by

Katie Hartsock

PARAGON

To eat sweet corn straight off
the cob, just shucked—
no one ever told me I could do that, like
no one ever. Another day
the world seems too full of protocols
boiled and buttered and salted.
How many times I sat with my grandfather
by the front yard rock
where we hammered walnuts apart
and shucked so many ears
for the huge pot my grandmother watched
inside and never once, the son
of tenant farmers, did he say, Just eat it
now, go ahead—he who loved immediacies,
gifts that arrived unmediated, charmed
with readiness. No I had to read
about it, and on I read, grieved
and grieved and grateful
still for the world, so much hiddenness
to live in. And stopped this afternoon
to give one of two bonneted daughters
a ten, three ones, and three quarters
for seven ears of corn and a small bouquet
of sunflowers, sticky with their stalk juice.
A while later and I never knew summer
could be like this, undivided,
as it always seemed in my youth
between cooked and raw, fun
and boredom, never been kissed
and yes, healthy and un, light and shadows
of television after dinner. I took sunflowers
to my mother, who used to be one, please God
may she be again. Then in an unhurried rain
my sons and I sat on the front porch and shucked
this corn, our shirts dampled with quiet
and I said, You know you can just eat it now.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Katie Hartsock: “Small revelations—such as, you can eat corn fresh straight off the cob, which is an idea that did not exist in the Ohio town where I grew up—can profoundly reorient in times of disorientation, and comfort in uncomfortable times.” (web)

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August 3, 2024

“What We Leave Behind” by Abby HabtehansPosted by

Abby Habtehans (age 15)

WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND

My father drank salt water mixed with air
And sacrificed his legs and calloused hands at the altar of the sea,
So that it may split in half to give me the life he had only dreamed of.
 
Immigrant was the first name he was called.
He would say he is a man of faith first,
And I would say he is first a man of good heart
 
He wraps his baby boys in American flags but dreams in tigrinya
and his heart beats blood in hues of saffron and golden threads
 
I wonder if he remembers the smell of his sisters,
The plushness of his bed
Or the vastness of those fields
If he misses even the sewers …
 
Don’t call me an immigrant
Call me a blossom bearing tree,
robed in petals of pink and white
 
Call me sunny butterfly
With swallowtail
He still smells of boat rocks
 
The raw beating of an immigrant’s son
made news this morning.
 
Maybe if love was purer,
like it was before the bombs and the bullets,
when the smallest bugs whispered those great nothings of romance,
then we could all find what we’re looking for
 
son, look before you step:
the globe’s ill—
brother, the great dove’s ready
to fly without perch’ng!
the world’s ill—
son, a live goat
shall be eaten up by a dead rat
 
An immigrant’s son was beaten the other day.
My father’s immigrant son, beaten the same way.
 

—from 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Abby Habtehans: “I like to write poetry because it allows me to learn so much about myself and puts shape to the thoughts in my head.”

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August 2, 2024

“At the Reception” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

AT THE RECEPTION

Everyone else had gone to dance 
around a man and woman lifted on chairs, 
into the sky of the future of their love, 
when he pushed away his plate, rolled up 
his white sleeve, showed me the number 
on his arm and rubbed it 
as if asking it to grant him
three wishes. I imagine 
he would have been tempted in the camp 
to mourn all of the ashes 
the wind carried on its shoulders 
across Poland, not knowing which 
were his mother, father, sister, 
had he not been so busy 
dying of hunger. I wanted to listen 
to the locomotive of his heart, 
to go to sleep on the pillow 
of his breath, and should have kissed him 
on the lips like a lover 
of life, or at least pulled a rose 
out of my ear to show him the magic 
of his survival had endured. 
But I think he would have said 
it wasn’t magic, it was luck, 
that evil was so busy back then 
it couldn’t get around to all the Jews, 
no matter how hard it tried. 
As I watched him shuffle away, I wondered
what normal was for him, for anyone 
who’d seen human beings 
become bored with cruelty 
in that factory of death. Later 
I saw him dancing with his cane
since he couldn’t dance with the ashes 
of his wife. He’d shown me her picture. 
She looked the way most people 
look in photos. Plain. Happy. Alive. 
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024

__________

Bob Hicok: “I like starting poems. After I start a poem, I like getting to the middle, and after the middle, an end seems a good thing to reach. When the end is reached, I like doing everything that isn’t writing poems, until the next day, when my desk is exactly where I left it, though I am a slightly different person than the last time we met.”

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August 1, 2024

“The Book of the Dead Man (Peacetime)” by Marvin BellPosted by

Marvin Bell

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (PEACETIME)

Live as if you were already dead.
—Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man in Peacetime, If and When

If and when the war is over, the dead man’s days will seem longer.
When the ammo is spent, the funds discharged, when the fields have shut down and the flares fallen, an hour will take an hour.
Time for the dead man lengthens when the shooting stops.
The waiting for the next war to begin can seem endless, though it take but a week, a month or a year.
The low intensity conflicts, the raids and assassinations, the deployments and
withdrawals, the coups and revolutions, the precursors and aftermaths—it’s a lifetime of keeping track.
It’s as if the sun fell and fizzled—somewhere.
Then the black, white and gray propaganda, the documents planted on corpses, the reading of tea leaves and bones …
The dead man takes stock in the darkness of peacetime.
The Judas goats stand waiting in the corrals.
We are the sheep that gambol through dreamless nights.
A quietude hangs in the air, an expectancy, the shimmer that some believe presages alien life forms.
The calm before the stampede.
It was wartime when love arrived, yes, love.
It was wartime when the virtuosi performed, standing on their heads, as it were, for peace time is our upside-down time.

 

2. More About the Dead Man In Peacetime, If and When

On a field of armed conflict, in the midst of rushing water, at the lip of a canyon, by the border of a fire-torched desert, in the overdark of a where else was there ever but here?
Do you think poetry is for the pretty?
Look up and down, then, avoiding the hillocks that hold the remains.
The dead man, too, sees the puffy good nature of the clouds.
He welcomes, too, the spring blooming that even the grass salutes.
The dead man has made peace with temporary residence and the eternal Diaspora.
Oh, to live in between, off the target, blipless on the radar, silent on the sonar.
To keep one’s head down when the satellites swoop over.
Not even to know when the last war is reincarnated and the next one conceived.
The dead man sings of a romantic evening in the eerie flickering of the last candle.
He whistles, he dances, he writes on the air as the music passes.
It was in wartime that the dead man conceived sons.
The dead man lifts a glass to the beauties of ruin.
The dead man is rapt, he is enveloped, he is keen to be held.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

Marvin Bell: “It’s true that, no matter what, the literary world is full of insult. When you put yourself out to the public, you’re going to get some negative stuff. But writing just feels wonderful. I mean, I love the discovery aspect of writing. I love that. I love saying what I didn’t know I knew, not knowing where I’m headed, abandoning myself to the materials to figure out where I’m going. Of course your personality is going to come out of it, of course your obsessions are going to make themselves known, of course if you have a philosophic mind a matrix of philosophy will be behind things; everyone has a stance, an attitude, a vision, a viewpoint. All that will come out. But in the meantime, you’re just dog-paddling like mad. And that’s fun. That’s what I always liked about every art.”

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July 31, 2024

“Ghazal: Like a Prayer” by Bethany JarmulPosted by

Bethany Jarmul

GHAZAL: LIKE A PRAYER

We cry out for peace like a prayer.
We yank weeds on our knees like a prayer.
 
Rays crisp Renée’s pepper plants to umber;
sprouts speak their final pleas like a prayer. 
 
Old men watch from porches as September burns out; 
leaves strip bare, surrender beneath trees like a prayer. 
 
Snowflakes speckle the sky. Lifeless, the children’s angels 
lie. Icicles unfreeze like a prayer. 
 
Bethany, don’t bend to the breeze. Begin on your knees,
then stand up, voice up, fists up—use these like a prayer.
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
Tribute to the Ghazal

__________

Bethany Jarmul: “I find the repetition and rhyme of a ghazal to be melodic and enjoyable to read and a fun challenge to write. When I learned about the history of the ghazal, that it was traditionally a communal art form, I was intrigued. This form that often engages with love, longing, metaphysical questions, and spirituality, seemed to invite me into it, to allow me to play with words and meanings using this powerful form. I feel honored to even attempt to write poetry in this form that has such a rich history.” (web)

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