Author: Rattle

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

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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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July 30, 2024

“What You Thought You Lost” by Wendy VidelockPosted by

Terry's Keys by Kim Beckham, photograph of keys hanging on a fence at a beach

Image: “Terry’s Keys” by Kim Beckham. “What You Thought You Lost” was written by Wendy Videlock for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

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Wendy Videlock

WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU LOST

What you thought you lost along the way
hangs in the air like a prayer
 
May you find your way home
may the doors swing open wide
            from the out and the in
 
              side
 
under a wide open sky
May you lose
            may you find,
may you know
              in the core
of your weathered soul your old
 
and your new sign
 
May every stranger on the path
become the one who
                        stopped
 
to hang something you thought
you lost in the air
              by a thread like an ancient
pagan prayer
            like some kind of
elder
          warm-eyed
 
guardian was standing there.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
June 2024, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “‘What You Thought You Lost’ begins with comparing what was lost to a prayer–an apt simile, given that this poem feels like a prayer, with its reverent language, melodic sound, and spiritual references. What a transcendent connection, too, the poet draws between the concrete image of keys hanging on a beach fence and the abstract concept of something lost (we don’t know what, but somehow we have a sense of it) hanging in the air ‘by a thread like an ancient/pagan prayer.’ There’s already an intangible quality to artist Kim Beckham’s beach scene, a sense of possibility, but the metaphysical tone of the poem adds greater complexity to the photo. One of the things I love most about the ekphrastic challenge is how differently I can see a piece of art after I read a poem about it, and ‘What You Thought You Lost’ made me look at this image in a way I never could have without it.”

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July 29, 2024

“Political Action” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

POLITICAL ACTION

Every time it snows, she walks twelve blocks
and makes a snow angel in front of the Supreme Court 
for her son who was shot and killed 
two blocks away seven years ago by a boy 
who was shot and killed three weeks later. 
 
Does anyone know for sure if vulture shadows 
are prettier than the real thing? 
 
Thanks to the telephone, she can cry together
in different cemeteries with her sister
for different sons. 
 
There are so many options. Wear blue socks 
to the Rapture or no socks or a different pair 
of blue socks or no socks. Visit everyone 
she’s not listened to fully and ask, 
Will you say that again? meaning everything. 
Turn the shade of redwoods into a perfume 
and spread it over DC from a plane. 
 
Do you think she could do that? 
I think she could do that, but she’s very busy 
being clawed to death from the inside out. 
 
The heart is a mouth with an appetite 
for itself and winter is coming. 
 
By that I mean, winter is always here.
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024

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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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July 28, 2024

“Elegy Beginning on a Line by Ross Gay” by Sophie Kaiser RojasPosted by

Sophie Kaiser Rojas

ELEGY BEGINNING ON A LINE BY ROSS GAY

The bullet craves the warmth of a body,
but forgets the body it leaves. Allow
me the metaphor, this aliveness
of everything—the last leg of the trail, scarring
the mountain’s rigid face. A friend tells me
two Spanish names for the steaming blue
aperture in an alpine hot spring: el ojo
de agua & donde nace el agua. I touch the mouth
of the coffee mug to mine, too distracted
with dodging the clotted white
flecks of coconut milk to see them spare me
my reflection. Headlines yank my heart
into my ears like the drum of distant fire-
works, so I walk to the holler, permission to clear
my mind. The mouth of the creek is one body
entering another. That is, a small river, emptied
of all it carried. Spanish has a structure
that makes your happenings
happen to you, takes what we’ve done
and does it to us. See: se me rompe el país—
my country is breaking
itself to me. I want to be blameless
as every birth, every baby crying
for help as it leaves one warmth
for want of another. A poem,
in its hunger, craves the soft bone
of the paper, but misses itself
to the chamber of its pen. The first act of
motherhood is a womb,
giving up. We’re all born
barreling toward beauty and a life
of yielding—how can a word mean gain
and surrender? I’ve strolled
this stream for years and never witnessed
more than dragonflies and crawdads. But today, I’m struck
by the slick of a turtle’s obsidian
shell under the surface, stippled with copper
sun. In certain light, everything’s the color of a gun
and what is lost to her.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Sophie Kaiser Rojas: “Say her name: Sonya Massey. Justice for her, and her mother, and her kids.”

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July 27, 2024

“Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town” by John Philip JohnsonPosted by

John Philip Johnson

STAIRS APPEAR IN A HOLE OUTSIDE OF TOWN

Stairs that never stop going down,
concrete steps, concrete walls:
down twelve, turn right, down twelve more,
fluorescent bulbs humming on every landing—
you can look between metal railings
and see down into the vanishing point. It’s creepy
because it’s so bland, because it is so otherwise
plausible. There are little clusters of tourists
and townsfolk, walking up and down,
murmuring their speculations. The municipality
has stationed a few policemen in the upper stories,
after that it’s the wilderness of young men
who aren’t huffing, or letting their better judgments
hold them back. Some pack a lunch,
see how far they can go. A few loners
have gone for days, or longer, obsessed, and come back
with critical perspectives on prior stories brought up,
arguing against them, bringing rumors of their own,
rumors of the lights shifting imperceptibly,
of ambiguous odors, of vast ballrooms
and wide open spaces, of small villages
with picnic areas, of hot steamy dioramas of hell,
strange animals, grotesque and sublime,
of a rapture that some theorize is the bends
but they swear is as real as the bright pounding light
that fills everything down that deep, where
the stairs are made of light, the walls a glow
you can’t quite touch—this is weeks down,
beyond some rapture or rupture point,
beyond some point from which they never
really come all the way back.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

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John Philip Johnson: “I hear a lot of poets say they’d rather be jazz musicians, but if I could be something else it would be an astronaut. I’d rather land on Mars than win a Nobel Prize. I got into poetry because I had a great high school teacher named Kirsten Van Dervoort. In college I came to believe I could write the stuff when I read Byron rhyme ‘gunnery’ with ‘nunnery.’ I thought, golly, anybody can do this.” (web)

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July 26, 2024

“You Must Never Ignore Self” by Nate JacobPosted by

Nate Jacob

YOU MUST NEVER IGNORE SELF

It may be in the sky, in sand, in dream you’ll find your Self.
For some, the search may never end. Don’t give up! Trust yourself!
 
Whatever you do, don’t sell your soul in discovery.
There will be those who’ll claim you, as if you are some “whore” self.
 
Better in desperate moments to deny shallow urges
that might cheapen you in their eyes, like some discount store self.
 
Maybe you are only just starting out on this journey.
Find people who will invest in you, in your ground floor self.
 
Keep your vision clear, no matter how many layers peel
back from the onion, until you discover your core self.
 
I get it, we all want to be completely authentic,
to tell our ultimate truth, to avoid our folklore self.
 
I only fear that in the midst of that terrible battle
you let go of peaceful You, settle for some post-war self.
 
Where the warrior goes, I could never follow. I’m too old.
Maybe you were never meant for my meek dinosaur self.
 
In the end, what matters most to Nate? What else makes more sense
than to dig deep, no matter the cost? You must explore Self.
 

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

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Nate Jacob: “Toward the end of 2022, a ghazal appeared in Rattle titled ‘Ghazal for Dida,’ by Karan Kapoor. Until that moment, I had never read a ghazal, never listened to a ghazal read, had never even heard of the form at all, but in that moment, I discovered a new reaction to a poem: I was gobsmacked! I was startled at the depth of feeling the structure of the form created in me, the way the qaafiyaa and the radif combined to create a near trance-like invocation within the poem. Plus the personal way a ghazal traditionally ends, with the naming of the self, adds so much of an ‘I, the poet, am here’ touch to a poem. And so I set out to attempt one of my own. This is the first ghazal I ever attempted, and in the attempt, I found that magical connection that ‘Ghazal for Dida’ created in me.” (web)

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July 25, 2024

“Buying Produce from the Marked-Down Cart” by Lynn LevinPosted by

Lynn Levin

BUYING PRODUCE FROM THE MARKED-DOWN CART

The Minor Virtues

I rescue them at times from the back of the store—
cellophaned oranges and apples
packaged good-side-up.
I imagine them as little brains
thinking of the days when they were on the tree
and full of promise.

Mostly I leave the rusty beans, blotched pears
to the gleaners, calling to mind my days
as a gleaner at Dominicks and Star
when I approached with furtive hunch
the scratched and bruised, bought them

with my meager pay. What a bounty of salads and pies
they made me who saved them from the heap.
More than anything I hate waste
and yet how much
of my own life have I let go unused.

—from Rattle #49, Fall 2015

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Lynn Levin: “I love to describe things in my poems. Somehow I think that expands or extends life as we know it. Right now I am interested in celebrating small practices in a series of poems I am calling The Minor Virtues. These poems seek to capture pleasant things, although some of these pleasant things may have a dark border.” (web)

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