Author: Rattle

June 5, 2024

“My 88-Year-Old Mother-in-Law Decides to Make New Year’s Resolutions” by Laurie UttichPosted by

Laurie Uttich

MY 88-YEAR-OLD MOTHER-IN-LAW DECIDES TO MAKE NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

and I want to say, oh, Rose, why? but there’s no way to pass the prime
rib and pretend the words You’ll be dead soon enough aren’t standing
behind her, waiting to be said. Instead, I say, Maybe we strive for more
pleasure this year instead and she nods, but her dead husband walks in
 
and a wave of grief floods the floors. We wade awhile in all she’s lost—
so many streams of her joy drained dry—and then I rise and slice
the rum cake I made that morning. I cut through the glaze of sugar
and pecans and present it on a plate that still bears the prints of my mother
 
who gave them to me before she died. I center it, sprinkle it with cocoa,
and bless it with cream I whipped by hand. I slide silver from the drawer
and polish it on a clean cloth and I set it in front of her like a sacrifice
to something I’m not brave enough to name. My mother-in-law smiles:
 
as she aged, she’s learned to recognize love when it appears on another
woman’s wedding china. She places the cake on her tongue and 20 years
fall away. We sit in the exhale and we breathe in all we were born to delight
in and then the moment passes and she is on to sleep cycles and squeezing
 
back into a size 12 and catching up with Ancestory.com. She makes a list
of all she didn’t achieve last year and asks me if I think she’ll live to see
her granddaughter marry. I don’t say, Who knows if any of us will? but days
have passed and I keep thinking about pleasure and how it comes when you
 
call it. A red cardinal studies the birdfeeder outside my window and watches
over the brown one while she lifts her beak to the seeds. The sun streaks
the sky and the white plume of a plane heads toward the west. My goddaughter
holds a newborn a thousand miles away and her baby’s scent wanders into
 
my living room. I settle into the soft skin of her neck and drink her in. Later,
I’ll study my husband’s shoulders and measure their width with the same
appreciation I did on a dance floor over 35 years ago. Look, I know we’re all
dying and some of us are already dead. But there is a book by my bed, a dog
 
who considers me her own, and there is rum and cake and words that wait
within. Tomorrow, I’ll walk by the river and the water will be brown
and the snakes sleeping in the shade, but I’ll only see the way the sun blinks
between the trees and winks at the waves. I’ll think of my sons, but
 
I won’t wrap them in worry. I’ll only see the great gift they are, the men
they are on their way to becoming. I’ll let everything I love—everything
I will ever love—settle on my own narrow shoulders and I’ll hold it out
to you, Reader of Poems, on a plate from my mother’s cabinet. I’ll ask
 
you to study its face. You can see it, right? It’s there, in front of you,
scratched but not cracked. It could have broken a thousand times
in 60 years, but still it survives, shines. It’s too obvious of a metaphor
—I know that—but I don’t know how to call Pleasure by its first name
 
and not fall to my knees when it answers. I’m one of those who bleed.
The world’s suffering is my own. (I know you’re the same.) But I can’t
stop thinking about how much the world needs poetry and pleasure
and everything that wavers in between and I don’t know much about
 
resolutions or all the ways we can thrive (or hide), but I want to pull
you into my kitchen, place a plate next to a fork, and tell you the secret
to rum cake is 5 eggs and vanilla pudding and Bacardi Dark and when
you leave for the night and step out into the black where the Florida
 
frogs speak in a language older than ours; I want you to match their
pitch with your own.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

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Laurie Uttich: “My poetry tends to be full of fury or grief. It stumbles into a room, throws an emotion on the floor, and slams the door on the way out. I revel in the release of my Inner Poet who is so different than the person I walk around as every day. She shows her teeth and she doesn’t spend a millisecond worried about what anyone thinks (even you). But one of the men I write with on Fridays at a Florida prison often calls me a contradiction and chides me for my ‘sad stories’ while he writes his own poems about joy. This year, I decided to try and do the same.” (web)

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June 4, 2024

“Picnic” by Suzanne Lummis & Ron KoertgePosted by

Suzanne Lummis & Ron Koertge

PICNIC

Henry James said he loved the words summer afternoon.
Only suicidal snowmen think of a summer afternoon.
 
And, only shady women throw out the line, Babe,
my Stroke of Midnight wants your Summer Afternoon.
 
No wonder the moon sulks and broods. It’s an astronomical
body, not a kitchen light left on one summer afternoon!
 
Astronomical it is, and affecting, that moon.
It’s got me plunging toward a rhyme: summer afternoon.
 
No influential figure, not love or unlove. Not even
a shabby mini-mart. Nothing to mar a summer afternoon. 
 
Oh Nothing, with your No-Thing-ness—get lost, Nada! 
Nothing can despoil this summer afternoon. 
 
Tedium before and boredom after. In between, “Maybe”
and an urgent “Please” take up a summer afternoon. 
 
But what can they defend against? Back to Nothing.
Bombs have fallen on summer afternoons.
 
The sight of a mountaineer’s ice ax buried in a rest stop
picnic table revives an ordinary summer afternoon.
 
What ruins every outdoor meal? Ants, especially giant
ants from outer space, some calm summer afternoon.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
May 2024

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Prompt: Find a partner and write a collaborative poem in some kind of form.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “Ghazals have always struck me as a literary picnic—a checkerboard blanket brimming with many different dishes composed of unique couplets. This modified, collaborative ghazal, with its ‘No-Thing-ness’ whimsicality served up alongside more serious stanzas, unpacks a memorable conversation for us all under the summer afternoon sun.”

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June 3, 2024

“Parking Meter” by Dean Marshall TuckPosted by

Dean Marshall Tuck

PARKING METER

If a slot machine is a one-armed bandit,
what does that make you? A cyclopean
troll? I don’t think it will catch on.
Maybe there’s nothing poetic about you.
A friend’s mother died the other day,
and it occurred to me at the service—
I’m embarrassed to admit so late into my forties—
that time is the greatest commodity, maybe
the only one that matters. Time is money,
people say, but is the inverse true?
I started thinking about the ways
we buy time on this earth, and you
were the first one I thought of. 
 
But there are other ways: jukeboxes, payphones—
coins for time with voices. Concerts, movies,
theme park tickets, hotel stays, prostitutes—
dollars for time in places we’d rather be, 
with people we’d rather see. Rent money,
the light bill—an exchange for a makeshift home
and delayed darkness. Is food fundamentally
just a purchase of more time in our own bodies? 
 
After the funeral, I stopped downtown. 
I found you still with a little time left, 
someone’s wasted minutes. I fed coin after coin 
into the slot, watching the countdown increase, 
buying more time, each quarter, less a guarantee 
against a ticket or tow, but rather, a promise 
to my car: “There’s no way I’m going to die 
before I come back for you.” I dropped another
quarter and relaxed, assured I would return
in fewer than 53 minutes, and soon enough,
head across town, maybe for a sandwich,
leaving you standing there with the rows
of your brothers, each one with their steady
internal ticking, little defused time bombs
that never explode, silently counting down
whatever’s left.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Dean Marshall Tuck: “Don’t you sort of miss dropping coins into payphones and parking meters and jukeboxes? I was thinking about this, and the sounds the coins made falling down their slots, and I suppose that’s what began my poem. Then things took a turn. It’s hard not to see mortality in everything. I did not expect to get there while contemplating the parking meter, but here we are.”

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June 2, 2024

“Anti-Aubade” by David RosenthalPosted by

David Rosenthal

ANTI-AUBADE

You shuffle through your waking house as though
the miracle of dawn does not deserve
acknowledgement, as though the way you go
downstairs, through doorways in the dark, and swerve
around the furniture, is nothing more
than habit, as if comfort doesn’t guide
your feet across the heated hardwood floor.
Your stomach turns at stirs of life outside.
You’re bracing for the dread of this new week,
though really you don’t know a dreadful thing.
You scroll through lifting darkness. What you seek
is anybody’s guess. The song you sing
turns out to be appropriated blues,
and genocides are other people’s news.
 

—from Poets Respond

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David Rosenthal: “I write early in the morning, so I tend to write about the dawn a lot. I also get most of my news in the early morning, scrolling through news outlets and social media. Those two elements of my morning routine intersect in this poem.”

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June 1, 2024

“In the Bleachers” by David Kelly-HedrickPosted by

David Kelly-Hedrick

IN THE BLEACHERS

We stand on the sidelines watching our children play.
We cheer for our kids and against the others, though
we could try cheering for the other kids
and against our own,
or, we might join with the opposing parents
and cheer for all our kids,
and against everyone on the next field,
or against the team playing across the street,
or across this town, or over the border.
We could just stand there and watch as witnesses for all,
for the coaches, the beleaguered referee,
the kids on the bench, the grass on the field,
garbage collecting under the bleachers,
ants disappearing into a sidewalk crack,
the gathering clouds, the darkening fields behind us,
the houses over the hill.
An ambulance waits in shadows just outside the stadium gates.
A raccoon drags a wounded foot through the brambles
while a young woman weeps alone in the parking lot.
But those are pieces of our flesh playing out on the field.
Chunks of our hearts and gasps of our spirits.
This is their game happening here, playing now in this stadium built
in a hollow where regional winds gather and swirl.
I even feel guilty for tucking a paperback of poems into my overcoat.
The scoreboard sucks us into its frenzy of ticking seconds.
We stare at the gulf between home and away and hope
for a victory that will not be recognized in a single ribbon or trophy on the
shelf but will unroll itself across the flutter of years and pulse across palms
gripping a succession of hands and handles.
We are rooted to a cold aluminum bench, and our mittened clapping
sounds like another failed attempt at turning over the engine of a giant car.
Above, a pair of osprey have built a home atop one of the field lights.
They fly stick-gathering missions during the game.
We could cheer for the dusk.
It is coming. It is here.

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

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David Kelly-Hedrick: “There are so many great poems out here and each one is like a transit pass for the soul, valid, permission given, full access granted, to roam. I like holding onto these scraps of paper and the movement given. I like being in the swirl of poetry.”

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May 31, 2024

“Go Home Boy Go Home” by Erik TschekunowPosted by

Erik Tschekunow

GO HOME BOY GO HOME

It’s in the story of an inmate whose dog
shows up at the prison and lies at the double
line of fences. Whenever a rabble
of prisoners struts out to the yard for rec,
the sad, lumpy mutt rises, drags its body
along the chain-link, stroked by the braids
of tempered metal, and for one hour a day
he and his master stare at each other
through sixteen feet of Concertina, fanged
helixes stacked like hay bales. “Go home, boy.
Go home. Who did this? Was it Sheila? She left
you here?” The dog stays for weeks. A guard
admits to leaving it peanuts and pork rinds.
Then on a morning the inmate wakes feeling
fluish and almost skips rec, when he
goes outside anyways, his dog is gone.
Down the gravel access road toward the pines
where the state highway heads north or south, the way
is blurred, like heat, like dust. “He finally obeyed,”
the inmate says to himself, though the absence
catches him like another sentence. He kneels by the fence,
the hinge of his jaw stiffening, something dense
but spectral rising into his throat and after
wiping a wrist across his cracked bottom lip lets out
a long howl. It lifts but falters
as he fixes his hashed gaze all the way
to where he imagines his call dissolves.
None of the inmates on the yard look, they don’t
laugh or blast from their wellsprings of derision.
All seem to have lowered their heads
as if searching for something delicate
dropped near their institution boots.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

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Erik Tschekunow: “As is evident in the subject matter of this, I spent five years in a federal prison for an addiction-fueled offense. More than anything else, poetry helped get me through my bid.”

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May 30, 2024

“Of California, the Wild” by Breonne StiglitzPosted by

Night Train by Gerrie Paino, train car deserted at night with stars in background

Image: “Night Train” by Gerrie Paino. “Of California, the Wild” was written by Breonne Stiglitz for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Breonne Stiglitz

OF CALIFORNIA, THE WILD

There, on a midnight railway,
beyond the static
of the locusts,
a small, broken hum
from an old radio
blinks in and out,
in and out,
through Cuyahoga Valley
when Ohio was for lovers.
A golden sepia-toned starlet
leans on the glass
of the window
and wonders
as the steam blows
from the engine ahead.
A man in a frock coat
and a three-piece suit
tips his hat
as her wonder floats
into the aisle
where it collides
with his glistening glare.
Her rosy, peach cheeks pull
her mouth to her ears,
and she can hear
the distant voices
of California, the wild
calling her name. There,
where the cars drive
faster, the trees turn
to telephone poles,
and the lights burn
an afterimage
into the eyes of twilight—
puddles spilt
in the street, reflecting
the stoplights, the theater,
the neon signs
that curl fingers inwards
to lift skirts and seduce
prey, to convince onlookers
to buy lipstick and pearls
that bleed and coil
like snakes around the necks
of the Beautiful
and the Enlightened.
And it pulls like a venom,
pulsing,
a steam engine traveling
across the skin
of a Hollywood dream,
where it once whistled
like a biting catcall,
that now, sits amongst
the brush and thistle
to shelter the rabbits
from the foxes’ mouths,
an orchestra of crickets—
the sounds of the night
begging
the locomotive to move
again under God’s collection
of dying stars, wheels
that once turned as time does.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
April 2024, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “There is a dreamy, cinematic quality to this image that I felt was perfectly captured by ‘Of California, the Wild.’ I found it effortless and satisfying to imagine this ‘golden sepia-toned starlet’ looking out the train window until the natural landscape fades and ‘the trees turn / to telephone poles.’ There is magic in the way the poet contrasts the glamour and glitz of Hollywood (“the neon signs/that curl fingers inwards”) against the still-wild California land. The poem ends with a haunting reminder that the train is an agent of time–once relentless and vibrant; now frozen, just a memory.”

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