Search Results for: stroke

August 1, 2017

“Straight Shooter” by Bayleigh CardinalPosted by

Bayleigh Cardinal

STRAIGHT SHOOTER

You are only as terrible as what falls,
like the season’s first kill, gleefully

from the wound of your mouth.
My cousin once told me not to fear God,

and that night I prayed to the graffiti ceiling
Please, no angels, brushed by wind from a window.

Every truth, sheared by the tongue that tells it,
by mirrors glinting like blood in the sun.

I would say to the clouds: rain takes my clothes off.
To my cab driver: another storm coming.

I’ve dyed my hair enough to stain my fingers
blue as an airless sentence

I have kissed too much. I have been in love quietly
with my country. Stroked the taxidermy

of her truth displayed like a sky on my television.
Someone once liked her image enough, limp as it was,

to hold her up in front of me, ask for a photograph.
I’ve cried for I’ve loved my country like a trophy,

like something I’d mount on my wall.

—from Poets Respond

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Bayleigh Cardinal: “This poem came in response to Anthony Scaramucci’s recent phone call with a reporter. Afterwards, in a television interview, he called himself a ‘straight shooter.’ And now, as of Monday, he’s already been fired.” (web)

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July 6, 2017

“Home” by Judith Tate O’BrienPosted by

Judith Tate O’Brien

HOME

for Gene, turning 75

Bring me all the synonyms for husband but don’t
expect me to find the one I need. It’s buried

in a medieval story I once read about Bede,
the monk who fell asleep and dreamed a sparrow

flew in a window facing east, swooped across
the room, and out a window west. Glide and gone,

the Irish poet put it, calling the little space
between dawn and stardust our brief home.

Home—the private journal where we learn who
we are by recording who we love. Home—

where we are cozy breathing silence, and where,
growing old, we grow easier to see through.

—from Rattle #18, Winter 2002
Tribute to Teachers

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Judith Tate O’Brien: “I am a retired teacher and psychotherapist, who married widower with five daughters, and lived to tell about it. I find that humor helps me cope with a stroke, which left me wheel-chaired. I read and/or write poetry every day partly because I can do it sitting, mostly because I love to.”

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January 10, 2017

“Birds” by Susan FirerPosted by

Susan Firer

BIRDS

I found the blue jay on the driveway
under the pink drunk Czechoslovakian-
grandma-planted peonies which were
under the restrained Scotch pine.
The bird’s nape was wide open.
You could kaleidoscope-look
into its neck and see rubber bands
leading to its complex brain.
You could see everywhere
it had ever flown: chaparral, scrub-oak
woodlands, coniferous & oak forests. There
were nuts, & insects, & seeds, & amphibians,
& even a piece or two of snake.
There was a cache of foil-bright objects, &
sounds: zreeks & shook, shook, shook & all
the colors of sex and death. I bent to it,
picked it up and brought it to my heart
like the strange forest pioneer women who took
abandoned bear cubs to their bare breasts
and rock-nursed them in front
of cabin fires until the cubs could live
on their own. I have not often since
had such patience. But then with that
found jay I stroked its wingbars & flight
feathers; I memorized its eye-rings, & crown,
wing coverts, & eye-stripes. And with weeks
and water, food, and breath
I brought it back to flight. For that
short summer I loved it more than myself,
enough to let it go. For months it would not.
Every time I went outside, it flew streetlight
straight to my head or shoulder
where it easy perched. There are photos
of me teenaged giving it milk-blue
bowls of water and photos of me bikini sun-
bathing, the blue jay on my then-
tan, flat belly, the jay feeling deceivingly
light as the first intimate gift-flesh touch
of love, as the children who swell and fall
from our love-soaked bodies, deceiving
as the hollow-boned, song-filled birds
that daily blue-grass drop dream feather
trails throughout our skin-heavy days.

—from Rattle #16, Winter 2001
Tribute to Boomer Girls

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Susan Firer lives, writes, and works within ear’s distance of the western shore of Lake Michigan. (link)

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September 19, 2016

“Inventing the Dolphin” by Chris GreenPosted by

Chris Green

INVENTING THE DOLPHIN

In a blue-painted pool sponsored by Corona & Sol,
It’s hard to see the larger ocean. Picture a lonely dolphin
Waiting to get paid. His forced smile, his blowhole opening
For coins. They call him Chuy, a Mexican nickname for Jesus.
He takes his fish lazily from the trainer, & you know,
If he could walk backwards from here to the sea, he would.
We are his 2:30.

Standing in life vests, all grouped in the shallow end like Baptists,
We’re told to stroke him, but carefully. We’re warned to avoid
His pinhole ears that hear what we cannot, also his blowhole,
A second mouth that speaks an ocean tongue of shrieks & clicks.
I can see by the trainer’s caution, our innocence is dangerous.
He says if Chuy takes a hand in his mouth, sometimes he’s curious,
We should not pull, but let him release us. Also, it’s a myth
Dolphins push drowning swimmers to shore. To a dolphin,
All humans look to be drowning. Besides, their instinct would be
To push us out to sea, to safety.

Looking close, I see in his wet grey eyes a child’s knowing buoyancy.
I feel an intimacy, like he might turn to me in some small café & say,
“I think there is something you should know.”
He’s not as slippery as I thought. And his skin, just like the moon
Shining back, that still silver, is cool to the touch, the exact temperature
Of the water. We take turns in a strange communion touching
His forehead, laying small bloodless fish on a big blue tongue.
We are educated people, but I sense among us a competition
For whom Chuy likes best. We command cheap tricks & he jumps—
First circling, gaining inhuman momentum. He fears for his job.
He works. His back bent as to a desk holding his breath.

Suddenly he leaps—pure muscle, no bones—Jesus the way we wish him
To be, nosing a blue-green ball, his fins not quite fingers or feet.

—from Rattle #52, Summer 2016

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Chris Green: “Frost said that actuality and intimacy is the greatest aim an artist can have. My intimate and actual experience swimming with a dolphin in Mexico seemed like a poem from beginning to end. I hope I conveyed at least a bit of the art that I felt.” (web)

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September 7, 2016

“Exorcism” by Tiana ClarkPosted by

Tiana Clark

EXORCISM

Pastor John stood over her body—
shouted scripture as she writhed in the jerk
of undulations that lit her bones on fire. Her eyes
slid to the back of her head slick as marbles. Only
the white jelly of sclera shone between the flutter
of eyelash flicks moored to the mouth of some
netherworld. I stood back in awe and in horror
like the first time I watched porn. Excited, because
we were inside the same heat as each of our hands
stretched forward, flexed as church fans we stroked
the flames of spirit higher and higher. She frothed
her lips to a disc of crema, cried and whimpered
almost like a self-soothing baby. Our finger pads
followed the bars on the pages of a hymnal book.
My youth group spoke as a choir in tongues, our
syllabic utterings were plucked marionette strings
that pulled her limbs to spasms. Pastor John said
she had a demon of lust, a Jezebel Spirit. He said
we had to pray louder and harder, had to touch her
arms and her sides, had to deliver the ember of her
sins from the second crust of hell. But I knew this
girl that twitched on the floor. Sarah was my older
friend. And yes, she made out with boys. And yes,
I saw how the boys looked at her breasts, like the way
they looked at them now when she jiggled—buoyant
as sunny side up eggs. As if I could pierce her yolks
with my praying fingers, bloodletting buttery sex.
She was like me: a girl with no father, a girl that
made God her father, a girl that wanted to be saved,
but mostly loved. She gave her body to greasy boys,
like the way she gave her body to all of us in that
musty cabin outside of the glowing gold buckle
of the Bible Belt for a church retreat.

—from Rattle #52, Summer 2016

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Tiana Clark: “I agree with Terrance Hayes: ‘… everything is a metaphor for sex.’ This poem evolved while unpacking my religious upbringing by converging the sacred and the sensual, the holy and the profane. Ranier Maria Rilke said ‘… the artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.’ When I decided to stop writing out of fear, the mist began to rise when my pen slid across the page. This is why I love to write poetry—because of the steam, that ineffable cloud that embodies the nebulous memories inside our minds.” (web)

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July 22, 2016

“Green Felt Pants” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

GREEN FELT PANTS

Just beyond the entrance to Knott’s Berry Farm
where hundreds congregate to plan what rides to ride
what shows to catch is a group of mentally challenged young people,
most rolled in on wheelchairs, one of them screaming as his caregiver,
a Native American man with the large-eyed face of a saint,
strokes the screamer’s hair and lathers sunscreen on him and holds his hands
and speaks to him in his ear, the screamer could be as young as eighteen
or old as twenty-eight I can’t tell though there’s another intellectually disabled man
standing patiently as the others get ready who is wearing high-cropped green felt pants
and a tidy yellow polo shirt; he appears calm though a little perplexed
and he is strange standing there with his feet perfectly together,
hands in his pockets, waiting for the others in wheelchairs and their caretakers,
the head caregiver a Latin woman clutching a pink cellphone and decidedly in charge
of this group I’m watching who will not yet commit to move further into the park
and I am waiting for my wife and children to finish the line and a ride
on this very crowded day so now I’m feeling a little disturbed watching
those who will need care forever, those that will never have children or a job or a spouse,
who will never even have the satisfaction, as I’ve recently had, of quitting a job
that was much too stressful to find myself at this amusement park
which could serve as a stand-in for life itself, the complex absurdity of it all,
watching these disabled individuals make the most of it
as the one who screams continues to recite his piercing scream,
something between a wolf and small child a wolf-child,
as his beautiful saint-friend rubs his face and leans over
to say something to him I’ll never know and will never have to know.

—from Rattle #52, Summer 2016
Tribute to Angelenos

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Alejandro Escudé: “I moved to Los Angeles when I was six years old. Rather, I was brought here by my parents from Argentina. My first memory is Venice Beach. I was scared. As a little kid, I thought the people looked weird and frightening. And they were! But I love Los Angeles. I love it the way tourists love it, which is to say palm trees and movie stars, and I love it the way locals love it, which is to say palm trees and movie stars. And sunsets! Can’t forget about those sunsets.” (website)

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June 23, 2016

“Alone in Love” by Mary MeriamPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2016: Editor’s Choice

 

Painting by Catherine Edmunds
Painting: “Castlerigg” by Catherine Edmunds. “Alone in Love” was written by Mary Meriam for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2016, and selected by Timothy Green as the Editor’s Choice winner.

[download broadside]

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Mary Meriam

ALONE IN LOVE

She isn’t mine. I am alone in love.
Inside my mind and soul, I moan in love.

The sound is pearly shell. The sound is slight,
only a cell of sound, a stone in love.

My flower bed so lavishly in bloom,
my elm tree’s swelling leaves, my own in love.

Those fragile fantasies of love I drew
erased in anguish, overthrown in love.

She hasn’t ears and eyes for this, old fool.
Impossible, your monotone in love.

Just face it, Mary, time is running short.
Love less, or you will die alone in love.

—Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2016
Editor’s Choice Winner

[download audio]

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Comment from the editor on his selection: “As artist Catherine Edmunds mentioned last week, the best ekphrastic poems tend to be those that use the source image as a doorway into something new. In this well-crafted ghazal, Mary Meriam seems to draw on the emotion of the stark angled strokes and color palette of the painting, but makes the leap of personifying what seems to be a rock at the center, transforming it into an image of lost love and loneliness.” Learn more about Mary Meriam at her website.

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