September 23, 2024

“The Concert” by Austin AlexisPosted by

Austin Alexis

THE CONCERT

The geometric sound of Bach:
refreshing seems not the right word;
satisfying feels more like it,
like a chaste kiss
delivered with just the right timing,
just the right pressure,
just the right intention
at just the right angle.
 
Or are his notes, his phrases,
the rectangular steps of a palace
turned into a public monument,
sunlight illuminating the façade
until the limestone is iridescent
 
as only music can be
when it is composed with love,
as an expression of love,
and performed with care
more compassionate than romantic?
 
No love rings more empathetic
than these string melodies—
with the woodwinds being tender
in their temperate, balanced trills.
The harpsichord beats are ardent hearts.
Even the brass echoes mellow
with empathy for all who listen,
all who understand how these structures,
this order, these rhythmic pulses
verge on an affection that is more than erotic.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Austin Alexis: “I was a member of St. George’s Choral Society, one of the oldest choral societies in the United States. Being involved with music in such an intimate way has influenced my choice of subject matter. Musicians such as Bach, Prince, Leontyne Price, and Beethoven appear in my poetry. My vocabulary has been impacted by my involvement with music, with words such as harmony, pace, melody, and rhythm frequently used by me in technical and non-technical ways. My sense of structure is heightened as a result of studying music, especially in the way I see stanzas as a series of episodes, which is similar to the way modern composers structure work, with loosely related intervals united in a work as ‘episodes’ rather than movements. The direct emotive appeal that music offers has caused me to work in a more emotional way. Lastly, music has taught me to listen to the absence of noise and/or what lurks beyond words, and to attempt to capture those fleeting sensations in language.” (web)

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September 22, 2024

“Ode to the New York Lanternfly” by Kirsten Shu-ying ChenPosted by

Kirsten Shu-ying Chen

ODE TO THE NEW YORK LANTERNFLY

I can’t stop admiring the dead.
They cover my every direction
leaving behind the spectacular
carnage of their significant
and insignificant lives.
Is it when we gather
and with whom
that stamps us into memory?
Is it the streets devouring
the daily pandemonium
and a late warmth rising
against our indifference
to the surrounding miracle?
First we take flight
then the loose ends of our lives
fray into thinner stories
until only the dog is sated
only the ceaseless gaze
of here and now
is turned to you in prayer—
the air filled with ideas
you have spent your life
escaping. The footsteps
of any family curse.
The learning of your own
desire
to annihilate
or how it feels
to hold a creature
even once
by its wings.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Kirsten Shu-ying Chen: “It’s that time of year again. Walking around this weekend in the late summer heat with hordes of Lanternflies everywhere and various tensions in the air, I couldn’t help but see their stamped out deaths as somewhat reflective of both the very real human deaths that seem to surround and numb us daily, as well as the metaphorical deaths we negotiate internally within ourselves. Why are we humans so driven to destroy? Where does this desire come from? And what—if any—good can we do with it? Admittedly, I’ve got more questions than answers.” (web)

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September 21, 2024

“Choices” by Miles RosenbergPosted by

Miles Rosenberg (age 9)

CHOICES

The volcano was erupting red fire.
Outside, next door, my friend was using a good,
old watering can on his garden,
training for a gardening competition.
Inside his warm house, his brother
was eating vanilla ice cream at his piano.
Lol.
After the house comes the street.
Around the block comes the candy man.
He’s cold and blue.
His door is frozen. Suddenly, boom goes the volcano.
 

—from 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Miles Rosenberg: “Writing poetry makes it so I have no fear.”

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September 20, 2024

“So God Will Know You” by Brendan ConstantinePosted by

Brendan Constantine

“SO GOD WILL KNOW YOU”

after Miroslav Valek

Go out, get us some money
and kill a dog. Take this coat,
this book of matches, a knife
from the wall to kill a dog
on the way. You need medicine;
if not now, you will—aspirin,
quinine, a packet of God.
These things are still strong
enough to heal the country
and kill a dog. Sulfur traps
in their intestines, from fruit,
toad stools; any limb off
a chocolate rabbit is death,
as it happens. This happens,
we spread a newspaper, cut
an onion, wait with each other.
You kill a dog; a shepherd, a bull,
a fool hound. Tell whoever
complains the dog has killed
your dog first, your older dog.
They won’t persist. The earth
is fed on the incorrigible. People
here worship this about the land;
that it is made rich by eating
thieves: the rabbit, the crow,
the pale gopher. Thus and so
we light a fire in a fireplace
and read half our book. Or sleep
in our beds and wake standing
by the window. If we call out,
the dogs inside us run away,
then creep back. They can
never come under our hands,
their softnesses. You must
keep the right things with you,
the family spoons, good spoons
to trade, to dig, to attract a dog.
You must expect to lose these
or not get enough for them. Have
some tea or ginger in your pocket
to offer the hermit, the widow
who takes you in against night,
the wild boy-man who thinks
he must be alone. Have a way
to mention us so they know
you cannot linger. At dawn
come home with money;
on the way, kill a dog.

—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

__________

Brendan Constantine: “I grew up in a house where poetry was a tradition, something read at bedtime, something framed on the wall. I was such a part of my environment I didn’t notice it until I was 27. I was sitting in a cafe in London and I began to write on a napkin. The next day I bought a notebook.” (web)

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September 19, 2024

“Brushscape” by Samuel ErteltPosted by

Forage by Tammy Nara, mixed media watercolor of a thistle on an expressive blue and brownish pink background

Image: “Forage” by Tammy Nara. “Brushscape” was written by Samuel Ertelt for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, August 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

__________

Samuel Ertelt

BRUSHSCAPE

A man is stuck between
        two dreams in a patch
of thistle. Reaching
down, he picks a spiny brush
and dips it in the sky dark as indigo
before it bleeds. In front of himself,
he paints a lake         a memory
a kind of dusk lingering
       around the edges of
how reflections appear lavender
when still. The evening blots and runs.
He wipes the brush clean
       and turns, turns to steal
some white from the cloud
he’s imagined above his head. The man kneels
and paints         the ghost of a snowbank,
but the ghost keeps disappearing
       before he can make it solid
enough to melt, and he can only
imagine so many clouds.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
August 2024, Artist’s Choice

__________

Comment from the artist, Tammy Nara: “I’m transported inside the painting as it is created. The artist creates his world. The evening blots and runs. (Yes, it does!) Stealing the white from a cloud. The ghost of a snowbank that disappears before he can make it solid. The other poems connected to the metaphor of the thistle, this poem is connected to the act of painting.”

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September 18, 2024

“Dear Proofreader” by David HernandezPosted by

David Hernandez

DEAR PROOFREADER

You’re right. I meant “midst,” not “mist.”
I don’t know what I was stinking,
I mean thinking, soap speaks intimately
to my skin every day. Most days.
Depending if darkness has risen
to my skull like smoke up a chimney floe.
Flue. Then no stepping nude
into the shower, no mist turning
the bathroom mirror into frosted glass
where my face would float
coldly in the oval. Picture a caveman
encased in ice. Good. I like how
your mind works, how your eyes
inside your mind works, and your actual eyes
reading this, their icy precision, nothing
slips by them. Even now I can feel you
hovering silently above these lines,
hawkish, Godlike, each period
a lone figure kneeling in the snow.
That’s too sad. I would like to send
search parties and rescue choppers
to every period ever printed.
I would like to apologize to my wife
for not showering on Monday and Tuesday.
I was stinking. I was simultaneously
numb and needled with anxiety,
in the midst of a depressive episode.
Although “mist” would work too,
metaphorically speaking, in the mist of,
in the fog of, this gray haze that followed me
relentlessly from room to room
until every red bell inside my head
was wrong. Rung.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

David Hernandez: “I finished writing ‘Dear Proofreader’ on December 15th, 2010. On that same date, the mummified head of King Henri IV was found inside a retiree’s garage in France. In Tokyo, a science professor announced that a Japanese salmon species thought to have been extinct since 1940 was discovered in a lake near Mount Fuji by his research team. Also on this date I took a nap.” (web)

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September 17, 2024

“Roadside” by Ted KooserPosted by

Ted Kooser

ROADSIDE

Someone has picked up after it, but it was there,
a half mile north of the interstate highway
where the paved spur ends and the gravel takes over,
a patch of waist-high weeds where what was once
a trailer park has since gone back to pasture.

It was never much more than a start, and it
never got anywhere close to a finish, just a half dozen
second- and third-hand cheap aluminum trailers
with windows glaring on their kitchen ends
and doors pulled shut on any hope of welcome.

They sat yards apart, like dice rolled out and left
where they’d stopped, and a few ambitious saplings
had pushed up under and worked their way in
and were leafing out over the roofs, and the lanes
which once led in, led in and under and were gone.

I suppose the trailers went for scrap, but if you and I
were to step over that wire with its dirty white rag
of surrender knotted dead center, we might just find
some part of something left behind by something
left behind, enough to show you what was there.

—from Rattle #55, Spring 2017

__________

Ted Kooser: “I don’t want anything on the page to call attention to itself; I want the writing to be completely transparent and all of the revision I do is from difficulty toward clarity, and toward economy as well. I pare out a lot of things as I go, but, again, transparency is the issue with me. I want my reader to just simply go right through the screen of the words into the experience.” (web)

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