Cortney Lamar Charleston: “This affair with poetry began after attending a spoken word showcase on my college campus. One performer by the name of Joshua Bennett drew me in, particularly. He was everything I loved about rhythm, about the black body, about the courage I had in me that I rarely showed. Before I knew it, I was putting every pound of me into verse of some type; all that paper became heavy. It became my go-to for explaining weight-gain to loved ones. Them old folks always said I was a heavy boy.” (web)
Jacqueline Berger: “It’s kind of exciting, kind of shameful, the feeling we get looking at horrible images, so the theory of ruin porn goes. But expand the definition of arousal, and the pornographic becomes the poetic. We read poetry to be lured from the daily hypnosis by the startle of lyric. As for ruin—loss, grief in its infinite shadings—there’s nothing shameful about being compelled by that which we can’t avoid.” (website)
Jack Powers: “I wrote the first draft of ‘Man on the Floor’ in my head while walking my dog. Charlie and our walk figured prominently in the early drafts. Although most of it ended up on the cutting room floor, the cadence of a walk and the in-and-out-of-my-head movement of my brain on a walk seem to still be there. And Charlie still gets a little song at the end.” (web)
Aran Donovan: “At nine, I followed my father on his hospital rounds—down white corridors, past patient beds and nurse stations, into imaging labs. There, he held x-rays and scans up to a light box, diagnosing strokes, aneurysms, atrophies. Watching him, I learned that each succession of images needs interpretation, words to connect the scenes. I write poems to make sense of what I see.”
I tell you to let it ring.
You give my lips a quick
kiss, lean over and pick
up the phone. You say Hello, press your palm
over the mouthpiece, whisper, It’s my mother. You move
to the edge of the bed, turn
away and sit up, answer, Yeah.
No, no.
Stop
doing this to me, Mom.
I slide across the bed,
kiss soft shoulders, glide
my lips down your spine, fit
my tongue in the crack
of your ass. You look back,
your eyes ask me to please
stop. I shake my head
sideways, smile. Not
a chance. I crawl out
of bed, kneel in front
of you. My lips, tongue
stroke thighs, kiss and lick
you open, move inside you,
try to make you come.
Come, while your mother
swears on the bodies
of her two brothers
gassed at Dachau
that I will slowly
swallow your soul.
“The Word-Swallower” by Eric Paul ShafferPosted by Rattle
Eric Paul Shaffer
THE WORD-SWALLOWER
There is no charge for admission to the green, mildewed tent
staked slackly in an alley of the midway between a cotton candy
cart and ping-pong toss. Billed an attraction, the word-swallower
is not. Few come to observe him, seated on a steel, folding chair,
beneath a single spot in a vacant, shadowed, curtained room,
enshrined in silence. He swallows words. His silence is golden.
No matter how keen the verbiage rising to his tongue, no matter
how many edges on each unspoken word that comes to mind,
his tent is hushed but for the whispers of visitors who mark well
his silent line of lips. He answers no questions, retorts to no quip,
responds to no riposte, and his attendant dog-faced boy at the door
tells every dusty bumpkin a grim, dismal tale. Says the boy,
“If there were a king of the carnival, a lord of the boardwalk,
the word-swallower is not he. He hasn’t spoken since he learned
to talk. With no words for his wisdom, he speaks none.
Philosophers divide our sullen species from the other chimpanzees
by the power of speech, but the word-swallower knows finer
and says naught on this or any other subject.” The word-swallower
denies nothing. He fears no loss in lack of speech. He keeps peace
battened like a castle under siege and guards an armory of lustrous
weapons best left beyond reach. From imaginary battlements, each
word slips behind the tongue, lies sunk in the gullet, plummets
to the gut. Lips sealed, tongue unbitten, his thought hardens
beneath the red fist beating the bars of his chest and the bellows
burning breath into a world soundless and pointless without words.
At dusk, the word-swallower and dog-faced boy stroll into the hills
of a trim town noisy with streetlit night. The boy barks.
The word-swallower strokes the curly fur on the boy’s ears,
creeping through charged darkness and the grandiloquence of stars.
Eric Paul Shaffer: “I’m a great lover of carnivals, and my eye gravitates to stories about them. In one, as I read a list of performers, I misread ‘the sword-swallower,’ and the complete central image for the poem appeared full-blown before me. Luckily, the dog-faced boy arrived when I—understandably—needed someone to speak for the word-swallower. I’m a fan of serendipity, too.”
“Xanthus, Achilles’ Immortal Warhorse …” by Corrie WilliamsonPosted by Rattle
Corrie Williamson
XANTHUS, ACHILLES’ IMMORTAL WARHORSE, RODEOS IN AMARILLO
Ah, why did we give you…to a mortal,
while you are deathless and ageless?
Was it so you could share men’s pain?
Nothing is more miserable than man
of all that breathes and moves upon earth.
—The Iliad, XVII, trans. Stanley Lombardo
It was meant to be a gift, though the gods
should know by now it never is: sick of it
themselves, grown fidgety, restless, meddlesome.
It was harder on me of course than Balius,
him having never known speech while I tongue
the narrow trough of my mouth and half
expect words to return. Where he is now
I don’t know. After a time, we gave up being
untamable, and let ourselves be led, be put
to whatever tasks men could imagine. They call
this place Texas, hot enough for wandering
souls, where all of time stretches before me
as an endless tunnel of wind. The children wear
strange hats and their boots point like nettles
between fence boards. Men wish to be thrown, and,
understanding, I toss them, light as milkweed,
as burdock. But how tiring to make a living
from this act of riddance: spur in the side and belly
raw, summoning the body’s rage, a strap of leather
Corrie Williamson: “After college, I embarked on a trial career as an archaeologist. A year later, I gave it up to pursue my poetry MFA, but for me, the disciplines remain closely related. Poetry too is a process of excavation which I think at its best, for reader and writer, involves dirt and dust, gentle brush strokes, and the piecing together of something buried or broken that gets held up to the sun either to illuminate or expand the mystery.”
