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

__________

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

__________

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)

__________

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

__________

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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May 29, 2024

“Midwest Houses” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

MIDWEST HOUSES

Full of a million things
that cost a dollar apiece
 
*
 
Nothing is truly old or truly modern 
everything could be anyone’s
even the family pictures on the walls 
 
*
 
Giant Sears and Roebuck dollhouses
do people live here
or stuffed animals?
 
*
 
Spice racks of hollow glass idols
that are never touched
salt is the one true god 
 
*
 
Shoot or poison animals
to keep them off the lawn
replace with plastic deer and flamingoes 
 
*
 
No stone lions 
at the entryways
only ceramic frogs 
 
*
 
Humid hairy armpit summer afternoons
the grass they mow 
and mow and mow and mow
 
*
 
The thunder
of a drunk father
home from bowling night
 
*
A man sets his alarm clock
clicking in the dark
like an S.O.S
 
*
 
At Grandpa’s
small circle of family
medicine ball conversation
 
*
 
At the end of the summer
our last kiss 
tastes like bug-spray
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Mather Schneider: “I don’t like trying to come up with something clever for these things. I write poetry and prose when there is something I want to put down. I don’t like writing for the hell of it.”

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May 28, 2024

“Bottomlands Dream” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

BOTTOMLANDS DREAM

The boy fell from the Monahegnee Bridge,
and his parents buried him, and the years
were a cottonmouth swimming in an oxbow 
lake, and the boy became an owl as he fell
and lived in the woods so that when he held 
himself motionless, he felt himself becoming
the gray bark of the tree. And sometimes
the boy swooped low across the bottomlands
behind the house of his parents, and sometimes
they watched him going by, and maybe he held
a mouse in his talons, or maybe the sun’s eye
blurred across the glass and transformed him
into a diffused smear of photons. One time
when he fell, he was caught in the updraft
of a prayer lifting itself toward the heavens,
and another time he landed in the lake then
became a catfish swimming along the muddy 
bottom, his body twisting and raising swirls
of murky visions. And his parents dreamed
sometimes of opening their arms at the bottom 
of the bridge and catching him. And the boy 
became a cottonmouth twisting his way
across the water’s surface, and the water
rippled out behind him and made of everything
a transitory motion, something there then gone.
And the boy whispered in the air as he went by,
I fall and fall but never strike the ground.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

__________

Doug Ramspeck: “I wrote this poem in the fall, while being distracted by a bear with her two cubs as they climbed the oak trees outside my office window and fed on acorns and sometimes napped.” (web)

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May 27, 2024

“The Breaks” by Kirk RobinsonPosted by

Kirk Robinson

THE BREAKS

To learn more about your new Kenmore
washer, break the plastic seal.
—from the manufacturer’s instructions

I’ve a friend who says, “Treat anything mechanical
as if it’s just about to break.”
I’ve a feeling           broken-hearted
he’s talking about himself
in relation to his ex-wife,
but I don’t tell him that. She called me break the news
just before she left him. “Breaking up” was her phrase,
as if we were all broken promise still in grade school.
“I’m leaving,” she said, “For good.” I pictured him exactly
where I knew he was at the time—in mid-schuss
breakneck on a mogul-filled downhill in Vail.
He wouldn’t be back for two days, and had no idea
it would be to a broken home. And then,
no note, on the kitchen table or anywhere.
No red box on the wall: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
BREAK GLASS.

Two weeks later we sat line break
in front of a ridiculous amount of beer.
I was trying, at that point, to explain to him
that humans didn’t invent weaving … breaking point
that it was an innovation of certain brightly colored,
long-beaked birds, and when we stumbled upon
the wonderful, twisted nests, we figured them out
by breaking them apart.
Something in him broke loose, I guess. I’d been talking
as if I could say anything groundbreaking
about love. In retrospect, he probably should’ve broke my nose,
but all he did was sit there, for the first time, slumped over
in a bar, and cry. “I looked everywhere,” he said,
“for a note.” Everywhere. He kept saying it. What’s the word?
What’s the word for one of those great big crashing waves?

—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

_________

Kirk Robinson: “I’ve always loved poems—like David Clewell’s ‘A Heart for Patricia’—that take a single, well-worn idea and then run at it from angles until it’s new again. When a friend of mine spoke those words of advice about mechanical things, I happened to hear a decent line in my head. Then I sat down, and I made a break for it.”

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May 26, 2024

“Ode to the Cop Next to the One with the Pepper Spray” by Ryan McCartyPosted by

Ryan McCarty

ODE TO THE COP NEXT TO THE ONE WITH THE PEPPER SPRAY

Your cheek turns, Christ-like
from your buddy with the buddha
belly blowing chemicals
on crowds of my students. One falls
facedown while her own mucus
and sweat bottlenecks in the rush
to exit every hole she has. You
might or might not know the blind
terror of drowning, the lung-torn
scream that almost always does
the trick eventually, boosted by the guts
heaving underneath, till air breaks
through. Ten seconds, not like Floyd,
but enough to feel your mother
pounding inside your skull,
calling for you this time, to forget the grass
hasn’t always mixed with gravel
on your knees and palms in a prayer
of almost-dying. Officer, you know
the straight-backed virtue
of duty, eyes cast to the horizon,
white vapors spreading
to the morning. You avoid the sight
of a baseball cap skirting the fog,
kneeling, eyes on your chin, helping
the retching shoulders rise.
I’ll buy you a beer. Let’s rewind
and rewatch on half-speed, wait
for one foot to stir, one hand to drop
the pose. Never. You never break.
While we play you again and again,
you can explain, for all of us
non-heroes, how to hold the line, to pity
the spastic terrified flapping
of robins, escaping their trees in the choke
your boy backhands into the crowd,
how to see the birds disperse
when sense commands, how to look
away from a body and really believe.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Ryan McCarty: “I keep rewatching this video of University of Michigan campus police pepper spraying a crowd of my students, colleagues, friends, and community members. Most of my life (but especially the last dozen years or so) have been spent watching the cops who are doing the beating, the spraying, the kneeling, the dragging. But this time I can’t stop looking at one cop near the pepper sprayer. They’re looking upward, toward the east and some trees where I know hundreds of birds nest, and the sun had just risen. Can poetry help us understand that moment? Can anything?” (web)

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