Search Results for: Pool Head

September 18, 2023

“The Preakness” by John ColasaccoPosted by

John Colasacco

THE PREAKNESS

Jesus wasn’t going to make it, Jim kept coughing and crying
on the floor next to the blue crib, the longest hair
on the backs of the girls—none of it came back, a moth came back,
in the noise it wasn’t possible, the garden
wouldn’t turn around and show its face, it wouldn’t open, yes the black
and white story lady music teacher tells about a phantom, I listened to it,
I found out you could die with your eyes open, I went with E.
and D. upstairs and we played die with your eyes open
in the room with the sandpaper door like doctors
flying, flying around, one having more sadness than the other, one listening
close, and I needed to blink, but I was dead, so I tried to squint and I saw
a knuckle in a black tree branch, I saw my uncle saying it’s diseased
I saw my marker drawing of a snake, a brontosaurus,
and a t-shirt, and
a glowing in the dark; one had her wrist
over my eyes saying yes
this happens, how it can happen, and whether
it actually happens we answered in part, we were starting
to improvise and the bathing suits
had lives of their own with water in them under water. There was the week
my uncle took both pairs of scissors away
and didn’t tell me where they were; I found out about the insides
of my eye, and what was in there; I didn’t want to do it, but
I wanted to do it, and I said so, but I shouldn’t have said so,
and I tried to draw the knuckle but it came out nothing,
I was mad, the basement was on a slant, we put gasoline
in a coffee can, we kept playing but I blinked, it was fine, I explained
again the point of the game, I forced
them, I had a little sale. Some pretzels
and a deck of cards, it’s not called a brontosaurus
anymore and then some daisies died in my hand
when I picked them for this picture, this blue one,
with Jim, in a wagon. The fruit trees
would sting you outside the woods would sting you.
I fell into a log full of hornets and died.
I fell into a plastic swimming pool and died.
I had to cough. I forced it. It was Tourette’s. I wasn’t born. My uncle
was following me like gasoline in a coffee can, rows of snakes moved
in the garden and I caught one and killed it and my shoe sunk halfway
down like a thought, the garden stung you,
the basement was on a slant.
I had my own hatchet. My uncle
had a hatchet. The moon came out, they tore the kneelers
out of St. Edward’s and chopped them up for money, we chopped
branches off the branches, we chopped stakes
for the vines to climb and ate all winter, some lighters died, the for sale sign
was gone, my uncle said Who you like in the Preakness, when we were Italian
and the girls knew what I knew, my eyes were going; I blinked
at Jim and he came back, we took out two pairs of scissors, I found
out about scissors and water, my uncle swung a bucket of water
over his head and said Centrifugal force.

—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008

__________

John Colasacco: “I want to thank my teachers Michael and Chris for helping me with this poem. It started as an exercise; I was basically listing as many distant memories as I could, especially memories that seemed mostly visual. While I was making the list I became aware of a frustration I have with my memory, and with list-making. After that the poem’s movement started to jive more closely with my frustration, and it seemed to become its own thing.”

Rattle Logo

July 23, 2023

“Barbie Manifesto” by Alison LutermanPosted by

Alison Luterman

BARBIE MANIFESTO

I’m gonna see the Barbie movie tonight
because I had a feminist mother who didn’t buy us Barbies
and when I said I wanted to be a nurse, she said why don’t you be a doctor,
but I really did want to be a nurse
because of the perky hats they got to wear,
bobby-pinned to their sleek, shiny hair,
and I’m going to wear pink to the Barbie movie,
hot pink, the color of cheap candy,
like the chalky sugar cigarettes we pretended to smoke
with their fake red tips,
and I’m going to squeal like a cheerleader on Ecstasy,
I’m going to be silly and girly and super excited,
and all the things you were never supposed to be,
because doing anything like a girl–running,
or throwing, or thinking or writing or talking,
is the worst insult—
an icky, sticky, oozing, bleeding, shrill, smelly girlie-girl.
It means you’re not smart, or cool.
You cry when they throw footballs at your chest
which my boyfriend did in high school
because he wanted to help me toughen up.
It means you’ll be laughed at and dismissed,
so I’ve acted serious and intelligent
and tough for about a thousand years, just to prove them all wrong,
but now I’m begging to be dismissed—please! Dismiss me,
so I can lounge by the pool in a bright pink bikini
while some Ken bring me drinks with little umbrellas.
Because I’m tired of proving my point.
I don’t remember what my point is anyway,
or the point of this whole thing in the first place—
men, women, who cares? I just want to hide under the bed
with my best friend and a flashlight, constructing secret worlds
we can live in forever. I want to grow old on Planet Girl,
painting each of my stubby fingernails a different color of neon.
I have pretended I sprang fully-grown
from the forehead of my father, bristling with armor.
I have worn olive drab and camouflaged the delight I once took
in smearing myself with Vaseline and admiring my new little breast-buds
in the midnight mirror. I have done all the right things,
I have feigned interest in what bored me,
I have feigned politeness. I have pretended that my inner organs
are not all glistening pink, my heart and my liver and my lungs.
Pink as your own tongue, or the pads of your feet, or your palms.
 

—from Poets Respond
July 23, 2023

__________

Alison Luterman: “Like so many women of my generation, I’ve wrestled with the contradictions of who I’m supposed to be, and who I am, what I’m supposed to enjoy, and what I actually do like. I think the Barbie movie is arriving in our world at a great time for all of us, men and women, to start looking at these questions in a new, playful way.” (web)

Rattle Logo

May 23, 2023

“Hole” by Bill ChristophersenPosted by

Bill Christophersen

HOLE

I

When the toddler disappeared (the septic tank’s
countersunk manhole cover not quite centered
and so become a revolving door), the May
sun was drying the grass of the bed-and-breakfast’s
manicured front lawn. A gardener
was coaxing a power mower up the property’s
street-side incline, one hand on the throttle,
the other on the driving wheel’s black dish.

When the father disappeared (down the same hole,
self-preservation trumped by something else
more limbic still, some gut-level imperative
or sense that hell had got him by the balls,
no matter how he played it), the mother, alone
and shaking, screamed with her whole body.
The gardener jammed the stick in park and hove
his lumbering, sweating self from the metal seat.

Then the mother disappeared (belayed
by the gardener’s sausage fingers round her ankles,
arms flailing the stinking darkness; flailing
and groping, the acrid stench suffocating
as her terror of the epiphany that life,
into which we bring these ones we love,
can snatch them by the toe and eat them whole;
can leach their little hides, do what we will).

Then the child reappeared (hauled up bodily,
the mother, arms extended like a midwife’s,
seizing it in midair from the father,
who, plunging deep, had gone to work, feeling
past turds till hand touched skull, then tugged
the curled-up infant from the pissy muck
and raised it above his head, a living trophy―
delivered to its mother, then babe and mom delivered

by the puffing gardener, whose yells of “Help! Baby!”
brought a passing mom-and-stroller, hence clean
water, disinfectant wipes, cell phone and the steady
voice required to summon 911).
Below, the father, treading bilious sludge,
barked knuckles on cement, then struck a rung―
egress from that twilight zone of filth;
chimney to pure light, sun-drenched salvation.

And so the father reappeared (climbing
out of deeper shit than I or anyone
I know has ever been encompassed by).
One doesn’t think, they say, at times like this;
one reacts. One thinks all sorts of things: How deep?
Well? Cesspool? Caustic chemicals? Will I
land on him? Break his back? My back? Is he
dead already? Am I committing suicide?

The ambulance arrived in a minute-thirty.
Son and father had stomachs pumped, got meds,
caught colds, got better. All three wake up screaming
more often than most of us. The parents shower
way more than they need to. The two-year-old
climbs the walls at the mention of bath time but
otherwise is doing fine. Turns out babies
hold their breath instinctively under water.

 

II

One wants the tale to end there, and perhaps
it does, a centerpiece of family lore, a
miracle of love, bravery, a special
dispensation all three share going forward.
But perhaps the enormity of the episode,
like a dark star, warps the space around it,
and the debt of love incurred toward the father
smothers the wife, and later the child, in guilt.

Perhaps the father, a dozen or more years later,
watching his teenage son do reckless things,
thinks, “What right’s he got to pull this kind
of shit on me?” Or, seething at the wife’s
obiter dicta and bickering retorts,
thinks, “Why was it up to me to take the plunge?
Was my life more expendable than yours?”
Perhaps the boy, unable at last to abide

the horror of that day, its happy ending
notwithstanding, loses the knack for trust,
without which nothing much is ever ventured,
fought for, wrestled with, maintained in spite
of obstacles? Perhaps no foothold ever
fully persuades; no morning sun on green
lawn but signifies some nightmare’s mise-
en-scène; no darkness seems negotiable.

 

III

A miracle is deceptive. Isolated,
it can make all history seem foreordained,
as if the jeweled part stands for the whole
bloody mess, that far less scintillating
prospect. There’s the chance, of course, that life’s
a latticework, a series of intersecting
miracles or miracle plays whose characters
appear/disappear within the larger structure,

a glimpse of which we’re occasionally afforded:
no clockwork universe but one ably directed
by the playwright himself, who, understandably
perhaps, bends over backward to retain
his privacy, anonymity, invisibility,
though peering, now and then, from a wing to nod
or appearing, like Alfred Hitchcock, in a cameo―
as grandfather, gardener, deus ex machina.

A tempting proposition, this invisible
script, this hidden teleology
in which each of us plays an unwitting part.
But over and against it is the hole―
unspeakable; mephitic; defiling;
predatory, one almost wants to say;
lying there beneath resplendent grass
on which young couples and their babies play.

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Bill Christophersen: “‘Crossing the Bar’ and ‘Ozymandias’ floored me in ninth grade, and hearing Bill Zavatsky and Gregory Orr read when I was in college helped me realize poems weren’t made by gray-bearded deities. When I turned 23, the country band I was playing in dissolved, the girl I was seeing walked, and I was alone in eastern Long Island with winter coming on. It was write or start drinking, and I’m not a drinking man.”

Rattle Logo

April 25, 2023

“Spin” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

SPIN

I don’t remember if the bottle was a Coke or a Fresca,
just that the glass was cool against our hands
in the warm, empty tool shed. Where we’d gathered
after swimming all afternoon at Debbie Worthman’s
eighth grade pool party, everyone’s skin damp
and blue in the shadows, the boys’ chests bare,
the other girls wearing cute, peek-a-boo cover-ups
that matched their demure suits. And me with a frayed

blue shirt of my father’s, its tails tied fetchingly
around my first bikini, a homemade job I’d stitched
up in pink and red paisley from a Simplicity pattern,
the bottom half barely on because I’d run out of elastic.
I don’t know what Debbie’s parents thought when we slipped
away, leaving the pool. Or whose idea it was as we trudged
up the hill between her father’s prize-winning roses,

their scent filling the air like primitive attar,
their metal name tags chinking in the breeze. That seemed
to have come up from nowhere, pushing at us with invisible
hands as we locked ourselves inside the half dark
that smelled of wood chips and compost, our eyes dilating
like cats’, faces suddenly pale beneath Coppertone tans.
I wasn’t sure why I’d been invited to this party
or why I’d come, except that he was here, the boy
who’d pushed me into the pool more times than any other girl,

and who, when the guys “rated” the girls during a lull
in Mr. Tallerico’s “Classical Music Experience,”
had given me a “9,” Beethoven’s booming, making me feel
almost good enough, almost deserving of his attention.
Which, when it fell on me, when our eyes caught
and locked, threw out a tensile, silk line that hooked
my breath and heart as easily as he made jump-shots at games,
the ball teetering on the orange rim—then bingo, in.

While the sweaty mascot pranced in the moth-eaten tiger
suit, and cheerleaders scissored their perfect legs,
and I’d held my breath, hoping he’d look my way, his hand
dribbling the ball as if he was touching my body.
All that, pressurized and pushed down inside as someone
twirled the bottle and it spun, blurring as we held
our breath like fourteen-year-old yogis and (thank God)
it pointed at someone else. From whom I had to look away

as their lips met, my stepmother’s injunctions—Don’t
stare; cross your legs at the ankles—loud in my head.
Though I would have liked pointers, one dry, chaste peck
the year before from Bruce Colley all I had to go on.
But I gazed down until the bottle whirled toward me,
its opening like the little “oh” of surprise that undid
a slipknot inside my body, something not quite desire,
but what I’d soon call anticipation, singing along

with Carley Simon’s song, a fist in my solar plexus
opening and closing like a Luna moth’s wings.
As he moved across the circle and tilted my face up,
his palm cupped beneath the curve of my cheek,
then fastened his silky, Doublemint-scented mouth
over mine, everything in the room disappearing
in the plush wriggle of his tongue, the slight
thrust of his cock stirring beneath cut-off jeans.

And my tongue moving back. As if I had been born
knowing this, as if we were back in the pool,
his hand water on my skin, the rest of the kids gone,
the inside of my eyelids spangled with paisley swirls.
As I leaned further and further into this kiss that would
sustain me all summer, practicing for the next one
with my pillow or the fleshy part of my palm, enlisting
for life to the lure of the male’s hard, angular body,

the taste of mint everywhere like clean, green rain.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Alison Townsend: “I write poetry to make discoveries, to articulate what feels (at least initially) beyond words, to find out what I don’t know I know.”

Rattle Logo

January 2, 2023

“Oscar’s Invention” by Anders Carlson-WeePosted by

Anders Carlson-Wee

OSCAR’S INVENTION

Fuck no she didn’t leave me over money. 
She left me cause I have no ass. It’s true—
a belt holds on my hips about as good 
as an oiled-up pole dancer. That’s why 
I invented these strapless suspenders. 
Can’t see em, can you? Good, that’s the idea. 
Almost went bankrupt makin the prototype. 
My wife kept sayin What suspenders?— 
you aint wearin nothin. But riddle me this: 
Are my jeans pooled at my feet? I swear, 
bonafide genius dumbfounds belief 
with simplicity. Same goes for the truth. 
Like if I told you my wife left me cause 
I got less milkshake than a garter snake, 
you’d say there’s gotta be more to that story. 
Like what? I go to work one day and come 
back home to no trace of her. No photos. 
No toothbrush. Not even the carrots 
she raised in the garden beds, just holes 
in the earth like buckshot where she plucked em 
free. And of course, she got custody. 
And the house eventually, which, I’ll admit, 
I mortgaged to pay for the patent. 
You think that was the dagger? Here I am 
workin to cure auto-pantsin for the assless 
and she’s fussin over a little loan? Yes or no: 
could I win her back if I doubled down 
and got those silicone implants? Fine, 
shake your head, but I don’t think you respect 
how bad it is when God forgets to blow up 
your balloons. Hell, I’d show you, but these 
suspenders are a bitch to get back into.
 

—from Rattle #78, Winter 2022

__________

Anders Carlson-Wee: “As the son of two Lutheran pastors, I grew up on sermons. I tried hard to not listen, especially during my teen years, but I couldn’t resist a good story: my parents both preach in a personal narrative mode, telling stories of daily human experience as a means to evoke the sacred. This preaching style has had a large impact on my writing style. As for why I write—if I understood that, I don’t think I’d have the drive to spend the energies of my life pursuing it.” (web)

Rattle Logo

October 15, 2022

“First-Generation Driftwood” by Syazwani SaifudinPosted by

Syazwani Saifudin (age 14)

FIRST-GENERATION DRIFTWOOD

A google search will tell you that “muak” pronounced “moo-ah” is a Malay
word meaning queasy, but it’s usually used to describe food:
This cake is muak—it’s too much, too sweet.
 
A google search won’t tell you that my grandmother’s kue tat were never muak
bite-sized treats eaten with family on Hari Raya (or Eid as I eventually learnt to call it),
with golden dough turned soft and slightly crumbly upon baking
but not before being adorned by its crown jewel: sticky pineapple jam
stirred to perfection for hours, boiling in a bubbling pot
heat worthy of combatting Singapore’s humid sunshine
that languishing flies would bathe in,
their iridescent bodies glistening as I swatted them away
while walking to the market with my atok and nenek,
our hands intertwined, theirs calloused and wrinkled, mine still soft, all of ours damp
even in the early morning before the sun had risen above
the towering apartment complexes with thousands of windows
some of them flaunting patriotic red and white flags
others sporting laundry fluttering in the light breeze
that did little to dispel the sweat pooling on my forehead
as pacik in sandals, shorts and baggy button-downs tried to sell us
nasik lemak, or ice kacang or the discount baju kurung
that my parents used to dress us in for whole family gatherings
intricate designs and vibrant colours beautifully arranged to form clothes
that I am now too scared to wear on my school’s multicultural day
 
My parents will tell you that something is “muak” if it makes you feel sick
maybe they were muak of home and so, this is home now, it has to be.
But I’m muak of spending each Hari Raya
Without baju kurung
Without my grandmother’s kue tat
Without knowing any of my cousins or relatives
Without buying from the smiling macik some steaming fish balls on a stick
that my friends would describe as disgusting without ever tasting
 
This store-bought pastry is cotton
My skin is clingwrap pulled taut around a child’s finger
My words are loud like Singapore at night
My language is lost; stale and acrid in my mouth
Neither home feels like home.
 

—from 2022 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Syazwani Saifudin: “The poem that got me into writing poetry was ‘Some Things I Like’ by Lemn Sissay, which beautifully highlights some things often overlooked. Through poetry, I can highlight the things I don’t want to be overlooked which enables me to share my thoughts the way I never could aloud.”

Rattle Logo

July 12, 2022

“Interdependence Day” by John AmenPosted by

John Amen

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

July 4th

My maternal grandfather, born in 1896, & who didn’t know
rock & roll from a Christmas carol, framed the paper,
that loud black headline blaring from his office wall:
Elvis Presley Is Dead. A Mizrahi Jew who fled Europe
with his wife & kids in ’38, he clocked for the rations board,
basking in that blue-chip fountain,
the stock market of the 1960s.
My grandparents didn’t own any of Elvis’s albums;
their music collection consisted of a single LP,
Nina Simone’s debut, a gift from one of their kids
that probably seemed appropriate,
given that Simone grew up in Tryon,
the same town where they lived,
albeit on the other side of the Red River,
across train tracks, past the cop station,
in the gulley where flood waters pooled every time it rained.
Nina fled Tryon as soon as she could, wrapping
herself in a neon gown, overdosing on jazz chords.
She died by an open window
in a spaceship flying to the sun,
dreaming of one final concert,
an electric piano that floated in the dark.
My grandfather’s sister died in a concentration camp in ’44.
My mother says that most meals the ghost woman sat grimly at their table,
flashing her tattooed arm as often as she could.
Elvis ate fried food & took sleeping pills.
The last ten years of his life, he gained 180 pounds.
He was my grandfather’s American son,
who tossed his hips for a moonlit moment
while in Tryon we waited in our trucks for the Northern Suffolk to pass.
Baptism, burial, a lifetime flashes
before that caboose finally arrives.
My grandfather, safe among the magnolia trees,
died on his back porch. 1980, roses in blossom,
heart bursting as he stared into a wisteria hedge.
You could almost hear Nina’s jazz chords writhing in the grass.
Steam coiled above the Red River. The Northern Suffolk
carved across the mountainside. A month
after his service, I helped my grandmother pack boxes.
“He adored The King,” she said, glancing at the ’77 headline,
& I figure that on some level what she said had to be true,
though I don’t think my grandfather could’ve named one Elvis song
if his sister’s life depended on it. & it probably did.
 

—from Poets Respond
July 12, 2022

__________

John Amen: “When I saw the review of the new Elvis film, and then planned to see it, I was reminded of my grandfather’s odd relationship with Elvis Presley, which became particularly evident after Elvis died. Also, I began to reconsider the context of their lives, how they left Europe to settle in the rural US, and how they related to the country at large, including its music and economic opportunities. An intriguing immigrant story.” (web)

Rattle Logo