December 12, 2024

“Reading Exodus” by Craig van RooyenPosted by

Craig van Rooyen

READING EXODUS

after Marie Howe

The thing about the Old Testament is that
at least metaphorically
 
God has balls. If Pharaoh can’t make up his mind fast,
he’s looking at a world of hurt:
 
“You don’t think it’s time to let my people go?
Well maybe it’s time for me
 
to open up a whole can of frogs and boils, asshole.”
That’s Yahweh for you.
 
A guy who wears the pants in the family.
Sometimes I fantasize
 
about saying to the woman I married: “Let my
people go,
 
or frogs will multiply in your eight-hundred-dollar
Italian motorcycle boots.”
 
By “my people,” I mean primarily me. But if
history is any lesson,
 
that would only lead to years in the wilderness.
Not to mention
 
an unnecessary sacrifice of children. As a minor prophet once said:
“Wherever you are,
 
there you are”—whether that’s turning circles
in the desert for forty years,
 
or paying a mortgage in the suburbs and making
small talk on date night.
 
Remember the story of the Golden Calf? When all the people
took off their wedding rings,
 
thinking they would get a second chance at love?
They danced and threw their lives
 
into the fire. Look at the poor bastards there around the flames,
faces glowing, while Yahweh gathers himself
 
on the mountain top. They feel the desert on their backs,
they feel the sky is ready to collapse.

Look at them. They’re dancing.
 

—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

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Craig van Rooyen: “My father is a preacher and I grew up strong on words and Southern cooking. I think the old stories in scripture still can give shape to our longings if we let the words live in our imaginations. The ‘I’ in ‘Reading Exodus’ is not autobiographical. I live with my wife of fifteen years, happily married, on the Central Californian coast—maybe not the land of milk and honey, but pretty close.”

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December 11, 2024

“The Way It Goes” by Wendy VidelockPosted by

Wendy Videlock

THE WAY IT GOES

Driving by
our old home
on Mayfair,
 
the cairn was gone
the tire swing
still floating there.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

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Wendy Videlock: “It’s always seemed to me that there is really nowhere to turn but the arts. Poetry in particular bypasses the dominant culture’s insistence on fragmentation and polarization, offering us instead a sense of integration and wholeness.” (web)

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December 10, 2024

“All the Fixings” by Kelly BennettPosted by

Kelly Bennett

ALL THE FIXINGS

My grandmother saved the butts.
The butt of every bread loaf
went into the freezer for stuffing.
One stale loaf makes 8-10 servings.
Chicken, duck and turkey butts
were saved for stock,
onion and celery butts, too.
Roasted, they result in richer flavor.
 
When she passed, my grandmother’s freezer
was stuffed with hoarfrosted butts
awaiting the oft-promised return
of prodigal family.
Use a slurry of potato water and flour
to thicken gravies and soup.
 
The first time I left my children’s father,
I stuffed my trusty tank-green Cadillac
with kids and toys and their clothes.
Kids go through clothes faster
than grass grows.
Fueled by fury, drove Route 66,
the subject, if not the butt of song, drove
one thousand six hundred, seventy three,
point nine kickless miles—not looking
pretty—Tulsa, Oklahoma to Amarillo, Gallup,
New Mexico, San Bernardino.
Stopping only long enough to gas up
and drive-through.
 
Burger Kings are spaced a meal apart.
Kid’s Meal prizes change at the state line.
Drove Freedom Boulevard to Oregon Street,
straight into the long, fuchsia-lined driveway.
The ballerina flowers waved, so did she.
My grandmother saved my butt, too.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
November 2024

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Prompt: Write an ode to the first thing you remember being thankful for.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “There’s immense beauty in plain-spoken poems that skim off the all-too-common fat of highfalutin language from the gravy. No butts about it, this poem functions as a micro-memoir with an unlikely binding agent. In the end, the title sets us up for a George Bilgere-style revelation, where the title’s meaning evolves throughout the course of the poem. How can we help but go back for a second helping?”

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December 9, 2024

“Grandaddy, a Mystery” by Dean Marshall TuckPosted by

Dean Marshall Tuck

GRANDADDY, A MYSTERY

Who shaved my grandfather’s face?
That gray scrub upon the cheek
I’d kiss before crashing out the storm door.
Did grandma help him dress? I never saw
him do anything but sit on the back porch
in his rocking chair. Never saw him in church.
I can only recall seeing him in three other places—
the waterhole, fishing from one of those flimsy,
fold-up aluminum chairs; the hospital;
and playing fiddle in the den at Christmas.
I lose count of the strokes or was it heart attacks?
Some families do not pass down stories
about each other. It’s something I’ve never
understood about my mom’s side. Dad neither.
He tells a story about fishing with grandaddy
on a homemade boat out at the reservoir.
He said passing ski boats were white capping
waves in their wake, rocking the flat-bottomed
boat like it would capsize. Dad said, I knew
I would have to save the old man from drowning
any minute, but they made it back, caught nothing.
Now the boat has old bags of charcoal
and fertilizer in it. One night, after Wednesday
prayer meeting, sitting on the porch, we heard
the stress sounds of chickens being massacred.
Grandaddy cursed and produced a shotgun
surprisingly soon—mom mothering him,
close behind, talking him down—the boom
that peppered the shed’s tin behind the carport.
He stumbled back to his chair, plopped down,
gasping for air, mom taking the gun, a possum
scurrying over roots and moss, and moon shadows.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

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Dean Marshall Tuck: “In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe’s narrator observes that ‘men [are] forever strangers to one another,’ even among family. Passed down stories and vague memories become the impressions we carry with us, but the truth of anyone remains elusive, and that’s okay.”

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December 8, 2024

“Spotify Wrapped Comes Out as” by Ziqr PeehuPosted by

Ziqr Peehu

SPOTIFY WRAPPED COMES OUT AS

Spotify Wrapped drops like a priest’s robe,
a holy unveiling: you are 97% melancholy,
a top listener of rainstorms recorded in tin buckets.
 
Somewhere in Seoul, the President scrawls martial law
like a toddler with crayons, blunt and trembling.
The streets answer in pitchforks and foghorns,
a symphony of breathless mothers and students
with gasoline hearts. For three hours, the nation
is a mouthful of broken teeth, until the people
swallow the law whole, chew it down to pulp.
 
At dawn, the decree retreats like a wet dog,
tail between its legs, the ink on the paper
still drying, still reeking of ash. On my phone,
Spotify chirps: Your favorite genre is destruction.
 
Meanwhile, in New York, a healthcare CEO
is unstitched by a bullet. His chest opens
like a Velcro wallet, and inside, nothing but receipts.
 
On the streets, the people rejoice—
not with candles, but with fireworks:
sparks caught in the teeth of the night.
 
Spotify suggests a playlist for the mood:
Songs to Mourn Corrupt Billionaires.
I imagine the algorithm is sentient,
and somewhere in its digital brain,
it’s weeping—over us, over itself,
over the world’s tendency to bite its own tail.
 
I listen to the sound of glass being swept,
of cities exhaling, of monuments crumbling
like sugar cubes in coffee.
 
By evening, the headlines are a Picasso painting,
shattered bodies, crooked timelines,
colors bleeding into each other.
 
The President releases a public apology;
the people remix it into a club anthem.
The CEO’s obituary reads like the back
of a cereal box: Ingredients: greed, neglect,
a pinch of humanity.
 
At midnight, I watch my Wrapped one last time.
It tells me nothing about the year except
that I am human, that I prefer crescendos
to silence, that sometimes the most-played song
isn’t a song at all, but the sound of the people
dragging themselves through the wreckage,
singing off-key, but still singing.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Ziqr Peehu: “I wrote the first version of this poem titled ‘Spotify Wrapped Comes Out As Danny Materson’s Jury Rules Not Guilty’ last year, also for Rattle’s Poets Respond around the same time in an almost helpless fashion talking about how people don’t care about things that are truly important and are happy being in their little corner talking about their favourite artists and nothing else. This year, South Korea’s martial law was declared then taken back within hours on the day Wrapped was released and Brian Thompson was also shot and killed, both invoked the same kinds of reactions from the people, mass collectivisation and joy, and it’s brought back a level of certainty in my life that I have not had in so long, a sort of faith in the way this world works and hopefully will continue to work. That’s it, I think. That’s all there is to it. I feel safe about the world for now, however next year may be.”

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December 7, 2024

“Fried Elvis” by Jacob SunderlinPosted by

Jacob Sunderlin

FRIED ELVIS

If you’ve never been to Graceland
you should go eat some Tennessee
things & feel the world make its gut
sense. Walk the jumpsuits

of the headless bone-white mannequins
in the horse barn.
You see the house, its televisions
stacked like druid mounds & you

see the bullet hole, cobweb in the screen
where goofy-on-reds-Elvis sat & saw
Robert Goulet wink that he would
fuck Anita while Elvis was off in the army—

in the service—& see where Elvis aimed
a pistol & fired so that you, reader,
may know what it is to be small.
Could you shoot at the light

in some little box that means nothing?
The Fried Elvis is just a sandwich,
ridiculous big—something to keep
in the arteries you keep in your heart.

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

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Jacob Sunderlin: “I grew up in Indiana watching some shirtless maniac called the Ultimate Warrior on television, screaming about sinking anchors into his bones and loading a rocket ship with the fuel of the intergalactic warrior gods. Then I went outside and played in a park illuminated by the floodlight of a corn syrup factory. I want poetry to approximate the hilarious sadness of that.”

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December 6, 2024

“Song of the Black Hole” by William TrowbridgePosted by

William Trowbridge

SONG OF THE BLACK HOLE

radially extracted by NASA

You can almost see Vincent Price, black-robed,
hunched above the console of a jumbo organ
in the bowels of his creaky haunted manse; or
maybe a stadium of damned souls, strobed
in lurid red and howling nettle-robed
as they plummet into Pandemonium, pore
and pith aflame. It’s no troubadour,
undoubtedly, this vast atonal gob.
 
As with the Roach Motel, we’d check in,
but never out—us or anything, since
it can swallow errant planets whole, and still,
however much the mass, can’t eat its fill.
Though it’s larger far than Jupiter or Mars,
we can barely see it, thank our lucky stars.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

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William Trowbridge: “I’ve spent most of my years as a poet writing free verse, though lately I find myself turning toward form. Unlike those who see formalist verse as dry and effete, I find it can generate power by means of barriers to play against—‘the net’ as Frost put it, by which he also meant boundary lines. If you pour gunpowder in a pile and light it, a mere flash occurs. But pack it tightly into a container, and you can get something more powerful. And, as opposed to the notion that form is restrictive, I agree with Richard Wilbur that it often liberates one from choosing the easy word in order to discover the better, surprising one. I haven’t moved into this part of town yet, but I stop there more and more.” (web)

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