December 18, 2023

“Southpaw” by Mike WhitePosted by

Mike White

SOUTHPAW

The boy every boy
wanted to be, showing us
one day in the dugout
 
how he’d bloodied his old man’s
 
gravestone with a single
fist, with a right 
and a right and a right
 
because … he started
to say and stopped. 
 
We all looked 
at our hands, we all
had fathers.  
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

Mike White: “I love to write about sports and other games that we play. It seems only half correct to suggest that sports can serve as a metaphor for life. As any sports junkie can attest, it’s at least as true the other way around. I had already written and submitted ‘Southpaw’ when Ron Koertge’s life/basketball/life poem, ‘Things and How They Work,’ from Rattle 77, turned up on my porch—but his is a poem that sets the bar, and sets it high, for this sort of thing.”

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December 17, 2023

“Shroud of Light” by Lisa Suhair MajajPosted by

Lisa Suhair Majaj

SHROUD OF LIGHT

If I must die, you must live to tell my story
—Refaat Alareer

By the time they killed Refaat, there was nothing new
about the rows of bodies rolled up in stark white shrouds,
surprisingly unbesmirched by dust or blood, tied
 
at both ends in neat bundles, sometimes in the middle
too, so the sheet wouldn’t slip, carried gently through
streets on the way to mass graves, those pits dug
 
in whatever ground could be reached without the living
being picked off by snipers, the unstained white
of winding cloths belying the odor of carnage
 
permeating every crevice, miasma of death hanging
like an ashen pall in the sky, clogging the lungs of those
who still try to breathe. A newscaster said, children
 
are meant to play in the dirt, but in Gaza it’s their shroud.
Even that is beyond many. One Gazan wrote, if I die,
please make sure my children’s bodies are covered—
 
not left open to wild dogs, the relentless, howling
sky. Lost beneath rubble, Refaat was denied
a poet’s burial, left only stone dust and concrete
 
for his shroud. But the words that survive his death
wrap his living spirit in a gauze of light.
“There’s a Palestine that dwells inside all of us,”
 
he wrote. Take his words, inscribe them on a kite,
brilliant white, to fly high over the terrible world,
so that his death is a tale that brings hope,
 
so that he lives, so that we live, so that Gaza
becomes a place not of shrouds but of freedom,
kites rippling in sunshine, lit by the blaze of life.
 

—from Poets Respond
December 17, 2023

__________

Lisa Suhair Majaj: “On December 7th, Gazan writer Refaat Alareer was killed along with family members in a targeted Israeli airstrike. Refaat was a professor of literature, a poet and writer, beloved inside and outside of Gaza for his words and for his role in the non profit organization We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led project seeking to tell the stories of Gazans. Scores of Gazan poets, writers, artists, musicians and journalists had been killed in the past months. In a recording made before his killing Refaat said, choked with tears, ‘The situation is very bleak. We don’t even have water …’ Days before his death Refaat pinned this poem to his Twitter account.” (web)

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December 16, 2023

“On Realizing There Are Too Many…” by M.L. ClarkPosted by

M.L. Clark

ON REALIZING THERE ARE TOO MANY POEMS ABOUT ONIONS, PEARS, AND BRUEGHEL’S PAINTINGS

While cutting an onion I am reminded of Brueghel,
the lack of tears in his art. Mine are everywhere, yet his
paradise of dancers runs dry—too busy with the frenzy
of living—and even in The Triumph, the littered dying

do not weep—busy, in their own way, with the frenzy
of becoming dead. But I am still alone in the kitchen,
no orgiastic throng to advance my sullen mood as art;
there is time enough for me to cry. Who will stop me?

The pears ripening on the sill—bitter, mealy, and hard—
are making more of themselves, growing crisp and fresh
in the wan, white light of the world. Neutral, indifferent,
they cannot tell me what to do. So I think about layers

because they are there, because they are easy. Onions
cannot help being metaphors; they would rather stay
mysteries in the moist soil. They would rather I unwrap
myself. If I could, I tell them through the blur, I would.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

__________

M.L. Clark: “Taking a literal approach to actor Alan Alda’s declaration, ‘you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition,’ I recently moved to Victoria, British Columbia to Toronto, Ontario.”

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December 15, 2023

“Self-Portrait as Elizabeth Holmes” by Carrie ShipersPosted by

Carrie Shipers

SELF-PORTRAIT AS ELIZABETH HOLMES

In 2015, a series of investigations exposed as false Holmes’s claim to have developed a device to perform fast, inexpensive blood tests on miniscule samples. In January 2022, she was found guilty on multiple charges of fraud.

If I’d left Stanford early because I was sick
of teachers saying my ideas weren’t feasible;
if I’d already planned the kind of founder
I would be—black-clad, aloof yet 
passionate—before I knew which field 
I’d innovate; if I chose blood because 
when mine was drawn I’d vomit, faint 
and hyperventilate; if my pitch deck
was impeccable, my proof of concept praised
despite its vague science; if I attracted 
millions in funding, fans eager to applaud 
a young woman in tech; if I was too busy 
 
vowing Theranos could heal health care 
to be aware progress had clotted to a halt,
that lifting off the prototype’s sleek shell 
revealed a mess of pipettes crushed 
by clumsy robot arms, spilled blood gumming 
the works; if our launch date had grown 
closer and more definite because we’d 
partnered with Walgreens; if my engineers 
complained my promises weren’t possible, 
and if instead of being motivating, 
my rage triggered defections and delays; 
if once our clinics were open, the finger-prick 
 
sample our patients gave proved not enough 
to run most tests, even when diluted 
and spread thin; if in order to buy time, 
combat the grim panic the lab had grown 
infected with, I asked my staff to correct 
wrong results, then went further and installed
one of the huge machines I meant to render
obsolete; if my dream was under siege
by doctors doubting my values, employees
blowing bitter whistles, the FDA
demanding evidence; if I was sure
my phone was tapped, my apartment
being circled by black cars; if I’d poured
years of my life-blood into my company
and still believed we needed just a few 
more weeks—six months at very most—
to make my invention real, to stop
the fevered flood of blame and bleach
my record clean; then I, too, might’ve
clung to the pristine, inspiring story
that I’d started with: I might’ve lied
and lied and lied while the indictments
piled up, and kept at it until my last
nanotainer of hope was broken and drained.
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

Carrie Shipers: “I’ve been fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes since I read Ken Auletta’s profile of her in 2014. Her actions are obviously despicable, and yet I understand, I think, how it feels to want something to be true so much that you’re willing to ignore all available evidence and to keep doubling down on your denial because you’re afraid of being exposed and humiliated, and that’s what I wanted to explore in this poem.” (web)

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December 14, 2023

“The Second Pass” by Taylor MaliPosted by

Taylor Mali

THE SECOND PASS

The first pass along the whetting stone
creates an edge too fine to last;
the second, more blunting pass
tempers the edge into usefulness.

Together we used to hone blades
so unutterably precise
tomatoes would slice themselves
open to expose their reddest flesh.

Later, in the restaurant’s kitchen,
when the head chef needed a knife,
screaming in French, he came to her
station and used one of hers.

She told me this with pride one night,
then put her hand on my chest
and cried stainless steel tears
I could not understand.

When she jumped from the window
and they searched the apartment,
they found in the bathroom a knife,
its edge unbloodied, as sharp as a razor.

And I keep thinking of the second pass,
how it sharpens as it dulls the working edge,
how the one has a real and necessary need
of the other to do what it does.

—from The Whetting Stone
2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

Taylor Mali: “In both of the books of poetry I published after Rebecca’s death I tried to include a few poems about her. But they were always so unlike the rest of the manuscript that they couldn’t stay in. I’ve known for a decade that all my poems about Rebecca would need to be published in a collection by themselves. The Whetting Stone is that collection.” (web)

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December 13, 2023

“The Weight” by Gaetan SgroPosted by

Gaetan Sgro

THE WEIGHT

How much does a hospital weigh
I’ve tried to estimate
Fluorescent tiled corridors, star-crossed
Friends arriving late
 
Bags of saline, laundry trucks
Arresting lights and spoiling plates
The best laid plans, the bitter ends
Slant rhymes to ease the breaks
 
I added up the midnights
And multiplied the days
Divided by the setbacks
And factored in the grace
 
Untied a stack of letters
And checked the book of names
But after all of this accounting
The sum was something out of range
 
What is it like to feel
The lightening of such weight
 
For weeks the leaves along the drive
Have scorched the corners of my eyes
Until today I stepped outside and saw
The naked branches dancing
 
From across the neighbor’s fields
The verse came charging
 
The hard clay shook
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

Gaetan Sgro: “I’ve never had much vision when it comes to career planning, arriving late to my medical training with only an English degree and an ear for stories. But the compulsion to write, to engage in this often frustrating, occasionally sublime, and ever-evolving process, has always been with me. It will always be with me because I will never get it right.” (web)

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December 12, 2023

“Four Guys and a Truck” by Tony TrigilioPosted by

Tony Trigilio

FOUR GUYS AND A TRUCK

The rooms were stolen
by four guys who joked
about everything I owned,
talked and shrink-wrapped
my bookshelf at the same time.
I bought them pizza for lunch.
They hulked at the table
without their knees touching,
one pepperoni one plain,
argued about the Bears-Packers
game tomorrow. The mood
was muscular. I watched
the whole time (my excuse:
lower lumbar vertebrae).
The rooms crowded with couches,
mirrors, sconces, the droopy
desert painting I bought
the last year of my marriage—
what looks, lashed in bubble-wrap,
like a very large waffle. Could be
just another boring Saturday.
How they got the desk through
the kitchen. How they wrapped
a mattress. A ladder
in the living room where
my television used to be.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets

__________

Tony Trigilio: “Within a two-year period, I got divorced, moved twice, and lost two close family members: ‘Four Guys and a Truck’ emerged from the awe and exhaustion of impermanence.” (web)

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