John O’Reilly: “Lorca said he wrote poetry because he wanted people to like him. For a long time, I was charmed by his candor. I’ve come to think of it as poetic candor, with a riddle inside. I write in part to solve that riddle, while I paper the door of my refrigerator.”
D. Dina Friedman: “Prompts open a pathway to new perspectives, whether it’s a shortcut to my own subconscious, or simply an alternate way of seeing.” (web)
“The Bush” by Alicia Rebecca MyersPosted by Rattle
Alicia Rebecca Myers
THE BUSH
Every time I thought of anger, or fear or revenge, I breathed it out. I tried to think of what I was grateful for—the bush that hid me so well that even birds landed on it, the birds that were still singing, the sky that was so blue.
—Maya Alper, survivor of Hamas’ attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival
The extraordinary arms of the bush.
Trap music still echoing: the singing
birds another cover. The conscious hush.
The sky that was so blue above the rush.
The sound of blood pooling, shots ringing.
The extraordinary arms of the bush.
The bush wasn’t burning, the birds weren’t ash.
A prayer for breath. The rigid thorns clinging.
Birds another cover. The conscious hush.
Lungs instead of terror, the labored wish
to survive. Birds that landed, kept going.
The extraordinary arms of the bush.
The roar of explosives, the forceful push
of gratitude against anger. Morning
birds another cover. The conscious hush.
The thorns, the sky, the breath, the birds, the bush.
Curtis Derrick: “As a preacher’s kid, I was baptized in the poetry of the Bible, the Lutheran liturgy, and hymns. My first sense of rhythm, rhyme, metaphor, and poetic devices such as alliteration came from these religious sources. But I grew up in an era when school recitations of poetry were still common. So, my exposure to more secular poets grew rapidly through memorizations of Longfellow, Frost, and Sandburg, for example. My early favorite was a poet of the troubadour school, Woody Guthrie, who gave me the metaphor that has been my motto ever since the fifth grade: ‘I’m just a speckle on a freckle on a face that’s got too many.’”
“Why don’t you go to Japan and ask the cats?” I said
to the TSA agent when she asked if I was Amish,
because I believe in answering a non-sequitur
with a non-sequitur. I only said it
after I’d been cleared, after I’d been strip-searched
behind frosted glass, and then posted
the bitch’s face on Facebook along with her name.
Maybe being trans is like being Amish,
or maybe I went pale when I missed my flight
as Security Agent Pamela E. Starks
conferred with Explosives Expert Gary Pickering
to discuss, based on the “soft anomaly”
picked up by the body scanner, which of them
needs to search me (at one point she
suggested they each take “half”).
I suppose I could have come from Amish country,
a place so deep in the heart of America it can’t be seen,
and delivered to the airport by horse and buggy—
an Amish horse, oblivious to traffic. Maybe
it’s because of my long black dress, or makeup
that makes it look like I’m not wearing makeup—
a goal whose purpose used to elude me,
though I totally get it now, but please don’t ask.
You could go and ask the cats in Japan,
though it’s bound to earn you a contemptuous frown,
by which they mean to say, “Eat my ass
in Macy’s window.” How do cats in Japan
know about Macy’s? you must be asking.
Beats the hell outta me. They have
no tails—did you know?
Neither do the Amish. Just kidding.
I’m still waiting to hear about
the complaint I filed, the one that,
along with the viral video of them
repeatedly calling me “it,” shut down
the TSA website for three days
while they rewrote the rules about me.
“You could be charged for this,”
friends warn me, but in America
it can’t be libel if it’s true. I learned that
from the cats in Japan, who you can ask—
though it’s best not to disturb them.
—fromIn America
2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize Selection
__________
Diana Goetsch: “I’m basically a love poet. I’ve started to understand that after all these years. No matter the subject, I think my mission has something to do with redemption. And I just go for the hardest thing to redeem.” (web)
Joseph Fasano (from the conversation): “My journey toward poetry was really a journey toward giving in to it. I always scribbled, I always read, and I was sort of saying, ‘You know what, maybe these great questions and these great mysteries are things that I want to explore within the human heart, within the human mind.’ That’s an abridged way of putting it, but it’s been a journey into language and into the human heart as the biggest mystery of all.” (web)