Search Results for: stroke

July 18, 2021

“Fifty Words” by Angie MinkinPosted by

Angie Minkin

FIFTY WORDS

for Pancho

Imagine fifty words
to describe your world,
to define yourself,
your heart.
Imagine your thoughts
trapped like thousands of blue jays,
caught in a too-small cage,
wings battering iron bars.
Imagine no movement, decades of stillness.
You are inside this body, this corset
of bones and muscles, slack, useless.
You move your head and neck in residual
tics; hunt and peck so slowly,
it hurts you, but you persevere.
You type and you learn English, you learn French,
you graduate from high school.
All this after your accident at age 20,
all this after your devastating stroke.
All this after you can no longer move.
Imagine brilliant doctors who implant
a sensor in your brain and those 128 electrodes
pick up forgotten movements
of your vocal cords, your larynx, your throat.
Imagine a cable like a new umbilical cord,
linking your brain to the computer
that starts writing words. Your words.
The algorithm learns as you do,
and suddenly you have fifty words of speech,
racing from your brain waves to the screen.
What words do you need?
Hunger, thirst, hurt, good, bad.
Love, soul, heart.
Hug me. Kiss me.
Family.
Perseverance. Hope.
Tell me you love me.
Miracles.
Thank you.

—from Poets Respond
July 18, 2021

__________

Angie Minkin: “This week, I was captivated by the story of doctors at UCSF who figured out how to tap into brain waves to help a paralyzed man speak. The patient was an integral part of the experiment but wishes to remain anonymous and is only known by his nickname, Pancho. How extraordinary to have your world opened up in this way. Truly a miracle.”

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July 14, 2021

“What Used to Be There” by Trent BuschPosted by

Trent Busch

WHAT USED TO BE THERE

Now, no one lives on the ridges;
houses up the hollow have slumped
into themselves and rabbits feed
above on grass in the cemetery.

After my father’s stroke, they put
him in a kind of harness at
the rehabilitation center,
advised a trip out for dinner.

On TV, which he can’t follow,
the sitcoms are about families
we don’t recognize, unfamiliar
as the reruns of The Waltons.

In the rockers on the porch I talk
to him of the willows breaking
into green above the swollen  
creeks, redbuds pinking the hardwoods.

I could just as well be talking
about a dried-up town where there
was only the taste of salt for
daughters, the saccharine need for

working sons, where wearing a life
was tuneless, decent nights and days 
with no thought of memorial.
I could just as well be silent.

—from Rattle #72, Summer 2021
Tribute to Appalachian Poets

__________

Trent Busch: “I have published over 400 poems and most of them are based on my growing up in rural West Virginia. In fact, my latest book is called West Virginians. When I write, I can never get away from that Appalachian influence.”

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July 10, 2021

“Klimt at the Musee Maillol” by Janalynn BlissPosted by

Janalynn Bliss

KLIMT AT THE MUSÉE MAILLOL

She stood before a sketch, tracing
with a curved finger the shapes
of simple pencil strokes lightly
onto the velvet skin of her inner arm.
The slow swirl of the crowd stirred
the air in the hushed space,
the movement of her long straight hair
raising shivers on her skin
as it caressed her bare shoulders.

She never saw him, a few paces back,
rendering into lines on the smooth white
paper of his sketchpad, the flutter
of her diaphanous dress
against her arched back and full hips.

Visitors to the exhibit who saw them
glanced furtively at each other.
Couples grasped at the fingers
of their partners while avoiding
direct eye contact. Old women
fanned themselves with brochures
and laughed quietly.

At closing, the crowd spilled
into the narrow street,
visible dissipation of energy;
people shot from the opening,
ejaculated onto the heated cobbles
of a sweltering Paris evening.

Couples cuddled
on metro platforms, embraced
in the middle of sidewalks, caressed
on bridges over the Seine, pressed each other
against tall iron fences in residential neighborhoods.

If she’d had a butterfly net,
she could have scooped up extra kisses.
They skittered everywhere, crisp sycamore
leaves in an unseasonably warm wind.

She returned to her tiny room.
Up a crooked staircase,
in the corner of the fourth floor
of a tired Montmartre walk-up,
her dress fell around her feet.
She spread the shuttered doors
to the balcony, propped a mirror
against the railing, and sketched
what she saw in the falling light,
knowing that red lines
were being pressed into her
white flesh by the rigid slats
of the wooden chair, and that
no one would be coming
home to see them.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

__________

Janalynn Bliss: “I live and work in Los Angeles, where I once saw a weed growing on the freeway. I like to think that through my writing I, too, am rooting in the collected grime of a million passing lives.”

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June 27, 2021

“Even the Nails in the Sheetrock Missed Her” by Cheryl GatlingPosted by

Cheryl Gatling

EVEN THE NAILS IN THE SHEET ROCK MISSED HER

When she entered a room, the room paid attention.
When she entered his house,
the leather couches plumped up and shone,
the hardwood floors were giddy with tapping
against the soles of her small black shoes,
the books on the shelves jostled each other
for a better view of the waves of her hair.
When she didn’t come, the walls held their breath,
straining to hear her voice, her laugh.

When she still didn’t come, that crying noise wasn’t him.
The white gauze curtains hung keening,
as they remembered the stroke of her fingers.
And at night, when he turned and turned,
it was only because the bed prodded him continually,
as the pillows pleaded in his ear, “Bring her back.”
And when he sat up, his hand on his chest,
how could he breathe,
when all the air had gone out into the street
calling her name?

—from Rattle #22, Winter 2004

__________

Cheryl Gatling: “I was a late bloomer. Whatever writing promise I showed as a girl lay dormant until I was almost 40. Then, almost every night, poetry emerged as a necessary part of who I am. Pity my poor husband, the computer geek, who married a registered nurse, a practical reliable girl, and woke up one day with a bohemian artist type. His support in the face of change is its own work of art.”

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May 27, 2021

“White Spots” by Elizabeth McMunn-TetangcoPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2021: Editor’s Choice

 

While Thinking About Snow and Ice by Jojo, image of intersection lines on a chalkboard

Image: “While Thinking About Snow and Ice” by Jojo. “White Spots” was written by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2021, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

__________

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

WHITE SPOTS

Sometimes you look for something else.
A corner where there might be rust.

An eyelash width.
A speck of dirt.

How you can use a poem’s words to keep
your distance.

Put a man there, in the picture, just
to see.

(You Google it and see a thousand
small attacks: the man a hacker now, a hood over his face.)

It is too much.

You change tacks and think of sugar,
silver tongs to lift each cube.

Whiter than

white.

The space around
that.

Next you see an envelope, lose
it again.

You wonder if there is a Rorschach test
for love (of course there’s not).

You think of how a friend said once she couldn’t tell
when you’re in love.

The more you look, you see the frayed
spots, little

gasps.
You stop to breathe.

You think of wings, or long wide
oars.

You remember this past winter, flying snow
geese, in a sheet.

How you could see the things you wanted to see

there (if you had looked).
How they slept next to the highway

in small heaps.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
April 2021, Editor’s Choice

__________

Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco has won the Ekphrastic Challenge five times now over the seven years of the series and seems to be a master of the short line. She wields them like a scalpel, carving deeper into the image with each quick stroke, exposing unseen details and revealing the mysteries that lie beneath.”

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February 4, 2021

“Pets” by Tom C. HunleyPosted by

Tom C. Hunley

PETS

I tell my wife I dreamed we got a dog.
A big dog, big responsibility.
Apartments wouldn’t let us move in with
the dog, and hotels wouldn’t let us stay.
The dog made giant messes, tore apart
our furniture. Now what was that about?
You dreamed about our daughter, my wife said.
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen that. When
we got her, she’d already grown, but now
she’s not just some big dog, she’s Marmaduke
or Clifford knocking our fence over with
a sneeze and making massive messes, piles
of poop, then showing us those puppy eyes,
and sure, the foster system’s like the pound:
the lucky ones get homes. The rest, at age
eighteen, might just as well be put to sleep.

Another time, my wife complained that our
cat, Sarah, lies around the house and frowns
at vittles that we set in front of her,
and Sarah scratched my wife because she’d tried
to give her Kitty Prozac that the vet
prescribed, then settled in my wife’s lap like
those claws had not just dug into her neck.
(We bought the cat for our autistic son
who feeds her, loves her, tries to pet her, but
she hides beneath our bed until he leaves.)
Aha! I said. You say our cat just naps
all day, lies with her head in your lap while
you stroke her, then resists attempts to make
her healthy, happy? Darling, don’t you see?
The ready claws? The landing on all fours
despite a fall that most could not survive?

—from Adjusting to the Lights
2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

Tom C. Hunley: “I started writing poetry at age eighteen after reading ‘In the Desert’ by Stephen Crane. I have now devoted more than 30 years to a study of the delicious bitterness of my heart.” (web)

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January 16, 2021

“Mail-Order Tadpoles” by Lisa HickeyPosted by

Lisa Hickey

MAIL ORDER TADPOLES

1.) Arrival

The postman hands me the brown corrugated envelope
one sleety day in March. Inside, a zip-lock bag
containing eggs the size of a pinhead, jelled together.
My daughters gingerly hold the bag up to the light.
Like a nineteenth century lumberjack
who just received his bride,
we are eager to see how ours will blossom.

2.) Birth

Saucer, water, three drops of synthetic vitamins.
All that is needed for floating dots to sprout tails,
bulge eyes. Within weeks, bodies widen,
tiny prehistoric limbs turn to hoppable legs.
Skin mottles and leatherizes, mouths as wide
as my eyelid appear. We move small, breathing frogs
to a rock-filled plastic box. A small indent
of water pretends to be a pond. The frogs
take separate corners, glare at each other.

3.) Food

Rushing from work, late
to pick up my daughters. Again.
Delayed getting a gallon of milk
and a bag of crickets.
Crickets are sold by the dozen,
in thin plastic bags, knotted on top.
The bag jumps and shimmers
in the passenger seat of my car.

4.) Worry

A cricket has escaped
and sings haikus in my china cabinet.
He comes out to stare at me sometimes,
hears me breathing, turns still as granite.
My daughter runs by and I yell,
“Don’t step on the cricket!”
Some days the frogs go hungry.
I can’t seem to maintain
the balance of the ecosystem.

5.) I am God today

My littlest mortal tries not to jostle the plastic box.
We walk the path in the woods
to the pond’s edge. She sets the box down.
The frogs and crickets jump out with the zeal
of a born-again anything.
My daughters stare as the frogs
dart and glide through sepia pond water,
swim their freedom with tiny synchronized breast strokes.
The crickets hop towards the shadows
of the twilighted grass.
A duck ripples away.
A sparrow opens his wings to fly,
then settles into a branch above us.
We watch the frogs and crickets disappear,
until I am sure I could no longer save them if I tried.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2008

__________

Lisa Hickey: “I collect poems the way others collect knickknacks. I wallpaper my house with them. I surround myself with poetry, it seeps into me. And when I write, it comes from that place where I am not afraid.” (web)

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