“Queridas Tías,” by Luisa Caycedo-KimuraPosted by Rattle
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura
QUERIDAS TÍAS,
Snow falls like fists. Mamá sends Cesar, Tita, and me out to play, build snowmen, like the kids on TV, but Cesar puts it down my coat, makes me scream. The neighborhood boys pack it into ice balls. Yesterday Chickie threw one, hit my back, left me without air. My friend Luz says it’s because he likes me. I don’t want that. Ms. Barratta says the word “Arctic” comes from the Greek word for bear. “Antarctic” means the opposite of bear. I don’t know what that is. Maybe penguins or toucans. En Los Estados Unidos kids have teddy bears. Ms. Barratta says they were named after some president who decided not to shoot one. But he was a hunter. I don’t understand why we left Colombia. Nothing makes sense here. The apartment is crowded and loud with nine of us. Cesar, Tita, and I walk four blocks with a huge heavy bag to do everyone’s laundry. There are no guava trees to climb, no backyard, no swinging around the world from the highest branch.
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura: “My mother taught me to love Spanish-language poetry, reciting it to me from the time I was in utero. However, in the United States, I didn’t think it was possible for a Colombian-born woman to become an English-language writer. So, I pursued a ‘respectable’ career and studied law. It wasn’t until I read the prelude to Sandra Cisneros’s My Wicked Wicked Ways that I finally ‘took up with poetry,’ giving in to my ‘absurd vice’ to live ‘this wicked wanton writer’s life.’” (web)
Allan Johnston: “‘Goats’ is part of a series of poems about my experiences living in northern Washington State in the mid-1970s—in the heart of the ‘back to the land’ phase of the hippie movement. Though there is some elaboration and mixing of experiences, the goats actually did get in the house and wreak their own sort of havoc.” (web)
A spoken-word poem by Ana María Caballero visualized via a series of works coded in p5js that convey pregnant time—with its sensations of inevitability, vulnerability, and physical entrapment. Written in Caballero’s signature straightforward style, this text forms part of her prize-winning manuscript Mammal.
Ana María Caballero: “Minting my poems as NFTs has connected my work to a thriving, welcoming community eager to engage with poetry. It’s afforded me creative collaborations and opportunities I couldn’t have ever dreamed possible. I also think that blockchain provenance can help raise important questions, such as why are poems not exhibited and collected as art? Why aren’t poems typically in museums? Why aren’t poems in major art collections? Why are poems not transacted? I believe that we have a real possibility of elevating poetry’s cultural agency by bringing it into dialogue with the art world via technology and by speaking the visual languages of digital audiences. This is deeply exciting to me. I believe poems are works of art and should be collected, exhibited, and collected as such.” (web)
Heidi Seaborn: “This afternoon I saw a discarded upright piano missing its front panel in the rain, which brought on feelings of exposure and vulnerability, triggering thoughts of fears, my mother’s and my own greatest fear—of being unable to breathe. I’d been thinking about the five people trapped in a submersible at the bottom of the Atlantic, their oxygen dwindling. I chose to write the poem in a constrictive form—a left/right justified abecedarian. It’s a throat, a submersible, a dark cloud, an upright piano on the page. And it’s a straight jacket to write in, each word carefully chosen, as I imagine the inhabitants of the submersible rationing their words, their breath.” (web)
Janelle Adamson: “I like to write poetry because it’s fun and inspiring, and I like getting to write with my mom because my mom writes poetry, and she has helped me be interested in poetry.”
Penny Z. Campbell: “I write poetry not to find out what I think—I start with words lighting on my head—but to take things further. I write to document, to archive, to speak unmuffled about both joy and pain. I love to play with words, line breaks, near rhymes, even formal restraints (sometimes). When something hard happens, when what I think is what I feel and it hurts, I find solace in poetry even as it unburies more pain. Sometimes it helps. It’s all right if it doesn’t. ‘Penny Campbell’ is a pseudonym.”
“You Don’t Have to Choose” by Beth CopelandPosted by Rattle
Image: “A Lonesome Border” by Carmella Dolmer. “You Don’t Have to Choose” was written by Beth Copeland for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2023, and selected as an Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
Beth Copeland
YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE
Between the cube and the circle,
the container or the eddying drain,
the cardboard box or the manhole,
the collapsing star or the burning house,
the fiery floor or the raspberry arch that becomes a rainbow
after a thunder storm,
the missing door or the haloed saints that hover
in the Tuscan afterglow,
the embodied self or the shadow
holding your hand,
the green selvage of the world
where everything grows—grass, kudzu, weeping willows,
Comment from the editor, Megan O’Reilly: “I love the way this poem begins as a literal, generalized description of Carmella Dolmer’s piece—‘the cube and the circle’—and then progressively becomes more abstract and metaphorical—‘the haloed saints that hover,’ ‘the waterless well.’ Like the artwork, whose rich simplicity hints at more complex truths, ‘You Don’t Have to Choose’ seems to suggest that the cube and the circle are archetypal here, and the poet vividly and imaginatively explores this symbolism. The last stanza completely detaches from the imagistic nature of the rest of the poem to deliver objective statements, and the creative whiplash of this transition, combined with the undiluted truth of the statements themselves, renders the ending affecting and meaningful.”
