October 12, 2024

“Congratulations” by Ruoyu WangPosted by

Ruoyu Wang (age 15)

CONGRATULATIONS

You got the tattoos you always wanted. The two betta fish on your arm, sunk in red, the black spider lilies across your stomach. You love the kids you teach now. First graders who will do anything you want as long as you say, you really disappointed me last time! but you love them so much & know that they can do so much better. I saw online that you finally learned how to do liquid eyeliner. No more smudging, no more muddy brown eyeshadow. Every photo of you featuring just a flick upwards like another eyelash. Maybe you finally started writing people back, even though I’m not included on this list. Maybe you finally told your parents you changed your major—do your cousins at church know? Does your mom love you now in the way you want, now that you’re baptized? Can you live with yourself? I know you don’t pray to God. I know you don’t believe in yourself either. I know it’s been a while since you said anything real, following every shot by the rule of thirds. Do you remember when we first met. Two years ago             right before summer came down on us hard. April a prologue to our sleeplessness. Our regret, the correspondence of it, how it multiplied, we said a lot of things like, please try therapy, and, basically, think like a social media safety guideline. I’m still downing three fistfuls of melatonin every night. Still stripping back hangnails like wallpaper, hoping for the raw of it. I keep running myself into the direction of your house but that’s nothing now. Isn’t it. I’m so glad you’re doing well now. You and your dog and an impossible view, the way Phoebe Bridgers sings it, even though you still forget to eat. Even though us. Even though you don’t remember             don’t you remember / don’t you still want us? Do you even need to think about how it felt? 4am, trading messages back and forth until our typos began tripping into themselves, dawn just another alarm to shut out. Every confession that curdled in our arms. The truth was, our parents could both get better. They could have been nicer. Picked us up from school and came clean. You could have loved me, and I would’ve let you.
 

—from 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Ruoyu Wang: “I like poetry because it allows the intimacy for me to create a transitional space where these fragments from my life and my identity and the people I love are able to emerge into a fuller, lighter truth.”

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October 11, 2024

“I Love My Neighbors but Hate When They Barbeque (Radio Edit)” by Miseong KongPosted by

Miseong Kong

I LOVE MY NEIGHBORS BUT HATE WHEN THEY BARBEQUE (RADIO EDIT)

POLKA FOR EIGHT FREAKING HOURS,
my daughter cries out as she cowers,
taste in this music is not ours.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
 
Polka for eight freaking hours,
for no other channel he scours.
Change the station? I lack the powers.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
 
Polka for eight freaking hours,
the accordion groans betwixt towers,
the tuba is killing my flowers.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
 
Polka for eight freaking hours,
no response to my stares and glowers,
the forecast says sadly no showers.
POLKA FOR EIGHT FREAKING HOURS.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Miseong Kong: “I once lived to play classical guitar to the best of my ability, to the scrutiny of the masters, and that life produced some beautiful sounds but sacrificed my love of the guitar. Then I tried living to take small moments of life into poetry and that life produced some beautiful poetry but sacrificed too many small moments. Prompt poetry sacrifices the joy of freedom and, of all joys, maybe that is the easiest to let go? Let then the music flow in response, as words, constrained.”

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October 10, 2024

“Ruderal” by Katie BeswickPosted by

Katie Beswick

RUDERAL

Freddie, at last! We’ll take our secret to the grave.
—last words of Frances Weller, my great-grandmother

It was a life spent, mostly
stooped over things.
The counter at the butcher’s shop
her parents owned,
all through both wars,
wrapping bacon in brown paper parcels
as bombs fell
and far away, men she loved
were shot at;
sometimes blood from the steaks
would stain her dresses.
An ironing board,
straight-backed
perfect perpendicular;
she’d smoke as she ironed,
barely touching the cigarette,
pressing
all her weight upon each garment,
erasing the possibility of a crease.
And babies’ bottoms—
because babies came
and wouldn’t stop,
two at a time,
and the men were locked away or fighting
and anyway, wiping was woman’s work.
Then knitting needles
with their insistent clacks.
It’s good to know that in the cracks
between duties
she sprouted secrets,
like tufts of grass grow on wasteland,
just when you’re sure there is nothing fertile left.
I think now of her hardness—
the thick, sun-worn skin
folded over the bones of her face,
her hands’ dry crevasses,
that mouth, set in its unsmiling line—
as bark to a tree,
covering what’s tender beneath.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
September 2024

__________

Prompt: Find someone’s last words, and use that as an epigraph in a poem where “death” is not mentioned by name.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “All too often with epigraphic poems, the quote is more interesting than the poem itself. Here, the shocking last words of Frances Weller are immediately juxtaposed to the micro-memoir first line of the poem—and that brilliant contrast propels us through her life full of struggles. Instead of speculating as to her secret, Beswick explores empathy through the motion of her great-grandmother’s ever-moving hands during two world wars. Beswick’s tactile details are so well-crafted that we don’t just read her poem, we feel the heat of the iron and smell the smoke of her cigarette. The title both reveals the poem to be an extended metaphor for growth in the midst of adversity, and speaks more directly to the eventual fate of all of our secrets.”

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October 9, 2024

“Don’t Stop” by Jeff KnightPosted by

Jeff Knight

DON’T STOP

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
It’s about a dark night, a path, thick woods.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
 
The cabin you found had a hard dirt floor,
cobwebs, an old guitar made of plywood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
 
Sometimes the pictures change, sometimes the chords
sound strange as time. But once you understood
the light was nailed shut, it opened like a door
 
into the next verse you’d been walking toward,
a verse about spring, cool water, boyhood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
 
There’s a bridge leading you to the new shore
where daybreak came the way you thought it should.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door
 
into the last verse there was to explore.
Were you going to say you understood?
Don’t. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Jeff Knight: “I have played bar band and coffeehouse gigs in Austin (including with my old band Blue Haiku), have made money busking, worked for almost ten years as a professional songwriter for an educational curriculum company, and recently signed a contract (and got a paycheck) with Fervor Records to place some country-rock songs I co-wrote. I’m just a ham-and-egger on guitar but find that writing, arranging, and performing songs is satisfying in a similar way to poetry: you mess with it and mess with it until you think it’s done and then hope it will connect with people’s hearts and heads. And sometimes it does.” (web)

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October 8, 2024

“When My Student Who Wants to Be a Writer Says They Do Not Read” by Frances KleinPosted by

Frances Klein

WHEN MY STUDENT WHO WANTS TO BE A WRITER SAYS THEY DO NOT READ

Why would you build a house with no nails?
 
Why plant, till, harvest a crop
in whose taste you find no savor?
 
The bees of the field scan the dances of their sisters
before penning a path to the lavender patch—
 
The forest produces a new body
of work only after absorbing volumes of cedar trees,
each bear bread and blueberry bush in the Tongass
standing on the shoulders of giants—
 
The incoming waves read each stone and shell
on the shore as they sketch the high tide line—
 
Inside you is a curled fern yearning for light.
 
Inside you is a fire lit beneath a capped chimney.
 
Smoke fills your rooms; there are no doors
or windows to air them out.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Frances Klein: “There has been a lot of online discourse this week about an article in The Atlantic lamenting that students no longer come to college prepared to read full books. Although I disagree with the author’s chosen villain (she blames high school teachers) I related to the experience of having students enter creative writing classes with an expressed distaste for reading. I have been teaching creative writing to high school students for many years, and in the last five years or so I have noticed a major shift in the ‘influences’ students identify for their writing. More and more, kids who claim they want to be writers are open about disliking reading. When asked to talk about the influences on their writing, they identify TV shows, musicians, and online influencers. In real life, I try to be patient and understanding, to help guide students to texts that sparks their interest and draw them in to loving reading. This poem, however, was written from my knee jerk reaction of frustration, from the ‘what I wish I could say,’ point of view.” (web)

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October 7, 2024

“My Daddy Was an Appalachian Folksong” by Jennifer HambrickPosted by

Jennifer Hambrick

MY DADDY WAS AN APPALACHIAN FOLKSONG

a harmonica-breathing picker of tunes,
wayfaring stranger, foot-stomping pilgrim
of sorrow unseen in honeysuckle and wildwood
flowers high on a mountain his daddy
 
and his daddy and his and his knew by heart.
Sunday mornings he sings off key and so loud
the brethren in front look back over their shoulders
and smile at us that smile of sweet charity.
 
Quiet down, Mama sizzles, and he swallows
the song deep into his belly till the organ stops
playing and the choir stops singing and the afterglow
of stars in our crowns lingers in the circle
 
unbroken. And the stories those songs tell—
the one about the carpenter’s wife who left him
and her baby and ran off with a man who said
he’d buy her more than biscuits and grease gravy.
 
When the song ends, she’s crying. I expect she still is.
Learned the words from Daddy with his whompy-jawed
tune and I wonder now what happened to that baby—
did he grow up and build houses like his pa?
 
Did she fail to thrive? On the overnight shift
the police scanner wails of a body in a dumpster,
and Daddy’s sent out, reporter’s notebook cornering
through a hole in his pocket, to get the story.
 
Heat hovers like a fiddle’s dying note as he
looks over the edge, steps away, loses his
stomach. You’d think the baby was sleeping,
he tells Mama later, except for those blue lips
 
and all the world’s dirges bury fire in his gut,
round his shoulders into a weary refrain. Time comes
years later and Daddy moves on to the by and by,
the baby’s ballad stuck in his throat, the rhythm
 
of her name unsung, not once lined out at a
summer evening hymn sing, never whispered
to shape notes washing like Jordan over the pews.
Some tunes, they say, are just too hard to carry.
 

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians

__________

Jennifer Hambrick: “In my first career, I performed as a professional flutist with major orchestras and in studio recording sessions. Classical music got under my skin during my tender years through an intense study of dance, and pop radio was the soundtrack for my adolescence. That musical immersion helped prepare me for all of my work with music, including my current career as a professional singer, classical music broadcaster, multimedia producer, and cultural journalist. I don’t often write poetry about music, but I do always write poetry—whatever the theme or subject—musically, by ear. The word-rhythms and vowel and consonant sounds I hear in my mind’s ear guide me through the creation of every poem I write. In this sense, the process of writing poetry is, for me, nothing short of making music with words, and the most important ingredient in my writing process is second nature to all good musicians: listening.” (web)

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October 6, 2024

“When the Hundred-Year Flood Hits Home” by Christiana DoucettePosted by

Christiana Doucette

WHEN THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD HITS HOME

There is a gapping
in the chest when the water
outside pours indoors.
 
A continental
shift shuts down the panic that
will only drown me.
 
As the first tree gives
with a rush of wind and that
ground-shaking thunder
 
and then another
and another pound the house
next door. The roar as
 
oak folds shed like its
an old slice of bread around
raw celery spear.
 
There is clarity
of who must do what
to get where safely.
 
A laser focus
on further up and further
in gathering speed.
 
The wind whips razor
blade sheets of rain sideways as
everything roars. Doors
 
slam. My youngest’s hand
holds tight, as I urge older
sisters not to stare
 
but to move move move
to the house up the hill with
no trees and no creek
 
where yellow light pours
from storm-fogged windows like
freshly buttered toast.
 
Then the door opens.
We’re pulled inside where it’s warm.
Where it’s dry. Where it’s
 
safe. I look back home
just as the storm plants a tree
on my bedroom roof.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Christiana Doucette: “This poem was written as my phone battery depleted last night. We are on day four of no power, post-Helene. And I am so very grateful for good neighbors and bodily safety. I think we of the South Carolina upstate, and Western North Carolina will be carrying the terror of this storm for a long long time.” (web)

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