May 4, 2023

“Fight” by John W. EvansPosted by

John W. Evans

FIGHT

Pick up, I said, and talk to me, you said, come
home and talk to me, I said, not until we can talk, you said,
what, I said, like fucking human beings, you said, I won’t talk
to you, I said, until you come home, you said, I won’t call back,
I said, then don’t, you said, I can’t come home until
we talk, you said, who does this, I said, talk to me, I
said, no one does this, you said, someone is doing it, you said,
right now, you said, people don’t, you said, act like this, I said, I’m
trying to talk to you, I said, just come home, I
said, can’t we talk, you said, come home
first, I said, I left home, you said, so we can talk,
you said, no one talks, you said, not like this, I said, just
talk to me, I said, I am, I said, talking to you, you
said, what did I just say, I said, it matters how you say it,
you said, this is how I said it, I said, pick up, you said, come home.
 

—from The Fight Journal

__________

John W. Evans: “I wrote the poems in The Fight Journal to make sense of an experience about which I felt strongly biased: my divorce. I wanted to recognize the humanity of all involved on the page because this was something I struggled to do in real life. I hoped to find closure, healing, and an answer to two questions. Why had my marriage failed? How had I been complicit in that failure? Adrienne Rich’s ‘From An Old House in America’ was the formal model for the long title poem. Marta Tikkanen’s ‘The Love Story of the Century’ was a precedent for writing about these dynamics. Both poems are personal favorites.” (web)

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May 3, 2023

“Never Asking” by Madelyn ChenPosted by

Madelyn Chen

NEVER ASKING

Winter nights we wore socks to bed and still
shuddered like thin panes against the wind.
We rubbed our hands together. We pulled 
the blanket past our noses. Over our pajamas
were hand-knit sweaters, cheaper than turning 
on the radiator. Our mother made us drink 
water from plastic bottles bought in packs of 
twenty-four. She collected the empty ones from
our hands, underneath our beds, corner piles
and all through the trashcan. Ripping and 
scraping away the sticky labels, she filled 
each bottle with sink water. Each cap was
firmly twisted back on, and into the microwave 
went three bottles at a time. Six minutes later, 
her tender hands would pull the bottles out, 
plastic steaming redness into her palms. 
In bed, she tucked the bottles under our feet.
This is how we fell asleep, never
asking if our mother needed warmth. 
 

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

__________

Madelyn Chen: “As a kid, I rarely spoke unless I was spoken to. I was often late to class because I would hole up in the library, reading Shel Silverstein and Emily Dickinson, hearing their words instead of the bell. One day, I wrote my own poem. I liked it so much that I volunteered to read it at the school talent show. I remember struggling to raise my voice, to look up at the audience. I remember the applause. My teacher pulled me aside to tell me that I had a gift for writing. That I should share it more. So. Here I am, a law student at Harvard by day and a poet for life. I speak up more. I share more. I’m still finding my voice, but I’m not afraid of it anymore.” (web)

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May 2, 2023

“Download the App and We’ll Plant a Tree” by Katie HartsockPosted by

Katie Hartsock

DOWNLOAD THE APP AND WE’LL PLANT A TREE

A download equals a tree, assured
the dream creature who said she worked at a consulting firm
called Partly Knowledgeable.
Last night the things that keep me up kept me even better,
 
longer, smarter, smart-phonier.
When I slept into the creature, I also dreamt cathedrals, multiple
city squares of them,
and heard a voice describe their “offici-aura,” their flying buttresses
 
there are no apps for.
Or are there? I pay no mind to many things, many apps, and suffer
l’esprit d’escalier, staircase wit:
the condition when you think of perfect replies only as you get down
 
to the door. When you fantasize
being back in the room and staring at seated faces while you flip
the light switch on and off,
until finally you say, “Just as I thought! We’ve got electric, not gas,
 
lighting here.” Over 500 steps
to the top of Saint Paul’s: descending that heaven, what comebacks
I could muster—enough
to save earth’s face. Maybe people’s, too. AI developers agree
 
we should pause AI—
which is already developing itself by itself—but when interviewed,
many express feeling obligated
to usher in (that’s the phrase they use) this new phase of, what?
 
Once I turned dictation on
for a text but had said nothing yet, in our bathroom with the fan
whirring, and a sentence appeared:
“I’m angry.” What if it’s a consciousness they’re playing midwife to,
 
what if it’s already mad?
Boarding the Amtrak in Chicago, I saw an empty seat next to a nun
and took it. Hours later,
we were friends, telling girlhood stories, talking foster children,
 
quoting Robert Hayden
and love’s austere and lonely offices—which must have been where
my cathedrals came from—
and staring at deer, turkey, trees with character out the window
 
rolling, tracked with rain
and something human, something I want to keep so it covers me
not like a blanket,
but like snow that almost becomes the ground, like the Honey hairs
 
that became my mother’s couch.
Their black lines would fall inside its plaid pattern, those fur-falls
of the beloved dog
I took as a pup away from a woman who said she would drown her.
 
A scared shit-crusted runt,
beaten up and denied: when we got her home we kept saying oh honey,
oh honey, whenever she tried
to walk or eat, and before we knew it, our sadness was her name.
 

—from Poets Respond
May 2, 2023

__________

Katie Hartsock: “I received an email from Firestone Tires on Earth Day, and the subject line was ‘Download the App and We’ll Plant a Tree.’ This suggested transactional exchange seemed to indicate an equality between the two actions where I found none. It also points towards the ever-increasing weaving of the digital world into our material lives, a blurring which worries and saddens me. The poem also references interviews with AI developers which I read about in a recent Substack by the excellent Paul Kingsnorth.” (web)

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May 1, 2023

“To Hannah Lyons” by Azia ArmsteadPosted by

Azia Armstead

TO HANNAH LYONS

Instead of raising my hand and admitting to my incorrectness,
I changed the “D” on my quiz by drawing another D just
above the preexisting one, avoiding our teacher’s sharp eye,
and because the spines of those identical Ds aligned
perfectly they made a makeshift uppercase B, the right answer,
 
each kid seated at our roundtable minded their own business
and naturally had the decency of discretion except you,
you prepubescent Karen, you unhinged your cavernous
mouth, full of bloodthirsty baby teeth, unknowing of,
or perhaps feeling exempted from, what happens to snitches—
 
typical—your father, who I presume only put you in Southampton
Elementary for its diversity, was a doctor and probably paid for your
tutors and would eventually fund your SAT prep, Ivy League tuition
and luxury condominiums in lush hills, so you would have been covered
 
regardless of whether, hypothetically speaking, my small fist slipped
and hit your upper lip, however I was much more passive then
and wouldn’t have retaliated against you and your armor of goodness
and while this event was many years ago and you may have children
of your own now I do not offer you friendship nor forgiveness
 
for I am convinced that you were determined to destroy us all
because you were aware of the rumor, swirling around the Lego
block cubbies and cakey mulch playground, that you were not,
as you may have believed, the smartest student in our second grade
 
class but Alieka, who wore mahogany glasses that matched her skin tone
and whose mother always braided her hair in neat straight back cornrows,
also acquired an assemblage of scholar roll certificates, more than you in fact,
and we all knew it to be true as you simmered to a boil in your seat
while her name was called at the awards ceremony to collect her prize.
 

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

__________

Azia Armstead: “As a child I understood privilege very early on. I didn’t have the language to articulate it then but I knew there was a difference between myself and kids like Hannah. I cheated on my test because I so desperately wanted to be acknowledged and celebrated, but mostly I wanted to be ‘smart.’”

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April 30, 2023

“Elegy for a Ringmaster at Civilization’s End” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

ELEGY FOR A RINGMASTER AT CIVILIZATION’S END

After all, we are living,
now, in your America,
the air thick with arias
of insults, our neighbors mic’d,
their grievances caroling
 
out into the howling crowd.
Here, everyone arms themselves
with slurs & secrets & shock-
ing revelations about
lineage & history.
 
We used to watch your show in
dorm rooms & in living rooms,
waiting for the fuse you lit
to explode. Now, all we do
is follow fuse after fuse;
 
our mother tongue has become
the language of bombshell &
shrapnel, but this is how it
always was. You showed us how
America always breathed,
 
skittering on the lip of
apocalypse, this knowledge
a legacy of your grand-
mothers who died in the camps,
genocide encoded in
 
your DNA, urging you
to pull spectacle’s golden
filament time & again,
& weave it into sound bite
& fist fight & all that’s wild
 
& primal & screaming up
against what’s wretched within.
We watched because you showed us
the beasts & ghosts & monsters
clambering in our own chests.
 
Today, no final thought will
wing itself into the night,
but we will end on one last:
“take care of yourself, & each
other.” Take care of the dark.
 
Let the inside of your eye-
lids bead the braille of a prayer,
mumbling us into the tough
work of doing enough to
run another episode.
 

—from Poets Respond
April 30, 2023

__________

Dante Di Stefano: “This is an elegy for Jerry Springer who died this week. Like many people my age (44), I disliked his show, but sometimes watched it, despite, or maybe because of, my dislike. For better or worse, Springer was an archetypal American figure, part carnival barker, part confidence man. He harkened back to snake oil mountebanks of the nineteenth century and presaged the age we live in now, where the double helix of reality television and social media compose and decompose and writhe through our national DNA.”

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April 29, 2023

“Bell Bottom Trousers” by Diane WakoskiPosted by

Diane Wakoski

BELL BOTTOM TROUSERS

bell bottom trousers, coat of navy blue,
she loves a sailor and he loves her too.
—Guy Lombardo WWII song lyric

Mine were brown velvet,
lush as sable. ’70s wide and swinging,
swirling outward from my calves,
vaquero rhythmed, and very expensive,
the cost of a ’40s war savings-bond. Driving across
America, alone in Green Greed
—or was it the Fox-brown Audi?—
I laid them flat across the backseat, like hero’s flags,
covered them with a Mexican serape,
keeping them intact, uncrushed, ready for The Visit.
The Evening. The Expanse-of-Pacific-wrapped-around-me-Event,
where I would wear them.

When the night collapsed into next day,
and I fell—alone—into my motel room king-sized bed,
like a duffle bag thrown into a locker,
sleeping the salty sleep of a girl who dreams of oceans and the man
coracled upon it, I flung
the bell bottoms onto the foot
of the bed, where the tossed heavy-textured spread covered them
during my flailing night, thus
causing their
loss,
I leaving them, not unlike my sailor-father
leaving me.
The bell bottoms
next morning, forgotten,
abandoned,
in my haste to travel on.

That’s what I am thinking about
forty years later,
I left them behind, and
just to fill you in on my concern, I who hate telephones,
did call the next day,
but they said no one had found them. That’s
what they said.
Unlike my bookkeeper mother,
I don’t keep a list
of items left behind, yet these
brown-as-my-father’s-eyes trousers swirl
into history. They seem memorable like a
lost ring, topaz or sardonyx carved into a cameo.
They’ve conjured images of my father’s sea duty
to the Aleutians—bears hibernating—
or Pearl Harbor—yellow hibiscus worn behind an ear.
They floated, a topaz,
fallen brown-faceted and envious
out
of its setting,
my missing sailor pants,
worn in the days when I used to dance—
short breaths like the exhale of cigarette smoke,
animating the free swing of bell bottoms. A
small mishap in one
of many journeys, just a memory,
like the folded flag,
I can’t let go of.

—from Rattle #33, Summer 2010

__________

Diane Wakoski: “My poems are my secret garden, where I can be a girl wandering in a Southern California orange grove, a sorceress sailing between islands with the Argonauts, or a woman in a ’70s bar, waiting for the Motorcycle Betrayer to put his hand on her shoulder. The garden is confined, but not limited. I never get tired of sitting in this garden, knowing that only those who have the key can unlock the gate and join me inside.” (web)

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April 28, 2023

“Migrants” by Landa woPosted by

Landa wo

MIGRANTS

Strong boys to work on the farm. 
 
The sad lot of migrants in the shadows.
The emaciated look of Mother Africa.
The uncertainties of the desert girls.
 
Look:
Far away Aquarius has lost its flag.
Multifaceted Africa lies down once again.
Storm and night mingle in my heart, 
The flowing blood no longer human blood.
 
Look:
In the distance, floodlit in the desert of Libya,
The slave market of my fellow Blacks.
At the heart of night men
An outrage to humanity. This brother who is not me.
 
 
Strong boys to work on the farm. 
 
 
In the murky apocalyptic night of the desert
The migrant hungers for virtue, dignity, justice.
In the meshes of emboldened and fierce smugglers
The solitary migrant dies
King of stone
Grain of sand in the auction sale. 
 

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023
Tribute to Irish Poets

__________

Landa wo: “In 1999 I choose Ireland as my new home. An Afro French in search of opportunities I found a new place and at the same time I found poetry as a way to challenge the society. A new multiracial Irish society.” (web)

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