July 12, 2024

“Dishes” by Roberto ChristianoPosted by

Roberto Christiano

DISHES

“You can do what you want. Write a ghazal or do the dishes.”
I’m in Zoom, a poetry class, and I know, there really are dishes
 
in my sink accumulating guilt and luring the reckless red ants,
but I am thinking of Uvalde, of all the kitchens with one less dish
 
to wash tonight. I am thinking of my great niece and nephew,
aged nine and ten, who toss each other the warm dry dishes
 
straight out of the dishwasher. I am thinking of those bright dishes,
bought from across the border, on the governor’s dark pine table,
 
each one a swirl of blue and red. I am thinking hard about all the thoughts
and prayers, and every my heart goes out, and every platitude dished out.
 
I am thinking of a shy little girl in her white communion dress.
On the table behind her, Mother has set a mass of churros in a dish.
 
I am thinking of the antique, porcelain, Bavarian dishes my mother gave me.
Nobody cares about them anymore. Roberto, you can put away the dishes.
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
Tribute to the Ghazal

__________

Roberto Christiano: “The ghazal, like the villanelle and the pantoum, has its roots in song. This appeals to my musical past. My father and brother were both musicians—Father played Portuguese and Italian folk music on the accordion and my brother was a rock guitarist. I played the piano and was a church pianist for a while. The repeating end words of the ghazal couplets remind me of the rounds of my childhood, the songs I sang in school, the quick refrains, the catchy and playful rhymes.” (web)

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July 11, 2024

“A Family Matter” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

A FAMILY MATTER

Of course, when my mother asked
that I give my wife a kiss for her, I did so,
telling my wife, I am my mother, kissing you.
My wife’s mother, it turns out, had asked the same,
so of course she told me, I am my mother,
kissing you back. When we informed our mothers later
that they had kissed as lesbians
through heterosexual proxy
beside our cat’s sense that something
like a mouse or with the potential
to be a mouse would eventually move
through the spot she was staring at,
where nothing was or had ever been, as far
as the record shows, my mother asked, was tongue
involved? My wife and I consulted the log
but there was no entry. We shrugged
at our mothers and went about our lives,
though now with an awareness
there are gaps we’ll never fill
that may or may not have tongues in them,
though given a vote, I say yes, tongues, red
like our mouths are where flames go
to be alone.

—from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

__________

Bob Hicok: “I think of myself as a failed writer. There are periods of time when I’ll be happy with a given poem or a group of poems, but I, for the most part, detest my poems. I like writing. I love writing, and I believe in myself while I am writing; I feel limitless while I’m writing.” (web)

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July 10, 2024

“Eve’s Protest” by Isabella DeSendiPosted by

Isabella DeSendi

EVE’S PROTEST

Men insist I shouldn’t use my body to conquer
them when men have been using me
to look at loneliness less directly. I solve
their endless wars; I’m a rack to hang
headless hats. Is it lunacy or resilience
when something breaks but we keep on 
pushing through it? Like the body, becoming sacred 
is an act of love or self-deceit. Just look at Adam 
wrenching out his rib for me. Things haven’t changed. 
Lonely people are still desperate and busy
being loud about it. I would know. 
I’m shapeless as a fledgling flattened 
having surrendered all my bones. 
Look, all I wanted was someone 
I could show my wretchedness to, someone 
who would be there, loving. Or else, I wanted
to feel winter coming and not feel like an animal 
who’d forgotten to wake up. Do I really have to say it? 
Even the sequoia tree’s leaves will redden 
to ash, proving nature and God are good 
at showing us all the ways we’re wrong. 
Tell me, what woman hasn’t been 
tempted, porous—only wanting
what she wanted. Do you blame me, Lord?
I’m only doing what you’ve done. Made a man
suffer then surrender before I let him love me.
If I was wrong to die for pleasure, so be it. 
If I was wrong to make my man aware of his body 
the way wind is aware of its shapelessness
only after a locomotive blows through a tunnel 
and cleaves its loud nothing into more
billowing nothing, then I accept 
what damage, brightness I’ve caused. 
I know I’ve said this already 
but I mean it: Once, I was good. 
Now, standing by the pier, the sky opens up
in late-night light like a scab unwilling to close 
and I admit, part of me is still like you, Lord. 
Some days, I’m tired. Some days, all I want is to 
eradicate the earth. Instead, a man I love enters me 
slow as light stabbing its way through to morning. 
O God, don’t refute this. I know your rage
is fueled by jealousy and your jealousy fueled 
by sadness. You wish you could hold a body 
like this and understand what I mean when I say
it was worth it. All of it. Yes, it was worth it. 
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024

__________

Isabella DeSendi: “This poem was inspired by, of course, the first woman in biblical history to defy God’s law in favor of sex, companionship, desire. I wrote this piece during a time when I felt deeply frustrated with religion and its constructs around womanhood and purity; I was tired with all the people and forces that were imposing their rules on me. Although this is a persona poem, Eve’s story is one many women can relate to. I hope this poem offers a new perspective from Eve and showcases a voice that is defiant, autonomous, but tender—and yet, still finds (and chooses) love.”(web)

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July 9, 2024

“I Dreamed of Hendrix” by Willie James KingPosted by

Willie James King

I DREAMED OF HENDRIX

The white ones unwarranted,
hardly a one cared much for
a colored lad with long locks,
greedy for the guitar and
assorted girls, especially
during that goddamn War.
 
But I was born to rule
the blues, to do with it
whatever I chose. And I
would take that guitar
and I’d choke that son-
 
of-a-bitch. I even made
music with my mouth, by
taking those tiny strings
into my teeth, making them
sing like a sparrow on
its first outing into early-
April sun. And the people
 
didn’t know what to make
of me, a prodigious man, no,
a wild, black, prodigious
man controlling the band
stand. And I could not
cross the crowds that swarmed
like flies to the concerts, or
wherever I was performing
 
only to see me, witness
the magic of my every opus,
even in England, when
I was an ex-patriot. I
was angry as every average
person was at America’s
politics. I was ready for
 
a revolution long overdue.
I was propelled by the
plight of my people, called
‘colored’ then, but emerging.
I, well, put me in the place
like the parapet ready to
see the bottom rail rise
to the top as the Biblical
 
passage spoke of an oppressed
people. We were the only
ones, see, all of the Indians
wiped out, or, having lost
the distinction of individu-
ality. I needed that dumb
 
needle, and the coke in order
to cope with fame, and with
failure, too. It became as
perfunctory to me as an at-
omizer is to any woman
with night needs, having
to look to more than one
man to earn her quota
in money. I made music.
And, the music made me.
 
America wasn’t only fas-
cinated with that fat, lean
thing making an odd seam
down the length of my jeans,
it was also fascinated by
the slow, heavy weight of
a dark man dying by
the help of what it makes
available to that sinking
man’s hand, sometimes
 
in the notion of his needs,
this, as medicine, knowing
all the time it is dealing
death to him, in disguise
but my fame continues to
rise, all of those unusual
beats I brought, strange
chords, and other things
which made my music amusing.
But no marvelous man has
ever been alive to witness him-
self being made into a martyr,
 
neither me, Malcolm, nor
Martin. And even dead
sometimes, I find my form-
less mind befuddled by such
ambivalence, of how they
can kill a man in America
and canonize him after the kill.
 

—from Rattle #9, Summer 1998

__________

Willie James King: “I write only compelled to do so. Writing is hard, that is why I love it. Language is as difficult to control as any animal found in the deep, wild woods. They don’t conform. They hold to what they do best, no matter how we holler: Humanity! Humanity! And that is why I write; I might be able to speak not only for myself, but for those without a voice; or, who they think they are, etc.”

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July 8, 2024

“Ghazal at the End” by Melisa Cahnmann-TaylorPosted by

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

GHAZAL AT THE END

It’s a hint toward conclusion: All will be okay today.
The newsman assured “at the end of the day.”
 
Eastern, Greenwich Mean, Lord Howe, AoE
 “Anywhere on Earth”—all depends on the day.
 
Stopped at a red light, the car behind me didn’t stop
for mine—not how I wanted to spend the day.
 
Talking hens and bear friends, bedtime stories
we read again and again. “The End” for the day.
 
Confusing to language learners, this English filler
means “to sum up.” “Just a cliché,” we lesson the day.
 
Sumerians, the first to write, keep time, farm, brew,
built six miles of wall to defend their day.
 
Season of take-out, stay-in, mask-on, video-off, 
an effort to get ourselves dressed even on a Wednesday.
 
At the den of decay, the zen of dismay, there’s a chicken buffet
for the men of Bombay. Nonsense, Melisa, is the trend of the day.
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
Tribute to the Ghazal

__________

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor: “I am tethered to podcasts and news these days and I keep hearing ‘at the end of the day’ as a way to sum everything that’s been said up, as if there could be any end to the nonsense and terror. I took this idiomatic expression and used the ghazal form to twist and turn it. How does the day end, where, and for whom? As a professor of TESOL and world language education, the ghazal helped me explore the meaning that’s lost by cliché, as well as what might be newly found.” (web)

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July 7, 2024

“There Was No Fire” by Leila JacksonPosted by

Leila Jackson

THERE WAS NO FIRE

this time or the next, no rules to ignore,
no chamber to load with one round and send
spinning, no knife pointing forward, no sirens
to duck, no people to swing at the head,
no eyes to make any more black than they’d
already been, there were no explosions at all,
no exit wounds to patch up the messiness for,
no lashes or hands that severed other hands.
Make no mistake, it was me. I ate the whole
thing. I splintered the wood. I grew teeth
to chew glass. I cleaned people’s clocks
’til they shone. My siblings said how’s it taste
and I called it a banquet and ate the dining table.
There was a kick from the belly, a learning
to run, an inhale of rain, a feast and the blindness
it made—but once I put it out, there was no fire.
In our defense, we were starving.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

Leila Jackson: “For a few years now, I’ve been tracking major storms, and I was watching Beryl this week. I have family from the South and close friends from the Caribbean, so I’ve heard many firsthand stories about the devastation that Andrew, Katrina, Maria, etc. wrought on peoples’ homes and livelihoods. I wanted to personify a hurricane here because, unlike much of the other news we see, it’s completely out of human control (outside of the steps we can take to mitigate climate change).”

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July 6, 2024

“Ghazal for Grandmother” by Iris CaiPosted by

Iris Cai (age 15)

GHAZAL FOR GRANDMOTHER

My grandmother kept a suitcase, hard & rounded
like a deep pink shell. I used to finger its rounded
 
edges & compare them to her deft, valleyed hands.
Wind-chapped skin crinkled like crow’s feet, rounded
 
around eyes where her smile never reached. She grew
in the dried-out fields by the Yangtze, grains of rounded
 
rice panicles shriveled into shadows under her eyes &
trellised ribs. Three years, skin stretched over rounded
 
bone. My grandmother’s mother escaped the country
during the war. Her daughter, still a toddler, rounded
 
cheeks rubbed with dirt. Tucked in a bush, hidden
from soldiers. She learned to keep fear rounded
 
behind corners, choked into the packed-earth walls
of a household not her own. No one rubbed rounded
 
circles on her back once she woke from nightmares.
But when hurt is spread thin, sharp edges rounded
 
away by time, does memory fade? She has begun
to forget & cannot find words to describe rounded
 
edges slipping out of reach: the sunlit cream of her
living room walls & smiling family hung in rounded
 
wooden frames. America blurs into an ocean of ink,
tiding characters she can no longer write. Rounded
 
above these murky waves, all that she never knew
was family & forgiveness. The days have rounded
 
into full circles. My first memory is her, yet one day
she will forget the rounded syllables of my name.

—from 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology

__________

Why do you like to write poetry?

Iris Cai: “I like to write poetry because I’m in love with words, people, books, and things. I love English, which is not even my first language. Even now, I’m unacquainted with the feeling of these words on my tongue, but when I am writing poetry, I can create a syntax that is entirely my own. It’s a kind of empowerment: I can put a name to all the complex, confusing feelings I otherwise could never express. What comes out is small and pulsing and jagged with line breaks, but it is an ode to all the people who have made me, all the books that have sustained me, all the words I know and will never know. For me, poetry is the next closest thing to love.”

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