Search Results for: stroke

April 6, 2018

“I Like Her” by Nancy KangasPosted by

Nancy Kangas

I LIKE HER

But she sends too many texts.
When I see her it’s okay. Not great but it gets better
the more we sit together and if we have beers.
In the morning it’s no good.
She is a high-pitched fly strafing my temples.
I want to take some or all of her clothes off
and rub myself inside her. All day I lift
boards and tools and get tired.
She comes over with this bounce and says,
What should I do with my life? What is everything?
She wants talk. I like talk, some talk.
She wants to be my girlfriend. That is not
going to happen. It is a river I cannot cross.
I just want to rub myself inside her.
Inside the other ones. Inside them all.
They are birds because I have heard them
hit their wings against the window.
Breathing is all they are. Their chests heave,
their necks twist to see if there is danger.
I want to hold them on their backs in the palm
of my hand. Thumb and middle finger a necklace,
to pin them, so I can stroke their bellies
with my fingers as they lie still with their fears
and let me soothe their feathers
until their breathing evens
or their hearts stop.

—from Rattle #58, Winter 2017
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

[download audio]

__________

Nancy Kangas: “I write about what fascinates and confuses me. For a while, I circled and circled the feeling of being trapped. But I couldn’t untangle myself. Then, I tried letting someone else do the talking.” (web)

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January 31, 2018

“Slateku” by John Lee ClarkPosted by

John Lee Clark

SLATEKU

My son says let’s race
So we fly
A little ahead
I decide to lose without losing him

* * *

Walking right on the road
On a snowy night
With my boys
I’ve never felt so warm

* * *

What a wild time
We all had
In the shower room
Playing soap hockey

* * *

Wooduck
I feel for you
You never had hands to stroke
Your own wings

* * *

The greenest pasture
Is always
The one
I am in

—from Rattle #58, Winter 2017

__________

John Lee Clark: “The Braille slate has two parts connected by a hinge. The back is full of tiny holes and the other part has marching rows of windows. Set a sheet of paper on the back, close the other part over it, pick up a stylus, and you are ready to write. You press down on the stylus to make dots stand up on the other side of the sheet. You must go right to left so that the text reads left to right on the other side. Often described as ‘writing backward,’ I prefer to think of it as writing forward in a different direction and from a different spatial perspective. The classic slate has four rows of twenty-eight cells each. This rarely corresponds to 28 characters in print, for the English Braille American Edition code has 189 contractions. The one that saves the most space is ‘k’ standing alone, which means ‘knowledge.’ Sometimes you are aware of writing two things at once because the dots you are making stand up on the other side mean something else where you are pressing them down. It is not unlike painting the figure of the letter ‘b’ inside a shop window for it to say the letter ‘d’ to the outside. Braille is full of characters that are the obverse of each other—‘d’ and ‘f,’ or, if they are standing alone, ‘do’ and ‘from’; ‘m’ and ‘sh’ or ‘more’ and ‘shall’; ‘to’ or the exclamation point and the period or the prefix ‘dis’; ‘ked’ and the suffix ‘sion.’ Thus, to write ‘so you have it’ is also to write the ghost of ‘which and just it.’”

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October 27, 2017

“Coyote Country” by Milton BatesPosted by

Milton Bates

COYOTE COUNTRY

for Taylor Mitchell, 1990–2009

If she loved anything more than music,
her mother said, it was nature. That’s why
she wouldn’t have wanted her killers killed 
for doing what coyotes do. 
       I thought
of that young folk singer, hiking alone
on Cape Breton Island, as they charged
toward me, churning up the snow, their eyes
on fire with the setting sun. Just then
a rabbit erupted from a swale between us
and juked around my boots. One coyote
followed left, the other right, so close
I could have stroked their fur.
             So they were real,
those phantoms whose frantic yipping I heard
late at night in counterpoint to sirens, 
as though that wail of human pain drove them 
to hysteria. My island was no Cape Breton, 
just a scruffy patch of county land 
lapped on all sides by city. Not wilderness, 
by any means, but not quite urban either, 
if animals like these could live there 
undetected.
     They were pacing around
a pile of brush when I caught up with them, 
probing with paw and muzzle, too intent 
to notice me. I was luckier in my 
coyotes than she was, the day her love 
of nature went unrequited.
        Selfishly, 
perhaps, I save my love for those who love 
me back. Yet I would hate to lose the little 
that remains of wildness where I live.
I left them to their hunt, returning home 
by streets that seemed no longer so familiar.

—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
Tribute to Rust Belt Poets

[download audio]

__________

Milton Bates: “I’ve lived for all but a dozen of my seventy-plus years in the upper Midwest, most of them in Milwaukee, the self-proclaimed Machine Shop of the World. Like most Rust Belt cities, Milwaukee has had to re-invent itself since the days when my father and grandfather worked in its machine shops. That evolution, together with the city’s history of absorbing wave upon wave of immigrants, makes it a stimulating place in which to live and work. And we do work, whether making heavy machinery or poems. In few cities is the work ethic so revered and so strictly observed, even by artists and writers.”

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October 11, 2017

“Cat Women of the Moon” by Ron KoertgePosted by

Ron Koertge

CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON

Once my friend Rusty and I saw that movie, we couldn’t think of anything else. Sometimes we wanted to go to the moon in small space suits and surprise them. Other times we wanted to be Cat Women. The possibility of a new and feline gender made us queasy and excited. We fantasized about pouncing on our schoolyard tormentors and tearing their throats out with our claws and fangs. Then we would change back into boys with baseball gloves who were interested in Marilyn and Becky, pretty girls in our grade who wore fuzzy socks. But we weren’t just boys. We were Cat Women, too. We prowled on our way to school. We ate only fish sticks and drank only milk. We thought some day we would marry girls like Marilyn and Becky but never tell them that we, Rusty and I, dreamed the same dream every night: on the moon with our Cat Women friends: playing with a ball of yarn, grooming each other, watching for a rocket ship which we hoped would never come. 

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017

__________

Ron Koertge: “I love movies and see about 50 a year. In theaters. DVDs and Netflix aren’t part of that 50. I see a lot that way, too. I’m always available for a poem, or at least that’s the idea. There’s a cool video rental place in South Pasadena called Videotheque. Big old place with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of DVDs. They also have a poster outside; it’s under glass like in an old-fashioned Orpheum or Rialto, and it changes every few weeks. One evening there was the poster for Cat Women. I could feel the warm breath of the muse, so I just stood there for a while. I thought about the poem a lot, stroked it in a way. Then pretty soon—presto: There it was.” (website)

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August 8, 2017

“Dear Kim Jong-un,” by Sonia GreenfieldPosted by

Sonia Greenfield

DEAR KIM JONG-UN,

Do you work out? Because I’ve seen a lot of flexing
going on in state houses while the rest of us
are just trying to figure out what to feed our kids
when they want nothing but pizza, so we come up
with novel ways to pair bread and cheese as if
we’re fooling ourselves into thinking it’s not pizza.
Do you like cheese? My son likes string cheese best,
Manchego second, and sharp cheddar at a distant third.
I would be happy to feel your biceps if it would mean
endless bomb-free days of incognito pizza. Do you think
your ego is more Maine Coon in that it’s big and plush
or is it more Siamese in that it is almost slick to the touch
and likes to talk loudly in the middle of the night
while you’re trying to sleep? If you want I will stroke
your ego until it purrs if you put away your pet
submarine. I saw that picture of you posing
with your warhead, and I really like your fur hat
but was a little surprised to see that nuclear annihilation
could be wrapped in a package that looks like a prismatic ball
meant to turn and toss reflected red spotlights
all over a club floor. Do you like to disco? My son
likes to play freeze dance at summer camp to songs
by Lady Gaga. I know under your double-breasted
khaki coat a heart beats same as mine. Do you like
children? My son has a beauty mark next to his mouth
and eyelashes every lady says she want to steal.
He is made of cameo pink incandescence and clumsy
grace. I can feel his guileless heart hammer through
the thin wall of his chest which can’t be much different
than your daughter’s delicate ribs wrapping around her motor
as a hand cups a flame to keep it from blowing out.

—from Poets Respond

__________

Sonia Greenfield: “In the news this week were several stories about North Korea’s missiles and nuclear aspirations. One wonders whether such stories are meant to elicit fear with their doomsday scenarios or whether they are meant to inform us of a true threat. Either way, the rest of us, the citizens in our homes—presumably in either country—are just trying to keep our children alive.” (web)

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August 4, 2017

“My Beautiful Father the Fire Bird” by John GossleePosted by

John Gosslee

MY BEAUTIFUL FATHER THE FIRE BIRD

Today is the day of finishing little tasks. 

The words of his body locked in a stroke
the doctors can’t edit.

*   *   *

He walks through the brown field
in Vietnam, the ambush,
agent orange pedals in the sweat.

The nurse spoons in pureed beets,
wipes his mouth, elevates the dead hand
that was filled with fire.

*   *   *

He held my wings in one hand,
the scissors in the other
and after the clip I beat my wings
so much harder to fly. 

He steers my face’s pale fire
from the psychiatrist to the hospital,
the stomach pump, the in-patient.

He says, 
whoever you become now,
I will love him.

*   *   *

And father, people have begun
to love my words, chewed so hard 
in your mouth, fed into mine.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

__________

John Gosslee: “As a teenager, after moving around America and Europe every few years since I was born, my family settled. I felt cornered by what I still feel is the way of the world, and I was depressed and disconnected. My parents took me to a psychiatrist. I began running away to find something that felt real. I began writing poetry. When I was fourteen, I calmly took all of the pills and medicine in the house. I was in intensive care and then in-patient treatment for a few weeks. My parents took me to more psychiatrists. I was diagnosed manic depressive and was hospitalized again at sixteen. I still wrote. It was painful to be in a place where I was not understood as the kind of creative being I knew I was. I didn’t have any connections or in-roads to a world that I saw and couldn’t access. After being off of antidepressants for almost a decade, I started having anxiety and hospitalized myself twice in my twenties. I wanted to live, I was contributing, but I didn’t have all of the tools to cope. A decade later, I’m so happy that I had those experiences and haven’t had to take any psychiatric medication for almost twenty years. I’ve learned to take the sadness and anger and channel them into something meaningful for myself and others. I have learned how to lead with my vision. Sometimes I still feel out of touch, distant, a thousand years old, but I work through it. My poems give me strength; their precision, the wisdom that I stumble into, makes even the hardest days or weeks of moods bearable, because I know I’ll have something valuable when the smoke lifts. Through all of the realization and loss, poetry remains the one consistent thing in my life, and I know to the depth of my core that I’m fortunate to have it. In poetry I have hope, I have a voice, and I have a community. This is my home.” (website)

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August 3, 2017

“A Little Sermon” by Judith Tate O’BrienPosted by

Judith Tate O’Brien

A LITTLE SERMON

My advice to you is this: Commit
some bright, brave sins
while you have time. I admit
that most of mine
are timid, and now, confined
to a wheelchair, if I decide to go
where deviltries invite me,
I’d have to have my husband drive me.

—from Rattle #18, Winter 2002
Tribute to Teachers

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Judith Tate O’Brien: “I am a retired teacher and psychotherapist, who married widower with five daughters, and lived to tell about it. I find that humor helps me cope with a stroke, which left me wheel-chaired. I read and/or write poetry every day partly because I can do it sitting, mostly because I love to.”

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