“Many of my recent poems appear to be spiritual tool kits for the reader and this one can be found in the do-it-yourself aisle of the poetry store … Like all my recent poems, it was written in that liminal space between night and morning and though it’s very deliberative in its speech it arrived almost in one piece—or one uninterrupted voice. From the angel?”
March 20, 2025At the End of the World Is Forgetting Dick Westheimer
In the abandoned stacks of the abandoned wing of the library where abandoned books are kept—there is quiet beyond the finger-to-the-lips shush, beyond the quiet thrum of the furnace deep in the womb of this place, beyond the low hum of traffic seeping from the streets. No more sound comes from between the pages of the tomes. The dust motes whisper in dust mote tones wondering where the words have gone. There are no readers here, no sound of a novel sliding from between its companions off a shelf, no lips of a Sophomore Lit. student mouthing the final lines of a poem, no click of the lights going off when the last librarian leaves for the night. This is darker than the province of the dead, darker than between the leaves of journals and books. This is the darkness of forgetting, of deep space with no stars, of the rocky core of a dusty dead planet.
parts of speech
between
silence and breathing
Image: “Abandoned Library” by Walter Arnold. “At the End of the World Is Forgetting” was written by Dick Westheimer for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2025, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
“While reading ‘At the End of the World is Forgetting’ I am transported back to the moment in time when I captured this image. The descriptions of the ‘low hum of traffic” and the whispering dust motes help place the reader (and the viewer in this case) into the scene. As an artist I am always trying to draw people into my scenes, to have them feel like they can look around and dwell in these spaces even for just a fleeting moment. These words help complete that process in an eloquent way that adds to the emotion that I was hoping to convey in the photograph. I also particularly love the lines ‘the darkness of forgetting’ and ‘… between silence and breathing.’ I’d love to use these lines as titles of future photos, with permission from the author of course!”
March 19, 2025Among Other ThingsArthur Russell
I bought her two pairs of wide-leggèd jeans at Target last week.
For the longest time, like a year, I’d asked random women on elevators
where they got their wide-leggèd jeans, and report back to her.
“It’s a great look,” I’d say. “You’d look great in them,” and she’d say,
“I have something like that,” and I’d say, “No you don’t,”
and it would go on like that, with no wide-leggèd jeans in her closet.
So we’re in Target last week, picking out Legos for her grandson,
and there they are, wide-leggèd jeans, dozens of them, racks and racks,
in black and creamy white and olive drab. She couldn’t escape;
I stood outside the changing room while she tried them. I hadn’t done
that since my daughter and I, on Saturdays at the mall, shopped
at Madewell, and while I waited outside the heavy-curtained dressing booths,
I’d watch the young store clerks refolding clothes that had been tried
and rejected. I loved to watch them fold sweaters, jeans, anything really;
they were so bored, so deft, with plain, unconscious competence
in their soft fingers smoothing the fabric ahead of the fold. And there,
at Target, as I waited outside the dressing room, I watched another guy
sort of my age leaning with his elbows on his shopping cart handle clicking
his phone till his wife came out, and a young woman stuck her head out
one of the doors and called to her mom to come see, but her mom
didn’t hear, so I turned to the mom, and I said, “Mom, she needs you.”
I like stuff like that, where I fit into life. Then my gal emerged
in white socks, holding up the tail of her blue chambray shirt
exposing the waist of those creamy-white pants. And yesterday,
I picked her up to go to my sister’s house for dinner and she’s walking
down her driveway towards my truck wearing those wide-leggèd jeans
and a black tee and her white hair all scrunched into waves like she likes it.
She knows she looks good, and she wants me to see, so she holds
her arms out like a wine-bottle opener, then lowers them slowly,
which draws my heart right out of my chest. But the weird part, and this
is the part I’m reluctant to tell, is how, in my life, which has been going on
for a while, when one of these moments where something I’ve wanted
but thought wouldn’t happen occurs, like these wide-leggèd jeans,
or meeting my gal in the first place, when happiness is like a brand-new shirt,
my mind calls out the name of my first friend Andy, who withdrew
very early from life, how this happiness makes you think about that other
happiness you had and it’s not like I see his face. It’s just his name
anymore—Andy—that comes to mind, like kissing the spine
of a prayer book and reaching out to touch the passing Torah.
“I was as surprised as some readers of this poem have been at the turn it took from the happy story of a minor, romantic dream-come-true to a sad recollection of a childhood friend who didn’t make it past young adulthood. But once I saw where the poem wanted to go and agreed to take it there, it needed a lot of bracing to work. The bit about taking the daughter to Madewell and watching the store clerks folding clothes gave the speaker credibility, and the bit outside the Target changing room where the speaker gets to say that he likes feeling like he is part of life, was critical. And I needed a strong sub-ending for the happy part, which I found in the somewhat silly image of the wine opener. But the real delight writing this poem was finding my way from there into the ancient, recurring, pinprick grief that speaker encounters when his old friend’s name floats up into consciousness, and I loved the recklessness of the ending that I found.”
March 18, 2025Where Poems GoChris Green
In Tampa, Florida, Irene Ledbetter
sits at her desk to write to me.
She holds the magazine with my poem
about my brother and his dead dog.
She has two dogs herself and admits
she has the habit of rescuing baby rabbits,
baby birds … even unhatched eggs.
She writes to me as a friend in long
merry sentences, great streams of herself
and uses words like kisses and hugs.
She says her father is a big man
who grew up without a puppy. She tells
me everything. She says Lizzy was
her long-time pet chameleon she saved
from a tree. She swears Lizzy knew her name
and came when called to eat. She fed her
meal worms and water from a leaf.
Lizzy died, possibly from too much to eat.
In your poem, it says, ‘In that moment
I knew what animals know.’ I still talk to
Lizzy today, and when I see lizards outside
of my house that look like her, I know
it’s her telling me that she’s o.k.
Irene has written every paragraph in a
different color ink, and there are stickers
in the corners of cartoon bears holding
hearts and stepping over rainbows.
She sighs and drinks some Diet Coke as she
seals the envelope. Now it is dark. Tomorrow,
she goes back to high school, and I
consider my odd lifespan, and how I taught
students like Irene, girls in their prison blue
Catholic school uniforms. Not one now
remembers my name, not one recalls
my lecture on the rabbits in Of Mice and Men
—so poetic, I actually teared myself up,
when I overheard a girl in the front row
turn and ask her friend, “Are my lips chapped?”
The evenings in Florida are cold,
grapefruit trees hold tight to their heavy fruit
and the winds shake the heavy green
and buggy land. Weather there has teeth—
I once saw a man on a golf course killed
by lightning from a blue sky.
There is a hint of the sea in every suburb,
and instead of dirt, you find sand and shells
outside your door. Irene’s hopes mingle
with the scent of ocean and orange groves.
Of her fears for puppies and the future,
I cry. Oh I cry. I’ve got to continue to live.
When I read the letter again today, I feel blessed
to be drifting and deathless, bearing up like Irene.
“I started writing poetry by mistake. I spent six months writing a long bad essay about my grandfather … eventually, I realized that there were poems embedded in its paragraphs. So, bad prose can equal poetry. Now, I can’t stop myself.”
March 17, 2025Rural EducationEvan P. Schneider
When my classmate’s cow died
in the name of science they winched it
onto the junior high football field just as
the sky started to spit small white pellets
so we gathered round the bloated heifer, hands
deep in our pockets, chins tucked to our chests
to watch our biology teacher perform
an autopsy. Not to determine the cause
of death, but to show us the warm insides
of something so recently alive, how the body
works, or doesn’t. Things take a weird turn
when George, twice as big as any other kid,
without warning grabs one of the eyeballs
off the bloody tarp and puts it in his mouth
cutting the lesson short, or rather changing it
into a different one about humans and how
they’ll do anything for attention, anything for love
showing you how much they’re hurting or lonely
or both, that toxic concoction of being scared
of everything, and nothing, then being taught
to hide it, hide it as long and as well as you can.
“Coming across David Wagoner’s poem ‘Being Shot,’ I was struck by these lines that hit me in my chest as it ends: ‘… keep close track / of who you are, and where you had started from, and / why.’ So I’ve recently been working on taking Wagoner’s advice. The result is a chapbook titled Rural Education.”
“I’m responding to the hourly deluge of journalism about President Trump’s authoritarian actions and ambitions. And I’m also responding to the constant deluge of texts and emails from my fearful and angry friends and family.”
