April 29, 2024

“My Mother Says” by Amy ChanPosted by

Amy Chan

MY MOTHER SAYS

My mother says I sing like a bird
on a winter’s day,
my mother, whose grace catches,
light on water,
on her changing face.
 
But if I am the bird and she the sea, 
I sing because she flows through me.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

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Amy Chan: “Adrienne Rich writes that poetry (art, really) ‘ask[s] of us a grace in what we bear.’ That sums it up quite nicely for me—I write poems to find ‘grace in what we bear.’”

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April 28, 2024

“[translate me render me into the martian tongue …]” by Dmitry BlizniukPosted by

Dmitry Blizniuk

* * *

translate me render me into the martian tongue
across the black night
where the gun stock reaches the star.
beheaded houses hum in the gloom.
the neck vertebra of the torn staircases are exposed.
moonlight is bitter like the sap of killwort.
Lord translate my words.
we have not been born yet, but died already.
the evil sorcerer in his bunker gave the order
to annihilate all Ukrainians.
to burn all forms of memory. of life.
he poured a bucketful of flash drives into a bonfire.
our days are melting in the flames.
masses of memories of the universe.
 
I was young and once in a village I went diving
into the river after a running start.
rebar rods stood hidden underwater.
sharp rusted spikes.
the wooden fishing dock rotted away long ago.
for hours I chucked myself into the black river.
in the morning girl look here—you are covered with scratches.
on the legs, stomach, arms.
I was insanely lucky back then.
will I be lucky this day?
 
readers-refugees.
we pick the books off the shelves and knock
at every book’s cover. the classics.
let us into your paper worlds.
ray bradbury, sholokhov, leo tolstoy.
but no matter where I poke, it’s all For Thee the Bell Tolls.
I end up in War and insane Peace.
in Slaughterhouse-Number.
now the reality of our life is
Valley of the Red Data Book.
now every city is served
the cocktail Bloody Vlad.
crimson yolks float in dense murk
over the booze of events.
bombs gnaw at houses, schools, kindergartens, hospitals,
churches.
we are being freed of freedom and of lives.
the howling of sirens glides foreboding
air raid alarm—here comes flying
a purple swan with his head ripped away.
 
the dawn—a gray-blue
bigheaded infant resembling a shrimp.
labored breathing. pneumonia.
because of nights in a basement
a baby bird of mucus made its nest in the lungs.
yet another artillery barrage.
a rocket blasted an apartment in a skyscraper. a conflagration.
devil’s retrospective.
mom and the elder sister in the kitchen
are killed instantly by the explosion.
black thick smoke pours out of the corridor. billows.
burns a child’s eyes.
it’s not smoke-like, but black cotton candy.
the cat named Buttercup
is the first to tumble down to the asphalt
from the seventh-story window ledge.
thirteen-year old Misha follows him, leaps like a kitten
onto the enormous spire poplar—
planted three meters away from the balcony.
dry, slender branches break beneath the small body.
crackle.
it’s as if he is falling into an empty well,
inside it
sprouts a stinging biting tree.
the boy Misha finds a way
to snag his elbow on a thick branch
at the third-story level.
his ribs and left wrist are broken, but he’s alive.
he faints. translated, rendered safe.
 
people in the apartments.
butterflies under broken glass panes—
apollo, sailor. swallowtail, morpho menelaus—
with shrapnel-pins in their velvety backs
slowly, slowly
they lift off from the earth.
they rise together with the cement boxes.
but that’s impossible.
the butterfly collector is surprised.
how many more people will perish,
how many more worlds will vanish unexplored,
unnoticed. just like that.
by the sorcerous wish of the kremlin maniac.
 
Kharkiv 451.
two fire engines are already on the way.
carving corners an ambulance arrives at the entrance.
imperturbable medical angels.
dark-red scrubs. kevlars.
next to the car the cat
drags his back paws. crawls
towards the poplar. lifts his snout. screams horribly.
and the ambulance driver notices stuck in the crown
a child.
no stranger will save the people
the close ones and the distant ones
except us ourselves.
that’s why the boy Misha absolutely must survive.
that’s why we will win.
 
Translated from Russian by Yana Kane, edited by Bruce Esrig
 

—from Poets Respond
April 28, 2024

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Note from the translator Yana Kane: “Week after week, month after month, year after year I hear about Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine. Kharkiv is the city that has been subjected to especially vicious bombings. Yet each time the citizens of Ukraine, the citizens of Kharkiv respond with resilience and courage; each time they push back the darkness with their love of life. One of the ways I express my solidarity with them is by translating contemporary poetry written by Ukrainian authors. Dmitry Blizniuk is a Kharkiv poet who chronicles his city’s suffering and the indomitable spirit. Note that ‘we are being freed of freedom and our lives’ is a reference to Putin’s claim that he started the war in order to defend the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine against the discrimination by the Ukrainian government.”

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April 27, 2024

“The One and the Other” by Hayden SaunierPosted by

Hayden Saunier

THE ONE AND THE OTHER

The child hums as he carries, too late,
his grandmother’s sugar-dusted lemon-glazed cake

down the street to the neighbor who needs to be cheered,
too late for the neighbor

who’s stepped into the air
of her silent front hall from a ladder-backed chair

her church dress just pressed, her head in a loop she tied
into the clothesline, too late

he unlatches the gate,
walks up the brick walk on his tiptoes, avoiding the cracks

toward the door she unlocked, left ajar, who knows why
or for whom, if on purpose

or not, but because he’s too late
she’s gone still when he reaches the door and because

he’s too late, as he calls out and looks, brilliant sun
burns through haze

pours through sidelights and bevels
through chandelier prisms, strikes white sparks and purples

on ceiling and walls, on the overturned chair, on her stockings
her brown and white

spectator shoes on the floor
and because he’s too late he remembers both terror and beauty

but not which came first. But enough of the one
that he ran

and enough of the other
to carefully lay down the cake at her feet.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner

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Hayden Saunier: “I love the way objects and people and ideas find their way together in a poem. An old friend sent me an outrageous pound cake at Christmas and when I described it as sugar-dusted, lemon-glazed, the story of the boy in this poem, told to me years ago, came straight to my mind and stayed there. It was all in the cake: that sunny yellow circle with its center missing, dense, empty, bitter, sweet, the gestures we make too late, the child’s ability to take in everything at the same moment, at once and complete: It was all in the cake.” (web)

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April 26, 2024

“Just in Case You Should Meet Me on the Street” by Erik CampbellPosted by

Erik Campbell

JUST IN CASE YOU SHOULD MEET ME ON THE STREET

It’s come to this. Since last February I haven’t
touched you or anyone, save for my mechanic,
 
but that was by accident and in March and it
was only a handshake because I forgot he could
 
kill me without meaning to and, besides, I’ve known
him since junior high school. These days, I take
 
a couple of aspirin every morning just for good
luck. I go for one walk, sometimes two, daily,
 
just for research’s sake. Just to see, like some
crystalline anthropologist from the future, if
 
the present is like I imagine it or remember it
from my incessant apartment. I won’t come home
 
(sometimes I have to walk for miles. Once, a whole
day) until I’m convinced I’m not some simulacrum
 
(“Please, dog,” I’ve said aloud on walks, “bite my leg,
go for it. I need evidence”), part of some teenager’s
 
avatar on a campaign, wandering in the desert, banking
on the biblical: that doing so leads to the promised land,
 
or at least someplace worth selling or invading. So,
should I meet you on the street, after all of this (and “if”)
 
is over, and I hug you, I’ll not only be doing so too hard;
I will be trying to crush you before you can leave me again.
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

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Erik Campbell: “I wrote the attached because I wanted to feel more alive and consequential than I have in ages.”

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April 25, 2024

“The Space Between” by Amelie FlaglerPosted by

Alignment II by John Paul Caponigro, surreal photograph of boulders over a sand dune

Image: “Alignment II” by John Paul Caponigro. “The Space Between” was written by Amelie Flagler for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Amelie Flagler

THE SPACE BETWEEN

Perhaps equidistance is a secret to be explored.
I suggest it’s not something,
I believe it’s not nothing,
But a perfect illusion of what comes in between.
The things that we miss at the height of a scene.
Not as grand as the sky, or as low as the sands,
The air that’s unnoticed as it flows through the lands,
The blank space.
The missed place.
The dirt between home and first base.
 
So the zone between up and down lies still,
Forever ignored by the human’s will,
Floating and frozen, barely windblown,
Unmoving, unrecognized, encaptured in stone.
 
We continue our lives, always looking around,
Condoning our nature to miss middle-ground.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
March 2024, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, John Paul Caponigro: “‘The Space Between’ engages the art directly, transcending mere description, surprisingly and insightfully noting what often goes unnoticed. Never departing from the original source, the observations it shares feel both personal and universal, reminding us of truths we already know but often forget. I feel I learned something while reading this poem written in response to my art; something that was intuitively felt became consciously clearer.”

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April 24, 2024

“The New Battery Should Come Tomorrow” by Ruth BavettaPosted by

Ruth Bavetta

THE NEW BATTERY SHOULD COME TOMORROW

Got up this morning thinking about going to see my daughter.
Which led to thinking about the remote for the garage door opener 
which had stopped working when I replaced the battery.
 
Which led to searching online for garage door repairmen. Which led to
wanting to check the remote again before I called a repairman.
 
Which led to getting dressed so I could go outside. Which led to 
remembering to brush my teeth. Which led to discovering my Waterpik 
wasn’t working. Which led to researching online to find out 
what the problem could be. Which led to
 
scrabbling around to find the extra tips that came with the Waterpik 
and figuring out which was which and how to replace the tip. 
 
So with Waterpik repaired I went outside and tried again
to make the garage door opener work. Which led to
my discovering that the little red light in the remote wasn’t on. 
 
Which led me to fiddle with the batteries again. Which led to 
my discovering I had ordered the wrong battery for it. Which led to 
a protracted Amazon session looking for the proper battery 
 
and figuring out which were in stock and would come soon
and didn’t come only in a pack of fifty. 
 
So now I’m exhausted and I’m not going anywhere. 
 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

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Ruth Bavetta: “I write at a messy desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Once, it was important to me to make sense of life. Now, I’m convinced that there is no sense-making. There is only what is and what has been. I am human, separate and mortal, and that’s where the poetry comes from. This poem is pretty much an accurate report of an actual morning a couple of years ago. This kind of thing happens with increasing frequency as we age. What can we do but laugh about it?” (web)

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April 23, 2024

“The Return” by Kenny WilliamsPosted by

Kenny Williams

THE RETURN

When I returned to earth after forty thousand years
there were no more graves, no more cathedrals.
No public parks, no public. I looked everywhere
and couldn’t find a single statue of a hero put up
by a committee. There was simply none of that sadness
that can only be satisfied by a dose of dry-eyed Mahler,
sex in a sand trap or hunters in the snow. There were,
understand, no elevators. There were no jailbirds
to be prayed for, no thieves broken backward
across the tops of their crosses, no city walls or citadels
hung by a thread over the pit of the sky.
There had been a Russian documentary film
about a man gone in search of the birthplace of the wind,
but I couldn’t find it. There wasn’t the hospital garden
where, one cold Sunday morning, a man came to cut roses
in the face of all prohibitions, posted and implied,
for his wife, a girl he’d married ages ago, out of revenge
against the woman he loved, whose throat he feasted on
while her husband was in Honolulu with his lover,
who was working on her PhD in there’s-nobody-left-to-know-what,
probably something to do with marine mammals,
not a single specimen of which could I track down
to confirm or deny the rose-garden scene in its strange
un-hearable tongue. You must understand:
when I returned to earth after forty thousand years
there was not one single traffic circle or comic strip,
no Lucy diagnosing Charlie Brown or throwing
Schroeder’s piano in a tree. No one to take mental notes
on how a black-haired bitch handles competition.
No competition. No Darwin taking it all back
on his deathbed. No rest cures, glory holes, horsefly bites.
Not so much as a scrap of Brussels lace I might describe
in this report, in pointless triumph. Not so much
as a girl dressed like a garden statue, raising a birdcage
with no bird in it, like a lantern in the light of day.
In my mind and yours that cage tapers up into a copper nipple
with a ring through it. My friends, hear me when I tell you
there wasn’t so much as a dog to sniff me out.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

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Kenny Williams: “All my poems are about the same thing: human duration, in time, between the Fall and the Last Day. ‘The Return’ seems to be some sort of exception, taking place after the Last Day, though very much shot through with its clarifying light. What’s more, the more I think about it, ‘The Return’ really describes two returns: the return to earth after forty thousand years and the return to report what wasn’t found there. Which of these two returns the title refers to depends, I guess, on the angle from which you read the poem. I’ve always been obsessed with the emptied earth needing a witness to its emptiness, and as I was writing the poem I had to grapple with the complication of that witness’s own need for an audience that would 1) share his frame of Western culture reference and 2) be real. I hold degrees from the University of Virginia and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I own and operate The Fan Sitter, a pet care business, in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia.” (web)

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