Beautiful Freak Show
JILLIAN WEISE
 
I don't pretend to have been all pink
and unplucked. I knew nakedness,
knew the rattle of a leg in bed.
You rented a room from an old man
and his girlfriend, always cooking
bacon in the morning. The smell
of grease, the old man's whiskers
on my shoulder, him saying, I've seen you,
and I could smell the meat of him,
peeking from a hole in the closet wall.
Beautiful freak show, he said.
You left the closet door open and he
stopped asking for rent. You ask me
to pivot and pose, unstrap the leg.
I wanted to tell you I'm doing this
for myself. You think I care for
this body? Watch.
 
Source: Poetry Daily
​

Any Style
JACK GRAPES
 
Lord, I’m 500 miles from home,
you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.
—Peter, Paul, and Mary
Driving west out of El Paso,
the sun coming up behind me,
I look for a diner or roadside café
off the main highway.
Maybe I’ll just follow those dust clouds
that cars coming the other way
leave in their wake.
Maybe it’ll be
just a scratched Formica counter
and a waitress wearing
jeans and a T-shirt.
“Eggs any style,” I tell her,
waiting to see if she gets it--
the joke, I mean—but she doesn’t.
“Anything on the side?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say, studying
the menu as if it were
that calculus final I barely passed.
“Yeah, gimme the bacon,
the hash browns,
… you got grits?”
I look up from the menu
and admire her frontage.
After seven hours driving
in the dark, then heaving away
from the sun, the mouth waters
for the old breakfast roadside
standbys: toast, butter,
greasy bacon and eggs.
And frontage.
The urge rises from my toes,
through my stomach and into my chest,
the urge to reach out and touch them,
those well-fed breasts
inside that hefty bra
inside that white T-shirt.
“Yeah,” she says, moving the eraser
of the pencil back and forth
behind her ear, “we got grits.”
“I’m up for grits,” I say,
making the word grits sound
like I’d already eaten a mouthful.
She shifts her weight from one leg
to the other, writes on the pad,
then says it
—what I came in here for
in the first place,
not the food,
but to hear her say the words:
“Three eggs,
any style,
side a bacon,
side a hash browns,
side a grits.”
I almost swoon,
almost lean
across the counter
and place my head
between her breasts,
almost blurt out that I love her,
that I’ve been loving her
all night long--
loving her as I drove through the darkness
on this two lane highway
filled with nothing
but tractor trailers
and 18-wheelers
and tank trucks and boom trucks
and freight liners and box vans,
two-ton stake trucks
and Scammell ballast tractors,
not to mention the flatbeds
and the pick-ups,
all heading west,
just like me.
I want to tell her
that I love her
right now, here in this diner,
thirty miles west of El Paso,
and will always love her,
love her to my dying day,
love her any style,
side a bacon,
side a hash browns,
side a grits.
But I don’t.
The sun’s already breaking
the water glasses on the counter,
rousting the silverware,
dashing the flies to the floor
in where they languish the heat.
Five-hundred miles to go
before I hit L.A.,
before I take the big curve
where the I-10 turns north
under the overpass,
and heads up the Pacific Coast Highway,
white beaches to my left,
brown cliffs to my right.
Five-hundred miles to go.
“Yeah,” I say, “that should do it,
and gimme an order
of wheat toast, butter, jelly,
jam, marmalade with those
little pieces of citrus fruit
and rind, and coffee,
thick black coffee,
coffee that’s been sitting
in the pot for days,
just bring the whole pot,
and sugar, lots of sugar,
and cream, lots of cream.”
Then she sticks the pencil
in her hair behind her ear
and looks at me, finally.
“Mr. Poet,” she says,
smiling as the sun
begins to creep up
across her face.
“Yep,” I say, relaxing
onto the stool
and putting both elbows
on the counter,
“I’m Mr. Poet,
and I got
lots of poems,
any style you want,
side a bacon,
side a hash browns,
side a grits.”

--from Rattle #52, Summer 2016
Tribute to Angelenos
 
​

I met a man Thursday whose brain once kept moving at high speed after his skull had come to an abrupt stop. When we met, he was pushing a shopping cart with empty soda cans and wine bottles, which he figured would get him six bucks at the depot. Seventy years old, he’d slipped on the ice three times already that morning because people on his route hadn’t cleared their sidewalks. He couldn’t decide between blueberry or cherry danish at Sally Café so I bought both, and we stepped into rare winter sunshine as he told the story of how he’d come to be where he was. When he got to the part about being in a coma for six weeks in Atlanta, a Southern drawl introduced itself. After the coma, he spent another 540 days in hospital. They were using him for drug experiments by then, wanted to dissect him for research. His sister, a lawyer in the fancy part of town, finally got him out of there and sued the state of Georgia for 5.6 million dollars. A cheque will be ready in February he said, signed by Obama before he leaves office; a cheque the new guy can’t take away from me. That’s great I said, February’s not very far away. Just around the corner, he said back. It’s just around the corner.

                         salt water aquarium 
                         jellyfish 
                         press against the glass
 ​
--from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

A Story
SARAH PEMBERTON STRONG
 
On the street of my childhood
a boy kept a pet boa constrictor.
 
The boa ate live mice, one per month.
The boy left home and left his mother
 
in charge of the feedings.
The mother, unaware
 
the boa had just eaten, dropped a second mouse
into the glass terrarium.
 
The boa was already full and not interested.
The mouse huddled in a corner, terrified.
 
After several days the mouse began to starve:
no mouse food in the terrarium.
 
The mother, unhappy in her role
as procurer for a snake,
 
kept as far away from the terrarium as possible
and did not notice
 
anything. Eventually
hunger grew stronger than terror
 
and the mouse
took a bite of the boa constrictor.
 
I won’t prolong this.
The bite became infected and the boa died.
 
Eventually the mother noticed.
When the son came back
 
he found the palatial glass cage
inhabited by a single mouse.
 
When I think about this story now,
I think most often of all the life I’ve spent
 
being the huddled mouse,
in such danger, I felt,
 
but not.
It is harder to see that I have also been the snake.
 
 
And the mother. Too many times
the mother.
 
But today when I thought of it,
I was the boy,
 
staring in amazement at a life
I would not have thought possible
 
had I not been there to witness,
firsthand, the blindness of the body
 
and the persistence of the body
and the circumstances
 
of the body among others,
the body that needs and needs
 
and forgets absolutely nothing.

--from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
​

The Story, Part of It                       
 MARGE SAISER   ​

 The story, part of it, is that
the tractor was parked, running,
at the top of the hill, and that
my sister Jennie, ten years old, climbed
up and took a seat at the wheel. The story,
 
part of it, is that my father worked on something
attached behind the tractor, the boom of the digger
or the chain, perhaps; the story does not tell all. It tells
what he said to Jennie, his instruction; it tells
what he said into the fierce wind blowing that day,
the roar of the wind and the roar of the tractor.
 
He said, “Whatever you do, don’t step on the clutch.”
The wind took his words, flipped and turned them,
gusted them even as it gusted everything it could,
even as it tossed the ends of the red scarf Jennie wore,
flapping it out and back, out and back. Jennie
heard him say “Step on the clutch” and she did.
The tractor lurched down the hill like an animal
 
freed. The story, part of it, tells how the tractor
rolled, gaining, how Jennie stood steadfast
on the clutch, hanging onto the wheel, her hair
and her red scarf flying with the speed of it, how
the tractor roared down the slope until it
hit the barbed wire fence at the bottom,
broke through and rolled over,
how she flew off, and the clutch engaged and
killed the engine. Everything was at that second
silent from the roaring, and Jennie was
face-down on the grass, alive, but he, my father,
thought she was dead.
 
And years later when my father was dying, I called
Jennie. You’d better come, I said. She arrived
at the hospital and I met her at the main door
to show her through the maze, the halls,
to my father’s last room. We turned the turn
and could see him ahead. No longer
a man at work. Or rather a man doing
the new work of dying. He sat in the bed, tubes
into the skin of the backs of his hands.
He looked up and caught
sight of her, of us, and then he did what
Jennie cannot explain, get over, understand,
make sense of: he put his hand over his eyes;
he looked down at the floor while we came to him.
The story, part of it, is that Jennie cannot let go of this.
She told me: It’s what he’s always done--
he did not want to see me, to look at me.
No, I told her. No, it was to keep from crying.

--from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

To Put It Differently
BY NATAN ZACH
TRANSLATED BY PETER COLE
 
 Poetry chooses choice things, carefully selecting
select words, arranging,
fabulously, things arranged. To put it differently
is hard, if not out of the question.
 
Poetry's like a clay plate. It's broken easily
under the weight of all those poems. In the hands
of the poet, it sings. In those of others, not only
doesn't it sing, it's out of the question.

blessing the boats
BY LUCILLE CLIFTON
                                    (at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back     may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

Source: Poetry Foundation

The Cheer
WILLIAM MEREDITH
 
reader my friend, is in the words here, somewhere.
Frankly, I'd like to make you smile.
Words addressing evil won't turn evil back
but they can give heart.
The cheer is hidden in right words.
A great deal isn't right, as they say,
as they are lately at some pains to tell us.
Words have to speak about that.
They would be the less words
for saying smile when they should say do.
If you ask them do what?
they turn serious quick enough, but never unlovely.
And they will tell you what to do,
if you listen, if you want that.
Certainly good cheer has never been what's wrong,
though solemn people mistrust it.
Against evil, between evils, lovely words are right.
How absurd it would be to spin these noises out,
so serious that we call them poems,
if they couldn't make a person smile.
Cheer or courage is what they were all born in.
It's what they're trying to tell us, miming like that.
It's native to the words,
and what they want us to always know,
even when it seems quite impossible to do.

Hear Sarah Goettsch read her poem
"To All of You Gathered Here"

Read more blessing and thank you poems from PoBo writers here , including: 
   Megan Herlaar          Kathy Flanagan
   Melissa Hurt               Nancy Friedland
   Janine Theodore       Nancy Smith
   Mary Jo Andrews     Heather Miller

July
BY CRISTIN O’KEEFE APTOWICZ
 
The figs we ate wrapped in bacon.
The gelato we consumed greedily:
coconut milk, clove, fresh pear.
How we’d dump hot espresso on it
just to watch it melt, licking our spoons
clean. The potatoes fried in duck fat,
the salt we’d suck off our fingers,
the eggs we’d watch get beaten
’til they were a dizzying bright yellow,
how their edges crisped in the pan.
The pink salt blossom of prosciutto
we pulled apart with our hands, melted
on our eager tongues. The green herbs
with goat cheese, the aged brie paired
with a small pot of strawberry jam,
the final sour cherry we kept politely
pushing onto each other’s plate, saying,
No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours.
How I finally put an end to it, plucked it
from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth.
How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart.
How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.
 
Copyright © 2013 by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz. “July” originally appeared in The Year of No Mistakes (Write Bloody Publishing, 2013). Source: https://poets.org/poem/july

My dad & sardines
BY TOI DERRICOTTE
 
my dad's going to give me a self
back.
i've made an altar called
The Altar for Healing the Father & Child,
& asked him what i could do
for him so he would
do nice for me. he said i should stop
saying bad things about him &, since
i've said just about everything bad
i can think of &, since . . . well,
no, i change my
mind, i can't promise
him that. but even healing is
negotiable, so, if he's in
heaven (or trying
to get in), it wouldn't hurt
to be in touch. the first thing i want is to be able to
enjoy the little things again—for example, to stop peeling
down the list of things i
have to do &
enjoy this poem, enjoy how, last night, scouring
the cupboards, i found a
can of sardines that
must be five
years old &, since i was home after a long
trip &, since it was 1 a.m. & i hadn't eaten
dinner &, since there was no other
protein in the house,
i cranked it open & remembered that
my dad loved
sardines—right before bed—with
onions & mustard. i can't get into
my dad's old heart, but i remember that look
on his face when he would
load mustard on a saltine cracker, lay a little
fish on top, & tip it with a juicy slice
of onion. then he'd look up from his soiled
fingers with one eyebrow
raised, a rakish
grin that said--all
for me!—as if he was
getting away
with murder.

Source: https://pen.org/selected-poems-from-the-undertakers-daughter/

​From Blossoms
BY LI-YOUNG LEE
 
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted Peaches.
 
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
 
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.
 
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
​

Li-Young Lee reads his poem "From Blossoms"  from the Poetry Breaks series -- a series of videos filmed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by creator Leita Luchetti. Poetry Breaks features short videos of internationally renowned poets reading their work, reading the work of other poets, and discussing their takes on poetry in a variety of locations.