Author name: Rattle

Asteroids as Big as Skyscrapers

Rattle / February 20, 2024

We should come up with better ways
to define the size of an asteroid.
One headline likens Asteroid 2008 OS7
to a football stadium, as if we are in the habit
of measuring distance in sports arenas set end-to-end;

Audio, Awards, Poems, Poetry Prize

Motel Surrender

Rattle / February 19, 2024

Lovers come best together when they come
undone, empty-handed, rendered dumb,
come down to their last card, a turning
way past desperation and cleaner burning.

Audio, Poems, Poets Respond

Cocoa Ghazal

Rattle / February 18, 2024

Metaphor: my skin and my hair taste like cocoa.
Real life: grandparents kiss under trees heavy with cocoa.

As girls, we’d creak down the steep Dutch stairs,
return with mugs bursting with creamy hot cocoa.

Canadian Poets, Poems, Tributes

Love to But

Rattle / February 17, 2024

To decline, to refuse, dig in one’s heels, to resist like a
small dog its leash—I find that gesture so alluring, such a sweet, guilty
pleasure.

Audio, Awards, Poems, Poetry Prize

Elegy for Tío Lazaro

Rattle / February 16, 2024

Because he was already dying, he figured
there was no harm in huffing through 2 or 3 cigarettes

in the early morning before my mother would wake—
the animal of his thin, brown body lassoed

to an oxygen tank.

Poems, Sonnets, Tributes

Costume

Rattle / February 15, 2024

Our game’s a cross between A Chorus Line
and Fame. Rehearsals, here in our backyard.
Pretend the lawn’s the stage. The tutu’s mine,
but I let David pick a leotard.