Guest poet: Dan Rattelle

Three poems

Blueberrying

Early berries, blushing
at the touch
present themselves
in nebulas – unreachable

cloud-vast clumps.
They drop in place 
of predicted hail
but make no sound when they fall.

I violate them;
but you can see the prints
of other pickers
who passed them over.

Dull haze
molts and smudges
the skin. They burn 
like second circle damned on the table.

Apiculate nubs,
hooded, cloaked
and crowned, crushed
under a heaviness, my gaze.

 

Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset
For Libby

While autumn’s supple dusk
rumbles in the hum
of cars, the whistle
of a train wakes us.
Winter’s virgin martyrs
are trimming their wicks.
Such wasteful grace:
the sun slit open,

almond shaped,
wounded-side-of-Christ shaped,
and the clouds
like menstrual pads
paper over another 
miscarried world.
 


Grapefruit

Only a handful
of skin, carnation

pink, tropic-ripened,
bursting with dizzy

tang on the counter.
A liquid moon – light

drips impressionist-
color spectrum mess

all over the place,
bespeaks a nineties

waistline; when opened:
a body odor

stench wells saliva.
Hollowed, the two halves

are ladles to slake 
potency to act.

But eaten it is
no more like its own

photosynthesis
than anything else.

Dan Rattelle is a New England poet. His first collection, Painting Over the Growth Chart, is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books. You can follow him on Twitter @DanRattelle.