Kathryn Rantala

Kathryn Rantala has work currently in Iowa Reviw, Notre Dame Review, Field, Crowd, Pindelyboz and others. She is the founder and co-editor of Snow Monkey, an Eclectic Journal.

Vaudeville

1. The Improvisers

Your hair parted like the arcs of a fireboat,

Your hands squared off on your lap,

A window worries by waves,

And I was frightened alright,

Sitting still as a line

A serial dot

A partial shark dinner

While you spit out the bits and pieces

In public.

Then you darkened calculably,

A concentric dart, confident retro

Smirking at bridges and

The foam of my hat,

The fractions of water resolving

In narrowing eyes.

But you were surprised

When you snapped your fingers

That the ambiguous water taxi

Had already left

And was now a bobbing

Anemone sidecar

Sprung from depth to top;

And that this groundling was up,

Postprandially taking the air

In all of her skin.

By Degrees

Everything I've ever seen is snow

and I've seen everything.

It may not look like much,

you may not call it war,

or famine or flood or the

loves of our heads of state,

but our practical gods

have laid it out in the snow

in its untranslatable self;

have shown how it shifts

how it skiis on clouds or ground,

how it is equally mine

and me

Sometimes I feel heat

and sometimes cold.

Both serve me equally.

But as a practical matter,

thinking it over,

considering everything,

give me snow.

And a lot of dark.

A mate if you can find one.

Fraught

They gathered the rift of the sea. They invited the hyphenated

Victorian for dinner and her scabeous footman. Sometimes the

cardinal with his Mercurio, fumbling in his contellatory web, liked

apples. Wanda mined the orchard with thresher teeth and goat's

milk, David's bright smile, all of it combusting daily, a headlamp of

crows for canaries. The shaft of #7 was crumbled in song, his

Lamborghini and framboise, another sign. Her father signaling,

over here, over here, this is where we are dead and there was ham

with the bone in for dinner. She asked, David, have you ever been

to the sea, and yes, he had curdled brine for breakfast. He longed

to go weeding again in the she-rocks. She drowned thoughtlessly.

He forgave her, there was Alicia, her dim sister, the roto tiller of

his bowels. Think, if she had not been also dead, oh, how

glorious. But this was 1857, and anything was still possible.

I Think I Could Be a Finn

I think I could be a Finn.

Yes,

I made everything I own,

and replicas,

and can make them again and again

if I need to

and someday I will

I will always need to

though my heart

in its muffled parts

wants none of it anyway.

It's just that I need to have them.

2. The Scriptwriters

"Here," he said, "is the new collection of stories. Everything you could want: thieves, parrots,

painters, politicos, baristas, mummers, bricklayers, millers, cyclists and gypsy carpenters."

"No bananas?" the other asked.

"No."

"Then there are no stories."

Offstage:

Psst. What is it?

It’s "The Anemone Sidecar."

Again?

Yes.

Don’t look at it.

Cripes!

What’s the matter?

Stepped in something.

Smells like a banana.

Email Poetry

Should I know the meaning of the diagram?

Who assigns the gods their godlike qualities?

And do I dare to embed

Or eat a peach.

Ah! If goldengrove were yet unleaving

Our piecemeal wanwood, oh,

My dear, sweet Margaret…

Goldengrove!

I vowed never to speak his name again.

Not after that night along the Mohawk,

The water so dark one could hardly see the eels.

And there he stood,

The outline of his body

Stark against the potting shed.

It always shudders me to hit Send

When I know you will read me.

The Bus

The man sitting next to me

is pale,

his scars emptied today with the milk;

his nose a triangle

alerting the way to business.

The man sitting next to me

is a Khan.

His smile remembers the pillage

of last night.

His eyes caress some happy violence.

The man sitting next to me has tattoos.

Has puppets in ink

on each arm.

He flashed his pass and boarded

in an orderly way, but now!

His puppets!

He turns his wrists outside and they jump!

His arms inside, and they sit!

Six or more blocks of Punch 'N Judy,

then his hand flies up to the cord.

He pulls! We stop! He leaves!

The best on the bus:

Master Puppeteer.

Kathryn Rantala