Nick Rattner

Confession: Exorcist (1973)

a staircase like
a single helix
ribbons into
the living
room where a
young girl pees
on the carpet
outside Baghdad
the U.S. army
drops leaflets
onto a small
town some are
blown through
the excavation
of an ancient city
the priest astronaut
and actress stop
their song
sound of piss
hitting plush
carpet enough
to embarrass
even the piano
that evil might visit
in pajamas in the middle
of Sondheim so far
beyond imagining
its sudden presence
causes laughter
uncanny how
three million leaflets
dropped by helicopters
confuse birds
while three men
in a bazaar
strike an anvil
a man
in a living room
strikes a piano
outside we see
the anvil of
the staircase
below the girl child’s
bedroom window
one priest wrecking
his body on
the steps
a crecendo
of flesh along
concrete
piano keys
the helix’s
missing strand
the exit
on which candles
soon stand
each prying
apart the night
like chisels
burnishing
a supposedly
ancient
sword

Guilt: Alien (1979)

The mother of all survivors
was the monster they let loose,
mouths with mouths in ’em,
incisors big as babies’ arms
dripping rubber cement.

’79, year of the monster,
I, too, came by way of Caesarian,
lifted through viscera (my mother’s
organs having been set in steel pans)
into a world of flame throwers
wielded by intergalactic Marines.

Today the myth lives on
in a few choice T-shirt selections
at the Lizard Lounge on Westheimer.

I lift one from the rack.

Ripley seethes You bitch right at me
and I know it’s true. I only
pretend to want to destroy you.
I am a lamprey dressed in sheep gore.

Learn more about these poems.

Nick Rattner is a livestock manager in upstate New York. His poems, translations, and fiction have appeared in journals including Fence, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Denver Quarterly, and have been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, Kenyon Writers' Workshop, the Breadloaf Translators' Conference, and Spain's Ministry of Education. He was a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, and has translated books by Yvan Yauri, Salvador Elizondo, and Juan Andrés García Román.