[ “I was trying to understand, on a smaller scale than national
politics,” writes Vermont poet Rebecca Starks, “how an obvious
falsehood can seem obviously true to someone else.” ]
[[link removed]]
PORTSIDE CULTURE
SPEAKING OF DISINFORMATION
[[link removed]]
Rebecca Starks
November 24, 2020
Rattle
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]
_ “I was trying to understand, on a smaller scale than national
politics,” writes Vermont poet Rebecca Starks, “how an obvious
falsehood can seem obviously true to someone else.” _
,
Speaking of Disinformation
By Rebecca Starks
I am remembering for a friend
who grew up in a household
with an alcoholic father
whose illness was kept secret
from the kids, only the mom knew
why all the copies of the key
to the car trunk were broken off
but one, the one he kept with him—
I am remembering for her
how one day while the kids
watched cartoons on the couch
they found a half-empty
vodka bottle wedged between the cushions
and brought it to their mom,
not knowing what it was,
and how later that evening when
the father had them all stand
in front of the couch where he sat
on one cushion, their mom on the other,
hands folded in her lap, a cardboard
storage box resting on the crack
between them, and once everyone was still
proceeded to explain
that this bottle was a prize
he was meant to give out
at an awards ceremony, it had come
in this cardboard box, with its two
sets of flaps he opened
to demonstrate how it must have
slipped out and fallen between
the cushions, where some of it
evidently spilled and evaporated—
how the kids wouldn’t have remembered
beyond that day to this
except that it seemed so strange
and formal, the way he called
a press conference about it
when it was plain as day:
the box, the bottle, the crack
between the cushions.
Rebecca Starks is the author of the poetry collections Time Is Always
Now, a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, and Fetch, Muse,
forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her poems and short fiction have
appeared in Baltimore Review, Ocean State Review, Slice Literary, Crab
Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Winner of
Rattle‘s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, she is a co-founder
of Mud Season Review and on the board of Sundog Poetry. She works as a
freelance editor and workshop leader; teaches for the Osher Institute
of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont; and plays
violin in the Me2 Orchestra, in support of its mission to reduce
stigma surrounding mental illness. She lives with her family in
Richmond, Vermont.
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]
INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT
Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit portside.org [[link removed]]
Twitter [[link removed]]
Facebook [[link removed]]
########################################################################
[link removed]
To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]