Steven Monte: “This poem came to me as a wall—a line of separated rhyming couplets. That’s often the way it is for me: content suggests a form to me, and then the form influences the content in turn. Starting with the idea of ‘The Wall of China’ and Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ along with the notion of separated rhyming couplets, the poem wrote itself, as strange as that may sound. The stricter the form, the quicker the result—assuming that there is a result. It happens or it doesn’t happen.”
Hayden Saunier: “I had lost my bearings inside the poem I was working on and needed something to power and ground it, but I’d made too big a mess. I’d ruined it. So I let the search take over. The tarantula image is an echo from a poem called ‘Fence’ by Janet Poland and became an apt figure for the mucked, grasping mind.” (web)
Charlotte Matthews: “Since the pandemic, life seems chopped into little shards of time. I write poems to try to capture some of the mishmash and glue it all back together, to make something whole that cannot be broken apart. Thanks for reading.”
Dante Di Stefano: “This poem is about the horrible plane crash this week. I send my thoughts and deepest sympathies to the families of all the victims.” (web)
Robert W. King: “At 70, I find more past coming into the present in my poems and I love it—it’s like living twice. And poetry in general is the perfect place to find the past and present existing together. It was written. It’s being read now. Perfect.” (web)
David Mason: “Nearly 50 years ago, I wrote a poem that began, ‘Forgive me, I have envied Catholics, / raised on Latin and the Plan …’ I’m not sure the envy was real, but as a lapsed Unitarian I sensed something was missing. I’ve been trying to make my own tradition ever since. It is sound-based, and sometimes it is also unsound, but there it is. I like it when a poem defies gravity. Much of what I write is grave enough. Let affection fly!”
“The Boardroom at the Edge of the Field” by Caiti QuatmannPosted by Rattle
Image: “Self-Portrait as a Prep School Llama” by James Valvis. “The Boardroom at the Edge of the Field” was written by Caiti Quatmann for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
__________
Caiti Quatmann
THE BOARDROOM AT THE EDGE OF THE FIELD
The llama arrived late,
a constellation of hay clinging to his cuffs.
No one mentioned it.
The wolf in spectacles adjusted his slide,
a graph of rising hunger
etched in claw marks.
A heron sharpened pencils with its beak;
an eel-shaped pen wriggled across the sparrow’s wing,
its ink spilling like minnows on the table.
The llama presided.
Shoulders square as prairie hills,
his tie red as a wound pulled tight,
or a ribbon of victory—who could say?
The light hit him wrong:
the wool cast mountains of shadow
on the screen where forecasts buzzed like hornets.
“What about expansion?”
the lion growled, pawing at the margins of the map,
the fields already numbered, squared, indexed.
No one dared look outside.
The windows stretched floor to ceiling,
but the glass held them like a throat.
Beyond—
the fields were still wild,
a tide of gold bending to no wind but its own.
“The numbers,” the fox whispered,
his teeth jangling like keys.
The sparrow, wrists bowed by a heavy watch,
tapped her wing in time with the minutes.
The heron scribbled furiously
& ate the pen when the ink ran dry.
But the llama—
his silence pressed against the room like snow,
his voice, when it came,
low as thawing soil:
“What if we stayed here, just a minute more,
before the suit chokes it out?”
They blinked, startled.
The wolf cleared his throat; the fox lit a paw on fire.
The sparrow buckled beneath the weight of time.
Somewhere in the shadows, the lion scratched a map,
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “The absurdism inherent in ‘The Boardroom at the Edge of the Field’ is weighty and philosophical, an appropriate nod to Valvis’ image—a piece of art which, despite the objective ridiculousness of its subject (a llama in a suit), doesn’t feel silly or even playful, but symbolic of an unknown truth. This is not a portrait of comical nonsense, we quickly realize, just a scene we don’t yet fully understand. The way the poet mixes plain, unembellished language with poetic imagery (‘his silence pressed against the room like snow’) enhances the reader’s sense of an off-kilter, unsettling reality. Reading ‘The Boardroom’ feels like reading an allegorical classic ala Animal Farm, but in a medium that allows for more ambiguity and mystery—what’s unexplained is as important as what is.”
