Image: “Self-Portrait as a Prep School Llama” by James Valvis. “The Grass Ceiling” was written by Kevin West for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Comment from the artist, James Valvis: “I love the mixture of whimsy and woe in this poem. I’m especially impressed by the whimsy. Poets are often too serious. It’s a llama in a suit! It’s ridiculous. (Kind of like its artist.) What’s not ridiculous is the poet’s skill and tight wordplay. Kudos to the winner, and a hearty thanks to all the others that made the choice its own challenge.”
Ron Koertge: “A while ago I read at a retirement center with some friends. Afterwards, someone mentioned the Faulkner quote: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ I wasn’t surprised when I got home, sat down and wrote the first draft of ‘The Afterlife.’”
John Goode: “I was standing in the back of a pick-up truck unloading lumber for a construction site. The sun was blazing down and I was reciting Lorca’s poem ‘The Old Lizard’ under my breath. I knew then I would have to leave town and write my own poems.”
Willie James King: “Mary Oliver’s American Primitive became my first writing teacher. Reading her poems taught me that it was okay to write about the things that really moved, that I cared about. Once I was bitten by the bug, although it started decades ago, I haven’t tired of it since.”
“Insomnia Chronicles XXVI” by Erin MurphyPosted by Rattle
Erin Murphy
INSOMNIA CHRONICLES XXVI
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. Some of my friends are trying Dry January. Dryuary. Others are sober curious. There’s a mock cocktail called a Phony Negroni. It’s made with non-alcoholic gin. Phony Negroni. Phony baloney. When I was eight, my brother and I were walking by a house in our neighborhood when suddenly a slab of baloney sailed through the air and stuck to a chain link fence. There were no people or animals in sight. Such a funny word, baloney. What’s Biden’s favorite saying? Malarkey. So hokey. But then, even the word hokey is hokey. Monday we’ll inaugurate a felon the same day we celebrate Martin Luther King. Felonious Trump. For years we’d pass the brick rancher and say There’s the baloney house the way you might observe that it’s raining or snowing. We humans can normalize anything.
Erin Murphy: “The baloney house was a mid-century brick ranch that was nearly identical to my childhood home. I’ve wanted to write about it for years, and the upcoming inauguration finally gave me the opportunity.” (web)
Mathias Nelson: “When I was little I used to act like a monkey, holding my mother’s hand and doing chimp talk. Things have changed, but I still act like an idiot in attempt to make her smile when I can.Sometimes it works, and, well, other times … she calls me a stupid sonof- a-bitch.” (web)