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      December 31, 2019A CaricatureBola Opaleke

      Image: “Dog Walking” by Alice Pettway. “A Caricature” was written by Bola Opaleke for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2019, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
      Where I came from,
      the street is another religion
       
      & my feet know
      all its worship songs
      by heart. It effuses a silence that arouses
       
      the slumbering houses;
      make me watch their breasts as they rise
       
      & fall. My moment
      of peace & tranquility is
      when I can look the most human
       
      behind the chromatic harmony
      of car honks. Am I not a common sight, marveled
       
      at colors; yellow grass, green trees,
      red flowers? I know whatever is not black
      or white begs another name. & before I got pollinated
       
      inside this religion, I developed a new body
      which blinks only once a day like the streetlamp
       
      of a graveyard. Surrounded
      by shadows, I am not as lonely as people
      think. I have a skeleton dog lost to the street as I.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “The power of this poem lives within the title that undercuts it. As I read, I get lost in this idea of the street as a religion. I’m lulled by the blinking streetlamp in a graveyard and forget that what I’m lulled by is only a caricature—and that was always the tension within the photograph: that interplay between the scene and our interpretation of it. This is a poem with several layers of meaning, about the scene, about ourselves as viewers, and about the power of narrative to cloud our thinking.”

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