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      October 24, 2019Artifacts from the Buffalo Trunk Mfg. Co. (Defunct)Rachel Welton

      Image: “Loss for Words” by Asher ReTech. “Artifacts from the Buffalo Trunk Mfg. Co. (Defunct)” was written by Rachel Welton for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2019, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
      When my grandmother learned
      I was sewing for a living,
      she took down a suitcase
      from the garage rafters and
      make me poke my fingers
      into its crowded corners
      to feel the still-fine stitching.
      Her father, she said, sewed linings for luggage
      until the dust of a thousand snipped
      threads settled in his lungs
      and choked him out of the shop.
      He gave each child a suitcase and packed
      them off to a stranger’s farm
      as though sewing was tuberculosis
      in the tenement air: catching.
       
      I looked up the company that killed him.
      Turns out they did the fabric
      linings for caskets, too.
       
      Now, in my dark studio, breathing in lint
      as feather-fine as all the Polish words
      my grandmother forgot, I see
      him weigh his last paycheck’s dollars
      and debate: a coffin
      just long enough to lie down in
      or six small suitcases?
      The first a kind of luggage
      for the children to bury grief in,
      the second, luggage to carry
      old grief into new houses.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Asher ReTech

      “I think endings are as important as the beginnings. How a thing closes, how an event is finalised, how we say goodbye, is just as critical as how it all began. I like to explore abandoned places because they are full of stories, the last bastion of final notes. The image of carrying grief with you to a new place, for me, was melancholy without being maudlin. If anything this is admitting the truth of what we all do. We carry bits of bad memories attached to things we should have long since discarded. I was struck by how many poems used the suitcase as metaphor for immigration, while poignant and well written, they did not strike the same chord for me as “Artifacts”. They were emotionally strong but my personal bias certainly kept me closer to this one. Very few poems had the actual context of the suitcase, not that I expected them to. But it was interesting to see how others saw this moment versus the actual location and what I found. One poem spoke of a house fire and the collapse of the building, which was eerily accurate. In the end, however, after reading them all several times, I kept coming back to the final lines of ‘Artifacts’ and I loved them. There is a real sense of connection with the past. It’s an honest embrace of the good and bad. I look to the old places and things seeking that connection too. There’s a grace in holding onto your personal context and a dignity in not hiding from sadness that sometimes comes from that.”

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