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      June 28, 2018Dispatch from an Inland UniversityJen Jabaily-Blackburn

      Image: “Message in a Bottle” by Jen Ninnis. “Dispatch from an Inland University” was written by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2018, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      First thing they do:
      they rust
      the bright out of you.
       
      Your uniform almost
      a tourist’s,
      color-corrected
       
      to minimize joy.
      You’re rewired, and then
      to imagine
       
      you don’t know it,
      you dirty bomb, you,
      excites them.
       
      A hand raised up
      to the ear
      mimics boredom.
       
      They are so pleased
      to be launched
      ahead like this,
       
      so delighted to play
      sailor, to lay
      groundwork. So charmed
       
      to be met, to get to speak
      and speak and wait
      for no reply.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “I fell in love with this poem after reading just the first three lines—the enjambment, the image, the rhythm, the rhyme. A poem doesn’t have to be quotable to be great, but what a great quote! And then I also loved the way the poem doubles-down on the painting’s despair—even a hopeless message in a bottle is a fantasy so far from the sea. The rest of the poem is intimately ambiguous in its self-dialogue, and feels like a real window into the speaker’s thoughts. Is the mood a over-indulgent melodrama, comically self-aware, or is it expressing a genuine melancholy? Either way, the poem reminds me of times when it’s all of that at once, before closing with another great stanza that lives up to the promise of the first.”

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