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      February 17, 2022Emotional Self-Regulation, with Birds and Gifted ChildSean Kelbley

      Image: “Dark Figures” by Matthew King. “Emotional Self-Regulation, with Birds and Gifted Child” was written by Sean Kelbley for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2022, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
      It’s called Vacation in Your Head,
      but first the teacher makes him visit
       
      hers. “Give me a big thumbs-up
      when you have figured where I am”
       
      she sing-songs, and the boy knows
      it will be mundane, someplace
       
      pedestrian. “Oh! I feel sunshine
      on my face, and water licking
       
      at my feet.” The boy cannot believe
      how long it takes his class to realize
       
      they’re at the beach. “I hear seagulls!
      I smell hotdogs grilling: yum!” And
       
      since he has to wait, inside his head
      the boy becomes a seagull—no,
       
      a Steller’s Eagle—swooping,
      shitting on the teacher’s cookout buns
       
      and every kid that ever laughed
      at his vocabulary. “That’s correct,”
       
      the teacher says. “I’m at the beach!
      Where would you go, if your body
       
      had Big Feelings?” The eagle wheels
       
      and shits especially on Braxton Griggs,
      then wings to Maine, feathers lofting
       
      like the pages of a dictionary. It’s nice
      to be the biggest bird. He synchs his
       
      breathing with the ocean’s waves.
      From far away, a voice asks
       
      “Where are you vacationing?”
      “The beach,” a seagull cries, and then
       
      another seagull cries “the beach,”
      and all the seagulls cry “the beach!”
       
      “The beach,” the boy says, opening
      his eyes to brown Nebraska. But
       
      in his head it’s snowing, hard.
      Against the rules he pulls his hood up,
       
      ducks and turns, so no one notices
      his sharp resplendent beak.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Matthew King

      “It was a pleasure and a privilege to read these variously wonderful poems and many were hard to pass up, but ‘Emotional Self-Regulation, with Birds and Gifted Child’ hooked me with its Steller’s Eagle, reeled me in with its comic chorus of chanting seagulls (although, to be fair, I feel like the gulls must think the geese are unbearably dumb; these things are all relative!), and won’t let me go. I had a very different experience as a ‘gifted kid’—from an early age I was in a ‘gifted program’ (one of my old friends from which was the first to inform me of the enormous lost Asian eagle that had made its way to Maine) and always felt like I was surrounded by bigger fish. As an unsheltered adult my fish-out-of-water frustrations are complicated by concerns about elitism to which the kid in the poem is forgivably, gloriously oblivious, but boy does that biggest bird take me with it on its oceanic voyage, and oh how I love the birds that turn up their beaks at winter vacations to warmer climes. It’s hard to relax when it’s snowing in your head, but who wants to relax, anyway? ‘Big Feelings’—if indeed!”

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