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      August 30, 2018Grave of a Tourist TrapHannah V. Norman

      Image: “What Once Was” by Bryan DeLae. “Grave of a Tourist Trap” was written by Hannah V. Norman for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2018, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      We visited the hotel
      and it was a tombstone now.
      We had stayed as
      sunburnt sunglass laden
      tourists when it was
      beachside property,
      and then it was swallowed by
      the dunes and became a relic.
      The tour guide made
      up something about it
      featuring a ballroom
      and library—as if it was
      a palace—but I laughed
      because it had been a few decades
      but I remembered the
      ballroom had been
      converted to storage and
      single rooms. Things become
      more glamorous when they
      are relics, the palace the relic
      of consumerism and sunburn,
      the empty perfume relic of
      her wilting like a flower, only
      not so sweetly, the stack of papers
      a relic of his devotion, the grey
      half moons under his eyes and
      the rivers bulging under his skin.
      I think the manager still lives on the
      top floor, and laughs to see us
      trying to climb a wave of sand,
      trying to convince ourselves that
      the past was beautiful, simply
      because it is
      gone.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “Usually I’m drawn toward the more strange and surprising takes on an image—I like it when the poet finds some dimension of the artwork that I didn’t see myself. This wasn’t the case with ‘Grave of a Tourist Trap,’ which is a good representative of the consensus view: an apocalyptic future that can barely remember the past, extreme climate change expressed or implied. Several other poems even used the same trope of a group of tourists visiting the ruins. But Hannah V. Norman out-wrote them all, with vivid and precise details, an interesting turn in every indispensable line, and an ending that’s just so aphoristically true.”

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