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      January 23, 2020Greetings UnansweredJoshua Martin

      Image: “Bound” by Natalie Seabolt. “Greetings Unanswered” was written by Joshua Martin for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2019, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
      That December of salt, there were letters
      from loan and electric companies,
      letters from clothing stores praising
      their cottons as if pea coats could turn
      lives around, letters from my landlord
      typed in that font that looks half-human
      with its orchestrated imperfections, that read
      Happy Holidays with the insincerity
      of Caesar before the Senate, letters I didn’t open
      because they were addressed to someone else
      who had woken once in the same bedroom at 2 AM
      with the same unshakable thirst,
      the same knotted throat, letters that urged
      action on behalf of some politician
      who, pending a donation, could save us all.
      There were letters that slept uneasy on my table
      like hungry children on pullout couches,
      letters that screamed like prisoners tortured
      by open windows, letters containing
      cards of families I couldn’t remember—
      someone’s son looking past me, smiling,
      Seasons Greetings inked above the photograph
      like a sign outside that hospice in Nitro
      where my grandfather died after a lifetime
      of chemical plants and Wednesdays numb
      in West Virginia. Though his letters burned
      my palm like sulfuric acid, I never opened them
      out of fear they’d be the last I’d read
      of his chicken scratch laid down
      like a seed with his one good hand,
      so I’d bundle his letters and forget them
      in boxes like leaves hanging on
      the one holly left in the meadow
      I never returned to, the wind
      like a blunt letter knife, powerless
      to do anything but save them.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Natalie Seabolt

      “I chose ‘Greetings Unanswered’ because it speaks to a past that is worn and aged, a past that craves to be remembered, a past that has become letters with a hunger all their own. The poem’s language is hungry and wary of how past and present can switch places. The letters of the poem feel kin to those in my photograph—letters that exist in a dimension of urgency, lingering around the speaker’s presence whispering of their importance, but lost to those to whom they were delivered.”

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