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      April 28, 2022Her VanityMarc Alan Di Martino

      Image: “Anonymous Was a Woman” by Natascha Graham. “Her Vanity” was written by Marc Alan Di Martino for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2022, and selected as the Assistant Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
      My mother used to sit like this before
      her vanity, her shoulders bathed
      in blue and pink light, her powdered skin
      dredged in a cloud of talc, breathing it in.
      Oblivious at seventeen, she wanted
      more than anything to look her best
      when Eddie Fisher offered her a Coke
      in his posh Manhattan hotel suite.
      I sat with her in a room off Times Square
      years later, our last outing together
      before the nursing homes enchained her.
      She told me the story—as she said,
      for the umpteenth time—of how she’d met
      the singer whose career nosedived the day
      Elvis broke the charts with “Heartbreak Hotel.”
      They shared a Coke, the story went: his lips
      kissing the weightless ‘O’ of the glass
      bottle which was furtively snatched up
      from where he’d set it down, forgotten it,
      by her swift hand. Later, she told us
      about the talcosis, how it affected
      her breathing. For the rest of her life
      she saw a pulmonologist. I sat there
      letting her regale me with the tale
      of Eddie Fisher for the umpteenth time
      in a cheap hotel room off Times Square,
      a crooked mirror fixed above the sink
      a painting of a woman on the wall
      which might have been her, poised
      at her vanity, poisoning herself for love.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the assistant editor, Megan Green

      “When I read ‘Her Vanity’ and then look at ‘Anonymous Was a Woman,’ it’s so easy to see the poet’s mother, dreamlike in a ‘cloud of talc,’ disrobed and vulnerable but also vibrant and resilient. She seems, in both the painting and the poem, to be frozen in time, at once a youthful beauty and an older woman lost in memory. The poet’s choice of language is deceptively and skillfully effortless: ‘My mother used to sit like this/before her vanity,’ the poem begins, a line that appears simple yet contains layers of music and meaning. The vividness of the narrative and the unspoken questions about the value of beauty combine to create an extraordinary poem that reflects an extraordinary work of art.”

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