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      July 27, 2023Image of a Woman Along a SidewalkJason Brunner

      Image: “Untold Stories” by Judith Fox. “Image of a Woman Along a Sidewalk” was written by Jason Brunner for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      “She’s too pretty to be missing,”
      my father said as we walked past the poster,
       
      in that offhanded way that made my cheek twitch.
      I wondered what malady made him say it—
       
      maybe an old fleck of lead paint had lodged itself
      in just the right part of his brain,
       
      or he was choking on his own Adam’s apple
      and didn’t think to cover his mouth.
       
      Not ten steps into my speculation,
      he stopped to talk to a shop owner
       
      who was installing new locks on her door,
      and she gestured across the street
       
      to a vape shop with a plastic tarp
      taped over its missing center pane.
       
      It shuddered in the wind
      with the same enthusiasm
       
      as a sheet of glass in the moment
      that a rock strikes it, and it shatters.
       

      —from Ekphrastic Challenge
      June 2023, Editor’s Choice

      __________

      Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “What first caught my eye in this poem was the author’s depiction of the subject of this artwork as a missing person. The figure in Fox’s piece has a look in her eyes that strikes me as both haunted and searching, as if the victim of some unknown horror, which made it easy to envision this enigmatic face on a missing person poster. I was also impressed by the line ‘he was choking on his own Adam’s apple / and didn’t think to cover his mouth’ and how it parallels the image of the door keyhole as a mouth. What will stay with me most, though, is the quietly philosophical nature of the last two stanzas–the idea of the aftermath of a violent act having ‘the same enthusiasm’ as the act itself.”

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the series editor, Megan O'Reilly

      “What first caught my eye in this poem was the author’s depiction of the subject of this artwork as a missing person. The figure in Fox’s piece has a look in her eyes that strikes me as both haunted and searching, as if the victim of some unknown horror, which made it easy to envision this enigmatic face on a missing person poster. I was also impressed by the line ‘he was choking on his own Adam’s apple / and didn’t think to cover his mouth’ and how it parallels the image of the door keyhole as a mouth. What will stay with me most, though, is the quietly philosophical nature of the last two stanzas–the idea of the aftermath of a violent act having ‘the same enthusiasm’ as the act itself.”

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