Idman Omar: “I wrote this poem thinking about all the Somali women from my grandmother’s generation whose lives were very different to mine. It’s about the sacrifices they make simply to survive, ending up perpetually nomads for their whole lives and following a life plan that they don’t map out for themselves at all. Ultimately, they live eternally for everyone but themselves.”
“Resolution of Memory” by Sara DallmayrPosted by Rattle
Image: “Unsatisfied Externals” by J. Stormer. “Resolution of Memory” was written by Sara Dallmayr for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2022, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the editor, Megan O’Reilly: “There is a great deal of ambiguity and mystery in J. Stormer’s etching; I felt it needed a poem that was not too narrative or structured, but more experimental and open to interpretation. Sara Dallmayr’s ‘Resolution of Memory’ fit the bill: I love the way it subverts convention without leaning too far into abstraction, the way it combines concepts like ‘waxed your decency’ with concrete images like ‘watered the last plant alive, waited for tea to steep.’ Like its inspiration, ‘Resolution of Memory’ is just enigmatic enough to be compelling.”
Ted Kooser: “Many years ago I published a poem about field mice moving their nests out of the way of a plow in early spring, and a woman who saw the poem wrote to me and said that she would never again pass a freshly-plowed field without thinking about those mice, and I said to myself, ‘Well, this is to be my job!’ and I have been working at it ever since.” (web)
David Wagoner: “My father was his own home handyman during the Depression, and he wasn’t always successful at it, as our frequently flooded basement often proved. I tried to do the same during my early married years. I sympathize with plumbers, and this poem came out of those feelings.” (web)
Jasmine Khaliq: “During the pandemic, I moved back to my hometown. By April 2021, I knew I was moving away again by July to enter my PhD program at University of Utah, and that I was moving for good, away from my family and the place of my childhood. I wrote every day in April in an effort to preserve my time there, both present and past. That overlapping sense of time I felt being there, and the inability to capture or see everything, despite my best efforts, came out in this poem on April 3rd (while I listened to Caroline Polachek on repeat). Poetry for me is always about this—trying to understand the relationships between the self and others, past selves, place, language itself—all of it, an alchemy.” (web)
Chris Kaiser: “When I heard a piece on NPR’s Think about food waste, I remembered an incident that happened to me when I thought I’d want to pursue restaurant management. It also jogged my memory of times I’ve come face to face with people devising creative ways to assuage their hunger when their income is below the poverty line.”
Heather Bell: “It’s not that current events were ever something I wanted to dwell on, but I got to thinking about all the news articles out there with their sad lines and accusatory photos and I just wanted to stop all of it, right there. Is it wrong to see a deadly thing as beautiful? Maybe that was my point all along—poetry is like that: a news article gone awry that you and only you can rewrite to help someone get through it all, stop crying, begin taking his or her child to the grocery store again and just, in general, wake up.” (web)
