“Poetry and I met when I was fifteen and Poetry a couple of thousand or so. We’ve had our ups and downs, but I still hanker for Poetry, and new poems arrive when they feel like it. I try to help them land where other people can hear them too.”
“I’m not formally trained as a scientist, but have spent two decades working in science and natural history museums, experiences that have inspired a good number of my poems. These places are extraordinarily rich environments for poets. Among my many museum adventures, I’ve created lightning, worked with bobcats and great horned owls and spent plenty of time around Egyptian mummies. Where I am now, at the Milwaukee Public Museum, we’re the only venue in the upper Midwest outside of Chicago exhibiting mummies. So a good deal of the programming I’m involved with focuses on them. My poem, ‘Mummies,’ is based on questions I’ve heard from students visiting the museum.”
“Listening on my car radio to a doctor overwhelmed by new casualties in her Gaza City hospital, I felt a hint of the moment in that remote place, as if it were not far at all. And of course it isn’t! But we’ll always need to tune in, not out, to know it. My poem posits the light by which we can see through apparent distances.”
March 22, 2025Avant-GardeCourtney Kampa
A man slouches before a uni-colored canvas
with the perplexity of a stumped technician
gaping at the unremittingly blank screen
of a television. He adjusts his stance,
a double antenna, in search for reception.
Its artist has spread the blackest paint—probably
in fistfuls with her bare hands—until every inch
was filled, or emptied, with dark. “A negation
of art,” spouts a museum curator, but by now our guy
has stopped listening. Maybe the artist felt a wound
deserves a close-up. The threaded color
of sutures—dark stitches laid down like train tracks
across a forehead. Maybe she wants answers
but isn’t getting any. She’s in the tomb on Good Friday, before
the stone’s rolled back. Or maybe it’s feminine—
like pantyhose, or the womb. Something about birth.
Or death—that dark hound curled up at her feet.
Could be she has a black lab, and just really likes
her dog. Or it’s the view from inside a chamber
of the heart that has sealed itself off. Or it’s cancer.
Maybe she’s ruptured, and knows first hand
what a rip looks like, having watched the hole of herself
stretching even wider. It’s possible she’s been jilted
and has an axe to grind, and that this is a portrait
of her ex, that anatomical hole, himself.
Perhaps it’s a memory of being kissed—kissed well.
The lashes on a smolder-eyed man. Maybe it’s motherhood:
the charred casserole, smudges across the leather
in the back seat of her car, a sugary space a first-lost
tooth creates. Maybe the money’s gone
and she’s got kids in college. Maybe she’s divorced
and this is the hue of lost custody. Maybe it’s the bald-spot
in the ozone, and she wants her climate back. What if
she’s painted sacrifice: the gap plowed into Adam’s side
to create a second life; the rib removed from a girl named Eve
to create a wasp-like waist. Maybe it’s an un-filled cavity,
or the huge, open pores on her dentist’s nose.
Perhaps something very personal occurred here.
Steam-rolled asphalt. A star-scrubbed sky.
Either she wants to say nothing, or say too much.
Either her world keeps ending, or it’s always beginning.
Whatever it is, the man’s face awakens with what looks like an answer.
Taking two steps back in his trainers, he reaches
into his jeans for a ballpoint pen—a moment of light
“Many of my recent poems appear to be spiritual tool kits for the reader and this one can be found in the do-it-yourself aisle of the poetry store … Like all my recent poems, it was written in that liminal space between night and morning and though it’s very deliberative in its speech it arrived almost in one piece—or one uninterrupted voice. From the angel?”
March 20, 2025At the End of the World Is Forgetting Dick Westheimer
In the abandoned stacks of the abandoned wing of the library where abandoned books are kept—there is quiet beyond the finger-to-the-lips shush, beyond the quiet thrum of the furnace deep in the womb of this place, beyond the low hum of traffic seeping from the streets. No more sound comes from between the pages of the tomes. The dust motes whisper in dust mote tones wondering where the words have gone. There are no readers here, no sound of a novel sliding from between its companions off a shelf, no lips of a Sophomore Lit. student mouthing the final lines of a poem, no click of the lights going off when the last librarian leaves for the night. This is darker than the province of the dead, darker than between the leaves of journals and books. This is the darkness of forgetting, of deep space with no stars, of the rocky core of a dusty dead planet.
parts of speech
between
silence and breathing
Image: “Abandoned Library” by Walter Arnold. “At the End of the World Is Forgetting” was written by Dick Westheimer for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2025, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
“While reading ‘At the End of the World is Forgetting’ I am transported back to the moment in time when I captured this image. The descriptions of the ‘low hum of traffic” and the whispering dust motes help place the reader (and the viewer in this case) into the scene. As an artist I am always trying to draw people into my scenes, to have them feel like they can look around and dwell in these spaces even for just a fleeting moment. These words help complete that process in an eloquent way that adds to the emotion that I was hoping to convey in the photograph. I also particularly love the lines ‘the darkness of forgetting’ and ‘… between silence and breathing.’ I’d love to use these lines as titles of future photos, with permission from the author of course!”
