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      January 31, 2019Shell Thick and Her Own PlanetAngie Mason

      Image: “Untitled” by Kari Gunter-Seymour. “Shell Thick and Her Own Planet” was written by Angie Mason for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2018, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      There were days
      where she felt like this,
       
      like the weight of an egg
      last in its carton.
       
      It wasn’t out of kindness
      she kept leaving
       
      the last one for him,
      it was a kind of forfeiture.
       
      There was no point
      substituting snake
       
      egg, with milk stone,
      with last of its kind.
       
      Each morning
      she wondered if the day
       
      would pass without
      a crack. Each morning
       
      he would wake
      asking for another.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “My favorite ekphrastic poems are often those that spin the image into an entire world, and Angie Mason manages to do that here in just eighteen slender lines. As in the photograph, we never see the couple whose life as a pair revolves around the planet of the egg, but we can feel the weight of what’s coming. And those line breaks! Each turn is a new crack. The free verse is still verse.”