Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      March 28, 2024Shoulder MRIElizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

      Image: “Graphing Uncertainty V” by Christine Crockett. “Shoulder MRI” was written by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      It doesn’t hurt it is
      abstract.
       
      The pain
      is toothaches, but
       
      displaced.
      A refugee. There is
       
      a word.
      It’s like a hammer
       
      and a nail, how everything
       
      becomes your
      pain. It sleeps and wakes.
       
      It wakes you up. It goes all
       
      egg-shaped, tastes
      of blood. You
       
      picture pain
      in little threads, tender
       
      as clams. Papier maché. You see
       
      the torn part. No
       
      one knows that it is there. It hates
      this too.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the series editor, Megan O'Reilly

      “Even the title of this poem alone seems to me to resonate with the enigmatically compelling image—the abstract, angular, black-and-white tone reminiscent of an MRI scan. As the piece unfolds, I see an even stronger connection between the two: There’s an objectivity, a detachment, to the way the speaker describes pain, and yet also a vulnerable rawness that comes through, a contrast that reflects the distinction between the black-and-white angularity and the rounded red shape in the center. I love the way the poet writes in mostly clipped, staccato phrases—‘A refugee. There is / a word. / It’s like a hammer’–that don’t bely any feeling, and then the last line is the first time emotion is explicitly introduced, a surprising ending that renders the poem suddenly personal. In image and words alike, there is a beating heart under all this abstraction.”

      →

      Related