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      December 28, 2023(Sub)DivisionChristine Crockett

      Image: “Aerial II” by Scott Wiggerman. “(Sub)Division” was written by Christine Crockett for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      On a blueprint stark
      as a lunar footprint,
       
      my father signed up
      for its perfect math:
       
      plots of earth wedged
      into open arcs,
       
      arenas unmarred
      yet by tragedy.
       
      Even then, I moved
      in exponentials. Things
       
      blurred or bent in me,
      wrecked the lines,
       
      found romance in spandrels
      where misfits played,
       
      the spillover edges
      of trapped space.
       
      Broken is better,
      inevitable as cells
       
      that spilt, subdivide,
      thin until frayed
       
      tissues collapse
      and seepage sets in,
       
      the way children leave
      on well-lit roads
       
      out of the still dance
      of perfect math,
       
      those centers that
      will not hold.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the series editor, Megan O'Reilly

      “Scott Wiggerman’s image is so thoughtfully abstract, it sparks a lot of imagination, and I appreciated how poet Christine Crockett took that imaginativeness in multiple directions. The image invokes ‘a lunar footprint,’ ‘cells / That split, subdivide,’ and, most profound, ‘the way children leave/on well-lit roads.’ Even when not directly describing it, Crockett’s sharp writing reflects the subversively geometric tone of Wiggerman’s piece: ‘I moved in exponentials,’ she writes, ‘Things / Blurred or bent in me.’ Exquisitely epitomized in the last couplet is what I interpret as a main theme of both poem and image: the dance between chaos and order.”

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