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      January 24, 2019SubstancePeg Duthie

      Image: “Untitled” by Kari Gunter-Seymour. “Substance” was written by Peg Duthie for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2018, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
      I blame the malevolent fairy
      tales where the princess
      always presents a creamy complexion—
      porcelain, silk, satin, dewy
      as unblemished petals—bah.
      And fie on fathoming witches through
      the coarse-and-homely-as-cartons pelts
      of women earning their crow’s feet,
      scaring thieves away without straw men.
      The muscle and mastery needed to stir
      sludge into sustenance, and then to scrub
      the kettle clean enough for brewing cures—
      why is it when boys play with powerful
      powders and brines, it’s honored as chemistry
      rather than cooed at as cookery
      or cursed as conjuring? This is not
      the province of unformed chicks.
      Let me show you
      a shape of a happy ending:
      not the visage of a white washed egg
      but the graying angles and curves
      of a tested cradle,
      the invisible hands
      that clean up whatever’s after.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Kari Gunter-Seymour

      “Full disclosure: I was secretly hoping for a poem that was not so obviously about an egg or the carton, or for that matter a womb or chicken. Maybe a poem that discussed texture or extremes of angle and light, as those topics often come up in conversation about this image at exhibitions. A poem that was not above roaming beyond the edges of the photograph. ‘Substance’ does all that. It dances me in and out of the frame, asks the timeless question, discusses each element so cleverly ‘a creamy complexion—,’ ‘the coarse-and-homely,’ the ‘graying angles and curves’ and lands so solid ‘… a tested cradle/ the invisible hands …’ I could go on and on. Brava!”

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