Ekphrastic Challenge

August 31, 2023

“Aphorisms Thrown into the Eye of the Blizzard” by Tamara RaidtPosted by

Here I Go by Elizabeth Hlookoff, painting of a woman walking into a swirling yellow light

Image: “Here I Go” by Elizabeth Hlookoff. “Aphorisms Thrown into the Eye of the Blizzard” was written by Tamara Raidt for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Tamara Raidt

APHORISMS THROWN INTO THE EYE OF THE BLIZZARD

1. A girl walks into a blizzard of waltzing lights.
The other end of the tunnel is not as near as you think.
 
2. If you stare at the sun you’ll see a Cyclops face.
Ulysses and Nobody are the same person.
 
3. A girl doesn’t need to introduce herself to strangers.
Men often forget to ask for permission.
 
4. A girl disappeared next door and was never found again.
That is not true. She was found in a park.
 
5. She was found dead in a park behind buzzing bushes.
Words and their order matter.
 
6. At mass the priest made everyone stand up and pray.
Her coffin smelled like cheap wood.
 
7. Someone told me she now lives in the sky.
I do not believe they got it right.
 
8. So Ulysses said Nobody with the confidence of a lying man.
And the witnesses saw nobody, they saw nobody in a park.
 
9. I’m almost sure where she lives now.
Please let it not be behind baseboards of sprung floors.
 
10. The sun is as round as bellies can get.
There are as many stars as versions of what happened.
 
11. One version is my favorite and it goes like this:
A girl walks into a blizzard of waltzing lights.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
July 2023, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “When I chose ‘Aphorisms Thrown into the Eye of the Blizzard’ as my winner for the Ekphrastic Challenge this month, I knew I’d have to give a disclaimer: I love this poem but I’m not sure I’m equipped for it, and that’s partly because–brace yourselves–I’ve never read the Odyssey, which the poet clearly references with great significance. While I can’t do justice to the layers of meaning here, I am very compelled by the profundity I can sense, if not fully grasp. I enjoy the way this poem unfolds, the language and content becoming more open and revealing, and the way most lines are strong enough to stand alone–‘The sun is as round as bellies can get’ is a poem in and of itself. The facelessness of the female figure in the painting and the abstract nature of the swirling circle she exists within are elements that strike me as dark and haunting, and I find ‘Aphorisms …’ to have that same sense of evocative unease.”

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August 24, 2023

“Fighting the Wind” by Teresa BreedenPosted by

Here I Go by Elizabeth Hlookoff, painting of a woman walking into a swirling yellow light

Image: “Here I Go” by Elizabeth Hlookoff. “Fighting the Wind” was written by Teresa Breeden for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Teresa Breeden

FIGHTING THE WIND

The trick is not to.
Not to struggle, thrusting
the anvil of your
 
body against the
gale, not to compete, but to
sway and bend, threading
 
the edge of the air,
welcoming dishevelment.
Who is in charge of
 
corralling the squall
into meager breezes, these
air conditioned spaces?
 
Who is bold enough
to slam open the windows
let the shouting in?
 
You want to be brave.
But you yearn also to curl
beneath the blanket
 
of wind, a small fold,
your breath a small sigh beneath
the world’s loud exhale
 
and also
to be the window
it shoves into and through, a
portal for the sky.
 
The wind reminds you
of what you can be, tousled
dismantled,
a being
 
that can continually
be remade.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
July 2023, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Elizabeth Hlookoff: “The poem grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I’m a big proponent of the old ‘less is more’ adage. I love the spare, simple language the poet uses to convey a Zen like wisdom while invoking a way of being. I particularly love the line, welcoming dishevelment.'”

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July 27, 2023

“Image of a Woman Along a Sidewalk” by Jason BrunnerPosted by

Untold Stories by Judith Fox, collage photograph of woman with a door lock over her face

Image: “Untold Stories” by Judith Fox. “Image of a Woman Along a Sidewalk” was written by Jason Brunner for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Jason Brunner

IMAGE OF A WOMAN ALONG A SIDEWALK

“She’s too pretty to be missing,”
my father said as we walked past the poster,
 
in that offhanded way that made my cheek twitch.
I wondered what malady made him say it—
 
maybe an old fleck of lead paint had lodged itself
in just the right part of his brain,
 
or he was choking on his own Adam’s apple
and didn’t think to cover his mouth.
 
Not ten steps into my speculation,
he stopped to talk to a shop owner
 
who was installing new locks on her door,
and she gestured across the street
 
to a vape shop with a plastic tarp
taped over its missing center pane.
 
It shuddered in the wind
with the same enthusiasm
 
as a sheet of glass in the moment
that a rock strikes it, and it shatters.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
June 2023, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “What first caught my eye in this poem was the author’s depiction of the subject of this artwork as a missing person. The figure in Fox’s piece has a look in her eyes that strikes me as both haunted and searching, as if the victim of some unknown horror, which made it easy to envision this enigmatic face on a missing person poster. I was also impressed by the line ‘he was choking on his own Adam’s apple / and didn’t think to cover his mouth’ and how it parallels the image of the door keyhole as a mouth. What will stay with me most, though, is the quietly philosophical nature of the last two stanzas–the idea of the aftermath of a violent act having ‘the same enthusiasm’ as the act itself.”

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July 25, 2023

“Girl Is Glued to Door” by William RossPosted by

Untold Stories by Judith Fox, collage photograph of woman with a door lock over her face

Image: “Untold Stories” by Judith Fox. “Girl is Glued to Door” was written by William Ross for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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William Ross

GIRL IS GLUED TO DOOR

There are things I still don’t understand
about you. Your mouth would tell me,
but there has been a violence, your
voice punched away for being
in the wrong place, a darkness thrown
 
in spatters and now your face. Like a
wanted poster, you stare out, hair swept
back so you see clearly,
confronting the world head-on. Are you
followed? Are you hunted?
 
I’ve been combing dispatches,
the cryptic signals you send:
 
the flannel shirt, choice of lumberjacks
and grunge musicians, plaid considered
dangerous in some circles;
the skull pendant on a string.
 
And messages from a hunter of images,
ones you did not intend:
 
the fierce defiance of an armoured door,
blunt violence of a ragged hole
blasted through your likeness,
a documentary record torn open, raw
 
threshold revealed. The voice shouting:
Entry is Trespass.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
June 2023, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Judith Fox: “The poem I selected for the June Ekphrastic Challenge is the well-crafted and insightful ‘Girl is Glued to Door.’ It wasn’t an easy choice, there were numerous beautiful and intelligent entries, but the poem skillfully echoes and expands on the mysteries and tensions in the poster I photographed; in its placement over a shocking red lock and useless door. The poem opens with a simple and engaging observation: ‘There are things I still don’t understand about you’ and continues with thoughtful questions of the subject: ‘Are you Followed? Are you hunted?’ and observations: ‘the cryptic signals you send.’ The powerful final line particularly resonated with me: ‘The voice shouting: Entry is Trespass.'”

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June 29, 2023

“What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our Stars” by Dick WestheimerPosted by

A Lonesome Border by Carmella Dolmer, marker drawing of two shadowy figures looking down into a dark hole

Image: “A Lonesome Border” by Carmella Dolmer. “What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our Stars” was written by Dick Westheimer for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2023, and selected as an Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Dick Westheimer

WHAT THE ASTROLOGER FAILED TO SEE IN OUR STARS

The astrologer told us not to marry.
She said we would burn
one another in an astrological
furnace. She traced her finger
 
over the spider’s web chart
she’d drawn, showing one of our
rising signs made of dry tinder,
and mine, that of a match. Our choice
 
would be to burn or alternately fall
into a hole so deep that the only way
out would be fire. Of course, not even
this promise of planets in catastrophe
 
could dissuade us heated lovers
from each other’s flesh. We had this
fantasy of one day becoming gray-haired,
shade-tree sitting folk.
 
But what is a zodiac sign
other than a random pattern of stars?
And what is a horoscope other than
a dowser with no water to find?
 
And a star? It is the pressing
of the smallest parts of us
until there is fusion, heat where
once was none—and the stuff
 
of more stars, or maybe, like us,
now a quiet binary, living
out our graying days illuminated,
mostly, in each other’s orbit.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
May 2023, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “The best ekphrastic poems leap into something new without losing touch with the original image, so that it’s often not immediately clear whether the poem or visual art was created first. Like a binary star, they appear as one. Dick Westheimer manages that with a poignant extended metaphor that doubles over itself several times. On its own, the poem is full of memorable lines, but the addition of the drawing makes for a brilliant singular object.”

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May 25, 2023

“The World Beneath” by Devon BalwitPosted by

All of Us by Lou Storey, a complex pastoral landscape of simplified images of towns and fields with a quilt-like quality

Image: “All of Us” by Lou Storey. “The World Beneath” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Devon Balwit

THE WORLD BENEATH

Peel the disappointed world
back to its precursor—a child’s
 
town of bright primaries, streets
where the sun finds no impediment
 
and the wind none richer,
none poorer. No one suffers
 
or dies there—not even one
invisible dog sniffing the blue
 
salt air. The boats in the harbor,
the phone poles, the hills
 
and the houses all speak
a language before language,
 
that tuneful hum above
the shapes in a board-book.
 
There even shadows hesitate
to fall, mother nowhere
 
in sight, the afternoon lazy
and long.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
April 2023, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Megan O’Reilly: “As the title indicates, the poet imagines Lou Storey’s colorful and complex piece as depicting a ‘precursor’ to our current world (‘the disappointed world’), a more pure and essential civilization, and after viewing it through that lens, I can’t see it any other way. I found the language here to be irresistibly interesting, effortless lines that so aptly describe a place that doesn’t quite exist but is simultaneously more real than reality. I was particularly struck by ‘the houses all speak / a language before language, / that tuneful hum above / the shapes in a board-book,’ which I interpret as an incredible expression of the primitive way we experience the world as pre-verbal children, and a passage that will stick in my mind for a long time.”

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May 18, 2023

“Sestina” by Amanda QuaidPosted by

All of Us by Lou Storey, a complex pastoral landscape of simplified images of towns and fields with a quilt-like quality

Image: “All of Us” by Lou Storey. “Sestina” was written by Amanda Quaid for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Amanda Quaid

SESTINA

We buried him behind the church
before the carnies came to town.
Now at night, you can hear the laughter
all the way to Lover’s Lane and past my house.
I miss the quiet, if I ever really had it.
They tell me it’s the sound of progress.
 
My Daddy once measured my progress
on a worn-down wall inside the church.
He used a pencil to mark it,
confirming that I was the shortest kid in town.
Then he drove us back to our house—
the way was longer then—and laughter
 
bandied back and forth between us, laughter
like there had been progress
toward something like friendship, our house
a little more like a home than a church
that day. At that time in our town,
men kept to themselves, and that’s all there was to it.
 
I’ve heard there’s a village, though I’ve never seen it,
where boys run naked by the sea, and laughter
tumbles forth from the carnelian huts in town.
On warm June days, I wonder if progress
will take me there, where church
can be found not in a building or house
 
but in bodies, in eyes and in beauties that house
secrets, and some days I want that so much that it
hurts. Could bodies be church,
I wonder, could voices, could laughter
be church, and is it a yielding to progress
to forfeit this town
 
and find, I suppose, a different town,
a brightly-colored candy apple house
where I could feel the call of progress
move in me and with it
joy and life and song and laughter
in this body I could come to call my church?
 
But a town, in spite of progress, has a gate, and it
becomes a little higher every year. At night, the laughter
reaches all the way to my house past the church.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
April 2023, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Lou Storey: “I don’t paint to know myself better, but the poem ‘Sestina’ somehow excavates a hidden (and true) foundation of emotion beneath my painting ‘All of Us,’ offering a narrative fueled with longing, a need to be free of all unjust measures, to be someplace ‘where boys run naked by the sea, and laughter / tumbles forth from the carnelian huts in town’—a place unreachable, like the ‘candy apple’ house, a landscape of if only. This poem prompts a kaleidoscope of feelings and I love that.”

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