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      December 26, 2019The Anatomy of EndingsAnoushka Subbaiah

      Image: “Dog Walking” by Alice Pettway. “The Anatomy of Endings” was written by Anoushka Subbaiah for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2019, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
      Even tender mornings are labor here,
      something to be fought for. Light must erode
      itself through a membrane of smog, thick
      and silent as blood. The newspaper once called
      this sheet of pollution soup and I imagined
      us all broiled and begging in a great vat of the city,
      our tongues shrinking into white onions and vermicelli.
      Still, in the sharp glaze of summer, we will learn
      to stand outside ourselves. To measure distance
      with past-tenses: this was once the video rental store,
      some long-haired banyan trees, a boy. My country
      is dressed as a body-sized nothing. Can one know
      crevices, interludes, before any language or name?
      The dark eyes of potholes. Urine-streaked alleys.
      I’ve forgiven the stench, the sting of it all—
      it as much mine as anyone else’s. Stray dogs whip
      like ribbed arrows through metal carcasses, make feasts
      from boiled peanuts wrapped in damp tissue.
      We’ve all fed ourselves with the spill of something
      and called it enough. Yesterday it was the smoke
      I rinsed out from my hair. Tomorrow it will be a stranger
      with a face like an oil lamp—so burnished and flickering
      that I’ll mistake him for a fallen sun. It’s a dull hurt,
      to keep walking against such ordinary beauty. But
      there are sleepless borders to outrun, stubs of grief
      to be plucked from the dirt. My country is dressed
      as a tumor of cement and glass, multiplying lifelessly.
      All you can count on is the low whisper of passing limbs,
      fraught with warning: remember, these scaffoldings were planted
      on someone’s chest.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Alice Pettway

      “‘The Anatomy of Endings’ doesn’t seek to duplicate the photo but instead builds its own city of imperfections: a dog shot through a metal carcass, a stranger with an oil-lamp face, stubs of grief plucked from dirt. The poem captures the unease of street photography, which is so often the ‘dull hurt’ of ‘walking against such ordinary beauty.’”