Image: “Self-Portrait as a Prep School Llama” by James Valvis. “The Boardroom at the Edge of the Field” was written by Caiti Quatmann for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
__________
Caiti Quatmann
THE BOARDROOM AT THE EDGE OF THE FIELD
The llama arrived late,
a constellation of hay clinging to his cuffs.
No one mentioned it.
The wolf in spectacles adjusted his slide,
a graph of rising hunger
etched in claw marks.
A heron sharpened pencils with its beak;
an eel-shaped pen wriggled across the sparrow’s wing,
its ink spilling like minnows on the table.
The llama presided.
Shoulders square as prairie hills,
his tie red as a wound pulled tight,
or a ribbon of victory—who could say?
The light hit him wrong:
the wool cast mountains of shadow
on the screen where forecasts buzzed like hornets.
“What about expansion?”
the lion growled, pawing at the margins of the map,
the fields already numbered, squared, indexed.
No one dared look outside.
The windows stretched floor to ceiling,
but the glass held them like a throat.
Beyond—
the fields were still wild,
a tide of gold bending to no wind but its own.
“The numbers,” the fox whispered,
his teeth jangling like keys.
The sparrow, wrists bowed by a heavy watch,
tapped her wing in time with the minutes.
The heron scribbled furiously
& ate the pen when the ink ran dry.
But the llama—
his silence pressed against the room like snow,
his voice, when it came,
low as thawing soil:
“What if we stayed here, just a minute more,
before the suit chokes it out?”
They blinked, startled.
The wolf cleared his throat; the fox lit a paw on fire.
The sparrow buckled beneath the weight of time.
Somewhere in the shadows, the lion scratched a map,
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “The absurdism inherent in ‘The Boardroom at the Edge of the Field’ is weighty and philosophical, an appropriate nod to Valvis’ image—a piece of art which, despite the objective ridiculousness of its subject (a llama in a suit), doesn’t feel silly or even playful, but symbolic of an unknown truth. This is not a portrait of comical nonsense, we quickly realize, just a scene we don’t yet fully understand. The way the poet mixes plain, unembellished language with poetic imagery (‘his silence pressed against the room like snow’) enhances the reader’s sense of an off-kilter, unsettling reality. Reading ‘The Boardroom’ feels like reading an allegorical classic ala Animal Farm, but in a medium that allows for more ambiguity and mystery—what’s unexplained is as important as what is.”
