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      November 28, 2015The View from the CaféMatt Quinn

      Photograph by Ana Prundaru. “The View from the Café” was written by Matt Quinn for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2015, and selected by Timothy Green as the Editor’s Choice winner.
      Six men haul a jet ski out of a placid sea
      that’s flashing cream-soda in the evening sun;
      they drag it up onto the beach and cover it
      in a shroud of plastic. And Paul says:
       
      I think that in some way we are all refugees
      and leaves it hanging there in the salty breeze.
      So Jane steps in and tells of us of this dream she had
      where the whole world was packed inside a giant coracle,
       
      except really it was only thousands of people
      that she saw, but in the dream she knew
      it was the population of the whole planet crushed
      together and drifting on an unending ocean
       
      in a boat that might so easily tip over or break apart.
      She says that seen from above the bright colours
      of people’s ethnic clothing against the blue-green sea
      made it all seem so beautiful it could have been a photo
       
      in a Sunday magazine. We kick the metaphor about
      for a while as Paul wanders off to buy the next round
      of beers, and I store the image away just in case
      there’s a poem I can slip it into later. Then John says
       
      that surely we are all evicted from our homes
      at birth, squeezed naked and defenceless
      out into the cold and the clamour, the gate double-locked
      behind us by an angel with a flaming sword.
       
      We watch the men emerge from the sea a second time,
      and Paul says that really, if you think about it,
      we’ve been refugees ever since we first dragged
      ourselves out of the ocean on makeshift limbs, choking
       
      back the oxygen in our brand-new lungs. Meanwhile
      I’m working on something clever to say about Heidegger’s
      notion of unheimlichkeit and how, existentially
      speaking, none of us is ever truly at home anywhere
       
      in this world. Now the six men are back in the water
      herding the third empty jet ski up onto its trailer.
      Susan drains her beer and says she’s never seen a refugee
      on a jet ski. I can’t tell if she’s bored of this game,
       
      or is somehow trumping us all. We watch the sun sink
      into the waiting sea, then Jane calls for the bill.
      It’s cold on the beach, and no one’s brought a coat.
      We finish up our drinks and head for home.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “I love the way that this poem turns the photograph into a vignette that we can all enter, as readers. There is something uncanny about the image, juxtaposed against recent newspaper photographs of Syrian refugees, and Quinn manages to articulate and then illuminate that uneasy feeling.”