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      March 26, 2020They Tried to Cover Her UpStephanie Shlachtman

      Image: “Indietro” by Marc Alan Di Martino. “They Tried to Cover Her Up” was written by Stephanie Shlachtman for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2020, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
      She witnessed the induction of matter
      into everything, and they, too, witnessed
      the induction of matter into everything;
      a constitution for the cosmos. But that was
      eons ago when the quiet creases
       
      in her dress were fresh, the hemline a
      proper length. (They were afraid of those
      curls: Those curls would turn to spider silk
      in fifteen years or so; a girl who can look you
      in the eyes speaks volumes—too
       
      loud.) And now, Canis Major endeavors
      to ascribe her effulgence to its unfettered
      glow, now that she, too, is a constellation. Now
      that she, too, can fill the space without
       
      apology. How did night not see her (of course,
      it did) on the lens of a telescope, when
      “all luminaries” did not mean “all luminaries,”
      when her painted elements were immured
      by skylights in a nebula. When her little lights
       
      cried, her older ones, too. When her little lights
      died, her older ones, too, because of
      disproportional brushstrokes, because of
      unequal distances to and from the sun.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Marc Alan Di Martino

      “What stopped me in my tracks were the last lines: ‘because of / disproportional brushstrokes, because of / unequal distances to and from the sun.’ Is it a veiled social critique, a treatise on painting, or an essay on cosmology? Perhaps it’s all three together, which is why it has to be a poem.”

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