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      March 21, 2024Things That CollapseJonathan Harris

      Image: “Graphing Uncertainty V” by Christine Crockett. “Things That Collapse” was written by Jonathan Harris for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
      Slumped in a lawn chair under a pink umbrella a hand fan on his belly
      in a jackknifing heat that’s me I see now and those are my children
      coming for me from our rose bed gone-under. They lay me
      on the earth and fall in tight my son at my heart splitting
      stones on my chest. On her knees and cell with 911
      my daughter traces half/faces the wrinkles
      on my forehead. She bends closer after
      ending the call coos in my ear ruffling
      her ringlets: orphans, origami, tents,
      tables, tarantulas, hammocks,
      accordions, waves. At least
      those are the notes I’m
      vaguely aware of
      but find hard to
      swallow.
      A
      slap on the cheek a shrug by my shoulders my children
      cry out: Dad! Dad! Don’t leave us! Don’t you dare
      leave us! Then together scoop me up
      in their arms and won’t let go as if
      everything in our top-down top-
      heavy world hinges
      on the screws
      holding.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Christine Crockett

      “This poem handles the ekphrastic challenge with such craft and imagination. The concrete format of two ‘collapsing’ triangles not only mirrors the geometry of the collage, but also captures something profoundly human in its composition. The organic roundness of red at the center of the college is a pulsing, endangered heart. The first triangle tapers as the stricken narrator’s consciousness streams and ebbs into single-word utterances, each a play on triangular or folded forms: accordions, origami, tents. A heartbeat pause, then the poem pivots into the ‘slap’ and embrace of his son and daughter who revive him, ‘hinge’ him back into the widening world–bloodlines that stave off the ‘top-down-top-heavy’ world that threatens collapse.”

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