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      August 22, 2019Time TravelAlida Rol

      Image: “Restricted | U.S. Air Force” by B.A. Van Sise from his “Elsewhere” series. “Time Travel” was written by Alida Rol for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2019, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
      We served our sentence
      under the city’s insomniac glare,
      by the racket of garbage trucks
      and the screams of all-night sirens,
      racked up paychecks and overtime
      to the smell of pissed-on
      asphalt baked in swampy heat.
      After the punishment
      of never alone but too often
      lonely, we left for the country, took
      custody of a glowering sky,
      the withering glances of bare trees,
      a house full of dust and
      crumbled hope. We
      have no idea what to do
      with the silos, their stern
      concrete, or how we’ll feed
      the sheep in snow. Feral cats
      possess the outbuilding, so we’ve kept
      its one door closed. When a pair
      of cow-eyed Herefords, the docile
      bulk of them, stares at us
      like aliens, we understand
      we are. We gawk in awe
      at their foreignness and
      see ourselves. Tonight
      we make love in the barn
      despite the dark, our animal
      scent in the air, ears already
      callousing to the growl
      of planes overhead. Contrails
      spike our dreams, but we vow
      by day to tread a gentler and less
      breathless path. We will warm
      to the neighbors despite
      their reminders that Herefords
      are raised for slaughter. Come
      spring we’ll spin our wool, bring
      the neighbors fresh laid
      eggs, tomatoes in the summer.
      We will often be alone.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, B.A. Van Sise

      “Alida Rol brought a sense of visual thinking to the piece that was, as an artist, hard to pass up, building an interior world that feels palpable, rowdy to all senses: you can smell the asphalt, you can feel the dust on your fingers, you can hear the city disgorging its noise, sirens raising Cain as they bring people you don’t like to places you don’t want to be. It tells a tale we all know already—we scorn our mundane, seek out something better, something different, try to find beauty elsewhere. But it also gives the reader a lesson, surely unwanted but sorely needed: the grass isn’t always greener. In fact, the grass isn’t even green, and maybe there is, in the end, just no grass at all.”

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