Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      January 21, 2016UntitledAngela Johnson

      Photograph by Colleen McLaughlin. “Untitled” was written by Angela Johnson for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2015, and selected by McLaughlin as the Artist’s Choice winner.
      Chopsticks in the loose
      grasp
      of a metal hand
       
      Spongy
      stilts
      of a robotic penguin
       
      Squint
      and it’s the double line dissecting a highway
       
      Until the paint ran out
       
      Hard to believe
      anything
       
      as vulnerable
      as human flesh
      is hurtling through that calm sky
       
      etched with a
      particulate footprint:
       
      A lovelier, cloud-soft
      map of travel
      still
      reminiscent of a slug’s slime trail
       
      evaporating in the elements.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Colleen McLaughlin

      “I love everything about this poem—the haiku-like stanzas; words sparse, yet bursting with whimsical imagery; the line breaks which set the tone and evokes a certain mood. The photographic image is stark, and perhaps even ominous if one considers chemtrails and conspiracy-theories, yet this poem took me to another, most pleasantly unexpected place, a kind of space oddity. It’s the stuff kids’ dreams are made of—and still, the unbelievable wonder that ‘anything as vulnerable as human flesh is hurtling through that calm sky.’ I even find it apropos that this poem, in reflection of this image, is ‘Untitled,’ because it lends a feeling of timelessness, an ‘evaporating in the elements’ … like a ground control to Major Tom.”

      →