Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2021: Artist’s Choice
Image: “Bucket” by Danny Mask. “Call Me Boy on Saturdays” was written by Jackson Jesse Nash for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2021, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Comment from the artist, Danny Mask: “‘Call me Boy on Saturdays’ is an inspiring and youthfully happy, fast clip, high energy jaunt, following two young entrepreneurs as they wash cars. The winner of this challenge engaged my imagination with an easy-going, relaxed, well-grounded very relatable story, guided by conversational living room logic. I was there with them on their journey, all along the way! This poem entered my hard heart by giving me a reason to care, it had a strong sense of the writer’s world, and brought back strong memories of my own childhood, when my twin brother and I climbed up and down tall trees to get mistletoe and sold it door to door at Christmas when we were 10 years old. The winner of this challenge is a purposely breezy, sweet, self-conscious autobiographic narrative, that, thank god, is not too long or dense. It uses clear—with a hint of vernacular—conscious, concrete, figurative language, with a tinge of nostalgia.”