Alexis V. Jackson: “Song and scent, for me, are the strongest connections to memory. My mother taught me how to remember things with song and verse; so, I’m conditioned to connect hymns and rap verses to blood memory and lived experiences. This poem is about what we see M. NourbeSe Philip ‘exaqua[s]’ in Zong, what Philip and Ping invited me to do with language and memory, what my mother has conditioned me to do, what conversations with water about their memory looks like.” (web)
Deron Eckert: “‘What Will Be Left’ is in response to today’s historic flooding in eastern Kentucky, an area that has already lost so much, but as the storms have shown, still has much left to lose. There is no way to know this early how many people, homes, and businesses have been lost.” (web)
“Poem with a Cloud and Frank Ocean Lyrics” by José Felipe OzunaPosted by Rattle
Image: “Kennedy Lake” by M-A Murphy. “Poem with a Cloud and Frank Ocean Lyrics” was written by José Felipe Ozuna for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2022, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
José Felipe Ozuna
POEM WITH CLOUD AND FRANK OCEAN LYRICS
August 2016 and the sky and lake bleed
into each other. I’ve spent the weekend
trying to download Blond on my phone
with shoddy WiFi at my friend’s cabin,
where I take my shirt off outside for
the first time in years and we use nets
to try to catch minnows shooting through
the water like scaled bullets. I don’t remember
catching anything. Or showering. I know it
can’t be true but in my head the sky was lower
back then, close enough to touch. If I had
reached my hand out I could’ve stolen a cloud
and crushed it in my palm small enough to fit in my pocket,
so I would always have that sky with me. By the end of the trip
my arms will be darker and my cheeks rosy, something I didn’t
know could happen to skin like mine. In the car ride home
I don’t cry when Frank sings we’ll never be those kids again.
I doubt I really heard it. I don’t know how to swim, but that summer
when my friends jump in the lake so do I, and I aim where I can
see the bottom so I don’t sink too far. So I can come up for air.
The sky isn’t pink and white. But it’s blue. And it’s there.
Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “The poems were especially good this month—perhaps because the artwork itself provokes such strong memories—but I thought José’s poem did the best job of capturing the true complexity of nostalgia and the human predicament of being conscious creatures caught in the river of time. We’ll never return to the lakes of our youth, or experience the same great album again for the first time. To love something is to lose it, a fact that remains as happy as it is sad. And it’s there.”
Emily Ruth Hazel: “Once, after an arts showcase, a man confessed to me, ‘When I heard that the next performer was a poet, my eyes rolled back in my head.’ Then he told me he’d been won over by my opening poem about being delayed at an airport. Whenever I share my work, I think of people like him who will stumble into poetry and receive something they need—a moment of human connection, understanding, humor, hope, or healing—because my words were there to welcome them. I write for the people hovering in the doorway, those who don’t yet know if they want to be in the room, as well as for the eager listeners in the front row who’ve already experienced how nourishing and delicious poetry can be.” (web)
Anna M. Evans: “I’m not lying when I call my blog ‘Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter’ either. However, I always write my defenses of formalist poems in free verse. I just want my readers to be moved by my poems, and that isn’t a quality guaranteed by meter any more than it is by a good line break.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I was talking to a friend the other night about how, whenever anything painful or sad happens on a national scale in Britain, there’s a part of me that is, for a fraction of a second, surprised—like I’ve grown to expect ineptitude and blatant disregard for humanity in the U.S., and seeing it in Britain is about as unsettling as seeing my mother drunk (which is, for the record, about as likely as me seeing the Queen herself show up at my house in the wee hours, blitzed). Even heat waves brought about by man-made climate change, which affect us all, are being spoken about as wholly unanticipated in Britain. So I’m kind of making fun of my sense of problematic surprise, even as I move to correct it.” (web)
