Amy Miller: “An interactive map that shows you where your town was in relation to landmasses and oceans millions of years ago has been making the rounds of social media this week. What begins as a fun diversion—‘My house was beachfront property in the Late Cretaceous!’—becomes an existential rabbit hole when you start reading the descriptions (lower left corner) of what was happening on the planet at that time. At many times, what was happening were mass extinctions. Pondering the massive die-offs and how many millions of years it took for life to rebound each time, and how often that has happened—it’s a staggering, sobering perspective. I probably learned this all in school, but I was young and it didn’t stick. It’s sticking now.” (web)
Luke Johnson: “Recently, I spent the summer living in a tent in the woods of West Virginia. Nights, I read poetry by headlamp: James Galvin, Elizabeth Bishop, Fred Chappell. Rain storms drummed tarps strung above me, and the poems joined those rhythms, those gales. I’d like to believe they’re equally necessary, poetry and rain, with the same capacity to ease and to overwhelm.” (web)
Deborah Ketai: “I believe that our given names help forge our identities. They come into being with us, but often lose currency as we age. So what happens—to humans or to God—when names fade into oblivion? Let’s continue to acknowledge each other completely, even as we age.”
Image: “All of Us” by Lou Storey. “Sestina” was written by Amanda Quaid for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
Amanda Quaid
SESTINA
We buried him behind the church
before the carnies came to town.
Now at night, you can hear the laughter
all the way to Lover’s Lane and past my house.
I miss the quiet, if I ever really had it.
They tell me it’s the sound of progress.
My Daddy once measured my progress
on a worn-down wall inside the church.
He used a pencil to mark it,
confirming that I was the shortest kid in town.
Then he drove us back to our house—
the way was longer then—and laughter
bandied back and forth between us, laughter
like there had been progress
toward something like friendship, our house
a little more like a home than a church
that day. At that time in our town,
men kept to themselves, and that’s all there was to it.
I’ve heard there’s a village, though I’ve never seen it,
where boys run naked by the sea, and laughter
tumbles forth from the carnelian huts in town.
On warm June days, I wonder if progress
will take me there, where church
can be found not in a building or house
but in bodies, in eyes and in beauties that house
secrets, and some days I want that so much that it
hurts. Could bodies be church,
I wonder, could voices, could laughter
be church, and is it a yielding to progress
to forfeit this town
and find, I suppose, a different town,
a brightly-colored candy apple house
where I could feel the call of progress
move in me and with it
joy and life and song and laughter
in this body I could come to call my church?
But a town, in spite of progress, has a gate, and it
becomes a little higher every year. At night, the laughter
Comment from the artist, Lou Storey: “I don’t paint to know myself better, but the poem ‘Sestina’ somehow excavates a hidden (and true) foundation of emotion beneath my painting ‘All of Us,’ offering a narrative fueled with longing, a need to be free of all unjust measures, to be someplace ‘where boys run naked by the sea, and laughter / tumbles forth from the carnelian huts in town’—a place unreachable, like the ‘candy apple’ house, a landscape of if only. This poem prompts a kaleidoscope of feelings and I love that.”
Michael Hettich: “When I was a child, my father would sometimes read poems to me, in the evening before dinner, while he sipped a cocktail. T.S. Eliot was his favorite. Though I didn’t understand what they were about, the cadences and images charmed and moved me deeply. They also haunted me. Then, 15 years later, in a creative writing class taught by James Crenner, I came across Casar Vallejo’s ‘Black Stone Lying on a White Stone,’ in the Bly Knopf translation, and was transfixed and transformed by the language, and by the possibilities. I knew then that I wanted to try to do something like that, someday. Maybe, if I was lucky …” (web)
Matt Dhillon: “There’s been a scary number of shootings in the news recently. It made me think about how often strength is equated to a capacity for violence, especially among men.”
William Harry Harding: “Sometimes, writing poems connects me to my heroes and my demons in ways that writing novels can’t. This poem helped my daughter and me bring suicidal ideation to the kitchen table, where we discuss it as if it was ordinary, like breakfast, and something to be discussed head-on.”
