Chelsea Welsh

January 31, 2017

Haiku by Elizabeth McMunn-TetangcoPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2016: Editor’s Choice

 

Image by Chelsea Welsh
Image: “Caught in the Days Unraveling” by Chelsea Welsh. This haiku was written by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2016, and selected by Timothy Green as the Editor’s Choice winner.

[download broadside]

__________

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

HAIKU

stillbirth
the whole house full
of lost hair

—Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2016
Editor’s Choice Winner

[download audio]

__________

Comment from the editor on this selection: “Many poets saw illness and grief in Chelsea Welsh’s photograph, but none were able to distill that mood into its essence like this little haiku, which in its brevity speaks to the swirling silence that often follows tragedy, and encourages reflection on the words ‘stillbirth’ and ‘still life’ themselves.”

Rattle Logo

January 26, 2017

“Menarche” by Melina PapadopoulosPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2016: Artist’s Choice

 

Image by Chelsea Welsh
Image: “Caught in the Days Unraveling” by Chelsea Welsh. “Menarche” was written by Melina Papadopoulos for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2016, and selected by Welsh as the Artist’s Choice winner.

[download broadside]

__________

Melina Papadopoulos

MENARCHE

My fish-eyed brush caught my hair
in a fistful of undoing. I’d become
somebody else’s home. The things I was made of:
Broken glass, teaspoons, sewing needles retrieved
from abandoned quilts, their unhealed cross-stitches.

Told the first thing to change about me would be
my midday shadow when I wore my hair down.
Next, my handwriting: from blotched ink like inner-thigh bruises
to bows-and-ribbons cursive, flirty but still flimsy where the s’s stammer.

I never wrote love poems then, only letters broken into deaf stanzas.
There was one to the night. I kissed craters and stars into white pages.
There was one to the day. I cupped in my palms the pieces of itself
The sun wished to hide: its non-gilded stride into December,
its dimpled summer shadows dark and red among oak trees.

Today, I am a stranger’s home. In a room with nothing to its name but dust,
I contort my body into the floor’s harsh woodwork. Light works its way around me.
Surrounding me instead, my hair, a dark and useless wingspan.
I don’t have a voice, but I have birdsong: I am a stranger’s home. I am my own.

—Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2016
Artist’s Choice Winner

[download audio]

__________

Comment from the artist, Chelsea Welsh, on this selection: “It was wonderful to read the variety of submissions in response to my photograph—and incredibly difficult to choose just one poem! ‘Menarche’ by Melina Papadopoulos is a poem that I couldn’t get out of my head after reading it. It’s such a gorgeously haunting poem—the last stanza really pierced me. I’m always grateful when a poem does that—leaves a kind of lingering wreckage. What a gift.”

Rattle Logo