Colleen McLaughlin

January 28, 2016

“Contrails” by D.R. JamesPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2015: Editor’s Choice

 

Photograph by Colleen McLaughlin
Photograph by Colleen McLaughlin. “Contrails” was written by D.R. James for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2015, and selected by Timothy Green as the Editor’s Choice winner.

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__________

D.R. James

CONTRAILS

One answer lies in the tropospheric molecules scattering
short blue waves and vapor meeting minus-sixty. But

what’s the burning question? What orders the eye, the
brain, to catch all the colors after rain? What comprehends

a handful of sand, November’s endless branches of birds?
I’m bowed down by the simply phenomenal, the asymmetric

stain of mulberry crushed on concrete, what was sown that
now reveals its long green line. Yesterday, mountainous

clouds turned our Midwest horizon into I-76’s Wiggins’s
vision of the Colorado Rockies, and any headfirst plunge

off my cautious stage in this life supplies the slickest look
at all I never see. Forget insipid interpretations, how the jet

streaking seven miles above your sweetheart blazes the trail
connecting her to you. In a blink, or maybe in a day, those

contrails, heavy as the thin air they cleave, will leave you,
expanding, disbandingly unparalleled into a marbled blue.

—Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2015
Editor’s Choice Winner

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__________

Comment from the editor: “From a simple photograph, D.R. James takes us from the troposphere to a small town in Colorado to long distance love. It’s an elegantly turned and worthy journey.”

For more information on books by D.R. James, visit his author page.

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January 21, 2016

“Untitled” by Angela JohnsonPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2015: Artist’s Choice

 

Photograph by Colleen McLaughlin
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.

[download broadside]

__________

Angela Johnson

UNTITLED

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.

—Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2015
Artist’s Choice Winner

__________

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.” (website)

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