February 27, 2020

Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2020: Editor’s Choice

 

watercolor painting of nighttime street scene with liquor store

Image: “Open All Night” by Kate Peper. “Cheer” was written by Sean Kelbley for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2020, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Sean Kelbley

CHEER

The kid outside the liquor store is one of mine:
5th period, sits halfway back. Laughs at my puns,
but I should cross the street and scare him off.
How much of 17 is trying to stand convincingly

in places you’re not old enough to be? He shifts
his weight, configures spine and mouth and brow
inexpertly. Experiments with where to put his arms
and stick his thumbs. I want to see if anybody

buys it. Or, I want to see the father of the kid come out,
the way my father, once a year for years, came smiling/
laughing out, and hear him joke about the “Naughty List,”
and watch him hoist a fifth of gin one-handed overhead

like it’s the only gift worth getting. Then I want the kid
to disappear. Maybe he’s old enough to drink with mom
and dad—Singapore Slings, before they tumble like a happy
pillow family down the street to Spanish Midnight Mass—

except, remembering the drink has got a funny name,
he’ll giggle through the Homilía. I want him gone, but that
will happen soon enough. Like drinks and Mass with only
dad, and after that, just drinks with dad, and after that,

inheritance—a crate of dusty bottles: bitters, kirsch,
Grand Marnier. One Christmas Eve, a man will tell himself
there’s time, there still is time to cross the street and go
inside before they lock up shop. To grab some cheer,

before it’s just the glow of ornaments he’s known for
30 years. Before it’s just the light that shines through
other peoples’ windows, when they’re home.

from Ekphrastic Challenge
January 2020, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “I realized I’d be choosing this poem four lines in: ‘How much of 17 is trying to stand convincingly / in places you’re not old enough to be?’ How true is that? And how interesting a thought. Those two lines would have been enough for me, but then the last lines are just as good. I’ve never been a high school teacher, but I understand the student-teacher relationship considerably better for having read this poem.”

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February 20, 2020

Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2020: Artist’s Choice

 

watercolor painting of nighttime street scene with liquor store

Image: “Open All Night” by Kate Peper. “An Index of Visitors” was written by Ajay Kumar for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2020, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Ajay Kumar

AN INDEX OF VISITORS

I’ve seen something like this somewhere, all the time.
white, black & red the first colors. as we enter november,

the weather turns december. as it was june, it was also may.
remember, all the buildings blurring by to the next station.

remember the index of visitors, the middle-finger ring-fingers,
singers whose songs were just extended foreplays.

an old couple practice arranging furniture on the street,
still looking for the house they were sent to. sunglass-seller

on the newspaper-road-blanket looks polaroidal, as we enter
the new year, kaleidoscopic weather, stuck in the last decade.

swinging lighters caught the ruddiness of the white of eyes.
tea, tap, tray, gully rap to traffic-beat-hymns of highway

protests. blushing heel in my soiled hands, on my crossed legs,
soiling them too. we came out & went back in through somewhere else,

& being told about a way from the inside, we realized
how everything’s connected by a skeleton of ladders, like roads,

like railway lines, computer chips, germs of the lips of canon-mouths.
still, I see something like this somewhere all the time but every time

is different, with new unstill flames. the old couple pack up with all
their wooden things in the back of a truck to the next station. on fridays,

the sunglass-seller sells toy parrots instead, which fly into the neon lights
until the next. this time, from this body place the car has already moved

away half towards the blinding light. but as it was gone,
it was also there, waving & particle, all the time.

from Ekphrastic Challenge
January 2020, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Kate Peper: “Ted Kooser wrote, ‘… I hope that after I have labored over my poems … they look as if they’d been dashed off in a few minutes, the way good watercolor paintings look.’ One of the many things I love about this poem—and why I kept coming back to it—was that it embodied the very essence of what Ted Kooser wrote: immediacy, quickness and unexpected moments. I’m also a sucker for surreal imagery. And this poem manages to link ‘by a skeleton of ladders’ all its wild bounty into something beautiful and cohesive, and yet elusive. In the end, the poet’s attempt—like my attempt to paint a street scene at night—realizes it can never be captured: ‘… it was gone,/ it was also there, waving & particle, all the time.’”

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February 11, 2015

Kate Peper

SAVED

My husband and I have Space Bagged our genitalia—
dried kelp bulbs and cowrie shells—
and hung them in the spare bedroom closet.
At Christmas, I nudge them aside
to get to the egg carton of tiny glass:
an angel, lamb, stars.

Cleaning the junk drawer
I tell him, There’s a Swedish woman
who’s working on breaking
the human body down into plant food.
Honey, that’s what I want
when I die.

As a Jew, he replies, I believe
our bodies must not be defiled,
and writes Buy Burial Plots on the whiteboard.
Well, I say, dumping out old Tupperware,
as a Christian, we’re already dust.
God will remold me after I die.

We climb the stairs to our bedroom
and pull the eiderdown to our chins.
There are no crashing waves here.
The tide has receded, just dusting
our lips with salt.
Slowly, his hand smoothes my hair.
This is what we have, really:
there’s nothing to be saved.

from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

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Kate Peper: “Though I was raised Lutheran, I didn’t jump into Christianity until a few years ago. My faith is growing daily in small but significant increments: Every time I pray and ask for help—even if it’s to write a poem—I receive God’s grace and am blessed with humility and strength, which in turn strengthens my faith. In the past four years I’ve seen how my painting and poetry have been quietly inspired by this new sense of looking at the world.” (web)

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March 22, 2010

Kate Peper

DON’T YOU MISS THE PHONE BOOTH—

—a place where once you closed that hinged door
you could still look out, but now the outside world
was hushed and you were in a capsule of privacy?
The etchings of phone numbers, names and expletives
cheering you while you listened to the dial tone,
thinking, grandly, how connected you were
to those who came before you in this one booth.
And wasn’t it comforting, too, to feel the heft and solidity
of the phone book or rub the cigarette burns on that little corner table?
In old movies, people excused themselves in restaurants
to make a call and you, yourself, remember finding
the quiet corner near the restrooms, the pay phone
inside the cubicle just big enough for you to lean in.
How good you were at not speaking loudly. How nice it was
for folks to stand back, waiting for the caller to finish and step away
before walking up and putting in the dime.
Oh, sure, back then it meant people couldn’t reach you 24/7,
photos snapped from your cell at a dinner party couldn’t be sent
to your loved ones in Zurich, or your pre-teen’s thumbs
couldn’t get the workout from texting, but hey—
wasn’t it swell to walk down a city street and the only
people you heard talking to themselves were crazy?
And driving away from the city, no pop song sound bites
rang in your pocket? And in the pouring rain, when you miss
your turn to So-and-So’s Cabins, the wipers going like mad,
you see a closed gas station and with relief—a sudden feeling of joy—
spot the shape of the booth with its panels lit,
the unmistakable sign of the phone on top, haloed in light,
offering you shelter and connection.

from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

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Kate Peper: “Last year I was fired from a ‘very respected job’ as a custom rug designer. It was a job I had just spent three years trying to get. After the typical free-fall and confusion that followed, I realized I wanted to spend most of my time writing and painting—two things I never really had any training in nor, I knew, would make much money. These days, I work part-time at a flower store, write constantly, paint, design rugs on the side and daydream a lot.”

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