Marc Alan Di Martino

May 14, 2023

“Technicolor Coronation Day” by Marc Alan Di MartinoPosted by

Marc Alan Di Martino

TECHNICOLOR CORONATION DAY

It’s Technicolor Coronation Day.
Our phones and television screens are lit.
All skeletons are neatly tucked away.
 
Scepter-in-hand, the king makes his entrée,
an old man no one likes, a bore and twit:
it’s Technicolor Coronation Day.
 
I’m sitting this one out. I’d rather, say,
read a good book or pick a nasty zit.
All skeletons lie neatly tucked away
 
in closets where they frolic, bump and sway.
Refresh your feeds, there’s no mistaking it—
it’s Technicolor Coronation Day.
 
And now it’s time for everyone to pray
in grave solemnity. Ignore the pit
of skeletons so neatly tucked away.
 
The King will sit above the noisome fray,
His Majesty a target for their wit.
It’s Technicolor Coronation Day
all skeletons mute, neatly tucked away.
 

—from Poets Respond
May 14, 2023

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Marc Alan Di Martino: “I didn’t watch the coronation ceremony, though my Twitter feed was full of commentary on the lavish and anachronistic event. I was struck by one person’s comment that all of this looked better in black-and-white, this of course being the first such ceremony to take place in the age of the internet and universally available color broadcasting. The first line came to me and, having wanted to write another villanelle for some time, the rest fell into place fairly naturally. A profile of Charles published in the New Yorker a few years ago makes reference to him as a ‘twit.’” (web)

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April 28, 2022

“Her Vanity” by Marc Alan Di MartinoPosted by

Anonymous Was a Woman by Natascha Graham, impressionistic painting of a woman's back

Image: “Anonymous Was a Woman” by Natascha Graham. “Her Vanity” was written by Marc Alan Di Martino for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2022, and selected as the Assistant Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Marc Alan Di Martino

HER VANITY

My mother used to sit like this before
her vanity, her shoulders bathed
in blue and pink light, her powdered skin
dredged in a cloud of talc, breathing it in.
Oblivious at seventeen, she wanted
more than anything to look her best
when Eddie Fisher offered her a Coke
in his posh Manhattan hotel suite.
I sat with her in a room off Times Square
years later, our last outing together
before the nursing homes enchained her.
She told me the story—as she said,
for the umpteenth time—of how she’d met
the singer whose career nosedived the day
Elvis broke the charts with “Heartbreak Hotel.”
They shared a Coke, the story went: his lips
kissing the weightless ‘O’ of the glass
bottle which was furtively snatched up
from where he’d set it down, forgotten it,
by her swift hand. Later, she told us
about the talcosis, how it affected
her breathing. For the rest of her life
she saw a pulmonologist. I sat there
letting her regale me with the tale
of Eddie Fisher for the umpteenth time
in a cheap hotel room off Times Square,
a crooked mirror fixed above the sink
a painting of a woman on the wall
which might have been her, poised
at her vanity, poisoning herself for love.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
March 2022, Assistant Editor’s Choice

__________

Comment from the assistant editor, Megan Green: “When I read ‘Her Vanity’ and then look at ‘Anonymous Was a Woman,’ it’s so easy to see the poet’s mother, dreamlike in a ‘cloud of talc,’ disrobed and vulnerable but also vibrant and resilient. She seems, in both the painting and the poem, to be frozen in time, at once a youthful beauty and an older woman lost in memory. The poet’s choice of language is deceptively and skillfully effortless: ‘My mother used to sit like this/before her vanity,’ the poem begins, a line that appears simple yet contains layers of music and meaning. The vividness of the narrative and the unspoken questions about the value of beauty combine to create an extraordinary poem that reflects an extraordinary work of art.”

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October 19, 2021

“Sestina for the Falling Autumn Light” by Marc Alan Di MartinoPosted by

Marc Alan Di Martino

SESTINA FOR THE FALLING AUTUMN LIGHT

Time strangles anything it strains to hold,
tangles the whistle of a passing train
into refracted pitches, a refrain
as Now recedes in squall. Tally the gold
dust on the telescope, polish the trick
mirror. Your image flickers like a wick.

Your image flickers like a candle’s wick
in time’s dense mirror. What you cannot hold
is all there is. Arrive, depart. The train
warps through the station’s prism, its refrain
refracted coordinates. Fade to gold:
the sun goes down like a child’s magic trick.

The sun goes down like a child’s magic trick
trapped in the squall of a departing train
to Nowheresville. This backbeat’s crack refrain
refracts the scene in its mad mirror’s gold
pitch dark at rainbow’s edge, its flaming wick
a fire no individual can hope to hold.

A fire no individual can hope to hold
awaits at rainbow’s edge: a trigger, a wick
unravelling time. Strike chorus, refrain,
backbeat, tempo, music—the faded gold
of thought, our consciousness’ greatest trick,
clacking along indeterminately. Train

clacking along indeterminately, train
with no conductor, accumulate refrain
of themes, associate music—stick, wick
and flame bound up together by some trick,
evolutionary sleight-of-hand. Hold
me, stroll with me through all this falling gold.

Stroll with me through all this falling gold
no human eye could ever hope to hold.
The trees are candles, incandescent. Wick
by wick, performing nature’s magic trick,
their glitter wanes faster than any train,
drains to the dregs its annual refrain.

The brilliance of the wick is in its gold.
Time’s hat trick is to never miss your train.
Find one small hand to hold. Chorus, refrain.

—from Poets Respond
October 19, 2021

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Marc Alan Di Martino: “Every October I begin to miss the fall colors of the mid-Atlantic region where I grew up. We don’t get them quite the same way where I live now. After a weird superheated summer, it looks like the fall colors have suddenly snapped back. Who knows how much longer we will get to witness their glory?” (web)

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November 10, 2020

“Still” by Marc Alan Di MartinoPosted by

Marc Alan Di Martino

STILL

There are still birds, still things coming to life
in unexpected ways. Still nights and days.
Nocturnal, diurnal. Circadian rhythms
scratching an itch at the back of the throat.
Still family, still friends. Still love
slapping you silly with its rubber tongue,
salt that makes your stomach sing a psalm,
palettes of rusted foliage, stray bees
in November, still buzzing in the lavender.

—from Poets Respond
November 10, 2020

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Marc Alan Di Martino: “For four years our attention has been kidnapped by the fiasco of this administration. For several days and nights, the world has done little else but watch as each vote is tallied in a handful of states that will determine the course of the next four years, maybe longer. This morning I opened the windows. The world is still, somehow, there.” (web)

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July 30, 2020

“Upstate” by Marc Alan Di MartinoPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2020: Editor’s Choice

 

Impressionistic painting of old industrial buildings

Image: “The Old Paper Mill” by Denise Sedor. “Upstate” was written by Marc Alan Di Martino for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2020, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Marc Alan Di Martino

UPSTATE

Start with a brief description of the town:
its sagging thoroughfares, its battered clock
tower. Places like this exist for trains
to falter through. Have you ever lost a sock
in the wash? Here it is on Mrs. Owens’
clothesline, drying in the rust-ruined sun.
Wormholes connect us to outposts like this,
main drags so proverbial in their want
they must be paintings. What else can capture
the hot charred candy center of a soul
so beaten it whimpers beneath the rod
of time? As if some wicked, wastrel god
playing a prank, tossed snake-eyes with trick dice,
punished creation out of boredom. Twice.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
June 2020, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “I’m always a sucker for a sonnet, and like most of the best in the form, the final couplet is just wonderful. But I’d already fallen in love with this a few lines in: ‘Places like this exist for trains / to falter through.’ What a great description of the Rust Belt, which Denise Sedor’s painting so poignantly captures. That line and that great verb choice, ‘falter,’ took me straight back to my childhood in Western New York, and all those almost forgotten towns along Routes 5 & 20.”

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March 31, 2020

“When Peeled Back” by Mary Ann HonakerPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2020: Editor’s Choice

 

photograph of billboard with posters peeling to reveal previous layers, including a young child with curly hair

Image: “Indietro” by Marc Alan Di Martino. “When Peeled Back” was written by Mary Ann Honaker for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2020, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Mary Ann Honaker

WHEN PEELED BACK

Beneath morning Folgers, hazelnut creamer,
beneath wet hand-prints of fog lifting slowly from the window,
beneath thick-inked newspaper and glossy ads rolled into it,

Beneath the smudge of newsprint on your forefinger as your heartbeat
drops another octave, as all the fucks you could give drain from you
more slowly than floodwater drains to lowlands, to ditches,

Beneath the archaic metal dragon unfolding its thin tendons
over the parking lot of smashed Biggie cups and tumbleweed napkins,
all of its teeth filled in, jagged, askew, with bedewed shopping carts,

Beneath neon codes of signs and symbols of every chain restaurant,
store, coffee shop, the same everywhere beckoning you to the same flavors,
beneath the crushed liquor store box the dread-headed homeless woman sits on,

Beneath the coin you do or do not drop into her strangely fresh, white paper cup,
beneath words you speak flatly over and over again at work, because it’s a script
and you cannot, must not deviate, because they are always listening,

Beneath the momentary joy of finding sugar-skull themed coasters,
beneath the low frequency satisfaction of setting them out on your end tables,
and how quickly that glow, like drunkenness, is replaced by a hollow ringing,

Beneath getting everything you want and finding yourself still unhappy,
beneath making a new list to tick off and fall of the cliff of,
beneath how the bones of your city are starting to show, siding in the side-yard,

rafters bare now that the skin of roof has been peeled off or has fallen in
like the cheeks of a young woman’s body as it mummifies on some remote hillside,
beneath the bruises on a child’s arm, the circular stains in the crease of a father’s elbow,

Beneath it all when peeled back you find the cruel face of some fey spirit,
whose plump pink hands rub together all the smooth stones of your riverbed:
a god guileless, feral, who smirks at you from under the skin of the world.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
February 2020, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “Reading this poem feels to me like watching a flying trapeze act. It’s a thrill to see these images tumble out, but how long can the poet possibly keep it going, and how will the poem to land? Then we reach the final lines, which might be the best of the whole poem, and she sticks the landing with the colon. Brava!”

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March 26, 2020

“They Tried to Cover Her Up” by Stephanie ShlachtmanPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2020: Artist’s Choice

 

photograph of billboard with posters peeling to reveal previous layers, including a young child with curly hair

Image: “Indietro” by Marc Alan Di Martino. “They Tried to Cover Her Up” was written by Stephanie Shlachtman for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2020, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Stephanie Shlachtman

THEY TRIED TO COVER HER UP

She witnessed the induction of matter
into everything, and they, too, witnessed
the induction of matter into everything;
a constitution for the cosmos. But that was
eons ago when the quiet creases

in her dress were fresh, the hemline a
proper length. (They were afraid of those
curls: Those curls would turn to spider silk
in fifteen years or so; a girl who can look you
in the eyes speaks volumes—too

loud.) And now, Canis Major endeavors
to ascribe her effulgence to its unfettered
glow, now that she, too, is a constellation. Now
that she, too, can fill the space without

apology. How did night not see her (of course,
it did) on the lens of a telescope, when
“all luminaries” did not mean “all luminaries,”
when her painted elements were immured
by skylights in a nebula. When her little lights

cried, her older ones, too. When her little lights
died, her older ones, too, because of
disproportional brushstrokes, because of
unequal distances to and from the sun.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
February 2020, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Marc Alan Di Martino: “What stopped me in my tracks were the last lines: ‘because of / disproportional brushstrokes, because of / unequal distances to and from the sun.’ Is it a veiled social critique, a treatise on painting, or an essay on cosmology? Perhaps it’s all three together, which is why it has to be a poem.”

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