February 17, 2022

Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2022: Artist’s Choice

 

Dark Figures by Matthew King, photograph of a figure surrounded by gulls

Image: “Dark Figures” by Matthew King. “Emotional Self-Regulation, with Birds and Gifted Child” was written by Sean Kelbley for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2022, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Sean Kelbley

EMOTIONAL SELF-REGULATION, WITH BIRDS AND GIFTED CHILD

It’s called Vacation in Your Head,
but first the teacher makes him visit

hers. “Give me a big thumbs-up
when you have figured where I am”

she sing-songs, and the boy knows
it will be mundane, someplace

pedestrian. “Oh! I feel sunshine
on my face, and water licking

at my feet.” The boy cannot believe
how long it takes his class to realize

they’re at the beach. “I hear seagulls!
I smell hotdogs grilling: yum!” And

since he has to wait, inside his head
the boy becomes a seagull—no,

a Steller’s Eagle—swooping,
shitting on the teacher’s cookout buns

and every kid that ever laughed
at his vocabulary. “That’s correct,”

the teacher says. “I’m at the beach!
Where would you go, if your body

had Big Feelings?” The eagle wheels

and shits especially on Braxton Griggs,
then wings to Maine, feathers lofting

like the pages of a dictionary. It’s nice
to be the biggest bird. He synchs his

breathing with the ocean’s waves.
From far away, a voice asks

“Where are you vacationing?”
“The beach,” a seagull cries, and then

another seagull cries “the beach,”
and all the seagulls cry “the beach!”

The beach,” the boy says, opening
his eyes to brown Nebraska. But

in his head it’s snowing, hard.
Against the rules he pulls his hood up,

ducks and turns, so no one notices
his sharp resplendent beak.

from Ekphrastic Challenge
January 2022, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Matthew King: “It was a pleasure and a privilege to read these variously wonderful poems and many were hard to pass up, but ‘Emotional Self-Regulation, with Birds and Gifted Child’ hooked me with its Steller’s Eagle, reeled me in with its comic chorus of chanting seagulls (although, to be fair, I feel like the gulls must think the geese are unbearably dumb; these things are all relative!), and won’t let me go. I had a very different experience as a ‘gifted kid’—from an early age I was in a ‘gifted program’ (one of my old friends from which was the first to inform me of the enormous lost Asian eagle that had made its way to Maine) and always felt like I was surrounded by bigger fish. As an unsheltered adult my fish-out-of-water frustrations are complicated by concerns about elitism to which the kid in the poem is forgivably, gloriously oblivious, but boy does that biggest bird take me with it on its oceanic voyage, and oh how I love the birds that turn up their beaks at winter vacations to warmer climes. It’s hard to relax when it’s snowing in your head, but who wants to relax, anyway? ‘Big Feelings’—if indeed!”

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August 11, 2021

Sean Kelbley

PIPELINE SURVEYORS

I resent the men who’ve come 
to mark our land. On breaks they sit 

inside their giant pickup trucks, 
engines running so their leather seats 

stay hot. Wolf down their Subway 
double-meats like puppies vying 

to grow biggest fastest. Not yet fully 
men: mid-20s, college logos 

on their too-clean baseball caps, 
Gore-Tex shells un-ripped, 

skin paler on the narrow bands 
where rings should be. Oklahoma, 

Mississippi, Louisiana—not a single
local license plate, and someone here 

could use the work. I dislike 

their easiness. Their casual bro-nods 
when we pass each other on the road, 

the way they play the open courts 
at City Rec—not bad enough to pity, 

not good enough to outright hate. 
What kind of guys pound ribboned 

stakes, paint arrows red and blue 
across a property to show the butchers

where to cut, then just move on? 
I’ve watched them take the measure 

of our waitresses at Applebee’s. 
It’s unforgivable, how much 

they love their jobs.

from Rattle #72, Summer 2021
Tribute to Appalachian Poets

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Sean Kelbley: “I live and work in Appalachian southeastern Ohio, not half an hour from where I was born. I used to feel that staying in this place I know too well (and one that knows me too well, back) was limiting. Then I grew up. Fell in love and married a man with roots so deep, they couldn’t be transplanted. I live here now by choice, in a house we built together on his family’s land. I wish we had better access to the internet, and that we traveled more, but I am grateful for a life and place that’s taught me how to really listen to, retell, and make up stories. Many hurtful and inaccurate Appalachian stereotypes persist. I hope this tribute will dispel them. But it’s true how much we value, and depend upon, the oral tradition. The poems I’ve chosen to submit arise from voices I have heard—in story, conversation, song. I want to thank the family and friends, the colleagues and students, and the almost-strangers who have shared their truths. They’re just like anyone’s from anywhere, except not quite.”

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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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December 27, 2018

Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2018: Editor’s Choice

 

Eat Me by Nicolette Daskalakis

Image: “Eat Me” by Nicolette Daskalakis. “The Happy Game” was written by Sean Kelbley for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2018, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Sean Kelbley

THE HAPPY GAME

was hard. Only kids could have
invented it. The girl sat on the toilet

and the boy sat on the bath mat,
criss-cross-applesauce. The father

filled a Dixie cup and stepped
into the closet. Most days,

he closed the door and walked
straight through and opened/

shut the bedroom door and gave
the pill and came right back.

Other days, he stood between the

doors a while and thought of Narnia,

or being airlocked in a passage
on the Space Station.

The girl would shake the plastic bottle,
which had once held fish oil supplements,

impatiently. It made the dad remember when
the cat went missing, and his mother

wouldn’t call for it, but shook and shook
its dry food in the little silver bowl. And

he would picture how the kids had scraped
the jelly beans across the kitchen island,

counting batches out like pharmacists.
It seemed too big, the thing that made his

wife inert and gray and distant as the mashed
potatoes everyone kept pushing farther back

inside the fridge. But he’d agreed to take
the medicine. They drank the jelly beans

with water from the cup the mother/
wife had used, because that was a rule.

I’m feeling happier, the girl
or boy would say. Me, too,

the other would agree.
Then they’d do happy things,

like scoop mud from the creek
if it was nice outside,

and turn a frisbee upside-down
to make a pottery wheel.

They played The Happy Game
until it just turned into life.

The times the father cried
were fast and quiet.

from Ekphrastic Challenge
November 2018, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “’The Happy Game’ is so imaginative I don’t think even kids could have invented it. The world of these 21 couplets is so rich in detail it feels as though you could walk right in—even the supporting characters seem real, as much as I hope they aren’t. It’s a poem that could have been a screenplay—all in a two-minute read. There were a lot of excellent poems submitted this month, but none more memorable.”

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