Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2021: Editor’s Choice
Image: “While Thinking About Snow and Ice” by Jojo. “White Spots” was written by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2021, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
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WHITE SPOTS
Sometimes you look for something else.
A corner where there might be rust.
An eyelash width.
A speck of dirt.
How you can use a poem’s words to keep
your distance.
Put a man there, in the picture, just
to see.
(You Google it and see a thousand
small attacks: the man a hacker now, a hood over his face.)
It is too much.
You change tacks and think of sugar,
silver tongs to lift each cube.
Whiter than
white.
The space around
that.
Next you see an envelope, lose
it again.
You wonder if there is a Rorschach test
for love (of course there’s not).
You think of how a friend said once she couldn’t tell
when you’re in love.
The more you look, you see the frayed
spots, little
gasps.
You stop to breathe.
You think of wings, or long wide
oars.
You remember this past winter, flying snow
geese, in a sheet.
How you could see the things you wanted to see
there (if you had looked).
How they slept next to the highway
in small heaps.
—from Ekphrastic Challenge
April 2021, Editor’s Choice
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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco has won the Ekphrastic Challenge five times now over the seven years of the series and seems to be a master of the short line. She wields them like a scalpel, carving deeper into the image with each quick stroke, exposing unseen details and revealing the mysteries that lie beneath.”
