Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2015: Editor’s Choice

[download broadside]

__________

[audioplayer file=”https://admin.rattle.com/audio/GaskinAbduction.mp3″]

Kate Gaskin

ABDUCTION

When was the last

time I touched your hair

pale as milk, face wan

as the carton that claimed it?

Another day the trees

knit tighter to the one

before until the forest chokes.

But it wasn’t, as I’d remembered,

a great adventure,

packing sandwiches,

coming home when there was

nothing better to do.

My love, they found you not

in a copse of firs

but interred, after a wretch

of weeks, bone-white

and weathered

in a fist of gravel.

Has it been this way

forever? You holding

the basketball that night

beneath a sky scattershot

with stars, and then

the sound of you gone,

how the ball bounced once,

twice, then rolled to a stop

in the empty parking lot.

—Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2015
Editor’s Choice Winner

[download audio]

__________

Comment from the editor, Timothy Green, on his selection: “Choosing your favorite from a large stack of poems is easy: Just read them all and wait for your blood to run cold. Kate Gaskin’s poem is chilling, but it’s also a well-crafted lesson in poetic symbolism and syntax, winding its way to the final heart-stopping image. I wish I could forget a few of the lines, but I know that I won’t be able to.”

Note: This poem has been published exclusively online as part of our quarterly Ekphrastic Challenge, in which we ask poets to respond to an image provided by a selected artist. This May, the image was a painting by Åsa Antalffy Eriksson. We received 187 entries, and the artist and Rattle‘s editor each chose their favorite. Åsa’s choice was posted last Friday. For more information on the Ekphrastic Challenge visit its page. See other poets’ responses or post your own by joining our Facebook group.