DaguerreoTyped #3: Ekphrastic Response
Each month, Alternating Current Press presents an ekphrastic challenge for writers and lovers of history: We feature a different public domain historical photograph, and ask writers to respond to it. There is no wrong answer, and no set style guidelines. Poetry, prose, hybrid, fiction or non, experimental — Anything goes that has a history bent. All work is considered for our Charter Oak Award for Best Historical and for publication in our annual Footnote: A Literary Journal of History (only if selected), and the best responses will be published on The Coil the following month. Check out last week’s post for your chance to participate in the July DaguerreoTyped historical ekphrastic challenge, and read all of the past archives here.
We present to you: the featured response to DaguerreoTyped #3! Enjoy!
“This Thing They Call a Great Depression”
by Dianne Borsenik
Mam-maw and Pap-paw call this thing a “Depression,”
but I don’t feel all that sad. I am hungry sometimes,
and I feel bad for Mama having to go pick up coal along
the train tracks. She ’lows me to go every now and again
when she’s got one of her headaches, but she says
she’s too worried about me getting run over to let me
make it a habit. I know I’m lucky to live in a real wood
house with Mam-maw and Pap-paw and Mama;
Pap-paw built it with his own hands when he married
Mam-maw, and he says he ain’t never letting it go.
Then he laughs and spits and says he ain’t never letting
“his girl” go, neither. They been together since they was
sixteen. I know Daddy’d like it here, too, if he hadn’t
gone off to California to pick fields. Mama says it’s so,
but she says, too, he might’ve already run off with some
dark-eyed beauty like himself, and then she looks at me
and shakes her head. She says I take after him. I don’t
have her straw-colored hair, or blue eyes, neither.
These two gals passing through look more like her
than I do. But I don’t think I take after him. I don’t think
I take after nobody but me. And I’m telling you, I
don’t see what’s so great about a depression, anyways.
Dianne Borsenik is active in the northern Ohio poetry scene and regional reading circuit. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies,
and Lit Youngstown put her poem, “Disco,” on its T-shirts, which makes her feel like a rock star. In 2011, she founded NightBallet Press, where she continues to produce books for poets across the United States.
