Rachael Ikins
Painting: Owl by Rachael Ikins
By Sharon Waller Knutson
I was stunned and mesmerized by Storyteller Rachael Ikins painting of the owl with the poem written on it and asked if she had other poems that went with her paintings. What she sent me boggled my mind.
I am in awe of artists because I can’t draw a straight line. Rachael’s artwork is as powerful as her poetry. It stares out at me from the wall and speaks to me. It tells a story of its own.
“I began making art and poetry around age 14, lucky to have both supportive grandparents and an art and an English teacher urging me on.” Rachael said.
‘While I worked on my poetry right along, after high school I believed I didn’t know how to draw and it wasn’t until around 2008 when my mom gifted me art lessons for Christmas that I took up the paint brush, ink and pencils again.
“I’m a mixed media artist and largely self-taught. My work has hung in galleries from Washington DC to Cooperstown, NY and multiple places in the CNY area, Syracuse, the Everson Museum, ArtRage Gallery. A print of Shelter lives in NYC and another original of mine lives in Paris, France.
I had my first gallery show in about a decade at Books Etc., in Macedon, NY’ in July.”
I’m proud to publish her paintings and poems.
Owl
She is the fluttered vessel
that carries my beating
heart. Translucent
porcelain, the arc,
a span like ribcage
or fingers' spread entreaty.
She is the owl
that carries my beating
heart in a taloned
basket, prison bars beneath battened
wings. She is careless black
eyes, wide to witness
Night. Sickle Moon pricks
her ears.
In the round Moon's face,
She is crescent lip, a head
that dips to rip at my beating
heart, to sip my blood, my sinew
to feed her young.
Rachael named this pen and ink of elephant mother sheltering her baby “Shelter.”
This poem goes with the painting.
Shelter
The river opens its hand, calls down rain, sheets
and wings of rain.
Spread your wings, hover above the railing of the dislodged
dock atop a boat floating toward lake
toward ocean.
Jump on! with swallowtails after milkweed, fragrance
soaking grass even through voices of the open spigots.
One tree spreads thighs outside my second-story window,
knot hole pees.
Swear to God.
Next morning the watering can full,
yellow water, color of smoke and wildfires,
the color of dead trees.
****
You could hear that voice over two fans, the television,
you tried not to look, but it pulled you to the window.
Your disbelief- we were the epicenter.
Everyone will take their turn
being epicenter. You think
it’s others’ tents across the continent
that drown in ash? No, Mother
wants your blood, too.
You wonder where did the rabbits who eat bachelor buttons
in your garden though you leave piles of plucked clover,
shelter when the water walked through.
Rabbits flop in grass, hardly break the surface. Where did the rabbits
hide when trees went mad with all the water torturing them
leaf by leaf.
Falling nuts, cones, rolling pavement a river, a sea, whole cities of ants washed away.
The bats in their bat house, tree toads in theirs, and when water pauses,
slit silver scrapes horizon. Stars blink at your hope.
You pace, toes blind blunt animals feeling for wet, you think
there is no money for flood,
do we have flood insurance,
can’t remember.
House sealed its lips, birds in their houses by the front door,
house held water back where it tried to creep like a snake over the sill.
The birds, the poems do not preoccupy themselves with anxieties,
humans pick a scab until it hurts.
Just live in this house,
be present. Drape it around
your shoulders, sit in
between-places, halfway up the stairs
for example, or under the dining room table,
places a child speaks fluently.
You carry that child to bed every night. Just remember
to let her out again.
Rachael named this pen and ink of the hollyhock flower in pinks and greens: “Heat Wave.” Below is the poem that goes with this painting.
After the Hottest Heat Wave in Earth’s History
Piled sock wads and shed shorts mumble in corners.
Shoes stepped-out-of
shamble near doorways.
Drying towels smell of mold,
and heat stored in unexpected places,
a box of cookies exhales warmth when
you open the flaps.
You’ve been in the pool
in the shower,
kept your hair soaked,
run naked through the golf course sprinklers at dawn,
expect mushrooms to sprout from your navel.
Packets of neatly embalmed hibiscus blossoms
drop into puddles. Float, so many perfect,
wrapped mermaids
as lovely dead as when they spread themselves
in the sun
waiting for love’s juice.
You dove through walls of water,
cartwheeled across the garden
spouting books from every orifice,
heart pounded a distant engine
you could never quite hear,
but you felt it through your skin.
Yes, there are wonders, cactus buds,
blackberries bigger than nipples,
hummingbirds’ faces filled with gladiolus,
but
your friend is still dying. Tiny cells chase each other
up and down the highway, infiltrate her membranes,
ants in a sugar bowl. You keep driving even though
you can’t see the end,
even though the roar of water is so loud
you can’t hear the destination. You do your best
to arrive in time because that, the flower packets-
all there is.
A moment of lust blinked to ashes,
memory of a summer lake
where you two almost intersected
so many times
on a different planet
back when winters buried the castle on the hill
in deep
blue
snow.
Rachael named this portrait of a cactus flower mixed media collage: “Ode to a Cactus Flower.” It goes with this poem:
Ode to a Cactus Flower: Calling Me
Petals call my fingers,
mouth, stroke against
my cheek.
Cool silk alien.
Silence roars magenta
ecstasy, each dancer
swirls a wider skirt,
hides my face, those
taffeta folds.
Lavish.
Luscious.
Lipstick-slathered-on-glass, you
wester, melty
sunward.
Palm-stuck skin, my fingernail worries one spine,
painful pleasure.
Trickling droplet, my blood’s
color,
your velvet throat.
Swallow
me.
The artwork “Shelter” appeared as cover for Mused: Bella Online Literary Journal and won Critic’s Choice award and appeared in the student-run journal of Oklahoma City Community College, Absolute. The poem “Owl” is from the award winning collection Just Two Girls (ClareSongbirds Publishing House.) The artwork “Heat Wave” appeared as illustration in the novel Totems.
No comments:
Post a Comment