Michele Santamaria | Ekphrastic Towards a Family

Michele Santamaria received her MFA in poetry from University of Oregon, her MLitt in anthropology from University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and her MS in Library Science from Long Island University. Michele’s poems are informed by these diverse fields of study and by her experiences living in and between the Americas. Michele’s poems have appeared or will appear in Rhino, Harpur Palate, The Shore, The Canary, Bellingham Review, and Cimarron Review, among others. She received a scholarship from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, served as a poetry reader for Clemson University’s South Carolina Review, and served as a senior poetry reader for Washington College’s Cherry Tree. Michele has also taught poetry to all age groups. As a poet-librarian, Michele published a chapter about poet-librarianship in Poet-Librarians in the Library of Babel and co-wrote a book about teaching research through social media engagement. She lives with her family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and works at Millersville University as the Learning Design & Student Engagement librarian, prioritizing the role of wonder in students’ research process.

Also by Michele Santamaria: Technicolor Sonnet Oberwolfach, a Love Poem The Ballad of the Quito Tenis

October 1, 2025

Michele Santamaria

Ekphrastic Towards a Family

How to account for my grandmother’s eyes in that portrait, the surprising sharpness of irises in crayon, not the Technicolor green I had hoped for, instead, an in-between color I remember as silver, an unrepentant goddess unlikely to fulfill the promise that accompanied the drawing — to come back for her daughter, a pact my mother only tells me about in this moment, as she asks me if I remember where I last saw the portrait, after asking if I remember it, & I try to think only of another drawing in my mother’s house — a reproduction of a Picasso — the baby’s hand clasping the mother’s cheek while the mother grasps whatever she can.