The world is filled with creativity. Whether between the pages of a book or within the walls of a museum, signs of humanity’s need to create are everywhere. Yet despite the countless forms creativity can take, we often experience them separately—compartmentalized like food divided by a cafeteria tray.
Few creative disciplines feel more separated than visual art and literature. While these forms occasionally intersect through illustrated book covers, exhibition reviews, or artist statements, they are rarely given the opportunity to grow alongside one another in true collaboration. In a time increasingly shaped by isolation, fast consumption, and digital distance, spaces that encourage creative dialogue have become more important than ever. True collaboration asks artists not only to create, but to listen, respond, and reinterpret through another person’s perspective.
As part of my Garrett Hongo Internship for Young Editors of Color with Poetry Northwest, I wanted to create a platform where poets and visual artists could work hand in hand. From that idea came the Text&Sketch Gallery.
Hosted on Poetry Northwest’s website, this gallery is rooted in inspiration, exchange, and conversation. Drawing from the practice of ekphrasis, three pairs of poets and artists spent three months sharing existing works and responding to one another through newly created pieces. Each collaboration became an evolving dialogue: one artist offering an image, emotion, or idea, and the other transforming it through their own medium. Through this process of reinterpretation, the boundaries between visual and literary art began to dissolve.
What emerged from these collaborations was more than a collection of poems and artworks. The pieces within this gallery speak to one another—expanding upon shared themes, challenging perspectives, and continuing conversations across mediums. Whether exploring the pressures of business, the weight of music, or the role of religion and identity, each pairing reflects the deeply human desire to connect and communicate.
With this online gallery space, I hope to encourage poets and visual artists alike to embrace collaboration as an essential part of the creative process. Creativity does not exist in isolation, and neither do we. Though artistic mediums may differ in form, each carries the same impulse: to reach beyond ourselves and share the ways we experience the world.
As you look through this gallery, I invite you to not only observe these works individually, but to experience the conversations unfolding between them . . . and to perhaps participate in the conversation by making a new work of your own.
Ian Jackson, Garrett Hongo Intern, 2026
Untitled
Lucas Rate
Intermezzo
Paul Zammit
Here, at this old piano, you don’t have to explain
why you tried to hang yourself.
The bagatelle of youth jetsam in all those green gallons
of flea market sake & another fish-bait bar gig.
A perfunctory sarabande roils you naked
through a foamless ketamine ocean.
Your skeleton whammy-bars under a festival tent,
the fake-acid atmosphere all milk-glass electric.
An aluminum tongue fails to recircuit your self-pity—
you have no favorite drug.
Forgetting your name is not a remedy,
but still the kids try.
Blank-faced in the strobe-light bedlam,
neon souls dead to the inattention economy.
Elbow yourself in a mosh pit,
snort confetti straight from the cannon.
They found you in the high school band room
ripping JWH-noids from an apple;
found me mushroom-headed in a bathtub
with dinosaur ghosts & a Kierkegaard action figure.
Sometimes you just have to survive yourself
long enough to survive yourself.
Here in this garage, where once we sang of how silent
we sleep in the land where bombs are made—
this is best place for you. Composing your intermezzo,
fingers grooved in the keys we burned caramel.
Recalibrate the drum machine. Oil the upright bass.
Make music for something more than drink tickets—
or better yet, for less.
Profit and Loss
Lucas Rate
The Salesman of the Year
Paul Zammit
boofed two mollies
& while we’re caged in a windowless hotel ballroom,
developing a formula for more money,
he’s bouncing around bright casino lights,
floating through cocktail waitresses
& zombified slot players, spanking a craps thrower
in a wrist brace & pissing into the Mississippi
with a bum who got trapped here after Katrina
& hasn’t seen his wife since she died.
So, the Salesman of the Year hugs him
with a bump of coke & a beer,
& they watch the cargo ships blink off
into the foggy, polluted delta,
while we argue fluorescently with white little mints
& white boards & non-toxic markers
you couldn’t huff to kill a braincell—
& still, we haven’t found the formula.
We lost it somewhere,
down by the dark, friendly pier.
Colours on My Face
Itohan Ekle
Seamripper
Amy Raasch
Velvet was the first / daguerreotype / shapeshifting
quicksilver & fissioned light // I have broken
from the sun / refashioned the horizon / into
a negative of myself / stenciled my eyes
into the vast black ream // Sewing machine
teeth don’t dream / they inscribe / the unseen
God we lean to / but cannot describe // Something
shimmers / swallowed / in the fold //
the big blue Earth / God’s pocket square //
We grow cold // unbuttoned / from the center
of things / but I’m happy for anyone / for whom order
is a dare // Why suture fear / to something
darker / than the sea // needled by a billboard /
dug into our dreams // I have unmoored myself
from the sail of God // Listen // Earth keeps
stitching itself bluely / into the voluptuous black //
a hum / no tailor / can out-sew // And so / I am fitted /
to a new / cosmology // I have fastened myself
to the mangle // I am a dressmaker / in the dark //
I border-stitch / I bolt // The melt value
of my hunger / can be measured / in volts // I unseam
bad money // I sew best / in the dark
Now I Stare
Itohan Ekle
My Sister Donates Her Eyes to the State of Minnesota
Amy Raasch
I stare too long into the eyes of strangers // Mom gets a certificate
with my sister’s name in the mail // In Minneapolis
or somewhere / my sister’s eyes read their new name
on a Starbucks cup / scan billboards for her morning
talk radio show // Her eyes blast Tom Petty / sing at stoplights //
You belong among the wildflowers // Once / she ran a marathon
with no training / obsessed over Tonya & Nancy // Now her eyes burn
with a sudden desire to figure skate / to kneecap a rival //
Tom Petty says her eyes belong somewhere they feel free // Where
are these wildflowers / her eyes ask the Ouija // Hands they don’t recognize
spell a sister they never met // Her eyes sign up for a marathon
with no training / circle Lake Bde Mka Ska // A plaque on a bench
spells a name they can’t place // Her eyes carve involuntary
letters in snow / yank flyers from telephone poles / & go out looking
for all the lost dogs // I carry her eyes like marbles in my pocket //
They sound like color the blossom has rejected //
In Minneapolis / or somewhere / her eyes spot their hundredth lost dog /
& celebrate by not drinking a fifth of gin // I stare too long
into the eyes of strangers // Dig for the certificate
Mom threw in the trash // Wonder if my sister’s eyes still
feel calmest among horses // If they see what only horses know//
In spring / I hold the marbles up to the close sun /
watch blossoms turn her particular blue / the kind that limits
its evolutionary options / purpling for only the heaviest bee //
The horses are not a poem // I hold the marbles to their muzzles
like a detective // Have you seen this? // Do you know this blue?
As Below, Below, Below
Verena Raban
Hi
Verena Raban
Tlazolteotl Eats La Mala to Purify Her
Xochitl Portillo
His eyes look like dying,
little windmills churning.
So much loose tobacco
it sheds like petals
and I think this is pure
love but really
it’s pure daddy wound, sickle shape
on my mama’s communist belly,
deflated warning of what grew
in greater times. I chance it anyway
like jumping off the Denny Overpass
in the shape of a tear
which is actually rippled rain
on my mother’s stomach.
So much stretching skin
to make a baby in the form
of a lunatic.
Used to love showing childhood
friends my home birth snapshots.
Amniotic fluid like cream, mama
screaming thick and vibrant like Excene,
reigning X in my name
busting out of her so all Dolores Park could hear.
If crowning isn’t punk rock,
I don’t know what is.
Pincushion body
distorted voodoo
breasts two planets above another
mosh pit of circles.
Sticky placenta
on my sister’s hands
as they plant what grew me,
as they examine the seed.
And now look at these blisters I choose for men.
Floating Bukowski-broken-boi-brains.
Blood dropped from my nose as I came
and I called it ritual.
My thighs clamped down on his dome
like I was harnessing something heartier than a newborn,
maybe if I grip onto a man’s skull the way my mother released my own,
we can ouroboros our way back to the initial moment,
wave to the shadow tailored in a suit of lemon moonlight.
Does death always stand in 4th position with a cigarette?
Or is she in full plié, filthy like me.
I know her lipstick from childhood, the cut of her.
Pink parameters of hell as a holy nightclub,
I’m green to go with her
I only trust the ghoul with the girl inside of me.
On Sundays
Verena Raban
On Sundays
Xochitl Portillo
with the Lakewood tías—
I go to work with lemons,
they go to work with La Virgén.
On the 14, one has her bible
sealed up like a couch in plastic,
another counts rosary beads
like she’s sorting frijoles.
One has hibiscus hair,
aglow with chismosa knowledge.
At her stop—Praise Center on W. Florida
—fuchsia varnish glints in plexi-
splendor as she waves
¡Vaya con Dios!
Thinking of my own tías
drifting in & out of the Carmelita kitchen,
loud as onion fumes, unknown fish
& hot, holy lard.
I always sat in the adjacent room
—my own private iglesia—
surrounded by a thousand bloodied
Cristo crucifixes nailed to Rosa’s walls,
hearing familiar muffles
of bolillos splitting mid-gossip.
Rosa’s old parrot Pierre
still mimics her favorite phrases,
And the mother? . . .
And the husband? . . .
Y ya, se fue!
