Maame in the Alcove I’m not among those willing to look back toward the old gods, those who gave comfort, fear, rites to feel whole. But she twists back desperate to cling to them, Cape Coast bollards in time’s typhoon—its unrelenting gusts tug her braids westward, straightening them out. Perhaps it’s ignorance of the old ways: I can’t decipher what distresses her. A water jug her head once bore lies cracked beside a stool (sagging, much like her breasts), yet the hassock at her feet a trendy pouf covered in durable polyester chintz. I keep such knickknacks in an attic baized in webs, mildew, dust: a warped psalter, masques from a bygone fête—remnants of gatherings fit for her mise-en-scène? Why does she parade them—jugs, handholds on a cliff-face as if they’d stop a freefall? Like me, she sits alone; they’ve shuttered the old marketplace. But if she’ll shop in Shoprite’s fluorescent anonymity for her yams, cassava flour, I could help her connect-- where thousands stream a grainy highlife clip and google Who are Asase Yaa, Nyame? Michael Sandler Michael Sandler is the author of a poetry collection, The Lamps of History (FutureCycle Press 2021). His work has appeared in scores of journals, including recently in THINK, Literary Imagination, and Smartish Pace. Previously he worked as a lawyer, in addition to writing poems. He lives near Seattle; his website is www.sandlerpoetry.com.
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Méliès Moon I will refuse the cold and lifeless rock and instead choose the Méliès moon, a wild, anarchic planet, one eyeball burst by a rocket’s priapic thrust. I will refuse a cold and distant science and instead choose a lunar snowfall sprinkled by star-girls with shining stockings over forests of swollen mushrooms. I will refuse to be cold and logical and instead choose spectacle, the dark side of the moon governed by skeletal simians, the dominion of dreams I am afraid to confess. Jacob Lee Bachinger Jacob Lee Bachinger lives in southern Alberta where he teaches at University of Lethbridge. His book of poetry, Earth-cool, and Dirty, was published by Radiant Press of Regina in 2021. His work has been featured in Canadian journals such as The Fiddlehead, Riddle Fence, and The Malahat Review, among others. For more information: https://www.jacobleebachinger.com/ Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), film by Georges Méliès (French) 1902 Clouds of Glory Papa was a rolling stone. Papa was a bowling ball. Papa was a Hallmark card. Papa was a pocket slide-rule. Papa was a pluggerdoodle. Papa was a binkus. Papa was a schnulli. Papa was the smell of napalm in the morning. Papa was the odor of formaldehyde rising from the mortician’s open door at night. Papa was a Kool Aid flavor, Man-o-Mangoberry, with a twist. Papa was the Cookie Monster. Papa was an unsacked bottle of port wine, passed hand to hand, in an alley behind Fifth and Western. Papa was the beleaguered Ricci in Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 Italian neorealist masterpiece The Bicycle Thief. Papa was the inimitable Nervous Norvus before “Transfusion” fame ruined him and drove him into seclusion in the Hollywood Hills. Papa was the original Nervous Nelly before a fusillade of anti-aircraft fire ripped through his B-17 Flying Fortress on January 27, 1943, on a bombing run over the submarine yards in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, and parts of the waist gunner were splattered across the hatch of Papa’s ball turret, and the catwalk was slickened with blood, and the babyfaced pilot judged the mission a bust, and dropped the plane out of formation, and turned, and limped back to England on one engine, and crash-landed there, in a cornfield, events which would imbue Papa with a disquieting composure that would remain with him the rest of his life. Papa was a chainsmoker, naturally. Papa was not for sale. Papa was not for resale. Papa was not to be removed under penalty of law. Papa was not for everybody. Or maybe he was. Papa was a rolling stone. Edward Miller Edward Miller teaches writing at Madera Community College. Included among his areas of interest are outsider art, street photography, and the American vernacular. What If the Sky Could Help Us I listen to the news of another war, chopping onions on this early October night. I put the knife down but feel like screaming at every man. Then, I remember Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City. That vast sky, sugary and glistening with peaches, offering sweetness to the windswept world. I take a deep breath. Visualize the two faint ships adrift in the bright melancholy of the ocean. Let myself sail with them, like a tired seabird on a mast. I feel myself relaxing. The wild shaking of rage turning into something else, something far less ruinous. What if I could study the sky for a few moments, like here, from the kitchen window, to become spacious and quiet, to become inclusive of every changing cloud and colour? What if my habits of hurting others, could be altered? And if I look long enough, amazed at the alchemy, at the sun’s fathomless art, I could evolve. Teresa Williams Teresa Williams is a poet living in Seattle, Washington. Her work has been featured in Psychological Perspectives, Lily Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing she likes to wander near mountains and rivers with her wolfdog. She received an MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Rock Art of the Lower Pecos A yucca hides the quick retreat of a red racer beneath spines. Agave’s rough leaves used for sandals and twine, the botanist says. A crow spreads its feathers, complains at our descent to the cliff shelter. A trinity of rectangular figures sways on the rock wall. “First red, then yellow, then black,” a paleobiologist says, foaming over his discovery of paint layers. Tangle of shapes and lines—antlered shamans and creatures pierced with arrows—I can’t make the connections. An ochre ripple, the river drying out in the bottom of the canyon, weaves though the composition. For a moment the cave breathes in the morning wind. Welcome to the altar, our guide says. I have a button of peyote in my hand, jimson seeds in my pouch. Horned roaches and hairy animalcules swarm the walls. I squeeze through a hole in the sky, impale the beasties that afflict the woman, lying on a grid of sticks, a bushy-tailed panther at my side. No saint, no martyr… I am the bird that glances at the moon and harkens the call of waving plumes. Mark McKain Mark McKain’s work has appeared in Agni, The Journal, Subtropics, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Superstition Review, Western Humanities Review, ISLE, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere. His second poetry chapbook Blue Sun was published by Aldrich Press. He experiences global warming in St Petersburg, Florida. Two years ago on a drive from Florida to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he made a determined stop to see the inspiring rock art images which are little known and should receive more attention. Still glowing from yesterday's incredible Dress You Up session on fashion in art history and literature, with TER editor Kate Copeland. It was a truly amazing time and some of you were inspired to create brilliant poems already. Join us on Thursday night for a wine and art write night. Inspired by the paint night phenomenon, we get together on Zoom to relax and write together while diving into art. This time, we are looking at mermaids in art history, and using some mermaid themed work to fuel creative writing exercises. Bring your favourite Shiraz or Chardonnay, or a pot of tea. Our workshops are about creation, connection, conversation, and creativity. We delve into the theme and think about the images, write, and share if we are moved to. New and experienced writers will be equally inspired. An art history session is also coming up. Learn more about Mexican art history at Frida's World: Mexico's art story. See you there! The Mermaid Muses: writing with sea sirens in art history
CA$35.00
Join us for a deep sea dive into the story of mermaids in the visual arts. We will look at a variety of mermaid art and use it to inspire our own nostalgia, fantasy, and mythology. Thursday, March 14 from 6 to 8 pm. A wine and art write night! Bring your favourite wine (or a cup of tea) and we will relax together, look at amazing art, and get some ideas down for our poetry and stories. Frida's World: Mexico's Art Story
CA$35.00
Join us to explore the incredible story of Mexico's art history. It will be a whirlwind tour through time. Frida Kahlo was passionate about pre-Columbian artefacts and her husband was considered the master artist of Mexico. The couple were surrounded by art stars and brilliant creatives. Of course, Frida became the most beloved artist and icon. We will look at a wide variety of visual art through time. This session will focus on looking at and talking about visual art rather than on writing exercises, but writers will find a wealth of inspiration to be mined for their poetry and stories later. On Birkenau, by Gerhard Richter During an April in Berlin, when it is still winter, I wear fingerless gloves through a blank white day and take the bus to the Neue Nationalgalerie. Here in the basement of a stark glass building is a Gerhard Richter show: 100 Words for Berlin. The centerpiece of the show is his four Birkenau paintings. The Birkenau pieces are ceiling-height abstractions. Each is slightly different, but they are all executed in grays, reds, whites, greens, their thick paint smeared horizontally and unevenly. The paint is thinly cratered like a moon landscape. The paintings are based on—literally, painted over renditions of—four photographs taken inside Birkenau, the death camp partner to Auschwitz’s concentration camp. Initially Richter attempted to render the photographs figuratively; later, as he came to believe in the impossibility of doing this, he covered them with paint. The photographs were taken by prisoners—the only such photographs of a Nazi camp by victims. It was 1944. * The first time I visited the genocide memorial at Ntarama, the tour guide told me to take photos. We had walked around the site and she had recounted to me the story of Rwanda’s genocide, and now, the way she framed it, I felt she was asking me for something in return. I wasn’t sure: wasn’t it rude, somehow, to take a picture—as if a picture was indeed a taking, as if it was almost embarrassing to photograph these remains? As if violence was somehow shame? I resisted it. Yes, the guide said, moving her hands forward, palms up, in a sweeping motion. At the time—they do not allow this anymore—many tour guides at Rwanda’s memorials were telling visitors to take photographs. Proof of genocide needed to be shared around the world. Too many years of being ignored had taken their toll. Now photographs would prove what had happened here, what had been neglected in 1994 and neglected every year after by outsiders who valued Rwandan lives as little as they plausibly could. As if by witnessing one was returning something to Rwanda: attention, a weak form of reparation. I took a few photographs that first trip: broken windows. Clothing hanging from the ceiling. The same photographs everybody took. The same photographs you would take to rate a visitor attraction. Here is what you’ll see from the outside; here is what you’ll see when you enter. The contents, the clothes, the bones. Here is a close-up at a slight angle. Here you can see the trees. I would hold on to those photographs for years. I was a researcher; I needed them; they made me uneasy, hearts beating in a locked box. * In 1944 in Birkenau, a member of the Sonderkommando, who were responsible for burning bodies from the gas chambers, held the camera. It had been smuggled into the camp by the Polish resistance. The probable photographer was Alberto Errera, a Greek Jewish naval officer. A small team of Sonderkommando members put the exposed film into a toothpaste tube and a woman named Helena Datón smuggled it out. The note that accompanied the photos was from Stanisław Kłodziński, a leader of the camp’s resistance. He wrote: "Sending you snaps from Birkenau – gas poisoning action. These photos show one of the stakes at which bodies were burned, when the crematoria could not manage to burn all the bodies. The bodies in the foreground are waiting to be thrown into the fire. Another picture shows one of the places in the forest, where people are undressing before ‘showering’ – as they were told – and then go to the gas-chambers." When they were first published in the 1940s, the photographs were cropped. In the originals the photos are crooked and slightly blurry, human figures listing to one side. The crops straightened the pictures, aligning them vertically. They made the photographs more straightforward, like journalistic documentation. But they also removed the blackness that had framed each photo. Errera had taken the pictures from a hiding place--the shadowed exit of a gas chamber. In their original form—crooked, unbalanced, half-obscured by the darkness of the building—the pictures are documents not only of events but also of Errera’s towering bravery. I think of Errera hanging back, trusting the interior darkness to hide him. Outside it’s bright—sun on a clearing, pale bodies laid out on the ground before trees—and the photographs are taken at an angle, as if Errera had snapped photos at waist or chest height, unable to check his aim. There is debate about what exactly the photographs depict, based on when they were taken. One narrative says that they were taken within half an hour or even fifteen minutes of each other; another says they depict morning and afternoon. Both arguments are based on the angles of the shadows. Some say they are the before and after of the same transport: people arriving at the gas chambers, being told to undress, heading for the shower, and then, after, the same laid out, dead, in the clearing. Facing Birkenau, I consider Errera taking the first photographs, guarded by several other men; he pointed his camera through the gas chamber’s door, or window, or (one source says) opening through which Zyklon B was poured, knowing exactly what was going to happen, momentarily, to these naked women heading through the trees, toward a spot somewhere to his left. And then after. * A decade ago, for the first time, I stood in front of a room to talk about Rwanda’s genocide memorials. I showed none of those images from Ntarama; none of its bones, or its broken windows. None of its exposed and fleshless human bodies. Someone did ask me why. At the time I thought this choice not to show the dead had to do with shock or respect. I was thinking about the gaze as both witness and violator, of the dead as exposed to view, whether or not they had chosen it. But of course this is an old, old story. Susan Sontag talks about it in Regarding the Pain of Others, her book on the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people's pain. Photography is new, but looking is not. Sontag goes all the way back to a story told by Socrates about Leontius: "On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, 'There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight.'" Is it feasting? Something to be eaten and then processed, a consuming witness stuffed with guilt? * Richter reportedly created the Birkenau paintings after a year of attempting to render the photographs figuratively. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl reports that Richter first saw the images in the fifties. … In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. He covered them with paint, layering it on and scraping it away. Now, as Schjeldahl acknowledges, you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. When I visit 100 Words for Berlin, in the same room as Birkenau are images of the original Sonderkommando photographs. The explanation contained in the glossy trifold brochure seems to move the room: the photographs and the paintings slot into place, history stacks around them. I stare at the paintings as if I can see the traces of women’s bodies beneath them: the men standing around the corpses, rummaging as if in a pile of belongings; the smoke rising in great thick billows; the trees stretching up toward the sky. There are two photographs where the walls of the gas chamber are visible, and the corpses of the dead through the opening. A third shows mostly trees and then, down in the bottom left corner, women walking toward their deaths. The fourth aims too high: it shows only branches. What was happening down below them, what Errera saw as he clicked the shutter, is lost. * I passed by the bones at Ntarama and took their picture—but the word took is wrong. I took nothing from them; they felt nothing as I went by; they were still quietly, securely themselves. It was me that felt the churn as the tour guide told me to take a picture, me who sensed them thrumming with blood as they sat quietly in my research folders. The twitching, nervous thing that needed a shield was me—the thing that needed a filter, needed to cover those photographs in paint and color, needed to hide from them. I think of Richter attempting to representing those photographs and then painting over them, scraping the paint off, over and over: sealing them in a box. His process has sometimes been represented as coming to terms with the futility of representation. But it is also a process of protection, a way to admit smallness in the face of something too big to consume at all. The dead are quiet and their photographs equally so. It’s the rest of us who are alive, passing through the rooms of art and death, a roiling, churning set of bodies, turned into what the faces of the silent, judging dead render us: made of what we eat. There’s one more thing Schjeldahl says about Richter’s work on Birkenau. After Richter first saw the Sonderkommando photographs in the 1950s, he encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. He did not paint Birkenau until 2014. He stared at them for six years. Annalisa Bolin Annalisa Bolin’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is an archaeologist and anthropologist who researches how people perceive and use the heritage of the difficult past, working mainly in Rwanda and the US Virgin Islands. The Magpie This is not a winter of discontent though the crackled paint reminds us of age, but what the French have called effet de neige-- just the absoluteness of a moment before its mauve and pink fiction is spent and a magpie’s black, white, and blue message vanishes with the haste of a turned page defying the artist’s eye and intent. We’re left questioning whether bird remained centered on a gate for him to complete and then en plein air capture snow still bright, amazed that fence shadows wouldn’t have changed too quickly to be done sur le motif against the world’s constantly failing light. Claude Wilkinson This poem was first published in the author's collection, Marvelous Light (Stephen F. Austin University Press.) Claude Wilkinson is a critic, essayist, painter, and poet. His poetry collections include Reading the Earth, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, Joy in the Morning, Marvelous Light, World without End, and Soon Done with the Crosses. He has been a Provost Scholar and also John and Renee Grisham Visiting Southern Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Other honours for his poetry include a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and the Whiting Writers' Award. Pilgrimage You bump on beater bikes over miles of dry lake bed, past the Man and the Temple and roving throbbing art cars into deep playa. Far off in the dust, a vertical ring of floating stones like a relic of ancient rites. You come upon it then, an elliptical staircase. Twenty-seven rough-hewn sand-toned boulders, each the weight of four men, suspended from looming columns by a ship’s rigging of cables. Through the wires, wedges of cloud and mountain. Light, air, and earth, the frame. Stepping into it like entering a grove of redwoods. If you’re bold, you scramble up and over the twenty-foot peak; you can’t help grinning. If you’re old like me, you try five giant steps till the wobble defeats you. Like at six on roller skates: dread had already breached my bones. How many exhilarations did I miss? But I wouldn’t miss this. Hello new planet! I stroke the sun-warmed stone like an amulet, pray that nobody falls. Gaze down at rock piles that hide the hardware. It took three engineers and heavy equipment to anchor my son’s vision, make it soar. A pilgrim, I visit day and night. At noon, it throws down a shadow on the desert floor like a fat pearl necklace. At dusk, it’s swarmed by revelers, their billowing scarves and sarongs the only colour. One morning, I bask in its stillness, then spot four legs dangling from the top. I settle on the first stone, turn to the sun. Susan Auerbach Susan Auerbach is a retired professor of education who returned in midlife to her first love of creative writing. She often writes in the key of grief, as in her chapbook, In the Mourning Grove (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in Spillway, Gyroscope Review, Greensboro Review, and other journals, and in her memoir, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’s Quest for Comfort, Courage & Clarity After Suicide Loss (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017). She lives with her husband, dog, and seven chickens in Altadena, CA, where she takes inspiration from the San Gabriel Mountains. Winter Apples in tribute to Seraphine de Senlis My apple was old but no less sweet for having set on the checkered tablecloth since before Christmas. A bit more pith, a white inside slightly yellowed waiting for that painting of the apples I ordered this morning by the French painter (pacing the border of madness with footsteps of a cleaning woman) who splashed her apple tree with orange and red and roots below ground that bound it in the wind storm that grabbed apples and threw them onto damp grass where the doe and her fawn tiptoed with caution (weighing smells in the wind) to eat so many apples, tart and wet. Tricia Knoll Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose next book Wild Apples (Fernwood Press, 2024) incorporates this image on the cover, a tribute to an artist of the past whose life and painting resonates with the poet as she writes about moving 3,000 miles to Vermont after downsizing. Knoll is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Website: triciaknoll.com |
The Ekphrastic Review
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