There Would Be Feathers
My eyes are still the same. Dove gray, the right one slightly wider so it looks like my patience is depleted. Face Kabuki white, layers of powder obscuring pock marks, moles, imperfection, tears. Porcelain doll lips painted scarlet, brushstrokes that slur when you’ve had too many Kir Royales. My chin resting imperiously on a black boa. I knew at five there would be feathers. Hundreds of feathers cut from the wings of forgotten swans. I’m sweating in the rented dress, cinched tight at the waist. I try to hide my hands, bending them away from you. Later, when I kick my toes above my curls the men in the last row will grunt like pigs, stupid with desire. We are two freaks in the Paris night. Dwarf and whore. Voyeur and fly trap. Impervious to name calling or the dull vagaries of life: the unwashed cup, the stocking that needs mending, the pain in twice scarred thighs. People gaze at us a beat too long, re-arranging pieces in their minds, but the puzzle refuses to fit. If you’d finished the portrait, chosen a proper background instead of dirty cardboard, they’d take me for royalty. No mirror please. No promises or whispers of false adoration. You knew the chrysalis would have to burn, the butterfly damaged, wings dazed with fire. Beth Sherman Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her fiction has been published in Portland Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Blue Lyra Review, SandyRiver Review, Gloom Cupboard, Delmarva Review, Panoplyzine, Sinkhole, and Sou’wester. Her poetry has been published in Lime Hawk, Gyroscope, Rust + Moth and Silver Birch Press. She is also a Pushcart nominee and has written five mystery novels.
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How to Paint Pain
Canvas must be skin. A hide pulled tight. Gesso the canvas by allowing a gossamer stream of saliva to fall onto your palm. Rub into skin. Like a balm softening the hide. Now split yourself open. Use a scalpel to find the fissure where muscles and tendons open. Stretch one across for texture. Snap off the radius where it meets the ulna. Dip the heart shaped end to the pool inside your elbow. Hold it over your head like a half note. Wave long and short strokes onto the canvas. Circle your abdomen until the skin swirls open exposing the coiled intestinal maze. For a balance of earth tones: Take what is left in the bowels with both palms. Carve yourself open to the clavicle. Break off the smallest rib for finer detail. Open your lungs to lacquer over the clotting. Plunge a fingernail into your inner ear. Now blow to heat what lingers there. Use this encaustic to seal the layers. Now you may sign your work by pressing the veins of your heart against its corner. If you’ve created something you could live with daily on your wall, begin again. Jennifer Bradpiece Jennifer Bradpiece was born and raised in the multifaceted muse, Los Angeles, where she still resides. She remains active in the Los Angeles writing and art scene, often collaborating with multi-media artists on projects. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, journals, and online zines, including Redactions, Degenerate Literature, and The Common Ground Review. She has poetry forthcoming in Black Napkin, Nowhere Poetry, and NeosAlexandria: The Dark Ones Anthology among others. In 2016, her manuscript, Lullabies for End Times, was acknowledged as one the final ten favorites in the Paper Nautilus Debut Serious Chapbook Contest. Painting the Blackboard, or Writing
To shuttle: to travel back and forth. Here to there. There to here. Across the width of this room, here. We, two. You are the mode and I am the transported. Wavering, with my heel dug into your side. The clasp as you start back. The vehicle I use. What is that word? Conduit. Your trembling legs and lurch and my uplift of arm. The heady scrawl. There, that’s it, now we’re onto something. And now, go!, my arm sweeping and the paint nothing special – crazed on the front porch, where the sun has gotten to it – and the wax crayon ground down. Who were you? They’ll stand in the room years later and want to trace my scribble, my chicken scratch, as my grandmother used to say. Seeing meaning. Kelly R. Samuels Kelly R. Samuels lives and works as an adjunct English instructor near what some term the “west coast of Wisconsin.” Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appeared online at apt, Off the Coast, Burningword and The Summerset Review. At the Guggenheim, or Working-Class Girl Meets Rothko
My first time walking up the Guggenheim ramp, colour took me over: two stacked rectangles, orange and yellow-green, that shimmer in my mind decades later. I stopped knowing where I was – fell into some sort of zone, the Saturday museum crowd vanished. I'd never been alone with orange before. Mine had been a sepia childhood with regular bursts of fireworks. Sunset was dangerous, a time to look toward ground, fathers due home and mothers flashing red, when a flaming 3-D orange ball would be tossed back and forth, no attention left to pay to the incidental sky. While my lover had tutored me in sunsets – the fine art of looking out and up, the peaceful co-existence of reds, purples, greens and blues – he hadn't prepared me for Rothko, how a shape of colour lifted off the canvas. Orange had always meant marigolds, green-yellow the lawn during a dry spell. And how those beckoning rectangles could hang there so stridently, for no practical reason, two wide swaths radiating waves. Two separate colours bleeding into each other – but neither capitulating – to become something larger. Orange and Yellow, 1956, cloaking me, staking its claim. Nancy Hewitt This poem was first published in Connecticut River Review, 2017. Nancy Hewitt received her MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2002. Her chapbook HEARD was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review (Editor’s Prize), Phoebe, Connecticut River Review, Ellipsis, Off the Coast, and other journals. Her awards include nominations for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. She recently retired from her private practice in psychotherapy in Salem, MA, in order to focus more fully on writing. She divides her time between Swampscott, MA, and East Randolph, VT. Jean and Suzanne
He can’t draw, and she’s afraid of everything. (Her lovers know the rules: no guns in the bedroom.) He says his paintings are jazz. He cries over Billie Holiday’s unmarked grave.) Once upon a time, a man who can be counted among the great loves of your life told you about Jean, and you grumbled something about overrated outcasts. (You were still too young to know anything worth knowing in those days.) This same man once kissed you because Tom Jones was singing on a jukebox at the Winchester Arms Hotel (now a Starbucks.) Kissed you like you never thought he’d kiss you and never kissed you again, no, not like that, and you never wanted him to, because it might take away something from that night. It was this man, too, who said your work reminded him of Cy Twombly’s. There was no Google then; it was not until later that you read how only Cy of any painters was allowed to make pencil scribbles on his paintings. Ah, well, you did not know. And all your work has pencil scribblings, and it is too late to stop doing exactly what you are going to do, to stop doing exactly what you want. (And that is what this man who kissed you with an audience of irate bikers who did not like Tom Jones at the Winchester Hotel saw about you and loved.) You do not recall the complete details of all those afternoons spent swaddled in the arms of red wine. But, it is also true that love is brutal and lonely; it means spouses, choices, death, children and other disappointments. Now you are almost forty. You still can’t draw, but can’t has never stopped you, not from anything but success, that is. You fill those canvases, you fill those pages, the terrible law of averages means obscurity for the great and for the small. You accept that. Who will read your books? You will still write them for those few, for this man, the one who was always up for another long story, long after all the others had gone on. And now he too has gone on, and that is how it goes- those who loved you have turned to ghosts. And how do you live a life when all the living has gone out of it, when everything you knew has turned to dust? You also miss the one you married by mistake, the one who changed you, the one who told you to go and meet your fate. The one who gave you new eyes, and then gave you coins for his. Now here you stand: the whole earth is his grave. But you live. That is what you do, it is what you can’t help, this hunger to create, which you will do even if no one is left to see it, or no one wants to. It is why you are here. But once upon a time, oh the parties, oh, you would not believe oh, you would not believe the music. You could see in voodoo. You were still up to see the sunrise flooding the world with light. And you were still up to see it go down. And oh, the magic, of those potions and those powders. They caused the great and whole empires to crumble, so you forgive yourself. It was so beautiful at first to be so cosmic. Oh, the music, it was too much. How it could move over the beach and out across the water, oh, how the stars would dance. And after, way after, after you had moved on, the way you always will, to wrench every poem out of every ordinary moment, to paint, to live alone, working furiously you showed some work. They were big white paintings. They were about clean, they showed your emptiness to anyone who cared to look and few did but some did, the man did, he was there he was always there, even when he wasn’t. There in your aloneness at the edge of the end of the world, there he stood looking at those big white paintings, those paintings about emptiness and clean, looking into your devastation and sorrow hand on his chin searching them his eyes far away then he turned and said, This is your best work yet, baby you know that don’t you? As if I was a real artist or something. Lorette C. Luzajic This poem first appeared in the author's book of ekphrastic poetry, Aspartame. Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and the author of four collections of poetry. She is a visual artist showing regularly in her home town Toronto, and has recently exhibited in Tunisia and Mexico. Visit her at www. mixedupmedia.ca. Captive He sits in the back of the class wishing he could be anywhere but there. His father beat him when he saw his report card, took his bicycle away, and told him there’d be no more desert until he improved his grades. He sits there watching the teacher diagramming sentences but the only word he hears is the pronoun, “She” which makes him direct his attention to Veronica Miller, the pretty blond girl sitting in the front of the room, who he’s secretly been in love with since kindergarten, who’s smart, funny, and popular-- who hardly even knows he’s alive. He stares at her as she nods her head from time to time at what the teacher is saying, and wishes he were the teacher receiving her attention. He wonders what it must be like to be that powerful. Finally the bell rings and he gathers his books and puts them in his sack. He leaves the room with his head down and slowly walks in the direction of his home, wishing he were a different person, in a different time, and a different place. And he ‘d never come back. . . Jeffrey Zable Jeffrey Zable is a teacher and conga drummer who plays Afro Cuban Folkloric music for dance classes and Rumbas around the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and anthologies. Recent writing in MockingHeart Review, Colloquial, Ordinary Madness, Third Wednesday, After The Pause, Fear of Monkeys, Brickplight, Tigershark, Corvus, and many others. In 2017 he was nominated for both The Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. The Lynx Speaks Locked in winter, mine is the stare of hunger. Crouching under white spruce, I wait. A squirrel? A snowshoe hare? One grand spring—its neck will snap in my fanged jaws. I wait. I prowl. I wait. —A ptarmigan? A vole? Not even the tatters of a wolf-killed moose to gnaw on? Day and night, mine is the glare of knowing. My gaze hypnotizes the Two-Legged hunters panting to warm themselves in skins of my frosted grey fur. My eyes burn through lies, through fears, through you —all secrets my brain buries beneath great truths Ancestors whispered down the long black tufts of my ears and rituals they promised my spirit to ease into death. Alive, I stalk alone. Mine is the snare of patience. My paws slide soundless circling this frozen forest. Invisibility is my Medicine slipping between dimensions and planes. Look hard, you may never glimpse me again. Susan Ioannou Editor's note: The illustrating bronze is a placeholder image. Susan wrote this poem in response to the incredible Inuit sculpture, by Manasie Akpaliapik, Respecting the Circle, 1989. Please visit this link to view it, in order to receive the complete experience of the poem: https://ago.ca/collection/object/96/1294 Canadian writer Susan Ioannou has published stories, literary essays, novels for young people, and several poetry collections. Her books of poems include Clarity Between Clouds(Goose Lane Editions), Where the Light Waists (Ekstasis Editions), Looking Through Stone: Poems about the Earth (Your Scrivener Press), Coming Home: An Old Love Story (Leaf Press), and Looking for Light (Hidden Brook Press). Her full Literary CV is online: www3.sympatico.ca/susanio/sioancv.html The Merchant's Pearl
girl, he'll tell you anything and everything to get what he wants, didn't your mother tell you anything of the deceits of men? it's going too far to say it like this, but how else are you supposed to learn?: the pearl he wants is between your legs and he doesn't care about your pleasure, your name, your dreams, the things going on inside that darling head of yours, no... and so what if he's your father, the truth is that his is the kind of love that suffocates, and if you don't know already, you will soon enough, you'll look back on this moment as the awakening you should've had... for now he thinks you are the virgin, that no one's ever crept up to your room, that none have curled up next to you under the bushes in the wastelands where no one could hear you. let him think what he wants, he's going to anyway, and besides, you'd only be another whore if you told him, whereas were you his son, there'd be afternoon tea served from the dallah on that carpet with him leaning close and still closer as he smiled to ask what she was like, this woman who in the light of day, doesn’t even exist without a father’s judgement Garth Ferrante This poem was written in response to the sex and art ekphrastic challenge. Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity. He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless. Adieu
it's not going to happen all at once-- in fact, this moment of suffering will turn into several eternities: it's just how these things go, the time will creep by and you'll do nothing but hate god and yourself for not having saved her: all these things are normal, even your pain, especially your pain... but they won't tell you about reliving that moment in your heart till time "runneth out" and they won't tell you you'll wish you too were dead even though as your beard greys and the eyes dim, you won't be able to tell much difference between life and death, so that your misery will come to feel normal, like something that is good and wholesome because it reminds you of her... until you remember what she was really like and you'll despise yourself for replacing her with this disgusting substitute that could never be her, that she never would have approved of you curling up with, for where is your life now? you can point to this image and say there, right there! but that was then, and you are more than her loss, aren't you? they'll want something transcendent here, something lifting them up to where their own wisdom could never take them, and so you point to her death, to your lamenting, and say forever that this is who you are, even as you know she is shaking her head at you from beyond... where is the part that says you will do the same, that you will leave her as she left you? if she hated dying, you can hate to continue living, but still, you must go… yet in spite of knowing this, you stay Garth Ferrante This poem was written in response to the sex and art ekphrastic challenge. Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity. He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless. Hot Heat Jazz Call and response notes float over killing fields, spiritual stories – nuggets of blackgold boldy hollered across snowy cotton fields, sound of music hanging in air laying bare a hard day’s nightache Rising from rags in time into the mix, European clicks Irish jigs, German waltzes, French quadrilles New Orleans schmaltz and sass all that jazz Ragtime! Flappers chop their hair Americans throw caution… swing to new rhythm, synchronicity glides, shades of blue Gillespie-life fizzy notes spinning ol’ black magic Dizzy, and the dancehall born, till wartorn cries screech down time’s elevator shafts, a man with no notion of rhyme – rises up speaking guttural, drowning out music and the dance halls close, all the good players shipped off to die – them white folk found no one to make dance hall songs fly, but the beboppers gathered listening to intricate sounds strain as the moustachioed man manically barked hate spewed pain – notes in the gutter, yet music tinkles in stars. Bebop to freedom, Monk obeys scatting, free chatting, scatterbrain natting Thelonius speeds up the music, too fast for dance. From fingers to brain – Blitzing warpain Blues fuses with jazz. Out of smoke-choked bars notes rise, drift across plains once again, sweat drops drip onto white cotton- picking fields, melodies drift back, drift forth; so gentle, so sweet, clever and fulsome and deep. Oh, those hot steamy nights – nights that jazz was born. Maria Straw-Cinar Maria Straw-Cinar is a poet, writer and teacher. Her recent projects include a T.V Drama, Wild Women of Paris, about the female artists and writers living in Paris in the 20s. She hopes to continue to develop strong roles for women in her future writing for theatre, film and television. Her debut novel Girl, was short-listed for the Cinnamon Press Novel award in 2010 and is available to purchase online. In 2016 year she published a poetry collection Flamenco with Lulu Press, and her play, Vinegar Alley was long-listed for the Papatango Writing Prize and went on to have a staged reading in London (BAME/The Great Pretenders). She has a poetry website, Poetry and Other Pleasures mstrawcinar.wordpress.com. Over the past year she has been involved in a mentoring project with the editor of Cinnamon Press, inspired by the work of artist Lito de Silva to create an ekphrastic poetry collection, A-feto |
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