The Rabbit In Paris, beneath the lush rooms of Waterlilies, the rabbit hangs by its feet, eye dilated and white, dead-eye, but whose brown fur feathers to be touched and then the copper jug suspended beside its back, orange bulb blooming, full of wine, perhaps, or stale water. Hunting trophy still life, remnant of moments-- of paw in dirt, view of grass, sound vibrating in ears, punctured flesh and torpid light before the aperture closed. One of a series of dead rabbits and hares, done after fish and forks and light-taut glass. A series of darkened walls hung with luminous fur, with jugs and a wisp, perhaps, of a flower. It is the suspension of fear-- the mouth forever frozen open, the suggestion of ribs that enclose the stilled heart, one ear dotted with the orange-red of the jug to balance the composition, to appease the eye’s need for symmetry, to provide some resolution to the rabbit hung, forever now, beyond death. Ann McGlinn Ann McGlinn has published short stories and poems in a variety of journals, including Art/Life, Poem, Cutbank, Rosebud, Quarterly West and The Flexible Persona. Her first novel, El Penco, was published by Cuidono Press in 2014. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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John Everett Millais' Ophelia Wind stirring branches beats the windows, as a storm pours over the gutters that have given up like Hamlet who could not even save his love from drowning. Asters wave their red wands in the current, Nile lilies gasp, going under. I dream of Lizzie Siddal in a two story walk-up where John Everett Millais has dressed her in a pool with deep cut banks, her auburn hair pulled free. A little thunder, a zipper of lightning scoring the post oak in the front yard carries me to a London afternoon when I stopped to visit Lizzie at the Tate while my friends wandered off to sketch friezes and nudes. After forty years, what have I forgotten of Millais’ Ophelia: phlox, delphinium, a blue stream that just fit her body, water lilies bearing her lightly in their arms? Once, in another electric storm, lightning cracked behind the second story farmhouse window where my wife’s hair rose in the surge and all the lights blew. In the stillness we could hear the guzzle of bright cold water pouring off the roof as the wind dredged deep channels through galleries of corn, leaves bent and turning palms up in the current, while lancets of rain furrowed the field. I slipped into a dream of floating in the moonlight miracle of earth turned to water. Even here in Oklahoma one life might be exchanged for another. Markham Johnson Markham Johnson won the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, and his first poetry collection was published by the University Press of Florida. He has an MFA from Vermont College, and his poems have been published widely in magazines including Nine Mile, Coal Hill, and Library Journal. Tranquility Shot Through with Sorrow (Early Sunday Morning) Early Sunday Morning. Every time I look at the print on the wall in my office I have the uncanny feeling that I am seeing a slightly different painting. The first impression is always one of a bright and peaceful morning. The stillness is palpable and the overwhelming emotion is one of tranquility. The calm silence is comforting in its familiarity and yet the scene is devoid of sentimentality. Upon closer inspection, underlying this almost ataraxic sense of solitude and quiet are ineluctable traces of dissolution and disquiet. The recrudescent past slowly encroaches and I can hear echoes of Beckett, “All of old. Nothing else ever. No future in this. Alas, yes.” 1 The past indeed pervades this scene. The eye is drawn to the melancholy barbershop pole, listing in stark evidence of the persistence and indifference of time. What is it about this pole that resonates so deeply? Is it metonymic of the inescapable fate faced by everyone and everything? One can begin to envision the days of the old neighborhood that will never return. Those days of grandeur, if they could be called that, have receded into the invisible dust of the past. Long gone are the innocent salad days of hopes and dreams that would never materialize, a lifetime of waiting for something that would never arrive. All that remains are the fetters of an unending present. Hopper’s paintings evoke the passage of time, of things irretrievably lost, the sadness of knowing that things will never be the same and that we are subject to the aleatory, capricious whims of destiny. The loneliness of the street is overwhelming. It has a knowledge that must be respected and secrets that remain best unrevealed. It is not just a scene of tranquility, it is one of “tranquility shot through with sorrow.” 2 The painting attempts to capture that which eludes representation. It opens up to reveal layers of depth and is replete with internal reflections and messages waiting to be deciphered by the viewer, who feels the subtle emotional weight of what is not seen. It is a painting of contrasts and alternating intensities. Beneath the solid façade of the building is the underlying fragility of the lives led inside. The initial impression of light is counterpoised by the darkly ominous vertical structure in the upper right-hand corner. There is the calmness with its irruptive unease simmering beneath the surface, the aforementioned comforting familiarity masking an undercurrent of alienation. There is the bright yellow in some of the windows juxtaposed with the dark, gaping, curtainless openings. It is these contrasts and the differences between initial impressions and the consequent alterations of them that lend the work its enigmatic air. Time has briefly been held in abeyance. Although it is early Sunday morning this is not a time that can be measured in hours and days. This is what Tom McCarthy calls the “time-out-of-time” or the “recessional” 3. It is, as he says, the time of fiction, and the viewer is invited to imagine the lives being led behind those windows, lives of quiet desperation, with their all-too-fleeting moments of happiness. I imagine a man sitting on the edge of the bed, the oblique rays of sunlight cutting a path across the floor, while the serried dust motes dance a sad pavane. A half-empty whiskey bottle from the night before stands in silent observance on the table. This man has long ceased wondering how he has arrived at this destination or what other lives he might have lived. I am reminded of another fictional personage, the narrator of Emerald Blue, who reflects on Sunday afternoon as the “saddest time of the week”, the realization having set in once again that “you were no more than the person you were.” 4 In the next apartment I see a woman, perhaps not dissimilar to the woman in Hopper’s Morning in a City, waking to another lonely, unfulfilled day. She is standing there, looking vulnerable in the gloomy interior, not contemplating the scene of countless days wherein she can read the story of her life, but instead she is looking toward the wavering haze on a horizon that stretches out to infinity, imagining a journey to a place that might truly be hers, which she will never visit. Last fall in London I saw one of Whistler’s Nocturnes of the Chelsea Bridge. I can no longer recall where I read that when asked how long it took him to paint his nocturnes, Whistler answered “all my life”. I looked at the seemingly infinite shades of blue and the sparse yellow flickers on the other side of the water, the forms and shapes in the distance atremble in the dim light across the silvery, dark expanse of water. Hopper came to mind and I wondered whether he might have given the same response for Early Sunday Morning. Yesterday I looked at the painting again. Yes, it really is best described by the phrase “tranquility shot through with sorrow.” I thought about myself and the imperceptible passing of the years, as I imagined someone just out of view in front surreptitiously preparing to leave, reminding me of a phrase from Rilke’s elegies, although the coign of vantage was not a hill but this desolate street. “As he who halts one final time, on a hill high enough to show off his whole valley, wavers and stops and lingers there, we too live our lives forever taking leave.” 5 Kimmo Rosenthal 1. These phrases are in the opening pages of Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett in Nohow On : Three Novels by Beckett, (Grove Press, 1980). 2. This phrase is attributed to Victor Hugo by Peter Davidson in The Last of the Light : About Twilight, Reaktion Books, 2017 3. “Recessional – The Time of the Hammer” appears in Typewriters, Bombs and Jellyfish: Essays by Tom McCarthy, (New York Review of Books, 2017) 4. The story Emerald Blue appears in the collection Stream System by Gerald Murnane (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2018)
Kimmo Rosenthal has been teaching mathematics for over three decades. In the last half-dozen years he has turned his attention from mathematical research to writing. His work has appeared in Prime Number (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), EDGE, decomP, KYSO Flash, and The Fib Review. A Responding Mode A sign indicates it's Bill meeting Willem's mind and skills, and I'm rapt, beginning to absorb. Then someone snaps, "Careful! Don't touch it!" Breaking the silence, turning me. A guard stands 15 feet away. His dark suit supports a badge and a name plate, S. Something, our distance apart affecting what I can read. He's probably retired, maybe an ex-teacher. A colleague of mine is doing this job. He shakes his head. His face is blank, etched with wrinkles, shaven. His hair is raked into terraces, the part between them as straight as a die, as some old timers say, the hair matted down as if gel holds it in place: two farm fields that a stone wall separates. My responding-to-art mode persists. I don't want to lose it. Stance: His black shoes are shined, and his spectacles gleam in the lights. His arms hang down so that his hands rest in front, the back of one inside the palm of the other, making a vee, suggesting "I'm relaxed." Clad according to the museum's code, he looks alert, assured, maybe bored (I would be in his place). His pose reflects poise, confidence without friendliness, but hints of a threat (the laws of the land cloak him with power). I smile and nod, following the protocols and habits I've learned in 60 years. The walls still echo his words, or my mind does, plus the two clicks my shoes made stepping close to the artwork. I remember extending my right hand so its fingertips nearly touched the wall by the work. Considering the guard's angle of vision and the position of my body, I don't think he would have been able to see the space between my fingers, the edge nor inside of the hung object. Maybe that perspective explains his intrusion. More to consider: my knowledge of this place. We're in a restored, early 20th century, three-story, rambling, stony structure on a hillside overlooking a river named after a North American Indian tribe. A multimillionaire donated the land and the building over a century ago, 50 some years after predecessors had driven the last indigenous tribes from Ohio, annihilating a large portion of them. His money was derived in part from manufacturing locomotive passenger cars. Why think any of this? Something inside brings it up. Like the donor's preserved heart, a furnace or some kind of blower attached to it is blasting away, purring really, off in the background. Producing sterility? There's no smell. What I breathe is presumably vacuumed, cleansed of spoors, fungi, and other particles, most not perceivable with human eyesight. The circulation of purified air helps eliminate their normal massing into motes that would accumulate as dust. The flowing air also maintains temperature and humidity at levels an expert must have deemed beneficial to art. I turn back to the protected object itself, a mid-20th century creation. It deliberately, obviously, breaks the traditions of using a frame and imitating physical shapes and movements, but retains the conventionally squared-off corners and rectangular shape, plus ending the paint at the edges. The swirls of flat paint imply scattered and random applications. There seem to be no splashes with spikes of paint radiating off central cores, as if thrown or dropped from a container. My impression: the colours were applied with brushes, therefore with more control than perhaps initially thought. A few heavy, solid patches of red, creamy white, and black occur asymmetrically. For these I imagine the paint-dappled hand of the artist pressing down bristles laden with paint back near the ferrule and dragging the thick liquid a few inches. Some of these colours overlap yellow, green, blue, and a brighter, purer white, all of which seem to have been applied with bristle ends, some leaving discernible stroke marks. I'm guessing a 2- or 3-inch flat brush. Do I perceive a pattern? The lighter colours support and emphasize the darker colours, and most of them extend horizontally from my right to my left and lower to higher in the picture. A wide black belt runs from above the middle toward the upper left where it drops along the painting's upper edge. The brighter white might be the bare canvas. It occurs between colours, seems to underlie everything, and dominates the upper part of the black belt making it gray because the black there is thin. There's also a movement, which I can feel. My eyes follow the diffusion from lower right to upper left. But why not the reverse, left to right, top to bottom? I wonder: would the artist approve of hanging the painting lengthwise or upside down from this presentation? Probably not. The movement of the eyes upward seems an ecstatic expression. "Untitled," the printed sign says. I like that as a title. It tells me to figure out the painting myself. It leaves significance up to me. Its meaning too. Meaning and significance aren't the same thing, but they do overlap. No canvas though. The sign also says, "Oil on paper on board." The softened black is soothing as it gives way to brightness, moving from depression to enlightenment. Perhaps this painting broke new ground flaunting old rules. I don't know about that. But it is colourful and decorative. It would glow in the sombre decor of my bedroom. The artist and I are collaborators, but I have no idea what he had in mind. The painting fills the space it takes up without crowding. Its colourful arrangements please me. Maybe in half an hour the painting will not affect me this way. Moods change, and like the weather, inversions can result. The artist, though, is long gone, and even if I do discover that he has explained the painting, wouldn't he look at his creation proprietarily? Wouldn't he be viewing the artwork at a distance as I am? Plus, I believe, we are all mysteries unto ourselves, and so is the ultimate meaning of art. Bill Vernon Bill Vernon studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folk dances. Five Star Mysteries published his novel OLD TOWN, and his poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. Deauville, Le Paddock This house, pink stucco, could be made of meringue, a confection beaten out of egg white and light. If I bit into it, sugar would melt on my tongue. Sunlight drops like coins through the leaves of the plane trees; a short lick of black defines every shadow. Behind it, sky meets sea, rises, a field of cobalt. I imagine our hearts to be pink as this house, moving blood through delicate machinery, red on one side, blue on the other. There’s a riderless horse in one corner of the picture, you’ve just alighted and are looking into my eyes as if nothing in the world was as important as what I might say next. I want to paint your body with the pink sable of my tongue. I want to memorize your skin. I want this blue afternoon to never end. Barbara Crooker This poem was previously published in Barbara Crooker's book, Gold (Poiema Poetry). Barbara Crooker is the author of nine books of poetry; Les Fauves is the most recent. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Poetry of Presence and Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. www.barbaracrooker.com Pink Azaleas Pink azaleas in a blue Chinese vase their colors quickened by a world of shadows. Not one petal has fallen. Not one petal, yet — the shadows remind us. Mike Dillon Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. He is the author of four books of poetry and three books of haiku. Several of his haiku were included in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, from W.W. Norton (2013). Departures, a book of poetry and prose about the forced removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor will be published by Unsolicited Press in April 2019. The Rothko Chapel hurried art and architecture to the church on time. scorched his palette, held this wake of colour epicentre, particle accelerator, octagonal compression chamber his colour field paintings finally site-specific, lowered from the screened ceiling on platters of daylight louvers a painter known for tweaking the gallery lights, the quiet purist who would debate line and hanging to the quarter inch career-high commission and black, empurpled swan song insatiably dark triptychs march the long walls, oil money’s blackened air raid windows, the smoke filled portholes of a plunging jet five (final) panels of a mauve unseen in his oeuvre centre the apse triptych and brighten each corner. lavender boxers. moan punctuation, mauve opposites of white space churning waterfalls in a lost mountain city of pain. a tumbling harvest of bruised grapes for ethereal wine a single canvas hangs between the humble entrances. top-heavy with black and framed with the brown of dried blood the slaughtered hide of Lascaux’s bulls, a mahogany screen door into the abyss Darryl Whetter Darryl Whetter is the author of three books of fiction and two poetry collections. His novels include the bicycle odyssey The Push & the Pull and the multi-generational smuggling epic Keeping Things Whole. He is the inaugural Programme Leader of the new MA Creative Writing programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. www.darrylwhetter.ca Thank you to those of you who have ordered journals featuring the artwork of Lorette C. Luzajic. This line of notebook designs is to support The Ekphrastic Review. Two journals featuring artwork from Lorette's Writing on the Wall series have been added. One shows poet Philip Larkin and the other features Sylvia Plath. There are many other abstract, urban, and street art designs in spiral and hardbound blank or lined journals. Thank you so much for your support.
Click here to get your journal! The original collage paintings for these journal designs can be viewed here. Child Dancing in Her Back Yard Maybe last winter, she saw a tulle- woman spinning in the static of an old TV. From behind the camera, her mother calls out, Turn. and then, Turn back, but the naked child is busy feeling her body in the sun, in the shape of dancing. Tendrils of toffee-brown hair bedraggle her shoulders, and around her all the while, the trumpet vine-- called creeper, called devil’s shoestring--flourishes ruthlessly. Three blossoms pose above her head, their narrow throats open to hummingbirds, and long-tongued bees while deep in the leafy, twisting core, a hungry hornworm doesn’t know itself, doesn’t know it’s beginning to become the green-dappled moth called sphinx. ** Female Gaze In love with the austere line of her dying husband’s back, Sally Mann balances her clumsy camera on a shallow ridge and sends him into the valley. Didn’t I do the same on a day near the end when I was gripped with denial? Certain I could bear the sight of my love walking away. Alone under the black cloth, Sally wills her stubborn machine to pull his diminishing body back: loose gait , square shoulders, left hand holding a ragged clump of earth. White haze floats like scrim in the widening space between them, and the man—distracted or grieving or maybe just familiar with her art, its ruthlessness—the man strides off into the high grass. No way to know if he still listens for a voice, trying to call him back. ** Jessie Hanging from the Hay Hook The naked girl and a leaning sycamore split the after-supper space on the grey deck. Over here, her father looks the other way. Over there a grandmother dozes, a sister gnaws watermelon. Behind the big box camera, under the dark cloth, her mother waits to catch what she calls, the angel of uncertainty. I imagine Jesse feels surrounded and invisible. I remember a moment like that-- woman on one side, girl on the other-- Wanting to cross the barrier, lean dizzily out and test how much gravity I could endure. Maybe that’s why Jessie stretches her hands to a height she’s never before possessed, grips the hook and lifts her beauty onto it: shining skin over elegant bone, the mons, the breasts barely budded. Her head falls backward, a sheaf of hair ripples out away from her, and her mother releases the shutter. Now for all time—Jessie hanging from the hay hook-- a white and human slash across the half-open mouth of the dark. Not even sore. Not even trembling. Gail DiMaggio "Child Dancing in Her Back Yard" was inspired by Sally Mann's photo, Trumpet Flowers. See it here. "Female Gaze" was inspired by Sally Mann's photo, The Turn. See it here. "Jessie Hanging From the Hay Hook" was inspired by Sally Mann's photo, Hay Hook. See it here. Gail DiMaggio lives and writes in Concord NH. Her work has appeared most recently in Salamander, Slipstream and the Tishman Review. In 2017, her book, Woman Prime, was chosen by Jericho Brown for the Permafrost Poetry Prize and was released in Feb. 2018 by Alaska University Press. Chris Lewis Grassic Gibbon, you gave me Scotland, you gave me Chris Guthrie. In your books Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Gray Granite, Chris moved through her world of wild heather, hard farming, of Highlands, of men, of female desire and pain. She fought for her Self -- first as girl, then a woman -- holding fast to the disappearing ways of crofters and land. I loved her so much, I went to Scotland again and again. I rolled Scots words in my mouth -- wee bairn aye lass the kye and the queans -- as I hiked by the loch in mist, heedless of rain, hearing the quiet voice of your Chris, speaking my name. . . Tricia Marcella Cimera Inspired by A Scot’s Quair, a trilogy comprised of Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Gray Granite by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (pen name of Scottish writer James Leslie Mitchell, 1901-1935), published between 1932-1934. This poem was first published by Silver Birch Press. Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Her work appears in many diverse places — from the Buddhist Poetry Review to the Origami Poems Project. Her poem ‘The Stag’ won first place honours in College of DuPage’s 2017 Writers Read: Emerging Voices contest. She lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois, in a town called St. Charles, near a river named Fox, with a Poetry Box in her front yard. |
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