Orogenes His
For his journey he took with him . carbon, water, andesite, dust, emotion and colour complex and igneous. When convergence calls he forms crust in answer, woozy in the heat of transference, shooting to the surface as glass purified, conchoidal, amorphous. How does he surrender so completely? Emitting abstraction and cadence, waves so easily contained that alien undercurrent birthing continuously the means to all beginnings, too young a fold to hold any one formation, too old a soul to desire separation. The words themselves aren’t golden, nor the clast from which he came undone, obvious yet unknown, rounded when worn. Years pass. His sills stretch and thin, joy and sorrow distractions for phone screen cataracts blind to his being passed out as data on sheets not taken with them. He doesn’t cling to forms, as if each white dawn prints another book of of poems, untorn yet creased as paper often becomes, each bead of sweat a gas giant swooning induction. He is fusion holding at the brink for the pleasure of the burning, honoured simply for the chance to be new again. With constant warming he folds each time his core melts, ductile each time he gives himself. I’m not sure there’s a name for the grade, that basalt he calls home formed from parts of everything. The glacier melt we barely hold our heads above a swollen, breccia rush tumbled to cobbles in his throat. Possessed his cheeks flush. He paces the peak. Searching for correlation we struggle to keep up, origami in his genesis. Only when angles sheer and distress can grey matter shed its rust. He whips his magmas to fury, plutons his dead language, draws stars conducting fertile soil where none was before. It’s all here with him; all he endures, all he loves. New mountains to climb, each unique in texture and hue (how do you do you?) Tiffany Corley Tiffany Corley is a 44 year old house painter, life-long writer, and current junior student at the University of Missouri, working towards her PhD in quantum mechanics.
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Restless The big feet of the tall thin men ground them as they walk. They are always walking leaning forward to gain an unreachable momentum. Restless spirits, encased in bronze, in stasis. Only their shadows and dreams escape. Derek Adams Derek Adams is a professional photographer, originally from London, he now lives in Suffolk. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths and his poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and abroad. He has a collection Everyday Objects, Chance Remarks (Littoral, 2005) and pamphlets Postcards to Olympus and unconcerned but not indifferent: the life of Man Ray. He is currently working on a collection of poems about the American photographer, model and WW2 correspondent Lee Miller. Road Apricot sunrise caught me under a green blanket. It enters as it will with no apology, no blame. If I take the road across the wolds, how long before the fields end and you begin? Is that the sea? I’ll never make that drive, nor you return to me. Laura Cherry Editor's note: The photograph shown is a placeholder image. Laura Cherry's poem was inspired by David Hockney's The Road Across the Wolds (UK, 1997.) We hope you will follow this link to see the painting so that you get the full effect of the poem. Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and the chapbooks Two White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press). Her work has been published in journals including Antiphon, Clementine Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, Cider Press Review, Tuesday; An Art Project, and Hartskill Review. Photography sale to support The Ekphrastic Review: buy one, get one free. http://www.mixedupmedia.ca/photography.html Images shown below are just a few of the available library. Stop by and browse! Did you know? The Ekphrastic Review never charges submission fees and never will.
We don't want to pollute the integrity of the art and writing with heinous click bait ads about Donald Trump or easy weight loss. Lorette C. Luzajic started The Ekphrastic Review in July of 2015 because there weren't many outlets dedicated to ekphrastic writing. Lorette's writing was more often than not about art, and her art was often about poetry, literature, and words. It would be an enjoyable hobby to run a little ekphrastic blog. Today we have between 3000 and 4000 unique readers a week, and she spends 40 to 60 volunteer hours a month- more than one work week reviewing submissions, posting, responding, promoting, etc. If you would like to support this labour of love, you can: 1. Make a donation through PayPal using the email address theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. (www.PayPal.com) 2. Become a Patreon supporter. From 2$ a month. Patreon is an innovative, easy to use platform where people can support artists and creative initiatives with a monthly patronage of their choice. 3. Purchase some fine art photography prints from Lorette. This buy two get one free promotion means you can own three beautiful signed prints. Give them as gifts to people you know will love The Ekphrastic Review! http://www.mixedupmedia.ca/photography.html Place Me Like a Seal Over Your Heart (A Golden Shovel) "Set me as a seal upon your heart, for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: its flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame." Song of Solomon 8:6 Workmanlike, I lift the hod, set it on my back. Show me what needs doing, and I will, as stolid as a draft horse leaning into the yoke. Many mock me as a simpleton, but I bear willingly the original seal laid on Adam, to work by the sweat of his brow. Upon me falls the same injunction. Let it be done to me, according to your word, I say. I find pleasure in sweat, in the pounding of my heart; Decades have made maul and trowel as comfortable for me as my own hands. The sawblade sings my love for the thing done well. What is finer than the crossbar true beneath the level, the strong fence, the well-joined table? As a father, I pray my children outlive me, but neither shall death rob me of what I’ve made. I feel jealousy before the cathedral, Stonehenge, the menhir. Behind them is my twin, separated by time. It’s cruel that one day my hands will tremble, that I’ll only watch as others labor. The trick will be the reachable task, even the preparation of my grave; As my world contracts, I’ll survey the spot, map its length, dig it deep, shore it up. Only in flashes can I imagine what comes after, glimpses that are swallowed as quickly as they come. Only in flashes can I set aside fear and trust that the god of Eden will know of my nature and either smelt me anew in his unquenchable fire, or craft me otherwise, making me more like a candlewick, most comfortable when consumed, even by vehement flame. Devon Balwit
This poem is from the just released Risk Being/Complicated, a full-colour illustrated collection of poems by Devon Balwit inspired by the art of Ekphrastic Review editor Lorette C. Luzajic. Click book cover image below to view or purchase on Amazon. The poem was first published at Ink and Letters. Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and two collections out or forthcoming, among them: The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry); We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, the Aeolian Harp Folio, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Rattle, The Inflectionist Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and more. On Slim Whitman and How Irony Entered the World • The river only looked red on paper. • The river only felt red from a distance. • The river only sounded red in Spanish. To sell more albums than the Beatles as the infomercial asserted seemed more curse than blessing, but then so too did the shuffling of shoes from the dance floor, heard but not seen from the stage, the yodel yes yodel that he refused to be defined by, the pencil mustache that served its purpose, but no more. The crooner can't remember in which city tonight’s hotel is located, reckoning only the warmth on the pillow that might be Memphis, simple irony to one who shrugged off the blues. The between-song repartee always swings around to the obligatory anecdote about having to bum an overnight bus ticket just to record two songs in a midtown Manhattan studio, hyperbole that may have sounded better as the ending to the second verse of another unfinished song about heartache than as the justification of the journey itself, the de rigueur metaphysics of the train's whistle. Take for example the red of the sun, a conceit in the bridge designed to somehow make the inevitable parting more palatable but less real. Short of the river nowhere ever really came to feel like home. Christopher T. Keaveney Christopher T. Keaveney teaches Japanese language and East Asian culture at Linfield College in Oregon and is the author of three books about Sino-Japanese cultural relations. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia Review,Spoon River Poetry Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Minetta Review, Stolen Island, Faultline, Wilderness House Literary Review, and elsewhere, and he is the author of the collection Your Eureka not Mined (Broadstone Books, 2017). Chardin’s Pitcher, Two Eggs, a Casserole, Three
Herrings, a Copper Pot, a Slice of Fish, and a Jug This is the poem Marie Howe warned you to walk away from. The one about staring into the kitchen gloom at a dead fish on the table. A lot of dead fish. Never mind that others more gifted than you wade against the undertow of sleep to their own dark corners of the house each day and re-emerge later waving won lotteries: poems about blue spiked veronica, watching the unsubmissive sleep, furbelows of Venetian lace, and how wonderful it is after all to be you, just you. Never mind how glorious its conception: when strung along a museum wall its quiescence lures you with a great title, having anticipated someone with your sensibilities would one day screw that light bulb into its mystery. Soon, it’s sending you on errands to find out who delivers the Frenchman’s groceries each morning, who he will propose to at night fall. It promises to showcase your hidden talents, beginning with those both you and Jean-Baptiste share: A fascination with solemn, almost penitent, crockery. Spunk for staring into space. The love of herring. With time, it begins to stink up the whole house, your most important relationships. It glues its poster over your daughter’s face, as she expresses desire to see the world. It interrupts your husband calling for you from the bedroom. Never mind there are things you still want to know – how, for instance, he could stand sitting indoors day after day, smelling the vastness of the sea suspended there above his table and in the raw umber on his hands, knowing what it did to him that he never did anything about. Shelley Benaroya This poem was previously published in Mad Poets Review, 2005 Shelley Benaroya is founding director and teaching artist for the Writing Center for Creative Aging (www.writingcenterforcreativeaging.org). Her poetry has appeared in Diner, The Edison Literary Review, Ekphrasis, The Lyric, Mobius, Thirteenth Moon, and elsewhere. In 2017, she received the Ekphrasis Prize and a Pushcart Prize nomination. German Doll
Not hard to see why some family lost track of you, abandoned in some attic for 200 years. Pinched face, crimped hair, hands like flippers, good for nothing but shoving. Neither smiling nor elegant, yet seated high up as if enthroned, obsessively well-tended garden a backdrop for your tattered jacket, faded dress, big black boots fit for kicking small animals. Greta Bolger Greta Bolger is a writer and visual artist retired and living the dream in NW lower Michigan. Her previous work has appeared in several print and online publications, including Electica, typishly, The Chimaera, Third Coast, Literary Bohemian, Snakeskin and others. She volunteers with art organizations and international efforts to support women and girls in the developing world. Szpilman after viewing The Pianist You play Chopin’s Ballade no. 1 in an orphaned house of cement, shirt and jacket worn like my father’s work clothes. Soiled fingers commencing chords with timid strokes of keys. Breath drawing hills and valleys under moonlight’s gaze. Face rigid with tempo’s apogee. A steady cadence and thundering clang closes the performance. Hosenfeld, your sole spectator, gives no applause, only a question: Juden? Does his trim, grey uniform remind you of German boots clacking on Warsaw streets, Star of David armbands, death’s long scythe slicing through a ghetto’s flesh, thick from ingesting half-a-million, your parents, siblings, sister-in-law herded into cattle cars whistling to Treblinka’s silence? // Someday I will learn to sing to those who loathe my body, make melodies in times of lament and desire life above all else, as you did, Szpilman, survival your great composition. Jonathan Rowe Jonathan Rowe currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts where he is an undergraduate student and writing peer tutor at Emmanuel College. His work is forthcoming in Cecile’s Writers’ Magazine, Kweli Journal, and Black Fox Literary Magazine and can be found at newgenerationverse.com. The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski (Poland). 2002. Narrowing
First it was narrowing, then expanding, as if breathing, as I walked around the pond, difficult to sleep so many monuments shifting position, brimming. I considered its mass, surfaces. On the bench beneath the dogwood—blue, from the corner near the road—white, the angles narrowing to the west, then as I turned to hug the curve, expanding-- like a black wing against the sky. Theresa Burns Theresa Burns’ poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, America Magazine, New Ohio Review, and upstreet, among other publications. In 2017 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her second chapbook of poems, Two Train Town, was published by Finishing Line Press. A long time book editor in New York and Boston, she has taught writing at Seton Hall University, The Fashion Institute of Technology, and the 92nd Street Y. |
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