The Rookery Like a seaweed pod bulbous, swollen, glistening – the mother’s burnished head tenses looking out to sea. She is heavy, hard, at a glance, supple as a sea lion flopping across the sand like one big muscle, to bask in the sun; her pup is close by. The reclining woman is unafraid, unpretentious, big, impossible to move in the gravity of land, solid but sleek in the briny deep. The baby is inert with intertidal weight. She trusts the mother’s unconstructed bulk, resting in the embryonic hollow of her arm – at high tide they will rise and lumber over rocks to heft and slide polished bodies back again into their aquatic origins. Mary Torregrossa Mary Torregrossa, originally from Rhode Island, lives in Southern California where she teaches ESL to adults from around the world. Her poems appear in the Los Angeles anthologies, Voices From Leimert Park Redux and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Dime Show Review, Poets Responding to the News and Remembered Arts Journal. A chapbook, My Zocalo Heart is published by FinishingLine Press, 2018.
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Before the Mist
In Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses, Whistler takes us to the edge of the world where the land gives out and the sea goes on and on right into the sky. Here, along this margin, the air manifests itself as mist, as the planet itself exhaling its hot breath over the cold ocean, as Emerson’s oversoul cloaking all, dampening everything—sound, colour, shape, and light. Whistler lets us stand and look out past seeing, past the almost hidden sailboats, past the white railing, past the three women in their long dresses and full skirts, each solid, each definite—grey and blue and mottled green and yellow-- each anchored on this side of eternity. Two turn at something the third has said beneath her parasol, divert their eyes to her pale round face, to her words which mingle with the mist. Far to their left, maybe fifteen feet down the rail, alone, one more woman floats, transparent, ethereal, the white bars showing through her. Less visible than the distant sailboats, she has already begun to transcend herself, to become more aeriform than human, to loose herself to the infinite expanse of sea and sky and longing, to escape our earthly frame. Cecil Morris Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English in California, where he wrote numerous memos, lesson plans, and the occasional poem. He has had a few poems published, mostly in English teacher magazines (English Journal and California English) and small literary magazines (Poem and Hiram Review). Portrait of (Monna) Lisa Gherardini, 1503-1506
Before it was stolen then found four hundred content years of anonymity. Louvre security couldn’t control lawless camera flashes. So now the portrait’s hung behind light-shielding Plexiglas. We pose next to it (click) to prove our visit. Take two minutes to get the right shot (click). We won’t recall the sfumato (click), the hands one atop the other, or the road that leads away. We skip home with our prized shots, pictures of a painting, but no memory of the painting. Janée J. Baugher Baugher is the author of two ekphrastic poetry collections, The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2013) and Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010). Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been published in The Writer’s Chronicle, Boulevard, NANO Fiction, Nimrod, and The Southern Review, among other places. Her essay “Art to Art: Ekphrastic Poetry” can be found at https://boulevardmagazine.org/jjbaugher/ Everyone's asking for money! Thank you for patiently enduring these occasional requests.
The Ekphrastic Review refuses to monetize with click bait crap or Google Ads because it cheapens the aesthetic of the journal, and more importantly, takes away from the literary and creative content. We also refuse to charge reading fees. Writers, especially poets, seldom get paid and we refuse to join the trend of charging submission fees. This would, however, solve many problems if we did: it cuts down on the number of submissions dramatically, and raises a few bucks for the maintenance and promotion of the journal. Instead, we are committed to reading every single submission with care- that means going through hundreds of poems, stories and essays a month, sometimes a week. It takes a lot of time- approximately 40 hours a month for me at this point is spent on The Ekphrastic Review. A big thank you to those who chose to support us already. Full disclosure: we have been gifted through Patreon, PayPal donations, and supporting art sales approximately $600 from the journal's start almost three years ago. If you believe in what we are doing, consider a "cup of coffee" donation- it's not too small. This editor needs coffee! If you are a millionaire, consider a substantial gift so we can grow. Here are three ways that you can help: Support us through Patreon. Patreon is easy to use: basically, you pledge a monthly amount, whether $2 or $1000. Patrons support creative endeavours they believe in by subscribing to various artists or projects. Click here. Send a gift through PayPal. Go to PayPal and send a gift to the email address theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. Buy some art. Did you know? Ekphrastic readers and writers always get 25% off Lorette's (the editor!) small artworks at Etsy. If you haven't stopped in to check out what's there, a playground of words and images awaits you. By checking out at Etsy with the coupon code EKPHRASTIC you automatically receive 25% off everything, AND it lets me know that the proceeds are for time, maintenance, and fees for The Ekphrastic Review. And you get a wonderful curiosity piece for your home or cubicle. Click here to visit Lorette's Etsy playground! THANK YOU ALL Picasso Dreams of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza:
In the Shadow of Windmills on the Plains of La Mancha, Campo de Montiel, Spain, March 15, 1565 DREAM #1: Don Quixote, 57, Knight Errant de la Mancha I know better than believe these windmills to be giants, yet what right man would not choose a world of maidens, beautiful and fair, high romance, a king’s ransom, and a dragon’s lair when weighed against the daily life we live? So I set forth on a long-tooth nag and this old fool by my side to roam abroad the country wide, to court adventure and quell the searing fear of death inside us all, and poor poor Panza, he cannot see because he has no questful eyes, not for any dreams beyond his monstrous belly—yet I know these things exist, the same as I know God does not—still there I am weekly at mass, thumbing my rosary on bended knee, a devout, praying at each station of the cross, all because I desire the approval of Father, who, once Mother had passed, locked the doors and read himself away to death—and so too have I consumed a library full of fantasy, though I will not be my father, will not pine loveless and a loon in some dusty hidden room—I know that before me, squat and bright in lye-washed white, is no giant at all, but I will it so and so it is—and how can a man who knows he is mad be truly mad after all, especially one who knows his life draws near to close and wants only one more moment of adventure’s good grace—so, Hie, vale anon! I spur dear rack of bones Rocinante onward and into the giant’s flailing arms, aware that his time too is at hand and shall too like Father pass from this world: I smash my wooden lance against his jaw but, Grim Reaper-like, he grabs my steed and self and sends us over—the world whirls by like a Bedouin dervish and slams us on the ground—in in the distance I see clouds in the shape of buzzards, beautiful and languid and hungry, and just above me, the windmill’s slow eternal spinning hands. DREAM #2: Sancho Panza, 47, an illiterate squire Under this unforgiving sun, I sit mule-back in the meagre shade afforded by a lone olive tree and I pick the fruit and bite and find it bitter. My bile rises for the want of brine. And of capers and of caper berries and of all things pickled and delicious. My donkey Dapple’s head is like a giant shovel and his large jutting jaw an insatiable maw! Oh what I could eat if I but had that hasp: In one Rabelessian moment, a dozen bocadillo con jamon y queso de cabra. And though I am but a goat at jest, I am still less than half as daft as this man here who’s taken leave of his senses, every one, pressed he claims into blessed service by God’s own voice. But it’s plain to see there will be no boquerones en vinagere, no ajo blanco with a nubile Mudéjar to grind the garlic with mortar and pestle, and no bread with which to sop it up, no bladders of wine at the ready, no gypsy girl to tickle my feet with rosemary branches as we moon over my island paradise, where I serve as Lord and Governor and bring together the Moor and the Jew and the Catholic alike: Come friends, one and all, come and bare your breasts and souls and be my guests. My ass is swayed and my back is bulging with the fat of years and indolence and friendships raised and toasted and devoured. Don Quixote has promised me this sacred isle de pace, but now, seeing his broken body lying in the earth beneath the tall and twisting windmill, all hope for it is dashed. But shall I leave him, return to my home and to my old wife, she who waved me a fond farewell, or to my daughter, who is herself old enough to marry, both who berate me so and so were happy to see me go? True, the old man is little more than bluff and bluster, hot wind and noisy clang, like the time the wind rose and sang and loosed the Santa Maria bell from its moorings and blew it out of the church tower, bats bursting forth in all directions—the bell and frayed rope fell an impossibly long time and crashed in the earth, cracked, and let off one last note that tolled in the square for nearly a year, the noise caught somehow in the old winding streets, confused and lost with no way nor want to find its way home. Michael Garriga A native of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Michael Garriga is the author of the short story collection, The Book of Duels (Milkweed Editions, 2014). His work has appeared in The Southern Review, New Letters, Oxford American, and various other journals. He is also the co-editor of the literary journal, FictionSoutheast.com. He teaches creative writing at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, OH, where he lives with his wife and two sons. I Am Become the News of the Day
Imagine a dancer spinning, spinning, until the white chalk at her burning feet spools itself into a thread and coils out from her throat like the snaked coils of a sun-fired pot in which a cobra might or might not be sleeping-- Now say that the chalk was newsprint; the coils, words, black ink spilled in thin lines and banner fonts along a plane reaching corner to corner, bleeding almost off the edge, which is to say, the world-- And those words, spiraling out by centrifugal force, are not words only, but time; and not any time, but now: this moment, this, this, this, spooling fast as a reporter can file her version of the story or the dancer can spot and pull her body around and around and around-- And if you could still a single instant from this motion, capture it unblurred so that even some of the coiled-snake words-- damage, maybe, or crossroad, or even free--were legible, if not intelligible, wouldn’t it look like this? With a magnifier you might read a clue to the crossword, or the fine strands of the dancer’s hair-- Is she not Atlas, bearing the flattened weight of this moment’s map, which is to say, of the world as we know it now, and now, and now? See: how ink and paper-whiteness have spread like pox over her young face, yoked as she is like an ox to the plow of the current, or a planet orbited by rings of water and ash-- Her lips are set, her red-rimmed eyes look out—to what? What future allows such burdens? The weight of it, of paper. Hannah Silverstein Hannah Silverstein lives in Vermont. Her writing has appeared in Si Señor, The New Guard, and SWWIM Every Day. |
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