A Poem for Georgia O'Keeffe The difference between flowers that fruit or not is only a nodule hardening to zucchini, cucumber, squash or pumpkin, who's to say from the first broad leaf? Even now in late September hugely orange arrays splay about the yard on hose mandalas rigged for fruit too late to come by. What's given is accounted for, well on its way to being eaten. Among the parasols of pumpkin leaves chipping sparrows peck for seeds. About us milkweed parachutes silk dancing as we catch the work, the word as light play. Patterns. How we toss to and fro still expectant mid-way through our lives. Almost mature, almost coming into our own. Seed potency bursting beyond hard casement through the boundary of design. Penn Kemp London ON performance poet, activist and playwright Penn Kemp is the 40th Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets and their 2015 Spoken Word Artist of the Year. As Writer-in-Residence for Western University, her project was the DVD, Luminous Entrance: a Sound Opera for Climate Change Action, Pendas Productions. Her latest works are two anthologies for the Feminist Caucus Archives of the League of Canadian Poets and the Guild of Canadian Playwrights, to be launched at the Writers’ Summit at Harbourfront in June. Forthcoming is a new collection of poetry, Barbaric Cultural Practice and a play, The Triumph of Teresa Harris. www.mytown.ca/pennkemp
1 Comment
How to Bend the Light
William Turner, lashed to a clipper ship’s mast, in the crow’s nest, enduring a snowstorm. Tied, so if his fingers froze he wouldn’t fall to choppy winter waters, or smash on the deck. He had to know a squall first-hand. No other method would let him bend the blurs of light the right way. Deckhands bring him below nearly iced-over, frostbit but smiling. Even in the sleet spray, Turner sees a flicker of his deity: the sun, God. No difference. We’re all under it, warming, even when the anvil clouds obscure it. He was up there bellowing, saving the view to push out brushes, a human camera obscura, not unlike a telescope, focusing and diffusing, concentrating rays. The essence of the necessary image live in his mind’s eye, Turner marks the precise location of that vital glimmer, evidence of holiness, even out to sea and in a storm. Todd Mercer TODD MERCER won the Dyer-Ives Kent County Prize for Poetry in 2016, the National Writers Series Poetry Prize for 2016, and the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts Flash Fiction Award for 2015. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, appeared at Right Hand Pointing. Mercer's recent poetry and fiction appear in: Bartleby Snopes, Blast Furnace, Cheap Pop, Eunoia Review, The Fib Review, Flash Frontier Magazine, Fried Chicken and Coffee, In-flight Literary Magazine, The Lake, The Magnolia Review, Softblow Journal, Star 82 Review and Two Cities Review. Continuously Arriving
The painting hangs at threshold to the basement—a journey of the sight, left to right, the way I might if I were reading, say, a book of some adventure—like Marco Polo traveling to cities spiced and towered golden-- two approach, the master and the youth, the old one ushering forever the novice to the palace. Here, stately mandarins hold seats before the scribes, kowtowing to calligraphies. The inked instruction I might read from right to left…pine, the flowered branches leading sight to ocher roofs. Beyond, the clouds instruct: Absence is presence in the higher order of accounts-- not this basement with its binders, this dragonhold of filed receipts, the reams in busy folders, this waste of bark. Wealth I’ve khanned. I should have left accumulation at the gate. Kathleen Heller Poet, educator and former journalist, Kathleen Hellen is the author of the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Her poems are widely published and have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, The Nation, North American Review, Poetry East, Poetry Daily, the Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She has served as senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review and now sits on the editorial board of Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Twice nominated for the Pushcart, she teaches in Baltimore. (she)ll on the shining sand
she sees it on the shining sand gleaming silver, then pink, then silver again. she smiles to find the shell empty. once a gold snail lived within, then a hermit crab who quoted edna st. vincent millay — the jingle-shells that lie and bleach. she crawls inside gently and falls asleep. she dreams of primeval green turtles, black-lipped pearl oysters, and a sliver of white moon hanging over the Shell in the painting by Dali. she awakes in the sea. Tricia Marcella Cimera This poem was first published in Fox Adoption Magazine, March 2016 Tricia Marcella Cimera will forever be an obsessed reader and lover of words. Look for her work in these diverse places: Buddhist Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Foliate Oak, Fox Adoption, Hedgerow, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Mad Swirl, Silver Birch Press, Stepping Stones, Yellow Chair Review, and elsewhere. She has a micro collection of water-themed poems called THE SEA AND A RIVER on the Origami Poems Project website. Tricia believes there’s no place like her own backyard and has traveled the world (including Graceland). She lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois / in a town called St. Charles / by a river named Fox. John Constable's Seascape Study with Rain Clouds
Praise be the Art whose subtle power could stay Yon cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape; Nor would permit the thin smoke to escape, Nor those bright sunbeams to forsake the day.... -- William Wordsworth What could be more impossible than to paint the shapes and unstable configurations of clouds? The painter gazes, marks the canvas, and looks up; the clouds have turned, twisted, swelled into something new. They present moving targets in time, stories, rather than image. Impossible to arrest no matter how fast the painter paints. you can feel the speed of his desperate laying on paint with urgency trying to capture the smoke to reproduce falling rain he rides the raindrops down with quick slashing brushstrokes hammering the sea stirring up the salted waves refusing to hold their pose frozen wisps, the black racing clouds, stilled by his brush hang impossibly in his petrified stone air as tiny ships hesitate Charles Tarlton This poem was first published in Haibun Today. Charles Tarlton says, "I am a retired professor of philosophy living and writing poetry in Northampton, Massachusetts with my wife, Ann Knickerbocker, a painter." |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you. Join us on Facebook:
Tickled Pink Contest
April 2024
|