Quadratura, Sant’Ignazio, Rome Inside the church, I obeyed the guide’s injunction not to raise my eyes until he said. Now looking upwards I see, built four-square above the nave, further storeys open to the skies, whose soft-lit columns stretch towards the infinite. In this vast space Christ floats above mundane architecture, drawing Ignatius towards a paradise beyond the clouds. At my side the guide is whispering how a strict geometry of eyelines and a graticule of threads helped Pozzo construct this illusion of the divine. I cannot remain, unmoved by rapture: each step to the periphery reveals the columns curling over me like pallid fingers of a corpse, and the unboundedness of space constrained by paint. I admire the determination of this artifice, then slip quietly into the piazza’s blaze. Mantz Yorke Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England. He is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in a number of print magazines, anthologies and e-magazines in the UK, Ireland, Israel, Canada, the US and Hong Kong.
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Belonging If there is a map to get here, it’s buried under layers of paint and skitter, a bouquet of wary and doubt. A girlhood of scars married to skin. All my life I’ve been bracing for someday: gear up, set out, gaze locked on the horizon, lost in the rush of promise above the trees. A silver ring holds worlds of warm turquoise, woozy and star-crossed. I’ve been watching the signs. I’ve tried everything else. There’s a dumb moment when you spot birds of prey and it’s some kind of magical sign. I rehearse the story of our romance through internet passwords-- an indigo oasis in the metal grin of commerce. A talisman to cleave to, a forecast to ignore. Fires are messaging from the opposite shore. Melanie Figg Melanie Figg is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. Her chapbook, Hurry, Love, was printed in standard and fine art editions with paper artist Doug Abbott (Fuori Editions). She has won many awards for her poetry including grants from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. With an MFA in Poetry, her poems, essays and reviews have been published in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, LIT, Colorado Review and others. She curates Literary Art Tours in DC galleries (aWashington Post Editor’s Pick), and teaches and coaches writers in community art centers and privately. www.melaniefigg.net Holcomb
Tonight, after the men leave, this white farmhouse is like a poem about Quiet. Softly ticking clocks. Faucet dripping. Dripping. Photographs on the piano smiling at no one. Polished floors uncreaking. Telephone unringing. Purse gaping on the floor. Outside, fields stretch out below the moon. Animals shift in their stalls. Farmhouses in the country always seem to mind their own business, keep their mouths shut. In the morning — Sunday before church — two girls will walk up the staircase of this silent house, call Nancy? approach her bedroom, the door standing open inviting them in to see. Tricia Marcella Cimera This poem first appeared in 22-5. It was inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Look for her work in these diverse places (some forthcoming): Anti-Heroin Chic, Buddhist Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Failed Haiku, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Mad Swirl, Silver Birch Press, The Bees are Dead, Wild Plum and elsewhere. She has two micro collections, THE SEA AND A RIVER and BOXBOROUGH POEMS, 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 and keeps a Poetry Box in her front yard. Chihuly in the Forest He plays with fire in the hot shop Sand melting toward colour, toward the edge of shatter light passing through the thick and thin until both are refined. Using the skills of lip wrap and trailing, like Lumière he entertains with light through a substance pliant as wisteria on the pergola, until it comes to the marver to be cooled, to be solid as a plank, to light some hillside with wands of solid flame, until he proves what simple sand can be, tortured into glass. Wendy Taylor Carlisle Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks and is grateful to have Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art a close drive from home. See more about her and her work at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com |
The Ekphrastic Review
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