Tenderness at the Cusp When sun Bleeds through the waters Lancing out to Trestrignel Dappling like panned gold They shine brighter Than any sky Blushing As it folds A candle lights the future Tenderness at the cusp Eyes cast down In some reverence holy The air gathers This family In a sunset cup Nods to old And young alike Divinity Sought In that light Brightest before night Amanda Niamh Dawson Amanda Niamh Dawson was raised in London, Dallas, Boston, and Washington, DC, spending summers shining brass in her uncle's antiques shop. She attended Tufts University, the Ecole du Louvre, and Sorbonne University and then completed graduate studies in the decorative arts at Winterthur. Amanda worked at Sotheby's in Books & Manuscripts, and Old Master Paintings. She has a collection of antique brass candlesticks which she shines regularly. Her poems have appeared in The Dewdrop, Pomona Valley Review, The Banyan Review and others.
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The Mountain Dwellers for Peggy Knelt close to the ground, we looked up. It was new every night or not there at all. We looked up, and we gave her a name. When the dark drew down, we looked up. She pulled blood from women, desire from men. We looked up. We were shaking and luminous. In death and at birth, we looked up. We blew prayers and ash up to her and her children. We looked up and teased ritual from myth. Each day at the change, we looked up. She set fire to mountains we knew were not burning. We looked up, we looked up, we looked up. Autumn Newman Autumn Newman is a metrical poet living in California. She mentors women learning meter in Annie Finch's online community, The Meter Magic Spiral. Her poems have been published in many journals and her chapbook, This Is My Body A Flower Burst Open, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Home Time turns upside down on the freeway of life. Days blur into oatmeal at the breakfast table. Green leaves born as buds, hopeful as a new intention, unmask to red, gold, and brown in the autumn crisp. With the blueness of evening they become colourless. Branches remain predictable securing the next generation, pointing to a structure with footings and a solid roof. At the door the glow of love greets us like a garden, a bed of comfort and safety, where windows watch the world. Lois Perch Villemaire Lois Perch Villemaire is the author of My Eight Greats, a family history in poetry and prose published in 2023. Her work has appeared in such places as ONE ART, The Ekphrastic Review, Pen In Hand, and anthologies, including I Am My Father’s Daughter. Lois lives in Annapolis, MD. where she enjoys researching family history connections, fun photography, and doting over her collection of African violets. Eve Writes to Mary Cassatt I know you will never marry or bear a child, instead becoming a matron saint to mother and child, a twist of fate from the outside in, witness to the bond and cleave a thousand times over. So what if yours are two-dimensional and cannot be lifted from the canvas? Still they are alive and breathe, leave evidence of the endless story, the holy link. Before you left the garden I might have read your palm, traced the lifeline from my rib to yours against the clink of chain as you unlatched the gate. Do not the poses and the waiting tell the tale? The girl slouched in a blue armchair, a mother about to wash her sleepy child, the one combing her daughter’s hair, this baby in her mother's arms reaching for an apple? It is cold in my garden as I write. I want you to know I could have kept your secrets, could have saved the letters that you burned. Sharon Tracey Sharon Tracey is the author of three books of poetry: Land Marks (Shanti Arts), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts), and What I Remember Most is Everything (All Caps Publishing). Her poems have appeared in Terrain.org, Radar Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She loves writing ekphrastic poetry. Find some of her work online at sharontracey.com Nine Lives: an Ekphrastic Marathon Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating nine years of The Ekphrastic Review. Join us on Sunday, July 14, 2024 for our third annual ekphrastic marathon. This is an all -ay creative writing event that we do independently, together. Take the plunge and see what happens! Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone. We will gather in a specially created Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, before the deadline for submission. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2024). Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site. One poem and one flash will win $100 CAD each. Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year! Marathon: Sunday July 14, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks) (For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 14, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.) Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2024 Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 15 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors. If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at theekphrasticreview@gmail.com and we'll sign you up. Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September. Sign up below! Modigliani, While You Can for Jeanne Hebuturne, devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice Someone might have said go to her tonight, say something tender-- like her voice is a faint tune in the wind you always hear. She is your bright star burning in the night sky. Shower her with your words, not only lavish paint on canvas. She is like the stunning Cereus-- queen of the night, you know, Modi, the gorgeous one that spirals toward the heavens, the one with a myriad of blooms that intoxicates the air you breathe every minute. Whisper it even while she sleeps. Lay a garland of violets around her shoulders while her magnificent dark hair falls over her pillow in the cold Paris wind that sweeps through her open window. You don’t know that she, your haven of rest, is a fast-fading apparition, the one you will long for in your last hours. So, again lay the rain-soaked words of the poet around her— from the master: This living hand now warm and capable of earnest grasping would if it could--- or whisper your own La Vita Nuova to her. While you can, Modi, leave the raucous midnight café, your sketches of friends at crowded tables, the bottles of fine Beaujolais and go to her. Your death masque will come soon enough, yours first, then keeping the pact, hers so quickly following you— Your friends will come soon enough to lay bewildered flowers on the sidewalk below her window after her swoon to death there-- hers and your unborn child’s. Then all the roses and violets piled there will wash away in a flood of night rain-- so that all we will have left, will be your repose together finally at du Pere Lachaise and her blurred, immortal blue eyes, too beautiful, too intimate to paint, your muse, called wife, so filled with love and desire for you. Then only her silent beauty on your canvas-- will be left behind to breaks our hearts. Adele Ne Jame Adele Ne Jame "I have published three books of poems and won many awards including a National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, a Eliott Cades Award for Literature and a Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. My poems have been published in many fine journals such as Ploughshares, the Atlanta Review, the Notre Dame Review and others. I have served as the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I've taught creative writing at the university level in Hawai'i for many years. My poems as broadsides have been exhibited in the Sharjah/Dubai Biennial and at the Arab American National Museum. I was recently honored to be selected as the Mikhail Series lecturer at Toledo University." Before He Was Papa after Untitled (Italians Playing Cards, Village, NY) photography by Ilse Bing (USA) 1936 https://whitney.org/collection/works/15893 Before the war, before the women, deep sea marlins and scarred hands. Before Cuba and Pilar and his six toed cat, a young Hemingway passed our sidewalk card game on the way to the grocery for his mother. He felt he was no one then. His skinny arms hadn't built themselves hard and bearlike yet. His chest hadn't barreled. His face still had a boyish turn. As young men often hint in their lanky arms and long legs, he had filling out to do. He walked past our game with sidelong interest and then turned, and came back to watch, serious on his face. Even then, sharks swam his thoughts-- He wanted to do something his mother wouldn't approve. Written across his face, like the short lines on his father's palm or leaves his mother would never read in the bottom of her tea cup, was the man he meant to be. When we folded and the winner picked his winnings, I nodded at the empty seat and asked, "You want in?" Before Finca Vigia, before running with the bulls in Spain or lion hunting in Africa, plane crashes, war, or suicide, in the steep inhalation of surprise, there was a hesitation, and then with a jingle of change in his pocket, and a rapping of the reins on his life, he sat on the open crate and said, "My name is Ernest," and I believed he was. ** If Hemingway Rode a Bicycle in the First Tour de France after The First Tour de France, photography from The Nationaal Archief/The Hague (France) 1903 https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2011/07/22/137828661/photo-first-tour-de-france-winner-1903 Hemingway was four years old when Maurice Garin won the first Tour de France. He could not have listened to the race on the radio. Macroni had just sent the first broadcasts out. He could not have imagined the thick legged swarthy man in a newsboy cap. But if he had, I am sure he would have turned creature-ready, throttling into the race, singing a catchy fugue, tucking a lucky penny in his pocket, kissing a woman in white full on, leaving her pink and panting before pedaling off to chase switchbacks around cliffs without noticing the views. I am sure he would have donned goggles and maybe would have stripped to the waist, his chest hair and mustache pressed flat with the speed of steep his descent. ** A Farewell to Arms after Hemingway On Safari. photography by Earl Theisen (USA) 1952 https://photos.com/featured/hemingway-on-safari-earl-theisen-collection.html Hemingway sits at his friend’s desk writing parts of A Farewell to Arms. Forty-seven times he rewrote the ending, 30 times he’s made the journey around the sun, only 31 one more until his last mark on the world is made. But for now, he sits at that desk in an uncomfortable chair, rewriting, in Piggot, Arkansas, while his son is being born 72,000 miles away ** Not That I Mind after Untitled (Men in Bar), photography by Gertjan Bartelsman (Colombia, b. Netherlands) c. 1980 https://www.phillips.com/detail/gertjan-bartelsman/UK040217/7 Once somewhere in Cuba in a whitewashed bar with sweating walls and hungry men, Hemingway once challenged me to arm wrestle. What does one say to that? Certainly not no. His shirt was casually unbuttoned and he pulled at the collar as if to cool himself, but there was no cooling-- the fan was broken and we all sat sweltering at the tables, leaning on the walls, drinking our drinks. His grip was firm as we braided our arms. The table, grooved by too many men with pocket knives and centavos, dug at my elbow, but it didn’t matter. His forearm was thick and his bicep strained at the sleeve he had rolled up as far as he could. He didn’t look like a writer who leaned into his typewriter each morning, who penned notes on drafts, squinted at endings then crumpled them into the trash, thirty times thirty times. Instead his great barrel chest and bear-hands said athlete, bravado, machismo, monolith. Pearls of sweat hesitated in his beard before dropping onto the table. Too humid for even the wood to soak up, they domed and caught the inverted onlookers, the upside down room, the white ceiling fan that wouldn’t turn and us, one on each side squatting on our heads at that table. Three drops I lasted. That was all. He must have taken it easy on me. As he held my struggle he drew the scene, laughed too loudly at a joke from across the room, turned and stared too long at another man’s woman. Three drops, and then he hammered my hand into the table with a proud “Ah Ha” as if surprised, and turned to the knot of men around him and filled the room. And what of me? I was background who now, at least, had a good story to tell. Julene Waffle Julene Waffle, a graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher in rural NYS, an entrepreneur, a nature lover, a wife, a mother of three boys, two dogs, three cats, a bearded dragon, and, of course, she’s a writer. She finds pleasure in juggling these jobs while seeming like she has it all together. Her work has appeared in Sequestrum, The Adroit Journal Blog, NCTE’s English Journal, Mslexia, The Bangalore Review, The Ekphrastic Review among other journals and anthologies and her chapbook So I Will Remember. Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com.
Hmong Hangings Sisters, you who sewed these pa ndau with your fleet fingered running stitches, with their neat folds of fabric on fabric. On one, the pleat of purple on black, the other--slate blue on brown and always the white skip of thread as they blossom out mandala-holy in their frames-- they watch over me to my right, to my left as I sit on my couch and watch my shows. They minmbly murmur Asiain chants-- elephant walk, heart-love, rams-head. To my left, to my right, they give me your gift. As I sit under the bland light-- they knit up and tuck in my unravel. Carol Siemering Carol Siemering has been published in a number of publications including the Artword Quarterly, the Anthology of Unitarian Poets, and Unlocking the Poem. A chapbook is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Code of Silence The sister hasn’t spoken in months, you say. More than that, actually, nearly a year. Things were just going along and then one day, she stopped talking. At first you thought she was playing some messed up kind of trick that you weren’t getting. Then you thought it was a protest. Sometimes she would write something down in the little notebook she’d started carrying around. But there would just be a few cryptic words like “the broken heart of Mexico” or “before they turn the summer into dust.” It took some figuring but eventually you caught on that these were snippets of song lyrics. Nothing in her own words, not even on paper. ** Urdu Translation ہیلن شیرف بیک (فن لینڈ) کی تصویر "ذاتی شبیہ" (۱۹۱۵ء) کی طرز پر خاموشی کا ضابطہ بہن نے کئی مہینوں سے کوئی بات نہیں کی، تم کہتی ہو۔ اُس سے بھی زیادہ عرصے سے، دراصل، تقریباً ایک سال سے۔ سب کچھ ٹھیک چل رہا تھا اور پھر ایک دن، اُس نے بات کرنا بند کر دیا۔ شروع میں ایسا لگتا کہ وہ کوئی الجھانے والا حربہ لگا رہی ہے جو تم سمجھ نہیں پا رہی۔ پھر ایسا لگتا کہ یہ کوئی احتجاج تھا۔ بعض دفعہ وہ یاداشت کی بیاض میں کچھ لکھتی جس کو اُس نے اپنے ساتھ رکھنا شروع کر دیا تھا۔ مگر وہاں صرف چند خفیہ الفاظ ہوتے جیسے " میکسیکو کا ٹوٹا ہوا دل" یا " اُن کے موسم گرما کو دھول میں تبدیل کرنے سے پہلے۔" کچھ اندازہ لگانا پڑا مگر آخرکار تم نے پکڑ ہی لیا کہ وہ گانے کے کچھ بول تھے۔ اُس کے ذاتی الفاظ میں سے کچھ بھی نہیں تھا، نہ ہی کاغذ پر۔ **
Transliteration Helene Schjerfbeck (Finland) ki tasweer Zaati Shabeeh (1915) ki tarz per Khamooshi ka Zabta Behen ne kayi mahenoon se koi baat nahein ki, tum kehti ho. Uss se bhi ziada arsae se, darasal, taqreban aik saal se. Sab kuch theek chal reha tha aur phir aik din, uss ne baat kerna band ker diya. Shuru mein aisa lagta ke who koi uljhane waala harba laga rehi hai jo tum samejh nahein pa rehi. Phir aisa lagta ke yeh koi ehtejaaj tha. B’aaz daf’a who yaadasht ki beyaaz mein kuch likhti jis ko uss ne apne saath rekhna shuru ker diya tha. Magar wahan sirf chand khufiya alfaaz hote jaise “Mexico ka toota huwa dil” ya “unn ke mosam-e-garma ko dhool mein tabdeel kerne se pehle.” Kuch andaaza lagana pera magar aakhir kar tum ne paker hi liya ke who gaanay ke kuch bol thay. Uss ke zaati alfaaz mein se kuch bhi nahein tha, na hi kaaghz per. Lorette C. Luzajic translated by Saad Ali & Nashwa Yaqoob Butt This poem first appeared (in English) in The Neon Rosary: tiny prose poems (Cyberwit Books). Saad Ali (b. 1980 CE in Okara, Pakistan) has been brought up and educated in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. He is a bilingual poet-philosopher and literary translator. His new collection of poems is titled Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021). He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrastic poetry and micro/flash fictions into Urdu: Lorette C. Luzajic: Selected Ekphrases: Translated into Urdu(2023). He is a regular contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. He has had poems published in The Mackinaw and Synchronized Chaos. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. He has had ekphrases showcased at an Art Exhibition, Bleeding Borders, curated at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie in Alberta, Canada. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Kafka, Tagore, Lispector, et alia. He enjoys learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities/towns on foot. To learn further about his work, please visit: www.saadalipoetry.com; www.facebook.com/owlofpines. Nashua Yaqoob Butt (b. 1984 C.E.) is from the Gujrat District, Pakistan. She is a teacher, social worker, and poetess. She holds an MA in Mass Communication from The Allama Iqbal Open University, Pakistan. She has authored two collections of poetry: Luminous Butterfly (2021), and Solitude: Silence and Self Identity (2023). Currently, she teaches Urdu and Social Studies (Secondary Level/Grade 9 & 10) at the Jinnah Public School & College, Gujrat, Pakistan. She has also been a part of a local Social Welfare Organisation (working for the empowerment of women in the region) as a Crochet Instructor. Her influences include: Rumi, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Amrita Pritam, and Rabindranath Tagore – to name a few. In her spare time, she pursues gardening, sketching/painting, writing, and crocheting. You can learn more about her work via her Facebook Author Page: www.nashwayaqoobbutt. The Spaniel Pup Mother’s claws are blue, painted by an eight-year-old labourer. She is still in the chair, yellow eye fixed. Her daughter is smiling. Her son is clawing her stomach. He is climbing onto her back, slipping down onto the windowsill. Scents of salt and storm and hot dough are wafting through the open window. A boat is sailing between the boulder and the island. Clouds are dimming the lighthouse. A grey mass is bobbing in the waves -- hat or seal or drowned man? A red flag is clapping in the wind. The roof of the doughnut van is dirty. A boy is leaning against the van. He is biting a doughnut. His chin is stubbled with warm sugar. The pup leans too far falls breaks into four pieces. Gillian Fielder Gillian Fielder is a writer based in Wallsend. She has recently graduated from Newcastle University with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. She writes poems in response to a variety of existing materials —paintings, archaeological artefacts, medieval manuscripts. Her ekphrastic poem "Bird Song," after Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s painting of the same name, appears in the pamphlet Beyond Abstraction, 2023, published by Newcastle University in collaboration with the Hatton Gallery. She lives with her husband and three school-age children. |
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