This Flying Monkey is from the “Quanta Smears” series, works that are composed from 11 x 14 in. templates comprised entirely of natural/organic elements: flowers, leaves, berries, cones, seashells, stones, mushrooms, grasses, “tar spot” fungus from Big Leaf Maples, etc.
Originally from New York City, Robert Bharda has resided in the Northwest where for the last 35 years he has specialized in vintage photographica as a profession, everything from salt prints to poloroids. His illustrations/artwork have appeared in numerous publications, both in the U.S. and abroad, and are current on covers of Naugatuck River Review, Blue Five NoteBook, and within recently published Conclave 8, Cirque and Rio Grande Review. His portfolios of images have been featured in Cahoodahoodaling, Blue Five, The Adirondack Review, Aaduna, Superstition and Blue Fifth. Also a writer, his poetry, fiction and critical reviews have been published in The North American Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Quarterly West, Willow Springs, ACM, Cutbank, Fine Madness, Kansas Quarterly, Yellow Silk, Poets On, and many others including anthologies.
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Yosemite Tryst
A wanton girl Used you so – Deep scratches, gouges, Pale scars On your face; Dark streaks where tears flowed And will again – Yet you wait, Oblivious to pines’ lingering scent, Brow uplifted in moonlight, For the glacier’s return. Robert Walton Robert Walton is an experienced writer with several dozen poems published. His novel Dawn Drums was awarded first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors Association’s literary contest and also won the 2014 Tony Hillerman Best Fiction Award. He is a retired teacher and a life-long rock climber. Nightview, New York, 1932
Here it is: a cozy of gems stitched down your sleeve. Blood pulsing hot against your temple. You hold the lights like children in your gaze. The tempo of traffic. Inhale the shoe polish deep in the subway. Shoulder the cold as if it’s a woman you can’t leave. Heidi Seaborn Heidi Seaborn is in her Poet 2.0 incarnation. She wrote prodigiously in her youth then stopped. After three decades, three kids, four marriages, 27 moves and a successful business career, she started writing again with the advantage of all that experience. Today Heidi lives in Seattle, and benefits from the mentorship of David Wagoner. Her poetry can be found in Puget Soundings, Concrete Wolf’s Ice Dream Anthology, the Flying South 2016 Anthology, Fredericksburg Literary & Arts Review, the Voices Project, in the book Fast Moving Water and elsewhere. Stevia
By the third day, you would consider drowning a kitten, or giving up sex, for a decent cup of coffee. Such a pedestrian pleasure is hard to come by, apparently, and when you ask for it, a mug of almost-hot water gets plopped on the table with a jar of instant. Looks like sisters are doing it for themselves. A better bet is the OXXO chain, where you can get a Styrofoam take-out of those fake lattes. While not technically “good,” machine cappuccino is a delicious kind of guilty. And also, they are crack. Except that in Mexico, everything is ten times sweeter, and you can choke on the sugar. It’s not drinkable, but the sugar-free is worse. It’s Aspartame extremism. The stuff is so sweet that your eyes unhinge themselves from their sockets. Coffee in Mexico is, quite literally it seems, more rare than gold. There is gold everywhere, mountains of it, rising above you, showing you the way to heaven. Up, up, up it goes, taking your eye onto the frescoes where painted saints tell their stories. The altar in front of you is carved out of solid gold, and all the horrible and majestic history of Mexican mining and the Indians and land and the Spanish thieves and the grandeur of the church and beauty and all the art and skilled craftsmanship required and inspired, all of it is told to you on these altars. The candelabra, the frames on the Old Masters, the painted trim and the statues, gold, gold, gold. At night the flames to the dead and of our sins flicker and the churches thrum with quiet fire. You can kneel inside of this beauty, you can light another candle for a lost soul that you are missing so hard you fear you could fall open, you can watch the silent tear-streaked faces glowing gold in the trembling light. There is a gold beacon, a seven tonne angel, high above the maze and urgency of city traffic. El Angel, the Angel of Independence, stands triumphant and 22 feet tall, atop a column of 118 feet. Artist Enrique Alciati gave her wings by 1910 after a series of stops and starts and crumblings. Now Victory blinds in bronze, melting in the sun in a top coat of pure 24 karat gold. But you can’t get a proper coffee. Don’t worry, we’ll go to Starbucks, the artist tells you. If we have to, we have to. You take two strong Americanos over to the Malecon and watch a little man all in white balancing a few dozen cubic metres of colourful puffed snacks on a bicycle. You have already tried the dayglo green cheesies, and they might not have been bad if the guy hadn’t soaked them with hot sauce. The flavour had real pep, but the soggy texture negated the crunch that you needed from such a calorie investment. You sit behind the famous bronze dolphins and try to count the gold rays across the sea to the horizon but there are hundreds of them. The artist is telling you about what it was like, coming home after fifteen years. How he had gone into America through a hole in the fence when he was twelve, he’d been sent by his family to the other side. He’d had something of a life there, eventually. A wife and two kids, nearly teenagers now. A few years here and there in prison. You both chain smoke, sipping the coffees. The artist wonders if he will ever leave again. He hopes never, he was homesick every minute and he is happier now, even though he was also near the ocean there. He doesn’t mind serving tourists at a restaurant or making postcard paintings of the river or the sea. He doesn’t want to live away from Mexico. There’s Aztec blood still running through these veins, he says. Except he’s always been curious about Canada. Can you find construction work there if you’re willing, he asks. Is it easy to sell your art? Is the cold pretty? But you wonder about moving here, what it would take to never have to leave. Its sweetness has been mainlined into your veins and going back home feels like grief. You could be an ex-pat, like Toller Cranston or Elizabeth Taylor. You could open a coffee shop, you could have good coffee with a Stevia option, nothing artificial, and local art, and maybe some poets could read there at night, too. Lorette C. Luzajic Lorette C. Luzajic is a Toronto creative working in collage, paint, photography, poetry, and prose. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca. A Photograph of Two Girls in the Country
This bicycle could travel from here down the snaking drive, beneath the clouded trees, take us on a journey to plant our yellow flowers, take us deeper into this silence. For now, we remain still like an unbroken promise. What sun filters through the haze lights on the brim of my hat, soft roses and the blue ribbons winding down my back. Your hair knots itself into the silver air and your breasts wrinkle the white blouse like a wind. There is a stone roof where the road turns. I know if we sat on it, we could see only steady air, trees and the far off hum of home. I balance the bicycle with my toes, think about tarrying here or moving on. At home you live happiest. I ride you here to pick roses, walk barefoot through bunch grass, to learn the voice of the country. Heidi Seaborn This poem was first published in Sequoia. Heidi Seaborn is in her Poet 2.0 incarnation. She wrote prodigiously in her youth then stopped. After three decades, three kids, four marriages, 27 moves and a successful business career, she started writing again with the advantage of all that experience. Today Heidi lives in Seattle, and benefits from the mentorship of David Wagoner. Her poetry can be found in Puget Soundings, Concrete Wolf’s Ice Dream Anthology, the Flying South 2016 Anthology, Fredericksburg Literary & Arts Review, the Voices Project, in the book Fast Moving Water and elsewhere. Voices in the Hospital Gallery: Musings on Art “Art’s whatever you choose to frame.”—Fleur Adcock, “Leaving the Tate” In the spacious, well-lit corridor of a major metropolitan hospital, a line of empty wheelchairs like taxis at an airport, a train of black and silver, press lightly against a white wall. Grids of 2-inch square photos, in 7 x 7 rows, hang above, part of an art project collaboration between medical students and photo-media students. Unintentional juxtaposition. Images in the grid: stethoscope and lens cap, otoscope head and “help” buzzer button, fragments, the top of a sanitizing liquid dispenser and color-coded chart tabs. Birds eye view of Q-tips and tongue depressors, an MRI stretcher-bed and vials of saline in marked tubes. Four of these prismatic grids with repeating and distinct images, sequences of chromatic variations like slides of stained cells. And yet. Some things defy measurement, defy scientific knowledge, fall away from our grasp and so there are missing squares on the fourth grid, empty spaces above the empty wheelchairs. The wheelchairs wait. Not meant as “art” they have become so, they have merged with the images above. This armada for arms, bodies and feet also speaks to what is missing from the photos above. There aren’t any human body parts visible. The next time I come to visit, the wheelchairs are gone. Deployed elsewhere? My view of the exhibit changes. Easier to see the images on the wall, easier to detach from the fact of a hospital. My perception is more simplified and reduced simultaneously, as if I’ve been transported out of the environment. Even though the images speak to medicine, the wheelchairs added an immediacy the grids lack. How do poets respond to other artist’s work? Where do I put my frame? I always want to be mindful of the context in which I’m viewing. In this same Sky Gallery, four plexi-glass boxes of eyes, about 30 in each, made by people working, visiting or staying in the hospital. No two alike though each began with the same blank, almond-shaped template. Riveted by eyes, rivets on eyes, a river of eyes. What you see, what they reflect, is from the outside looking in, or inside looking out. Some are literal eyes, with lashes, pupils and irises. The blue-eyed congregate with like-eyed as do the black and brown ones. Some are figurative, imagistic, symbolic. A heart where the pupil is and inside the heart, a book. One eye is decorated with paper leaves for lashes, constellations in the night sky fill what is usually white space, the pupil is a flower. “I always see / the forest” says the I-eye. In another part of the hospital a sign reads: DO NOT PLACE GURNEYS IN FRONT OF ART. A large, multi-media piece by Dennis Evans hangs next to it. Metal words frame the outside of the 5 x 10 foot piece. Natural Law hangs next to the warning sign. And the laws of nature say that nature abhors a vacuum so gurney attendants looking for a place to stash them must have found the space convenient. Was there a patient on the gurney who needed to rest, to gaze at something other than the white ceiling? Continuing over the top of the frame, Day, Times Rhythm, The Great Cycle, Nature Opera and Night carry on. Bifurcated canvas of creamy yellow and black further delineate day and night. Though no gurneys currently block the art, clearly one or more have. The second part of this art piece hangs directly opposite it, across the hall, and bears the ravages of being “equipment damaged.” It is missing three of its 5 metal ‘rocks’ which were once outcroppings on the piece that speaks to the balance of nature and science. Now out of balance, it appears as an amputee. This hospital, one of three in the area with significant collections of: paintings, sculptures, mixed media, crafts: woven, carved, glazed, sewn, stuffed, installed, photographed, made by “professional” artists, patients, doctors, nurses, and staff, is a testament to the need for, and high regard for, voices from both sides of the body/mind. “Is this a museum or a hospital?” a child asks his father. We are standing in an atrium space between surgery clinics. It is airy and spacious. A spiral staircase cascades down four flights from skylight to blue-rock pool. Touching art is often prohibited here, as in a museum, but in this space, a life-sized horse by Deborah Butterfield, made from recycled, metal scrap, can be petted. He gazes forever out the wall of glass to grass he’ll never graze. We hunger for escape too, hope that what ails us and what heals us can balance, lets us walk out unaided by chair or gurney, lets us reframe our world. As Fleur Adcock said: …Put what space you like around the ones you fix on, and gloat. Art multiplies itself. Art’s whatever your choose to frame. Suzanne E. Edison Suzanne's work appears, among other places, in: her chapbook, The Moth Eaten World, Finishing Line Press, 2014; Spillway; Crab Creek Review; The Healing Art of Writing, Vol. 1; The Examined Life Journal; Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening, and www.literarymama.com. www.seedison.com All photographs by the author. All artwork resides in the University of Washington Medical Center Hospital, Seattle, Washington.
Camera
During the latter days of that long trip the camera ceased to be an intermediary lens that simply sensed and seized any view it pleased. Gradually it grew into an organizing tool choosing and composing, tidying and trimming, dividing, defining, refining shapes and fields, forms and lines, patterns and planes, whether rough, refined, fractal, frumpy, thick, thin, round, rectangular, rhomboid, rhombus, receding, reaching, choice, chance. The camera now devises visual dances, designs that dwell in graceful domains found in the four sides of the frame. Rhythmic arrangements eclipsing the frame’s simple squareness, growing wild, sometimes sublime, defying distance by grasping the universe beyond the peripheries of flat surfaces, Offering images of travelless travels extending beyond paper corners and gallery walls, unravelling from margins and right angles, untangling from the dictates and demands of left and right. The beauty of shapes. They first define, and then unwind. Carl Lindquist Carl Lindquist lives in India. Beautiful, Beautiful Machines “…Nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: ‘Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?’” Walker Evans I love to photograph machines, trucks, construction sites, glass, bricks, engines, skyscrapers, cement slabs, forklifts, bulldozers, factories. Like the great feminist philosopher Camille Paglia, I love roads and concrete bridges. She wrote, “When I cross America's great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.” When I consider nature, I feel appropriate awesome wonder. I am moved by stars and water lilies. I weep during storms. When I stand by the ocean, I feel God’s grandeur deeply in my soul. I feel the veins of minerals in the earth, lapis and turquoise and silver. The mirror of a lake is a miracle. Lava and lilacs, hail and icicles. Feathers astound, as does the unexpected ululating elegance of the neck of the giraffe. I am curious about the planets, and standing in a room of dinosaur bones is always downright mythic. Still, none of these holds my fancy for long. I scan the horizon of the sea for a ship and want to know her name, and the names of the men inside her. Walking in the forest among unwinding fiddleheads and vines and all of their attendant fairies, my spine prickles when I see an empty can of Coca Cola, or the remains of a fire pit. I comb the beach for plastic trinkets washed up from someone else’s life in another land. These treasures are their own kind of archeology. My pulse quickens when I see the footsteps of man. It’s fashionable for man to find man’s presence a disgrace, to snort with disgruntled indignation about man’s mark, to declare that our very presence has spoiled something pristine that is only pure without us. This self-hatred is readily revealed in how we use words like synthetic, unnatural, man-made, artificial, and unnatural; these are all used to describe the mark of man. But man is natural, man is nature, man is part of nature, and anything man makes or does is therefore natural and part of nature. How can anything we’ve made be artificial? Such language is an effective psychological manipulation to undermine human creativity. Our problem is not just racism, sexism, and a long lineup of assorted hatreds of the “other.” It is this, too, this intrinsic loathing for our own existence. In the face of human accomplishments, we feel a strange kind of guilt when the only moral response is gratitude. I don’t propose that humankind is perfect or that he does no wrong. On the contrary, I believe in sins, and our accountability for them. On the other hand, I don’t believe that natural is neutral, or share the Romantic painters’ adulation and delusion that she is innocent. Nature is not just pretty daisies and lazy meadows: it also open sores and parasites and festering diseases. It is the destructive power of fire, and the agony of childbirth inflicted on billions of innocents. It is the ruthlessness of rape in the animal kingdom, of tormenting one’s young and eating them for fun among chimpanzees. There is a certain kind of carelessness to in the thoughtlessly flung empty can, and the can’s story contains factory tyranny and toil. But it also includes the macabre fairy tale of sugar, an epic evil harnessed by man but which is wholly natural. No, not just the story of slavery, but the sweet stuff itself. It’s a substance that has seduced the gullible and left festering, rotten holes where teeth used to be; it has poisoned untold pancreases, crippled us with cancer, and wreaked more havoc than all the fake pharma we’ve ever known. But all the magic is here in this story of the tossed tin, too. How we took one of those veins from the soil, where it sat inert, we ground stones into pigment and made paint, and from that paint we have made a trillion paintings. We made tin and bronze, we melted metal, we polished emeralds and made heartbreakingly beautiful things. Machines are magic. Photography is witchcraft. We have made languages, and when we started writing, we began to preserve the history of culture. We could record poetry and stories. We were Dante and Virgil and Job, Sharon Olds and Haruki Murakami. We made music. On whatever we could find, and with manmade machines. With more machines, we also learned how to preserve it. Most paintings and pictures of the industrial revolution and of machines are clouded with some kind of obligatory apology or condemnation of progress. My photography of buildings and oil pipes and steel structures and urban alleys seeks to show magnificence instead. The chugging trains and the whirring printing presses and the trucks hauling produce and raw materials are about being alive. I see beauty in stacks and bricks and steam. Here is the story of our struggle to invent. Here is how we made the world smaller, and invented possibilities to know other people far away. I see grandeur in skyscrapers and cities. Here is the story of people, of communities striving to stretch the laws of physics to their limits, discover the boundaries of the outer edge of the imagination. From the wheel and turning sand to glass, to La Traviata. And consider how we take for granted the now ubiquitous mobile phone! If our ancestors dreamed we could whisper into a little black box and talk to strangers in the Congo or Buenos Aires, they would deem it sorcery. It boggles my mind when we “research” astrology or crystal “power” or look for evidence that a “medium” calling out “I feel the initial J!” might actually be talking to the dead. We have magic so magic that by pressing a button, we can see cinema filled with the living voices of dead people. We can turn sand into instruments that let us communicate instantly with people five thousand miles away. We know the names and chemical makeup of thousands of stars, for real, not for some mumbo jumbo. Magic is not some vague vibe from swishing sage or obsidian about! We have long taken the compounds in plants for real medicine and real food, we have already mapped time with those rocks. And oil, that apparent evil, black gold, as if energy is always some kind of personification of greed. Oil is a miracle- the ultimate in recycling. The discarded remains, the garbage dump, of beings gone before, turned into power that can fly us across the world into the arms of our lovers or new friends in a day. Refuse that can propel machines to take spices and pineapples north by morning. When I see machines and cities and concrete, I survey man’s astonishing history of architecture and culture and art and transportation and evolution. Oh, the machines! The spinning wheels! The greasy mechanical parts! The skyscrapers! The roaring engines! The mammoth steel bridges! Ayn Rand said, “The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time.” Machines have freed women from lye-raw hands and a lifetime of nothing but washing clothes, and machines have freed men from the fields, where they were mere beasts of burden, to be doctors and writers and chefs. Machines have made books available to everyone, not just to emperors. Beautiful, beautiful machines. When I wander in the glory of a starry night, I feel a profound sense of awesome wonder. I experience intense gratitude for the beauty of the natural world. But it is the skyline of a city and the twinkling of its lights breaking through those stars that inspires me more. Lorette C. Luzajic "I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all." Michelangelo Words that Wound
One mouth frozen twisted with such hate it becomes obscene like a snake about to reel and devour itself again. Her words have been forgotten but they have no less power to wound–the words thrown like a dagger: the words that prompt the dagger itself. How can one speak with so much venom without choking on the poison and slowly dying from within? We become what we say: Fill us with blackened charred words and we eat ash, swallow fire, and slowly burn with hate from the inside out– But fill us with love and light and let us shine so brightly that our pores become stars, a constellation of hope, and we will file the sharp edges off their words, pack them in downy daisy fluff, create a spoken font so soft until there are no words left to speak except in green and gold song. Ariel S. Maloney Ariel S. Maloney teaches literature and writing to high school students in Cambridge, MA. She has published multiple op-eds about educational policy issues online, and her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in local publications such as The Inman Review, the Harvard Summer Review, and Around the World: An Anthology of Travel Writing Collected by Harvard Book Store. |
The Ekphrastic Review
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