The Bus
My bare feet graze the trolley’s metal floor. The apricot-flamed scarf winds its way from head to toe, a cotton shield, and tucks lightly around you: my silent, hidden son. You are quiet and eager. My eyes dart, diligent, from your eyes to chin to forehead, tracing the well-worn circuit of you. My gaze is only yours, and you, my copper-gauzed world. We sit in a row on the pressed wood bench: dolls on a playroom shelf, our tourists queued up outside the museum. Lost in thoughts and dreams. The split seconds between the now and the next are frozen in frame-- your tongue darts back and forth-- your coo a small mewing-- we are unsuspecting passengers for one moment more, and then the seconds will collapse into each other, and we will follow. Catherine Ruffing Drotleff A non-profit fundraiser by day, and a poet by night, Catherine Ruffing Drotleff writes to place herself in the world and to observe that place over time and space. A Midwesterner by birthright and a Chicagoan by choice, Catherine's work has appeared in Rattle and Blue Hour Magazine.
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Sing of Bareness a New Song
Were it necessary to recognize only carved agony, the inevitable effort of suffering, the starved human frame doubled to a clinging skeletal pair, genocide, famine, all things apocalyptic in these death-bound lovers, I would not have come to know that one in one united bare in bare doth shine; nor been struck wordless by the force of the glow from the stripped complexity of the final ecstatic coupling. Shirley Glubka (Author's Note: "The title is from 'The Song of Bareness,' author unknown, formerly ascribed to Johannes Tauler; the line in italics is from Meister Eckhart.) This was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic challenge on sex and art. Shirley Glubka is a retired psychotherapist, the author of three poetry collections, a mixed genre collection, and two novels. The Bright Logic of Wilma Schuh (novel, Blade of Grass Press, 2017) is her latest. Shirley lives in Prospect, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes. Website: http://shirleyglubka.weebly.com/ Online poetry at The Ekphrastic Review here and at 2River View here and at The Ghazal Page here and here. Sophia Behrs at Seventeen
photographer, painter, writer; mother of 13; wife of Tolstoy This is what she is like, the year before she marries him -- before he gives her, this fresh-hearted girl (yes, I know she looks feisty, but come on), his diaries to read which tell in searing detail of sex with another woman; before being pregnant from ages eighteen to forty-four and burying five children; before he makes her nurse their firstborn despite the open sores in her breasts; before seven times copying out War and Peace from his tangled scribbles, feeding and caring for family, servants and the ubiquitous hangers-on and pleading with him for years not to gift away their livelihood-- Sophia, before she draws up from inside a bucketful of something, and starts furiously writing her own stories-- sketching flowers—taking pictures of everything, later developed in the pantry. Before she takes her own portrait, a dolled-up grandmother, still beautiful. You forget the husband’s scowl at her side: light flocks to her, the old woman, same as at seventeen. Look, here is Sophia. Laura Chalar This poem was first published in the chapbook, Midnight at the Law Firm (Coal City Press, 2015) Laura Chalar was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a lawyer and writer whose most recent poetry collection, Unlearning, was published by Coal City Press in 2018. The Scream
The sky leaks it first. Then we’re pulled to the oily drift of the bridge to see where it ends. If it ends. Pulled To the figure in the foreground both less and more than human holding forever in his hands both his ears in a view that will never be over-- So infinite is it. One raining pitch, a twisted splicing of lines, clogged both less and more in the pipes of the sky than the dim canals of the ears. How it bends and winds the continuing etched pen and ink, drilling the runnels of rough and worn wooden slats Underneath with the depth of enduring inception luring us further and further in to the silent camp of the deaf where the railing of inner liquids runs in elliptical rivulets-- transfusions embalming the brain pumping a skeletal premonition through the facial bones of this gnome whose hands, upon staring become two pinned wings, two symmetrical slabs of marble framing the face like the hair of a woman-- So that now it is lion, serpent, bird-- the shared eye and ear of the inhuman, wild with nightmare sustained in the shadowed couple arm in arm in the tiny background-- calm as the cloud of lake while ribs of the sky quietly starve in testament to the steeple riding its fading spine to the edge of the cliff gliding and ringing both beneath and above the bridge singing and singing a gorgon’s lullabye. Deborah DeNicola This poem was previously published in Where Divinity Begins, by Deborah DeNicola from Alice James Books. Deborah DeNicola is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently, Original Human, 2010 from Word Tech, Where Divinity Begins from Alice James Books, four chapbooks, and her memoir, The Future That Brought Her Here from NicholasHays 2009. She edited Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (UPNE.) An adjunct professor, and editor, DeNicola received The Carpe Articulum Award in 2010, Briar Cliff Poetry Award, 2007, the Santa Barbara Poetry Award, 2008 and The Paul Hoover Critical Essay Award from Packingtown Review, 2009. She is the recipient of an artist’s fellowship from the NEA. Her web site is www.intuitivegateways.com. Wings
Two small birds on the canvas aerodynamic even in repose colored feathers resplendent end of a long inheritance reaching back to saurian life before flight before flowers before we could have been imagined coming so late and so full of new ideas you were our first music your songs rising in counterpoint above the drumbeat of our blood giving us dreams full of wings lifting in the bright air of morning or swift and soundless as the great owl in moonlight our hearts forever yearning for the grace of flight Mary McCarthy This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic poetry challenge on birds. Mary McCarthy has always been a writer even though she spent most of her working years as a Registered Nurse. Recently moved to Florida, she has been enjoying the abundant local wildlife, including a great variety of birds, everything from snowy egrets and pelicans to osprey and vultures. She has had work published in many online and print journals, and has an e chapbook “Things I Was Told Not to Think About” available as a free download from Praxis Magazine. Hummingbird Facts
My mother, who knows nothing about birds, points to the nest. The eggs have hatched and all we can see from afar are three, thin, little needles bobbing up and down towards the sky. If we stop talking for a second, we can hear the high-pitched cries of the hungry chicks. "I wonder where the mom goes off to." My mother says. I know exactly where, because I've been out here perched on a ladder watching birds for hours. I signal to the top of the Pine Tree. For the first time, we see the mom with another hummingbird in flight. “Look,” my mother says. “There’s the dad.” “Probably not.” I tell her. Hummingbirds are the least romantic of birds. Soon after mating, they each go off to another partner. They don’t even stay together to raise their young. The female builds the nest alone. She also cares for them all on her own. My mom doesn’t ask why I know all these hummingbird facts. Rebeca Ladrón de Guevara This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic challenge on birds. Rebeca Ladrón de Guevara received an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. Her fiction has previously appeared in Chicago Literati, Genre, Sonora Review and Badlands Literary Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry and Ekphrastic Review. She lives in Los Angeles, California where she watches birds all day, every day. Petals and Garden of Nymph Ancolie A friend and I attend the exhibition at The Menil. The Max Ernst mural served as backdrop to the dance floor of a Zurich nightclub, 1934–smoky room with zebra-striped upholstery, jazz band, stylish dancers gliding across the polished floor. In the painting, a bloom suggests the head of a heron. Tendrils of exotic flowers–vibrant red, orange–curl between four-fingered hands. Curve of a woman’s leg lazing against a shapely pool of blue. Plant, animal, human entwined. Playful, strange and pleasurable. I mention a contemporary artist whose exhibit I've just seen twice. My friend smiles. She'd seen it, too. We discuss the significance of birds in both men’s work, the political undertones. She lowers her voice and tells me– years before, she and the artist were lovers. She speaks of art, but I want to hear more of life. At dinner, she promises. Outside, absorbed in her revelation, I rummage for my car keys. Look, she says. Dusk has brought a fine mist to settle in the grass and low limbs of the live oaks while above, the air is clear–as though we’ve stepped into two halves of a world. Fog silhouettes a couple strolling, a man tossing a stick to a dog, and one of those birds I’ve seen here before– a yellow-crowned night heron. The bird seems here by design. How perfectly its elegance and colours–grey, black, white– complement the museum. The delight of one thing playing off another. Later, over a glass of wine, she tells the story while I picture her younger, dashing to his studio in a cab in Manhattan (so very New York, she says). I’m seduced by her daring, the delicious interlude. Laura Quinn Guidry Laura Quinn Guidry grew up in New Orleans and currently lives in Carmine, Texas. Her poetry has been published in The San Antonio Express-News; journals including Louisiana Literature and The Texas Review, and in anthologies including In These Latitudes: Ten Contemporary Poets. Her first full-length volume of poetry Between Two Gardens was published by Alamo Bay Press in 2017. Go Back to Finger Painting Remember the smeary freedom and tactile bliss? How you could fill the page as it curled with fire and became uniquely yours, yellow never just yellow and red never lonely red. The fluidity of identities, a meld of hues and primaries, of places, lands and waters crossed, capsized emotions. Light and its absence, the greatest sorrows, fragmented and unpredictable. By the time you finger your colour it’s already changed. Take Klee whose watercolours shift according to your gaze. His Architecture of the Plain depends on conjecture. Some days deliver its pleasing synchronicity – darker blues and greens defining margins left and right – and the coloured rectangles overlap, now raspberry, now vermillion. Fleeting moments pass and all you see is collision, hear a noisy argument, colours clamouring for space. Klee knew what he was doing – flat as a checked shirt pressed on an ironing board, yet there’s such depth to the painting, you want to put your hand through the paper and feel around, you want to wear your shades, tag your name graffiti-style to the lowest rainbow stripe. This is a multicoloured manifesto of love. Darkness and light in perfect Greek proportionality, an artful construction based on math and spontaneity where form is all there without being too visible. Look carefully: the ratio of the smaller part (the yellows, say) to the larger part (the reds) equals the ratio of the larger part to the entirety (the painting). Even your fleeting childhood, even your fingers painting reflect a perfect symmetry where yellow is to red equals red is to (yellow plus red). See what I mean? The painting is greater than the sum of its brushstrokes. Cora Siré Cora Siré is the author of three books. Her latest novel, Behold Things Beautiful, was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2017. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Arc Poetry, Literary Review of Canada, Geist, The Puritan, carte blanche and Montreal Serai. Based in Montréal, she often writes of elsewheres drawing on her encounters in faraway places and her family’s history of displacement. For details, please visit her website, www.quena.ca. Another Take, with Prologue, on Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
As youth will, knowing nothing but to soar on a spring day’s rush of baby-green sprout and lemon haze, too much aching to resist, he ignores warning; hoots and yowls as he climbs the thermals, pushes up and up, vein-bulged arms and legs pumping, swimming the clouds, gasping his ecstasy, watching farm and hill give way to the coast. Drums out over the sea’s cerulean heave, thrusts higher, higher, as it recedes, appears a puddle, prone to dry to saline flakes before day’s end. Now the sun grows attainable, a wild tale for his grandchildren, and he pumps higher, pores weeping in the effort (easily cooled once he’s made history). Higher still, heat, sweat, hot drops on shoulders, more hot drops and wings have grown smaller; the sun suddenly farther. When survival keeps grown-up heads down in planting’s and herding’s urgency, dinner’s catch, and shipping’s commerce, why worry strung feathers, bits of congealed wax, two legs kicking sudden on sea’s surface. Splash. A young fool’s foiled. Bernadette McBride Bernadette McBride, author of three poetry collections, most recently, Whatever Measure of Light (Kelsay Books, 2016), is poetry editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a Pennsylvania county Poet Laureate, and poetry winner, second place, for the International Ray Bradbury Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review, Cider Press Review, Philadelphia Stories, and Ragged Sky Press as well as journals in the UK, Canada, and on PRI's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. She welcomes your visit atbernadettemcbrideblog.wordpress.com. Millennia Insecta I have known the eons-long longing of insects gone to stone, the empty wishes of disjointed plates no longer encasing throbbing thorax, fecund abdomen, the despondency of coxae that once cupped flexing femurs, the weariness of wings become limestone lithographs, the layered years hardened against weather: sturdy siltstone, kiln-baked mudstone that hold the compressed millennia of wisps of beings that whisked the air mere days, then died. And I have seen a day pass from horizon to horizon in the instant I looked up from stone to sky, the split second I became aware of buzzing and flapping around me, the flicking wings, the whirring flags of chitin and scales, the jumping, hopping, stalking, searching, pulsating life arisen from these very foundations of their world. Roy J. Beckemeyer Roy J. Beckemeyer is a retired engineer and scientific journal editor who lives in Wichita, Kansas. He currently studies the Paleozoic insect fossils of Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and writes poetry. His poems have appeared in half a dozen anthologies as well as in many print and on-line literary journals. His first book of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, Lawrence, KS, 2014) was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He won the Beecher’s Magazine poetry contest in 2014, and the Kansas Voices poetry award in 2016. He recently co-edited (with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg) Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, Pittsburg, KS, 2017). |
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