Pareidolia
Some say Böcklin dreamt the Isle of the Dead and spent the rest of his life trying to paint it. Some say each snowflake sets out to reproduce a dreamflake, but the clouds are careless copyists. Nabokov said the Isle on a wall is part of every Berlin home, like a roof or running water. Maybe Böcklin’s dream is dreamt by each of us, even if they’re his initials on the cave-tomb’s door. Maybe I dreamt a poem once, at least its contours, and have spent the rest of my life trying to write it. Maybe every poem is really the same elegy, the same suicide note, reflected in a shattered funhouse mirror, leaving you, me, anyone to pick up the pieces. Each pearl conceals a grain of sand—but try to find it. Of course, Böcklin didn’t paint and repaint the Isle to realize his undying fixation, his dream of death, but to satisfy his patrons and their commissions, his landlords and their past-due notices. And maybe this was never about the obsession of the painter, the poet, the clouds, but of each of us and our insatiable hunger for pattern, for meaning. And maybe you can tell me: do we ever find it? Daniel J. Pizappi This poem was written for the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge. Daniel J. Pizappi grew up in New York’s Hudson River Valley and currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is a PhD student, Managing Editor of Grist: A Literary Journal, and co-editor of Kentucky Writers: The Deus Loci and the Lyrical Landscape (Des Hymnagistes Press, 2016). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Burningword, and The Schawangunk Review.
1 Comment
Death and the Woodcutter
again you are wrong, do you purposely misunderstand me, do you think i am here for the benefit of you or anyone else?: we are here yet were never asked to be born and are never asked if we wish to die except by those who'd be happy to deliver it...this is why it's so easy for me to trick you, to deceive like you were a child, some fool thing destined to be disappointed when called: it's alright, though, come closer and closer when i drive a thousand miles on shot tires fit for a blowout as i'm doing ninety-three...come even closer when i've got my sex in my hands imagining myself exploding inside her telling her she is amazing, telling her she's all i ever wanted, needed, prayed for, and now i can die happy and fulfilled...come right up to my face, feel my breath mix with yours, take one more stride and step inside this mind that's been stewing with so many questions, so much grief, so many demands that you should be tried and hanged for all you've ever taken without mercy, without giving them the time they were due, and now see how i reject you, how i eject you from me with laughter over whatever power they say you have...you don't exist, no one exists like they think they do, there are beginnings i don't remember when i was ripped from the cradle of unbeing, and them saying i will beg for you if i'm made to suffer enough, but i've suffered plenty and have only ever asked to understand why and why and why the way that was chosen, why i chose that way that led to such sharp thorns, the sword in the side, the laughter as i looked up to ask where was the one who was going to save me...but that was me, it's always been me, just as it's each of us who decides the length of our suffering if not ever the method...who knew it would be so easy to call you bastard, ghost, nothing, just as easily as i have without penalty, for yes, there is a darkness, but you are not that darkness, and you are not the sentinel guarding the gateway to that darkness…you are only the unknown we cannot yet understand, maybe will never understand, because we don't get to say when unless we take that resolve for ourselves: this is the hardest thing in existence to take... Garth Ferrante This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge. Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity. He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless. holes in the fabric of time
your lips run with the blood of your children speak but you can't or will not stitches bind the past to a grave dug into tomorrow never deep enough eyes burn in a hell where visions die over and over a pale resemblance seeping out of follicles chalked over a murder scene victim's silhouette a glow in the dark biologic aberrance whiter and whiter yet your purpose a reverse order of life a longing a spider's web i see it not in your eyes in the night that frames you a hieroglypic untranslatable the meaning flowing from your lips a blasphemy the end of hope Billy Howell-Sinnard This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge. Billy is a hospice case manager, visual artist, and poet. He's had numerous first, second, and third place wins at IBPC (InterBoard Poetry Community). His poem, Hospice Nurse, won second place for poem of the year for 2014-2015. Several of his poems have been published in anthologies and at online poetry sites. The Race Track i greet you like this, cannot help but greet you like this, i am remiss, have not prayed in a long time, i see another satellite being swallowed by another gas giant and say to myself this is just proof on top of proof on top of proof that there is no god: since six million died in the holocaust, there can be no god, since i was allowed to be devoured by fear and loneliness and depression, there can be no god, since you were murdered slowly by your illness into dust and ash there can be no god...there is only the occasional meeting of fellow travelers, as we two were, and then the inevitable parting of the ways...i have so much to say to him wherever he rides as you know there are too many questions to ask, too many explanations to demand, to list here, but at least i can say without a trace of irony that i'm done with my war on christ: he was never the problem, really...i have only returned to the place i left long ago, the same one where i'm watching me tell you we shouldn't be friends anymore, the same one where i'm kissing goodbye years of friendship i'll never get back because soon enough you're going to die and fall victim to your own body, your own genes...there i am watching myself make all these mistakes and there's nothing i can do, no god steps in, no good ever comes of this, though sometimes i am transported to the deaf outer reaches of space where hang and slowly revolve the lonely planets...i go there to get the fuck away from myself, but death calls me back, says i'm not getting any time-outs, so if i want to live, i better start soon...there is no god, no one to be angry with, no one to murder in kind for murdering you, and after all this, what is there?: should i go to work tomorrow, be concerned about my pension, my savings?...should i be worried about my health benefits when i don't even know how much longer i'm going to have my health?...i want to be you sometimes, i want to be dead and gone, to not have these worries on my mind, being stressed from existence for saying he should be killed, that he should be made to die, that he should explain why wake us to such beauty if we're only going to be cut down by the rider just when we feel we've stayed to live...i'm still scared, matt, and you're not around to talk to anymore...i have only the grim silence of those planets which will never be enough for me... Garth Ferrante This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge. Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity. He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless. Not Here Open rooms, open doors, doors I walk through but do not find you. Doors opening into openness, the old/new space of I, not us. And where is the window God opens after shutting a door, a window to the blue door of a sky so wide no one can latch or unlock it. The door to my heart is also blue, a door opened and stained blue before blue was blue when it was only sky and a door the dead walk through if we give them a knob. So take this knob, my knob, which unlike yours still throbs, shutting, shutting, shutting it's small blue door against this house, this labyrinth of mute and open rooms. Christina Daub This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge. Christina Daub co-founded The Plum Review, a national award winning poetry journal, started The Plum Writers Retreats and The Plum Reading Series which featured Joseph Brodsky, Carolyn Forché, Mark Strand and many others. Recent poems appear in the anthologies Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, edited by Kim Roberts, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and The Paradelle, both edited by Billy Collins. She is a recipient of a Young American Poet's award and her work has been translated into Russian, Italian and German. She has taught Poetry and Creative Writing in the English Department at George Washington University and in both the Maryland and Virginia Poets-in-the-Schools programs as well as to adults for many years at The Writer's Center. She has forthcoming work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and The Southampton Review. Pieta of the Mayans
The solstice, as predicted: chill wind; bitter sun; the temperature falling like a glove belies all the talk of the world dying of the heat. Most will make it to the far side of winter, no matter what the Mayans might claim: the world soon coming to an end. Compared to their workaday miracles: toileting my mother, changing her, putting on lipstick, it hardly matters the brutality that went on atop Chichen Itza so long ago. Joy to the World and all is forgiven, we hear from the desperate, the sick-at-heart, but what’s all such idle saying worth? A song pitched too high, even for the cherubim? A so-called virgin birth--the agony without the earlier pleasure that might serve to redeem? It’ll be cold enough in the grave with or without, but how about we try a winter coat? I know my mother is tired of all this incessant being. When she taps her tongue to her palate just so, gets the neurons to fire in proper sequence, and those stubborn synapses to bridge, she tells me, No good! No good! Maybe the Mayans are keeping it too hot in here, too much like the Yucatan: I start to think a little cooling in the ground could be just what the doctor ordered. Es la vida, one of the señoras tells me when I cry from this cold, cold thought I now regret thinking. Que lastima, niño!--she pities me my weakness, my child-like honesty, but offers no substitute, no shoulder to cry upon, no lap to cradle me my wounds. Alan Walowitz This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic Halloween challenge. Alan Walowitz’s poems can be found on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College and St. John’s University. His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing. Go to alanwalowitz.com for more poems and more information. White Doors no, no, this was around the time he'd told me that certain places disturbed him even if they weren't really haunted, and then launched into story where he was in a forest and it was the way the trees refused to move in the wind, the way the hill sloped downward as though it were trying to give him a nudge toward the way back where he came that had made him feel like there was a presence watching him, taking note of his movements...this all synced perfectly with the story i'd already shared with him, the one when i must've been like four because my parents were sleeping in the room next door when, on returning to bed after going to the bathroom, the window flew open on its own in the dead of night and the curtains, just like those trees, had refused to move...one or two people said it must've been the alley between the two houses that funneled the wind which opened my window, but then why did the curtains remain still?...the only answers are the ones that are rejected because they don't make sense, because it is popular to say in broad daylight that one has rubbed elbows with the supernatural, but just you wait for the sunset, then you'll see a different kind of logic, the logic of fear...and it won't be like him telling you his story and you saying "hmm..." to something so interesting, nor will it be like mine where physics and what is possible don't seem to mix very well...no, it will be more like you lying there waiting for a visit from some fiend who might be a creep from the apartment downstairs, a moaning of the wind against your house, the rattling of your mind going all the way back in time to show you that here, right here, is the reptilian brain, here is why you jump and shake and scream your little scream of death that is too confused with everything you let play in the soup of all you know and heard and cannot now un-hear and un-know in the small hours when you are the plaything... Garth Ferrante This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge. Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity. He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless. The Rain of Empty Choices My once rosy pink flesh has been drained of life. I am left with nothing but this pale wrinkled whiteness, revolting as writhing maggots. We are all awash in blinding white that appears to us as an endless gray rain. The voice of God washes over us. Drowns us within our own irrelevance. We have been left here to stare into the open pit of empty choices no rain could ever wash away. Andrew Vinstra This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic Halloween challenge. Andrew Vinstra is a huge devotee and fan of 60's British invasion classic rock, 50's rockabilly, American blues and soul music and the classic standards of American popular music from the 30's, 40's and 50's as well as old country and jazz. Andrew also loves old classic Hollywood films, the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, the poetry of William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Pablo Neruda and the rantings of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. When not writing poetry or singing classic rock and Sinatra standards at karaoke bars Andrew wishes he had the guts to pursue becoming a stand up comic like his heroes Robin Williams and George Carlin or that greatest of American writers who was also perhaps the first great stand up comic, Mark Twain. The Healing
Dressed in pink and wheeled forth to the healing in a pillowed cart by her husband's hired man, this woman is not dead yet, but her sidelong glance at the ground beside her, covered in figured cloth anchored in place with pots of flowers, tells us her thoughts are earthward. She will not be healed. Her husband and daughter are there, the child wearing a dress cut from the same pink bolt of cloth and painted with the same pink brush, but ruddier, for she is twelve or twenty years away from love, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, death. It is spring, everything is wet and ripe and fresh, and from a rose on one of the potted plants the dying woman sees an infant worm hang by a gleaming thread, then drop suddenly, and she knows that when they lay her on the cloth the pots will fail, the cloth give way, and she will fall into the chute of endless night. Michele Stepto This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic Halloween challenge. Michele Stepto lives in Connecticut, where she has taught literature and writing at Yale University for many years. In the summers, she teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. Her work has appeared in One Sentence Poem,NatureWriting, Mirror Dance Fantasy, Lacuna Journal, and Italian Americana. She is the translator, along with her son Gabriel, of Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World. Procession in Fog Squeezed out by the heavy feet of mourners, an unearthly fog rises from hell. Day after day, the dead pass my door, followed like a shadow by those who can still pray or dig. I think I see Mother, and she’s been gone ten years. Death, like a new pastor, busily makes the rounds to every household before winter. I have nothing more to say to God for myself, but ask mercy for parents who plead, Please, Lord, please. Take me instead. Alarie Tennille This poem was written for the surprise Halloween ekphrastic challenge. Alarie’s latest poetry book, Waking on the Moon, contains many poems first published by The Ekphrastic Review. Please visit her at alariepoet.com. |
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
March 2024
|