​Hen House 
 
He has gone, the rooster perched on the centre console of his pickup truck. The hen house sighs. She signals her relief by undressing. Hangs the stiff flag of femininity out the high window of her throat, its genderless shadow greening the rough stone wall of the tower. A coop now, a pink shell, but for roosts, tossed to land upright in zig-zag across false felt. Cue excitement: Some game is about to begin. A bloody ball rolls outside two slick ones, whiter, rounder, harder than eggs. Laid not by golden hens, bobbing, in pairs, beak to beak; but disgorged by the gray sack he left behind. Chicks hatch in twosomes, liminal in the green bluing to black sky. Objects are out of proportion. Feelings flare. 

​Mushroom Hunters

Across the prairie, heath, any arid wilderness, we are faceless now. All semblances of the real cracked, peeling, revealing the bald agony of grief. We were mushroom hunters, stems sturdy and dirt-clung, fissured black caps dressed with earth. Our buckets, trash bags, pockets overflowed with morels, to butter-braise for dressing eggs, steak, salad. Metaphor, too, for your riven brain, gaps widening where the webbing no longer held. Remember we, a twosome. Father-daughter, bulb-clove, mushroom-spawn. We floated through landscapes beloved, tending toward one another. My hands are yours now, spotted, wrinkled. My wrists ragged, root-torn to desert, burying my head in white peony petals; the bushes under which we’d find our fungal delight. 

Camille LeFevre

Camille LeFevre crafts poetry and creative nonfiction, and teaches writing workshops on art and place, from her home on the unceded lands of the Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache in Northern Arizona. Her essay, “Body Topography,” published in The Dodge, was selected for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology. Her first poetry collection, Sandstone and Kin, will be published in Fall 2026. Her work also appears in Poets for Science, wildscape.literary, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Metphrastics, Fugue, Unleash Literary, Electric Lit, Brevity Blog, and other publications. She’s thrilled to have her work, once again, in The Ekphrastic Review.

​Complete

If there were anything to say, 
a word to speak, 
an offering.
 
But no.

Not that the Image, 
the Event, 
comes bleak to me,

but that it invades, 

suspended as it is, 
there in the air, 
but not even the air,

there in the Nowhere,

the clarity of the thing,
the bare, pure beauty,
invades, overtakes, 

there in the Everywhere.

Shirley Glubka
​
Shirley Glubka is a retired psychotherapist, a poet, essayist, novelist, long-term  enthusiast of The Ekphrastic Review, and the author of thirteen books. Her latest collection is Feet upon the Verge: poems et cetera. She lives in Bucksport, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes.

​
Self-Portrait as a Girl

after Thérèse, by Balthus (France) 1938
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/484717

Am I a girl or am I sex?
My tainted finger points to rose light 
gauzy as my blouse, removed.
Vibrating yet absent. 
In a blink my collarbone is mirrored across the floor
where a black cat embroiders shame upon my imagination. 
 
In a strawberry field
ripe fruit stains my youth.
 
In a Citroën my teacher drives us to his home, 
remote, centred in a yellow field. 

In a stranger’s room
vertigo in scarlet shadows.
 
Humiliation imprints me 
as a needle jabbed into my own damp skin. 
Digs a thread through softness.
Tiny cuts open rivulets of doubt.
A drop, a slip.
Dirty as a spectacle.
 
**
 
Geraniums

after Thérèse, by Balthus (France) 1936
https://www.artnet.fr/artistes/balthus/portrait-de-th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-blanchard-qlzgCs1RUIyz35FmCigstg2

I recognize my narrow face in hers.
Glance sharp gaps.  
Momentary reprieve from monotony. 
Every brushstroke thickens her angle
like a punch to the gut. 
Puts her in her place.
Erased from any record. 
A snarled bow tightens her throat. 
Cuts a word.
Silence can eat a girl up.
Fester and turn a tangle 
of blush ribbon resentful.
When window boxes 
burst blood red buds 
an impossible chorus swells over 
3 Cour de Rohan.
Is there any song we can sing.
 
**
 
Brother

after Brother and Sister, by Balthus (France) 1936 
https://smithsonianprovenance.si.edu/brother-and-sister-frere-et-soeur

Age eleven, she stares 
into a wall of burnt umber 
 
and squints worry 
for things unseen.
 
War, a baby 
left behind.
 
Brother grips her wrist
as men will do.
 
When a fist bites.
When a cat shrieks.
 
His slanted face pierces
the picture plane. 
 
Leaves her suspended 
in his shallow shadow
 
to be painted into stillness.
Filmy as a lace slip.
 
Quiet.
A shredded balloon.
 
**
NB: This poem borrows from "Balloons" by Sylvia Plath.

**

Sallow

after Thérèse, by Balthus (France) 1939
https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Etude-pour-Portrait-de-Therese/9159E80297B3A6AA
​
She holds his pose, renders his horizon line.
Stares through warp & weft 
another canvas beyond her.
 
A bruise will soften to yellow before it fades.
Taut at the bone and flesh gossamer.  
Inside her glimmer, black eyes 
 
like startled animals plead for rescue. 
Request a pause, wink a distraction? 
Play below the surface of hours.
 
Stiff as a cadaver she counts each stroke.
Her cold numb fingers fondle
stolen brushes under prickly woolens.
 
She follows unspoken rules.
Bleed, marry, bear a child.
Vanish like an odorless fume.
 
 **
 
Restraint

after Thérèse, by Balthus (France) 1939
https://ca.pinterest.com/pin/397442735848988837/

His thick breath separates his imposing 
stance from her static young limbs— 
precocious swirl
of purity and promiscuity.
 
She lowers her eyes like a daydream. 
Melts her knowing body into his tortured postures.
Perfume of bitter coffee, turpentine, stale tobacco. 
Like her, I’ve held my breath till gasping. 
 
Buckled at the knees. Succumbed to remote rituals.
In practiced ceremonies pretended consent.
Every weighted brushstroke, smooth scrape 
of a knife will level a man’s executions. 
 
Now, observe 
our sherbet shoulders 
velvet ribbons
our pallid stare. 
 
Elizabeth Leister

Author's note: Thérèse Blanchard posed for the painter Balthus beginning in 1936 when she was eleven years old. She continued to model through her adolescence resulting in ten paintings that centre Thérèse; some highly charged with a pre-pubescent sexuality that continues to draw controversy. In 2017, a group of women demanded that the Metropolitan Museum of Art take the painting, Thérèse Dreaming, down. The museum refused to remove it from the wall.
 
Thérèse lived with her family in the same Parisian neighborhood where Balthus had a studio at 3, Cour de Rohan. Her modeling presumably made extra money for the struggling family. Thérèse married, had a child and died prematurely in 1950 at the age of twenty-five.  There is little record of her life or death aside from his paintings. She is buried in the Parisian Cemetery of Thiais, in division 63, line 7, tomb 48. There is no headstone to mark her location. Ten poems for Thérèse punctuate the collection.

Elizabeth Leister is a poet and visual artist who conceptualizes uncertainty through a feminist perspective on the body across real and imagined landscapes.  Her poem, "Tiny Coffin," was published in the Hoxie Gorge Review. Leister recently completed her certificate in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from the UCLA Extension.  She earned an MFA in sculpture from Bard College and lives in Los Angeles.

Topiary Outside the E.R.

EMERGENCY: This sculpture is alive.
The subject is a mother and her child--
cartoon giraffes. A beastly bush...so wild,
the grounds staff have to shear and shave and skive
it monthly, or the thing will shift its shape
to something far less cute and kid-appealing.
(Such frequent trims reveal what they’re concealing:
chaos’s constant struggle to escape.)

I don’t have time for haircuts anymore.
My boundaries were more distinct before
my ailing daughter’s needs grew never-ending.

I watch this pair of figures slowly blending,
becoming an amorphous greenstone chunk.
An inkblot test in chlorophyll. I flunk.

Julie Steiner

This poem first appeared in American Arts Quarterly.

Julie Steiner is the pseudonym of a recovering classicist in San Diego. Recent verse translations and work in repeating forms appear in The Classical Outlook, Literary Matters, and Light, among other venues. Her Substack is "Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus" (offpisteonmountp.substack.com).

Walking in Paris is a Long Sentence

Today I was walking – no it was yesterday or maybe was last year – when I crossed the city south to north, east to west, every day, I mean I wandered, my pace unhurried as I took pictures of people, buildings, cars, and mostly evrrything on my way while I asked myself why I do that, why I walk so much, why do I watch so much, stare at every passerby and it was somewhere while I ambled between one block and the next that it struck me how we like to live in villages within the city life, an observation I came upon when I passed a crowd of women clad in bright orange, intense yellows and green flowered and flowing garbs, their heads covered, pushing strollers while speaking in loud voices, a language that I could hear well but couldn’t understand, a patois perhaps from another land, but this was Paris where I happened to be at the time, and then I passed several stores with stiff men, standing straight in their entrances, dressed in tailored suits, mirrors of ambition, lies covering their plastic pink skins, molded golden wigs for the mannequins hair, while the store owners were dark, and beyond those stores, the next ones had their vitrines full of white tulles for the brides, long dresses embroidered with garish pearls, bright white, and I kept moving, strolling through more blocks encountering now many people walking their small dogs, couples hand in hand, their face concealed with floppy brimmed hats avoiding the sun, khaki pants, most of them were pale, spoke in low whispers, in Queen approved English or plaited, strand by strand, French into their breath while they looked at the store windows crammed with stiff chotchkes or whatever they call these decorations that people like but have no actual use for, these stores owners were white, the clerks behind the counters were dark and I kept going through the streets full of noise, ambulances, police cars their red lights on, the smells of dead fish, grilled meat and cooked salmon, kebabs, and falafel, jasmine rice, tabbouleh, momo, thukpa and gyurma steaming from open stalls next to boulangeries and viennoiseries, and I stopped there and chose one of each fare: shrimp atop wilted spinach, roasted pumpkin, a fresh baguette and a pain au chocolate, took a seat on a high chair besides a tall round and varnished wooden table, scratched with blue, red and yellow dogs and cats,  children’s drawings reflecting the afternoon sun.

Maria Caponi

Maria Caponi was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. An only child with a vivid imagination, she spent much of her childhood inventing stories and working on mathematical equations. She has a Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Maryland and a Certificate of Creative Fiction Writing with honours from the University of California, Los Angeles. Maria has lived in Los Angeles since her late twenties. Her memoir, An Accidental Pilgrim, a memoir in prose and verse, was published in 2024. She’s currently completing a collection of personal essays and poems. More details about her work and interests can be found at https://mariacaponi.com/