 Untitled, by Maud Hale. Provided by the author. In Grandma Hale’s Painting, Which She Gave Me Nothing can keep the white farmhouse from floating in moonlit smoke from a black locomotive. The molten orange field in an invisible sun whose gold haystacks can't stop glowing. The sun, the moon, a brother and sister, two black-and-white cows-- near one's nose, a bee almost big as the incredulous bonnet our Grandma’s cousin Millie wore in the asylum on Long Island. I never wanted children, our Mom told me. Oh white triangle of fruit trees, oh red barn roof. Say what you want about the Jews-- they make good family men, said Grandma. The place inside the barn. Oh frozen cherry trees. Oh two white silos. Richard Widerkehr This poem first appeared at Open: A Journal of Arts & Letters. Richard Widerkehr’s fourth book of poems is Night Journey (Shanti Arts Press, 2022). At The Grace Cafe (Main Street Rag) came out in 2021. His work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Writer’s Almanac, Atlanta Review, and over 50 others He won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review and enjoys singing and playing guitar.
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 Guyasdom's D'Sonoqua, by Emily Carr (Canada) 1930 Guyasdom's D'Sonoqua by Emily Carr, 1930 “She seemed to be part of the tree itself, as if she had grown there at its heart, and the carver had only chipped away the outer wood. So you could see her.” Emily Carr, Klee Wyck Red cedar totem. Dangling breasts, carved as eagle heads. Dark hair matted to her scalp. Face a seizure of circles. Thick, wide brows arch high over sunken eyes, pupils white ringed in black like bullseyes. Cheeks concave discs. Twisted greenery covers a third of her. A toothy alligator suns on a roof, bellows in her left ear. Is she the nourisher, Earth Mother, or the fabled hag who steals children in the forest? I say both—unhinged with grief from how we maul our home. Her arms grasp for us. Lips strain in a perpetually-open O, mouth a grim abyss. Karen George Karen George is author of three poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her short story collection, How We Fracture, which won the Rosemary Daniell Fiction Prize, is forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press in Spring 2023. After 25 years as a computer programmer/analyst, she retired to write full-time. She enjoys photography and visiting museums, cemeteries, historic towns, gardens, and bodies of water. Her website is: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.  Date Night, by CW Allwine (USA) contemporary. Used with artist permission. Inspired by CW Allwine’s Date Night (Booth 48) It won’t be long now. I hear they’re coming for me. We had a long run. I can’t say exactly how many miles I’ve covered because I’ve outlived my odometer. I’m sixty-two now, not nearly old enough to say goodbye to this world yet I’ve never been one to complain. I no longer have a four-barrel carburetor, but pondering the end does choke me up a bit. There’s still a beauty about me; they say I still have a glow. People walk around me and say kind words. Things like, “Check out that old Chrysler Imperial—they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” They talk about my long lines and elegance and fancy taillights, and “all that chrome! You don’t find it in newer models.” Those were the good old days; six-way power bench seats. V-8 engine, power steering, power brakes, push button this and that. My eerie and modern dashboard lighting that glowed in the dark. I admit I liked my toothy grill; people said I looked as if I were smiling. Cruising down the highway, songs like “Little Deuce Coupe,” “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” and “Drive My Car” playing on the radio. Funny aside: Used to be when you hit the brakes the kids in the back tumbled onto the floor. Seatbelts have their advantages, of course, but they also clutter things up. Now, in my last days, I’ve settled into one of my favourite places: the Starview Drive-in. Automobiles were a novelty when drive-ins began. People loved watching movies in the comfort of their own cars. It was like sitting in their living room. In 1959 when I was born, there were more than 4,000 drive-in theatres around the country. When I think about the old days here at the Starview, I feel happy. I haven’t felt this electrified since I was hotwired back in the ‘70s. Wasn’t so long ago the family crowded in to watch movies: Jaws was a favorite, all the kids screeching and cowering. Why they let the little ones watch the movie is anyone’s guess. They had nightmares for days. The Long Hot Summer, too, with Paul Newman at his finest with Joanne Woodward—that’s when they knew they couldn’t ignore what they felt for each other. Then Belle du Jour, Endless Summer, even Psycho. The kids were asleep for that one. There was Viva Las Vegas, Rebel Without a Cause, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and Mary Poppins. The kids loved Mary Poppins. At intermission the lobby filled up with purchasers of 7-Up and popcorn and milkshakes and fries. I smelled like popcorn into the next day. And Date Night, when the car grew quiet except for the clip-on speakers on the window, broadcasting the film. I saw it all, not all of it good. JFK, protests to the Vietnam War, summer of love that ended with that Manson night of hate. Then the big hair, big collared ‘70s, and the ‘80s when cars shrunk like dried up mushrooms. All that detailing: tail fins segueing into streamlined but nondescript bumpers. It’s fitting the end comes for me here, at the Starview—though it’s not the end end. I hear I’ll be reincarnated. As for the drive-in, the stars may no longer visit the big screen, but they mob the sky like daisies in spring. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is editor of Palm Springs Noir (Akashic, 2021), which she also contributed a story. Her first book, Pen on Fire, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her writing has appeared in Coolest American Stories 2022, USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, Inlandia, Antarctica Journal, Rock and a Hard Place, Crossing Borders, Poets and Writers, and The Dark City Crime & Mystery Magazine. She hosts the podcast, Writers on Writing. More at penonfire.com.  Hinton, West Virginia, photography by Jason Baldinger (USA) 2022 Heaven From Here by Robert L. Dean, Jr. (photo: Hinton, West Virginia, by Jason Baldinger) The train arrives, or, not quite, really, still belching, no squeal of iron on iron, no one there to hear it, platform empty, the sign of who we are backwards, perhaps we have been or will be or are passed by, history on display at the Ritz, an audience of ghost chairs, stacking metal and vinyl banquet on mosaic Depression tile, floral pattern long wilted, like us, are we in or out, we can’t make up our minds, maybe we’ll turn left, maybe right, one arrow pointing us toward the train, the other in the direction it is headed, or was headed, or we remember it being headed, or would remember, if we were still here, still performing, still listening for the whistle of time rolling in, the drum-drum heartbeat of shako-plumed youth celebrating whatever it is we used to celebrate, lamp-post flags waving once again in the breeze that is surely locomoting in on the dark underbelly of sky, one lone tourist trying to capture us, ghost that he is and always will be.  Walkersville, West Virginia, photography by Jason Baldinger (USA) 2022 The Hang Up by Robert L. Dean, Jr. (photo: Walkersville, West Virginia, by Jason Baldinger) They hear it in Ohio, Pennsylvania, the cotton fields of the Llano Estacado, the gator lands of south Florida, the bottom of Crater Lake. Tsunami warnings siren across the Pacific. Three mountains in the Hindu Kush implode. Blood stains your connection to civilization. You didn’t know Bakelite could cut so deep. It’s 1983 and she’s told you don’t call her again, no matter if you’re lost in the woods in Hicksville, or wherever, falling off a cliff. Sinking in quicksand, goodbye, good riddance, good God. Hasn’t she had enough. Haven’t you. And here you are, four decades, three divorces, two heart attacks, six grandkids later, a middle of nowhere return, sanity hanging by a thread, you wish you could pick it up, put it back together, punch the right numbers, say I’m sorry, wondering, isn’t life funny, how you found it again, how this thing is still here, your anger, your hang up, if only you’d known. Leaves rustle. Wind blusters in the open window. You start the car, head for the Interstate, that lunatic asylum you saw in Weston. Shuttered now, tourists and ghost hunters only, poems of the lost tattooed on therapy room walls. You happen to have a crayon on you. In the rear view, the phone rings. Robert L. Dean, Jr Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s poetry collections are Pulp (Finishing Line Press 2022); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018). A multiple Best of the Net nominee and a Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in many literary journals. Dean is a member of the Kansas Authors Club and The Writers Place. He has been a professional musician, and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capital of the World and the Flint Hills.  Banquet Piece with Ham, By Willem Claesz Hedy (Netherlands) 1656 Recalled to Life for my husband, upon his receiving first dose of experimental drug Today you and I venture from our cocoon near the medical center to the fine arts museum about a block away to enjoy a few hours of the respite for which art and verse are made. The paintings speak as never before-- Heda’s Banquet Piece with its crumpled linens, overturned silver goblets, half-peeled citrus, and bread and oysters strewn across table; van Dijk’s 1600s painting of Elisha’s meeting with the Shunammite and her son, her only son, having just returned to his mother in the land of the living. And here we are, this April day, ourselves a part of the canvases—we, the figures in Heda’s painting, having hurriedly exited the dinner table, the ghosts in van Dijk’s masterpiece awaiting the call to new life. Jo Taylor This poem was first published in Georgia Poetry Society’s Reach of Song, Spring, 2022. Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. Her favourite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it. In 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire. She enjoys morning walks, playing with her two grandsons, ages four and seven, and collecting and reading cookbooks.  Elisha in the House of the Shunammite Woman, by Abraham Van Dijk (Netherlands) 1654  Sleepy Freeway, by Pierrick Gaumé (France) 2008 Sleepy Freeway A San Francisco Bay area sunset inspired French designer Pierrick Gaumé’s painting Sleepy Freeway (2008). Facing the viewer, atop the magenta sunset hills rests a bald sleeping figure of a hillside, head on hands, eyes closed. Stylized magenta and gold-outlined cars zoom left and right in the foreground. In as little as a decade, scenes like this one–even a super bloom of poppies, lupines, and golden mustard that colour hills as if lit by sunset–might morph into more sinister visions when fire seasons approach sooner and more quickly. Once we could celebrate untroubled the brilliant reds, magentas, and oranges of the Bay Area sunset. Now those colours are the scale of fire danger alerts, nightmares of fire tornados, vision of an elderly couple in the in-ground swimming pool while the fire rages above them, the burnt paint odor of a white pickup toasted like a marshmallow as it escaped the Camp Fire. Paradise in ashes. Sleepy Freeway is no longer able to drowse undisturbed. It must be ever watchful, like the fire watchers on duty, ready to tweet calls to CalFire and all who keep their bug-out bags at the ready. Jeanne Blum Lesinski Jeanne Blum Lesinski is a long-time amateur of French culture and first met the artist of Sleepy Freeway when she was an exchange student in France and Pierrick Gaumé a school boy drawing cars. Years later the two reconnected. She still loves French culture and the car culture, this time the California car culture that jumps from the canvas in brilliant colour. In 2008 when Gaumé painted Sleepy Freeway, the dangers of climate-change induced wildfires were not on our minds the way they are today, demonstrating how viewers’ interactions with artwork evolve as the world changes. Read Jeanne's poem, World in Motion, in response to artist Joseph Cornell. Jeanne's poem, Embroidery, Lily Yeats, was a finalist in our Women Artists contest.  Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, by Claude Lorrain (France) 1682 Moriturus (Ascanius and the Stag) Cervulus ille redit, iamiam moriturus in urbe Quae non condita erat … Caught by perspective’s spell, the eye Lifts to that blurry reach of blue Above the bridge – a peak or two, Then cloudy trees meet branching sky: A prospect delicate as foam! Till, drifting left, you find, below, The lengthened form and levelled bow Of Prince Ascanius, heir of Rome. To see his target, you must turn: Across the bushy stream, due right, A stag, neck skewed, confronts his sight Direct: poor beast, about to learn History’s impetus, the blow Long told. Look left: the arrow’s set Straight at his lengthened throat, and yet – Look right – he stands there still, as though Saved by the context; through this frame Nothing can pass. Look right, look left; Pause at the entry point, that cleft Of edgeless blue. The sky’s the same, The bridge, the temple – not yet built, And yet already ruined, bare Against the still bucolic air. Heaped between loss and loss, the silt Of memory thickens, aided by The clench of art. What should we mourn? The stag waits, spindly as a fawn. Look back, look up: the stones rise high. The sky holds blue. The branching sky. Julia Griffin Julia Griffin lives in South-East Georgia. She has published in Light, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and some other magazines.  Artwork owned by the poet, details not known, painted by Paul Arlt (1914-2005, USA). The Shadow of the Lighthouse falls on the grass sloping down to the hotel at the edge of Monhegan Island in our painting by Paul Arlt, which hung in my parents’ living room in 1943 when my father worked in D.C. as our troops pushed ashore at Salerno and I was born. In the painting, we stand atop the absent lighthouse, looking beyond the hotel to a smaller island, then the curved horizon beneath a pinkish sky. General Kesselring’s panzers countered, then withdrew to their Winter Line slowly up the snowy central mountains, the “tough gut” of the Axis, said General Clark, apologizing to his men. Two decades later my brother and I retrieved the Chevrolet convertible of our father, divorced and dead, and drove it east, stopping at Dealey Plaza where in November President Kennedy had been hit, the Zapruder frame holding the instant not shown for years. The smaller island, Manana, is bare with just a foghorn station’s lone beacon sticking in the sky. A few sailboats sit in the harbour near the hotel where my family must have stayed when we visited and I was only a boy. Hunt Hawkins Hunt Hawkins' book of poems, The Domestic Life, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, Poet Lore, and many other journals. Hunt has lived in Norway, Myanmar, Tanzania, and Poland where he taught as a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.  Bayard-Condict Building (1899) in New York City, designed by Louis Sullivan, photo by Joel Seligmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 Louis Sullivan “The fairy delicacy, ceaselessly at work.” The Autobiography of an Idea, Louis H. Sullivan I say there’s something living in this common earth, Latent, not free before to manifest in flesh, Only to reach toward heaven, not sky; I say at last let us let it be true. Now come immense and peaceful migrations; Thundering engines of steel and steam; Instant electric signals; A new kind of light. Let ancient fathers remain at their rest; In this new world, even the stars are new. Seeking with all of their youthful pride, Born in the breadth of the Mississippi River, The redwoods that tower above the Pacific, The thousand-mile horizons over the prairies, Unpent mankind begins to bend back All the massed superstitions. Can will command nature? I say will is nature. As the tree in the seed, so are we liberated. A bridge leaps the gap, knit from steel tendrils; Stones once defiant yield at last, And summon new angels who, Stretching their wings, Form a canopy like boughs shielding the garden Where a gentler force unfurls: Vitality groping toward its fate, Enfolding its frame in a million faceted intricate blossoms; A lace of vines and fractal structures, glittering effulgences; The asymmetric, incalculable, wild marvel of ensoulment. I say new bones, new life. Yes, Emerging like Eve from Adam’s rib of iron, From starbursts and diamonds and oak leaves, Spinning atoms’ forces and the Feminine swells that bring new creation; Gravity now is balanced on lightness; Great masses expertly poised upon pinpoints; Arches throwing their compass feet forward, Toward a tomorrow certain to be. Let me show you the golden doorway. Step through, Step through. Timothy Sandefur Timothy Sandefur: "I'm an attorney and author located in Phoenix, Arizona. I've published several books, including my first book of poems, Some Notes on the Silence, which came out this past spring, from Kelsay Books. My poem "New York City Haiku" appeared in The Ekphrastic Review this past summer."  Arrangement in Grey and Black (Whistler's Mother), by James McNeill Whistler (USA) 1871 Even Now mother paints, marks my canvas from beyond time twenty years passed held by limitless light lids emit ice blue influence even now blessed or cursed her shadow covers blankets to her will be like her or not say wizened crones daughters of night telling my life history of tomorrows Julie A. Dickson This poem was inspired by another painting, called The Artist's Mother, Josephine, by Joseph Sulkowski (USA), contemporary. Julie A. Dickson has written poetry since age 12, writing her conduit to memories, both creative and cathartic. She has dabbled with Ekphrastic poems for several years now and enjoys the visual prompt. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Girl God, Misfit, Open Door and The Ekphrastic Review. Dickson holds a BPS in Behavioral Science and is a past poetry board member and Pushcart nominee. She loves cats and advocates for captive elephants. |
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December 2022
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