Snapshot: Exes in Black & White You remember who you were that sweet version of sugar dust, the taste of forever. Now, you float, a filament leaving a field of vision, exiting stage left. Backdrop: the weather-beaten two-story with a front-end turret, scalloped curtains tied back, a sturdy silhouette statue’d between drapes; libido smoldering in concrete. Zoom in: an owl perches on the coned peak, offers a full-circled head spin, a lulling coo. Focused to pinpoint black/white immortal clarity: You remember who you were. Catherine Arra Catherine Arra lives in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, where she teaches part-time, and facilitates local writing groups. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections. And four chapbooks. Recent work appears in San Pedro River Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Origami Poems Project, and Stone Circle Review. Find her at www.catherinearra.com Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; his photos have appeared or are forthcoming in Ink in Thirds, San Pedro Review, Unleashed Lit, and Anti-Heroin Chic. His full-length book Pop.1280, is a poetry and photo collection, available from Amazon. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press.
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An Offering in Blue On tiptoe, bare-breasted and bent-kneed, I laid my heart down on the table, over coated paper, under rays, and breathed, while it raced. My heart. Arced over my limbs were those of a Russian olive, heavy with age. Naked, like me, after a long winter. But with promise. Ten minutes, twenty. I watched the treated surface below me change in response to time and light, like you, after a long winter apart from me. A distant image, emerging: chartreuse, cerulean. Silver. I was shielded on the patio, behind the humble house on the private lane they named for whalers. Still, the April wind reached me cold on what was for others a table for summer meals, but for now was one to hold an offering of another kind. A spring together. Like farming and fishing, whaling was an industry here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whalers’ blubber was boiled for oil to light lamps. For lubricants. Even margarine. I recoil at the thought of the mammoth creatures I see swimming freely today hunted for their flesh, but understand the drive to do what is needed to survive. On his own table, across centuries and the ocean at my door, a man searches for survival of a different nature. Sir John Herschel, a scientist knighted for his contributions to the stars, sought a method to capture and preserve an image. When something matters, we want to keep it forever. We can’t let it fade. Janelle Lynch Janelle Lynch is a writer and an award-winning photographer. Her writing has been published in monographs and in journals including Afterimage, The Photo Review, and Loupe. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in several museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs published by Radius Books: Los Jardines de México (2010); Barcelona (2012), which also includes her writings; and Another Way of Looking at Love (2018). She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery. After Remedios Varo [Rheumatic Pain, 1948] They wrap me in the pained body of linen strips striping flesh compressed and pressured sealing what’s physical from view so that none can see agonies as my face portrays them, refuse to admit the failure of their purported cures and pin me with excuses pressed into my Self: she suffers from ego neurasthenia hypo-gyno-other-chondrias female problems meno-glosses a glossary of terms that imply head has no truck with the body, with its boundaries, bounties, bowels. Red means swelling, signifies pain—say to my beloved untether me I prefer undoing to unknowing, to the forces that tell me “press on” toward an unwelcoming citadel that never has been my goal. There’s no remedy from men in medical smocks who’d swaddle me in certainty or terminology. Unpin me from these message boards. Let me float in my own corpus lightly above a world of hurt. I’ve earned my right to cry Let go. Ann E. Michael Ann E. Michael's latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Retired from academia, she keeps busy as a hospice volunteer, gardener, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at http://www.annemichael.blog Tree of Life I’m done with my sunset watercolour and the class is loud. I almost get hit with a wet paintbrush, so I ask to go to the book corner. I see one with a guy in glasses and a hoodie on the cover. He’s standing in front of his painting with the vibrating babies with no eyes. He looks friendly and kind. I read how Keith Haring was gay and died of AIDS and made a lot of cool stuff, starting in the New York subways as a graffiti artist. The teacher has soft music on, and she puts the lights down to get the class quiet. I almost fall asleep on the bean bag in the book corner where no one will see me. The bell rings and wakes me up and on my lap is the Keith Haring book opened to a big picture of one of his paintings called Tree of Life. It’s funny, because the church I go to since I moved in with my aunt is also called Tree of Life. There’s loud singing and clapping, and people are “slain in the Spirit.” They pass out and the elders go over and fan them. This happens every Sunday. When I lived with my mom, we never went to church. When I said certain things, she said I should not say them in church, but I always wondered if we’d go and what it would really be like. Then my mom had to go to rehab, and I moved in with my aunt, who’s nice and makes delicious banana bread. Soon, my mom will finish treatment, then we’ll live together again, so I look forward to that a lot. The Keith Haring painting is also better than the church. I like that Tree of Life. The next class Ms. Wilson assigns us a biography project, so I choose Keith Haring and check out three books on him and take them home. My aunt asks if I need help. All I want is big white paper and paints to make an example of Keith Haring’s work. The rest will be a report I’m typing on my aunt’s computer. It’s easy to find information about Keith Haring’s childhood and time learning about art in college and how he got the idea to start his own style by filling in the black empty subway ad posters. My aunt hugs me like she’s so happy I’m okay considering my mom isn’t around to see things like this. “You’ll have to read this to her next time she calls,” she says. I get so many hugs from her. They’re not like my mom’s hugs. My aunt’s hugs have love in them, and she’s soft and smells like almonds, but when she hugs me, I remember my mom’s not there and inside it feels like a black subway ad all blank, waiting for some kind of art or life to be born there, like a tree could sprout or wants to, but it can’t. I decide I should paint my own Tree of Life, but I don’t know what should go on it. The next day I show Ms. Wilson the report I wrote already, and she says, “This is gorgeous. Don’t forget the visual!” I tell her I’m waiting to get the materials. She says that’s fine. It’s good because I don’t know yet what my own Tree of Life is. I worry that I’ll have to turn in the project before I find out. When I get home from school that day, my aunt is on the couch. In front of her on the glass coffee table surface is an acrylic paint set and brushes still in the package and not just one big white paper page but five. I can’t believe it. My mom never had the money for things like this and when I got home from school, if she was there, she was in her room with the lights out and curtains drawn, and she was missing work from the drugs making her sick. The art supplies are amazing, but my aunt looks worried. She’s reading one of my Keith Haring books. I sit down next to her. She’s frowning at a picture he painted of a smiley face on a big penis. “This is shameful,” she says. “Sorry. You need to do your project on someone else.” “Alright,” I say. My ears and face are hot, like I’ve done something terrible. “I’ll take these books back and talk to the librarian. They don’t need books like this for children.” Later, alone in the room where my aunt has me staying, I’m on the floor with the paints and paper. I can remember Keith Haring’s painting, the green branches becoming people with hands waving. The tree connects them to each other and the ground—hands wave and their faces look like seeds. The people under it are yellow with x faces and tiny orange boxes sprinkled around, like they have disease invading and they’re reaching up to the tree for help, like anyone reaches up, like my mom is now. At school I tell Ms. Wilson my aunt won’t let me do Keith Haring. Her mouth goes straight. Then her head turns. “I forgot you’re with your aunt right now,” she says. “I can talk to her about it.” During lunch I see her pull the phone cord out into the hall. She comes out looking very serious and says, “There’s sad news about your mom.” My mom, one of the pretty seeds on the tree waving its hands, getting sucked back into the earth. I reach toward my teacher, eyes in an X. Joshua Wetjen Joshua Wetjen is a high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not grading or chasing my two children, he likes to noodle on his jazz guitar and try new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Newfound and Yalobusha Review among other publications. Garden Path with Chickens, 1916 I walk a straight line down this narrow, well-trimmed path to ward off the wild but the muted lure of wildflowers and overgrown grass pulls at me. I long to be as wise as serpents, yet pure as doves, but perhaps I am more like a chicken, bewildered on the brink of untamed abundance. A.R. Williams A.R. Williams, a poet hailing from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (USA), is the author of A Funeral in the Wild (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Time in Shenandoah (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Connect with him on Twitter (X) and Instagram @arw_poetry Raven Maniac The Raven Maniac can fly upside down, low or high, or somersault across the sky. Another aeronautic trick is dropping from aloft a stick, then grabbing it in mid-air pick. They’re known for raiding campers’ tents and cabins. Cornered, in defense, they turn to avian violence and lunge at nose and eye and ear till all who face them flee in fear. Of such a bird, one might steer clear. Barbara Lydecker Crane Barbara Lydecker Crane was a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist in 2017 and 2019. Her fourth collection, You Will Remember Me, sonnets in the imagined voices of artists through history, with many colour reproductions, will be published in October 2023 by Able Muse Press. Don't miss this wonderful introduction to prose poetry through Women on Writing! I can't wait to share my favourite poems with you, and I know you will write some amazing pieces during this program.
Click here or on image to find out more about this course, or to enrol today. https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_ProsePoetry.html The Actress Polina Strepetova Twenty-three months ago, after being buried in black and white on page 133 of an obscure book of Russian paintings, you paused, stage left, and began your wordless soliloquy -- unimpressed with your audience of one, buried in olive-drab and khaki in room 205 of a peeling-paint army barracks amid the live colours of South Korea; its cerulean and carmine, golden yellow and chartreuse unseen in the grey world your artist chose. When you passed across the pressed-page theater, your petite drooping shoulders betrayed you: this portrait was no performance, and I felt a foreigner. I didn’t speak the language at the time: I did not understand the tragic angle of your chin, loose lay of your merging fingers, their rough, labored womb poured against your peasant dress like a January night sky in Rybinsk -- Even these were Russian. When Nikolai Yaroshenko painted you (with minor conceit a century ago) did he foresee the glossy pages that would bring you to my attention. Could he have known that a war-monger GI, bred on Budweiser and Playboy, would spend five hundred American dollars and two years learning Russian just to pose these questions to this shadow of your likeness -- which is as close as I will ever come to Moscow. Gary P English Gary P English (they/them/their) lives in Baton Rouge, LA, where they and their partner share a home with a dachshund and two cats. Besides writing, they paint and play the guitar. Their poems have been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Home Planet News, and Stonecoast Review. Under a Cloak, Dreaming after Pio Abad's I am Singing a Song that Can Only Be Borne After Losing a Country, 2023, seen in the Ashmolean Museum. In a place where things come to die when they have drifted to the edge, lies a roanoke deer skin mantle. The people are gone, their language is dead. In blood-red pencil an exile draws a map of destruction, of a land washed away in a flood, now only the ghost of a place. Look beneath and below, see, there's something behind, the map's other side is a gleaming cowrie mirror made by a people who didn't make mirrors. A pearly view of the world, with a man at its centre, a wolf, a white tailed deer and the people. In this vision man and wolf are brothers, both hunt the deer. We honour the wolf for his cunning, his skill and his pack. This makes him our brother. We do not eat the wolf. Now think of the mirror from the flesh side, remember that wolves too have dreams When they dream, they dream they are running through the forest chasing the deer. They dream of how you can smell deer in the mist, they dream of the blood side of skin. And if you look closely, you'll see the wolf's leg twitching, while it sleeps, chasing deer. When the wolf wakes, it is hungry and hunts. We know deer dream of flight of sun-dappled glades, the taste of spring growth in the clearing, their herds. Men dream of many things, porcupines, bison, heron, the salmon, their wives. But the white men, who came from the ocean, what do they dream of? They, like all men, dream of deer and in dreams they are wolves. In their dreams they chase deer in the mist and they hear them fleeing ahead and they smell them, but for some reason, these dream-deer smell like men. In the mist they cannot see them, but they chase. And in their dreams the pack of white wolves bring down their prey, tear their quarry asunder. In the frenzy they notice that the deer taste like men, but flesh is flesh and wolf will eat wolf so long as they are starving and the dinner is not of their pack. So they eat these dream-deer anyway. Exiles and the dead know that dreams, in the colour of blood, are the nightmares of what others call history. Basil Meyer Basil Meyer was born outside Johannesburg in South Africa. He studied in Johannesburg, Leeds and London, completing doctoral work on narrative and death in Victorian medicine and literature. He has published poetry in Contrast, Presence and Green Dragon, as well as reviews and criticism. He has worked as an English lecturer in South Africa and various UK universities and most recently in hospital administration. He is interested in the intersections between poetry and other forms of knowledge, discourse and artistic practice. He currently lives in England. Cycladic Figurines, Cycladic female figurines of the widespread Spedos variety (22-23) and Dokathismata variety (24). Early Cycladic II, 2800-2300 BC, Keros-Syros group. Findings from Naxos and Amorgos. National Archaeological Museum of Athens, inv. no. 6140.21, 3913, 9096. photo by Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0 In this Poem, Writing About Cycladic Art Leads to the Election These Cycladic figures are so unlike, admit it, those grotesque Venuses, whose sculptors invoked a chthonic gravitas, bloated and erupted the stone, to make of it a baroque nakedness, turbulently noduled, thickly thighed, hot-water-bottle breasted, the whole of her furled inward, capped acorn, locked inside a fisted inscrutable darkness. She’s bowed downward, as if fixed by her uterus, the body growing inside her belly. And that’s all, folks. Back then, I’d be scared to be a woman. No wonder we were worshipped. But several thousand years later, what a difference! Of ever fresh white marble, these figures, angular, slim and sleek, except for noses sharply denotated, dashes for eyes and mouth, white silhouettes, look Deco-like, would-be flappers, their v’s lightly incised, bellies just slightly rising, nothing tumid, arms folded above the waist, perhaps protective of their bodies before they became properties, or just sporting, stream-lining women, like summery linen, tennis whites, strong white teeth. Don’t get me wrong-- I’m not arguing boyish bodies for women, or almost childlessness. Found in cemeteries, no one knows their meaning: doll, idol, talisman, mascot, underworld docent? I don’t really care. Because I like their wholesome, confident mystery. Now they steady me in this vast museum, rooms populous with art works and too many spectators. Alone in this gallery, off the beaten path, before the display cases I can contemplate, rest my eyes, to gaze at them as if sipping from a straw my refreshment, a lemonade in the heat, the great elemental simplicity and serenity of one I could easily clutch or carry in my bag, hold as a hand weight, as we use in Pilates, a tiny barbell of antiquity, my ideal model to build an anonymous lovely body, not some contested, identified whomever. To suck on her timeless lozenge, to soothe my throat sore with too confused, querulous growling voices, to use her as a baton to conduct the divisive orchestra, and to carve with an obsidian chisel once more the age-old rock of us, the equivalent of an Oscar statuette, except female, the award going to a woman to lead our nation. Deborah Gorlin Read Deborah's work after the fascinating Isabella Blow: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/poems-about-isabella-blow-by-deborah-gorlin Read Deborah's poem after Raymond Isidore: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/cover-story-by-deborah-gorlin Deborah Gorlin is the author of two previous books of poems, Bodily Course, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997, and Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her new book of poems, Open Fire, Bauhan, was published in Spring, 2023. Recent poems have been published in Plume; On the Seawall; the Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; Rumors, Secrets & Lies; Swwim; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades” was a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing. Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. |
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November 2024
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