 The Gleaners, by Jean Francois Millet (France) 1857 The Gleaners What can three women leaning over small seeds they have sown hear from dirt’s persistent birth that a straighter back would miss? If ever they could relax, and out of rest find meaning, would they teach us how to pray for mercy and forgiveness? I doubt any wiser words have been spoken by a man in his world domination than what’s left these women’s lips -- gems gathered from the gleaning and the tending of the earth. Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum is a writer and teacher born and raised in Alaska. She has a Master of Arts in Teaching and a B.A. in English and Japanese Studies. She currently publishes books through Red Sweater Press and serves as the Mat-Su Vice President of Alaska Writers Guild.
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 At long last, the finalists for the Bird Watching contest have been selected! There will be two posts, one for flash fiction, and one for poetry. Be sure to bookmark them both so you don't miss any. The bird theme in art is literally as old as the caves, and transcends cultures, media, and time. We are fascinated by birds: they can fly, for one thing, which makes them seem magical. We see them as richly symbolic: freedom, peace, life, death, mystery, war. We see them as messengers. The Bird Watching ebook contained forty intriguing artworks on the theme of "birds." Participants entered up to five poems or stories inspired by those works. (If you missed the contest, you can still use the curation of bird paintings and other art in your ekphrastic practice. Click here to nab yours.) Congratulations to our finalists in flash fiction and in poetry. It was incredibly difficult to choose. The Ekphrastic Review seems to attract and inspire a magnificent array of creativity. We have attracted a wealth of poetry from the start of the Review. This was no exception. Narrowing down the pool of tremendous poetry was painful for me! I am very grateful that I can pass off the tough job of choosing one from these finalists to Tricia Marcella Cimera. Tricia is our guest judge for poetry, and her choice will be awarded $100CAD and publication in The Fox Poetry Box, her brainchild installation of poetry in St. Charles, Illinois. Tricia is a widely published poet, a longtime contributor, and her poem, "Second Plum" was nominated by TER for a Best of the Net award. Her recent chapbook is GO SLOW, LEONARD COHEN. We can't thank you enough, Tricia, for sharing your talent and expertise with us as our poetry judge. (Find the flash fiction finalists here.) Poetry Finalists Fate Foreseen, by Portly Bard Savage, by Laurel Benjamin The Woman and the Canary, by Jamie Brian Bird, Temple, Mirror, by Dorothy Burrows The Myth of Keeping Busy after Loss, by Sandra Fees Woman with a Bird Cage, by D. Walsh Gilbert Genyornis Newtoni, by Ronnie Hess The Eye Always Describes Itself, by Mary B. Moore Wheat Field with Crows, by Pamela Porter The Goldfinch Tale, by Alun Robert Bright Feathers in Moonlight, by Janet Ruth Young Girl Eating a Bird, by Matthew Sisson Recurring Nightmare, by Alarie Tennille February’s Loss, by Rebecca Weigold Congratulations to all of you!!! We are grateful to each and every participant. Your ebook purchases have helped us create these cash prize contests where we can pay a winner. We have also been able to run a few social media ads, with the goal of attracting more readers. And as the Review grows and takes more and more time, your purchase and support helps accommodate that reality. Soon we will turn six and we are just getting started! We want to have many more challenges, contests, and content and we are so glad you are part of this wonderful movement. Join us for our next contest, on the theme of Women Artists. Our guest judge is Alarie Tennille! Without further adieu, here are the poetry finalists. love, Lorette  Anguish, by August Friedrich Albrecht (Germany) c. 1878 February’s Loss remembering Judah Your heart stopped and February collapsed under the strain of the news. A chill caw pierced my bones: There must have been something wrong…as though I had botched spinning a wool blanket. You were not a mistake. Not a mishap. Not a malfunction. Your body was the size of a down feather, finespun breath and skin… is loss any smaller when it is something small? Lullabies flapped and circled, alighted at my feet. I crowed your name as though my wails could bring you back, as though in frantically turning under the bitter ground I could find explanation, comfort, but the field only shuddered and gave up its dead while God watched in silence perched in the skeleton of ash. Rebecca Weigold Rebecca Weigold studied writing and theatre at Northern Kentucky University. Her poetry has appeared in BlazeVox, The Ekphrastic Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tishman Review, and other publications. She has been an editor, a model, and an actor. Rebecca loves to travel to see her favorite band, Duran Duran, and has been to several countries. She lives in Kentucky with her computer programmer husband, has two adult sons, and an adorable muted calico named Sox. ** Recurring Nightmare I’m only six years old the first time and wake with a bleat. Such an odd dream! A field of sheep and crows, no humans except me. I know I’m my real self because I want to pet the sleeping lamb. Don’t understand it’s dead. Only three crows then, but being alone in a field scares me almost as much as those dagger beaks and piercing stares. Perhaps I’m witnessing the lamb of God visited by three austere magi or priests come to give last rites. Year by year the trinity of crows grows to an impressive murder. Any sane person would be afraid to stand among them now. The thunder of wings overhead triggers the memory: I’ve been here before, cooling in the snow, the shaking ewe standing over me. Panic continues to wake me before anything happens. Soon I’ll be the fierce ewe standing my ground like mothers do. I worry about the night I become a crow. Alarie Tennille Alarie’s latest poetry book, Waking on the Moon, contains many poems first published by The Ekphrastic Review. Please visit her at alariepoet.com.  Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1890 Wheat Field with Crows Light, and the reverse of light. And the sky dark as a breaking sea, a storm built one upon another. And wheat bending in the wind as though alive, alight as if it were a fire set, in search of the one lost. Such is the wind’s sadness. A kind of church which sanctified colour, the angelic flock of the dark-winged. And throughout, a snake of green, a river, as though it flowed as veins in the souls of the dispossessed. Here he stood in his silent world. He slapped on impasto straight from the tube. Crows tossed in as though they were shards broken off from the night. Each thick stroke as if God himself had proclaimed it. And light, the remaining light an ache inside the brain — this the field he blessed and by which he was blessed, freed from the cement room in which he was kept, from which he wrote his letters to Theo: Through the iron-barred window I see a square field of wheat, and above, the morning sun in all its glory... The heart’s labour. Where this earthly journey begins and where it ends. Your life is no accident. All who come into this world are sent. Pamela Porter Pamela Porter is the author of four collections of poetry, two verse novels, and a novel and picture book for children. Her poetry collection, Cathedral, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, and her poems have won the Vallum Magazine Poem of the Year Award, the Prism International Grand Prize in Poetry, the FreeFall Poetry Prize, and have been shortlisted four times for the CBC literary awards. Her verse novel,The Crazy Man, won the 2005 Governor General’s Award, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, and other accolades. M. Travis Lane has written, “Porter’s poems are pervaded with a sense of grace, of mercy, beauty and benediction.” Pamela lives in North Saanich with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs, and cats, including a formerly wild mustang.  The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius (Netherlands) 1654 The Goldfinch Tale fringilla carduelis passerine green captured finch studio Delft perched alone high chained fed watered trilled sung looked listened smelled sensed posed poised static erect Fabritius observed painted lead brushed scratched trompe-l’œil completed unframed thunderclap killed acquired lost found bequeathed auctioned purchased Mauritshuis Hague displayed toured no longer sings Alun Robert Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical free verse. He has achieved success in poetry competitions across the British Isles and North America. His work has been published by many literary magazines, anthologies and webzines in the UK, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Kenya, USA and Canada. Since 2018, he has been part of The Ekphrastic Review community particularly enjoying the challenges. He is a member of the Federation of Writers Scotland for whom he was a Featured Writer in 2019.  Earth After the Fall of Man, by Franz Rosel von Rosenhof (Germany) 1690 Savage Not the Roman Empire but claws lashing on air, elephants flying to ground vulture finally meeting his match cities pounded until eyelids bandaged only a lone towhee, orange rump ringing his approach. They do not like crowds as humans do this is not the Colosseum. Sorrows gild in a garden without humans. No heaven or hell, animals climb an eternal tightrope through atmosphere rungs to a place without hierarchy without angels, and below no demons. A wolf’s treasure not raided even if rampage destroys flowers. We are the trodders humans with our eyes that cling jaws that turn air we who seduce everything yellow the original garden overturned. When the animals take over we then passersby with no Godly notion just briefcase empty of paper just savage. Laurel Benjamin Laurel Benjamin holds an MFA from Mills College. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, California Quarterly, The Midway Review, Mac Queens Quinterly, Wild Roof Journal Poetry and Places, WordFest Anthology, Global Quarantine Museum Pendemics issue, Silver Burch Press, including honorable mention in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Poetry Contest 2017 and 2020, long-listed in Sunspot Literary Journal’s long list, among others. She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers. More of her work can be found at https://thebadgerpress.  Woman with a Bird Cage, by József Rippl-Rónai (Hungary) 1892 The Woman and the Canary I know your heart; I have seen it, the canary calls to the woman in black from the window’s ledge. Nothing grows there anymore, not primrose or lily or even the common daisy. You have strangled your love with vines, and you do not know how to let it live. It is the first day of spring. Outside, the world is waking up from its slumber. Streetlights flutter on and children stumble into the village square for jump rope games. In her room, dust swirls in corners that light has not reached in years. She wears the dress of mourning. It has been so long since any voice but her own has spoken, so long since music filled these walls. Won’t you stay just a little longer? the woman asks. I have other suns to bask in; I must be going-- The canary sings, stretching its wings to leave. Before the canary can finish speaking, the bars of the cage encircle its body and bind its wings. The sky lies just beyond the window’s ledge, but suddenly it is as unreachable as a streak streak of sunlight at the end of the world. If you pass under that townhouse window, you can hear the canary calling still, its song growing louder and louder with time, a flightless bird pacing the floor of an iron cage like a heart straining against the end of its leash. Jamie Brian Jamie Brian is a pilot and freelance writer living in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon, Ephemeral Elegies, and Auroras and Blossoms Poetry Journal. ** Woman with a Bird Cage Canary, you, with your throat opening the way the chestnut buds of Goat Willow open into pods of buttermilk, come with me. Your voice bursts wide like the yellow-feathered seed capsules of witch hazel. And I need you. I’m closed within an elderberry’s purple-black, a tincture of its toxic roots. Once clothed in the mint-ruffled bunting of ruby peonies in April, now I’m draped in woolen thorn, hat-brimmed and pinned without a vine or tendril spilling. I wear the winter-knotted bark of galled and wounded maple branches. Show me your face. Teach me your timbrado melody sung though your golden-wired bars. Mallow. Primrose. Clover song. Warble me. Bird me. Sky me through the rainclouds. The ground is loosening, and asparagus shoots have broken through. Let me open the cage’s door. Peregrine the two of us. D. Walsh Gilbert D. Walsh Gilbert is the author of Ransom (Grayson Books, 2017). A Pushcart nominee, she has also received honors from The Farmington River Literary Arts Center and the Artist for Artists Project at the Hartford Art School. Her work has most recently appeared in Montana Mouthful, The Ekphrastic Review, Vita Brevis, Third Wednesday, Uppagus, The Purpled Nail, and the anthology, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis. She serves on the board of the non-profit, Riverwood Poetry Series, and as co-editor of the Connecticut River Review.  Clairvoyance, by Rene Magritte (Belgium) 1936 Fate Foreseen For want of warmth it could not beg, it's merely now infertile egg -- a source of life, though still within, without its moment to begin -- that faces in what time remains the fear of fate that feast ordains for those who would not know the soul now taken from its brief control if not for eye and hand and brush of mind that sees within its hush the wonder that it might have been bewinged as life begun again to keep its species still alive beyond all it would dare survive. Portly Bard Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent of verse becoming complement... ...and by such homage being lent... ideally also compliment.  Woman With Blue Parrot, by Josef Maria Auchentaller (Austria) by 1949, exact date not known Bright Feathers in Moonlight the old priestess leans on her staff her back bent, her skin wrinkled her eyes cloudy now but her mind as sharp as ever-- as piercing as the claws that grasped her hand the first night the macaw flew into her room on a silver shaft of moonlight the first time he whispered in her ear in the voice of a god she stood naked before his insistence before the glimmer in the velvet words that slid from his golden throat he had murmured of summer places far to the south called her to a lifetime of service to bright feathers opulent ceremonies and stony pyramids she foreswore forever the gentle touch of a man the chubby clutches of children and yet-- standing here alone, a faded cloth woven with blue and silver symbols wrapped around her withered breasts a single tattered ultramarine plume grasped in her gnarled fingers-- if she could go back, she still would not resist that velvet voice Janet Ruth Janet Ruth is a New Mexico ornithologist. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world and she thoroughly enjoyed putting a bird in every one of her poems for this challenge. She has recent poems in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Sin Fronteras, Spiral Orb, Unlost: Journal of Found Poetry & Art, and anthologies including Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Film (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications, 2021), and New Mexico Remembers 9/11 (Artemesia Publishing, 2020). Her first book, Feathered Dreams: celebrating birds in poems, stories & images (Mercury HeartLink, 2018) was a Finalist for the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards. With sister-poets Faith Kaltenbach and Andi Penner, she self-published the chapbook What is the Boiling Point of Clouds? (2019). https://redstartsandravens.com/janets-poetry/  Temple of Mysterious Birds, by Bolesław Biegas (Poland) 1928 Bird, Temple, Mirror mute, silvery swan, ghosting glassy waters, lit by bright bulbs illuminating ice towers piercing deeply inked skies. all around, rainbow trees shimmer rocks mimicking clouds drifting upwards. celestial, enchanted birds; praising, worshipping silvery swan… …swan silvery, worshipping, praising birds; enchanted, celestial. upwards, drifting clouds mimicking rocks shimmer. trees rainbow. all around, skies, inked; deeply piercing ice towers, illuminating bulbs. bright by lit waters, glassy, ghosting swan; silvery, mute. Dorothy Burrows Based in the United Kingdom, Dorothy Burrows enjoys writing poetry, flash fiction and short plays. She regularly walks over the downland near her home and can often be spotted watching kettles of red kites whistling. This year, her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Spelt Magazine, The Alchemy Spoon, Wales Haiku Journal, Failed Haiku, The Poetry Pea and Prune Juice. She tweets @rambling_dot  Young Girl Eating a Bird, by Rene Magritte (Belgium) 1927 Young Girl Eating A Bird Birds descended from dinosaurs, one continuous phylogeny, Archaeopteryx to the American Bald Eagle. That ancient predestinator never inhabiting the Garden of Eden. I was a bird watcher, but couldn’t help thinking Thanksgiving, and four and twenty blackbirds. “You’ve got to move quickly if you want to follow sap-suckers,” our guide scolds. I’m moving as fast as I can. And the birds: Cedar Waxwings, Bombycilla cedrorum all dominance hierarchy in post-modern pastels. Scarlet Tanagers, Piranga olivacea, garish in conflict management. Black-caped Chickadees, sleeping owls. Work, alcohol, and family. Evolutionary pressure. All of us struggling to survive. Matthew Sisson Matthew Sisson’s poetry has appeared in magazines and journals ranging from the Harvard Review Online, to JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and read his work on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. His First book, Please, Call Me Moby, was published by the Pecan Grove Press, St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas.  Bird Effort, by Jackson Pollock (USA) 1946 The Myth of Keeping Busy after Loss A bird is a nibbed instrument the sweep of the calligrapher’s pen a bird, coiffed elegance or buffed refusal each effort a wing-boned strength and muscular métier an insistence that life is motion-- the only thing you can’t do is stop the only thing you can’t do is be perfectly still-- or you’ll plummet, crumble to ash. Such. An. Exquisite. Lie. A bird is a brushstroke of blue or red or grief gathered to your stilling beat poured out in splattered song. Sandra Fees Sandra Fees is the author of The Temporary Vase of Hands (Finishing Line Press, 2017), served a term as Berks County, Pennsylvania, Poet Laureate (2016-2018), and is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Chiron Review, Sky Island Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. She holds a master’s degree from Syracuse University's Creative Writing Program and Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees from Lancaster Theological Seminary. She resides in South Central Pennsylvania and enjoys long walks near water and Sivananda yoga. ** The Eye Always Describes Itself Are those birds or entrails? They coil and veer into or grow inside each other: sinuous necks, beaked and billed heads, the round press of bodies. The thick black outlines don’t forestall the slippage: they insist. A duck head near the coil’s centre smiles, its eye Groucho Marx’s, the brow, a check mark, and below its bill, another bill opens, a black line between the halves: a serpent’s tongue under the humor. An ivory-crested waterbird’s neck greens into a another sinuous neck below, its beak points down. Nearby, a gray shape, almost a small hawk’s, points for eyes, lodges in a larger bird. Everything mothers another or has eaten it. The palette is brilliant, jays’ and bunting’s blues, vireo greens, rooster reds, a milkier jade green and the eider-neck teal above and winding around. My writer friend Rachael doesn’t like birds. I never asked why. Pollock’s attitude is obscure: The small jade duck near the bottom may float under an upside down seagull, neck and eye red, bill slightly open. Is he dead or merely red? An orange wing nests among the mélange, the edges scalloped. I see a curled swan’s neck too. Step back, and behold! The whole coil is a bird head or mask: two eyes, the main beak, and the gull caught in it: The palette, kill, eat, and preen, head a swarm of guts, beak a mechanism for tearing and singing: it’s nothing like me, nothing at all. Mary B. Moore Mary B. Moore’s books include three full-length collections and several chapbooks: Dear If, is due out from Orison Books, late 2021; Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys Chapbook Prize, 2017), Flicker (Dogfish Head Book Prize, 2016), Eating the Light (Sable Books Chapbook Contest 2016), and The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State University, 1997). She has also received several awards for poems in Terrain, Nelle, Nimrod, and Asheville Poetry Review. Recent work appears in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Nasty Women Poets Anthology, Fire & Rain-Ecopoetry of California, and others.  Genyornis Birds, rock painting (Australia) c. 40000 to 3000 B.C date not certain Genyornis Newtoni O, biggest of big birds, three times the size of an emu, 500 pounds of muscle, bone: Early hunters may have tracked you too hard across the Australian landscape, poached your eggs buried in sand. Or, was it the earth went dry, a kind of early warming? You were the Pleistocene’s passenger pigeon, dead as a dodo, giant Moa, great Auk, Carolina parakeet, elephant bird. Like police detectives contemplating the body, we ask, What happened? Or, Who did this to you? Not what medium was used: Charcoal, clay, shell, amalgam of powders, not whether the painter was extinction’s blind culprit. Isn’t the story beyond the telling? To observe is to be responsible. Giant ibis, New Caledonian owlet-nightjar, birds in our backyards. Ronnie Hess Ronnie Hess is an essayist and poet, the author of five poetry chapbooks (including O Is for Owl) and two culinary travel guides on France and Portugal (Ginkgo Press). She birdwatches from a perch in Madison, WI. At long last, the finalists for the Bird Watching contest have been selected! There will be two posts, one for flash fiction, and one for poetry. Be sure to bookmark them both so you don't miss any. The bird theme in art is literally as old as the caves, and transcends cultures, media, and time. We are fascinated by birds: they can fly, for one thing, which makes them seem magical. We see them as richly symbolic: freedom, peace, life, death, mystery, war. We see them as messengers. The Bird Watching ebook contained forty intriguing artworks on the theme of "birds." Participants entered up to five poems or stories inspired by those works. (If you missed the contest, you can still use the curation of bird paintings and other art in your ekphrastic practice. Click here to nab yours.) Congratulations to our finalists in flash fiction and in poetry. It was incredibly difficult to choose. The Ekphrastic Review seems to attract and inspire a magnificent array of creativity. We have had a goal in recent times to attract more flash fiction writers and readers to a journal that evolved organically to be poetry-heavy. We love poetry- always have and always will- but we also hoped to bring the wonders of ekphrasis to the fiction world and let short story writers who love art discover us. There is a tradition of fine fiction inspired by art in the form of novels, some of them ultra famous (The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt) and we wanted to find the pulse of emphasis in short fiction, too. With this goal in mind, we invited the incredible Karen Schauber to be our judge. Karen is well-known for her flash fiction: she is everywhere. She is the editor of Group of Seven Reimagined (Heritage Books), a collection of flash fiction in response to paintings by the iconic Canadian landscape artists (full disclosure: a Pushcart-nominated story by yours truly, "The Paper Dark," is inside, and I am humbled to appear alongside many Canadian literary all stars!) Karen is also the editor of the flash fiction column at The Miramichi Reader and runs Vancouver Flash Fiction on social media. She is a family therapist as well. We are very grateful to Karen for so generously sharing her time and talent with us. Her enthusiasm for art and flash and for our journal has been instrumental in getting more eyes on the work inside Ekphrastic. Karen will choose our contest winner in the flash category from the selection of finalists here. The winner will be announced by end of May, and will be published again, in The Miramichi Reader, and will be awarded a prize of $100CAD. Congratulations to our flash fiction finalists! What wonderful feats of the imagination- you have opened new doorways to art, approached the paintings from every angle and invented angles of your own. One story is just a few sentences; one incorporates the "hermit crab" style of flash fiction; some are surreal/speculative; one is a haibun; one writer landed two stories; and some flash fiction entries were bravely submitted by writers who usually send poetry. Bravo to all of you! The poetry finalists will be posted shortly! The Flash Fiction Finalists Birds, Fish, Snake, by Alan Bern Origins of Language, by Barbara Black Frida and Me, by Bonnie Lee Black If It Is a Genyornis, by Rose Mary Boehm Giant School, by Federico Escobar The Glitch, by Federico Escobar Cutting Figure, by Christina Rauh Fishburne Bird Child, by Gloria Garfunkel A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, by Jason Gebhardt Mystical Birds, by Kendall Johnson Unfit, by Mary McCarthy Stepping on the Throat of Their Song, by Barbara Ponomareff Fly, by K.D. Prima We are grateful to each and every participant. Your ebook purchases have helped us create these cash prize contests where we can pay a winner. We have also been able to run a few social media ads, with the goal of attracting more readers. And as the Review grows and takes more and more time, your purchase and support helps accommodate that reality. Soon we will turn six and we are just getting started! We want to have many more challenges, contests, and content and we are so glad you are part of this wonderful movement. Join us for our next contest, on the theme of Women Artists. Our guest judge is Alarie Tennille! Without further adieu, here are the finalists in flash fiction. love, Lorette  Genyornis Birds, rock painting (Australia) c. 40000 to 3000 B.C date not certain If it is a Genyornis 1) A genyornis is a very old bird. Resembles an Emu. And if it is one, this cave painting is old. About 40,000 years old. That’s when the genyornis disappeared from Australia. Just died out. Like the dodo. No hungry sailors reported. 2) The Chauvet Cave in France is the oldest painted cave in Europe. They dated it at 30,000 years old (Upper Paleolithic), the time that began 40,000 years ago and produced stone tools. 3) Archaeologist Ben Gunn said, "The details on this painting indicate that it was done by someone who knew that animal very well. The detail could not have been passed down through oral storytelling.” Across the road as it were, they found some cool paintings of thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), the giant echidna, and the giant kangaroo. 4) 40,000 years ago the Jawoyn people lived in this country as well as other Indigenous groups. Speculations are rife: The paintings helped the hunters. They offered them to their Gods. Perhaps it was ritualistic in other ways… why not for the love of art? 5) “I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.” Vincent van Gogh Rose Mary Boehm Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her fourth poetry collection, THE RAIN GIRL, was published by Chaffinch Press in 2020. Want to find out more? https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/  Birds, Fish, Snake, by Max Ernst (Germany) 1921 Birds, Fish, Snake, by Max Ernst (Germany) 1921 Please be aware of the dangers Even metal objects can pose as living beings in terrible places. The letterbox with jaws clamping. No letterbox can swallow the letters...thank goodness. l envied Bobby so much; he had the freckles. And his Dad knew how to fish, taught him how. Father-son overnight at rivers end when Bobby and I were seven. I loved sleeping in the cool, slick bags. Foggy morning, early hike around. Campfired breakfast, can’t remember what. It was decades later that I asked Dad about Bobby’s father, Robert, Sr. Dad wasn’t sure what had happened to him. “And do you remember camping with them at rivers end?” I asked. Dad did. Father-son overnight. Dad still didn’t know how to fly fish, but he knew more about some fish, salmon for example, than nearly everybody. Dad loved to eat trout, but didn’t ever order salmon. “But they’re cousins,” I wondered. No response from Dad. Then Dad filled me in: Bobby’s father had been a drinker, an abusive one. “I think he probably hit Bobby,” Dad spoke softly. “Senior knew how to fly fish, but his research was weak.” My memory of that whole outing flipped. Afraid. Not of my Dad though he used to yell sometimes. Dad was a kind man. But Senior in my memory holding that fishing rod. I was scared of that. And Bobby? What had happened to him? Who knows. In a letter Rilke reminds the young poet that sadness will pass and as it passes, one can learn things. Maybe my fear was like that, a fine teacher. Alan Bern Alan Bern is a recently retired Children’s Librarian. He is a poet, storywriter, and photographer and has two books of poetry published by Fithian Press: No no the saddest (2004) and Waterwalking in Berkeley (2007). A third book of poetry, greater distance (2015), was published by his own press, Lines & Faces, a press and publisher specializing in illustrated poetry broadsides, collaborating with the artist/printer Robert Woods, linesandfaces.com. Alan was a runner up for The Raw Art Review's The John H. Kim Memorial Short Fiction Prize for his story 'The alleyway near the downtown library'; he won a medal from SouthWest Writers for his story 'The Return of the Very Fierce Wolf of Gubbio to Assisi, 1943 CE [and now, 2013 CE]'; and his poem “Boxae” was first runner-up for the Raw Art Review’s first Mirabai Prize for Poetry, 2020. Alan has poems, stories, and photos published in a wide variety of online and print publications, from which his work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Recent photos include: unearthedesf.com/alan-bern, thimblelitmag.com/2020/08/10/emptying/, and pleaseseeme.com/issue-7/art/alan-bern-art-psm7/. Alan is also a performer working with the dancer Lucinda Weaver as PACES: dance & poetry fit to the space and with musicians from Composing Together, composingtogether.org.  A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, by Hans Holbein (Germany) 1528 A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling She’s so pale and still against a blue that’s too deep and uniform to be the sky. The squirrel leashed to her arm. The starling leaning in to whisper the story of this blue that’s not air, but an ocean tugging continents toward each other. Jason Gebhardt Jason Gebhardt’s work has appeared widely, including in The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and more. His chapbook Good Housekeeping was a semifinalist in the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition and won the 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Prize. He is the recipient of multiple Artist Fellowships awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.  Baltimore Oriole, by M.T. Ross (USA) 1912 Bird Child My parents and grandfather were Holocaust survivors who settled on a 100-acre poultry farm in New Jersey when I was a baby. I was raised among birds, and thought of myself as a bird child. I loved all our farm birds: chickens, ducks, and geese. They had free range to roam in the sun and large spaces. We could hear them all day and as they settled in for the night. All were well-fed and too fat to fly away, so they waddled, and when they could, ducks swam in the pond and geese floated along the current of the creek. Chickens jumped on and off the expansive chicken wire stand in the middle of the room where they could socialize and not step on their own poops that fell to the hay below. Weekend afternoons, drivers would stop and take pictures as our hundreds of white geese followed the feed wagon of our tractor in a single file, meeting it from the shady forest across the cornfield as it crossed the shallow part of the creek to the other side where their nesting boxes and food bins were located. They would settle in for the night, though the occasional fox would cause them to squawk in the dark and my grandfather would have to shoot his rifle in the air to scare the predator away. In the morning, the geese would swim or simply float back with the river current to the shade by midday. Our gravel road turned off the main paved street along the river to our house. Across the gravel road was a large pond surrounded by loose wire fencing where our ducks swam. We loved to watch them gobble up our watermelon rinds in the summer. Though our outdoor geese and ducks were too heavy to fly, they often enjoyed stretching and flapping their wings, never leaving the ground. Further up the gravel road were four large chicken coops, light airy spaces with wide windows and screens, the concrete floors and nesting boxes along the walls covered with hay. All the hay was changed frequently and used for compost for the cornfield which grew the feed that was then crushed and stored behind the barn for the farm birds. Feral cat families inhabited our barn to protect the feed from rodents, as did our two farm dogs. I still have a photograph on my wall taken by a photographer for a farm magazine. I am about three and happily holding a large rooster in my arms as I sit on a wooden fence, grasping his legs gently with one hand and wrapping my other hand around his silky wing, holding him close like a baby and smiling in the sun. I helped my grandfather during hatching season in the spring, in a separate building with a room full of fertilized eggs heated in narrow drawers of hay, watching as he pulled out the drawers, checking on progress and helping some having trouble get out of the eggs. He would warm their wet fur under heat lamps one-by-one until they were each a puffy yellow fluffball and could join the large groups of others cheeping and running around in pens under large heaters hanging from the ceiling low to the floor in the adjacent room. I also helped him use the grading machines in an adjoining building for the eggs collected twice daily by my grandfather and the farm workers, a chore I enjoyed doing as well, slipping my hand under the warm silky bellies of sitting chickens. I also loved the little birds who flew freely all over our trees and fields. From a young age, I precisely drew a variety of them with colored pencils and taped them to my bedroom walls, every kind of bird I recognized from the books I begged my mother to buy me: sparrows, starlings, robins, blue jays, cardinals, mourning doves, chickadees, mocking birds, Baltimore orioles, red-winged blackbirds, tufted titmice, goldfinches, woodpeckers, crows, hawks, and owls. I even drew the two parakeets we kept in a cage in the house, blue Peggy and green Joey. At night, I often dreamed I was a magical colorful bird child with the wing span of an angel, soaring over our farm land with a battalion of other bird children in all shapes and sizes, swooping among the nighthawks and owls, protecting our flightless birds from foxes, fierce child guardians keeping our farm birds safe at night, just like I had often wished angels had flown over the concentration camps my parents had inhabited during the Holocaust to keep them and their killed family members safe. Gloria Garfunkel Gloria Garfunkel is a retired psychotherapist near Boston with a Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard University. She was a psychotherapist for 35 years, listening to others’ stories. She is now a writer of flash fiction and memoir, telling her own tales. She has published over a hundred stories in journals and is currently completing a memoir in flashes of her childhood on a farm with parents who were Holocaust survivors. She was an art history major at Barnard College as well as a painter since adolescence through much of her adulthood.  Bird Head Dress, by the Haussa people (Nigeria) c. late 1800s Origins of Language The Creator who dashed off a bird, who snapped his fingers over the water and… Laura Kasischke, “The Accident” Was it an accident that a black word became a crow and a white word a dove? How is it possible that a Creator spoke language first and knew the names of things? Crow knew the word for “sacrificial” long before the gods were invented and even dropped sounds on rock to see what words would burst out. Later, there were whole voluptuous sentences that oozed out of an oyster shell and, with luck, a pearl as an endstop. Crow came up with articles long before that other God pointed and named. “The” was quartz grains or red ants. Shrew eyes and thistle seeds said “a” and “an.” Yes, if you want the truth, look to the birds. Doves, for example, invented the vowel sound “oo,” which has been in use ever since. Of course, being doves, they never bragged about this. Crows and doves have had a bit of a battle trying to get their vowels and consonants to work together. (Crows are the artisans who created the twig tools that were the original consonants. Don’t talk to them about how hard it is to bend a willow branch into a “c” and make it stay.) And just for the record, diphthongs were invented by the Great moaning Potoo to terrorize humans in the night. And finally, heron, with its long, particular and exacting beak, was elected to assign punctuation, done only in solitude, of course, when no one was looking on and disagreeing. So, sure, Creator by his own account “dashed off a bird,” if you want to believe that. But next time, call on the birds and they’ll give you the real story. Barbara Black Barbara Black writes fiction, flash fiction, and poetry. Her work has been published in Canadian and international magazines and anthologies, including the 2020 Bath Flash Fiction Award anthology, The Cincinnati Review, The New Quarterly, CV2, Geist and Prairie Fire. She was recently a finalist in the 2020 National Magazine Awards, nominated for the 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and won the 2019 Geist Annual Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. She lives in Victoria, BC, Canada. www.barbarablack.ca, @barbarablackwriter and @bblackwrites. ** Unfit She was an acre of tinder waiting for the match, would set her hair on fire and slap it out fast, a dramatic dare and rescue the wrong side of sane. Followed by the smell of burning she marked everything she touched with fingerprints of ash. She walked the alleys for hours. Those years most drinks came in glass bottles and every one she found she swung Hard and threw against a wall to hear it smash. No one saw or stopped her and she left behind a trail of broken glass. Trees spoke to her the way they speak to the deaf, in gestures and with the shapes of shadow and light splintering the air. She knew each one she passed by its secret name, the path sap took from root to leaf, the way fog rested like a scarf around its shoulders, the way each day was a slow step in its long dance, the way they forgave her with new greens after each long winter’s freeze. She had no guardian angel but a great bird, a shadow falling like an owl, silent and dark, swift and accurate as any raptor, claw and beak and the hush of air coming down clean as a knife. Even with that fierce eye, she was more crow than owl or eagle, no diva but a canny scavenger, polishing her darks in the sun, voice a raw caw, neither the gull’s bold squack nor the long soft grief of the dove, her voice unfit for words in any language but the one she invented to speak to herself. Arms spread like wings she wore her fury like a crown, a totem, a warning, a bird whose silent scream could turn men's bones to sand, leaving her there at last a Queen, triumphant and alone Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired RN with a lifetime love of writing and visual art. Ekphrastic work suits these interests particularly well, and has become a real favorite. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, most lately in The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, and the Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette Luzajic. Recent work has also appeared in the latest issue of Earth’s Daughters, and Silver Birch Press. She has an electronic chapbook, Things I Was Told Not to Think About, available as a free download from Praxis magazine.  Mystical Bird , by Katsushika Hokusai (Japan) 1820-1833 Mystical Birds You find yourself drawn back to the lava fields up Highway 395. Volcanic spew carved by ice rivers millennia ago, invite you to go deep. Narrow labyrinths snake through towering walls, private sanctuaries. Your bi-annual trips have turned bi-monthly and you begin to suspect ritual involved. Today monsoons are blowing up from the Sea of Cortez, and the usual dust has turned to light mud, the air heavy and rich. Desert climbs from below sea level at Death Valley on the east, to Mt. Whitney to the west. Only 70 some miles as crow flies. It’s not yet summer, so most of the tourists haven’t hatched out yet, and between weekends it’s still almost deserted. You lower yourself into a gorge, careful not to slip on water slick glacial polish. Moving south to north, a squadron of white pelicans head toward Manzanar. Kendall Johnson Kendall Johnson writes and paints in the Southern California Inland Empire. A former psychotherapist specializing in trauma, he has published several books on trauma and crisis management. He has a number of poems and stories in literary journals (including Shark Reef, Literary Hub, Cultural Weekly). His literary memoir book Chaos and Ashes (Pelekinesis Press) was released June, 2020, and his collection of flash memoir Black Box Poetics (Bamboo Needles Press) appears June, 2021. www.layeredmeaning.com  The Cage, by Berthe Morisot (France) 1885 Cutting Figure Breasts are meant to come in pairs. They kiss softly over a sinking heart. Jealous palms imitate their pressure in prayer. Soft seeks soft. Ridges hide. The backbone rises. The blood pumps within its cage. The ribs press, closing the gaps, reforming the space; The laces tighten; The figure is born. The eye is pleased. The breasts collide, seeking their twin. The breath rises and only rises. All is flight. All is sky. All is boundless gasp. Christina Rauh Fishburne Christina Rauh Fishburne is an American writer and artist currently living in England. Her work has appeared in Waterwheel Review, Defenestrationism.net, The Ekphrastic Review, and Perhappened, among others. She can be found at christinarauhfishburne.com.  Still Life with a Sparrow Hawk, Fowl, Porcelain and Shells, by Clara Peeters (Netherlands) 1611 Stepping on the Throat of Their Song Clara, Antwerp, 1611 As I enter the kitchen through the waning morning dark, I enter a deep silence. When my eyes adjust, I am startled by the variety of beings and feathers heaped on the surface of the narrow table. Here, the intact head of a waterfowl has been dropped like an anchor while its limp neck still droops like a spent rope. Over there, the heavy bulk of a pheasant’s body, slung over other bodies has been piled into a basket. How careless death makes us. That cortège of small ortolan buntings, their subtle colours from madder-rose to a pale shade of lemon, has been tightly strung along a whittled willow branch that pierces each throat. And that thrush, thrown like used glove onto a bare spot. Dead center, two plucked birds, have been pressed by broad palm on my favourite platter. Its deep cinnabar colour, toxic, yes, but so alive. Enough songbirds and fowl for making pâté and roasted ortolans. Cook will know what to do, all I know, it involves Armagnac and a large white dinner napkin… Night still sticks like pitch to the background of the scene. A death-like finality presses in from the sides. Only the rim of the wicker basket gleams in a familiar way, like the perfect perch for a bird’s claw. Perhaps that of a raptor. A sparrow hawk would work, since his prey is spread out in front of us like a menu, a statement, or a question. That hawk, the hawk of my soul, I will put him on that perch, slightly off center, his head averted from the carnage, to let his all-knowing eye focus just beyond what he did.  Barbara Ponomareff Barbara Ponomareff lives in southern Ontario, Canada. By profession a child psychotherapist, she has been delighted to pursue her life-long interest in literature, art and psychology since her retirement. The first of her two published novellas dealt with a possible life of the painter J.S. Chardin. Her short stories, memoirs and poetry have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies. At present, she is translating modern German poetry.  Me and My Parrots, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1941 Frida and Me Your face, Frida, is everywhere around here. On just one stroll through the local mercado de artesanías on a sweltering Mexican afternoon recently, I saw your image on jewelry, jewelry boxes, face masks, key chains, change purses, back packs, T-shirts, blouses, swim suits, shopping bags, notebooks, fridge magnets, postcards, and of course in picture frames. Your popularity appears to rival that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s beloved patron saint. I fear, though, you’ve become a cliché, and I doubt you’d like that much. What is it about you, Frida, that has captivated this country and has driven manufacturers to make so many souvenirs with your image painted on them for tourists to take back to their respective countries as mementos? Might you be the face of female Mexico? There’s you smiling, you frowning; you with flowers in your hair, with monkeys on your shoulder; wearing an embroidered huipil in vivid colors like a young girl, wearing a rebozo wrapped around your torso like an old woman. There’s your trademark unibrow like a tarp over your eyes. In some of these souvenirs you look vulnerable, as if sleeping; in others you stare at the viewer like a dare. Are all of these self-portraits? Did you ever tire of painting yourself? What were you really like, I sometimes wonder. If I had lived in your time and place, could we have become friends? Honestly, I doubt it. I study these images of you in the many small stalls at the mercado, and I see little that might connect us, other than our shared gender. But this portrait, this one with the parrots, is unlike all the others I’ve seen of you. It is mesmerizing, and flooding me with memories. At last, I can see we have one more thing in common, querida Frida: a love of parrots. I had a Senegal parrot once in Africa who lived in a large, globe-shaped wicker cage tucked in the crook of the central branches of a young mango tree directly in front of my study window in the front of my small, cement-block home in Mali. I named him Irwin, after the American missionaries who bequeathed him to me when they left the country. If it’s possible to love a bird the same way we women are capable of loving a puppy or a kitten – delightedly -- that’s the way I loved Irwin. Somehow, Frida, I think you would understand. Irwin, with his gray, characteristic curved beak and yellow-rimmed, beadlike eyes, was the same pale green colour, tapered, oblong shape, and roughly eight-inch length as a young mango leaf. So he was perfectly camouflaged in the mango tree. In fact, to make him happy, I tied together several of the branches of the nearby mango trees to his tree, so he could stroll along this aerial walkway when I let him out of his cage during the day, in lieu of flying. The missionaries had -- cruelly, I thought -- clipped his wings to prevent him from flying away when he lived with them. But whatever bitterness and resentment he had harbored toward them for doing this, he promptly forgot soon after coming to live with me. His daily strolls – more like military struts – from mango tree to mango tree seemed to delight him. He whistled, chortled, laughed and sang what sounded like freedom songs as he swaggered among the high branches. Some of the words to these distinctive, squawky songs seemed to be, “Look at me! I am beautiful! I am FREE! I’m no longer in a cage! I can do as I please all day!” Ah, is that it, Frida? Did your parrots sing freedom songs to you too? I know that life had cruelly clipped you, as it has me, albeit in different ways. Could this be our common bond: that you and I loved our parrots so deeply because they knew the words to our songs? Bonnie Lee Black Bonnie Lee Black is the author of many published essays, as well as five published books: most recently, Sweet Tarts for My Sweethearts: Stories and Recipes from a Culinary Career (Nighthawk Press 2020); an historical novel, Jamie’s Muse, based on the lives of her Scottish great-grandparents who emigrated to South Africa in the late 19th century; and three memoirs about her own life-changing experiences in various countries in Africa (www.bonnieleeblack.com). Bonnie is an honours graduate of the writing program at Columbia University in New York and holds an MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles. She taught English and Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico’s Taos branch for ten years. Now retired and living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she writes an award-winning weekly blog called The WOW Factor: Words of Wisdom from Wise Older Women, which is read by hundreds of (mostly) women worldwide (www.bonnieleeblack.com/blog/).  Francis O. Watts with Bird, by John Brewster Jr (USA) 1895 Giant School Party day at Giant School! The bybees crawled as they sucked on sequoias and grown-ups laughed while the widgies in the school’s exhibit snuck around tunnels with teeny stone hammers to chip off flakes of gold. When Liath burped and the widgies ran for cover, oh, it was the funniest thing in the world, the funniest thing in the world. The thing with funny is it doesn’t last. This time, Moonth the Younger One started talking rivers again. “If it were a piece of string, I wouldn’t drop it on the ground like that, all curled up, eh? I’m just saying.” He stroked his beard, tilted his head, put a finger at the source of the river, which sent the water gushing in all directions, and pointed another finger at the mouth of the river. “It’s just—I would tie it in a straight line, from start to finish, eh? Wouldn’t you?” He looked at everyone and everyone looked at their shoes. Everyone except Moonth the Elder But Less Elder, who never got it, like the time with the shark-whale race that ended up sinking that widgy city called Miami. “You’re right,” he said, to the sound of thirty giants slapping their foreheads at the same time, “that bend here doesn’t need to be so bendy.” They both got up, trundled to the river, and tried to grab it to straighten it out. Dead fishy things sprinkled the land and tiny river rocks became tinier river rocks, but the river was still there. They scooped and they pulled and they splashed—still there. Then, Moonth the Elder slapped them both on the back of the head. “You can’t squeeze a river, boys,” Moonth the Elder said. “You blow it.” He kneeled and blew at the river until there were waves and Moonth-spit bubbles and more waves. Thirty giant eyes did a giant eye roll at the same time. And that was that for Wylla the Wise, who got up and gave one of the Wylla Words of Wisdom speeches that every giant nods to and wonders why they even send their bybee giants to Giant School, if Wylla has all those wisy wisdom things to say without sitting in a classroom. One of the bybees tried to listen to the whole speech, really did, but something moved across the sky and this bybee followed the shiny little flying thing and crawled over a mountain and rolled into a canyon and next thing you know she saw the flying thing’s shadow flickering over a big group of widgies, a for-real big group of widgies, listening to a handful of widgies stroking teeny metal things on their chests while the bigger group jumped and yelled and waved and something. The bybee promised herself to stay on her own side of the hill and leave the widgies where they were, doing their group thing, but the itty eagle spun in the air and came back the way it had come, and the bybee kept looking at the eagle, thinking, gosh, you could be so much more, so much faster. The thought dragged her out the hills and she caught the slowpoke bird in the air, and as the bird squawked and spun and squawked and spun, eagle feathers danced in the air like flecks of wood after stomping on a forest. The bybee was about to throw the bird forward, but there was something Wylla said, something about making peace with the times and spaces of things, because not everyone can be brilliant and funny and gianty, so the bybee thought of the perfect thing—the blue lace of peace. She untied it from her wrist—untied it from her own wrist, imagine that coming from a giant, it says it all—and took the squawky eagle and tied the lace the softest of ways, around the eagle’s ankles, for it to fly off over the widgies and make the blue lace of peace dance over all of them—imagine that, the incredibleness of that. When the bybee looked up, the widgies were gone, scared by gosh-knows-what. The bybee checked behind her, maybe the B’moth had crawled up from the sea or something, but no, just her, in her party-day-at-Giant-School dress, and the widgies were leaving a trail of tiny little shoes and tiny little meals—or poop, you never know with widgies—as they got into playthingy cars outside. Gosh, the bybee said, talking to the bird that didn’t seem to be in the mood to talk. What is wrong with them? And funny, in a not that funny way, this is the same thing the bybee said, years later, when she wasn’t a bybee anymore, and the widgies came at them, with flying things made of putty yanked from the earth and packed into hard and shiny shapes, and these flying things shot tiny flying things that nipped their way into the Moonths and turned into burning things inside them and the Moonths themselves turned into volcanoes for a minute and into stone seconds later, same with Liath, same with Wylla, and just a few of us escaped, scattered, we went as deep and far as we could, and the bybee that was no longer a bybee, the bybee that is me now, with a bybee of my own, a bybee of my own that became a stone bybee after it was stung by the widgy’s burning things, and in this inside-the-mountain darkness I rock the stone in my arms and find the water I can feel and not see, and I tell myself the stone is moving, not the creek, moving toward its own party day at the Giant School, with the bybees and the grown-ups and the laughing, and I try to squeeze the water and remember what she said, what Wylla said, that day, about the river and life and time and space, but my hands turn up wet and the stone turns up still. Federico Escobar Federico Escobar grew up in Cali, Colombia, and after living in New Orleans, Oxford, and Jerusalem, spent most of the past decade in Puerto Rico—Hurricane María included. He has published short stories and poems, as well as academic articles and translations, in both Spanish and English. His literary work has been published or is forthcoming in The Phare, Bending Genres, Passengers Journal, Typishly, Tulane Review, HermanoCerdo, Revista Eñe, and Stone’s Throw Magazine. A book of his memories as a widowed parent of a three-year-old is being considered by a publisher in Colombia. He currently works in education.  Bye, Bye Blackbird, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2018 The Glitch Roge looks at Pilar as he turns the doorknob halfway. His lip trembles. His hand stops and retreats into his pockets. “What?” she says. “I can’t take another baboon.” He holds his own elbows, shivering. “I really can’t.” “I can open it,” I say, and take a step forward, but it barely gets them to glance over their shoulder. “Look,” Roge says, and he lifts his shirt just enough to show her the purple pulped on his stomach. Another cold gust and his shivering gets worse. “Yes,” she says. “But it could be him this time, behind that door.” “Him or a baboon. Or an effing snake again.” “You know we have to,” she says. “What I know is I would’ve given up ages ago. Pretended the Glitch is what’s real. Lived with it.” “Yeah, yeah, you would’ve forgotten there was anything before the Glitch.” She sighed at his frown. “You’ve said this a dozen times at least.” “I have? Me?” “At least a dozen. So,” hands on her hips, “are you opening it or not? Come on, it’s the first door we’ve seen since the swamp.” His hand is perched on the doorknob again. “What if,” he says, “we’ve seen him before and not recognized him? Maybe he was the alligator from the bog. Maybe he was the lava that poured out of the door in the desert. Or maybe, just maybe—” “He was in the emptiness of the door up in the mountains? You were going to say that for the, I don’t know, fiftieth time, weren’t you?” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Matter of fact, I wasn’t.” “Look, hon, Roge, dear. This has been hard for me too. The Glitch cracked up my world too, remember? I also see numbers floating at the edge of my vision, gray squiggles threading themselves into everything, splashes of color that weren’t there before.” “Here comes the ‘but.’ Here comes Pilar’s open-the-door-anyway argument.” “He’s our son, Roge. Of course we’d recognize him. He wouldn’t be a baboon or an alligator—” “Or a dinosaur,” he says. “Or a dinosaur. He wouldn’t be that, not to us. Some things are beyond the Glitch, things not even the Glitch can touch. Like us.” “But Ginger’s eyes, remember that? As she came at us that morning, with the fangs and the claws and, and, so strong, at us, who raised her and—” She wraps her arms around him, digs her head into his chest. He breathes in her hair and strokes it until his fingers get caught in a knot. He swats at something with his free hand, swats and swats and swats, until she notices it, steps back, and holds him steady with her hands on his cheeks. “Let’s open it, dear,” she says. He gives her a slant smile, puts his hand on the handle, and turns. The hinges whine until a song takes over, the song of a black bird with red wings perched on a branch that isn’t there. “The beauty,” he says, “the beauty of the song.” “Do you know that song?” “Of course. You don’t? It played at our wedding.” He whistles to the rhythm of the bird’s song, spinning his body back and forth. “Oh my God!” She lifts her head, closes her eyes. “I do remember. And that bird. I remember it, too. Used to feed birds like that with Papa, by the lake, under a sun as bright as the one beyond that door, a sun that doubled on the water as it sank into the mountains.” He is still spinning, just outside the door, while the bird sings, without pause, without mercy. “This is it,” she says. “He has to be inside there, Roge.” “Who?” “Our son, dear. In there.” “Oh yes, of course,” he says. “The sun.” “It’s just so—beautiful. Right, Roge? So—real. Come.” She takes his hand. “Want to come with me? In there?” His head swings left and right, to the ups and downs of the song. He lets himself be steered inside, until the yellow engulfs them. The creaking of the door drowns out the song. I think of screaming, of ramming my foot inside and yanking them back here. No point. Inside or out, the Glitch has them. The door clicks closed. I open it and a fire burns inside, a fire in the middle of a cricketed prairie, dancing over the logs that ashen as they nourish it. No bird, no yellow, no song. They are gone. And they were wrong, about recognizing their son. I watched them from the start, following them from door to door, from swamp to desert to forest to tundra, as they searched. I talked to them and they kept looking. I got in their way and they kept looking, as sure of my absence as I was sure of their presence. They looked at the Glitch so long they ended up looking for the Glitch. They were wrong, though. They never recognized me. Federico Escobar Federico Escobar grew up in Cali, Colombia, and after living in New Orleans, Oxford, and Jerusalem, spent most of the past decade in Puerto Rico—Hurricane María included. He has published short stories and poems, as well as academic articles and translations, in both Spanish and English. His literary work has been published or is forthcoming in The Phare, Bending Genres, Passengers Journal, Typishly, Tulane Review, HermanoCerdo, Revista Eñe, and Stone’s Throw Magazine. A book of his memories as a widowed parent of a three-year-old is being considered by a publisher in Colombia. He currently works in education.  Leda and the Swan, by Jean Leon Gerome (France) 1895
Fly Six year-old Mikey and his best friend Arturo tumbled into the kitchen. Behind them, the door slammed so hard the top screen popped out of its frame and clattered onto the stoop outside. Susan jumped at the noise. She turned from the sink, dish towel in hand. “Michael Christopher Caldwell! How many times do I have to –” Seeing her son’s expression, she gasped. “Honey, what is it?” A fat tear slid down Mikey’s cheek and dripped off his chin. He lowered his eyes to the floor, his dark sweaty curls as tangled as a bird’s nest. Arturo assumed a similar posture, offering up the crown of his head, shaved bald from his recent summer buzz cut. The boys stood, mute but heaving for breath, shoulders slumped, hands clasped in front of them, like criminals awaiting sentencing. Susan dropped to her knees. She reached out and gingerly patted Mikey’s arms and legs, her hands grazing over scratches and scabs. “You’re not bleeding. Nothing’s broken, thank goodness.” She placed her finger under his chin and tilted his face up, swiping the dirt away with her dishtowel. “All right, Mikey, what happened?” He twisted away and shook his head. “Arty?” The boy looked up, blinked, then lowered his eyes and shrugged. Susan stood, planted her hands on her hips, and raised her voice. “Well, somebody had better start talking. Right now!” Arturo draped his arm around Mikey’s shoulders and nudged him. “Go on, Mikey, tell her.” Mikey hazarded a side-ways glance at Susan. She nodded encouragingly. “I, I . . .” he began, biting his lower lip to stop its quivering. He swallowed a gob of air, then vomited a rush of words. “I – I killed them! All of them, all of the babies! But I didn’t mean to, honest. Now I’m a murderer, and I’ll be a murderer for the rest of my life as long as I live!” Mikey’s face crumbled. He collapsed in a heap, his body wracked with sobs. Susan again sank to the floor. “Oh, honey – Arty, what’s he talking about?” Arturo sighed heavily. “It’s like this, Miz Caldwell, we found a blue egg under a tree. Just lying in the dirt where the roots are. Figured it fell outta a nest, and so Mikey put the egg in his pocket and climbed up the tree and real careful put the egg back. We thought we’d saved her, saved the baby bird! Until that shithead Billy Barber – ooh, sorry, Miz Caldwell – came along. He said now the whole nest smells like humans, and now . . .” Arturo wiped his eyes. “The mother’s gonna abandon the eggs and . . . all the baby birds, even the one we saved, are gonna die and Mikey killed them all.” Arturo’s voice faltered. “I see. Thank you, Arty. Run along home now, honey. Mikey’ll come out to play later.” “Uh, okay. See ya, Mikey!” Arty said, flinging himself through the door. Susan drew Mikey onto her lap and rocked slowly. His head rested heavily on her chest. He clenched her shirt in both fists as if he were holding onto the side of a cliff. His breath came in shivery sighs, wet lashes like spider’s legs brushing his cheek. “I didn’t mean it, Mommy, I didn’t. But I killed the eggs and now I’m bad. Will you still love me even if . . . even if . . .” Susan caught her breath. Voices from her childhood rang in her ears: stupid, fat, ugly. Then Mikey’s father’s voice, louder: lazy, worthless, bitch. “I’ll always love you, no matter what,” she said. “But you’re not bad. You didn’t kill the baby birds. The mother won’t smell you.” “She won’t?” A hopeful note crept into his voice. “But Billy said –” He wriggled around in her lap so that they were face-to-face. “Billy’s wrong. I’m your mom, and I know something Billy doesn’t know. Little boys don’t smell like humans.” Mikey’s mouth dropped open. “They don’t? What do they smell like?” Her heart exploded for love of him. She smiled and traced his cheek with her finger. “Cookies and dirt. Little boys smell like cookies and dirt.” His face beamed as if he’d swallowed the stars. Jumping up, he ran to the kitchen door and jerked it open. “I gotta go find Arty!” Susan stood, and from the kitchen window watched her son tearing across the backyard. He turned and waved, and when she raised her arm and gestured back, her sleeve slipped down to her elbow, exposing the thin red lines carved into the flesh of her forearm. For several seconds, she contemplated the scars, parallel and neat, like railroad tracks. Then she pulled the fabric to her wrist and shook her head. Not her son. Never her son. Life’s ugly truths could wait another day. For now, for today, he will soar. K. Di Prima K. Di Prima is a novelist and short story writer. Her work has appeared in Dream Noir, Flash Fiction Magazine, Rock and a Hard Place, Crack the Spine, the Broad River Review, Image OutWrite, and Our Happy Hours: LGBT Voices from the Gay Bars. She has written also for The Philadelphia Business Journal, The Philadelphia Lawyer, NJ Lifestyles Magazine, and others.  Unknown etching found in Emily's basement. Winter Etching There is no colour, but a rustic feel, a solitude. The little cottage house is mostly hidden behind rolling white hills which must be covered in thick snow. It looks so soft, like a pillow tucked up against the pine woods growing in a gentle slope to the pond. The sky is white and the family living there must have some kind of dog, probably a Labrador named Jasper or Pistol or Abraham Lincoln or something like that, and I’m sure they look up at the blank sky and maybe feel a little lost and probably they have electricity but also a wood stove and I’m sure the inside of the cottage smells like warmth and mahogany and gunpowder and heated milk and maybe even bread because I think it makes sense that they would make bread themselves, and also it makes sense that each window would have its own tiny candle burning in it so that the light flickers over the untouched snow nestled up to the cottage in just the right way to make one think of God. The pond must be frozen and maybe the folks that live in the cottage enjoy ice fishing and shoveling the snow off the pond so that their children can play ice hockey, or just so they can kneel on the bumpy surface and look at the bubbles that froze inside the layers of ice, wondering at how dark and still it is. Maybe they even climb the pine trees and get sticky resin all over their handsbut that’s OK because now their fingers smell sweet and musty and like serious things that stand up straight in the wind and the rain and the snow. They would light the pine in the grate and the smoke would drift up into the blank white sky - a forlorn dance that says in its twisting quietude: I came from where there is fire. Emily Jahn Emily Jahn is a poet, artist, and biologist educated at Northwestern University. She is from Illinois, and enjoys camping, hiking, and canoeing.  Horizon Light, by April Gornik (USA) contemporary
Horizon Light Dive fearlessly into the Jack-o-lantern’s gaping maw. Though nibbled by squirrels and blackened by rain, it is not yet rotten. Instead it is primed to heal itself, turning as elliptically smooth as the place where its edge meets the rest of the world. Circumambulate the carefully triangled eyes, which, radiating outward, reveal themselves to be whales who breached the silver surface and took unlikely flight among the vastness of their ancestors. Ponder this blue parcel cut from infinity knowing you cannot demand it reveal itself. Allow the embrace of the dark, sucking sand. Do not be confined by the temptations of a safe harbour. This boundless world is but a horizon, wrinkled and rippled and alive. Tinged with azure, surely. The light pours over the horizon. Holly Lebowitz Rossi *Italicized phrases are from John Yau’s ekphrastic piece in Further Adventures in Monochrome. Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a writer who lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with her husband, 10-year-old son, and small stand of fruit trees. She is coauthor of two books: The Yoga Effect: A Proven Program for Depression and Anxiety (Hachette Books, 2019) and Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back (Shambhala Publications, 2013). A Crown for Ida O’Keeffe “Her life and art have only appeared as context for that of her famed sister.” -The Clark Art Institute, “Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow.”  Creation, by Ida O'Keeffe (USA) date not known- by 1961 1. Creation The famous last name nudges you to find a trace of Georgia, and you might—in stark geometry and large blocks well defined by colour—but in Ida’s work a spark of wildness sets its own fire. Bold abstraction subdues her sister’s shadow; shapes collide, their force accumulates, and light and action crowd the space. Sharp edges, multiplied, direct the eye toward a blue and gold and perfect orb of hard-won harmony-- as if a world of difference might uphold a world of peace. Whatever you may see, it’s not a shadow, it’s not imitation; as Ida’s title tells us, it’s creation.  The Royal Oak of Tennessee, by Ida O'Keeffe (USA) 1932 2. Royal Oak of Tennessee As Ida’s title tells us, this creation of soil and sun and time stands regally beneath a southern sky; its domination of earth and air determines what we see. Reducing distant mountains to dull hills, obscuring ripples in a nearby stream, it sprawls both up and out, and more than fills the frame. Its leaves, bright green but blurry, seem to float above the massive trunk and limbs, whose thickly muscled reach commands the eye; more bark than foliage, the grand oak trims the vastness of the heavens. When the sky grows dark, this king of trees stands unafraid-- and blocks from view the crown the stars have made.  Star Gazing in Texas, by Ida O'Keeffe (USA) 1938 3. Star Gazing in Texas A woman’s need to see the stars has made her climb this hill and stretch toward the sky, her body long and thin, her bent arms laid against her skull, her moon-pale chin held high. Her need to see the stars has made men fall, their faces unseen, their feet in the air-- has made them, like the distant horses, small and vague and helpless and just barely there. Her need has made her coal-black dog alert; head cocked, tail straight, he stares out of the frame, while she searches the sky, her milk-white skirt bright as the starlight that she hopes to claim. But need has made the stars unreal: too neat, like children’s drawings. Heaven, too, a cheat.  Toadstool, by Ida O'Keeffe (USA) 1932 4. Toadstool Like children’s drawings—though they wouldn’t cheat the eye of colour—this brown painting shows a simple, finite world, a life complete. The solitary toadstool will expose no troubling passion; in its curving stem and speckled head no secrets lie in wait, no subtle mystery that might condemn the random spectator to meditate on meaning. But it’s all so very brown-- from tan to cocoa to mahogany. No sunlight’s penetrated this far down; the toadstool lives beneath a canopy of grander green. Perhaps it does deserve a closer look. Why does this pale stem curve?  Still Life With Fruit, by Ida O'Keeffe (USA) 1926 5. Still Life with Fruit A close look at this fruit and this pale curve of wall behind it finds a harmony of shapes: the creamy backdrop’s rightward swerve echoes the lean of berries, which agree with arcs of apples. And a rhythm made of colors links the yellows of the vase and apples, like bright whole notes played against leaf green and berry pink. The space has been composed to satisfy the eye, but almost stirs the ear: a mute pavane, a nearly-sung but soundless lullaby, an etude when Chopin’s left the salon. An unseen sun conducts the scene: its gaze lights arcs of calm that hum beneath its rays.  Variation on a Lighthouse Theme lV, by Ida O'Keeffe (USA) 1931-1932 6. Variation on a Lighthouse Theme IV Wild arcs and angles broadcast piercing rays of artificial sun that punctuate a realm they don’t attempt to rule; their blaze of white and yellow means to mitigate the gray and blue. Not warmed by Georgia’s light, her sister coolly trusted her own eyes; her vision proved sufficient to ignite this shining lamp. Defining coastal skies in well-timed intervals, her lighthouse guides and warns the sailor, but won’t save a soul; a lack of wit or will quickly divides the sailor or the artist from his goal, and neither would trust solely in protection that might be offered by a split reflection.  Whirl of Life, by Ida O'Keeffe (USA) 1936 7. Whirl of Life What might be offered in this split reflection-- this half-red, half-black flash of energy-- is up to you. Do you see disconnection between the dark and bright? Or do you see one feed the other? Scarlet swirls invade an inky depth—or that abyss has bred a bloody fury—or the void has made a space for brilliant revels. Or instead you might see flames, or birth, a pulsing heart, a holy moment or one of damnation, two mighty forces wed, or torn apart. What few will see is peace, or resignation, or shadows—those that cast doubt or the kind the famous last name nudges you to find. Jean L. Kreiling Jean L. Kreiling is the author of two collections of poetry: Arts & Letters & Love (2018) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014). Her work has been honoured with the Able Muse Write Prize, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Prize, the Kelsay Books Metrical Poetry Prize, a Laureates’ Prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, three New England Poetry Club prizes, the Plymouth Poetry Contest prize, and the String Poet Prize.  Presumed to be a portrait of Marie Angelique Fontanges, anonymous, details not known. A Life Little Fontanges, seventeen to the Sun King’s forty, was gilded Versailles’s version of your perfect underage starlet: small lovely breasts, oval face, that teasing pout now made ubiquitous by selfies and hair to die for. She was said to be good-natured but stupid. The family having gauged her mortal frame’s worth, they steered her all the way into the royal four-poster. Soon pregnant (a major turn-off for HM), she lost a bit too much blood in childbirth, court gossips jeering that she’d been wounded in service. Her winter boy lasted only a few days, the mother ailing on for another year: discharged with a duchy, turning to piety in the usual abbey – then dead at nineteen, a footnote to a hairstyle. Laura Chalar 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. Her short story collection The Guardian Angel of Lawyers was published by Roundabout Press in 2018.  Women Making Textiles, by Mario Urteaga Alvarado (Peru) 1939 The Alvarado challenge responses are up! Click here to read some amazing poetry and fiction.
My Grandmother’s Blood after Peaches, by Hung Liu (USA) 2002 In the Ackland Art Museum, there’s a painting of a Chinese girl. She sits in her canvas and eyes the peaches that dangle just out of reach while art snobs and white people with yellow fever leer down her tall collar. I shouldn’t be jealous of the girl in the frame, but I am. Her world is predictable, stagnant. Red bats patrol the top right corner, teasing her cheekbone. Branches laden with peaches encircle her face. Every time you look, she’s the same. She dons the same high-neck, constricting qipao and she’ll face the same corner at the same angle with the same steeled gaze. She's a solid force in her frame. Her paint falls around her, but she stays rigid. Her pale skin lovingly contrasts her black hair. Black hair that her grandparents compliment. While making dinner, they fight over which side of the family gave it to her. Good-naturedly, as grandparents do. Her grandparents actually speak to her, rather than above her head or around her torso. Her qipao was made for her by her mom's mom who heard that her granddaughter would go to America in search of honest work. So, she scraped together what little yuan she had for silk fabric. The grandmother spent hours sewing this qipao and twenty other ones to be packed away in an old suitcase. There'll be blood along the hemlines from where the grandmother pricked herself when her eyes clouded. The night before her granddaughter leaves, the family comes together to cook a final feast. When the granddaughter leaves, grandmother and mother mourn together; clutch each other in the remains of last night’s feast. The girl surrounded by red bats and bamboo shoots has what I cannot wish for. My grandmother: 1. Everyone calls her Lao Niang, “Old Woman.” 2. She’s in her mid to late seventies. Maybe even early eighties– she’s old.[1] 3. She has eleven siblings, or maybe ten. Most of them are buried anyway. 4. She revels in buying cheap shit. Goodwill is her pharmacy and senior discount days are her prescription. It could be a side effect of owning nothing when she was younger because of the Great Leap Forward[2]. 5. She likes my cousin more than me. She also likes my brother and the gallon jug of Canola oil more than me. No, I’m not bitter, only resigned. 6. She once cried heart attack in an attempt to get my mom to come home. 7. Her phone calls from China used to leave my mom sobbing on the couch when the house was quiet. Now she doesn’t call. 8. The first and last time she visited was two peach seasons ago. Lao Niang’s family never lived up to expectation. Her husband was poor, stupid, and graying. Lao Niang didn’t have anything worth bragging about. Not her husband, definitely not her kids. My mom studied when she should’ve been pampering herself and she pampered herself when she should’ve been studying. Lao Niang was less grating to her sons since boys are the ones who pass down the name, get obedient wives, and eventually, fund their mom’s spending. Girls are the ones who get married off to the highest bidder with the heaviest pockets. A surprise then, that all of Lao Niang’s kids left her. Her oldest son went to the Middle East while the other son started a company in Canada. The oldest son left Janice, his daughter, with Lao Niang until Janice moved to America, too.[3] After Janice left, Lao Niang no longer had a young, pliable thing to berate. One year after Janice moved in with us, Lao Niang came to visit after my mom’s reluctant agreement. Once in America, Lao Niang took the thirty-minute trek to the Goodwill for senior discount day, passing my brother's elementary school and one megachurch before loading up with three hours’ worth of junk. Years later, we are still in possession of two golden sconces, one African paddle, two clocks, a Minnie Mouse in a wedding dress, at least four horse figurines, and nicks on the countertop from the Fights that Made Her Leave. The argument started on a school night. I was doing homework while my brother stared, empty-mouthed at the TV in my mom’s bedroom. Janice locked herself in her room with headphones on. The usual Tuesday ambience. Then the shouting began. My mom threw candles, cookie tins, and cursed. You went through her room without permission? For what– tell me,” she said before a plate shattered. “For some– some jeans?” my mom continued, “You invaded her privacy for pants? And you want me to give a fuck? I’m exhausted and you want me to care about Janice’s jeans?” Lao Niang attempted to placate her, like you would with a feral cat you wanted to pet. Soft murmurs did nothing for my mom, who then took the heavy Yankee Candle jar and threw it at Lao Niang. Plates, bowls, a mortar, and the paired pestle, thrown. While the one-sided war raged on in the kitchen, I slid into my mom’s bedroom, where my brother was, to distract him. I turned the TV’s volume up. Faked a laugh at the characters. Huddled with him, I waited for silence. Down below, soft Chinese and harsh swears tumbled through the kitchen. It began when Lao Niang couldn’t find a pair of Janice’s jeans– ones she brought for Janice. She blamed me. Lao Niang rifled through the towel closets before searching my room. She pulled open the closet door and pushed aside the clothing racks. Nothing. They also weren’t under my bed, in the dresser, between my sheets, behind my headboard, or in my nightstand. Defeated, Lao Niang said I “sold them on the black market to my friends,” the only correct assumption. Triumphant, she took the story to my mom. Our kitchen wall received a siracha stain for its troubles. Later, Lao Niang found me in my mom’s bedroom curled into the couch. The same couch where I slept for a week, terrified to be alone in my room. Where I plucked at the tawdry brown cloth covering the cushion until the emptiness underneath showed through. Where I took meals, terrified to see Lao Niang. She leaned in to tell me she will buy me a car. Ignoring the way my eyes darted around her head, she promised, “twenty-thousand dollars for you when you turn eighteen, okay?” She looked pleased with herself. A week later, the shouting returned. This time, it was noon on a Saturday. This time, my mom didn’t let my brother and I hide in her bedroom. We fled the house after my mom contained Lao Niang’s frantic shouting and throwing to the kitchen. On the way out of the neighborhood, Janice called my mom, frantic. “Lao Niang says she’s going to have a heart attack,” she took a heaving breath here. “She feels a pain in her chest and it’s getting harder for her to breathe.” Another breath. “It started when you left with Stacy and Arthur. I think the stress is getting to her. Last week left her tired but this week–oh please don’t cry–” Lao Niang starts wailing here. A tirade about how she’s an old, fragile woman and her only daughter left her and now she’s alone in a strange country and her kids hate her and her granddaughter doesn’t know how to show respect and she’ll never be loved again and now that her daughter is taking her grandchildren away and she’ll never see them again and this family will be damned if she ever steps foot on evil American soil ever again. I imagine she sat in the middle of the destroyed kitchen while faking giant heaving sobs. Janice continues from her brief intake, “She’s in a new country and doesn’t know anything and she says she needs to go to the doctor for heart attack medication.” My mom closed her eyes as Janice’s ramble ended and flexed her hands against the steering wheel. “She’s a liar. I’ll see her when I get home. Don’t call the hospital. She can’t afford it and I can’t either,” she paused, mulling over the next words. “Don’t call me again unless she’s dead,” she spat before ending the call. My brother and I looked at each other over the armrests before going back to gazing at the windows. We pulled into the driveway two hours later. Janice greeted us in the kitchen with the news that Lao Niang was fine. Resting in her room with the blinds shut and the door locked. Lao Niang put herself on a flight back to China two weeks earlier than promised. We threw out all the candle jars broken in battle and never spoke of it. We haven’t seen Lao Niang since. Two peach seasons ago. Anastasia Dai [1] One foot in the grave, two if she’d let me close enough to push her in. [2] The Great Leap Forward was when glorious leader, Mao Zedong, rapidly industrialized China through a series of reforms in the late 1950s. The Washington Post calls it the “biggest mass murder in the history of the world.” [3] If I were raised by a raging, hoarding narcissist I’d want to leave too. Anastasia Dai is an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When she isn't experimenting with the English language, she can be found drinking iced matcha lattes and reminiscing about her parents' dumplings.  Picasso in His Studio in Montmartre, photo by Franck Gelett Burgess, 1908, Franck Gelett Burgess, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons There are almost six years worth of writing at The Ekphrastic Review. With daily or more posts of poetry, fiction, and prose for most of that history, we have a wealth of talent to show off. We encourage readers to explore our archives by month and year in the sidebar. Click on a random selection and read through our history. Would you like to be a guest editor for a Throwback Thursday? Pick up to 10 favourite or random posts from the archives of The Ekphrastic Review. Use the format you see below: title, name of author, a sentence or two about your choice, and the link. Include a bio and if you wish, a note to readers about the Review, your relationship to the journal, ekphrastic writing in general, or any other relevant subject. Put THROWBACK THURSDAYS in the subject line and send to theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. Let's have some fun with this- along with your picks, send a vintage photo of yourself too! ** Fixed in Place, by M.N. O’Brien “Lilith told me the sun was green…” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/fixed-in-place-by-m-n-obrien ** Eva Gouel’s Last Tango with Picasso, by Jennifer Hambrick "Women are machines for suffering."-- Pablo Picasso https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/eva-gouels-last-tango-with-picasso-by-jennifer-hambrick ** The Two Saltimbanques, by Strider Marcus Jones “...undoing and doing each other…” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/the-two-saltimbanques-by-strider-marcus-jones ** Disconnected, by Kitty Jospe “Picasso paints my insides with the outsides…” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/disconnected-by-kitty-jospe ** Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Henry Bladon “‘I will have my place,’ says the ambitious young Spaniard. ‘I will be the world’s greatest painter.’” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/les-demoiselles-davignon-by-henry-bladon ** Guernica at MOMA, by Jonathan Stolzenberg “Horse took me, took all I was, expanded to fill the room…” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/guernica-at-moma-by-jonathan-stolzenberg ** What I Said to Picasso, by Dale Patterson “...then heard whistles that showered like hail... https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/what-i-said-to-picasso-by-dale-patterson ** Still Life, by Dominic James “The bottle, half full or empty…” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/still-life-by-dominic-james ** Painting With Words, by Bill Waters “But your Guernica eyes are distant and blank.” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/painting-with-words-by-bill-waters1 ** The Charnel House, by Jim Woessner “The label stated that Picasso had intentionally left the painting unfinished, since the brutality and senselessness of war hadn’t ended when Picasso stepped away from it.” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/the-charnel-house-by-jim-woessner  Lorette at a very early art show ever, around 2000? I'm running out of Throwback pictures- it's your turn to send in your picture and your favourite ekphrases! |
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May 2021
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