Laurel, a Ghazal Hanc quoque Phoebus amat—Ovid, Metamorphoses Phoebus, you never stopped loving her, did you? Her fingers, her face, still appear in your dreams. You still feel her grasping your fingers; her face flashes before you at night. (How she looked, like an arrow, straight through you, as honesty does.) There are times when you hear how she’d sing, her sweet face all sinless and solemn, not knowing that anyone heard. You recall how serenely she’d touch just your cheek or your forehead, and finger your face as softly as flakes of a winter’s first snow. And remember how mornings, her kisses would taste like the springtime itself? As you lingered, you’d face her and wonder at something so perfect: the magical curve of her waist; the delicate hairs on the back of her neck—and your hunger effaced every thought but to love her. Ten centuries later, her limbs reaching skyward, she stands with her toes rooted deep by a slow, backwards stream, where her face is concealed by branches and shadows. After she left there were others-- Dryope, Stilbe—but soon they discovered you couldn’t stop bringing her face back to mind, and wondering how is it going to end? You still visit the vale to gather the leaves for your wreaths, and keep thinking her face might appear, but it doesn’t. At sunset, the wind turns the fragrance of laurel from memory into eternity. Vesper now blinks. Turn your face from the chasm of Tempe and think of how love never fades. Just as years leave their traces on trees, with their permanent rings, you’re enfaced. Timothy Sandefur Timothy Sandefur is an attorney and author in Phoenix, Arizona. His book of poems, Some Notes on the Silence, was published by Kelsay Books. Other poems in The Ekphrastic Review: Louis Sullivan: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/louis-sullivan-by-timothy-sandefur Casey Baugh: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/new-york-city-haiku-by-timothy-sandefur
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Cast of a Dog Killed by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, c 1874 Ellie had drawn that dog from a photograph many times. She'd drawn a lot from photos: a ceramic bowl - a receptacle - titled Vessel, caked in river mud before firing and thus also alluding to "vessel" as in "ship"; Marlon Brando in The Godfather; a Weimar matchseller with the matchboxes in a tray around his neck – a haunted waif. Old photos mainly, like the one of that dog, taken in Victorian times; old photos with subjects aching to reach forward as if in mute appeal to the present. All flawed subjects, she'd realized: a ship foundered (or primitive bowl); a mobster soiled by iniquity; a ragged-arse to whom society would never offer prospects. After favourable first impressions, she realised that her drawings from photos looked just like the photos themselves. They had not moved the image on. So, apart from the self-congratulation at having created a passable likeness, it had been frustrating. Drawing from life, even when it was inanimate, she found difficult. It were as if the subject could get up and walk away or, if a person, grow impatient with her endless markings and revisions or berate her for spying on them. Humans and animals, anyway, never kept still; not still enough for her to complete her drawings. Most times she crumpled the results into balls and tossed them in the bin. But, in a photograph, her subject was a prisoner, completely under her control. It would never abscond out of anger, fear, or impatience; its "gloating'" over any frustration she felt would be imaginary. In such cases, a photographed object, human and animal or not, would personify the inviolable, albeit defenceless against her exasperation. It watched her fail, withdraw, and return for another attempt. That Pompeiian hound, petrified in its anguish, was doubly imprisoned: first by lava flow, then by the photographer's lens. The lava had made a sculpture of it; the photographer had photographed the sculpture; and she had tried to draw the photographed sculpture. That lapidary dog, so lifeless yet so alive in its torment, was a work of art. After trying to draw it for the nth time she began to feel sorry for it, for the way it had waited so often and so long for her to capture its essence. On the day she was ruminating on all this, her husband agreed to pose for her naked – or "in the nude," as he put it. She hadn't wanted to ask. But she had. He was watching the TV. "Why not?" Harry said, without looking at her. Anyone who knew how much and for how long her marriage had been idling might have thought her suggestion a desperate attempt at revival or acceleration. She thought that concealing behind his nonchalant reply the sense of something sparking repeatedly in the air was Harry picturing a Zippo with a worn plug of flint or too low on gas or both. She couldn't recall when she last saw him without clothes on. She didn't mean the nightly and early morning view in passing when they undressed or got ready for breakfast and work. But not even that of late: for a while – well, a couple of years – he'd been turning in an hour or so before her. He was asleep when she entered the bedroom that night. Not wishing to disturb him, she didn't switch on the light, but relied on what light seeped in when she left the bathroom door ajar. It was enough for her to look at herself, a spectre in the tall mirror, and wonder if her changed shape had placed her former one beyond recall. Did he agree to "sit" for her knowing there was little prospect of his nudity or nakedness leading to anything? She realised her body had been overtaken or taken over and left changed, probably for ever, though not in an instant and not with her obviously contorted with fright and trepidation. No – feelings like that were stored below the surface and kept to herself, not shared with Harry or anyone else and, she guessed, put down by him to moodiness. She was indeed moody and seemed successful in dealing with it. She did deal with it. He'd ask her if she was OK and she'd always say Yes, which he probably accepted as a token of what was needed from him to guarantee her independence. Harry posed for her one Saturday morning. Neither of them had work and they'd both slept on. "Let's do it," he said. "The nude thing." He swung out of bed and adopted the pose of Rodin's The Thinker as a joke. "The Thinker doesn't wear boxer shorts," she said. They could hear next door's kids playing outside. The sound always sounded like a reproach, someone else's progeny as emissaries, their voices disembodied and carried on the wind; but she never shared that with Harry. They went into the sitting-room and he sat, relaxed and not thinking, in an upright chair away from the window, the shorts discarded. "How do you want me?" he asked. She told him to sit forward, as if alert, with hands on knees. After a few seconds, she began drawing half-way between frontal and side-on. She saw how much he, too, had changed; or, rather, she saw something she knew but had never pondered. It were as if he'd agreed to produce incontrovertible evidence of irrevocable change. In the evening art classes she attended, students were told to look intently at an object and draw as they looked, as if looking would reveal something to them. Well, it had been fun. Her drawings of him naked, nude, could have been anyone. She'd captured his soapsud hairstyle but obliterated his facial features with firm diagonal strokes in parallel, relegating them to shadow. "You haven't flattered me," he said, referring to those unwanted migrations of the flesh. It wasn't meant to be a criticism; in fact; it sounded like an admission that revealed a truth hitherto unspoken. He turned in early that night, as usual. She retrieved the wedding photos from the second album, the photographer having convinced them that retro black-and-white portraits were the coming thing and provided two sets. She homed in on a picture of them both – it wasn't a "white" wedding anyway – and touched Harry's face. She began drawing it, revelling in its complex lack of gradations, the fissures that opened up, in pure light and dark, such expectant happiness. Nigel Jarrett Nigel Jarrett is a leading Welsh writer, a former newspaperman and a double prizewinner: the Rhys Davies award and the inaugural Templar Shorts award, both for short fiction. He's had eight books published, including in 2023 his fourth story collection, Five Go to Switzerland. In March 2024 his second poetry collection, Gwyriad, was published by Cockatrice Books. His story, Our Man in Beauvais, based on the work of Rodin, appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. He writes and reviews for Jazz Journal and Acumen poetry magazine, among several others, and was formerly chief music critic of the South Wales Argus. He lives in Monmouthshire. Get your submissions in! Deadline is Feb 20! It's not too late to enter if you haven't. Instructions follow. Send in the Clowns: an Ekphrastic Circus The rise of the circus over 200 years past inspired an incredibly vast and varied world of visual art depictions. Painters were attracted to the rich array of themes and interesting characters of the circus. The colourful props, epic entertainment, harrowing feats, and beautiful women were irresistible subjects for many artists. The circus, of course, also had its darker side, its underbelly crawling with strange power exchange relationships, the display of differently abled human beings for profit, abuse of animals and women, and more. This colourful tapestry of psychology and spectacle was and is fertile ground for artists and writers, too. The new contest at The Ekphrastic Review is Send in the Clowns. We have curated more than NINETY fascinating paintings and other artworks, chosen to invite your writing to unexpected places. You can write poetry, flash fiction, or both, inspired by any of the artworks in Book One or Book Two. Be inspired by the characters and scenes in these paintings, by the art itself or the artists, or the subjects of the art, in any way that you want to interpret them. The purchase of one ebook of circus images serves as entry fee for the contest ($10CAD or approx. $7USD). You can choose book one or book two or both. These images can serve your ekphrastic practice through the contest and beyond, providing endless inspiration. We will publish a selection of finalists in The Ekphrastic Review. One poetry entry and one flash fiction entry will be declared winner in that category. The winning poet and winning flash fiction author will receive $100CAD. Rules 1. Write stories or poems inspired in any way by any of the artworks in the Send in the Clowns ebooks. Art can be from book one, book two, or both. 2. Submit up to three poems or flash fiction entries. You can enter as many times as you wish, with three entries for every $10 entry purchase. (For example, if you get both books one and two, you can enter six works.) 3. Poems and flash fiction 1000 max including title. 4. Deadline is midnight, eastern standard time, February 20, 2025. 5. Submit entries to [email protected]. 6. Put your entries in a Word document, together. Don't put your name etc. on the document. 7. Include a 100 word bio with your submission. Include your order number with your submission as well. 8. Include CIRCUS CONTEST in the subject line when submitting. 9. Please include the name and artist of the painting that inspired the work, noted along with every poem or story. 10. Please tell your friends and peers about this fabulous contest. We can't wait to be inundated with amazing circus stories and poetry! Send in the Clowns: an ekphrastic circus book one
CA$10.00
A curated collection of 45 plus artworks on different aspects of the circus theme. Book one of two. Welcome/Burl It’s not the wracking wind one would assume brings about this shape, not the sculpting flow of water either, the way that can model stone given enough time. No. It’s actually confusion on the cellular level, a tree’s own growth deranged by some distracting presence, parasite or infestation. Not unlike an itch scratched at until it is a wound, then a scar, then simply something of the wood itself, of its form and flesh. It sings somehow something more than the monotone ring upon ring of the straighter trunk material. This eloquent moment of melody, silent, complex. Is it that the irritation is forgotten finally? Does some kind of acceptance come about in the end? House of Opinions The phone mounted on the wall next to my father’s place at the kitchen table. He’s talking with his father, a Democrat since Roosevelt came along with the WPA. Grampa built bridges, dug ditches all through The Great Depression. I only hear my father’s side of the conversation: Richard Nixon and a concept called “Peace with honor.” They talk a long while, my father raises his voice at times. “Dad, Dad! I’ve three sons. I want this war over and done.” It's twenty years later and I’ve come to dread the sound of the telephone ringing. Always the same time of night, same topics we covered the last time. Everything wrong with the current (Clinton) administration. He tells me he loves a good debate. An exchange of ideas he calls it. What I hear is pain. Cowboy Oil Weather had its way with the paint once more blatantly red, white, and blue. Sheet metal rusted through those places it was joined together. Neon long gone, not even power to the lamps meant to light that cowboy bronco busting a bumblebee. Central Equipment bought the land more than twenty years back. At first they simply didn’t bother with tearing the old sign down. Then they got to liking it, that sad old face, that wistful song of a bygone place not even quite singing any more. I was sorry to learn someone’s started to repaint the thing, they mean to maybe even get the lights working again. I think it’s a mistake. The other night it was just me and my TV and I found myself watching Simon and Garfunkle singing the songs that made them famous fifty years ago. Their voices were shot, their friendship still plainly strained. Two old men. But there was a sweet brokenness there that I would never want to fix. Thank you, Avita The hospice nurse who’s come to the loft because Denise has fallen says she grew up in the same town we lived in way back when. Her grandmother raised her there. And I think I remember her, too. A shy little girl. We got her in trouble giving her Halloween candy against Grandma’s strict proscription. They lived just two doors down, rented from the same woman. I thought, at the time, that the grandmother was unnecessarily hard on the girl, a cruel scold. I say nothing now and doubt our kind nurse remembers. She cleans the wound with water and explains that there’s often more blood than damage with cuts like this one. This will heal, she says, I promise you. City Shapes I’d never seen a helicopter hold so perfectly still as on that night I was walking the way I always do along Suffolk beside the canal. I think it was some water main broke down toward Father Morissette. Fire trucks and squad cars all there with nothing to do but watch the water rising. A large bald man in it up to his knees was looking like he was somehow to blame. His bare arms lifted slightly from his sides, his hands balled into fists. And that chopper. It could have been painted on the sky. Four pigeons up there on a telephone line. The moon was full. I stopped and just stood there for a little while. It was like we all expected to see something. Something different. Kids running about taking none of it seriously. And just for a moment I did not feel so all alone in this universe. Tom Driscoll Note: These poems are from a visual art exhibition, Living in America, at Loading Dock Gallery in Lowell, Massachusetts, October 2024, a poetry convergence. Tom wrote the poems to works shown in the exhibition. Tom says, "Once again and always, thanks go out to poet Stephan Anstey (the propellant force behind the poetry convergence every year) and to the artists at Western Avenue/Loading Dock." Tom Driscoll is a poet, columnist, and essayist who lives and works in Lowell, Massachusetts. Driscoll’s poetry has appeared appeared previously in The Ekphrastic Review as well as Oddball Magazine, Abraxis Review, Scapegoat, Paterson Literary Review, and The Worcester Review Mayan Afterlife After cremation will my bones become part of the soil, earth’s new life? Like a Mayan ritual. Remains of the dead, they believed, become precious seeds that carry progeny, fertilize earth. They created clay ancestral figures, and the maize god modeled from waist up, centered in a leaf on a short stem, to grow like flora after they die. Used as whistles practically, they summon folks to celebrate their lives. * I imagine my return to earth as a blooming flower, dahlia nestled in a bower of oval-shaped leaves, green on top, auburn underneath, open in daylight, closed at night. Like prayer plants, they preserve my petals with subtle fragrance, keep me fresh, as I appear in blossoms of radiant magenta, born again into life, I soar, much more colourful than before. Mary K. Limberg These artworks were viewed by the author at the exhibition, Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Mayan Art, 7th-9th Century, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022-23. Dr. Mary Lindberg’s work explores links between art, music, dance, literature. Her chapbook, The Tang of Glue, appeared in 2006 (Puddinghouse); prize-winning poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gallery&Studio, among others; several ekphrastic poems in River of Stars (Artists Embassy International, 2022) She contributes often to Waterways. Winner of the Grand Prize, Dancing Poetry Contest (2021). Her nonfiction essays consider 9/11 (PEN award), and William Hogarth’s art and the London theatre. For an NYU English doctorate, she studied at Oxford; and, earlier, Eastman Music School. She was a tenured Associate Professor, California State U., Northridge, and UCLA Mellon Fellow. Editor's note: This poem was titled after and written in response to Their Bones Were Extracted and Sold, by Kent Monkman (Canada) 2023.
https://www.kentmonkman.com/painting-2020-present/their-bones-were-extracted-and-sold ** Their Bones Were Extracted and Sold at campgrounds and gas stations, toys made in sweatshops, consecration made kitschy, high holies now tchotchkes, the pterosaur, the triceratops, and the Indian mounted astride. Her billowing shawl shimmered like cellophane, like plastic derived from fossil fuels that were really mostly plankton but everyone prefers to think about as dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs were beaded like regalia, hoops and stripes of gold and orange and green and blue and pink. A rainbow war bonnet. Their bones were extracted and sold. Before the Romantics, the backdrop of sweeping American pride, the paleontologists and pioneers, they ate and drank and married and warred and sang and sinned and searched and slept. The pterosaur glittered over rivers of fishes and snapped up her meal like a lover steals kisses. The half-naked two-spirit goddess, her hair spilling freely, exulted and whooped to the world’s windy ceiling. Then someone spied gold. Then their bones were extracted and sold. Lillie E. Mortensen Lillie E. Mortensen is a lifelong writer currently studying English Education and Creative Writing at Utah Valley University, with a minor in American Indian studies. Her work has twice received awards from the Vera Hinckley Mayhew Student Creative Arts Contest. She lives in Utah, USA with her wife (also a writer) and two dogs (not writers). Degas: a sequence after an exhibition at the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, 2024, by Chris Athorne2/4/2025 Portrait of Hilaire de Gas, Musée d’Orsay, 1857 Hilaire de Gas, his stick across his thigh, suffers no fools, only hard cash for cotton. A fourteen year old trainee ballerina pouts nue, her bust-less chest; position four. De Gas fixes the interest with a disapproving eye. Study in the Nude for The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1878-80 Perhaps it was, in that world prior to the fin de siécle, where children ran naked under the trees in the garden at La Maison Rose, Montmartre, before Freudian suspicion spoiled the dream of prepubescence; perhaps, only natural to think of innocence. Whose discomfort is it, after all? Whose transference? Study of a Young Girl’s Head, National Gallery of Scotland, 1890s Sharp in your central eyesight, in unusual oils, your retinal cones fix the profile of a young girl. The hard edge floats in our peripheral vision, a candle held before a dark, uncertain future. Woman Combing her Hair, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1888-90 Your pastels are hairy, Edgar, chalked down ward like river weed stroked by the current or rivulets running down the window pane. A world seen through glass? Or submarine? And here’s a waterfall of female hair over the rock of her shoulder. Never a Nature painter, never plein air. Before the Race, The Walters Art Museum, 1882-84 Familiar from childhood Saturdays, my father rides the sofa: Newmarket, Cheltenham, Ascot. He knows the odds, the tote, the easy come, the easy go. His dad: Big Tanner, between the mine, North Africa and the glass factory, a bookie’s runner. Look at it this way. You throw in a fiver. He throws in a tenner. Two to one on and winner takes all. Easy come. Easy go. A thousand quid in the money this week and out of it the next. Easy come. Easy go. Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, National Gallery, London, 1879 Might this angel fall, holding on by the skin of her teeth, momentum conserved in the arms’ spun inertia, wheeling the canopy about her, pirouetting on a pin’s head? What’s in the frame stays in the frame. An accidental view from the window is inept photography, as though falling, spinning, a moment salvaged in not quite perfect condition. C’est la. La-La. The Bellelli Family, Musée d’Orsay, 1858-1867 My head is still spinning. You make me dizzy like Cezanne’s frustratingly ordinary trees with elbows for branches getting in the way of my sightline and sticking in and out of the frame, being not at all behaved like the daughter of a well-to-do critic in a family portrait. Portrait of Edmond Durranty, Burrell Collection, Glasgow, 1879 Uncomfortable people, the critics, to spend time with, and restless with themselves too: apes picking their brains for the nit of a thought, something to say at today’s soirée. Something out of the frame? Left field? Outré? Dancer Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap, Glasgow Museums, 1895-1900 Natural. Unnatural. A Rebours. Studied, sequinned, the gilded tortoise. A dancer adjusts her shoulder strap. An image of a dancer adjusting her shoulder strap. A model studies a dancer. A model models a dancer adjusting her shoulder strap. L’Absinthe, Musée d’Orsay, 1875-76 They’re all framed, mounted, arranged in ordinary. Don’t you see? It takes a while. Yes, you! You’re set up too. Young Woman Looking Through Field Glasses, British Museum, 1866-68 Mannish glasses for the supervision of combat in the field. She’s Field Marshal in drag and we the crowd, not troops but flaneurs trooping, window shopping these canvasses. She reflects us. Voyeur! Ma soeur. Silence and soft shuffles under dimmed light, we walk the gallery of the dead patrons and collectors, a slow descent: Durand-Ruel and Henry Hill, Ionides.; acknowldege Key for Absinthe; for van Gogh, Alex Reid. Did they make history with Degas? Or did Degas do for them? More recently, women step into the frame: Audrey Loats for Woman Ironing; Rosalind Maitland, Geraldine and Marge Workman gave us the wordsman Martelli. Women in the frame, the falling hair, the irony. There is always something between us: the rain on the window, the disguising eye-glasses, the invisible protective pane separating absinthe drinker from (pretended) pimp. There is the complex of composition, the model, the dress, the placing, the setting, the sitting and waiting. What do we trust of the reconstruction of the Real in the ditching of the Ideal? These, says Baudelaire, are the heroes of the quotidian city of light. What I have lost, I gave away too easily, falling in with the habits of others’ language; must now regain, claw back the way I came, exit by deceit, dissemblance, the cave of Truth, the One-Eyed Liar’s lair, woke by a phrase outside the tribe’s making and stumble out into the no-man’s land of liminal commitment. Chris Athorne Chris Athorne is a mathematician living in Glasgow. Recent poetry has been published in MAGMA, Acumen and in Apocalyptic Landscape, an anthology edited by Steve Ely. A Whole Night I live in the lining of your cloak. I am the spaces between the thread and the satin- tiny blacknesses where the needle entered and the thread couldn’t fill. In my last lifetime, I was a fly on your skin and the time before that, a drop of spit in your butter. After all I have learned, you would think I would be born as your door latch, your water faucet, the hand of the barber who cuts the hair on your chin. But through all those lifetimes, I was not waking up- I was only becoming more vigilant Inhabiting space like a taut question mark, reluctant mathematician, desperate seamstress calculating force of your footfall + number of times your key fumbles in the metal lock x distance fumes extend from your hot mouth - number of steps before you fall down on the wooden floor = number of breaths I can take until I have to stitch us back up again This is what you hate most- for all the weight you throw in the world, all the folds of your flourish and sway, promising protection-- you cannot hide from me the empty body underneath, cannot fill the tiny blacknesses with anything but me That I’m able to think at all is a kind of awakening asking Next time, could I live as the hawk that crouches, hunched against the wind? Could I be the hooded eyes that watch me? Not be distracted by the sky breaking apart and rearranging? Next time, could I wait for the moment to pounce and carry the shivering mouse up off the earth to a high branch to devour it, crunch its bones? make a paste of its parts for my babies? This is what I want to happen to my fear once and for all: Let it be eaten by something noble, something inhuman- that only hunts to live. Once and for all let me pull on the thread that binds us, and from a great unraveling let me knit the tiny blacknesses into a whole night where no one knows you where yours is not even a name that anything can be called by. Susan Skeele Susan Skeele is an American poet, writer and MFA candidate at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In 2024, she received Mozaik Philanthropy's Future Art Writers Award, and is collaborating on a book-length project with fellow student and award-winning visual artist Badri Valian on the subject of their childhoods in Vermont and Iran. She lives in Oakland with Riley, Yuki and Nick (dog, cat, cat). "That's How My Condition Is, It Cannot Be Fixed" These days I cannot sleep or eat without thinking of flesh. Will I return & if so, in what form? Leaping from the arrowed grove, a bloodied stag with human nose, untouched lips, gaunt antlers to stab the air? Acid rain, lightning. Little cakes of dirt. Sky braiding the forest’s hair with fevered fingers & I, creature of smog & smoke? Me, slipping off my gown of melting fur, & at last, everywhere, burning up-- Barbara Schwartz Barbara Schwartz is the author of three books of poetry, a chapbook Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017) the collaborative collection Nothing But Light (Circling Rivers, 2022), and the hybrid memoir in verse, What Survives is the Fire, forthcoming from Alternating Current Press in 2024. Survivor’s Lament they came in grey uniforms and blackened boots they raided the granaries set fields to burn relished scents of scorched corn and emaciated horses they ate our food they came with faces grim set their hearts pewtered and stoned they manured the wells razed the houses blindfolded the men for pleasure tortured the boys they ate our food they came with no memories of kin nor loved ones aching their return they tormented dogs and cats lusted young girls rained sky-bullets and demanded we dance they ate our food they came with focal intent one-eyed wildebeests they plundered and crushed they badgered the decrepit forced us to imbibe the blood of the dying they sprouted forehead-horns grew long forked tails skins glowed sickly-red still they ate we could not help the haggard we could not protect nor shelter nor feed you our darlings our maimed sad darlings we the ones left we exist despite the horrors the hell the hunger mothers and nurturers we are only in name Joanne Godley Godley’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pratik, Mantis, The Bellevue Review, FIYAH, among others. She is a member of the Poetry Witch Community. She is an Anaphora Arts Fellow in poetry and fiction. Her second poetry chapbook, Doc.X, was recently published by Black Sunflowers Press. |
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February 2025
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