Cownose Ray, Rhinoptera Bonasus
 
Who is this smiling creature, her wings spread wide, ready to embrace, her wide-set eyes focused on the camera, that is, the viewer, the photographer Henry Horenstein, me. One way we know she’s female is the vulva exposed at the bottom of her body, poised for easy penetration. Around her neck are tiny valves that open and close, that could be mistaken for a beaded necklace. She’s beautiful, ever so slippery, but Horenstein imagines her frozen, hanging in black waters, like a Stealth Bomber. Don’t be fooled: her jaws are hard as concrete, and if she’s hungry, she’ll pulverize any kind of seashell. As reserve weapons, her tail is lined with teeth and toxins, handy when approached by predators and kids and unlucky fishermen.

Remember the beach in Florida, the ocean calm, shallow for a hundred little steps, then a gradual drop. Little rolling ripples atop the water, mirrored like tiny hills in the sand below. Perfect for vacationing children, safe enough so that mother absorbs herself in a book and father sleeps. The ray’s back matches the colour of sand and the animal glides to the bottom and sequesters, feeding and digesting her food. If the children are romping and splashing around, one child may happen upon one, unseen by the grownups. It’s true, when you were young, your best friend let out a scream, ruby drops of blood sinking below the water’s surface, long red ragged streaks on your legs. Your father and mother came running, lifted you up by the arms then raced to the hospital. It took weeks for the wounds to heal, maybe a decade before you ventured into the water again. Horenstein’s vision is deliberately misleading, like all beauty, it blacks out the danger and, of course, the casualties.   
 
Sarah Gorham
 
Sarah Gorham is a poet and essayist, most recently the forthcoming essay collection Funeral Playlist from Etruscan Press. She is the author of Alpine Apprentice (2017), which made the short list for 2018 PEN/Diamonstein Award in the Essay, and Study in Perfect (2014), selected by Bernard Cooper for the 2013 AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. Gorham is also the author of four poetry collections— Bad Daughter (2011), The Cure (2003), The Tension Zone (1996), and Don’t Go Back to Sleep (1989). Other honours include grants and fellowships from the NEA, three state arts councils, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Announcing two anthology calls!

The Metaphor Tree: an anthology of ekphrastic poetry

Blood Dance: an anthology of dark ekphrastic flash fiction

​
The Metaphor Tree: an anthology of ekphrastic poetry

Symbols, motifs, signs, portents, and metaphors are essential elements of art history, literature, and our personal experiences. In this ekphrastic anthology call, we are looking for poetry that explores the rich territory of symbolism through visual art, cultural or historical significance, and a personal lens. What do objects, colours, numbers, and images in art conjure for you? What do they symbolize? What are the symbols that have unique significance to you and what do they mean to you?

You can interpret this theme in any way that makes sense to you. Some symbols are placed into art on purpose and hold specific cultural meanings, such as the cross, the ankh, or the poppy. Some are unintentional and resonate with you apart from the artist’s intention. Some symbols are universal. And some hold meaning to you alone.

This poetry anthology will be published by The Ekphrastic Review under the imprint Ekphrastic Editions. 
​
1. Submit up to five poems of any lengths.

2. We are open to all forms of poetry. This anthology call is for poems only, no fiction or essays. Prose poetry is welcome.

3. Poems must explore the theme of symbolism, in any way you interpret this theme. They must be ekphrastic. We define “ekphrastic” as “creative writing inspired by visual art.” The poem can be about any painting or artist, or the art can be a springboard for your imagination. The artwork is your choice.

4. Submit all poems in one word document that does not include your name in the file itself or in the file name.

5. Selected poems will be included in the anthology. All decisions of The Ekphrastic Review are final.

6. The anthology will be published as a paperback anthology, and will be available on Amazon. The anthology will also be available as a PDF virtual file. 

7. No fees to submit, and no payment. Accepted authors will receive a virtual PDF copy of the anthology.

8. Deadline is May 1, 2026.

9. Put METAPHOR TREE SUBMISSION in the subject line.

10. Authors will be notified of acceptance or decline with regrets by August 1, 2026.

11. The book will be published late in 2026.

12. Include the title, artist, nationality of artist, and date of artwork creation, along with a link to the image. Example: after Sunrise, by Jane Doe (Belgium) 1904.
​
13. For this anthology, we are seeking only unpublished works. Simultaneous submissions are accepted. Please notify us right away if you need to withdraw your work.

​
Blood Dance: an anthology of dark ekphrastic flash fiction

Dark themes and horror are longstanding and important themes in art history and literature, as humans grapple with fear, uncertainty, the meaning of evil, and the unknown. Just a few of the themes that artists and writers have addressed in this way include murder, war, vampires, ghosts, hauntings, plagues, sadism, violence, and more. This anthology is open to all dark themes in any way you interpret them.

The possibilities of ekphrasis in horror or dark fiction, and in dark flash fiction, are infinite, but there are few publications in journals or books that explore ekphrasis in this way. We hope this anthology will change this and contribute to the interest and proliferation of this form.

We are looking for ekphrastic flash fiction that grapples frankly with these important themes and questions, but we want work that is literary and artistic, rather than focused on gore and gratuitous violence. This line is admittedly blurry but something to keep in mind. 

This flash fiction anthology will be published by The Ekphrastic Review under the imprint Ekphrastic Editions. 

1. Submit up to five flash fictions under 1000 words, including title.

2. We are open to all forms of flash fiction, from 50 to 1000 words. This anthology call is for dark ekphrastic flash fiction only, no poetry.

3. Stories must explore dark or horror themes. We are looking for literary explorations, not gratuitous gore. They must be ekphrastic. We define “ekphrastic” as “creative writing inspired by visual art.” The flash can be about any painting or artist, or the art can be a springboard for your imagination. The art is your choice. The artwork that inspires you may be dark or horror-themed, or it may be any painting that inspires a dark story.

4. Submit all flashes in one word document that does not include your name in the file itself or in the file name.

5. Selected flashes will be included in the anthology. All decisions of The Ekphrastic Review are final.

6. The anthology will be published as a paperback anthology, and will be available on Amazon. The anthology will also be available as a PDF virtual file. 

7. No fees to submit, and no payment. Accepted authors will receive a virtual PDF copy of the anthology.

8. Deadline is May 1, 2026.

9. Put BLOOD DANCE SUBMISSION in the subject line.

10. Authors will be notified of acceptance or decline with regrets by August 1, 2026.

11. The book will be published late in 2026.

12. Include the title, artist, nationality of artist, and date of artwork creation, along with a link to the image. Example: after Sunrise, by Jane Doe (Belgium) 1904.
 
13. For this anthology, we are seeking only unpublished works. Simultaneous submissions are accepted. Please notify us right away if you need to withdraw your work.

​Braque’s Violins, From Metonym to Metaphor
 
In “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” linguist and literary critic Roman Jakobson divides figures of speech into two major types. There are metaphors, in which one word is substituted for another on the basis of a similarity between their referents, and metonymy, in which an entity is referred to with a word naming a thing or feature associated with it. A common form of metonymy is synecdoche, which Jakobson defines economically as the substitution of “part for whole or whole for part.” Examples of the former type of substitution are most commonly encountered, as for example when the name of a capital city is used to stand for the entire country, or “sail” is used to mean “ship,” “boots on the ground” to refer to an army, and so on. The language of synecdoche is laconic; as Jakobson notes, it’s similar to Freud’s condensation in that it signifies a complex entity with a single image rich in associated information.
 
Although Jakobson is concerned with figures of speech and thus with language as such, in an aside he suggests a likeness between the visual and verbal arts when he claims that Cubist painting exhibits “a metonymical orientation...where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches.” Jakobson’s claim is intriguing and I believe provides insight into how Cubism conjures its objects. We can see this with Braque’s violins, which are paradigmatic of Cubist – at least analytical Cubist – objects.
 
***
 
Between 1909 and 1912, Georges Braque painted several pictures that included images of violins. In each of these paintings, Braque portrayed the instruments through their constituent parts – in effect, he analogized them to part-for-whole synecdochal figures of speech. Consider his Violin and Pitcher of 1910. Braque performs a neat act of reduction, dismantling the violin and presenting it as a collection of its various parts. Although each individual part is more or less where it should be in relation to the others, and although the parts display a high degree of contiguity, Braque’s carving up of the instrument at its imaginary joints, and arranging its disjointed parts on planes that abut at skewed angles, has the effect of isolating each one as a focus of visual attention. The pegs wrench themselves free of the peg box and scroll; the nut seems to float free of the fingerboard; the upper bouts slide away from the ribs and from each other; the strings are divided into two discrete and disconnected sections; the bridge is collapsed nearly flat against the top; the f-holes, which Braque, a classically trained violinist who knew the instrument well, has turned backwards, belong as much to the surrounding space as to the instrument itself. 
 
Braque’s disassembly of the violin in Homage to J. S. Bach (1911-12) is even more radical. Here, the continguity that held the different parts of the violin together in Violin and Pitcher is dissolved, as are entire regions of the instrument. The upper bouts have disappeared, while three curved lines represent the two lower bouts; the strings are four short lines projecting from a fully-depicted tailpiece; the fingerboard appears intact along its length, though seen from two perspectives; the f-holes occupy separate planes. The visual information Braque provides to signify the violin is partial and localized; here he is laconic indeed. Because of this, the synecdochal orientation of Homage to J. S. Bach feels stronger than it does in Violin and Pitcher, even if it isn’t certain that Braque portrays all of the parts of the instrument in the latter picture.
 
Regardless of the differences between them, in both of these paintings Braque’s disintegration of the violin effectively strips it of its status as a whole. One glance may be enough to take in the elements that Braque has set out, but it isn’t enough to put them together and to fill in what Braque has left out. We need to extrapolate and infer, as we do with a synecdoche – we have to derive the whole on the basis of the parts provided. Braque provides them, but in the form of a detotalized totality.
 
***
 
A detotalized totality – I adapt the concept from Sartre’s later writings – is an entity made up of constituent parts that retain their independent identities as parts. It’s easy to see how this is pertinent to synecdoche. The part-for-whole synecdoche detotalizes the totality of the object it alludes to by detaching and presenting one part or quality through which we infer the rest. The part signifies through separation; its effectiveness as a representation is precisely its standing alone and implying what hasn’t been given. It summons the whole by displacing and replacing it, leaving us with the paradox that the whole comes to mind precisely by virtue of its absence in favor of the constituent part that stands apart from it. 
 
The object in analytical Cubism, broken up and dispersed across multiple planes, as Braque’s violins are broken up and dispersed, is the epitome of the detotalized totality. It presents things as sets of features, and not always as ordered sets at that. The detotalized totality that is the Cubist object can be totalized in a number of ways; given the disconnection and distribution of its parts, the relationships of the latter to each other appear to be unstable and changeable. In its disassembly, the Cubist object suggests alternative ways that the mind might assemble it.
 
***
 
That the mind’s assembly of parts wasn’t intended as a reassembly was stated by Braque in 1917. He asserted that the intention of the Cubist portrayal of the object “is not to reconstitute the anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact...The subject is not the object, it is the new unity.” The new unity is this detotalized totality, this series of parts. In other words, the Cubist object isn’t a mimetic portrayal of a purely perceptual object but instead is something else, something that didn’t exist before and that is to the extent that it represents the negation of the given, even as it adds itself to the given, “thus to live its own life,” as Picasso said.
 
Braque’s statement suggests an irony in Cubism’s synecdochal orientation. For if for Jakobson, synecdoche in literature is the hallmark of the realist author who is “fond of” presenting life in all its details, then synecdoche in Cubist painting, even given its corresponding fondness for presenting details, serves to dismantle the sense of realism, at least if the latter is understood as consisting of the faithful reproduction of the eye’s plain version of the scene before it.
 
***
 
The part-for-whole synecdochal orientation of analytical Cubism points to a quality it shares with something beyond its similarity to metonymic figures of speech. What it seems to hint at is how the dynamic structure of synecdochal comprehension, which consists in the active inference of the whole from the part, mimics the structure of perceptual comprehension itself.
 
Consider that when the analytical Cubist painting creates a new unity for the object thanks to its part-for-whole synecdochal orientation it detotalizes the totality of the object it portrays by distributing the parts in space and (often) intersperses them with lacunae. Each part occupies a different point or plane, which in turn represents a possible perspective from which to view the object. 
 
Hence the Cubist object reveals the synecdochal orientation of vision itself. We perceive an object by way of whatever part of it is given to vision, and from that part the mind fills in the rest. The structure of synecdoche turns out to mimic the structure of vision. In detotalizing itself into the parts through which it signifies itself as the totality we constitute in grasping it, the Cubist object offers itself as the point at which synecdoche and vision, the figure of speech and the grasp of the object, meet. If Braque’s violins are analogous to part-for-whole synecdoches, it’s because part-for-whole synecdoche is analogous to vision.
 
***
 
The analogy to vision brings us to another analogy brought out by the Cubist object, one that leads us from the metonymy of the part-for-whole synedoche to a metaphor in which space is made to stand for time. 
 
Consider that we’re given the violins from a number of viewpoints through which selected parts of their fronts and sides are made visible at different angles. In order to see the instrument from the many perspectives Braque portrays, we’d have to move around it or rotate it, processes that take place in time. On the canvas, these processes are spatialized in that Braque, in good Cubist fashion, distributes our different views of the violins across different planes, scattering in space sights that unfold in time. What appears on the canvas as a simultaneity is experienced in fact as a sequence of events; the substitution of spatial distribution for temporal sequence in effect makes space a metaphor for time. The metaphor works because of a quality the object in space shares with the object in time: both are extended, one through the three dimensions of height, length, and width and the other through duration. In order to grasp the object extended in space we apprehend it in time, hence its spatial extension is correlated with the temporal extension of the perceptual-cognitive act through which we grasp it. Cubist part-for-whole synecdoche may start as an instance of metonymy, but it ends as its opposite number -- as metaphor. 

Daniel Barbiero

References:
Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in Modern Criticism and Theory, 2nd edition, edited by David Lodge with Nigel Wood (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000).
 
Max Kozloff, Cubism/Futurism (New York: Harper & Row/Icon Editions, 1974). Quote from Braque is on p. 11; quote from Picasso is on p. 12.

Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in After the Art, Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press).

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Please consider a holiday gift to support this journal.

Thank you for all of your support, readership, participation, and love.

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​THANK YOU.

​Dreamsplit

Come to me,
Dreamsplit,
fog-fallen,
where the pine leans wrong
and the trail forgets its end.

Come to me,
headlit,
cracked as thin ice,
yourself a thought
half-lost to moss.
​
The stars flicker out of order.
Let the brain float free.
Let the hawk spiral
through your own sky.
Let the wind gather
the leaves you meant to remember.

Michael J. Kolb

Michael J. Kolb is a poet and a professor of archaeology based in Colorado. He writes across disciplinary thresholds, exploring nature, memory, commemoration, and illness—asking what we carry, and what we leave behind. His work appears or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday, Sky Island Journal, Eunoia Review, Defenestration, and Moss Piglet among others. He is the author of Making Sense of Monuments (Routledge 2020) and shares his writing on Instagram @michaeljkolb and at substack.com/@michaeljkolb.

A Pot of Basil: 
Ekphrases on Love and Loss
edited by Lorette C. Luzajic
 
Donna Carnes
Sara Castaneda
Allison Connolly
Barbara Krasner
Meredyth Lillejord
Lorette C. Luzajic
Ann Matzke
Lisa Molina
Karen Ostrov
Iris Quinn
Beverly Sce
Rebecca Weigold

We are so excited to announce A Pot of Basil: ekphrases on love and loss.

This collection was born in special class through The Ekphrastic Academy on love and loss. The writers above collaboratively created this collection of ekphrastic stories and poetry through their work during the course. 

​Click on the images above or below to get your copy on Amazon.

​Smoke

Yesterday's work stands behind him. The large canvas leans against the white wall. His eyes try to stay with the sky. He has been standing before this window for an hour, waiting, watching the light creep from the darkness, hoping that the sun's golden resilience might find its way to him. He doesn't feel strong enough to turn.

It's been a bad night. It's been a bad couple of weeks. Insomnia’s taken hold and won’t let go. He sucks hard on the cigarette, opening his throat for the tarred fizz to sharpen his senses, for sensation to be something more than despair. He looks to the glass and steel of Mercury Insurance on Fourth Avenue. Once solid things. He knows the light is coming, that a golden sheen will coat the upper stories, echoing to the sun that it is business as usual. The world will go on. He breathes the last life from the butt in his hand, drops it to the floor, and presses the sole of his shoe to its ember. The canvas cannot wait any longer.

Eleven foot and five of stretched canvas. Blocks of cadmium red, pigeon blue and a lightly panted swirl of forest green. The colours aren't there. He can name them, he can see them, but they aren't doing anything except ridiculing him.  What did you expect? You knew. Somewhere inside you've always known, now you've got to face it. Their derisive sneer forces him back, scrambling for his cigarettes. He must smoke. He must smoke and find his way out. He cannot be here any longer, cannot work here any longer. He grabs the packet from the chair, the chair from which he has spent forty years looking, finding his way into his work, and heads for the door. Once there, something happens, a sensation, something beyond the trembling anxiety that has stalked him for months. It surges into him and his hands seem to stop shaking. Rage. He feels it. He welcomes it. He wants to turn and take on the painting. Not with brush or palette knife or fingers, but with a blade, an axe, a fire. He won't be mocked, ridiculed, emptied. Then, just as quickly as it came, it is gone. The familiar dread returns and he forages in his pocket for a cigarette. He must smoke.

Simon Parker

Simon is a London based writer, performer and teacher. Simon is an associate artist of Vocal Point Theatre, a theatre company dedicated to telling stories from those not often heard, and providing workshops for the marginalized. He also runs creative writing and reading groups for the homeless, socially excluded and vulnerable at the 24o Project. His work has been published in various publications including  The Crank, Gramercy Review, Cathexis NW, The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, The Pomegranate London. www.simonparkerwriter.com

​Decoy
 
Carefree living
debauchery by noon
 
red wine flowing
violinist serenading
 
one wild child blows
in Grandma’s ear as
 
the other meddles with
a medallion not me.
 
the Cavalier yonder
toys with table scraps
 
while a sow below 
sucks up her fair share
 
happy they’re distracted
not occupied with me
 
center stage a harlot glowing
golden and groping
 
her ne’er-do-well can 
barely contain his flowers
 
Auntie props him up
with one hand
 
implores Uncle to hurry
to find the antidote  
 
his hunched shoulder
a perfect perch to
 
survey the scene as 
I’ve oft’ done before my
 
bird’s-eye view the distance
between safety and dinner

Kirk Lawson

Kirk Lawson lives in Ulster County, New York and the Shawangunk mountains. He enjoys poetry as a creative outlet to deepen meaning in living. Publications: Discretionary Love, Months to Years, Thorn and Bloom, Pulses. Grateful to husband Jim and dog Leo for joining his journey.