Tree Roots: the Final Masterpiece

Vincent comes to, the oppressive atmosphere heavy around him. His ear smarts, the scar raw this morning as if he’s been sleeping on a blade. It stabs his thoughts, like words of friends who have deserted him.

The smell is heat; hot air rising like a shroud, covering everything in the attic room with the odour of dust and coffee from the café below. The bed frame creaks as he turns. Vincent groans. Fetid absinthe coats his tongue as he swallows. His body is sweaty and his head drums, full of thousands of thoughts jumbled together. But loudest are his brother’s last words, "I can’t support you anymore Vincent, I have to put my son and wife first."

Above him on the whitewashed ceiling is a crack. It was a fine line when he moved to the auberge weeks ago, but the strength of summer heat has pulled it wider like fingers parting a wound, peeling back the edges to reveal a gaping fissure. In the blackness beyond, Vincent thinks something watches him. A melancholy darkness weighing him down; a burden which is always with him, and he is certain he can never escape.

He rubs a hand across his eyes and screws them up, assaulted by the intensity of light slamming into the room from the high square window. Its central beam makes the rest of the room shadowy, dust motes rising and spinning above the wooden floorboards. They dance in front of his eyes, and he can make out words as they scroll into an epigraph inscribed on the block of light… ‘Today is the day’.
It is a calling. Vincent gets up and pulls on his stained painting smock. He collects his pouch of brushes and palette knife. The gun is there too, cold metal against his hot palm as he wraps it. He packs up paints and his prepared canvas.

As he leaves the building, there’s a shout from Madame, an appeal for him to have coffee; but her words are already stolen by the sun. He steps onto the track, focused on his destination.

He has walked past the place often enough on his way to Auvers church and the endless fields. Today is not a day for golden wheat or religion. No, it is a day for shadows and dark earth; fissures and dust.

Vincent stops at a cut through the forest, pine trees either side of the path where charcoal and purple shadows promise some shelter from the burning sun. He coughs and wipes spittle flecked with blood onto his sleeve.

He sets up his easel and unfolds the stool, a familiar clipping and tapping which comes easily, like a dance. He lays out his tubes of paint and observes the scene.

On the opposite bank, a tangle of roots scrambles but he cannot work out which individual tree they support. They push into the crumbling soil, seeking a hold; clinging on. The trees above are silent, enclosing him in a bubble of tranquillity. He breathes in the essence of fir resin.

Vincent begins with a squeeze of paint onto the board sensing resistance under his palette knife, a resistance he controls. He starts, bending the blade to and fro, adding oils and then lifting, so textures converge like waves in peaks and troughs. The knife turns like a sword cutting air, swishing against the canvas. With the flow of motion, his thoughts are loosened. Vincent mutters under his breath, berating those who have offended him. As the form of roots takes shape, Vincent imagines he sees his brother and acquaintances sitting there. "You are no good," they tell him, "Your paintings are too dark."

Other figures emerge. He swears as a group of town’s people point their fingers at him, the village priest shaking his head, "No girl will be allowed to sit for you, you are depraved." A former tutor makes derogatory comments.

“God damn it!” Vincent shouts at them, his voice amplified by the trees. “You know nothing about painting.”

Thoughts clang and quarrel. His fingers sweat, slip on the palette knife, sweeping faster and faster.
The midday sun burns down on his head. He has forgotten his hat. Perspiration running from his brow into his eyes, leaving salty trails as the moisture evaporates.

Vincent has become lost amidst the painting, disorientated by the shadows, shape-shifting between trees. Roots are exposed and brittle; the colour of parched bones. A drop of sweat stings his eyes, blurring his vision. He sways; holding the easel with a shaking hand.

The sun continues its thirst, drinking up moisture. Pine needles shrivel and drop from the tinder-dry canopy. The heat has a similar effect on his skin; scorching. Finger beams of light slide between the pine trunks grasping the tree roots, twisting them to indigo and lavender shadows, like bruising. Vincent presses his hands to his aching head. If only the voices would stop.

The sun starts its descent, pitch shadows crossing the path, so dark that they are gaping chasms into which he might fall. Vincent stumbles on the path, as if he is caught up within his own painting, being strangled by roots.
​
Bang. A blast. Too close. Reverberating through the trees. Trunk to trunk, bough to bough, echoing off the hard ground. Beating like an ailing heart, out of time. His hand shakes. He drops the gun. When he places a palm to his chest, warm wetness spills through his fingers. Red, spreading across his smock. There is a trace of cordite on the air. The gun glinting on the ground.

Stephanie Percival 

Stephanie’s writing journey began when she was a finalist in the BBC End of Story competition. This came as a complete surprise. But it did serve as a starting point, and she realized just how much she enjoyed writing. From work started on a writing course, she self-published The Memory of Wood, a psychological suspense novel. Other books have followed. Stephanie enjoys writing in different genres and experimenting with different styles. In 2023 she self-published a collection of short fiction, called How to Catch and Keep a Kiss, featuring stories which won or were listed in a variety of competitions.

Her Entanglements
on Carol Rama’s indelible imagining
 
Each passing lantern’s  
flicker gutters in the cruel
light she casts. Each clever
observation founders
in the fissile glare 
of her unsentimental, 
lidless, zygote eye. Each
gesture of indifference
intensifies the saturated
hues, the weeping apertures,
exacerbates this hemorrhage 
of lips and carmine tongues,
the merciless entrapments
of a pinching spoke,
a furrowing wheel,
the glaucous swarms
of soft tumescent moons,
each analogue of moist, 
toroidal flesh, the defenseless 
ovate universe itself rolled back 
to form an inverse space
where nothing’s left to hide behind 
beyond the breach that splits 
the sallow breathing skin,
the torn and densely tangled earth, 
the rift that opens up her pitiless,
ecstatic, vast, unblinking
membrane sky

DB Jonas
​
DB Jonas is the author of four collections of poetry: Tarantula Season and other Poems (2023), Flight Risk (2025), In Dubious Terrain: Lyric and Conjecture (2026) and Ut pictura: New and Selected Ekphrastics (forthcoming in Autumn, 2026). Further examples of his work are accessible at jonaspoetry.com.

​On Transit
 
Returning home from a failed job interview once, I watched a woman in one of the elevated bus seats nearby. I tried not to stare. She grasped a pitchfork in one hand and looked ahead wide-eyed, self-conscious, and, if I could have guessed, a little amused at her own conspicuousness. Was she headed to work in a garden? To participate in an American Gothic reenactment? My stop came before I could learn more. 

I love watching others in these moments of suspension between one place and the next. I picture the painting The Third-Class Carriage by nineteenth-century artist and social critic Honoré Daumier. The passengers in the crowded railcar slump and their faces look resigned, but Daumier, nevertheless, seems intent on portraying the small universe each contains. The painting’s most prominent figures, a young mother with a baby in her lap and an older woman next to them, appear awash in glowing light. 

I like to think of myself as unassuming when I travel, but I know people have noticed me crying in airports: after saying goodbye and not knowing when the next words of recognition or welcome would be; distraught after missing a flight in a country whose language I should have understood better after a month of study; feeling like I was always going when what I should have been doing was staying. Regret and misgiving collide with the anticipation of a winged plane lifted to air and arcing flight path, and I become fragile and strange to myself, a stranger among other strangers. 

I think of songbirds flying, exquisitely sensitive to air currents and the compass of magnetic fields. They intuit when and how to leave and to return but also when and how to stay. Migration, molting, and nesting, in fact, each have their allotted and distinct season. Besides wings that fly, passerine songbirds have toes, feet, and whole bodies adapted to perching and balance in poised stillness. In other words, they know how to remain in place. 

​I’m on board the #26 bus when the driver guides us over one of Seattle’s many bridges connecting one edge of land to another. As we cross the lake below, held briefly in a kind of engineering-supported flight, the clouds break. The slanted sunlight of a winter afternoon rushes in at the woman sitting opposite me, making her its target. She does not shield her face or try to move from the light’s path. Instead, she closes her eyes, lifts her chin, raises the corners of her mouth, and gives herself over. 
 
Elissa Favero 

Elissa Favero teaches visual arts histories at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University. Her essays often center visual art, film, built environments, and the more-than-human world, and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, River Teeth Journal’s Beautiful Things series, and Ecotone. She is the winner of the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize for writing about how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding, and her chapbook Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian was published by Newfound in 2024. Elissa is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop and a nonfiction editor at the environmental literary magazine The Hopper. ​

​Algerian Triptych
​
three poems after the watercolours of Lilias Trotter (1853-1928)

Her Sky

Her sky can hardly hold
all the hues of possibility,
horizon of violet, a terracotta band floating
in rosy peach, dissolving upward into
ripe persimmon, melting into silver-blue
and broken patches of grey.

And all is whisper-echoed in the water,
the very shades of desert that she loved, 
hints of Saharan dunes and blowing sands,
light refracted along the surface
of dry salt lakes in that vast space
pulsing with the presence of God.
​
The low-hanging crescent moon
is the slit of an eye, beckoning two dark figures
rowing their boat toward the glowing shore.
This veil over the unseen is vellum-thin;
mere peeling back an onion skin
will show them all of heaven.

Centered

What sort of place brings camels to their knees?
These mountains in a lavender-washed haze,
a row of craggy peaks by turquoise grazed.
Expansive as the sky, brown ochre eased
​
only by darker coffee-coloured stains
of shadowed ripples stippling the sands,
and central to it all, a figure stands
in white as rare and clean as desert rains.

The Softening

It could be oleander,
mallow, or hibiscus
blushing pink against the
barren outcrop, gray
but for its scrubby trees,
​
and all around that rock,
the ground is gilded,
washed by a wadi
filled with April rain,
the softening
for which she prayed.

Eileen Berry
​
Eileen Berry is an educational content writer and creative writing instructor in South Carolina. She has published eight children's books, including a biography of Lilias Trotter, and numerous lyrics for choral music. Her poems have appeared in Relief, Time of Singing, and The Penwood Review.

Catching Memories 

Red parasol and the yellow hat 
Under green canopy of the Bois de Boulogne -
Two bright spots, two artists
Staring at the reflections in mirrored waters – 
What is the catch of the morning stroll?
She sees a little girl who runs barefoot
On a golden sand of the oceanside,
Free, happy, ready to jump in a water
And be carried away by a salty wind -
Sun, dunes, waves, seagulls on a shore…
He looks at the boy with a fishing rod
Catching a silver fish in a brook,
And hopeful his rod will endure
Big fish moving in murky waters
Reeds, grassy banks, clouds reflections…
Two dreams flow down below 
Among tree trunks perplexed and bended
In an inverted aquatic world…
Who will catch them
in a green net of young spring 
of awakening forest?

Olga Trubetskoy

Olga lives with her husband on the edge of a drumline in Wisconsin  where she enjoys early morning and late-night walks around kettle ponds, kayaking and camping in the woods,  and any time conversations with friends and family around the fire. Olga’s poetry has appeared in Where the Mountains Were, an anthology by Cuttlefish Books, Flying over the Waters, a chapbook by Bottlecap Press and Signatures of Time Segoe Poets, ​an anthology commemorating 35th anniversary of the group.

Walking the Dog

Under yellow skies, 
breathing heat and smoke, we dash
tree to shady tree.

Laurie Rosen

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander who splits her time between the MA coast and a hollow in central VT but loves to venture into any city to spend time in art museums. Her poetry has appeared in One Art, Gyroscope Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. Laurie was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. ​

​Walls and Stairs

These walls were made for walking.  They are steep.
We made them from the siftings of a dune.
I like to study magic in my sleep.
We store our hieroglyphics in the Moon.

We made them from the siftings of a dune
To keep us on the right side of the sea.
We store our hieroglyphics in the Moon.
Nobody currently is here but me.

To keep us on the right side of the sea,
We guard our distance from opposing coasts,
Nobody currently is here but me;
The other figures you perceive are ghosts.

We guard our distance from opposing coasts,
These walls are made for walking.  They are steep.
The other figures you perceive are ghosts.
I like to study magic in my sleep.

Julia Griffin

Julia Griffin has published in some poetry journals, including Light, Classical Outlook, and The Ekphrastic Review.

 
Early Snow

As if Runchu needed more to fall into his lap, his lap squeezed tight into his old wedding suit, it was snowing.  As if being seven months into a pandemic wasn’t enough.  As if being seven months into a pandemic, with a face like his, a Chinese face that made people here in Canada and especially in rural Burk’s Falls scowl at you, wasn’t enough.  As if being seven months into a pandemic, with a face like his, and you owned a struggling Chinese restaurant, a place that had - until COVID shut everything down - done pretty well, wasn’t enough.

And now it was snowing.  Runchu watched the flakes gathering on the sidewalk, and worried about his trees at home.  He and his wife, Ling, were here in a Toronto bank lobby, to tell their sad tale and ask for a loan to keep their restaurant open another six months.  “That’s all we need,” Ling had said for the last week, “That will get us through.”

Ling knew what she wanted and went after it.  He admired this about her.  Runchu tended to linger between options, putting off decisions. Eight years ago they had married, bought a house and opened a restaurant up in Burk’s Falls, where Ling said property was cheaper than Toronto. On opening night, Runchu waved a linen napkin with an exaggerated bow before Ling.  “Your empire, my empress,” he said.  She laughed and they embraced in an exhausted hug.

For a time, the restaurant consumed their days, and the desire to start a family filled their nights.  But as the newlywed glow faded and was not replaced by children, an absence started to grow, a gnawing thing.

Runchu did not know how to talk about what was happening to them. Each month, he would hear Ling curse in the bathroom, hear paper rip open, catching the evidence of their failure.  Once he had tried, after he heard her sob from behind the door.  Ling came into bed and turned away from him.  He cleared his throat and said, “Well, another month of trying then?” She sniffed and said, “Yes.”
No further conversation.  And, eventually, no longer really trying.

Winter had limped into spring as COVID dragged on. The dogwood trees outside their restaurant unfurled bright white blossoms.  Each morning as Runchu steeled himself for another day, the blossoms met him with their audacity.  “Yes, quite,” he thought one day as he walked past. He stopped at the plant nursery on the way home.

“Apple trees?” Ling asked, surprised and skeptical, squinting her eyes at the scrawny twigs topped with fragile green leaves, leaning crookedly on their root balls in the driveway.

“Yes,” said Runchu.  The next morning, before the sun rose, he was mixing compost with soil and digging holes twice as wide as their root balls to place them – one, two, three. They shifted the look of the front yard, and shifted something inside him. Now, as Ling locked up each night, chatting about promotions and tax write-offs, his mind was already on their yard.  As he turned onto their street, he leaned forward, looking ahead to where he knew those three trees were tucked into the earth.

Now, Runchu looked out the bank window at the snow still coming down from the clouds, covering cars and buildings in Toronto and thought of his trees, a three hour drive away.

“I hope they are okay,” he said to Ling, who was looking at a painting, her back to him.  “I’m supposed to cover them for the winter. I don’t know how they’ll do in this snow.”

She knew exactly what he meant by “they.”  

“They will be fine,” Ling said, in the disinterested tone she used for the trees. “Besides, the cooler weather is good for business.  People want Chinese food more in the winter.”

“True, true,” Runchu agreed, still watching the snow.  He didn’t mind Ling’s attitude about the trees. He couldn’t explain his devotion to them, either.  All he knew is that in the early mornings before he went to work, and in the evenings after he had returned home, his heart felt calm when he sat by the trees, their silhouettes stark against the low light, their leaves moving reassuringly in the wind.

“Look, we must be next,” whispered Ling from under her mask. “That couple was ahead of us and they are just leaving now. Straighten your tie.”

Runchu absently pulled on his tie knot. He didn’t care much about his tie.  He knew Ling was ready with their loan application and that his only job during the interview was to sit upright and nod solicitously, to show his masculine approval over the entire operation, the loan that Ling wants for the restaurant she wants.

He just wanted it to stop snowing.

Sarah Barbo

after Early Snow, by Jeffrey Chong Wang (Canada, b. China) contemporary
https://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.com/2021/11/selected-paintings-by-jeffrey-chong.html
(scroll way down)

Sarah Barbo writes about identity, sense of place, and little moments. Her work has been published in Hippocampus, River Teeth's Beautiful Things, and The Ekphrastic Review, and nominated for Best Small Fictions.  Find her in the Colorado mountains and at www.sarahbarbo.com.

The Bowl of Hygieia
 
The face is calm, emotionless, coldly aware of the plume of human simulacra that rises behind her. Her chin is upturned. Her smoke-coloured eyes are narrow; their gaze is elsewhere, peripheral, towards a place he cannot follow. Her left hand holds a bowl — glass, scalloped, demure — at the level of her neck. A golden serpent is partially wrapped around her right arm, its tail dangling in a loose scroll. It will drink the water of life from the bowl, but not now, not yet, not while the rude ecstasies of the simulacra continue to unfold. 
 
The sorcerer Phane pauses his scrutiny. The image in the vat hesitates and reforms. Did she once walk the young earth? Or was she then as she appears now, among the immortals, breathed into being by lips long since turned to earth? Flowers move in her dark hair as if stirred by a breeze — or are they coins, thin discs of hammered metal? Thick gold bands grip her throat; the curl of the snake’s tail tightens. Phane senses a provocation. There is a faint moan from somewhere nearby. Phane pauses again. He has been alone in his greenstone tower for a long time. He searches his memory, drawing his copper cloak about his thin body. It was Arlecchino the Vain who last climbed the greenstone stairs in another millennium, his magic batte — wooden, slightly tapered — still leaning against the cold stone of the inner stairs. The moan is gone. It’s nothing, Phane whispers to himself. The black liquid in his vats remains undisturbed; he bends over once again.
 
The woman’s lips are hearth-warmed, red, but duller than her long, vivid gown, subordinate to the rivulets of orange-red which flow off her shoulders. The sorcerer detects a professional equivalence. These are the crimson robes of an Animator. Her implements are analogous to his own; her glass bowl is coterminous with his vat. What he had perceived as apathy is but the serene indifference of a Magistra of the Medical Arts. Phane laughs. How subtle were those men! Was that not the zenith of paleogene science?
 
Another imago. 
 
An ancient building. MEDICAL ARTS — bloodless flesh, chilled cadavers, discrete layers of cool skin, venous muscle, and fiber. Colonnades of grey plaster, white corridors of wheezing machines and sharpened steel. Deep cold, ice. MEDICAL ARTS — the flesh now stripped to gibbering bone, a smokey body rocking backward in abandon, red hair adrift in the splashing pool.
 
The woman’s face returns. Her golden serpent takes long draughts from the bowl. There is a redness to her cheek, an application of rouge. She does not smile. A small bubble forms on the surface of Phane’s vat. The sorcerer frowns; the equipment is not yet in place; the auspices have not yet been consulted.
​
He raises his copper-cloaked arms and begins to speak, first a low sibilant whisper, then a rising chant. But there, at the rigid end of the invocation, at the precise end of his memory corridor, Phane finds an empty room. 
 
Yet he is no longer truly alone. And he is left to wonder — what cruel abomination, what thing, might rise unthinking — bloodless yet animate — from his pool?
 
kreicken
​
kreicken is the author of EL YANTAR and other Tales (Analepsis Press, 2026). He lives in Bellingham, Washington with his family.

The Colour Gods and the Chosen Stone

I will follow the orange god up and down the lines.
I will leap over the blue, the green, 
the yellow. This is a difficult game, like 
hopscotch, we jump over the other gods,

we land on the orange line, 
we are seeking the stone, 
here is the stone, 
we will fold ourselves, 
reach down, try not to fall.

Up and down we go, 
now the god is an elevator,
ride the orange god up and down, 
it’s easy, the god does the work, 
just be ready to fold, to bend, 
to pick up again and hold in the hand 

the chosen stone, the one you found in the alley 
when the god was shining special orange, 
it was almost supper time, it was clear cold air, 
you were brave then, but this is now 
and you are still going up and down,
up and down the lines of the orange god, 
the easy one, the one who called first. 

Some day maybe the blue, or green, 
or yellow, there is so much more, 
all the lines, the beautiful lines, 
and clear and yes 
and then and…

Oh let us enter then
the final joyous shimmer
of these simple gleaming gods.

​Shirley Glubka

​Shirley Glubka is a retired psychotherapist, a poet, essayist, novelist, long-term  enthusiast of The Ekphrastic Review, and the author of thirteen books. Her latest collection is Feet upon the Verge: poems et cetera. She lives in Bucksport, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes.