The Venus de Milo, by Sully Prudhomme (France, 1839-1907)

Nature takes her time completing each design.
To sketch the shape of breasts, she stood well back, and made
the oceans undulate, and once that surface swayed,
made mountains elevate, and basin-forms incline.

Preparing to create hearts’ softly cushioned shrine,
she curved and curved the hills, their profiles charm-inlaid.
Who knows how many drafts -- a feminine parade --
she formed of lilies first, while breasts were next in line?

Of all her long attempts, the last one wasn’t Eve.
Her masterpiece, and beauty’s, too, she’d not achieve --
awaited age by age, emerging woman by woman --

till one great specimen: triumphant, Art could trace
a perfect human body -- its contours, superhuman.
And Greece, this model was the flower of your race.

Sully Prudhomme, translated by Julie Steiner

**
​
La Vénus de Milo

La Nature accomplit lentement ses desseins.
Elle ébauchait de loin la forme des poitrines
En faisant onduler les surfaces marines,
Se soulever les monts, se creuser les bassins ;

Elle apprêtait aux cœurs leurs suaves coussins
En courbant les profils enchanteurs des collines ;
Qui sait après combien d’esquisses féminines,
Au temps des premiers lys elle moula les siens ?

Et de ses longs essais le dernier n’est pas Ève :
Son chef-d’œuvre attendu d’âge en âge s’achève,
Et de la beauté, de femme en femme, éclôt toujours,

Jusqu’au type suprême où l’Art triomphe et trace
D’un corps humain parfait les surhumains contours,
Et ce modèle, ô Grèce, est la fleur de ta race.

Sully Prudhomme

Author's Note: Sully Prudhomme, winner of the first-ever Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1901), had pursued engineering studies until an eye ailment forced him to change careers. That engineering background informs the language of drafting, design, and prototypes in this sonnet, which was published in his posthumous collection Épaves (i.e., Flotsam and Jetsam) in 1908.

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego, California. Her poetry has appeared in Literary Matters, The New Verse News, Light, and Snakeskin, among other venues. She has been an active participant in the Eratosphere online poetry workshop (www.ablemuse.com/erato) for more than twenty years.

Join Barbara Krasner, Maria Lisella, Anna Citrino, and Lorette C. Luzajic on Sunday night for a zoom reading in celebration of International Women's Day.

Register:

​ https://www.barbarakrasner.com/workshop/international-womens-day-poetry-reading-march-8-2026/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQXlGRleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFDMkZEaWh3bWJBb1N5NlBpc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHrHd4vsb8eJdkgH6GpXHWmpeiDWOVl2lX8xJrsFsjXUZT-hE_K-RAOn3V-4w_aem_id2p3X-HguoM6QWrTRahUw

Rest Stop

I can smell the gasoline and motor oil, feel the grime on surfaces in the restroom.
The man – young once, now long dead – whose place this is, his pride and joy,
with the quiet ambition of having good work, a business of one’s own – 
appreciated customers but was glad to see them leave, glad to have his thoughts to himself once again.
Long minutes when his mind can wander. He steps outside for fresh air and to contemplate his lost opportunities.
He wasn’t in it for the money. It was something he could do, is all, and show others he was making something of himself.
The quiet hours. Counting the change in the register, opening it again just to hear the bell.
This road was the place to be back then. Shiny people from out of town, bounding out of shiny cars, graced the threshold and were gone.
When the interstate came through, this road became a well-kept secret, the gasoline in underground tanks never to be burned on the road.
He stays outside. No reason to go back in.

Celeste Budwit-Hunter

This poem first appeared on the photographer Melody Locke's blog.
​
Celeste Budwit-Hunter works for Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Surviving a rare cancer leads her to celebrate daily through writing, photography, and walks in the woods. Her writing has been published by Equinox Journal, Synkroniciti, and Sudden Flash, among other publications.

Sailboats and Sailors

Shadows follow us everywhere. Some may say these light obstructions bring a third dimension to the two-dimensional world. Some may say shadows constantly change shape, angle, and intensity, like emotions and thoughts. Some may say life is a walking shadowor question if we really have to walk in the shadow of death. Most say the brighter the light, the darker the shadow’s hue.
 
Sailboats rest in partial morning light, the winds calm, and ocean water glassy. Reflections of hulls and masts lie still. Reflections that double their size, like dreams, dreams of their sailors.
 
Sailboats rest in partial morning light, awaiting the dreams of sailors, who dream as they sail through the waters, who dream of tomorrow and remember lost love, who imagine as they head to sea, guided by the wind, sometimes tranquil, sometimes disturbed.
 
The sky hidden by roving clouds, light shines through heaven-like and blessing the harbor. Heaven-like and blessing sailors’ dreams, moving through the water, sailors dream how they may live, how they may die.
 
The sky reflects a dark shadow in the water. It shows heavenly light fading into Hades’ gloom. It shows heavenly light diminished to a spark, reminding the sailor dreams may fade until the morn when the sun will rise, and the reflections will return—so will the dreams.

Ghostly

People of the past linger
in abandoned houses,
their footsteps echo
disembodied presence.
 
No one pays attention to me. I’ve been here longer than any of them. A century has passed, and I still walk this spiral staircase alone, unnoticed by students, ignored by cleaning crews. I live here, damn it. I am Estéban Garcia.

No one knows I died laying the tiles that make this staircase in Baker Hall at Carnegie Mellon University a wonder of the world. Who knew my heart would give out? Who knew I would collapse and fall down the flight of stairs I now traverse? Why didn’t I get a plaque—even a small one—to recognize my contribution to the grandeur of this Rafael Guastavino architecture? Who will acknowledge me? Nobody, I guess. 

They put me in the ground in a Pittsburg cemetery like a pauper, no marker above my head. Now I am a ghost that glides the steps I laid, next to the Spanish tiled walls I constructed, three tiles thick.
​
Still, I am content. The beauty nourishes me, and the exclamations of those who study my work give me sustenance.

​Tick Tock

No man goes before his time–unless the boss leaves early.
Groucho Marx, comedian
 
I arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport and, after checking in to my Left Bank hotel, make a bee-line for the Musée d'Orsay and the top floor of the iconic building. I have a destination—the back of a clock face, a clock placed in the late 1800s to remind those waiting for trains of the time when the building was a railway station, Gare d’Orsay. I’ve studied the photos, and I am so close. Pitching my coffee cup in the trash, I reverently climb the stairs above the main entrance, stairs that will take me to the clock. I’ve come all the way from Iowa for this moment. What if it disappoints? What if one of the hands is broken and the space is unavailable to tourists with our cameras? I panic and run up the last flight of stairs.
 
I turn the corner towards the clock. There is no yellow crime scene tape, just a couple of grade school kids and their parents who lecture the youngsters, “Behave, damn it. Or no ice cream for you!” Desperate for a glimpse, I crowd in front of them, murmur a prayer, and cross myself. There it is…just as I hoped.
 
Wow, I think, look at the Seine, look at the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur in the distance. It is a perfect vision. Thrilling. Yet, I felt a little uneasy, a little confused, a little out of body.
 
“Sometimes I get tired of the view,” a metallic, French-accented voice said.
 
I look around. I am alone. 
 
“Hello,” I said, “Who’s there?” I am just jet-lagged and affected; I suppose.
 
“Sometimes I get tired of little kids touching my parts.”
 
What? There it is again. Maybe I am dehydrated and spaced out. I distract myself by staring at the ornate, elegant Roman numerals on the clock face and the intricate design of the clockwork. But I did hear someone speak. I did.
 
 “Sometimes I get annoyed if my clock does not get cleaned.
 
No one is going to believe me. I don’t believe me. I am glued to the spot. But, then…
 
“Move along, buddy. Your time’s up.”

Steve Gerkin

Steve Gerkin: "At 72, I applied to the MFA program at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, and graduated in January 2022 with a degree in Creative Writing - Nonfiction. My writing life began after retiring from 36 years in dentistry (2010). To date, I have four books and over fifty published essays."

Author's note: These images, taken by Sam Joyner in the mid-80s, and four dozen others, were prompts in an Oklahoma Book Award 2025 winner, Echoes of Light: Images into Writing.

​
​The Rose and the Chariot
 
1. Unframed Portraits

This is a story more stumbled upon than pursued. It begins in a mansion with an oddly stirring painting. From there, the story wanders into the labyrinth of the mansion’s past, wades through the melancholy pages of an old book, and ends with an oddly stirring painting. 

María Gainza, in her book Optic Nerve, describes her visit alone to a museum on a stormy April day. When she encounters Alfred de Dreux’s painting Chasse au Cerf, she experiences an uncanny case of Stendhal syndrome. Disturbed, she staggers into a garden and catches her breath to recover from this sudden unease. She regains her poise and braces herself to observe the picture again, finding it undeniably conventional, yet alluring, even unsettling.

The painting is part of the collection of the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo in Buenos Aires. The museum is housed in what was once a private mansion built during the beginning of the 20th century, the Palacio Errázuriz Alvear. A South American patrician couple commissioned the mansion: Josefina de Alvear, an Argentine socialite, and her Chilean husband, Matías Errázuriz Ortúzar, a high-ranking official at the Chilean embassy. Chasse au Cerf belonged to the original Errázuriz Alvear art collection, together with paintings by Fragonard, Corot, and Sargent, among many other art pieces. 
​
At the beginning of the 1900s, Mr. Errázuriz commissioned the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla to paint portraits of Josefina and their son. Detailed instructions on “embellishments” and photographs of the subjects were sent from Argentina to Spain for Sorolla’s inspiration. Later, the mansion prominently displayed these vague images.

In 1910, Mr. Errázuriz chose Giovanni Boldini to paint portraits of Josefina and their daughter. The daughter’s portrait displayed in the mansion features her holding, not a shaggy dog, but a spiky-furred, glaring cat reminiscent of Louis Wain’s wired felines. 

It is at this juncture that the forking paths of Errázuriz and Boldini become entangled. For reasons unknown, Boldini’s first portrait of Josefina de Alvear never made it to Buenos Aires. In 1912, Boldini repurposed this former work and produced a new portrait of Josefina. This revamped Josefina earned a place of honour in the mansion, above Mr. Errázuriz’s desk in his studio. One imagines him pleasantly bemused each time he encountered this beautiful woman who was and was not his wife. Later, another Boldini portrait resembling Josefina roamed Europe until it was auctioned by Christie’s in 1971. A charcoal sketch by Boldini of a woman haunted by the eerie factions of Josefina was auctioned in France. Based on this drawing, a Boldini portrait of a ghostly Josefina again wandered Europe until it was auctioned in Vienna in 2012. 

Boldini began this mischief with the Errázuriz family at the 1892 Paris Exposition Nationale Des Beaux-Arts. Here, he exhibited two portraits, both mysteriously titled: one as Portrait de Mme E, and the other as Portrait de Mlle E. The Madame was relentlessly identified as Josefina de Alvear, and the Mademoiselle as her daughter, also named, in mystifying García Márquez recurrence, Josefina. Later, these hasty nominations were reconsidered given that Josefina (mother) and Matías (father), not to be confused with their son Matías, were married in 1897.

All these portraits, unmoored in time and space, labile in form, seem to float in an ethereal atmosphere of “an uncertain legacy of incongruous sketches.”

​2. The Good Book

Matías’ library in the mansion contained rows and rows of lush leather-bound books, their spines engraved with names and inscriptions in gilt lettering like so many narrow headstones. One hopes Matias pursued book collecting in his own Proustian “façon particulière,” and not in the maniacal manner of an agitated bibliophile, a disorder that leaves one wondering if bibliophiles suffer more as feverish readers or as unhealthy hoarders. Sadly, he departed with most of his books in a two-day auction held in Buenos Aires. This mournful departure recalls Walter Benjamin’s fateful dictum that a collection loses its meaning when it loses its collector. Benjamin ends his lament with a fitting epitaph for Matías: “Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.”

One book in Matias’ library was a French novel titled L’Abbé Constantin, written by Ludovic Halévy and published in 1888.  The novel is undeniably conventional. It tells the story of a kind Catholic Priest and the idyllic community he shepherds. Calamity strikes when two American women appear: Madame Scott and her younger sister, Bettina, who sparks an inauspicious romance. The Abbé cautiously maneuvers around the devilish Madame Scott, who brandishes a three-pronged pitchfork of being an actor, rich, and “une hérétique…protestante.” A Roman Catholic deus ex machina saves the day, uncovering the sisters’ Catholic roots. This plot twist blesses Bettina’s engagement to a gallant army officer, making her a French Lieutenant’s Woman without the postmodern twist. 

​3. The Red Rose of Paris, France

This 1888 edition of L’Abbé Constantin features eighteen full-page colour illustrations. To create these illustrations the academic Madame Madeleine Lemaire was selected, among the many French artists of the time, from the smug avant-garde to the dull academics. As a classic genre artist, Madame Lemaire specialized in still-life watercolours, particularly roses, with Stein-like redundancy. She painted roses in gardens; she painted roses within an ample floral arrangement; she painted a solitary red rose, gently inclined, cupped in its calyx of green sepals, the softly curled petals whorling delicately, the thorns almost invisible. 

“Madame Lemaire painted almost as many roses as God created,” Alexandre Dumas fils declaimed in fluent French. As her rumoured secret lover, his blasphemous flattery perhaps sprouted from reckless passion. To praise Madame Lemaire as “l’impératrice des roses” seems more objective if the compliment emanates from a disinterested party like Robert Montesquiou. A poet and critic, he embodied the stylish and sophisticated Parisian dandy. He inspired the Baron de Charlus character in Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Both elegant luminaries met in Madeleine Lemaire’s famed Parisian salon. Another character in Proust’s novel, Madame Verdurin, was based on certain qualities of Madeleine, without the fond memories of tea and cake. 

In 2010, an exhibition was held in Paris of women artists linked to the life and times of Marcel Proust. The long-forgotten Madeleine was represented by a large-format painting titled Le Char de Fées, successfully shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. 

4. Terrible, Strange, Sublime and Beauteous Shapes

Three fierce, snarling griffins spread their blue wings, like a ferocious version of the Wizard of Oz’s flying monkeys, and draw The Chariot of Fairies soaring through the heavens. Three fairies ride the golden chariot in majestic poise, arrayed in full fairy regalia and windswept in gauzy elegance, the chime of Tchaikovsky’s celeste ringing in one’s mind. They are carefully coiffured as a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. One fairy sits boldly upfront, and the other two stand bravely in the back. With their pearly faces and the eggshell white skin of their bare shoulders glowing, the thinly clothed fairies clutch their wands as if anxious to be airborne. They scan the skies in different directions, eager to confront a portentous marvel to reckon with, one hopes not air turbulence. At the centre of the picture, the seated fairy’s right bare breast points a rosy nipple at you.

If you follow the diagonal line from this point toward the upper left-hand corner of the canvas, a pair of dark, chaffing eyes halts your gaze. The eyes belong to a fourth fairy, with only her head popping up unexpectedly behind the upright fairies. She has a ruddy complexion, tousled black hair with feathery bangs covering her forehead, and a hint of dark Frida Kahlo eyebrows. Her bony fingers rest on her wand while her teasing expression and bizarre pose contrast with those of the other three fairies. The spell is heightened by this odd intruder. Who is this fairy staring straight at you? 

​5. Framed Portrait

Madame Lemaire was forty-seven years old and happily divorced for twelve years when she exhibited this painting at the 1892 Paris Exposition Nationale Des Beaux-Arts. A few years later, she was appointed Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the third female artist to receive the honour after Virginie Demont-Breton and Rosa Bonheur. Lemaire must have felt accomplished and proud, her strong and ambitious character reinforced.

However, some vicious backbiting creatures lurked in the darker corners of her salon. A guest derided the sessions held in her glass-roofed studio as uncomfortable and suffocating experiences with overly extended musical interludes. Another person sneered about a dark peach fuzz on Lemaire’s face. Her unkind mentor crowed to anyone within earshot that “everything she paints has a moustache.” 

If one compares photographs taken of Lemaire with the face that pops up behind the fairies, a certain resemblance emerges: the reddish complexion, the thick eyebrows, the aloof stare, the black hair, the Nubian-like nose. 

One difference stands out. In Lemaire’s photographic portraits, her hair always holds up high, unlike the fairy’s bushy mane that playfully flows down to her shoulders. This fairy proudly lets her hair down with a confident, impish glare and a self-assured grin of sardonic mocking.

Amaiur Attam

Amaiur Attam was born in Santiago de Chile in 1959, and spent the 1960s living in Southern California, eventually settling in Europe and finally retiring in a remote village in northwestern Spain overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Amaiur writes CNF.

Main Sources:
​
Ringelberg, Kirstin. “Reading cisheteronormativity into the Art Historical Archives.” Arts, vol. 13, no. 3, 14 May 2024, p. 89, https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030089
Espejo Fernández, Alejandro. “An Argentinian in Paris: Josefina de Alvear de Errázuriz and the Belle Époque Painters.” Prieto Ustio, Ester. Coleccionismo, Mecenazgo y Mercado Artístico: Su Proyección En Europa y América, 2018, p. 41, Universidad de Sevilla.
Nine, Lucas. “El misterio de los retratos de la familia Errázuriz Alvear.” Diario Página/12, 19 de Febrero de 2023, Buenos Aires, Argentina. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/524481-el-misterio-de-los-retratos-de-la-familia-errazuriz-alvear/

The Arnolfini's Mirror

This is the way we wish marriage was -
the Arnolfini couple hand-fasted
in the honey-coloured room in Bruges,
their sidelong gaze melding them,
as much as the clasping of hands,
his left within her right, equally slender, and pale as milk.

 We see them standing, two shoulder-breadths apart
in their magnificent wedding clothes.
Her emerald gown, trimmed in ermine, has a full train
whose folds
make a sculptured sea upon the polished boards.
The dress’s sumptuousness, its high padded waist
serve to show how modest is the bearing
of the woman herself.
Her face is the small flower here.

Her new husband, in his dark-brown calf-length cloak,
resembles an elongated bell.
His somewhat ridiculous stovepipe hat
black, full-brimmed
lengthens a face already lean and vulpine.
He has the pallor of the banker
cloistered with numbers,
deploying skills, gleaned out of Italy,
to make them multiply.

As evidence of his wealth, we see
the open casement with its glazed medallions
the oranges ripening on the sill,
the metalwork chandelier with its look of Brussels lace,
the little dog at their feet, rare as a Pekinese,
and the bevelled mirror on the wall behind them,
exactly above their joined white hands,
which reveals aspects of the room
that would otherwise be hidden from us,
the beams of the ceiling,
a second window,
and two witnesses, one in sky blue,
who have stood in silence as the couple spoke their vows.

We know that one of the witnesses
was the painter himself.
Johann de Eyck fuit hic he inscribed beneath the mirror
Johann van Eyck was here.
He, the maker, plied the wafer-thin layers
of paint, lap over lap
so translucent, they trap the light
and render this moment of mild union
eternal for us.
We too are witnesses to a yet unsullied
promise in a honey-coloured room.

In her apartment in Wood Green
when she was studying at the LSE,
my friend Linda had a framed print
of the Arnolfinis’ marriage on her wall.
There was an uncanny melding, in that
the young husband she would shortly meet
had a vulpine beauty, much like
the tall-hatted banker in Bruges.

Linda’s marriage ended badly,
but there must have been, in the beginning,
a yielding gaze, a hand-fasting,
of wholly ripening promise,
the equal of that nuptial chamber,
where van Eyck stood witness
and caught the light in wafer-thin
layers of paint,
and showed Love trembling,
in joyous expectation of perfection,
shining back at us
out of a mirror, bevelled and all-revealing.

Wendy MacIntyre
​
Wendy MacIntyre: "I am a Scots-born Canadian citizen, with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Of my five novels published with Canadian literary presses, the most recent is Hunting Piero (Thistledown Press, 2017), which The Toronto Star called “a fabulist tale that crosses the centuries with its themes of art, ethics and the natural world.” I have also published short fiction and poetry in literary journals including Cleaver Magazine, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review and Acumen (U.K.) My author’s website is wendymacintyreauthor.ca."

​Trumpets!
​
She would run to the mountains that day, she decided, just as she had decided not long ago to move to the desert to save herself. They had told her that it’d be too hard out there, 35 miles from the nearest pharmacy, alone with her headaches and moods, the pains that shot through her skull and left molten sunlight dripping from her bedroom ceiling even in the most absolute dark. But she had gone to the desert to treat the headaches, to let the silence heal her perforated brain, and out here she had found total relief from intruding sensation: no people, no machines, little life, hardly any wind, and when there was wind it did not carry the sounds or smells of something far away. In the stillness, the belt around her head loosened and the hallucinations faded. But then one terrible day they came, Trumpets! - - flourishing in the mountains, exactly at noon, a thunderclap across the dry-brush plain that rattled the window of her shack. After a minute they stopped and left her in the pounding silence. They came back the next day, and the next, at noon without fail, and though they didn’t sound for long their booming exuberance was enough to make her nights sleepless and fill her mornings with dread. The headaches returned and bright amoebas tilted across her vision once more. They would keep playing until she went to them; she knew that the men playing these trumpets would keep blowing until they had all exchanged words. So she got up early that morning to run. She showered, dressed in clean pants and a white shirt, clipped her hair behind her head, slow, grinding work in her condition. Already it was time to go. She stood up from her cot and walked outside, white shoes on her feet, up the empty road, eyes on the mountains ahead. At noon they started to play. Yes I will go to them, she said. Yes I will meet them, I will go, I will go. She started to run.

Jordan Gisselbrecht

Jordan Gisselbrecht lives in Washington, DC. His fiction has appeared in or will be out soon in PRISM international, The End, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere.

Bowl with Human Feet 
Predynastic Egypt, circa 3700-3450 B.C. 
 
Stout feet support the round open bowl.  Baby feet. Or swollen feet, under a pregnant belly.  You’re carrying low, must be a boy. Gentle curve of red-brown clay, vessel tipping slightly forward. Similar in form, the Met notes, to the hieroglyph that means “to bring,” “to offer.”  Or to a symbol that means “pure” as in water, as in source of life. It’s too ancient for us to know what it bore, why it has feet.  Footed bowl, trifle bowl, bowl of wonder. Perhaps used for offerings to a deity or the dead. Perhaps to hold water to cleanse or to drink. Perhaps to cup petals, other-worldly blue lotus. Perhaps to serve beer, bread, the daily gruel. How did this piece of pottery withstand nearly 6,000 years? What if the world seems set to destruct? Hammer to the head, hate on the Jumbotron, drone attacks, missile strikes, blocked grain, conflagration.  Didn’t we all come from a fat belly, start with small feet? Don’t we all need to be held and fed? Rim of civilization, tilt of the earth, everything off kilter and the bowl is still standing on its sturdy little feet. 
​
Christine Osvald-Mruz
​
Christine Osvald-Mruz is an attorney in private practice and the mother of four sons. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Christine is the daughter of a Hungarian immigrant father who taught French and an English-teacher mother. Originally from Long Island, New York, she lives in Morristown, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Atlanta Review.