Woman’s Glory (according to man)

Because I could stop for death
By:  Emily Dickinson
“Because I could not stop for death -
He kindly stopped for me -
The carriage held but just ourselves -
And immortality.”

Tearing down, backward progress to
time smeared with vaseline glasses,
pretty, only in distorted 
reality of benefit
to warlords brave behind the screens,
dissecting hard fought, won freedoms.
Afraid of irrelevancy-
If not needed as provider,
What worth?  Murder autonomy.
Because I could not stop for death:

Refusing to bow,
to give in, to give
up - no submission.
Stand against hard blows -
future in peril,
hold strong and prevail;
Absorb the bruises,
ignore the voices
angry and loud as
He kindly stopped for me.

Bow strings taut with accusations:
You are too much, yet not enough;
Allow the soft light to infuse,
blurring hard edges, revealing
glowing beauty of womanhood.
Lean into the arms that protect:
Just pray, obey, keep sweet as your
rights fade into your true purpose:
Support, submit… isolate as
The carriage held but ourselves.

There is no greater 
blessing than to give
your life, your soul, your
essence to home, hearth.
Your beauty to him.
Your body to him.
Exalting on high
his manly ego -
you achieve glory
and immortality. 

Robin White

Robin is a lifelong creative: poet, writer, painter, collagist, and mixed media artist.  She was born and raised in a small gown in Georgia, USA and can drive on a wet red clay road without going in the ditch.  She loves music from gospel to hair metal.  Going thrifting and antiquing followed by good food and good company is a perfect day.   Her dream is to live on the beach at her favorite place in the world, Jekyll Island, GA.

White Birds in Another Life
 
She stands, arms at her sides,
red hair brushed back, head turned
to gaze across a spindly picket fence,
horizon reddened by the sinking sun.
Or is it the pink of dawn that draws 
her patient stare? Is she waiting for 
someone to return, or is she wondering 
how she landed here, white apron crisp
and circled with moons? The dark sky 
pulses with the green of life, verdant 
but half-seen, her dreams in the distance, 
white birds winging in formation 
toward an unknown destination. 
Her heart lifts, then falls, she hears 
the birds call out her name. She keeps 
her outer calm, but deep inside 
her heart responds. In another life 
she knows she wouldn’t stay. 
A wind would rise to give her wings, 
carry her away.

Field of Embers
 
She stands in a field of embers,
orange flames leaping up around her
red-hot cinders sizzling in the sky
like malevolent stars. 
 
She is resigned, calm amid devastation,
her sad eyes closed and shyly downcast, 
awaiting the outcome. She makes 
no effort to flee. 
 
Did she set this fire or did it erupt 
spontaneously, inevitably, despite
her efforts to create a happy life?
She clutches a tiny house in her arms.
 
Tall boots protect her feet, 
but her hair is wrapped neatly 
with a bow, and her dress is demure, 
fashioned of blue sky 
 
and fluffy clouds, flowers dotting 
a border of green. How can she remain 
coolly steadfast as her dreams
burn to ashes around her? 
 
She stands there, as if condemned,
consigned to immolation by her choices
holding her dreams in her hands
trying to protect her vision of home.

​Debora Tremont

Yuten

Oh, great and powerful Immovable One. Please come to me here and guide me toward wisdom. 

Since I’ve arrived here at Zojoji, I’ve suffered the greatest of humiliations. Though the other acolytes have not said a word, I’m certain that even the wooden walls of the temple laugh at me. 

For I study day in and day out, and yet I struggle to recite a single sutra; to recount any of the day's teachings. I excel only in sweeping floors and cooking miso. And oh, illustrious Wisdom King, how am I to reach enlightenment like this?

It seems that I won’t travel, but a single step on the journey, no matter how hard I try. Even the fine teachers of Zojoji think me hopeless! 

Oh, great Immovable Wisdom King. Please grant me but a hundredth of your all-powerful knowledge, so that I have not renounced the world in vain.    

*  

Wisdom! Wisdom King! Oh, great Immovable One, who stands atop of man, and who, atop of me, leaned, bearing down your insurmountable sword of knowledge. Plunging it down my throat until I choked and gagged, and finally awoke. 

How am I now to go on, oh great Immovable One? I could, only a few nights ago, remember but a single sutra, and now I know as Buddha himself once did. 

Oh, Illustrious Wisdom King! As I kneeled, hands clasped before your likeness, I had the palest hopes of your coming, but under the moon you came. Flanked by your attendants Kongara and Seitaka, your likeness was no longer a mere imitation. 

And I awoke, spitting up pales of blackened mud. Blood mixed with parting ignorance. 

No longer do I studly so much as I myself am studied. But oh, Immovable One! Oh, powerful Wisdom King! I can not stand it. This can’t be it, is it? Is this enlightenment? If it is, then please let this be the last time I kneel, hands clasped before your likeness. 

Oh, great and powerful Wisdom King. Please come to me again, but this time I have another request. Bring with you your diamond rope. ​

Tyson Matthews

Tyson Matthews is a 22-year-old writer from Prince Edward Island, Canada. A writer of primarily short fiction and poetry.

​The Ambassadors.  After Holbein
 
Practitioners of circumstance,
They stand, inured to foreign space,
Embodying the court of France.
Their diplomatic carapace
Deflects the whispering gallery;
Like Guildenstern and Rosencrantz,
Dependent on a king’s esprit,
They carry a distorted shield:
The sign of death, obscurely sealed.
 
The point transcends the specular:
Attempting honestly to see
Subjects the smugly secular
To boredom and indignity,
Discomfort and disturbing loss:
The world of the molecular -
The flesh, the globe, the very cross –
Must scatter into dust before
Death looms in focus from the floor.
 
Sic transit, then, the worldly ghost,
The caustic cornucopia
Of painted veil and silent boast.
The graveyards of Utopia
Gape at our feet; yet in the Square,
Where one-eyed Nelson keeps his post
And birds swoop up from earth to air,
Fresh wonders of perspective start,
Beyond the parables of art.

Julia Griffin

Julia Griffin has published in several online poetry journals, including Light, Lighten Up Online, Classical Outlook, and The Ekphrastic Review. ​

Join Brent Terry and Lorette on Zoom to celebrate Radio Free Nebraska!

This ekphrastic collaboration features the poetry of Brent Terry and collage artworks of Lorette C. Luzajic.

Lorette and Brent will both read. We will interview each other about our art and writing practices and take questions from the audience. It will be an informal and fun discussion with this amazing community.

Free to join. Bring your own Champagne, tea, or soda and celebrate this milestone with us!

To sign up: send an email to [email protected] with RADIO FREE NEBRASKA in subject line. We'll send you a zoom link.

​hugs from Lorette and Brent

​mercy
 
i lie face down in the field
because Mont Sainte-Victoire won’t come to me,
her pale shoulders shrug, 
like Atlas holding up the sky 
as if endurance were a form of tithe
they’d been rehearsing forever.
 
a hoary pine rises skyward,
weathered, feathered, above me, 
frames the mountains like proscenium,
tickling the clouds to clear the way 
for a blue that awaits,
full of sunlit promises, and the great knowledge
that god has a sense of humour, too.
 
watch, the fir needles hiss,
 
and i see the cypresses seek
to suppress the blocks and cubes of man
to overcome the ancient aqueduct
its gray arches 
carving progress into the valley,
and green is losing
to square terracotta houses
who’ve forgotten their curve.
 
it's silent where i lie. 
no voices rise from the menageries
my eye stabilizes, fixed on the mountain,
its weary shoulders
a form of mercy.

PS Conway

PS Conway is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of two books, Echoes Lost in Stars (2024) and Life Sucks (2025). Over the last five years, his work has appeared in The Belfast Review, Spectral Realms, and twenty-five other journals and anthologies. He lives in Upstate New York freezing to death with his wife Susan and often identifies as a palimpsest soaked in red wine

 
Persephone Naps and Saves the Dead
​
She was sleeping naked under his tree, so the old farmer took her, harvested her like wheat, muffled her nose and mouth with his tough, massive hand as he pulled her to his waiting cart. There was nothing she could do, couldn’t kick or scream because the scent of the earth on his palm gave off the odor of night and darkness, and so that’s where she thought she was—asleep. 
 
The moss upon which she’d slept curled softly around her hips and feet, but as soon as her skin left the touch of the furry green, her limbs grew chill, and she struggled to wake. But wake she did not. Not until she was six feet under, twenty feet, thirty feet, right down to the center of the earth.
            
He was not an unkind man, except that he stole her away from the day’s beauty; not cruel in that he didn’t hurt her, except to remove her from all that she wanted, which was to relish that one afternoon away from the sweltering kitchen on that late summer day when the heat rose in waves off the treetops and fields, and birds took shelter in the branches, making the leaves tremble with the flutter of their wings. 
 
She had longed to escape that smelly kitchen where potato peels and gristle piled up on plates. That afternoon, standing at the sink, washing that unending stack of dishes, she saw it in the distance as if for the first time--a tree springing from the center of that flat, dry field, offering the promise of shade and relief. 
 
She turned off the spigot, untied her apron, slipped on her old, black pumps, opened the back door and stepped into the hot, hot sun. The tall, brittle grass scratched her ankles and calves as she trudged towards the ancient oak, its limbs stretching wide, inviting her to partake of its shade. How many times had she looked out the window without really seeing it? Why, in all her years of washing dish after dish, her hands scorched and sore, had she never considered throwing down her rag and crossing the hot, dry field to investigate that enormous grandfather of a tree?
            
Her mind had been stuck ever since her last day as chambermaid. She’d gone upstairs to her master’s bedroom to clean the fireplace when she saw his delightful, huge bed, the sheets and blankets a tangle at the foot of it, the feather pillows piled high like clouds. She was so tired she couldn’t resist, and had lain down, thinking if old Betsy found her there, the woman would simply pinch her and say, get up you silly girl. But it was not old Betsy, it was plain, ugly Marta who hated Persephone because she was everything Marta was not, soft and voluptuous and curvy, but maybe a bit stupid? For what chambermaid would enter her master’s bedroom and lay on his bed and not expect trouble? And so, she told on Persephone and got her demoted to scullery maid. 
            
The dishes kept appearing. Persephone couldn’t rest until every one of them was cleaned and put away. That afternoon she had looked down at her hands bleeding into the white, sudsy water, turning the bubbles pink, then looked up and saw the tree off in the distance, standing so proud and bold and strong. 
 
The tall, brown grass crunched, and field mice squeaked and scurried away as she passed. Crows cawed and reeled overhead, screeching at her disturbance, for when had anyone ever crossed the field? They couldn’t remember. 
 
The moment she stepped out of that hot, blazing sun that scorched the top of her head and the back of her neck and into the shade, it was like sinking a burning finger into snow. The perfumed air smelled like every honeysuckle blossom she’d ever sipped as a child, like roses and hyacinth, like geraniums and marigolds. 
 
And before you know it, Persephone is stripping down to her skin and settling down between the roots of that magnanimous tree. She can no more resist getting naked than she can resist breathing. The filigree of green, feather-soft whirls closes around her limbs like seaweed as she drifts off into the most languorous, delicious, eloquent sleep she’s ever known, far, far away from dishes and demands and exhaustion. 
 
The ancient farmer gazes upon her naked body sprawled out under the cool shade of his tree, his tree! How could she not expect him to take her, to drag her across his field with his big, dirty hands across her tender, full mouth? 
 
Hades takes her down, down, down into the musky, moldy dark where the dead clamor and give him no peace. 
            
Persephone wakes and cries out, sensing that this is all real, as real as the tree had been, as real as her journey across that dry field had been, and that here she is in this new place. And who is this gnarly, old man who smells of a newly dug grave? It is then she believes she is dead.
 
But he’s shaking his head and wagging a knotted finger at her.
            
“Not dead. Renewed.”
            
Persephone trembles, but only a little, for she realizes that she does feel refreshed. And yet she does not know what he has in mind. Will she be stuck down here forever just as she was at the sink?
 
“Where are my clothes?” No sooner does she say this than she is draped in a shimmering gown the color of new ferns unfurling. She breathes in its scent of spring rain. A soft, green light emanates from her dress, and not just that, but her skin, her eyes, her hair.
            
They stare at one another, the old man and the young woman, and reach a truce for she realizes what he offers—a life of purpose. 
 
“Show me where we are,” she says.

Hades leads her through his vast halls where legions of the dead cry out. Persephone takes pity on their poor, hungry souls and spreads her arms wide, shaking green over the hordes. Moss springs up from the ground where the dead stand and curls under their limbs like soft kittens. The dead grow sleepy, sigh, and fall to the ground, smiles on their faces. No worries, no concerns, just gentle slumber until their bodies turn into ash, and a wind blows through the great halls, and the air fills with the dust of the dead, spreading it over the dry, brittle field above where tendrils of green sprout from the earth, and the mice delight in having new shoots to eat, and the earthworms gambol in the moist soil, and the great tree spreads its limbs, shedding bounty.

Polly Hansen

Polly Hansen is a flutist and writer. Her first job out of graduate school after experiencing homelessness and trafficking was as editor of a flute magazine, which launched her career in publishing. Today, she produces two nationally syndicated, weekly radio programs. She’s published in Newsweek, The Sun, LIT Magazine, and numerous literary journals. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband and two black dogs often mistaken for small black bears on leashes. You can learn about her memoir at pollyhansen.com.

The Tree of Dreams

Fruit on the tree
Turns to ash
And spirals
Slow and graceful
on the morning air
settles on bent shoulders
the silver powder
of broken dreams
The hand flicks
the coat-sleeve
Plants another sapling
in the turf of faith
Wonder as it grows
Deny as it withers
Dismiss as it dies
Then move on easy

Damp roots preserved
Under the dust
Of memory
Embers fanned
Of hope long gone
For a moment
Cold smoke
Chokes the lungs

A thousand
Shades of grey
Dance in the air
Carpet the ground
Strange beauty
At the end of dreams
Says we managed to hope
All this, for a while
And when our spirits
Ride the ash
Of earthly dreams
To heaven
Hope is not found
Among the trash
We’re asked to leave
Outside the door

Mary Featherstone

Mary Featherstone is a retired arts administrator based in Paris, France.  An Anglo-French dual national, she moved to France from the UK over 35 years ago. Having spent much of her life enjoying connecting artists together and promoting the work of others, she is now finding time to develop her own writing. She recently retired from her role as administrator of le Pavé d’Orsay Arts space and is a member of a Protestant church in the Marais district, where she volunteers in various capacities, including helping with meals for those experiencing homelessness. 

Girl Before a Mirror 
 
One of us is pregnant.
She did what we animals do, or,
it was done to her; she cannot know
what is reflection and what is real. 
Hundreds of eyes,
the air is heavy with them,
are grasping for her womb.                              
She is a moon girl so parts of her                   
are missing.  
The sun girl glares through fire; 
she does not know
that sun striking the mirror
could turn our world to ash.                   
We do not know if mirror girl looks  
through scarf or shroud,
how long she will be without air.
No. I will not see, 
moon girl blocks with her hand, 
this is not happening;
her other hand touches
mirror girl’s shoulder.

Barbara Johnstone

Barbara Johnstone lives near Seattle, WA where she came from the desert beauty of New Mexico for the tall trees, lush greenery, rivers and ocean of the Pacific Northwest.  She worked for 43 years as a psychotherapist, providing individual and couples therapy.  Her fifth-grade teacher inspired her love of poetry and she memorized and wrote poems privately until eventually (at 64) she began to attend readings, take workshops and send work out.  Poems are in a variety of journals including Pilgrimage, Persimmon Tree, Diagram and Crosswinds Poetry Journal.  

Red Shoes Retrospective 

How wicked was that witch? She of the verdigris skin, carmine nails, ruby pumps. The one crushed under the weight of narrative symbolism. What if Dorothy, instead of Glinda fastening them to her feet, had taken the red shoes for herself? What would that say about her? 

Click-click-click. 

How spoiled was another fairy-tale girl? Karen begged for scarlet leather slippers. Got them. Couldn’t bear their restless fascination. Pleaded to have her feet chopped off, footwear and all. Those bloody stumps danced themselves into the forest. Follow those shoes. Into Walmart. Where you can buy t-shirts reading, Your body, my choice. 

Click-click-click. 

How possessed was the ballerina, Victoria? This iteration always on her toes. Her secret a mangled spirit seeping through crimson pointes steadfastly dancing her to death. 

Click-click-click. 

Vanity, though. The illusion, of control. Go ahead. Give those pretty shoes a twirl. Tappity-tap, stilettos on stone; clonkity-clonk, heels on yellow brick; swish-chasse, ballet slippers on wood. The slow sinking of princess heels into soil. A corpse posed. 

Click. 

Click. 
​
Click. 

Camille LeFevre

Camille LeFevre crafts poetry and creative nonfiction, and teaches writing workshops on art and place, from her home on the unceded lands of the Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache in Northern Arizona. Her essay, “Body Topography,” published in The Dodge, was selected for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology. Her first poetry collection, Sandstone and Kin, will be published in Fall 2026. Her work also appears in Poets for Science, wildscape.literary, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Metphrastics, Fugue, Unleash Literary, Electric Lit, Brevity Blog, and other publications. She’s thrilled to have her work, once again, in The Ekphrastic Review.