The Gift of Tears 

At panic's valley, penchant's peak...
...what you would hide her art will seek
as mirror in which you reveal
what she has found and knows you feel...
 
...confusion as the frame of fear
surrounding what within is clear...
...the azure of an endless sky
where clouds are merely passing by
 
and songs of love are softly heard
as sun unseen by light inferred
that whitens billows even more
of lifting shrouds becoming door
 
through which you'll pass as you accept
the gift of tears that she has wept.

Portly Bard

Portly Bard: Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.

Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart. ​

**

​Editor's note: This poem is from a very special collaboration between Portly Bard and Lorette. The book, Thinking Inside the Box, features a dialogue in poetry and art, with ekphrastic pairings and a back and forth discussion between the artists on the meaning of painting, poetry, and life. You can get a full colour hardback or paperback copy at Amazon by clicking on the cover image below. 

You can also get a completely free digital copy by scrolling down. When we created this project, we wanted to make it accessible to anyone who was interested in looking at it, as well as having a coffee table and shelf version. 

​Death in Tepito
 
And just like that, you are there again, pushing your way through the yellow tents of Tepito’s market. You cannot stay away from Mexico. It is like skydiving, or popping amphetamines. It is life at the crescendo. These stalls of towering flowers, these heaps of chintzy, absurd toys are a labyrinth connecting the Centro Historico with the no-go barrio. Here, heads roll, if they’re lucky.  
 
At the north and east of the squalor of caged dogs and baby birds, past baskets of chipotle crickets, nopales, past skyscraper shoeboxes of wrestling masks and diablito figurines, you slip into the streets.
 
You shake your head curtly whenever a twin set of stony eyes latch onto yours. You aren’t looking for blow or a guerrilla machine gun for a steal. You have no list of enemies you want dead. 
 
But you ARE looking for death, after all, and haven’t you always been? Tonight, you are one of her pilgrims. 
 
You follow the others past the shady men whose faces are covered like old western train bandits. Toss paper money into an upturned cup for an ancient mestiza missing both legs.  She hands you a bouquet of orange and violet chrysanthemums. Armed with sacred offerings, you are now part of the procession. A thousand candles flicker as the river of humans moves toward Her shrine.
 
You approach the church of Santa Muerta, a humble hole now showered in purple and gilt fire. You weren’t expecting to see glory in the grim one’s gaunt visage, but you were hoping for something. A glimpse, at least, of what might come after. But the colours in her aura are festoons of the living. There is nothing there after all, only sockets emptied of sight, and a grinning rope of clattering dentin keys.

Lorette C. Luzajic
 
This was first published in Rune Bear Weekly and in the author's collection, Winter in June.

Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry. Mexico City is her favourite place in the world.

The brilliant innovative surrealist Leonora Carrington has a fascinating life story and a tremendous body of work. Join us Tuesday afternoon on Zoom to discover more about her remarkable art. We will be doing some creative writing exercises using her paintings as well.

The Ekphrastic Academy has added several new workshops. Upcoming Zooms include Women Outsider artists, erotic paintings, the Pre Raphaelites, Warhol, Frida Kahlo, and Still Life.

​Our Zoom sessions are focused on community, conversation, connection, and creativity. Come and explore a range of visual arts and let them ignite your writing practice.

Click on image above, or the link below, to see what's coming soon.

​https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrasticwritingworkshops.html

​Of the Wind 

I sing for you, the merry games of lust, 
with eyes like shrines and flickering icy shines 
to harmonize with glacier’s turquoise dust 
who groans in waterfalls and surging pines.

Let bells roar mightily in spheric 
valleys; waves, let waves fold warmth aweigh. 
My bride, a campanula’s prayer, an 
apple-scented ghostly whiff ... Enchanted strays! 

Must I deform my limbs to keep you near? 
For nature’s huntsmen morph forevermore?
As moonlight, airflow, floods the storm will tear 
our fervor; I’m but petrified and sore. 
​
I mourn for you, the blind ones’ passionate arts, 
with ears enclosed from my confiding heart.

Sophie Kehan Chen 

Kehan Chen is a sophomore at Dover-Sherborn High School. Through her imaginative expression and intellectual inquiry, Kehan invites readers to understand love and passion through semi-surrealistic metaphors, strong inquisitive voices, and vivid auditory and olfactory experiences. Passionate for poetry, short stories, and classical music, Kehan’s poems are inspired by not only poets such as Heine, Keats, Tagore, and Hsu Chih-mo, but also novelist Turgenev and composer Ravel.  

​Haiku

found calligraphy
touched with silver at daybreak:  
the brushwork of slugs

**
​
this unhurried life
a single trail of the brush:  
slug being slug

Daniel Gustafsson 

Daniel Gustafsson is a bi-lingual poet, writing and publishing in both English and his native Swedish. His most recent pamphlet is Fordings (Marble Poetry, 2020), but much new work has appeared since in a variety of publications in the UK, the US, and Sweden, notably Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry (Bournbrook Press, 2022). He lives in York, England. 

​Seurat’s The Stone Breakers

They swing their mallets
breaking stones
into smaller stones
into a rubble of brushstrokes.
Down-to-earth iconoclasts
they hammer away at the Image
that crumbles under the blows
inviolable no longer
until only the figures of the three stone breakers
can be recognized
breaking the world into fragments
and the fragments into
smaller fragments
and the senseless hammering
goes on and on
because once started
it cannot be stopped
and the world crumbles
before our eyes
and falls to dust.

Peter De Swart

Peter de Swart was born in Holland, studied philosophy in Paris, art in Los Angeles, and resides in the Bay Area. He is a sculptor by profession (peterdeswartsculpture.net) with an abiding interest in literature. Short stories have been published in the Georgia Review, Oxford magazine, American Writing, the Wisconsin review and other magazines.

​On Seeing Agnes Martin's Night Sea

I did not know this painting, though I know
The artist well.  Blue, big as the ocean,
On my phone a pale blue dot. No picture
Can capture the the way it moves and changes
As you move your eyes from patch to patch and
Back again. People pop in and study
Just one patch. Can they think they've seen it all?
Persistence of memory makes each glance
New, eye expecting something else, not rip
Tides phosphorescent, pulling out to sea.

Jim Wolper

Jim Wolper, professional pilot, former professor, and passionate cook, writes poetry, fiction, travel pieces, and philosophical essays, as well as technical work in Mathematics and in Aviation. His work has appeared in Free Lit, Cenizo Journal, and many technical journals. His chapbook Misdirections will appear soon from Finishing Line Press. He and his wife live with their corgi near Portland, OR.

Our next workshop at The Ekphrastic Academy is a zoom session on the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Join us to learn more about this brilliant artist's life and work. Paintings, sculpture, short stories, and more, Carrington left England and eventually landed in Mexico, where she worked for more than 50 years. She is one of the luminaries of surrealist art, and her life story was as wild as her artworks. ​

Comet Over Snettisham Beach

(for Amanda)

In an age-worn Book of Hours
or disintegrating Apokalypse,
indigo is split by fire, its tail
an incendiary flail scorching
through deep turquoise.

Photographer, then artist, recorded
that miracle of sped flame, as
if a Flammarion woodcut was
incised by visionary burin.
In the post-technological age,

where such visions are increasingly
contraband, so your hazel eyes
& adept fingers did not flinch
from the undertaking, to re-enact
the soaring sphere of pent flame.

Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time  (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016).  A fifth collection, Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate, will appear from Black Herald Press in 2025. He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragicomedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, Tears in the Fence, 3:AM Magazine, Enheduanna, Anvil Tongue, International Times, The Fiend, Syncopation, Epignosis Quarterly, Mande, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.

​Loneliness

I am convinced animals can see our nightmares. Sweet Girl, the cow, looked up as I scratched her neck. “I’m going to make us coffee,” Andrea announced, stroking one of Sweet Girl’s ears. “You’re welcome to stay out here as long as you’d like.” 

Andrea has the intuition of a housekeeper knocking right before you slip the do not disturb sign on the hotel door. Andrea’s always in my parent’s driveway before I am. This weekend she swallowed me in an embrace, begging me to meet her newest addition to the farm. 

Sweet Girl is predicted to not make it past the new year. I want a print of her nose tattooed on my arm, to trace the fuzzy nostrils when I am away and hear her huffs. I want to remember her eyelashes when I lather my own with mascara in the morning. She slowly munches at a lush patch of the field, so gentle like the green blades are glass.  

“She sure knows how to make one swoon. Isn’t that right?” Andrea hands me a mug of steaming coffee. I move to the ground and settle in against the fence, waiting for a heavy head to relax on my lap. “Rumor has it you could use some quiet days.” I chuckle and take a big sip, letting the rich drink burn my throat. Sweet Girl nudges me like I am hers.

Gwenyth Wheat

Gwenyth Wheat (she/her), nominee for Best New Poets 2024, is currently an MFA and MA candidate at McNeese State University. Her work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in Poetry and has appeared in Great Lakes Review, The Poet’s Touchstone, Voicemail Poems, ZAUM, and elsewhere. She is currently a writing instructor and the Poetry Editor for The McNeese Review.