 Ioánnina, by Edward Lear (England) 1857 Ungovernable Forces Edward Lear, Ioánnina, 6th November 1848 A letter’s wilful invitation to chase fresh adventures -- Cairo, Sinai, Palestine with my friend John Cross -- and the spoilsport later season so unreasonable here in Epirus, where the climate is too bitter to host outdoor sketching, nudge me on a different path: I will defer completion of this tour until the spring sun warms my painting hand, and these surly rains skulk into hiding with their coldness. What’s more — Charles Church, my wandering companion, whom cholera and quarantine kept from me three months ago, is now nearby, our fellowship rekindled. But there are further convoluted logics for diversion: the published whims and quirks of steamboat timetables. And worse: insatiable caprices within my feet, fidgeting so much for daily novelty they seem not even to be part of me. To the interior of my darling ankles I must forward some strange new verses of complaint. Michael Loveday Author's note: "In 1848, the poet and landscape painter Edward Lear sailed from Constantinople to Saloníki (now Thessaloniki) in Northeast Greece, in order to embark upon a tour of southeastern Europe with a friend. A cholera outbreak blocked his onward route. Despite having only recently recovered from malaria, Lear decided to travel alone into Ottoman-ruled Albania, at that time a territory ravaged by conflict. His journals and landscape paintings were later published as one of the most celebrated travel books of the 19th century: Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c. (1851)." Michael Loveday lives in Bath, England, and is the author of two books and two pamphlets/chapbooks. His debut poetry pamphlet He Said/She Said was published by HappenStance Press in 2011. His most recent book is the writing craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022), which won an Arts Council England Award and three international book awards. More information is available at: www.michaelloveday.com
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Missing Artist Found in the Railyard This poem was inspired by the artist, her story, and by Transmission Session, 2022: (scroll down to last painting) https://2022.rca.ac.uk/students/sarah-cunningham/ Between the first and third vertebrae, where the tracks switch, allowing passage to another direction. Loud drone like someone pressing a piano pedal, sostenuto silencing her pale flesh. A transmission to once gold fields now brown, where catkins catch reeds from river channels, where cows had given up a future pasture. Her youth convinced us to imagine knifepricks, a righteousness, though her website lacquered best practices, hundreds interviewed on meaningful connections. Her paintbrush demanded smoothness, yet she rough- brushed, captive to the linen canvas. Perhaps a lilac beard of the past spring snuck into the final landscape, with steps of green and ivy walls-- a southerly climate? Italy with swollen afternoon windows shuttered, seeping through the cracks, streaks of carmen. Laurel Benjamin Laurel Benjamin's new collection, Flowers on a Train, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She is a San Francisco Bay Area poet, active with the Women’s Poetry Salon. She curates Ekphrastic Writers and is a reader for Common Ground Review. Current publications: Pirene's Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. She received an Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College. She invented a secret language with her brother. Find her at: https://www.laurelbenjamin.com  Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1930 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 1V At first glance it’s a stark and shocking face: Green hood (or hair) like large leaves. Black. No eyes. A giant nostril (or is that a mouth?) That rises to a blade with a sharp point. One feels one’s being stared at. Such a stare Is disconcerting! What of one is seen? And can that be evaded? Held and probed, The viewer may be daunted, and recoil. Or may continue gazing. If a flower, Its mystery’s intact. It’s deep and dark, Yet may not be the hostile force one feared. It may indeed be friendly, even known, If one can just gaze long enough, and give Oneself to what, perhaps, is gazing back. Bruce Bennett Bruce Bennett is author of ten books of poetry and more than thirty chapbooks. His most recent chapbook is Images Into Words (The Dove Block Project, 2022), a collection of ekphrastic poems co-authored with poet Jim Crenner. Bennett was a founder and editor of the journals Field and Ploughshares, and from 1973-2014 taught Literature and Creative Writing and directed the Visiting Writers Series at Wells College. In 2012 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Aurora, New York. His poetry website is https://justanotherdayinjustourtown.com.  The Face of War, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1940 The Face of War still dreaming of more efficient ways to maim and murder ourselves. what to say to poison gas, mass radiation and napalm. to this Hundred Years’ War. to the snap and crack of broken bones. missing limbs. the smell of burnt and rotted flesh. millions of disappeared, disabled, distended. so many dead. my guts wrench. despair and disgust choke my throat. these hell-stones in my stomach will not pass. I can say humankind is an oxymoron. civilization, a misnomer. doublespeak. how to explain all this hate, this mass hysteria? I say hatred doesn’t simply wheedle its way into us, metastasize, and then find a place as insuppressible as breathing, eating or sleeping. it’s a bloodlust pumped through our veins by that evil engine in our chest, with us from very beginning, prenatal, delivered. compassion and tolerance only mop up the afterbirth. John M. Davis John M. Davis currently lives in Visalia, California. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, includingDescant (Canada), The Comstock Review, Gyroscope Review, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Constellations and Reunion: The Dallas Review. The Mojave, a chapbook, was published by the Dallas Community Poets.  A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat (France) 1884 The Woman on the Island and the Woman at the Diner Although La Grande Jatte shimmers in the sun, one woman stands in shadow, tense and wary This Sunday walk’s unsettling; if undone by innuendo, she may never marry. The woman in New York sits in harsh light that carves her face and neck in gaunt relief, but darkness lurks behind her: inky night might be the shadow of impending grief. These women stir our curiosity, the artists’ palettes colouring our urge to make up stories, as if we could see lives off the canvas. Theirs and ours may merge as we interpret worlds the artists made and contemplate the secrets half-betrayed. Our own secrets are also half-betrayed as we imagine two biographies. As if I am the woman in the shade, I burden her with my uncertainties. Has she arranged her hair beneath her hat with due discretion? Is her back as straight as is required of an aristocrat? Is she sufficiently poised and sedate? Or I sit in the diner and suppose the woman’s loose red hair means confidence, her forward slouch and painted lips expose her boldness. I can’t cite much evidence for my assumptions—these women don’t speak-- but there are hints in each painter’s technique. We read a painter’s hints in his technique. Throughout the canvas filled with Seurat’s dots, which render faces oddly vague, we peek at unknowable characters in plots that never intersect. Each face looks down or blankly forward—their expressions bland-- not toward another. Every bustled gown and drab suit on this crowded strip of land disguises one more stranger. Though less proper, the New York figures also make a show of cool reserve; with longer brush strokes, Hopper drew hawkish faces—but it’s hard to know if what’s so frankly lit is misery, a jaded sort of pleasure, or ennui. I’d guess it’s with less pleasure than ennui that each woman regards the man beside her-- both silent, smoking. Neither seems to be the woman’s lover, one who’s satisfied her. The man in France is top-hatted and tall; his presence renders her more dignified and decent, so she grips her parasol, stares straight ahead, walks mutely at his side. The man in New York, close enough to hold the woman’s hand, does not; they’re both restrained by mirthless poise. Companionship looks cold in both these scenes; no warmth is even feigned. I’ve known such men: vacant, if debonair; of course these women train their eyes elsewhere. I see what they see, as they look elsewhere. With one I see more hats, more bustled skirts, a river, trees, and people who might stare if she takes one wrong step. Her stiff neck hurts, but posture might just help her pass inspection. The woman in the diner doesn’t look at her surroundings; she makes no connection with either seated man or with the cook in his white cap in front of her. Instead, she stares at what might be the check; it’s nearly invisible before the dazzling red of her slim dress (no bustle here). Not merely considering the bill, she seems to weigh some other costs. What does each woman pay? The place and time dictate what each will pay for happiness, respectability, or what else she might seek. But what if they switched places? Could the bustled woman be emancipated by a bright red dress, the diner’s sharper contours, and late-night autonomy? And would the blurriness of dots, the long skirts, and the island light disclose some softness in the other’s being? It seems more likely both would be aghast, the change of scene disturbing more than freeing. Each woman was in fact perfectly cast, essential to each painting; to confuse the two lives disrespects these painted views. These women are more than these painted views-- this park or diner, staid or daring dress, and dull companions. With these well-drawn clues that give breath to lives long since gone, we guess about the blanks paint hasn’t filled. But though I almost smell the fresh green grass in France and urn-stale coffee in New York, I know I may have misread every circumstance. And yet I’ve met these women. One is shy, the other bitter; each of them will keep her secrets, braving what she can’t defy; and both will sleep alone tonight and weep-- although the diner’s food suits everyone, although La Grande Jatte shimmers in the sun. Jean L. Kreiling Jean L. Kreiling is the author of three books of poems; another is forthcoming soon from Able Muse Press. Her work has been awarded the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, the Frost Farm Prize, and the Able Muse Write Prize, among other honours; she lives on the coast of Massachusetts.  Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1942  Underland, by Michael Smith (Canada) 2020. Click image for artist site. Underland i On the steep bank opposite my cabin is a cave, perhaps just a hole opened after a tall beech tree toppled to lie as a host for moss or chanterelles. In winter light it’s visible, a darkness with roots like tentacles around it as if about to whisper hoarsely, “Enter.” There could be adders nesting. I am afraid. ii To step with care under an arch of limestone recalling Romanesque becoming Gothic when the verge escapement was invented and memory began to click with precision, not flow or flicker like water or a flame on a monastery candle burning down, to step with care stooping into narrowness, into the dark that comes before revelation. iii Deep within a nave that twists to labyrinth, navis then ship, becoming the voyage itself, an ark, a covenant with the spectrum, a heart beats unlike a clock, quickening as it designs vaults, overpaints, splashes, squirts, slaps on vanishing points with a straight edge as beyond all this a bison licks its flank and a hand’s outline persists on rock. iv Warned not experiment with manganese dioxide, one of the pigments Upper Palaeolithic artists used, Lorblanchet recorded, “I put the charcoal powder in my mouth, chewed and diluted it with saliva and water. The mixture of charcoal and saliva extended with water forms a paint that adheres quite well to a cave wall.” v How does a painting smell? How does it feel to the touch? “If you were allowed to touch the painting you might get a really good idea nevertheless of how they got there.” Does the painting sing like Sonny Boy Williamson, his old man’s husky voice, his harmonica stuck upright in his mouth like a fat cigar vibrating the smoky blue notes of vision? vi A dry broad brush scrapes the canvas, blurring colour to depth, sfumato. “ … never be able to suspect underneath is a black painting and on top a blue painting.” In the cave of making I grope my way downwards in the darkness until my eyes open into the blue light where sky gods are present. I see I see I see I see I see.  Outside Lines, by Michael Smith (Canada) 2020. Click image for artist site. Outside Lines i The broad-leafed ivy has shed its last burgundy hand span. So only brown dreadlock plaits of creeper remain into which clusters of berries have been woven. Beside them I clip begonias to their roots and disturb a black spider to scuttle over my fingers as afternoon sunlight disintegrates on quartz pebbles under dogwood and a cypress that must be cut back in spring. ii On the ridge behind us before the snow comes down the woods are a mediocre varnished Dutch landscape, Dirk van Hoogpratel’s last work before he was whitewashed into religion and a hatred of the image as the snow begins to displace those coarse lines of bigotry with lethal gentle gusts and drifts like dustsheets laid over a chapel’s furniture. iii At the onset of spring the artist sketches outside with liquid graphite black verticals of maple trunks and unnames the lines of winter. Inside on canvas black and grey, then burnt ochre, Prussian blue, lime, chartreuse, canary, moss, magenta, cobalt applied with brush, blade, drip, until titanium white, the sun’s dazzle through the trees or on melting water. iv In May after blossom as the various greens arrive I’ll climb the ridge to look for the first Crane’s-Bill, Odin’s Grace, the colour of Victorian silk, nature imitating craft and hear the artist, “I feel there’s something going on now,” but no more than that as if what his work means can be walked up to, visited, seen, but never named. James Sutherland-Smith Author's note: In "Underland," stanza iv is taken almost verbatim from The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis Williams (Thames and Hudson, reprinted 2020 pp 218-9).The quotations in stanzas v and vi are from the artist in the video Underland as is the quotation in stanza iv in Outside Lines. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/WhctKLbVZWBWskQbzvzbtCQrMzdfSjnNKSgFwHZzgpqJBgKTCgfdFSLVMLlrDHmgGjvsWVL James Sutherland-Smith was born in Scotland in 1948, but has lived in Slovakia since 1989. He has published eight collections, the latest being Small Scale Observations from Shearsman. He has translated a number of Slovak and Serbian poets, a selection from Eva Luka’s poetry being due from Seagull Books in 2025.  Discover the joy of juxtaposition and the awakening of creativity through collage, with Ekphrastic editor Lorette C. Luzajic. I have been asked about a course like this for some time! This four week course will get you started on your own collage mixed media practice. We will look at the history of collage, discover the diverse work of artists around the world, and create our own projects. The course will cover topics like colour in collage and mixed media, composition, tools, adhesives, collecting and creating collage materials, choosing themes that resonate, and finding your voice. Each week will include both discussion of the above topics and creation of your own collage mixed media pieces. You will bring your own materials to the Zoom session. You can use anything you have on hand. You will need scissors, a glue stick, acrylic gel medium, acrylic paints and brushes, and a stack of collected images and papers from magazines, books, and brochures. You can work on small canvases, canvas boards, or watercolour/mixed media/acrylic paper. You can also bring crayons, pencil crayons, pastels, and any other media you like. Dates: June 2025 Wednesday, June 4, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Wednesday, June 11, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Wednesday, June 18, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Wednesday, June 25, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Lorette C. Luzajic, the editor of The Ekphrastic Review, is an award-winning collage and mixed media artist. She creates abstract, surreal, and urban collage paintings. Her work has been exhibited in hundreds of group and solo shows in Toronto and around the world. Venues include galleries, museums, restaurants, cafes, hotels, banks, offices, and corporate lobbies. Her work has appeared on the cover of two textbooks, several poetry books, a novel, and in countless literary journals. It has been shown on a billboard in New Orleans and used in an ad campaign for a Madrid based diamond company. She was invited to represent Canada in a symposium in North Africa, a guest of the Ministry of Culture of Tunisia. Her work won first place and $5000 from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Canada. Lorette has collectors in forty countries so far, including Canada, USA, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Mexico, China, Estonia, UAE, England, and Saudi Arabia. Collage and Mixed Media: a four week course on creativity and creation (on zoom)
CA$200.00
Discover the joy of juxtaposition and the awakening of creativity through collage, with Ekphrastic editor Lorette C. Luzajic. This four week course will get you started on your own collage mixed media practice. We will look at the history of collage, discover the diverse work of artists around the world, and create our own projects. The course will cover topics like colour in collage and mixed media, composition, tools, adhesives, collecting and creating collage materials, choosing themes that resonate, and finding your voice. Each week will include both discussion of the above topics and creation of your own collage mixed media pieces. You will bring your own materials to the Zoom session. You can use anything you have on hand. You will need scissors, a glue stick, acrylic gel medium, acrylic paints and brushes, and a stack of collected images and papers from magazines, books, and brochures. You can work on small canvases, canvas boards, or watercolour/mixed media/acrylic paper. You can also bring crayons, pencil crayons, pastels, and any other media you like. Dates: June 2025 Wednesday, June 4, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Wednesday, June 11, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Wednesday, June 18, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Wednesday, June 25, 2025 from 6 to 8 PM eastern time Lorette C. Luzajic, the editor of The Ekphrastic Review, is an award-winning collage and mixed media artist. She creates abstract, surreal, and urban collage paintings. Her work has been exhibited in hundreds of group and solo shows in Toronto and around the world. Venues include galleries, museums, restaurants, cafes, hotels, banks, offices, and corporate lobbies. Her work has appeared on the cover of two textbooks, several poetry books, a novel, and in countless literary journals. It has been shown on a billboard in New Orleans and used in an ad campaign for a Madrid based diamond company. She was invited to represent Canada in a symposium in North Africa, a guest of the Ministry of Culture of Tunisia. Her work won first place and $5000 from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Canada. Lorette has collectors in forty countries so far, including Canada, USA, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Mexico, China, Estonia, UAE, England, and Saudi Arabia. An Ancient Longing after The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010, by David Hockney (England) 2010 Your instinct is to stitch together the seams of the world-- weld limbs and trunks of trees back into place, free yourself of phantasmagoria flooding your senses. You are not a guppy gliding along glass walls of your tank. Nor should you don hat and gloves to go gallivanting with children, slipping and sliding on their sled. Whose woods these are is of no consequence, only that you surrender to their mythology woven in snow-laden sinews that canopy the lane, carried in hearts of trampers who trudge icy drifts and pass like shadow crows crossing overhead. Theirs is a truth as elusive as a sun forever out of reach, its light sluicing branches and warming your cheek against the deepening cold of an English countryside. Chuck Salmons Chuck Salmons is a poet and has served as part of the leadership for the Ohio Poetry Association for more than a decade. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Chiron Review, Pudding Magazine, The Fib Review, Evening Street Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices. He has published three poetry collections: Stargazer Suite (11thour Press, 2016), Patch Job (NightBallet Press, 2017), and The Grace of Gazing Inward: Poems in Response to the Art of Alice Carpenter (Dos Madres Press, 2024). Chuck is recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for poetry, and he performs with the poetry trio Concrete Wink. www. chucksalmons.com Self Portrait as an Electron Cloud I once believed if I lost my keys and arrived home to a locked door, I could simply slip through its layers, the way Ernest Rutherford once feared he would slip right through the floorboards beneath his bed the morning after discovering that an atom is composed of mostly empty space. Thin girl insinuating briskly through the smallest crack, like a sharp breath. This risks sounding as though I thought this page or life could be entered so easily and isn’t the ultimate locked room mystery we know it to be. Finding my way in is just harder these days, my head rippling and folding with repeated attempts. The relief in learning that electrons act more like a cloud of overlapping energy states. No wonder just existing takes so much, this constant fizzing spreading, like a goalkeeper trying to be in all corners of the net at once. Everyone must see -- this mind butter-on-toast-thin, its static ever louder in ways I can’t explain to anyone who could help. There are only so many things one person can be and yet I’m still grieved by all I should. Hand on door, the electrons in each of us press fervently against the other, skin and particle board, an invisible shift somehow chaste and ardent, subtly deforming and reforming our shapes in the process. This effect magnified exponentially between living things, say two human beings. I could end here. Dagne Forrest This piece was inspired by Head of Paula Eyles, by Frank Auerbach (Britain, b. Germany) 1972. https://www.artnet.com/artists/frank-auerbach/head-of-paula-eyles-udzojzxJvzGqpmzgygJjyQ2 Dagne Forrest is a Canadian poet. In 2021 she was included in Canada’s Poem in Your Pocket campaign. Her work has appeared in december magazine, Rust + Moth, Lake Effect, SWWIM Every Day, Prism International, Whale Road Review, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. She belongs to Painted Bride Quarterly’s senior editorial and podcast teams. Her debut chapbook will be published by Baseline Press in 2025. Thank you to everyone who participated in the Send in the Clowns ekphrastic contest. It was a joy to read through the poetry and flash fiction that these wonderful artworks inspired! Please find below, in alphabetic order by author, the responses selected for publication in The Ekphrastic Review. A big thank you to editor Sandi Stromberg for choosing the flash fiction and poetry winners. Sandi read the entries blind. The winning poem is Equipoise, by Julia Griffin. The winning flash fiction is Coney Island Kaleidoscope, by Barbara Krasner. A big congratulations to these winners! Julia and Barbara will each receive $100 for their winning entries. Please read all of the selected pieces below and celebrate our writers by sharing them far and wide. If you missed the contest but would like to dive into the world of the circus in art history for further inspiration, you can purchase the curated ebooks with a treasure trove of imagery, here: https://www.ekphrastic.net/ebooks.html Congratulations again to all participants, to the selected writers, and to Julia and Barbara for their winning work!  Acrobat You told me the city was a circus but I never thought you meant it literally. You did: leaving the bus station I see high wires strung between buildings, an office worker or two darting along. There’s nothing to catch them if they fall, these worker-walkers, but they don’t seem to mind, with their briefcases in place of a balancing pole. I hail a cab, and a clown, one of those who distracts from the accidents, blinks back at me from the driver’s seat. On the road it’s all a riot under the big top. There’s an elephant serving as a roundabout, sentinel-like and calm, but the rest is enough extravaganza that I don’t know where to look. A lion tamer cracks his whip, and the cats stretch their jaws open to receive the heads of pedestrians. Beside these, the horses prance, hooves flying upwards and outwards, nearly smashing the hubs of cars. The ringleader signals me; do I want to join? I am tired, though, and shake my head; above the lapels of his red coat, the man nods and turns back; the tigers are emerging from behind the cafés. The taxi and I set off towards the striped tent I’ve rented for a recuperation home. My baggage in the back seat bounces: you know I’ve juggled a lot this past year, healthwise. The car ricochets past a boulevard, a ballet dancer with her feet arched in beauty and pain. In the suburbs where we’re going, the streets are lined with more of them, dancers, all backbending in the double-jointed circus-style that will kill you when you’re old. A few stand on tiptoe to wave at me, and their arms shining with work and the sweat that comes from it; they smile but one or two faces are grey now, lined from old injuries. One dancer is dressed as an ageing Harlequin and treats me to an awkward bow. As we approach my new home, I see you in your window. I’d thought you the strongman, but you are just another acrobat, your feet dangling dangerously from your trapeze. How healthy am I now? Not very. How healthy are you? Be careful, I think. I realize I’ve forgotten to tell you how easily after the surgery my heart can break. I’ve forgotten to tell you to be gentle with me, and always practise with a net. Colleen V. Addison Colleen Addison completed a Master's degree in Creative Writing, followed by a PhD in health information; she then promptly got sick herself. She now lives, writes, and heals on a small island off the coast of Vancouver, Canada. Previously, her work was published in numerous Canadian literary magazines and newspapers; now her recent work has featured in Halfway Down the Stairs, Flash Fiction Friday, and A Story in 100 Words. She has been nominated for a Best of the Net award and is writing a romance novel and a poetry chapbook, rather stupidly at the same time.  Sideshow How strange to think mere oddity would be a prized commodity as staple of the circus fare far better known for art of dare and energetic comic flair and feats that beasts are trained to bare and hand and eye agility and balancing ability... ...and yet the sideshow found its place success in part that it could trace to women clad in skimpy clothes who teased what they would not expose with mesmerizing skillful dance that flaunted thrill of stolen glance which never came but satisfied the ego that in earnest tried... ...and that, perhaps as well, explained bravado whether real or feigned enticing payments made for seats to marvel at fantastic feats -- a swallowed sword, a flame consumed, escape from shackles while entombed, a body pierced as calm prevails or weighted while it's laid on nails -- all things we say can't be believed yet wonder just how we're deceived... ...in fashion much the same it seems as doubt that weakens barker screams that we will sense the soul unique of life forever lived as freak at least that is if we possess the courage to endure duress and look them squarely in the eye admitting that we wonder why we can't dissolve the disbelief relieving us from pain of grief for persons grossly overweight or born conjoined as cruel fate or destined to be grossly tall or made to suffer far too small or bearded though a woman born or inked as art forever worn… all casting light where light is due on who we are and what we do reminding us we too at dawn greet life as show that must go on 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.  Never Forget They pulled me away from my sister as she reached for me, her chains stretched and rattled as she screamed. Hands guided me into a truck. I could hear but not see and I cried, Terrified- I stood still as we rode. I never saw my sister as time passed. I thought of her when they beat me, when I did tricks and ran the ring. At night, I dreamed she was there beside me, as we leaned together, bearing our loneliness in a circus tent. Even that would have been better than my solitude, in a circus trailer not knowing where I traveled. Each time they coax me forward, tugging at me with their stick, I think I hear my sister. So long ago when I cried, she screamed out to me, never forget. Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson is a long time poet who advocates for captive elephants, writing about sanctuaries, as well as teen issues, nature, environment and other topics. She is particularly fond of writing ekphrastic poems. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Blue Heron Review, Elephant Vigil, Lothlorien and The Ekphrastic Review. Dickson has served on two poetry boards and as a guest editor. Her full length works are available on Amazon.  Colour Theory Chagall's, The Grand Circus. I read that Chagall, in painting so many of his circuses, used colour more than line or shape to evoke those whose talent and will refuse to follow the body’s usual protocols, but rather with strong and flexible muscles push past anatomical limits, extend without the loss of balance, the range and possibilities of movement, to spin dizzy the compass of limbs in whatever wanted directions, must be quick and silken clean, pinpointed, control that torso, to mime the agility of animals, monkeys or birds or panthers, solids to turn fluid, weight to float, arms winged for flight. Makes sense, colour does, best suggests these effects on his canvas, for instance, lemon yellow an obvious choice for these trapeze artists like rays of juiced sunlight, red for the acrobats, balls of somersaulting fire and flame, green for the vinous contortionists. Never black or brown to indicate any earthen gravities. And over all a gouache of his favoured cobalt blue as if space itself were not an absence, but a colour, a cool swirl of sky to tint our glasses, the whole of us mere pigments mixed with water or oil and any minute liable to liquidate into a gloppy medium, squeezed sumptuously from our tubes onto a palette to mix and bleed not in horror but in ecstasy, like some really great acid trip, or the fun abandon during Holi, the Hindu festival when celebrants riot color, splash confetti powders of every hue, at our dour monochrome skins, painted one big hot mess, obscuring the molds that keep us intact as identifiable forms. Chagall plays the music of prisms, plucks the ROYGIBV strings with an artist’s prerogative, frees up colour from its associated nature to determine its own spectrum. Who cares! He said that painting this subject matter felt the same as when he worked on religious scenes, the three-ring circus was like a crucifixion, by which I think he meant that the performers, saints of muscle and bone, endure pain and injury for the joy of spectators, sacrifice their bodies to great heights, each one like a tragic kind of Christ on the cross hung up and nailed to the wood in the most unlikely stunt of all, to believe how in the end we will transcend our incarnations, rise to the occasion to become the everlasting life of light. Deborah Gorlin Deborah Gorlin is the author of three books of poems, Bodily Course, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997; Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize; and Open Fire Bauhan, 2023. Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Poetry; American Poetry Review; Bomb, Best Spiritual Writing 2000, Plume; On the Seawall; the Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades,” was published as a finalist in Calyx Magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing. Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.  It’s Lucky the Circus Was in Town That Day Mae and Vern opened their upstairs window to see their neighbours, Ted and Dolly, scrambling onto the back of a giant, fibreboard whale, as it bobbled about on the brown river of the high street. Dolly waved, hey, and launched the whale towards May and Vern with a broom handle. “I can’t,” said Mae. “You must,” said Vern. “Our things,” said Mae. “Just things,” said Vern. Their son loved the circus. Toddler Howie would drag thick rings of lipstick around his eyes and mouth and chant, “Look at me, I’m Howie the clown!” while Vern glared and rustled his newspaper with stiff wrists. Mae still searched for Howie in the faces of the circus folk whenever they showed up. Had hoped he might be with them this time round. “Easy now!” said Ted. “This whale’s a trifle precarious.” “Looking forward to a cuppa,” said Dolly, patting Mae’s hand. Small rescue boats breezed past, hastily tethered pallets, the odd door. All heading towards the library, which had been commandeered as a temporary refuge. Mae turned to speak to Vern, but he was staring into the murky water. Perhaps he was thinking about trout. Or that time in the public baths when Mae left her swimsuit in the locker room. Close up the whale wasn’t as wholesome as it had seemed in the circus’s wheeled aquarium. There were ugly, leering gashes across its hollow casing and its blow hole was a crudely painted black circle. Dolly delved into her knitting bag. “Third grandchild,” she grinned, “had to save this.” She offered Mae a plump ball of wool, “I got spare.” Mae shook her head, “I can’t knit.” She would have saved Howie’s baby photos, his unfathomably detailed circus drawings. The felt, elephant-shaped pin cushion he’d sewn for her, her initials stitched like fat lines of ants. Vern hadn’t given her time. At the Little Splashers session for parents and toddlers, the other kids had giggled and shrieked. Howie’d clung to the edge of the pool, his knuckles as bleached as the tiny worms Vern used for fishing bait, Mae behind him, murmuring, “I’ve got you I’ve got you,” please can’t you just enjoy this. By the time she’d prised Howie’s fingers free, Vern had disappeared. To check out the squash courts, he’d said later. The other mums and dads had tutted to each other. Mae couldn’t hear them over Howie’s screams, but she could see what their mouths were doing. Later nobody could remember exactly how it happened. The whale lurched in the wake of a small powerboat, and Vern was in the juice, scrabbling to grasp a flimsy flipper. Ted and Dolly strained to reach his hand, their lips pursed and wrinkled like deflated pool rings. “It’ll be fine,” said Mae, as her husband’s head waggled away in the current. “Somebody will save him.” Ted and Dolly looked enormously relieved. Mae didn’t mention that Vern couldn’t swim. It would be wrong to worry her neighbours. They’d always been so kind. Linda Grierson-Irish Linda Grierson-Irish’s short fiction has appeared in Flash Frontier, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Unbroken Journal, 100 Word Story, Reflex Fiction, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, Ellipsis Zine, The Ekphrastic Review, TSS, Flash 500 and elsewhere. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Bath Flash Fiction Award, included on the BIFFY50 list, received two honourable mentions for Best Microfiction, and been selected for the 2023 Best Small Fictions anthology. She lives in Shropshire, UK.   First place winner in poetry! Equipoise And as he lifts his arm he sees four hooves Rise in slow motion like a dream, and rise And rise above him, while the spotlight moves Upwards and upwards where, tornado-wise, The great cloud-bodies swell, the blue, the grey, Higher and higher, stretching, neck and croup, Over the earth – and he can only pray They still can hear his voice, for should they swoop Down, should those fiery head-crests plummet, how Could he, lone man, survive the weight, the force Of storm made flesh? But, hand still pointing, now He summons all his will and whispers: Horse; And sees them slowly sink, deflate, undo This moment – which he offers here to you. Julia Griffin Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia. She has published in several online poetry magazines, including The Ekphrastic Review.  Orange Crush Citrus absinthe inebriation hallucination. Juicy fantasy giant oranges the size of footballs trample a tangerine pageant. Unconscious in Amsterdam in apricot pantaloons hazy tangelos drop from a tree fresh-squeezed neroli wafts marmalade peel. Tanya Adèle Koehnke Tanya Adèle Koehnke earned her MA in English from York University. Tanya taught English at several colleges and universities in Toronto. Tanya also has a background in arts journalism. Tanya’s poems appear in The Ekphrastic Review; Canadian Woman Studies; Hamilton Arts & Letters; Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits: An International Anthology of Poetry & Photography; Big Art Book; Tinted Memories; Alchemy and Miracles: Nature Woven Into Words; Harmonic Verse: Poems for the Holidays; Bards Against Hunger: 10th Anniversary Anthology; Tea-Ku: Poems About Tea; Foreplay: An Anthology of Word Sonnets; Grid Poems: A Guide and Workbook; and other publications.  Puppet Waltz Old king clown asleep with one eye open in a knobby red bed head tilted hands folded bozo nose. Old queen clownette drowsy and stooped in a red velvet chair awaits drama music to play an angel and suitor to waltz away on scuffed floorboards a queue of dancehall guests dressed in fancy best observe. Red courtesan blue dandy everyone is still with wonder until puppeteers pull invisible strings animate marionettes suspended in a royal vignette wobbling stumbling teetering tottering collapsing. Tanya Adèle Koehnke Tanya Adèle Koehnke earned her MA in English from York University. Tanya taught English at several colleges and universities in Toronto. Tanya also has a background in arts journalism. Tanya’s poems appear in The Ekphrastic Review; Canadian Woman Studies; Hamilton Arts & Letters; Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits: An International Anthology of Poetry & Photography; Big Art Book; Tinted Memories; Alchemy and Miracles: Nature Woven Into Words; Harmonic Verse: Poems for the Holidays; Bards Against Hunger: 10th Anniversary Anthology; Tea-Ku: Poems About Tea; Foreplay: An Anthology of Word Sonnets; Grid Poems: A Guide and Workbook; and other publications.   First place in flash fiction! Coney Island Kaleidoscope Coney Island was the place to be. Manhattan’s Lower East Side was too crowded, too loud, too dirty, nothing at all like the fields of Max’s native Poland. He wanted the water, the smell of the salt, the crunch of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs, the seagull caw over the ocean’s surface. After he arrived in 1914 from France, Max lived with his cousin and her husband, started a business. Soon he could move to Mermaid Avenue on Coney Island. Mermaids, an idea that would have made his father’s face flare like fireplace bellows, comforted Max. An adventure, a fantastic adventure unlike his school days, his joiner apprenticeship in the shtetl. Here, the electrified lights of the amusement park made him feel alive, at the edge of something unexpected and great. To Max, there was no battle of lights, but a dance of lights that invited him and his bride, Rose, to enter towered pavilions, their spires reaching to the sky with flags reminding them of the movement of the ocean and the ships that brought them across. Carnival attractions in hues of Atlantic blue, tomato red, American dollar green, and gold, replace the gray of the shtetl. Here in America, here on Coney Island, here on Mermaid Avenue, lives were about to change. Dreamland. Creation. The End of the World. All illusion, because here anything became possible. Barbara Krasner Barbara Krasner is a frequent contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Here: A Poetry Journal, The Mackinaw: A Journal of Prose Poetry, MacQueen's Quinterly, Nimrod, Rust + Moth, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey where she is also the co-editor of the regional literary magazine, Kelsey Review. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com.  Mary Hartline and Me, Equestriennes Mary Hartline wore red and white spangles, but both she and this woman stood on a white stallion’s broad bare back circling the ring to the pace set by the ringmaster’s whip snap. I watched Mary on grandma’s black and white tv but my set of Mary Hartline paper dolls showed me the colors of her costumes. I spent many long summer afternoons on grandma’s porch bending the paper tabs so Mary could change from red riding clothes to baton twirler to normal “street” clothes. I often wished Mary would visit, share the secrets of bareback riding, maybe even allow me to mount her steed. (I’d experienced only a park’s pony rides-- saddled, no standing, no bareback.) When grandma went inside the house her wide steel glider became my white horse. I stood on it, imagining a circling ride as the bench rocked to and fro. No ringmaster set my pace. I powered my own feats of daring and as best I could imitated Mary’s moves on my glider steed. Although I greatly admired Mary, I never considered running away to a circus. My imagined circus sufficed, in some ways superior to reality. For even now, in old age my circus days continue. I merely smile at this painting and in a flash, I’ve replaced the artist’s rider; I’m the one circling the ring on that white stallion and the who’s one in control. Joan Leotta Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in North Carolina Literary Review, Red Wolf, Ovunque Siamo, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Silver Birch, The Ekphrastic Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others all over the globe. Joan’s poetry chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, is from Finishing Line Press. Her performances include person and folklore presentations featuring food, family, travel, and strong women.  No Saint No one’s Madonna she’s faced the weight of gods and monsters from the start a patterned scarf coils round her neck another snakes over her arm woven in roses as though to remember a garden she won’t see again She wears nothing else stands open and easy naked and relaxed hiding nothing asking no permission refusing judgement from any god or audience she dares to see her disobedient innocence holding our desperate lust a puppet dandled from a wire his face the grinning rictus of an old clown’s leer his arm dangled useless empty as the cheap chintz sack that hides his fleshless wooden joints powerless and sour Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, The Memory Palace, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic and Clare MacQueen, and recent issues of Gyroscope, 3rd Wednesday, Caustic Frolic, Inscribe, the Storyteller Review, and Verse Virtual. Her collection How to Become Invisible, that chronicles a bipolar journey, is now available from Kelsay books, Amazon, and the author.  I Went Off to Seek the Circus I went off to seek the circus. This world had ever had no fit for me, always chafing, and with no place in proper society. This world had ever worn me half a size too small. I'd had more in line with seasons in squall, the man on the moon, than any friend, or family — at all. So, ta ta now, see you soon. I went off to seek the circus. Surely, they had a place for me. I'd find my spot and make my luck! You chuckle? Just wait! — you'll see. I searched far and I searched wide. I opened every ragged scar and peeked inside, to see what secrets they may hide. I walked so many miles, I feared I would go mad. I walked until I saw Coyote. At his sight, I was so glad. He'd help me out — oh surely! His ragged coat and crooked smiles. I asked him, “Brother, tell me, which way should I walk?” Coyote, gave his head a tilt — his voice, he spoke, a familiar lilt, “I'm Coyote, you know, I can't talk. Anyway, head east, take a left at the daisy.” What a relief! I thought I was starting to think I'd gone crazy! So east I walked. Directions vague and less than clear. But at the last, they got me there. My turn mistaken for carnation, By dusk I knew, this was damnation. At just the hour, when hope was through, I saw starry sky of every hue. Oh, what a miracle! Oh, what a site! The stars had come down to kiss the ground. The circus I'd sought had finally been found! I walked on through half-remembered dream. Through wagons of red, and blue, and wagons of green. Through carnie calls and children's screams. Strangers all about and more in between. Fires that explode, riot bells that ring, vendors that bellow, and monkeys that sing! All the chaos in the world, did here convene! I covered my eyes, and covered my ears, did all that I could to hold back the fears, hold back the shout, hold back the tears. Until at last — “I had to get out!” I had come to seek the circus. Not this chaos nor this panic. I could have this at home, in the comfort of my manic. Time settled the storm as it tends to do. Leaving scars, not one, but two. With further gift of time, chaos found rhythm, and a little rhyme. Then, The merry go round pulled me right out my head. Here was something new to ponder instead. Round and round forever it goes. I cried for them, their endless throes. Look in their face, how they howl and scream, for someone to wake them from Sisyphus dream. A hand came crashing down upon my shoulder. I thought it was a man's, but it belonged to a boulder! A taller man I had never seen. I decided it best not to say anything. “My my, sir! You are obscene!” With furrowed ridge, the boulder glowered. “My apologies sir! I believe it's the hour. If you would be so kind, I'm in need of aid.” Let me guess, he graveled, You seek Feejee Mermaid. “No, you see, I went off to seek the circus. I went off to seek the freaks — the freaks like me. I came to the circus — to seek my family.” The boulder looked me up and down, made no comment, except a stony frown. Simply turned and walked away. Of course I followed. Too long had I been a stray. In the tent all striped ribald, My heart sang home, that sweet herald. There stood a man, to eye bare fit for stardom. But when asked, he said My name is Barnum. All around us, the most curious sort I had ever seen. Each man and woman and those in between! They gathered all around, and said, Won't you let us see? Let us see your talent, Tell us of your curiosity. “No talent mine not held by other hand. I would be oddity, a strange member of your stranger land.” So Barnum pitched a practiced eye, up & down over every inch he pried. Meaning no offense, son. There's nothing odd that I can spy. “See it not, yet I speak it true. For I am curiosity, and in my mind is my deformity. I live on tides of labile moons. After every ditty the dial tunes. Low I wander through veils of darkness, Then dance on clouds untouched by sadness!” Silence filled the tent now full, the only only sound a silent grating of silent thoughts. The Siamese twins reached across and covered their coughs, Wolf boy howled, began to mutter, A fair lady hid behind her beard. Tom Thumb slipped behind a boulder. And I started to wonder, if I'd even been heard! Barnum gave his feet a shuffle, said, I'm afraid I see no feat, nor spectacle. You might want to try somewhere, son a bit more — respectable. “No, you see it's a deformity of the mind! Look inside and surely you'll find that I've nothing to hide!” Yes, well you see… It is that which we fear, It is that we'd leave be. I'm sorry son. I really am. I know you seek your family, I know you seek your clan. But still you see, and must understand, Barnum lives in capitalist society. And I know none alive who'd pay for such deformity. “What of him?” I pointed, “He seems a normal man.” He's from Borneo. “And her?” A Scorpio. “Damn…” And so it was, and so I went. With heavy heart and pocket bare. I am off to seek the circus. (where?) A circus of the mind. Perhaps Coyote can lead me there. Shawn Reagan Shawn Reagan is a poet, teacher, and husband from Minnesota. A sleeping giant of the poetic world, his work is currently focused on life with bipolar 2 and depression. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Tadpole Press Poetry Prize.  New World: Coney Island 1913 The battle of lights ineluctably becomes a ballet of lights Barest hints of mortal red tamped down by photon fairies The swirl of their tutus casting a geometry of cooler colours: Fractals of ultramarine and cerulean, viridian and white. The flick of their wands flings webs of silver. Under this blazing canopy a four year old boy leans forward Moves with slow-motion steps, carefully lifts one foot, then the other. A cloud of pink sugar in one hand, the other clutching his father’s. Their boat from Lebanon recently landed in the shadow of Lady Liberty. The boy turns his tousled head up to his father Who smiles at his raspberry-rimmed mouth, Catches his breath as he sees the lights from above Dancing across his son’s saucer eyes, a magical matrix of colour. “Daddy? What world is this?” Bill Richard Bill Richard is a docent at the Phoenix Art Museum and has loved art since he sat on his dad’s lap as a toddler and looked at books of paintings. His poems have appeared in publications such as Red River Review, Ilya’s Honey, Grey Matter, and National Catholic Reporter.  The Rival This limber lad at first felt glad to join the tumbling team – before each show, backstage he’d go, rehearsing up a steam. He’d place his hands, and make such stands, a wonder to behold – so flexible, incredible! So brilliant and bold! Face fixed and fine, he’d arch his spine – his arms could bear the strain – then bend his knees, to twelve degrees, at least, the best to train. A splendid thing – his feet would swing, and almost brush his head! But then, surprise! A mass of eyes! A peacock came, and said: “Not bad, my friend; let’s not pretend, the crowds are here for you – yes, you can lift, but can you shift? And shimmy, as I do? And can you call, like this – hee-all?” The peacock shrieked with glee. The young man sighed; the bird, with pride, exclaimed: “All eyes on ME!” F.F. Teague F.F. Teague (Fliss) is a copyeditor/copywriter by day and a poet/composer come nightfall. She lives in Pittville, a suburb of Cheltenham (UK). Her poetry features in a number of journals and her second collection, Interruptus: A Poetry Year, is forthcoming. Her other interests include art, film, and photography. 
 Red Deer at Berghof, unknown artist consumed (Germany) 1938 Berghof *, Hitler's Alpine retreat, was near Berchtesgaden / red deer, Cervus elaphus, were widespread throughout Europe and central Asia / this a stylised naïve painting of calm / Hitler a vegetarian / surprising, think the deer. reassuring after being hunted for millennia / red deer named for their ruddy summer coats / the Nazis weaponized hope / the grass here is so green. the edelweiss plentiful / one doe is a saturated red / stylised because stags are solitary until the autumn rut / two whimsical hounds doze with the herd / stylised because canines wild and domestic are predators / nothing remains of Berghof after the Allies bombed it / stags roar, does chatter / the railway tracks to Auschwitz never were / the doe in bright red has a drum / The Monarch of the Glen by Sir Walter Landseer (England, 1851) is a famous specimen / Hitler drew, painted / red deer are not a single species / landscapes, mostly. uninspired and pedantic / rather, a group of related sub-species adapted to various environments / the Nazi Nuremberg Laws forbade marriage to, extramarital relations with non-Aryans / and likely hybridised with other types of deer / the Nazis staged exhibitions of entartete kunst**, degenerate art / in chemise and stockings, the deer are frank. voluptuous / in which nature was "corrupted by the sickness of Cubism and filthy Fauvism. by Naïve with its perverted equal description on all planes and refusal to lessen the background or the other" / Nazi state art glorified the dutiful volk worker, overalls and rolled-up sleeves / the art then the artists disappeared / Communists and Jews, Freemasons and Jehovah Witnesses / trucks? they look like caravans, think the deer / elaborate deceptions maintained calm / "where you'll be taken, the grass is even greener" / mankind has long hunted red deer for meat and hide, bone and antler for prehistoric tools and weapons / "bring valuables and one suitcase each" / the very red doe drums. they board the trucks / where they go, the edelweiss taste of ash Karen Walker Karen Walker (she/her) writes short in Ontario, Canada. Her most recent work is in or forthcoming in antonym, Ark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Misery Tourism, Does it Have Pockets? and EGG+FROG. |
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March 2025
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