Clairvoyance

René decided to cook an omelet for lunch. He opened his icebox and noted that he had six eggs left. That would be enough for a meal and leftovers. He cracked five of the eggs against the side of his porcelain bowl. The yokes stared up at him, five perfect yellow eyes. They looked beautiful, and he regretted having to mix them with the whites. When he tried to crack the sixth egg, he found that he couldn’t no matter how many times he struck it against the side of the bowl. The shell was apparently stone-hard. Eventually, he became so frustrated with this uncrackable egg that overcoming the obstacle became more important than enlarging his omelet, so he threw the egg on the floor making it unusable. It didn’t break. He stomped on it which made no difference. The egg was unbreakable, so he picked it up and left it on the kitchen counter. Then he beat the whites and yokes of the other eggs already in the bowl and added fresh herbs from his kitchen garden to the mixture: Parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil for a perfect Omelette aux fines herbes. Once the concoction was in the pan, he stirred it to a perfect consistency, not too hard, not too runny and flopped it on a plate with flourish as if it were a crepe. 

No sooner had he sat down at his kitchen table to eat that he heard a loud stage whisper coming from the counter. It said, “Paint me.” At first, he thought he had imagined it, but the third time it spoke, the egg punctuated each word by jumping up and down, hitting the counter with a bang saying, “Paint me” repeatedly leaving no doubt as to where the sound was coming from.  The egg was so sturdy that it didn’t break with these antics any more than it had under René’s foot. It was getting loud and annoying so René, thinking of his masterpiece with misnamed objects called The Key to Dreams, said to himself, if a glass can be called a storm, why shouldn’t an egg speak and be obeyed, so he put the rest of his unfinished omelet back in the icebox, picked up the intact egg from the counter and placed it on the rickety wooden table near his easel in his central room that served as a sitting room, a dining room and a bedroom. Then he started to paint the egg on a fresh canvas. So as not to slavishly copy his model, he painted the white egg brown with a few spots here and there, those “freckles” eggs sometimes have. He thought it would show up more clearly that way against his ecru canvas. He added shading at the bottom of the egg to make it look as three-dimensional as possible and sat back to study the result.

A few seconds later, the egg, which had behaved perfectly during the sitting, began speaking again in its ominous stage whisper saying, “Paint me.”

“What?!” answered René, “I just did.”

“Paint me,” said the egg bouncing up and down on the table, the way it had on the kitchen counter, so René conceding that his painted egg did not look like the model covered it with ecru paint, the same colour of the canvas so as to erase it. Once the paint had dried, he painted a stark icy white one on the ecru canvas. He didn’t add shadowing this time. After all, he thought, since the painted egg was floating in isolation on the canvas, it wouldn’t have anything on which to cast a shadow. Keep it simple, he told himself. 

No sooner had he put his brush down that the egg repeated its strange command, “Paint me.” René leaned back in his chair sighing with disappointment. What do I do, he wondered. This egg is like a lash hair stuck on your eyeball. You can’t get rid of it. Of course, he could have disposed of the pesky thing by taking it down to the street and throwing it in one of the metal garbage bins on the sidewalk, but he didn’t want to. This was a mystery to be solved, not avoided. What could the egg want? A chicken lays an egg which, in turn, becomes a chicken which in turn lays eggs, he thought remembering the brown hen between two eggs in one of his other paintings, A Variation of Sadness. Maybe I should paint the chicken the egg would produce or, better yet, instead of a chicken, a crow in flight. Crows are much more beautiful than chickens. The black against the ecru canvas would be gorgeous.

So, he threw the painting of the egg to the side and put a fresh canvas on his easel. He painted a large black crow spreading its wings against the ivory sky that was now his canvas, adding specks of pure white to the bird’s wings as if they were shiny enough to reflect the light of an unseen sun. Then he waited about twenty minutes to see what the egg on the table would do. It did not repeat its command but just lay motionless on the table acting like an egg. 

René got up from his chair and walked to the table. He picked up the egg and cracked it against the wood. There, I did it. Let it make a mess, he thought proudly, as he watched the yoke drip down one of the legs of the table forming a slimy yellow pool on the carpet. However, when he took a good look inside the shell now broken in half, he noticed with horror that it contained a dead black chick, a chicken fetus with a small drop of blood hanging out of its beak. Disgusted, he picked up the shell halves and the chick with a turpentine cloth and took it down to the street to throw the mess in the metal bin on the sidewalk. 

When he returned to his apartment, he noticed a big hole in the shape of a bird in flight on the canvas. The crow, now a real bird, had flown out of the picture. It was perched on the arm of his couch which also served as a bed. 

“Do not be afraid,” cawed the crow, “You killed me when you stomped on my egg, but you resurrected me in your painting. All I had to do was crawl out of the canvas. Besides you upgraded me from a slaughter bound chicken to a crow. So, I have a good chance of surviving. Now, my friend, please open your window and set me free.”

René was moved to tears. He stretched his hand out, and the bird flew to him landing on his palm which it pecked affectionately. René smiled through his tears. He walked over to the window, still holding the bird, and opened it with his free hand. He held his arm out of the window and the bird took flight, disappearing into the now setting sun. René, who was exhausted by all the work he had just done, lay down on the couch for a nap. When he woke up, it was dark outside. He felt lonely without the bird. If nothing else, he wanted to have its picture, something to remember it by instead of the gaping hole that now filled his canvas.

He took the torn canvas off the easel and placed yet another fresh one on it and proceeded to paint the same black crow as best he could remember it from the original painting, but he added things to the tableau such as a brick red tablecloth over the wooden table by the easel. On the clad table lay a small white egg. René liked the contrast between the colours. More importantly he added himself painting a black bird on a canvas, within the real canvas, while looking at the egg as if he were painting that instead of a bird. He also added the easel under the canvas and an artist palette with paints attached to the easel. He was satisfied with the result because it could leave no doubt that the picture was a picture of a bird and not the bird itself. As such, it would stay put inside the painting and not fly out of the canvas to become real. It would not change in any way, but he would be able to hang on to the memory of his newfound feathered friend. He called the painting Clairvoyance because it depicted that frozen moment in time when the bird was in the future even though now, it was in the past, and in the past, or rather in infinity, it would remain.
 
Helaina Pisar McKibbin 
 
​Helaina Pisar Mckibbin lives with her husband in Los Angeles where she worked as an ESL and French teacher for many years. She is now focusing more on her writing which includes short stories and poems. Some of these have appeared in the following journals: The Storyteller, Rattle, The San Gabriel Querterly, Onthebus, Blood and Honey, and Twin Bird Review. She has also published some translations from French to English and vice a versa. 

The Shed: The Daughter of Shadows Speaks from Max Beckmann's The Dream (1921)

1.
Father holds the fish without hands.
His parted hair reveals dead eyes.
His prisoner's suit was bought in the fish market--
where his hands were amputated for stealing a carp.
He stands suspended in the air, looking down on us.
 
2.
My uncle plays a thick trumpet and laughs between notes.
He wears sandwich boards all day long in the streets,
but he does not beg, his pockets are always empty.
His blue sandals do not become him, and he laughs.
His name is Joseph, and he only speaks Hebrew at night.
 
3.
Mother does not have all her bones.
Her legs are sieves of flesh, folded at right angles.
The wheat grinder has taken her soul.
She smells of creosote and crabs,
her eyes are blackened and her hair thin.
 
4.
Mother holds the monkey in one hand,
in the other, the parrot, taken from the town's arbor.
They speak to each other, the three of them, 
they speak with soft tongues and liquid breath.
The dialogue destroys Mother, the monkey and parrot know this.

Louis Bourgeois

​​Louis Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry and interviews in over two hundred magazines and journals in North America, Europe and Asia. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing.  He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.

On a Chagall Canvas 
 
a bride bigger than the town 
below her
leans on air
 
her flat feet 
whiter than her gown
to her left her tall groom
 
dark & handsome 
almost disappears
her bouquet open stemless
 
roses strewn across a leafy 
sky like planets, a galaxy
they rise above the red
 
mist of the hazy village 
buildings, faces, hands pointing 
in animated conversation
 
three giant tapers blaze 
multi-coloured flames
in celebration or remembrance
 
or perhaps she is the Sabbath
queen   winged creatures circling
in the midground three birds
 
transforming      losing wings
becoming human 
or three humans sprouting wings 
 
becoming angels     two seem to take 
the air and soar     the largest
near as pale as the veiled bride 
 
drifts in a downward course 
toward earth    tell me how 
to know if I’m flying or falling
 
Laurel Brett
​
Laurel Brett writes in many genres. Her poems and essays have appeared in venues such as The New York Times, Lilith, ONE ART, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Westchester Review. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Literature claimed her life as a young child and is still the centre of her activities. Her goal is to be in conversation with other writers seeking to raise consciousness, protect our natural resources and create an equitable world. She lives on a hill that overlooks a harbour.

​We are pleased to invite you to our Zoom reading series!

​Join us for our next event, Monday, July 20,  2026. We have a stellar lineup of ekphrastic contributors. 

Electric Ekphrasis will present five readers each session, using the extra time after the readings for audience questions and community conversation.

To sign up, send an email to [email protected]with ELECTRIC EKPHRASIS in the subject line. You'll get a zoom link a few days before each reading.

If you have signed up for any session, you will receive the link and announcement for every event. No need to sign up every month. If you have not registered yet, do so at the above email and join us.

Free to attend!

Please share this page and celebrate our amazing writers far and wide.

Everybody Agrees 
 
Everybody agrees
to start the day off with 
two words: 
the bacon. 
 
Tracy Royce

* Each line (title included) in this micro-cento is sourced from a different poem in Richard Brautigan’s 1976 collection, Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork: “Betty Makes Wonderful Waffles”; “Right Beside the Morning Coffee”; “5 / Comet Telegram”; “We Are in a Kitchen.”

Tracy Royce’s poems have appeared in The Mackinaw, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and ONE ART. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and a Pushcart Prize, and was selected for Best Microfiction (2026). She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking and watching Richard Widmark films. Find her on Bluesky.

​​Join us for the epic event of the year. It's the annual ekphrastic marathon!

You won't be sorry. It is wild, exhilarating, exhausting and wonderful.

A day of pure creation. Play. Brainstorming. 

​Join us on Sunday, July 12, or do it on your own time over the following week.

This year, to celebrate eleven years of The Ekphrastic Review, an optional Champagne Party follows the marathon on zoom.
​
Details are below. Scroll down to register.

Heaven Eleven: an Ekphrastic Marathon
 
Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating ten years of The Ekphrastic Review. 
 
Join us on Sunday, July 12 2026 for our  annual ekphrastic marathon. This year we are celebrating eleven years!!!!!

This is an all -day creative writing event that we do independently, together.

Take the plunge and see what happens!
 
Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone.
 
We will gather in a specially created private Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. 
 
Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, in the week following the 12th. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date in the week following July 12.  . 
 
Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site.
 
One poem and one flash fiction will win $100 CAD each.
 
Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year!
 
Marathon: Sunday July 12, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks)
(For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 12, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.)

Champagne Party: at 6.05 pm until 7. 05 on Sunday, July 12, join participants on Zoom to celebrate an exhilarating day. Bring Champagne, wine, or a pot of tea. We'll have words from The Ekphrastic Review, conversation as a chance to connect with community, and some optional readings from your work in the marathon.   
 
Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2026
Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less
 
Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 14.50 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors.

If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll sign you up. 
​
Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September.

​Sign up below!

​Two Still Lifes
(The year after his wife died)

1. The First Date

Low lighting is suggested by dabs of yellow
on two forks lying across a dark blue plate;
smears of cream and crumbs of dark chocolate.
A painting within a painting, half of a print visible:
Henri Rousseau’s Dream, jungly, a snake, sad-eyed lions,
a piper piping and, just in frame, two naked feet.
Olive-coloured napkins pick up the print’s palette; 
light, like egg-white, on two espresso cups; on the saucers
two sweet biscuits, still wrapped in hyper-real cellophane.
The table for two is seen behind a curtain in gilt brocade,
drawn back as if to expose something clandestine.

2. The First Sex

Looking into a hotel room through the open bathroom door,
we see a third of a large bed, a glass of water on a side-table.
It is skilful how the painter catches, reflected in the water,
a hint of two bodies lying together in the unseen part of the bed.
A neutral wall, not much more than gessoed; in contrast
the rumpled white duvet is worked with thick brush strokes 
and heavy impasto, some unexpected colour added: blues,
a ruckle of waves, we are unsteady on shore after a sea-journey; 
occasional passages of spring-leaf green amongst the folds; 
purple shadows beneath the white ridges of bedding, 
like blood pooling in the limbs of the recently dead.

Mark McDonnell  
​
Mark worked in industry in the UK, Spain and the US before a second career in psychotherapy.  He spends his time nowadays writing, singing and teaching English to refugees. His work has been published  in English, Irish and Spanish journals. He is working on two pamphlets.

Another Saturday

Her husband, Kronos, would not leave the stony room. It had been a very long time since their newest, and now thanks to him, only, child was born. There was always a lot of time between them. Rhea opened the heavy stone door and found him there, sitting naked, huge and bony and red-eyed. In his shame, he had been starving himself ever since he ate their last one. Time had passed, the world grew old all over again, and they had another child. He quickly fled to the stony room, and refused to look at his offspring at all.
   
Rhea tossed him a change of clothes which he would probably ignore. He did not look up. She closed the heavy stone door, and left him in the dark. Forever afraid of his children.

She walked with her young child on a path of soft dirt, and the child asked questions about Kronos. The same questions every sibling had asked, though they never met each other. “Why will he not see me?” “Why does he punish himself?” “What did he do?”

With every child since the first, Rhea had wondered whether or not to answer the questions. When she looked into their eyes, she could never do it.

All she said was: “He is ashamed. He has done something monstrous that he cannot resist. This is his punishment for castrating his father, Ouranos. You must not go near him.”

Kronos overthrew Ouranos to become ruler of the Golden Age, only to hide away ever since. Rhea had no desire to coax him out. She had promised her child that she would never leave them alone.

The child had grown and become a god before Rhea could bring herself to eat her first full meal since her last child was murdered. The young god was beautiful, like living marble.

The two of them ate together, at the top of the Mountain, on a field outside their home of ivory and white silver. They would gather food, watch the world, and consider how they might mold it into something new. The child was eager to learn how to be a god, and what that meant.

It had been a long time, and Rhea had decided to offer Kronos more clean clothes. At the thought of opening the heavy stone door and looking at him again, her body ached, and her mouth grew dry. She commanded the young god to stay outside their home.

“I’m fully grown, mother,” said the young god, her child. “I have never known him. I would like to see him.”

“You will not!” shouted Rhea. “He will never see you, he cannot!”

“Why not? He is my father!”

“He is cruel and monstrous, and he knows this!”

The young god remained outside, sulking, and Rhea opened the heavy stone door and threw in the new clothes. She paused at the sound of a deep sniff, and Kronos’s huge head jerked up and looked past her.

*

Starvation to a titan: endless emptiness that amounts to an infectious pit. He cannot die, his stomach begins to eat away at him, unable to harm him, but very able to hurt. Like a pool of acidic filth left to ferment in a dark room, in a thin glass bottle. How much pain must that bottle be in?

Kronos, his eyes burning worse than any of his body, looked behind his sister-wife, and saw the face of a young god he had not seen before but recognized, poking out behind a corner.

*

Rhea turned and saw the young god watching, and she shut the heavy stone door with a fury, and approached her child, whose face showed more sorrow than it had known before.

“How could he do that to himself? How could you let him?”

“It is for his own good.”

“It’s cruel! I’ve never seen anything so pitiful. Starving…”

“It is what he deserves! I will hear no more of this.”

The two left the home of ivory and white silver in silence, and outside, they would say nothing to each other for a long time. Even when Rhea tried to speak with the young god, she would receive no response. Time passed, and the world grew old all over again, and she even forgot her promise to always be together. The next time her child would speak to her, she decided, she would tell everything: the other children, the Kronos’s fate, everything.

She was outside her bright home when she heard the heavy stone door being pushed.

Her heart was beating fast enough to shake loose inside her body as she ran with tears in her eyes to the black stony room, and found it was open. Unable to control her breath, she leaned into the darkness inside, and found them both. There had been no scream.

He was kneeling, naked, his skin leathery and browned like an old hog’s. At first sight of her, he froze, his bright eyes appeared lidless, and his face began to twist and shake like he was going to burst into tears; he said nothing. His mouth was full.

Their child, naked too, was in shreds. The head and an arm were black-and-red stumps, flowing hot. Kronos had the other arm in his mouth, between red-stained teeth. His grip on the corpse nearly ripped it apart lengthways as his fingers dug bloody gashes deep into the spine.

His face was a mix of starving desperation and fear, tightened by shame, but he would not stop chewing. It was a wonder he didn’t choke.

Rhea wondered if he realized what he was doing. He bit down again and again, huge chunk after huge chunk of their child before her eyes. The whole time, weeping, grunting, moaning, and wet, wet crunching. He never slowed down.

There was bread and fruit on the floor. Her child, it seemed, had wanted to feed him. Kronos would not look at the food, now soggy with blood.

The child was dead, she knew, it had happened again. Her face straightened, her heart slowed, and she calmly set the heavy stone door back in its place as the weeping grew louder within the stony room.

Being immortal came with it certain understandings. A quick acceptance, an ease of moving on, a remarkable resignation. This had happened before. Time heals all wounds. Another child gone, then time would pass, and the world would grow old all over again, and they would have another child. They would have to. Their child was destined to kill him.

In the meantime she wondered idly as she walked on the soft dirt what more she might do to save the next one. No gods have ever died, so could they be saved? She promised herself she would tell her next child everything about Kronos.

​The home went quiet, the smell of blood grew foul, then faded, and never once did Kronos step outside. Then his weeping began again, then it stopped. Rhea thought of her husband’s face as he devoured their child. She could not imagine being so hungry.

RJ Pugh

RJ Pugh is a writer of short fiction whose work is focused on combining the fantastical with the mundane to create absurd situations. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA and enjoys art inspired by mythology and folklore.