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The work below was written, edited, and selected by high school students under the direction of their teachers Terri Carnell and Elizabeth Jorgensen. Terri teaches English to juniors and seniors in a traditional high school setting, while Elizabeth works with freshmen through seniors at a charter school that emphasizes leadership, career exploration, and global citizenship. Despite their contrasting teaching environments—both within the same Southeastern Wisconsin county—Terri and Elizabeth collaborated to engage their students in authentic writing thanks to Lorette and The Ekphrastic Review. Lorette provided four thought-provoking artworks for students to explore and respond to:
Each teacher’s students focused on specific works:
Following the student ekphrases are student remarks on the process.  Migrants, by Candido Portinari (Brazil) 1944 Ghost on Grim’s Trail Sickly creatures that were no longer humans. Starved. Prey-to-be. A group of white wisps that blew about in the wind. “Mother” clutches its past, something no longer within its possession. The “man” who stares beyond that of which it fears; it is angry, so very furious. It knows who to blame, who put it there, who stole its food. Big bellies were whom the ashes envied for they had bones so sharp that its gray poked through the skin. Hollowed cheeks struggled to form words, no longer able to ask for help. The drought had seeped into their veins, eating away at what was left. Such is the “story” told within Candido Portinari’s Migrant. A stranded memory that once was a family who traveled the path of death. If not for its lack of flesh, the murder of crows would have feasted. They too have seen the trail that death had blazed, ate with a voracious diet for sad souls. Did the white ashes know they were being stalked? Did they know that their winged cousins were inching closer? Cannibalism was a virtue. Ignorance was no freedom. Everything was dying or maybe all of it had already died. The ashes blown about should retreat. The crows should give up. The land should sink under. A composition of decadence; efforts were futile and the after-life was already setting up a welcome party. Even the moon had turned away from their pitiful efforts. This is the life of the unwanted. Too insignificant to be considered human. But who decides who is and who is not a person? Surely the blood in their veins is proof. Who decides who is and who is not a person? The very people that took their lives away. The crows. Look once more at the murder and see that their feathers are rich and deep in their black, they have full stomachs and the strength to fly. Look once more to the elusive creatures gawking at their success. They take and take oh so diligently and yet were still greedy, they see no mercy from up above their skyed view. To them, perhaps, those ugly, white creatures are feed and the crows only pity the things. The creatures too had bellies that didn’t always cry, they once had cheeks that blushed, they once had blood in their veins. So, sickly creatures, once human. Still human? Starving, hungry yet still alive. With little they have left, it is just enough to beat the crows to death and finish the blazing trail. Let death follow only after victory, let death be but no more than a confirmation that life was fulfilling. Let those sickly creatures be human once more. AJ Holmes ** Checkers We have never been lucky. Growing up, we had to constantly move around our country because we could not afford living anymore. Although, this time was different. This time, we were moving for good. Our country was suffering, our village was suffering, and we could not live there anymore. It was time to pack up our bags and go, but I didn’t own many things. The only thing that I had with me was my favorite checkered shirt, which I was already wearing. My mother said we didn’t have enough time to pack up everything–we were scared and needed to get out. For days, we walked. The minutes felt like hours, hours felt like days, and days felt like weeks. After three days, we had found a safer place to stay for the night. Everyone was tired, hungry, and in pain—we needed to rest. We needed to find food. My grandfather struggled to continue on. He had not eaten a meal in nearly four days now, and he had painful blisters and infected wounds on his feet from the rocks and the thorns, because we could not afford shoes. Nearly 86 years old, he was a modest man and knew his time was coming soon, and he had one last request–playing checkers. “But how could we play checkers without a checkerboard?” I asked in a quandary. “Give me your shirt, boy.” And so I did. We gathered some rocks and leaves, and laid my shirt down on the ground. My grandfather chose to be rocks, while I chose to be leaves. We set it up just like a checkerboard and played the best-of-three. In our typical competitive way, my grandfather had won the first game. Then I won the second game. We were tied! This third game determined the ultimate winner… It was getting close but I was doing better. I knew that I would win, but then I remembered why we were playing this game. This was my grandfather’s final request from me. I couldn’t win and let him die losing. So purposefully, I moved the wrong piece, giving him an easy win over me. He was ecstatic. Joyfully cheering through his coughs, he could now die knowing that he had just won playing his favorite game. It was time to leave this spot and continue on, but we knew we had to leave my grandfather behind. He could not go on and we could not force him to. It was not a safe or smart idea. So, I picked up my checkered shirt off of the ground and put it back on. Even though it was full of dirt and sand, it had become the thing that I cherished the most. The memories of my grandfather that day were the most important memories that I have. Isabelle Menden ** A Cycle of Carnage We are in danger. We need to evacuate. We will perish. My neighbor cried a piercing scream that sent shivers through my fragile bones, echoing through my mind. Time stopped and the air became rotten. Sirens killed any sense of peace that the small town brought. As my family and I rushed to pack our things, a feeling of dread and anxiety hit me like a sledgehammer. As I fell to my knees, I gripped the skin tightly wrapped around my ribs easing some of the pain that passed through me. The world outside our cramped apartment has changed. *** We’ve been walking for months. My feet are fractured and torn exposing me to the horrible outside cold. Each step burns. I look down at my feet, frostbitten and black from dirt and blood. I don't know how much more I can handle. My children are tired and limp along with me silently. Their faces are obscured by their blank stare and matted hair. They barely talk other than the rare cry of pain. My oldest son, once a strong and respected man, now wobbles with each aching step. He carries much of our clothes while grasping at the twigs that my grandson's fingers have become. The youngest has not moved in days, I'm afraid she has grown too tired to continue living. The crows that glide above remind us that we are walking corpses, shadows of what we used to be. As we wander, the haunting caw of these dark nightmares keeps me awake. They swoop and tear flesh from our skin and meat from our bones as I swat at them with a walking staff I had picked up two months into our journey. When they started attacking, it felt like a giant hangnail peeling off my back while tiny strands of muscle held it from tearing off. Now their bites don't hurt as much like the pinch from a needle. However, my body aches more with each chunk of my life taken from me. We are headed West. As the sun paints the sky orange and pink, we confirm our direction. In the distant future, a sanctum of flourishing trees, lively people, and guardian hawks awaits us—a place where we will finally be safe from the terror and pain that this walk has brought upon us. *** We arrive but there is no sanctum. The lively people have been torn to skin and bone. The hawks have fled I assume to somewhere safe. The trees feast on the decomposing bodies that I once considered my saviors. I collapse to my knees once again with my family surrounding me as I see the beast that has caused this cycle of carnage. Charlie Platten ** A Day in the Life Len’s Journal March, 1846 Day 1: Today is the day. Mom and Dad said we are packing up and heading West. I don’t really know why but they say it will be good for us—something about manifest destiny? Packing didn’t take long—I don’t have much to take with me. My grandpa seems kind of worried about our upcoming journey, but my sisters were nothing but excited. I am sad to be leaving, I don’t know when I will be seeing all my friends again and we have to leave our dog behind. It is weird seeing everyone else gathering together and ready to leave. Why is everyone leaving? We are positioned just past half the way back in the line, only wagons separating us. That's all for today. -Len Day 2: I am nothing but excited. I am having so much fun on the trail, playing tag with my sisters and running around the others. My parents seem to be happy too, we only got yelled at once today about having too much confidence, but my grandparents still seem somber. There's only a few other kids on the trail with us, most of them teenagers, but they seem nice enough. The food we packed was really good today, I ate until my stomach hurt! Check in soon! -Len Day 7: Today marks one week on the trail. I think it's going well, but I'm starting to get bored. I wonder how much longer we have left? It's starting to smell, we haven't seen a river in a while. My legs are hurting from all the walking, but mom says the wagon is already moaning under all the wait. Later. -Len Day 12: Today was not good. I got into a fight with my sister and my dad made me walk behind the wagon in silence. And to make things worse it started to storm today. The BANG of the thunder scares me everytime. Not to mention I'm sick of this food. I just want a homemade meal again. My grandma seems weird today, but I'm not so sure why. I hope tomorrow is better. -Len Day 17: It was finally sunny today. The weather is starting to get warmer too, but that means mosquitos and flies. I think people are becoming ill. Coughing is surrounding the wagons like a cloud, but it shouldn’t be a big deal. I saw my first deer on the trail today which was fun! One of the older men at the front of the line diligently got him for us and we had a good meal finally! Things are starting to look better! -Len Day 43: Today was bad. An older woman died today. They say it was from disease so now we are all scared to death. Everyone gathered to bury her but my grandparents stayed in the wagon. Next time. -Len Day 82: I don’t know what to do. Grandma died today. Grandpa is distraught. That makes it 22 total to die on the journey. Why are we doing this? I saw a buffalo today. My grandma would have liked that. R.I.P. -Len Day 117: It is soooooo hot. My clothes are a home to sweat. I have been starving lately, we really only eat once a day. Dad says we are almost there but I don’t really trust him. My sister broke her arm a few days ago. My mom made her a splint but I can tell she is in pain. My birthday is soon! -Len Day 143: My birthday was terrible. I awoke to another dead traveler. This time a younger boy, close in age to me. I didn’t get any gifts as we didn’t have anything in our wagon. I really hope we are close. This is such a nightmare. Day 182: Finally! We made it! My dad says we are way West. I wonder how far—we have been walking for a long time. It is really nice here, lots of land—my dad says that is good for us. We found a new town we are going to stay in for a while. I'm still thinking if this was worth it. I guess we will see. Until next time. -Len Alec Behringer ** Genesis We do not know what is yet to come, for we’ve been through so much in the past few days. Scorching heat, dehydration, hunger. The tight pulling sensation of my pale skin on my brittle bones. The smell of my daughter’s hair, encased in dirt and grime. The feeling of the unsympathetic sun, burning our faces, arms, and bodies. My father, Alejandro. My brother, Andrés. My wife, Lucia. My daughters, Emilia and Lola. My sons, Carmen, Gabriel and Antonio. And me, Alvaro. We do not know specifically where we are going, but we knew we needed to get out, escape, not only for myself but for my children, so they can have a life past the age of twelve. We do not know how the people from the “land of the free” will react to us, pale, scrawny, and worn. The people from the “land of the free” who take pride in their country, who wave their flags on the street as soldiers march by. The people from the “land of the free” who don’t fear being attacked in the middle of the night. The people from the “land of the free” who have clean water. The “land of the free” where my children will be able to get an education. The “land of the free” where my children can have a future. We only have a short time left of this life before we can become one of the people of the “land of the free.” On the brink of death but the cusp of freedom. We can only aspire for the best. For this, this is our genesis. Sawyer West-Toebe ** The Travelers The nine of us stand in a bunch, looking into the distance. The air sad, filled with sorrow. Our stomachs growl with hunger, but we refuse to eat. We continue on, to a better life, a better future, a better hereafter, for our kids. So they don't have to feel this again, the emptiness. The feeling of the hot air. Feeling like we are suffocating. Like we are being tied back, like someone is holding us back, from finding the end of the tunnel. The nine of us stare into the distance, watching as the dust goes by, waiting for a new beginning. To start over, to feel at home again. Audrey Gottschalk ** Migration Migration… Cracked feet drag through mysterious pathways, skeletal bodies lean on branches of hope. Dark weary eyes search through paint, clawing out of frame. Migration… Generations look to each other for guidance, the desire for better is hydrating. It helps cool the skin from the dry heat. Migration… Birds flock overhead, anticipating the next drop, the next failure, the next death. Hope withers, flying like dust through the air. Migration… There is no option of turning back, feet have carried their fatigued bodies for too long. Bodies race, competing with factors beyond control. Migration… Hope that can both save and kill, hope that is as dangerous as it is healing. Hope is migration. Zaela Schlissel ** La Esperanza Bloodshot eyes and pronounced ribs. Food is so far. Bliss even farther. But hope is here now. Hope is the last crumb of bread spared for my empty stomach. Hope is brother’s hat shading my eyes, papa’s tunic covering my figure. Because these shaded eyes see forward; leaving behind what was and whirling towards what will be. What was fades behind me with each hobbling step I take, our icy village just remnants of a memory, replaced by endless sand. I covet what will be—but I ache for what I have now. Losing what I have is losing everything. No matter the riches; tear-shaped diamonds cannot rectify their sacrifices. Pobrecito niño. Mason Long ** Here’s what students said about the ekphrastic experience:
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 Erased de Kooning Drawing, by Robert Rauschenberg (USA) 1953 Erasure "It’s not negation, it’s a celebration. It’s just the idea." Robert Rauschenberg To experience an after, there must have been a before. Though it isn’t pure absence; it’s the near absence, the almost but not quite essence, we feel. There’s a time element, too, tinged with regret for not taking notice earlier. This looking without seeing haunts us like a ghost, like an unintelligible whisper. Only part of a vivid dream crosses the threshold into daylight. Someone is very busy with an eraser working to remove every trace. We fall back on what we know of objects and shadows. If shadows exist, then there must be corresponding objects. But here, there are no definable objects, only shadows. The picture frame corrals our attention. We should seriously consider what is enclosed. And yet without the artwork’s inscription we would never know what was missing. Like the scent of cologne in a vacant drawer, it conjures the memory of a lost love down to the pulse points and texture of their skin. The invitation stands, come pilot the empty. Cherie Hunter Day Cherie Hunter Day lives in Auburn, New Hampshire, near Massabesic Lake. her work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Moon City Review, Rust & Moth, and Unbroken, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction anthologies. Her most recent collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (Red Moon Press, 2023) features haibun and tanka prose. When not writing poetry and micro prose, or making collages, she is outside exploring the woods and avoiding ticks.  Her Room, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1963 Their Room Some would call it bland, the plain weathered door, but I recall how his gnarled hands planed the curling strips of oak as it lay across sawhorses, how he joined and hung the sanded boards on mortised hinges, snugged pins in hinge-holes to help the door swing free of creaks. Inside, the table is elbow-scuffed to a dull brown, adorned only by a conch whose geometry invites me to cup then press it against the echo-chamber of my ear. Fifty years later I can't resist lifting it-- and strain to hear their voices, too, though both are gone decades now. Memories hazed, like once beige walls aged to taupe, neither brown nor gray. Here, contrast is subtle in faded curtains of pale pink taffeta that grandmother stitched by lamplight, hung to hurry along springtime. The blizzard left windows trousered with snow so deep the door had to be taken off to dig out. Someone left the door open today, and light burnishes the old wood like laughter, like the whispering whoosh in the conch, and the soft touch of the silent door closing. Nancy Sobanik Nancy Sobanik is a Registered Nurse who started writing in 2020, and is learning poetics through workshops, study and the feedback of generous poet friends. She was awarded second place in the Belfast Maine Postmark Poetry Contest 2023, and is currently a 2024 finalist. Her poems can be found in Sparks of Calliope- Best of The Net Nominee 2023 and Pushcart Nomination 2024, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig. Maine is her playground and home.  Lone Wolf I, by Janelle Lynch (USA) 2024 Safe Light I am curious how one colour can mean opposing things: safe and sorry. How it can be a signal to stop and one to go. How it can mean the unfathomable. Amber was introduced as a safelight in the darkroom in Paris in 1841. On the street between red and green in Detroit in 1920. And as an alert nationwide in 1996 after the death of a girl. In the Stone Age, amber was a gem. I am ten today and at my party receive the gift of my mother’s presence and from her a camera wrapped with ribbon. What surprises me more? I hold the black plastic box, slide open the lens cover and start to take snapshots like my grandfather did before he died when I was four. In them, my uncle grins, my aunt glowers. My cousins gaze uncertain from their bikes. Kids aren’t supposed to have cameras in Jamestown. Nana, in profile: the line of her back repeats that of her hair, curved from a visit to Carm’s for the occasion. I am in a crowd of strangers in a darkroom lit by warm light. Big black machines lurch on the perimeter, each in its own station. My peers’ skin, the colour of death. Standing corpses around a stainless steel sink of trays and tongs. Is anyone as afraid as I am? Numbers and timers, mixtures and math. What are ratios, anyway? Long ago I was told I couldn’t learn. I do want to, but leave with the list of materials I can’t afford. Why don’t you become a secretary? I hear my grandmother’s voice from years before in the whirl of the revolving door. It follows me onto the New York City streets. How will you live? I am in spotlight on stage, a master of something after just two years. The audience is full and empty. What I know is that I barely know a thing. What I know is that I needed my name in calligraphic letters to lay claim to who I already was. To show the results of a hearing test. That I listened to myself. A license on bond paper. Textured and vulnerable. But safe to proceed. I am standing in safety underneath an amber light that in this small space means go not slow. The chemistry is intoxicating. I want to inhale it, drink it, bathe myself in it as a homecoming celebration in this Oklahoman home far from home where I belong and don’t belong and where I’ve been born a photographer all over again. A lone wolf teaching photography in Lone Wolf. Janelle Lynch Janelle Lynch is a writer and an award-winning photographer. Her writing has been published in monographs and in journals including Afterimage, The Photo Review, and Loupe. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in several museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs published by Radius Books: Los Jardines de México (2010); Barcelona (2012), which also includes her writings; and Another Way of Looking at Love (2018). She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery. When Fireflies Speak The Language Of Love after Fireflies on the Water, by Yayoi Kusama (Japan) 2002 Aren't these flickering lights at dusk a magical gift of hot summer nights, also called lantern fly, sparkling like fallen stars on hot summer nights? As thousands of lanterns set afloat to reach departed souls, guiding spirits through the darkness, they speak in silent sign language on hot summer nights. I think of candles lit inside votive lotus-shaped lanterns as I watch rows of quivering lights desperately glued onto window panes on hot summer nights. In an intermittent flutter, an electric shock echoing my musings, fireflies speak the language of love, an inaudible music in the stillness of hot summer nights. With bright names formed around light and fire, luciole, lucciole, luciérnaga, pygolampída, Yínghuǒchóng, zubabat el nar, they dance on hot summer nights, echo lovers' wordless encounters with all their variations, conjuring up lost faces, recalling all the shining promises my younger self dreamt of on hot summer nights Hedy Habra First published by Nūr Mélange: a ghazal anthology, Quitab Editions Hedy Habra Hedy Habra's latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? won the 2024 International Poetry Book Award and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award and The USA Best Book Awards. The Taste of the Earth, won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Poetry Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Poetry Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa, She is a twenty one-time-nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. https://www.hedyhabra.com/  The Stargazer (western Anatolia) c 3000 BCE The Lesser-Known Riddle of the Sphinx There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other. She, in turn gives birth to the first. Who are the sisters? My sister & I rarely talk about it that hazy time we were small Mom was crying on her bed we stood at the foot of it in wonder something gone wrong with the pregnancy. Later we learned she had named the baby Mary Ellen after whom, we didn’t know, Donna & I named for grandmothers in Asia Minor & so, by twist of fate, a ghost trio, our sister’s remains buried in an Orthodox cemetery we never went to on the other side of town. * The first time Donna takes me to the museum to view the sculpture I feel the pulse of something lost: baptismal cross, a gold ring a missing limb. Stargazer, I stare at your mystery, hair as short as mine. Samson after Delilah & you have survived, the tender slope of your shoulders holds up the air: Atlas before Atlas your DNA, my inheritance scripted in marble. You are naked & I merely mortal. * Dad loved repeating to us kids the Riddle of the Sphinx: Which is the creature that has one voice four feet in the morning two feet in the afternoon three feet at night? A simple equation & impossible mathematics. Years later I find a second riddle. We chased each other around the yard day & night. Anastasia Vassos Anastasia Vassos grew up in Cleveland. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. She is the author of Nostos (2023) and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (2021). Find her work in RHINO, Whale Road Review, Thrush, Comstock Review, and elsewhere. She is a reader for Lily Poetry Review, speaks three languages, and lives in Boston.  What You Don’t See Is What You Get : A Review of White Fence ** White Fence: An Ekphrastic Collaboration Across Ten Images Alan Basting, Paul Deblinger, Marilyn Hedgpeth, Bruce Metge on photography by Paula Siwek Window Press, 2024 https://windowpress.org/products/white-fence-an-ekphrastic-collaboration-across-ten-images ** For me, the most inspiring literary discussions are those, like symposia, in which a group of experts are provided a compelling question or issue and then each panelist responds in turn, not only to the topic but to each other. Such is one of the beauties of the book White Fence: An Ekphrastic Collaboration Across Ten Images (Window Press, 2024). Consider Paula Siwek’s ten photographic works to be compelling questions and present one each week to four master poets for their consideration and reflection—that is, as prompts for poems generated by those images (in “ekphrastic” manner)—and you have the potential for the kind of transformative exchange, or artistry, that the best symposium is capable of. You have a White Fence. What can be more compelling than a weathered privacy fence with one small slat missing, a narrow opening through which you can see in the distance a line of trees bordering a grassy field and, closer, the back of a metal folding chair? Or a black and white photo of a girl, her back to us, sitting in a patch of sunlight and shadow, her sandals off, a stick held upright in her right hand, seemingly unaware of the blurry “happy camping” activities going on in the distance? (It’s title Hoola Hoop, is alone worthy of contemplation and suggestion.) Or the shocking red brilliance of curly hair on a woman seemingly caught up in distant—swirling green and yellow—contemplations? Or a pictograph drawn or chalked on what appears to be urban cement, depicting several red-haired nudes (The Muses?) dancing in a circle, as if around an imaginary maypole? “Every picture tells a story,” Rod Stewart reminded us back in the day—a time in my life I don’t care to elaborate on here, except to acknowledge that even some fifty years later the song can stir up a dialectic of both difficult and pleasant memories, youthful moments of questioning and discovery, of love and loss, of solitude and society, of myth and memory. It was a time of conflicting attractions, during which I could find equally enticing an awkward, sweaty embrace of a stranger in a crowded high school gym or dancing alone, naked, “grotesquely / before my mirror” (as W.C. Williams’ describes in “Danse Russe”). That is, moments equally worthy of a story or a poem. And therein is yet another beauty of White Fence, for Siwek’s images have roused such reflections, mirror-like, of myth and memory in the four poets represented in the book: Alan Basting, Paul Deblinger, Marilyn Hedgpeth, and Bruce Metge. Deblinger in particular tends toward narrative in his poetry. Siwek’s Red Hair, for instance, stirs up the poet’s memory of watching Secretariat run in the Preakness—a flash of colour that so transcends shade or hue that it defines itself as uniquely thoroughbred: Big Red. (Red, in point of fact, is one of the unifying devices within White Fence; the color, as well as the word’s homophone, reappears in imagistic or metaphoric ambiguity—if not outright punning—throughout the book.) “There are two kinds of red for me now,” Deblinger concludes, all those ordinary reds and the red trying to tell me it belonged in my universe . . . A universe, as the other poets in White Fence will attest, that may be mythical and mysterious yet is nonetheless rooted in the immediacy (intimacy) of our dailiness, which, for the poet Marilyn Hedgpeth, means a life-long dedication to all things spiritual. Whereas Hedgpeth’s bio claims that she is a “retired” Minister of Word and Sacrament for the Presbyterian Church, her poetry continues a religious mission—to consider the manifestations of Being in the things and language of the world. In response to Siwek’s Initiation Triptych, an image that seems to meld forces of sky (lightning), water (ocean), and earth (body), Hedgpeth’s poem “Orenda” (a Haudenosaunee term defined as “the collective power of nature’s energies”) describes how the photograph seems to capture “heaven’s thunderbird” releasing its living energy from that trinity, “enraging the sea / its song a collective moan / our cry a prayer.” Thus these poets remind us that the possibilities for knowledge (enlightenment) are endless, given the imagination, and yet our bodies have learned to speak in more sensory ways as well, as Alan Basting proves, in his more physically grounded approach to Siwek’s artistry. In his poem “Joining the Movement,” based upon Red Headed Dance, Basting begins with a simple description of the image itself: “The redheaded ladies began dancing / in circles. Light pooled under their feet.” Then he is drawn into it (a necessary pun, forgive me) and concludes: Each held arms out to touch sea mist, then fingertips of sisters before and behind them, a garland of naked females, each lovely and perfect: flowers of form and movement, petals so beautiful, I wished to bury my face in their fragrance. Bruce Metge’s poems also have a physical intimacy and narrative, and yet at times it is the image itself speaking—or a persona speaking out of the image—thus presenting a truly ekphrastic dialogue, the language of art. Reflecting on the book’s title image, the speaker in “Woods and Fences” first considers what the white fence is hiding or keeping the poet away from—the shelter of the trees, its welcome silence, the sun’s warmth—and how a neighbour’s desire to build a fence “for his privacy” transforms not only the woods (which the neighbor cuts to make lumber) but also the speaker’s memory of nature’s inherent pleasures. And yet, the narrow opening left “between two planks” appears to be intentional on the neighbor’s part, providing, perhaps, a glimpse of his human nature. “[P]erhaps to keep a view of the pines beyond,” writes Metge, “where true tranquility makes its home.” Printed in a hardcover format (approx. 9 x 10 inches) with high quality paper and striking design, White Fence has all the aesthetic qualities and textures to make a wonderful coffee table book. (Or collector’s showcase: A deluxe, limited edition of 26 copies signed by the artists includes an original Siwek image not found in the volume.) But it would be a shame for White Fence to be treated as simply book art, that is, for us to admire it solely for its lovely images and presentation. White Fence is, after all, a book of gorgeous poetry, a book to spend time with, to return to over and again—as I did—stimulated not only by the questions the images raise, but by the answers the poets provide, as well as the compelling additional questions of artistry and humanity that the poems will continue to ask. Phillip Sterling Phillip Sterling’s most recent books are Lessons in Geography: The Education of a Michigan Poet (essays/memoir, Cornerstone Press) and Local Congregation: Poems Uncollected 1985-2015 (Main Street Rag). He served as program coordinator and juror for WordView: Art Inspiring Art, an exhibit of artwork incorporating both visual and textual elements, presented by LowellArts (Lowell, MI) in 2022.  Join us in December for The Art of the Madonna, to learn about Mary in the history of art. In the new year, blast away the winter blahs with a wine and art write night using Tarot for creative inspiration. Plus, Leonora Carrington, the pre-Raphaelites, The Erotic Muse, AND....special gift certificates so your friends can try our fabulous workshops. Treat your friends AND support The Ekphrastic Review! We want to continue bringing ekphrasis to the world every day, and continue inspiring writers with our unique, interactive community workshops on art appreciation and writing. Thank you so much. Click here to see what's coming up: https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrasticwritingworkshops.html ** "Lorette is one of the most vibrant, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable workshop leaders I’ve encountered, and I’ve worked with about a dozen of the top poets in the U.S., including Naomi Shihab Nye, Ted Kooser, and Jane Hirshfield. No one should get bored by coming back again and again. It’s amazing how she keeps the topic fresh: always varied, always full of more prompts and resources to check, and most important of all, always welcoming to everyone who shows up." Alarie T. "Lorette's enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge about art combine to make her one of the most exciting and empowering workshop leaders I have ever had the joy of writing with. And the Hyperbole police would not arrest me for saying that! I was exposed to art I would never have looked twice at, and have learned how to linger and engage with the work and the artist. Her preparation, presentations and written feedback were thoughtful, generous and encouraging. an absolute delight!" Susie Whelehan "In 2024, while dealing with a serious medical condition, I've taken a wild ride with Lorette C. Luzajic and The Ekphrastic Review--workshops, Facebook marathons, biweekly challenges. Writing in response to art is helping me heal at the soul level, and for that, I am forever grateful to Lorette and the team at The Ekphrastic Review." Barbara K.  For Clementine Hunter Strung gourds choke up out of earth, out from loam the tinge of ecstasy at dusk. Eyes filmed over prophesy in smoke as cyclopes score a music of mule sweat, chink the blackest eaves with cooled off Sun’s blood, blinking come, caution. Ripple, crumble, fade, aching over barrow handles, bandanaed, powdered, stewing a week’s caked vestments far from shade. The grass is green with killing, the scalded earth watered with pig shrieks spilled from the black, oak-shrouded cauldron where unease curls in whispers, smiling to vine the lustrous pickets. Do not let the earth undo what dares, slide splayed and craving from the furrow that is yours. Let the little bites chime the garden gate and teach a song too deep for melody. That’s us in the ground, in the ground, crying. Daniel Fitzpatrick This poem was inspired by Harvesting Gourds near the African House and Wash Day Near Ghana House, Melrose Plantation, by Clementine Hunter (USA) 1959. https://noma.org/clementine-hunter-mural/ Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels and two poetry collections. He is a member of the creative assembly at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He edits a journal called Joie de Vivre.  Sunrise III, by Arthur Garfield Dove (USA) 1936 Heliopause 1948: Katherine Dreier wakes early, an orb of inchoate pain dawning on her right, directly beneath her lowest rib. She knew the pain would only worsen as the day slid forward, so she moved quickly, before the pain took the best of her thinking, to her desk, where the lecture notes for today’s speech to Yale students waited, almost finished. Oneness. Unity. Line. Form. Transcendence. The attendant images of El Grego, Kandinsky, Gaugo, and Giato gathered round each other, communing in a tongue she felt certain she was close to translating completely. The students, she hoped, would hear half of what she had to say, if she did her job well. The pain roared early. She did not understand the pain, but she knew that one day she would reveal its connection to the Absolute. She had hours before she’d leave for the lecture hall in New Haven and try to embarrass the critics of modern art—a task of which, if she was being honest, she never tired. A wrapped canvas, delivered in the late hours, waited for her. The pain crescendoed, shouted. Artitecture, she’d written in her notes, was the play of Form in Space. Painting was the Division of Space. Music was a Division of Time. Pain, then, in this formulation, was a kind of music. She unwrapped the painting recently donated by Arthur. Pain irrupted into time, froze, shattered, stretched, and ossified it. The painting shone with its own kind of illuminance, as if it were actually producing the very light it sought to represent. Dove, that rare early American modernist, had finally relented and sent something worthy of the Yale gallery. The painting slid from its packing and the yellow sun stared at her, a holy eye. Circle after circle of shading colors, white into blue into purple into teal into blue again rising over the shapeful hills. It was the sun rising above us all. It was the ordered center of the universe, a system within a system within a system. Inside itself, she thought, inside us all. Concentric circles of pain pulsed out from her and met the painting’s concentric circles, the sun’s concentric circles, the universe’s concentric circles. All contained all within itself. Pain is a Force, she knew then, yes, understanding. Pain is a Force, and so is Art. Art, that Force within humanity that extends, develops humanity. Pain a Force that extends, develops the self. Yes, soon it would kill her, she knew. But that was little matter. Force and Form she hummed to herself: that’s all we are. Force contained by Form. Form that emanates from Force. She could not possibly hope to teach the students all this, but she could gesture at the existence of Force and Form. The rest would be up to them. Behind her, she knew, the painting still shone its circles extending forever, to the very edge of everything and back again. 1969: Some days, the sun seems so strong against the yellow, cresting hills behind her father’s ranch home, it’s impossible not to imagine it's actually rushing, wide-mouthed, toward earth. There’s a car rolling down the winding dirt driveway and two of Astrid’s brothers are sitting on the porch, following the car with the empty circular barrel of a shotgun. Lukas is three years older than her, but so are her brothers. He doesn’t leave the car, just waits for her while she makes a show of leaving. He’s handsome, in a distant kind of way, but more importantly to Astrid, his best friend is dating her best friend, and it's vital to them both that they lock into synchronous orbit with one another. Once he has her, the four of them all meet in a parking lot, grab deli meat and a can of pickles from a small grocery store at the foot of the hills and drink beer Lukas brought. “Look,” says her boyfriend, pointing to the tops of the hills as the sun begins to set. “If you watch the hills, you can see the mountain lions come out. Tiny, shadowed suggestions of violence. Just watch.” Astrid squints at the mountain and sees nothing. Behind Lukas’s back Lisa touches her hand. They are drunk by the time Lukas drives her home. It is dark now. There’s no moon, just the dark shadows of earth smearing into the dark sky. Two miles from home, the single working headlight on Lukas’s car flashes against eyes in the night. Astrid watches as two perfect, reflective spheres bounce off the hood of Lukas’s car. A feline snarl. A thud. Then silence. Lukas hardly slows, cursing under his breath, and takes her home. In her bedroom, alone, she imagines the lions Lukas saw on the hills sniffing the dead body. They follow the scent of gasoline, tracing its outline all the way back to her ranch home. She imagines the scraping of claws against wood. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s still dreaming. One of her brother’s shouts and the shotgun echoes his cry. “Damn beasts are coming right up to the cattle.” She covers her head with a pillow. All the while, the lion’s shining, reflective eyes still peer straight at her, a piercing beam of yellow-white light cutting through the night. In the morning, she wakes to the sound of her father’s pickup truck idling in the driveway. Out her window, she watches her father and her brothers heave a corpse into the bed and drive up into the hills. The sun is just rising behind them. A single, great predatory eye rises above everything. The hills are dark, silhouetted, but she looks closely. Thin shadows, but they’re not violence, she knows. They’re a formless force, disintegrating into a single sphere above them all. They’re everywhere she thinks, those glowing eyes. They’re everywhere. 2019: Anne’s mother is far from her, planting spring bulbs in a garden just outside Berlin, but her tiny childhood piano is splayed open in Anne’s recording room. Egg cartons are stacked to the ceiling of the small apartment, keeping the fecund sounds of spring away from the microphone. She hovers over the things’ open guts. Its old strings are gently patinated with age. She hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, but the sound is finally coming out right now. She takes a guitar plectrum and strikes the strings directly. She listens to the sound and howls. It’s right, finally. She plucks a few more times, the dissonant sound of her very first instrument rings. The choked sonorousness feels like a swallowed pill, too large. Plunked sound spreads, waves encircling, flying away from their source. Just last month she’d heard the second Voyager satellite had finally fled the heliopause. It had left the solar winds. No more would our bright star be at its back. It was alone, without its center, or even its center’s echoes. It was among only silence. She records the piano again and again. The morning melts into midnight and by the time she is finished arranging her recordings, the second song of her album has its percussion. It’s like this, she thinks, we are born at the center of something, our mothers love, a hospital nurses’ attention, something. We are propulsed forward by the force of this center, like sound waves in all directions. The winds and heat of our great sphere powers us. Our mother has a small piano she learned to play on as a broke teenager before we were born. We are seated on her lap and watch her play on it before we even have words. Great bubbles of sound pop in our ears. We plunk our first notes, then our second and thirds until our mother hands us a cello and we play that. We play that again and again and again because it produces something inside us that reminds us of that center. We are propelled forward to Frankfurt where we study the masters. Around us sounds echo, by now millions of spheres encircle us, sounds ceaseless and profound. We break from the masters and play with contemporaries and we look back and find ourselves very, very far from home. This freefall fear freezes us. We are content with collaborations, finding the circles of others and letting their motion remind us of our own without any of the attendant risks the self brings. We know we need force but we are afraid to produce our own, until one day we hear that the second Voyager satellite has left the embrace of our sun and entered that wild and empty space between stars. We feel a sounding call. We finally answer it. We spend months in a tiny apartment by ourselves, recording and composing and recording and composing. We move so far from that first force that we can never return. We fall asleep before we eat. At night we dream of Voyager slipping from the heliopause, its plasma instrument reading zero solar wind. It’s alone. The sun’s circles spread to Earth. Earth gave form to this force, in music, in rhythm, in the long impossible parabolas of spaceflight, in Voyager. At the very edge of the sun’s echoing song, a note slips through. And this, this tiny blinking satellite, carries the force farther yet. The heliopause extends and extends and extends. In the morning Anne wakes, and there is so much empty between her and her first solo album. The sun rises. Voyager speeds father yet, and Anne begins to play her cello. 14,678: They will swallow the sun come morning. Kate waits on the deck of the Voyager Starliner with her sisters. They are arguing over what their next stop on their galactic sightseeing tour should entail. Kate is not listening. Once the sun is gone, she will return home, to Proxima. This sun has long outlived its usefulness. The detritus that encircles Earth has long ago rendered it pointless as a member of intergalactic society. They made the final decision to encircle Sol in a great unwinding machine that consumes its energy directly, and the whole system will grow dark. There is little use for nostalgia in a universe as open as ours, but Kate doesn’t care. This is humanity's origin. It's home for half a megaannum of struggle and joy. It’s their home, though no one has been born there in a millennia. Kate is saying goodbye. The final bits of the machine are ready and come morning, only darkness will sing here. There is something ruinous about this, she thinks, through the chrome and fluorescence of the observatory deck. Her sisters can not understand her sadness. In truth, they cannot even see it as sadness at all. In her grief, she flips through a large art book the starliner has left on the table near the observatory. Next to the dyson sphere designs and holographic images of the stages of the sun’s life stages rendered in super-high fidelity, thick, glossy pages filled with works of art dedicated to the sun. Monet’s impressionistic sunrise. The microsun atomic sculptures of Altair. The Bierstadt mountainside bright pink with morning. Arthur Dove’s Sunrise, III. Here, she stops. The sharp yellow interior. The crisp division of blue surrounding it. It preempted its enclosure, she thinks, marveling. Yet the concentric rings continue into the dark, stains of purple, black, blue, and teal. Out and out and out. The deep voice of some stringed instrument playing on the deck seeming, impossibly, to correspond to the painted rings of the sun. Come morning, they will swallow the sun. It will be gone. Yet in the painting Kate finds, not comfort, but something else, a propulsion, an outward seeking, a force. Yes, a Force. The sun will be gone but its collective Force will be everywhere, rippling out like waves in a vacuum, ceaseless, stunning, hers. And when the sun is gone, we will still be there, our circles extending forever, to the very edge of everything, and then, if we are very lucky, back to the beginning again. Spencer Nitkey Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, and others. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart, and Rhysling awards. You can find more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com. |
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November 2024
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