In Blue Rooms: For My Mother and the story of the hidden painting underneath My grief paints the last days of you in Picasso’s muted tones of melancholy. Paints you in a gown the colour of consolations; hospital walls, shades of faded postcard oceans. Paints your aqua skin, paper-thin, bleached by morphine. Daubs the bruised greys for coma. But no matter how I mix the colours, none portray the leach of chemotherapy in your veins, the ruthless atrophy of cells. No colour for the tumour, lodged deep in your brain like an unsolvable riddle. I make a work of art of my mourning. I resist the title, imprinting itself in every moment of my blue period: Portrait of My Mother Dying. Cancer rendered you into a still life. Yet your seascape eyes, your topaz ring cut from clear summer sky, sing brighter hues in my memory. I am Picasso, hiding another room inside this room of (in)terminal waiting, a place of solace. I sketch the vase of cornflowers, defiantly joyful like you, cooking to music in the kitchen, your hands a dance of spices and love over the pan. Splash recollection’s canvas in vivid cobalt for the coverlet to warm your weary body. Direct the sun from a window to drench you in seven intensities of light—one for every year your illness tainted. From the ghost of your heart-shielding breast—brave absorber of unspoken sorrows, sacrificed years ago—I release a symphony of sapphire butterflies, winging your pain far away. Soon, you too, will take flight, beyond the confines of these blue rooms, into an endless sky. Grief mourns with one palette, love with another. Melissa Coffey This poem was first published at Medium.com. Melissa Coffey (they/their) is an Australian writer and editor. A former theatre director, they’re fascinated by the wilds of nature and the human heart. Their work often explores loss, desire and sexuality, sometimes through a feminist lens. Melissa’s poetry and fiction are published in Aurora Journal, Exist Otherwise, Crow’s Quill Magazine, Last Girls Club, and The Ekphrastic Review. Forthcoming are works in Antithesis and two anthologies in 2024 (Improbable Press and The Ekphrastic Review). Melissa was once an artist’s model, where they fell in love with art. They’re working on several chapbook projects and a novella. Connect on Twitter @CuriousSeeds.
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Artists’ Model Not to be cut by artists’ eyes, The model turns away, Wishing her true face onto A protected presence Living within her and safe, Much more than a likeness. But never mindless or mute, She intimates to the painter With her cambered spine Elliptical knowledge unvoiced Of the price she pays To preserve herself faceless. James Shay James Shay is a poet and visual artist living in the Sonoma Valley of California. Poetry publications include The Blue Unicorn and The Ekphrastic Review. An architect for fifty-three years, he studies ancient Egyptian temples, tombs and other structures. Fear of Where the River Goes I'm but a fish in river where I break the surface, feel the air, and fall despondent in despair to wish for wings that I could wear and be instead the butterfly who flutters through an endless sky and never has to wonder why its life between two banks would lie where all that it has never seen denies a way to ever glean the wisdom that would still a soul that has no way to seize control nor hope at hand it might impose on fear of where the river goes. Portly Bard Portly Bard: Old man. Ekphrastic fan. 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. This poem and the artwork it accompanies is from Thinking Inside the Box: the undrawn art of poet's heart, a very special collaboration between Portly Bard and Lorette C. Luzajic. The hardcover and paperback both feature a full colour collection of Luzajic's visual art, with ekphrastic responses in poetry by Portly Bard. There is also a dialogue between the two artists about ekphrasis and creativity. You can add this jewel to your library by clicking the front cover image. There is also an ebook version that you can download free of charge, below.
Tenderness at the Cusp When sun Bleeds through the waters Lancing out to Trestrignel Dappling like panned gold They shine brighter Than any sky Blushing As it folds A candle lights the future Tenderness at the cusp Eyes cast down In some reverence holy The air gathers This family In a sunset cup Nods to old And young alike Divinity Sought In that light Brightest before night Amanda Niamh Dawson Amanda Niamh Dawson was raised in London, Dallas, Boston, and Washington, DC, spending summers shining brass in her uncle's antiques shop. She attended Tufts University, the Ecole du Louvre, and Sorbonne University and then completed graduate studies in the decorative arts at Winterthur. Amanda worked at Sotheby's in Books & Manuscripts, and Old Master Paintings. She has a collection of antique brass candlesticks which she shines regularly. Her poems have appeared in The Dewdrop, Pomona Valley Review, The Banyan Review and others. The Mountain Dwellers for Peggy Knelt close to the ground, we looked up. It was new every night or not there at all. We looked up, and we gave her a name. When the dark drew down, we looked up. She pulled blood from women, desire from men. We looked up. We were shaking and luminous. In death and at birth, we looked up. We blew prayers and ash up to her and her children. We looked up and teased ritual from myth. Each day at the change, we looked up. She set fire to mountains we knew were not burning. We looked up, we looked up, we looked up. Autumn Newman Autumn Newman is a metrical poet living in California. She mentors women learning meter in Annie Finch's online community, The Meter Magic Spiral. Her poems have been published in many journals and her chapbook, This Is My Body A Flower Burst Open, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Home Time turns upside down on the freeway of life. Days blur into oatmeal at the breakfast table. Green leaves born as buds, hopeful as a new intention, unmask to red, gold, and brown in the autumn crisp. With the blueness of evening they become colourless. Branches remain predictable securing the next generation, pointing to a structure with footings and a solid roof. At the door the glow of love greets us like a garden, a bed of comfort and safety, where windows watch the world. Lois Perch Villemaire Lois Perch Villemaire is the author of My Eight Greats, a family history in poetry and prose published in 2023. Her work has appeared in such places as ONE ART, The Ekphrastic Review, Pen In Hand, and anthologies, including I Am My Father’s Daughter. Lois lives in Annapolis, MD. where she enjoys researching family history connections, fun photography, and doting over her collection of African violets. Eve Writes to Mary Cassatt I know you will never marry or bear a child, instead becoming a matron saint to mother and child, a twist of fate from the outside in, witness to the bond and cleave a thousand times over. So what if yours are two-dimensional and cannot be lifted from the canvas? Still they are alive and breathe, leave evidence of the endless story, the holy link. Before you left the garden I might have read your palm, traced the lifeline from my rib to yours against the clink of chain as you unlatched the gate. Do not the poses and the waiting tell the tale? The girl slouched in a blue armchair, a mother about to wash her sleepy child, the one combing her daughter’s hair, this baby in her mother's arms reaching for an apple? It is cold in my garden as I write. I want you to know I could have kept your secrets, could have saved the letters that you burned. Sharon Tracey Sharon Tracey is the author of three books of poetry: Land Marks (Shanti Arts), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts), and What I Remember Most is Everything (All Caps Publishing). Her poems have appeared in Terrain.org, Radar Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She loves writing ekphrastic poetry. Find some of her work online at sharontracey.com Nine Lives: an Ekphrastic Marathon Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating nine years of The Ekphrastic Review. Join us on Sunday, July 14, 2024 for our third annual ekphrastic marathon. This is an all -ay 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 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, before the deadline for submission. 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 within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2024). Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site. One poem and one flash 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 14, 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 14, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.) Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2024 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. 15 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 theekphrasticreview@gmail.com and we'll sign you up. Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September. Sign up below! Modigliani, While You Can for Jeanne Hebuturne, devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice Someone might have said go to her tonight, say something tender-- like her voice is a faint tune in the wind you always hear. She is your bright star burning in the night sky. Shower her with your words, not only lavish paint on canvas. She is like the stunning Cereus-- queen of the night, you know, Modi, the gorgeous one that spirals toward the heavens, the one with a myriad of blooms that intoxicates the air you breathe every minute. Whisper it even while she sleeps. Lay a garland of violets around her shoulders while her magnificent dark hair falls over her pillow in the cold Paris wind that sweeps through her open window. You don’t know that she, your haven of rest, is a fast-fading apparition, the one you will long for in your last hours. So, again lay the rain-soaked words of the poet around her— from the master: This living hand now warm and capable of earnest grasping would if it could--- or whisper your own La Vita Nuova to her. While you can, Modi, leave the raucous midnight café, your sketches of friends at crowded tables, the bottles of fine Beaujolais and go to her. Your death masque will come soon enough, yours first, then keeping the pact, hers so quickly following you— Your friends will come soon enough to lay bewildered flowers on the sidewalk below her window after her swoon to death there-- hers and your unborn child’s. Then all the roses and violets piled there will wash away in a flood of night rain-- so that all we will have left, will be your repose together finally at du Pere Lachaise and her blurred, immortal blue eyes, too beautiful, too intimate to paint, your muse, called wife, so filled with love and desire for you. Then only her silent beauty on your canvas-- will be left behind to breaks our hearts. Adele Ne Jame Adele Ne Jame "I have published three books of poems and won many awards including a National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, a Eliott Cades Award for Literature and a Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. My poems have been published in many fine journals such as Ploughshares, the Atlanta Review, the Notre Dame Review and others. I have served as the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I've taught creative writing at the university level in Hawai'i for many years. My poems as broadsides have been exhibited in the Sharjah/Dubai Biennial and at the Arab American National Museum. I was recently honored to be selected as the Mikhail Series lecturer at Toledo University." Before He Was Papa after Untitled (Italians Playing Cards, Village, NY) photography by Ilse Bing (USA) 1936 https://whitney.org/collection/works/15893 Before the war, before the women, deep sea marlins and scarred hands. Before Cuba and Pilar and his six toed cat, a young Hemingway passed our sidewalk card game on the way to the grocery for his mother. He felt he was no one then. His skinny arms hadn't built themselves hard and bearlike yet. His chest hadn't barreled. His face still had a boyish turn. As young men often hint in their lanky arms and long legs, he had filling out to do. He walked past our game with sidelong interest and then turned, and came back to watch, serious on his face. Even then, sharks swam his thoughts-- He wanted to do something his mother wouldn't approve. Written across his face, like the short lines on his father's palm or leaves his mother would never read in the bottom of her tea cup, was the man he meant to be. When we folded and the winner picked his winnings, I nodded at the empty seat and asked, "You want in?" Before Finca Vigia, before running with the bulls in Spain or lion hunting in Africa, plane crashes, war, or suicide, in the steep inhalation of surprise, there was a hesitation, and then with a jingle of change in his pocket, and a rapping of the reins on his life, he sat on the open crate and said, "My name is Ernest," and I believed he was. ** If Hemingway Rode a Bicycle in the First Tour de France after The First Tour de France, photography from The Nationaal Archief/The Hague (France) 1903 https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2011/07/22/137828661/photo-first-tour-de-france-winner-1903 Hemingway was four years old when Maurice Garin won the first Tour de France. He could not have listened to the race on the radio. Macroni had just sent the first broadcasts out. He could not have imagined the thick legged swarthy man in a newsboy cap. But if he had, I am sure he would have turned creature-ready, throttling into the race, singing a catchy fugue, tucking a lucky penny in his pocket, kissing a woman in white full on, leaving her pink and panting before pedaling off to chase switchbacks around cliffs without noticing the views. I am sure he would have donned goggles and maybe would have stripped to the waist, his chest hair and mustache pressed flat with the speed of steep his descent. ** A Farewell to Arms after Hemingway On Safari. photography by Earl Theisen (USA) 1952 https://photos.com/featured/hemingway-on-safari-earl-theisen-collection.html Hemingway sits at his friend’s desk writing parts of A Farewell to Arms. Forty-seven times he rewrote the ending, 30 times he’s made the journey around the sun, only 31 one more until his last mark on the world is made. But for now, he sits at that desk in an uncomfortable chair, rewriting, in Piggot, Arkansas, while his son is being born 72,000 miles away ** Not That I Mind after Untitled (Men in Bar), photography by Gertjan Bartelsman (Colombia, b. Netherlands) c. 1980 https://www.phillips.com/detail/gertjan-bartelsman/UK040217/7 Once somewhere in Cuba in a whitewashed bar with sweating walls and hungry men, Hemingway once challenged me to arm wrestle. What does one say to that? Certainly not no. His shirt was casually unbuttoned and he pulled at the collar as if to cool himself, but there was no cooling-- the fan was broken and we all sat sweltering at the tables, leaning on the walls, drinking our drinks. His grip was firm as we braided our arms. The table, grooved by too many men with pocket knives and centavos, dug at my elbow, but it didn’t matter. His forearm was thick and his bicep strained at the sleeve he had rolled up as far as he could. He didn’t look like a writer who leaned into his typewriter each morning, who penned notes on drafts, squinted at endings then crumpled them into the trash, thirty times thirty times. Instead his great barrel chest and bear-hands said athlete, bravado, machismo, monolith. Pearls of sweat hesitated in his beard before dropping onto the table. Too humid for even the wood to soak up, they domed and caught the inverted onlookers, the upside down room, the white ceiling fan that wouldn’t turn and us, one on each side squatting on our heads at that table. Three drops I lasted. That was all. He must have taken it easy on me. As he held my struggle he drew the scene, laughed too loudly at a joke from across the room, turned and stared too long at another man’s woman. Three drops, and then he hammered my hand into the table with a proud “Ah Ha” as if surprised, and turned to the knot of men around him and filled the room. And what of me? I was background who now, at least, had a good story to tell. Julene Waffle Julene Waffle, a graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher in rural NYS, an entrepreneur, a nature lover, a wife, a mother of three boys, two dogs, three cats, a bearded dragon, and, of course, she’s a writer. She finds pleasure in juggling these jobs while seeming like she has it all together. Her work has appeared in Sequestrum, The Adroit Journal Blog, NCTE’s English Journal, Mslexia, The Bangalore Review, The Ekphrastic Review among other journals and anthologies and her chapbook So I Will Remember. Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com.
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