Letter to Kandinsky

Caviar nests in your black shot lines.
Why abandon the old-time net?
You block a cheese to staunch the blood.
The fish, stitched shut, bumps icy air,
yet the bow of the boat lets him flounder.
 
Teepee triangle, squared-edge gash,
I find no native, no human form.
Your buzzing pear tickles my ear.
Diagonal flag-red stripes the rain.
Where is France? Your Russian home?
 
Background cloth of messy wine;
you’ve spilled the camping meal from your chest. 
An antennaed bug leans on the frame.
Why embrace the wolfish face?
Sun orange, burnt cloud, whipping water,
 
Your pictures move, deny the stagnant.
No touch of brown decay or graves.
A leafed umbrella drips, wrapped in July.

Jeanne DeLarm

Jeanne DeLarm was born in the northwest corner of Connecticut and now lives diagonally across the state at the southeast corner with her husband of forty-three years.  The poem published here in The Ekphrastic Review came about while viewing a Kandinsky mural during a Paintings and Painters workshop at the Museum of Modern Art. Her poems and essays have been included in various journals and magazines. A chapbook of poems titled My Father’s Mirror, was published by California State University in January 2025.  ​

​Landslide
 
I’d beg someone to loosen the straps
on my floral dress
if it would help the earth breathe.
With creases and compartments
we are confused, in denial.
 
Scaffolding. A church
of rock breaks apart too fast.
Still trapped in amber.
 
The Huascaran avalanche in Peru
left 18,000 lives
under debris and mudflow.
An earthquake’s white wrath.
 
I am scrubbing my knees with salt.
I am remembering the far side
of a mountain before faces are erased.

Susan Michele Coronel

Susan Michele Coronel's first manuscript, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press this summer. She has had poems published in numerous journals including Mom Egg Review, One Art, Minyan, and Spillway 29. She lives in New York City, where she has owned and directed a daycare business for over fifteen years.

​The Cost of Everything

Saint Sebastian rests on the rough stone floor. Propped against a lime-washed wall, he is bleeding.

There are two more Sebastians in a corner far from the south-facing window, and one still perched on a rickety easel. 

Jorge* is methodical; he measures each canvas, notes its main features, then adds it to his long, numbered list. 

As if there is need to prove his father’s worth?

As if these tortured skies were not enough? 

Six arrows have found their mark. His limbs are bound but his eyes turn upward. And all about, the heavens are swirling.

carmine red --
a pierced heart sold 
to the highest bidder

Alan Peat

*After El Greco’s death (1621) his son, Jorge, compiled an inventory of the artist’s possessions. One of the St. Sebastians listed in the inventory is to be auctioned at the New York branch of Christie’s on the 5th Feb 2025.

Alan Peat is an English writer. In 2021 he placed third in the International Golden Triangle Haiku contest & second in the New Zealand International Haiku contest. In 2022 he was runner up in the British Haiku Society Haibun Award; honourable mention in the Haiku Poets of North California International Haibun contest & second in the Sandford Goldstein international tanka contest. In 2022 he was a guest author at Cornell University’s Mann Library. The following year he won the inaugural HSA Touchstone Award for haibun. He has also written books about ceramics, textiles, and the art of John Tunnard.

Autumn — Portrait of Lydia Cassatt (Mary Cassatt 1880)

You were your almost-famous sister’s 
favorite model, posed on a mint-green park bench,
shawled in a blanket. 

It’s the coldest Impressionist painting I know, 
colder than Monet’s sun-scrubbed Haystacks in Winter

but that’s because I know too much. 
Your black bonnet and knotted scarf, those 
knitted gloves, the way your sister 

tucked the blanket around your lap and legs 
with more than sisterly concern 

for the damp chill rising off the Seine … You’re dying,
your failing kidneys 
flooding your body with the toxic waste

of being alive — your pale, precisely limned face, 
both cheeks lightly kissed with fever flush,

the only still point in the painting.
Seven years Mary’s senior, 
you were her designated chaperone in Paris

once she decided America had nothing 
left to teach her about art.

Dutiful, first-born daughter
of Philadelphia’s upper crust, 
free to learn nothing 

more practical than knitting and needlepoint.
Mary painted you at both, blank canvas 

she turned to again and again,
crocheting in the garden wearing a gauzy white
frilled bonnet and French blue dress, 

or sitting at a tapestry loom, keeping
a careful eye on the work at hand, 

while the dark wall and window dissolve
in a bright white column 
that’s beginning to claim 

a sturdy, lathe-turned table leg.
A more ominous dissolve stopped me 

the first time I saw you 
on your green bench: Mary’s scraped 
and reworked the bottom of your blanket

until it’s the same reds and sulfur
of the bare flower bed, painting you

out of the picture. But is it from grief
at losing you or rage at what’s taking you 
from her? Or had she discovered 

there’s no difference? 

Aaron Fischer

​Aaron Fischer’s poems have appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Five Points, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine poetry contest, 2023 Connecticut poetry prize, 2023 Naugatuck River Review poetry prize, and the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest. He’s been nominated for a 2024 Pushcart.

My Room is a Comfortable Cage
 
Each day I see
the big bold sky
she tells me hi
so then I say
do I stay
or do I fly?
 
My things are here
in my safe cage
all is clear
life is ordered
life is neat
my routine
is quite complete.
 
But some days I think
what does sky hold
beyond the comforts
of sweet home.
 
Do I dare
dare to roam
do I attempt
the great unknown?
 
Am I so bold
to spread my wings
it might be grand
to feel so free,
 
but then a thought,
maybe it’s not.
 
When the rain
and lightning strikes
when thunder
booms into night
 
I have no cage
of comforts near
what would I do
that’s not so clear.

Now every day
this thought haunts me
do I try
Infinity?
 
Or do I stay
here in my cage
I can’t decide
maybe I’ll fly
another day.

Sara Castaneda

Sara Castaneda is a poet/writer living in Dallas, TX.  Newer to submitting, she has been published in The Zebra Ink and Space and Time Magazine. After nine proofs she finally finished her chapbook of poetry, Underdog Bet, much to the relief of her editors, being released this year. Formerly an actor in television shows and theatre in New York and Sydney, she is oddly at home in the world of rejections with some kudos that go along with poetry.  She and her husband are proudly owned by their dog Mac and three cats Oscar, Sketchy, and Mr. Davis.  

Corridors
​
The trees drowned by the reservoir engineers surprised me. I had already
found the late winter bluebirds by the shore ice. And a pelican swimming so
close to the bike path in this water made dark by trees that I am told will
soon fall or be cut down. And a striped yellow bird hesitated just long
enough that I caught it forever against driftwood and icicles.
 
Cold, I drove toward the park gate home, but then this swath of trees
stopped me where one mirrored pelican floated above and below the winter
water, a wake of blue strung behind it. What is sky? What is water? I asked
myself. What tissue finite as spider silk suspends itself between this bird of air
and the blind carp that sways just below it?    

There was something about the trees. How reflective they were, how blue
they crisscrossed down to that blur of shore snow I stood in and its chittering
of grass heads that my memory now knits and unravels and knits because
each time, snagged there, is the white bird or the hollow bone of the wing I
once held as a child.
 
When does a photo become an image become poetry? You see, I cropped
out the billowing sky-burst of tree branches and left the pelican so content in
their mirrored scratches. And those small lit cubes of tree trunks where the
sky should be? I left them too, like a chain of paper lanterns calling back all I
love.
 
Kathryn Winograd

"Retired,” Kathryn Winograd writes with her golden doodle daily on the back screen porch of her Littleton home and her hummingbird porch up at her cabin near Phantom Canyon. With camera in hand, she has taken to haunting the wetlands around the neighbouring reservoir and South Platte River and the ranchers’ summer grazing land above the canyon. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and publications and her photography in a growing number of exhibits. More here: kathrynwinograd.com

  
for Nikolaos Karfakis, Cameron Batmanghlich & Nashwa Y. Butt
 
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
—Francis Bacon 
(excerpt from “Of Friendship”)
 
     1
   Shadows and Personas1
 
   Ceaselessly swimming – for > a decade+ years – in the nuisances ‘n intricacies of the polis, I’ve carelessly swam a million miles away from (my)Self. The character this polis puts on display fits the bill of an age-old old chestnut: the horses are knackered; the dogs can’t help barking (they’re yet to learn to bite); the (holy) cows can’t evade slaughtering, no matter how hard they scheme; the hen/geese won’t lay a golden egg(s); the pigs can’t have enough of laugh! 
 
   This polis is analogous to one Matsya incessantly pullin’ the Boat – with one Manu ‘n Saptarishi (Seven Sages) – through the river-of-duality without fruition.2 Exempli gratia – the sun neither rises nor does it set! Or even better revisiting of the famous proverb would be: the sun neither rises in the East nor does it set in the West! BUT, this polis is as if a million miles away from (scientific) Rationality; a million miles closer to clichés, grand narratives, obsolete idioms, and what have you! And enveloped by her cloak-of-dualism, I’ve inadvertently begun to resemble more a (postmodern) chimera, too – with a mule-like head of religiosity, cow-like torso of (social) democracy, horse-like limbs of (corporate) capitalism, dog-like tail of monopoly/oligarchy, and hen-like wings of utopia!
 
     2
   The Peepal and Buddha
 
   This polis suffers neither from the dearth of all manner of native trees – Ditabark, Sunbal, Chanar, Banyan, Sukh Chayn, Shisham, Neem – nor one Buddha-inspired youths (Generation Z & Generation Alpha). Yet, without satisfying the primary precondition, id est, Principal of Solitude, they’re relentlessly found blowing the trumpet of being the Sages-of-AI Age. And the complexes-of-landscape immediately refreshes one Baba Bulleh Shah vis-à-vis (self-)Reflection: Many a thousand scriptures, you’ve read / The Book of Self, you’ve never read / To the mosques ‘n temples, you’ve constantly rushed / The deep inside, you’ve permanently hushed.3
 
   Every so often, on concluding a brief post meridiem potter, I find myself shedding-the-skin under a Peepal in the Bagh-e-Jinnah (formerly: Lawrence Gardens; modelled on: Kew Gardens, London, UK) with “A Million Miles Away” by one R. Gallagher: Why ask how I feel / Well, how does it look to you? / I fell hook, line and sinker / Lost my captain and my crew / … / I’m a million miles away / a million miles away. (Every time, the guitar chords induce the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response).)
 
   ***
 
   On a rather serious (metaphysical) postscriptum, though: more often than not, ‘separateness’ is the vessel of ‘closeness’ – when observed in the context of (material) Detachment. On the contrary, this polis is a potent potion for inducing (self-)Estrangement.
 
     3
   Puppet of Tales
 
   ‘Tis a commendable trait – being an aficionado-of-tales. Better still is being an artisan-of-tales – tales that function as muses and invite others to re-acquaint themselves with the(ir) shadows and personas. 
 
   Wo/man is terribly delusional – lives in a fallacy of being the master-of-tales. IN FACT, ‘tis precisely the other way round: s/he gets devised and structured by the tales. AND ‘tis tales that terraform wastelands into lush green forests.
 
   ‘Til the present day, I’ve not known of any human epochs, when the aforesaid aphorism ever failed to hold its ground!

Saad Ali
  
1. In Carl G. Jung / Analytical psychology: Shadow (unconscious): an individual’s ‘dark side’ that the ego (sense of purpose and identity) hides from the others; Persona (conscious): an individual’s ‘(theatre) mask’ – worn for the society on behalf of the ego.
2. Ancient Hindu Mythology / Mahabharata: Manu: The First Man (human being) and/or 14 Rulers of Earth; Matsya: Fish-Avatar (Saviour) of the god Vishnu or Brahma. According to the said epic, Matsya saves Manu, Seven Sages, plant seeds, and various animals from the pralaya (deluge) and takes them to a safe haven in the Himalayas. 
3. Excerpt from a lyrical Punjabi poem, “Parh Parh Ilm Hazaar Kitaban” (Many a Thousand Scriptures), by Bulleh Shah – a revered pre-modern Punjabi Sufi Poet-philosopher (1680–1757 CE). English Translation: Saad Ali.

Saad Ali is a  poet-philosopher & literary translator from the UK and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and MSc in Management from the University of Leicester, UK. His new collection of poems, Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse), is an homage to vers libre, prose poetry, and ekphrasis. He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrases into Urdu. His work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, Synchronized Chaos, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Lotus-eater, BRAWL Lit., and several anthologies, including Poetry in English from Pakistan, by Ilona Yusuf & Shafiq Naz (eds.). He has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and Best Microfiction. Influences include Vyasa, Homer, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Jung, Kafka, Tagore, Lispector and more. www.saadalipoet.com 
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Don't miss our upcoming zoom session on Yayoi Kusama. Kusama is the most successful woman artist of all time. Her eccentric body of work is bold, conceptual, and inspired by her personal mythology as a response to severe mental illness. Her life story is incredible. Kusama is in her 90s today and still working and growing. We will look at how her early work was overshadowed by male artists who benefited from her influence while she receded into the shadows. And how she didn't stop, eventually breaking out into epic fame. We will do creative writing exercises using her intriguing art. ​

Warrior Queen   

I sing your praises 
Warrior Queen,
red hair badged with blood, 
mouth a howl of rage 
in blue tattooed face 
as you roared into battle 
on your chariot, 
javelin leaping 
from your hand.

Was there ever an epitaph for you?
Bards scorned the written word -
shameful not to have it by heart,
the mead hall of the Iceni destroyed.

We have only your conquerors’
story, those who 
stole your inheritance 
gang raped your daughters
flogged you to the bone. 

Tall as a man, your glance could kill,
a mass of tawny hair reaching your hips, 
voice harsh as a raven
your battle cry terrified.

Your vengeance was like the Furies. 
They say you called on Andraste,
War Goddess of the Celts
your hands rising to the heavens
in ecstatic appeal,
a sacred hare under your cloak. 

You rallied
over a thousand warriors,
you were politician, 
strategist, tactician, 
Queen of the Celts 

At the last
Eighty thousand of the enemy fell,
 for the loss of only four hundred Romans
so Tacitus tells us.

channelled into chaos 
by the Roman war machine. 

He said you took poison. 
You probably did.

You were never going to paraded 
through the streets of Rome
enslaved and shamed.
 
What would you have thought 
of your statue high over London, 
icon of the British Empire 
a layer of red scorched earth 
deep under your chariot wheels?

Sue Mackrell 

Sue Mackrell is a grandmother, gardener, poet and writer from Leicester, UK who loves art in all its forms.  Many of her poems, short stories and non-fiction historical pieces have been published online and in print, including in Agenda Poetry, Bloody Amazing, (Dragon Yaffle) and currently in Whirlagust (Yaffle) and The Dawntreader (Indigo Dreams.) Highlights have been having her poems displayed in Ladies’ toilets in Leicester as part of a Wee Poems project and winning an Archaeology Festival Haiku prize – the most lucrative 17 syllables of her career! She is extremely proud to have poems already in The Ekphrastic Review  

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