 The Tallest File Cabinet in the World by Bren Alvarez (USA) 2002. Image courtesy of the author. Cursive Monuments are built for fear our small lives won’t be remembered. Trajan’s, Nelson’s, Washington’s– all with history expunged by rain. Then there is the tallest file cabinet. Rusty, 40 feet high, with 38 drawers that held 150,000 pages, just 304 Mb my iPhone could inhale for a snack. This one is different– so paltry, yet it towers like the stanzas of an ode. The in memoriam is what is not here: fully articulated fingers opposed by the thumb which, in concert, assign our X. The Palmer Method taught us rote ovals & sawgrass & right-formed letters ending up ours. I’m amazed at clear smooth streams of styled words grandparents left as family history– script flourishes of T’s and F’s and S’s illuminating a person behind the pen. I am speaking in Times New Roman. Their inky letters infused life like blood. My signature scrawls– anxiously ad lib. Philip H. Coleman This poem and image appeared in the April PoemCity in Montpelier, VT. In celebration of Poetry Month, 300+ poems are displayed in all the stores and buildings downtown; this year the library that sponsors the event also printed PoemCity: 2023 Anthology in which the poem appears. Philip H. Coleman has arrived here the long way around– from fine arts Yale, to decades convincing Vermont high schoolers of the symmetric beauty of chemistry, to the molecular science of poetry. He has been seen in Eunoia Review, Trouvaille Review, Quail Bell Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, et al.
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 The Birth of Venus, by Sandro Botticelli (Italy) c. 1486 Tableau Vivant In the shower, I pose as Boticelli’s Birth of Venus: 1. Weight on the left foot, point the right, dancer-like. 2. Place right hand over left breast, let left hand be the fig leaf -- and 3. Venus glides to shore on a giant scallop shell propelled by West Wind. In the masterpiece, she arrives all alabaster, head tilted, copper tresses rippling like fur, gold-flecked eyes seemingly benign, Goddess in human skin, or painter’s inner woman, or an aging-woman- under-waterfall’s illusion. She glows. I try. Compared to her centuries, I’m the babe in this sea. In Greek, she’s Aphrodite, thousands of years old. She’s the truly ancient one. Q: But how was Venus born? A: She rose from sea foam where Uranus’ testicles (!) were tossed by Cronos, the Titan of Time — a slight wobble on my axis — time’s dangerous, but I’m careful not to slip. Boticelli’s dawn sky’s pastel; roses dive and soar like gulls. Instead, draped around me, I imagine an incandescent, twilit heaven, for a few moments more, and then it’s time to turn off the water. Lora Berg Lora Berg has published a collaborative poetry book with visual artist Canute Caliste, and poems in Shenandoah, Colorado Review, The Carolina Quarterly, etc. She served as a Poet-in-Residence at the Saint Albans School and holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins. Lora served as a U.S. Cultural Attaché at U.S. Embassies abroad and has lived in several countries. Lora is a 2022-23 participant in the Poetry Collective based at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. She is a proud mom and grandma.  The Birthday, by Marc Chagall (France, b. Belarus) 1887 After studying Chagall’s painting The Birthday, the Overachiever decides to write a stinking love poem to best Chagall and the clichéd new love painted bold black forest green blinding beige and red orange the hues so bright the sun pales his weightless body accents how he’s the first to discover the feel of love eating the heart from the inside insatiable breath every move colored by the texture of a lace collar shoes with no tread marks passion like a small animal clawing smitten he floats disembodied and grotesque his neck swiveled 270 degrees like a Tawny owl touching beak to lips his love’s fish-eye opens wide projecting the hemisphere of love on the bourgeoisie rug hung on the wall to keep cold away from the bed he hoots about the birthday flowers and raspberries picked in the morning clouds to crown the curd cake they're too busy to eat hunger for food irrelevant and disgusting the overachiever smears their canvas with better metaphors for a passion almost two decades old love that grew heavy to meet the earth and roll in understanding and obligations frenzied movement and surprise morphed into habitual consideration the business of established eros gradations of black and white the value of seeing a kaleidoscope with mostly rose quartz crystals the kind of love that can tromp in a field full of ticks and pull them off one by one waiting for the winter freeze Sandra L. Faulkner Faulkner researches, teaches, and writes about close relationships in NW Ohio where she knits, runs, and writes poetry about her feminist middle-aged rage. Her poetry appears in places like Writer’s Resist, Literary Mama, Ithaca Lit, and Gulf Stream. She lives with her partner, their warrior girl, and three rescue mutts. https://www.sandrafaulkner.online/  Join us next weekend on Zoom with special guest Brent Terry! Brent Terry is a longtime friend of The Ekphrastic Review, and of the arts in general. His accolades are for poetry, a novel, and essays, but he is just as legendary as a creative writing and literature professor. Don't miss this very special chance to work and play with a brilliant, creative, and funny writer. This session will be at Brent's speed, which as a semi-elite runner with a wardrobe of neon shoes, is electric. There will be 20 tiny poetry exercises! (If you're a fiction writer or other kind of writer, of course you can modify your participation accordingly.) Come out and play and see what surprises you leave with in your notebook. $35 CAD or approximately $25 USD. Electric Poetry- with Brent Terry
CA$35.00
Brent Terry is a longtime friend of The Ekphrastic Review, and of the arts in general. His accolades are for poetry, a novel, and essays, but he is just as legendary as a creative writing and literature professor. Don't miss this very special chance to work and play with a brilliant, creative, and funny writer. This session will be at Brent's speed, which as a semi-elite runner with a wardrobe of neon shoes, is electric. There will be 20 tiny poetry exercises! (If you're a fiction writer or other kind of writer, of course you can modify your participation accordingly.) Come out and play and see what surprises you leave with in your notebook. $35 CAD or approximately $25 USD.  The Baptism of Christ, by Piero della Francesca (Italy) c. 1450 Baptism of The Zonzotti Addendum “Beyond a first mover exists an augmenting of creation.” Dr. Tera Nadi, Notebook 3 My role in exposing the story of creation began pathetically enough with my weeping in front of Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ in London’s National Gallery. I had recently walked away from an unsatisfying career in finance and been released from a fallow 27-year marriage, leaving me job, friend, family, and dogless. The halcyon days before the great pandemic clashed with my defeated state. The Baptism took me back to my eighth-grade field trip to Manhattan’s Frick. The class stood in front of a sunbaked, white-fork-bearded St. John the Evangelist and I shouted, “Check out that heavy metal mother fucker!” Mrs. La Cotta refrained from ripping out my hair and yelled “Language, Mr. Rubin!” When the disinterested group drifted to the next old painting, the Saint of the Apocalypse winked to me, which I took to mean that they would get their just rewards when all goes up in flames. I nodded that that would be cool and then we would hang beneath that calm blue sky, wearing matching crimson mantles. My Piero della Francesca allegiance solidified decades later at the 2013 Frick gathering of the American Pieros, including the four Frick pieces, the Clark Museum’s Virgin and Child with Four Angels, the Washington National Gallery’s St. Apollonia, patron saint of dentistry, and a technicolour icon-cloaked St. Augustine flown in from Lisbon. Most of the pieces had once been part of a complex wooden altarpiece in Sant’Agostino Church in Sansepolcro that had been dismantled and sold off, and the Frick curators had re-gathered the ancient parts as from tar-pit bones. Once again, I was in the presence of St. John, now with his colleagues, and a more seasoned me noticed that they appeared disjointed, mourning their missing and lacking context, like assorted New World Chiefs dog-and-pony-showed through the courts of Europe or made to visit the White House to be gazed upon by Jefferson. The show heightened the disorientation around an artist from the 15th century but who was not of it, and even more anomalous in the 21st. Of no school or clique, and according to the Frick’s program, Piero went unmarried, often traveling for commissions. Based on how my work and travel ruined intimacy, I assumed he had few friends and mostly transactional connections. Maybe he was lensing a world of existential isolation through painstaking perspective, carefully placing and connecting human forms on a two-dimensional surface -- that could be controlled. The magical solutions revealed ineffable meditations. One was reminded of the Zen motorcyclist who knew how the bike and all its parts functioned yet was welcome behind the curtain to emptiness. Here in London, older and more beaten, optically tricked to genuflect for my baptism, I awaited Piero’s John the Baptist to finish with the Savior so he could thumb a cross and douse my head. Across Gallery 14, from an Adoration, accompanied by Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano along with a chorus of my sobbing, appeared an angel drawn to my trembling. Pulchritude incarnate was experiencing me experiencing the Piero; me as art, a more attractive notion than I could have conceived. Driven by the exquisite potentialities, from metaphysical transcendent to coffee house intellectual to voluptuous gutter coupling, my concentration telescoped towards concrete next steps. The angel approached and wiped my tears with a hsbd-iryt silk scarf, revealing she was flesh and blood with eyes matching the scarf and a silver-coloured, banged and bobbed hairdo fixed well above her chiseled sleeveless shoulders. I straightened, puffed out my chest, gently flexed a bicep, hoping the flaming hilt of my Manjushri wisdom sword tattoo became visible, and mansplained the glory of the painting: “The holy cousins stand on dry ground as despite the power of this ritual need no purification. Just look at that larger-than-life dove of the Holy Spirit! The master painted the figures to perfect the forms, only clothing them after.” This last note brought nudity into dialogue, a brilliantly subtle, low-risk gambit. Had I crossed an ocean of despair to the banks of the ecstatic, an elation of reward far greater than Poussin’s St. Paul7 carried upward by angels? I found myself back at my hotel with the Angel on top of me while I lay on the bed, smiling like the helmsman of a bloated ship of fools, a totally disoriented imbecile. She was seemingly having a third frustrated go at me. When I finished my business, she yelled, “Februa for Calpurnia!” and slapped my flushed cheek so hard my head snapped into the backboard. When I came to, she was bathed and dressed, mumbling with mild amusement “No awareness of the mathematics of Delft thrust angles or Germain’s 'Recherches sur la theorie des surface elastiques'”? She pulled from a wool-woven satchel a medieval looking volume with “Z30-33” gold-leafed on the spine and three notebooks labeled Tera Nadi 1, 2 and 3. “You have modest relevant writing talent, adore the master, and no one will miss you if you disappear for a time.” “Disappear?” “You will publish a short literary tale of our encounter that you will claim came to you in a dream.” “A short literary tale?” “The short tale must be published in a journal with greater than 2500 readers to place it sufficiently on record. You will then stay hidden long enough to draft what is in these notebooks – details on the forces behind the Quattrocento -- into a complete work which you will hand-deliver with the notebooks and the last remaining copy of The Zonzotti Addendum, to Stefano Campagnola, the Maestro at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, and copies to James Peltz, the Editor in Chief at SUNY Press. You will then be free to resume your life as you see fit.” David M. Rubin Paintings cited above:
David M. Rubin has a Ph.D. in biology. His recent stories, poems, and essays appear in Café Irreal, City Key, Corvus, ffraid, Ginosko Literary Journal, Last Stanza Poetry Journal (2022 Pushcart Nomination for "Traumerei"), Maudlin House, The Nabokovian, The Smart Set, and others. He hopes to create connection @Six18sFoundry and @six18sfoundry.bsky.social  Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, by Piero della Francesca (Italy) c. 1460-70 runneth under whoever created your glass made you overfull on the inside there is no half-full, no half-empty you only know how to deal in extremes and how to scramble when you run over downhill slide, terminal velocity, stumbling keep up, keep up, don’t let them see the way you’re desperate, how each exhale feels like a sacrifice, how there are invisible things hunting you, forever just a step behind you, tasting sweat on your neck, and you never learned how to fight. pull your dear things closer like you can protect them. don’t stop moving. you can’t. you don’t want to. put the tears in a locked box out of sight. it’s crumbling like a house fire, catching like a flower in a child’s fist and it’s all getting away from you now. you remember something about birds in the hand or the bush— you never had either, you think, just phantom feathers in your palms and the ineffable feeling of being caged in, knowing this is it. you’re in it for the long run— or rather, truer, the long run’s in you. running over, stain the rug, stain your skin, prints on glass, places you can’t reach, the only proof you were ever there at all. Grace McGory Can't Help Myself, by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu (China) 2016 Grace McGory is a queer student, writer, and artist based in New Jersey. She is currently working towards two bachelors of arts degrees at Rowan University. Grace is the proud recipient of several awards for her poetry and prose, including the Rowan University Prize for Poetry and the Edward Czwartacki Prize for Fiction. You can find her other work in Capsule Stories and forthcoming in Avant.  The Bowl of Milk, by Pierre Bonnard (France) 1919 How to Remember What is a painting but the logic of colour, the architecture of shape and line? Yet we believe in its existence— the brightness of lavender and the beautiful purple shadow. The moonlit figure dissolving into background. The cat buried in darkness and the pale bowl of milk. A hand yearning toward tenderness. I am very weak when my subject is in front of me, wrote Bonnard. One does not always sing out of happiness. Outside the closed windows cold light strikes the balcony. The indigo sky shivers. Todd Campbell Todd Campbell is a speechwriter, poet, and mosaic artist. A former journalist, he lives in Seattle.  Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, by Francisco Zurbaran (Spain) 1633 Spanish Lesson with Grapefruit In a tiny Madrileño café my Zaragozan instructor conjugated subjunctive verbs as the crunch of my puffy croissant lathered in melting butter and layered with glistening grapefruit marmalade crumbled down to the white plate. Sticky fingers stopped me from turning the lesson page as I sipped strong coffee from a large round bowl rather than a cup. Yo coma Tu comas Ella / el / Usted coma Nosotras / Nosotros comamos Verb endings change like the direction of fractions When inverted, confusing and tumbling my thoughts back to the focus of the crunch of the croissant the ingestion of the tingling intensity of grapefruit tartness the lemony aroma, it closes my eyes. The grapefruit juices transformed into reflective, glass-like substance. Hearing the white plates clattering behind the counter as the waitress organizes her miniature station, I open my eyes to the reflections tilting off the Spanish book from the invading morning sunlight through a picture window with views of a narrow, uneven cobble-stoned street; its gray stones shine half in sun splash and half lay in the opposite building’s shadow. Vosotras / vosotros comáis Ellas / Ellos / Ustedes coman My instructor recited the chart I hear the inflections, the soft Spanish conversations at other tables, the giggles and complaints uttered in a sound and pictorial collage. Still the present perfect conjugation is to speak of unlikely or uncertain events in the past or to cast an opinion, often emotional, about an event or moment in the past. I ate or comiera is the subjunctive imperfect but I wish I were in the subjunctive present, yo coma, I eat and the grapefruit marmelada puckers the insides of my mouth. It was the essence of grapefruit and its memory persists like the madeleine Proust’s aunt Leonie tasted after dipping its crumb into the lime-flower infused tea on a Sunday morning. Kathleen Shull Kathleen Shull teaches AP Literature and Composition, AP Seminar Capstone at the largest Native American High School in the United States, Chinle High School on the Navajo Nation. Formerly a journalist, she also taught American English to Germans for 16 years in Saarbruecken, Muelheim an der Ruhr and Berlin. She is also a certified German, journalism, and history teacher. Last summer, she went to Jordan on a Fulbright-Hays cultural exchange to Amman, Petra, Madaba, Aqaba, the Wadi Rum, Jerash, Irbid and Umm Qais where she learned about the Ghazal poetry tradition in Arabic which she now teaches to her students. She studied Spanish in Guanajuato, Mexico and Madrid, Spain. When not learning languages, reading, or hiking, she spends most of her leisure time learning about art or visiting museums.  The Rope Artist: small ekphrastic fictions, by Lorette C. Luzajic Mixed Up Media Books, 2023 Cover art by Caroline Bacher. Click here to view on Amazon. Luzajic is likely one of the few people in the world who has taken up William Blake’s challenge “to see a world in a grain of sand,” but she does even better. She squeezes a dozen or more parallel universes into 141 pages of short fictions based on art. On top of that, knowing the art involved or troubling to search for it on the internet isn’t necessary. You may get an extra thrill when you recognize the art or already love Freddie Mercury, but you’ll be amazed and awed just to experience each fiction. While each piece is inspired by some form of art, Luzajic also throws in a short quote: whipped cream on top. I normally place check marks and stars in the table of contents for poems or short fiction to know which pieces to visit again or quote in a review. I marked a few stars here, but realized quickly that it was a waste of time. The entire collection is astounding. If you happen to be squeamish about evil events, she’ll soon push the darkness away with writing that is charming and full of whimsy, or maybe with romance or a heartwarming family story. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet of wonder. You know you eat more when the choices are seemingly endless. If you are a regular contributor or reader of The Ekphrastic Review on line, I’ve just wasted my time in reviewing this. You already know this book will be one of your best reads of the year. Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille graduated from the first coed class at the University of Virginia, where she earned her B.A. in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. She appears frequently in The Ekphrastic Review. Her ekphrastic collection, Three A.M. at the Museum, is available from Kelsay Books. Notes on Lost Highway The mind falls apart like a woman without shoes. I sit by the window with an antler. Found it out down there. In the pines. My ventricle from heaven. Bone-bright. Tough. Unlike the frayed plate of my thumb nail, or any other comfort I’ve been known to stroke in the dark. Lit with lightning. Often I think of Townes Van Zandt before he was famous. A mad boy. Whose parents loved him. Enough to get him electric shock therapy behind mint-green doors. As his molars bit the leather stick, where did his spirit go? They say grief is a place. Mine’s a desert. Here’s another allusion to a lost, brilliant man who could have been my father. I have as many as the day is long. As the dusk is coyote-hungry. A mentor once said why don’t you listen to something else when I wanted her to ask who–not what–are you looking for? Oh I have fortified, one might say calcified myself against the heat. Sigils tattooed on my fingers. Poison to sedate my hands. From killing all the deer. Each one a day. Galloped through me. Clare Welsh This poem was inspired by the musician's drawing, Lost Highway. Townes Van Zandt (American) 1980. Click here to view it. Clare Welsh is a writer and visual artist living in Pittsburgh. Her most recent poems can be found in The Los Angeles Review and The Southeast Review. She is working on a book. |
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September 2023
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