Inspired by CW Allwine’s Date Night (Booth 48)
 
It won’t be long now. I hear they’re coming for me. We had a long run. I can’t say exactly how many miles I’ve covered because I’ve outlived my odometer. I’m sixty-two now, not nearly old enough to say goodbye to this world yet I’ve never been one to complain. I no longer have a four-barrel carburetor, but pondering the end does choke me up a bit.

There’s still a beauty about me; they say I still have a glow. People walk around me and say kind words. Things like, “Check out that old Chrysler Imperial—they don’t make ‘em like they used to.”  They talk about my long lines and elegance and fancy taillights, and “all that chrome! You don’t find it in newer models.”

Those were the good old days; six-way power bench seats. V-8 engine, power steering, power brakes, push button this and that. My eerie and modern dashboard lighting that glowed in the dark. I admit I liked my toothy grill; people said I looked as if I were smiling.

Cruising down the highway, songs like “Little Deuce Coupe,” “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” and “Drive My Car” playing on the radio. Funny aside: Used to be when you hit the brakes the kids in the back tumbled onto the floor. Seatbelts have their advantages, of course, but they also clutter things up.

Now, in my last days, I’ve settled into one of my favourite places: the Starview Drive-in. Automobiles were a novelty when drive-ins began. People loved watching movies in the comfort of their own cars. It was like sitting in their living room. In 1959 when I was born, there were more than 4,000 drive-in theatres around the country. When I think about the old days here at the Starview, I feel happy. I haven’t felt this electrified since I was hotwired back in the ‘70s.

Wasn’t so long ago the family crowded in to watch movies: Jaws was a favorite, all the kids screeching and cowering. Why they let the little ones watch the movie is anyone’s guess. They had nightmares for days.

The Long Hot Summer, too, with Paul Newman at his finest with Joanne Woodward—that’s when they knew they couldn’t ignore what they felt for each other. 

Then Belle du Jour, Endless Summer, even Psycho. The kids were asleep for that one.  There was Viva Las Vegas, Rebel Without a Cause, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and Mary Poppins. The kids loved Mary Poppins. At intermission the lobby filled up with purchasers of 7-Up and popcorn and milkshakes and fries. I smelled like popcorn into the next day.

And Date Night, when the car grew quiet except for the clip-on speakers on the window, broadcasting the film.

I saw it all, not all of it good. JFK, protests to the Vietnam War, summer of love that ended with that Manson night of hate. Then the big hair, big collared ‘70s, and the ‘80s when cars shrunk like dried up mushrooms. All that detailing: tail fins segueing into streamlined but nondescript bumpers.
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It’s fitting the end comes for me here, at the Starview—though it’s not the end end. I hear I’ll be reincarnated. As for the drive-in, the stars may no longer visit the big screen, but they mob the sky like daisies in spring.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is editor of Palm Springs Noir (Akashic, 2021), which she also contributed a story. Her first book, Pen on Fire, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her writing has appeared in Coolest American Stories 2022, USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, Inlandia, Antarctica Journal, Rock and a Hard Place, Crossing Borders, Poets and Writers, and The Dark City Crime & Mystery Magazine. She hosts the podcast, Writers on Writing.  More at penonfire.com.

Sleepy Freeway
 
A San Francisco Bay area sunset inspired French designer Pierrick Gaumé’s painting Sleepy Freeway (2008). Facing the viewer, atop the magenta sunset hills rests a bald sleeping figure of a hillside, head on hands, eyes closed. Stylized magenta and gold-outlined cars zoom left and right in the foreground.  In as little as a decade, scenes like this one–even a super bloom of poppies, lupines, and golden mustard that colour hills as if lit by sunset–might morph into more sinister visions when fire seasons approach sooner and more quickly.
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Once we could celebrate untroubled the brilliant reds, magentas, and oranges of the Bay Area sunset. Now those colours are the scale of fire danger alerts, nightmares of fire tornados, vision of an elderly couple in the in-ground swimming pool while the fire rages above them, the burnt paint odor of a white pickup toasted like a marshmallow as it escaped the Camp Fire. Paradise in ashes. 

​Sleepy Freeway is no longer able to drowse undisturbed. It must be ever watchful, like the fire watchers on duty, ready to tweet calls to CalFire and all who keep their bug-out bags at the ready.
 
Jeanne Blum Lesinski
 
Jeanne Blum Lesinski is a long-time amateur of French culture and first met the artist of Sleepy Freeway when she was an exchange student in France and Pierrick Gaumé a school boy drawing cars. Years later the two reconnected. She still loves French culture and the car culture, this time the California car culture that jumps from the canvas in brilliant colour. In 2008 when Gaumé painted Sleepy Freeway, the dangers of climate-change induced wildfires were not on our minds the way they are today, demonstrating how viewers’ interactions with artwork evolve as the world changes.

Read Jeanne's poem, World in Motion, in response to artist Joseph Cornell.

Jeanne's poem, Embroidery, Lily Yeats, was a finalist in our Women Artists contest.

Louis Sullivan

“The fairy delicacy, ceaselessly at work.” 
The Autobiography of an Idea, Louis H. Sullivan

I say there’s something living in this common earth,
Latent, not free before to manifest in flesh,
Only to reach toward heaven, not sky;
I say at last let us let it be true.

Now come immense and peaceful migrations;
Thundering engines of steel and steam;
Instant electric signals;
A new kind of light.
Let ancient fathers remain at their rest;
In this new world, even the stars are new.

Seeking with all of their youthful pride,
Born in the breadth of the Mississippi River,
The redwoods that tower above the Pacific,
The thousand-mile horizons over the prairies,
Unpent mankind begins to bend back
All the massed superstitions.

Can will command nature? I say will is nature.
As the tree in the seed, so are we liberated.

A bridge leaps the gap, knit from steel tendrils;
Stones once defiant yield at last,
And summon new angels who,
Stretching their wings,
Form a canopy like boughs shielding the garden
Where a gentler force unfurls:
Vitality groping toward its fate,
Enfolding its frame in a million faceted intricate blossoms;
A lace of vines and fractal structures, glittering effulgences;
The asymmetric, incalculable, wild marvel of ensoulment.

I say new bones, new life.  Yes,
Emerging like Eve from Adam’s rib of iron,
From starbursts and diamonds and oak leaves,
Spinning atoms’ forces and the
Feminine swells that bring new creation;
Gravity now is balanced on lightness;
Great masses expertly poised upon pinpoints;
Arches throwing their compass feet forward,
Toward a tomorrow certain to be.

Let me show you the golden doorway.
Step through,
Step through.

Timothy Sandefur​
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Timothy Sandefur​: "I'm an attorney and author located in Phoenix, Arizona. I've published several books, including my first book of poems, Some Notes on the Silence, which came out this past spring, from Kelsay Books. My poem "New York City Haiku" appeared in The Ekphrastic Review this past summer." 

Even Now

mother paints,
marks my canvas
from beyond time
twenty years passed
held by limitless light
lids emit ice blue
influence even now
blessed or cursed
her shadow covers
blankets to her will
be like her or not say
wizened crones
daughters of night
telling my life
history of tomorrows

Julie A. Dickson

This poem was inspired by another painting, called The Artist's Mother, Josephine, by Joseph Sulkowski (USA), contemporary. 
  
Julie A. Dickson has written poetry since age 12, writing her conduit to memories, both creative and cathartic. She has dabbled with Ekphrastic poems for several years now and enjoys the visual prompt. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Girl God, Misfit, Open Door and The Ekphrastic Review. Dickson holds a BPS in Behavioral Science and is a past poetry board member and Pushcart nominee. She loves cats and advocates for captive elephants.

The Painter Who Painted Blue

He painted blue and it didn’t mean anything which felt like a relief after so much caring and that’s what he probably liked best about it.

Everything was too complicated, like his mother’s blue eyeshadow and his dad’s blue absence, and he wished as a child that he could paint every one of the family sadnesses blue. 

He stood in his own doorway often, staring out at the blue coloured promise of many blue coloured walls.

He was handsome in a Buster Keaton kind of way, which made many unattached women feel blue.

You can turn empty space into gold, he told the public, but he didn’t do that. He turned empty space into blue. 

His famous monochrome symphony of one-note paintings made even his critical mother feel proud.

He may have been known as “the man who used to be blue inside.”

He overthought everything unless it became blue, and the heart in his chest pumped out pieces of sky.

Meg Pokrass

​Meg Pokrass is the author of numerous flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry,  two novellas-in-flash, an award winning collection of prose poetry, and a 2020 collection of microfiction, Spinning to Mars, which won the Blue Light Book Award. Her work has appeared in  Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip and McSweeney's has been anthologized in New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015) and The Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019. She serves as Founding Co-Editor of Best Microfiction and Festival Curator of Flash Fiction Festival U.K. and teaches flash fiction online and in person. Find out more at megpokrass.com.
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Our last workshop of the year is a special Frida Kahlo wine and art night on Sunday evening! Join us to celebrate the legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. We will relax with our choice of beverages from the comfort of Zoom at home, discuss Frida's amazing biography and artworks, and use her works for some creative writing exercises. Come and discover these special workshops where the ekphrastic community connects in conversation and creativity.