Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Christ After the Flagellation, by Francisco Antonio Vallejo. Deadline is April 12, 2024. You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.
Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include VALLEJO CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, April 12, 2024. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.
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Dear Ekphrastic Poets/Writers and Readers, When I view this exquisite piece of art, I love the blurred colours and light. Having visited Paris only once, strolling along the Seine, Moulin Rouge, Notre Dame and other familiar places bring me back to Paris in my mind’s eye, wandering Musee D’Orsay and the Louvre, browsing the Shakespeare bookstore, and sipping wine under a canopy of an outdoor café. It pleases me to read the interpretations of each writer, experiencing this art in their own way, the descriptions, poetic alliteration, subtle rhyming, all congruent with my own time in Paris. The fog and gentle rain obscure both vision and memories. Words entice me like the aroma of crepes and fresh croissants along brick paths in early morning, when the pavements are drying and the street vendors are setting up. Although it was difficult to choose, I felt most drawn to the writing pieces that represented the feeling of the art, the blur of color and the history of the boulevard in the purist sense. Thanks to all who have submitted, and especially to Lorette for the opportunity to serve as a guest editor! Warm regards, Julie A. Dickson ** Amuse Bouche (ii) Montmartre steals me. On sight, on entry. Waves of déjà vu sweeping over. Or maybe it’s wishfulness. Busy artist hands circle the square, stealing the light before it falls. At the turn of night, the bustle becomes itself, excitement’s undercurrent happening somewhere, everywhere. Street musicians offer acoustics with finger-light effort. The waft of pancakes, crépe de chocolat. The benevolent lights. We went walking. Merged into it. Fancied ourselves French. I thought about Van Gogh, trying to join his peers, painting in the square. And yet, this was Toulouse-Lautrec’s domain. His theatre stage, neon-lit. A cabaret of flying skirts and abandon. Absinthe bars. La fée verte flitting down beside you, to woo you from your senses. The café’s ambience. Still breathing all the history in its walls. Of a time we have come to love. Frozen in paintings. Funny how you can be nostalgic for a time you never knew. How lights make the darkness inviting. How the promise of sex in the air answers the call of tourist’s unspoken wishes. Strangers know what strangers want. The mill of Moulin Rouge spins steady with the smell of money, beckons you in. Beautiful women sell the illusion, beautiful men. Diamanté glints, eyes and teeth. Glamour is a muse here, concentrated, never to be snuffed. At the turn of the night. Nina Nazir Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, artist and avid multi-potentialite based in Birmingham, UK. She's had work published in various journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Free Verse Revolution, Unlost Journal, Harana Poetry, Visual Verse and Sunday Mornings at the River. You can usually find her writing in her local favourite café or on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir and X (Twitter): @NusraNazir ** Rainy City Just raindrops falling, falling into wetness making waterways of roads and streets and it’s such a pretty scene. I try to focus on it try to see the calming colours but the drizzly, misty rain is shrouding me in a fog of fear. I take the deep breaths I need to forestall the rising panic though it’s such a pretty scene with the raindrops falling like silvery teardrops from glassy eyes, teardrops which will run their course and splatter like rain then disappear into wetness and become invisible as if by magic. Lynn White Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud War Poetry for Today competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com///www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/ *** Pissarro Pissarro’s time warp, braving juxtaposition, never forgetting. ** Paris Depiction: Paris. Once a lively city scene. Painter’s reminder. Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher has been writing since 2010 and has had many micro-flash fiction stories published. In 2018 her book Shorts for the Short Story Enthusiasts, was published, The Importance of Being Short, in 2019 and In A Flash in 2022. She currently resides on Long Island, New York with her husband Richard and dogs Lucy and Breanna. Being Short, in 2019 and In A Flash in 2022. She currently resides on Long Island, New York with her husband Richard and dogs Lucy and Breanna. ** Architexture Passage The Hôtel Russie offered lift, a Grand framed window overview, above the throng, along, nightlong, here carriage queue for Moulin Rouge around the bend, so out of site. Observant programmed episodes, like Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, a baker’s dozen plus, impressed, for cash required as principal - not portraits, Paris wealth elites. En plein air pain had brought inside, as pointillism set aside for full life, movement, shimmer sense, both aerial and linear, those nightlights under canopies. An architextured cityscape in urban oeuvre, boulevard, a bustle like blurred photographs of crowds beneath trees, beyond shops, where some suit selves for Mardi Gras. In light of change for tutored young, his Passage as Van Gogh, Cezanne, transitions, modern, pathways new - warm glow of gas, glass panes above yet stream of street, electric lights. Eccentric strikes, eclectic sprites play in the damp road mirrorwork; that downpour passed, as glower clouds, so were his final points, the stars of pure paint over layered oils? Stephen Kingsnorth Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** Paris La Ville Lumière—City of Lights, of Dreams, Of Love: La Ville d’Amour. Whose night is day-- Whose stars are mirrored in the sky which streams Them back again: La Seine: the Milky Way. La Tour Eiffel, la Louvre, et Notre-Dame, A strand of diamonds strung along the quai Like Left Bank lovers hand in hand on prom- enade beside the Ile de la Cité. La Boulevard Montmartre, Claude Monet, Dumas et Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Et l’Opéra, Bizet et Massenet, Couture, Le Métro, et cafés plein aire. C’est magnifique, tres chic, La Ville Romance, Et par bon chance, la capitale de France. James A. Tweedie James A. Tweedie is a formal poet living in Long Beach, Washington, with four books of poetry published by Dunecrest Press. He is the winner of the 2021 Society of Classical Poets International Poetry Competition, a Laureate's Choice in the 2021 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, a First Prize winner in the 2022 100 Days of Dante Poetry Competition, and recipient of the quarterly prize for Best Poem by the Lyric. *** Walk Down This Boulevard And you will find that distances dim, friction fades and spaces shimmer under the soft glow of these ochre lamps. The crown of trees silhouette against a sapphire sky. The rustling rain winds syncopate with the whispered breaths of men in bowler hats and black coats seeking escape. The cobbled pathways glisten despite the rush of cold shadows, the crowd of sodden dreams. Here, silent stories shift shapes each night, as silken fountains of faith come awake. Here, the habit of hope is impossible to break. Preeth Ganapathy Preeth Ganapathy is a software engineer turned civil servant from Bengaluru, India. Her recent works have been published in several magazines such as Star 82 Review, Panoply Zine, Visual Verse, Quill & Parchment, Shotglass journal, Sparks of Calliope, Tiger Moth Review, The Sunlight Press, Ink, Sweat & Tears and various other journals. Her microchaps, A Single Moment, and Purple, have been published by Origami Poems Project. ** Radiance Camille! Everyone should call you Uncle! You were a gift giver, a mentor, a lifter of hearts, Starting in your balmy childhood in St. Thomas. Born into brightness, surrounded by tall palms, Shifting shades in the warm, slow rivers, inching Toward the soft sea, women chatting on the shore, A parasol reflecting the sun’s eternal radiance, You saw everything and needed to paint each holy Moment-- shadows, colours, every one of them, And darkness, where every shade of green and brown, Red and blue still linger along with light, which Is never extinguished. You were the herald, crowning the peasants, The farmers and their humble homes with glory. Your jewels were the knots on trees, Clods of dirt, the ragged clothing of children And the drooping leaves of the olive trees in the Last silvery shades of dusk. Of course, you came to the City of Lights, And on the Boulevard Montmartre a Paris You still saw it all. In your old age, you painted this vibrant Street six times, looking down from a high hotel window When your eyes had started to fade. You still discerned The daylight, the boundless joy of Mardi Gras, cloudy Mornings, winter, spring and finally, night. Nine electric streetlights formed a line to the End of vision, and all along the way, light and Darkness danced in endless exuberance with the faint dots of stars. Rose Anna Higashi Rose Anna Higashi is a retired professor of English Literature, Japanese Literature, Poetry and Creative Writing. Her prose works include the novel, The Learning Wars, the poetry collection, Blue Wings, and the website, myteaplanner.com, which she co-wrote with her niece, chef Kathleen Pedulla. She writes a monthly blog, Tea and Travels, which appears on this website. Her poetry has appeared recently in poetsonline.org, The Ekphrastic Review, Americamedia.org, The Avocet and The Catholic Poetry Room. She was a finalist in the Filoli Haiku Contest. Rose Anna lives in Honolulu with her husband, Wayne Higashi. ** Nighttime Boulevard Light from lamps pool onto sidewalks, rushing into night's uneven surface like rainwater across glass. Elanur Eroglu Williams Elanur Eroglu Williams is a writer and teacher. She studied English & Creative Writing in Montreal and Children's Literature in Dublin. She worked as an elementary school teacher and now works as a Reading and Writing GED Teacher in the Bronx. She lives in New York City with her husband and her dog, Luna. ** The Lure of Pissarro Paint-soaked Boulevard Smeared with golden hues. To walk among the ghostly crowds. To splash in your puddles. To smell the freshness of a Parisian rain. I want To live among your brushstrokes Blending into the precise indistinctions Until I, too, disappear In the distance As the evening disappears into the darkness. Kimberly Beckham Kimberly Beckham: Wanderer, photographer, reader, writer, hopeful human with two older demanding cats and a love of breakfast cereal and Lego building. ** Reflections on Camille Pissarro's The Boulevard Montmartre at Night What is it Camille that allowed hotel windows to be your eyes to be our eyes rivulets from glass panes and eye pain were your inspiration paint strokes of blurred Montmartre created yellow light from streetlamps, shop windows and lines of coaches against the dark blue night the Boulevard's bustling crowd rendered more complete and of themselves than mere cohesion could design. Daniel W. Brown Daniel Brown has recently published at age 72 his first collection Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems through Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY. He has most recently been published in Jerry Jazz Musician and Chronogram Magazine and was included in Arts Mid-Hudson 2023 gallery presentation Poets Respond To Art in Poughkeepsie, NY. ** That was Then A rain of light, a jewel box, Paris nights on the grands boulevards were brilliant then. Roof slate, slick-glittered purple and midnight blue, and the hot gold of music poured from brasseries, peals of laughter, and the click-clack of hoofs, water-splashing. The echoes lingered long, so long I heard them before they faded. Les filles were the same, the paint, the pose, the clatter of plates, chink of glasses, and the brassy yellow light, smelling of choucroute and bright red lobster corpses. Waiters, white shirted, black tied and aproned, swooped like swallows, and in the dark all cars were Tractions. But the vibrant, multi-layered social architecture of the Impressionists, Piaf, Simenon, Jean Gabin and Zola was changing. In the streets behind the glitter, the girls waiting in dark doorways, cats at windows, washing hanging out to dry, music blaring, voices shouting in scènes de ménage, all were slowly being tidied away, pushed out beyond the périphérique into the soulless suburbs, so the rich of the world could have the playground of lights, the rain slicking off purple slate all to themselves. What was once a city of squalor and beauty, misery and merveilles, a noisy colourful cacophony of sounds and smells, of rain and refuse in streets where satin shoes and buttoned boots trod, where urchins followed red balloons, is now a cemetery inhabited by ghosts, as at home here as in Dubai, New York, London. They have it all now, squeezed of life and colour, cleansed of its ordinary people, workers, families, old folk with their chairs out on the pavements, babies in prams, dogs, street vendors and prostitutes. The argot of the titis parisiens has been replaced by sanitised interactions in the universal language of wealth, and the Paris of Maigret, Montand and Monet is dead. Jane Dougherty Pushcart Prize nominee, Jane Dougherty’s poetry has appeared in publications including Gleam, Ogham Stone, Black Bough Poetry, Ekphrastic Review and The Storms Journal. Her short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Lucent Dreaming among others, and her first adult novel will be published in 2025 by Northodox Press. She lives in southwest France and has published three collections of poetry, thicker than water, birds and other feathers and night horses. ** Memories of a Forgotten Paris Bright lights shining with the colours of love and dreamers forgotten places long gone but still remain in the genetic memories of those that look for true love men still go under the warm glowing beams while the ins and outs of business create an ongoing hopeful cycle that will continue until love’s message is answered young Parisians utter real poor thoughts of love in the dark lights of golden hues houses stem from romantic ponds of falling rain real pouring thoughts of heartache love speaks nightly forever in the frozen image forgotten but with massive fondness gifted to us from paintings pointing towards the night with parties in the street beauty imprints onto my soul justifying greatness lots of jumbled colors and patterns provoke a sense of lost memories Heather Sarabia Heather Sarabia is a visual artist and long-time writer. She lives in Madison, WI and is on the autism spectrum. Despite being nonverbal, she is a prolific writer, typing out poetry and prose with assistance. Her writing centres on her lived experience and hope for justice. Through her work, she consistently strives to gain freedom from the systems of dependence that leave her feeling trapped. Her work has recently appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. ** The Boulevard Montmartre Is it rain or the jumble of tears that fill my eyes as I look down the boulevard? How bright the streetlamps are as they recede in not quite perfect order. How the buildings glow-- their dappled skirts reflected in the street. We walked here it seems only a minute (or a lifetime) ago. You left. Nothing was finished. I was unfinished. Now the night is both blurred and shining. The shops call to me in their amber voices-- Come, come. Carol Siemering Carol Siemering: "I have been writing poetry for all of my life which is getting ridiculously longer (I will be 81 this month!) I have been published in a a number of magazines and journals including the Blue Collar Review, Fish Drum Magazine, the Catholic Worker, the Bellowing Ark, Unlocking the Poem, and The Ekphrastic Review. ** A Love Letter to Montmartre in the Rain Oil colour-filled tubes bright with the promise of rich hues reflect the fragmented views of heavy graphite skies obscuring the light. The rain is a melody and each droplet is a note in the symphony of Parisian reality. A dance of light and shadows A melody of muted colors The city of lights, darkly beautiful now, lies waiting. Impressionist strokes blur the boundaries weaving reality through dreams as droplets dance on canvas skies. A painting emerges from the chaos of the storm. Nivedita Karthik Nivedita Karthik is a graduate in Immunology from the University of Oxford. She is an accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer and published poet. She also loves writing stories. Her poetry has appeared in Glomag, The Society of Classical Poets, The Epoch Times, The Poet anthologies, The Ekphrastic Review, Visual Verse, The Bamboo Hut, Eskimopie, The Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, and Trouvaille Review. Her microfiction has been published by The Potato Soup Literary Journal. She also regularly contributes to the open mics organized by Rattle Poetry. She currently resides in Gurgaon, India, and works as a senior associate editor. She has two published books, She: the reality of womanhood and The many moods of water. ** Urban Mirage Velvet darkness curtains the sky cafés and shops mere slashes of light reflecting pools of gold and liquid shadow onto the broad pavements which quiver and flow in the lamplight In street cafés anonymous figures crowd under striped canvas Dark trees, like feather dusters line the floating boulevard Thin straight trunks anchor the crowds which float past. A fragile world, brilliant, poetic seductive is held, suspended in the darkness which waits, possessive, hovering at the end of the street Sarah Das Gupta Sarah Das Gupta is a teacher from Cambridge; UK who has also lived in India and and Tanzania. Her work has been published in many magazines and in over 15 different countries. ** Parisian Lights Dance along that boulevard Those glowing streetlights Those cafe candle flickers Lure me back time and again Rose Menyon Heflin Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet, writer, and visual artist living in Madison, Wisconsin, although she was born and raised in rural, southern Kentucky. She has had over 200 poems published in outlets spanning five continents, and her poetry has won multiple awards. One of her poems was choreographed and performed by a dance troupe, and she had an ekphrastic creative nonfiction piece featured in the Chazen Museum of Art’s Companion Species exhibit. While primarily a poet, she has also published memoir and flash fiction pieces. Among other venues, her poetry has appeared in Deep South Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Salamander Ink Magazine, San Antonio Review, and Xinachtli Journal (Journal X). Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is The Reverie of Mr. James, by Rene Magritte. Deadline is March 29, 2024. You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include MAGRITTE CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, March 29 2024. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly. Strange Comfort I have been leafing through a catalogue from the Musee d’Orsay while you sit reading near my bed. The book lies heavy on my outstretched lap, and I will need you or someone to take it from me when a nurse appears with my evening meds. Sadly I am no longer able to lift even the smallest brush to try and reproduce the golden bowl of Guillaumet’s sky, the grey, dun colour of the camel’s skeleton or the vast desolate Sahara. This painting somehow calls to me. I am surprised at the elegant way the bones of the camel’s long legs, once flesh and blood, are outstretched, not splayed. It is as if the animal felt death approaching and chose how to sink down onto the hot dry sand and accept its fate. The tiny caravan in the distance, on the horizon line, offers no solace, no story. “Sahara,” I say to you. “The title of this painting.” You lay aside your book and rise from your chair to stand by my bed, to see what I see in the painting. But your hand on my hand cannot hide your sadness, your dismay that this vision of death gives me comfort, something you can no longer offer, and I must forgive. Pamela Painter Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections, and her stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has received three Pushcart Prizes and her work has been staged by Word Theatre in London, New York, and LA. Her story, “Doors,” is being made into a short film. ** Emptiness The emptiness of grief through the eyes of a girl who is dreadfully lonely inside her mind better hope for heartful grief when I can write these words and release the wretched soul seizing in the lonely desert My mind forms this scene to make sense of the swirls of tides pouring over my tired body Go to the place of loneliness and hold up the form give it peace real love and there be life and colour once again pour out my ungrateful yelling onto the world to let the good life fill the empty desert in my mind Heather Sarabia Heather Sarabia is a writer and visual artist living in Madison, WI, who is on the autism spectrum. Despite being nonverbal, she is a prolific writer, typing out poetry and prose with assistance. Her writing centers on her lived experience and hope for justice. Through her work, she consistently strives to gain freedom from the systems of dependence that leave her feeling trapped. ** A Postcard from the Museum Gift Shop You would talk about pigment sources, about brush manufacture, the relative value of this painting on this or that market. You know those things about art. How it is done. How much it costs. What is popular now, and what was popular in the 19th century. “This frame,” you’d say, stopping at a painting by a French artist. “Worth two grand alone, easy.” What would I say to you? Nothing. Or, I would say the painting isn’t about the camel. It’s about the desert. It’s about how a thing will die when there is nothing to sustain it. How a thing will die, and no other thing will come to pick clean its bones because nothing, not even a vulture, can live where there is nothing. I would look at you, if you were here in this gallery with me, surrounded by oil paints and canvas and gilt frames, with tears in my eyes, with more water in my eyes than in the whole Sahara, the whole painting of the dead camel, the desiccating camel from which all the material goods it was carrying have been stripped. “Maybe it was a wild camel,” you’d say, your tone bored, your words flat and uninterested. Humouring me. No wild camel would let itself be caught like that, at the forefront of a scene, already almost a part of the sand. It had to have been a domesticated camel. Not a wild thing. Soon it will be half-buried, angles softened by drift, and I feel the sting of the sand that will scour the bones, that will dry the rough-hair hide to cracked leather. There’s a postcard of that painting here in the museum gift shop. I imagine sending the dead camel in the Sahara through the U.S. mail. The mail sorters would spare barely a glance, or maybe one would snatch the dead camel from the sorting machine just for a moment, show it to a co-worker. “Weird thing to send someone,” one might say to the other. The postal carrier, the one who delivers your mail to the out-of-fashion brass box next to your front door, would look at it, I’m certain, and would read the note on the back. “Wish you were here.” Epiphany Ferrell Epiphany Ferrell lives on the edge of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in more than 80 journals and anthologies, including Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Best Microfiction, and The Disappointed Housewife. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and a Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize recipient. ** You Never Made It To The Oasis You never made it to the oasis. It was there, but you didn't believe it. You didn't think you could have it all in one place: fresh water, cool shade from the sun, all the things you lack now. Instead, you carried all you thought you needed, but that's gone, too; it's just you, reduced to the colours around you. To the hot, dry air. To the hot, dry land. You can't live on these things, but they will live on you. The air will leech all the moisture from your skin, muscles, organs, and bones. The land will emulsify and reduce you to particles of itself. You thought the oasis was an illusion. But you are here in all that is disappearing. Rina Palumbo Rina Palumbo (she/her) is working on a novel and two nonfiction long-form writing projects alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al. You can find her work at https://rinapalumbowriter.com/ ** Concentrate Evaded A mirage - in the past preferred - romanticised, idealised, when Gustave, grand, but simple shows infinity in solitude. See on those waves, both beached, far reach - set crests, dips, statuesque through span - horizon hint of caravan, its passing, mirage as that past? Below mist mellow yellow sky, monotony, bleached bands of sand, old skeleton, cold, frozen tones, sole camel carcass in the waste. Alone, soul-search, did Guillaumet seek desolate to feel the real, as isolated wilderness revealed erased, evaded truth? Stretched parchment skin, yet sinew tent, parched bones to crumble into grains, for space, time aeons, concentrate, deserted places, Sahara. Stephen Kingsnorth Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** On Guillaumet’s Sahara The world must have begun like this. “Without form and void,” we are told. In the beginning, life was not just missing—it was rejected, as the camel is rejected: You do not belong here. The beauty of emptiness must remain uncorrupted. Any life here is ephemeral. The distant caravan passes through the landscape, does not dwell in it, cannot survive on it. The camel did not. Others, too, if they do not feel urgency, will lie rejected here. Not decaying, never decaying, for few microbes avail to consume and digest in this aridness. The camel will remain desiccated instead, a warning as Ozymandias was warned: Only distance is eternal, life is not. The world must have begun like this, with only dawn to remove the chill of night, only dusk to grant its restoration. Void, and without form. Ron Wetherington Ron Wetherington is a retired professor of anthropology living in Dallas, Texas. After more than half a century of university teaching and research, he has settled on replacing scientific journals with literary magazines as an outlet for his writing efforts. He has a novel, Kiva, and numerous short fiction pieces in this second career. He also enjoys writing creative non-fiction. Among his published pieces are three in this Review. ** Sahara Trade Route The caravan slowly travels south past the carcass of a camel lost on a previous journey, travels through the desert under 102 degree temperatures in search of the next oasis when a northeast wind horizontally obliterates their forward movement with sandstorm particles. In the early afternoon the vagabonds pitch tents, wait out intense midday heat before the herd continues a dangerous trek until well after dark when the Sahara turns cold. On this forty-second day of the trip they approach an oasis where lemon and fig trees flourish where nomads exchange salt for gold, copper, and animal hides. Jim Brosnan Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Long Distance Driving (2024) and Nameless Roads (2019). His poems have appeared in the Aurorean (US), Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), Eunoia Review (Singapore), Nine Muses (Wales,) Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Strand (India), The Madrigal (Ireland), The Wild Word (Germany) and Voices of the Poppies (United Kingdom). He holds the rank of full professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI. Jim has also won numerous awards from the National Federation of Poetry Societies. ** You Desert Someone once told me that water is friendly. Free Our patron saint This place is barren of that elixir Arid one says Did God punish you? Did you eat of the poisoned apple? Oh Wait, no apples here, did you eat the poison cactus fruit? Did you take God’s name in vain? Did you forget green Or never know? Oh wait, perhaps desert lives in the slow lane, morphing slowly, slowly, so slowly we cannot discern, except perhaps at night when the owl swoops You are home Animals crawl across your scaly self Hide from the sun, thick skinned Plants get tough Proud to be resilient, canny They make do Are they your friends? Or is it just the law of the jungle, I mean the desert Harsh world, harsh truths Preparing us for water wars, to catch our notice. It takes patience to watch a world slowly emaciate itself of water, thin skinned, short sighted. We humans plod on in our juicy bodies Lie all is well, it is not. Listen, it is slowly ebbing away, hear it Listen to the desert, it will tell you how to hide in plain sight How to hunker down in dryness, solitude. How to disappear when danger comes. Pay attention. Doris Brigitte Ash Doris Brigitte Ash: "I was born in Munich Germany in 1943 during World War II. My mother tells of bomb shelters with my baby carriage. We escaped to the country, suffered diphtheria in 1945, emigrated to the US in 1948 to Brooklyn, then to upstate New York. I went to Cornell and then to the University of California Berkeley, received a PhD, taught at UC Santa Cruz for 20 years, now retired. I have been a poet and artist most of my life, often combining them in ekphrastic poetry. I write very personal poems, as my history lives within me." ** The Horizon Walks Down an emptiness that gets emptier. I see pink magnolia in white grains of sand devoid of revolt. A mirage or a miracle, swarming quiet parsing the unknown into freedom of sorts. Abha Das Sarma An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Silver Birch Press, Blue Heron Review, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru. ** Tough: A Sijo Sequence I. She died hard, and she died proud, with nary a complaint. Tough. Death’s freedom returned her to this Earth that she had worked tirelessly. Subtly stubborn and quiet, she would have wanted it this way. II. I, too, was - am - supposed to be strong. Steadfast. Unbreakable. Tough. My disapproved tears would have been met with a silent, shunning glare. She would have said to walk off my sobs and just get over it. III. We were never supposed to get lost - to survive a land this tough - to lose honest dreams to lying nightmares in this rotting abyss, goodness lost to this brimstone- and fireless hell we so wrongly chose. IV. She never got any credit. She simply soldiered on. Tough. Lacking the accolades of fine breeding, she went unrecognized, her courage, her strength, her hard work, and her kindness all unfeted. V. All our intergenerational traumas made us women tough. My own nightmares join the elite company of age old ones passed mother to daughter on repeat on ragged x-chromosomes. VI. We women die hard, and we die stubbornly, fighting and tough. Unrepentant for our sins, we become unwilling martyrs, surviving, thriving, and even tougher than we thought we were. Rose Menyon Heflin Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet, writer, and visual artist living in Madison, Wisconsin, although she was born and raised in rural, southern Kentucky. She has had over 200 poems published in outlets spanning five continents, and her poetry has won multiple awards. One of her poems was choreographed and performed by a dance troupe, and she had an ekphrastic creative nonfiction piece featured in the Chazen Museum of Art’s Companion Species exhibit. While primarily a poet, she has also published memoir and flash fiction pieces. Among other venues, her poetry has appeared in Deep South Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Salamander Ink Magazine, San Antonio Review, and Xinachtli Journal (Journal X). ** Desert Scene (High Desert, Palmdale California) Joshua trees have that power to be perceived as you need them to be perceived. Today as most days, they trod on dry ground -- grist scattered with brush; the mountains' stone temple in the distance. Gawkily, they stretch and stalk the high desert wind. Their bulge of leaves maintaining whatever moisture the night spawned. One tree lies fallen in the field, a carcass burdened with straw and crows on its back, struck by lightning or something else. We just stare and step away, following the others under a summer sun, heading toward the carved heights where cool water veils the rock; and dark pines like perfume burners honour the hawk, the hush of the living. Wendy Howe Wendy Howe is an English teacher and free lance writer who lives in Southern California. Her poetry reflects her interest in myth, diverse landscapes, women in conflict and ancient cultures. Over the years, she has been published in an assortment of journals both on-line and in print. Among them: Strange Horizons, Liminality, Coffin Bell, Eternal Haunted Summer , The Poetry Salzburg Review, The Interpreter's House, Stirring A literary Collection, The Orchards Journal, The Copperfield Review and Sun Dial Magazine. Her most recent work has appeared in Indelible Magazine and Songs of Eretz. ** Seeing The Sahara by Gustave Guillaumet We saw it on our final trip to Paris, you at my side as I mansplained meaning. If you look hard enough, I said, it's clear it means that nothing really matters. The sun is indifferent, the desert is indifferent, and the bones that were a camel don't care. They spend their days dead, awaiting their erasure by sands of time. He’s painted the future of everything; listen to the silence you can almost hear… But you urged me to contemplate the light: cool yellow wide across limitless sky, borderless dusk that could just as well be dawn. I can see it now. Where the end was born. Paul McDonald Paul McDonald taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, before taking early retirement in 2019. He is the author of 20 books to date, which includes fiction, poetry and scholarship. His most recent poetry collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange Press, 2023). ** Sahara Wadi O, wind in the dunes old wells, the aquifers mud houses “Kel Tagelmust,” the veiled people Sahrawi, Berber for desert along the river bed date trees, olive trees, figs humped camels, the zebu the wattle trees used for fodder and firewood sheep and the goats. O, everything flattens a field of bitter apple reed grass locust swarms. Ilona Martonfi Ilona Martonfi is a mother, an activist, an educator, literary curator, poet and an editor. Born in Budapest, Hungary, she has also lived in Austria and Germany. Martonfi writes in seven chapbooks, journals across North America and abroad. Recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2010 Community Award. Martonfi lives in Montreal, Canada. The Tempest, Inanna Publications, 2022, is her fifth poetry book. ** I Can’t Blame You There was no reason for you to stay. I was already gone, lost in the great Sahara of my heart. Acres of sand repeating the same denial, grain by grain, from here to the world’s blunt end, a place without mercy, that teases the eyes with visions of golden domes and towers rising into the blind white sky. Where the sun’s an anvil, each day hammered flat as sheets of metal too hot to touch, where no bird flies and no green seed dares unfold on the incinerating air. You did not see me there, bleak as the line of the horizon dividing burning sand from burning sky. You could not see through my eyes-still there but fading fast into the once green world, gone flat as a cardboard sign advertising hopes I can’t believe in. Here where my heart is a desert no one can cross, where even camels collapse like empty sacks, nothing more than leather and bones, a warning only the desperate can ignore. In this great nothing you will never enter with voice or hand or eye, where I’ve gone too far to catch, where the wind shifts sand to fill my footprints, erasing my faintest trace too fast for anyone to follow. Where no one will find me. Where I too am nothing, leather and bones, drying in the sun. Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, and recent issues of Gyroscope, 3rd Wednesday, Caustic Frolic, Inscribe, and Verse Virtual. Her collection How to Become Invisible is now available from Kelsay books. ** Deserted 1 Does the sky rise to meet us? It scatters our questions into lamentations of unshed tears. It seeps into our blood roots growing like branches between our bones. 2 The barren land holds onto our days. We keep knocking on its door but the only answer is dust. The dust turns us into ghosts. We try to find the one that is Death-- to claim it, clarify it, give it meaning. 3 Lost ground settles on the horizon. It exposes all we wish to be but are not, all that leaves us stranded, isolated, alone. Without a deity, what defines us? Belief comes and goes like anger, like despair, like all those tiny glimmers of hope. Kerfe Roig A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/ (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/. ** Deserted The new guy, most had called him, not bothering to learn the names that changed like a long-running show with an ever-changing cast and crew. At some point, someone noticed he was missing, a break in the chorus line, easily replaced. He lay there, not feeling the hot sand anymore--bleeding, blending, becoming a part of the desert. Downed by a scorpion, was it? He couldn’t remember anymore. He was floating on waterless waves in the sea of time. Drifting as night devoured the day. Were his eyes open? He was certain he saw the lights of the city, a radiant dance across the distant expanse of arid dunes. They murmur to him with the voices of forgotten loves, “come!” Stars glow in the eyes of the fennec fox. He yelps in excitement to his burrow mates, calling each by name. Merril D. Smith Merril D. Smith lives in southern New Jersey. Her poetry has been published in Black Bough Poetry, Acropolis, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Storms, Fevers of the Mind, Humana Obscura, and Sidhe Press, among other places. Her full-length collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was a Black Bough Press featured book. ** The Sahara, Gustave Guillaumet (1867) A skeleton is all a rotting camel leaves, just as the blazing sunlight sets -- without a trace of preying birds or mammals -- its death was due, perhaps, to unpaid debts in drifts of sand no human feet now trammel. Orientalists created fictions of the desert, luring and exotic, whose sand contained some secretive encryptions, as dreams made tantalizingly erotic. embraced by ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians. The desert is where we meet God alone -- the flat Sahara filled with nothingness -- while the wind like us prolongs a moan. Far back, across this treeless wilderness a caravan heads off to the unknown. It moves between two worlds in blinding gusts, across terrain that hides our history -- buried implements of war now left to rust, as the sky reveals its mystery: the arc of stars whose dust became our dust. Royal Rhodes Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who remembers various visits to the deserts in New Mexico, Texas, and the Negev. His poems have appeared in: The Ekphrastic Review, Ekstasis Poetry, Chained Muse, Snakeskin Poetry, The Montreal Review, and elsewhere. ** And You Knew Me I put city life behind me, turn my back on spires and “turf” lines. I follow my gut, those pressing urges whose origin grows from unformed substance. I never look up. I never look back. I set my face like flint and strike my own path in the desert. I know the names of every tumbleweed, every burnt stalk, every sunless shadow. I can lie down now, dream of what’s dew. mid-day shimmers in waves of shady green floating . . . floating Todd Sukany Todd Sukany <tasukany@gmail.com>, a Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over forty years. His work appears in Ancient Paths, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. He and Raymond Kirk have co-authored books of poetry, Book of Mirrors (1st through 5th). Sukany’s latest book, Frisco Trail and Tales, chronicles a decade of running experiences. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing guitar, doting on six grandchildren, and caring for three rescued dogs and four rescued cats. ** visiting an exhibition in the rain rainbow hues of parked cars do not relieve the grey infusion of constant drizzle even museum corridors have absorbed the mood captured by the artist what pigment is this a muddle of avocado and coffee colors the stark Saharan landscape the desert brushed in varying tones stretches to an indeterminant sky where even the sun is muted with dust should I pity the mummified camel reduced to leather and bones neck stretched out as though reaching for one more step one more galactic spectacle of moon and stars was it the icy night that felled him or the nearness of stars that rendered him breathless outside dusk had chased the rain perhaps the night sky would blaze with that starlit brilliance Kat Dunlap Kat Dunlap grew up Norristown, PA and now resides in Massachusetts where she is a member of the Tidepool Poets of Plymouth. She received a BA in English from Arcadia University and holds an MFA from Pacific University. She edited two college writing publications as well as the Tidepool Poets Annual. For many years she was Director of the National Writing Project site at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and is currently the co-owner of Writers Ink of MA. Her chapbook The Blue Bicycle is being prepared for a spring launch. ** New Ekphrastic Contest!!!!Pick up our ebook of 50 pink prompts to inspire your ekphrastic practice.
You can enter up to eight of your pink-themed poems or stories into our contest, too. Click here for contest info: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ekphrastic-contest-announcement-tickled-pink?fbclid=IwAR1JelpV9gFQ43MJOPbpQDDsZ0avm8b8XhTkc0kNfPhtRvmFSLVZbI1_zBc Welcome lovers of art and ekphrastic writing and please enjoy Boulevard Montmartre by Camille Pissarro. According to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Pissarro "acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, including Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. I am intrigued with this particular time period of art, and am a fan of these artists. It was interesting to read of his influence on impressionists and post- impressionists. I look forward to your poetry and flash fiction using this exquisite piece of art as a prompt. Thank you to Lorette Luzajic for allowing me to serve as a guest editor for this ekphrastic challenge! Warm Regards, Julie A. Dickson ** Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Boulevard Montmartre, by Camille Pissarro. Deadline is March 15, 2024. You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include PISSARRO CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, March 15, 2024. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly. Dear Ekphrastic Challengees, Thank you all so much for submitting your Green Terrain-pieces to The Ekphrastic Review. It was just wonderful to read your words, prompted by Kelly Austin-Rolo’s encaustic artwork…making it indeed difficult to decide on an appropriate, honourable selection. And here it is! Congratulations to all you writers, I hope you enjoy reading all the pieces. Such joy to have TER and the amazing Lorette around! Thank you all, warm wishes, Kate Copeland ** Note from Lorette: Come to our upcoming workshop to meet Kate and follow her inspiration from fashion in art and literature. Kate will present on the meaning of clothes, such as Anne Sexton's famous red reading dress. Lorette will present on fashion in art history. Sign up here, or after the poetry selections below. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrasticwritingworkshops.html ** Encaustic Terrain It is at night that the old hills, worn down by the abrading winds, accept the touch of the moon's light, as lovely as any of us imagined, making us catch our breath suddenly by being caught up in this beauty. A tent of trees edges the fields, the ancient soil lying quiet after a season of plowing and reaping, being moved about by others, as if a soft, sensual bed were prepared for us to enter at last for some distant embrace, distant only for us, not the waiting earth the sun warmed and now lies cold. And I can see, as if a vision, when that lamp in the heavens is veiled, a dark angel comes to my room, in whose eyes is a portrait of longing that pours into my perceptions of desolation I reach for in shadows. Royal Rhodes Royal Rhodes is a retired educator whose grandparents were farmers in New Mexico. He lives now in a rural village, near to sheep farms, Amish communities, and an environmental center where bees are tended. His poems have appeared in: Ekstasis Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review and Challenge, Grey Sparrow, First Literary Review--East, The Montreal Review, and in others. ** Circles Sun eclipses pasture, dark shadows the field, covers livestock grazing; none stop to gaze up, Arial view, celestial crop circles mingle, criss-crossed lines, delineate cart paths, plow marks like scratches. Rows of bright yellow, whether tulips or daffodils, loaded wagons to market run between cow corn carts headed to silo conveyor – wheat sways, gentle rustle symphony of fragrant farm adds to late summer song. Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson writes from art, nature and prompts of memories. Her poems appear in many journals including Lothlorien, Blue Heron Review, Open Door Magazine and The Ekphrastic Review. Dickson has a BPS in Behavioral Science, has served as guest editor, sat on two poetry boards, advocates for captive elephants. She shares her home with two rescued semi-feral cats, Cam and Jojo. ** To Kelly Austin-Rolo Regarding Green Terrain How strange it seems -- the world you see -- from where we are not meant to be, and where your ingenuity intrudes on your acuity designing thus indelibly, in molten wax, fidelity to higher sense of who we are abstracting the enduring scar so geometric we impose on green terrain that we enclose denying what would else suffice as unconfining paradise for creatures unconcerned with soul or destiny in their control. Portly Bard Portly Bard: 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. ** Aerial Overviews A candle spilling from wick pool, or taper dripping while it’s lit, to fabric of batik in kind, or blocked ear treated as a child; but ‘means’, ‘meant’ words, not open minds, for blue sky thinkers, without box, or else encaustic not found out, uncovered, though, but what’s in store? It takes me to topography, to architects’ designer sheets, though colour invests action, place, a unity within this space. What shapes this stretch, both up, about, a drone to figure underground, the overview for soundings, view of plumb, dig deeper history? Both wax and wane of movements, tides, I dream allotments, footpaths, trails, haphazard growth, as stories told, the bold, as earthworks played their rôle. On common land which time refined - here shades are buried under land, of forest lawn and myrtle green - where pine, mint, pear, lime, sage, and fern. This crusty slice itself sublime as clime also in earthy spin, and like ley lines there’s mystery, in making mark, encaustic flow. Knife cutter bars imagined, swirl, or mapped contorted isobars, for whether playing part or not in how this scape is today’s plot. Stephen Kingsnorth Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com. ** Home Base Looking at the greens at our doorstep Two years above me my sister is Peering through the window on the top floor One we are. We nickname the runners Red shorts and Blue shorts Their rounds around the fields a winding wheel of Wit and fun between us Our universe One day I owned these fields. There is a picture of me in track suit Red and blue. Just hit a moon shot A face inverted into itself. Firm and ready On my way at arrival Standing at the window. Alone at night waiting for Our car to return at the far Side of the greens. Beads of light run Through the night and on to the ceiling I count them Another one, another one Another one The terrains lie dark and hollow I turn on the faucet of hope Filling them up Filling in time Stien Pijp Stien Pijp lives in the eastern part of the Netherlands amidst trees and heather. She works as a language therapist. ** The Zen of Dressmaking (iv) It will be a work of art. Misplaced tartan. Scraps of, a mini architecture. I, its sculpture. Intuit the pattern. Arrange all the pieces, lay them out. This will be a mishap of a dress. Wayward and angular, one to attract the right shade of folly. Maths won’t help you now. Secret pockets for my rune of the day, my hip flask for emergencies. Sapling green. Not my usual shade…but. The last one, viridian, didn’t do me much good. Oh, it was gorgeous, no doubt about that. Heart-stoppingly green. Like leaves after rain, touched by fingers of dusk. But it drew the wrong type, despite being delectable. Snug-hugging then flared. Untameable. This one shall be understated but all-knowing. This one shall sense you coming, your whys and wherefores. Rules? What of them? This one spits on rules of form, remakes them. Yes. This shall be that type of dress. There will be suns, a moon in half-shadow. A suggestion of light between leafy shade. There will be no exposure but revelation. Paths that lead to who-knows-where. There will be décolletage. There will be layers to peel away, petticoats, moss-green. A fresh winter sun and a morning walk. Friendly woods, equilibrium. Lungfuls of air and coming homeliness. A skyline of wisdom. You dare to learn this geometry? You have a yen for the zen of dressmaking? Then pay attention. Your lesson has begun. Nina Nazir Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, artist and avid multi-potentialite based in Birmingham, UK. She's had work published in various journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Free Verse Revolution, Unlost Journal, Harana Poetry, Visual Verse and Sunday Mornings at the River. You can usually find her writing in her local favourite café or or on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir and X (Twitter): @NusraNazir. ** In Our Youth the yard was a retired cow patch, filled with green weeds and grasses, yellow buttercups and dandelions, tickling our bare feet as we fought epic battles with swords of hardwood until we’d collapse, exhausted giggles escaping sunburnt lips. Each blade of green, some browned and darkened from ancient mowing, would slice our exposed necks, pausing exuberance for an errant scratch. We’d snatch a few for harmony or taste the sour dandelion milk or blow when white replaced yellow and wonder at the seeds’ flight. We never thought of their solitude after our breath dislodged them, separated them from family and friends, spread them over long distances, not the solitude of a wind-blown seed, filled with regret, longing for home. Tony Daly Tony Daly is a Washington DC area poet and short story writer of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and military fiction/nonfiction. His work has recently been published in The Horror Zine, Lovecraftiana, and others. He recently served as guest editor for Eye to the Telescope’s Summer 2023 issue on Trauma. For a list of published work, please visit https://aldaly13.wixsite.com/website or follow him on Twitter @aldaly18. ** Crop-Marked Only look down and Medieval England lies there still. The old strips, the common land not yet enclosed the common people not yet expelled. Then there are the newer parts. The squares of enclosed fields divisive hedges the common people expelled unseen buried in time. All the crop-marks of history lying there exposed even when invisible. But those circles are revelations unexplained by history. It’s unclear now if they are new or old modern mystery making or ancient spirit visitations, fortifications, tombs, or another mystery still the crop-marks can’t tell us. Lynn White Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and www.facebook.com///www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/. ** In the Last Days of the Fourth World after Joy Harjo's "A Map to the Next World" They say that a picture can speak. It can intone a poem, can sing the sweet song of holy incantation and elegy. Sometimes, the truth of the earth is too much to bear - scorched lines, marks etched and scored on red rocks like music staves, a scroll that's rolled and swirling, scattered with nature's crotchets and minims and quavers. In these last days of our world, what voice will sing verses over pure clear notes, ululations, the heart-songs of despair? We know it's over. We have abandoned the ancient wisdom, all that our ancestors learned of sun, stars, beasts, water, grass. "They have never left us; we abandoned them for science." The stars are drowned by city lights. Sun rage brings drought. Grass is tamed to pasture, beasts are unrecognisable burdens. Water makes wars, pumped from wells, corralled in irrigation canals. Whole lands are turned to patterns of criss-crossing lines. Roads and runways make a macro level like a microchip. Everything subservient to man's needs heedless of cost. What road will lead us out of our self-inflicted new wilderness? What prophet can be the oracle of hope in these end days? Will we find a way to live a better, greener life? "You must make your own map." Emily Tee Author's Note: This poem's title and the two lines in quotation marks are from Joy Harjo's poem, "A Map to the Next World.” Stave, crotchet, minim and quaver are musical terms in UK English. Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. She's had recent pieces published in The Ekphrastic Review, Blue Heron Review, Whale Road Review and elsewhere online, and in print in Poetry Scotland and several anthologies, including Ourselves in Rivers and Oceans, from The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. She lives in the UK. ** Viewing a Landscape Through Cataracts Nothing is clear, all is blurred green with blotched lights strung out like beads while every dew-drop glows at the centre of its own rainbow. We seem to be in the middle of fields and there looks to be woodland over there. I wish I could see the birds that are singing. Surgery will soon fix my eyes: these blurred colours will resolve back into shapes and meaningful things but nothing is clear for this land - any time in the future, all this greenery could be erased just by the whim of a bureaucrat's pen. Juliet Wilson Juliet Wilson is an adult education tutor, wildlife surveyor and conservation volunteer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published. She blogs at http://craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com and can be found @craftygreenpoet on BlueSky and Twitter. ** Some Memories are Better Left Untouched I’m falling into this conspiracy: a hint of sheet music —a melody?-- and a coffee stain (it’s not a coffee stain) the coal mine canary perches, surrounded by crop circles-- the avocado green and harvest gold of my childhood peeling linoleum stuffed animals with breath like sour cedar the crinkly paper in my fingertips, displacing musty motes-- I will pack this away, try to forget. Eileen Lawrence Eileen Lawrence is a lawyer, but please don’t hold that against her. Her poetry has been published by Dos Gatos Press, Mutabilis Press, and the Fargo Public Library. ** Green’s Not Easy It’s not easy being green. Ask Kermit. I was a mentor when all that Sesame Street fandango went public. Look where it has gotten him. I’m not saying I regret an instant of his rocket-to-stardom fame, what I am saying, and always will say, art is definitely in the eye of the observer. What you see is what you hold it to be, not perfect but with some parts laid out in sanctioned sections of your mind. Strive for the place that suits, that spells home, that makes your journey a complete picture: rolling greens or those bright/shaded, distinct ochres, yellows, muted lace. You’ll know it when your green selects its target and lies prominently among once fallow fields. life is a challenge my blueprint of life is green What colour is yours? Jane Lang Jane Lang’s work has appeared in online publications including Quill and Parchment, the Avocet, Creative Inspirations, The Ekphrastic Review, and published in several anthologies. She has written and given two chap books to family and friends in lieu of Christmas cards. Jane lives in the Pacific Northwest. ** From Here place becomes abstracted as distance grows and I’m subtracted from the composition of home. From here I see the golden shape of you and every jagged line we drew, shadows hinting at the stories left behind. From here the worst memories can be redacted, (still, I can’t forget the way I acted,) and I wonder, if despite the distance and all my resistance, can I still say I come from here? Elizabeth A. Curry Elizabeth Curry is a poet and writer. She’s also been a dancer, creative arts therapist, volunteer librarian, and taught arts-based workshops for all ages. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts where she received the Excellence in Writing Chapter Books Award. She lives in Minnesota with her family and loves being outdoors year-round, especially at dusk. ** Musica Universalis He cocked his head to one side, rested foot on shovel -- "Hear that?" I could not tell a lie; sometimes I'd hear the ocean swell of the Colorado-blues from the root twanged between gigantic thumbs, or a flute wrapped in its bunting mantle, or the bell for supper. Then however my ear fell on a mute world: September's earthy fruit (potatoes) ripen best in silence. "No -- to youth, what's always there seems nothing. As red and green go in to white, just so this blank reverberates from forest dells again in crop circles and coffee rings, down to the nucleus of the meanest cell." I like to think not all things change with time. My uncle has not worked in many years, but autumn does not stop, nor work, and I'm still pocketing these pocked, imperfect spheres. Kathryn Borobia Katy Borobia is a recent graduate of Hillsdale College. Her poems and prose have been published by Ekstasis, Glass Mountain, and several others. ** Sanctuary You forage the shores of your thought—where is the line between in and sane? Some days it feels like your mind is nothing at all but an opening, a passage for winds transforming into riptides, casting you adrift. You search for a calm stillness to float you gently towards shelter, refuge-- a place strange and beautiful-- a place to both rest and hide. Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig lives and works in NYC, where she values each parcel of green terrain. ** Frog Song They say that frogs no longer sing, that wetland patches have dried to hard stones. Here in the north, the summer sun grows meaner each year, but last night the frogs crooned in a joyful green chorus. Their songs filled the rain soaked streets, rising from the potholes and the viridescent grass. Last night I opened the door. Grooves recorded on the land for a thousand years played under stars hidden by the last stitches of the great rain. Wind raised havoc along the fringes of the mountains surrounding my home. Nothing normal anymore, but this ancient, stubborn melody. Music rises from mud in the street, from the marshland, pungent as the narcissus that scream spring, spring, spring. Last night I opened my own stubborn heart and wished a storm would strike it clean. They say all will be quiet in the extinct foreverland, the lines of earth striated with the memory of wild exhilaration. But last night the frog song was a wake of drunken canticles that lifted my own small grief. The door opened to life, the dark enveloped by green. Alethea Eason Alethea Eason has recently returned to her home in Lake County, California after a five year sojourn in New Mexico. Her poetry has appeared in El Palacio, New Mexico Poetry Anthology, and Writing in a Woman's Voice. She has written four novels, Charlotte and the Demons being the latest. She lives near a volcano with her husband, a dog and a cat. ** The Quilted Landscape She pulls from her stash the greens that are meant to be fields for baseball or sprouting corn. Some greens will be velvet forests or rough, weedy roadside growth. She finds golds that recall ripened wheat and kisses of morning sun. Touches of black and midnight blue: these will be asphalt and shadows-- or tractors turning the soil. Color determines it all. For lawns and lots she needs solids and chambrays. Plaids and stripes will be highways and driveways. In prints she sees creeks or rolling bales. Her fabrics blend vintage and new-- past and present, in harmony with her soul. Remnants and quarters will be ironed by hands that find joy in warm cotton newly pressed, then cut by fingers at home in shears and stitched by one who knows the feel of the land-- whose needle forms valleys, crags, and hills, crop circles, ridges, and level ground. What she has seen and learned flows into her work the way inspiration pours from her stash. She draws on all she has loved, because, in art as in life, one needs love to build a world. Catherine Reef Catherine Reef's poetry has appeared in several online and print journals. She has published more than forty nonfiction and biographical works on subjects including Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Victoria, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. A graduate of Washington State University, Catherine Reef lives and writes in Rochester, New York. ** On the Blue-Yellow Spectrum to Green Central Park lawns and evergreens, Cezanne and Pissarro impressions of Giverny, Key West sky as it stretches from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Jealousy, envy, and American paper money, a dead friend’s eyes before they closed. The afghan my mother crocheted for my infant son. The hospital room where he cried for his mama who was upstairs recuperating from meningitis. Demerol circles and CAT scan angles, a collage of infection and antibiotics, blue and yellow confluence to green. Barbara Krasner Barbara Krasner's kitchen uses the complementary colors of blue, yellow, and green. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod International, Paterson Literary Review, Typehouse, Cimarron Review, Rust + Moth, and other journals. She lives and teaches in New Jersey. ** Cornucopia's Ghost She kept rolling and making the point for 12,000 years but now the point is that the point will soon vanish when no one is left to worship at her rotting shrines. dan smith dan smith has been widely published in print and on-line in such diverse journals as The Rhysling Anthology, Scifaikuest, Deep Cleveland Junk Mail Oracle and Gas Station Famous. Most recently he has had poems at dadakuku, Five Fleas Itchy Poetry and Cold Moon Journal. ** With Thoughts of William Blake Is this the green and pleasant land you had in mind? I wonder what you would make of this metal bird circling Heathrow, trapped and waiting to descend. My eyes glance through glass, come to rest on a patchwork quilt sewn into fields of wheat and hedgerow, threaded with yellow. I imagine the ground teeming with beetle, the sky awash with gulls swooping full throttle looping the metal coils that infiltrate the edge. For this, Mr Blake, is the Green Belt, to protect this beautiful site: it draws tighter each sunrise squeezing at life, making it hard to breathe. I observe each geometric shape and tone, an ancient woodland weaving fingerprints on soil and recoil to think of it, folded flat like a map. Kate Young Kate Young lives in England and enjoys writing poetry, painting and playing the guitar, ukulele and mandolin. Her poems have appeared in various webzines, magazines, and chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlet A Spark in the Darkness has been published by Hedgehog Press and her next pamphlet Beyond the School Gate is due to be published soon. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet. ** What Do Birds Think? funny isn’t it containing the land but green is a fugitive she jumps the walls and the cornfields are envious of the sky because air is like sea slipping through a hand while birds look down and wonder Marc Brimble Marc lives in Spain and when he's not teaching English he likes drinking tea and wandering about ** Near Elkhart Under gauzy sunlight I peer over the right wing of the Cessna, gaze at a patchwork of rolling Amish farms scrolled over Indiana hillsides and valleys, white farmhouses surrounded by summer fields of corn and barley, plows pulled by a seven-horse hitch over hayfields, those verdant acres separated by crisscross county roads where gray buggies trot to farmers markets with fresh produce, colorful quilts, and baked goods-- a century-old lifestyle preserved today. Jim Brosnan Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Driving Long Distance (2024) and Nameless Roads (2019). His poems have appeared in the Aurorean (US), Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), Eunoia Review (Singapore), Nine Muses (Wales,) Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Strand (India), The Madrigal (Ireland), and Voices of the Poppies (United Kingdom) and forthcoming in The Wild Word (Germany). He is a full professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI. Jim has also won numerous awards from the National Federation of Poetry Societies (US). ** Flower Moon it is the season of hunger. the sky hangs heavy, and the earth rolls gently beneath it, rumbling with the tunneling of bees wanting for a queen. for a taste of root and nectar and fire. i am young, and have barely settled into my own wanting – when she, a sweet bear, reaches up into the blue- black night and pulls the honey moon down. i watch with awe as she drags its golden light between her fingers, low across the ground, the green terrain of a body criss- crossed with cropmarks and crocus petals. heat, peat and loam. within moments the air is filled with the smell of it – smell which is so close to taste which is so, so close to freedom. freedom, the thrill of breath so sweet and thick it sticks to the roof of a mouth. the mouth, a cave hidden away from the prying eyes of sun and society. safe haven, gasping. she gasps, sweet bear, and i catch the cavernous sound of her on my tongue. i gasp, and she splits the echo like honeycomb between her teeth. Kimberly Hall Kimberly Hall (she/her) is a queer and neurodivergent poet based in Southeast Texas, with a master's degree in behavioral science. Her work has appeared in several print anthologies, as well as in online publications such as Sappho's Torque, Equinox, and The Ekphrastic Review. She is currently working on her first collection. ** Frenzied Photosynthesis At last – the optimist aspiration atlas – a spectacle of frenzied photosynthesis, run by a cryptic pragmatist – chlorophyll, a lover of the sun, a rival of the moon, stamping its jade mark as if for fun. But despite the all-green light there are hiking rules on site if you want to reach the dreamed side: Never take the straight-branched path – it is too traveled. Never climb a tendril to the skies – it is too imagined. Never run after a sunbeam – it is too transient. Never peep over a leaf cliff – it is too ambivalent. Never look on shoots bright side – it is too blinding. Meandering tenderly-verdantly artless lose yourself in this lush-streaming paradise, spend your reason in that out-of-body experience and get hyphened to the impending miracle – blossoming – the whole point of optimist’s voyaging. Though it is bud-trapped to the last moment – you will instantly find it if you keep ambling eyes-closed but open-minded for a suddenly-flashed internally-synthesized dash. How otherwise can you heed a blooming hush? Ekateria Dukas Ekaterina Dukas writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning. Her poems have often been hosted by The Ekphrastic Review and its challenges. Her poetry collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europa Edizioni 2021. ** Tending The NICU hums a low tone of medical instruments and computer fans. I switch off the phototherapy bulb in my son’s incubator. He wears a miniature eye mask, a plastic tube snaked through his nostril to his stomach. Cords link his chest to machine. I unlatch and lift the fiberglass sidewall, scoop my hands underneath his warm body, gather him to my sternum. He stays asleep. I settle my sore pelvis into a wheeled chair in his corner of the ward, remove his eye mask. Bow my head to his hair and inhale. He smells sweet, intoxicates me like newly-turned earth, a fresh field to sow my heart into. His tiny fingers soft as moss, skin hued amber from early arrival. His fingerprints are a maze, a path, a map leading back to tended roots, twisting through shade and sun, plots of sweet corn, summer squash, butterbeans and brassica. The NICU doctors and interns begin their morning circuit, murmur in a cluster under the dimmed fluorescence. How-to and Don’t-do posters advise from the walls. A screen above me squiggles out vitals: oxygen, body temp, pulse. Silent numbers satisfy a nurse, who opens and closes doors, drawers, checks supply stock. Her sneakers squeak down the row of dozing infants. My son wakes, tilts his face upward. I bundle him closer. His blue eyes, deeper than sky, open wide, graze the gold-flecked forests of mine. We’re an olive branch, sweet- grass, a lemon grove, a meadow of dandelion, goldenrod, and clover. We’re a newborn continent unto ourselves. Heather Brown Barrett Heather Brown Barrett is an award-winning poet in southeastern Virginia. She mothers her young son and discusses all things literary with her writer husband. She is a member of Hampton Roads Writers, where she serves on the Advisory Board and the newsletter staff. She’s also a member and regular student of The Muse Writers Center. Her poetry has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, Black Bough Poetry, OyeDrum Magazine, AvantAppal(achia), and elsewhere. Visit her website https://heatherbrownbarrett.com/ ** Green Wraiths The watery green light of a languid summer evening, lingers in the silent attic, filters through the skylight onto the intestines of the house. A ladder leads up to an exit always barred and banned. Lengths of silver piping wind and coil, the sleeping serpent in its own luscious green Eden. A tall treasure chest full of dead people's secrets, faded into dusty obscurity, decaying, rotting, skeletal. Fragile playroom for mice and spiders, awaiting past owners who float like dust, motes caught in a green silence. Sarah Das Gupta Sarah Das Gupta is a retired teacher from Cambridge, UK who also taught in India and Tanzania. Her work has been published in many magazines in over 15 different countries.Among her interests are art, early music, parish churches, history and landscape. ** The Three Sisters Sown in circles seen from above yellow green Maize silky elegance blades sharp tongue sweet Beans entwining social climbing azote lush Squash shady lady leafy broad earthily moist Family Planting some 6000 years & nary a rhubarb Donna-Lee Smith Donna-Lee Smith taught at McGill University (Faculty of Education) for a quarter century and often had the privilege of working in First Nations and Inuit communities, where she learned the ancient wisdom of companion planting the Three Sisters. 1. Create a circular mound of rich soil 2. Plant Maize first; she grows tall, like a trellis 3. Next plant Beans; she climbs Maize, adding nitrogen to the soil 4. Third is Squash; her broad leaves shade the soil, keeping it moist. ** Spring Creed It is Spring again: green and gold glamour mirage the mundane. It is Spring again: sunshine alchemy, tree-rising sap yellow roads, emerald cities. It is Spring again: tapestry of tuning square to circle, but to bud. It is Spring again: hurrah of grasses, hallelujah of light, hymn of begin. It is Spring again: breathe in green, giddy the heart with hope. It is Spring again: turn self with earth, map the way to yes. Siobhán Mc Laughlin Siobhán Mc Laughlin is a poet and creative writing facilitator from Co. Donegal in Ireland. Her poems have appeared numerous times before in The Ekphrastic Review. Her work has also been published in a selection of journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Poetry Village, The Waxed Lemon, Drawn to the Light Press and upcoming in Reverie Magazine. Twitter: @siobhan347 ** My Dark Green World There is nowhere to walk when everything is green, I’m paralyzed to turn as I remain unseen. Distant sunlight finds me like a small speck of star, I have no hand to hold but wonder where you are. Grass fills my senses as I try to calm my mind, A small step to distract how I was left behind. Voices taunt and murmur in this desolate place, As cloth-covered eyes hide the salt tears on my face. Corrie Pappas Corrie Pappas is a small business owner living outside Boston. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review and she is the author of the children’s book, Come Along and Dream. ** We are a Green Palimpsest Sometimes I come splashing spreading green paint Or greener vomit I dig into the dirt fingers feel so green I sit at a table cut crepe paper make origami cranes They are fruit green parrots I see one in a cage eager to maneuver language Out of it onto the page I sit at a table making paper collages & papier mache I squat at a garden’s back corner mixing browns & greens I compost everything in my waste basket all my failed poems thrownaway salad leaves Sometimes on my fingertips there’s umami Sometimes I walk the shorelines around the green terrain Scouting out seaweeds They are so funky Green breezes from the Pacific billow in Dawn’s margin between golden & blue weaves into the tapestry I sit by a window composting light Earth comes blooming There are so few green flowers but heliotropes open under my green hedge The green roses feel unripe green in loving But the first single-cell leaf was blue-green Phytoplankton mosses ferns didn’t make gaudy kisses What would it be like to be woven into the mysterious funkiness Of a prehistoric forest I wonder when the incense was all brown & green I sit by the hearth of earth watching its greenest fire leap and leap And lick my face my eye my noseholes My hands are bleeding leaves into the earth As I sit on my haunches in my back garden digging Digging a new tapestry out every day Planting & replanting Calling nothing a weed Today the first fresh buds of the year are bursting And rain falls like unraveled crepe Behind the veil of my thirsty winter eyes All is scratchy & green I stand staring up at my yellowing ceiling my yellowing wallpaper (I know one type that stays evergreen like Amazon but I don’t want to breathe arsenic) We like to color maps with green Even where no blade of grass sneaks from concrete Even when we’ve no time or energy To plant a veggie garden on our balconies To whisper to tender green grow grow beautiful & delicious Sprout seeds scramble vine weigh us down with green marbles marvels Oh tree tree tree I got hit on the head by a gargantuan pomelo Even when we don’t want to wait till the spinach leaves are wilted The broccoli is nicely braised or roasted To add superfoods to smoothies wheatgrass kale leaves seaweeds We’d like to drink our greens I sit in scratchy city green spaces replanting uprooted weeds It takes one oak & one linden to make a wood make a myth When you read Metamorphoses the Genesis or better the Georgics Each page is a perfectly patched green terrain Lucie Chou Lucie Chou is an ecopoet hiking and gardening in mainland China. An undergraduate English major, she has work published or forthcoming in Entropy, the Black Earth Institute Blog, Tiny Seed Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Transom, Tofu Ink Arts, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Slant: A Journal of Poetry. A debut collection, Convivial Communiverse, came from Atmosphere Press. In August 2023, she participated in the Tupelo Press 30/30 project where she fundraised for the indie press by writing one poem each day for a month. In spring 2024, she is doing exchange studies at UC Berkeley, where she explores the gay outdoors and works on a long poem that seeks to queer Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden. Dress You Up, Zoom Workshop with Kate Copeland
CA$35.00
Join us on Zoom on Saturday, March 9 from 10 am to noon eastern standard time, for a survey and discussion about fashion and its underlying subtexts and meanings that make their way into our poetry and stories. Ekphrastic editor Kate Copeland will take us on a fashionable tour of art and clothing, with time to write our own artistic exploration of appearances. Weaving through personal and cultural meanings we attach to clothing, Kate will touch on poetry, research, linguistics, and Anne Sexton's iconic red reading dress. Lorette will show us a brief survey of fashion in art history. Virginia Woolf would sign off her invitation with "bring no clothes," but we invite you to dress up or bring your favourite garment, to inspire your own poem or story. Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is The Sahara, by Gustave Guillaumet. Deadline is March 1, 2024. You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.
Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include GUILLAUMET CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, March 1, 2024. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly. An Ordinary Day "You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioner singing joyfully... Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns." Try To Praise The Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski It was an ordinary day: I saw the angel rise wearing handcuffs, the black wall of forest trees trimmed of individual identity obstructing movement in the background. I have dreamed of fields where foliage wears a crown of saffron; seasons when an ideology of earth clings like lost ideas to a wind- buffeted angel -- like children, words are spirits of new life, the harvest of the past. So I believe I have held newborns and watched the light illuminate a window; read poems by a professor, born in the Ukraine where now war mutilates the people, toppling cities; crippling everything but hope... How slim the stalks are, this past we've harvested, praying gun fire would grow silent; praying we can hold on to one another, tangled, as we are in the leitmotif of clouds where nothing guides the bare feet of an angel toward the breath of dawn above the ground. Laurie Newendorp Laurie Newendorp's book, When Dreams Were Poems, explores the relationship between art and words. Honoured multiple times by The Ekphrastic Challenge, she studied poetry in The University of Houston's creative writing program at a time when Adam Zagajewski's poem, "Try To Praise The Mutilated World," appeared between black covers as the last page in the New Yorker issued after 911. ** Spinning Dust-Bowl Dreams
The clouds Create havoc in their wake — splitting atoms in the sky prospecting gilded wheat extracted from an emulsion of grime spinning dust-bowl dreams from fool’s gold delusions If you spin it, they will come, quoth the silence to the lamb whistling through lips greedy with I, spewing silence evading her starving ears fighting for just a nugget Foraging among a carrion of broken fences— shackled in a saucer of milk and honey intentions, she watches as these demons in angel’s clothing tumble from the sky Dethroned, denied their place in this dystopian debacle tempting fate as hellions grapple with her thirst for I fearless spectres eradicating sovereignty in this whirlwind And the clouds in the distance, witnessing the carnage spinning from its loins with eyes wide shut — rain icy tears on the stark meadow this boulevard of broken dreams, exposed and bowing to the ominous reality of stark days to come. Ann Marie Steele Ann Marie Steele, who resides in Charlotte, NC, America, is a writer who dabs mainly in free verse and prose poetry. She holds a BS in Journalism (News-Editorial), and an MA in Secondary English Education. Ann Marie pens pieces about love and loss, and what she observes and experiences. The loss of her youngest son, Brandon, has influenced much of her writing. Her works have been described as “resiliently defiant.” Ann Marie has been published in The Ekphrastic Review with her pieces, “Every Lilly Donned with Grief” and “I Dare You, Pretty Please,” and in Exist Otherwise with her piece, “Scintillating Symbiotic Sea.” ** A Day's Work A leg broken and healed out-of-shape betrays its farmhand, the wheat-worker, my grandfather. One day he will leave to mine coal in the Alleghenies and die of something else entirely. But today he is more than a man: his the rough hand that feels for God when leisure won't, who knows angels dirty with a day's work. Kathryn Borobia Katy Borobia is a recent graduate of Hillsdale College. Her poems and prose have been published by Ekstasis, Glass Mountain, and several others. ** Birth of Spring Demeter spins and seeds scatter, burrow, and are sown. She stalks the rows, protecting the tiny shoots bursting through, pushing further away from Hades’ black below. She haunts and hunts the snacking crows as her daughter, Persephone, snakes her way up through the silt and soil with loam in her pores and worms in her mouth. Persephone’s hand breaches the land, and Demeter, feet planted and toes channelling the strength of roots, grunts and pants to heave her free. Hades spits out the girl and her grubs, and Demeter’s sweat and tears rain joy on the grains to the music of Persephone’s vernal scream. Bayveen O'Connell Bayveen O'Connell is an Irish writer whose words have been nominated for Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She loves art, history, folklore, and myth. ** The Moments of Tomorrow Bound we run, slightly unhinged through the buoyant clouds of golden dust Haunted by the shadows of the past blending with the nature that surrounds Embraced in the dense canopy meeting the sky sheltered from the torrent of time Disappearing footprints wear our names tow-coloured meadow, a soothing sanctuary Emanating endurance of our weary shape indestructible perseverance of our inner spirit Ohh, how we mourn the loss of Humanity; the enslaved homeland left behind Our minds, dust clouds, floating forward tentatively towards the moments of tomorrow Andrea Damic Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, resides in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and author of poetry and prose. She writes at night when everyone is asleep; when she lacks words to express herself, she uses photography to speak for her. Her poems can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, the other side of hope, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Door Is A Jar Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, The Piker Press, Mad Swirl and elsewhere. She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website: https://damicandrea.wordpress.com. ** Breakfast Cereal Oh to break fast with wing-milled wheat And the milk of angels aged ! Fresh from the field Where cherubs are chained And Polonia’s sunny yield preserved. Alas, all we consume is twisted and free In the shade of trees askew, For we deserve not she who We fasten with our fresh air, No, we break fast with milky shadow, sucked from above her greying hair. Sophiya Sian Sophiya Sian is a UK-based creative and undergraduate student reading Comparative Literature. She recently wrote the screenplay Pigeon-Livered, an independent short film set to be released early this year. Catch her over on Instagram @thinkinfin. ** When Souls Can’t Rest She soars on gossamer wings into a silent sky, safe from the deafening thunder of war below, her fragile wrists shackled behind her back, still bearing the battle scars of hatred. Who will save the children left behind in despair? Who will feed their shriveling bodies and nurse their open wounds? The children beg her to stay but their voices fade from afar as she focuses on the trees beyond that continue to thrive while children die. Clouds thicken and gray as her wings slip into the mist. Cries of anguish still linger in the breeze and her tears spill, too. No one wins when souls can’t rest. Shelly Blankman Shelly Blankman lives in Columbia, Maryland with her husband of 43 years. They have two sons, Richard and Joshua, who live in New York and Texas, respectively. They have filled their empty nest with four rescue cats and a dog. Richard and Joshua surprised Shelly with the publication of her first book of poetry, Pumpkinhead. Her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Verse-Virtual, and Muddy River Poetry Review, and Open Door Magazine, among others. ** No Turning Back In the far distance they saw something moving. Heat shimmer down the road, a mirage growing. Not water, pooled on black tarmac, but something golden, alien – angelic. Rising silvery in a tumbling cloud, as once the prophesising angels must have seemed. But here in the bread basket, while rye and wheat and barley baked in the summer sun, something else was loosed. Dust bowl America, overworked earth. Seventeen-year cicada hum groaning into life. Or on the Great Steppe, dry air, winter cold as dusty death. August breezes blasted from a broken car muffler stripped the topsoil away, flung it skyward, as if to declare, here are my children, here, their inheritance, which, like your progress, are promises reduced to just so much hot air. Only the poltergeist is left, alone in its abject fury. Jo Mazelis Novelist, poet, photographer, essayist and short story writer, Jo Mazelis grew up in Swansea, later living in Aberystwyth and then London for over 14 years before returning to her hometown. Her novel Significance was awarded the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2015. Her first collection of short stories Diving Girls was shortlisted for both Wales Book of the Year and Commonwealth Best First Book. Her book Circle Games was long-listed for Wales Book of the Year. Her third collection of stories Ritual, 1969 was long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2017. Blister and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Rubery Award in 2023. ** The Northern Line No one remembers getting on the train. Amnesiac, we’ve always been traveling, always riding. Our folks paid our fare, but we only remember how July heat rose from the fields and women cooked all day, red-faced, bickering, envying their menfolk’s outdoor life. But that prison’s drawn by a tall black line fencing their reach, the wide blue yonder just a torment. Aunts and uncles fall by the wayside. Bits and pieces abide, moving along with us, outside our train window. Now, my mother joins them, the smartest of thirteen kids, born with both hands tied behind her back. No. I did not agree to this. The train’s moving too fast, I say, as we fly through Rapid City, our people trailing behind us. Sarah Holloway Sarah Holloway lives with her husband and lots of books in Savannah, GA. She’s a recovering tax accountant. Her recent work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly's blog, Roi Fainéant, Emerge Literary Journal, Cowboy Jamboree and SugarSugarSalt. She’s on Twitter/X @Sarah31405. ** The Incident Those kids were asking for it, who told them to joyride the tractor like that─ slamming on the brakes for a bird whiffling through the air like some corkscrew opening dreams that they (like everyone) had of flying, knowing they would surely fly someday but never thinking it would be that day, the dust cloud rising, harsh braking lifting them out of their seats, tire tracks furrowing the field where grass won’t grow, not to this day, especially not on the spot where, if you view it from a distance, it looks for all the world like angel wings opening. Cheryl Snell's books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Her most recent writing has appeared in Does It Have Pockets? Switch, Gone Lawn, Your Impossible Voice, Pure Slush, and other journals. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer. ** Fields of Witness Wheat fields of Zaręby Kościelne loom brittle, no longer incubated in Brok River bed soil, no longer trampled by naked boys racing to splash in their Sunday swim, no longer rented to their parents to eke their week’s zlotys. My shoes crunch on crispy stalks, stomp on my grandfather’s memory clouds, slipping between blades of long-gone windmills. Dew insists life once existed here, before Russian occupation, Soviet takeover, Nazi invasion. Shrouded ancestors, you omnipresent sentinels, why did you not emerge from struggling vegetation, breathe your warnings? They whisper: We lost our voices in troop dust. Barbara Krasner Barbara Krasner visited her grandparents’ Polish village in 2008. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod International, Paterson Literary Review, Typehouse, Cimarron Review, Rust + Moth, and other journals. She lives and teaches in New Jersey. ** From the Cloud of Dust From earth to earth, and dust to dust, is this a ghoul, ghost of the swirl from yellow field, sand sundried track where sky, trees, field, path stratified? With speckled cloud, long pine line thinned, weed growth of green ’gainst meadow gold, though wheel tread rutting parallel, set lines are drawn for wight erupt. So are they shades or one in whirl, these dancers of one move unfurled, dust devil’s grit confusing eye or phantoms raised as spectral wraith? No will-o’-wisp, phosphine oxide, or lantern swamp to misguide fools, this dry five, more, evolving shape writhes wrist chains, grim skull, digit reach. Polonia, emerging sons, from shackled hands of Poland’s past, can Motherland be symbolised; or demon mad, Poludnica? A tromp l’oeil, imagined mind, a marriage, surreal, well-earthed, out on a limb, unmeasured step, that breath, wind, spirit blows as will. Stephen Kingsnorth Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** Apparition Did you descend from the sky or ascend from the earth, your ethereal form hovers over brush and scrub. You could be struggling to escape the shackles of motherhood or liberating yourself from a homeland steeped in tsarist autocracy searching for a more vibrant, independent palette of landscape. Elaine Sorrentino Elaine Sorrentino, communications director by day, poet by night, has been published in Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, Global Poemic, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Agape Review, Haiku Universe, Sparks of Calliope, Muddy River Poetry Review, Panoply, Etched Onyx Magazine, and at wildamorris.blogspot.com. ** I Don’t Know, Angels Maybe I’m trying on the vestments of angels, I’m trying to be good. Remember when you asked me what word do I misspell? It’s definitely. Somewhere inside me, I want the base to be define instead of finite and it fucks me up every time. Finite leads to infinity and then the idea that I could go on living for who knows how long and that’s a downer even though I’m not ready to die yet. I still need more clarification regarding dogs. Most of the stories about them are sad stories unless they are happy stories, but I’m still crying by the end either way while a great dark mouth is eating all the trees and I keep thinking of that time your car died on the roadside in what we thought of then as rural Maine and I imagined a kind of fog rolling in from the fields to envelop you while I waited for a call back. Unacceptable! A hole like that is either a portal or it’s vastly empty. I promised myself I would never stop trying, but I’m so tired. I want my old clothes back, the jeans that you used to borrow. I love you so much, though I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud, in that way. Let the damned pendulum keep swinging. I’m easily as culpable as my own mother was but in completely different ways. God! I tried, I swear it. It was just the wrong day, I was wearing the wrong face, but now things are moving at an incurable rate, bridges are connecting people who never thought they’d meet. It’s beautiful, a golden hour. Maybe we could all be better than we ever dreamed of being. Crystal Karlberg Crystal Karlberg is a Library Assistant at her local public library. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: The Threepenny Review; The Penn Review; Beloit Poetry Journal. ** Defiance Tumbling through time, a mist of loam enshrines —a glimpse-- of an angel’s untimely demise. An apparition of Atropos, cutting her threads shy, so when plucked, she might choose to die. Sworn never to be the unwilling bride of some dreadful lord, unwedded, her dress torn where faithful sisters stitched wings inside. In defiance, the goddess throws herself down, on a bed of nightshade sewed into the gown. Loosed, the spool begins to unravel, until uncoiled she’s freed, becoming immortal. Jory Como Jory Como is an emerging poet and songwriter from northern Minnesota. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Nursing and Organizational Behavior. Several of his short holiday stories have been published in local newspapers. As a veteran, Jory hopes to use his work and the art of poetry to help others realize healing from emotional and physical trauma. He lives on a hobby farm with his spouse and children. ** In the Gold Fields The gold. It hurts your eyes. And you see things that are not there. Are possibly not there. Were there, you said. You told me of a flurry, white and gold with arms or wings. You told me this in the evening, you had been waiting all day to tell me and admitted that you worried I would laugh. Or worse, deny. It was beautiful, you said. Three or four beings, maybe more or less it was hard to tell with the way the breeze whipped cloth, feathers, hair, bodies. I refrained from saying what I thought. That you were tired, that a wind stirred up the golden field into a twister, that you wanted it to be something marvelous. The fields are a vivid gold I said. They are, you said, and that’s what brought them here. They were attracted to the gold. They whirled in it, like bees dancing to gather pollen. I tried to ask, did they see you, did they acknowledge you, but your face was aglow as if lit by the fields, your eyes were shining, you looked so enthralled I decided not to drag reality into your dream. But perhaps I should have. The next day you went to the fields. I saw from the porch as you stepped into the gold and you laughed and cried out in wonder, and I saw the moment you left me. Amy Jones Sedivy Amy Jones Sedivy retired this year and is happy to sit on the front porch with the dog, and read novels, short stories, and politics. She has been published in several online and print literary magazines. ** To Jacek Malczewski Regarding In the Clouds So well in dust you conjured theme where clouds and trees in tandem seem to hold the souls in captive state who suffer heat of demon's hate for yearning's thirst to labour free and self determine destiny tradition long has held as trust bequeathed by generations thrust where love would flicker into flame becoming home and hearth and name -- a blaze that would sustain and heal and forge a will of tempered steel assured forever to survive as spirit in which they would thrive. Portly Bard Portly Bard: 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. Dear Ekphrastic Challengees, An inspiring ekphrastic challenge for you to start February 2024 with, this challenge is based on the encaustic art of Kelly Austin-Rolo. Kelly’s studio is based in Denver, CO, where I had the grand pleasure of meeting her, and of adoring the beauty of her artworks. She is an artist who is curious and open to learn about and work with all sorts of different media. As she states on her website https://kellyaustinrolo.com/ : “Every day brings something new,” and this was the energy and enthusiasm she showed in her atelier. I hope you will be properly prompted by Green Terrain (2019), and as Kelly mentions: “Green Terrain holds a special place and I would love to see and feel others' response to it”. Thank you for submitting your pieces, I am looking forward to reading your writing. Thank you Kelly, for your art and permission, thank you Lorette, for being TER’s life force. Be good, Kate Copeland ** Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Green Terrain, by Kelly Austin-Rolo. Deadline is February 16, 2024. You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include AUSTIN-ROLO CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, February 16, 2024. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly. Dear Ekphrastic Writers, You are my people. Many of you have become friends, exchanging emails, sharing poetry news, and turning The Ekphrastic Review into a home and place for inspiring workshops. Of course, we have our own Queen Bee, Lorette C. Luzajic, to thank for that. This challenge brought in a record number of responses (at least for challenges I’ve judged), which means it was even harder than usual for me to narrow my selections. As TER regularly tells us, it’s good to have a blend of regulars and new talent, as well as a variety of approaches. I was pleased to name TWO high school students (from the same school) and a retired beekeeper in my dozen finalists. A big THANK YOU TO ARTIST Noah Jayne Andrews for inspiring our contestants! Writers, take a bow. I was almost as delighted by your praise for Noah’s art as I was to read the wide variety of your responses. Please visit noahjayneart.com to learn more about her and her artwork. (I suspect these three weeks have seemed a long wait for Noah Jayne. I know she’s excited to see your creations.) Thanks always to Lorette C. Luzajic for bringing our ekphrastic community together. Happy reading! Alarie Tennille ** Does anyone know that behind the glamour lashes beyond the spiffy nails beneath the furs in spite of the sparkle you hide a lethal stinger? Laura Rovi Laura Rovi is an assistant librarian in northern WI, USA. Often, she reads. Sometimes, she writes. ** Wilson's Corners Still Buzzes About Her Auntie Delphine, a bee's knees, being blown to New York on a wind across our Wisconsin meadow, to wildflower in the city, to speakeasy and hive jive in pearls. Auntie Delphine freezing as a worker bee, a spent blossom with chipped red polish, in an alley off 41st Street for, it's whispered, a dope drone promising honey. Karen Walker Karen Walker (she/her) is in a basement in Ontario. Her work is in Centaur, Flash Boulevard, The Hooghley Review, voidspace zine, Brink, Overheard, and elsewhere. @kawalker.bsky.social ** Long Live the Queen She’s ready now. They’ve fed her royally as befits her station. She’s groomed and pampered, decked in the finest furs and fripperies. She’s ready now, eyeing up her suitors as they fly above with fire in their bellies. None will survive the encounter. When their job is done so are they, as they surely fall back down to earth. She’s ready now to lay and lay and lay and in return she’ll be fed and watered, groomed and pampered, while her fertility and proficiency is closely inspected by her servants. So when her laying slows they make another from her own egg, in her own image to be groomed and pampered and decked in the finest furs and fripperies and when she’s ready they’ll kill the old and lay her to rest. The old queen is dead! Long live the queen! She’s ready now! Lynn White Lynn White is a retired bee-keeper who lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com ** Queen Bee I have an eye for jewelry I am not pretty, I am glamorous People love me, want to become me But deep down inside I worry I worry that people will see the real me And hate me Hiding behind the confident smiles I am insecure Worried about every thought that passes through Others minds Behind all the makeup and glitter Are bruises and scars From brothers much older then I Under all the mean comments to others I make Are little voices that question My every move I hate who I’ve become But how can I change? Seri Cummings Seri Cummings is a sophomore at Herriman High School in Herriman, Utah who loves to read and cook. ** He is the Queen Bee He is the queen bee. Our world is like the hive. Instead of the matriarchy we have a patriarchy. He is the queen bee. I sting once and I die. He can sting as many times as he wants and he gets no repercussions. He is the queen bee. He orders everyone around. He lets other people do his bidding. He is the queen bee. He has a pheromone that leaves no room for contentment. If he’s in a bad mood, he makes it known. It is then everyone’s problem. He is the queen bee. He’s convinced that if he were to die, the whole world would spiral. He’s convinced anything and everything is made for him. In actuality, he’s not much bigger than the rest, just his ego is. He is the queen bee. Paityn Burns Paityn Burns is an involved high school theatre student who lives in Herriman, Utah, and attends Herriman High as a senior. ** Hollywood Avatar You could be a movie star a multitasking Hollywood avatar wearing diamante tassel earrings. You could outshine them bigwigs be the queen of their ant colony cool as a cucumber, never wobbly if you put your mind to it you could do almost anything, legit. I would even buy your picture. Ask if you would sign it. And feel ten times richer. You are one specimen that cannot be contained of course, you'll need to be subordinate follow your true, unique path take your chosen direction at every impasse find a new strategy to climb and like every good actress, learn to mime. Failing that? I'll share a bottle of cognac or hold hands over chilled champagne. Mark Andrew Heathcote Mark Andrew Heathcote is an adult learning difficulties support worker. He has poems published in journals, magazines, and anthologies online and in print. He resides in the UK and is from Manchester. Mark is the author of In Perpetuity and Back on Earth, two books of poems published by Creative Talents Unleashed. ** Slay, Queen! The three of them stood near the entrance, droning on. Busboys were such gossips, especially when there was a true celebrity arriving, full entourage in tow and all the paparazzi getting in on the act. Flash bulbs popped and camera shutters snapped away. Queenie posed nonchalantly. She was always comfortable being in the limelight. She felt she'd be born to it. The busboys agreed there was an unmistakable buzz around Queenie. Busboy A: "She's really found her signature style." Busboy B: "Oh yes, a cocoon coat, how very appropriate! How very her. And that fur collar, it's to die for!" Busboy C: "And that gorgeous soft black velvet cloche hat. How fitting. How on trend." Busboy A: "It's perfectly complementing her mascara. I could drown in those eyes." Busboy B: "And her nails. That must be the latest shade of vermillion." Busboy C: "Queenie's always been my favourite. She's fierce with a capital F. And she's here tonight to slay!" Busboy B: "Oh, bee-have! She'd eat you up for breakfast." Queenie, half listening, savoured every moment of the attention. After all, she deserved it. Emily Tee Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. She's had recent pieces published in The Ekphrastic ReviewChallenges, Whale Road Review and elsewhere online, and in print in Poetry Scotland and several anthologies. Emily is also the judge of the monthly ekphrastic poetry contest run by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. She lives in the UK. ** Queen Bee It was the summer of nectar, the nightclub buzzing with lust as he made a beeline for her, irresistible in leather and fur adorned in beaded dewdrops with lips that tasted of pollen. How she loved the purr and hum of the Harley-Davidson, the sticky ooze of its oil grazing the slickened road, goggles sealed beneath her chin, black jacket stitched to skin. She loved him then, the way he stood out in a crowd, all the fussing, the flirting, that speed at which they kissed the wind with the grace of skaters swerving over flowers and curbs. What happened to adventure? At what point did she tire of his constant droning, on and on, urging her to rest, build a nest? The matriarch dying in a hive of activity. How easily he was replaced, the natural order restored. These expectations, obligations exhaust her; she longs to taste the sweet sun on her tongue, to feel that sting in her tail. Kate Young Kate Young lives in England and enjoys writing poetry, painting and playing the guitar, ukulele, and mandolin. Her poems have appeared in various webzines, magazines, and chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlet A Spark in the Darkness has been published by Hedgehog Press and her next pamphlet Beyond the School Gate is due to be published soon. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet. ** Portrait of the Queen She was born to be a queen, the Mother of the bees. Her fur is soft and supple. Her eye looks straight at me. She’s alluring, she’s a priestess, and, now and then, a scamp. She knows the way to work a room, exactly how to dress– when to enter, when to leave– how to shimmy with the best. She’s stunningly seductive, provocative, and camp. Has no question of her place. She was fed on royal jelly put an end to all her rivals this bee queen Machiavelli. She’s a danger, she’s a warning. She’s a Siren, she’s a vamp. For days she’s sat here on my desk, this haughty queen of bees, and though I’ve work to do she’s called out to me. I’d like to crawl into her portrait get deep into her skin find out how she learned to make her way with men. to don her regal swagger, grab her gift of rare esprit, for she’s the very femme fatale I often long to be. Ursula Shepherd Ursula Shepherd spent her professional life as an ecologist and biogeographer. She has watched the world dry and heat, and species go extinct. She has also delighted in the planet’s beauty and writes in warning and wonder. She is the author of a book, Nature Notes: A Notebook Companion for the Seasons, as well as essays and non-fiction pieces and has recently returned to poetry. Her poetry has appeared in, among others, Unbroken, Minnow, Grim and Gilded, Passionfruit, The Orchards, and previously in The Ekphrastic Review. ** Bad Women My aunt was fur and long red fingernails, she was Arpège and hats with veils, worn at an angle. She was dare and devil, bewitching and hot of temper. Oh, the temper. There was a buzz about her. When she walked (she never tottered) on heels that reached into the sky, there was a swishing sound of silk and taffeta rubbing and inviting lude thoughts. I read the thoughts in men’s eyes when they watched her pass. She was earrings that pulled the earlobes down with their weight-- glass, not diamonds. It was said she had lovers. There were other aunts who had husbands. She was everything I wanted to be when I grew up, and I was prepared to pay the price of nasty whispers behind gloved hand, raised eyebrows, jealous looks that could kill. I’d watch her lift up her chin, raise her long cigarette holder, and smile. Rose Mary Boehm Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was three times nominated for a Pushcart and once for Best of Net. Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling In The Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), and Saudade (December 2022) are available on Amazon. Also available on Amazon is a new collection, Life Stuff, published by Kelsay Books November 2023. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/ ** Biggest Bummer about Being Queen? That’s a cinch, it’s the constant expectations. It’s always sip, sip, sip, mate, mate, mate, lay, lay, lay, so tonight, that’s why we’re standing right here by the front door, eggs dropped, hive larvae tucked up … Yes of course, nannies there and drones foraging, which means I’m choosing, just this once, to scarper. Can’t I scrap my duties for this rare flight out? Glad you agree. Go ahead and take the shot. You mean the beret? Yes, chic isn’t it? French. Thanks, it’s velvet, so cosy with this fur stole over my low-cut evening gown. I’d show you, but don’t want to smudge my freshly lacquered nails. Oh, great you noticed! They do match my spiked heels and set off my diamonds and pearls. Shall I smile? Makes my eyes sparkle you say? My best feature I think, though of course the workers disagree. Haha! They’re new vegan lash wispies, glued on and my antennae have been specially curled. Cheers! Let’s abscond from all this royal jelly and fussy buzz. One last spray of Gucci Bloom and it’s time. Madame Butterfly, here we come. Helen Freeman Helen loves trying her hand at the prompts on The Ekphrastic Review when the artwork catches her eye. She has poems published on various sites and magazines and currently lives in Durham, England. Instagram @chemchemi.hf ** Incognito I got out. Finally. So often I’d dreamed of the Outside. Oh, how often. But they kept me there, ruler of their kingdom, as if it was my dream. But I only dreamed of the Outside. All my babies flew the nest, season after season, and there I remained. A baby-making machine. Egg after egg after egg. Hive mind always sensed what would happen next. So I couldn’t escape. I was trapped and pampered. The walls of my haven, a cage of incubation. I wanted out. I didn’t know what Out was. It took me so long to be brave and learn. I was too big to escape. What hidey hole was there for me? What way to get free? Such a farce to be queen. There is no true power in this. It’s a beautiful prison but a prison nonetheless. There are none like you and no one cares. No one knows you. You give and give and they take. Who would understand your aches? I had to be my own knight in shining armour. I had a stinger and I would use it if it killed me. Which it would. Better that than live the rest of my days breeding, breeding endlessly. The endless egg woman. My body, but not my body. Then. Oh then, one day. My wish came true. One day, I finally used my wings. Feeble at first, they were, weak from lack of use, but I gave it all I had. It was a balmy season, there was warmth, I remember. The colonies were out that afternoon. Nectar duty. I had some time. Not much, but enough. I’d laid my eggs for the day and feigned rest. So my other minions would suspect nothing. But all the time I was spying. Spying for a way out. And all of a sudden, as the hive walls were being rebuilt by the longstanding ones, I spied a hole. A tiny hexagon of light. A beam of holy ray. Just shining. As if for me. So close it was, so close and almost striking me. And I was afraid. But I knew too that my chance would not come again and I would surely perish if I didn’t leave now. Now. So I got up and made to fly. It took me several tries but I reached the holy light. Yet the next hurdle was to be overcome. I got stuck, I could not fit through. My womanly girth would not allow me. So. I ate my way out. Ate the hole bigger and bumbled through. The longstanding ones stood aside, buzzing wildly. Calling me back. No, I said. No. Clumsy and drunk-flying, I flew. Flew, then tumbled to the ground. Onto a bed of leaves. And my God, the sensations! Light, breeze, sound, all these new vibrations! So this was the Outside! I shivered with pleasure and went along my way. I never looked back. Now I go around incognito. The colonies couldn’t find me. No doubt they have a new queen now. I met others like me, others who’d got out. We have our own special circle. We meet when opportune, when the equation of seasons allows. Life is good on the Outside. I love my new life. I need never be the egg woman again. Nina Nazir Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani artist, poet and teacher based in Birmingham, UK. She's had work published in various journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Free Verse Revolution, Unlost Journal, Messy Misfits Club, Harana Poetry and Visual Verse among others. She has work forthcoming in Laughing Ronin Press and Sunday Mornings at the River. When she's not teaching, she's making art or poems. Other than that, she can usually be found with her nose in a book in her favourite local café, but also on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir and X (Twitter): @NusraNazir |
Challenges
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