Litha Solstice hangs thick behind hidden sunlight on a night that hasn't severed cleanly from the hour that went down a plump horizon of fleshy magenta, down a burning bridge, down a seagull's salty sea scented sweat, and down the ridges between mountains, a long distance from the place where a pair of swans have forfeit the lake, and a woman with her thatched crown folding her hands toward an invisible prayer; we know it is the light from Horus when beads of translucent pearls drip down the forehead of the stones of her castle, and her body dampens with the heavy air embowered in heat. The night has only just begun, a young girl wears the colour of flame on her hips as her feet dance along the tracks of a circle; she is moments away from tracing it fully. The forest across the mountains where she stands flails its wailing limbs; the trees, toadstools and pixie folk have convened; someone from the honey-fire has descended. He is quiet in the darkly pulsing associated with stealthy crickets; only his torch burns, the night's hair is ashes. The flame-clad girl gyrates her hips to the humming of the woman's litany; the moonlight turn-tilts cleaving her dance into a shadow. From the edges of a summer's arc, clouds emboss and in, as if, an instant, all thin fabrics illume. Sheikha A. Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her works appear in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Recent publications have been Strange Horizons, Pedestal Magazine, Atlantean Publishing, Alban Lake Publishing, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Persian. She has also appeared in Epiphanies and Late Realizations of Love anthology that has been nominated for a Pulitzer. More about her can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com
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Bus Riders But for the indentations of their eyes, their faces lack features. Their stillness has the weight and volume of genocide. They stare ahead with the dignity of those who have earned the right to be left alone. Their unholy whiteness sets them apart from everything around them, even the eggshell walls. Next to them, my own skin is developing like a photograph in a tray of chemicals, brown freckles darkening, pale veins burning bluer, tiny unfelt scratches materializing in red branches. Soon, I expect the flagged spires of Disneyland to surface on my arm, as though my simple breathing body were a family vacation from these people and wherever they are headed. Michael C. Smith Michael C. Smith is the author of Writing Dangerous Poetry (McGraw-Hill) and the coauthor of another book on creative writing, Everyday Creative Writing: Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink (McGraw-Hill). His work has appeared in several journals, including Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Northwest Review, and more. Recently his metafictional story, “Bass Weather,” published originally by Gemini Magazine, was included in the 2017 Best Small Fictions anthology, edited by Amy Hempel, and including works by Joy Williams and Brian Doyle. He lives in Pomona, CA, and is a proud graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Embroidered Map I am measuring my own meridians in linen, silk and kisses, stitching along the Pacific routes that sundered us for all those years. My service to empire was our separation, still is. With no nautical almanac I made my own calculations as you stood with your sextant night after velvet night measuring the distance of stars from the moon, from the horizon, from me. They said you died on Valentine’s Day. When they arrived with the ditty box the sailors carved, with your lock of hair and the tiny painting of your brave Hawaiian death, I put aside the waistcoat of tapa cloth I was making you, cried into hard black skirts. You found your longitude but I’ve been measuring distances ever since, and I’m tired of suturing loss and years and stars. I will burn our letters: there have been enough discoveries. I will finish sewing the world you found, and sail to you. Jane Frank This poem was previously published in the Heroines anthology (Neo Perennial Press, 2018). Jane Frank teaches creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University in south east Queensland, and has qualifications in art history. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Meniscus, Eunoia Review, Cicerone Journal, Not Very Quiet, Takahe and is forthcoming in both Hecate and Antipodes. Poems have been anthologised in Pale Fire: New Writing on the Moon (The Frogmore Press 2019) and Grieve vol 7 (Hunter Writers Centre, 2019). She was joint winner of the Philip Bacon Ekphasis prize in 2019. Find more of her work at https://janefrankpoetry.wordpress.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/JaneFrankPoet/ Five Poems on Mary Pratt i) Roast beef, and then pears on a plate. Supper tables left, standing abandoned. Chairs pushed back after a milk jug is poured, a glass filled, then drunk quickly; a day recounted, the way sun moves across a room from noon until six; after a deep sigh, of disappointment, anger, of love, frustration— and then— of love once more. Empty places. Blanks that need to be filled in. ii) Glass bowls full of apples cut in half, open to air, world divided. Christmas turkey, anonymous, tented in bent tin foil to keep heat in, cold out. Casserole in an open microwave, to re-heat. Fish head in a steel sink, discarded. Talk of an amputation, fragmented cast off. Something left behind. Cod fillets in take-out cardboard boxes, and eggshells in an egg crate. Grilse on glass, mouth open, gaping, yawning. Or longing. Things in pieces. Leftovers. Trout in pan, then raspberries that reflect summer. Depression glass, coloured or maybe clear. Ripples in clarity. Marriages that shift, shimmer, break. Pheasants with lace and velvet, still feathered, hung upside down. Markers of dissolution. Half a birthday cake, tarnished shine of memory. Trifle in a dark room, melting. Sacrificial. Bright lupins in the window of a husband’s burnt out studio, colours left as an offering to what was. Litany of love lost. Floral rosary beads, clicking through fingers, slipping now. Away. v) That gas station, with the cow strung up, half gone, only the parts that matter left now. Back of a tow truck. Legs splayed wide, and how that makes you think of invasion, desecration. How violation isn’t always clear cut. Another one, hung upside down, skinned but for the bottoms of legs, its hooves gathered, neatly. A bouquet in a vase. vii) Before fire pits, there were barrels, taken from industrial yards in dead of night, rolled down the hill under cover of darkness. Toss in your poems, paintings, old secrets. Flames will lick, taste edges and curves, paper curled sensuous, tongued, heat devouring. In depths of January, when a polar vortex comes, a fire barrel on the edge of a northern lake sends shimmers of heated air up, incense and burnt offering. Toss in your secrets with deft wrist. Watch them turn to ash, smoke-grey and sepia. All memory turns in on itself—rewritten, then erased. viii) So bright, he said, thinking of when they first met, paint under their fingernails, and walks along Sackville streets. Time spent together, along a marsh. So beautiful, she said, her eyes alight. No, he replied. You haven’t seen Newfoundland yet. He went first, spark rising, while she tended the house and kids. She painted, in spare minutes gleaned from a life. Woven, she said, of their marriage and art. (But jealousy nudges, elbows in, shunts itself, divides an equation. Broken things.) Kim Fahner These five poems are from Kim Fahner's manuscript, Still Life, Dissolving: The Mary Pratt Sequence. Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. She was the poet laureate for the City of Greater Sudbury (2016-18) and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's most recent book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She is currently working on a novel and a new play. Kim is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers' Union of Canada, and a supporting member of the Playwrights' Guild of Canada. She blogs fairly regularly at www.kimfahner.wordpress.com and she may be reached through her author website at www.kimfahner.com On Kandinsky, Composition 8 (1923) The softness of newborn planets Emerging from chaos, Some half-formed and empty, Others full, glowing, giving birth. Circularity asserts itself. Soon angles and lines arrive, Striving to impose grids On the curves of orbs, To lock in directionality, Suppress the spontaneity Of nascent worlds. Fear of infinity is strong. Donna Beckage Donna Beckage lives in Los Angeles and works at the Getty Research Institute. She holds degrees in comparative literature from the University of California, Riverside, and wrote a dissertation on representations of Beethoven and his music in literary works. In 1996 she was a contestant on Jeopardy! and won a portable hot tub large enough for six. How Pale the Rose How pale the rose that blooms as never wild against the green of grasses unconfined and fate of thus becoming sickly child of limb and root forlornly intertwined. Transparently, so bravely it prevails as witness to predictable demise that must become the journey it regales in role as heaven's seed it will reprise, and thus so humbly occupies its place with hope of being plucked and dried and pressed between the leaves of time's eternal grace as beauty yet again to be addressed... ...or found at least by those who will today admire it as the pale of life's bouquet. Portly Bard Bio: Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent of verse becoming complement... ...and by such homage being lent... ideally also compliment. Seascape-Jetty and Beloved Artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner Inky indigo cradles froth. Mood roils where jetty churns. Oils drape navy within ashen skies. Waves turn in turquoise and sage. Beloved artist, tell me, did pain dampen your interior? did nonacceptance torture your soul? During the struggle, did God Almighty whisper in breadth of light? Beloved artist, we’re not so different, you and I-- when inky indigo cradled froth, mood roiled where jetty churned, oils draped navy within ashen skies, and waves turned in turquoise and sage-- amid the pain, did you see angels? Jeannie E. Roberts lives in west-central Wisconsin. She has authored four poetry collections and two children’s books. Her work appears in print and online in North American and international journals and anthologies. She's a coffee drinker, an animal lover, a nature enthusiast, and poetry editor of the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. When she’s not reading, writing, or editing, you can find her drawing and painting, or outdoors photographing her natural surroundings. ** Seascape—Jetty
after Henry Ossawa Tanner It’s the wave that I see but don’t hear that cresting crashes each window pane a notion the sunlight shatters onto rocks to lap each piling’s circumference into froth and dumbness upon which a roar errant for its tardiness is solitary reason the suckling waters deceptive in their imitation of stillness an audible sunray that slits the looming gale’s cobalt skein siren in charm and lure the aquatic blues deepen to black echoed in a pine for feet’s muffled percussion upon planks that frame both promenade and window and offer escape in steps counterpointed against wave strike along tan bluff in the distance a storm too close in my mind for comfort along creosote-soaked stanchions driven to last a battering the navy-blue tempest overhead echoed inside my head black against black to ground the sea’s recession into itself Jonathan Yungkans Jonathan Yungkans is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in Panoplyzine, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review and other publications. His poetry chapbook, Colors the Thorns Draw, was released by Desert Willow Press in August 2018. ** lesson after two paintings by Henry Ossawa Tanner (USA), The Banjo Lesson, 1893 and Seascape-Jetty, 1879 the wind out there is wild, son it gives the sky a churn the sea too, and our rough shore but waves they never stop make of your arms a cradle, son feel the way I stomp like the surf at dawn when we wake and the waves in time beat on just your thumb now, an open G let's rock to a steady strum let the strings resound as one while the waves out there still pound place fingers on the frets, son first and second, pointer and ring move from open to C for the waves crash and never do they hush hush, my son, hear that cadent thrum-- beneath it all, the heart’s tidal turn a lesson never done so waves, beat on and sing beat on beat on . . . Alan Girling Alan Girling writes poetry mainly, sometimes fiction, non-fiction, or plays. His work has been seen in print, heard on the radio, at live readings, even viewed in shop windows. Such venues include The Ponder Review, Panoply, Hobart, The MacGuffin, Smokelong Quarterly, FreeFall, The Ekphrastic Review and CBC Radio. He is happy to have had poems win or place in four local poetry contests and a play produced for the Walking Fish Festival in Vancouver, B.C. ** Rearranged in Strange Light I want to be in this water dark as night, cold, alive. I, of both flesh and water, soiled, stained, ask to land hard on this stark coast, epidermis purged by salt and wind, body leaving grain by grain, face leveling like a rock. I ask this raging water to knock my coils off, to mutate me, spilling green over gold, churning me out sweeping me back without thought, my carnality downed by turbulence. In water I become water, ebbing from mortal time, moving in blankness rearranged in strange light like that ambiguous shape at the rocky edge where the sea turns over its colours again, where in a thin coat, a black figure, an artist perhaps, head lowered, balances two surfaces of the water I know and the rest of water. Janice Bethany Janice Bethany is a part-time professor in Houston who recently placed in a writing competition for Letheon with work forthcoming in 2020. Her work has appeared in the The Ekphrastic Review, Kansas Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review and more. ** Stronger Thick brushstrokes—discontent, disappointment, transformed into strength fueled by inner storms as fierce as the weather canvas recreates. Crossing the state to study with Eakins, Talent respected but not the man. A dark form on the edge of the Jetty—is it you, waiting there to jump off of, out of, our world into one where you are respected? I hear the ocean argue with you, its voice deep, deep as the crash of waves upon the jetty deep as the darkness of stormy afternoon sky deep as the water that sprays up between rocks as waves crashes onto the jetty. I hear you argue from your place on the canvas and behind the brush-- will stormy waters continue to rage about the rockes, your soul, or will you in a leap of faith, leave these shores? When skies clear, only those stronger than the waves, stronger than the bold brush of the master teacher, will succeed. Joan Leotta Joan Leotta, born in Pittsburgh herself, plays with words on page and stage. She loves the sea and spends hours walking the beach, looking for shells when she is not writing or performing. ** Template Wields Near fifty years since I in Sceaux, not knowing Henry Tanner there - a grave place for a starry son. I would have honoured him: mother a slave till underground, Wesley episcopal, father brand, and he debated octoroon. He detailed real rather than type, his daily frame, as middle name, a battleground for freedom fought - from canvassed shades came life and height. His passage first on seascape rocked, the horses riding in their rage, the roar of forties turning bend, the swell, walls, gulfs topography, sourced bubbled springs, drops of rain, oasis cloud or ice-melt stain. That water of the gully drift, should visit berg and sailing ship, moisten lips, xylem, tree of life, intricacies of massive maze, the plumbing of a worldly sort, nature, nurture, experience. So of Sarah, Ossawa welled and willed, pattern against the template wield, some hope in stratified, stultified, a point of light in layered dark. Stephen Kingsnorth Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had pieces accepted by over a dozen on-line poetry sites, including The Ekphrastic Review, and Gold Dust, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawntreader & Foxtrot Uniform Poetry Magazines. https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/ ** Seaside Our faces glow, Flushed with firelight. The bonfire blazes warmth for fingers and toes. Laughter trills chatter like crackle from burning logs. Beneath the smile heartbreak arises, A hiss of sea spray fogs that memory. Sand and seaweed, Fishermen hurl their weighty spinning rods, Mullet bait tossed from the shore. Today the chill wind tugs my hair And the strong shoulder of love gone. Skiffs bump the dock. The jetty reaches far into the gulf. Patsy Kate Booth Born in Beaumont, Texas, Patsy Kate migrated to the La Garita mountains of southern Colorado in 1973 where she lived off the grid, taught special education, created an outfitting/guide service with llamas as pack animals and began publishing her poetry and prose. Publications include, Lummox Press, Willow Creek Journal, Sand Hill Review, Amethyst Review, several anthologies including, Why We Boat, and A Walk Along the River. She is currently compiling decades of memoir adventures and endlessly organizing her poetry for publication. ** uncompassed distant forms, unattached, pull away like a feather drifting unbalanced, unaware of the difficulty of flight-- following the wind without intention like a feather drifting unbalanced into what is not after before-- following the wind without intention, currented by air carried away into what is now after before-- molecules alive with their own journeys, currented by air, carried away, caught by circumstance by tides molecules alive with their own journey turning into the undertow caught by circumstance, by tides, by sooner or later-- turning into the undertow, the unchosen intersection of elements, the sooner or later at the crossroads of to come or to go-- the unchosen intersection of elements unafraid of the difficulty of flight-- at the crossroads of to come or to go distant forms, unattached, pull away 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/, and see more of her work on her website http://kerferoig.com/ ** Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Seascape-Jetty Brings to Mind Winslow Homer My brother, who died a year ago, lived not far from Homer’s studio at Black Point, Maine. Seascapes with jetties all have the same look as the path I hiked behind the painter’s house. Before it became part of Portland Museum of Art you could walk right in, door unlocked, sit down at the table and read his books. For someone who grew up on the sea, it was like waking up in Van Gogh’s blue bedroom after a dream. For even the most sacred of spaces, there is a limit of your endurance of them. They are so still and quiet your attention wanders. I left the studio for slippery rocks crashed by waves as the tide came in. I took off a necklace of tumbled stones and left it in a crevice of the jetty. My brother’s wish was to have his ashes scattered from the breakwater just across the inlet where lobster boats leave to check their traps buoyed off the coast. Everyone gathered in a bitter Nor’easter, cast point closed for safety. They went ahead anyway for a sailor who’d settled on one of the most dramatic seas found and same as Homer, only left the protection of jetty to be swept up into a storm. Kyle Laws Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. ** Tanner Speaks, 1879 So you think because a man is black-- father preaching to a church of small children, sad black men & wordless women, his mother of Virginia slave-stock—so you think he hasn’t a word to say for himself, but cap in hand will mutter, ‘Sir’, and bow & back away with eyes downcast? Not I, Mister! For I have stood watching on that jetty where the Delaware sweeps out into the rolling Atlantic. Sure, that sight, those sounds will diminish me to nothingness-- however, not one word that you can say will ring above the roar of my senses when I stand here next the jetty; where moaning fog has closed the cliffs and all before us is the drag & thrash of water, waves bursting on these boulders into shards of light: the blue & turquoise of my palette melted like wax by light & water—light! Black I may be, but I can hear the hiss & rush & lash of sea, the same salt sea my fathers crossed in chains below the foetid decks. This brush, these oils speak louder in my ears than oceans, drown your voice to the abyss. And more than that—for I can see the ocean with my own dark eyes, frame it with my white- soled palms, ebony African fingers that hold these oils, this brush. So let me speak in darkest hues shot through with truth’s hot light. And for God’s sake hold your tongue. Lizzie Ballagher A published novelist between 1984 and 1996 in North America, Australasia, the UK, Netherlands and Sweden (pen-name Elizabeth Gibson), Lizzie Ballagher is now writing poetry rather than fiction. Her work has been featured in a variety of magazines and webzines, including The Ekphrastic Review. She blogs at https://www.lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/. ** To Henry Ossawa Tanner Regarding Seascape-Jetty Your brush enlightened sounds the roar of rage against resistant shore where harbour must be engineered to still the waters being steered so those asea can come ashore as equals -- neither less nor more -- with blood in common though unique to follow course by art you seek that wills one's authenticity by skills -- not by ethnicity -- respecting and yet not enslaved to path behind that pain has paved for those who now are free to yearn for joy they have a right to earn. Portly Bard Portly Bard: Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent of verse becoming complement... ...and by such homage being lent... ideally also compliment. ** Sea-Jetty, 1879, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, the Only African-American Enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1879-1885. One night his easel was carried out into the middle of Broad Street and, though not painfully crucified, he was firmly tied to it and left there. —Joseph Pennell, The Adventures of an Illustrator The cloud-river sky, absorbed with itself, is speeding along on its own. A ship nearing the horizon has somewhere to get to, and sails on. But, in the middle distance, a ribbon of shallower water, sunlit by early or late rays, turns chrysoprase green for the artist’s eye, and where obdurate land and driven sea confront each other in a cataclysm of spume, something is exploding open-- like light about to be prism-split, like a crystal revealing its secret geometries, like the seed-pod of his own universe. Judy Kronenfeld Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent books of poetry are Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, Natural Bridge, New Ohio Review, One (Jacar Press), Rattle, South Florida Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals, and in two dozen anthologies. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside, and an Associate Editor of the online poetry journal, Poemeleon. Three Blacks in Dark Blue What if I die and wake in the dark like a body lain flat in a boat, aimlessly roaming oceans of space? Years beyond our blue-green swirl of life, Miranda’s tinny whining mantle of ice, the haunted lagoons of Saturn, exhalations of Neptune’s grave blue, it’s glowing cold like a ghost of Earth. What if the dead are just clouds of dust, souls in multiple no longer bodied, drifting in the serum god knows what, unable to hear the popping static, whistling pink, interstellar darkness, crashing red, sounds like drums, helium, insects, dread. I fear when we are dead we are less moons drifting from their suns than lithe thought in a river of gloom, matter so dark it cannot be seen. What if death has no starting point and we are always in its river, stuck. What if even now I’m here and there at once: in my body on this Earth but also sailing dark into dark, black into shimmering bands of night. Sometimes on this Earth I catch myself falling through my fingertips. I know we may die and then be done, but what if we go on and on, nothing in our wake or in our way, just now opening like a mouth lacking sound, the matte-black centre pulling us in a million years from what might have been. Caley O’Dwyer This poem is from the author's recently completed manuscript of ekphrastic poems, Light, Earth, and Blue: Poems After the Paintings of Mark Rothko. Caley O’Dwyer is a poet, painter, psychotherapist, and teacher living in Los Angeles. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Ekphrasis, and numerous other venues, including the Tate Modern Museum in London (as part of the 2008 Mark Rothko Retrospective). He is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. His first poetry collection, Full Nova, was published by Orchises Press (2001). Dali's Minotaur Dalí’s Minotaur stands on his plinth like he’s posing on the red carpet – all teeth and tits and toes. He has one hand on a cocked hip and the other’s at a right angle to its dead-straight arm. His mouth’s open and a tongues lolls out of his big, square head. All sculptures are rigid, just as all paintings are still. However, Dalí’s Minotaur isn’t just set in bronze. He’s fixed in that unnatural stance. The pose of modernity’s fashion and ideals. In the myth the Minotaur is the child of Pasiphaë - the Queen of Crete - and the Cretan bull. He lives at the center of the labyrinth, the impenetrable maze built by Daedalus and Icarus under the orders of Pasiphaë’s husband, King Minos. The monster is regarded as abnormal, a deviation from nature’s way. Its story is one of the best known in Greek mythology. And for many the Minotaur is the archetypal Greek monster, the pinnacle of ugliness just as Athens was the pinnacle of a harmonious society. The myth is a tale of normality triumphing over weirdness, of the heroic status quo slaying the deviant. But instead of a hero killing the monster, Dalí’s Minotaur has adopted the pose of normality. The mythological beast was slain. Dalí’s beast was castrated, stripped of its uniqueness, and made to walk the catwalk. The function of myth is to relate a people’s values and ways within a social context. Art has played a similar role throughout history. Ancient Greece, particularly the Athenians, valued harmony and concord above all else. It can be said that its monsters are representations of discord. Heroes like Theseus ensured that balance was maintained, that harmony held sway. When he went into the labyrinth and killed the Minotaur he acted as an agent of normality. Dalí’s Minotaur was created in 1981, a year into “the Greed Decade.” Brett Easton Ellis would write about the conformism that defined the age in American Psycho. Patrick Bateman, its protagonist, sums up the time’s ugliness when he says “I want to fit in.” Minotaur adopts the pose of that decade but wears it like someone else’s skin. It’s not the monster’s natural form. But he has had it forced on him, so he conforms to normality’s values. The lines of Minotaur’s muscles look misshapen and knotted, as if they were kneaded into shape rather than sculpted. Dalí angled that cocked hip too far for it to be sincere. And he juxtaposed these signifiers of banal sexiness with genuine madness. A lobster crawls from Minotaur’s belly. A drawer juts from his chest and another sticks out from his ankle like a fractured bone. Gaping holes in his thighs hold a goblet and a perfume bottle and a golden key hangs from its kneecap. Drawers and keys and perfume bottles are normal, everyday objects. But here they serve to highlight the normal, everyday madness of our expectations. The Minotaur should not be made to pose like a photographer’s model. But it is what is expected today, even of monsters. Expectations are dangerous and “should” is a bad word. It’s a byword for disappointment, a dissatisfaction with oneself or the world or both. Minotaur is a sculpture of that disappointment and its implications. For centuries art was dedicated to conveying the emotions of mankind and its world through beauty. Even the portraits of suffering were painted to be beautiful. The Renaissance’s pietas depict grief and death and pain through exquisite fineness. Dalí inverted that mission with Minotaur. By taking the standard of beauty and forcing one of ugliness’s definitions into its shape, he revealed that “beauty” is neither intrinsically worthwhile nor a reasonable expectation. Its tropes are not what make something beautiful. These things are ballgowns and tuxedos and abs and asses - signs of wealth, beauty, satisfaction, and perfection. They are not one-size-fits-all. And yet they have become expectations and standards. Standards aren’t just made of the clothes we wear and shows we watch and drugs we take. They’re made of our desires, dreams, fears, values - the elements of normality. Standards exist foremost as ideas. Like the Minotaur, the one and only place they definitely exist is in our minds. They have little bearing on reality, and belong to what Lenny Bruce called “what should be, a terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago.” He said that “truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy.” The Minotaur only exists in our fantasy. Dalí’s Minotaur is real. Ideas may not be tangible but they are as real as any city. They have the power to shape societies and ages. Dalí was a man of many ideas. His art impacted all manifestations of modern culture – art, music, film, fashion. Like all artists he stole from the sources around him. Minotaur melds myth and fashion into a sculpture of ordinary madness. Its lines, that seem so bizarre and freakish and cracked, trace the frame of the 21st century. This is an age, like all before it, that squeezes itself into an idea that doesn’t fit. In centuries gone by religions and empires tailored that idea. Today it is pop culture and fashion that have sculpted our images. Both our inner and outer reflections. Minotaur salutes the viewer with his cocked hip and wears our expectations’ uniform. It emphasizes the beast’s grotesqueness, clings to his angles and lumps, bends him out of shape. Dalí dreamt up this beast from the normality that fills our high and low cultures. Minotaur is still a monster. But he’s wearing hot-pants. James Fleming James Fleming is a teacher and writer, based in the Czech Republic. He has opinions and writes them down. Vermeer in Boston I’d waited decades To see that knowing glance, forever paused That letter being permanently written And that ermine-edged yellow morning jacket. Yet I found myself, ridiculously, In the exhibition by accident Travelled half the world here For another reason entirely And stood, clammy palmed and weary My thoughts haywire, clinging To another imagined room a mere walk away Where a team of specialists Pored over our son Whose opened chest Was spread like a canvas For the surgeons to splatter and daub And create another version Of his deformed and failing heart: Their masterpiece. And while all this was happening I met her painted gaze, unflinching, Wondering, even then, what she’d been writing (and to whom, and why). She’d raised her eyes, unblinking Poised and faintly mocking Too intelligent, I couldn’t help thinking, For twenty-first century positivity. Instead, her Mona Lisa almost-smile Stayed with me almost all the while I waited for the phone call I didn’t feel alone. And when they’d finished Eleven long hours later Applied the appropriate solutions Brushed away the bloody residue Hung up their paintbrushes, It came: "Your son is in recovery." Still later, on the long flight home, Juggling pills and international time differences Her enigmatic expression flew with me Long after the shadows around her faded With her writing box and ink-wells, Her slim stilled quill pen, The satin ribbons shining in her hair And the round of her wrist bone All this slipped away – Until I saw it later In a catalogue. And in one moment I was back in Boston with her, Waiting. Denise O'Hagan Author's note: Written after waiting for our son’s open-heart surgery in Boston Children’s Hospital, November 2015. Coincidentally, the nearby Museum of Arts was holding an exhibition on the painters of the Dutch Republic, which included Vermeer’s A Lady Writing. This poem was shortlisted in the Booranga Literary Prizes 2019. It was published in fourWthirty, anthology of selected entries (Booranga Writers’ Centre, November 2019). Denise O’Hagan is an editor by trade. Born in Italy, she lived in the UK before emigrating to Australia. With a background in commercial book publishing, she set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press, in 2015. She is Poetry Editor for Australia and New Zealand for The Blue Nib and her poetry is published widely, including in New Reader Magazine, Other Terrain Journal and Scarlet Leaf Review. She won First Prize in the Adelaide Plains Poetry Competition (2019), was highly commended in the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize (2018) and the Scribes Writers Literary Award (2019), and short-listed in the Robert Graves Poetry Prize (2018). Website: https://denise-ohagan.com/ |
The Ekphrastic Review
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April 2024
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