Fear is Late
and in his absence sink the eyes into white shawls and in his absence sink their eyes into day hats that used to be a crown of bones that he would throw that used to be a crown but is a coxcomb that blends into backgrounds of eyes that watch but should be watched into backgrounds of eyes rimmed, happy, glaring. Max Lemuz Max Lemuz is a Mexican-American who recently graduated from California State University, San Bernardino with a B.A. in English. He tutors foster youth full-time and writes poetry in his head all the time. He spends his weekends with his amazing wife and daughter in San Bernardino. He has been recently published in SoFloPoJo, Scarlet Leaf Review, and Triggerfish Critical Review.
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Flash Dance
Flushed out in the pre-dawn darkness, whirling birds are blinded by torchlight as the air glows gold, filled with frantic fire. Unnested, frenzied wings rise in unison in the upsurge to escape. Beating the wind, singed feathers fan the flames, feed the suffocating fire, and some fall stunned – breathless birds captured in the muck and struggle. The dance is frozen, caught in the moment's movement. Betsy Mars This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic challenge on birds. Betsy Mars is a poet, educator, mother, animal lover, and travel fanatic who lives in the Los Angeles area. She finds her adrenaline rush in taking new and strange substitute teaching jobs as often as her psyche allows, while trying to maintain the balance she needs to write. Her work has appeared in the California Quarterly, Illya's Honey, and the Rise Up Review, among others. The Testimony Given to the Court Remains Ambiguous
Like a milkmaid, Leda curves into the avid swan, her sheer rain of drapery spilling into cloud. She looks grim about her business. What the swan is whispering, blandishments or threats, escapes us. Perhaps Zeus worries about comparisons to swains, fearing he’ll come off poorly with his primitive cloaca. He presses his other points upon her. Above, horses, dogs, a girl model shock, the world holding more possibilities than they were told of. Devon Balwit This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic poetry challenge on birds. Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and two collections out or forthcoming, among them: We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/Complicated (A collaboration with Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic); and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found here in The Ekphrastic Review as well as in The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, the Aeolian Harp Folio, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Red Paint Hill, Peacock Journal, and more. How To Paint Potential Flight
Scribble with your pencil, let your pink paint run. Ponder the perfect butterfly with its delicate dark outline which will separate it, clarify it, let it be large. Larger than the pair of warblers. Larger than any city to which a plane might fly. Scatter your alphabet on your edges, a single row, a double row, a triplet, and make a pink promise with a few words. Place your large number, the perfect 10, toward the lower right of the work. It weights the whole. Now decide. Where will you fly? And how? As what creature? With what mind? Do not erase the scribbles, they are cryptic hieroglyphs. Shirley Glubka This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic poetry challenge on birds. Shirley Glubka is a retired psychotherapist, the author of three poetry collections, a mixed genre collection, and two novels. The Bright Logic of Wilma Schuh (novel, Blade of Grass Press, 2017) is her latest. Shirley lives in Prospect, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes. Website: http://shirleyglubka.weebly.com/ Online poetry at The Ekphrastic Review here and at 2River View here and at The Ghazal Page here and here. Work
"When you paint Spring, just paint Spring. Painting willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is painting willows, plums, peaches, or apricots. It is not yet painting Spring." –Dogen Evening lights began to blink, still, day held light enough to paint a man in a car parked on Hollywood Boulevard eating his way through a bag of plums. Later, at Zuma Beach washed up onto the sand, a horseshoe crab, piercing tail intact. The man set a driftwood fire and burned paper, brushes, paints. When he waded in to cast his work onto the sea, Spring blew the ashes back. Peter Schireson Peter Schireson’s poems have been published in Quiddity, Hotel Amerika, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pleiades, among others. His chapbook – “The Welter of Me & You” – won the Coal Hill 2013 Chapbook Prize. He’s an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Pseudopodia; Jonathan Wolken for Pilobolus Dance Theater, 1973 Coiling body as rolling flames, holding foot in space hangs. He is soundless in the hall behind the kitchen. She protects her softening core, her crumbling color still red. In the doorway, he leans. Over her darkening hips he breaks his decline. An all-percussion score is playing across the gored linoleum, digging her heels and clenching each toe purple, wedged, while gravity proves following too closely against the suspension she is failing to hold. Beyond silent, the evening shifts along the asphalt, distracting dirt as he lets the rest of her fall again, still again, still red. Emily Newman Emily Newman is a poet from Seattle. She served as managing editor for the Beloit Fiction Journal for the Spring 2017 issue, and her poetry has been published most recently by Seattle 4Culture and The Eunoia Review. She is uncommonly good at the 1981 edition of Trivial Pursuit considering that she was not alive in 1981. Eleanor, Chicago 1953
I love you, telephone pole brick streets, tracks and parked, fat cars. Oh, back in the day, my drab, sweet city. Behind her, concrete arches a roof and angles to ramp a road. At her feet, Neenah cast iron covers another manhole, while her face holds the centre and calls me to traffic in black and white. She fixes me with her stare. Matthew Murrey Matthew Murrey: "My poems have appeared in various journals such as Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, and Rattle. I received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry a number of years ago, and my first book manuscript is seeking a publisher. I am a high school librarian in Urbana, Illinois where I live with my partner. We have two sons who live in the Pacific Northwest. My website is https://matthewmurrey.weebly. com/" Bronze to Bronze
—WWI Memorial, Jacksonville, Florida Streaked black and green, he stands a close crow-fly to the hospital where I was cast into this weathered world. Naked, young, metal, and muscular—wide wings outstretched from his back-- he perches atop a huge globe of bronze aswirl with torsos and limbs and pained faces. World of war underfoot, he’s gazing up, as if to take to the sky where kids claimed they’d heard the thwump, thwump of his wings at night above stormed and stardarked roofs. As a kid I loved to look at him: his freakish wings and green indifference to all the years of standing, staring, solitude and rain. Pity him, forever looking up, poised to fly but never leaving—his feet welded to a world of grief, bronze to bronze. Matthew Murrey Matthew Murrey: "My poems have appeared in various journals such as Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, and Rattle. I received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry a number of years ago, and my first book manuscript is seeking a publisher. I am a high school librarian in Urbana, Illinois where I live with my partner. We have two sons who live in the Pacific Northwest. My website is https://matthewmurrey.weebly. com/" Here’s Johnny She would look at me in such a way that every day became a brand-new mountain in need of God to pull me to the top, each gesture reminding me of the peeling paint, the unmown yard. The only thing for it was the whiskey hidden in the dash, the fishtailing around the farthest curve that she could follow with her eyes. Even out of sight, she bothered. I could never rest easy on the barstool, open an envelope without fearing the bounced check. Days became the burn barrel, the shotgun shatter of empties on the sagging fence. When she finally left, I changed the locks, left the lawn to sun-glare, ripped each tired geranium from her bed. Devon Balwit This poem is from the just released Risk Being/Complicated, a full-colour illustrated collection of poems by Devon Balwit inspired by the art of Ekphrastic Review editor Lorette C. Luzajic. Click book cover image below to view or purchase on Amazon. Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and two collections out or forthcoming, among them: The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry); We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, the Aeolian Harp Folio, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Rattle, The Inflectionist Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and more. Van Gogh’s Room
Everyone’s seen it. The wooden footboard of the bed frame, slanted like the ceiling above with the painting of a showgirl’s golden hair and his own self-portrait hung from wires. The little table with blue pitcher and cruets for vinegar or turpentine, and the mirror that reflects nothing back. Tabula rasa in a black frame. No wonder he sliced his ear, jangled by interruptive smudges, these tan chips across the sea-green floor. Blue door, closed, walls with fauvist colours, even the green windows bleed to a jaundiced yellow and hold no view. All his monkish possessions in one cell as if he could step like Tarot’s Fool into colourless air, dance off a mountain to a tune he alone hears. I see him thinking in those wooden chairs. Their straw seats, inverted Cezanne haystacks, snap my heartstrings. No one Vincent knows is here to share the sunlight of Arles. Gauguin’s already gone, burn out in the islands with his Polynesian girls, draped in orange and lime sarongs. He’ll lose a leg to gangrene, dump Vincent completely, die leaving paintings And a notebook, never knowing where we’re going, Why we’re here, from whence we’ve come Unlike Van Gogh who always knew. Some never need to leave a room. Deborah DeNicola This poem was previously published in the book, Original Human, by Deborah DeNicola, from Wordtech Press. Deborah DeNicola is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently, Original Human, 2010 from Word Tech, Where Divinity Begins from Alice James Books, four chapbooks, and her memoir, The Future That Brought Her Here from NicholasHays 2009. She edited Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (UPNE.) An adjunct professor, and editor, DeNicola received The Carpe Articulum Award in 2010, Briar Cliff Poetry Award, 2007, the Santa Barbara Poetry Award, 2008 and The Paul Hoover Critical Essay Award from Packingtown Review, 2009. She is the recipient of an artist’s fellowship from the NEA. Her web site is www.intuitivegateways.com. |
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