Woman with Outstretched Arms Close to naked under a northern noon-- a sturdy, muscled creature, back straight, palms down, ready for the dive. Hers is a body escaped from youth—taut and accustomed to its own uses. Under this porous sky she is the column of a forgotten temple, a fletched arrow aimed past the cobalt surface and into the wreck. Shadow climbs the left quadricep, and one last time considering the distribution of weight, she points her hands toward prayer and springs. Like a hawk—she falls free. Gail DiMaggio This poem was written in response to Graham Nickson's painting, Bather With Outstretched Arms ll. The beautiful photograph shown here is a placeholder, generously provided by Nowshad Arefin through Unsplash, but you can see the original inspiration for this ekphrasis here. Gail DiMaggio lives and writes in Concord NH. Her work has appeared most recently in Salamander, Slipstream and the Tishman Review. In 2017, her book, Woman Prime, was chosen by Jericho Brown for the Permafrost Poetry Prize and was released in Feb. 2018 by Alaska University Press.
0 Comments
Still Life with Lemons: Luis Egidio Meléndez (1716-1780) Madrid, 1780 I have painted cork coolers of Rioja wine, a pair of doves, red beaks and claws, forever entwined, a copper chocolate mill used to mix the thick brew that royal ladies sip in gilded porcelain cups. Before meals, I set out our best Talavera plates with cucumbers, lemons, grapes and watermelon. I rendered juice so real you could taste it. I am the painter Luis Egidio Meléndez . You must have seen my self-portrait at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. It won first prize in my first year as a student there. Did you notice my rendering in chalk of a male nude who seems to step off the page? I am holding the chalk in a brass holder and my white ruffles are immaculately clean. You may wonder why I was never commissioned to paint the portraits of our King and Queen. I live on Calle del Espejo. In this Street of the Mirror, my neighbour Francisco de Goya has seen only success: royal commissions and court appointments. This twisted street has shown me only disappointment. Legends say that the Muslims built a tower here to watch for enemies. I should have done likewise. My father, renowned miniaturist, Francisco Meléndez de Rivera Díaz, was the head of painting at Madrid’s new Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and I, its most promising student. I thought father was proud, but perhaps he felt threatened, when I won highest honours in painting in my first year. Father wrote a scathing epistle to the school’s director to demand more recognition as a founder of the school. I understand his frustration but, why didn’t he deliver the letter instead of giving that job to me? He was fired, and I was expelled, so I left to study in Rome and Naples. The dominion of our King Carlos III stretches beyond the seas. He is a patron of the arts, yet he’s never requested a single work from me. Years ago, I painted his portrait as a gift, but he never answered my letters and proposals. I am a married man with children. We would have starved if my patron, the heir to the throne, were not a botanist, hunter, and epicure. The prince has my forty-four paintings of the fruits and vegetables of Spain. When money from the prince’s commission ran out, I traced over my work to make copies for merchants and courtiers. Painted ‘til the bread cracked, and the pears bruised. Plugged the wine carafe with cork ‘til it crumbled, replaced the cork with scraps of cloth, then paper. I’ve pawned everything but my pen and pencils. Today, on my deathbed, I declare myself a pauper. Lois Baer Barr This story previously appeared in Loading Zone/Zona de carga and as part of an essay called "Still Life: Theory and Practice" in cream city review. Lois Baer Barr took art history courses at the Prado Museum through the University of Madrid and writes poetry and fiction about Hispanic painters. Her work has appeared in Spanish and English at Alimentum, cream city review, Letralia, Southern Women's Quarterly and in anthologies such as Art from Art. An emerita professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College, Barr is a literacy tutor and a student of flamenco. Hotel Window But I was afraid of how sweet words sour in the press of the years of the babies of the bills of our disappointed standards and skin stretching and the little wrinkles creeping in of the black void when you go of the sealed envelope I pressed to the lamp and found beaming with cursive promises. The Little Prince has golden hair his smile is crooked his eyes are green and the wild birds are flying south. He won’t stay. No one has ever done what they could. The black alleys in Belfast are filling with rain like your hair slowly fills up with silver between the borders of birthdays when you’re not looking. I could have said yes. Bryana Joy Bryana Joy is a writer and full-time artist fascinated by traditional art forms and the subtle beauty of literature. She spent twelve of her growing-up years in the Middle East and she and her husband are currently preparing to move to York, England for further study. Last year, she launched the Letters From The Sea Tower, a handmade monthly subscription letter full of watercolour sketches, paintings, and snippets of glory from the Great Books. She has one full-length collection of poetry (Having Decided To Stay, 2012) and her work has appeared in about a dozen literary journals. Guest Editor's note: First, I want to thank Lorette Luzajic for this opportunity to go behind the scenes at The Ekphrastic Review, the journal that comes closest to being my home. Writing to art is my quickest fix for writer’s block, and I know many other writers here must feel the same way. Next, thanks to all the writers who participated in this challenge. I even enjoyed reading the writing I turned away. I apologize for being picky, but I chose to make this a true challenge by accepting only what I considered the top 10. I know I’ll be called to pay for my heavy heart when Anubis weighs it against a feather. Readers may not notice I made cuts, since many of the poems are long. I was looking for the usual surprise and delight that comes with writing competitions. My hope was that by selecting a wide range of approaches, I could balance some of the inevitable subjectivity of taste. I generally prefer shorter, compressed poems, but you’ll see that most of these are not short. Finalists ranged from prose poems, free verse, and a sonnet to haiku. Some stuck to ancient Egypt, some modern, some personal, some universal, and the haiku by Gabriel Rosenstock managed to combine the personal, universal, and eternal in just 17 syllables. If a picture, any old picture, is worth a thousand words, I hope you’ll agree that this ancient Egyptian funerary boat is worth twice that and more. Bon voyage! Alarie Tennille Please visit my website: alariepoet.com. ** Not a Toy This small boat was made to carry our souls across the last dark river -- not to some insipid heaven but to a new world rich and familiar as the one we knew where we would feast again on dates and honey wear perfume in our hair and gold collars at our necks our bodies robed in linen fine and light as air as we watch dancers and acrobats celebrating joy Instead we’ve come to rest in a strange world past the gates of eternity impossibly far from our beginnings And yet the hands of those that hold us here can see and understand how each small piece was shaped and set the skill that made us so carefully and well to fit the laws of labor and desire- as their hands meet ours across time’s deep chasm where our wooden oarsman stand ready staring back at them with ancient ivory eyes Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy has always been a writer, but spent most of her working life as a Registered Nurse. She has had work appearing in many print and online journals, and has an electronic chapbook, Things I Was Told Not to Think About, available as a free download from Praxis Magazine online. Currently she is enjoying the water and birdlife in such abundance here in Florida, as well as the wonderful community of poets and writers active on the internet — both endless sources of inspiration and delight. ** Ancient Egyptian Funerary Boat Over and over, the weighted line goes down, down, down into the mouth of the roiling river to gage its depth as we move downstream, our mast furled. A north wind threatens to blow us off course if we aren’t careful. My men strain at each oar. I am frozen in place like a statue. Dare I move beyond this seat under the canopy? The closed lotus in my hand begins to wilt. Its significance is not lost on me. I have seen the lotus close at dusk then drown. I have seen it resurface again at dawn, rose-tinged with first-light; rose- tinged and reborn. I know its meaning. I no longer ask where we are going. No, I no longer ask how long we will be gone or why the libation vase is being filled, or ask who is worthy of its offering, or why my men have shaved their heads. There won’t be the usual picnic at the end of our journey. No tears. I am simply touched by the poignancy of my favourite singer’s lush songs that float across the water like so many sprinkled flowers; each song accompanied by the blind one’s harp and the sound of the plashing oars. Jenene Ravesloot Jenene Ravesloot has written five books of poetry. She has published in The Ekphrastic Review, The Ekphrastic Challenge, After Hours Press, the Caravel Literary Arts Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Packingtown Review, The Miscreant, Exact Change Only, THIS Literary Magazine, and other online journals, print journals, chapbooks, and anthologies. Jenene is a member of The Poets' Club of Chicago, the Illinois State Poetry Society, and Poets & Patrons. She received two Pushcart Prize nominations in 2018. ** going to my own funeral again . . . again . . . no beginning . . . no end Gabriel Rosenstock Gabriel Rosenstock is a poet, tankaist and haikuist. His multicultural blog (mostly in Irish/Gaelic): http://roghaghabriel.blogspot.ie/ His Amazon page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=gabriel+rosenstock ** Ancient Egyptian Funerary Boat Carved in wood, these rowers of the dead forever stare upon an endless Nile, each with two eyes and fully-rounded head, unlike the gods in flattened-out profile on painted artifacts within this tomb. These men are slaves, but men with power at last to pull this boat beyond some fearful doom the spirits drag in from their living past. Flat on papyrus, one-eyed deities have no perspective and assume a pose that never changes, fixed within a frieze, while every figure of a boatman rows through godless time and space, his body free in four dimensions, to eternity. Barbara Loots Sonnets are a special interest of Barbara Loots, whose poems are collected in Road Trip and Windshift, both from Kelsay Books, available on amazon. ** Art Lesson My high school students were farm kids unaware of Art. They knew dairy cows whose steamy breath condensed into clouds of tiny droplets on chilly Wisconsin mornings. They knew newborn calves and mangy barn cats who wouldn't live to see the pink and orange dawn. They knew uncles who had sunk to their waists in grain bins, little cousins whose shirts got stuck in augers, grandpas who had died when their tractors rolled over. One year I chaperoned these students on a tour of the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison to see Picasso. Goya. Especially Grant Wood. Culture — and Art — in a short course. With rafters taller than barns, the rooms echoed as snowy, booted feet slapped against the cold marble tiles. The girls giggled, pointing at Diana by Kenyon Cox, a modest representation of the academic tradition of the nude; the guys stole glances at the girls. On the third floor and down a narrow corridor, ancient art collections stood behind glass, preserved by some miracle of grace. In front of an Egyptian funerary boat, several students halted, mouths open, to see the carved men taking the dead across the River Nile to the afterlife, black spear-shaped oars clutched in wooden hands whittled smooth and rounded like small mounds of hay. No one spoke; the great hall fell silent. But the moment passed. A student groaned, “When’s lunch?” Briefly I had imagined they were awed -- funerals and death — Art worthy of study; the Nile, I wanted to tell them, was the source of fertility and farming. It was many years later when I stood at the bank of the Oconto River where my son scattered Mother’s ashes into the swift current, as was her dying wish. I remembered my students and their wide, gaping mouths. Yes. Death is a passage, undiscovered, a room taller than barns or galleries. Art approaches death. But it cannot cross over, which my students learned long before I. Sandra Frye Sandra Frye is a retired English teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She has written poetry since the age of ten. Recently her focus has been on completing her memoirs. She has published her first memoir, African Dreams, about teaching English with the Peace Corps in Malawi from 1969-71. Currently she is writing her second memoir, Fatherless, about growing up in the 1950s as a child of divorce. Many of her poems are included in the second memoir. ** Driftwood, Sweat, Blood and Pain Took me two years of Driftwood, sweat, blood. Dabbing on paint for closed eyes, For modesty cloths, Pillars and oars. But In those days of Pre-trauma with toxic Tar in my gullet, Paddling was my vocation, Death my premonition. This Was how I remembered us Until the tsunami struck when Only three survived: Brother, cousin, me and The horror of that day. My Nightmare nightmares, Sleep deprivation. Needing an escape. Needed something tangible To overcome pain. For I cry every night Thanking Ra I was spared. Grateful to see to touch My replica funerary boat Lamenting those lost. The Toughest call is blame. Mine alone to bear though Deep down I know I cannot bring ankh back No matter the icon. Just A humble model created. My tribute, my crutch. Hardly a penance, Only my memory in Driftwood, sweat, blood. Alun Robert Born in Scotland of Irish lineage, Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical verse achieving success in poetry competitions in Europe and North America. His poems have featured in international literary magazines, anthologies and on the web. He is particularly inspired by ekphrastic challenges. ** August, and Everything After "For every joy, there is a price to be paid." -Egyptian proverb row row row your boat There is no air in my lungs. I am in flip flops and a black dress. I am too young to be here. An August funeral, beachside, Lake Ontario. In the pictures, my lipstick is perfect, my hair is windswept, I am pretty, I am reasonably composed. All lies: I am disintegrating. I can't tell what is real, or remember why I am crying. All of us are standing there, dazed and hollowed out. The sky is as clear and beautiful a blue as ever. Sailboats float past, carefree, and on the horizon, the ships dot the vista as if painted in where you'd expect them on a canvas. They do not know that our beloved has finally gone over that edge he courted for so long. We all file down to the shore, open our hands and spill sea salt into the fresh water. It was a small symbolic gesture, because my husband was a sailor. He should have been buried at sea. gently down the stream A few years ago, archeologists unearthed a sixty-foot long boat next to a necropolis in Egypt. Dated from the Third or Fourth dynasty, the vessel was some 4500 years old. It was intended to take the dead safely over the Nile and into the other world. The Egyptians' quaint and clever custom of burying everything important with its dead has long ignited curiosity from every corner. We sift through papyrus clues to the past, we feel the gravitas of centuries gone while contemplating curious ceremonial objects and mysterious gods. Is this small-scale sculpture of rowers on a funerary boat a sacred object, or a toy? I imagine a beautiful brown boy towing it through the sand. I dreamed about this boat before I saw it: rowers tugging us through a river without water. I felt grief expand as the boat began its descent to the underworld. I joined the women with raised arms, keening lamentations. Sometimes I still follow that ship into the night, floating into the emptiness and getting lost there. I kneel at all my tombs in the shadows where no one can see me. merrily merrily merrily After that terrible August and a handful of summers had gone by, I was sitting on a sidewalk patio, and overheard a woman talking to a friend. Sharing how she had survived the car crash that took her father and her son. She had an exquisite scarab pinned to her sweater that looked like a careful replica of an ancient amulet, and she explained to her companion that she'd been drawn to its historical significance as an emblem of renewal and rebirth. "It wasn't easy," she was saying, about all that she had lost. "For years, it was like I was choking on sand, buried alive in the desert. But one day I realized something important: there is more to life than death." Her words have always stayed with me. life is but a dream There is Bernini, and violets. There are olives and mangoes. There are books not yet read. There is champagne. We manage some ecstasy. We find laughter and jazz. We come to epiphanies, that imperfect love is perfect, that for now must be enough. Lorette C. Luzajic Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning mixed media collage artist from Toronto, Canada, whose artwork has been shown in galleries, museums, theatres, pubs, laundromats, banks, offices, billboards, and reality TV. She is also a writer, with poetry and prose pending or published in Cultural Weekly, KYSO Flash, Bookslut, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Rattle, and many more. Lorette is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca. ** A Pilgrimage to Abydos We’ve ennobled death By being made. Dancing on urns, Or in our boat-- Four feet of wood, Plaster, lashed By linen twine, The hull green, Green as the trickster Osiris – six- Teen of us Paddling, in Our stillness re- Plicating Motion. They Called the dead Gods “the living Ones,” and we Are living too, On the way To Abydos, Not to our death, But to a play Enacting death, Little wooden Paddlers together Ennobling death By being made. David M. Katz David M. Katz’s books of poems include Stanzas on Oz and Claims of Home, both published by Dos Madres Press. He’s also the author of The Warrior in the Forest, published by House of Keys Press. In addition to The Ekphrastic Review, poems of his have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Cortland Review. He is currently working on a new poetry collection, tentatively entitled Money. ** Kohl-Rimmed Eyes I remember them—those, black, kohl-edged eyes. I painted them on people I sculpted from clay those days when teachers let us play to learn. My statues didn’t row a funerary boat with Egyptians looking distracted as if oaring halfway between sleep and dreaming. I grew and forgot them until kohl-rimmed eyes re-appeared on some of my students. Mideast girls at the university painted them on eyelids to emphasize their black, fluid eyes. Then, one night, hundreds of black-rimmed eyes formed kaleidoscopes festooning my walls. They landed there during a sleepless night when Uncle Will almost died, pole piercing his chest, like a stake through a vampire’s heart. But the eye prisms didn’t see that. Glazed over, they stared at me instead—cut into my chest. Sometimes, they still sneak into my dreams. Lindsey Martin-Bowen Lindsey Martin-Bowen’s fourth book, Where Water Meets the Rock (39 West Press 2017) contains a poem that reaped an Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest’s 85th Contest. Her third book, CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison (in chapbook form) was a finalist in the Quills Edge Press 2015-2016 contest and won the KAC 2017 “Looks Like a Million.” Her poems have appeared in many lit zines, including New Letters, I-70 Review, Thorny Locust, Flint Hills Review, Coal City Review, Phantom Drift, and Rockhurst Review. Poetry is her way of singing. ** Of Pomp and Circumstance What frail ship they left, that pottery could shepherd me across cold river, grey dead water. Set adrift to find divine course to a beneficent shore. Instead my decaying molecules divide, fall away from one another, their memories lost in an unending vacuum, my detritus food for new life. Better to take the fragile clay of life for what it is, and rejoice. Melissa Rendlen Melissa Rendlen is a pseudo-retired urgent care physician who has been devoting more of her time to writing poetry. In the past three years, she has had poems in Poets Reading the News, Ink in Thirds, Underfoot Poetry, Nixes Mate Review Anthology, The Missing Slate, Indolent Press What Rough Beast, L’ephemere, and the Plath Poetry Project to name a few. Her first chapbook is forthcoming from Clare Song Birds this summer. Monet’s Winter on the Seine, Lavacourt These blues were never in the world. He would have had to let his palette find this benign freeze, this landscape still as a stoic’s paradise. The ice must have lain beneath his frayed gray gloves as he thrust his brush stiff across the canvas. His red spreads from the sun. Nothing else moves. In this infinity of cold, this pitiless lucidity of fading light, the dead walk across the river into town. Jack Ridl Jack Ridl's Practicing to Walk Like a Heron was named best collection of poetry for 2013 by Indiefab/ForeWord Reviews. His collection Broken Symmetry was selected by The Society of Midland Authors as the best collection of poetry for 2006. Billy Collins selected his Against Elegies for the Center for Book Arts (NYC) Chapbook Award. In April his new collection Saint Peter and the Goldfinch will be released. All three full collections are from Wayne State University Press. Dear Ekphrastic Readers, Some of you might be aware already that I do a column on Wine and Art at Good Food Revolution. For the Valentine's Day edition, I wrote about erotic art history and what wines pair best with the contemplation of six sexy masterpieces. Click here to read it. Cheers! Lorette
Phryne the Impious
Phryne the beautiful courtesan of whom it was said her glorious body odor shamed the rose one day found herself in trouble, accused of impiety. She trembled before the basalt-eyed jurors. She could feel the cold reeking cheek of the cup of hemlock jammed against her own when suddenly her lawyer in lewd inspiration ripped her gown open from throat to waist. Now it was the jurors who trembled. They found her innocent on the spot. The lawyer juror contended, "Just because she did it doesn't mean she's guilty." The priest juror reasoned, "The gods must have loved Phryne very much to give her this righteous pair." The scholar juror noted, "Her bust is classically bathykolpian, if we give Bathy and Kolpos their ancient meanings of Deep and Gulf. Let the fair-clefted darlings swing free!" The goat farmer juror thought of his randy ungulates and stared at her with his dirty, pretty yellow eyes. He mumbled, "Plenty of the best cream went into those. I'd like to be her goat daddy, prance on my cloven hooves up and down the sway of her spine and bleat my moans on her hip gold." Another sighed only, "Sweet honey in the rock." But the last juror of all remembered a flower he'd seen, impossibly rooted in a wall of stone: the flushed round of a peony gazing up with its pointed red-gold eye, lifting its pink to the dangerous sky. Margaret Benbow Margaret Benbow: "My poems have been published in The Georgia Review, The Antioch Review, and many other places. The collection STALKING JOY won the Walt McDonald First Book award, and was published by TTUP. I also write fiction. BOY INTO PANTHER AND OTHER STORIES won the Many Voices Project award, and was printed in 2018 by New Rivers Press." Red in Six Sections I The simplest observation is this: there is little sublimity in division, but proximity facilitates immersion. It is not the image we will leave this world or its future inhabitants. History does not rummage through the glories, only ruins remain. II Standing before you is the shade of my transgressions. Of depth and enormity and fracture of subtleties in monochrome. Plasticity, verisimilitude, invention by right ought to fade a presence with no context save the making. I will never admit to expansion. III It’s never as easy as field and figure when the plane itself—though not the object—aggresses. Sublimity is our mother tongue, our source of fundamental recollection—countless brushstrokes publish wonder, negate by accumulation. There you are again, on the other side of a red field that denies direction. I refuse to diminish our separation. I refuse to bring these barriers down. IV The simplest observation is this: there is nothing to read and any stride toward the heroic sublime necessarily begins a blemish on an otherwise pristine canvas. What would have been had we left this world unaffected. V What is the point of a monument that outlives its observers? Why not leave a footprint in sand? VI The bridge exceeds the span of land it calls its destination. Nolan Meditz Nolan Meditz was born and raised on Long Island. He received his MFA from Hofstra University in 2014 and his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2018. His poetry has appeared in Roanoke Review, Califragile, deLuge Journal, and Mockingheart Review among other publications. He currently lives in Weatherford, OK, where he teaches writing at Southwestern Oklahoma State University.
Not Everyone in Esfahan is Interested in Art History Unknown Qajar House, Esfahan, similar to Lariha House, Yazd, c. 1869 The street is full of washing machines. I am walking in an alley north of Hafez Street in Esfahan, where the cool, airy passages of the Safavid bazaar spill out onto muddy streets bristling with cleaning products and white goods. The shadow of the Friday Mosque’s minaret lengthens over Aabsal, Pakshoma, Daewoo, Samsung. From between two shops, an old man beckons to me. He is simply dressed in a collarless shirt and a worn, but well-fitted, grey jacket. "Salom, xanom – beya," he calls. The doorway that he is sitting in belongs to an older city of Persian spice, silk-traders, and nightingales. Wooden and arched, the threshold has two door-knockers – a heavy one for men to hammer and a lighter one for women to touch, so that the wrong person will not answer. It looks like the door to another world. The old man takes out a key and opens the lock. "Come, madam," he repeats, "You and your friend too. Peace to you both. How is your health?" We go in. The cobbled floor runs downwards to a round hall; from its low, domed, dusty roof a lamp hangs, unlit. We follow another passage to the right and emerge into an enclosed garden. My friend is a Scotsman who spends half the year on oil rigs and half travelling the world on a shoestring snapped and retied in five places. "Ezdevâj kardid?" our guide asks, "Are you married?" – I have been here a week and I already know that one. No, I am not married, and no, I really couldn’t explain why not, but if I were, it certainly would not be to this man who has tried to borrow money from me twice in as many days. The garden is abandoned, overgrown with desiccated ivy in places, but mainly just empty; the ground is dirty and the fountain is dry. Away from the street, the silence is lucent. Our guide starts to talk. I am lost within seconds, but he is either unable or unwilling to believe that we cannot follow his fluent commentary. Embarrassed, I nod hopefully and enthusiastically until, finally, he leads us up a stairway and into a large room with three filigree windows open to the sky. The paper is coming away from the white walls in great sticking-plaster swathes, like lace petticoats torn from a vintage wedding dress; mirror fragments set in the ceiling glimmer with the diamond light of a fairy tale. The paper left on the walls is covered with miniature paintings: elegant women and pastoral scenes. I recognize a Renoir, copied in diminished detail: Jeunes Filles au Piano, transmuted but unmistakable. I’m intrigued. What are they doing here? In a city whose decoration so far has been lavishly geometric, tile upon turquoise tile, soaring pattern picked out with the intricate name of god, these representational images, secular and wholly foreign, are out of place and, to me, weirdly familiar. The old man grabs my arm, breaking the law by the way. "Mal-e ke," he says urgently, "Mal-e ke." For some reason I remember, correctly as it later turns out, that malek means king in Arabic. Maybe, I think, it is one of the many Arabic loan words into Farsi and means royal here in Iran too. "He’s saying these are royal apartments," I say confidently to my loan-shark companion. I smile at the old man, delighted to have seen this derelict paradise, and relieved to have understood. Still grasping my arm, he leads us back to the street and, refusing money or thanks, ushers us out into the world of household appliances, with motorcycles stuttering through the pervasive rubbish. This was in my first week in Esfahan. Later, I found a library in the Office of Scientific and International Co-operation at the university, and I discovered that these courtyard houses with white, picture-encrusted walls are far from unusual: they are a common late nineteenth-century design, the copied paintings – often actual postcards or European fashion plates, pasted to the walls – a symptom of Iran’s tense but covetous relationship with the West. Later still, my Farsi improved and I realized that mal-e ke is not derived from Arabic at all; it is a compound simply of mal– property – and ke– whose. The gentleman in the grey jacket was asking whose property I was, to whom I belonged. His interest in art history was less than I had thought, and his curiosity about my marital status much greater. When I went back to see the house again – alone this time – the doorway was gone, or at least I could not find it. But for the rest of my stay I listened more carefully, trying to hear not what I wanted to be told but what was really being said. Sophy Downes A Cambridge native, Sophy lives in Rome, where she teaches archaeology by day, writes by night, and stalks the Romantic poets whenever she can. Piano Notes and Dance
The piano notes are raindrops; A flute is the breeze. Her dress is layered white laces; His suit is blue. Her head rests on his shoulder, And his broad roughened hand Encircles her waist. They swirl - blue and white - Water and sky. Chromatic piano chords in a torrent. Will their dance be longer than spring? Joseph Kleponis Joseph Kleponis had taught English and American Literature in schools north of Boston, Massachusetts. His poetry has appeared nationally and internationally in journals such as The Aurorean, The Penmen Review, Leaflet: The Journal of the New England Teachers of English, paperwasp, Eucalypt, and other literary magazines in print and online. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you. Join us on Facebook:
Tickled Pink Contest
April 2024
|