Hymn of the Kharites Pamphos, our shades have crossed again, dim figure standing off in the shadows of Canova’s Graces glossed in bookish black & white. Look, they are all marbled; milky in harmony, two on either side caressing the third in the middle, surely Aglaea, Splendor and Youth; eternal theme that in your hymn may have stirred them. Elegance and Charm are whispering perhaps trying to persuade their diaphanous sister Grace to confirm the rumor she had wandered away one night from the square out into the countryside to visit a poet. Was that poet you, Pamphos? You can tell me, you know. Shades must trust each other. Michael Gessner Michael Gessner has authored 12 books of poetry and prose. His work has been included in American Letters & Commentary, American Literary Review, The French Literary Review, JAMA, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Oxford Review (UK,) Pacific Review, Sycamore Review, The Yale Journal of Humanities and others. He is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.
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American Loggers, 1939 The deep green river chokes on backwoods bounty, churning its industry downstream to the mill. In the creamy fading light of day: silence. No more rhythmic thump of axes; their report startling birds from branches. Quiet enough to smell pitch bleeding from pines and the sweet perfume of felled wood. Five men rest callused palms on long-necked tools, rooted to their stillness. The youngest poses hand on hip, eyes on tomorrow’s prey: treetops grazing the sky. He will set a rigging, strap the harness, cinch buckles to shimmy feet-first up the scaled hide of trunk; climb higher than the owl’s nest to amputate mossy limbs one by one and then, with forest’s enormity at his feet, count its rings: 200, 250, until he loses track. Connie Soper Connie Soper has come back to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have previously appeared in Calyx, Willamette Week, San Francisco Guardian, Adirondack Review and elsewhere. She is also the author of a non-fiction book, Exploring the Oregon Coast Trail. She divides her time between Portland and Manzanita, Oregon. She loves and is continually inspired by the time she spends at the Oregon Coast. Behind Paper Walls The time is not right it’s never right he’s perfected the art of creasing time - weeks have folded into months have folded into years. it’s a pattern with him defensive burying of head in newspaper every time she raises questions of the future. he lays down the rules - dolling up is imperative she fidgets, orange taffeta itching stilettos straps biting into bruised ankles, lithe nymph contrast to the grotesque wife he flees from. he mutters, eyes glued to the wall of paper this time murmuring that he intends to leave the minute the gorgon is out of chemo. plain duty, he clarifies that, and the boys will both be eight, better prepared for his departure. outside, the soot of New York settles waxy upon the balcony she counts the years yellowed, sallow as the wallpaper wrapping the studio. she strikes two keys B flat and an A together they sound cacophonous like letters in scarlet like life clanging by. Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a Sydney based artist, poet, and pianist. She holds a Masters in English. Oormila has exhibited her art and accompanying poetry in Kuwait, India, Singapore, and Australia. She is a member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project and Authora Australis. Her recent works have been published in Red Eft Review, Glass Poetry Journal’s Poets Resist, Eunoia Review, and Underwood Press’ Rue Scribe. She regularly performs her poetry and exhibits her art at venues in Sydney. Fauves Of Luxury, Calm and Desire 1. They stand there, each one with a throat - a reservoir of furious words, beating themselves into being, dragging, their songs out, slowly, untangling that urgency, pulling limbs over their heads 2. Their words are heavy, Their questions, bigger than themselves, all swallowed by colour spiralling, into bodies, expressing the emotions they almost felt - there on that dry plane, their body questions - there, with the unparceled twirling of time, in their mouths are the compounding rhythm of question Watching the day whirl away Slowly, with their feet, they coax the sun back 3. I can no longer speak the emotions, the way I first could the way, I first said couleur instead of colour the way I’d doubte instead of question Like that painting - that fauve, I am beating the words, so desperately I want to say, into being but all of them, are lodged in my mouth, drowned At night, my eyes flecked with remorse, my eyelids slowly doming shut, I’d watch old French movies, hoping the weight of each word would sink back in There, battering the wall with white TV light, I sleep, quietly echoing hymnals from my mouth for no one to hear, scraping each syllable from my throat, my tangled tongue of want, a roving beast - and in that transcendental state, each word is a wish Janiru Liyanage Janiru is a fourteen year old Sri-Lankan/Australian student and poet who lives in Sydney. Aside from poetry, he loves maths and has received numerous awards in both national and international math competitions/olympiads. He is the 2019 junior winner of the national Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards and is also a prolific participant and winner of poetry slams. His work is forthcoming or appears in [PANK], The Journal Of Compressed Creative Arts & elsewhere. Having just begun his personal poetic journey, Janiru is eager to find his own voice in his work. To Francisco Goya Regarding El Conjuro Your deafness, left as illness passed, was cruel curse upon you cast by demons such as these you've wrought whose wretched incantation fought was struggle made to no avail against such power to assail the flesh by piercing mystic doll, unmoved that could not feel at all, yet made you writhe and relegate to canvas plane and copper plate prophetic wisdom pain invites to fill the dread of restless nights in sackcloth silence fit to mourn the fear and folly vainly borne by peasant and by noble fool who grant by blood empowered rule. The first are poor covinced they're sheep whose constant shearing earns their keep... ...the second shepherds foisting ruse of such illusion they abuse... ...so long as favoured by the reign that otherwise they would profane as promise evil ogre kept to menace conscience having slept, neglecting the atrocities that human animosities contrive as futile wars to wage where hate is masked as moral rage as if by principle obsessed, which we imagine dispossessed, we can endear, as righteous cause, the proposition -- and its flaws -- that power is by birth the right descended as the spoil of fight long unremembered but by those thus granted will that they impose to reincarnate monsters made where reason lulled to sleep is laid. 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. ** Apparitions "I imagined man...noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night." Guy de Maupassant, Complete Works You look to the sky, hearing a flutter of wings, and nothing is there but questions. You imagine a coven of bare bones in your future - time-stripped, a vulture sated -- every ounce of what's meaty eaten, unwasted. A wing-whispered voice in your mind's ear teases, baiting: Here is what's left of your beloved. You cower, bereft and listening. Schizophrenic imaginings: a light touch when you're alone, a flash of father in his favorite chair, an olfactory memory of cologne. What need have we for witches or psychics and mediums when the crones in your conscience hover so near, with their gapped teeth and darkened eyes so like a former lover, carrying a basket of all you didn't conceive or failed from negligence? Betsy Mars Betsy Mars is an LA-based poet, educator, photographer, and newly fledged publisher. Her first release, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife (Kingly Street Press) came out in October, 2019. She is a travel and animal enthusiast, a lover of language, art, and a believer in humanity. Her work has appeared online in numerous publications, as well as in a variety of anthologies and the California Quarterly. Her chapbook, Alinea (Picture Show Press), was published in January, 2019. Both books are available on Amazon or through the author who can be reached at marsmyst@gmail.com. ** In the Shadow of Malleus Maleficarum The Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for “The Hammer of Witches”, or “Hexenhammer” in German) is one of the most famous medieval treatises on witches. It was written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, and was first published in Germany in 1487. Its main purpose was to challenge all arguments against the existence of witchcraft and to instruct magistrates on how to identify, interrogate and convict witches. www.malleusmaleficarum.org One must have a mind of witches and witchery for Goya’s Incantation, four disfigured women, perhaps no more than the stylish majas of his early works, their beauty lost with age and suffering. I saw four such women in a Spanish village years ago. Their black outlines sharp against whitewashed walls, their faces shadowed in wrinkles and warts. But Goya paints these four with kidnapped babies, has them twisting waxen figures, casting spells by candlelight. And I cannot shove aside thoughts of medieval witch hunts, the Inquisition, the Malleus Maleficarum. How suspected witches were hammered and hung, hexed by its words. A holocaust of women. Were the man and boy who grovel here at their feet bent to witch’s will as men perennially fear—the man in yellow a neophyte, enticing a young boy to shed his innocence, harken to the hoot of owls, surrender? Or are both females and males governed by the fallen angel, a Lucifer banished, descending from the darkened sky? Sandi Stromberg Sandi Stromberg loves The Ekphrastic Review challenges and gathering poets’ work into anthologies. She co-edited Echoes of the Cordillera (ekphrastic poems, Museum of the Big Bend 2018) and Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press, 2015). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, read on PBS during the April 2017 "Voices and Verses," and published in multiple small journals and anthologies. She has been a juried poet ten times in the Houston Poetry Fest. Her translations of Dutch poetry were published in the United States and Luxembourg. ** Swell for Marge Simon Her memories swelled like a large magnetic wave when she sent them out to the universe – the last spell, the last cost by a final fall of her strand of hair; the diminutive time and the hordes of owls – come white as the bleached shades of treeless branches, birds with diminished addresses, hordes of black – hoards of clouds against ebony cloaks – attached limbs on babies, unsevered like an unploughed piece of land; a needle ruptures her iris, skein of screams gush as water in the sky; bloodless plunder – virgin’s broken protection of dreams – nightmares sit by her bed as addictions before dissipating into smoke; only the walls are white, and the light she sees behind shut lids cowering against reels of sunlight – the timeless realm; and the mercenary, who is awake with his quiver of spells, rips off the glassy night like a wilted page; he hovers over her body like a lucid bone, transforming with the call of owls – sky, a static of flapping chords – a flame whips the backs of amassing hordes; black as face, potent as moon-harvest, invisible as eclipse. 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 are 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 ** Nightmare of My Reality My prayers for deliverance have gone awry. Even from above, creatures descend, in a sulfurous fog, flanking me, cackling crushing, stomping all hope. employing innocent babes, repurposed to evil singly and by basketfuls. My beloved friend, by my side changed into a ragged crone stinking of urine, in a perversion of sunny yellow. Her hand upon me, not a comfort, instead stings my flesh, scores it with sharp nails. Cackling, cavorting, calling curses upon me. her confederates ravish my soul. Owls, messengers of death, drift toward me in the fog. Oh, how I long for their arrival! My soul is at the limit of anguish ready to roll over the rim of sanity into despair. Will something save me from this dream that has seeped into my reality? Will more false friends manifest their crone selves or will they stay hidden behind masks of smiles so Then I also too could pretend, pretend to be happy, to be sane? Joan Leotta Joan Leotta is a writer and story performer. Her work has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, read at the Ashmolean, and published in journals in Germany, Ireland, England, Canada, and the US. She usually writes on more cheerful topics, and both her stage and page wordplay often involves, food, family, and strong women. ** El Conjuro Goya started this way: he painted the canvas a thick black thoughts winged their way like demons along the painting’s surface they communed with witches and owls but they could see nothing in the dark Goya took some paint away he added bright yellow for a candle flame his thoughts could now see! they conjured up a basket of babies and witches who smirked at evil Goya painted a reddish yellow crone she reaches towards the figure in white who is EVERYMAN trying to flee panic if only the man could turn himself around detect the sunlight; it could save him Susan Koppersmith Susan Koppersmith is a poet living in Vancouver, Canada. She attempts to write a poem a day. ** Hallowed Be Blessed are the fools for they have grown wings Blessed are the wings for they carry the sky Blessed is the sky for it follows the path of the moon Blessed is the moon for it knows both the light and the dark Blessed is the dark for it illuminates the unseen Blessed is the unseen for it exists without reason Blessed is unreasoning for it cannot be known Blessed is the unknown for it is the realm of fools Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig enjoys playing with words and images. You can see more of her work on her blog https://kblog.blog/ . ** Malediction at a Matelot Under a waning moon I discover, espy you mangy matelot sneering at my torso gnarled, broken from millennia chasing my rat persona without a tail. Hence I will curse affect incantation upon your soul inside your heart for no good reason apart from I can pronounce malediction until you’re broken. Rapscallion! Rocambole! Rumpsuckle! Rumpelstiltskin! I see you quiver from head to toes with shrieks and screams body contractions, shakes as I control your every muscle. Alas Father Time strikes seven forty seven my powers recede my spell is broken you clasp your knee you turn your head you regain composure free up your mind. Without a tale my rat persona retreats from the scene gnarled, broken devoid of coven powers over manky matelots I wither, wilt under a waning moon. 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. In September 2019, he was the featured writer for the Federation of Writers Scotland. ** After A Funeral No one has died yet and it’s unusual. Well, I admit I’m writing this after a funeral so maybe it’s unspoken. I took off my nice shoes, the shiny, black ones, and crumpled onto grandma’s couch and we’re waiting for something to happen. It’s North here, the leaves are already changing against this pavement coloured sky— lighter than ink but still dark enough to write off the sun. Someone said it will freeze tonight for the first time this year. I need to remember to bring in my plants from the yard. I’ve never seen someone hand out frozen candy on Halloween, the frigid, filed down edge of a Jolly Rancher is too similar to a razor blade’s. I wish I worked on a fishing boat in Florida for the inspiration but I never applied, I’m afraid of drowning. That’s the thing about it, it can happen anywhere: oceans, lakes, streams, pools, bathtubs, refillable bottles, the dog’s bowl, any one of the puddles deepening outside. This is my first will: Do not cremate me. I hate dust. But I don’t want a casket or formaldehyde either. I tried cigarette’s chemical solution in high school and didn’t like them. Voodoo is the next obvious experiment because I want the owls to speak Spanish and with their yellow eyes hold the eyes of every remembered dead. It makes sense, once you understand it, that death approaches like this: a tangled thicket of arms and soft skulls swaddled in wicker. I don’t hear the moaning but I see it. The tunnel of light everyone fears is not the moon, an angel, or even a nightgown, It’s a pale glow radiating from a handful of descending bones. The question remains: at which end of the tunnel do you live, here in fear, or there, where everyone is dying to go? Tate Lewis Tate Lewis recently graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University with a double major in English-writing and Religion. He lives in Bloomington, Il with his fiancé in an almost flipped house and is finishing his first full-length book of poetry, he just needs a publisher now. This book is determined to not only focus the reader’s eye on the ugliness of his father’s struggle with cancer but also his discoveries of him within and apart from fatherhood. His poetry can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, Better than Starbucks, The American Journal of Poetry, and Dream Pop Press. ** Dark Minds, Dark Arts Day of all souls, day of the dead, forever night, night of the dark arts, night of the righteous when the priests took over the old traditions. The Spanish church all powerful, images of sins and sinners; run-ins with a lingering inquisition still fresh in memory. Deaf and disillusioned, black-period Goya, no longer quite in and of this world, remembered his youth, feared madness. It was in the family. A painter imagines, is haunted, paints. In a private museum, in a patrician street in Madrid, hangs his painting El Conjuro. A group of witches, a man crouching in horror. An owl, a basket full of babies, a wax effigy, pins, bats… the ingredients for a witches’ ritual. Goya paints the mad, the disfigured, the believers on a layer of black. Colours only used as highlights. The rest stays in the dark. Midnight. Goya knew that witchcraft is not explained by rational analysis. He immersed himself into dark places of the mind where stark horrors live. Rose Mary Boehm A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of Tangents, a full-length poetry collection published in the UK in 2010/2011, her work has been widely published in US poetry journals (online and print). She was three times winner of the now defunct Goodreads monthly competition. There were other prizes. Recent poetry collections: From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939-1949: A Child’s Journey and Peru Blues or Lady Gaga Won’t Be Back. Her latest full-length poetry MS, The Rain Girl, has been accepted for publication in June 2020 by Blue Nib. ** Goya’s Damned You don’t expect the heath: after nightfall, in your nightshirt, the late October air frigid, stars receding, the moon in a septic haze, as you cower and tremble and the wind roars, faintly cackling. You don’t expect emissaries, certainly not the demon kind: in black cloaks, with blood-soaked glares, teeth falling out, bats and owls like flies clawing at their heads. You don’t imagine music either: dark, runic strains intoned, dragged from the bowels, throats, of hairless hags, the devil rattling old bones through your marrow, their wails bubbling in bile. And how could you even begin to fathom the innocents—in a basket, gnarled, ash-skinned, they squeak like snared rats pinned to each bottomless curse, each bone-thump—to succumb to souls that never saw light, ever borne to their doom? But least of all do you expect the one draped in gold: the sightless crone, her laying on of groping hands: offering, in your fatal descent, surrender, in her touch, embrace: the last moan, and final release, of the damned. 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 Blynkt, Panoply, Hobart, The MacGuffin, Smokelong Quarterly, FreeFall, Galleon, Blue Skies, The Ekphrastic Review and CBC Radio among others. He is happy to have had poems win or place in four local poetry contests and to have a play produced for the Walking Fish Festival in Vancouver, B.C. Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight No, the archetype’s not lost upon me: one hand upraised to heart as if to bless, I’m frontal, dark, symmetrical and pious. Some have seen this pose as Christ Almighty. It’s true I am endowed with special power as an artist. I’ve kept it for myself; this portrait rests upon my topmost shelf, reminding me that every trumpet flower, fluted lily, man and mandolin all sing the clear perfection of their maker. I’ll make myself into a mover-shaker this new century. Remorse, chagrin, humility, I do not choose to know. My God creates above and I below. Barbara Lydecker Crane Barbara Lydecker Crane has won Laureate’s Choice awards from the Maria Faust Sonnet Contest in 2016 and 2018, as well as First Prize in the 2011 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. She was a finalist for the 2017 Rattle Poetry Prize. She has published three chapbooks: Zero Gravitas (2012), Alphabetricks (2013), and BackWords Logic (2017). Her poems have appeared in First Things, Light, Measure, Rattle, Valparaiso Review, Think, Writer’s Almanac, and several anthologies. She’s also an artist.
Tektōn The boy holds light in his hands—a candle-- for his father, who bends over an auger, drills a framing joist by the taper’s flame. Why does he work so late into evening? It must be winter. The old man’s bald head illuminated, his child’s profile brilliant, watching how the work of being human is accomplished, how tool resembles letter, zayin, which can be used to make words, which were used in the beginning. That letter, vertical topped by horizontal, crossed, useful in the building of scaffolds and houses, marks the lower center of the frame. A symbol? A premonition? But the boy’s eyes meet his father’s. He seeks human connection, and Joseph returns his gaze with something like sorrow. Is this not the carpenter’s son? the Pharisees will ask, empty of understanding, unaware of miracle, expecting a gilded messiah, not flesh, not child. Not a man who fells cedars for rafters, employs a drawknife to craft oxen yokes, not the person made, like us, from earth and nourished by trees, ungilded, plain, made by hand, carved with chisel and mallet metaphorically—each of us with distinct flaws the maker sees, dismayed, and recognizes, with love. That wood shaving, curled next to the boy’s left foot, suggests the infinite, which he knows; his task here is to be human. Ann E. Michael Ann E. Michael grew up loving art and art museums but, after many years of art school, realized she lacked the temperament and ability to be an artist. She also loved literature and writing, however, and now directs the writing centre at DeSales University. She's the author of the collection Water-Rites, and her latest chapbook, Barefoot Girls, is forthcoming from Prolific Press.
Lautrec Deft hands pick apples, slice them with a well-honed knife, layer them in a tartouillat, caramel soft and buttery. The hare saddled and ridden with marinade at least 24 hours with good red wine. Hairy vetch nourished by hunger, longing, long and thick, splashed with red-violet, not tenuous, not fragile. The whole day is shot through with streaks of lightning where birds bang against the windows. “To tenderize chickens,” Henri said, “you must take them out of the hen-run, pursue them and when you have made them run, kill them with very small shot.” He cracked at the egg’s shell before he was ready, ruptured the thin casing, burst into the world of folies and red mills where music crackled and courtesans bared their buttocks in the shadow of the Sacré Cœur. La Goulue (the glutton), at a dance hall in dresses borrowed from her family’s laundry, flipped his hat off with her toe, drank his wine, swished her dress under his pastels, the V baring cleavage. Henri slashed chalk on her cheek, her mouth wry, her eyes unfocused, left hand in the crook of a woman’s elbow. Over the wall of the Palais de la Berbie the river Tarn runs through Albi and countryside, meandering as rivers do, sandy banks, scrubby pines. Henri spread a cloth over scraggly grass, laid the dancer and the menu side on side with plates of grapes, paté with calf’s foot sauce and red currant jelly, the woman lying with a mushroom in her hand, her red hair careless, her gown slipping her shoulder and the man in black beneath, hand cupping her breast. Stephanie Pressman Stephanie Pressman started writing poetry at about age eight. She has an MA in English from San Jose State University, taught writing at community college, and became a graphic artist and owner of her own design and publishing business, Frog on the Moon. She served as co-editor of cæsura and americas review. Her work has appeared in many journals including Bridges, cæsura, CQ/California State Poetry Quarterly, The MacGuffin, The Kerf, Sing Heavenly Muse, and Montserrat Review as well as on-line in Newport Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Red Wolf Editions, and forthcoming in The Writers’ Café Magazine, The Collidescope, and others. Her long poem Lovebirdman appears in an illustrated volume published in June, 2018, available on amazon.com. Thanks so much to Kari Ann Ebert for a thoughtful interview with The Ekphrastic Review for The Broadkill Review. We talk about how The Ekphrastic Review got started, the joy of ekphrastic writing, submissions, and much more. Read it here. Echoes of Yesterday She often sat here decades long before The writing there was added to the wall, Wrapped snugly in her favorite knitted shawl, Forgetting pains she'd chosen to ignore. Her memory has faded like this chair-- Its finish chipped away, its cushions torn-- Few people now around were then to mourn, And fewer still know who was sitting there. It's easy to forget she settled here And lived and worked with dreams of better days. An optimist, she'd often count the ways Tomorrow'd be the highlight of her year. Yet now this soul has long returned to dust; Possessions left to chip and fade and rust. Randal A. Burd, Jr. This poem was first published in Nine Muses Poetry. The image provided is not the original source of the poem, but a similar one. Randal A. Burd, Jr. is a married father of two and an educator who works with the disadvantaged in rural Missouri. He holds a master's degree in English Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Missouri. Randal is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Sparks of Calliope magazine. His latest collection of poems, Memoirs of a Witness Tree, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in Summer 2020. |
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