 Indonesian Shadow Puppet- Kresna, Wayang Kulit Purwa, Central Java, photography by Alain Secretan (USA) 2004. (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) TANKA break free from the past-- tell my past self ARIGATO even more than goodbye 過去の自分 とお別れを する時は さよならよりも ありがとうだね Uchimura Kaho 内村佳保 ** TANKA both are the real me-- one is the playful, extroverted me the other is fearful of COVID, the introverted me どちらとも ほんとのわたし なんだよね ひなたのわたし ひかげのわたし Uchimura Kaho 内村佳保 Born in Japan, Uchimura Kaho (内村佳保) lives in Tokyo. Her slogan won the grand prize at the Japanese Reconstruction Agency Slogan Competition 2017. Her book report won the special prize at the Defence of Japan 2019 Book Report Competition. She is the author of two novels, Jyuusansai no TAIDOU and Inishie Gatari vol.1. Her Tanka (a genre of classical Japanese poetry) won the grand prize at Minokamo city Tanka Competition 2021 and the Nikkei Newspaper the Best Tanka of the Year Award 2020. Find more on her website https://uchimurakaho.studio.site ** The Dance of the Blue God (based on the story of Krishna and Kaliya Naag) A blue god tiptoes by the Yamuna’s banks. Below the waters of the sacred stream, the many hooded Kaliya Naag* lurks, carnelian eyes stalking through gaps in lily pads. Waters churn, poisons simmer, swirling dark whirlpools, but the blue god, undaunted, wades into its depths. The leviathan cleaves the waves, twisting into muscular knots, coiling its scaled ferociousness around the blue god. He draws a whirlwind into his lungs, his thorax filling with the weight of planets and stars. The blue god pummels the serpent’s skulls, feet pounding, dancing the cosmic dance. Blood sprays across the waters. Distraught naginis* rise, ruby heads bowed, pleading for mercy. The blue god softens, growing lighter. The vanquished snake cowers in supplication, slithering away in an ebony wave, entourage in tow. Clear of venom, the Yamuna glistens mirroring the midsummer sky. The blue god floats above the rushes - lost rubies and pearls rising from the foam, crusting his dripping silks, lighting his prussian shadow. Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad *Kaliya Naag - In Hindu traditions, a venomous snake that terrorised the waters of the Yamuna river *Naginis- the two wives of Kaliya Naag Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist and poet who serves as a chief editor for Authora Australis. She holds a Masters in English, and is a member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project. Her recent works have been published in both print and online literary journals and anthologies including The Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, Bracken Magazine, and The Eunoia Review. She won the 66th Moon Prize awarded by Writing in a Woman’s Voice Journal, and an Honourable Mention in the Glass Poetry Awards 2020. She lives and works in Sydney on the land of the Ku-ring-gai people of The Eora Nation. ** His Dark Materials A child of light, I come to life as darkness. My filigree skin carved by a craftsman’s hands, painted in bright-hued colours: blues and purples, scarlet red. My story is played out against the thin scrim of passing time, the flicker-flame of history, my limbs articulated by strong threads of fate. I do not control my own voice but sing his song. I am a dancing doll, manipulated by a master puppeteer; nothing more to me than backlit shadow. Louise Longson Louise Longson lives in West Oxfordshire. She is a qualified psychotherapist, specialising in trauma and enduring mental health issues and currently works to support those distressed by chronic loneliness and isolation. A late starter to writing poetry, she settled down to it in 2020 at the age of 57, and her work has appeared in various publications including One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Dreich, Vaine, Nymphs, The Ekphrastic Review, Drifting Sands, The Poetry Shed, Obsessed with Pipework and the various publication of Indigo dreams Publications. She is a winner of the Dreich ‘Slims’ competition 2021 with her chapbook Hanging Fire. ** Blue Shadow The Supreme Being of the Mahabharata has followed me from childhood, starting from the mantle of the dank middle room of our East Ham house. Kresna is my mother's god, whose colour is all attractive black. In my imagination, his blue shadow is a vestige like a Javanese puppet silhouette, waiting for the dalang to direct the next act. My mother loved Kresna, but hated being married. My father rolled Pay-Pay when it was affordable, smoked indoors while listening to the BBC on a transistor radio, and lazed on layers of blurring Hindi newspapers that covered his torn recliner. My mother collected Tesco stamps toward free suitcases and placed flowers at the foot of her god's picture. It was the 1970s and the National Front began its hold in Britain. My father brought every scrap of anger home from the pubs. Get out in the garden, he would say. My play outdoors was eclipsed by mornings sitting on the floor with my beaten mother. Her clothes concealed everything except the disappearance of what I loved, her sweet hope, her delicate way of speaking with her eyes. My mother took photos of her visible wounds, mailed them to her sister, and told me the story of how Sheshnaag protected baby Kresna. I forgave my father because I knew his humanity-- not his godless violent insanity, not his addiction, not his inability to fit in English society, not his failings as a head of a household, not his version of immigrant status, not his inability to fulfil his father's expectations, not his unfulfilled dream to go to college—I forgave him because he played the harmonica, held my hand as we walked to the library, and because he came to watch me, a brown-skinned angel in a Christmas play. My mother scolded me for crying when he spent the night in jail. She wept in front of her idol, shielding herself from my suffering. Rhony Bhopla Rhony Bhopla is a poet and visual artist. Her previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosumnes River Journal, Pratik Magazine, and Notre Dame Review. Her multimedia piece The Indian Accent is featured online by the Crocker Art Museum. Rhony has an interest in indigenous artworks and heritage sites from around the world. She is a student in the Pacific University's MFA in Writing Program. When she is not writing, Rhony enjoys cooking and gardening. ** Not As My Shadow (A Puppet's Lament) I was, of course, by artist made, and by another then portrayed. My soul was borrowed voice and hand that spoke and moved me as she planned to tell a tale that otherwise could not have greeted ears and eyes through shadow cast upon a screen by light I blocked, where held unseen, I mourned the days ahead forlorn of home too soon I now adorn in purgatory known as art long absent life of soul and heart at least admired, perhaps, on shelf not as my shadow but my self. 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. ** Will Not My war is gone. My war is gone and you are not my war. I stand here suspended. You wait behind but my war is gone and you are not my war. My war brought riches. My war brought crowns of jewels and robes of bones and red vests that were the suns of the war. Now my war is gone and you are a shadow. You are a shadow dreaming of my war. A shadow suspended in my space but you are not my war. My face is a burned bark left at the end of my war. My arm is attached with bolts longing for the next war and all you can do is shadow me with hopes to be my next war but you shall never be my war. You trail me like a scout and mock me like a child but you will never be my war and you will never be me. My war is gone and you who are a tiny shadow will know no war. You who are already dead will know no war. You who do not know you are dead will know no war. You who wait for the arrows to pierce your shadow will know no war. You who are not my war will never be my war. My war is gone. John Riley John Riley has published poetry and fiction in Smokelong Quarterly, Better Than Starbucks, Ekphrastic Review, Banyan Review, Connotation Press, Fiction Daily, The Molotov Cocktail, Dead Mule, St. Anne's Review, and numerous other anthologies and journals both online and in print. He has also published over thirty books of nonfiction for young readers and continues his work in educational publishing. ** Dalang’s Opening Synopsis The kenong gongs! Time for Wayang Kulit to commence For I am Dalang Puppeteer of all Java, the nation. Pay attention to learn My lessons and intricate messages Of tales from Antasena Contradicted, by Bagawan Bagaspati. As music syncopates Soothing your soul, heart, mind Warriors face each other Holding, heinous heirlooms in hand. Shadows shall come Shadows shall go Shadows shall rise To reflect on the wall. Blood will be spilt From the daggers and dialogue As lives will be lost To your loud screeches of horror. Through the magic of flight With the heritage of Cupu Madusena Dead Pandavas will revive To the predilection of you audience. The jamboree will last From crepuscular through to dawn so Prepare yourselves children Let our Wayang Kulit commence … Alun Robert Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical free verse. He has achieved success in poetry competitions across the British Isles and North America. His work has been published by numerous literary magazines, anthologies and webzines in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, India, South Africa, Kenya, USA and Canada. Since 2018, he has been part of The Ekphrastic Review community particularly enjoying the bi-weekly challenges. He is a member of the Federation of Writers Scotland for whom he was a Featured Writer in 2019. ** Strings Attached Shadow thing walks, dances Tethered strings attached, hands Rendered not your own, bidding done Indolent arms forced to response, resistance Not possible, accept fate and lose that Grimace – attitude does not become you, Sadistically, you are controlled All actions dictated by puppeteer - The audience whispers, applauds in glee, they, Touted from streets, purses open to pay, Admit to prime seats, flamboyant dress, Colorful garb distracts, flushed faces fanned, Hats held in laps, mesmerized are the Eyes, follow strings attached to limbs Designed to deceive; what a show! Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson is a Pushcart nominee, rescuer of feral cats, advocate of captive zoo and circus elephants whose poems appear in various journals including Sledgehammer, Misfit, Open Door and The Ekphrastic Review. Full length works are available on Amazon. Dickson enjoys writing to visual prompts, including art, nature and autumn colours. ** Java Shadow Puppet This puppet of leather and wood glides, graceful and lithe manipulated by unseen forces to tell the story of love and battle fear and victory and – again and always – love The puppet gleams with colours and curves But the shadow – The shadow is alive And that is the secret to the story Katherine Saxby Katherine Saxby is a veteran English and French teacher, an optimistic but negligent gardener, and an adventurous vegetarian cook. Katherine is always looking for ways to improve her lesson plans, her accent, her pie crust, and everything else (including her poetry). ** For Want of the Unattainable She lived in a land of make believe her suitors were the guards of demons and dreams - their spears pierced broken hearts of maidens’ lost hopes and made them whole. She was defended protected and bartered her gossamer self against all perils. Arms bowed behind her serpentine back, the taut black cord of want, lust, need, tortured her ruptured soul as it pleaded for love. Jane Lang Jane Lang has written for years. Her work has appeared in several online journals including Quill and Parchment, the Avocet, Creative Inspirations and The Ekphrastic Review. She has been published in several anthologies and written and given two chap books to family and friends in lieu of Christmas cards. She lives in the Pacific Northwest in a big house with her lofty ideas and ideals. ** Shadow of the Deity Kresna…deity, elegant in your fine robes of white and red, Your skin gold leaf, your face painted black. These are the colours of your spirit, symbols of your qualities… maturity and strength, knowledge, and serenity. Your audience assembled back and front, the oil lamp illuminates your stage, a translucent screen welcoming your shadow. Gamelan, choir, bells, and gongs usher you in, angular limbs move with the voice of the dalang, the expert puppeteer. His life of training, knowledge of narration and movement handed down through millennia. Who gave you life? The buffalo, which gave its own, the team of carvers with their intricate tools, or the puppeteer with his ancient wisdom? Kresna…hero of the Mahabharata, in shadow form you take part in stories, epics from the ancient times, of battles between good and evil, of divinities and cosmos. Your shadow brings to life the ancestors, lamp light and music breathe forth their souls, to protect participants through the long night of performance. Maryjane Sherwin This is the first ekphrastic poem I have written. I became interested in this form of poetry after taking part in a short online workshop recently. I have a Degree in Archaeology and a Graduate Certificate of History from the University of New England. I usually work in administration, but I have taken time off to pursue creative writing. I live in regional New South Wales, Australia, with my husband, two dogs, two cats, and two guinea pigs. My grandson thinks it is Noah’s ark. ** Hocus-Pocus We are all shadows, said Plato, sitting in a cave watching movies-- our backs to the sun-lit world, our eyes shackled to the wall before us And outside the cave people walk and sing and make love; and inside the cave we laugh and cheer and cry as the fire casts their shadows on the granite screen before us And the Wayang puppet-masters of Java meticulously re-create the illusion with control rods and handles and joints and screens and oil lamps and laughter-- and none dare notice the artful hocus-pocus Mark C Watney Mark C Watney is an immigrant from South Africa who teaches English at Sterling College in Kansas. As his brain ages, and his chess ratings drop, he is discovering a poetic sensibility he lacked as a younger man. Recent publications: Acumen, Dappled Things (First place, Jacques Maritain Prize for Nonfiction), The Ekphrastic Review, Saint Katherine Review, Front Porch Review, Presence, Cider Press Review, and others. ** Shadow Puppet The drumming in the wall is disorderly. His voice manipulates the metre of her pulse which I cannot ignore so I knock on the door. It opens a crack. The tension in her eyes slips through and I sense his presence back-stage. He lifts her arm, a master of puppetry. It is stiff with intricate lies tattooed and stained in purple and blue but it drops effortlessly to her side, the tell-tale signs concealed in the low lighting cast in the hall. He articulates her mouth, choosing words carefully to match the shapes made by the opening hinge of her jaw. I observe her stick-like features projected as shadows on the wall, power at his fingertips, a closed door. Kate Young Kate Young lives in England and has been passionate about poetry since childhood. She generally writes free verse and loves responding to art through ekphrastic poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Village, Words for the Wild, Poetry on the Lake, Alchemy Spoon, Dreich and Friends and Friendship. She has had poems in two Scottish Writers Centre chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlet A Spark in the Darkness is due to be published by Hedgehog Press next year. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet. ** Shadow Puppets I still see you in the shadows. It’s where you’ve always been casting shadows over my life playing your part in its theatre while staying hidden to project an image which makes me feel as manipulated as you surely are behind that screen. It will take courage to draw back the blind to let me see your features, let me see who you are and who you can be when you’re free, when we both are free. So step forward. Step out of the shadows and on to the stage to greet me. When I see your smile we’ll rewrite our parts free of the puppet master and out of the shadows. Lynn White Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com///www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/ ** When Sita Learned to Dance "Yes, I'm being followed by a moonshadow, Moonshadow, moonshadow, Leaping and hopping on a moonshadow -- And if I ever lose my hands, Lose my plow, lose my land..." Moonshadow, Cat Stevens 1. First the shadows danced moved by a child's hands: Rama said Gamelan rhymes with hands. 2. Words were braided into branches of trees, and shadows danced moved by the Gamelan's hands. 3. The moon was as full as a porcelain plate and lovers danced moved by the Gamelan's hands. 4. Ravana watched Sita learning to dance, dancing like shadows in the Gamelan's hands -- 5. how her heart caught the colors of morning! And the ring on her hand came from Rama's hands... 6. she'd be safe if she stayed in the circle of land as their shadows danced in the Gamelan's hands... 7. Outside the circle -- outside of good fate -- Ravana changed shapes in the Gamelan's hands. 8. An evil drama, that was Ravana! & Sita cried out, kidnapped... Could she be saved by the Gamelan's hands safe in the brown arms 9. of Rama? The candles grew dim, and the hour was late as the shadows danced, dreaming in the Gamelan's hands. Laurie Newendorp Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston. Her recent book, When Dreams Were Poems, 2020, explores the relationship between art and writing. Honoured multiple times by the Ekphrastic Challenge, her poems have received honourable mention for the Pablo Neruda Prize and second place in The Houston Poetry Fest's Ekphrastic Poem Contest. The Gamelan is the "puppet master" and musician in the Wayang Kulit, his stories like the Ramayana often told in an outdoor setting. "When Sita Learned To Dance" is a Ghazal. ** Shadows in Time: A Sijo Sequence I. Pale shadows elongate with each passing hour of daylight, as seconds quickly become years in our tender memories, age dancing across our minds in a rhythm too unforgiving. II. The past and the present are both foreshadowed, omens presaged, by the routine lengthening of the night as seasons progress, the equinox of youth, so very sweet, rapidly forgotten. III. Slowly, the new becomes the old, and the old becomes the new in a cycle at once familiar and so very shocking, just as we are surprised at how our own shadows shorten with time. IV. They will shorten ‘til they cast no more, no longer absorbing or reflecting any of the sun’s light throughout the seasons, and the only shadows that we still cast are merely memories. V. Even those supple impressions will be forgotten in time, and once we are truly gone, our stories wafting on the wind, only the shadows of our bare headstones will bedim the sun’s light. Rose Menyon Heflin Originally from rural, southern Kentucky, Rose Menyon Heflin is a writer and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies spanning four continents, and her poetry won a 2021 Merit Award from Arts for All Wisconsin. One of her poems will be choreographed and performed by a local dance troupe, and she will have an ekphrastic creative nonfiction piece featured in the exhibit “Companion Species'' at the Chazen Museum of Art. Among other venues, her recent and forthcoming publications include Deep South Magazine, DREICH, The Ekphrastic Review, Fauxmoir, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Fireflies’ Light, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Minison Project, Tangled Locks Journal’s MoonBites, and Visual Verse. ** Its irksome this shadow that follows cancels out my moves taunts and teases traces my extremities from my nose to my toes making out that I lie like poor Pinocchio I’m no Narcissus seeking self-reflection I have no beauty but see my aging mother in all the windows so have no need of shadow. Diana Moen Pritchard From a log cabin childhood on a remote farmstead in the mountains of British Columbia, Canada to retirement in Guernsey, Channel Islands, there is a wealth of experience in between which Diana Moen Pritchard endeavours to capture in her writing and poetry. She has some of her poems published in Ver, Reach, Artemis, Second Light, The Poetry Business anthologies. ** Shadow Puppet Welcome to a world of sweet illusions, where a puppet’s shadow dances on a screen, where from the dreams we dream come solutions to all of our troubles and confusion, and life is a puppeteer’s play, scene by scene. Welcome. Here is a world of only illusions, where all ties to reality are loosened. Here shadows form stories of make-believe, and from the dreams we dream come solutions to the griever’s grief, to the lover’s broken heart, and to the loner’s longing; for we’ve come to a world sweetened by illusions, an enchanted world, where a profusion of pictures is all that we need or see, where dreams upon dreams are now solutions to everything, and everything’s a fusion of images, flickering and inter-weaved. Welcome to a world of sweet illusions, where the dreams we dream become solutions. Gregory E. Lucas Gregory E. Lucas writes fiction and poetry. His short stories and poems have appeared in magazines such as past issues of The Ekphrastic Review, Blueline, The Horror Zine, Blue Unicorn, and Peeking Cat. ** Shadow Play We are two headed, bobbing on the surface of water both hiding and revealing, the being and its mirror image, the real and the reflected. Where do the two merge? Where does one end and the other begin? Like night and day the same worlds yet strangely different in changing lights, puppets in a shadow play. Is god the puppeteer? Does he pull the strings? Are we really tethered, empty entities, fleeting, or is it a sleight of hand, misguided, on our own, are we conjured out of nothing? Akshaya Pawaskar Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India, and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling, among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020 and was placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018. Her first solo poetry chapbook The falling in and the falling out was published by Alien Buddha press in January 2021. ** Shadow Puppet When he shines his light on me I am nothing but the thing he wants: the twist and thrust of his puppet rods, dark on the screen of his desire. He dances me, a rhythmic indignity for all to see, trapped by a tune in his head... Does the crowd think me dead, though my eyes dilate in the lantern glow, or do they prefer not to know? Paul McDonald Paul McDonald taught at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, where he ran the Creative Writing Programme. He took early retirement in 2019 to write full time. He is the author of over twenty books, which cover fiction, poetry, and scholarship. His creative work has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes including The Bedford Prize, The Bridport Prize, The John Clare Poetry Prize, the Ottakars/Faber and Faber Poetry Competition, the Sentinel Poetry Prize, the Sentinel Short Story Prize, and Retreat West Flash Fiction Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. ** Shadowing Jan, I still talk to you in my head almost every day. I hope you talk to me like that, too. Remember our spy phase in sixth grade when The Man from U.N.C.L.E. came on TV? This is going to sound crazy, but you know how my mind takes leaps. Today I saw a presentation of Java shadow puppets at an art museum. I think the only puppets I saw as a kid were on The Ed Sullivan Show. These flat puppets projected through a backlit screen reminded me of our spy nights. Remember how we’d sit on the hill across the street to shadow our folks watching TV? Their matching picture windows were almost like side-by-side screens. Boring! Well, it would have been if we hadn’t juiced it up by making up dialogues for the enemy agents who were only pretending to watch TV – their cover in suburbia. I’m pretty sure most shows were already in colour, but we still had black and white sets. The eerie blue light through cigarette smoke and sheer curtains showed us almost nothing – just who was on the sofa in front of the window and who got up. But we took our mission for U.N.C.L.E. seriously. You had a crush on Napoleon while I was nuts over Illya. Once a car with two men pulled up in front of my house. We squealed and ran. We actually believed those actors might drop by to help solve our case! Your folks hardly moved – just sat watching the tube with your mom’s head leaning on your dad’s shoulder. Remember how we wore ear plugs from our transistors, pretending we were intercepting transmissions? Their diabolical boss bribed script writers to slip clues into the night’s programming. “Shhh, Olga’s speaking. If anyone mentions red dog, they’ll meet the 7:30 a.m. train arriving from Pittsburgh at Grand Central Station tomorrow. No red dog means they’re stuck here another week. Wait, Olga just got up and left the room. She must be packing!” A few minutes later, there was a loud bang at Anna and Misha’s home next door. The window went black. “I’ll call you tomorrow!” I yelled, racing for home. My dad had thrown the TV against the wall and shorted out the power. I’d never heard the term broken home before, but I now knew what one sounded like. Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille did have a crush on Illya Kuryakin (actor David McCallum). The rest of this writing is fiction. Alarie graduated from the first coed class at the University of Virginia. Now retired, she devotes a substantial part of her poetry life to The Ekphrastic Review. Please check out her three poetry books on The Ekphrastic Bookshelf and visit Alarie at alariepoet.com. ** Shadow Puppets Are elegant, intricate cut and painted, arms and legs long and thin as spindles, the hands delicate, expressive, their gestures clear, emphatic, unmistakable, cast in shadows against the lighted screen, they move like dancers through the old stories everyone knows, sacred and familiar, repeated in that magic theater. As night falls the music rises, flutes and drums beat and chime as voices sing an introduction. Lit, the fire lantern shines through the white cloth casting the puppet shadows into crisp relief, where every movement every small detail, is figured in the bright space between memory and creation where Master and audience find themselves again dreaming the old stories down to their eternal bones- shining like diamonds, true as all the fixed and errant stars we trust to guide us. Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a Retired RN with a life long love of art and writing. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Third Wednesday, Verse Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, and Earth’s Daughters. She has been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her digital chapbook Things I Was Told Not to Think About is available as a free download from Praxis magazine. ** The King I Am Notice the gold leaf, leather, buffalo horn Magnificent ornament of my clothes. Craftsmen wear their fingers To the bone to make them, And my nose so proud It points like an accusing finger At you, my friend. Beware. It detects wisdom, good and evil. Each hot, Smokey night The play, my play, Has me confront monsters and men In my kingdom, in my palace. I chase ogres, glimpse beautiful Sita. Ring the gamelan! Draw near! Let the play begin! And yet. And yet… In this whirligig someone says, Some whispering child from the front row, That I am but shadow, A prop, someone’s hand in my stomach! I wait in the darkness Mute in the darkness Hiding my shame My gold and vermillion jewels But a dull smudge in the darkness. I am shadow now, only essence. There is a moment When the shadow draws back When the eyes in your heart Are opened and you see me In all my glory. Lucie Payne Lucie Payne is a retired Librarian and is writing as much as she can. ** In the Land of Shadow Puppets I snuff out the candle just as the gamelan gong sounds once, twice. A moment of silence and then the drums begin to beat. Shadows march out of my mind. Guided by bamboo sticks fixed to hands and feet, exotic shapes scissor across a sheet bleached white by light. They poke elongated noses into my psyche, its foibles and fancies. Hours pondering le mot juste. Holding my husband’s hand at concerts. His hugs that find us dancing through the kitchen. Who are these shades from another culture whose playfulness stirs a flurry of memories? Let them be spirits come to guide me. Let them know my name, rekindle joy. Sandi Stromberg Sandi Stromberg is a dedicated contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, which has honoured her with one of its Fantastic Ekphrastic Awards and twice nominated her poems for Best of the Net. Also twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in many small journals and anthologies, most recently in MockingHeart Review, Equinox, easing the edges: a collection of everyday miracles, San Pedro River Review, The Ocotillo Review, and in Dutch in the Netherlands in Brabant Cultureel and Dichtersbankje (the Poet’s Bench). For ten years, she served on the board of Houston’s Mutabilis Press, dedicated to poetry.
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 The Witches Dance, by artist unknown (Scotland?) date unknown Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is The Witches Dance, by artist unknown. Deadline is October 29, 2021 . You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules
1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Helping the editor share the time and expenses involved is very much appreciated. There is an easy button to click above to share a five spot through PayPal or credit card. Thank you. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include THE WITCHES DANCE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your piece. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, October 29, 2021. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we will no longer send out sorry notices or yes letters. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. Please note, some selected responses may also be chosen for our newly born podcast, TERcets, with host Brian Salmons. Your submission implies permission should he decide to read yours. If that happens, you will be notified and sent a link to share. Thank you! 14. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send Spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! We send a newsletter zero to two times a month, with hopes of more consistency in the future. It updates you on challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, the podcast, and more. You can cancel at any time, of course, but may find yourself back on the list after another submission. We hope you don't cancel because we like to stay in touch occasionally! 15. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 16. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 17. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.  After Breakfast, by Elin Danielson-Gambogi (Finland) 1890 Editor's note: Dear Readers and Writers, Every once in awhile I have to stop in and say thank you, again, for making this wonderful thing happen. It is a true privilege to have the chance to challenge you with various artworks from all over the world, to set you scurrying out into your imagination or down the rabbit hole of the artwork's story. You wow me with wondrous things every time. Art history is my absolute passion, and sharing that with all of you is a rewarding experience. I learn so much more from all of you writers and what you see and write down. As we continue to grow, some challenges get an avalanche of entries, and as always, I find choosing the pieces the hardest task. I understand that the words are your heart and soul, your gift, your talent, and that means something to me. While some journals publish only a very few pieces, quarterly, we publish two challenge showcases a month and daily in the main section! I am astonished that the poems and stories inspired by art just keep coming. Your talent, ideas, and ways of seeing inspire me and show me something new, over and over. Thank you. When we aren't able to post your work, it is because of an embarrassment of riches. Thank you so much for being part of this family. We are now a worldwide ekphrastic community! I can't thank you enough for making this happen. Will all of you please share this page on your social media? The most important thing is more readers for our writers. Help us tell the rest of the world what they're missing! love, Lorette ** Through the Keyhole The woman’s cigarette turns to ash, the frail balloon of her thoughts rising with the smoke. If I could slip through the keyhole, I would sit in the chair abandoned by her breakfast friend, sip from the glass of cold coffee, put out the burning cigarette on the tablecloth’s edge. Remnants of companionship. It’s Saturday morning, two days after my husband’s death, and I gaze with her down the long hours ahead. Grateful for the company and a day that may be as empty as the shells of her soft-boiled eggs or an egg cup I could fill to the brim. Widowhood has surprised me, arrived unannounced. I’m drawn to her youth, all that lies ahead-- Italy, the Italian artist-husband, a painting life. And remind myself of the richness of my own past. Still, I envy the rebellion born in her bones, the different melody painted on this canvas. She’s a woman at home in her skin, as the French love to say. She could make herself into a perfect song. Sandi Stromberg Sandi Stromberg is a dedicated contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, which has honoured her with one of its Fantastic Ekphrastic Awards and twice nominated her poems for Best of the Net. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in many small journals and anthologies, most recently in MockingHeart Review, Equinox, easing the edges: a collection of everyday miracles, San Pedro River Review, The Ocotillo Review, and in Dutch in the Netherlands in Brabant Cultureel and Dichtersbankje (the Poet’s Bench). For ten years, she served on the board of Houston’s Mutabilis Press, dedicated to poetry. ** Haiku North pole in a vase once plucked from the wilderness who knows its full bloom? 冬菊や盛りのときを人知らず Toshiji Kawagoe Toshiji Kawagoe, Ph.D. is a professor at Future University Hakodate. He lives in Hokkaido, Japan. His haiku was selected in the 21 Best Haiku of 2021 at the Society of Classical Poets and his poems in classical Chinese have been published in the anthologies of Chinese poetry. His academic works in economics are also published in many books and academic journals. ** After the Gold Rush The days that you saw me write made a gentleman out of you. It was the golden spot to rest down all my moonlit words and sunlight in little bell jars, for preservation of the most unique talent, a propensity for storytelling. A story is what you wrote for me when books bore my name and then slowly it seeped into you, the cagedness of the realisation, the origin of your inborn faults. That you were a man. That none of your innuendos could lay under the shadows of progress for too long. Then it started, the theatrics of being second best, playing second fiddle. Being the lesser half ground down to his knees and I laughed at your impertinence because your only words were merely on your account books, numbered to less than a dozen. It wouldn't have caused me a blush if they called me Jezebel But you were there, to interweave my accomplishments fitfully with ambition, two words as disparate as the land and the sea. And so I chose to ponder and squander all your meals away for a dowdy ensemble and broken egg shells and jam spilling out of porcelain, until you stormed out of the room, unable to gaslight me for creating paeans to the sunlight first thing in the morning. It dawned on you after five years of wedded weather that my words wouldn't fail me nor would my God elude me. She rested right there on the tip of my tongue and thundered like a flooded stream with the ink. I picked up the last of the broken plates and chose to show you the power of silence. My words were enough in that instance, on the page and beyond. That's why the breakfast table now is my study and you the last letter on my index. Prithvijeet Sinha The writer's name is Prithvijeet Sinha from Lucknow, India. He is a post graduate in MPhil from the University of Lucknow, having launched his prolific writing career by self publishing on the worldwide community Wattpad since 2015 and on his WordPress blog, An Awadh Boy's Panorama, besides having his works published in several varied publications as Cafe Dissensus, The Medley, Screen Queens, Reader's Digest, Borderless Journal, Aspiring Writer's Society, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Chamber Magazine, Live Wire, Rhetorica Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, The Quiver Review, Dreich Magazine, and in the children's anthology Nursery Rhymes and Children's Poems From Around the World AuthorsPress, February 2021) among others. His life force resides in writing. ** My Grandmother Gives Up: a Haiku Series I. She lights up a smoke Uncaring what people say Pummelled by boredom II. Unsure what to do WIth herself this fine fall day WIth nowhere to go III. So she puffs lightly And stares into an abyss As nothing stares back IV. Her sould unsettled Her heart beating out of time Her mind wondering V. With nothing to do She takes yet another draw Numb to her small world VI. Silently thinking How this world can go to hell How useless it is VII. Mentally wishing That is will kill her soon As she breathes deeply VIII. Inhaling slowly A puff of her cigarette The first of many Rose Menyon Heflin
Originally from rural southern Kentucky, Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin who enjoys nature and travel. She was the August 2021 featured writer in Tangled Locks Journal’s MoonBites. Among other venues, her poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in 50 Haikus, Ariel Chart, Asahi Haikuist Network, Bramble, The Closed Eye Open, The Daily Drunk, Deep South Magazine, Dreich Magazine, Eastern Structures, The Ekphrastic Review, Fireflies’ Light, Haikuniverse, The Light Ekphrastic, Littoral Magazine, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Minison Project, Please See Me, Plum Tree Tavern, THE POET, Poetry and Covid, Red Alder Review, Red Eft Review, Sparked Literary Magazine, The Texas Poetry Calendar, Three Line Poetry, Trauma Timelines, Trouvaille Review, Visual Verse, The Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, The Writers Club, and various anthologies. Her poetry won a 2021 Merit Award from Arts for All Wisconsin. An OCD sufferer since childhood, she strongly prefers hugging trees to people. ** How to Love a Daughter She will never forgive you your love. She will reject the profound knowledge that you are bound to each other. Oh, sometimes, very occasionally, she’ll almost be seduced by your insistence. Make no mistake, it’s only a truce, never peace. There is no steadfastness in her offering of absolution. She loved you once with a fierce and all-consuming emotion. That she will never forgive. Neither will she forgive that you had a life of your own, that you needed to leave for fear of the master. She looks at you and finds you wanting and tells you in a roundabout way that you failed. And you know you are guilty. You look into her eyes and feel her pain. She is judging you and you will never forgive yourself. Rose Mary Boehm Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her fifth poetry collection, Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders, has just been snapped up by Kelsay Books for publication May/June 2022. Her website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/ ** En Famille If Mother says one word about this cigarette, I'm going to strangle her. I can't remember the last time she said anything nice to me. Anything complimentary, anything remotely friendly. Even when I brought her those flowers, she said Where did you get those? The graveyard? Then she tried to cover it up by claiming it was a joke. Joke, my foot. She wanted to think I'd stolen them. Well, I didn't. It isn't stealing to take something out of the bin at the back of the flower shop. If everybody wasn't so suspicious about Rolf and me, we wouldn't have to sneak back there to have a smoke. And I really picked the best ones out of the bin. They were better than the ones Papa brought home after that big row he and Mother had – yes, the one about me. She kept telling him that he spoils me. He kept telling her she was being mean, which she is. She never buys anything for me because she wants to spend it all on herself. She'll probably smell the smoke when she comes in. I guess it soaks into the tablecloth, and the furniture. I can always smell Papa's pipe. There's a bubble of pipe-smell around him, like an aura. I can almost see it. It's not a bad smell, but it is strong. Maybe it soaked into that tweed jacket he likes to wear. I should slip into their dressing-room and smell that jacket when he's not wearing it. I could even try it on. I wonder what Mother would say if she found me trying on Papa's clothes? I know this much – the only time she gets close to me is when she wants to sniff my breath. She thinks she's being so sly, but I can tell see her nose wrinkle when she sniffs. What’s she looking for, anyway? Smoke? Brandy? Bad breath? Anything to criticise me about! If she's not sniffing, she looks me up and down and then she starts telling me I need to lose weight. She should talk! She waddles around like an old sow, and she tries to squeeze into those clothes that don't fit her any more, but she doesn't fool anybody. She definitely doesn't fool me. I wonder what Rolf's doing this morning. I wanted to let him touch me last night, but he got all trembly and dropped his cigarette. It's a good thing he wasn't touching me – if Mother found a cigarette burn on one of my dresses, she'd really kill me. What am I going to do today? I guess I could go sketching and get out of this mausoleum that Mother calls a house. I could pack up some cheese sandwiches and go to the lake and stay down there all afternoon. If she calls me, I can pretend I didn't hear her. Actually, I think the only reason she'd look for me is to make sure I'm away, so she can stick her nose in the liquor cabinet. I know that she tipples when Papa isn't home. I can smell it. Maybe Rolf will touch me tonight. I'll just need to make sure he puts out his cigarette first. Tom Sigafoos Tom Sigafoos is the author of The Cursing Stone, an Irish historical novel. His crime novella Pool of Darkness: Raymond Chandler in Ireland was shortlisted for the Penny Dreadful Novella Prize. His memoir and short fiction have appeared in in The Quiet Quarter Anthology, Trasna, Crannog Literary Magazine and other publications. A member of the Irish Writers’ Centre and the Irish Writers’ Union, he also serves as PRO for the Allingham Arts Association. See www.tomsigafoos.com for contact information. ** Weltshmerz Tired, oh so tired I am of this world’s quotidian tasks – every day the boiling of eggs the toasting of bread the brewing of tea. And the endless arguments – What is art? What is life? words flying across the breakfast table, like sparks from our cigarettes, rising in the air above us like smoke, till finally he pushes back his chair, goes out of the room once again leaving his cigarette on the table where it will burn a small brown spot in the tablecloth. I am tired. I watch it slowly smolder. Gretchen Fletcher Gretchen’s poetry and travel articles have been published in numerous magazines, newspapers, journals and anthologies. She won the Poetry Society of America’s Bright Lights, Big Verse competition and was projected on the Jumbotron as she read her poem in Times Square. She has led writing workshops for Florida Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress. Her chapbooks, That Severed Cord and The Scent of Oranges, were published by Finishing Line Press. ** After Danielson-Gambogi "Her early years were however spent at Ilmajoki as her father attempted farming there. Because of the Finnish famine of 1866–68, the farm failed. After being forced to sell the farm, her father Karl shot himself." Wikipedia, “Elin Danielson-Gambogi" After the Finnish famine, After the farm failed, After Father was forced to sell the farm, After Father forsook, After the frosty silence in the garden, After the agony in stony places, there are still somehow languid Sunday mornings stretching into afternoons of emptied egg shells and long smokes in front of feathery sketches and an Asian fan, After Breakfast. She puffs her languor into a cloud. I think it is the gray flag of her disposition. Her hooded eyes, offset by rosy cheeks, show she has mastered the pose of indifference or she mirrors it and I have mastered it as the After years have demanded of me--so you think. One day you will read a few facts about me-- fragments from an encyclopedia (If you still call it that) and stich them together, to try to know me, and you will put poets’ voices in a painter’s mouth. I could say to you, “Just look. I have painted what I want you to see. Don’t palimpsest me out of memory.” But then, the girl in my painting could have asked me not to make her my mirror. We do what we can do, imperfect as it is and as it will be always, until After. Brian O'Sullivan Brian O'Sullivan teaches rhetoric and modern English literature in southern Maryland. He has had work published in One Art, Everyday Fiction, and several nonfiction academic journals. ** Morning Meditation Warmth of porcelain on skin warmth of tea in throat, warmth of cigarette in hand warmth of smoke in chest, the luxury of morning, space and time to breathe, free of the press and urgency of the world, to sit quietly, lost in thought, composed. Still life, before clearing the table. Jaime Banks Jaime Banks is a marketing/communications professional and freelance journalist who has recently returned to her first love, poetry. She lives with her husband in the DC area. ** A Morning What first? Clear the table? Wash the dishes? Search for my truant husband? Let me enjoy the cigarette and escape to a Fantasy place of music, dance and poetry, Where life is sweet and contagious Where my heart flutters with anticipation And my soul dances with precision. Let the goddess of time extract more minutes of reverie And allow me to quietly extinguish the last Wavering wafts of my cigarette. Ellie Klaus Ellie Klaus was born and raised in Montreal. She has lived different selves over several decades: daughter, wildlife biology graduate, vision quest traveler, family life educator, president (of her son's school committee), friend, confidante, lover, wife, mother, caregiver and now caregivee, if there is such a word. Each has contributed to a different perspective of living, of life. The pieces of the puzzle are evident and coming together, although the final image is yet to be revealed. So, writing has reemerged as a creative endeavor to release some of the angst that arises from living a confined life, or any life for that matter. She has a poem entitled 'Bones' that appears on NationalPoetryMonth.ca April 9, 2020 and poems appearing inThe Ekphrastic Review and Pocket Lint. ** Anonymous Journal Entry From Finland July 17, 1890 After breakfast, they always leave, even if they have nowhere to go, and I get a little lonely. I guess you’d have to be lonely in the first place to bring home a different man every night and charge him. They’re desperate; I’m lonely. It’s a perfect storm. I want to cry, but I smoke instead, looking at his plate: bits of shell from boiled eggs, a mess on the white tablecloth. There are a few sips left in his white coffee mug. I don’t let them use the good china. I hate sloppy eaters, and so many of them are, but when a man gets a warm body and a hot meal, he comes back, and that is the way I afford this blue dining room, white china and teapot with blue foliage, and fresh daisies. I take a long drag, feeling unbalanced, which is the way I feel most of the time. They say I have a nervous condition, the doctors, and prescribed this line of work because I am incompetent with a sewing machine, too nervous to be a nurse, and my brain, said the doctors, is so scrambled that I wouldn’t notice when the syphilis kicked in. And yet I am still able to feel the untouchable darkness of my sins—a darkness no man can touch. The daisies though…they’re here now. Their smiling faces and soft petals make me wonder if they grit their teeth through the suffering of being cut from their mother source of soil. Are they looking around right now at these blue walls and white tablecloth thinking, this is the last scene. Sometimes I think maybe I’ll have one last bouquet of daisies and when they die, I’ll off myself. Last night—I won’t say his name just in case this daybook gets lost and his wife finds out—he stunk to high heaven. I hinted several times that he may find a bath relaxing, but he was eager. And once they’re in the house, they’ve got me. It’s too late to show them out once you’ve invited them in. They’re like vampires in that respect. Rejecting a man is the worst crime a woman can commit. Sometimes I daydream, smoking my cigarettes, that someday things will be different. That one hundred years from now, this house will still be standing, and a young woman will go to work and not a workhouse. Mostly I dream that someone will know where my grave is—that someone will care—and plant all the daisies they can find. Megan D. Henson Megan D. Henson received her MFA in Creative Writing from University of Kentucky. She is the author of two books of poetry by Dos Madres Press: What Pain Does (2018) and Little Girl Gray: Sestinas (2020). ** After After Breakfast You paint in filigree detail as Nordic morning distills, clarifies daisies, china, glass. You tame her in cream silk and intricate lace, each shadow and fold as delicate as eggshell. You seat her sated, slumped in reverie, yet leaning forward, defiant, not caring a crumb, refusing the rattle and rush of sink or easel, carving out for all time just one moment to simply exhale. Still-life. Cursory solace. You hint at the sister who bounces in to stub out her Lucky Strike and crack into the apple-green day. You don’t show at all the dog who romps ahead in Lapphund elation, looping liberating. Racing outdoors, white skirts thigh-high, wind at their backs thrusting them against the skyline, they bound over buttocky hills, Pink Lady cheeks, hair loosening, crimson culottes ablaze like wild-fire. Helen Freeman Helen Freeman has been published on several sites such as Ink, Sweat and Tears, Red River Review, Barren Magazine, The Drabble, Sukoon and The Ekphrastic Review. She lives in Durham, England. Her instagram page is @chemchemi.hf ** Summer's Time Finland's fens are pale ice blue and white. Forests stride the shadows and defy the sun on Sundays. Warm heart of home, daisy charmed, where the scooped polished cup reflects deep inside the leaves of fortune like trails through snow. Time lies heavy here at the curving summit of the world, and lists north, toward blue ice. Here fire is life, and smoke a beckoning, reckoning worth the burn. Fire burns in the stove in summer, when heat is is at the back, warmth in the mouth. For who can say man lives by bread alone under the looming run of days when summer is a reverie, A minuscule repast, shattered shell, a crumb. The white smoke takes the form of breath, Rises, disperses from the glow, and is gone as if it never was. No time is time for summer in the mind. T.S. Page T.S. Page is a life-long poet. Her first work was at age 8, and her love of poetry has been a reward for the introspective life. Over 600 works have been carefully collected from her daily life for many decades and her first chapbook, Heliotrope, A Woman's Turning, is online at Amazon. For the past year she has begun to submit poetry for publication. She studies philosophy currently, along with theoretical physics, and has a degree in German language from the University of Florida. In the past she told original Florida Folk Tales from her family tradition at the Folk Festival in White Springs Florida. One play, John and the Moon Maiden was written and performed for children in Martin County, Florida. Four grown children are her contribution to the world. She is particularly interested in the ideas of Spinoza, as well as Schopenhauer, and plans a book of poetry on some of these enlightened themes. ** Barometric Breakfast Egg me on. I’ll boil summer, lick it like ships skimming over clenching death. Nights of corduroy & velvet, of smoke & stars moaned until morning’s quenched fire. You of the dry eyes, our yellowed yolk of summer dulled, cool & still. Leave the cracked crockery, the coffee cold in my belly, your broken breath scattering shards of embers, frosty ash casual in its cruelty. Our crumbs are better suited to winter’s bones Charlotee Hamrick Charlotte Hamrick’s poetry, prose, and photography has been published in numerous online and print journals and anthologies, recently including Emerge Journal, Reckon Review, Love in the Time of Covid Chronicle, and New World Writing. She’s had nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and was a Finalist for the 15thGlass Woman Prize and for Micro Madness 2020. She is Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Citron Review. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and a menagerie of rescued pets where she sometimes does things other than read and write. ** Yesterday's Canvas You leave your cigarette balanced on the edge, threatening our white linen. I examine the middle distance of your absence, your sharp bone-handled knife, your tall medicinal wine. I have no opinion on your absence. No more opinion than the listening daisies, who have no memory of your passionate presence. You return with the tray, stub your cigarette into the egg cup, gather the napkins, the teapot, the dish of salt. You stack the plates, crushing feathered shells. I push back my chair, slip the cigarettes into my pocket, place the daisies on the sideboard, gather the tablecloth, shake the crumbs out the door. Fold and fold, in and in, catching blue-green shadow. I set my easel here, at this end. Yesterday's canvas, my brushes and rags, my smock. You set your easel there, at the far end of our long feasting table. All day long the daisies inhale, without complaint, your weary exhalations. Monica Corish Monica Corish is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction, and an Amherst-trained writing group leader. She is currently working on a novel set 6000 years ago in the north-west of Ireland. www.monicacorish.ie ** After Breakfast Inverted fan tacked to a pale wall lace descending sketches belie a hand insouciant. Fat bellied teapot in ash and blue one almost matched tea cup--hers-- he prefers his tea in a Russian glass. Her dish pushed away, eggs untouched a distraction from the cigarette dreaming in her hand along her face. Broken egg shells on a painted plate pieces of toast abandoned on a white cloth a woven fringe at the edge exposed like lingerie betrayed. His chair angles back, precise yet in haste. Her eyes dissolve to the center of the room as a winding waft of smoke escapes her lips with secrets revealed. His plate, the knife, askew the clash of sounds echoing in a hollow room. Daisies lean as if to capture her waning dream. How long will it be before his cigarette left burning, over the edge of the table, will flame more than the faint color in her cheeks. He expects to return by then she will be gone. Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes. Seeker of wild things in the north woods of Wisconsin. Member of the Root River Poets, Racine Wi. and the Spectrum Gallery and School of Arts. Numerous poems published in the U.S., other work in England and Canada, including inThe Malahat Review. Most recent poem published in Poetry Hall, tranlated into Chinese. Chapbook: The Lost Italian and the Sound of Words, Brighter Path Press. ** Could It Be If you returned, I could hear In the floating shadows and The abandoned cigarette. From the emptiness of the egg shells. The words had made a hurried escape, Could it be that you had waited? Until the descending grief had melted- Walking the streets silent in rain, Watching the sky turning grey, The sun limiting its patch, us crossing the land, Connecting its diagonal ends. In the room, the red bangles lay exposed and The perfume emanated from the bottle. As I reached for the shriveled bougainvillea petals Held in place through the dried stamen and pistils. Drawing the curtains to the sides, Letting the moon occupy The soul now bare on the floor Ready for the journey it had waited for. Of making immortal the childhood lores. Could it be that you had stayed? Until the Jupiter and Venus had aligned and We had held the unborn. Abha Das Sarma An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing the most. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru.  Indonesian Shadow Puppet- Kresna, Wayang Kulit Purwa, Central Java, photography by Alain Secretan (USA) 2004. (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Indonesian Shadow Puppet, by Alain Secretan. Deadline is October 15, 2021 . You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules
1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Helping the editor share the time and expenses involved is very much appreciated. There is an easy button to click above to share a five spot through PayPal or credit card. Thank you. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include JAVA SHADOW PUPPET in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your piece. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, October 15, 2021. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we will no longer send out sorry notices or yes letters. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. Please note, some selected responses may also be chosen for our newly born podcast, TERcets, with host Brian Salmons. Your submission implies permission should he decide to read yours. If that happens, you will be notified and sent a link to share. Thank you! 14. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send Spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! We send a newsletter zero to two times a month, with hopes of more consistency in the future. It updates you on challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, the podcast, and more. You can cancel at any time, of course, but may find yourself back on the list after another submission. We hope you don't cancel because we like to stay in touch occasionally! 15. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 16. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 17. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.  Magbo Helmet for Oro Association Rituals, by Onabanjo of Itu Meko (Yoruba People) (Nigeria) c. 1880-1910 Secrets "All human beings must pass through Knoena Ayanmo, which translates to destiny or fate --" A Yoruba belief "When I take my girl to the swimming party, I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there, smooth..." Sharon Olds, The One Girl at the Boys Party In the years when we were free slaves only to the music of our hearts, I dreamed I carried my daughter home singing down the river transported by a mermaid -- and O how her scales did shine! The Elders of the tribe had said Never look at the Oro because you are a woman! But I dyed my fabric with indigo the colour of deep-blue water, and ignored the men except for this one thing: which one would be my daughter's father? One of the Elders had warned me that my eyes would be eclipsed, like the sun, if I looked when the moon shadowed daylight and the great bird cried out, rising from the head of a mounted warrior; and because I am a woman I must beware of he who wants to learn (not fight) to write or to be an artist holding the blank page of a beginning. So I considered the accordion player who'd carved an amulet from mother- of-pearl so it looked like ivory. He kept it hidden in a batik bag during the Festival when his instrument sighed with a swishing sound -- a whoosh of air -- making it sound like the voices of the trees when the Oro is coming his magic soft as a secret, like rain falling until the night's broken open by the crash of the bullroarers and I cover up my ears -- but not my eyes like I'm supposed to -- as the preacher speaks in a loud, loud voice so all the men will know he's serious when he talks about sacred instruments and the power of the Oro; who looks splendid, I think in a robe covered with shells his lips red as blood when the river goddess winks at the blacksmith who made the iron nails to fasten all my choices (to be fathers, that is) on a wooden helmet with the river mermaid's face because it's she who knows my community's fate: call it destiny -- a secret -- the golden infant Onabanjo sculpts when I'm the only woman on the Oro's helmet holding my Itu Meto boy. Laurie Newendorp Laurie Newendorp's recent book, When Dreams Were Poems, 2020, explores the relationship between art and poetry; and in the case of the Magbo Helmet, the influence of anthropology. The Oro is thought of as a god by the Yoruba People of West Africa, a place where magic is a part of nature. Nails to hold thirteen figures to the Magbo Helmet is unusual, and more contemporary than carving the entire helmet from a single piece of wood, so the woman's voice in the poem is modern, from a time when Yoruba People returned home bringing multi-cultural art elements, freed from enslavement in Brazil. ** A De Ni Alafi Eewu bę loko Longę, Longę fun ara rę eewu ni…(Yoruba proverb). (Translation) There is danger at Longę's farm (Longę is a name of a Yoruba Legend), Longę himself is danger. (Meaning) You should be extremely careful of situations that have a past history of danger. 1 We shall drift on God’s back whose gaze will be steady, whose face will be serene with notions of peace and rituals of balance. Akin will offset any bobbing by carrying a great white bird above his head. The mal de debarquement with never occur because the bird keeps the sea mirror-flat, the direction true. Stand erect with your gifts as you sail across the boundary between two worlds. 2 It is black night but Aabdar tends the moonlight like a prayer and illuminates the crew whose motion is powered by Emenike who pumps the Juju melodeon and sings on the mountain, in the valley, on the land and in the sea; my God is my portion in the land of the living; my God is good for evermore. 3 Aadesh carries the message of harmony in a gold satin satchel. Aadesh was given the remedy of language which he must carry carefully; should he drop one letter it will drift to the sea bed causing the other letters to pile into one another unable to spell anything. 4 Aaeedah carries a hat box in which there may be a hat. All gestures of reconciliation come with risk. Bolade listens to a tambourine only she can hear. Often this is the only way. Abayomi carries the golden child who is all children. Should the guests refuse this child the journey home will be tumultuous, the joy absent, and Amadia will hide the spirit of lightning under his coat, beginning already to plan the next journey, perhaps with different travelers, perhaps with a antidote, perhaps with a cargo of loneliness that will carry them back empty, ready, as always, to be replenished. John L. Stanizzi John L. Stanizzi - author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Guides Us Home. Besides Ekphrastic Review, John’s poems are in Prairie Schooner, Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, New York Quarterly, and others. John’s nonfiction has been in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, and many others. He was awarded an Artist Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction, 2021 from the Connecticut Office of the Arts and Culture. https://www.johnlstanizzi.com ** We Are Ancient we are ancient magic and burning embers mirror images of souls shatter’d in bone kept for the ages, for historians to argue over chewing the fact with opinion after opinion fighting over our opaque messages in gold driven by a circus dissolved into horizons time and the end are needlessly near we are gifts under a tree, shadowed, twisted wearing memories soaked in lime and salt drift down the pathway to our hearts a song from the wild, birds once hanging like lanterns in the trees, like dew we are lava dreams that swarm over the land swiped and reduced to hardened labour always in our hearts, only one wears the crown and when he stands we will all be free Zac Thraves Zac Thraves is a performer, writer and speaker who lives in Kent. His latest book about coming to terms with anxiety and depression is being adapted into a show; the book is available on Amazon. He presents workshops on mindset and emotional balance using pop culture. Poetry has been published by Nitrogen House and Scrittura Magazine; The Ekphrastic Review, and some are on Youtube. You can follow on Twitter - @28thraves or Insta - @28zacthrav ** Who Am I? Several months ago my doctor asked, Do you remember any past lives? No! I said. Now I’m not so sure. Here I am in a dream, surrounded by African villagers. The people all know me, accept me as one of them. I know them, too, from the prisoner, nursing mother, bandoneon player, and dandy, to both the warrior and his horse. We’re the Oro, a cross section of village life, a jury to bring justice to all our people. I nod at the scribe, here to record our meeting. That’s my favorite job. On waking I can’t recall the outcome of the trial, but my conscience is clear – only how do I know about the Oro? Weird dreams are my norm – talking animals and nameless quests – but this is different. A week later, I’m on a museum tour in a strange city. My legs shake when I spy my dream squad posing atop a Magbo helmet. Who’s the large face below the villagers? Me? Any moment I expect to hear the voice of Rod Serling. Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia in the first class admitting women. Thanks to fellow poets, who generously share the hottest poetry news, Alarie visited The Ekphrastic Review a few months after its birth and decided to move in to stay. She is a consultant for prizes, occasional judge, and received one of the first Fantastic Ekphrastic Awards in 2020. Please check out her three poetry collections on the Ekphrastic Bookshelf. ** Mom and I Go Shopping for Masks Before We Learn We Need to Grasp the Concept of Cultural Appropriation And it’s just as well, as we wouldn’t have been able to deal with the guilt on top of everything else, Dad just having croaked and us in the hospital gift shop at the very moment he slipped away. Our cells ring at the same time. We stare at each other. Maybe if we’d waited to take a break, or gone a lot earlier? Or maybe he and his oncologist had a secret pact and maybe that doctor pushed a little more morphine than required, held off till we couldn’t see. Maybe doesn’t really count anymore. We take the elevator to his room on the 5th floor. Just enough time to absorb his vacancy then leave the room when they come to scrape off his corneas. Mom signs all the papers. We make a few calls, don’t know what to do with ourselves next, head to the parking garage. “That new folk art store’s just opened.” Hushed, her husky Tallulah voice, seductive in any occasion. It’s not like our homes aren’t overflowing with handmade objects from lands other than ours, but we drive over to check it out. An African vendor at the counter is showing his wares to the owner, whose mouth twists with disinterest. But Mom and I know. This is not airport art. We sidle over to the seller, smile. “Meet us outside,” our voices low, conspiratorial. He does. He opens the rear of his van. The smell of campfire smoke rushes out, cloaks us, confirms authenticity. These masks have been danced, at night, under stars. Or maybe the wool’s being pulled over our eyes. We don’t ask. Or care. We have always favored the ease of presumption. Besides, distraction is the point, and it’s here in spades. We scribble mom’s address on a piece of paper, point which way to turn first. Fifteen minutes later, her arc of the cul de sac is lined with carvings, face masks, helmet masks, the odd basket. Mom and I shuffle sideways, shoulders pressing, like Chang and Eng, not speaking, pointing to this one, then that. Bobbing and shaking our separate heads. A distant cousin from across town chooses that moment to come pay her respects. Isn’t she a bit early? She surveys the scene — the masks, us, the vendor. Back to the vendor, us, the masks. She can’t quite work out what’s happening so lands on that default sympathy face everyone hates but knows how to give, then mumbles, “He’s in a better place,” a no less despicable offering, shuffles backwards to her car. Mom and I nod, not at the cousin’s purloined propriety nor at her sweeping Uriah Heep exit, but at this mask and that, already putting nails in our walls. Mikki Aronoff Mikki Aronoff’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, London Reader, SurVision, Rogue Agent Journal, Popshot Quarterly, South Shore Review, The Fortnightly Review, Gentian Journal, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and elsewhere. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she is also involved in animal advocacy. ** Power of Oro Oro, do not disclose our most secret task Ride upon your steed, sacred avian perches Over all, sentinel, protector of our people Warriors, bards, infants in arms, those who fill Air with chants and music, celebratory wine Render our past within scrolls, carry all into battle Rejoice in our gods, survival of Oro, most wise Intelligent elder, each purposeful; walk the path Oro shall keep vigil, upon his head, mighty strength Reduce enemies to harmless as we march on Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson is a poet who loves challenges, from nature to current events, from captive elephants to teen issues of bullying. Ekphrastic writing has become a mainstay. Her poems appear in many journals including Misfit, Open Door, Sledgehammer and The Ekphrastic Review; full length works are available on Amazon. Dickson is a Pushcart prize nominee who participates in many workshops and coordinates 100 thousand poets for change. She shares her home with rescued feral cats, Cam and Claire. ** Emergence Song We come. We come from the great unknown. We come to welcome you into the world. We celebrate your arrival from the dust into fully created by the One-Who-Starts-The-World. We come bringing music of life. All will follow you. We emerge. We merge of out clouds, from a distance you can’t imagine. We greet you. We’ve been watching for you. Once you were nothing, now you are present like the land and stirring waters. All this is yours now. Protect it and love it. We will be watching to see how you do. Nurture the land and the food growing from plants. Do not harm the ones following you. We hope you will spread words of kindness to those still waiting to arrive. We will be watching to see if you do. Here. Here is the great Ibis. Learn how he moves among the land and water, and befriends the cows. Do the same. Learn. We will be watching you. We trust you to do wonderful surprises for a long time. On my head, you will find my thoughts offering ten more treasures. You are in my dreams and now you are real as the Book of Life, one of the many treasures. Be careful when you open and use it, and we will be watching. All this world is in your care. Do what is right and proper. See this other gift. This one is music so you can sing to your mate. The Great Ibis has dipped his beak into creation and provided one. Take care of your mate. We see your mate already slipping into your arms. This is how to learn compassion. Now use music to sing to each other how you love each other. See how gifts multiply and intensify. Look at the treasure chest of stories. Place your story inside and share your stories with those that follow after you. We will watch what you say. Make the stories good ones. Now I am thinking of offering you the gift of hearing each other before responding. I believe this is helpful. And instead of telling you about all the other gifts, maybe I should encourage you to explore the rest of the gifts. We trust you will know how to use them well. But we will be watching, closely, because each gift has both good and bad uses. Some gifts might fall into disrepair if you do not carefully use them. Remember to always love and encourage others, and nothing bad will happen. Take care of the earth, because you arrived out of the earth, and nothing bad will happen to the earth if you take care of it. Welcome all the plants, trees, animals, and sunrises. Take care of them. Welcome them. We will be watching at a distance. When you look into the sky, you will see us watching. Now we are leaving. We are leaving you like a dream leaves when waking. We are leaving, we are leaving, we are leaving, be careful how to use your gifts. We already see you won’t use them correctly. We hope we are wrong. Please prove us wrong. We are leaving. Martin Willitts Jr Martin Willitts Jr, edits the Comstock Review.. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, The Wire Fence Holding Back the World (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 21 full-length collections including Blue Light Award The Temporary World. His current book includes Harvest Time (Deerbrook Editions, 2021). ** The Mask of Many Parts I am the maker of Man, in all things there is balance. I can shape a mother’s breast, create the curve of kindness, chisel out the preacher’s mouth, his breath an incantation, fret and mold a musician’s voice to hone notes of sorrow and joy, chip rub whittle trim trace hew stipple skim I can sculp the prisoner’s conscience into something bright, enlightened, model the hands of medicine man so he can heal the ailing, smooth the elder’s angled chin to meld with wit and wisdom, slice gorge rend rip cleave grate hack split I can forge the warrior’s sword, his crown welded tight to helmet, mount the gold on a soldier’s metal arm him with weapons of war, cast the eagle, wings of bronze to mask the edge of the abyss, heat torch singe sear ignite melt engineer. In all things there is balance, I am the maker of Man. Kate Young Kate Young lives in England and has been passionate about poetry since childhood. She generally writes free verse and loves responding to art through ekphrastic poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Village, Words for the Wild, Poetry on the Lake, Alchemy Spoon, Dreich and Friends and Friendship. She has had poems in two Scottish Writers Centre chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlet A Spark in the Darkness is due to be published by Hedgehog Press next year. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet. ** Ancestors Unravel mythologies fabrications of generations carried over seas and oceans wrapping around limbs, seaweed weaving old wives tales. Cut against coral, freeing ankles: bleeding gashes worth the unravelling into measured strokes and hefty breaths of air, spitting out deceptions. I am not moved by statues by false idols, or prophets calling out doomsday predictions. But by those who seek refuge on shores that hold tired limbs in open palms Eleni Gouliaras Eleni Gouliaras is a Scarborough poet. Her experience living with major depressive disorder shapes her writing. Her poetry touches on mental health, resilience and resistance. Her poem "Capitalism*2mg" was a winner for the 2020 Power of the Poets contest. Her poem "Proceed with Caution" is published on Pamenar Press online magazine. Her poem "Silence" is published on the Scugog Council for the Arts website after winning 2nd place in the Voice of the Arts Literary Contest 2020. Her writing also appears in Feel Ways: A Scarborough Anthology, released in April 2021. Her poem "Pulse" appears in the August 2021 issue of The Quarantine Review. She is busy studying to become a Library Technician, but poetry always finds a way into her life. ** Beasts of No Nation When you told me your father worked in the oil business, I pictured a ruddy guy in grimy denim coveralls and dented white hard hat, Standing next to an oil derrick in Texas -- the kind that often catches fire. Your family’s home movies from the oil company compound in Lagos, Where you grew up -- set me straight. Pin-the-tail on the donkey games I played at childhood parties in White Plains, Couldn’t hold a blindfold to the Yoruba dancers celebrating your thirteenth birthday. Thirty or forty Nigerian women and men rhythmically paraded through your backyard, Soundlessly singing a Fela Kuti song. The men’s white lace-embellished trousers and the women’s elaborate headwraps Were vibrant in silent 16mm Kodachrome. Your pet White Throated monkey, Naija, made a cameo, Leaping silently from painted porch to your younger sister’s bare shoulder. Later than fateful afternoon, your mother couldn’t find the cash She’d stashed in the cookie jar, a ceramic elephant boy outfitted in a sailor suit. By nightfall, the jig was up. Peter, the teenage Yoruba houseboy, was arrested for theft. Later that year, they shipped you off to a Swiss boarding school, Because there was no American high school in the company compound And because you were beginning to like the local ganja too much. You have spent a difficult life trying to sort your place, your roots . . . Living in the darkness of your corporate father’s oily shadow. I guess it’s true if our fathers sinned, and are no more, It is we who have to bear their iniquities. Jude Bradley Jude Bradley’s prose has aired on National Public Radio and has been published in Teaching in the Two-Year College journal, and Momentum magazine. Her poetry has been published by literary journals including Tupelo Press and Thimble. Jude's poem “Argos” was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry and flash fiction re-envision classical literature and art and reflect on urban life in an ever-shrinking, ever-expanding world. She is lifelong writing teacher who loves to sing, dance, and garden. She is the Reverend Al Green’s most devoted fan. ** A Chieftain’s Burden The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, the smithy, the quack, the shaman, the drummer, the trumpeter, the singer, all ride on the horns of a giant ram parading through town on this helmet sat on the head of the chieftain who walks alone guided by the light of the north star and feeling the earth rotate beneath his feet. In the deepening dusk, the helmet takes on an otherworldly glow. The warm community scene so evident by light of day turns to vague, shadowy blurs reminiscent of monsters and devils. The chieftain breathes a sigh of relief, reaching the temple gates for here, he can finally unburden himself unburden himself of the weight of the helmet, the weight of the community the weight of the community that depends on him and transfer this weighty burden to God. Nivedita Karthik Nivedita Karthik is a graduate in Immunology from the University of Oxford and an accomplished Bharatanatyam (Indian classical dance form) dancer. Her poems have previously appeared in Glomag, Society of Classical Poets, The Ekphrastic Review, The Epoch Times, Eskimo Pie Literary Journal, The Poet (Christmas, Childhood, and Faith issues), The Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, Bamboo Hut, Visual Verse, and Trouvaille Review. She is a regular participant on the open mic show held by Rattle Poetry. Her micro-stories have appeared in The Potato Soup Literary Journal. She is currently working on her first poetry book. Find more on her blog https://www.justrandomwithnk.com/. ** Droppings Assorted castings behind us… still to come and presently developing into a village. In mine there have already been seamstresses, sailors...a tram-driver and characters in fireside tales that skipped professions. Time offers only flash recordings reduced mostly to fiction. Earned livings aren’t lives except to daily comrades; family hold onto words – advice orders, beratings, tall tales. Actions leave scenes behind of comedy, farce and tragedy. Irene Cunningham Irene Cunningham has had many poems in many magazines and anthologies over the decades. Hedgehog Press published a poetry conversation between her and Diana Devlin – SANDMEN: A Space Odyssey. One of her poems was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2019, and she won the Autumn Voices memoir competition. She has recently moved to live in Brighton, and is editing several novels from the back shelves. ** The Warrior’s Heron We dance, dance, dance, dancing ourselves away on a world forever turning, turning, turning, turning to you my partners in life and death, as my golden babe suckles at my breast, saying what a magnificent crowd, our heels, kicking up in celebration, worshipping the passing of our lives, grinning, grimacing, grinding against the grain, swallowing our palm wine in frantic gulps, the warrior’s heron our only judge. Melissa Llanes Brownlee Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has fiction in The Citron Review, Milk Candy Review, (mac)ro(mic), Necessary Fiction, HAD, The Birdseed, Bandit Fiction, Best Small Fictions and elsewhere. Hard Skin, her short story collection, will be coming soon from Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com. ** Wear Me High Adorned with gold He wears me high. A metal bird With no hope of flight He wears me high For a god on whom they tread. With no hope of flight Men and women offer music and song For a god on whom they tread. With elongated head Men and women offer music and song Wealth, and a child With elongated head. Men crafted me. Wealth and a child All offerings for prosperity. Men crafted me A body, a beak, a wing All offerings for prosperity For plentiful crops and long life. A body, a beak, a wing With no hope of flight For plentiful crops and long life He wears me high Alison R Reed Alison R Reed has been writing for many years but only recently took up poetry, and even more recently discovered ekphrasis. She has had poems published in local anthologies and in 2020 won the Writers' Bureau poetry competition. She is a long time member of Walsall Writers' Circle. ** Wild Things I struggle to find a foothold in the blackness of this void, hold the gaze of the thirteen pairs of irises that bore into my chest. This is the face of the obsidian judgement that has kept me in my place, my feet aligned to the path that every woman before me has been taught to walk, in my land. Straying is punishable. One day, I dared to flee the confines of this cosmos that told me how I should view the world from the moment I was flushed from the womb, from the moment I was a helpless suckling clutching at my mother’s breast. I became the rogue that ripped through the palm fronds that roped me in. I was brought back to the fold in irons. She floats towards me, grand matriarch, she of the lidless eyes, red pupils blazing with punitive power, while others of my flesh and blood mutely follow, riding the horned carpet of her tresses. I take in my last breath and exhale. At her bidding the ibis will shred my heart and peck out my eyes - those wild things that dared to dream beyond the void, that dared to look askance. Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist and poet who serves as a chief editor for Authora Australis. She holds a Masters in English, and is a member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project. Her poems have been published in both print and online literary journals and anthologies including The Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, Bracken Magazine, Red Eft Review, and The Eunoia Review. She won the 66th Moon Prize awarded by Writing in a Woman’s Voice Journal, and an Honourable Mention in the Glass Poetry Awards 2020. She lives and works in Sydney on the land of the Ku-ring-gai people of The Eora Nation. ** This Is What I Remember A last gasp of Summer in mid to late Fall. A night so sticky, so hot, my sister and I were barely wearing PJs. Her face was stuck in a pillow. Mama blasting Santana, my sister sleeping through it. I remember Wildcat attacking my toes. Me tucking my feet underneath the sheet, and Wildcat pouncing up all wild-like to bite my hair. I remember wasted laughter in the living room. The hard-driving beat of Jingo. Me pulling the sheet over my head as the African drumbeat drove harder. The conga all power. The chanting tribal. The bed rattling—along with my nerves. I remember the laughter. Stopping. When one of Mama’s friends shrieked, “There’s something at the window!” I remember pulling the sheet below my nose and pressing my ear against the wall. Listening. Listening. And Mama’s boyfriend shushing, “I think it wants in.” The wall was vibrating from the heavy hypnotic percussion, surging through my body like a conjuration. The record skipping to an altered beat. The needle screeching like a cat until somebody picked it up. I remember jumping at the sudden quiet and Mama whispering, her voice an irregular heartbeat, “I don’t like the look in its eyes. I’m going to get the girls.” I remember the door to our bedroom creeping open. A sliver of caution spilling yellow across the floor. Wildcat’s fur turning spikey and jumping off the bed. Mama scooping up my sister. Me standing up all jellyfish for legs. I remember lying on the couch. My sister still asleep on one side. Me, on the other. Mama and her friends were huddled on the floor, speaking in Spanish about calling a priest. Whispers like a prayer, the fear in their voice’s hot breath in my ear. Mama’s boyfriend was shutting all the windows. Another of her friends turned out the lights. The candles on the table kept flickering like angry wind in an airtight room. I remember someone screaming “Chicken,” and Mama silent screaming into the palm of her hand. Me following Mama’s eyes. My sister’s fingers lizard skin, with nails like talons, her nose a beak. I remember shrinking into the couch, cheek pressed hard into a threadbare cushion. A dark shadow of a hand crossing my face. Me holding my breath. Fading to black. I remember my sister shaking me awake. Mama on the phone twisting the yellow curly cord between long fingers and bare nails. Pacing. Pacing. An old bible and sainted candles spread across the kitchen table like a makeshift altar. And Mama asking Daddy to come and get us, please. Because something visited last night. Some. Thing. I remember the sweat on my skin in that sweltering apartment. And me shivering. Karen Crawford Karen Crawford grew up in the vibrant neighborhood of East Harlem in New York City. She currently lives in the City of Angels where she exorcises demons one word at a time. You can find her on twitter: @KarenCrawford_ ** The Truth in Justice Justice in its embodiment: The communal perspective truths producing a foundation. A foundation stood on by those who carry the weight of their fellow people on their conscience. But, is justice true? The essence of it is Truth. The execution—how you live out Truth—is the ethic. Feel the gravity of this reality: Truth is in everyone; we are born from it. And only those who think they know how Truth looks get to decide how Truth is executed. Mary Elizabeth Bruner Mary Elizabeth Bruner is a 2019 Wofford College graduate living in Greenville, SC with her dog, four cats, and nine chickens. ** Breathed the Sky In the early times the animals sang all day long. They gave thanks for their food and took nothing for granted. There was no envy or greed, only yes and no. And when it was silent all rested in gentle peaceful calmness. In those days the kingfisher and the lark didn’t yet have names, but they knew who they were. And the heather, willow, and the maple, encouraged by the sun, made sugar and breathed the sky, and because of this, we can breathe too. Daphne Clifton Daphne Clifton lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes poetry, plays Renaissance music, and makes art. Her poems have appeared in Alchemy, Bellwether Review, Paper Mountains:2020 Seabeck Haiku Getaway Anthology, The Avocet, and Voices from the Mill Pond. **  After Breakfast, by Elin Danielson-Gambogi (Finland) 1890 Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is After Breakfast, by Elin Danielson-Gambogi. Deadline is October 1, 2021 . You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.
The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Helping the editor share the time and expenses involved is very much appreciated. There is an easy button to click above to share a five spot through PayPal or credit card. Thank you. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include ELIN DANIELSON-GAMBOGI WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your piece. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, October 1, 2021. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we will no longer send out sorry notices or yes letters. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. Please note, some selected responses may also be chosen for our newly born podcast, TERcets, with host Brian Salmons. Your submission implies permission should he decide to read yours. If that happens, you will be notified and sent a link to share. Thank you! 14. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send Spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! We send a newsletter zero to two times a month, with hopes of more consistency in the future. It updates you on challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, the podcast, and more. You can cancel at any time, of course, but may find yourself back on the list after another submission. We hope you don't cancel because we like to stay in touch occasionally! 15. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 16. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 17. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.  Planet Set, by Joseph Cornell (USA) 1950 To Joseph Cornell Regarding Planet Set, Dedicated To Giuditta Pasta Perfection, you would have us know, is hemispheric sky aglow with heaven's art the eye can frame unveiled in darkness, name by name, amid the orbs that move beheld in paths, unending, thus compelled to be predestined solar set that would its precious gems beget of clarity in nature's glass and man's that would for nature's pass as crystalline in form and tone, the beauty lent we cannot own except as voice exquisite found in which, divine, we hear its sound. 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. ** Atlas Titans aren't immortal. When Atlas dies he'll strike the Earth's gong to sound a song of death: skies will tear from pole to melting pole. Futures shrink - spheres within a sphere - to a single blind bead. You'll hear his mallet swing and his final exhalation, his final exclamation: Titans aren't immortal. Paul McDonald Paul McDonald taught at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, where he ran the Creative Writing Programme. He took early retirement in 2019 to write full time. He is the author of over twenty books, which cover fiction, poetry, and scholarship. His creative work has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes including The Bedford Prize, The Bridport Prize, The John Clare Poetry Prize, the Ottakars/Faber and Faber Poetry Competition, the Sentinel Poetry Prize, the Sentinal Short Story Prize, and Retreat West Flash Fiction Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. Paul McDonald Amazon Author Page ** A Small Box of Everything I stand alone Ninety degrees north Earth rotates beneath my feet Every latitude begins with me Each time zone No time All time One pirouette describes twenty-four hours and a trip around the world The polestar identifies me anchors above my head Half the heavens spin around it and around me All time No time I raise a glass full of nothing and one half full of nothing and one half empty Our blue planet in another and our virgin moon Finally crystallised rock Formed by a force unimaginable to me insignificant to the stars All of this the rest of creation distant moons Titania and Oberon unleashed from their realm held in a rough box behind a sheet of melted sand Rob Joynson Rob Joynson has written poetry for 50 years with no intention of publication. For the last few years as a member of poetry groups in Louth, Lincolnshire, and the instigator of several performance poetry events he has decided to expose his poetry to the critical gaze of the wider world. He published his first collection Of Life and Love and Interludes in 2020 and has been published by the The Ekphrastic Review. ** An Uncharted Star* Do you remember a celestial map on a shelf of a laboratory in our high school among the heap of scrap neglected but kept its former glory? Beside of it an assemblage of balls expressed the planets orbiting around the sun, but now on earth each of them falls and they get dumped and packed in a box browned. Though these stars are almost forgotten now I still recall your dream you told to me when we searched an uncharted star somehow in the night sky and I still want to see your comeback as a ballet star on stage and look up your lasting shine from backstage. Toshiji Kawagoe * This Cornell artwork is dedicated to Giuditta Pasta, a nineteenth-century Italian opera singer. Toshiji Kawagoe, Ph.D. is a professor at Future University Hakodate. He lives in Hokkaido, Japan. His poems in classical Chinese have been published in the anthologies of Chinese poetry and his science fiction short stories in S-F Magazine and Anotherealm. His academic works in economics are also published in many books and academic journals. ** Boxed Love You first came into my life in a store on Fourth Avenue where I found a lithograph of you as you had been in life. Captivated, I saw your face rise before me like the dawn and I had to possess you, claim you as mine. You won my affection from beyond the grave and your ghost was safe to pursue, no fear of rejection. I have impossible crushes, death ensuring they are unrequited. I long for what cannot be, to see you, to hear you sing. To listen to your unique voice, the ability you had to sing contralto as easily as you sang soprano and I envy Stendhal who saw you perform. He heard what I will never hear, he breathed the air you breathed out, he seems like a love rival and he is with you in the afterlife. All I can offer you this side of the grave is one of my boxes of discarded artifacts. I dedicate it to you, Giuditta Pasta. Tête Etoilée. Stephen Poole Stephen Poole served for 31 years in the Metropolitan Police in London, England. As a freelance journalist, he has written for a variety of British county and national magazines. Passionate about poetry since boyhood, his poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry on the Lake, LPP Magazine, and two anthologies. ** On Planet Set by Joseph Cornell I don't have much to give, a few worn treasures on a weathered tray plucked from the ash heap of a broken life. Two shells the sea has polished into pearl, a row of glasses ready to hold tears or fine champagne, and two maps of heaven, the swirl of the milky way drawn like a scarf across night’s body, filled with stars that trace the outlines of gods and monsters measuring their way through centuries of sky, I offer you these as gift and invitation, emblem and souvenir of the plain magic that asks nothing more than wonder, the held breath of our most profound attention. Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who finds ekphrasis particularly satisfying, as it links her two major passions, art and language. She has had work appear in many print and online journals and anthologies, including The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester and The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, and the latest editions of Verse Virtual and Earth’s Daughters. ** Join Up The Dots Though being one inconsequential dot in our universe of monumental proportion, we have developed technologies of astonishing achievement, and creativity. We have an insatiable palette, for exploration and discovery from our nose of curiosity protruding from psyche and skull yet should we inflict on other planets our predilection for heinous greed with ears tone deaf to alien suffering and eyes wide open only when convenient? For we are the self-proclaimed alpha anilmalia with unbridled capability, to induce pain on the weak yet we are the moral mentors to vulnerable offspring en pursuit of the noble fibre to join up the dots. Despite global warnings from leading indicators, we perch on the precipice of self-destruction - planet and conurbations and nodes from nature of plant, bird and animal endangered species - from egotistical aims far beyond our horizon of decency, of humanity, of honesty, of truth. While we may claim charity for the weak and those insecure in their own fragile skin, we bomb, we maim, we inflict carnage at the very slightest provocation. Shame, yet shame is but perceived weakness. Do we want to export wanton human traits to the fringes of our unbridled universe to life in an existence beyond our capability for peace, kindness and tenets of tolerance? Alun Robert Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical free verse. He has achieved success in poetry competitions across the British Isles and North America. His work has been published by many literary magazines, anthologies and webzines in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, India, South Africa, Kenya, USA and Canada. Since 2018, he has been part of The Ekphrastic Review community particularly enjoying the fortnightly challenges. He is a member of the Federation of Writers Scotland for whom he was a Featured Writer in 2019. ** Flight Like the light escaping from under the door, I hurried into the Milky Way, a train of starry monks, Wiser than the moon, shining on their own. In search of permanence akin to flying ants Dotting the dark searching for the flames To shed their wings and procreate, Into a world of little known, I stepped. The temple dome beamed gold. The bells chimed and the chanting grew as the pastor spoke. Earthen lamps flickered lighting up a little girl's face, Head down, hands folded, she stood in silent prayers. Looking to find all that had disappeared Beyond the receding horizon, to which she could run As the pink began to grey. Somewhere among the trees or the muddy lanes, Peace must be. Unclear as to bring or let stay, Building existence between now and then. Abha Das Sarma An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing the most. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru. ** Safe at Last Ah! My celestial hemispheres in a box Three handspans across How much more convenient, Less unimaginably far Than ice caps, islands and stars Carefully plotted on this map, The frightening infinity of it all If not pinned down by me They would fly off their axis My perspective is god like The earth all small to me here. To make it more homely I add a few tchotchkes: A marble, conductor’s baton, shells, goblets That sort of thing Before the hugeness, the great unknowing Escapes! With god like hand I Wrestle them into the box Decant, filter, sieve them of Size, of unknown hugeness You’ll not find the roaring of the sea For these shells Or the swell and cacophony of the orchestra For this baton The revelry for these wine glasses… But this manageable tidy size Fitting on my mantelpiece Boxed in and boxed out To be passed by Without a murmur As if the world were not The ogre I take it to be But tame, caged, docile Safe. Lucie Payne Lucie is a retired librarian who is writing as much as she can. ** Night Sky Voices - a Duplex I protect my cuttings, defend files, memorable charts, for even the most sheltered boxes sound like night skies you found the sound of sheltered boxes quite a night sky when the pavers under your feet signed and stirred mysteriously then the pavers under your feet started to wave, and mystery stirred, saved the charts that work as carbon-copies of her voice how may charts save the carbon-copy work of her voice, and when did I become the bachelor of calm and clouds? When the muse of clouds turned me into a bachelor of calm, I sang to the sky in even waves, my world right in your hands my even sky you sang to, waving the world right with your hands that could never caress me, that forever set my mind surreal that I forever should mind, still I caress the thoughts that set surreals in files, as I cut time, protect memories, and map out superstars. Kate Copeland Kate Copeland started absorbing stories ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching and translating some silvery languages; her love for art, water & writing led her to poetry...with publications sealed already! You can find her poems @ The Ekphrastic Review, Hedgehog Press, The Poetry Barn x Poetry Distillery, The Spirit Fire Review, First Lit.Review-East, GrandLittleThings & The Metaworker. Kate was born in Rotterdam some 51 ages ago and adores housesitting in the UK, USA and in Spain. ** is that all there is I am traveling the world is also traveling and together we blue latitude and longitude the oceans mapped with interchangeable stars and isn’t that always the way I’ll drink to that magician checking the schedule cape that glitters hat pulled low who is he really and where do the planets go the planets turning the universe expanding and why does it always say end and dead but meantime everything is moving beyond is watching blurring falling behind but where is when and why is it always between the getting on the getting off the port of call unanswered just keep moving crossing riding piling up gone but mostly not stopping it must be the wind or maybe a wave both sides around repeating maybe and maybe not the focus shifting now the other side is turning all transparent only ghosts where am I going wasn’t this supposed to be a journey with a destination yet it’s taking all my time I didn’t even say hello hello I don’t know why and then goodbye will I return again once maybe am I when is it how now about tomorrow here and every step is sideways holding fast the way to never in this blue blue orb I don’t know who is what and how is where is it or not Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig has always enjoyed visiting the worlds created by Joseph Cornell. ** World in Motion My daughter, hysterical, wakes me in the middle of the night to drive her to the hospital. In the private ER waiting room, the father cries as he tells how he had tried to hold her up and call 911 at the same time. Failed. He curses the boyfriend who’d broken up with her by text from the Army, threatens to kill him. The divorced parents talk of their daughter’s manic-depression, maybe she’d be luckier not to live. My yellow hoodie shrouds my face somewhat, protects the back of my neck from hospital cold as stress clenches every muscle. The second hand on the round Pegasus clock ticks audibly 360 degrees, a mechanical pulse measuring interminable moments of anguish as the night creeps by. A van pulls up to the ER drop off. A man hops from the driver’s side, not bothering to shut the door. He runs through the ER doors and returns to the passenger side with a wheelchair. He rushes his laboring wife past me, as a nurse instructs them to take the elevator on the left to the maternity wing. In the security office next to the entrance sits a box labeled “human organs.” Printed on the side are icons for various body parts—one of them eyes. We wait hours for a specialist. My daughter slumps on the berm of the parking lot with her friend. Near the hospital entrance a pair of rabbits frolics on the small lawn. The specialist comes and goes. My daughter and her girlfriend are allowed to say good-bye to their friend. The sculpture in the hospital visitors’ entrance a large granite boulder—perfectly round gray, is designed to roll continuously when the water flows beneath it. As the morning shift arrives, a custodian turns on the water, sets the world in motion. Jeanne Blum Lesinski An author of nonfiction and poetry, Jeanne Blum Lesinski writes for journals, lifestyle and gardening magazines, anthologies, and online sites. When not at her computer, she can often be found on a bicycle path, in a garden, or deep in a book. Recent work has appeared in Non-Binary Review, the Alphanumeric podcast, and F3LL. She is a finalist in The Ekphrastic Review Women Artists contest. ** Night Sky for Giuditta Her voice, high soprano reaches for the night sky, universal sound permeates atmosphere, crystalline notes held; Giuditta’s hand rises into spotlight as moon ascends. His tribute, love from afar, shadowbox altar worthy of her praise; were she with him, hands clasped to her breast. Voice rising in pitch, her shattered crystals shower him with joy, amidst broken glass, face streaming with tears, eyes raised with her to night sky. Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson has seen La Traviata and other operas, but more can appreciate art from which to write poetry. Visual prompts, she finds intriguing and challenging. Nature, animals and water always spark poetry as well; her two rescued feral cats standing by for the first reading. Misfit, Open Door, Sledgehammer and The Ekphrastic Review are among the many journals where Dickson's work can be found, as well as full length works on Amazon. ** Cornell’s Planet Set Tanka singing their Earth song an artist’s scavenged objects on dowling rods two balls create new alignments planets orbiting the sun cyan blue marble the hemisphere’s colours this day he recalls the resonance between the heavens and the individual he locks a shadow box celestial navigation charts stars clinging to it like silver webs on the wind full moon lunar tides Ilona Martonfi Ilona Martonfi is a poet, editor, literary curator, and activist; she is the author of four poetry books, Blue Poppy (Coracle Press, 2009), Black Grass (Broken Rules Press, 2012), The Snow Kimono (Inanna Publications, 2015) and Salt Bride (Inanna Publications, 2019). Forthcoming, The Tempest (Inanna Publications, 2022). Her work has published in seven chapbooks, journals across North America and abroad. Recently, her poem "My Brother's Ashes" was nominated by The Ekphrastic Review for the Best Microfiction Awards Anthology, 2021. She is the curator of Visual Arts Centre and Argo Bookshop Reading Series. She is also the recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2010 Community Award. ** The Moment the Womb Unravels We all want to run our own Broadway show leave these trappings of time and place the moment the womb unravels its innards. Each body, each person is a wilting-flower vase. We’re all departmentalized into this world. Boxed contents, the volume of which is equal and yet disproportionate, whatever vibrations shape their path; the framework of these people. They are all the same, glass half full, half-empty, They are like a divided ocean pivoting one way and then another moment another way we’re all internationally, globally, commingling, mingling ah, all of creation, creation is singing listen to the hummingbird, the common nightingale listen to the New Guinea singing dog howl listen to the gibbon and the common quail. This world has its very own reggae-roots-musician, a music baton in an otherworldly "conductor's hand" this world is a singing beluga whale the musical notations, connotations of which, we’ll never understand. Mark Andrew Heathcote Mark Andrew Heathcote is adult learning difficulties support worker, his poetry has been published in many journals, magazines and anthologies, he resides in the UK, from Manchester, Mark is the author of In Perpetuity and Back on Earth two books of poems published by a CTU publishing group, Creative Talents Unleashed. ** Three Haikus Planet Rotating planet. Moving beings all around, circling the sun. Earth Gravity and life, moon circling the planet, earth’s floating forces. Full Circle Coming full circle, air, gravity, and life forms, earth interlocking. Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher has been writing since 2010 and has had many micro-flash fiction stories published. In 2018 her book Shorts for the Short Story Enthusiasts, was published and The Importance of Being Short, in 2019. She currently resides on Long Island, New York with her husband Richard and dogs Lucy and Breanna. ** Voice of an Angel Once I thought love would be enough to fly us away spinning past planets and stars reaching up to them breaking through the atmosphere to grasp that moment and put it in a glass, our own shining orb that would stay forever gleaming and shimmering and singing at my touch with the pure notes of the voice of an angel breaking through the atmosphere, your voice a voice so pure it will never shatter the glass. It’s lustre has faded now but it will stay forever a still shining sphere in my memories and dreams. Lynn White Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com///www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/ ** Night Shift at the Observatory A liqueur glass tilted on a balanced shelf upholding celestial heavens cradles the eye of the world as it wavers between north and south six crystal glasses host the opera singer’s top notes trapped in raw quartz. Venus swirls then swigs a shot of medicinal herbs shocks the stagehand into raising the curtain. Perfect number, perfect crystal, infinity held in two wooden balls rolling on a pair of doweling rods. Suzy Aspell Suzy lives and works in Luton, Bedfordshire, UK. Her work has appeared in Sledgehammer Lit, Spelt Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review and Wombwell Rainbow. Suzy wrote and directed two plays for the Civic Centre in Tainan, Taiwan, on British pantomime theme and is currently working towards a poetry pamphlet. ** The Aqua Game Board Our Celestial Hemisphere game board hangs on the wall. It’s a diorama box with two aqua maps of constellations above a shelf with six tulip glasses. We roll the dice of coordinates to see where we land on Northern and Southern sky views, and drop a clear or aqua glass ball into a cup. If we land in the Milky Way, we move a clear sphere into the next cup. If we land on a celestial body, we move a blue sphere. On rainy days, there are two white croquet balls on a railing above the hemispheres; we take them down to push around on the carpet. We direct each snowy ball through chair and table legs with a wooden wand, and carefully replace everything back on the wall when finished. But now this game says, water. Its aqua spheres look like a flooded earth where water seeps from melting snowcaps and tropical storms stream rivers of muck into subway tunnels. I want to jettison this Humpty Dumpty board game which keeps me playing while earth goes overboard. I’ve cracked glass game pieces and drained the magic from the wand. There’s no water to douse wildfires, as all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men are nowhere to be found. Melinda Thomsen Melinda Thomsen’s book full length Armature was just released from Hermit Feathers Press, and Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Naming Rights and Field Rations. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Tar River Poetry, The Comstock Review, and others. Find her at @ThomsenMelinda  Congratulations to Jennifer Leigh Selig, winner of our ekphrastic flash summer vacation contest. Click on image above to read her story!  Don't miss out on the sauciest contest in ekphrastic history...Adults Only teases you with sixty sex-themed works from art history. Our guest judge is the one and only Alexis Rhone Fancher. Click on image for instructions and to order your inspiration book.  The Little Deer, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1946 Thank you to everyone who entered our How I Spent My Summer Vacation ekphrastic flash fiction contest. We are pleased to announce the winner is Jennifer Leigh Selig with her story, "Resignation Letter." Congratulations, Jennifer! Please share this story on your social media and help spread the word and the work of our amazing writers. ** Resignation Letter Dear Memoir Students, As you know, I took the summer away from our ongoing course in order to finally fully tend to my own writing. I spent two months trampling through the forest of my memory, leaving many a broken branch in my wake. I wrote nine pieces in total, and each one cost me dearly. Hear no hyperbole when I tell you this—each piece felt like a near-death experience. I am writing to offer you my deepest regrets. Now that I fully understand the costs of memoir writing, which I have been so ignorantly extracting from you for years now, I cannot in good faith continue to mete out such punishment. I apologize for dismissing your cries of but this is hard. It is hard, outrageously so. The past is full of too many slings and arrows. It is to be avoided. Therefore, I am pleased to inform you that I am resigning as your writing teacher, effective immediately. In the words of Frida Kahlo, “I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return.” I set you free, my little dears. Run, run, run—run for your lives. Run away from your past, and run into your future. Run for, run with, run toward your own joy. Stay present, Your Teacher Jennifer Leigh Selig Jennifer Leigh Selig is a lifelong educator with 33 years of classroom experience, teaching in the fields of literature, psychology, creativity studies, and the humanities. She’s also a prolific writer, authoring dozens of newspaper articles, book reviews, journal articles, 3 screenplays, and is either the author, editor, contributor, or publisher of over 40 books, including Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit. To see some of those titles, visit her publishing company, www.mandorlabooks.com.   Magbo Helmet for Oro Association Rituals, by Onabanjo of Itu Meko (Yoruba People) (Nigeria) c. 1880-1910 Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Magbo Helmet, by Onabanjo of Itu Meko . Deadline is September 17, 2021 . You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please. The Rules
1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Helping the editor share the time and expenses involved is very much appreciated. There is an easy button to click above to share a five spot through PayPal or credit card. Thank you. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include Onabanjo of Itu Meko WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your piece. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight EST, September 17, 2021. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we will no longer send out sorry notices or yes letters. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. Please note, some selected responses may also be chosen for our newly born podcast, TERcets, with host Brian Salmons. Your submission implies permission should he decide to read yours. If that happens, you will be notified and sent a link to share. Thank you! 14. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send Spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! We send a newsletter zero to two times a month, with hopes of more consistency in the future. It updates you on challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, the podcast, and more. You can cancel at any time, of course, but may find yourself back on the list after another submission. We hope you don't cancel because we like to stay in touch occasionally! 15. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 16. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 17. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.  Istanbul, by Garabet Yazmaciyan (Turkey) by 1929 Waiting "Armenian weddings have many traditions. One such tradition is the cutting of the red and green ribbon." Anonymous Green sky at moonrise means the lovers must have stood outside the artist's shop looking at his hand-painted sign, the self- portrait of a man sitting at an easel. No, it meant when this picture of an artist-at-work showed the man who could paint what they wanted, they did not have to buy a still-life like the picture on the other side of the sign, and they didn't want a landscape without people the Maiden's Tower without Hero waiting while Leandros swims toward her; to be reminded of tragedy, how he drowned in the darkness. Will we be in a boat? the young man asks in Armenian, and when the girl answers O yes! the artist smiles. Already his paint brush has begun to trace the circle of the moon fallen from the pale shape of the clouds, and even in darkness the boat holding the couple will leave the pier on the other side of the swollen river from a house that could be his house, a house where a man stands on a porch as smoke curls into the sky from a chimney pipe. Inside the house, built on stilts so the river can't come in a woman calls to him from the hearth -- Are they coming? Can you see them? She is thankful for the warmth of the fire after the violence of the storm, and thankful for her daughter coming home with the man she has decided to marry; who will, formally, ask her parents for her hand. In the past, weddings have been lavish the Priest placing small crowns on the heads of the bride and groom to consecrate them as king and queen of a new kingdom -- their own kingdom. The Byzantine Emperor is ancient history, part of a world where he built a Maiden's Tower to isolate his daughter -- to protect her from death, a fatal snake bite. Everyone in Istanbul knows of this legend, one of misfortune; and however unlikely such a story is in 1928 the woman in the kitchen is worried for the safety of her children, delayed by storm and high water as she prepares food for their engagement celebration stuffing grape leaves with meat and rice for Dolma, and crushing walnuts for Gata and Paklava. The young man will be their son, and when the sky clears her husband will paint the ritual colours -- that strange and diaphanous green. They cannot afford a luxurious ceremony, but the painting will be a wedding gift. In it, the children will be coming home by boat after the storm and before the signing of the marriage contract in the Consulate's office; then the pro- cession, money-giving and dancing in the streets on their way to watch their children blessed by the Priest. She has saved her wedding ribbon -- red and green -- for this very special day and her husband will paint the spring into the sky, into the moon-ripples reflected in the water so like a fortune made with wavy lines the gypsy has seen in her coffee grounds: the future of the young couple, who, like their foolish parents will share the wedding ribbon and start a family, unraveling time when the colour red is heart-fire burning in an artist's hearth. Laurie Newendorp Laurie Newendorp is one of the writers who is addicted to Ekphrastic Challenges. Yazmaciyan's painting, Istanbul, reminded her of her daughter's trip to Bodrum, on the Turkish coast north of Istanbul, to visit a friend who was studying underwater archaeology. In order to marry a Turkish boy, her friend had to sign a contract in a government office (standard procedure) before she married in America. The Armenian alphabet was accepted in Turkey until 1926 when Turkish became the official language of the country. Yazmaciyan's self-portrait, painted on a sign to advertise his tin shop, is one of his best-known works. ** The Moon Practises the Art of Night Photography
1. He leans into a sea-green sky. Soft focus. 2. Leander’s Tower. Foreground, midground and background: Straits of the Bosphorus. 3. Beyond Sultanahmet men sit in winding streets, play backgammon and drink small glasses of z’atar tea. Cats slink into shadow. Panorama. Pan from left to right. 4. In Beşiktaş a young woman stands, watches as mourners lift her mother’s bier into a waiting carriage. Amber beads twist through her fingers. Point of focus: the daughter. 5. A single boat with quiet oars. To avoid noise lower the ISO. 6. The muzzein calls the hour for morning prayer. The moon shutters the lens, slips away. Marjory Woodfield Marjory Woodfield is a New Zealand teacher and writer. She has lived in the Middle East and this often provides inspiration for her writing. She’s been published by the BBC, Atrium, Orbis, The High Window, The Pomegranate London and others. She has won the New Zealand Robert Burns Competition, and most recently been placed in the Hippocrates Poetry Awards, Yeovil, Ver and John McGivering writing competitions. She is currently recipient of a Cinnamon Press mentoring bursary. ** Refuge The wandering spirit. The homeless. The stateless. The Spinx. Silent and heroic. The gasps of joy. That escape from the child's mouth. Make yourself at home in me. Sandy Rochelle Sandy Rochelle is a widely published poet-actress and filmmaker. She narrated and produced the documentary film, ARTWATCH, about famed art historian James Beck. She is the recipient of the Autism Society of America's Literary Achievement Award - and hosted the television series On Our Own, winner of the President's Award. Her documentary film, Silent Journey, is streaming on: http://www.cultureunplugged.com/storyteller/Sandy_Rochelle Publications include: Dissident Voice, Every Writer, Wild Word, Lothlorien Poetry journal, Black Poppy Magazine, Poetic Sun, Potato Soup Journal, Spillwords Press, and others. http://sandyrochelle.com ** Hunger in Istanbul A soundless night under a hungry-green moon, devoid of all vulnerable appeal, the sea stalls, reflecting the same ravenous hue, the leaning mast, the lonely house, the 2-man boat trying to find the shore, reach the steady smoke, join two pallid souls waiting to share the catch, four men feasting on one paltry fish—this, for a brief, sumptuous moment, becomes everything. C.L. Fisher I am moved by words, trees, butterflies, art, music, and all forms of truth expression. I am a Christ believer who yearns to create art that glorifies the only One worthy of our praise. You can find my poems and learn more about my faith and love for God’s creations at my blog poeticmeanderings.com. My husband and I reside in a sage-blooming, tumbleweed-moving town in the oilfields of Texas. ** The Hearth Fire of Your Story Your soul’s hearth fire still burns. You carry it with you into the emerald moonglow night, an unknown journey into the next world where you glimmer eternal. Your every word and breath becomes the subtle, undulating ripple on the water’s surface. Each sea vessel holds a memory, like a golden honeycomb candle, the way a living room holds the energy from twenty years of tree trimmings, the way your fingers instinctively knew what notes to play from that Irving Berlin song, the way you embellished sound with extra chords, the way you layered your stories with harmonies, with multi-toned details. You are now floating to distant vistas, the horizon of your life’s cinematic screen still playing the highlights reel. I see you carrying planks of wood, a small pencil behind your ear. I see you moving sesame oil from side to side in a wok, chopped bok choy at the ready. I see you typing up a report, your block letter edits in the margins. Someone kneels in prayer, adding wood, keeping the flame lit, tending to it lovingly with smaller twigs and large branches of devotion. I look down and see my hands working to remember, keeping the story of you burning. Cristina M. R. Norcross Cristina M. R. Norcross of Wisconsin, is the author of 8 poetry collections, founding editor of Blue Heron Review, and is a Pushcart nominee. Her latest book is Beauty in the Broken Places (Kelsay Books, 2019). Her forthcoming chapbook, The Sound of a Collective Pulse, will be released Fall 2021 (Kelsay Books). Cristina’s work appears in: Visual Verse, Your Daily Poem, Verse-Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, and Pirene’s Fountain, among others, as well as numerous anthologies. She has led community poetry projects, workshops, and has hosted many readings. Cristina is the co-founder of Random Acts of Poetry & Art Day. www.cristinanorcross.com ** The Emerald Epic Emerald skies portend emerald rivers- Water is just a flowing mirror. Thunderclouds tease boats bobbing on lakes, Boats that have been built to return home every night. Even the frail oarsman has sinewy arms from Rowing the boat through cobwebs of lotus that Blush under the green moonlight And fold up like the wings of birds. The moon is green tonight like the Fragrant frangipani; Sunshine is a memory now, strangely becoming Vivid by the day. The moon stands resplendent Like a known stranger farther away today than yesterday. Thunderclouds burst forth, emptying their crypts of vapor, and kitchen fires keep homes warm- homes that the oarsman ferries the passengers to. The sound of thunder is the same in winters and summers; The sound of thunder is the same in Istanbul and the rest of the world. Hail and rain have no birthplace. They move like wanderers through Caliphates, kingdoms, and empires. Why yearn like an alchemist for a gold idyll, While the calligrapher inscribes love sans embellishment With her quill. A painting’s flourish enchants where a photograph would do mere justice. Through the crisp winds Carrying cinders, I wonder- Why write short verse when one can write an epic? Gargi Shivanand Gargi Shivanand is an aspiring researcher based in Hyderabad, India, whose work has previously appeared in Visual Verse. She found it easier to find her voice on paper rather than out loud but was pleasantly surprised when she discovered that expressions of any one kind helped blossom expressions of all kinds. ** For the Ride You leave the witch adding twigs to her fire – delicately, as though their precise placing were significant – and go out onto the water-balcony as she’s directed. You’re already lightheaded from the sweet smoke inside the room; when you step out through warped wooden doors there’s an effervescence in your lower stomach, and by the time you set both hands on the rail, the night has begun to melt. You used to know things about this place at the confluence of two seas. You used to know about that city across the water, its bloodstained glittering history, its changing names - Lygos, Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul – but tonight, none of that counts. Here and now – though here and now is ebbing, already insubstantial, and I/me with it – other confluences are softly forming. You came here expecting symbols, and the night’s replete with them. The full moon, personal favourite of the witch, is for divinity and otherness; the unending dark water is for connection, the unity beneath the surface; the metropolis with its many eyes is for belonging; oh yes, you’re part of humanity even if you deny it! Over there is the caique on which your own hopes have rested. Sometime symbol of departure and crossing, it’s not yet rigged but surely ready; its shadowy pilot waits, who could be Charon or Phlegyas or Urshanabi (from here you can reach east or west across continents, ransack their mythologies at will). And then, drawing the eye, stalling the imagination, the rocky lighthouse-island that stilly, insistently, waits to call you home. You could draw a constellation, a mandala, heavy with meaning, to join up the symbols. It might even prove to be a roadmap of your spiritual life. Going, staying, family, exile, pagan goddess, reassuring ritual, love of home. You could draw it on parchment, carry it next to your skin, take it out and trace its silvered lines with your finger whenever doubt rises to choke you. Wait instead. See, first, how the colours begin to run, see how moon-green bleeds into underlit water, how the water rises, overwhelming the caique, creeping up the sides of the lighthouse, flowing towards the quays and jetties of the distant city, swirling in its streets, up against its walls and towers, extinguishing the witchfire, lapping at the balcony where you no longer stand, because you’ve made your choice and are already on your way to the deep places, to the impossible, luminous realm below. Patience Mackarness Patience Mackarness lives and writes in Brittany, France. Her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Every Day Fiction, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. She finds art scary. ** Green My home at the world’s edge overlooks a sea that envies me: my life on stilts, my sunsets on the balcony, the slap of green gallons for company. The moon kisses me, and I let it as the last of the boatmen creak to shore, and the clouds absorb their own reflection. The sea is emerald with jealousy, blue-green, indigo, then something darker… I watch it nightly, feel the draw of the woman who waits for me, patient in the bedroom: her amber lamp aglow, the moths on the window that flock to see. The sea envies me, and I feel it, tell it 'hush' before I turn my back to join her, hear it soothe itself with sobs, swallows. It envies me my home, my wife: I let its lullaby caress my life. Paul McDonald Paul McDonald taught at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, where he ran the Creative Writing Programme. He took early retirement in 2019 to write full time. He is the author of over twenty books, which cover fiction, poetry, and scholarship. His creative work has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes including The Bedford Prize, The Bridport Prize, The John Clare Poetry Prize, the Ottakars/Faber and Faber Poetry Competition, the Sentinel Poetry Prize, the Sentinal Short Story Prize, and Retreat West Flash Fiction Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. ** Pilgrimage I went to the country seeking beauty and found nothing but taxidermy shops and insular wooden houses with their porches caving in. The billboards looming over the side of the road changed from the veneered smiles of lawyers and dentists to bold slanting font reminding me that HELL IS REAL and a heartbeat begins nine days after conception. In other words, I was unwelcome. I drove through mountains where the radio played nothing but static, stopped for gas at a station with a single pump and a cooler boasting live bait and tackle. Who first said you can’t outrun yourself by moving from one place to another? I snap at people who ask me for anything when I have already been asked to make peace with the end of the world. And yes, sometimes I cry about it. I am perpetually angry. I sat safely on a bench and considered dipping my feet into a secluded and rocky stretch of the Hudson while I watched a sixty-year-old man take off his clothes and wade in, stark naked. Emily McDonald Emily McDonald is a writer and English teacher living in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry has recently appeared in Eunoia Review and SUSAN / The Journal. ** Before Garabet Yazmaciyan Runs With Canvases Under His Arm The house on stilts overlooks water so green you’d think a pickle factory had disgorged its waste Maybe in Kadikoy green pigment was cheap and Garabet, in a hurry covered his world with broad brush strokes the house, the port, the okra boat his unsuspecting wife, her arms deep in scaling fish or maybe filling the lamp — what else could account for the daub of red in the window Garabet, I want to say, put down your brush trim the wick, the flames are hungry for your green house, your littered floor your rags of turps, your powdered pigment the canvases in the corner stretched towards the door Frankie McMillan Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent work appears in Best Microfictions 2021 (Pelekinesis) Best Small Fictions 2021 ( Sonder Press), the New Zealand Year Book of Poetry ( Massey University) New World Writing, the Cleaver and Atticus Review. ** Letter with Green Sky I hope to God that you are silver all over. The dock is slick with ghosts and bird leavings, and winter has ballooned into a groaning, glacial brain, an animal of which even the brooding, secular face of St. John the Baptist would approve. I am curious to know where it is you keep your qualms. Mine are strung around the hip and jangle lightly as I walk. You would think they are some kind of dark burgundy, the color of shame, but really, they are a lot like what you cannot see — that is, specifically, the sky which has so thoroughly crushed me into conjuring a reason to bear it. Someone wrote me with the confession that they no longer knew how to look at a flower, and, you, I’ve caught it too — the light beams wobble, fall off the eye and it’s like all that fever had been studiously misplaced. It’s the same with the moon, with trees, with flame. The silver of the waves. Perhaps you wear a rosary around the neck, like they tell you not to. Harbor a flair for rumination. The rowers whoop like prophets; I pocket the smallest echos. Their backs threaten rain. Brenna Courtney Brenna Courtney studies at the University of Virginia. ** The Theatre of Orion for Monika Pisniak after Istanbul, by Garabet Yazmaciyan (Turkey), 1929 C.E. I At this before-the-dawn ante meridiem, the silent pier is our arms-wide-open stage, engulfed by the serene sea-- drunk on the sublime moonlight. The silhouette of moon & its reflection —riding the quiet waves-- bring us in the spotlight at The Theatre of Orion, where Betelgeuse, Bellatria, Saiph, Rigel et al chair the procession. II Mathematica is the language of the stars, you point to the Orion belt. “We’re but of / by / for the stars, you & I,” I gently brush a bunch of annoying audience —a cluster of entangled hair, hindering the way-- off your peach-red right cheek & stamp it with a mild kiss. III “This congregation of hazel-brown moles, running up & down the left side of your face, itself resembles the Orion constellation,” I amuse you with my romanticism. Yours too. But yours is cologne-earth brown, you smile back. ~ Look at these sparkling bubbles in the wine. They look like tiny universes, you raise the disposable-cup for a toast. “If we find the courage to burst the bubbles of our preconceived ideas, then there’re many universes awaiting sprouting,” I raise the disposable-cup. IV We would’ve defied E equals MC2. We could’ve fashioned our own equations! Saad Ali Saad Ali (b. 1980 C.E. in Okara, Pakistan) has been educated and brought up in the United Kingdom (UK) and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and an MSc in Management from the University of Leicester, UK. He is an existential philosopher, poet, and translator. Ali has authored five books of poetry. His latest collection of poetry is called Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021). He is a regular contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. By profession, he is a Lecturer, Consultant, and Trainer/Mentor. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Ovid, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, and Tagore. He is fond of the Persian, Chinese, and Greek cuisines. He likes learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities on foot. To learn more about his work, please visit www.facebook.com/owlofpines. ** the moon and her voyeur you watched her every night, casting eyes like a fishing line on her form; first a sliver Then a half, three-quarters. now, while she’s pregnant, rotund, swollen-bellied, full. and her blood spills light over the horizon. She cannot cry in pain, she can only squeeze the fabric of the sky. Watch it happen, voyeur-- you’re Alice, peering through the looking glass. Or a furtive-eyed peeping tom, eyes flickering to and away from her plight like candle-lights in the dark. Watch the sky try and sew her together; behold the army of sewing needles; glittering pinpricks strewn carelessly across the horizon. Each is too dull to suture her up: her flesh is so fragile, her skin ripped so deep. She is desperate, she knits her fingers into the sky’s fabric. She, buries her face in it as the blood splatters the sea. you glide underneath her, riverbound, silent as a mouse in your wooden shell; Oars slicing through the churning waters, Thanking her for the ichor that falls on the water, how It lights your way. Kiran Bassi Kiran Bassi is currently a high school senior in Richmond B.C. When she isn’t writing, you can probably find her doing something weird to her hair, drinking green tea or watching really bad zombie movies. (current favourite: Pride, Prejudice & Zombies). You can find "the moon and her voyeur" and more of her other works at writingbykiran.com ** Elusions And yet there were two sources of light. Each beckoning, calling, asking me to recognize their silhouettes of darkness as the true patterns showing me how to reach my journey’s end. Inviting me to join their respective circles, to choose a side, in or out. To open the channels between sea and sky or to burrow into the ashes of earth and fire. What did I know of my destiny? I sailed an empty vessel waiting to be filled, navigating between the spaces held by promises. Whispered words and ghostly hands extended towards the edges I straddled, balanced on the verge of both inhaling and exhaling. My breath could not tell which way pointed to certainty. I tried to recast my shadow onto something else, but I was suspended too tightly inside the directionless void. Everything was impending, flickering like a candle carried by the whims of the gods and goddesses that saturated the water and air. If I held out my arms would they become fins or wings? Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig lives in NYC where she plays with images and words. ** Following the Path Laid Down by the Full Moon What is it about the full moon that makes me and others so prone to trust him? Here I watch the fisherman leaving his home pier, wife standing, watching until he is no longer in view. I wonder how often must sail out from the warmth of his hearth’s cheerful blaze to into a dark unknown. He points his skiff toward the path laid down by the moon. He will fish somewhere along that silver line laid down across the dark jade of night’s waters. And stay until he has enough fish to bring home, until the sun burns hot along the water. I want to jump in and follow the silver path over those green swirls and whirls and move my arms to the rhythm of the water’s flow secure in that same moonlight streak of silver, trusting it’s path will lead to someplace wonderful. Last week the full moon beckoned me from my house. As I watched it rise from behind our neighbours’ houses and hover over the small stream behind us, I walked its path to the water’s edge. Although unable now, at my age to physically follow the path into the water, my imagination could leap into the water.. So, I closed my eyes and let my heart and soul follow the silver path laid down by the full moon into the unknown. I wonder as I wander, what prizes will I catch? Joan Leotta Joan Leotta is a poet, author, playwright, short story and essay writer and novelist. In addition she plays with words on stage telling personal and folk stories that often focus on food, family, and strong women. Ekphrastic poetry is a special love of hers. ** Guardian Moon Guardian moon, protect thy brave daughter escaping poverty, ignorance, befoulment; sister borne by abused mother now bidding Godspeed, herself borne by defiled mother now pleading to the gods for mercy—in blackness shattered by brilliant candle whose orange radiance might have beckoned phantoms lurking in the dark waters and forest but could not, as your brilliance casts a veil of luminous green to light the path and quell the evils roiling beneath the stillness. Guardian moon, deliver her and the child she bears, her sibling, at dawn to a safe shore where she can break free from familial corruption, where she can find her voice, her strength, her power, her self. Ann Maureen Rouhi Ann Maureen Rouhi is Filipino by birth, Iranian by marriage, and American by choice. She is a reluctant writer but tries nevertheless so she can tell her life stories. |
