Michelangelo's Bacchus
To the thirty-something across from me on the languid train from Florence back to Pistoia, rowdy years perhaps behind but just barely, punkish vibe humming in the shock of disheveled, sun-bleached curls atop a chiseled yet youthful face. Such day-to-day subtlety must have ripened this place for certain keen sculptors. To the faded jeans and t-shirt concealing form with as much tact as an ex post facto fig leaf, rolled-up sleeves spilling bronzy biceps-- curvature of a life spent lifting buckets of paint or plaster, kegs of wine or maidens by the bare haunches. To the staggered stance in the carrozza stairwell and gaze out the window. Thank you for the contrapposto, for essence captured in a pose—the animal warmth and human ingenuity that Michelangelo conjured in marble. Peter Tolly Peter Tolly has studied and practiced creative writing at Northwestern University--where his poetry earned the Faricy Award in first place and appeared in the campus literary magazine Prompt--and more recently at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Paros, Greece. He is currently based in Wisconsin.
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Nighthawks Some broad’s just tossed you and you’re strolling past this corner joint with the wrap-around window and it’s 3 AM and the ceiling all lit up like a galaxy with that new-fangled fluorescent crap and you stop to watch the lonely planets frozen inside, just you and the vacant-eyed storefront peeping in from across the street, you’re kinda curious to see what’s gonna happen, what kind of rumble’s gonna bust loose, three guys and one redhead is always trouble, especially with her dark cavern eyes contemplating the sandwich she holds up with one hand instead of the snap-brimmed fedora sharpie sitting next to her, hasta be the guy she came in with, the guy whose hand her free hand is not quite touching, the guy staring sullenly ahead, cigarette dripping from his fingers as if something’s finally sinking in behind that hawk beak of a face and it ain’t what he walked in expecting, and maybe the counterman’s gonna flourish an answer out from beneath the countertop, he’s certainly reaching for something in his crisp white uniform and soda jerk cap and it sure as hell ain’t coffee, three cups sitting neglected at three cocked elbows, these guys, these all-night countermen, they’ve seen it all, heard it all, they’re real magicians, these guys, his lips are open a crack, he’s about to spill it, who she will leave with, will it be the bird that brung her, or maybe that loner who’s somehow managed to find a shadow to lurk in on a stool at the acute but somehow obtuse angle of this triangle of an otherwise reflective countertop, and he looks familiar, this occluded moon of human night, at least the bit of his mug you can see anyway, you know this guy, you can feel him, he’s you, pondering the world as it slips through your fingers, or would be, if you walked in through that yellow door at the back, and you know in a flash the counterman’s guess is wrong, the trick is flubbed, someone’s switched out the rabbit, cause that’s just the door to the kitchen, there is no ingress/egress to this universe, even the counterman’s trapped in an orbit of polished Cherrywood, and you realize how close the color is to the woman’s dress, hair, irradiated brick across the street, as if she planned all this when she gussied herself up for this tableau vivant, this final curtain call, realize with new- fangled fluorescent clarity Red’s not leaving with Mr. Mystery, she’s tossing everything and everybody, in a minute she’ll toss that sandwich and you and the storefront’ll be keeping those otherworldly coffee tureens on the back counter company till the sun comes up, you might as well light up a Phillies like the sign above the window says cause you ain’t going nowhere neither. Robert L. Dean, Jr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, River City Poetry, Heartland!, and the Wichita Broadsides Project. In April 2017 he organized a program of poetry and improvised music at Fisch Haus in Wichita. His haibun placed first at Poetry Rendezvous 2017. He was a finalist in the 2014 Dallas Poets Community chapbook contest. His haiku placed second in the 2016 Kansas Authors Club competition. He has been a professional musician, and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas. Rocks and Sea
"build all toward one eye-- make all lines lead toward that eye" —Robert Henri A modest ghost looks on this scene, or a mummy, wrapped, alert, or a plain but never empty mask, an elementary emergence, small gray form, mere patch on rough rock. I see it hovering, watching the waters. The scene itself unsettles, sears the sight. The ordinary eye is burned away. The gods, the simple surging gods, are crashing here. Shirley Glubka Shirley Glubka is a retired psychotherapist, the author of three poetry collections, a mixed genre collection, and two novels. The Bright Logic of Wilma Schuh (novel, Blade of Grass Press, 2017) is her latest. Shirley lives in Prospect, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes. Website: http://shirleyglubka.weebly.com/ Online poetry at 2River View here and at The Ghazal Page here and here. Doubling Back
Where is the sitter, the mirror? Outside the frame. Unseen. So whose portrait does he paint, his father’s or his own? Perhaps he glimpses the darkened edge of what’s to come or the backlight of lineage in this doubling, a portrait of a man painting a portrait of the man who taught him to paint. He has finished his own figure as reflection has shown him, form and light confirmed by his sidelong look. A last touch, the fine-haired brush feathers the beard of the father, who peers sideways too, perhaps eyeing the mirrored face of the one he created recreating him. Or is it the artist who emerges from the canvas he has painted on canvas, adding years with each stroke? Does he glance over his shoulder to ask, Who is this, coming up on me, aged? Not my future but a foreshadow my father teaches me to see. J. C. Todd J. C. Todd’s books are FUBAR, an artist book collaboration (Lucia Press), What Space This Body (Wind Publications), and two chapbooks. Poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and most recently in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Thrush, and Valparaiso Review. Winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, she has received fellowships and awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the New Jersey Arts Council, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Pew, UCross, Ragdale and Leeway foundations. Sint Maarten (for —)
i. The Blue Bitch Bar, on the boardwalk behind Front Street, Philipsburg, was where we read, Friday night, during the Book Fair -- dogs chased kids on Segways a band played Third World classics waitress gave me the wireless password -- patrons were polite writers applauded each other, and you reminded me of someone I loved, and who loved me 45 years ago. ii. “Casino country” said a friend, and downtown, lining narrow cobbled streets, jewellery stores everywhere, their elderly women who get a tip if you enter and buy -- a yellow antique car decorates Old Street Indian shops offer deals on saris and ipads, and back at the book tables, you sign faith for a young one who believes in more than cruise-ship terminals -- but we can’t go back, you and I to undivided lives, to love as seminal as pelicans browsing uninvaded shallows. iii. At Boundary Monument, driving to Marigot Shujah points the flag of the independence movement for a united St. Martin no more French lagoon, or Dutch salt pond, a mosaic “island of dreams”, multi-national, multi-lingual cosmopolitan Caribbean -- I didn’t see enough of bay-embraced quartiers and small hills to measure the fantasy, like bridging the points between archived nostalgia and relentless vague desire. John R. Lee Saint Lucian writer, broadcaster, teacher, Bible preacher John R. Lee has a recent publication, Collected Poems: 1975-2015, from Peepal Tree. Click here to learn more. The Card Players Each night, these three-- Nathan, Henri and Charles make ritual of rummy. “To pass the time,” they might offer, should they so honour your question. Henri, in beige, so often wins, the others call him master. His word is law in all things agricultural. Poor Albert, skilless, watches wordlessly, drawing comfort from his pipe. I paint and sketch And daily dream I hear-- “Paul, won’t you play?” “Yes,” I say in a wink. My spattered hands somehow completed by the cards, I sit with hat drawn deeply down to hide my thought-filled eyes. I play with verve and brilliance. I am gallant in my dream. But the invitation never comes-- and its lofty cousin, acceptance, never finds its way to me-- to poor Cézanne, the master of rejection. Steve Deutsch Steve Deutsch lives with his wife Karen--a visual artist, in State College, PA. He writes poetry, short fiction and the blog: stevieslaw@wordpress.com. His most recent publications have been in Misfit Magazine, Word Fountain, Eclectica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, New Verse News, The Drabble. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. World With Wings that was us once, though when you said “pair bonding” and told me what it meant, it just felt like a caution and a reckoning were due: in the pastels were each other’s bodies we’d started tiring of being with, our world the wild and garish colours of what wasn’t possible, what we didn’t want anyway but these were all beside the point-- we should not have been a pair, and whatever bonding was there was done out of fear and loneliness and despair and the only flying in the picture was fated to be in opposite directions to opposing poles where i could tell them i’d served twelve years of a life sentence, this jailbird did Garth Ferrante This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic challenge on birds. Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity. He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless. Emily Carr’s Forest, British Columbia, 1931-2
I No sky. Nothing but smothering succession. Parallel tree trunks linked parts of a whole, a schema, flow. Braided tangle of foliage heavy, creased curtains that block the way green waves of oceans thrust a final tsunami to bury the world II Three-fourths up the crush a sliver of golden light illumines what it squeezes between III No place for a foothold. A few trunks hold spikes-- remnant of branches-- that will pierce skin IV Cloy of soil, corroding wood, dense vegetation-- huddling confluences V What you can’t smell or see, but hear burrow, rustle, plummet through air sounds you can’t pinpoint what direction they come from. Everything echoes VI Is that you breathing? Karen L. George I'm author of the poetry collection Swim Your Way Back (Dos Madres Press, 2014), and five chapbooks, most recently The Fire Circle (Blue Lyra Press, 2016), and an ekphrastic collaborative chapbook Frame and Mount the Sky (Finishing Line Press, 2017). My work has appeared inAdirondack Review, Naugatuck River Review, Louisville Review, Heron Tree, and Sliver of Stone. I review poetry at Poetry Matters: http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/, and am co-founder and fiction editor of the journal, Waypoints: http://www.waypointsmag.com/. My website is: http://karenlgeorge.snack.ws/. Caribbean Dawn, Storm Clearing
after Stephen Hannock Evasive light, blood orange amid the filtering mist above barely visible trees as black clouds recede; as the day clarifies, heat intensifies, the landscape sheds its mysterious skin Alan Catlin Editor's note: Alan Catlin's poem was inspired by the work of artist Stephen Hannock, whose stunning landscape paintings can be viewed at http://www.stephenhannock.info. Alan Catlin has been publishing for parts of five decades in little, minuscule, not so little, literary and university publications from the Wisconsin Review to Tray Full of Lab Rats, to Wordsworth’s Socks and The Literary Review among many others. His chapbook, Blue Velvet, won the Slipstream Chapbook Contest in 2017. He is the poetry and review editor of Misfitmagazine.net, an online poetry journal. Rauschenberg’s Bed, 1955
Art is a threadbare quilt aggrandized with paint, hung on a wall with a spattered pillow, christened, Bed. Gallons of effusion, in red yellow, blue, black, pour over it for decades-- the drip is an emblem of the authentic moment. The praise of the cognoscenti anoints the Artist with the imprimatur of ironic, witty genius. Never an inkling of recoil at his contempt for art that works, art that keeps you warm--the art of women. For real women--contempt for his grandmother, hands knotted around her needle, pushing it with her grandmother’s thimble, or contempt for the girl in a dim Charleston sweatshop, a hundred sewing machines like wasps buzzing around her, or contempt for who knows what woman, but quilting, I say, is women’s art. A woman made this and a man was praised for throwing paint on it. Barbara Carlton Barbara Carlton is a writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She lives in San Diego, California. In her other professional life she is an architect. In her personal life she is the mother of two grown children and the servant of two cats known as the Permanent Toddlers. |
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