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Blue, by Sheila Stewart

2/23/2020

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Picture
Genesis, Mary Lou Payzant (Canada) 2015. Click image for artist site.

Blue
 
​   
 And the earth was without form and void
And darkness was upon the face of the deep
And the Spirit of God
Moved upon the face of the waters
                                          Genesis 1:2 


Was earth ever without form?
Clay-coloured earthly angel of might
Rising from the blue
Between field and violet
Blue wavelengths                                                       
Birdwoman, fish figure
Gowned in azure--
Head back, arms spread--Hallelujah
High-priest breastplate born
And the earth was without form

Splashing, piercing light
But all is not lyric
We are burdened with the Bible
An excuse for dangerous men
To call me angel—sow what they reap
Dare I  try on robes of snakeskin
Take to the sea
Full measure replete
Darkness upon the face of the deep

But all is not parable
Nor a firmament of good and evil
Mother Earth returns
Blows wind into her sail--
Tern, puffin, thick-billed
Murre, winter-phase guillemot--
A wet bird beats in your chest
Seahorse meets air
Wing-tipped pen nib, paint pot
The Spirit of God

Black-billed mother trails ribbon in her beak
Builds nest on rugged shore
Stares me in the eye--
Birdwoman looks to her daughters                
Earth and air release her
Upon the face of the waters

Sheila Stewart
​
Sheila Stewart has two poetry collections, The Shape of a Throat (Signature Editions) and A Hat to Stop a Train, (Wolsak and Wynn), and a co-edited anthology of poetry and essays, The Art of Poetic Inquiry(Backalong Books). Her work has been published in Canada, Ireland, and the US and recognized by the gritLIT Contest, Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Contest, and Scarborough Arts Council Windows on Words. She teaches at the University of Toronto.
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​Lost, by Bojana Stojcic

2/23/2020

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Picture
Apology, by Glenn Brady (Australia) contemporary

Lost

I’m looking for a word that goes by the name of sorry. She used to be patient and generous before she turned double-faced and I called her a pathetic bitch. She packed her bags and left. I hear she’s taken refuge on a lost-and-found shelf between an umbrella and a purse.

I lost my word and found her in a shoe one day, soaked after the rainy season, so I asked her out. She sat by the window of a mom-and-pop restaurant, ordered an extra dry martini like a pro and waited for me, all dressed up. She had all the evidence spread out in front of her under the local paper’s Romance on the Road column. I didn’t even call to say I wasn’t coming.  
 

Sometimes I see her from afar, long rosemary-thin fingers crossing bridges and opening doors.

Sometimes she tucks me in and lies down beside me, snoring the night away in the starfish position. The other day, I heard her panting while watching me undress from a coin-operated booth, like in a pornographic show.


You know I can’t see you, and it excites the hell out of you, doesn’t it? You need to pay the entrance fee, though. Nothing’s free, lady. What if I pulled you out of the audience and asked you to join me? What if I was the one watching, and said – Strip for me. Would you turn me down for fear of what I may (not) find underneath or nod as if guilty because it’d be less embarrassing to go along? 

You playing a trick on me? she asked. Women are rarely chosen for this shit. 

Maybe, but you can’t tell as you’ve never been to a sex show. I always wanted to do it with another woman. It could be fun if you left your camera at the door. Some things you just don’t do, like buy drugs off the street or take photos of show girls to laugh at how imperfect they are with the lights on. 

Over the years, we got into a rut and started resembling longtime married couples – wrinkled sheets every day, once a week, once a year, year after year, drifting to the other side of the bed, separate beds, separate bedrooms, fragments of lava fuming and sizzling, moving out and in and out, and at some point I began to shudder at the thought of her. I hated her slicked-back hair, rolled-up sleeves and other pretentious bullshit. I hated the taste of her on my tongue and gave her the finger. 

When we got back together, I took a sadistic pleasure in beating her up repeatedly. She tried to break up with me but I assured her I’d change, and she stayed. I kept her chained up in the cold basement while she waited an eternity for me to think again. She’d reach out for the door but it slammed shut. I held her captive till she admitted she had never existed and I forgot what she’d love me to remember. 

​Bojana Stojcic

Bojana Stojcic teaches, bitches, writes, bites and tries to breathe in between. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over 30 publications, including Rust + Moth, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, The Opiate, BHP, Mojave Heart Review, Okay Donkey, Spelk Fiction, Eunoia Review and X-R-A-Y. Her flash was a finalist in the 2019 Midway Journal’s -1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest. She blogs at Coffee and Confessions to go.
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Fire Escape, by Steve Deutsch

2/22/2020

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Picture
Sunday Papers, W.86th Street, NYC, 1922, by Edward Steichen (USA, b. Luxembourg) 1922

Fire Escape
 
Most summer nights
the three of us
slept on that fire-escape--
crammed together
like a litter of baby rabbits.
Mr. Nestor downstairs
complained he couldn’t 
keep his windows up
because of the racket.
 
Remember the time 
we let Joey sleep
through the downpour.
We stood by the window,
stomped our feet 
and laughed
like only brothers can.
He was one tough little guy.
His mouth 
and dad’s belt
like those syncopated swimmers
at the Olympics in Helsinki.
Never a whimper.
 
The only time dad seemed proud
was when Joey became 
a green beret in ’66.
He spent twenty-seven days in Nam--
shot in the belly,
he bled to death 
in a rice paddy--
one final soaking.
Remember when he finally came in
through the window that night,
looking like a drowned cat,
and climbed right into bed 
without saying a word.

Steve Deutsch

Steve Deutsch lives in State College, PA. Over the past two years, his work has appeared in over two dozen print and on line journals. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2017 and 2018. His chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length book, Persistence of Memory, was recently accepted for publication.
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Ekphrastic Writing Challenge: Lorette C. Luzajic

2/21/2020

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Picture
The Best is Yet to Come, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2019
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 Best is Yet to Come, by Lorette C. Luzajic. Deadline is March 6, 2020.
​

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. (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. Have fun.

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 LUZAJIC WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line in all caps please. 

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 poem. 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, March 6, 2020.

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. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
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Poetry by Michael John Wiese

2/20/2020

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Picture
The Lady of Shalott, by William A. Breakspeare (England) between 1872-1903
​
Bury Me in White
 
Copper shards in Merlot 
Dense and deep and wealthy
Luna pries apart a pristine bower.

Crimson tears in hyssop and 
Splashed across mulberry.
Baby's breath grown in red clay.

Mother's milk to sickle cells and
Pools ripple with salty floes.
Miming screams with whispering echoes.

Joyful in the spring and 
Wonderful in the summer.
Awful in the autumn.
Terrible is the young winter.

Michael John Wiese
​

Picture
Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1889

Someone Shot the Sun Today

It bled into the sky,
Bled bright red and pink, until the night was nigh.
So the sun thus murdered for yet another day,
The stars alight to move around and play.

Little eyes of different shades, staring through the night;
They twinkle and they wink at me with all their glowing might.
All the while I see some grow so weak and tired, 
They fall right from the very sky so bright and set afire.

But the time is what it is and no clock is really broken, 
And rosy fingered dawn is softly spoken.
 
So the tiny boiling lights seem to turn into a shimmer,
And all their winking eyes are suddenly much dimmer.
To the east the sky - caught a faint blue-gray,
Was it true? Could it be? A star for another day?
 
Birthing into the waters of a sky to be so blue,
Came in infant sun to start its life anew.
It laboured and it crowned and the sky became so bright.
The world was filled in every way and every dark made light.
 
Like the crime forgiven, and all the blood before,
The sun had rose in red and pink, with the new day it had bore.

Michael John Wiese
Picture
Saturn Devouring His Children, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1819-1823

Goya's Republic
 
They say the Gods live
           up on the hill,

but it hadn't always 
           been so.

First, there was infanticide,
           Native Sons gone to grist and gristle,

until patricide reigned
           only to postpone the tyranny.

Then a capital hill rose
           to a mountain built on 

lighting and sea and
           the scent of death

Where the Gods still 
           devour the children of the poor

in their land. They are guilty too,
           but pretend they are not.

This time, abused Mother Gaia
          may not have the strength

to secret us away,
         us freshly children of her womb.

Michael John Wiese
​

Picture
Judith Slays Holofernes, by Caravaggio (Italy) 1599
​
​Judith's Confession
 
I love running fingers
through dark curly hair.
Seeing a long sharp nose and
strong square chin.

You look at me like an army to conquer
like I'm meek and mild, but I'm seething with malice.
 
Even while I dance, 
you're watching at my friend,
wondering at her basket, wanting to touch it,
rough it, pry it open, leave your mark upon it. 

If your gaze strays from my hips
the truth is in my eyes.
 
Instead, you underestimate me,
you undervalue us and you are mistaken.
Patriarchy meets the immovable object of the feminine.
I am silk in the evening. I am steel in the night.

I am creator and destroyer.
I am become Savior to my people.
 
Because your locks have lost their luster.
Your sparkling eyes turned silent and surprised,
unlike my nerves, alight with hope and heat,
as I steal through the darkness toward my own lamp.

I am liberator and deliverer.
I am warrior and an army will tremble in dawn's early light.

Michael John Wiese

Michael John Wiese is a writer and an inmate in Texas. While incarcerated, he has earned his Associate of Arts degree and is well on his way to a  Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies. He writes stories, essays, and poetry. Many thanks to his writing mentor Barbara Martinsons for sharing his poetry on his behalf.

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Weegee: Self-Portrait with Speed Graphic, by Aaron Fischer

2/20/2020

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Picture
Self-Portrait with Speed Graphic Camera, by Weegee (USA) 1944

Weegee: Self-Portrait with Speed Graphic
 
In this shot you’re mostly camera.
Weegee and his love you captioned the working print --
bulky, tucked under your chin,
it hides everything but your face and hands, neatly manicured
 
as a surgeon’s. Why am I surprised? as if shooting
all those cops and corpses were manual labour.
Bland and blank, round as the flash reflector, 
your face says nothing 
 
about the ambition that smoldered
like a tenement furnace. 
You hardly look like the canny businessman you were. 
You made death pay. Murders and fires, 
 
you liked to say, my best sellers,
my bread and butter. Is that all that kept you 
behind the wheel each night, the static-burred police radio
running down another shooting, another floater?
 
Count it 10 years; 10 years and 10 thousand negatives.
Even after you owned every front page, 
and museums bought your pictures,
you made your nightly trawl through the Lower East Side.
 
Who cares if your later work was crap --
cheesy nudes and trick photographs? 
Who cares what happened when you left New York?
You gave us a new way of seeing in the dark.

Aaron Fischer

This poem appeared in 
Black Stars of Blood: The Weegee Poems  (Main Street Rag).
​
Aaron Fischer spent 30+ years in technology and trade journalism and as an online editor at a news and public-policy website. His poems have appeared in Adelaide Poetry Review, After Happy Hour, American Journal of Poetry, Briar Cliff Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crosswinds Poetry, Naugatuck River Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and Tishman Review. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, as well as for Best Poetry 2019. His chapbook, Black Stars of Blood: The Weegee Poems was published in 2018 by Main Street Rag.
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WELCOME TO EARTH: YOU TOO CAN BE US, by Donald Brackett

2/19/2020

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Picture
Welcome to Earth, photography by Donald Brackett (Canada) contemporary

WELCOME TO EARTH :
YOU TOO CAN BE US

“What is essential is invisible to the eye
and can only be seen with the heart.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery


1.
“HOW TO RECOGNIZE A HUMAN BEING”

Gravity plus appetite equals forward motion:

We are limited to three dimensions, 
with the hope of a fourth forming our future.

Our bodies are very fragile and 
our existence is incredibly brief, 
hence our history: colonizing the void.

2.
“HOW TO GREET THE HUMAN CREATURE”

Occupying the intermediate zone:
We are living radios and living clocks.

We have multiple languages saying 
the same thing without realizing it.

Our skins look different but inside
we are identical, a fact we frequently forget.
Our destiny is unified in absence. 

3.
“HOW TO TAKE A HUMAN OUT ON A DATE”

These are metaphysical mnemonics,
for knowing the situation we are in.

Our beliefs are based in large part
on misinterpreting everything that happens to us.

Our living and dying occur without the
slightest bit of certainty, apart from the fact
that soon everything must disappear before our eyes.

4. 
“HOW TO ENJOY HUMANIST HUMOUR”

Essentials rest below the surface:

Remember: any attempt to explain 
our basic human dilemma, of which 
all art is an emblem, will inevitably
result in paradox, since paradox,
and to some extent irony, immediately
arises from attempts to express the ineffable.

5. 
“HOW TO DEAL WITH REJECTION”

Accidental archives:

An emergency is waiting to happen.
My thirst is your thirst : my thirst first.
Procedures for a well-timed ending.

End of the world productions: 
because........we cater your dreams.

6.
“HOW TO KNOW WHEN ITS TIME TO GO”

Slaves of the alphabet:
a fence surrounding nothing.

Entrance to the large hours: 
no east or west in dreams.

Making of virtue of necessity:
the meaning of life is that it ends.

7.
“HOW NOT TO BECOME A HUMAN”

Mobile enigma.

A eulogy for our history:
Queen of the earth
we worship at your feet.

Some things are perfect the way they are.

Suddenly the search for
the miraculous comes unglued, 
and we find ourselves 
in love with being lost. 

8.
“HOW TO FILL IN THE BLANKS”  

We have forgotten our names
on a landscape fashioned from 
laughter and tears: so we wait.

The armour of our heart
is almost unimaginable.

Our animals are still 
hiding deep inside of us. 

Be careful of befriending us.

Donald Brackett

​Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based culture journalist and poet who writes about music, art and films, as well as curating film programs for Cinematheque. He is the author of three books with Backbeat Books: on Amy Winehouse, 2016, Sharon Jones, 2018, and Tina Turner, 2020. He is currently working on a new book about the conceptual artist and musician Yoko Ono.
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The Bones of the Foot, and the Shoulder, by Bert Molsom

2/19/2020

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Picture
The Bones of the Foot, and Shoulder, by Leonardo Da Vinci (Italy) 1511

The Bones of the Foot, and the Shoulder

Charged to finish Agostino's statue
he looked for a youth of shape and vigour
with the strength to stand perfectly balanced
and make his David perfect.

He chose me. I became respected,
celebrated, my fame a reflection
of the artist's illumination. Finished,
David will remain forever in the light.

I slid, unneeded, into anonymous dark.
No-one saw my fall. My bones un-fleshed
for the pen of the anatomist.
In death I have recovered my fame,

my images admired by thousands,
though my name is lost.

Bert Molsom

Bert Molsom retired early to become an apprentice poet, fully understanding apprenticeships last a long time! He has been long-listed for the Bridport Prize, won Poetry on Loan 2016 and his work has been published by Anthropocene and Ink, Sweat and Tears.
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Seville Still Life, by Barbara Crooker

2/18/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
Seville Still Life, by Henri Matisse (France) 1911

Seville Still Life

An arm chair with a shawl of deep Atlantic blue.  

A settee the colour of the garrigue patterned
with flowers and pink flamingoes, and two end tables
draped in the same cloth.  And a tablecloth the shade
of Seville oranges, all floating on a terra cotta sea.
It’s a riot of color, inviting the eye to sit down
and eat.  From the open window, a fresh breeze
is billowing the curtain like a flag.  The pleasures 
of the table reign among other pleasures, 

said Brillat-Savorin. No food on this table, 
only a cool white pitcher outlined in blue, 
a splotch of lemon on its side.  But I can imagine 
a plate of cheeses, a scattering of grapes.  
I read somewhere that Roquefort is not just a cheese, 
it’s a complex network of shepherds, dairymen, 
fromagers, geologists, hewers and haulers,
business executives.  I put a wedge in my mouth,
and a meadow of wildflowers blooms.  Matisse’s father
said Everything you do is pointless and leads nowhere,
and I wonder, where else would you want to be?

Barbara Crooker

This poem appeared in Barbara Crooker's book, Some Glad Morning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.)

Barbara Crooker is the author of many books of poetry; Some Glad Morning and Les Fauves are recent.  Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Poetry of Presence and Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and she has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award,  three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature, and the Fantastic Ekphrastic award of recognition from The Ekphrastic Review for her body of art-inspired writing.
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update: Pretty Time Machine, by Lorette C. Luzajic

2/18/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
Click book cover to see on Amazon.

Dear Friends,

I am so grateful for the many wonderful reviews of my new collection, Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems.

​Click here for a review by Bill Arnott at League of Canadian Poets.

Click here for a review by poet Alarie Tennille.

Click here for a review by Jenene Ravesloot.

​There are five reader reviews on Amazon, all five star. THANK YOU for your love and support!

There are several interviews, reviews, and features coming soon. I'm overwhelmed by the response to this book. 

​love, Lorette
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