Meiji Metal Vase Isn’t this the way loneliness displays – as old bronze under patinas, layered metals that imitate the grain of hardwood, a technique carried over from sword making? A unicorn handle, one replaced by a craftswoman in a small shop in the belly of New York. This is not a vessel to scrub, time-worn is its beauty as I come to see that the birds will always hover, looking at the bloom and gold leaves just out of reach – and the mouth will always open to the green stems of seasons. Tricia Knoll Tricia Knoll lives alone in a Vermont woods. She loves horses and wishes for unicorns. Her work is widely available online and in anthologies. Website: triciaknoll.com
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Madame Kupka Among Verticals Madame Kupka’s torso emulsifies in a shower of parti-coloured bands, blues and reds, purples and greens, disappears like a Cheshire cat. Her delicate face, tilted chin, and slightly parted lips are the next to go. Half seen and unseen, her eyes are closed either because she’s blind or dreaming. From a position below her chin we watch the last of her dissolve, red lips circled by green eye shadow, hair piled up in a cloud beckoning a storm. Frank made this portrait of his wife three years before the war to end all wars, his announcement card for the end of mimesis and the birth of modernity, turning his wife into a visual metaphor. We see Eugenie slip beneath the choppy strips like a body sliding into a pool, no arms to wave goodbye with, not even legs to back away from the edge of becoming an abstract being, not merely a verb, like abstraction from nature, the old method by which even the ancients almost did the same thing to the Venus of Willendorf or those thundering herds on the walls of Lascaux. Her portrait’s a noun, an object as abstract as a thought, as real as a spoon, a woman hiding behind a shower curtain like Joseph’s coat of many colours. Select, distort and emphasize was the game the ancients played and Picasso too before he stepped back from the brink afraid of losing the last glimpse of a woman’s breast or a lover’s thigh. That was not enough for Kupka who went all in on art as religion. Soon nothing of the real remained of his wife but coloured strokes up and down. He erased her from an old canvas and she loved him enough to give away her arms and shoulders to the future, like an astronaut on a space walk, drifting away, a Venus who became one with the frame. Michael Salcman Michael Salcman is a retired physician and teacher of art history. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. His books include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises), nominated for The Poet’s Prize, The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises), Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing (Persea Books, 2015), and A Prague Spring, Before & After (2016), winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. Shades & Graces, forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil (2020) won the inaugural Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize. Many of the poems in his published collections are ekphrastic in nature (especially in The Clock made of Confetti). I Explain the Art of Reading to an Alien At night she folds herself into one, filmy, shrinkwrapped and bound by things that puncture the mind and sink under surface, dead- bark and wood. At first the cover proves unmalleable much like a globe but to press a finger in and dig up pulls Algeria to Greenland, oceans kneaded, nations overturned. At the heart of it sidles up four walls on either side of her, foreign, like the inner skin of ice when it tries to flower. In the end only one clover remains standing, its membrane of leaves threadbare, pushing against light, the feeling of multiplying and rising and fading all at once. At night she folds herself in, can never get out. Dreaming in different colours like religions, bowing to a single word. Yejin Suh Yejin Suh is a student from New Jersey whose work appears or is forthcoming in Prometheus Dreaming, Half Mystic, and Juke Joint Mag, among others. The specific Giger work that inspired this poem is Sheet from Biomechanoiden in 1969. Click here to see it. Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well Tossed off perhaps by the great master the small pen and brown ink drawing Of Eliezer and Rebecca at the well. Whimsical, or perhaps not, the traveler sits while the comely Rebecca tilts her pitcher to his lips. His hair is carefully parted on the left, wayfarers’ stock rests between his knees, in the distance another traveler walks. Whimsical, the background seems almost doodling but on closer look is alive with faces and detail. What speaks most to lightheartedness is Rebecca’s saucy wide brimmed hat, a hat not fit for drawing water. A taciturn face in background right is carefully observant of events unfolding and the great moment of the chance encounter. Or was it chance? Eliezer began his journey with a solemn oath to one who had lain on a bundle of faggots at God’s command, which is the back story to this encounter not sketched by Rembrandt, Eliezer prayed not to his own God, but to Abraham’s: Oh, thou great choreographer, Thou Stage manager of the theater in which we humans play our lives, who hides behind the thrown die, be constrained by my master’s need grant the success of my perilous journey. “Drink and I will draw for your camels also” will mark the discharge of our pact, You will have met your word to Abraham. The lightness of the drawing prefigures the happy outcome of the eternal struggle among accident, fate and purpose. Lloyd A. Jacobs, M.D. After undergraduate study at Miami University of Ohio, Dr. Jacobs attended The Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. After postdoctoral study at three institutions, he practiced Surgery for twenty years, becoming Professor of Surgery at the University of Michigan. He was appointed President of The Medical College of Ohio in 2003 and became president of the combined institution when the Medical College merged into The University of Toledo. He served in this role until 2015. He recently resumed writing poetry, an art form he had not practiced for nearly forty years. Monet’s Purple Poppies Luxurious drowsiness drowned in an opiate of oils. Lost in ferment--oriental fumes and ambrosial poisons. Ah, hydra plant of hypnotic tint, toxic strain of violet, mauve dirge of paradise and close disaster. Spiked fragrance sears, Circe’s feverous perfume obscures a blind assassin’s sharp perse scent. Exotic your lush petals stun, long before a curved pod, plump with unripe seeds, might leak delirium. Dan MacIsaac Dan MacIsaac, a trial lawyer, served for ten years as a director on the Environmental Law Centre board at the University of Victoria. In 2017, Brick Books published his collection of poetry, Cries from the Ark. His poetry, fiction and verse translations have been published in a wide variety of literary magazines, including Stand, The Malahat Review, Arc, and The American Journal of Poetry. His poetry has received awards including the Foley Prize from America Magazine. Dan MacIsaac’s work has been short-listed for the Walrus Poetry Prize and the CBC Short Story Prize. His website, which includes links to his poetry published in online journals, is www.danmacisaac.com. Netherlandish Proverbs Why I love writing poetry becomes clear working on this 1,500 piece picture puzzle of Breugel’s painting, Dutch Proverbs. In week two of social distancing to curb the effect of the Covid 19 pandemic, to tear ourselves away from computers, zoom chatrooms and overdoses of email containing libraries of information and media, we start a puzzle. A one thousand, five-hundred piece puzzle. What fun to enter Breugel’s world of 1559 and find how he hides over 100 Dutch proverbs! Forms, colours spill on the dining room table— you can see from the picture…Let’s start with blue: just three places large enough to put more than three pieces together: 1) the famous blue cloak, the lady in red (sin) puts on her husband front and centre, (meaning she is cheating on him) 2) the upper left corner of blue sea and sky, where the blind lead the blind, (hence, both will fall into the ditch) and another man struggles against the current (uphill battle), 3) middle sky, where a man in a red jerkin sits on a chimney waving a black cape (hang your coat in the wind, i.e. going with the flow of the current opinion.) Ah… but then, blue is also in tiny patches! Don’t confuse the two blue orbs, or the mottled blues and greens of a man crouched as if on our planet. That prince in the pink cape is “spinning him on his thumb.” What fools we are… like the pillar biter, with turquoise sleeves. You will note the ochres, yellows and oranges will provide you hours of contemplation about walls — some not needed at all… some needing repair, as well as thoughts about straw rooves, sandy banks where no houses should be built, and pigs— ah yes! Pigs trampling in fields of wheat… pigs on the knees of butchers waiting to be slaughtered (as opposed to a sheep, which can be sheared, hence a more lasting and lucrative activity), pigs roaming behind the man banging his head against a wall… which bring us to the problem of differentiating bricks! All those shades of brown, some sliding into maroons and russets, squaring off into bricks--making things such as the pillar in a pond with the man trying to catch fish with his hands, or an oven in front of which a man is yawning or a very high tower from which a man casts feathers to the wind (another fairly useless activity.) Last night, I had a dream of working on the puzzle, placing the same piece over and over again in different possible spots, as a song kept repeating, “all will turn to stone”. And yet, I do not regret taking time to put together pieces that paint proverbs of human folly, our foibles, and life as luck of the draw. In so many ways, it is the same as writing, penning the words, placing, replacing, trying to make order out of a mass of confusion. We are but passing ships in the night, but the proverbs give me the hope that I am not alone, listening to the distant voice in the darkness, the slow shuffle of oars. Kitty Jospe 1.https://mymodernmet.com/dutch-proverbs-pieter-bruegel/ This gives details of images illustrating 25 of the almost 100 proverbs! short video: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/northern/antwerp-bruges/v/pieter-bruegel-the-elder-the-dutch-proverbs-1559 Also entitled The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World, this painting contains a literal illustration of idioms and aphorisms of 16th century Flemish life. Whereas some of the idioms have been lost to history, others are still relevant and in use today. Although other artists and authors had produced paintings and books on proverbs, this painting is considered to be the first large-scale rendition of the theme. The proverbs, of which there are over 100, as well as the early titles, are meant to illustrate human stupidity and foolishness. The painting was so popular that Pieter Brueghel the Younger reproduced up to twenty copies of it, many of which included various renditions on the proverbs. 2. It took a close up picture to see the man in the window is actually “taking a crap on the world” (i.e. despise everything); note, the Cross is underneath the orb, instead of on top. ** Kitty Jospé has authored many books and her work has appeared in numerous local and national journals. Bilingual in French/English, (MA French Literature, NYU; worked in Belgium for the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) she retired from teaching French in 2006 to pursue an MFA (Pacific University, OR). She gives tours in both languages as docent at the Memorial Art Gallery; lectures on language and art as tools for deeper understanding and offers weekly poetry appreciation courses at the public library since February 2008. The Other Son I saw him first, a well-fed shadow – though thinner still than mine if luckier hands had led me across the peacock lawns of baize and through the snorted nights whose sequinned stars left each tuxedo dawn. Those champagne breakfasts let me lie, exhausted, the sky’s roulette-red sunrise offering odds of dreamless luxury I never could resist. All the rest was to impress: myself, strangers, friends, the critical ever-presence father gifted, along with all the money, when I swaggered away from home. Nothing that relentless can be fun, and from the start I went at it like a curse, some demented calling, which was why I was back, with nothing left but time to meet my expectations, to order their extent. Remorse, shame, indignity, buzzard-thick above my shaven head. But what smashed the mirror shard of my unseen better self was the pride I felt in him, standing where I should’ve been. The rags he didn’t wear, the gap-toothed grin he didn’t share, wept around with sores, the trackless arms he held out, half-unsure, his clear eyes widening at my ghost, the choking voice he used to shout the news, the hurry in his step to fetch our father out, ignoring the palm I raised to stop him – my mind changed, my gambler’s sense suddenly aware of all he stood to gain, in fairness, should I depart again, choosing to re-break the old man’s heart, to retract my filthy, outstretched hand that held, for once, more than even I could lose. Craig Dobson Craig Dobson lives and works in the UK. He has had poems and short stories published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Rialto, New Welsh Review, The North, The London Magazine, The Interpreter's House, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Poetry Daily Website, among others. The Birth of Venus No one mentions her feet. Enough with dreamy eyes And billowing, amber hair Long as need be for the Modest work at hand. And what hands! Nimble, Quick, whether they will Pluck lute strings or guide The shuttle’s wefting trail. But, oh, her feet, which Bring a wistful survey Of legs to a grinding Halt! They are hideous Loaves of unrisen dough, Making up in finger- Length toes all they lack In ankles. The story goes, The goddess saw Praxiteles At work and wondered When he’d seen her nude. Sandro, what did she say About you? Never mind -- An attendant is here, already Unfurling a cloak of spring Blossoms to censor the body Of her mistress. Please, Let her bring shoes, too. Dan Curley Dan Curley is an Associate Professor of Classics (Saratoga Springs, NY). Though he often makes his students write ekphrases, this is his first ekphrastic poem. His first collection of poetry, Conditional Future Perfect, was published in September 2019 by Wolfson Press. Julieta in Judgement after a portrait by Irish artist Val McLoughlin of his Spanish granddaughter, Julieta The Julieta in this portrait won’t deign to bestow the full-frontal view of her countenance, nor will she deign to display any interest in beholding more than a peripheral glimpse of our own – we, whom she appears to deem of less consequence than courtiers and no better than footmen to attend to her whims. Or perhaps she imagines we’re aspiring explorers, there to beseech her to finance a fleet of carracks and caravels for a perilous expedition across uncharted seas, but knows full well we are lacking collateral and that all we could offer is a doubtful promise to enrich her coffers with the jade of China, pepper and rubies from India, nutmeg and cloves from the Spice Islands, cinnamon from Ceylon. Even an assurance that, if all else failed, we would enslave as a substitute gift a million new souls for the Inquisition and from a new world we would christen, in Julieta’s honour, New Spain, would elicit from her no more than a smirk. No Maria Theresa could have matched Julieta in the art of the imperial gaze. No infanta of Spain could have equalled her look of regal disdain. Indeed, if the Julieta in this portrait had been born prior to the fall of Granada and the resulting expulsion of the Moors, Isabella the First, Queen of Castile, could have taken instruction from her in how to silence and dismiss every supplicant with a glance, as in the way Julieta regards us: askance, with eyebrows arched, lips pursed, nose upturned – is it our stench? But, then, the posing Julieta comes to a decision and relents, steps out of her portrait with a full-frontal grin, grants us a thrown kiss as if to say she was just having us on all along; springs across the floor into her Irish grandfather’s arms – a gladsome Galician child again! Jack Grady Jack Grady is a founder member of the Irish-based Ox Mountain Poets. His poetry has appeared online or in print in Live Encounters; Crannóg; Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing; The Irish Literary Times; The Ekphrastic Review; Mediterranean Poetry; The Galway Review; Poet Lore; The Worcester Review; Dodging the Rain; Algebra of Owls; Skylight 47; North West Words; A New Ulster; Mauvaise Graine, and others as well as in several anthologies, the more recent ones being Poesia a Sul 1 (Portugal); 300K: Une anthologie de poésie sur l’espèce humaine (France); and Universal Oneness: An Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World (India). He read in Morocco in 2016 at the 3rd annual Festival International Poésie Marrakech and in Olhão, Portugal in 2019 at the 3rd annual Poesia a Sul festival, in both cases as the poet invited by the festival committees to represent Ireland. His poetry collection, Resurrection, which was published in the UK by Lapwing Publications in 2017, was nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and can be ordered via the list of poets on the Lapwing Publications website or from the publisher’s direct link to the collection, which is at Jack Grady – Lapwing Store. Covid 19 Like swallows’ wings Tiny waves Flee wind Across tidal flats Sheeted with noontime silver. Elusive as tears, Their salt whispers that Tsunamis Swell Beyond azure horizons. Robert Walton Robert Walton is a retired middle school teacher and lifelong rock climber with many ascents in the Sierras and Pinnacles National Park. His writing about climbing has appeared in the Sierra Club's Ascent. His publishing credits include works of science fiction, fantasy and poetry. He also worked as a newspaper columnist for a time.His historical novel Dawn Drums won the 2014 New Mexico Book Awards Tony Hillerman Prize for best fiction, first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors competition and first place in the historical fiction category of the 2017 Readers Choice Awards. http://chaosgatebook.wordpress.com/ Ginny Morgan is a professional harpist and accomplished artist. The pandemic has put her musical career on hold, but she’s taken the opportunity to add several paintings to her portfolio. Home | Maui Harp Music |
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