Four Apologies to Ecce Homo: A Glosa The paint absorbed into the damp I started it, then I went on holiday I was only trying to do a good thing Return it to its former glory -- Cecilia Gimenez I started at your crown, Lord. Then my brush dabbed at your brow. Cecilia, you said. My eyes. My eyes. And I listened, your gaze too distant, I made it right. When the newsmen Asked me, I explained. There I was, In the afternoon. There was no one else. But you are not an easy canvas. I’m sure you understand, Lord. The paint absorbed into the damp Let me explain, Lord. Garcia spoke to me from these walls, Even today, he speaks His voice even louder Still. I hear him, Lord. Like my children, I delivered you In a hot mess of earth and pigment I lost my way When I touched the face I started it, then I went on holiday Behold, I took you in my aged hands, Flaking and faded, we were Worn thin and pale. My knees buckled as I stood Exhausted, slacks wet with paint. My Lord. White static of years, No one else Would run her thumb Along our temple I was only trying to do a good thing. Christ, your face has never Looked more alive! You are awake again. A beast Of wide eyes. They might be Right. You are an animal Of awful flesh. Like me. And when my body cracks and peels Falls apart Restore it, Lord. Return it to its former glory. Karin Wraley Barbee A native of Ohio, Karin Wraley Barbee currently teaches at Siena Heights University. She lives with her husband and two children in Tecumseh, Michigan. Her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Swerve, Fjords Review, Columbia Review, Fiction Southeast, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Diagram, Whiskey Island, Found Poetry Review, and Sugar House Review. More work is forthcoming in Packingtown Review.
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Fauno Rosso
“Red Faun,” (actually a satyr) sculpture in red marble from the 2nd Century, restored in the 18th Century , speaking when on loan to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Carpe diem! Drink, laugh, kiss, fondle! Pleasure’s too brief, eternity’s too long without it! Imagine me here in a New World unknown when I followed Dionysus. Those were the days! I roved through the vineyards, frisked after nymphs in the meadows. I had the great Hadrian’s ear or rather he had mine, for wine is a fine relaxer of tongues. The Emperor needed a friend. Poor man, surrounded by ignoramuses who disdained his love of art. How gladly we shared our passion for beauty. What? You can’t believe I appreciate more than carnal pleasures? You forget I play the flute, my tool of seduction. My music soothed the emperor. Alas, I foresaw Hadrian’s end – just not my own. Somehow found myself buried in rubble, dismembered, abandoned. My glory days lost, I dreamed of the past. But oh my thirst for wine and seduction! How I yearned for 1500 years to again feel the thrill of warm hands on my torso. Delicious. How awkward when my chest traveled to the Vatican alone. Soon my face also felt the sun. Too brief! Now my collected parts reside inside forever. Cold as marble, I warmed myself with memories until healed by the skilled hands of Cavaceppi. More than restored, he brought muscles, sinews, and flesh to life in ways not understood by my creators. My prowess wasted among the red-dressed, celibate idiots of Rome. They labeled me a faun! Guess I can’t expect them to know their own haunches from those of a goat. But bless them. I raise my handful of grapes in gratitude to be a satyr. Even as I stand before you in perpetual indoor winter. I give thanks to be handsome and whole once more. Alarie Tennille Alarie’s latest poetry book, Waking on the Moon, contains many poems first published by The Ekphrastic Review. Please visit her at alariepoet.com. Model in the Artist's Studio, 1928 This model is zaftig, even hefty by today’s standards, fleshy thighs, round belly, ample curves. Bottom heavy as a ripe pear. But she is bien dans sa peau, doesn’t go to Weight Watchers, had a café crème this morning, broke her croissant into small pieces, dabbed it with confiture d’abricot, little bits of sun. She took pleasure in the moment. So when Dufy posed her, arms behind her head, solid hips jutting right, there she was, delectable as an oyster, ready to be consumed. And here we are in our imperfect flesh, the dimpled arms, the parts that jiggle, the great softening, as we succumb to gravity, our last lover. So let’s raise our arms above our heads, let the world see the pudding bowl our bellies have become. These hips have carried babies, these thighs have walked many miles. This is it; it’s not going to get any better. So let’s stand in the cool light of this blue room naked as the day we were born. Let’s tip our breasts to the sun, and love our unairbrushed surgically unaltered exquisite bodies for what they are: the houses that we live in. Barbara Crooker This poem was first published in Barbara Crooker's book, Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017). Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry; Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017) is the most recent. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including 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, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her website is www.barbaracrooker.com Letter from Frida to Chavela It’s half past three. The garden is soaked in a pool of blue light. I can’t sleep. This morning I looked again at the photographs you sent. Do you remember cariño the night we spent on the Zocalo? We busked with the mariachas swigged tequila straight from the bottle smoked Padilla cigars. You swaggered with the best of the boys, warmed the brown earth with your gravel laugh, wore a man’s suit beneath your jorango (how we howled!) a pistol slung low on your hip. Diego sends his love, by the way. Wonders when you’ll visit us next? He’s a new fresco on the go. I haven’t been painting much. My dear doctor says I’m to have a bone graft next month. My thirtieth operation, you know. Do you remember cariño how we clutched our bellies with laughter, rolled like armadillos across the flagstones at Coyoacan, our art our armour against my broken body, your years of loss? What you never knew is that as the sun rose I swept a vine of Mexican Flame through your hair, breathed lover’s words into the kiss point of your neck. Mi rareza, hurry back. Jane Salmons Jane Salmons is a teacher living and working in Stourbridge in England. She is currently studying an MA in Creative Writing and has had poems published in various online magazines including Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Algebra of Owls. Aside from writing poetry, in her precious free time she enjoys photography and creating handmade photomontage collage.
Malevich, Kazimir. The Black Square. Malevich’s Red Square was ours. But you didn’t care for beautiful things. The Black Square is hardly aesthetic. It is deeply conceptual. I was surprised to happen upon it in an almost empty room one day, walking through the General Staff building. The painting was hung next to a couple of Kandinsky’s works. I knew the Russian Museum had a large collection of his work, but I hadn't realized the Hermitage had a few pieces too. The Russian Museum has many of Malevich’s famous colour paintings: his geometric, faceless peasants, simple fields with red horses running across them, train-like, and the Red Square. I remember the Red Square more than I remember the Black Square. But I like the red one less. The Red Square is like the blander sister: same shape, same size, same two-dimensional surface, but somehow flatter. That wasn’t my first impression of it. The first time I saw that painting was on Valentines Day in 2015 and it felt important. It felt significant that an obscure red shape was what my then-boyfriend and I happened upon as we walked through the galleries. We were holding hands. He was wearing a dark green sweater I’d gotten him for Christmas. I was wearing a three-quarter sleeve grey dress I’d bought that morning. The Red Square was hung towards the end of the gallery. I pulled on his hand to signal a shift in our slow walk-through. We stopped in front of the painting. I took a picture. I didn’t know what it meant, but I pretended to get it. He didn’t know what it meant, and he told me so. It was red, avant-garde, and the picture we photographed on Valentine’s day. That was enough then. But what does it say about a memory, a memory full of sensual, aesthetic, and emotional pleasure, if it is attached to de-aestheticized art? What has always been interesting to me about the Black Square is that at the original exhibit, Malevich famously hung the painting in the corner referred to as the krasniy ugol. In Modern Russian, krasniy means “red,” but the word used to have the connotation of “beautiful.” It was the place in a room in which a Orthodox icon was commonly placed. There is something important for me in the relationship of the two squares, red and black. In hindsight, maybe I should have known that the subconscious association of that painting as a symbol of our love was an eerie foreshadowing. Won't red turn to black, and won't love leave? Did I need to cover myself in the satin of colour to fall into the blackness and know something? To emerge from that blackness and be able to handle the silence? Is that what Malevich did? Silence. I read that white represents the very limit of the expressible, the silence beyond language and blackness beyond the image. So then, is silence the border of emptiness? Is the way to be, the way to keep making sense, to furiously continue going forward to wherever we all seem to be rushing to? And when we come to that end, is the goal simply to be still? Is that what we should do with the black squares in our souls, paint them over with more white? Maybe. Maybe then, at the highest and lowest moments, the only appropriate thing to do is to be quiet. Quiet alone? Quiet with someone? To be quiet and not alone. To listen to the vibration of one’s soul. And maybe when we get that close to the edge of all that we are the only logical next step is to embrace that this is the very edge or to hope that this is the edge of God, not the edge of life. Have I been baptized in black? Have I learned my lessons yet? I don't know, but I will stand still on the edges of silence, looking into the blackness of the square, and continue to fall through nothingness into God. Alisa Goz Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, Alisa Goz now lives in New York, NY, where she recently graduated from The King's College with a B.A. in Media, Culture, and the Arts. Square Tower Dwindling
Dark pools of shadow, fish hooks on shallow craters. That pale white beach by the inky black sea. The full moon cast light on itself that night. It wore the dusk clouds like a thick scarf and watched, cold eyed, the master of the house on his evening stroll. In the estate which overshadowed that extinguished beach (or would overshadow, if the sun was shining) a solemn celebration was taking place. To mark the end of another year and the continued survival of those in attendance. Inside the house a lady sang old songs in French and under those lights, for just a moment the audience understood the words she sang. She kept going and going until those words were swept away. A young girl asked her mother about the flowers that she had heard about on their journey there. The stories were green, red, orange, brown but the plants here were blue and grey. Her mother gestured to the ballroom, at all the white and gold. A waiter overheard this conversation and frowned. He had seen the garden staff's faces when they were told the news that cuts were being made. “You know, this place will be empty soon.” The master of the house didn't mind any of that. He sat near the window and craned his neck and stared all night at the beach outside. "That pale white. Sand? Salt? Sugar?" The tide started to come in. "Something else?" Brendan Kearon Brendan Kearon is a student of English Literature and Creative Writing at Cardiff University. He has never published a piece of writing before. Jemmy Paints My Portrait
(monologue spoken by Anna McNeil Whistler) I had other things to do. It’s not as if my life was empty. Meeting and managing and persuading patrons of Jemmy’s genius was my full time job. I’m not complaining. He is my life, all I have left after influenza took his father and his two brothers. When Jemmy settled in London he needed me to manage his career. I enjoyed it. Enjoyed too his wild and sometimes disreputable friends, flamboyant, brilliant, dressed in their velvet waistcoats and yellow kid gloves. Jemmy followed their fashion and, oh, my, he was beautiful. He had the wild curly hair from the McNeil side of the family. Except for his moustache he looked like a cherub in a rococo painting. He had an Idea with a capital I. Get rid of all the soft colours and billowy blue skies, the delicate young female flesh–it wasn’t women he was attracted to, after all–forget about the melon breasts and delicate pink nipples. He would paint a symphony of gray and black. No, I didn’t really have time to pose for him. But he was my darling Jemmy so I stood, straight and still and serious in that awful black dress and lace bonnet. It certainly wasn’t my most becoming gown, I only kept it for wakes and funerals. But he wanted black. My feet hurt, my back hurt, I was a martyr for his art. I couldn’t stop the sighs, even a groan now and then, just to let him know what a burden and imposition it was to pose like a corpse in rigor mortise standing instead of lying in the comfort of a pillowed casket. Finally he went into the dining room and came back with a straight-backed chair. “All right, you can sit and be comfortable if you’ll stop the dramatics,” he said. “A footstool would be a help,” I said. “Oh, a footstool, too? I’ll get one. But no pillows. This is serious painting.” “I know,” I said, “Gray and deep shadowless black. And white–my lace bonnet.” So I sat and he painted. I turned my head away. Nothing is more boring than watching a painter dab and squint and chew his lips and wrinkle his brow, pick his nose. I closed my eyes to settle into my own thoughts, the gray and white and black of the Russian winter when I buried his father and his brothers and took this one beloved child back to Lowell, Massachusetts to make a life for us. My life a symphony in gray and black … and Jemmy’s sparkling blue eyes and his sweet smile and kiss on the forehead when he said, “Thank you, Mother. This painting will make us both famous.” “God forbid,” I said. “I don’t want the world thinking that’s what I looked like.” June Calender June Calender retired to Cape Cod after a 25+ year career in NYC as an off-off-Broadway playwright. Now she writes poetry, fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction. She teaches writing skills at the Academy for Lifelong Learning at Cape Cod Community College and edits their annual anthology. Dreaming on Paper
Using a reed pen on large sheets of paper, he translated sky, rocks, fields into dots, jabs, scratches. They try to catch the wind in olive branches, the gnarled trunks, the way the light lay down. You can sense colour, though it isn’t there: brown earth, yellow grain, blue sky. In thousands of letters, drawings, diaries, Van Gogh laboured with paper and ink. He made peace with his own awkwardness, using reeds from the Midi fields sharpened into pens. Each could only hold a little bit of ink at a time, so he devised his own notation, a kind of Morse code, which he varied again and again. As he reinvented drawing, he found himself. By the time he was in the asylum at St. Rémy, he was drawing everything: nesting curls for the flickering flames of the cypresses, a splash of black in a sunny landscape; the farmyards of Auvers; clouds that billowed in staccato lines. Right before he shot himself, he told Theo, I still love art and life very much. Finally, he’d found how to make the hardest thing he had ever tried look easy. And then, the wheat field, with crows. Barbara Crooker This poem was first published in Barbara Crooker's book, Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017). Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry; Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017) is the most recent. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including 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, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her website is www.barbaracrooker.com Cameralover
Honey, there is no honey. The sun sucked it into a cloud. See that cataract on our horizon, the scratch on the lens I can't afford to replace? An arm and a leg. An arm and a leg and all my long, shining hair for a new glass eye to see you through. I could watch you snake fingers through the sockets of a skull all morning. Drives me wild as a stripped stage and you some new-wave Lancelot waving your hot bone blade. Who you gonna stab with that thing? Is it me? Can it be me? Can it be you, the one reclining out of character, watching yourself undress? I don't know who we're performing for out here. We're always blowing ourselves away with our personas. Our tornados trace spirals in dust. I could do this forever. The desert is a circle. The sound of opening. The desert is a gong clanging your name so what'll it be? One syllable fast as a flash exposure of peyote flowers and teeth? A good fuck on the floor where the stone is dry and cool? Time shakes, a rattlesnake on the doormat. Welcome, baby, welcome home. Clare Welsh Clare Welsh is a writer, photographer, and illustrator based in New Orleans. Here words and images have appeared in McSweeney’s, Southern Glossary, Offbeat Magazine, and other places in print and online. Her Chapbook Chimeras is available through Finishing Line Press. Currently, she is currently working on a full-length poetry book about wild dogs. To keep up with her work, follow her Instagram @clarewelsh. Three Musicians Mark Chain
Mark Chain has lived most of his adult life in Northern New England and Europe. A former Community Organizer, Teacher, and Psychotherapist, he's given readings and guest lectures, made radio programs, and driven taxi in both the US and Germany, where he lived for 16 years. He has had a number of his writings and translations published or broadcast, was once simultaneous translator of a live presentation by Richard Baker-Roshi, Zen-Master, and once teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan. In 2016 he retired from cutting and splitting his firewood by hand, sold his log cabin, and moved into a nearby village -- though he still has his chain saw and axe. |
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