Staying Put
He paints me naked in an empty room. Like I need nothing. Like he needs me. I’m his type. High tits. Lean shadow, blond hair falling past my shoulders. A long drink of water. There is no escape. But the window to my left is a promise. Wide open. Green hills. "Hold still!" he says. So I stare at the painting on the wall. Another landscape, this one contained by a white mat, black frame; it, too, allows for dreaming. But it only goes so far, then hits the wall. Like him. Only so far before he drops off-grid and disappears into the canvas. No wonder I can’t stay still. The room holds little. A bed, my shoes abandoned underneath. A pack of cigarettes. My restless heart. A rectangular shaft of light pours in from an open, second window and the breeze plays with my hair. "Fix it!" he says. I tuck the wisp of hair behind my right ear, just the way he likes it, then put my hand back where it belongs. He says his favourite thing is painting sunlight on the side of a house. "So why paint me?" I ask. "So you’ll stay put.” Alexis Rhone Fancher This poem was first published in The Mas Tequila Review. Alexis Rhone Fancher’s poem, “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” was chosen by Edward Hirsch for inclusion in The Best American Poetry of 2016. Find her poems in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Slipstream, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles, Hobart, Chiron Review, Quaint, Fjords Review, Broadzine, Cleaver and elsewhere. She’s the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen, (Sybaritic Press, 2014) and State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (KYSO Flash Press, 2015). Since 2013 Alexis has been nominated for 7 Pushcart Prizes and 4 Best of the Net Awards. www.alexisrhonefancher.com
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Beautiful, Beautiful Machines “…Nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: ‘Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?’” Walker Evans I love to photograph machines, trucks, construction sites, glass, bricks, engines, skyscrapers, cement slabs, forklifts, bulldozers, factories. Like the great feminist philosopher Camille Paglia, I love roads and concrete bridges. She wrote, “When I cross America's great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.” When I consider nature, I feel appropriate awesome wonder. I am moved by stars and water lilies. I weep during storms. When I stand by the ocean, I feel God’s grandeur deeply in my soul. I feel the veins of minerals in the earth, lapis and turquoise and silver. The mirror of a lake is a miracle. Lava and lilacs, hail and icicles. Feathers astound, as does the unexpected ululating elegance of the neck of the giraffe. I am curious about the planets, and standing in a room of dinosaur bones is always downright mythic. Still, none of these holds my fancy for long. I scan the horizon of the sea for a ship and want to know her name, and the names of the men inside her. Walking in the forest among unwinding fiddleheads and vines and all of their attendant fairies, my spine prickles when I see an empty can of Coca Cola, or the remains of a fire pit. I comb the beach for plastic trinkets washed up from someone else’s life in another land. These treasures are their own kind of archeology. My pulse quickens when I see the footsteps of man. It’s fashionable for man to find man’s presence a disgrace, to snort with disgruntled indignation about man’s mark, to declare that our very presence has spoiled something pristine that is only pure without us. This self-hatred is readily revealed in how we use words like synthetic, unnatural, man-made, artificial, and unnatural; these are all used to describe the mark of man. But man is natural, man is nature, man is part of nature, and anything man makes or does is therefore natural and part of nature. How can anything we’ve made be artificial? Such language is an effective psychological manipulation to undermine human creativity. Our problem is not just racism, sexism, and a long lineup of assorted hatreds of the “other.” It is this, too, this intrinsic loathing for our own existence. In the face of human accomplishments, we feel a strange kind of guilt when the only moral response is gratitude. I don’t propose that humankind is perfect or that he does no wrong. On the contrary, I believe in sins, and our accountability for them. On the other hand, I don’t believe that natural is neutral, or share the Romantic painters’ adulation and delusion that she is innocent. Nature is not just pretty daisies and lazy meadows: it also open sores and parasites and festering diseases. It is the destructive power of fire, and the agony of childbirth inflicted on billions of innocents. It is the ruthlessness of rape in the animal kingdom, of tormenting one’s young and eating them for fun among chimpanzees. There is a certain kind of carelessness to in the thoughtlessly flung empty can, and the can’s story contains factory tyranny and toil. But it also includes the macabre fairy tale of sugar, an epic evil harnessed by man but which is wholly natural. No, not just the story of slavery, but the sweet stuff itself. It’s a substance that has seduced the gullible and left festering, rotten holes where teeth used to be; it has poisoned untold pancreases, crippled us with cancer, and wreaked more havoc than all the fake pharma we’ve ever known. But all the magic is here in this story of the tossed tin, too. How we took one of those veins from the soil, where it sat inert, we ground stones into pigment and made paint, and from that paint we have made a trillion paintings. We made tin and bronze, we melted metal, we polished emeralds and made heartbreakingly beautiful things. Machines are magic. Photography is witchcraft. We have made languages, and when we started writing, we began to preserve the history of culture. We could record poetry and stories. We were Dante and Virgil and Job, Sharon Olds and Haruki Murakami. We made music. On whatever we could find, and with manmade machines. With more machines, we also learned how to preserve it. Most paintings and pictures of the industrial revolution and of machines are clouded with some kind of obligatory apology or condemnation of progress. My photography of buildings and oil pipes and steel structures and urban alleys seeks to show magnificence instead. The chugging trains and the whirring printing presses and the trucks hauling produce and raw materials are about being alive. I see beauty in stacks and bricks and steam. Here is the story of our struggle to invent. Here is how we made the world smaller, and invented possibilities to know other people far away. I see grandeur in skyscrapers and cities. Here is the story of people, of communities striving to stretch the laws of physics to their limits, discover the boundaries of the outer edge of the imagination. From the wheel and turning sand to glass, to La Traviata. And consider how we take for granted the now ubiquitous mobile phone! If our ancestors dreamed we could whisper into a little black box and talk to strangers in the Congo or Buenos Aires, they would deem it sorcery. It boggles my mind when we “research” astrology or crystal “power” or look for evidence that a “medium” calling out “I feel the initial J!” might actually be talking to the dead. We have magic so magic that by pressing a button, we can see cinema filled with the living voices of dead people. We can turn sand into instruments that let us communicate instantly with people five thousand miles away. We know the names and chemical makeup of thousands of stars, for real, not for some mumbo jumbo. Magic is not some vague vibe from swishing sage or obsidian about! We have long taken the compounds in plants for real medicine and real food, we have already mapped time with those rocks. And oil, that apparent evil, black gold, as if energy is always some kind of personification of greed. Oil is a miracle- the ultimate in recycling. The discarded remains, the garbage dump, of beings gone before, turned into power that can fly us across the world into the arms of our lovers or new friends in a day. Refuse that can propel machines to take spices and pineapples north by morning. When I see machines and cities and concrete, I survey man’s astonishing history of architecture and culture and art and transportation and evolution. Oh, the machines! The spinning wheels! The greasy mechanical parts! The skyscrapers! The roaring engines! The mammoth steel bridges! Ayn Rand said, “The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time.” Machines have freed women from lye-raw hands and a lifetime of nothing but washing clothes, and machines have freed men from the fields, where they were mere beasts of burden, to be doctors and writers and chefs. Machines have made books available to everyone, not just to emperors. Beautiful, beautiful machines. When I wander in the glory of a starry night, I feel a profound sense of awesome wonder. I experience intense gratitude for the beauty of the natural world. But it is the skyline of a city and the twinkling of its lights breaking through those stars that inspires me more. Lorette C. Luzajic "I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all." Michelangelo Stereoptical Study #4, Black and White They were laden with franklins and lindenshields gleaming, with Westland spearshafts and with Welsh broadswords. The berserkers bellowed as the battle opened, the wolf-coats shrieked loud and shook their weapons. - Thòhorbiorn Hornklofi 1 Black ghostly figures painted on a gray stone wall, in a chalk cave somewhere in the desert or the mountains. Misty figures wrapped in dark shawls or blankets coming to a ritual based in strange machinery, coming out of the stone, coming toward us. Or, I’m imagining snow now, an ice crevasse uncovered, and these are figures frozen in the ice, ancient Viking remains, wrapped in sealskin, propped up against the rocks. Look, where the painter has drawn a long red line with a straight edge, dividing the two interpretations. smutty images black ereksjon white cuños but it’s the background that confuses you, the white on black on white, all colors present in white every light can be reflected and then in the black every color in the spectrum now absorbed, we cannot see it could be someone emerging from city fog or wrapping themselves in mists rolling off the bay they come hither, they go back 2 The truth is you cannot say just what these images are images of; in part they resemble things in our experience but mostly not, mostly they are inventions. And what are we supposed to do with that? An artist takes a brush and makes a bowl of green pears on a canvas; now all we have to do is see if they resemble pears, as we have known them (or seen them made by other painters). Then, another artist, takes the same brush loaded with the same green paint and lets an image emerge from the effort to sing an emotion with this brush, this color paint, and this figure. So, now, what are these images the picture of? each brush load of paint has a beginning and end where the paint pushes hard and heavy a broad line lighter, thin and feathery the paint is never something else, never a lake never a hay wain a viewer or maker viewing assembles the view ties a hair’s width of yellow to an underleaf like deciphering a code scumbling a line of which clouds 3 I was questioning why I knew of no white shadows, no black lanterns to make pale silhouettes on the dark walls. The world could have been that way (in some places it may well be that way), the blackness sucking everything into it, absorbing everything. Darkness then might radiate, in turn, in images projected in differences of temperature, the heat at an invisible end of the spectrum burning white-hot roses, boiling skies. See the shadows cut out of black paper, shine the light right through. What about black and white clouds? its complexity is all in the lower right unfamiliar shapes uniqueness in a world sui generis, nothing familiar looking carefully down through the white painted mists there’s another world trying to show through, eager to be kept in the picture like everything else the world being portrayed here is layered. You see what can seen from where you are maybe a bolt of lightning? Charles D. Tarlton Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International. Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California. Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com.). It's hard to believe but we just turned one!
What a fantastic year it's been at The Ekphrastic Review. Thank you to every single one of you who has contributed, submitted, "liked", posted us on Facebook, read our poetry, shared with your friends, or talked about us behind our back! Please continue to spread the word and share your inspirations. Thank you, thank you, thank you. A Study in Blue and Pink
Blue, but you are Rose, too, and buttermilk, but with blood dots showing through. - May Swenson 1 Suppose we set out to discuss a landscape by John Constable; there would be representations of natural things to be described - a river, clouds, fields, and, above all, trees. But there are no recognizable things in this painting. Thinking again about the Constable you would find a crucial elements of composition, images arranged to create masses, shapes, and colours, perspective for distances, and an horizon, always the horizon. In this painting, however, there are no distances, no recognizable objects, and though there is a red line, strictly speaking, there is no horizon. What we can discern in this painting, however, are two competing media; the first is collage, with three distinctive but glued-on surfaces here, and the second is paint, which gives us intersecting red (horizontal) and yellow (vertical) lines, the red supporting a rough blue-over-green patch that, in turn, holds down the left side of the red line. a red steel girder cantilevered and blue-loaded floating in the air on scratches and wet scumbling a corner torn from a page collage interests me just the way an old photo album does, moments seized by someone, pasted in everyone holding their breaths among my sharpest memories, none stands out more more vividly than sitting in the barber’s chair looking down the long mirrors 2 The parts that are pasted on, that winkled sheet, what looks like a page torn out of an antique Bible, and last, a fragment cut from of an earlier abstract painting, now disoriented; these are fastened to the blue matrix, seducing it over from the possessive red line. The weight of things in stasis, all of it perfectly balanced, suspended in a field of white. But something is wrong, something is causing the red beam to bleed. the little abstract pasted to this larger one entices you in pulls your eye, your attention from the yellows, blues, and reds its composition does what form and balance should leads your eye away asking what are these images saving the yellow bar for last if these collages had been painted on (they were taken from other paintings) would we then have felt so differently and clearly? 3 It seems a hard thing to accept that the abstract artist, in assembling and applying her materials to the canvas, was not trying to say something, meant nothing in particular. We use a language when talking even about abstract painting that leans heavily on verbs like say, convey, present and represent, evoke, depict, voice and manner, and in the United States we say that, however Abstract a painting might be, it was always also Expression. We mean, perhaps, that it was the artist’s unconscious “expressing” itself or even that making is doing is meaning, i.e., symbolic action. step to the canvas dip a large brush, of the sort used painting houses, into a bucket of black paint and drag a large brash line across the surface now you have your paint problem your dissonance and your suspense. The tension builds searching for resolution with a smaller brush you paint on white graftings, buds to propagate new sights, forms, shapes unimagined color, mingle, and contort Charles D. Tarlton Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International. Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California. Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com). My Wife at the Art Gallery
We walk hand in hand inside the Riverfront gallery Amazed by the paintings thumbtacked Like posters to the wall. For me it’s about space and Capturing the lightening quick responses The caramel surprise of her upturned eyes Glancing with marvel and glee at what she sees. I marvel back at her, the way she absorbs Each subject. The way she weighs it all, with the Geiger counter of untainted beauty. Moving from view to view, ekphrastic and tender. Almost unlocking the tears lodged in paint Feeling the atomic weight of colour on the canvas Each splotch organized by the eye Discerning the fainted silence of each deft stroke. My own eyes paint this scene as she rises above me Like a true painting of the Transfiguration, A bright angel amidst the canvas of my eye. Denis Robillard Denis Robillard has had more than 200 poems published across Canada, The USA and Europe since 2005. Bright & Infinite this evening you drive across the bridge tunnel like you have your whole life, away from home or toward it, face hanging out of the window like a dog lapping up air, your nose and cheeks wet with tears. did you choose this water or did it choose you? gulls swarm above the waves, dive bombing for bait. on your skin, on the windows, their fevered pitch echoes. if it’s true this city is sinking into a meteor’s crater formed some 35 million years ago in the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, why don’t people believe it more? instinct or foolishness, the gulls chase desire to the death, to the point of being swallowed. you’re paralyzed in front of photographs of blown off mountain tops, or people up to their waists in water—an unthinkable, vanishing beauty. you discover the word solastalgia, origins in solace and desolation, in other words a deep sadness for a world irreversibly altered-- knowing your city ranks second only to New Orleans, two sea level rise hotspots, you eye angry waves staining the legs of the bridge, licking the concrete belly of the beast carrying you toward thunder- storms. as a child you walked into the mouth of the ocean, swam far enough out, your periphery—bright and infinite—kicking madly against fear, against a giant body that could consume you-- Sarah McCall Sarah McCall worked for many years as both English teacher and bartender, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Old Dominion University. Her writing has appeared in several journals including Whurk, The Quotable, Barely South Review, and Jet Fuel Review. She and her husband and their two dogs live in Norfolk, VA. Considering Caravaggio’s Portrait of Medusa
That we have always wanted to do away with ugly, though who gets to judge? She was my mother after all bullied by the gifted, her face used as a weapon, her story a cautionary tale. A snake's skin is cool to the touch, each scale like a jewel, each jewel onyx or topaz. I would have liked to run my hands over her hair and feel its every sinew. In her last breath we were born from her torn neck. It’s terrible to never know your family. My twin was born a winged horse who took flight the minute he sprung from the heart in her throat. How he carries this I'll never know. Such burdens can drag and turn us to stone. Sonia Greenfield Sonia Greenfield: "I was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and now live with my husband and son in Los Angeles, California, where I teach writing at USC. My poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in a variety of places, including in 2010 Best American Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, The Massachusetts Review, Meridian, and Rattle. My first book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize." Get Your Facts Straight
Not only this flimsy sun-gold fence but a chunky, buckled collar and a skimpy chain tethers you to an improbable pomegranate. This woven floral frenzy, does it imprison or protect? Hanging there as you do, does it matter? You seem tired of these tedious questions, staring off at wild orchids, bistort, and thistle, and, my guess is you’ve settled for whatever symbolic gloss the pundits offer, for you know, you do not assure a fruitful season, you do not negate poison, you do not purify water, and most assuredly you are not the resurrected Christ. You are content to be a quartz-white, goat-bearded, cloven hoofed oddity, who balances an unwieldy horn in a magic starved world. Hallie Moore Hallie Moore, raised in Washington State and educated in California (Stanford University, BA, MA; Antioch University Los Angeles, MFA), now calls the Texas Gulf Coast home. Most recently she is the winner of the 2013 Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest. Her poetry is currently on display in Houston on an 84 foot photo wall on Main Street . Other work has appeared in The Texas Review, Borderlands, Spillway, Blue Mesa Review, Calyx, Moondance, The Adirondack Review, Suddenly, Persimmon Tree etc. with work forthcoming in Sugar Mule, Black Heart Magazine, and Pirene’s Fountain . The Entourage and Saint Rosalia
In any case, to hoist a revived saint towards Heaven is no routine undertaking, not even for eleven cherubs’ might combined. No waif, Rosalia. No firm foundation, baby cloud beneath her feet. A fleshy human figure, when at rest, plummets through a water-vapour platform. Thus, both saint and fluffy scud must be continuously elevated and aligned, cloud-lid with saint-feet. By itself this could be counted satisfactory miracle. But to admit the truth, the little guys (although their gender markings are obscured) more demonstrate entropic disarray than crackerjack coordination. Two are grappling with the saint’s redundant draperies, de trop considering her dress, full-length though form-revealing, preserves her modesty as she ascends. (Say, that Van Dyck! He sure can render duds! The patrons’ wallets gaped in raw desire.) Five cherubs only of eleven nerve themselves to the Hereafterish Heave-Ho, put shoulders to the Celestial College Try, the Intercessory Up-and-At-Em, raising female mass and cumulus puff in tandem above a shrouded Monte Pellegrino. The eighth unsurely aims a floral ring toward the crown of Rosalia’s head, while perched snugly on a separate cloudling. Hey posy baby! Number eight! How ‘bout you pull some weight here! Though when pleading for a quickly putrefying population, accessorizing never harms the case. Speaking of which, our cherub nine has nabbed a rotten skull and carries it aloft as evidence for the empyreal Judge, or maybe as a souvenir. The tenth screws up its face and holds its nose: Stink-O! The final fellow sends an earthward glance toward miserable humanity outside the picture plane. Its flings its arms toward Heaven and Rosalia’s transfixed eyes. Take heart, ye sufferers! Help is on the way! it motions. And perhaps the people, bubo-exploding, gratefully take notice. Rosalia, blessed soul prepared to supplicate her Saviour and His Mother, extends her arms, with palms open and curved, toward the luckless populace of Palermo. Her gesture welds calamity with Grace. Unless her action indicates the roiling, wreathing mass of cherub pudge: Oh Lord! Can we do no better? Has it come to this? David P. Miller David P. Miller is a pushcart nominated poet and former member of the Mobius Artists Group in Boston. His chapbook The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press) was published in 2014. He has been published in many magazines including Ibbetson Street and Oddball Magazine. David is a librarian at Curry College. |
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