Stieglitz Photograph of O’Keeffe’s Hands Two spheres trace dual plumb lines, all vertical and shade that become the backdrop for her hands. You have to see the drawing and photograph in proximity, the Hands now so recognizable it obscures the charcoal. She says, “He photographed me till I was crazy,” but nothing matches her long fingers reaching for spheres in the pattern of a parallelogram, the other forefinger along folds of a curtain, film out of view. Kyle Laws Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO. Her collections include Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018); This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017); So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015); Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014); My Visions Are As Real As Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudolph Valentino (Dancing Girl Press, 2013); and George Sand’s Haiti (co-winner of Poetry West’s 2012 award). With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Granted residencies in poetry from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), she is one of eight members of the Boiler House Poets who perform and study at the museum. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.
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His Red Room
1. After the ice-palaces of St Petersburg, his dining room chilled him, so he painted it scarlet, confined blue to leaves and flowers on walls and table, to a patch of sky out of a window in the left-hand corner. Closer inspection reveals a blue tinge on his housekeeper’s collar, counterbalanced by fierce tawny hair. What are the fruits she arranges with her long white hands? Did she understand his blue mood? Her head is a geisha’s, her body, another kind of servant’s. From here you can’t tell where the wallpaper and tablecloth end, and she begins. 2. I am led, I do not lead. But by what? Oranges? We can probably trust Apollinaire who tells us he put faith in the power of that sun-charged fruit; a gift, with cakes and flowers, sent to Picasso when he lay sick in the Boulevard Raspail. then a crate, each subsequent New Year. There they are, lined up on the table edge, repeated in the colour of the woman’s hair. He watches from the doorway, thinks he’s unseen, but she knows he’s there, chooses what looks like the ripest, peels it, takes her time, licks juices from her fingers. Mixing a precise shade of red, he remembers— it was the smell that led him. 3. The orchard in Relleu—hot sun on my shoulders and neck on an afternoon that could have gone either way. There’s nothing cold about this blue sky. Last oranges on this tree look more like lemons—weathered, pale, they’re braving it out before blotches of rot, passages of ants and spiders. Wasps pester. Is that desperate love for the flesh farmers have rejected? Almonds I’ve sprung from their husks will most likely stay in my rucksack until way after Christmas. No place for these oranges in my fruit bowl-- a still life more entire on low branches, parched ground. Pam Thompson Pam Thompson is a poet, lecturer, reviewer and writing tutor based in Leicester. Her publications include The Japan Quiz ( Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith | Doorstop, 2006). Pam has a PhD in Creative Writing and her second collection, Strange Fashion, was recently published by Pindrop Press. pamthompsonpoetry@wordpress.com The Assumption of the Virgin
Close in, it’s a matter of scattered Crosshatches, tiny plus marks, plus A turbaned figure peeking through A curtain forbiddingly darkened. He sees a solemn surgeon’s fingers Taking her fading pulse. Palpable Sadness, but taken down quickly, As in a diary of sketches. But step back Three or four paces and you see A cloud of a body consumed in smoke In a funnel rising toward heaven. These are the steps the turbaned head Had not taken, this is the assumption That Rembrandt wanted you to make. David M. Katz David M. Katz’s books of poems include Stanzas on Oz and Claims of Home, both published by Dos Madres Press. He’s also the author of The Warrior in the Forest, published by House of Keys Press. Poems of his have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, and The Cortland Review. He is currently working on a new poetry collection, tentatively entitled Money. He lives in New York City and recently retired after a 40-year career as a business journalist and editor. Boris Gourevitz’s Shoe (Mac McClain, Mexico City, 1953) …and so we proceed on into 2012, broke, looking for stars on mountain nights. When a moon is added, a blessing. (from the letters of Mac McClain, 1923-2012) You lived knowing you were lucky, you and Boris Gourevitz at art school a few years after shrapnel ripped his leg, forcing him to wear a four-inch heel you couldn’t take your eyes off. It lived with him, on him and also had its own life throwing shadows other forms burbled from: sun-flecked leaves growing at the arch, fish swimming over toes, amoebas lurking in the dark or rising as dustmotes, electric particles, the heel itself a stack of bones echoed by dark slashes in the shade. Rosiness runs through it from crimson at toe-joints to garnet under loopy laces dissolving into pastel pinks and oranges against blue. In Mexico you dug clay out of caves, built a wooden wheel, began to learn ceramics. Boris sculpted granite using chisels, refused to use pneumatic carving tools. Boris had been Air Force, you were Infantry. At war’s end you took a bus to Grasse, started walking across France, reached Toulouse, erupted into poems. Decades later, house-bound, you wrote about a bobcat chasing a red squirrel near your front porch, of Joanie’s horse, of coyote barks and howls and the White Leghorn chickens your grandpa raised, 80 years before, on a California ranch you considered paradise. Of how you thought of me at moonrise. Both lonely, we found solace in smoke signals, vapour trails. Every time the moon hangs herself I think of you. Penelope Moffet Penelope Moffet’s poetry has been published in Natural Bridge, Permafrost, Levure Litteraire, Truthdig, Pearl, Steam Ticket, Wavelength, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and other literary journals. She lives in Southern California. Her second chapbook, It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You, is about to be published by Arroyo Seco Press. The Ekphrastic Review thanks Jim Harrington for an interview at Six Questions For ... Check it out here: http://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.com/2018/07/The-Ekphrasti-Review.html Elegy to Robert Motherwell
Irresistible bulbous black orbs, linked by solid black bands forming a kind of propulsive mothership, collide against a white colonnade, while pockets of tangerine, lime, and grape try not to be obliterated. Rigid bands of Spanish sky and Verna lemon teeter on the edge, uncertain to intervene, more likely to be expelled completely. Leaky engines of malice, the orbs ooze crude oil and snail slime. In the distance, what appear to be amber banners struggle to stay unfurled. What survivors remain bend at the waist as they plod away, hoping to escape the vortex, cradling their young in bare hands. Alan Humason Alan Humason is a writer in Fort Bragg, CA. He has published short fiction and poetry in such periodicals as Flash: The International Short Story Magazine, Third Wednesday, The Longleaf Pine, The Reed, WORK, and 100wordstory.com. He has a BA in English Literature from UC Santa Barbara and is a past winner of the Grand Prize Phelan Award for writing from San Jose State University. Richard Serra at Gagosian There are numbers penciled along the edge of a couple of Serra’s steel slabs, all in the same hand. His, presumably. I find myself writing them down, sketching them almost, the distinctive 1s with their long beak-- 62592-15 62569-5 B1688 I do this as if these numbers were the aesthetic objects at hand, skirting around the steel slabs themselves, which in their huge brute presence are just as matter-of-fact, but equipped with less graspable contours. Their bulk and the mute self-evidence of steel overwhelms any angle of approach. I am drawing the numbers for something to say. They are on the edge of a slab that lies flat named Silence (for John Cage). This silence is, it seems, a spreading horizontality in contrast to the upright assertions, the positive vertical presences of Every Which Way, the forest of slabs installed in the main space. Like redwoods the stillness of these is full and tense with latent power. But their surfaces are busy—on one, dribble trails of some liquid run sideways from the edge so that I can tell its orientation was once 90 degrees otherwise. But it’s hard to imagine the colossal object uprooting or moving. What would it sound like, slamming onto its side? Can a thud be sharp? A suddenness that’s dull with weight but keen with the zing of steel. Dull and sharp are the two poles we use when seeking to articulate bodily pain: a crude linguistic scale made necessary by the difficulty of giving voice to brute feeling. The slabs are incontrovertible, majestic, and my body is small. In Through it is ushered narrowly between two especially enormous slabs whose rectangular uprightness has been toppled on its side, landing lengthwise and becoming cavernous. There are three of these, with a smaller crack between the second two—not for bodies. The sound comes again when I imagine it closing in—a sharp thud and a perfect airless embrace. And there is another sound—less sharp but not round, either—that’s happening on the surface of the steel: a rogue noise that belies the total, austere clarity of the sculptural objects. A faint buzzing and tinkling of small life that gets louder as I get closer up, and discover the delinquency of rust in all of its tangential, penumbral glory. The chalky yellow of smeared pollen; clusters like stuff on a beach rock that cakes off with your finger, or iron filings; bubbly lacquer-black blotches spreading like sores. From further back, these small infestations present as a rash of colour—orange-magentas, bright and fleshy, and dusty plum blues—that insist, from within these mute bodies, upon the nuances of joy. There is one small, square, windowless room containing no objects, just black rectangles painted alternately across the upper or lower half of each wall. Here is a different kind of flattening, and a discolouration, as if the room were acting as a cave of forms. But I am moved by how the upper rectangles of black paint bulge subtly at their lower edges where they meet the white of the wall, the way blue-tacked child drawings do when the paint has dried. And the smell of the paint is dense, almost peaty. Sound from the street is amplified fiercely in this small room, and the atmosphere becomes circus-like when the jingle of an ice-cream van echoes around inside its arena of checkered black & white. Jonelle Mannion Jonelle Mannion is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazineand Art Monthly Australia among others.
The Merry Drinker Ruddy cheeked, boozy with tattered vest and barely balanced glass of genever gin, he extends a shaky hand to say: “Since you’ve bought my last drink, I’ll tell you of places I’ve been, the Amsterdam whores I’ve known, the Spaniards I’ve killed as a soldier of Orange, with blunderbuss and sword.” He’s into the tavern from wintry cold, staggering along snow-fringed canals, seeking alms from passersby, scraps of food tossed out for dogs. Wall-eyed and thin, he lives for his next drink, hoping to sleep it off inside, not on the cobblestone streets, puking up blood in the gutter, possessed by demons and ghosts of comrades long since gone. Charles Halsted This poem first appeared in Yolo Crow. Charles Halsted is a retired academic physician at the University of California Davis who has been writing poetry for several years. The Child's Bath
A woman washing her daughter’s feet in a porcelain bowl, shown from your high angle, forgive my slowness. My waddle is all thumbs, my memory, a steer’s rib cage upturned, bleaching in a meadow. When you first appeared on the overhead in Mr. McCloud’s class, I confess my mind was on that girl sitting in the back row whose name I can’t recall, but whose face now seems imprinted along the same synapses you course through. Do some ducklings not recognize their mother? Perhaps that’s why, here before your original at the Art Institute of Chicago, I’m finally struck by how I can’t see the woman’s eyes or her daughter’s, that I have to look down, as they do, to the hand cupping the toes dipped in water. So much of you is that drab striped dress, itself a canvas for holding the child. The rug, pitcher, bureau there only to hint this was a real room once, before it became a tender gaze held by a room with no door for me to enter. Jason Gebhardt Jason Gebhardt’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The William and Mary Review. His chapbook Good Housekeeping was a semifinalist in the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition and won the 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Prize. He is the recipient of multiple Artist Fellowships awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He studies with Sandra Beasley, Stanley Plumly, and Elizabeth Rees. To Fluttering Figure by Wassily Kandinsky
When the itches start inside his belly and, quick as lightning, crackle down legs and out arms, flicker into fingers, he sees himself as a hootchie cootchie dancer, every little shiver blooming out his loosey-goosey skin, he’d be a fire working itself across the stage, no one knowing where he came from, just a blaze of color and syncopation. Glory be, his rags are flapping. He cannot sit a bit longer at this desk, tapping out numbers, pinning letters onto paper, putting things in order. He’s a jiver, a jumper, a humming- bird and flea, he could raise folks outa their seats, maybe outa pants ‘n shoes. If he could be free to realize all he is, he knows he could bring joy to the multitude, get the common blood to flow ‘n flower. What this dull world deserves, himself included: carnival sparklers, pulled down off the shelf. Grace Marie Grafton Grace Marie Grafton’s most recent book, Jester, was published by Hip Pocket Press. She is the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems won first prize in the Soul Making contest (PEN women, San Francisco), in the annual Bellingham Review contest, Honorable Mention from Anderbo and Sycamore Review, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poems recently appear in Basalt, Sin Fronteras, The Cortland Review, Canary, CA Quarterly, Askew, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Ambush Review. |
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