Corn Dancer The woman glares down for decades. Her eyes dare me to look away, to notice adobe when she will not be housed in a pale box. Behind her stands the First Mother, looking back, beside her a child with the face of Pan. But she-- she is Eve who needs no Adam. She is Persephone fresh from Hades. She is the corn maid from every harvest. The gold frame means nothing, it cannot hold her. Karen Douglass This poem previously appeared in Write Denver/AMWA. Karen Douglass has published short fiction, three novels, Accidental Child, Providence and Invisible Juan, and five books of poetry. Karen is a member of Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop, Academy of American Poets, and Columbine Poets of Colorado. She has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publication list is available at www.KVDbooks.com.
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war visions
there's a hole in the sky in my side in my heart in my brain a hole raining black tear drops a hole fertile with seeds that can't be planted this season or the next devorah major devorah major served as San Francisco’s Third Poet Laureate. She has five poetry books, the most recent and then we became, two novels, four chapbooks and a host of short stories, essays, and poems in anthologies and periodicals. Trade Routes, a symphony by Guillermo Galindo with spoken word poetry and song by devorah major premiered at the Oakland East Bay Symphony in 2006. In June 2015 major premiered her poetry play Classic Black: Voices of 19th Century African-Americans in San Francisco at the S.F. International Arts Festival. devorah major performs her work nationally and internationally with and without musicians. http://www.devorahmajor.com Rhoda used to tell people she was a captive even though anyone with eyes and a nose could see they belonged together. Boyd, red face and all, was her father. There was no hiding that odor of land, that set of blue eyes and gold cap of hair, that love of animal slaughter and the colour red, that bull dog squareness of their shoulders. And Jane could be no one other than her mother, flinty chin, hand on hip, gunslinger style, the trigger temper.
But Rhoda persisted, used to beg rides to the county library (twice on a wagon and once on a tractor). She looked up all the names of all the women who had ever been stolen, tortured, killed, or assimilated into a tribe not of her own choosing. There was Cynthia Ann Parker and Rebecca Kellogg, Mercy Harbison and Fanny Kelly. Mary Draper, the county librarian, refused to help her get Rachel Plummer's Narrative of 21 Months' Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Comanche Indians. She said it wasn't fitting for a young lady. She told Rhoda's parents, I think that child is unhealthy. Boyd and Jane had to disagree. They understood a child's needs, the longing for change, for rain and a city. They'd grown up under the poverty of sun, sky, and endless mesas. They knew the limits of brown and gold and brown. Still there would be no more trips to the library. If Rhoda had to read, let her read Jane's old novels – The Virginian, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Log of a Cowboy. If Rhoda had to dream, let her dream of cattle and hay, quilts and the occasional orchard. Herman Begay, a man twice her age, a salesman who belonged everywhere and nowhere, who said he'd seen New York and could take her to Denver, offered her escape. She thought him handsome in a dark, foreign way. She loved his trunk full of tractor catalogs, the pictures of bulls for sale, the promise of “fine hogs.” Boyd said, Don't go. Jane just shrugged her shoulders. They never married, never had children, although they did the things married couples did. Now that's captivity, Mary Draper would tell any patron to the library. Rhoda didn't care. She loved Herman. He took her to Denver, kept her in red dresses and green Cadillacs. Life was fun. She thought of writing a memoir. Nan Wigington Nan Wigington lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Her flash has appeared in Gravel, Spelk, and Pithead Chapel. The Questions She Makes Me Ask
This is what women have always been for me: an alluring mystery, a hidden fruit, a secret not quite revealed, not quite concealed, a metaphor that calls to me—O! Siren’s song—and then withdraws within dark folds distant as death’s far kingdom. See the red hair curled and massing, the perfect arcing eyebrows, the hooded eyes and flushing cheeks. Can she think what I am thinking? Does she know? See the red lips peeping above the black scarf, the fascinator. Does she look at me as she recedes—inscrutable-- into desire’s black banks? And if I follow, if I pursue, if I part her great dark cloak, if I seek the obscure promise she withholds, will I ever find the light again? Cecil Morris Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English in California, where he wrote numerous memos, lesson plans, and the occasional poem. He has had a few poems published, mostly in English teacher magazines (English Journal and California English) and small literary magazines (Poem and Hiram Review). Old Plum
The landscape, continents away from where I stand, hemispheric change, yet oddly similar. Rough, layered stone, trees twisted by the bellow of wind, a few branches in bud, a few branches heavy in death. Yet among this bleakness, an explosion of delicate flowers, white tinged with pink. Next to them, a valiant beam of red petals and green leaves rooted in rock. If I stare into the flower’s heart, I can see the past, back and back and back, when the world was blushed with beginning, the sky held a young sun in its turquoise hands, the spirits of the dead twirled in mad joy. Valerie Bacharach Valerie Bacharach’s poetry has appeared in several publications including Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh Quarterly, US 1 Worksheets, The Tishman Review, Topology Magazine, Poetica, VerseWrights, and Voices from the Attic. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic workshops and conducts weekly poetry workshops for the women at Power House and CeCe’s Place, halfway houses for women in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Her first chapbook, Fireweed, will be published in 2018 by Main Street Rag. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Picasso’s Bicycle
was blue and for a period his favoured means of travel. When it ceased to be of use it was propped against a fence, abandoned to the weather. In the summer of forty-two, left to entertain his daughter Maya, the artist organised an afternoon sketching flowers. But the child wandered off and chancing on the wreck, she asked her father to take it indoors and make it better. Whilst Maya ate her biscuits and drank milk, Pablo set to work and when he said, Look, I have made you a magnificent bull’s head, there were tears. Sandra Burnett This poem previously appeared in the pamphlet New Lease, Half Moon Books. Sandra Burnett lives in Otley, West Yorkshire, UK. She has been published in anthologies produced by Half Moon Books and in poetry magazines including Prole, Frogmore Papers, Strix, Coast-to-Coast-to-Coast, and Magma 71: the Film Issue. She enjoys performing her poetry and her pamphlet New Lease is published by Half Moon Books. http://www.halfmoonbooks.co.uk/ Jenny, Jenny I’m still here, waiting for this phone to ring, a blast from the past, though we’ve been disconnected for so long the phone company has repossessed the cord and even if I knew your number now and stuck my index finger in the holes above those big black numbers 1-0 and spun the dial, the handful of receiver to my ear, you wouldn’t answer, no signal can possibly reach you, breach the distance of the years, let me hear your voice again, I have to be content with the yellow of this desk top reminding me of your hair on that summer day we spent at—where was it, Jenny, oh, where was it? Please call, Jenny. I’m up against that metal thing that stops the dial from spinning, spinning, spinning and I don’t know how long it’s going to hold-- Robert L. Dean, Jr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.'s work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, River City Poetry, Heartland!, and the Wichita Broadsides Project. He read at the 13th Annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in April 2018 at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. His haibun placed first at Poetry Rendezvous 2017. He was a quarter-finalist in the 2018 Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry contest. He has been a professional musician and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas. Reliquary Arm of St. Valentine
Your vessel was split into too many pieces for one man, but perhaps enough for two. Conflated with love, you spread to great cities all wanting a moment alone with your fragments to kiss them through glass windows with dustless lips. In Rome is your alleged skull, forehead labeled, crowned with flowers. in Dublin is a vial tinged with your blood, in Roquemare is a shred of bone, another sliver is in Vienna. Here, in a city you might think was made of hell we have your alleged arm, silver-shelled, in an alarmed case: Golden porticullis poised to drop protecting your pocked bone knobby knuckles to hold your tireless benediction under a sapphire ring neat buttons climbing to the hinge where your wrist would be if your hands weren’t somewhere in Savona. What will become of the encased saints when the dead are resurrected? This bone in silver armour might drop itself into the harbour to paddle towards its cousins, and remedy this long disruption. Honor Vincent Honor Vincent is a writer living in New York City, where she dedicates most of her apartment's square footage to cats and books. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her writing is published or forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, Entropy, and Nowhere. Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap
A dazzling scene—why mar it with a bird trap? About Breugel, Auden was never wrong-- that meaning waits unnoticed in the corner while winter sunlight floods the snow, blots sky, turns shapes to figures skating on noonday shadows. Villagers spread across the glowing ice, and birds watch, like the many-eyed houses turned toward the skaters. And, stillest, the heavy boards, propped on a stick, baited for hungry beaks. But now I see that the skaters, themselves, are trapped in a winter dream of freedom and sunlit snow. And I have been enthralled along with them by this silent prologue glimpsed through tangled limbs, this glow flooding ice, blurring a weight's faint shadow-- so caught up that I missed the hole in the ice and the string on the trap, its unseen hand offstage (a boy's? the devil's? the painter’s?) waiting for dazzled souls like mine grown heedless in blissful light. Memye Curtis Tucker Memye Curtis Tucker is the author of The Watchers (Hollis Summers Prize, Ohio University Press), the prizewinning chapbooks Admit One and Storm Line, and Holding Patterns; and poems in Poetry Daily, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, Shidae Munhuck [featured in Korean translation], Southern Review, among others. With a Ph.D. in English literature, multiple fellowships from MacDowell, VCCA, and the Georgia Council for the Arts, and numerous awards, she teaches poetry writing and is former Senior Editor of Atlanta Review. Crater Lake, 1923 I stood before the lake one summer day minerals fell silent fragments all at once the souls of children rose up together headed west over the valley surrender not grief nothing rippled the lake’s surface An Oasis in the Badlands, 1905 This land has not saved us. My horse drinks here for the last time. Winter will come, unaware of how I leaned back in the saddle as my animal filled herself, the river emptying under her hooves; loss wears away to black and white soft like ashes after a prairie fire. Canyon de Chelly, 1904 The distance divides itself and becomes greater, a covert equation. Our horses raise their heads, alert to barometric change. We look up from the sandy floor to the top of an island. What logic put an ocean here and then took it away gallon by salty gallon? The Rush Gatherer, 1910 All day I go about my work groping through mud and living things. People think the hardest part is bundling thick wet grass, but it’s watching my hands disappear into that dark water again and again. The Vanishing Race, 1904 When you finally saw us you gave us names intended to destroy. We are going not because we are doomed but because you are. You have facts and we have facts. How differently the truth accords itself. We know how to address the mountain. No towns will come here and roads will dwindle to one. No one else wanted this land: we, its reluctant caretakers, ride the horses you brought us straight into the cliff. Erica Goss Four of these poems were first published as a sequence by Ekphrasis. Erica Goss served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA from 2013-2016. She is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2016 Lyrebird Award, Wild Place and Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets. Recent work appears in Lake Effect, Atticus Review, Contrary, Convergence, Spillway, Eclectica, The Tishman Review, Tinderbox, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Main Street Rag, among others. She is editor of Sticks & Stones, a bi-monthly poetry newsletter. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com. |
The Ekphrastic Review
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