Bliss
Vishnu clasps a gold, multi-armed goddess who straddles his lap in a lusty embrace. Despite gilt garments, they kiss, erotically entangle, bound to the wheel of sensual bliss. Voyeuristic visitors glance, consult museum brochures, discreetly move on. Inspired lovers look and learn, seek a quiet corner, feel themselves blaze. Jennifer Lagier Jennifer Lagier has published thirteen books, taught with California Poets in the Schools, co-edits the Homestead Review, helps coordinate Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium readings. Newest books: Scene of the Crime (Evening Street Press), Harbingers (Blue Light Press), Camille Abroad (FutureCycle Press). Forthcoming publications: Like a B Movie and Camille Mobilizes, (FutureCycle Press, 2018). Website: jlagier.net
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Just a few copies remaining of this micro-run of The Luzajic Variations by Ekphrastic Review poet Bill Waters.
Bill wrote poetry by arranging and rearranging the titles of editor Lorette C. Luzajic's paintings. They are the only words he used to create these beautiful poems. Each tiny chapbook is illustrated in colour with the paintings. Get yours here for $10, includes shipping. Contemplating People, I Have Observed
the vast divide between the clean and those who choose to remain unwashed. A child will feed pigeons, happy in the dust. A bull pierced through the shoulder sinks to his haunches. Never was red so dull. The female form excites the muse but all becomes ordinary in reduction. A platter. A bowl. A long-legged table. While masculinity resolves its headache in paunch and penis. Hills rolling unregarded. A study in plane and colour is as academic as mud and blood, piss and undressed lamb. We have eyes that slide past drooping nose, and oh so many teeth. Sharp. White. She scrubs herself in a blue room. He plays ball on the beach. Lover of sand. Here at last, a man with a guitar. To wake me in my grave. Carve your tune in basalt. Singing the seas to a crying woman. Where she reclines nude under stars. We cringe. We crawl. We crow. So little time to find the soap … Rinse the sullen crimson tide from your fingers. Ponder the inevitable fall. Cracked heels. Rise from bed. This life. Uncovered. Art. Kerry O’Connor Kerry O’Connor is the Creative Manager of a communal blog, imaginary garden with real toads, a group project which provides a forum for on-line poets. Her poetry is to be found on the Skylover blogsite, and several pieces have appeared in the online publications: Nice Cage, Verse Wrights and Visual Verse. During working hours, Kerry is to be found in a South African high school, teaching English as a first and second language. In the Middle Distance
We dress as if for a funeral of a distant acquaintance, hats and all. Anyone can see we are sisters, fair, forties, features a two-way mirror. All the way up there on the subway, I tell myself this will be the time when we will laugh like girls, silly over wine and cake, touch hands, share secrets only those who have slept in the same childhood bed can know. But no. You show me the unscarred side of your face, hide your eyes, speak in riddles, drink black coffee. No sugar. No cream. Greta Bolger Greta Bolger is a writer and visual artist retired and living the dream in NW lower Michigan. Her previous work has appeared in several print and online publications, including Electica, typishly, The Chimaera, Third Coast, Literary Bohemian, Snakeskin and others. She volunteers with art organizations and international efforts to support women and girls in the developing world. Coltrane on a Friday Night
Bone brittle from battling the week, I disarm the alarm inside our penthouse door. I glance at the dish where you keep your keys to the beamer. Still empty. A glass of wine releases cool shades of Coltrane. Collapsed on one of our sofas, I stare at this space, leather rectangles arranged for mock cocktail conversation. Brushed cymbals scrape a useless circle, like the cut-rate merlot swirling dry and metallic on my tongue. Drums stutter-start, the bass pulsing beats from a dying heart alone at twilight. This apartment used to gleam. Now the sleek furniture reeks of stale ambition. Faux modernism in red and black lines the walls, framed spatters of blood and death. The pleading tenor sax tosses longing through the window of the million dollar view. A circuit board of winking lights ends at the shore, where electric life fizzles into the ocean. Along the horizon, a distant cargo ship passes, low in the water. I follow its lit outline, as the weighted vessel carries, unaware, my stinging blues of darkness singing blind despair. Christine Jackson Christine Jackson grew up in New England as a swamp Yankee. She now lives at the edge of the Everglades and teaches literature and creative writing at a South Florida university. That is, she is supposed to teach, but she probably learns as much from her students as they do from her. Chris’s poetry has been published in several online publications, including Verse-Virtual, Treehouse Arts, Peacock Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. After Child Picking a Fruit
To know Pennsylvania, its farmland and deep quiet I had to go to France. To birth the little peachling I paint the furze of the cheek, urge the dyad toward deep shade. Blindness is a lane in the dark, an alleyway of speckled stuff cast off by horse chestnuts. Woody peach stones too-- I have dreamed in time's blue interstice of a genderless life hung limp as pastel sheets. I cannot make a child but with oils, yet happy vantage, bedclothes stirred by a breeze, sister women suckling mouths, sweetmeats filched by my oiled brush, nursery loves. In the garden, ground snails underfoot. Phantom smoke from a studio lingers in my hair. Thinking s-curves, I meld the woman's hand to a branch. Hunger its fate, I mean the child's, boy or girl, against the figured silk of a pink gown-- they will pity my late blindness, sun-soaked dream. Why not paint an idyll? The night we spoke of contraposto, my friend licked a charcoal stick, and in his shirtsleeves, conjured up a dancing girl. Carol Alexander Carol Alexander's poetry appears in various anthologies, among them Resurrection of a Sunflower (Pski's Porch Publishing), Broken Circles (Cave Moon Press), Through a Distant Lens (Write Wing Publishing) and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 1. Her work can be found in numerous print and online journals such as Bluestem, Caesura, Canary, CHEST Journal, Chiron Review, The Common, The Ekphrastic Review, Gravel, The High Window, Matter, One, Poetrybay, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Split Rock Review, The New Verse News, Soundings East and forthcoming in Home Planet News Online, Southern Humanities Review, J Journal, Third Wednesday and The Main Street Rag. She is the author of the chapbook BRIDAL VEIL FALLS (Flutter Press, 2013) and the poetry collection HABITAT LOST (Cave Moon Press, 2017). The Girl in the Picture June 7, 1972 Gasoline and soap make napalm -- sticks like glue, burns alive. Collateral children scream, "Nóng quá, nóng quá!" The photo almost wasn't published -- atrocities of war sell papers. But nudity? A bare child screaming Nóng quá, nóng quá? Too hot, too hot! Sarah Russell Sarah Russell’s poetry and short fiction have been published in Kentucky Review, Red River Review, Misfit Magazine, Rusty Truck, The Ekphrastic Review, Psaltery and Lyre, and many other journals and anthologies. She was recently nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Sarah blogs at SarahRussellPoetry.net. Edward Hopper: Chop Suey 1929 The young woman’s gaze is a shadow. In her lap, her hands hide as well. The red bow of her mouth is strung taut against the light blanching her white. Who has not found themselves here at this uncomfortable table? To place a hand in the cool valley between the shoulder blades of the other woman. To tip the daughter’s chin up—lift her eyes. Doesn’t she see how much she is like her mother? Look how their shoulders slope, their hats pulled low against the drafty chill of the restaurant. The distance across the table isn't as far as it appears. See now the teapot between them-- how both could reach it with barely any effort at all. Carol McMahon Carol McMahon is a teacher and poet whose work has been published, or is forthcoming, in various journals (IthacaLit, The Wild Word, The Ekphrastic Review, Prodigal, Claudius Speaks, Clockhouse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Stone Canoe) and has a chapbook, On Any Given Day, published by FootHills Press. McMahon received an MFA in Poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop in Washington State and, when she is not with 11-year-olds, spends her time either running or rowing. The Shepherd’s Scold
I’ve had enough of dreams that tantalize, then blow to nothing like smoke when I wake to the stone fact of tending the flock-- weathered hours for coins, for lentils and wheat, for the homespun on my back. Wishes used to dog me like the fleas feeding on our dog, like thirst on a shadeless day. You anger me angel. Don’t come singing of hope. I’ve seen how things end for sick children, for widows, for the man in debt, for sheep. Leave me in peace, bless me with sleep like those seven with their horns and fleece, like my companion under his hood. His snoring is the best hymn of praise I’ve ever heard. Matthew Murrey Matthew Murrey: "My poems have appeared in various journals such as Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, and Rattle. I received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry a number of years ago, and my first book manuscript is seeking a publisher. I am a high school librarian in Urbana, Illinois where I live with my partner. We have two sons who live in the Pacific Northwest. My website is https://matthewmurrey.weebly.com/" La Géante (The Giantess)
She’s a lady liberated from Baudelaire’s poetics From his tomcat worship of women For what generation of men over the expanse of time has not knelt at the feet of a well-formed naked female Blown her importance out of proportion with heavy breath of passion Turned pubescent in her presence with the predisposition to explore her staggering proportions To seduce her with flowery references to soul steamy eyes and somber flames And after the flush of fervor has faded To lie in sated stupor under the cool shadow of satisfaction But Magritte’s woman painted a hundred years after Baudelaire versified her appears as no oil-engendered giantess She stands disrobed and secured in scale to her domestic surroundings Oblivious to her dwarfed husband watching from a cat’s-eye view in his business suit She probably supports the European suffragette movement Cleans house without wearing clothes Reads Virginia Woolf in English And has enough certitude to do her own seducing Growing in the husband’s grateful eyes to the queenly size of her namesake Ellaraine Lockie Magritte's painting contains the script for the poem, "La Geante," by Charles Baudelaire. Click here to read Baudelaire's poem in French, and a number of English translations as well. This poem was first published at California Ekphrastic. Ellaraine Lockie is a widely published and awarded poet, nonfiction book author and essayist. Her thirteenth chapbook, Tripping with the Top Down, was recently released from FootHills Publishing. Earlier collections have won the Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, the Poetry Forum Press Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Contest, the Aurorean Chapbook Choice Award and Best Individual Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England. Ellaraine teaches poetry workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh. |
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