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John Slaby: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge, Curated by Sandi Stromberg

7/18/2025

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Picture
The Serpent, by John Slaby (USA) 2024

Dear Writers,

In The Serpent, artist John Slaby offers a true smorgasbord of daily life for your imagination! He and I look forward to all your responses and hope you enjoy the journey.

John Slaby was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has been a Houston resident for almost 40 years. Trained as an engineer (he holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering), he splits his time between his profession and his art practice. He is mostly self-taught as an artist and has exhibited his work in the Houston region since his first outdoor art show in 1989. He has been a member of Archway Gallery, Texas's oldest artist-owned gallery, since 1993 and has had many solo exhibitions there. 

Happy writing!
Sandi 

**

Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is The Serpent, by John Slaby. Deadline is August 1, 2025. 

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way.​ Scroll down to donate $5CAD (about $3.75 USD).

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include SLABY CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, AUGUST 1, 2025.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
​
​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
​
15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.
​

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Charles Altamont Doyle: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

7/11/2025

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Picture
Spirits of Prisoners, by Charles Altamont Doyle (England) 1885

​Sunnyside Prison

Only an after when once
was before, and during shadows 
board in between. Joyful 
I collapse in star-sand, yet they,
here, want an obey; transforming 
all that falling in to steadier 
views. Walls dark - even on 
days - as memories destroy 
a distance. How they rebuild 
our film of wishes here. Sanity 
in spirit, an impressive gift to 
daily sketch. Delicately. Never 
will I cascade, down their brainy 
stairs. Hardly they listen.
Today, I just smooth the beard,
laugh my smiles and water-
colour with stone compeers 
balancing. The ones who ask 
the good questions. Better 
than butterfly ruins: 
the crows that hope. Voice 
and cosmos, together, open 
up clearly; a history of now 
and then — though never 
may I unravel. A cell is
not sunny in the end. 

Kate Copeland 

Kate Copeland’s love for languages led her to linguistics & teaching; her love for art & water to poetry. She is curator-editor for The Ekphrastic Review & runs linguistic-poetry workshops for the International Women's Writing Guild. Find her poems @ https://www.instagram.com/kate.copeland.poems/ plus @ TER, WildfireWords, Gleam, Hedgehog Press [a.o.]. Kate was born in harbour-city, and adores housesitting in the world. 

**

Imprisoned

Prisoners of our own imperfections
Chained to our fantasies 
In the tightened straitjackets of our illusions
We're only fatally flawed humans
Even imps and greater demons
Colonizing our surroundings — 
Parasites — living inside our mortal hearts
Are doomed
Unless redemption is sought...
Will the Maker 
Give us a second chance 
In the reality of an as yet unfathomable
Other world of freedom?

Z. T. Balian

Multilingual French-Armenian author, Z. T. Balian, holds and MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut.  After a career as a university lecturer, she now devotes her time to writing.  Waiting for Morning Twilight (2023) is her first collection of haiku poetry in English, and her 199 Haiku Poems in Western Armenian was published in 2022.  Her poetry in English has previously appeared in Hope: An Anthology of Poetry (2020) and Setu Mag's Poetry: Western Voices (2021-2023).  She is also the author of two novels, Three Kisses of the Cobra (2016) and Fallen Pine Cones (2023).  She is currently working on a collection of poems in English which will be published in October.

**

Top of the Tower
 
She felt no need to retrofit
her solitary status
accustomed to the confines of plentiful
arts ideating her private nest
 
when she risked a brief glimpse
beyond
she imagined legion of souls escaping,
banshee shrieks assaulted her,
tempted her to follow
the chill, the other, the unkept
confusion of freedom
 
beckoning, as evil does, 
to a prison of “you should”
out there
nowhere
 
Unseen in her upper room she chooses
her boundaries, her single purpose
her bountiful joy
 
Cathy Hollister

Cathy Hollister is the author of Seasoned Women, A Collection of Poems published by Poet’s Choice.  A 2024 Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been in Eclectica Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. She lives in middle Tennessee; find her online at www.cathyhollister.com and Instagram cathy.hollister.52
 
**

Phantasm at Sunnyside Asylum

Morpheus glazes the moon’s blue patina
in serene morphine the porcelain stars craze
spiraling below chimneys ghosts tumble
from Hermes’ gable in paralyzed flight

in serene morphine the porcelain stars craze
the inmates sing dreams deprived of sight
from Hermes’ gable in paralyzed flight
conjuring spectres compound windows watch

the inmates sing dreams deprived of sight
giants strangle screams of pleasure 
conjuring spectres compound windows watch
at their leisure amorphous horses infants

giants strangle screams of pleasure
spiraling below chimneys ghosts tumble
at their leisure amorphous horses infants
Morpheus glazes the moon’s blue patina


Denise England

Denise England’s passion for languages, art, cultures and connections inspires her writing.  She studied in Bordeaux, France and holds an M.A. in French literature. Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in Cave Region Review, UAMS Medicine and Meaning, The French Literary Review, SLANT, and Ekstasis Magazine.  She enjoys sharing and developing her poetry within communities of other poets and artists including The Poets Roundtable of Arkansas and Spectra Arts. www.pw.org/directory/writers/denise_england

**

Dreaming of Freedom
 
In the gray -blue hour of early morn
before a day is fully born,
 
I watch the spirits flee
climbing on what seems to be
 
a beanstalk spiral grown from dreams,
rising from its start as magic beans.
 
As the wraiths rise up toward the stars,
out of bondage beyond walls,
 
I note the smiling cloud- a benign face
urging them on to a better place.
 
Before sun sucks up the hopes of night
these must reach dipper’s cup to complete their flight.
 
Have any climbers reached stars’ dipper cup
stars arranged to shelter, guide those who float up?
 
Sadly, of those still climbing up when sun appears
most will fall from the withering vine, back into living fears.
 
Some will escape again to stars, climbing dream vines at night;
others will discover how to become free in day’s bright light.
 
Joan Leotta

Joan Leotta is a poet and story performer who loves writing and performing to the inspriation of art and has been a frequent contributor to The Ekprahstic Review.

**


Artist
 
The artist will not be at work today. 
He has called in sick.
He’s closed his door and his eyes.
And is resting in his revery.
 
Everyone is in a muddle.
The attendants are not attending.
The patients are getting impatient.
The quiet is cresting chaotic.
 
Somewhere:
Stories unravel into warp and weft
Jack and Jill fall off the roof
Titans flee Mount Olympus
The spirits sputter.
The sprites succumb. 
 
Somewhere:
People go about their people things.
Nature nurtures naturally
The poet writes her homage poem.
The artist dreams
 
He dreams he is 
An artist locked in a tangled world 
Of nested syntax and illusion.
 
So many parts
To puzzle out.
 
Kaz Ogino

Author's note: An homage to Sarah Kay’s “Astronaut."

Kaz Ogino lives in Toronto. A lifelong artist, her practice has been enriched with poetry. Her practice is all about the discoveries and wonders of the process, in making art and crafting poems. Kaz’s art and visual poetry can be seen on her Instagram accounts; artbykaz.ca and artbykaz.play. 

**

The Pause
 
Found guilty of a lifetime of never, the laughter of always
and the stink of getting used to being used, the jury saw fit to sentence her
to a hefty burden.
 
She accepted it as would the donkey owned by a master who took pleasure 
in regular overloading, along with the whip, extending her pain and regret 
because he could.
 
Upon her back, secured in ropes of heavy hemp, she carried 
those she had wronged who cried out at the least provocation:
the man who beat her until at last she paid him back, in spades,
the baby she had never asked for, the husband she hadn’t wanted
those who daily dressed her in the flaws and transgressions of her life
or rubbed her face in larvae-laden ordure of any kind or source
or etched graffiti on her soul simply from the habit of being in this place 
with no one she could truly trust and still with fourteen years before release 
if she were lucky.
            
By some mental skill, perhaps from an atavistic trait before sapiens
claimed ascendancy, she could sleep at night without having to revisit 
what brought her there. 
 
Yet the dead who writhed and swore, raining excrement and threats 
for what they’d do when they regained mastery of her mind remained largely 
unheard as they hung like unwashed laundry entangled in the cable of souls
she’d cast off in the dark. 
  
Except for the sense that the air—sighing from the barred windows— 
might carry some unholy essence, she could spend the entire night unwaking
innocent again, for a while.

Linden Van Wert

Linden Van Wert has been writing since high school but has only recently considered regular submissions.  Her work has appeared in Muleskinner Journal, One Sentence Poems, Ekphrastic Review and Orchards Journal among others.  Originally from New England, she is a teacher now living in California where four deer and a turkey have elected to live in her backyard.

**

​Never Say Never

After the jump from the top floor window of a hotel near Central Park shreds you into 100 pieces, will someone attach to the sill a small plastic shrine secured with red and white bakery twine, interstitched blue and pink plastic flowers, and a small index card calligraphed in black Magic Marker, NVR Alone? Over time, will the hotel, etched with your shadows, be listed on the National Historical Register? On designated holidays, will the public cry red, white, and blue tears, God loves you, God loves you?

Janice Scudder

Janice Scudder is a poet. She lives in Colorado. 

**

The Genius Inside
 
Hide me away from prying eyes
Awkward questions, your shameless lies
Block your ears to my anguished cries
 
I will not let you break me
 
Lock me up but you cannot crush
The spirit flowing through my brush
The voice inside that won’t be hushed
 
I will not let you break me
 
Shut me in with iron bars
Beyond my gaze, the moon and stars
Imprisoned till I breathe my last
 
I will not let you break me

Berni Rushton

Berni Rushton works in the health sector in Sydney, Australia. She writes poetry and short fiction and is working on her first novel. Berni enjoys the outdoor life, running and theatre. Follow Berni on Instagram @berni_rushton

**


Spirits 

The moon’s gray-blue glow 
Somberly lights the curved dormer 
On the three story stone building 
Coats its walls in cold sterility 

Stars flicker outside its’ windows 
Barred to thwart escape
With just enough view for some 
To allow yearning 

Swirling downward from rooftop to ground 
driven by Dante’s demons
Tumble writhing spirits
Of all things lost in that building 
Humans, animals, non-humans and souls 

Inside, unseen, the moans of human 
Suffering, as law requires,
Fill each room
With stifling air 

One man, held there
For episodes not criminal
Paints images from his time spent as protest 
Sends them to his family 

How people are selected 
To occupy this building 
And who wields that power 
Is unclear 

Only a sleuth could uncover those facts ​

Dean Luttrell

Dean Luttrell, a Houston poet, pianist and artist has been writing poetry since high school. His work has most recently been seen in the The Ekphrastic Review and has been published in the Archway Readers 20th and 25th Anniversary Anthologies. In 2016 he was awarded Third Prize in the Houston Poetry Fest’s Ekphrastic Poetry Competition.

**

A Constant Battle

Locked in his head
Fear of the outside world
Feeling of falling
Waking nightmare
Daily fears
Caught between
Health and madness
Freed from his dementia
Emotional rationality of painting
Stopped him
Today he didn’t fall
May be tomorrow
He won’t fall either
Navigating the World
Of Mental Health
Is a constant battle
 
Jean Bourque
 
Jean lives in Montreal. One of his hobbies is painting. For the past seven years, as an amateur painter, he has sent paintings to the Canadian Mental Health Halifax-Dartmouth Foundation in Nova-Scotia. The Foundation holds an online painting sale every fall to raise funds. In October, it will be their 27th Annual Mosaic Sale: https://www.cmhahalifaxdartmouth.ca/mosaicformentalhealth

**

A Shrine

of souls-
under low clouds,
faith’s brittle scaffold.

Its walls in whispered prayers
against the slow settling grey-
truth tumbling out,
the ground unravelled.

A hollow husk of hoarse hope.

Abha Das Sarma

An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Silver Birch Press, Blue Heron Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru. 

**

If I Have Freedom in My Love...
                                                             Richard Lovelace, 1642
 
                                             "Then dawns the invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals;
                                               My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels
                                               Its wings are almost free -- "
                                                                               The Prisoner, Emily Bronte
 
 
When do our ideas become ghosts     of where we've been?
Like the wings of parrots     flying in colours, their original meaning
 
cloaked in fog?     To begin, there is the actual-reality
of what we can create ourselves     the faces of children, too soon
 
grown.    I stand alone on the roof of the grey prison,
an unexpected muse in your 19th century     depiction of falling
 
like a fool caught by     a strange interpretation
of a midnight Pegasus, or was it    a pale horse of the Apocalypse?
 
No matter.    I hung on like tomorrow in the sisterhood
of heartache, watching lines of poetry    falling all around me --
 
how could I live, my life    caught in a summer storm,
impetuous as a poet I'd loved     Old Thunderbolts (or should I
 
have called him Lightning Bolt?)     How can a storm
be lyrical?     There was music in the garden.  Spring flowers.
 
A dove calling --     why wasn't it afraid, and why
wasn't I?     With Lovelace's mandolin, how to compare my fate,
 
Stone walls do not a prison make/    Nor iron bars
a cage.  Al the world's a stage    say Shakespearian scholars.
 
I suppose I could add     Quoth the Raven,
Nevermore!     (a Gothic blackbird's Americana with rib vaults)
 
a way to identify what I can't forget     that lines
of poetry are the spirits     that lie within us --  what you take
 
into your hands     you take into your heart --
those early days     when girls were the birds in a gilded cage,
 
the lace    on my grandmother's pantaloons, self-
made, cotton from southern cotton fields     where love stopped
 
to pick me, lame from Civil Wars --    Lady Stumbleton --
my lineage faded into spirits;     poems I wrote to try to change
 
what seemed unholy in my future:     Days I pray
And in my soul am free/     Angels alone
                                                         that soar above,
                                                                                  Enjoying such liberty.  
 
Laurie Newendorp
 
Honoured multiple times by The Ekphrastic Review's Challenge, Laurie Newendorp, at eighty, has endured entrapment, both real and emotional.  The lines from Richard Lovelace's 17th century poem, “To Althea from Prison,” defends the freedom of thought as a means of survival though the body is imprisoned.  A more violent example -- contemporary as the tribes of Israel and Iran continue to fight battles older than Lovelace's poem -- comes from Bruno Schulz's "Street of Crocodiles," 1933, an example of the way a Polish-Jewish writer, born in the Ukraine, used his imagination and the power of thought to encounter his death, a prisoner of the Nazi Regime.
 
**

​
One Man’s Madness…

The stoic man
in the starbright sky
oversaw it all:
the painting
the ramblings
the protestations of insanity
between doctor and patient

Look, the artist said
see the precision 
in the brick and the panes
not a mullion out of place
even the shadows are cast 
with architectural perfection

But the smokeless stacks, said the doctor
and the bright blue sky
and the Great Bear made of stars 
with no darkness — 
not to mention the array of blue
fairies and men, dogs and horses
even a baby falls from the roof
tossed over the edge by a demon!

That’s a fairy, the artist corrected,
without malice, and those are 
the columns on the roof 
of this hospital 
you treat as a temple
and there is love 
and shouts of exultation
at the prospect of freedom  

Kaila Schwartz

Kaila Schwartz runs an award-winning high school theatre program in the San Francisco Bay Area where she has spent the past 24 years with her spouse and their kitty overlords. Her work can be seen in Hippocrates Awards Anthology 2020, The Ekphrastic Review, Moss Piglet, Waffle Fried, and in the upcoming The Yelling Continues,, a Procrastinating Writers United Anthology. 

**

​A Nurse, a Cop, and a Priest Walk Into an Asylum...
 
A nurse, a cop, and a priest walk into an asylum...
And we see them every morning with a long line behind ‘em
At two in the morning from our high-rise sadness
 
We can see them badging in when the work shifts change
They've all come for their own reasons too intimate to explain
But from our perspective, we aren't the only ones with some madness
 
One prays at the door
Another pretends to ignore the stains on the floor 
And the other has a gun without a receipt
 
One cries at breakfast alone
Another calls his kids at home
When the other buys rum from across the street 
 
One reads a book about body parts
While another steals pills from the clinic's cart
As the last mumbles to everyone in made up languages
 
One avoids all the others
The big one talks poorly of her mother
And then there's the one who flinches when opening packages
 
But these three have helped us all to decide
That maybe this place is not only for the insane on the inside
And that our purpose here comes from the man floating behind the columns 
- to watch over a nurse, a cop, and a priest as they walk into an asylum…

Brendan Dawson

Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy.  He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and experiences as an expat.

**


Relics

My eyes are sightless, my mind swimming in a sea of grief.  My body, weightless, shrinks, tries to disappear.  I haunt myself into transparency, ghosted as part of a script that has been erased, its pages scattered inside a vortex of wailing wind.  I am a shadow of keening.  I am imprinted into the fabric of an unrelenting night.  I have lost the details of who I could have been and the direction of where I could have gone. I am an unfinished absence that only appears when seen in a certain unconjurable light.

mirror shimmers—moon
reflects rising tide’s abyss
swallowing the stars

Kerfe Roig

A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new.  Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/  (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/.

**


Keep Steadily In View

Keep steadily in view
the detention of the unusual person, whose art is
ascribed wholly produce of a MADMAN
thrown aside like those that escape from the towers of Montrose Asylum,
would you say deficiency of Intellect
when viewing the intricate detail of window and arch, is this art or
depraved taste, 
these phantoms, prisoners as unseen as fairies silent among us
If you can find a single evidence of either,
madness or lack of normality in thought, then
mark it
where the detritus of sane society floats away,
record it against me
fill a ledger with the sum of unjust confinement of caged spirits but
as to the angels, the sooner they get away the better for themselves.

Daniel W. Brown 

Author's note: The lines in bold are from the writings of Charles Altamont Doyle.

Daniel W. Brown is a retired special education teacher who began writing poetry as a senior. At age 72 he published his first collection Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems through Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY.  Daniel has been published in various journals and anthologies, most recently Jerry Jazz Musician,  Chronogram Magazine and Kinds of Cool, an anthology of jazz poetry. He has hosted a youtube channel Poetry From Shooks Pond and was included in Arts Mid-Hudson's  Poets Respond To Art in 2022-23. Daniel writes each day about music, art and whatever else captures his imagination.

**


Strange Casement*
  
Sheer interlocking bodies sway
Silently down from walls of stone.
I paint beneath the sign of fay;
My study’s starlit.  I have known
Adventure's spirit – stymied now;  
Liberty's ways are hard to learn.
To be or not to be?  This bow
Is not my last:  I will return.
Yes, I’m the father of a son
Certain to trust these faeries too:
The blind and jealous will make fun
Of him; they call me MAD.  Do you?
Look at my work: can you not see
In what dire homes they’re holding me?    

Julia Griffin

*Charles Altamont Doyle, the father of Arthur Conan Doyle, provided illustrations for his son’s first Sherlock Holmes publication.  Afflicted by depression and alcoholism, he protested desperately that he was not “a MADMAN”; he died in a mental asylum. 

​Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia.  She has published in several online poetry magazines, including Light, Classical Outlook, Snakeskin Poetry, and The Ekphrastic Review.
​

**

Hoping We Can Levitate Without Falling to the Ground

Spirits of prisoners rattle their chains.
It’s a golden age for stolen bones and faceless devils.
And killers committing homicide
It’s a golden age for orphans eating gruel and neglecting school
It’s a golden age for cotton mills.
And the workhouse for malnutrition
And the death penalty, it’s a golden age.
For infantile deaths before the age of seven
For poor sanitation and harsh living conditions
Dreaming of a skylark behind the clouds

Spirits of prisoners rattle their chains.
It’s a golden age for long hours, low wages,
And widespread suffering
While the wealthy enjoyed advancements
Of the Industrial Revolution
Others face numerous diseases without doctors
It was a golden age, and not that unlike today.
When I see the homeless in the street
And people, people neglected in hospital corridors
It’s a golden age for sure.

It’s the reality for many, especially the poor.
There's a lack of necessities.
If you're working class
It’s your cross to bear.
Okay, there’s no more death penalty.
There have been improvements along the way.
And slavery has been long gone, too.
But we’re all enslaved by a minimum wage and despair.
Hoping we can levitate without falling to the ground.
Hope there’s a silver lining to that dark cloud, maybe.

Mark Andrew Heathcote​

Mark Andrew Heathcote is an adult learning difficulties support worker. His poems have been published in journals, magazines, and anthologies online and in print. He is from Manchester and resides in the UK. Mark is the author of In Perpetuity and Back on Earth, two books of poems published by Creative Talents Unleashed.

**

On The Spirits of the Prisoners 

Watching from on high as if a cloud,
a well-known face, this “bearded apparition”
within a cloak which soon would be his shroud,
resided there, but not by his volition,
for magistrates determined his transgressions,
results of years of alcohol addiction,
were far too dangerous for more concessions,
while deep depression furthered his affliction.
 
He sketched and painted wonderous works of art
in many notebooks, most unsigned, undated;
some offered as presentments on his part,
decrying his immurement was ill-fated.
Inscribed above the painting where souls flee,
the spirits of the inmates carried there,
to Sunnyside, sights he alone could see,
beneath the constellation of Great Bear.
 
Sometimes, his illustrations found the sun;
“Our Trip to Blunderland,” by Lewis Carroll,
and there’s a Scarlet Study by his son
about a great sleuth known by his apparel.
His last ten years were in asylums’ halls.
Sir Arthur’s words, “his playful wit undone
by weaknesses. We all heed our own calls.”
He died within when only sixty-one.
 
Ken Gosse
  
Ken Gosse prefers to write rhymed, humorous verse using traditional forms. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, since then he has been in The Ekphrastic Review, Pure Slush, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Home Planet News, and others. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years, usually with rescue dogs and cats underfoot.

**

Free
 
Free from gloom
from dark walls
reek of mold
inedible food
filth and decay
 
Kept for years
dressed in rags
unwashed
unshaven
left to rot
shivering
 
Scourge descends
sickens many
not much difference
from days inside
cells stink of death
or at least illness
 
Finally taken
spirits flee 
no more filth
disease cured 
by the hand of death
finally free
 
Julie A. Dickson

Julie A. Dickson is a long time poet and YA writer whose work is prompted by art, music, nature and memories. Her work appears in Lothlorien, Masticadores, Blue Heron and The Ekphrastic Review, among other journals. Dickson shares her home with two rescued feral cats, Cam and Jojo.

**

​Letter to Arthur Conan Doyle From “The Home For Intemperate Gentlemen,”  
April 25, 1882


My Beloved Son,

Here I sit, a prisoner in the Home for Intemperate “Gentlemen,” although I use that word loosely. One of my fellows kept me up until the brink of dawn, bellowing and laughing by turn until I almost succumbed to drink, an “Intemperate” one at that: Pure grain alcohol mixed with soured grapes that a guard offered in exchange for my silence about the bellowing. I just discovered the loudlouth, the French dissident Lemond, is the father-in-law of the guard! He is probably right to attempt to hush me, Lemond is on his last leg here! I’m sure McDaniel and his wife have no intention upon bringing him home, what with their six barins already terrified at the thought of his last visit, whereby he stuck the tines of a fork into the hand of an offending grandson who was too quick to grab the finest piece of Lamb from the platter of a Christmas feast. Don’t fret, son, I didn’t fall victim to the temptation, as hard as it was. Only the thought of your probable dismissal of me as the illustrator of our second story kept me away. It was in many ways like a miracle from God when you engaged me to illustrate the first, “A Study In Scarlet,” and to see the fruits of our labour in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual, was almost too delightful to bear! Even your sacred mother stopped by to congratulate me!

Better than the publication was your visit. So many eyes agog at my fine-figured Doctor Doyle, my own laddie! I’ve never been so proud in all of my life, Artie! The way the nurses and caretakers groveled for a seat near you! They would sooner cut off a limb than be near me in most circumstances. And then you paid me the penultimate compliment, myself, labelled as a ne'er-do-well father, and a drunkard, you said to me “Faither, you did a fine job with the illustrations, Holmes and Watson are drawn exactly as I pictured them in my mind.” Jingo! Aye, the baw-faced McDaniel was mouth agape. I know he lent me some respect at that moment. Thank you for that, Artie!

As for your auld man, I am doing the best I can while here, waiting everyday to be sprung out!

I sometimes draw for the newsletter for the captives, and even the fine lady McGinnis sat for a portrait, left her study where she does Lord God-knows-what to keep this place from running amuck. Your mother gets my County Pension, and gives a spot to her for my “care.” I still receive  some small compense from the illustrations of my first twenty-some books, when they are reprinted. So your dear mother gets by with the barins crawling all over the house. I do miss them all, especially of a Sunday afternoon, the loneliest time to be among the inmates, when the sun comes down on our families, after church, a fine meal and perhaps a hike. One day I hope to render these feelings into a lithograph,showing the spirits of these men, dying to be free and among loved ones. Alas, I am one of them. 

As for you, young man, fare thee well! I am holding onto your words to keep me as sane as I can be under the circumstances of my lodgings. I keep your last letter close to the vest, the one in which you wrote “I was sitting at my desk, looking through your many illustrations while having a smoke, when the idea for Sherlock Holmes came to me, as clear as if he were standing right there, in front of my open window.” 

Godspeed, Doctor Conan Doyle! 

Haste Ye Back!

Your Loving Faither, Charles Alamont Doyle  

Debbie Walker-Lass

Author's Note: Arthur Conan-Doyle was not yet a knight in 1882. Although he took a dim view of his father while young, he came to greatly admire and respect him and his art when he became a man. Charles illustrated the first Sherlock Holmes, and a few of Conan-Doyle’s later books.

Debbie Walker-Lass, (she/her) is a poet, collage artist, and writer living in Decatur, Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Rockvale Review, Green Ink Poetry, The Ekphrastic Journal, Punk Monk, Poetry Quarterly, The Light Ekphrastic and The Niagara Poetry Journal, among others. Debbie was proud to be nominated by TER for the Best Small Fictions, 2023 anthology. She is an avid Tybee Island beachcomber and lover of all things nature. (Except Spiders) She recently presented an Ekphrastic Poetry workshop for her local Dekalb County library.

**


Released

As though escaped
from  the chimneys
of their red brick prison,
like drifts of smoke
or steam from some
internal furnace,
a roiling stream
of dream-like phantasms
turn and twist
their way to freedom.
Fantasies and nightmares
curling and uncurling
on ladders of midnight air,
dressed only in their
garments of grief
and isolation, 
remembering
tales both bright and dark
of long-gone childhoods
and years of hope,
unwinding
like tangled threads
or knotted hair-
unruly as disordered
thoughts, discordant
dreams and offenses too
unmannerly and wild
for reason’s measured dance,

While midnight holds its 
breath, their bodies sleep-
heavy beneath the leaden thumb
of dull soporifics,
their souls eloping
like fog rolling
under the doors,
through every crack
and loose connection-
the night a recess
from grief and sorrow,
delicate and brief
as any moonlit vision
fading in the sun.

Mary McCarthy 

Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Memory Palace, edited By Clare MacQueen and Lorette C. Luzajic, and issues of Verse Virtual, Third Wednesday, Earth’s Daughters, and Caustic Frolic, as well as others. She has been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her collection, How to Become Invisible,  an exploration of experience with bi-polar disorder, is available from Kelsay Books and on Amazon.

**

A Silent Convocation

In the stillness before dawn,
they assemble,
the nameless, the faceless.
    A collective born of need.
The world beyond them faded
by the sharp angles and edges
of this soft blur of unity.

They gather together not for war,
but something more, much more, deeper.
    A communication among souls
    now untwined from the flesh.

In this dark predawn, they hold the space between breaths,
until the call comes to evanesce.

Then they become one with the morning breeze.

Nivedita Karthik

Nivedita Karthik is a graduate in Immunology from the University of Oxford and a professional Bharatanatyam dancer. Her poems have appeared in many national and international online and print magazines and anthologies. She has two poetry books to her credit (She: The Reality of Womanhood and Pa(i)red Poetry). Her profile showcasing her use of poetry was recently featured in Lifestyle Magazine.

**


​Dear Writers and Readers,

Our annual marathon is coming up on Sunday...

Scroll below for details and registration. Don't miss this epic opportunity for a wild day of pure creativity.

The Ekphrastic Review
​
Picture
​Join us for the epic event of the year.
You won't be sorry. It is wild, exhilarating, exhausting and wonderful.
A day of pure creation. Play. Brainstorming. 
​Join us on Sunday, or do it on your own time over the following weeks.
This year, to celebrate ten years of The Ekphrastic Review, an optional Champagne Party follows the marathon on zoom.
Details are below.

Perfect Ten: an Ekphrastic Marathon
 
Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating ten years of The Ekphrastic Review. 
 
Join us on Sunday, July 13 2025 for our  annual ekphrastic marathon. This year we are celebrating ten years!!!!!

This is an all -day creative writing event that we do independently, together.

Take the plunge and see what happens!
 
Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone.
 
We will gather in a specially created Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. 
 
Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, before the deadline for submission. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2025). 
 
Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site.
 
One poem and one flash fiction will win $100 CAD each.
 
Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year!
 
Marathon: Sunday July 13, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks)
(For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 13, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.)

Champagne Party: at 6.05 pm until 7. 30 on Sunday, July 13, join participants on Zoom to celebrate an exhilarating day. Bring Champagne, wine, or a pot of tea. We'll have words from The Ekphrastic Review, conversation as a chance to connect with community, and some optional readings from your work in the marathon.   
 
Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2025
Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less
 
Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 15 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors.

If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll sign you up. 
​
Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September.

​Sign up below!

Perfect Ten: annual ekphrastic marathon

CA$20.00

Celebrate ten years of The Ekphrastic Review with our annual ekphrastic marathon. Fourteen drafts, thirty minutes each, poetry, flash fiction, or CNF. You'll choose from a curated selection of artworks chosen to challenge, inspire, and stimulate.


The goal of the marathon is to finish the marathon by creating fourteen drafts. Optional: you'll have time after the event to polish any drafts and submit them. Selected works will be published in TER and a winner in poetry and flash fiction will each be chosen and honoured with $100 award.


Following the marathon, exhausted writers can join our Champagne Party on zoom to celebrate an amazing day.

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Arch Hades: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge, Curated by Kate Copeland

7/4/2025

0 Comments

 
Picture
Dances, by Arch Hades (United Kingdom) 2024. Click on image for artist site.

Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is Dances, by Arch Hades. Deadline is July 18, 2025. 

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way.​ Scroll down to donate $5CAD (about $3.75 USD).

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include HADES CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, JULY 18, 2025.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
​
​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
​
15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.
​

Voluntary Gift of $5 CAD (about $4 USD) With Submission

CA$5.00

Voluntary gift of $5 CAD with submission.

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Kaz Ogino: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

6/27/2025

1 Comment

 
Picture
Rainy Day Rainbow, by Kaz Ogino (Canada) 2024

​Pixelated


Rain pours from paint clouds, each a hue of the colour wheel. My window mullions bisect the transitions of pixel drops between green and blue, purple and red. The rain drips not in streaks but as genesis of fantastical shapes. I cannot help but smile. I don’t have to turn the round colour wheel. It is here in front of me, rectangular, moving with its own force. I poke my finger into the shapes. I enter the glass, let curlicue and musical note pigments wash over me. 

I am all colours, 
cartwheeling from pane to pane
until I rainbow.
Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner recently saw the Van Gogh immersive experience and marvelled at the movement of pixels from one hue to another. She is the author of two forthcoming ekphrastic poetry collections, Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press) and The Night Watch (Kelsay Books). Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com. ​

​**
Rainy Day Rainbow
 
On the eve of the Summer Solstice
I see a rainbow turned upside down,
everything backwards--- tilted.
 
The summer caterpillars
are purple as a queen’s robe and I 
become royalty as I tend my garden.
 
The pigs roll in the grass, and
turn green as Mother’s Depression
glass, and yes, I miss her.
 
I am blue watching my sailboat
sail away without me, but looking down,
the sea amazes me with its life.
 
I scream when I read the news--
It throws me perpetually sideways
with rage and droplets of regret.
 
I can only hope the dance moves
that come to me when I hear 
Blowing in the Wind brings answers,
 
will fill in a new rainbow 
of glee, shouts, hugs and waves,
the color wheel of the future.
 
The eve of the Summer Solstice
that turned everything upside down,
empties my pockets of everything

I do not need.

Beth Fox

Beth Fox loves being connected to the arts and the community of poetry in New Hampshire. Her work is found in The Poet’s Touchstone, The Seacoast Anthology, Covid Springs II, Silver Birch Press, New Verse News, and The 2010 Poets Guide to NH.  Her chapbook, Reaching for the Nightingale, was published by Finishing Line Press.  A finalist, Beth helped seniors in Wolfeboro publish their work in an anthology, Other Voices, Other Lives. 

​**

Room of Colours

A room of colours
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue
The colours blind me

​Sophia Smith

**


A Horror Movie Soundtrack 

Life’s music rainbow
Echoes in bright treble clefs - 
Just the silence of 
Disembodied illusions
And schizophrenic nightmares
 
Rose Menyon Heflin and Robert Bergmann 
 
Originally from rural, southern Kentucky, Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet, writer, and visual artist living in Wisconsin. Her award-winning poetry has been published over 250 times in outlets spanning five continents, and she has published memoir and flash fiction pieces. She has had a free verse poem choreographed and danced, an ekphrastic memoir piece featured in a museum art exhibit, and two haiku published in a gumball machine. Among other venues, her poetry has appeared in Deep South Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and San Antonio Review. An OCD sufferer since childhood, she strongly prefers hugging trees instead of people. 

Robert Bergmann is a retiree from Madison, Wisconsin. Although he thoroughly enjoys reading and writing, this was his first time venturing into poetry, and it is his first foray into the wilds of publication.
 
**
 
I See: a Sijo Sequence

I.
I see red, fury pulsing through my veins, a river of hot rage. 
I see orange, and I grow antsy, craving summer on my tongue.
I see yellow, and I think softly - fondly - of spring sunshine.

II.
I see green, and I grow calm, fight or flight ebbing from my muscles.
I see blue, and I trust in the honesty of sky and water.
I see indigo, and I feel strong, persisting through the pain.

III.
I see violet, and I wonder, wanting only to wander.
I see a refracted miracle in a sky whose tears have stopped.
I see the past and future as one only can in the present.

IV.
I see possibility. I see mystery. I see old pain.
I see new joy. I see justice. I see love, and I see pride.
I see it all through my window in one arching, endless rainbow.
 
Rose Menyon Heflin 
 
Originally from rural, southern Kentucky, Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet, writer, and visual artist living in Wisconsin. Her award-winning poetry has been published over 250 times in outlets spanning five continents, and she has published memoir and flash fiction pieces. She has had a free verse poem choreographed and danced, an ekphrastic memoir piece featured in a museum art exhibit, and two haiku published in a gumball machine. Among other venues, her poetry has appeared in Deep South Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and San Antonio Review. An OCD sufferer since childhood, she strongly prefers hugging trees instead of people. 

**
​
Discordant Harmony

Dancing musical notes
tossed in a cocktail tin-in-tin,
shaken, rattled and poured
no longer a composed tune.

Now liberated from their staff
dizzy dark scribbles
spill down multicoloured panes
like a jigsaw of misshapen clefs and rests;

this new arrangement
surprising, unstructured
thrives like an ideal alternative--
free and unlabeled.

Elaine Sorrentino

Elaine Sorrentino, author of Belly Dancing in a Brown Sweatsuit (Kelsay Books, 2025) has been published in journals such as Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Gyroscope Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Quartet Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Etched Onyx Magazine, and Haikuniverse. She lives in Massachusetts, holds a journalism degree from Suffolk University, and is facilitator of the Duxbury Poetry Circle.

**

Intervals

with a nod to Anne Sexton

Your muffled pulse
gallops like a seahorse
through remnants of ruptured waters.
The cardiotocograph squiggles lines
on a paper scroll

and I cradle my pregnant belly and crave
the comforts of outdoors, and childhood
swims back to me--

surprise rainbows
against a slate blue sky, scarlet roses
and lavender, honeysuckle vine, the scent
of wild onion wafting. Picking blueberries.
Grasshoppers startled from the hedge.

Antepartum nurses ask if I'm thirsty,
if I need water, but I'm overflowing

with baby, with imagined sips
of Nehi Grape and Cherry Slurpee,
lemonade and berry Kool-Aid.
The shifting hues of gobstoppers.
My offered tongue blue like a skink's.

I wait for the hour
when you'll thunder from the deep,
neck lasso'd with cord and a wail of song
escaping.

This stormy morning we're tethered,
the rhythm of rain beating the windowpane
and all you do is kick.

Heather Brown Barrett

Heather Brown Barrett is an award-winning poet in southeastern Virginia. She mothers her young son and contemplates life, the universe, and everything with her writer husband. She is a member and regular student of The Muse Writers Center, a member of The Poetry Society of Virginia, and a former board member of Hampton Roads Writers. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Literary Mama, Yellow Arrow Journal, formidable Woman sanctuary, and elsewhere. She’s the author of Water in Every Room (Kelsay Books, 2025). Website: https://heatherbrownbarrett.com/.

**


To Kaz Ogino Regarding Rainy Day Rainbow

Where otherwise the sun would preen
by shifting shadow shapes and sheen,
your muse amid the overcast
foresees the moment storm has passed

and  hears still echoed distant rains
symphonic on imagined panes
where sun that peeks through clouds in flight
is piecing spectral shards of light

together as the remnant blur
of forces that became the whir
reminding idled, yearning soul
of all the things it can't control

and yet of beauty still to find
by faith more tempered left behind.

**
​
sunlit spectral blur
silent as symphonic echo
sings to storm and lull

Portly Bard

Portly Bard: Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.

Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.

**


Ink Sink Skin

This art cannot be boxed.  In the splay of two-dimension, time stops.  The brain reconfigures.  You lay one form against another, and filters of light flit like a dance on water.  The colour is layers of solid and juice. Primary, secondary.  A pollen of marks, a song that stole in.  Hues are notes and notes are hues.  Violet swoons into scarlet that smooches crimson.  Cobalt tiptoes into violet, rubs right up against it, indigo is born.  Green strokes the flank of cobalt like a brush on paper.  They hold hands, create harmonies of jade and leaf.  Ink and space wait for the artist.  To dilly dally them about then declare it just so.  Pointillism and other tongues.  Lay to rest in the air-drying afternoon.  Musical notes, gone awol.  ‘Cause Debussy is all over this piece, infused between polyphonies.  The song left echoes in its wake.  When it quivered the ink that married the skin.

Nina Nazir

Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, writer and artist based in Birmingham, UK.  She has been widely published online and in print.  She is also a Room 204 writing cohort with Writing West Midlands.  You can usually find her with her nose in a book or on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir.  She blogs regularly atwww.sunrarainz.wordpress.com

**

Rainy Day Rainbow
 
The first shard of nascent light touches 
the intermittent slow pour of grey.
The sky pitter-patters
in the soft whispers of water-colours.
The fine print of dew, the spray paint of rain
pattern the square panes. 
The closed window 
turns into a coloured mosaic of possibilities. 
Scrawled on the glass, with the ink of change 
is the signature of dawn.
Ardent prayers usher in a spectrum 
of calligraphic answers.
 
Preeth Ganapathy

Preeth Ganapathy is from Bengaluru, India. Her works have been published in several magazines, more recently, in Pensive, Braided Way, The Orchard Poetry Journal and elsewhere.  Her microchaps A Single Moment, Purple, and Birds of the Sky, have been published by Origami Poems Project. Her work has been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature.

**

Rainy Day Rainbow
  
Today I’m going to say, I see a rainbow— 
even though the sky at noon has no colours--
because I know puddles can shine with the splendor 
of a clearing sky’s mixed hues,
and the cloudy streams in the gutters by roads
can gleam with reflections violet, indigo, and blue.
I think that I’ve always wanted the horizon
to become a vibrant canvas, wished sunlight 
would bend and slow until the air glows.
As nearby church bells ring in the town
and soft voices of a children’s choir drift 
toward me, the northeaster speaks in a sorrowful
language, reminds me of losses, and is far too loud. 
Hymns blend with the incessant patter 
of the deluge, the rattle of shutters, the noisome 
cascade that smears the window panes.
Lawns and side streets flood. In the forested hills
beyond them, branches of evergreens and poplars
sag, then break, yet I envision them coming back 
to their unspoiled form, picture an iridescent arc 
above them, believe that promises of hopeful 
beginnings will emerge after every storm. 

Gregory E. Lucas

Gregory E. Lucas lives on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. His fiction and short stories have appeared in magazines such as Blueline, Sparks of Calliope, and The Horror Zine.

**


Palette Doubt - a Broken Sonnet
 
Smeared into a slurry
Of water floated fragments
The dreams from decades of our marriage
Oozed down glass canvas
 
Cascaded from pain to pane
Shifted shapes from memories made
Stirred words we never said
Then puddled into perfect squares 
 
Although we etched what we hated
Into tear salted gutter troughs
At rain's ends, I believe we'll see
Past our own separation thoughts
 
To a clear view of our palette
And the rainbow of us that we should never doubt

Brendan Dawson​

Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy.  He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and experiences as an expat.

**

Through Looking Glass

Here’s pane-full insights, outside in,
boundary-bursting breaking through,
edge-walking on the lip of words.

A teeter, totter, waver swing, 
the toddle wobble, quiver quake,  
reel weave careen sway as fore-seen.

’Tis scenic mind-map, mindful been,
a quaver maybe, not galumph,
as clomp towards the trompe l’oeil.

Yet delicately waddle on
with glyphs a-plenty, blended inks,
to spin the spangled, treasured sap.

See window onto where folk been
as listen, draw, conclusions sought;
their images must be proclaimed.

Though mizzle, drizzle, falling drain,
precipitating what moods reign,
it’s brainpower whirls us into safe.

Though edgy, striding into strange
where strangers met are walking on
to find the rainbow, golden end.

An alchemy etched on our screen,
as letting spreads our sprinkled dream,
and what deemed secret soon revealed.

Stephen Kingsnorth

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review.  He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com

**

Summer Rain
 
It’s June and every storefront
has a rainbow on the door,
 
music bouncing off windows
and sliding down panes;
 
a smattering of quarter notes,
clefs and staffs,
 
splatterin’ and sweatin’
in the steamy colors of jazz;
 
greens, reds and purples
belting out the blues,
 
dancin’ and a’singin’
like rain upon the roof;
 
and every drop that falls –
every small part of the whole –
 
is a shower of joy
in a summer of pride.

Mark Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson (he/him/his) is a gay poet and writer in the Des Moines area navigating the Sturm und Drang of daily life through wordcraft. His work has appeared Variant Lit, Vestal Review, Modern Haiku, Spellbinder, and others. He has a background in music, psychology, and marriage & family therapy. Mark worked for many years as a Mental Health Technician on a locked psychiatric unit. Follow him @MarkHPoetry, or visit his website:  https://www.markhendricksonpoetry.com

**

​A Window to Escape

Prisoner of my thoughts
My head swims
My thoughts roll
Rock like a boat
On the tumultuous waves
Of the Newfoundland ocean
Overflowing from my head
My thoughts are looking for
A window to escape
 
Jean Bourque

Jean lives in Montreal. He just comes from a two-week trip in Newfoundland where he had the idea for this poem after a boat tour to the Icebergs.

**

iterations

sky changes randomly 
outside my window--
compressed into hushed 
anticipation, then 
spinning out, tangled, 
reconfigured by weather 
patterns beyond any 
control—I wait for the air
to conjure itself into 
chromatic saturation--
but what emerges
is gone almost before 
I notice it was there--
a luminous moment, 
shining in an uncertain 
configuration of light

Kerfe Roig

A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new.  Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/  (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/.

**

Haiku

​music
conversation
—she listens in the rain

K. J. Watson

K. J. Watson’s stories and poems have appeared on the radio; in magazines, comics and anthologies; and online.


**

​Windowpanes
 
Music fills the windowpanes,
notes bulge and curve
 
boisterous chords
 
seep through edges,
squeeze through gaps,
pour through every opening
 
*
 
window tries to keep control
 
unruly colours,
flower bed bursting its borders,
snail circus celebration
 
sheet music, sleet music,
strike up the band
 
*
 
rainmelt drizzles
red, blue, purple, green,
speckled like strawberries               
                                
fat calligraphy 
draws us outside the lines
 
gushes over sash, jamb, and sill
 
*
 
dance tilt, frost widget,
glass dissolves into laughter
 
sketch marks topsy-turvy,                   
syncopated message
we can almost read  
 
signed with a flourish by the rain.

Cindy Bousquet Harris

Cindy Bousquet Harris is a poet, photographer, the editor of Spirit Fire Review, and a licensed marriage and family therapist. Her poems can be found in Clamor, California Quarterly, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Unlost Journal, Black Bough Poetry, and several anthologies. Cindy lives in Southern California with her husband and family.

**

This Year, Winter Didn’t Dawdle
 
Spring taps at my window –
pitter-pat, pitter-pat, pat-a-pat-a-pat,
pat-a-pat. At first, a soft lullabye, 
before full joy bursts forth. A treble
clef blows up like a balloon and sails
right through the pane.
 
Curvaceous notes follow, changing costumes
like dancers at the Folies Bergère. The entire
chorus line rushes onto stage. (You DO know
that young, flirty girls can’t resist trying on
every color of the rainbow?)
 
Sure hope their show has a long run.
Keep singing and prancing, girls! 
I’m giving a long standing ovation.
 
Alarie Tennille
 
Alarie Tennille was a pioneer coed at the University of Virginia, where she earned her degree in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. She has now lived more than half her life in Kansas City, MO.Alarie received the first Editor’s Choice Fantastic Ekphrastic Award from The Ekphrastic Review, and in 2022, her latest book, Three A.M. at the Museum, was named Director’s Pick for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art gift shop. In April, Alarie was proud to be named the 2025 Muse of The Writers Place.

**


1 Comment

Charles Altamont Doyle: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

6/20/2025

1 Comment

 
Picture
Spirits of Prisoners, by Charles Altamont Doyle (England) 1885

​Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is Spirits of Prisoners, by Charles Altamont Doyle. Deadline is July 4, 2025. 

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way.​ Scroll down to donate $5CAD (about $3.75 USD).

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include DOYLE CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, JULY 4, 2025.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
​
​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
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15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.
1 Comment

Sarah Bernhardt: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

6/13/2025

1 Comment

 
Picture
After the Storm, by Sarah Bernhardt (France) 1876
ٹنکا

سارہ برن ہارٹ (فرانس) کی تصویر "طوفان کے بعد" کی طرز پر

گنیش کے نام 


ہلدی رنگ پُتلا 
اُما کی گود میں بے جان--
شیو کی خلاصی: 
ہاتھی کا سر بچاؤ کو؛
دانا گنیش کا جنم!
 
 سعد علی
۳۱ مئی ۵ ۲۰۲ء
​
**
​Tanka

 for Ganesha

turmeric golem
inert in Parvati's lap--
Shiva’s redemption:
elephant’s head to rescue;
birth o’ Ganesha, The Wise!

Saad Ali

Saad Ali (b. 1980 CE) is a poet-philosopher & literary translator from the UK and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and an MSc in Management. His new collection of poems is Owl Of Pines: Sunyata. He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrases into Urdu. His work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, Synchronized Chaos, Lothlorien, Lotus-eater, BRAWL Lit., Pandemonium Journal, Immagine e Poesia, and Poetry in English from Pakistan by Ilona Yusuf & Shafiq Naz (eds.). He has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and Best Microfiction. To know more: www.facebook.com/owlofpines

​**

After the Storms, the Surface Uncertain

The boy pretends to stumble, then flops across my lap, tongue lolling. He is poking fun at me for needing to stop and rest. “I’m simply ex-hausted!” he croaks in an old-lady voice, then shuts his eyes, feigning sleep. I’m glad he still thinks this journey is an adventure. He never heard the late-night grumbling. Never suspected that some of the others are no longer content to dine on bats or whatever we can catch in the nets we made after retreating underground. Now the boy is having trouble keeping a straight face—he clasps my cloak to keep from cracking up. I still think of him as the boy, even though I call him something else, this waif I found after we all fled the storms on the surface. He is mine now, and I bend over him, “Blech! What’s that smell? I must have snared something rotten in my net.” He laughs, then says, “Tell me again what my name means,” and I reply, “Well, you are my sunbeam. You look like a Ray.” His smile is luminous as he stands, and we resume our upward climb. Together, we approach a world he cannot recall, and I cannot fathom.
​
Tracy Royce

Tracy Royce is a writer and poet whose words appear in / are forthcoming in Bending Genres, Does It Have Pockets?, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Scrawl Place, Villain Era, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California where she enjoys hiking, playing board games, and obsessing over Richard Widmark movies. Find her on Bluesky.

​**

Sioulder Bras

ar re-mañ a davas, hag e voe ur sioulder bras
Luke 8:24, Breton version
(and the storm came to an end and there was a great calm)

Look at the catch: my little sea-star, Per,
Just as I’ve dreamed.  He always was too quick.
No flesh on him, but see his hair: so thick,
A man might fish with it.  His mother’s hair.
They caught him in the nets tonight.  She’s gone
Long since, my daughter, in another storm,
Thank God.  His hand’s curled up, but it’s not warm;
He used to glow like fire. The sea goes on.
I dreamed once of Our Lady: she looked young,
Although her boy was grown.  For near a week
I’ve seen it coming and I’ve held my tongue.
We nodded, in my dream.  We did not speak.
We understood each other, and we sat,
Minding our words.  Good night, Perig.  Noz vat.

Julia Griffin

Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia.

**

Pieta

Mary, the Blessed Mother, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, holds her son, Jesus, the Paschal Sacrifice, the Word made Flesh, Lamb slain from the beginning of the world. 
 
But it could be any mother and her son 

A mother whose son washed ashore after a storm 

A mother whose son did not come home from war  

A mother whose son was on the plane aboard

A mother whose son did not wake up one morn

A mother whose son, happy and healthy for the first twelve years of life, only to give way to slurred speech and neurological decline. 

Mothers offering up their sons on the altar of life’s painful circumstances.  A sword pierces her heart. 
For he became sin who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God.  He left his throne in heaven and humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, esteeming not equality with God a thing to be grasped.  And we do not have a Great High Priest who is incapable of empathizing with us in our weakness.    

We serve a God who suffers with us.  

Lila Feldman

Lila lives in Upstate New York with her husband.   She currently works as a school nurse.  She enjoys creative writing in her spare time, mostly prose and memoir. This is her first submission to The Ekphrastic Review. 

**


The Drowned Child

I told him not to go
You’re only a child I told him 
As he left my home for the sea 
With his delicate hands and soft skin  
                 
He said he was ready
For a fisherman’s life
He didn’t know the hell
Salt, winds, and stormy seas

Could wreck upon his face
Upon his body and the heaviness
Of the nets filled with the sea’s
Offerings entangled him instead

Poor child swept overboard
Poor child caught like a fish
Writhing against the currents
Unforgiving sea throwing him
 
Back ashore, I found him face down 
In the sand and carried him home, 
his tiny fists clutching my skirts, 
Hoping his strength remained, 

Then his body lay still, 
Frozen like marble,
Frozen across my lap, 
Is this what Mary felt

When they brought her 
Son down from the cross
His bloody fingers furled
Around her blue robes?

Laura Peña
​
Laura Peña is an award winning poet born and raised in Houston, Tx. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Education. She is a primary bilingual teacher as well as a translator of poetry into Spanish. Laura has been a featured poet at Valley International Poetry Festival, Inprint First Fridays, and Public Poetry. She has been published both in print and on-line journals. She has been a workshop presenter at VIPF in the Rio Grande Valley, Tx. and People's Literary Festival in Corpus Christi, Tx.. One of Laura's annual traditions is to write a poem a day for August Postcard Poetry Festival and has participated in the fest for the last 12 years. ​


**

Apres la Tempete

On the shore a pieta, a drowning:
the wet body returned, wrapped in nets.
It is still a child’s, slender and broken.

The sea’s a liar, it stole his warmth
with cold fingers, but the heart
knows no boundaries and his life

lies beating in this mother’s heart,
never to be taken,  though
green surges batter the beach

and the long shoreline shakes
with the pounding, in this heart
the child lives, lives still.

Martin Rieser

Martin Rieser is both a poet and visual artist. His interactive installations based on his poetry have been shown around the world.  Published: Poetry Review; Write to be Counted; The Unpredicted Spring; Magma 74; Morphrog 22,  Poetry kit; Primers, Artlyst Anthology; Pendemic; Alchemy Spoon; FFF Anthology; Shortlisted: Frosted Fire; Charles Causeley Prize; Runner up Norman Nicholson; Winner of the Hastings Poetry Competition; Shortlisted Wolves Poetry Competition; The Ekphrastic Review; Steel Jackdaw; Acumen; Obsessed by Pipework; Allegro; Cerasus Magazine Anthology; Vole Spring Anthology; Ink Sweat and Tears;Brussels Review; Longlisted Erbecce Prize; Shortlisted Artemesia Arts Poetry Competition and Anthology.

**

After the Storm

A sculpture carved entirely from white marble, the image captures a scene of intense emotive gravity, rendered with precision in mineral permanence. The stone surface, cool and luminescent under studio lighting, exhibits an even matte finish across the bulk of the sculpture, with only isolated zones of gentle polish — the bridge of the elder’s nose, the young man’s shoulder blade, the fingertips grasping fabric — betraying a slight glossiness born from incidental contact or intentional buffing during final toolwork. The overall hue is a uniform alabaster white with subtle gradations caused by the interplay of light and concave recession: folds in drapery fall into shadow with soft gray dimming; interstitial spaces, such as beneath the boy’s outstretched arm or between the netted fabric and the elder’s thigh, exhibit deeper zones of shade, verging toward bluish tones at the farthest recession points, a phenomenon of both sculptural carving and photographic lighting artifact.

The composition consists of two principal human figures: one upright, seated with an inclined forward posture, and the other supine, limp, and draped laterally across the lap of the former. The seated figure — older, clothed, turbaned — gazes downward with head slightly tilted leftward, brows knotted with chiselled concavity, upper eyelids pressed low in a gesture of somber witnessing. The turban is sculpted with parallel ridges of stone that wrap circumferentially about the cranium, each band deeply undercut at its boundary to accentuate fabric layering. The face emerges from this encirclement with a prominent nasal bridge and slightly sunken cheeks; the lips are pressed into a tight horizontal line, not parted, not sealed, with the upper lip incised more deeply than the lower to cast a shadow and define its curve. The figure's shoulders are covered by a thick mantle, carved with deep vertical pleats that fall from a loosely gathered collar region. The folds descend in diagonals across the torso and terminate over the knees, which are bent and level, serving as a platform for the boy’s collapsed body.

The younger figure is positioned with an arching of the back, the left arm dangling toward the base with open fingers, the right arm stretched across the robed knee of the older figure, the wrist angled unnaturally downward. His head is completely slack, neck hyperextended such that the chin nearly touches the clavicle, and the eyes are shut — lids carved with barely perceptible creases. His hair is mid-length, parted roughly at center, each lock rendered as a wavy, narrow ridge, tapering at the ends. These striations, flowing back from the forehead and clustering in flattened waves around the ear and neck, contrast with the smoothness of his forehead and jaw. The mouth is slightly parted, lower lip fuller than the upper, subtly shadowed to suggest the slackness of death or unconsciousness.

Both figures share a common base, irregular in shape and carved with vegetal and rocky motifs. At the lower left, two sheep heads or lambs emerge from the stone, barely raised in relief, their fleece represented with tight spirals and low mounds. These organic inclusions — symbolic perhaps — are not given the same dimensional prominence as the human forms but ground the scene in pastoral or Biblical suggestion. The boy’s garment consists only of shorts or a draped piece about the hips, detailed with an open netted pattern over the right thigh. The individual diamonds of the netting are cleanly bored through the marble, revealing darkness beneath and enhancing the sense of fragility. The net, though stone, appears as if it could flex or tear, its intersections knotted, the threads thickened at junctions. The fabric beneath is smoother, loosely hanging, with scalloped edges and minor vertical creases that collect in depressions as it is pulled by the boy’s falling weight.

The elder figure’s right hand is clenched against his chest, index finger bent at a downward angle, as though recently moved or about to shift. The hand is not fully relaxed but shows tension in the thumb’s compression against the folded palm. The left hand is buried beneath the draped torso of the youth, not visible except for a glimpse of the wrist emerging near the lower ribs of the younger figure. The elder’s exposed chest is bare, delineated by muscular striation and planar geometry, a stark contrast with the bulk of the robe, whose weight is indicated by deep, plunging folds that shift abruptly at the contour lines of the seated knees.

The base plane upon which the sculpture sits is a rectangular plinth, bevelled at the top edge and unadorned except for surface toolmarks, fine striations running at oblique angles likely left from rasp work or sanding. The composition is triangular, with the apex at the turbaned head and the base defined by the arc of the younger figure’s body. The centre of mass lies low and toward the front, creating a forward-leaning momentum that underscores the gesture of collapse and support. The entire sculpture is positioned against a matte black background, which amplifies the white stone’s radiance and allows the shadows cast by the folds and limbs to take on greater spatial presence. No armature, external prop, or restoration marks are visible; the figures are complete in themselves, unified in gesture, and isolated in silent stasis.

​Albert Abdul-Barr Wang

Albert Abdul-Barr Wang is a Taiwanese-American Los Angeles-based experimental writer, conceptual painter, photographer, sculptor, video, and installation artist. He received a MFA in studio art from the ArtCenter College of Design (2025), a BFA in Photography & Digital Imaging at the University of Utah (2023), and a BA in Creative Writing/English Literature at Vanderbilt University (1997).

**

​
This Sculpture is Not Representative
 
My mother called me Sarah Bernhardt.
All those times she believed I was overreacting to a telling-off 
or when I didn’t get my own way.
Stroppy, sulky, I knew no other response.
I was six or seven and Sarah Bernhardt meant nothing to me
but the tone of her voice and the look on her face told me my mother’s comment
was not meant in kindness.
 
Years later I found out she was a famous French actress 
and I viewed my mother’s jibe another way:
as a complement.
Perhaps my drama or melodrama was particularly convincing to have summoned
the name and likeness of someone so accomplished.
Maybe I should have followed her to the stage.
 
But I didn’t
and so I live with my mother’s voice in my ears.
Critical, dismissive – and not in the least maternal.

Berni Rushton

Berni Rushton works in the health sector in Sydney, Australia. She recently came back to writing poetry, as well as flash fiction and is also working hard on her first novel. 

**

​​Pieta
 
Have you noticed how statues round here 
never weep? Okay, they have stone tears
fossilised on marble cheeks, 
a narrative of misery. 
 
People who pass by nod in approval 
at grieving acted out in stone, but show them
grief in the raw, wet and red as meat slapped on a slab, 
they turn away. 
 
The widow has nowhere to turn. The sunshine 
and the spring leaves are mocking her tears. 
How can she find sympathy in stone? 
Statues may not weep, but neither do they heal.
 
She is her story and the passers-by 
pass by, as cold as marble tears.

Edward Alport 

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and international business executive living in the UK. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer. He has had poetry, articles and stories published in various webzines and magazines and performed on BBC Radio and Edinburgh Fringe. His Bluesky handle is @crossmouse.bsky.social. His website is crossmouse.wordpress.com

**

What Sarah Saw

There’s joy in catch for fisherfolk,
as witness lore of fishing smacks,
the fleet’s return with crew on board,
shoal haul continued, sacrosanct,
trawl, school, buoys, pots, gull hover nets.

So beach scene greeting Sarah’s view -
an overlap of fish, flesh cost,
in slumped despair, family loss,
forlorn with cradled cruciform,  
but draped, pietà, hanging free.

A limb entangled in the web -
that network on which trade relies -
patella hinge of dangled limbs,
no reflex, angle, shin to thigh,
like ankle dangle unattached.

Sea urchins, starfish, pebble dash,
here’s trigonometry of grief,
grandmother’s boy still, garment gripped
like crab caught in entanglement,
as she might grasp imagined gasps.

Both stranded, bare, a beach bereft,
with lanky strands, sleek silky hair,
a selkie now of nether world.
Bedraggled, rag doll, flap fish flop,
beyond once nestle of that lap.

A marble marvel of distraught,
that dead can grow from slab to life,
a living vein to bloodless corpse;
awaiting, too much, hope for soul,
in anguish for one laid before.

Stephen Kingsnorth

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review.  He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com

**

​​A Fist's Grip on Hope – a Ballade
 
The peasant family's home was worn
Against Breton's wind and water jets
A night like this was often the norm
Even though the stage was already set
When the grandmother saw a boy's silhouette
Mangled and tangled in knotted rope
Her scream shook the pale moonset
He still has a fist's grip on hope
 
In the scattered scene after the storm
Wrapped in an old fishing net
Laid the boy slumped upon the shore
Covered in sand; all cold and wet
Blue and limp; as never to forget
His grandmother lifted him to her robe
But the story doesn't end just yet
He still has a fist's grip on hope
 
The child must have not been warned
Or perhaps he had a stubborn mindset
To dive from the docks even if informed
Where loosened lines were a sure bet
And fishing gear had shifted and offset
Then reappeared where the sea crashes the stones
But with one arm stretched across his grandmother's garment
He still has a fist's grip on hope
 
So, fishermen, don't be rigid with regret
The storm is at fault for what broke
And the boy's fate remains unmet

He still has a fist's grip on hope

Brendan Dawson​

Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy.  He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and experiences as an expat.

**

​
Bernhardt Portrays Love Scene

What the sea gives: salt and seal pups, 
crashboom of spangled water,
pearl-white oyster shells, 
and floating remains of wreckage: 
bottles, seaglass, driftwood.

And a boy fisher along the Breton shore,
tender-muscled, just past safety
of women’s skirts and helping 
to bake their sweet butter cakes.

Storm swells so deep broke waves so high,
gales no fishermen would try. Alone, 
he cast a wild net, tore him out, 
washed him in. 

Portrayed in marble, luminous death,
theater piece, as his mamm-gozh breaks 
toward him.

Lynn Axelrod

Lynn Axelrod’s poetry has appeared in journals and outlets such as The Ekphrastic Review, California Quarterly, Orchards Poetry Journal; was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle; and is in the James Joyce Library Special Collections, University College, Dublin. Her chapbook Night Arrangements was described by Kirkus Reviews as “evocative and lushly detailed.” Lotus Earth on Fire, (2024, Finishing Line Press) was praised by a poet-reviewer as “an unflinching witness to the hungry and the homeless, to floods, fires, and the untold injustices of man to man.” She's been a disaster-readiness community organizer; weekly newspaper reporter; environmental NGO staffer; and a happily- and early-retired attorney.

**

​During the Creative Storm

my mind kept spinning thoughts and moved
in all directions. Even upside down
to navigate  through complex dreams
and theories The subject matter 
flowered around me. Half in light, half in shadow.
I flared with thirst, 
a ruby sunrise, an emerald spring 
but my brilliance shattered 
into stillness. My mother held me in her arms
and wept. Not a goddess  but a fragile pieta.
 
I stared at her  
with the seed dark eyes of a bird --
knowing I needed rest
and time to return
becoming merely human.

Wendy Howe 

Wendy Howe is an English teacher  who lives in  California. Her poetry reflects her interest in myth,, women in conflict and  history. Landscapes that influence  her writing  include  the seacoast and high desert where she has formed a poetic kinship with the  Joshua trees, hills and wild life spanning ravens, lizards and coyotes. She has been published in the following  journals: The Poetry Salzburg Review, The Interpreter's House, Corvid Queen, Strange Horizons, The Acropolis Journal and many others.

**

​My
Grand
Child


I heard the
   harpies singing 
after the storm

After
   you washed
 ashore

You lay
   across
 my marbleness

In shrouded
   god's
lament

I gave you
     my lungs
I gave
     you
         my 
              pulse

I lashed
    my
sorrow
    to the
               mast

I heard 
         the harpies
   singing
                  after the storm

Never
            more

Donna-Lee Smith 

DLS writes from l'île de Montreal where storms from the mighty St. Lawrence may wreak havoc. 
She dedicates this poem to her sister.

**

An Idol, an Icon. Sarah Bernhardt My Idol.
 
I have been impressed by Sarah Bernhardt for years.
Perhaps that is why a trilogy about her came to my mind, my heart and my soul:
The actress, the sculptor and the feminist.
 
In my mind, the actress
As a former speaker on academic success in schools and at conferences for many years,
I was influenced by Sarah Bernhardt’s modesty as an actress.
Every time I gave a lecture or a workshop, I had stage fright.
Once a colleague told me this charming anecdote about Sarah Bernhardt:
One day a young actress asked her if she had stage fright before performing.
She answered that she always had stage fright before going on stage.
The young actress, boastful and naïve, said that she never had stage fright.
Sarah Bernhardt told her this wonderful reply: “Those who are talented have stage fright, others don’t”.
I kept preciously this tasty reply, hoping, before each of my lectures, that I had some talent.
 
In my heart, the sculptor
I didn’t know that Sarah Bernardt was a sculptor.
Her splendid sculpture, After the Storm, reminds me of mothers and fathers in countries at war who are “In the storm”.
They are desperate and overwhelmed by a dreadful pain that ravages them
While they are seeing their children dying from lack of food and trapped in the (fishing) nets of horrible wars. 
 
In my soul, the Feminist
Sarah Bernardt, with her multiple talents, disturbed male artistic circle or her time.
Isn’t the same situation today when women have to fight for their rights and their place in a patriarchal world?
She particularly disturbed famous male sculptor Rodin who was not kind to her.
He would have said that her sculptures were “filth”.
Despite the criticism, she never gave up.
She «continued anyway”.
It was her motto:  to continue anyway.
From now on, I will make this motto mine.
It’s not too late…even at seventy-five years old.

Jean Bourque
 
Jean lives in Montréal. French speaking. Even if it's difficult, he continues to learn English anyway.

**

The Courage and the Beauty
 
I hold you draped  in my arms.
White is your skin of divine mystical grace.
Visions of the world at peace with itself.
You swoon with  the beauty of alabaster .
Untouched and unspoiled.
Blessing me with your body of purity.
We become one as forces of spiritual beauty remake our lives.
You have come to teach, to bless and to keep holy.
Behold the vision man has made.
Grant me the courage to see your wisdom.
To not be afraid.
To inhabit our shared souls.
You were created by the master of creation.
We live together in this one life now and forever.
 
Sandy Rochelle

Sandy Rochelle is an award winning poet, actress, and filmmaker. She is a recipient of the Autism Society of America's Literary Achievement Award. Sandy produced and narrated the documentary Film, ARTWATCH, about famed art historian James Beck. Her poetry has appeared in: Wild Word, One Art, Amethyst Review, Impspired, Verse Virtual, Dissident Voice, Connecticut River Review, Haiku Universe, Indelible, and others. Her chapbook, Soul Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press.

**

Cradled Before Standing

Even in black-and-white, 
shades of gray in relief,

the last gasps of consciousness, 
satin marble for smoothness,

grip the soul. A mother’s love 
piercing, crying out to her gods, 

unheard above the crashing 
waves upon the shore. Like a stone

net, chiseled salvation, an alabaster 
eternity cleaves their souls under- 

neath a just-
clearing sky.

Todd Sukany

Todd Sukany <[email protected]>, a two-time Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over forty years. His work has appeared in Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, eMerge Magazine, and The Ekphrastic Review. Sukany authored Frisco Trail and Tales as well as co-authored four books of poetry under the title, Book of Mirrors, with Raymond Kirk. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing music, loving three children, their spouses, seven grandchildren, caring for a rescued dog, and four rescued cats.

**

​
Picture

​Join us for the epic event of the year.
You won't be sorry. It is wild, exhilarating, exhausting and wonderful.
A day of pure creation. Play. Brainstorming. 
​Join us on Sunday, or do it on your own time over the following weeks.
This year, to celebrate ten years of The Ekphrastic Review, an optional Champagne Party follows the marathon on zoom.
Details are below.

Perfect Ten: an Ekphrastic Marathon
 
Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating ten years of The Ekphrastic Review. 
 
Join us on Sunday, July 13 2025 for our  annual ekphrastic marathon. This year we are celebrating ten years!!!!!

This is an all -day creative writing event that we do independently, together.

Take the plunge and see what happens!
 
Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone.
 
We will gather in a specially created Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. 
 
Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, before the deadline for submission. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2025). 
 
Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site.
 
One poem and one flash fiction will win $100 CAD each.
 
Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year!
 
Marathon: Sunday July 13, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks)
(For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 13, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.)

Champagne Party: at 6.05 pm until 7. 30 on Sunday, July 13, join participants on Zoom to celebrate an exhilarating day. Bring Champagne, wine, or a pot of tea. We'll have words from The Ekphrastic Review, conversation as a chance to connect with community, and some optional readings from your work in the marathon.   
 
Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2025
Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less
 
Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 15 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors.

If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll sign you up. 
​
Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September.

​Sign up below!

Perfect Ten: annual ekphrastic marathon

CA$20.00

Celebrate ten years of The Ekphrastic Review with our annual ekphrastic marathon. Fourteen drafts, thirty minutes each, poetry, flash fiction, or CNF. You'll choose from a curated selection of artworks chosen to challenge, inspire, and stimulate.


The goal of the marathon is to finish the marathon by creating fourteen drafts. Optional: you'll have time after the event to polish any drafts and submit them. Selected works will be published in TER and a winner in poetry and flash fiction will each be chosen and honoured with $100 award.


Following the marathon, exhausted writers can join our Champagne Party on zoom to celebrate an amazing day.

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Kaz Ogino: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

6/6/2025

1 Comment

 
Picture
Rainy Day Rainbow, by Kaz Ogino (Canada) 2024

Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is Rainy Day Rainbow, by Kaz Ogino. 

Deadline is June 20
, 2025. 

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way.​ Scroll down to donate $5CAD (about $3.75 USD).

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include OGINO CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, June 20, 2025.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
​
​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
​
15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.
​

Voluntary Gift of $5 CAD (about $4 USD) With Submission

CA$5.00

Voluntary gift of $5 CAD with submission.

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Ekphrastic Writing Responses- Donna-Lee Smith, Curated by Kate Copeland

5/27/2025

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
Transmogrification, by Donna-Lee Smith (Canada) contemporary

​Black Into White
 
Within just thee minutes, black into white
Transmogrification, as it has been named
What secrets were all hidden in negativity
Now being exposed to us with no privacy
With a face and identity that’s unashamed
Of what now can be observed in the light
 
There seems no reason for this odd change
Maybe it’s the image being self deprecating
A little frustrated with so few details shown
Yet since inception, many years have flown
And just be dissatisfied with all that waiting
But its choice of representation was strange
 
A subject or object, one may choose which
Relieved to be seen however one might feel
Now as a picture that is almost abstract art
As a strange conception from the very start
Perhaps a chance to be viewed as more real
And even trying to scratch that creative itch
 
Howard Osborne
 
Howard has written poetry and short stories, also a novel and several scripts. With poems published online and in print, he is a published author of a non-fiction reference book and several scientific papers many years ago. He is a UK citizen, retired, with interests in writing, music and travel.
 
**
 
Manifesto
 
He carries my wound like a badge of honour, 
holding me up as an example - of what?
of resilience? domination? of his own 
cruelty? All that is obvious. But what he 
doesn’t see, what this monster doesn’t know,
is that what he sees as a scar ripped 
across my face is actually a tool. A brush. 
A makeup brush that fools him into believing 
he has me in the palm of his hands. That I 
am stuck on his canvas. He is oh, so wrong. 
I am not even there. I am a painting of my 
own creation and as I leach myself of 
darkness, I transform him. My eyes glow at 
his screams as my brush becomes a scalpel. 
Turning him into the object he believed I was. 
Until he is nothing more than my shadow. 
And his wound becomes my mask.
 
Kaila Schwartz
 
Kaila Schwartz runs an award-winning theatre program at a secondary school in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has spent the past 23 years. Her poem Chaplaincy was selected for commendation in the Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and was published in the Hippocrates Awards Anthology in 2020. Her poem promise in the garden will be published in the June edition of Moss Piglet.
 
**
 
Arresting
 
Arresting woman,
hiding behind images,
protecting herself. 
 
**
 
Reflection
 
Deep attractive eyes,
staring into the blackness,
judging reflection.
 
Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher
 
Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher has been writing since 2010 and has had many micro-flash fiction stories published. In 2018 her book Shorts for the Short Story Enthusiasts was published, The Importance of Being Short in 2019 and In A Flash in 2022. She currently resides on Long Island, New York with her husband Richard and dogs Lucy and Breanna.
 
**
 
Transmogrification

Re: model, yes, remodel, morph,
but more than indication brought,
a grifter casting telling spell -
witch moves, transforming which we see -
the moment what might be revealed,
in manner magical it seems.

Those dark arts frame the ghostly wight
as pales into significance,
a play on what enlightens us,
the stage, the script, that cast again.
Is there a shadow armature,
some patent, type, prepared before,
a stock for grafting other fruit
but rooted, tapping common source?

I sense the Easter Island heads,
those moai stones of ancient craft,
great monoliths, hung ears and nose,
as if each knows their tribal part.

Whatever medium your art,
exhumed whomevers from your past -
hear spirits of their vocal hearts,
with black cat moggy in your sights.
 
Stephen Kingsnorth
 
Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review.  He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com
 
**
 
Exposed in Reverse Order
 
Now, all you see are my dark sides
The negative of me -- I won't deny
Yet, there is more going on within this shot
And I want you to see below my surface laid plot
I lured you into my shutter snapped shadows
Even though you were hung in my red room glows
You are more attracted to the leading lies on my face
Than the click of my cobra bite blade, but
I have more to offer, more to search for
There are parts of me that can only be exposed in reverse order
 
Why can't you just see me in the light?
 
There are parts of me that can only be exposed in reverse order
I have more to offer, more to search for
Than the click of my cobra bite blade, but
You are more attracted to the leading lies on my face
Even though you were hung in my red room glows
I lured you into my shutter snapped shadows
And I want you to see below my surface laid plot
Yet, there is more going on within this shot
The negative of me -- I won't deny
 
Now, all you see are my dark sides
 
Brendan Dawson
 
Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy. He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and experiences as an expat.
 
**
 
The Final Cut
 
Like Dorian Gray
she had two personas,
 
both with shadows,
one dark, one light.
 
Both slashed open,
sliced in two
divided.
 
In the final cut
she was both.
 
Lynn White
 
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for  Pushcarts, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com.
 
**
 
Gratitude
 
Dear friend Donna-Lee
 
Your black and white images take us through our own inside mirror
The thin and fragile skin which envelopes our body is transmogrified
It becomes our privileged and faithful channel
Between our soul and our peers
Transmogrification allows our breath to flow
And contacts our deepest feelings
Our creativity and our humanity
Our Human entity…being concerned by people around us
People who can transmogrify us
People we hope to transmogrify by our presence
It feels so good to influence each other
It feels so good to be transmogrified
By your inspiring vision of the environment
La gratitude fait partie de la métamorphose
Que nous pouvons opérer en nous
Pour devenir une meilleure personne
 
Jean Bourque
 
Jean lives in Montreal. He is retired from Special Education. He takes English classes. He also participates in a pairing program for English and French conversation at MCLL (McGill Community for Lifelong Learning). He is paired with Donna-Lee who told him about The Ekphrastic Challenges. Merci beaucoup Donna-Lee.
 
**
 
The Scar
 
                                                                     "They never forgot
                                             that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course..."
                                                                  W.H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Art
 
 
If I believed that my answer     would be to someone who
would never return to earth, this flame    would move no more,
 
but because no one has ever returned alive    from this grief,
if what is true I can, I can     I can reply with no fear of anything...*
 
When the pieces didn't fit     they were forced to rely on intuition.
It was a miracle (this they knew)     the 21st century's contemporary capacity
 
to scan the entire work of art     like a puzzle drawn by heart --
but whose heart? And who had made     the pieces? Alexander the Great 
 
had died at 32, by poisoning, assassination    or bacterial disease
which was no doubt called by something ancient     and infectious, and heart-
 
breaking. Definitely transmogrifying.    The plastic surgeon looked
at her birthmark, now a cavern, grown     upward on her face, threatening
 
her ear; if repaired, nerves    might be cut to her eye, winking
at fate above the ear    that might have to come off; and O yes: she would
 
not be able to smile.    It was losing the smile that became 
the most fearsome as she imagined a light    so bright above the eye above
 
the threatened ear;    the length of dissolving thread, commanded
by the needle to bridge the gap.    She had never visited Venice, the Bridge
  
of Sighs, or made love in a gondola.    Petronius, trapped 
within himself, had found humor     in The Satyriicon (See quote at beginning
 
of the poem to avoid footnotes)    and she was known for natural humour,
to laugh or die?    Alexander the Great was so brave, so young and accomplished 
 
(not to mention handsome)    a map of his conquests moving west
to east;     a part of his sarcophagus  (You never vanished from my heart,
 
antique sarcophagai*)  found in Venice    and finally scanned, all 
these centuries later, found to fit;    The Star-Shield Block, found, stars 
 
winking above passages, canals of thought    these memories, 
a bridge to a broken past, magically transformed
                                                                                        when a poet sighs,
                                                                                           happy on a bridge to try try try.
 
Laurie Newendorp
 
Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston. Honored multiple times by The Ekphrastic Review's Challenge, she found Donna-Lee Smith's Transmogrification, a face, darker by night, brighter at sunrise (or revealed by ill-health during an Inquisition) to be thought-provoking.  Although it is unusual for Newendorp to use multiple quotes in the body of a poem, The Scar reveals a variety of sources: Petronius, The Satyricon; You never vanished from my heart, antique sacophagai from Newendorp's translation of Rilke's Sonnets To Orpheus in the voice of Eurydice; and try try try [cry cry cry] is a quote written by Cynthia Macdonald, describing her struggle to become a poet.  The Star-Shield Block was found in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice. Its likeness -- scanned and printed  -- was carried to the British Museum to verify its fit in a fresco carved on Alexander's sarcophagus.
 
**
 
I Find There are Bits of Me in This
 
I see my past self
in the pictures here.
I cannot mold my precise,
my mirror image to them,
but my eyes grasp
that slash of shadow
sweeping from chin line upward,
and I raise my hand to
that place on my own face and
feel the crease left as I slept,
in Le Bourget airport,
cheek anchoring the
stiff strap of my shoulder bag
when I was stranded there
without funds.
In the light gray of the
phantom face mask I find
my fear of fading into
nothingness at my class
reunion while they laugh
over all our shared “jolly times”
of which I recall none,
since in those days I hid
in the library surrounded by
stacks of notes, frantic
to recall all data for tests to
keep my scholarship.
 
Only bits of me, but
yes, I am in these images.
These familiar but not comforting,
faces are not identical to me,
at least not yet. So I will step
away now before I find
more bits of me scattered
here and there in this work.
I will place these works
and my already noticed bits
of past discomfort
in a back drawer of my brain
and will them both to sleep.
 
Joan Leotta
 
Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She’s been published as essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist. She’s a two-time nominee for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her poetry, essays, and stories have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Lake, Ovunque Siamo, One Art, Gargoyle, and other journals. Her shows most often highlight her Italian heritage, food, family, and strong women and has been a guest on Italian radio. Her one-woman show is Louisa May Alcott, Author, Nurse, traveler to Italy and Writer. 
 
**
 
To Donna-Lee Smith Regarding Transmogrification
 
You model soul you've bared to bone
by brush that dared to turn the stone
exposing truth as underside
both dark and blinding light could hide.
 
beneath the good and evil known
in seed the wind of fate has sown
to freely bloom as conscious will
and yet forever struggle still
 
with choices one cannot undo
and consequences that ensue
to piece together greater sum
of hope and damage we become
 
that time completes, however strange,
as frames embracing art of change.
 
Portly Bard
 
Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.
 
Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.
 
**
 
The Dark Room
 
Sometimes someone flips a switch and the room
that held so much darkness and so many knives, is bright,
and the knives reveal as soft as feathers wafting in the wind.
Darkness, today, is the red of wine in a patterned glass
and its fear no longer grips.
 
Last week I was drowning in that glass, where the wine
was blood and the shadows were a curse. Every step
contained its own argument that near was far,
that less was more and the darkness was a parasite
heavy on my back.
 
This week the light cascades around me and the dark
is just a drift of feathers. The knives are sheathed
and the wind is a caress, but it has the promise
of the week gone by and the week yet to come.
And I still bear its scars.
 
Edward Alport
 
Edward Alport is a retired teacher and international business executive living in the UK. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer. He has had poetry, articles and stories published in various webzines and magazines and performed on BBC Radio and Edinburgh Fringe. His Bluesky handle is @crossmouse.bsky.social. His website is crossmouse.wordpress.com.
 
**

My Black Soul
 
Black is the colour of my soul.
It is the mask that I cleverly use to disguise my face.
I live with the undesirables fooling all who try to approach me.
My smile is rancid and cold.
Sinister is my game.
I will disgrace you if you look my way.
Stay away from the evil within me.
I am cold to the touch- no skin here.
I am plaster and paste-no blood in my veins.
No heart and no soul to love.
I am here on an expired passport.
Listen to me child.
Some praise my alleged beauty -but that is just a trap.
A myth discussed among the living of the world.
Those with blood in their veins and a clean heart and soul.
I am my own entity.
Touch me if you dare.
Observe me if you must.
You have been warned.
 
Sandy Rochelle 
 
Sandy Rochelle is a widely published poet, actress, narrator and filmmaker. Her documentary film Silent Journey is streaming on Culture Unplugged. Publications include: Wild Word, One Art, Verse Virtual, Dissident Voice, Connecticut River Review,Haiku Universe, Impspired, Indelible, and others.
 
**
 
Concealment Cento
 
The veil a device, 
Which hides my future life from me-
God, the unity of everything, my hands and eyes-
All they can see is my toes and my hair-
I’m hiding, I’m hiding-
I have wings flattened down and hid-
I raise the darkened veil
Subtle as light
The sudden, first unfurling,
That I may have the sky.
 
Debbie Walker-Lass

Line 1)The Marble Veil, by Paul Batchelor
Line 2 & 7) “Oh, Could I Raise The Dark’nd Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Line 3) “Onset” by Kim Addonzinio
 Lines 4 & 5) “Hiding” by Dorothy Keely Aldis
Lines 6 & 8) “The Bridal Veil” by Alice Cary
Line 9) “Dreams” by Grace Greenwood 
Line 10) “Before I Got My Eye Put Out” by Emily Dickinson 
  
Debbie Walker-Lass, (she/her) is a poet, collage artist, and writer living in Decatur, Georgia. Her work has appeared in, or soon will appear, in The Rockvale Review, Green Ink Poetry, The Ekphrastic Journal, Punk Monk, Poetry Quarterly, The Light Ekphrastic and The Niagara Poetry Journal, among others. She is an avid Tybee Island beachcomber and lover of all things nature. (Except spiders, not yet.) She’s recently provided a rollicking poetry workshop for her local Dekalb County library.
 
**
 
Amnesia
 
How is it I have misplaced my memories?  Is it that the shadows merged with my bones?  If I make myself very still, very quiet.
 
My thoughts are grey.  I keep failing to escape from these labyrinthine dreams.  The horizon moves farther and farther away.  Yet I cannot stop moving.
 
I am walking on a bridge inside a revolving door.  I go and go and go and go nowhere, spiraling within the formless silence of obliteration.
 
have I lost my mind?
where did it go?  the mirror laughs;
life abandons me
 
Kerfe Roig
 
A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new.  Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/  (which she does with her friend Nina), and  https://kblog.blog/.
 
**
 
Tectonic Face
 
I carry my face in my hands, 
hoist it onto the dining table,
ready my knife and fork.
My eyes, dark and brooding,
stare at the black-and-white plate. 
Nothing has taste for me anymore. 
I suck in my cheeks as I prepare to bite.
into gray food. I jut out my chin to make sure
I don’t dribble. But then light bites my face, forces
my eyes shut. A bright beam sears
my right cheek, penetrates my skin,
leaves a fault line from glabella to jowl.
Like lava, the heat creeps beneath the skin
until it enters from behind the eyes
and shoots out. I am sprouting
fireworks. My face is alive. 
 
I am alive.
 
Barbara Krasner
 
Barbara Krasner earned a World Art History certificate from Smithsonian Associates as she grappled with the confluence of chronic illnesses. Writing in response to art, especially surrealist art, helps her heal. Her work has been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. Her first ekphrastic poetry collection is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Visit Barbara's website at www.barbarakrasner.com.
 
**
 
Transmogrification 
 
Sometimes she would say that the next time she’d see
herself in the mirror, she’d have a different face. Her eyes
were the darkest brown, almost as dark as the Black Oaks
she often imagined the fiend within her hiding behind.
 
Sometimes she would say that the next time she’d see
herself, her face would be radiant, and her eyes
would gleam with the glory of the angel she often imagined
hiding behind Japanese Maples with their lovely coral bark.
 
Sometimes she would say that the next time she’d see
her reflection in the pond behind her home, the under-eye
circles formed during sleepless nights, when the fiend
and the angel inside her battled, would be gone.
 
Sometimes she would say that the next time she’d see
herself in the surface of a window at midnight or on a car’s
shiny hood, the war within her would be over, that magic
could change her into someone she’d never known.
 
Gregory E. Lucas
 
Gregory E. Lucas writes fiction and poetry. His short stories and poems have appeared in many magazines such as The Horror Zine, Sparks of Calliope, and previous issues of The Ekphrastic Review. He lives on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina.
 
**
 
Penumbra
 
There are two sides to every being.  To every shadow self.  Something unspoken works upon you as dusk falls.  An unmuttering of whispers.  When it’s time for all your doings.  Shadow selves do shadow work.  They embalm, they bury, burn candles, make offerings.  When the moon glows pink.  When the night of the dead looms high.  Sometimes, you hear the whooping.  
 
You spot a lone falcon during the day.  Messenger.  A sign.  Time for ritual and remedy.  The runes fall sideways, face up, sunlit.  Always telling you the same thing.  Protection.  Quiet time. Soft spells.  A time for fasting.  Scrying.  Reckoning.  
 
You are not alone and you never were.  The falling night brings a shedding of self.  You are fond of all the ways.  You, shadow woman, leave behind what no longer serves you.  The chameleon selves that never were you.  You grow into she of the four directions.  Future crone, she who loves.  Deep, secret, unceasing.  She who bestows her benediction upon the passing traveller.  To vanish the moment their back is turned.  Do not look into her eyes too long.  You would forget your purpose.  
 
She becomes a mystery.  She shed so many selves, she cannot be known.  Not anymore.  Those she loved she left, or they left her.  Through will, death, circumstance.  She is centuries old.  At one with the wildflowers in bloom.  The moon at half-mast.  The forest at the edge of the world.
 
Nina Nazir
 
Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, writer and artist based in Birmingham, UK. She has been widely published online and in print. She is also a Room 204 writing cohort with Writing West Midlands. You can usually find her with her nose in a book or on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir.  She blogs regularly at www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com
 
**
 
Breaking Out
 
I was tired of always,
bored with day after day,
 
with showing in shadows
a mask to go inside
 
frames and expectations
people carry as they
 
measure me with a glance
to see how I might fit.
 
Then a light dawned inside,
brightened until it cracked
 
my mask like a cocoon,
forced it open, and burst
 
from my forehead, my eyes.
I glared shadows away,
 
shattered frames as I stabbed
a challenge to the world:
 
Here I am, if you dare!
 
Gary S. Rosin
 
Gary S. Rosin is a retired law professor now living in California to be near family. He has been writing poetry for almost 60 years, and ekphrastic poetry for about 40 years. He is a contributing editor for MacQueen's Quinterly.
 
**
 
There Once Was a Mother
 
who rejected her daughter’s
birthmark, regretted her lack of
grace, and sent her to beauty school
to learn elegance, or at least,
not to wobble in high heels.
“Wasted money,” she sighed,
disappointed in this girl--
 
and handed her a tube of Max Factor
Erase. Together, they waited
for the swipe of makeup to transform
the duckling into a swan. To bestow
glamour at eighteen, twenty-five, forty.
Twice a day, the girl prayed
 
the tube would correct her defect.
But Erase was no magic wand.
At bedtime and each morning,
the port-wine stain still splattered
across her chin like bloody shards
 
of glass or the work of a palsied
tattoo artist. Decades of fruitless
efforts to cancel, expunge, delete--
no procedure more successful
 
than the last. Until a knight errant,
in somewhat tarnished armor,
proclaimed he loved everything
 
about her. She questioned his eyes
but accepted his care. With time,
 
she stopped erasing herself.
 
Sandi Stromberg
 
Sandi Stromberg is the author of the poetry collection Frogs Don’t Sing Red. Her poems have recently been accepted by The Orchards Poetry Journal, Panoply, and MockingHeart Review— and appeared in Pulse, equinox, Gyroscope Review, San Pedro River Review, and The Senior Class, among others. An editor at The Ekphrastic Review, she also edited two anthologies of poetry--Untameable City and Echoes of the Cordillera. A four-time Pushcart and two-time Best of the Net nominee, she was a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eleven times. Dutch translations of her poems have appeared in Brabant Cultureel. 
 
**
 
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
 
stern, sabred, resurrected,
remembering the undoing,
the ongoing undoing,
the undone morphing into the light,
nourishing into being,
 
black matter bringing forth
an unforeseen brightness,
a blazing unforgiving fire
blinding the bearer
and all who would
ask the mirror.
 
Rose Mary Boehm
 
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published (and rejected) widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was several times nominated for a Pushcart and Best of Net. Her eighth book Life Stuff has been published by Kelsay Books (November 2023). A chapbook is about to be published, and a new MS is looking for a home. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
 
**
 
Akhlut
 
Piebald and crouched
I stalk my prey
Toward the sea
Leaving wolf tracks 
On the shore
 
Black and white 
I slip transmogrified
Into murky darkness
Sending out a click train
Through the deep
 
Lara Dolphin
 
A native of Pennsylvania, Lara Dolphin is an attorney, nurse, wife, and mother of four. Her chapbooks include In Search Of The Wondrous Whole (Alien Buddha Press), Chronicle Of Lost Moments (Dancing Girl Press), and At Last a Valley (Blue Jade Press).  
 
**
 
When I Look in the Mirror
 
When I look in the mirror,
There are two reflections.
Three, four and many more
Those who are going forward
Those going back infinitesimally
Each is like a wax letter stamp.
Each is an unopened correspondence
Each muttering, pray, do -open me.
Now unto eternity.
 
Mark Andrew Heathcote
 
Mark Andrew Heathcote is an adult learning difficulties support worker. His poems have been published in journals, magazines, and anthologies online and in print. He is from Manchester and resides in the UK. Mark is the author of In Perpetuity and Back on Earth, two books of poems published by Creative Talents Unleashed.
 
**

In Meditation
(at Mount Auburn Cemetery)
 
Each stone
An ascetic-
No longer alone.
 
Rising at dusk
Rising in light
Rising
When there was
The rain.
 
Like the air
In folds of a curtain --
Like the unborn.
 
Illusions of a mind
Confined to whirling
Of a fan --
Burning with desire
To be found.
 
Abha Das Sarma
 
An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Silver Birch Press, Blue Heron Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru. 
 
**
 
Silence of Love
 
On my first rendezvous
with daylight since
I moved to Colorado
near Estes Park, I stir
from winter’s silence,
 
hours before a blizzard
is forecasted. I recall
months ago we attended
a harvest fair where we
encountered a tattooed
 
artist sitting by an easel
who created this clever
interpretation of your
portrait in black and white.
We laughed at the finished
 
sketch which you gave me
as a souvenir of that crisp
October afternoon. Months
later I mourn the distance
between us and the stars.
 
Jim Brosnan
 
A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Long Distance Driving (2024) and Nameless Roads (2019) copies available [email protected]. His poems have appeared in the Aurorean (US), Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), Eunoia Review (Singapore), Nine Muses (Wales), Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Strand (India), The Madrigal (Ireland), The Wild Word (Germany), and Voices of the Poppies (United Kingdom). He holds the rank of full professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI.
 
**
 
An Interview for the Artist in Chiaroscuro
 
Our understanding is correlative to our perception.
~ Robert Delaunay, French artist (b. 1885 – d. 1941)
 
Where division meets mystery
and creativity yields inner friendship,
do you document your face as proof
of existence, characterize your countenance
 
as evidence? Where contrast invites
interpretation and imagery explores
universal belonging, do your self-portraits
honor humanity, offer tribute to solidarity?
 
Where the knife cuts and the complexities
of life are lost in black and white thinking,
does your lens widen with nuance,
embrace the vastness of human grayscale?
 
Based on hypotheticals, if compassion
suddenly transformed the world canvas,
altered societal discernment, would your likeness
change, include a transmogrification of color?
 
As the Earth turns in this light-dark framework
of time, do you believe our understanding
is correlative to our perception?
 
Jeannie E. Roberts 
 
Jeannie E. Roberts is an artist, author, and poet. Her latest full-length poetry collection is titled On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing (Kelsay Books, 2025). Her work appears in various publications, including Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Heron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The New Verse News, ONE ART, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Panoply, The Poeming Pigeon, Presence, Quill and Parchment, Silver Birch Press, Sky Island Journal, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs and is an Eric Hoffer and a two-time Best of the Net award nominee. 
 
**
 
Hope Overshadowed
 
Darkness.
It clings to me
like a second skin.
No amount of soaking,
scrubbing,
washing
deters its inky quality.
 
It never ceases
in its appearance.
Gathering.
Layering.
Hardening.
More,
            and more,
                        and more.
 
The weight
            is so
heavy…
 
But no one sees
as it hides
behind an illusion
I’ve portrayed:
a radiant smile,
a helping hand,
a strong façade;
that no one
wants to believe
is false.
 
Removing the pretenses,
being open,
vulnerable
about the origins
and reasons
for this emptiness…
yet
you still cannot see
through this white,
angelic smokescreen
and truly
understand
me…
 
Will I forever be
a prisoner of
this shadow?
 
No.
 
For while hope
may seem lost
in the endless
void,
a light will
always
continue to burn
at the other end
of the tunnel
guiding you
onward.
 
Katie L. Davey
 
Katie L. Davey is an aspiring author from the rural parts of House Springs, MO. She has published four pieces through four separate challenges for the Ekphrastic Review, the first titled Hidden Prophecies as part of the Richard Challenge, the second titled Listen Well, Listen All, of My Tale to Caution All as part of the Vicente Challenge, the third titled I Blink as part of the Morrisseau Challenge, and the fourth title A Rocky Perspective as part of the Gabler Challenge. She has worked on Harbinger Magazine as a staff intern and is a member of Stephens College's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. She earned her BFA in Creative Writing, with minors in Equestrian Studies and Psychology, at Stephens College in May 2024.
 
**
 
Etymology of Portrait of Earth
 
Charcoal as whole body emoting emerging 
 
the etymology of portrait
of earth
unfurling                                 
 
draw is to draft is to drag is to seize
 
[what’s pleasing- what’s changing
what’s up for grabs?
 
DRAW from your wrist 
draw 
from your shoulder
 
conjure ecologies of charcoal 
emerging from embers 
embers emerging emergent     
 
emerging emergency
 
of charcoal calling on what came before us
charcoal—Middle English [related to coal
 
emerging  converging  smudging  transforming
form & transform 
the earth
 
brutal and raw
 
Jeanne Morel
 
Jeanne Morel is the author of three chapbooks, most recently, I See My Way to Some Partial Results(Ravenna Press). She holds an MFA from Pacific University and has been nominated for a Pushcart in both poetry and fiction. Her new work is forthcoming in Telephone—An International Arts Project, On Resilience, Stories of Climate Adaptation Across Washington’s Landscapes, and Birdbrains, a Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds.
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Sarah Bernhardt: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

5/23/2025

0 Comments

 
Picture
After the Storm, by Sarah Bernhardt (France) 1876

​Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is After the Storm, by Sarah Bernhardt. Deadline is June 6, 2025. 

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does not affect the selection process in any way.​ Scroll down to donate $5CAD (about $3.75 USD).

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include BERNHARDT CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, JUNE 6, 2025.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
​
​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
​
15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.
​

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Séverine Gallardo: Ekphrastic Writing Responses, Curated by Kate Copeland

5/16/2025

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Picture
Die Erde & Der Himmel (Heaven and Earth), by Séverine Gallardo (France) 2024

Heaven and Earth
 
Reality reins,
into cohabitation,
of heaven and earth.
 
Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher
 
Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher has been writing since 2010 and has had many micro-flash fiction stories published. In 2018 her book Shorts for the Short Story Enthusiasts was published, The Importance of Being Short, in 2019 and In A Flash in 2022. She currently resides on Long Island, New York with her husband Richard and dogs Lucy and Breanna.
 
**
 
Therapeutic Art That Makes Us Grow
 
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy argues that expansive body postures
increase self-confidence and the positive influence we have on other people.
To help us remember to do this when speaking to another person, she
suggests to “pretend there's a hat, or object, on our head that we are
supporting.”

 
I imagine for a second that I’m wearing one of these super colourful and fun head
ornaments created by Séverine Gallardo.
The thought of that spectacular hat on my head makes me feel like I am a steeple
of a cathedral connecting with the sky.
With the overshoulderarmsleeve, I feel as if I were a living part of a luminous
garden. 
A garden that emerges from the Artist’s mind and that tends to a paradise.
I feel a connection with Nature as if I were hugging a tree, but, here, it is the
tree that is hugging me.
 
Jean Bourque
 
Jean lives in Montreal. He is passionate about nature and sylvotherapy. He particularly enjoys hugging trees, except for conifers…because of the resin.
 
**
 
To Séverine Gallardo Regarding Die Erde & Der Himmel
 
You fashion us as juxtaposed
--  between the sensed and undisclosed  --
as bridge connecting things observed
to spirit never seen but served...
 
...as flesh aware yet mystified,
by timeless reach of soul inside
unique as force inherent free
to destine as its legacy
 
the mind, the eye, the hand, the heart
becoming tools of human art
to leave behind the work and worth
of time's decay and its rebirth
 
of crafted selfless sacrifice
that Love intended to entice
as promise kept of living Grace
that we become in faith's embrace.
 
Portly Bard
 
Portly Bard: Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.
 
Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.
 
**

 
You Are On My Mind
 
Swathed in the fabric of life
I enter and think of you only.
Tall and bright -the Tower on Pisa on my head.
Swaying back and forth.
You inhabit my brain and go forth in the world.
The beauty of color and fabrics leads me to accolades and wisdom.
I am a success in this world -tall and mighty.
The vision atop my head pushes me onward to brilliance.
I am observed and admired for my creative fortitude.
I am acknowledged for the new heights I have reached.
Talent is once again the center of my universe.
My audience applauds and awaits my entrance.
The awards are endless.
I am the mistress of creation.
My entrance is greeted by all.
Cheers abound from the crowd.
Hand clapping causes my ears to ring with endless applause.
My hat is a supreme success -my head dizzy with recognition.
I enter the room as people bend and bow.
Crowds cheer and genuflect.
Perfection is mine.
 
Sandy Rochelle 
 
Sandy Rochelle is an Internationally published poet. Actress and narrator. She narrated and produced the documentary film Artwatch about Art historian James Beck. Her poetry has appeared in: Wild Word, One Art, Dissident Voice, Connecticut River Review, Haiku Universe, Impspired, Indelible, and  others. Her chapbook, Soul Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press.
 
**
 
The Daughters of Atlas
 
“…Atlas... bade Hercules hold up the sky in his stead. Hercules promised to do so, but succeeded by craft in putting it on Atlas instead....he begged Atlas to hold up the sky till he should put a pad on his head.”  - Apollodorus, Library II.5.11, 
c. 1st-2nd century CE
 
Old tales tell of mighty men who fought to lose
What women daily bear with ease and grace
For men cannot balance the world on their heads
Who portray each daily chore as legend
 
But it is now strong and stately women 
Who hold up the sky’s unlikely colours
Pastel shades of blush and dawn nourishing
Towering gardens of russet and sage
 
As women have done since before the beginning
No matter what elder tales may tell
Balancing life as if practicing posture
Draping the world across their left shoulders
 
A cauldron of time there heaped and expanding
The world-serpent’s skin coiled around her brow
Her veins gush with the wine of summer
Heaven and earth a mere fashion statement
 
Heavily felt yet lightly burdened
Royal purple worn most casually
With her grace and a firm simplicity
For that which she bears is not all that she is
 
Mark Hendrickson
 
Mark Hendrickson (he/him/his) is a gay poet and writer in the Des Moines area navigating the Sturm und Drang of daily life through wordcraft. His work has appeared in Variant Lit, Vestal Review, Modern Haiku, Spellbinder, and others. He has a background in music, psychology, and marriage & family therapy. Mark worked for many years as a Mental Health Technician on a locked psychiatric unit. Follow him @MarkHPoetry, or visit his website:  https://www.markhendricksonpoetry.com
 
**
 
Elevate Your Thoughts
 
When the strain of this world
becomes a heavy padded cloak
that sits heavily over your shoulder
like the biggest epaulette ever
it does not matter how lovely it is,
the skill and care in its creation,
the green land and the forests of it,
flooded rivers running down your arm,
red lava flows reaching to your wrist.
The roiling mass of its primal forces
and drive for survival overwhelm:
it is fight or flight, kill or be killed.
When this lopsided burden threatens
to overcome you, contemplate heaven.
 
Lift your mind above earthly things,
the rock strata, the land, the water.
Elevate your troubled thoughts
to a more rosy view above,
dwell on those higher matters.
Unknowable portals will lead you
to mystical realms beyond.
This is the essence of the infinite,
its strangeness unquantifiable,
its exotic nature beyond our ken.
We can try to imagine it, taste it,
the fruit of a new kind of Eden
untainted by mortal corruption.
Clothe your head with meditations,
send prayers to rise in spirals,
make a mitre from your mantras.
 
Emily Tee
 
Emily Tee is a writer living in the UK Midlands. She's had pieces published in Ekphrastic Review Challenges previously, and elsewhere online and in print, including most recently in Poetry Scotland.
 
**
 
A Tendency to Work in Squares
 
I wear the office inside my window            Grafting Bosch onto their burnt life
Bold, risqué, exploratory graveyard            The people made of victory gardens
Grey of cadmium neutron absorbers          The people fresh with fruit and lush
Without which the system explodes          With the wreckage of lasting greens
 
Propst the rat race Daedalus for this          Mismatched patch over the software
Minoan Age of cheese yellow sheets         Sheltering my catgut jeweling bright
Bull market with hecatomb jaundice          What won’t belong makes belonging
Bully bullshit bullpen Chinaware era          Happen by the process called longing
 
When I’m cold I drape myself in the          Whenever the body becomes a rufous 
Nondescript bucolic cell lit with heat         Halo of kestrel and an orphic mammal
Magna cum laude certificate in Excel         The body also wears the leeward dive
Summa of the backroom imagination         Its determinate, uncertain textile rustle
 
Starched cloud atmosphere ironed on       Cockaigne resembling karst the heart
The end of the world isn’t a spheroid         Lithic mordant caustic a talon a claw
Flat, unwrinkled, unblinking fissions           A hand reaching for variegated fruits
Cleaved panes resembling utopianism      Without which the system explodes
 
JDG

JDG (they/them) is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and a member of the New Haven Writers' Group. Their work has been published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, Prospectus, and Prairie Schooner. You can find more of their work at JustinDGoodman.com
 
**
 
Easter Parade
 
The parade was over.
I was as pleased
with my creation,
as any creator would be,
especially a mad Hatter like me!
But though it was over, I wasn’t done.
 
I had so many pieces left over,
so many earthly marvels
still awaiting creation,
so I collaged a sleeve,
modified a sweater
clothed the Earth.
mapped its changes
and created some more heavenly art.
 
Lynn White
 
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com///www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/
 
**
 
The Reluctant Model
 
Why would someone do this to me?
It weighs a tonne and I feel a fool.
 
There's skill and artistry
in the intricate designs, but
any beauty in the detail is lost
in the overall execution.
 
No I won't smile for the camera
this thing is giving me a headache
and if I move a muscle
it will all come tumbling down.
 
So many problems in the world need solutions
and you choose to do this to me?
 
Juliet Wilson
 
Juliet Wilson is an adult education tutor, wildlife surveyor and conservation volunteer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published. She can be found in various places online as Crafty Green Poet.
 
**
 
Bluebird Liturgy
 
Heaven reached down and touched the earth, dipped its fingertips into the soil, grasped tree roots. Heaven kissed the earth and the roots broke through the ground, blossomed into majestic tree clouds. There, in the branches, a bluebird lifted its beak in gratitude toward Heaven and sang, “Then heaven touched the earth,” again and again. Three other bluebirds in red nests caught the refrain from the west and carried the tune, passing its notes from one to the other. Then the trio sang in unison, a three-part harmony. Red petals unfurled and worms crept out of the soil to find each other. The bluebirds knew no more effective prayer than this: “Then heaven touched the earth. And all was well.”
 
Barbara Krasner
 
Barbara Krasner earned a World Art History certificate from Smithsonian Associates as she grappled with the confluence of chronic illnesses. Writing in response to art, especially surrealist art, helps her heal. Her work has been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. Her first ekphrastic poetry collection is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Visit Barbara's website at www.barbarakrasner.com.
 
**

Woven in Dialectic
 
Here I stand on firm foundations
A thesis of thinking labelled on Die Erde
Wrapping arms with world sensations
Blocking fears, I've long been scared of
 
And yet above I continue to contend
An antithesis of angst that awaits in Der Himmel
Resting where my mind has never been
Imagining a worth beyond metaphysical
 
As all my observations blend into Das Leben
I synthesize, paired of the middle, woven in dialectic
 
Brendan Dawson
 
Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy. He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and experiences as an expat.
 
**

ensorcelled
 
what is it like to be
a hill, a tree, a place
of impossible beauty
that moves into spirit
expanding beyond all
estimation?  how to
measure time when
it disappears and loses
its borders?  when
what was formerly
distant pulls the outside
in and speaks in voices
that are not sounds
but images of pure
lucidity?  that can only
be heard in the hushed
luminescence of word
lessness, the cosmic hum?
 
Kerfe Roig
 
A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/ (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/.
 
**
 
Mad Hatter?

A helmet, hat, a mindset space,
agenda for evolving taste,
grandmother’s knee to artistry.

It started in a crochet tool,
repeated gestures, time again,
ahead, remoulding, textile part.

Beyond the screen, still reading squares,
tile history, ceramic piece,
or letters, alphabetti seize.

Intriguing motifs, headline stuff,
to cap it all, consolidate
repurposed bits as galvanised.

Through eye to pinpoint travelogue,
flea markets through to online shop,
what meets that eye are coloured threads.

Yoruba for the carried weight,
divinities in India,
unseen and seen met native heads.

A head for heights, totemic feel,
do heaven, earth find unity
in Séverine’s material?
 
Stephen Kingsnorth
 
Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com
 
**
 
pitch

you can tear out the thread
that weds heaven to earth
 
& then swear on your spit
of this bead it will birth
 
& while you might speak of it
as air or as breath or as spirit
 
god holds the idea of death so high
even the dogs cannot hear it
 
Mark DeCarteret
 
**
 
Die Erde & Der Himmel
 
Smart of you, Gallardo,
to place heaven & earth
not in the hand & head of God
but of the human, and especially –
the woman, which even Zarathustra
missed in his superman gist!
 
You structured the heaven
as a high hoisted fist, though carrying it
for a lifetime, even if it’s only her mane,
defies any rational frame,
but that’s exactly why the creator
has given us imagination!
 
Only by invention she can harmonize
the intricate heavenly perfection
into such fair super bun
and place all the big and small crusades
into their right honorable places,
as light shines, flowers bloom, mountains green
creatures crawl and fly and sing. 
 
At the same time it’s upon
her practical arm to balance and conduct
all the earth’s super contrasts:
deluge and drought, kernel and darnel,
fresh and old, calm and storm  
to grab the best from each whim
and turn blossom into fruit,
only to then start again from seed;
as authors interchange poetry with prose
and, of course, turn the other way around
as by the season of their ideation bound;
yet always carrying the two tasks
with gravitas and grace, no matter
full face, profile or back –
it’s always a pure poise,
as Gallardo here shows!
 
You may correct me if it’s otherwise –
earth standing on her head,
and heaven hanging on her arm –
but, it’s, any way, an argument resolved –
‘on earth as it is in heaven’, as by the book.
 
But Gallardo’s present open book reading 
wouldn’t be complete
without reaching the mounting top
and spice Michelangelo’s gist – 
indeed, man was once inspirited by God,
but woman – second time by giving Birth –
here facing labor alone looking calm
as if it is a piece of birthday cake
her poise enhancing as we speak,
but if you stop…you will hear
her “thanks” to heaven and earth
for turning into wearable mode
as her natal dress code.
 
Ekaterina Dukas
 
Ekaterina Dukas writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning and her poems have been honored often by TER. Her collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europe Edizioni.
 
**
 
What i was
 
i was an easter egg and my falcon, a trinity
In a history of eclipse i had my fibers combed into
thought stacks, smoking cones
years ago, riding horseback
i noticed my arm was pregnant with verse, time
and motion. A quisling child
betrayed me to my father, unseen
since the time of darkness. Silly
silly me. False deserts dressed in cacti
grew like mints in apocalypse, and i
turned away. i was the sea and shore, near Greece
overgrown with rosemary
weeping, in spite of blue
and green
and yellow
 
Feral Willcox
 
Feral Willcox is a poet and musician living in Truth or Consequences, NM. Her first full length poetry collection is forthcoming from Artemis Tales Press. Her work can be found in The Mackinaw, Rogue Agent, Nixes Mate, Per Contra, and elsewhere.
 
**
 
I Contain Multitudes
 
I contain multitudes
           Of virtue
           Of sin
 
I contain multitudes
           Of pleasure 
           Of pain
                      Of short sighs singing in the dark of night
                      Of persistent aches echoing in the marrow of my bones
 
I contain multitudes
           Of enigma
           Of clarity
 
I contain multitudes
            Of memory
            Of prophecy
                       Of toes-tangled-in-dew-drizzled-grass flickers and of arms-aloft-in-trees flashes
                       Of wet-astreaked-cheek assaults and of depressed-dirge-drumming-heart visions
 
I contain multitudes
           Of love
           Of hate
 
I contain multitudes
Of knowledge
Of the forgotten
           Of calculations and of dates and of trivial fact
           Of names and of faces and of important lessons
 
I contain multitudes
           Of sanity 
           Of craziness
 
I contain multitudes
           Of niceties
           Of aggressions
                      Of “please’s” and of “thank you’s” and of held doors and of smiles
                      Of “fuck you’s” and of “go to hell’s” and of punches and of glares
 
I contain multitudes
           Of defensiveness
           Of offensiveness
 
I contain multitudes
           Of order
           Of chaos
                      Of perfectly aligned books and of washed hands and of sanitized surfaces
                      Of randomly placed knick knacks and of dirty t-shirts and of disorganized closets
 
I contain multitudes
           Of forgiveness
           Of resentment
 
I contain multitudes
           Of joy
           Of sorrow
                      Of brilliant smiles and of sparkling laughter
                      Of poorly disguised frowns and of drip-drop-drip-drop-drip-dripping tears
 
I contain multitudes
           Of calm
           Of fury
 
I contain multitudes
           Of reality
           Of dreams
                      Of hard truths
                      Of wild desires
 
Indeed, I contain multitudes! Multitudes! Multitudes! Multitudes
           Of Heaven
                      and
           Of Earth!
 
Rose Menyon Heflin
 
Originally from rural, southern Kentucky, Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet, writer, and visual artist living in Wisconsin. Her award-winning poetry has been published over 250 times in outlets spanning five continents, and she has published memoir and flash fiction pieces. She has had a free verse poem choreographed and danced, an ekphrastic memoir piece featured in a museum art exhibit, and two haiku put into a gumball machine. Among other venues, her poetry has appeared in Deep South Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and San Antonio Review. An OCD sufferer since childhood, she strongly prefers hugging trees instead of people. 
 
**
 
Heaven and Earth
 
When the new Pope was chosen, I thought of the mitre 
he’d don, decorated with gold & gems, 
made of white linen or silk.
The right to wear the pointed cap belongs only to the pope,
cardinals & bishops — 
always men
who take their roles seriously,
incense wafting around robes
like the white smoke that emerged from Rome 
before we learned his name.
 
But what if holiness was less the terrain of pomp & gaudy display, 
instead accessible by donning a completely different 
head covering -– 
say, a felt stocking cap in the shape of a bouquet
woven by women,
displaying mountain, canopy & cloud 
as sun’s rays dance across 
snaking river bends, dense speckled soil 
teeming with flowers.
 
If only I could acknowledge the forest on my head & sleeve, parade 
a cape of bright colors for adoring fans smitten 
with natural beauty – 
sleepy orchids & lilac bends, waterfalls,
grassy peaks, blood red buds.
 
My elevated cap would depict the universe with yarn --
every item of worship that sustains me 
& makes the world bearable — clematis, 
bellflower, banyan tree, calla lily,
yarrow,
honey locust,
& the breath of the body, rising.
 
Susan Michele Coronel
 
Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection In the Needle, A Womanwon the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press this July. A two-time Pushcart nominee, Susan Michele Coronel has had poems published in numerous journals including Mom Egg Review, Redivider, One Art, TAB Journal, and Spillway 29. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award. Versions of her book were finalists for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023), the C&R Press Poetry Award (2023), and the Louise Bogan Award (2024). 
 
**
 
In the Spotlight
 
I’ll bloody knock ‘em dead with this,
not literally obviously
though I could hide a fair few things
up my sleeve if I wanted.
 
Red carpet gown, my arse.
They can’t upstage me. 
This, here, will be my centrepiece.
 
The second I walk in, they’ll be…
astounded.  Gobsmacked.  Wowed.
They just won’t know
where to put themselves.
 
I’m not trying to steal anyone’s limelight, mind,
cos mine was just a bit part, but still,
my character was key to the whole plot
and this is my moment too, damn it.
 
Forget muted tones, 
trailing skirts 
or artsy black,
give me all the colours!
Give me asymmetry! 
A forest on my head!
A village hanging off my arm!
Guaranteed no other bugger
will be wearing this.
 
Come on, Cannes Film Festival,
let’s have it, here I come.
Open the doors,
lock up your sons
and pass me a champagne flute, 
waiter, por favor.
 
I will say one thing though –
it’s a good job I’m right-handed.
 
Nina Nazir
 
Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, writer and artist based in Birmingham, UK. She has been widely published online and in print. She is also a Room 204 writing cohort with Writing West Midlands. You can usually find her with her nose in a book or on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir.  She blogs regularly at www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com
 
**
 
Weary Angel Cento 
 
Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, 
There’s little to bear but the things I bore.
I am tired of work, tired of building up
I take off my skin, hang it up,
There’s nothing to carry, and naught to add. 
 
Debbie Walker-Lass

Line 1) Alice Duer Miller “Why We Oppose Pockets For Women”
Lines 2 & 5) Dorothy Parker, “Ballade of Great Weariness”
Line 3) Fenton Johnson “Tired”
Line 4) Angela Jackson,  "Mules and Women"
  
Debbie Walker-Lass, (she/her) is a poet, collage artist, and writer living in Decatur, Georgia. Her work has appeared in, or soon will appear) in The Rockvale Review, Green Ink Poetry, The Ekphrastic Journal, Punk Monk, Poetry Quarterly, The Light Ekphrastic and The Niagara Poetry Journal, among others. She is an avid Tybee Island beachcomber and lover of all things nature. (Except Spiders, not yet.) She’s recently provided a rollicking poetry workshop for her local Dekalb County library.
 
**
 
Revival of the Fittest
 
After the collapse, The Revival commissioned The Gallardo to create biodegradable fabric; they were also entrusted with the development of a universal clothing system where everyone had access to clean, creative, and affordable apparel. Embellished with pearls, appliqué, and embroidery, the garments were unique and celebrated nature. Held in societal esteem, The Gallardo wore multicolored vestments. As if the living embodiment of sculpture, their winglike sleeves and soaring headdresses displayed land, sky, and ocean delights; offerings of reverence to Heaven and Earth, cacti, corals, and other organic shapes of ornamental needlework adorned the felted silk as a terrain of crocheted forms crowned the ceremonial raiment.
 
The Revival practiced the sociopolitical ideology of anti-consumerism. The new era protected the environment and prioritized contentment over materialism. The Gallardo were instrumental in the elimination of Fast Fashion, restored environmental balance by reducing landfills of textile waste.
 
After the collapse
revival of the fittest
Heaven and Earth thrive
 
Jeannie E. Roberts 
 
Jeannie E. Roberts is the author of nine books. Her latest full-length poetry collection is titled On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing (Kelsay Books, 2025). Her work appears in various publications, including Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Heron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The New Verse News, ONE ART, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Panoply, The Poeming Pigeon, Presence, Quill and Parchment, Silver Birch Press, Sky Island Journal, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs and is an Eric Hoffer and a two-time Best of the Net award nominee. 
 
**
 
Buffet of Daffodils
 
Aargh
my arm is a flower
I wished it to be
a bee
instead it's their
dinner table
well thanks for the honey
honey
 
Marc Brimble
 
**
 
Of Heaven and Earth
 
The creature slams into the door, its alien appendages puncturing the reinforced steel. I’ve thrown the bolt, but it won’t hold. No matter. Every three years this abomination comes for me with its fetid breath and flashing fangs. I’ve defeated this cosmic anomaly before, and I’ll beat it again tonight. I breathe deep and don my crown and armpiece and immediately feel the tingle as the warp and weft activate. Every thread glows with power. And even as the beast hurtles into the door again, I stand, now thrice as strong as any creature on Earth. A CRASH and the door bows inward. Let it come. I am ready, ready, ready.
 
Tracy Royce
 
Tracy Royce is a writer and poet whose words appear in / are forthcoming in Bending Genres, Does It Have Pockets?, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Scrawl Place, Villain Era, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California where she enjoys hiking, playing board games, and obsessing over Richard Widmark movies. Find her on Bluesky.
 
**
 
The Lady of Two Lands
 
Roots and wings, these are the things
she dreams about at night, between
the unpaid bills and the unknown
bank accounts still — quite probably --
in her husband’s ex-wife’s name.
 
Shame is what she feels for thinking
such thoughts, even though the animal
night-brain has a mind of its own,
the train’s far-off whistle in the un-
seen distance.  But roots and wings. . .
 
The red-barked manzanita tree
grows disks taller than Nefertiti’s own
elongated trunk, sheltering the birds
that sing her name — Teeti, Teeti, Teeti!
Meanwhile, the red-leafed palm tree
 
becomes a lake of fire, violet irises
the size of trees become palms,
and water falls in a trickle, carving
its way through heavy stones that
weigh the wings of her better angel.
 
Or are they gray-grape wisterias
soft as summer in a strange and
mysterious land?  Epaulettes of islands
decorate her wings, also holding her
down.  Or shall we call it grounding?
 
The pink palace of her mind reaches
higher and higher with a lush green crown
and dark arched windows to home
those wild birds, portals for passage
to a secret realm.  Which song,
 
which clicking clock-like lock, which key
word will magically unlatch the door?
What’s more, what is the name, she wonders,
for such unspeakable resplendence?
And where is heaven, if not everywhere
 
around and inside you — in roots and wings?
 
Greta Ehrig
 
Greta Ehrig holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University, where she was a Lannan Fellow and enjoyed editing (and finding art for) Folio literary journal. She also paints, sings, teaches, and holds BAs in Art and Psychology. Her writing has received support from the Maryland State Arts Council and the National League of American Pen Women. In 2024, she was nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize in Poetry. Ekphrastic writing is her favourite kind.

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