 Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlands) 1490-1510  Outer panels. 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 Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. Deadline is March 27, 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 BOSCH 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, March 27, 2026. 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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 Sonnet, by Stephanie Grainger (England) 2018-2019. Click on image for artist site Dear Ekphrastic-ers, Stephanie Grainger has received everyone's poems and flash fiction (not only the published selection below!) and I would like for you all to read her heartfelt message: Wow! What can I say… I am speechless. This is wonderful... Thank you to all the writers, I am so moved by the quality and quantity of the work. There are times when - as all creatives - you go through the doldrums and think 'why do I do this'? Today your email [with all the writings! KC] gave me such a lift. I find any form of collaboration is so very rewarding. A suitable parallel to the poem…. PS: Stephanie mentioned that the actual sonnet she has used to “draw on” was Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. Now you know... Have a lovely start of a new month, thank you ALL for your inspiring submissions, Kate Copeland ** Creation  WPiercy At the intersection of Art, Poetry and Contradiction, you will find my work, you will find me. Observing memories and the present moment, thinking with an eye that shadows the natural world. Philosophy, Theology, and Science are core of my writing - I have found that I am a synthesizer. Managing ideas which do not always cohere. A manipulator of ideas – **  Anna Million Anna Million is currently a student at Truman State University, where she will be receiving her BA in English and Creative Writing. The unhurried and reflective life of rural Missouri inspires her work. ** Soon It Will Be Over The turbulent waters are looking up to see Lightning tracks, like a spider’s web falling From the blackened clouds in a strange sky Yet with each glance, none understand why Despite the distant echo of thunder calling To some it’s elation, but for others, misery Three tercet glimpses and a couplet ending To some it triggers memories of Hiroshima As a frightening trail then breaks the silence The signal of impending doom and violence Whether imagined as Sonnet or Terza Rima Yet so few still get the message it’s sending 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. ** Bleak Bleak sky and water, Encumbering one’s thinking, on this sombre day. 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 two dogs. ** Reformed The Sonnet, school-child, technical, with rhyme-scheme, line-count, history - of Petrarch, Shakespeare, classic names, analysis of structured forms. Yet singing mood, romantic verse, less device as title-choice, scene-setting word for form of art, this mediating of a tone. Right angle, graphic column set, in visual blocks, this poet’s task, for feel that form laid out, as waits - glyph landscape for a couplet end. An animation in my mind - a need to turn this on its side, translate first scribbles into terms - to format, though discretion veils. So now to wrestle, then relax, performance masked as if perchance, and maybe, perhaps, formulate escape route from perplexity. 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 ** Perilous Pointing It was an insidious beginning Accumulating from horizons Brushed aside as it was happening Taking refuge inside our vices Burnt reflections on charcoal scratches Lingering in suffocating chokes Darkened residuals in masses Clotting blood in the backs of our throats Yet, we knew it could have been this way Watching signs of perilous pointing Still we sat crisscrossed and disobeyed Forgetting who we were exploiting Realized too late as we scattered Dissenting opinions never mattered 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 journey as an expat. ** Shanti The sea is such a daunting, mythic scene Where hidden Neptune and the sky-lord Zeus Resume, renew their everlasting war, While steady, patient land is free of struggle. But sometimes the Atlantic quietens down, And in its calm, it seems to be inviting. It calls for willing souls to swim its surface, And tempts them with Ulysses’ dream to sail. But this seductive state can never last. The old and furious battle will return, The thunder and the monstrous crashing waves, Rise from silent darkness, depths of water. And so, I’ll hold my peace here on the shore, Contemplate my saline verse, and little more. Edward An Irish poet and dramatist based in London. ** Thin Sonnet for Southern England clouds cling strike lightning again again waters pool, spread, sprawl far across floodplains winds drape -- scrape dark bows play violins of rain, more rain forever soft and down... deluge upon the Downs Lizzie Ballagher A winner in Ireland’s 2024 Fingal Poetry Festival Competition and in 2022’s Poetry on the Lake, Ballagher focuses on landscapes, currently creating a collection of poems about Exmoor. Having studied in England, Ireland, and America, she worked in education and publishing. Her poems have appeared in print and online throughout the English-speaking world. Find her blog at https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/ ** lines, curves, clouds, water, black, white and in between the vertical and the horizontal, imagining the volta as a streak of lightning, hitting water, the octave more musical than words on a page, and yes, there is metaphor, the brain meandering through language and thought and shading until the number 14 appears, and as if by magic, a small song is heard over oceans and deserts-- the sestet appearing beneath & above land, lakes, and mountains of doodling along the margins, ink on paper, and in the sky above the earth floating—movement-- in contrast a rock with five edges skipped across a pond explodes in the center, sending near funnels into the air—a windy amalgamation of thought-- word, action, slumber, brilliance Anne Graue Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press, 2020) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Find her work in Poet Lore, Gargoyle, Verse Daily, River Heron Review, Unbroken Journal, and Crab Orchard Review. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review. ** Shore Report Somewhere up ahead a storm assembles, A magnet drawing black scribbles to itself, Pushing clouds to the top of the sky, Water a dark mirror the sky moons over. Partial clearing will follow, as day winds Down to evening and waves flatten. You Fishermen will want to get back in the boat-- Fat bass and trout will be spawning. There’ll even be some blue, visible Beneath the white scroll of clouds, illegible But hopeful, a foretaste of tomorrow—blue Expanse, buttoned shut by scattered clouds. Still, the storm’s history will be written In foam, lacing the thin beach of Jackson’s Cove. Jeffrey Skinner Jeffrey Skinner’s selected poems, The Sun at Eye Level, won the Sexton Prize, and will appear in 2026. In 2014 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He has published nine books of poetry. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Image, Fence, and Poetry Ireland. ** Broken The cold wind speeds so move slowly now one step at a time careful now one step then another before the broken ice melts away the sky shatters and the wind brakes it all. 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/ ** Wandering Ophelia a demi-sonnet* How strange to make a flower crown in midst of dankish wintertime. When rheumy white winds tumble down, you search for doves of columbine. The boughs of willow will not hold. The brook below is nipping cold. Look up! The slender, rueful sky’s above. Lara Dolphin A descendant of immigrants, Lara Dolphin lives with her family among the Allegheny Mountains of Central Pennsylvania on the ancestral land of the Susquehannock/Iroquois people. She has written three chapbooks In Search Of The Wondrous Whole, Chronicle Of Lost Moments, and At Last a Valley. She, like countless others, hopes for a world filled with greater peace. * The demi-sonnet, created by Erin Murphy, is an aphoristic poetic form consisting of 7 lines, true or slant rhymes, and no set syllable count. ** the tapestry on my wall three slender panels white lightning swirls falling on slivered black ice one winter storm writes its cursive signature Sister Lou Ella Hickman Sister Lou Ella Hickman, OVISS is a former teacher and librarian whose writing appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her first published book of poetry is entitled she: robed and wordless (Press 53, 2015) and her second, Writing the Stars (Press 53, 2024). She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Using five poems from her first book, James Lee III composed Chavah’s Daughters Speak first performed at 92Y in New York City. Other venues were Cleveland, Ohio; Dallas, Texas; Washington Irving High School, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Clayton University, Atlanta, Georgia; and Sanibel Island, Florida. The most recent concerts were held at First Methodist Shoreline in Corpus Christi, Texas for their First Friday program in 2025 and Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, Texas with Assistant Professor Jessica Spafford’s faculty recital. She was a finalist for Amnesty International Humanitarian Creative Arts Competition sponsored by the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2025. ** To Stephanie Grainger Regarding Sonnet So many journeys here you've shown we step through fear from stone to stone as if we're poets well aware they bridge our here and now to where the peace we feel will be the calm of courage found to quiet qualm and weather tempest running course that, waning as destructive force, will leave its mark as task ahead, regret acknowledged put to bed, and lesson learned by which we're led to faith renewed as conquered dread becoming joy that we extol in stillness lifting strengthened soul. 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. ** Soliloquies Not Spoken Tidal pools filled with tears, emotions overflowing onto sand oversaturated with discomfort and regret. Rumbles in the distance as slate grey skies are replaced with clouds hanging heavy with Words. Letters tumble and scrape together groaning and creaking under the weight of unshed words, messages, meaning, trapped inside. Footsteps straggle along the shore showing indecision, second third fourth thoughts, emotions tamped down leaving words to die on the tongue. Nothing said, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Constrained passions cutting black scars on the soul. Brydon Caldwell Brydon is a long time teacher and emerging writer from the western edge of the Canadian Shield. He is grateful and motivated after his first submission was selected for The Ekphrastic Review’s challenge. ** Imperfect Sonnet The corpse, lying in its bed, wears its last bonnet, Its soul emerges from cold water in tangled lines, Each of them follows its own route marked with vague sines, Death is imperfection so is my first sonnet. Fate veils its face with a black sunbonnet, It dupes life, offering its sweet sunny grape wines. Drunk, its spirit doesn’t see the dark hidden signs. Fragile love in a deep coma joins its comet. Now lost in Stephanie Grainger’s wide Universe, Its grave is a deliverance, no more a curse, Birth and doom connected in a fusional link. Dense fog is disappearing letting light in place, Our destiny lettered and painted in black ink Moving to a new world with confidence and grace. Jean Bourque Jean lives in Montreal. He used the French structure to write his sonnet, which is composed of fourteen lines in alexandrines and rhymes according to the pattern ABBA ABBA CCD EDE. ** Neutral Triptych with Vertical Lace Volta First panel the viewer travels past a land dark yet not quite frozen her memory bends beyond the horizon lines of clouds cross toward branches the artist pedals into her future. Middle bridges solid and vapor. Ice shelves wait to be stocked with essentials--the viewer inhales the present--tries not to dip into her past--a dark shade of regret tarnished with guilt’s pewter. Third view cross hatches lines of neutral. The future dreams itself into color. Doubt evaporates--gathers into mixed precipitation. There is no wisdom only fluid connections. Final couplet is narrow--a lace path leading towards the artist and her practice. Work is mundane yet tender. Each fragment of phrase yields an image open to discourse. Jenna Rindo Jenna Rindo is a former pediatric intensive care nurse who lives in rural WI. She now tutors and mentors refugee students and trains for races from the 5K to full marathon. Her work is published in AJN, Calyx, Tampa Review Relief: a Journal of Art and Faith and JAMA. ** like a scar loves healing like a scar loves healing or to be healed like a line takes the curve in its arms and closes the door before a new day of burning like the dark whispers to the light i need you soon and in their embrace they make my memory and yours with the new day and like hate with time gives way to love and breaks in the door and rage runs away weeping for the rest of us soon forgotten by all in the room or like water with a smooth touch and caress the sand the salt the embers of the night with the first showers of the sun wrapped in honey and flowing down the beach like the dance allows the chair rest in a moment those times when we keep kisses in drawers to later rub on and off thighs pumping and hurling knees those legs our own horses escaped from stables the last of the gray getting in the way the black the white time held close in a coin purse bursting with notes for collection time and two sides just two sides blessed and dropped in a bowl for a monk’s breakfast or prayers for the dead or maybe in a slot to play our song that crushes the tin silence and opens our embrace one more time again mike sluchinski ** Lacy Lines I read your lacy lines from left to right your racy bits from here to infinity They hold my passion with fragility How dare you leave me like a blighted knight! You brush lacy lines from my aged face my tears reflect your animosity Did you love me out of curiosity when black widows spin their ragged veils of lace? Donna-Lee Smith DLS loves lacy bits of things and once housed a tarantula (with 8 pink feet) in her apartment. ** Sonnet After Grainger Three panels of the self before the quiet: the looped and tangled thinking, all that wire strung overhead, the dark nodes where the fire of some old fear kept circling. I won't hide it anymore. Below, the horizontal damage. How the body learns to carry what the mind insists upon. How every crisis leaves its stratigraphy, the total weight of years compressed to dark and pale. And then the fourth. That narrow, nearly white remainder. Not healed. Not even still. But the line continues, thin as an exhaled breath, as something that survived the night without quite knowing how. It does. It will. Lynne Kemen Lynne Kemen’s full-length book of poetry, Shoes for Lucy, was published by SCE Press in 2023. Her chapbook, More Than a Handful, appeared with Woodland Arts Editions in 2020. She is a nominee for a Pushcart Prize, and her work is anthologized in The Memory Palace: an ekphrastic anthology (Ekphrastic Editions, 2024), Seeing Things and Seeing Things 2 (Woodland Arts, 2020 and 2024). Lynne is an Editor and Interviewer for Blue Mountain Review. ** the pause between sky calligraphy writing into the shadows-- the land is restless stormclouds crack open, liberate unseen voices-- ocean overflows a sudden silence descends, quilted into dusk-- prayers rise like omens spirit empties itself, grows wings, follows the stars Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Feral, Pure Haiku, Collaborature, The Chaos Section Poetry Project, and The Ekphrastic Review, and published in The Anthropocene Hymnal, and The Polaris Trilogy. Follow her explorations at https://kblog.blog/. ** Sonnet’s Existential Crisis Let me not compare thee to poetry for thy liveliness is strictly rhymeless and would rather whirlwind between the two partners in shenanigans than calibrate by numerals who’s more changeless – substance or essence, though this portraiture is a bluff as they are made to look alike despite the slightest twist being a flight into a tango fight, only a volta pooling them apart. Here they start! 1.1 Substance defines its full perimeter and steps charm, pretending indifference 1.2 Essence deploys its holy righteousness and keeps its cruce with cool tenderness 2.1 Substance stirs barrida to the centre sweeping essence to full magnificence 2.2 Essence’ crusada bends down presence hanging over curves in charming semblance. 3.1 Substance replies with self-defeating hook 3.2 Essence sways its quintessential lapiz 4.1 Substance abrazo shattered sonnetics 4.2 Essence stamps its ocho of evanescence. What? Vertical volta! Call it a day. Visibly, you can’t push the sky at bay. Ekaterina Dukas Ekaterina Dukas writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning. Her poems have often been honoured by TER and its Challenges. Her collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europe Edizioni, 2021. ** Sonnet, Unbound Four narrow windows hold a storm in place. White script unravels upward from the shore, as if the sea has tried to write its face and failed, and tried again, and then once more. The bottom keeps its discipline: the black of tidal flats, of ink that will not rise. But higher up, the lines begin to crack, to loosen into weather, into skies. Is this what form does—hold the body tight until the body aches to be undone? A sonnet is a shoreline made of white where something spills and calls itself begun. Between restraint and ruin, see how far the language climbs before it loses shore. ** Between Panels The museum keeps the painting under glass, though no one can explain what might escape. From a distance, it looks like shoreline—low tide, exposed ribs of earth. But when you step closer, you begin to see the white lines climbing upward, frantic and delicate, like handwriting practiced in secret. A docent once told me the title was Sonnet. I stood there a long time trying to count fourteen of anything—lines, shapes, movements of tide. I never reached fourteen. Instead, I saw this: the bottom panels holding their breath, heavy with ink and water, while above them something pale and unruly kept trying to leave the frame. When I left the gallery, the sky was a pale, blown-out green. For a moment, the clouds looked exactly like handwriting. Later, I couldn’t stop thinking about the verticality of it—how the dark remains below, sedimented and obedient, while the white climbs as if it has somewhere urgent to be. As if the sky were safer than the ground. I went back the next day. No one else was in the room. The air felt thin, as if something had already been taken from it. Up close, the white lines were not smooth. They trembled. They broke and reconnected. Some ended abruptly, like sentences interrupted by a door opening. I leaned closer than the glass recommended. For a second—only a second—I thought I saw one of the lines move. Not dramatically. Just a slight adjustment, as if correcting itself. The lower panels seemed darker than before. The black ink had settled deeper into its marshes. The shoreline looked less like landscape and more like aftermath. I realized then that the glass was not there to keep something in. It was there to keep something from spreading. Language, when it climbs far enough, forgets what it was meant to describe. It begins to describe the space beyond the room. It begins to diagram exits. I counted again, carefully. One panel. Two. Three. Four. Four narrow thresholds. Four attempts to hold the tide in place. And above them, the script—if that is what it is—continues rising, thinning, almost vanishing into the pale green atmosphere. I stood there until the overhead lights flickered. For a moment, the white lines aligned into something almost legible. Not a sonnet. A warning. Then the lines loosened again. When I finally stepped outside, the sky had gone darker. The clouds no longer resembled handwriting. They looked like erasures. Isabella Nesheiwat Isabella Nesheiwat is a fiction and poetry writer based in Southern California. Much of her work explores mythology, identity, and the tension between inheritance and self-invention. Her debut collection, Turning & Turning, was self-published in 2025. She is currently at work on a mythic-horror novella series set in the Pacific Northwest. ** Cracked Earth Sonnet I am burned, formed of marriages held in pain a target for the curious, a grey haze of falling cloud sold to hard hearts, beaten into rivers flowing proud as cold now as ever, fallen behind a shrill refrain the virus of you gladdens your eyes insane I scream silently lost in the idea of what you are it was I who used to be to you, that distant star I am burning, blood ignites into what you became while you watch, aghast at these vicious ways failing to see it was you, all along, and weep as if trying to play with all colours of fate we stand alone like two forbidden strays split into quads and given breath to sleep I give in, fail, fall into this dreamlike state Zachary Thraves Zachary Thraves is a writer and performer. His poems have been published by Broken Sleep Books, Juste Millieu and at Poetry Worth Hearing, as well as a contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. His plays have been performed internationally. In 2023 he created a one-man fringe show exploring his experience with bipolar, and in the same year won best actor for portraying Charles Dickens. Zac also co-hosts a podcast. He lives with his partner in East Sussex. Find him on Bluesky @28hary ** A Folding Sonnet to What Could Have Been The cliff edge turns its back to the sky. The sea shrugs at our apocalypse, one eye bluer for its glance. These days, planes of truth are wiped with an innocuous blink. By sundown, the year takes flight. The whole experience is a series of lightning strikes or rerun after rerun of Groundhog Day. It seemed like we levitated, but you told me I could stand a course in air pressure. And then, the arrival of truncated time, looping without a life saver. Our little wings beat in contrapuntal turbulence. One plus one was not about two but the air between them. Alex Schofield Alex Schofield is a poet, editor, and visual artist living on the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq and Kanien’kehá:ka peoples as she completes her Master of English (Creative) at Concordia University. She holds degrees in English, Education, and Fine Arts. Her written work has won the WFNS micro-poem contest, the Canada Permanent Writing Contest, scholarships, and has been published in Fathom and Zettel journals, and the forthcoming anthology, Breach House Women. Her visual work has been shown in the Maritimes, published in journals, and is in collections internationally. ** Wrestling Like Jacob a man slumps down his head on stone his thoughts unsound his sleep a groan he’s taken flight he’s on the run unsoothing night unruly son white lines split dark and weight finds him his hip is jerked his breath crushed thin we won’t let go till blessings flow Helen Freeman Helen enjoys responding to art in ekphrastic challenges and reading other writers' takes on the same piece. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Instagram @chemchemi.hf ** Start to the Day After breakfast, Pop left her flat and crossed the road to the edge of the beach. She gazed at the view and described it to herself: Tide’s out, an unfriendly wind, bleak sand. She turned to go and stopped. On the beach, some two hundred metres to her right, she saw a forklift. Has the sea washed it up? she wondered. Or has someone driven it here? But from where? There are no businesses for miles, never mind one that would use a forklift. “I saw it first,” came a voice behind her. Pop twisted round and faced a teenage girl. “That thing on the beach is mine,” the girl said as she moved a fuel can from one hand to the other. “Is it?” Pop said. The girl sneered. “Yeah. I’ll set light to it. I reckon it should explode.” Pop recognised the girl. She came from a nearby block of flats. “Your name’s Bam, isn’t it?” “So?” the girl said. “I suppose yours is ‘Old Hag’.” The remark did not annoy Pop; rather, it made her smile. “That thing out there is a forklift,” she said. “I’ll race you to it. Whoever arrives first can claim it as their own.” “Nutter,” Bam said. “I’ll beat you easily.” They both ran. Pop made much better progress on the sand. The wind invigorated her, and she forgot about the girl. Only when she reached the forklift did she remember the purpose of the race. “I won,” she declared. “You cheated,” Bam said as she caught up. “I can’t run on sand. It’s too soft. And I have a stitch, which is your fault.” “You’re unfit,” Pop said and studied the forklift. It seemed in good condition, and the wheels had sunk no more than an inch into the sand. She climbed onto the seat. “Get off,” Bam said. “Let me pour petrol over it. I want to burn it.” With a shake of her head, Pop turned a key and pressed a button. The engine started. Dark smoke swirled from the exhaust. “Diesel-powered,” Pop said. Bam stared as Pop touched the controls and made the forks go up and down. “Okay,” Pop said and pointed to a pile of driftwood. “Bam, take your petrol and set fire to that.” “What?” “Do it, please.” Reluctantly, Bam splashed petrol over the driftwood and put a match to it. White smoke curled and swept over the sand. “Now join me,” Pop said. Bam squeezed herself onto the seat. Pop drove the forklift to the driftwood and scooped it up on the machine’s forks. She then raised the forks to the maximum height. “You’re crazy,” Bam said. Pop smiled and drove in a figure of eight. “Look up and around you, Bam,” Pop said. “We’re making patterns in the wind with the black smoke of the exhaust and the white of the wood.” Bam clutched Pop’s arm and laughed. Pop spun the forklift in a circle and thought, A good start to the day. K. J. Watson K. J. Watson’s stories and poems have appeared on the radio; in comics, magazines and anthologies; and online. ** After Sonnet, by Stephanie Grainger l. a twisting footpath the curve of branches an unknown path traveling to an antique land ll. so vast and mysterious shall I compare the landscape... to the lonely journey lll. twisting dark branches white etched clouds charcoal grey sky the true marriage of shadow and light lV. almost Japanese sonnet embraces Sumi-e Daniel W. Brown 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, and was included in Mid-Hudsons Arts Poets Respond To Art in 2022-23. He writes each day about music, art and whatever else catches his imagination. ** Conjuring the Mythic Superhighway of My Unconscious Mind I set out on my journey, packing light as I only plan on being gone a few hours; sensible shoes for walking, breathable pants to move in, long-sleeved shirt for the cold patches along the way, and the blindfold; I am walking inwards along the black-lined, curving paths; I put my hands in front of me feeling my way through wisps, filaments, gossamer silk threads; one foot in front of the other, sure, sure of my steps; unsure, unsure of who I will meet; ghosts from the past: who I was at 15, I don’t recognize her anymore, she remains frozen in time; me at 25 already brittle from the strain of a bad marriage; 35 years old, single mother, still counting footsteps one in front of the other; at 45 reborn into another body and mindset; here I’ve stopped at 55 to take a breather, exhaling 40 years of experience, watch it swirl up like a gyre trying to reach heaven; not yet, not yet, heaven can wait a little while longer for me; I wake in the tundra and I know if I’ve survived this long the rest of my life-story, like the sonnets of Shakespeare, will endure for generations. 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 13 years. Laura has performed poetry for Invisible Lines at such venues as Notsuoh, Interchange, Avante Garden, and The Match. ** Sonnet for Aurora and Helios Quatrain 1 Have you ever started a journey at night time, well before the dawn? It feels like night, but isn't. Night starts with evening, meanders to its zenith. Beyond midnight it's different - light's there in potentia, waiting for the morning, for the rosy fingers of Aurora to open the gates of heaven for her brother Helios. Quatrain 2 Travel crosses this liminal space, of little traffic except the shift workers, busy bees with a pre-set start time alien to most of us. They do not amble. Aurora takes her time. On open countryside roads there's nothing but headlight lit tarmac and roadside verge. Sometimes, there's the glint of green animal eyes: a fox, maybe, or a cat. Once, an owl at hedge height, a spectre puncturing the headlight beams. Quatrain 3 It's hard to say where the light begins to seep in. It rises like soft steam, streaming over whatever bounds the side of the road, at once close up and at a far distance. It's like turning up the wick on an oil lamp, so that a glow starts to suffuse the surroundings, but so gradual it's almost imperceptible, like the start of spring and how it slowly travels from one tree to the next, reviving at the speed of a bud opening. Heroic Couplet What was darkness is dark no longer. Blobs of shape first became outlines, silhouettes of black on a dark grey field of view. These shapes have acquired details, definition and become known objects: a thicket of trees, a nearby hedge, a low stone wall, a bridge. Light cascades, a waterfall of illumination. A transformation - the twist if you like - has happened and Helios shows his handsome face. Emily Tee Emily Tee lives in the UK Midlands and when she's not walking or volunteering she's writing. She has a mini poetry pamphlet due out at the end of 2026 with Atomic Bohemian. ** Mind Painting filling in the gaps if only making people whole was as easy dan smith ** Failure Billie sketched while Mr. Brautigan lectured. She couldn’t quite follow him, her attention kept drifting. Something about Shakespeare and...iambic pentagrams? Billie was still sketching and musing about what a great band name Iambic Pentagram would be when Mr. Brautigan said, “Isn’t that right, Billie?” “Sure,” she agreed, and the class laughed. Oops. Then the bell trilled its shrill dismissal and before Billie could join the outflow of students, Mr. Brautigan was at her desk. As he lifted her sketch his eyebrows shot up. Billie wondered if he’d expected a crude caricature instead of a surrealist landscape. “Billie, you have so much talent. I’d like to see you succeed. Just give me fourteen rhyming lines, due two weeks from today. Please. Be on time.” Billie nodded. Two weeks wasn’t so bad. She could write a poem in two weeks. Sure. She was almost out the door when she heard Mr. Brautigan call out. She turned as he said, “And don’t forget the volta!” * Billie plodded through her lasagna, telling herself she still had plenty of time, most of lunch left before English, and how hard could it be to write a poem? She stalled, scrawled, scowled. She read what she had so far: You can make me wear a bonnet, but I’ll never write this sonnet. Hell. She remembered Mr. Brautigan trying to be kind, trying to encourage her, and his reminder about a...volta? She couldn’t recall exactly what that was. I’ll give you a bolt of volta, she thought, and sketched charcoal clouds across her words, then used her eraser to slash a lightning strike across the impending tempest. Then another. Soon she’d made the loopiest lightning storm ever, a cataclysm snatched from the nightmares of meteorologists. Her poem was cancelled due to a freak weather event. “This is what pencils were made for,” she said aloud, then headed for class. * The bell rang and the students trailed out, but before Billie could join them, Mr. Brautigan gestured for her to approach. “Didn’t see you submit your poem, today, Billie. Maybe I missed it?” She thought, he’s trying to give me a chance, even now. Which is why she surprised herself when she produced her paper, held it up for him to see, then tore the page into three long strips. “This is a modern sonnet: three stanzas.” She deposited the remnants on his desk and started to leave, then remembered, and turned back. She ripped a fourth narrow strip from the final panel. “And a volta.” She strode toward the door. When she glanced back, she thought she saw Mr. Brautigan failing to suppress a smile. Tracy Royce Tracy Royce is a writer and poet with work recently appearing in Brilliant Flash Fiction and The Ekphrastic Review, and forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Hot Flash Literary, and Best Microfiction (2026). Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, a Touchstone Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Find her on Bluesky. ** A Sonnet in My Palm Drops down the darkened sky in trailing light Along the lines marking on earth our time. Like a waterfall in a stormy night In the moment of years since fifty-five. Tonight, moon sprawls beneath sidewalks upon A heap of fallen leaves in an embrace Of outstretched arms that outlast hope and dawn Delighted conversations I still trace. In death nothing matters, not even lines That I did not write below. Behold, then Be it here that our sonnet we find twined On banyan roots into ground that descend. Where sit bald eagle and a barbet steep Sending grey throated songs into the deep. Abha Das Sarma Abha Das Sarma lives in Bangalore, India. An engineer and management consultant by profession, writing is what makes her happy and fulfilled. Her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Blue Heron Review, Poetry X Hunger, here and elsewhere. ** Construction of a Sonnet Start with a quatrain of black gossamer drifting over a marsh at twilight. Next add a quatrain of white strands unravelling over an ice-bound sea. Then set a quatrain of swans to fly over the ice-bound sea or the marsh at twilight. A couplet for closure, light as a feather, weaving the mysteries all together. Ruth Holzer Ruth Holzer is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage (dancing girl press) and Float (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Freshwater, POEM, Slant and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart, Touchstone, and Best of the Net nominee, among her awards are the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Prize, the Tanka Splendor Award and the Ito En Art of Haiku Contest Grand Prize. She lives in Virginia. ** Craquelure Such are the fine cracks showing on the sky this gray day mirroring the icy surfaces of the ground below. Both earth and sky are ancient, yet only in cold do they drop their masks of smoothness to display the craquelure of age. I study the patterns, attempting to learn their ways of wisdom, kindness, love, humility, celebration, attempting to determine if the lines my own inner and outer skin will show, in cold or warmth or both, the truth craquelure of my own old age, my life. Joan Leotta Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Her folktale programs (ages 5-adult) highlight food, family, and strong women. Her show, live and on zoom, Louisa May Alcott, is for children and adults. Joan’s on the board of London’s LABRC, and is Regional Rep for the North Carolina Writers Network. She’s taught storytelling and writing, for LABRC, the North Carolina Poetry Society, NC Writers Network, and others. Internationally published as essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, she’s a multiple nominee for Pushcart and Best of Net. Her publications include One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. ** When Time Unfurls the Tongue God speaks like cursive and evening light whispering ice floes, waterfalls, white sage, and lichen and I speak as woman possessed of salt and sough shivering like a spider web woven over river. Whispered prayers weave the sky. Heather Brown Barrett Heather Brown Barrett is an award-winning poet in southeastern Virginia. She’s the Membership Chair of The Poetry Society of Virginia and a member of The Muse Writers Center. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, formidable Woman sanctuary, Black Bough Poetry, OyeDrum, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She’s the author of Water in Every Room (Kelsay Books, 2025). Website: https://heatherbrownbarrett.com/. ** Patterns Nothing will come of nothing. William Shakespeare, King Lear He measures life in surfaces Every year a smear across his skin Thoughts skim the static of his fear Each loss a wave he let pass through The day the papers dried the house went still A door unlatched and would not close again But still he said the air was clearer now That solitude proved strength, not flight He wants the perfect harbour, avoids the shore And moves from light to light with guarded hands If warmth draws near he feels the old recoil And names the distance wisdom, not retreat He stands where land and water meet A man who names the sea but will not swim. Angela Segredaki Angela Segredaki holds a CW degree from Oxford University and loves poetry, flowers, and people. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, The Ekphrastic Review, New Lyre, Amsterdam Quarterly, Mouthful of Salt, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Dawntreader, Snakeskin and elsewhere. ** Prefigurement You left me when spring was about to come, blossoms still the clustering of fresh snow... — From an ancient Japanese text I never thought The Lady Otomo would leave her winter garden and come here to dress my portrait windows. Scholars will tell you the poet walked light and smooth as the rice paper she committed to song and ink. Now she swirls in wearing her pale dawn-powdered face, defying time and its frames of reference. Her hands arrange snow on glass. while nearby the river thaws floating gulls, branches and other debris on its slow tide rinsing over stones shawled in fraying moss. Because of her plum blossoms silhouette the long panes; and I sense they are bouquets left for a woman's lover. Mine moved through the Dunbas woods at dusk and marched toward a mountain marking the sky in silver chalk. Soldier, husband, friend -- his death might be written at the height of battle, my heart chilled with the last air that glitters in his lungs. Wendy Howe Author's Note: Lady Otomo of Sakanoue was a prominent lady of the court and poet in 8th century Japan. Much of her work was recorded in a Japanese text called A Thousand Leaves. Her poetry focused on themes of love, death, isolation and a profound relationship with nature. 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. ** Untitled Black-green the vista opens: smoke and stone Meet on a streaked horizon. In a cloud Pale lines are forming, angular as bone: The X-ray of an elemental shroud. Green-grey the view continues: wisps break free: Shapes everywhere dissolving, as the air And what's below rephrase their harmony; The stones are melting into mud. A bare Grey-white vignette now follows: what was sky Turns marble, every feature now a streak On a cold floor; or has a house dropped by, Muted chinoiserie, refined technique? The final vision: whitish, cool and tight As a good couplet. Then a perfect white. Ruth S Baker ** On the Cusp of a Sonnet in Four Panels in nature’s arms quiet water a tangled sky storm building no bird song no outstretched wings no gliding hawk pools stagnant a brightening refuge weavings of driftwood halcyon sky out of the hush a flute’s high notes a song shaping Sandi Stromberg Sandi Stromberg is the author of Frogs Don't Sing Red and Moonlight, Shaken (accepted for publication in early 2026). Her poems have recently appeared in Synkroniciti, San Pedro River Review, Red River Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Panoply, and MockingHeart Review, and also published in Equinox, Gyroscope Review, and The Senior Class, among others. An editor at The Ekphrastic Review, she also edited two poetry anthologies--Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston and Echoes of the Cordillera. A four-time Pushcart and two-time Best of the Net nominee, she was juried into the Houston Poetry Fest eleven times. ** The World Is Too Much With Us Late And Soon "The only wisdom is knowing you know nothing." Ilia Manilin at the Winter Olympics, 2026 Can sound alone create a sonnet? The murmuring of movement in the way music catches nature? Outside the city's scenic sideshow with its automated cries, were we a quatrain, two stanzas -- 7 lines -- out of time, our lives reversed as we stood like Japanese lovers enshrined on scrolls, too close to the end even at the beginning destiny's infinite drum roll like a water wheel (straight line to rotary, a refreshing revolution.) Were we old and blind in troubled youth? 7 - lines trying to stand upright our coda added on the right, the weight of the world in musical patterns when we were stanzas, inverted in art & summed up unexpectedly as we evolved, arguing in sonnets, our rifts captured by the artist? The day your glasses -- what you saw shaped like an infinity 8 -- fell on the ice, were they churned away in the frozen lake? So much winter! You, straight-backed, a scroll with memories ( Emakimano is an illustrated horizontal narrative system ) & wasn't I in 7 lines, beside you when worldly forms were stanzas flipped, trying to be a quatrain an artwork where waters try to settle, the end of arguments predicted in the 3rd scroll where I told you the legend of lovers who escape their fate on Satsuma, their story pictured on a vessel where they are beautiful, though chased by an angry warlord (was he father or rejected lover?) as they crossed a river flowing on the right like a ribbon unknotted by sharp stones in a coda a 4th scroll added to the artist's canvas where we may have followed a century of unrest, civil wars and reconciliation lovers fleeing in a Sonnet -- call it a map or drawing of our time together: My darling, Friedrich Nietzsche said Without music, life would be a mistake & I have tried to write a Sonnet For A Romance Novelist -- our relationship a fiction. Laurie Newendorp Author's note: The poem's title is from a sonnet by William Wordsworth. Honoured many times by The Ekphrastic Review's Challenge, Laurie Newendorp’s poetry explores the relationship of what is fixed and what is free in a century where multiple disciplines and genres -- art, sonnets, music -- emotion and its interpretations, human and AI -- struggle to survive. **  Untitled, by Andrea Bogdan (USA) 2025 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 Untitled, by Andrea Bogdan. Deadline is March 13, 2026. 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 BOGDAN 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, MARCH 13, 2026. 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.  Gemälde "Schleudern", by Michael Schoenholtz (Germany) 2014. Museum for Sepulchral Culture, Germany - CC0. Image from Europeana. Click on image to visit Europeana and explore their art and research library. Editor's Note: A big thank you to Beth Daley and our friends at Europeana for providing the image for this challenge. If you haven't already visited Europeana, discovery this amazing repository of images, artifacts, and documents by clicking here: https://www.europeana.eu/en. It is a haven for ekphrastic writers seeking inspiration, as well as for research into art, science, archeology, and much more. We had a tremendous response to this unique artwork. Thank you to everyone who wrote and submitted work. it is always amazing to see how many directions a single artwork can inspire ekphrastic creativity. Our heartfelt congratulations to those writers selected. Please support our writers by sharing their work on your FB page, etc. love, Lorette  Helen Freeman Helen loves attempting some of these challenges on The Ekphrastic Review. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and enjoys art and writing. She is not particularly handy with a sling. Instagram @chemchemi.hf **  Blue Đào Nguyễn ** nước : a country & water a body of water as a bird forms watch it take a dive take the heel of a horned beast follow it why do all roads lead back home what beast cut your tongue oh river salmon swim up stream tell me about your heaven what is the sound of god & country. Blue Đào Nguyễn Blue Đào Nguyễn (IG: @blue.ngu) is a Vietnamese-Teochew (潮州話) non-binary lesbian poet, artist, and organizer. Their work, inspired by cartography and Vietnamese architectural symbolism, explores grief, prayer, and livelihood through poetry, oral history, and traditional Viet woodworking & fibre art, using organic materials. Material as altar : Poetics as prayer. Author of Hey Siri, What Time is it in Vietnam? (GameOverBooks, 2025) and an Associate Editor at Iron Horse Literary Review, their work is featured in Foglifter, Palette Poetry, & more. They’re a fellowship/scholarship/residency recipient of Kundiman, LAMBDA Literary, Fine Arts Work Center. More of their work can be found at bluenguyen.com. ** Under the Bandana That's not my hair. Nor Medusa's fanged locks or Sylvia's Plath's plait that her mother kept. It's not pigs' intestines or some sinew of roadkill carried off by scrawny black vulture. Likewise, it's not old flaky rope belonging to a schooner's mast nor net for lobster pots. It's not a wig, synthetic or natural, that affixes with glue. It looks nothing like golf grass seeds waiting sprout. It's not taut like guitar, violin or harp strings. It's not wispy and willowy as if it were smoke. It's hardly ribbon-soft, nor chocolate velvet. That's not my hair. It is but scar tissue and dried blood strands: the remnants of where a Phoenix rose. Bayveen O'Connell Bayveen O'Connell is an Irish writer who is inspired by art and mythology. She loves sun holidays, Halloween, the gothic, and Bowie. Writing is her lifeblood. ** Sepulcra On the surface it all seems white and black but underneath the shadows don't match A disconnect between time now and time past a delay buried among rumours and facts As fumes rise from smoke smouldering stacks forgotten feelings float on flakes of ash Dissipating what once was into the abstract on pyres of dead questions left unasked So, restrain the catapults’ swing-tossed attacks and weigh the risks of enduring impacts Because conditions we conceive as clearly intact will one day blend into grey that won't last 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 journey as an expat. ** Five Rings of Unity They sampled dozens of designs─ overlapping black and white squiggles, patterns with rainbow curlicues, then squares, triangles, octagons. None roared international athleticism or sufficiently honoured “best of the best” in cooperative competition spirit, all failed to hail ability over country until the French baron scribbled multicoloured circles on stationery. He might have just been doodling but his scribbling lit a creative ideal, blue, yellow, green, black, red rings on white to represent unity among the five inhabited parts of the globe: Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, with the Americas joined as one. It appears as early as 1914, influencers from around the world recognized the prudence of harmony between next-door neighbours. Elaine Sorrentino Elaine Sorrentino, author of Belly Dancing in a Brown Sweatsuit (Kelsay Books, 2025) has been published in journals such asQuartet Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Gyroscope Review, Sparks of Calliope, Poetry Porch, Ekphrastic Review, and Haikuniverse. Communications Director at South Shore Conservatory in Hingham, Ma, she is facilitator of the Duxbury Poetry Circle. ** Evolution to Infinity Spirals of all Life Nietzsche's eternal return In evolution Being connected With our close and far siblings In warm unity Allied together In a peaceful harmony To Infinity Jean Bourque Jean lives in Montreal. Before reading Lora Dolphin's poem, "Staying with the Trouble," published in the latest issue of Ekphrastic Challenges (We Are All Eve), Jean didn't know what a rensaku was. He liked this poetic style so much that he tried to write one himself. ** Loopy De Loop Looking back an old woman feels loops in her gut, the going round and coming back to what looks like an old place under a shifted moon. She ran circles through tangles of a shadowed wood. Backtracked here and there. Sees tread marks of the black wheels on the death car; ski-slides in powder snow coming home to a waiting door. Her skates carved spirals on ice. Repurposed yarn falls to her feet where a kitten plays, snarling the gray. The embroidered rainbow on her travel-worn parka unravels, arc of justice active-wear failure. A possible, often energetic, weave of opposites winds down, ties together in her memory even if no one else sees how. Tricia Knoll Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose 10th book of poems, about aging, Gathering Marbles, comes out from Fernwood Press in July 2027. Meanwhile, she laces up her running shoes to try to run a mile when she's 80 and writes primarily prose poems now. ** The Importance of Being Harnessed This is a cutting edge story concerning a starry myth that was about to be fit as a silver lining of a cloud but was flopping too much out and had to be edited three times around as the cloud was also too fugitive and never stopped shifting perspective overshadowing or revealing too much of the silver lined spell, basically, a work from editor’s hell, yet at one point they were unclipped and dropped down to earth but in that splitting moment of falling to a totally unknown realistic calling they instinctively kept hugging to the last second of hitting ground, finally, harnessed in togetherness they were saved from drifting alone into oblivion. Found on the road dotingly kept here in their original concord, by Schoenholtz. By Faith, if your mind is not in concord with the heart, you will miss heaven just for a foot and a half. By ancient belief, a special harness between ring-finger and pulsating hub keeps sweet sparks at hand. On the other hand, modern science attests that your double helix harnesses all your molecules with the one and only acid of selfhood: here you are – sweet and sour – facing your hour. So, put your ring on, let your hair down and dance your heart around to the edge of your dear harnessed realness faced by silver providence: there you are – sweet and sound – myth-rebound. Ekaterina Dukas Ekaterina Dukas writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning. Her poems have often been honoured by TER and its Challenges. Her collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europe Edizioni. ** Stripes She awakens with a cough and sees yarn littering the living room. Stripes. She’d flopped on the couch, exhausted. And while she was napping, he shredded the scarf she’d just finished. Hours of knit 1, purl 1, demolished in mere minutes. “Stripes, you bad cat!” She hurls his squeaky rat, aiming high and wide, and it flobs off the wall. He’s already out the cat-flap, a blur of fur and fury. She coughs again, raw, then bends to gather the tatters. This bit is spotted with what looks like daubs of...blood? Yuck. No salvaging it. Out it goes. Oh, Stripes. She sighs, chuckles. Such a silly cat, of course he doesn’t know any better. * Underhome place. Warm down here. Cleaning. Cleaning hurt. Black and white and gray thing hurt Mama. Covered face, Mama gasping. Stripes caught. Stripes shredded. Stripes is good cat. Tracy Royce Tracy Royce is a writer and poet with work recently appearing in Brilliant Flash Fiction and The Ekphrastic Review, and forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Hot Flash Literary, and Best Microfiction (2026). Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, a Touchstone Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Find her on Bluesky. ** Wir Bewegen Uns Wir drei stehen in der Küche, wo mein Mann, immer noch geärgert über meine chutzpah, die Scheidung einzureichen, nimmt einen Hammer und schlägt auf den Toaster ein, den ich seit der Universität habe und während wir uns bewegen, unser zweijähriges Kind schreit, Nein, Vati! Das gehört Mutti! and sein Vater schwingt ihn, schleudert ihn in die Schränke, während wir drei in der Küche stehen wir bewegen uns wie in einem Tanz: Ich, weiß, schockiert, mein Kind, grau, verletzt und verwirrt, und der Mann, schwartz vor Wut, während wir uns bewegen, einst ein Grisaille-Porträt, nun jetzt ist jeder von uns ein Bestandteil, während wir uns bewegen * We Are Moving The three of us stand in the kitchen, where my husband, still pissed off by my chutzpah in filing for divorce, takes a hammer and strikes the toaster I’ve had since university, and while we are moving our two-year-old screams No, Daddy! That belongs to Mommy!, and his father swings him, hurls him into the cabinets, while the three of us stand in the kitchen, while we are moving like in a dance: I, white, shocked; my child, gray, injured and bewildered; and the husband, black with rage, while we are moving, once a grisaille portrait, now each of us a component, while we are moving Barbara Krasner Barbara Krasner majored in German as an undergrad and sometimes writes in this language in response to art. She is the author of ten poetry collections, including the ekphrastic Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025), The Night Watch: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2025), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (Dancing Girl Press, 2026), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026). Dubbed the Ekphrastic Warrior, she lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com. ** into thin air the navigable world grows ever smaller--the ground less level—the transformations more rapid every day—what is this urge to move, to spin, to turn until my dizziness becomes dance, to immerse myself in what was once empty, to fill the center of myself with distant galaxies something impossibly beyond? Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Feral, Pure Haiku, Collaborature, The Chaos Section Poetry Project, and The Ekphrastic Review, and published in The Anthropocene Hymnal, and The Polaris Trilogy. Follow her explorations at https://kblog.blog/. ** The Museum for Sepulchral Culture in Kassel Museums are mostly graveyards It is easy to take things from the dead Far easier than from the living I have walked into tombs and through them in galleries Burial rites on the big screen The immersive experience of someone else’s sepulchre. Lay my body in the museum Let the contents of my tomb be itemized and labelled, with gift-shop replicas available by the cafe. Let all the ticket-buying world see what I have left them. It's a vulgar sort of archaeology: Shovels snaking down In a race to the bottom of the grave. How long must I be buried Before you can rob my tomb and call it research? Whatever way you look at it: You’re digging. M.A. Jessie The elusive M.A. Jessie is a mountain-dwelling species of writer, known for long periods of hibernation and a particular affinity for science fiction, fantasy, and speculative literature. ** (Non)Stress Test As kids, they made us recite from memory in front of the whole class, with flushed faces and quivering lips, the prayer of St. Michael the archangel, protect us in battle, we’d proclaim protect us from the wickedness and snares of the devil, we exhorted thrust Satan into hell, we yelled. But somehow, nature finds a way, when warm air lurks on the ground, leaking from the grates of the underworld and swirls with the cold truth of cumulus clouds, those foreshadowed devices that birthed us a summer vortex during a Midwest winter, when hell thawed the earth. They say it's not the wind itself that harms but the shrapnel that spits and spews lawn chairs as ornaments on evergreens, trusses flying from rooftops through the neighbour's front door. But we were trapped together at the apex of a hospital, a safe and dangerous place when the sirens blared. You, harnessed to a chair like fragile cargo 8 months pregnant with what could be our first born but far from our first hope. We had the shrapnel as evidence: glass shards pierced our lungs, wood splinters pricked our frontal lobes, rusty mufflers clogged our ventricles. We waited for your first contraction, the monitor signed life in sleepy slumber. You sucked on sugar cubes to arouse the unborn, make her dance on your bladder, stomp an Irish dance on your stomach. Come on, sweet child. Make that heart sing in soprano. Draw out some long, slow breaths in mommy’s womb. Teach us how to step into the light as gregarious as a goldfinch. It’s warm out here, we promised. You rub your belly, coaxing her gently, come on. We look out the window together, sirens raining, wondering with the sky watching the clouds pirouette. Zachary T. Kalinoski Zachary T. Kalinoski is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. When not scratching lines on paper or pecking a keyboard, you can find him wrangling data for organizations, listening to poetry podcasts, and adoring time with his wife, daughter, and cavapoo. ** Cooling of Bodies What one suffers to understand, it was apparent pleading wouldn’t help. Necessarily, God, while visiting London, had the occasion to meet up with– The Devil. He’d been imprisoned for some time now. Some sort of “let the bodies cool down” matter. A soul that remains indefeasibly free in its choices, always speaks from an interesting place. “Still holding on to that ransom? “You know it’s hard to let things go.” “They let a few of us out. –some sort of pardon. You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would you?” “You know some matters are completely out of my hands.” “You really—you’re kidding.” “The Resurrection that prefigured the Saints…are you still working on that? – You’re still working on that one little planet, in the middle of nowhere.” “And where have you been? “There was a lot of rehab-where you sent me…” “Earth is not so bad. Everywhere, things break.” “I’ve gotten used to it.” “Come on-- You know you couldn’t get away. God knows you, and you know London.” “They say–” “You are not a philosopher.” “Really.” “I almost missed the Perfection, but then everywhere I looked— there you were.” “I can be very stubborn. It seems like an eternity… We should do this again.” “Do be mindful to look twice –crossing the block.” “You’ve never lost that sense of humour.” –Good day, Sir, –and as they parted, London exhaled—as if relieved that even now, the oldest argument was still being tended by the only two who could bear it. But as he walked away, each felt the familiar ache– that strange, impossible longing for the one opponent who understood him better than any friend ever could. And the city resumed its hum, unaware that the cooling of bodies is never about bodies—but about the heat that remains between those who cannot let each other go. MWPiercy Michael W. Piercy : At the intersection of Art, Poetry and Contradiction, you will find my work, you will find me. Observing memories and the present moment , thinking with an eye that shadows the natural world. Philosophy, Theology, and Science are core of my writing - I have found that I am a synthesizer. Managing ideas which do not always cohere. A manipulator of ideas– ** Simple Truths Spirals of time lives lived, paths lost The twists and turns of the unexpected. Greyscale blends together overlapping, obscuring Becoming a squirming mass of ephemera Black blots out halfling variations Bold, brash, purity of voice and spirit White above all erasing those below Unconcerned by anything underfoot. A metaphor of melanin. Brydon Caldwell Brydon is a long time teacher and emerging writer from the western edge of the Canadian Shield. This is his first submission to The Ekphrastic Review. ** Theatre of Many Threads As I view Schoenholtz the opening appears at the top. The muddle in the middle gives way. Release opens suddenly. All lines stop. In days before dying Dan denied the monotones of his life. Then in the daze of pre-death transformation he saw his exit-- his own way out of time and space released from the Theater of Many Threads and restored to the vibrational realm of the great I am. Susan Kirsch Susan Kirsch is a Marin County, CA poet, colorist, and artist. In March, she will launch a book series called Simply Go*d. The Vol. 1 subtitle is "Praise Poems Celebrating the Divine in Daily Life." Vol. 2, to be published mid-2026, carries the subtitle "Praise Poems & Colorings for Everyday Mindfulness." Susan's poetry and art are a playful mix of observation and insight, aiming to use an asterisk to connect God and Good. ** Serpentine Our tour bus traced the Serpentine up mountains in Montenegro, teetering at the edge of the fenceless road. We were on our way to a farming village called Njegusi, where we would have a lunch made up of ingredients that all came from the village: ham-and-cheese sandwiches (made from their pigs, their cows, on bread made by the villagers) and honey wine, the national drink, also made in the village. We were a busload of Americans, taking photos for back home. Everything was exotic to us. Even the word “village,” which sounded more from a fairy tale than real life. Even the names of places, which we were never quite sure how to pronounce. My then-boyfriend, Tim, and I felt like imposters. We weren’t really supposed to be there. The weeklong trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia, with tour-bus day trips into Montenegro and, on a different day, Bosnia and Herzegovina (one country, two names) wasn’t something we could afford. For the past ten years I’d been supporting both of us on my puny newspaper-reporter’s salary, while Tim’s manic depression kept him unable to work, or convinced he was unable to work. That is, until he started looking at travel magazines and decided he wanted to go to Croatia. While I was at work, he did the math and figured out that if he got a minimum-wage job and worked there for a few months, we could maybe afford to go. He got a job in the warehouse at the back of a hardware store. It shocked me how easily he did this. He’d seen me struggle to support us for nearly a decade, writing checks for groceries on Thursday night when the money to cover it wouldn’t hit my bank account until payday on Friday. At the apartment complex where we lived, cockroaches streamed from cracks in the sidewalk. Yet here we were. After this quaint mountain lunch we’d return to our apartment-for-the-week that overlooked the Adriatic Sea, an unearthly-to-us turquoise against the creamy old limestone town and terra-cotta roofs. We took a ferry to a haunted island where Napoleon had once set foot, where now there was only an abandoned monastery, olive groves, and peacocks wandering around like it was their job. We ate gelato and watched the limestone glow in the cobalt evening. . And now: We rode a tour bus up the death-defying, hairpin turns of a road that slithered around and around on its way up the mountains and had only one narrow lane, so you felt like you really might die every time the tour bus met another tour bus coming in the opposite direction. The tight curves of this road were famous: 16 back-to-back swerves in which the tour bus had to jackknife itself around to stay on the road; we made our way up 3,000 feet of this, looking down on the aqua-jewel Bay of Kotor. There’s a picture Tim took of me with that bay in the background, far below: my thin shoulders slumped like a beast of burden, my tight fake smile, hiding behind sunglasses and a canvas hat. Looking back now, I can see that decade with Tim in layers of colour, even if at first it seems colorless, a drained contrast to our vacation in Croatia, a flash of respite in turquoise, terra cotta, limestone, cobalt. The surface of our back-home life, on top of everything, was white: the color of paper on which you write to-do lists, grocery lists, reminder notes. (“Remember to wake up early enough to drop me off at work so you can use the car to go apply for jobs.”) The color of calendar pages, a blank background for rote tasks. Just get through the day, I’d think. Just keep him alive. Just make sure he survives another day. There were other colors besides white, such as the pink scars on his arms, and the baby blue of his eyes, but I mostly saw white. I made myself see white. But beneath everything, at all times, was the blackness. His depression, his threats to take his life. Sometimes, dark voices only he could hear. For ten years there was not a single day that the black wasn’t showing through. Only later could I see the gray. It took a while for me to stop seeing in binaries, to hold two truths up at the same time: I can love him, but not want him. I can care about him, but not want to be with him. I can leave him, and still be a good person. The gray was harder to see but it was always there, at the base of everything that snaked across it. Several kinds of gray, in fact. The colour of rubbed-out graphite when a mistake has been erased but its shadow remains. The colour of sun-bleached asphalt on a death-trap road, or a straight one, a highway in the desert you drive on to start a new life. The colour of ghosts: now you see them, now you don’t. I can see that sometimes the only path to a place is one that zigs and zags in double the miles a straight one would take, but you have to take it if you want to make it to the honey wine. Christie Chapman Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, Virginia. Her work has been published by The Lascaux Review, Ghost Parachute, ARTWIFE, and others, and was selected for the Best Microfiction anthology. Her daughter is Deaf, and her family uses American Sign Language (ASL) at home when her daughter is taking a break from her cochlear implants. ** The Potter When I arrived in the town of money-grubbing souls, everyone ignored me–until my offer caught their attention. “You see before you a potter,” I said. “Allow me to show you, free of charge, how to make an item that you will all undoubtedly need.” I taught the townsfolk to roll clay into five strips, which they joined, twisted, turned and moulded in such a way that they each created an urn. I then fired the urns in my furnace. “Now you have receptacles for your ashes,” I said and pitched the townsfolk, one at a time, into the furnace. K. J. Watson K. J. Watson’s stories and poems have appeared on the radio; in magazines, comics and anthologies; and online. ** An Ekphrastic Pantoum thick brush strokes, whites and greys perfect curves overlap, gather like thought wound and rising, a hush among the frenzy, hurry to finish Soft swing of tide and wind, spilling from cupped hands perfect curves overlap, gather like thought desire held at the lip Soft swing of tide and wind, spilling from cupped hands the long road coils before me, tires losing traction desire held at the lip a monition: keep moving the long road coils before me, tires losing traction Your presence wants a monition: keep moving to tell me about God Your presence wants in one long sentence. to tell me about God wound and rising, a hush among the frenzy, hurry to finish in one long sentence. thick brush strokes, whites and greys Rachael Taylor ** Life or Something Like It This is what they didn’t tell you How graceful this falling (Though falling nonetheless For all the grace of it) This is what they didn’t tell you These shadows following Those racing ahead These twists Those turns This they might have mentioned Everything comes from the womb Becomes the womb feels like a wound This is what they didn’t tell you The disappearances The left behinds The sweet comings The I’m out of here goings This is what they didn’t tell you The accidental connections The rhythms The chaos The abrupt (you are never ready for it) ends Karen Gettert Shoemaker Karen Gettert Shoemaker is a fiction writer, poet, teacher, mother, wisher and worker for peace in our time. ** Dark Queen The May Queen comes dressed in black, stabbing at the air, with twisted ribbons, calling on ravens to take charge of the fields. An artist sits, painting the slingshots, erasing the dead as they fall, ink-blotting their eyes from seeing the truth. There is no end to the violent streams, we try to close the book, and another begins, pretending to be the answer, the new queen splurting rhetoric to please the masses, appease the riches; a conjurer's trick of ribbons to hide their real motives. Zachary Thraves Zachary Thraves is a writer and performer from the UK. His poems have been published by Broken Sleep Books, Juste Millieu and others, and his plays performed internationally. In 2023 he performed a one-man fringe show exploring his experience being diagnosed with bi-polar, and in the same year won best actor for portraying Charles Dickens. He lives with his partner in East Sussex. Find him on Bluesky @28hary. ** On the 14th of February Slinging our joyous memories as if in a blender, becoming rough, hard to swallow. Unentwining the knots of our love, loose ends spinning, only a shadow remaining. Donna Reiss Writer, editor, teacher, bookmaker, and mixed media/paper artist, Donna lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she is a member of the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, the Guild of American Papercutters, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Follow her on Instagram @dreissart ** Threads of Fate I live three intertwined lives. One follows the white magic path spiral upwards and downwards. The dark ribbon is the deep self; actions and consequences spoken, taken, and imagined. In between white tendril and black tendril lives the gray that straddles the conscious, waking self of sweet smiles and tight corners curled up revealing nothing. Then there’s the underside where honey from lips slips out with bee barbs still attached. Fingers furled close to palms; voice, tone, inflections highly trained to be calm as a glassy sea. I live three intertwined lives. They mesh and clash, meld and weld, becoming one. 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 13 years. Laura has performed poetry for Invisible Lines at such venues as Notsuoh, Interchange, Avante Garden, and The Match. ** Life is But a Fleeting Fling Now that I am old and dithery decades past my best before date but not yet dead I want to find the time to sail away to Mexico toss paint against the barricades light the bonfire of my vanities I want to find the time to breathe in the stillness and the silences share a mantra or two with the universe greet the reaper like a jealous lover Donna-Lee Smith DLS resides in Montreal where she is serenely slouching into her dotage!  Sonnet, by Stephanie Grainger (England) 2018-2019. 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 Sonnet, by Stephanie Grainger. Deadline is February 27, 2026. 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 GRAINGER 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, FEBRUARY 27, 2026. 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.  Gloomy Day (January), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlands) 1565 Season-Tilt: With Spring-Flow and Dark-Spill Lift and curl the arm that guides the blade, Though shoulder sinews ache their length from frost. Prune the tree for fruit, the ground for bread, Reweave the roof against the Lenten blast. The leaden ice beneath the ice will crack, Drown merchant ship, down herring buss and barque. When molten snows roar down the castle crag: Hoard wood to gild, and salt to salve, the hearth Against the lumbering grays that prowl the town. Earth shakes its fevers loose with axle-turn. With every hare-coat warmed from white to brown, The thawing chills the wandering mind that burns. The cure for wintered thoughts is honeyed work: Hived light, the secret dance that breaks the dark. Lyn Davidson Lyn Davidson is a multilingual journalist, poet, and tour guide based in San Francisco. She can also often be found in Mexico and the Czech Republic. In November 2025, she created and led a historical walking tour called Prague Through the Eyes of Its Poets, in celebration of the city’s annual Den Poezie event honoring Czech national poet Karel Hynek Mácha. * The Letter “Read it, Wouter, read it aloud!” Claes shouts. It’s not my letter to read, it’s Willem’s, but Willem won’t read it aloud, because Willem can’t read, much to his shame and my great enjoyment. So I shove Willem out of the way, holding the letter he brought foolishly to work today, just out of his grasp, and Claes leans in close, salivating at the very promise of a secret. If Willem didn’t want it known, he shouldn’t have brought the letter to work. More fool him. The wind threatens to pull the pages of the letter from my hand and carry them to the sea before I read it. The Voorman will surely throttle us soon if we don’t get back to it. Trees need pruning. Wood needs cutting. But then there is this mysterious letter which needs reading. “Oh my dear Willem,” I begin, with my voice pitched high and my chest thrust forward lustily. Claes is already laughing. A love letter. Delicious. Willem’s face twists in shame. I continue. “By the time you read this, it will already be done. I am sorry I couldn’t find a way to get this news to you sooner.” Now that’s a turn. Perhaps not a love letter. I glance at Willem, and his eyes are wide. “Go on, go on,” Claes demands. I look to Willem. I look to Claes. These two paths of my nature are splitting before me. I should return the letter. I should get back to work. It’s not my news to know. My mother’s hand against my cheek. Her eyes saying all the things a mother’s eyes can say. “Wouter, we aren’t just the sum of our good, we’re also the remainder of our worst.” She said things like that. She said them while emptying slop into a trough for the pigs. “Should I be continuing, then, Willem?” I ask him, because I am, after all, trying to meet my mother in heaven one day, I remember. Wilem looks to the Voorman, who has not yet noticed our slacking. He looks to Claes, who has nothing of interest going on in his own life and who’s clearly hungry for gossip he can trade with the barmaid in the Kroeg tonight, where he’ll peer down her gaping blouse as she leans over the bar saying, “Oh, go on then Claes, tell us more.” And then Willem turns to me. “Read it for me, but quiet,” Willem says. So we huddle together from the cutting wind that is tearing the waves up and spinning the ships in the harbour. And I read it to him, with our faces turned together and the coming storm swirling at our backs. I tell Willem that his little sister is gone. I tell him that though they wished for him to be there, so he might bury her with a flower and a kiss, she couldn’t be buried. And we know why, Willem, Claes, and I. Because the death that carried her off was the spreading kind. “I’m sorry we took your letter, Willem,” Claes says. “You couldn’t know what it said,” Willem replies, turning his face into the biting wind that blows so hard his tears run parallel to his cheek. I fold the two pages together and pass them back to him. But we could have known, or at least we could have guessed, because isn’t that the news right now? Plague and persecution. Isn’t now the worst it’s ever been, and the worst it ever will be? Is it too much to want the missives of a lover to dispel, if only for a moment, this darkness? Jen Eve Thorn Jen Eve Thorn is a writer, director, and public speaker. Her debut novel, Bitch Coyote is a finalist for the 2026 San Francisco Writers Conference Contest and she’s a nominee for Best Microfiction of the Year 2025. Thorn’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Raw Lit Magazine. She’s one of the founders of MOXIE Theatre and lives in San Diego with her husband and teenagers. www.jenevethorn.com * And the Woods Were No More In sombre bleakness labourers persist, clinging to leafless willows they cut while hauling wood to patch open roofs, as a paper-crowned boy asks for waffles. Castled mountains in the misty distance predict encroaching onslaughts of snow, as stormy waters nearby sink fragile ships and no one survives in that brownish flood. That morning the clouds kept layering. By noon their low-slung floor stretched in all directions along the river edge's to a few remaining trees, raising bony pillars in the crowded emptiness. The daily deluge of the unstopping rain that should have warned and urged them to find handy carpenters to build an ark loosened the soil, so trees gave way. One after another, the stands of old oaks, whose interior rings bore the evidence they had guarded and shaded the living here for hundreds of years, just toppled. No blasts of a mighty wind pushed them, just the toll of their greatly relaxed hold on the underlying wet earth -- and tumbling, roots and all, were tokens of fallen kingdoms. Royal Rhodes Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught the topic of Death & Dying for almost forty years. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals. He lives in a rural village, near a nature conservancy and Amish farms. * Calendar Low postage for late Christmas gift, along with socks and woolly hat; is this a page from calendar, remaindered in post season sales? Mere half the year depicted here -- six Bruegels (for the one is lost), so interspersed with other art, a masterpiece but poorly print? There’s too much for that hung on wall, those details of an early March. Just glance above the circled date, but crown and waffles, heady mix of pre-lent carnival, and ships. To canvas for such vibrant life on A4 sheet in A5 size -- small token figured on a page. Combining climate’s coming harsh with festive ’fore approaching Lent, in range of yellows, tans and browns with known gradations ’twixt the planes - does melancholy hold the day despite the bay of crashing waves? Entitled gloom, for empathy, but surely dun as turn the page. 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 * The Tempest Pieter Bruegel was a painter of the flat Dutch landscape. But no artist stands still. After so much horizon he surely found The Dutch Hills (Heuvelland) with its mounds, valleys, streams. And then he just might even have been enchanted by the Ardennes, a harsher mountainous landscape in what is now Belgium. How can a painter resist the Dutch sky, permanently dramatic, even on most of its summer days. And often the storms roll in from the unforgiving North Sea, the flatlands allowing it free reign, come in they say, we won’t oppose you, and the dark clouds descend, the last leaves are taken in the late-autumn dance, the trees skeletal, ready for pruning. And the people are prepared. They are one with whatever the seasons are bringing, know that Calvin’s God will have His angry way. This is the time to prepare for spring. The small houses crouch down a little lower, the roofs are trying to pull in their edges, a tree or two gives in to the first onslaught, but the men are out there, hammering in those last nails, fixing Widow Hendriks’ window frame, cutting the dry branch that had been threatening to fall on the van Dyke house. They have thirty minutes before the full fury of the storm will drive them inside to wait for a meek sun which they know will come again once the clouds have unloaded, the wind has blown itself out, calm has returned. They will be inside their homes, their clogs in the mudroom, the fires lit, and on the table a stamppot with smoked sausage and gravy, their voices low, their hands not used to idleness. May our storm blow itself out -- let calm return Rose Mary Boehm Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, short stories, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a several times Pushcart and a Best of Net nominee. All her recent books are available on Amazon. The new chapbook, The Matter of Words, was published in June 2025, and a new full-length collection has been slated for publishing in 2027. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/ * Dystopia Elected Incompetence scorched the horizon burned old friends snuffed out reason suffocated cities Enterprising Peasants collected scraps connected the lost constructed shelter Governing Bodies slept Cathy Hollister Cathy Hollister is the author of Seasoned Women, A Collection of Poems published by Poet’s Choice. When not writing you might find her on the dance floor enjoying the company of friends or deep in the woods basking in the peace of solitude. A 2024 Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been in Eclectica Magazine, Canyon Voices, 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. * Wafelijser You lean close to the iron. Wind needles through the seam in the trees -- fingers again, old and mean, prying where heat collects. It slaps the trees until they forget how to hold still. Something clacks inside -- the kind of sound that sends you looking. Your sleeves ride up again. Cloth always quits early. Cold pinches the soft skin -- the same patch it blisters each year. The batter drags, thick as doubt, slumps in the bowl’s curve. You leave it to sulk. Sap does the same -- grudging, heavy, no mind to be made. You know what it wants -- the batter, the burn. Pulled from its place on the hearth shelf -- our own, old thing, seasoned to bite. Waffles for Carnival, sweet and gone before the smoke clears. They eat. You count your blisters. No one asks the name of the girl who cooked. The handle slews -- slips just enough to warn you. You set the iron down, stare at the skin: old shine of scars, new bloom of blisters rising into themselves. A boy walks by -- paper crown slipping down one side. His arms swing wide, fat with the feast I’ve made since they stopped calling me child. For a few steps, the road performs the old script -- lets him play king. The crown folds. No one breaks the spell. Beyond the slope, the sea shoulders itself forward, blunt with old purpose. Boats lean, lean again -- rehearsing the fall they were born for. You don’t look long. The sea never answers for itself. Someone hacks at wood. Someone hauls the cold water. Flame coaxes from damp. The dark flinches -- doesn’t go. The light holds for now. The year shows its teeth. You reach for the hinge -- hands sure from years of this. Close the iron. Miss the slot. Try again. Fingers jolt -- nerve-fire, then nothing. You stand there. Wait for your body to remember what it’s for. When it does, the iron gapes open. The batter waits. The work outlasts the fire. Awen Fenwick Awen Fenwick is a poet based in Ohio. She writes about ritual, memory, and the body’s quiet forms of survival. New to the poetry community, she’s currently working on two full-length manuscripts and exploring how poems hold what doesn’t fit into story. * Dancing Already Although the chilly air beckons me to stay under covers, I wrap myself in my warmest clothing and venture out into the late January morning. Snow in the mountains looms far from our village. Wind-whipped water blows the boats in the lake. But I gather warmth from the grownups already welcoming this new year and the coming of spring, though still months away by the calendar. Fires brighten the dark as the men gather sticks and the women make waffles. Oh, you may call this a gloomy day, but for me and my brothers the day is glorious, the promise of dancing in sunlight its own kind of warmth. I won’t wait to make my paper crown for Carnival. We are dancing already, our steps making music, our hopefulness challenging the dark. Donna Reiss Donna Reiss is a writer, editor, teacher, bookmaker, and mixed media/paper artist. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she is a member of the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, the Guild of American Papercutters, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Follow her on Instagram @dreissart. * To Pieter Bruegel the Elder Regarding Gloomy Day Eerie is your winter dimming, holding in its darkness brimming, haunting rage of melt descended leaving ill-prepared upended while, above their river, neighbours -- bent to wisdom's daunting labours -- pollard trunks of trees forbearing plumage spring will yield from paring as the children, smiles prevailing, feast upon their treats regaling eve before religious season resurrecting love from treason, teaching tale of hill and river -- foresight's faith is gift to giver. 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. * The Shipwreck in the early morning the quiet village still sleeps in an hour the women will wake, don their aprons and open their larders set out the meat, cheeses, and bread for for day’s meals send the boys to chop firewood send the girls for fresh milk eggs, fruits, and honey for breakfast in the early morning the quiet village is unaware that one of their ships so close to home has broken apart twenty men won’t be at the breakfast, lunch, or dinner tables the much needed provisions scattered, fodder for the sea creatures, the much desired bolts of cloth for new clothes, bedding, and curtains shredded upon the rocks and in the distance the wealthy nobleman sits in his castle overlooking the village, continues drinking his wine and shrugs off the loss too far away to hear the village waking to tragedy; the women wailing for their husbands the children crying for their fathers 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 thirteen years. Laura has performed poetry for Invisible Lines at such venues as Notsuoh, Interchange, Avante Garden, and The Match. Laura translated Margo Stutt Toombs’ poem “How to Tend a Wall” into Spanish and the accompanying short film premiered at Fotogenia Festival 2025 in Mexico City. * Before the Thaw: Sonnet after Bruegel's Gloomy Day Jagged heights hold back a roiling sky, The salt-spray stings, and bitter wind pursues The tattered clouds that low and heavy lie, Drenched in the leaden gloom of winter's hues. With gnarled hands, they bind the brittle brush, While children huddle, gnawing at their bread; Against the wind, the leaning gables thrust, As overhead, the scent of storm is spread. The woodmen bend against the mountain's breath, Their shadows lost in mud and tangled briar. They pollard trees against a seasonal death, While children dream of honey cakes and fire. Though iron clouds may shroud the sun from sight, The stubborn heart prepares for the coming light. Elanur Eroglu Williams Elanur Eroglu Williams writes from New York City, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Her favorite Shakespearean sonnet is Sonnet 29. * Winter: A Warning Stand in the right spot, and you will see black winter eat its way across the land, sinking sharp teeth deep in the soil, swallowing the heartening colours of fall. Stack your firewood, countryfolk, store hay for livestock, secure your shutters and doors. Beware, those who suffer from sadness on dark days -- winter in this place will sup on your soul. Catherine Reef Catherine Reef's poetry has appeared in several online and print journals. She has published more than forty nonfiction and biographical works on subjects including Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Victoria, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. A graduate of Washington State University, Catherine Reef lives and writes in Rochester, New York. * Anticipation Interrupted Looking back, we should have had the foresight to undertake this fence repair earlier in the day, before turbulent seas and darkened skies trumpeted their announcement of a squall brewing; but this morning’s clear sky, its searing sun centerpiece indicated a day of frolic and levity which led us to dream of sprouting buds on leafless trees and crooked branches. Surely, spring is just around the corner, but first, Mother Nature demonstrates her ability to dramatically shift between freezing and warm weather conditions. Quick, before it’s too late, please pass my wattle, drawknife, and mallet. Elaine Sorrentino Elaine Sorrentino, author of Belly Dancing in a Brown Sweatsuit (Kelsay Books, 2025) has been published in journals such as Quartet Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Gyroscope Review, Ekphrastic Review, and Haikuniverse. A fan of ekphrastic poetry, she is facilitator of the Duxbury Poetry Circle. * Ancestral Homeland For a moment, I thought that I was looking at a picture of the Hudson River, an Asher Durand or Thomas Cole. On a closer, look I realized this painting was made almost half a century before the Dutch would ever lay claim to the Hudson River Valley. Henry Hudson sailed up the river in 1609, claiming the area for the Dutch. Later, it would be taken over by the English, but the Dutch influence still remained. A smattering of Dutch place names. From Manhattan, the Bronx, and Spuyten Duyvil, all the way up to Kinderhook and Voorheesville. Folktales like Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. Dutch Reformed churches that dot the landscape, surrounded by the graves of original settlers with names like Van Wyck, Van Voorhis, Rombout and Brett. The Hudson River was carved out by a glacier thousands of years ago, a great scraping of ice and rock across our state. It carved out a glacial gorge that extends from the Adirondacks to Manhattan and Long Island. It is believed that people tend to settle the places that remind them of their ancestral homelands. The Scots Irish in Appalachia; the Germans in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania and Ohio. While there are some differences, perhaps the Hudson River with its craggy rocks, or the low-lying coastal areas of New York City, New Jersey and Maryland, reminded the Dutch of their ancestral homeland. Lila Feldman Lila Feldman lives in Upstate New York and works in healthcare. She enjoys creative writing in her spare time, mostly prose and memoir. This is her third time submitting to The Ekphrastic Review. * There Goes the Sun The skies are burnt, charcoal clouds stand to attention ready to pounce at any moment; the air sticks as if posing a question, and little men scurry wondering where the end of the world sits. Does it fall off an edge? Where does the sea drain? Why do the trees remind me of Roman statues? They ask, while eating a lunch of wheat and week-old meat. They sit in circles, chanting, trying to remember their homes. They chatter and make sure each word follows the last, without success. This is the industry; lift your neck above the curtain of mustard smog, of prying eyes waiting for you to drop. Brew the tea to oblivion, follow the recipe and the orders. Bleach your mind so that you don’t notice it was you who turned the once white clouds black. Zachary Thraves Zachary Thraves is a writer and performer from the UK, based in East Sussex. His poems have been accepted by Broken Sleep Books and Juste Millieu to name but two, and his plays have been performed locally and at international competitions. He performed a one-man fringe show in 2023 exploring his bi-polar and the mental health industry, and in the same year won best actor for portraying Charles Dickens. He lives with his partner and has two children. * Chiaroscuro No one hears her cry, her urgent whispers. We’re too busy fighting a brisk breeze beneath portentous skies. Later, longing for bread and wine, we discover her blank eyes, the upturned bowl, flour dusting the floor, her checkered apron. Now we grieve nature’s calling, always shifting -- dark to light, light to dark. Barbara Edler Barbara Edler is a semi-retired teacher. She lives in southeast Iowa along the Mississippi River. Writing poetry is her lifeline. Her work has been published in a variety of journals and books including Lyrical Iowa, Grant Wood Country Chronicles, Encore Prize Poetry 2025, Ethical ELA publications, and The Cities of the Plains: An Anthology of Iowa Artists and Poets. * It’s Our Own Damn Fault We bring dark storm clouds Ravaging Earth to anger Her thunder ignored Each tree we fell is reason For lightning to strike us next 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. * A Home for All Seasons The ominous sky loomed dark and dreary. Settlers toiled in the icy countryside chopping wood, carving tools and clearing the land. Housing was needed for families who lost their minimal possessions in a raging fire that left burnt-out shells once inhabited by townsfolk who called this countryside home. In the valley below, houses covered with thatched roofs stood erect, a testament to the strength of the residents. Willow trees flanked the slopes of the hills and were prized by the residents for their flexibility and resilience. Crackling sounds from blades of axes pierced the air as logs split from the trees and fell to the ground. Towering willows secured themselves to the restless landscape during the snow and ice of winter months and sheltered everyone from the harsh elements. Oldtimers shared stories of trees swaying in the blustery winter breezes. Howling gusts reminiscent of wolves in the forests, filtered through the leaves as branches bent but never broke. The strength of the trees mirrored the resilience and adaptability of the people. Willows, perfect for the terrain, prevented soil erosion and flourished on the rocky hillside. Children scampered beneath them in summer, shielded from the hot sun as they played rousing games of hide and seek. Ropes strung from branches with attached wood seats that were carved from limbs and made into swings, provided hours of merriment for youngsters. Moms with babies in tow supervised play activities as they sewed scraps of fabric from worn-out shirts and dresses into patchwork quilts. These countryfolk were devoted to their willow trees for the medicinal properties provided. Bark, stripped from the trees in the spring and chopped into small squares were chewed to a pulpy consistency and served as a natural pain reliever for achy shoulders and backs. A welcome respite after a long day of toiling in the hills. Grandparents, wise from their years, used the example of the willow tree to tell their grandchildren stories of survival during harsh winters, hot dry summers and springtime when rains were absent. Rain needed to moisten the manure-covered soil to guarantee an abundance of fruit and vegetables, especially corn. Crisp on the cob, ground into meal, stirred in soups and dried for popping on hearth fires highlighted the many uses for this delicious vegetable. Grandchildren learned about survival and adapting to daily challenges when everything appeared bleak. Snow-capped mountains stood tall in the distance as ships in the waterway below tossed about in stomach wrenching waves as they inched their way to the shoreline. Loaded with textiles, spices, tobacco and sacks of sugar, the ship’s stop was a welcome respite for the townspeople. Trading occurred and essentials were received until the next ship arrived in four to six months and the process repeated. Through it all, the church in the valley, identified by its spire, remained a symbol of hope for the people. Traveling preachers periodically stopped and delivered encouraging Sunday sermons. A resident pastor and his family were due to arrive before the end of the year. Afterwards, families gathered for the noon-day meal of hearty soup and fresh baked bread followed by bowls of preserved fruit. During warm months, the men of the community gathered on front porches and smoked pipes filled with aromatic tobacco while children frolicked among the trees. After the dishes were washed, dried and stored in cupboards, women gathered to piece together the squares of their patchwork quilts in preparation for the cold months ahead. Neighbours helped neighbours. Men laboured side-by-side to repair and build houses that provided shelter for families and pitched in during planting season. Adolescent boys picked wood remnants and chips to fill timber boxes that guaranteed crackling fires that kept homes warm throughout the icy winters. Women worked together to harvest corn as children picked up loose kernels from the soil to save for popping or to feed pet chickens. The little valley and the sloping hills made a community for all the people. It was home to many generations and would continue to be for years to come. Beverly Sce Beverly Sce is a published author, writer and inspirational speaker at woman's retreats. She had an extensive career in public health at the local, state and national level and served in the U.S. military. She has been published in numerous journals and book anthologies and most recently had a piece titled, "Christmas Eve Traditions" accepted for publication by Grace Publishing in December 2026. Beverly facilitates a variety of in-person and virtual workshops including, "Life Writing, Divorce Recovery” and “Writing the Journey Through Cancer.” In addition, she facilitates a Creative Writing Circle for Women. Beverly lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their five-year-old German Shepard, professor emeritus at Barque University.  Gemälde "Schleudern", by Michael Schoenholtz (Germany) 2014. Museum for Sepulchral Culture, Germany - CC0. Image from Europeana. Click on image to visit Europeana and explore their art and research library. 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 Gemälde "Schleudern" , by Michael Schoenholtz. Deadline is February 13, 2026. 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 SCHOENHOLTZ 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, FEBRUARY 13, 2026. 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.  We Are All Eve, by Monica Marks (USA) 2023. Click image to visit artist site. Eve at Dawn Recycled from discarded parts, deserted wastes, thought inert, to craft a mediation’s start. Reconstituted from the past, collective memory at last, identity in wholesome heart. the art of healing on our part This meeting, collage on the frame, rings out our charming, chiming bells, tells of whom, what, why we are. Preformed in stature, dignity, whatever disability assigned, thought signifying all, but outperformed in being soul. As norm in this collective noun we people, persons earthed in clay, may find ourselves, bound in collage. Enhanced in status, being found, ephemera, that written off, we trust, spell out respect for all. For therein lies our healing call. 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 ** Only Human Blueness of my soul, transitioning into beauty. We’re only human. 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. ** Destiny The body, with a destiny that marked the beginning A proud torso, with breasts in a dark metallic sheen Hidden arms and hands holding up an angel’s wings As if wrenched away, and displayed as some trophy A sad predictable outcome, that was now not to be The neck reaching up toward the head, now missing Replaced by a representation of the sun and its rays A jewelled symbol, strategically placed on the navel And almost completes the message to be considered It was never just this one body image, all are special Howard Osborne Howard is a UK citizen, retired. Published author of non-fiction reference book, scientific papers and poetry. Interests mainly creative writing (poetry, novel, short stories, songs and scripts), music and travel. ** The Invention of Violence That’s all that’s left of her. She was found in this tree. A guy with a rigged-up radio says he picked up a violet signal, whatever that is, and suddenly in a burst of static, lit up the sky. And now this. Police report says she’s from outer space, but a farmer not a mile from here says he saw her in his apple orchard last week trying to get a ripe one, but since it’s December, there ain’t no apples. Octavio, artist from the island of dolls, says he fashioned her out of chicken feathers and coins from the bottom of a well. Put a headdress on her made of cedar intended for metronomes and fire. All I know is somebody took her out of this tree like a bird of prey in the wrong hemisphere. Set her down here, just outside this garden that somehow appeared out of thin air. Beautiful and terrible angel from the clouds come to offer balm to conjurers who’ve lost their way with magic. This tree was never any good. Farmer says he posted a sign once warning folks not to eat anything from it. Lenny DellaRocca Lenny DellaRocca’s latest collection, Pandemonium, recently won the 2025 Slipstream Chapbook Competition. He’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart and once for Best of Net. His latest work can be found in Tupelo Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, I-70 Review, and Blazevox. DellaRocca has poems forthcoming in Chiron Review and Rawhead. In 2016, Lenny founded South Florida Poetry Journal where he served as publisher and editor. He is curator and a co-editor of Chameleon Chimera, An Anthology of Florida Poets. His other chapbook Things I See in the Fire won the 12th annual Yellowjacket chapbook contest. His other books include Festival of Dangerous Ideas. ** Staying With The Trouble (a rensaku) in our loneliness across the Eremocene she tempts us again to fly away on wings of mulberry paper far from not-Eden but we must remain wedded to the Chthulucene on the eve of hope Lara Dolphin A descendant of immigrants, Lara Dolphin lives with her family among the Allegheny Mountains of Central Pennsylvania on the ancestral land of the Susquehannock/Iroquois people. She has written three chapbooks In Search Of The Wondrous Whole, Chronicle Of Lost Moments, and At Last a Valley. She, like countless others, hopes for a world filled with greater peace. ** Weaving Out of Eve's Unending Mystery Scene If I'm honest, I’m not sure which one is me The layers overlap blurring out memory Bolster bulges and press form reliefs Where sounds seep from dry keys Gather belly button bruise rings Into bottled suspicious things Around mirror rigged wings But, through these flings Peirce identity themes Passing long springs A circuitous stream Clinging to strings And, yet believe On my dreams This means I will sing Still free To be Me Brendan Dawson Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy. He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and travelling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and journey as an expat. ** Code Blue "...the persistent impact of invisible struggles while fostering space for vulnerability, healing and connection." Monica Marks website (on her art) "Turn to the right, there's a little white light Will lead you to my blue heaven." "My Blue Heaven," Walter Donaldson & George R. Whiting Was it love or writing that had been her armour? She had a passion for words -- cerulean, indigo, cobalt -- lines layered in sapphirine fabric painted on her blue torso. Did she look like the sky had fallen in blue notes? Or in an ocean where the white-capped waves were clouds, wing-feathers for an unidentified angel? She hadn't been able to find herself in time to be both arial and earthly -- an alchemical queen on canvas with pearl epaulets, her crown created with paint- brushes sprouting from her hair like sun rays. Was she, by night, a source of cosmic entertainment? Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone -- without a dream in my heart — without a love of my own... Why was it always the avian male who caught his lady's eye with azurite feathers? She was lacklustre today (drab, she was drab) unable to build a new nest hidden in a green-leafed garden. Eden was a biblical memory, and she'd never found The Garden of Earthly Delights her white dress trimmed with rain-washed gold as if the sun had given her details of an American Indian legend where the firstborn son of the Sun is a bird-- Blue Bird-- and didn't Uncle Remus have a blue bird on his shoulder? It's the truth -- it's actual -- everything is satisfactual! When the band quit before Gene Austin crooned "My Blue Heaven" with the boys at The Friars Club, someone found an old guy with a cello for backup along with a song plugger who was pretty good with piano, plus a guy who could whistle bird calls. It was music from her mama's time, maybe when a singer who called herself Midnight Sugar wore a flapper dress trimmed with fringe -- did Midnight feel the blues like I do, with that special touch of words & music before time takes time, a lifeline with scrawls & squalls at rest when God calls out Code Blue to the whip-poor-wills & a blue bird I call happiness. Laurie Newendorp Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston. Honoured many times by The Ekphrastic Review's Challenge, she finds that age is making her sentimental. Her mother, who always played “Blue Moon,”taught her that happiness can be translated as music: “When whip-poor-wills call” is the first line of “My Blue Heaven.” ** To Monica Marks Regarding We Are All Eve Yes, we too are bodies we possess. Yes, we too are tempted who transgress. Yes, we too are minds that serpents mold, helpless while they have us in their hold, making night the shelter where we hide hope in which our healing can reside, learning we are destiny we dare, grace that we can choose to live and share, pieced together as eternal whole, joyful, rising, thus transcendent soul praised for what its faith in time became -- servitude to cherish blessed in name of Mary, who from Eve begot, enshrined the strength to trouble not. 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. ** Mother of All Who Live and the Adamah Look what I plucked from the golden tree. Please, please, put it down. My love, my love, please take a bite. For God’s sake, do not take a bite! A whispered voice said it will set us free, Return it to the sacred ground. give us knowledge and inner sight. This snake-oil salesman only invites ─ My love, my love, please take a bite. For God’s sake, do not take a bite! Do not fear what you cannot perceive. Do not fall into Satan’s debt. Let us embrace this hallowed light. He’s using you as a vessel of spite This voice, no Satan ready to deceive. against the one who gave you breath. Do not fear what your cannot perceive. Do not fall into Satan’s debt. Death? I know nothing of death. Is his seduction more intense than mine? I do not mourn, I do not grieve. The cost of your passion is death I will love you through my every breath. for me, for you, for all your beloved thines. Melissa Wold Melissa Wold lives on the coast of Alabama surrounded by bays, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico. Her poems explore historic and current events, people, injustices and regenerations. She is happiest with her feet in the water and her face turned to the sun. ** These Wings I'll take it and fly with it then blue skies and angel wings falling cherry blossom while deep in my belly memories etched in acid pin me down in place star-headed I fight the contradictions to soar and fall soar and fall again every time a new beginning. Juliet Wilson Juliet Wilson is an adult education tutor, wildlife surveyor and conservation volunteer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She can be found in various places online as Crafty Green Poet. ** Matrix This matrix works: hides, snubs, grabs reminds, strives but mostly – blows trivial choices; 13 different chopsticks perched on her head means she can stir at least 13 different meals at once, in between flying to oversee the kids in the pool so, keeping her wings open full, yet, ensuring her plexus hub is lit and ready to admit the magic jug waiting its turn to let out its charms at the bottom of this frantic matrix multitasking as holy flexing. This is Eve – the second sex as by the existentialists and by the genesis so, the question is: which is the better matter – the mud or the rib? -of course – the bone, so, man-kind, accept the prime shine of the second in line and meet her facial grid - with the sun tagged the moon engraved shooting stars still seen undaunted metallically bonded exposed not to impress but to express, despite the muddy muscular vagaries, the shrewd bony stamp of love at first sight. Ekaterina Dukas Ekaterina Dukas writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning and her poems are often honoured by TER and its challenges selection, her collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europe Edizioni, 2021. ** The Other Face of Goddess She spreads her navel-gazing self across sky and plane. Airborne she is elixir gestating, carnival of magenta, seascape and uproarious femmescape. Come, she says, Suckle and be nourished with my goddess milk. I am the starry lunatic of your yearning forbidden and correct. Prowl and lose yourself this uncoiled night as I enfold you with all you hold dear, know fear, become supernature. Focus – you cannot cling to air. Sharpen your sights. Transpose desire –> elevate. My turbulence unfetters you, hurries you on to a Fool’s discovery. Nina Nazir Nina Nazir (she/her) is a neurodiverse British Pakistani poet, writer and fine artist based in Birmingham, UK. She has been widely published online and in print, most recently with Sunday Mornings at the River and Under the Radar magazine. She is also a Room 204 writing cohort with Writing West Midlands. You can usually find her surrounded by books, writing, or making art, which she sometimes shares on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir. She blogs regularly at www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com ** Eve Oh, my god with your wings of pink feathers and breasts of blue crown me in gold make me like you. 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 ofdream, 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/ ** Eve Takes Stock of Another New Year How did it come to be, this blueing? It started with the skin over the heart, over the ribs, then a rapid spread across the thorax and upwards to the throat. Cyanotic now; enamelled by life to a shiny lapis lazuliluminescence. A face, once mysterious and compelling as a dark orchid, is now a clock showing every hour, every month and all the years passed. The sparse shock of hair? Each strand is imbued with fierce power, enough to crown this queen. Saggy arm skin falls into folds, from untold stretching, carrying, bearing the weight of womanhood and all it entails. I am Eve, I am ageless, yet I wear all the years. Somewhere deep inside, below the blue ocean of my body and the papery wings wide enough to embrace the world, a small sun glows, incipient, ready to smoulder. This is the source of my hidden depths, hidden power. I am Eve - daughter, lover, mother, doula, nun, witch, priestess, sibyl and crone. I am ready for this year. I will overcome. Emily Tee Emily Tee lives in the UK Midlands and when she's not walking or volunteering she's writing. She has a mini poetry pamphlet due out at the end of 2026 with Atomic Bohemian. ** I Wish I Could Be Eve Eve like a braveheart Knight Emerges from the night With her blue steel belly As a protective shield Teutonic knight's helmet To preserve her integrity Her white feathered wings To fly away from men’s harassment Their judgment and violence Eve rehabilitated and free You Are All Eve I wish I could be Eve Jean Bourque Jean lives in Montreal. ** Dichotomy We are All-Mother, childless or not, carrying our names Madonna and Whore even among ourselves. Lilith was a snake charmer. She had no choice. Those who don’t learn to tame the beast will be consumed by it. Eve was charmed by the snake. He claims she learned lessons of seduction and felt shame, and so she was cursed. And all ensuing generations of women have been caught in a double-bind. We, who must weaponize against our vulnerabilities, hold our tired wings aloft; pendant and potion suspended above the place that brings forth life. Our sadness is worn on our skin like a shield, blue as cold steel armor. Golden brown spikes radiate from our intelligence. And we ready ourselves to join Lilith’s ranks. Kaila Schwartz Kaila Schwartz runs an award-winning high school theatre program in the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her spouse and kitty overlords. Her work can be seen in The Ekphrastic Review, Moss Piglet, Boudin, Metphrastics, and Still Point Arts Quarterly, among others. ** Split Mask It feels like another Sunday morning. This fetish rising, ghost branching out. Witness to my own decline – Sometimes, I don't think… “I will return disguised as Socrates!” Excellent plan, Sir’ *(stet) – My Lady’ Healers of old say: She speaks in riddles, laden with charm, spirits, and spells. Beauty – If witnessed fully in her glory – well then…expression itself becomes real, and she will answer you. “When?” When the truth can become breathable. “Sometimes, when I don’t think.” MWPiercy Michael W. Piercy: At the intersection of Art, Poetry and Contradiction, you will find my work, you will find me. Observing memories and the present moment , thinking with an eye that shadows the natural world. Philosophy, Theology, and Science are core of my writing - I have found that I am a synthesizer. Managing ideas which do not always cohere. A manipulator of ideas – ** Genesis I have visited the deep dark womb where the seeds of flesh are hidden and I have taken them and grown my own roots. I refuse the names you called me. The seeds of flesh are hidden inside the bones of our Mother the Earth. I have refused the names you called me and entwined myself with cosmic dust. Inside the bones of our Mother the Earth there is no shame -- we are all entwined with cosmic dust from the same endings, the same beginnings. There is no shame in being a woman. Why did you invent deities who abuse and destroy, who end every beginning with a curse when they could be singing songs of life? Why do you worship deities who abuse and destroy? I fill myself with the winged spirits of birds, singing the songs of The Tree of Life, that rise, lifting me towards the light, naked and unafraid. I fill myself with the winged spirits of birds and I have taken them and grown my own roots -- they lift me towards the light, naked and unafraid, one with the deep dark womb. Kerfe Roig A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Silver Birch Press, Feral, Pure Haiku, Zen Space, Visual Verse, Collaborature, The Chaos Section Poetry Project, and The Ekphrastic Review, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, The Raw Art Review, The Anthropocene Hymnal, and The Polaris Trilogy. Follow her explorations on her blog, https://kblog.blog/. ** Where is Eve? Everyone asked who Eve was at the party. As glasses dipped into punch, and gin turned blue, when was she going to appear? This illusion this memory of what we pretended to be. I dropped my tumbler, shattering into teeth on the parquet floor, they called for Eve, no-one came, instead a small non-descript robot rolled in, drank the spirit from the room, and swayed out; still we waited, small talk filling the gaps, until she was announced; and that was when my memory faded-- I woke the next day in someone else’s bed. I wondered what it was that Eve said to me. Zachary Thraves Zachary Thraves is a writer and performer from the UK, based in East Sussex. His poems have been accepted by Broken Sleep Books and Juste Millieu to name but two, and his plays have been performed locally and at international competitions. He performed a one-man fringe show in 2023 exploring his bi-polar and the mental health industry, and in the same year won best actor for portraying Charles Dickens. He lives with his partner and has two children. ** Always Eve Our wings unfurled, disguised as shoulders, do not reveal that we can fly. Our voices melodious, disguised as instruments, are not silenced for we shall sing. Our lips buttoned, our visages hidden, our bodies draped do not constrain us; our magic is strong. Our names are Eve, always Eve, always mirrored, always mysterious, always powerful. Donna Reiss Writer, editor, teacher, bookmaker, and mixed media/paper artist, Donna lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she is a member of the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, the Guild of American Papercutters, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Follow her on Instagram @dreissart ** I Will Never Be Your Dream Girl You gave me wings flightless and ornamental as a dancer’s feather fan a showgirl’s fancy boa - Without arms I have no hands Without legs I cannot walk away Without a face I must speak Without a tongue words unshaped by lips words no one can hear - In the bowl of my body the engine of generation refuses to lie quiet - Shining neon blue-green as the beetle’s hard armor come to rest in the rose it devours - I am the thorn in your side the sting in your flesh the poison in the serpent’s kiss waiting for you here in the heart of your garden. 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. ** I Am Eve You Are Eve We All Are Eve Drape me in your memories amid the darkly blues Kiss my scalloped bosom with the painting of your hues Gainsay my demise with the union of our muse Donna-Lee Smith DLS writes from La Ville de Montreal where an old saying lives on: This is a city where you can’t toss a baseball without breaking a church window. Twain (of said saying) tossed a brick, but you get the gist. ** Eve Reimagined Ears of wisdom feathers, white and softly flecked with pink, layered and grown large by folds of experience -- We fly with angels We listen as the child speaks, knowing the importance of her words, Follow ME into eternity Our third eye, brightly crowned, sees what man can not We are not ribs -- broken pieces of him We are born of our own stunning seed pearls, perfect and glistening through centuries of oppression… We rise above them all! Our small mouths whisper, their small ears listen We offer pomegranates… full and sweet and juicy, not to make the serpent rise -- But to feed the world. Susan Mayer Brumel Susan Mayer Brumel has been writing poetry since retiring from a thirty-five year career in hospice social work and bereavement counseling. Her poems are inspired by her patients’ spiritual journeys, the compelling beauty of nature, and the human condition. She has been published in several online journals and in print, and had the great honor of having one of her poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize, 2024. When not writing, she enjoys spending time with her grandchildren, taking voice lessons, and playing pickleball - very cautiously. She lives in central New Jersey, near the seashore. ** New Contours We will keep the flow breaking into your body low-- What was I thinking when the outlines grew wilting my skin-- hard lump drew new contours. What was I thinking-- when I resolved to walk the half marathon. Are you ok? asked the nurse adjusting the knobs-- We are all eve marching with the dripping chemo defying the lashes of time. The sun is slanting on my roof, flapping shadows of mynas randomly cut my path, preparing to roost, to return here often, to let go of no one. Abha Das Sarma Abha Das Sarma lives in Bangalore, India. An engineer and management consultant by profession, writing is what makes her happy and fulfilled. Her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Blue Heron Review, Poetry X Hunger, here and elsewhere. ** You Were the First The mother of all living, keeper of keys, the bearer of being, ancestral lines, you were the first. We are all Eve. The usher of kinship, circle of ease, you are the cradle, feminine shrine, mother of all living, keeper of keys. The planter of roots, bosom of seeds, the grower of branches, coequal vines, you were the first. We are all Eve. The holder of starlight, mirror of peace, you are the luster, subsequent shine, mother of all living, keeper of keys. The giver of gusto, wings of release, the guider of spirit, creative minds, you were the first. We are all Eve. The decanter of depth, color of seas, you are the water, life-giving brine. The mother of all living, keeper of keys, you were the first. We are all Eve. Jeannie E. Roberts Jeannie E. Roberts is the daughter of a Swedish immigrant mother and the author of nine books, including her latest full-length poetry collection On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing (Kelsay Books, 2025). She writes poetry and prose influenced by memory, the human experience, and the natural world. Her work appears in books, online magazines, print journals and anthologies. In 2007, her poem, La Luz, won first place in the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra’s statewide poetry contest. Musical composer Daniel Kellogg set her poem to music via an orchestral score with choir. Since 2018, she has served as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. She is an Eric Hoffer and a two-time Best of the Net award nominee, and finds joy spending time outdoors and with loved ones. ** Free Will I embrace a truth subordinate to the story I’ve been told. Looking forward to a future full of days when I have beaten my swords into bookmarks. When I will follow my free will until the city where I live seems suddenly more solitary, knowing I will be seen but never understood. So I have always been in love with Eve from the moment I realized she instigated our life of longing. If she’s not a saint, no saint could exist without her. If only Adam had been so bold. Lou Ventura Lou Ventura lives in Olean, NY. His poetry and prose have appeared in several publications including The Ekphrastic Review, The Worcester Review, English Journal, and The Calendula Review: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. His poetry collection, Bones So Close to Telling, is published by Foothill Publishing. ** In the Composition of Wings Grandmother Eva, you offer translucent wings to welcome me into your past. Your face, a dial into the Eva women who came before you. Your body, blue with the misery of the Khurbn, the loss of young ones before their time, grieving for parents, whose deaths always jolt. Grandmother Eva, you descend from the original Eve, that Chava of Life. Your head-spoke metronome jabs into collective memory. It clocks me as it once clocked you. But when crossed, those spokes become spears, instruments of impalement. I come from your javelin of boldness. To say what we think, to be blunt, even acerbic. I come from Eves who calculated in their heads when men had to write down numbers. Grandmother Eva, your face turns to the future, pointing toward the danger ahead. You know its signs. Wrap me in your wings, protect me as only you can. Let me hide between your breasts. Let me slide between the interstices of your remiges. Let me fly with you above the earth. Barbara Krasner Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet of ten poetry books, including Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025), The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (Dancing Girl Press, 2026), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026), and Memory Collector (Kelsay Books, 2027). She sees her paternal grandmother, Eva, the one she never knew, everywhere. ** The Chanteuse Despite the blue glamour of her sequined gown with sapphire earrings dripping radiance down — the curve of her face and neck, she feels the poignancy dragging in this dusk-lit haze and wraps it around herself like a stole of feathers — softly the blended grays of scenery from her past. Nights spent on the pier with bistro smoke and jazz, the lean saxophonist in his loose shirt and jeans matching the muted black of sea lit by the moon. Its tide rolling in like a slow song on the tongue, cocktail bitters, flavoured heartache belonging to neither the old nor the young. Just those deeply in love with a dream they can never keep. She shadows her ashen hair and collagen lips with saudade, yearning that unravels from its subconscious sleep. Wendy A 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. ** The Serpent Aboard (a Sonnet) We are all Eve, in a garden so lush, The aroma of nectar in the breeze. Lovely, the colors, the stroke of a brush, Candy cane fruit hangs upon the great tree. Gathered here together we stare in awe, Golden warm rays of light caress the skin. The only perfection we ever saw, A valley of gold where none wish nor sin. Nothing to want yet we held out our hands Crimson red apple so juicy and sweet, Cursed the people of a once great land. Ripe and ready but forbidden to eat... A serpent slithered aboard the great arc, For we are all Eve, alone in the dark. John Ford John Ford is a father of three, devoted spouse, blue collar, horticulturalist, with a passion for poetry. John lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA where he has published numerous poems, flash fiction, and a one act play, in the college funded academic journal Parley. His poetry has also previously appeared in The Ekphrastic Review.  Gloomy Day (January), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlands) 1565 We are so honoured to have Barbara Krasner as our guest editor and curator for this challenge! Barbara is a historian and teacher who loves art, ekphrasis, and art history, and has numerous ekphrastic books and an active ekphrastic practice, including many poems and stories published in the challenges and in the main journal pages. ** 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 Gloomy Day (January), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Deadline is January 30, 2026. 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 BRUEGEL 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, JANUARY 30, 2026. 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.  Cold, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1948 Happy New Year to our wonderful ekphrastic family, every reader and writer in this community. We wish you an amazing year ahead, filled with creativity, beauty, love, health, prosperity, and joy. Remedios Varo strikes many chords for writers. It was very difficult to choose, and even though we stuffed this response selection full to the gills, many fine works were left out. We continue to marvel at the variety of ways a single painting can inspire your words. Keep writing and bringing your voice into the world. There will continue to be new challenges every other week. We also have two anthology opportunities ahead- an ekphrastic poetry anthology and a collection of dark flash fiction. In other news, we are thrilled to have an Ekphrastic Book Club with the incredible Barbara Krasner- join us for a quarterly discussion of books about art. And check out our Ekphrastic Academy page- we have an ekphrastic scavenger hunt coming up, a zoom session on Picasso, one on pop art, and the new monthly Ekphrasis Anonymous, a generative writing session with a diverse curated selection of artworks. It's going to be a chock-full year. Thank you for making this journal and community so wonderful. love, Lorette ** Thanatophoenix to Stephen Marchand I am not the end. I am the condition. I drain the colour first, hear how the trees beg leaves rattle like lingering questions. The world forgets that endurance begins in refusal. I stiffen the compromised limbs, what should have fallen, but stayed out of habit. I teach weight to show what holds when bending is no longer mercy. Everything must suffer all the way, not halfway. Not with hope clinging like lichen not with rehearsals of green. I require silence, so complete, even memory loses warmth. Only then does weight lift. Only then does endurance learn its shape. I give silvery stars, snow, and shadow, collected at night, hung on branches and eyelids alike, finding roofs, spires and the quiet fields of sleep. The world stands, tempered, pure enough to feel again. When the burial is true, I loosen my grip. Ice fractures inward. Something breathes for the first time stronger forged for having held. What rises will not remember me only the steadiness in its grain only the light it can carry now. Spring will claim the credit. That is my work: to test life and see it return made whole, unafraid, new. Angela Segredaki Angela Segredaki is a Greek poet who lives in the Netherlands. She holds a Creative Writing degree from Oxford University and loves poetry and people. "Thanatophoenix" reflects how adversity shapes endurance and fosters renewal, imagining death and winter not as enemies but as necessary teachers guiding life toward rebirth. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, New Lyre, Mouthful of Salt, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Dawntreader, Snakeskin and elsewhere. ** Stagehands Gina, from high in the theatre rafters, sprinkled rice, styrofoam, and petals as rain, sleet, and confetti. Lucas swept them up at the change of set, at the interval, and after curtains closed from down below. She liked to watch him give closure to scenes; she thought he'd be as thorough with the brush of his lips. He wondered who was summoning the weather, playing the atmosphere: the one to whom he owed his labour. With all the weight of expection, and the Shakespeare season, Gina and Lucas were the Romeo and Juliet who spun invisible lines, missing each other at her break-neck balcony. Comedy or tragedy, they were the glue. And that was enough. Bayveen O'Connell Bayveen O'Connell is an Irish writer who loves flash fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. She is inspired by art, myth, travel, and history. Bayveen has recently published a creative non-fiction chapbook called Out of the Woods. ** Varo Who ever sees the consequences of their actions? Flying apparitions – a sprinkle of this and that. A reminder of distinction, winking at my littleness. An imposter spread the logos upon the earth, a cold snap, refreshing as early dawn. Sparkles of light fell on the sleeping town, without the knowing of anyone below. These quiet times– a hand gifting particles, inviting a seeded wisdom rooted deep within this town, this community… lives …and then we died Silence noticed a stir in the darkness, wildly alive. …wildly alive Silence, unnoticed, offered Herself– A new beginning… an emergence waiting for completion. MWPiercy Michael W. Piercy: “At the intersection of Art, Poetry and Contradiction, you will find my work, you will find me. Observing memories and the present moment , thinking with an eye that shadows the natural world. Philosophy, Theology, and Science are core of my writing - I have found that I am a synthesizer. Managing ideas which do not always cohere. A manipulator of ideas-“ ** Anqa عنقاء In another realm, the need for revival is blistering. A setting sun overthrows darkness. Bareness glows with a glare of courage; the dead ascend and the living survive a foodless sky. When doors in oceans open up caves of wisdom and mountains tear through roaring winds of ancestral echoes, it means the realm has shapeshifted its need for need. She arrives to the abandoned cold, dwells in the trees — no branch is childless, or bent from bearing phantom weight. Here, she seeds morality; watering from rainless stars. A false dawn in her reins is rays of sunlight no longer allowing the moon to call the light solely its own. She wears a collar of centuries, eating out of mercy, her voice spanning a lyrical elixir calming bellies that birth and decay in tranced tandem. She is complicit in witnessing, but through a whiteness of vision where she knows to distinguish pearls from stones. In the depths of dark-locked ages, she opens her wings, appearing at the whisper of every need to drown sunsets, and at the rise of true dusk as carmine exposure, every seed judged for karmic erasure— There will precede justice in the rubble of (dis)order when a throne will emerge from the shadows of cyclical ignorance, then when which side to turn will no longer be a matter of choice. There she will wait with flowers in her wings, telling her legion to hold still until the soft footsteps of sheerness tread nearer. There she will take flight, grinding her heels in a sky full of water-- Sheikha A. Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her poetry appears in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Her poetry has been translated into nine language so far. More about her can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com ** Departure The trees as a sign of surrender have raised their thin hands above their heads. The houses, so as not to be seen, have bowed their necks. The bird of death, with a glass cloak, flies in the sky and pours a bucket of snow over the city. The clouds, with contracted bodies, have closed their eyes. The first snowflake that reaches the ground, no one will recognize anyone else. Marjan Khoshbazan Marjan Khoshbazan is an Iranian poet and writer based in Tehran. "One of my poems was selected in a recent challenge for The Ekphrastic Review, and I have also had work published recently in The Light Ekphrastic. My writing is largely image-driven and often engages with ekphrasis as a way of exploring silence, memory, and collective experience. After years of trying to write poetry in Persian, I tried to create a new language with the help of images that is not bound by geography, time, or culture, but speaks the language of humanity." ** Cold From here, aloft, I pour the corn, scatter the black oil sunflower seeds. My pale hands tip the fluted urn. The plowed driveway shows the offering. The wind slaps at my face, the snow coats my lashes, melts. My shadow falls light against the snow, mirroring my pallor. Below, bare trees spread like bird tracks. No one is here right now, but I know they are watching, wary. The cold. It's twenty-two degrees with wind, it feels like ten. More snow is expected, at least two inches. I settle onto the crystalline structure, take up my roost by the window. Less than a minute later, a chickadee lands below, then another. Blue jays follow soon after. Once four jays eat, one flies off, returns with others. The window is old glass, wavy. I try not to move. I don't want to startle them. Here, I am sheltered. They remain exposed. Tomorrow, I'll scatter again. Twice. The new snow will cover what I've left. Winter isn't just one event but many. Lynne Kemen Lynne Kemen is the author of Shoes for Lucy (SCE Press, 2023) and More Than a Handful (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in One Art, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination and serves as editor/interviewer for Blue Mountain Review. She lives in rural Delaware County, New York. ** Wintering Cold enters my bones, spreads her skeletal pain through joints and limbs leaving flaked skin in her wake. I watch her, cranium queen eagled on an iceberg, pale embryo form scaling a north-easterly. She controls me, throws mood splinters into bruised sky and I cry for the brittleness of winter. Look up, I hear you say, see how her chiffon wings drift into moonshine softening the edges of darkness. I lift my chin, focus on forest glade where snow is back-sucked into iron, melts into light. My world stills. At the peak of pine feathered hope skims the sky, and rises. Keep rising, you say. Kate Young Kate Young lives in England and enjoys writing poetry, painting and playing the guitar, ukulele and mandolin. Her poems have appeared in various webzines, magazines, and Chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate have been published by Hedgehog Press. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet or on her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk ** Tree-Lined Winter What creature seeded clouds with diamonds to encourage snow? The frost parched the earth that remembers rain on a meadow. Here the cover of virgin white is everywhere level and smooth, and time, monotonous, static, is not sequential at all but all in the present and now. A crackling of ice on the door glass looks like arctic runes or maps to sacred ice caves, hidden. Through the large, double-thick panes the great trees look distorted, no longer linear, but in fact each one is bending exactly as they appear in the clear window. The winter moon, like one in a poem, sets diffuse light, not a single tense line broken on water. At the crossroads each path is blank. What is there to see? A birch and several small pine to the side, tipped by the wind towards the road. And if I could see their invisible essence? I would see a single birch and pines bent over an icy river.. But the river, crystal with ghostly water, ceaselessly freezes our sorrows, waiting to unleash them in Spring. Royal Rhodes Royal Rhodes lives in a small village in central Ohio, near to a nature conservancy, green cemetery, and Amish farms. He rejoices that the long-term forecast predicts a milder winter. ** To Remedios Varos Regarding Cold Jubilant seem trees as choir, spared the role of warming fire, where beneath the tolling spire spirits mourn your monster dire who would chill to bone the soul living fear of lost control dreading unforgiving troll winter seems as devil's dole hearts forever must embrace healing where they can by grace those dismissive kept in place frigid as endangered space never seeing spring renew growing they have yet to do. 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. ** Snowbird Scrapped his wings, fashioned a cape instead On his ice-crystal steed he skates through bleak clouds scooping buckets of flakes to shroud our wintry world Infants feeling his force, howl in the night shattering whole households But as soon as he passes they snuggle in their blankies suck on their binkies drift back to sleep and wake to crystal-white Amrita Skye Blaine Amrita Skye Blaine develops themes of impermanence, aging, disability, and awakening. In 2003, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, and in 2024, a PocketMFA in poetry. Two collections came out this spring. She has been published in fourteen poetry anthologies, numerous literary magazines, and is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology nominee. ** Snowbringer Whoever thought that snow was a natural phenomenon When the ghost of winter skies considers that it is time Sensing that any village, already shivering with the cold Might appreciate the silent beauty of some falling snow It swoops down from those threatening dark grey skies And from a bronze bucket, gripped by skeletal fingers Snowflakes like a white curtain, cascading gently down Bare black trees appear unbothered, and almost shrug Whilst all house red roofs await the delicate sprinkling Then the ghost sweeps by on its diamond-cut ice ride With its almost infinite supply of snow, to be let loose On to more homes, fields, and a few looking upwards Beyond and above snowflakes, to the ghost in the sky Howard Osborne Howard is a UK citizen, retired. Published author of non-fiction reference book, scientific papers and poetry. Interests mainly creative writing (poetry, novel, short stories, songs and scripts), music and travel. ** Clairvoyance Runs in My Cherokee Veins We rarely mention it, unless only to each other. The news, good or bad, is transferred through our X chromosome. Whether it’s a gift or a worry, I’d rather not know what I can’t control. Unlike me, Mama and Grandma were proud to get warnings from the other side. I wanted no part of the fear. When my college roommate and I moved out of our dorm, our dreams danced just two feet from each other’s head. I’d report a crazy dream to her, only to learn it had been HER dream. Maybe my Cherokee heritage had nothing to do with my fears and everything to say about how women communicate. I try to turn off what my dreams tell me and use them to inspire poetry. What one viewer may see as cold and fearful, another may see as delight. Barren trees, a skeletal creature shaking snow upon our village, how wonderful we each can decide what may happen next! 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. ** Engineered Anarchy? Bone pointy nose of bird-like skull, is this herself on zephyr’s cloud, much-travelled, exiled, with no home, explorer in the search for health; strange fingers’ work, that touched so much, spill, spinning crystals in a whirl, for cold, however warm the clime? Anarchic, like her lovers’ ways - unpublished or unfinished plays - precise, yet, engineering plans, mosquitoes laid beneath her lens; objects of magic by her bed, her life and times tumultuous, those teen dreams now seen surreal. She forged in destitution’s days - with odd jobs, made survival wage - from France and Spain escaped régimes; though welcome found in Mexico, with birds, her cat familiars, Which was her soul-mate through these tides; incongruent geometry? 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 ** Winter Comes No bright angel but a bone bare twig goblin body with a pointed plague mask face fleshless and starved freighted on a raft of ice dumping snow like refusal from a smudge dark sack no blessing but a stingy curse fine and dry as salt falling to smother the roofs and walls of houses too small to keep the last heat of harvest rattling like a wet cough caught in your throat as snow covers all the colours of a world lost to hunger’s aching white 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. ** Waiting Out the Cold it comes in on the wind dumped out of buckets as confetti from trumpets collected on roofs trimmed with sharp angled religion and stripped tree services for shivering sermons radiating heat from sin this is where it lives at the corner of cures with the year's clouded curves seeking to begin within we cover the ground till when the sunlight clears and swerves cuts with knives and carves swirls for a remedy to win but, the cold will leave again fly on as it always does bandaged in capes and coffins we will warm, this cold will end 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 journey as an expat. ** Feathers Our village: Black triangles reaching up, Red triangles reaching down. Wind whistles Through branches Where feathers fall like snowflakes, Float shivering and shimmering From a frosty diamond, Blanketing our village with starbursts As soft and cold as snow. Donna Reiss Writer, editor, teacher, bookmaker, and mixed media/paper artist, Donna lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she is a member of the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, the Guild of American Papercutters, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Follow her on Instagram @dreissart ** Humanoid I wait to be received as I enter the world with gifts in my hand and a pretend smile. I enter on a blanket of tears. A half made up incomplete humanoid I was never one of you with my smile - pointed grin and grasping hands. I arrive on a condemned cloud. With a gift, a false story, and diamonds to win your favour. A being of no consequence. Once revered. Once loved. No longer a being of honour. My face now revealed for what it is. A disgraced angel. No longer accepted by the Kingdom from which I came. I come seeking entrance and absolution. To enter again the world of acceptance, peace and love. To be clean-to be whole, to be one. Sandy Rochelle Sandy is a widely published poet, accomplished actress, and filmmaker. Sandy appeared both on Broadway and off-Broadway. On PBS -hosting and narrating several series. And conducting poetry readings and performances nation wide. ** Cold Haiku II Coldness and goosebumps Terrifying death’s shadow My home my refuge Jean Bourque Jean lives in Montreal. Happy New Year to the entire Ekphrastic team and to all readers and authors. Bonne et Heureuse Année à toute l’équipe d’Ekphrastic, ainsi qu’aux lecteurs, lectrices, auteurs et autrices. ** Divine Reminder by Winter The withering land warns of his Approach. Permission given to him By the Creator to keep the life mortal. Skeletal limbs, creaking. The monochromatic, barren earth. The bloodless skies covered with the mist of his breath. This land in sync with His own appearance; Starving, bleak, empty. Reminding them all that what they need Does indeed come from the land They attempted to conquer. He returns year after year, swiftly bringing about the cold that buries and hibernates within The bones of the red roofed village. Red roofs being The only reminder of the life That struggles to persevere. The swiftness and Urgency he brings to dull Them brought down in the breeze. With what intensity he comes, they are Never sure yet they are always Full of dread and unprepared. On the north wind he flies, Dropping beautiful and pure white damnation on all. Not even the holy ground, A fortress they’re were so sure of, Can keep his presence out. Mary Elizabeth Bruner Mary Elizabeth Bruner is a graduate of Wofford College and lives in Greenville, SC. ** What Falls Your Way Look how the snow falls so softly from the heavens as when the voice of a loved one floods your body, settles, saves you. If only these fragile flakes meant granted wishes, answers to prayers, pleas for mercy that turn true when caught in your palm, absorbed through your arms, hair, skin, your yearning heart. If only we all had saviors who swooped down, balanced on a glowing throne of crystallized quartz. This is not your guardian angel, fairy godmother, but a feathered wonder, a mammoth long-necked hen, with wise, almighty eyes, barbed beak, angular limbs, appalling claws. See how she clutches, upends the brass bucket, releases what wafts down to you through a sky the purple of bruises. Karen George Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and the collaborative Delight Is a Field (2025). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in 2024. Her poetry appears in The Mackinaw, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Luna Luna, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/. ** Los Exiliados West to southwest, I retrace your escape over your father’s Andalusia, the pueblos blancos, picture how you break free, your flight to that port, Casablanca-- in transition, from an imperial to golden eagle. Sea change, surreal, the language; the critics muse, your journey of isolation and fragility, your head high, emaciated remains balanced on a cloud, one crystalline mass. We rendezvous in cold, liminal states. Call it metaphysical existence-- ethereal beast, material nymph. We turn. Inside out. To feel. For this, warmth. Robert E. Ray Robert E. Ray's poetry has been published by Rattle, The Ekphrastic Review, The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, Wild Roof Journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and in multiple anthologies. He has published five poetry collections. Robert is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University. He lives in rural southeast Georgia. ** Cast the Skies Darkness, cast the skies, on the fate of all days… No one took notice, for they believed they were safe. Yes, the innocent lay in slumber, within whitewashed walls, When, over the red tile roofs, the first barrage came to fall. Citizens, with their rosy cheeked faces, who thought none would dare, They sit huddled on frozen ground shaking, clutching their knees in despair. The enchanted oak giants sit stripped of their waxy, green, summer leaves. Half frozen corpses, left posed as ornaments, sway in the breeze. Ropes creak, straining beneath the unmeasurable weight Of the poor harmless souls who’d been doomed with such fate. When indifference was born, atop a prism of light, A sorcerer came riding, streaking across the cloudy night skies. Peering down through crazed and merciless eyes, Undeterred by the desperate, blood curdling, screams and cries. Cloaked is this phantom, soaring overhead with no wings, Who, from a worn burlap sack, unleashes the most terrible things. Mounted upon a chariot of a thousand cracked mirrors To reflect in their petrified eyes, the worst of their fears… Terrified they worship bowing their heads toward the sand Beseeching all Gods, for the creature, laying claim to their lands. Yes, wickedness came calling in the dead of the night People, once blessed, turned their backs to the light. Suddenly their sullen eyes burst open, but far too late to see, They’d succumbed to the madness the crow had unleashed. John Ford
John Ford is a father of three, devoted spouse, blue collar, horticulturalist, with a passion for poetry. John has published numerous poems, flash fiction, and a one act play, in the college funded academic journal Parley. His poetry has previously appeared in the Ekphrastic Review. ** Recycling Yeats' Words at Year's End* The Old Year streaks across a leaden sky, riding a meteor of disaster toward the horizon. It passes through bruised clouds that turn and turn in a widening storm that obscures the gyre of heaven. Its gray and skeletal form, a chimera. Beaked plague mask with spare and pitiless gaze. Feathers cling to a frail human body, but its wings are gone. Both hands and feet bear pale claws that grasp at nothing. Trees in the bleak landscape below, their skeletal forms black and scraping the sky. Not a light in any window. The populace sleeps. Or huddles, vexed to nightmare by passionate misdirection loosed upon the world. As it departs, the Old Year opens a wrinkled sack, and in a ceremony of corruption, dumps the ashes of the people’s hopes like dirty snow to cover the world’s sins—insufficient for the task. But somewhere in the shadowed east the New Year slouches in a rocky aerie. A ghastly new-feathered beast, its hour come round, screams and flaps rough wings against the darkness, prepares to fledge. Janet Ruth *This poem repurposes Yeats’ words from “The Second Coming” Janet Ruth is an NM ornithologist and poet. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world. Poems recently or soon-to-be published in The Nature of Our Times, Unlost: Journal of Found Poetry and Art, and Unbroken: Prose Poems. Her winning sonnet, “A World That Shimmers,” was set to music and performed by True Concord Voices in 2023. See more at redstartsandravens.com/janets-poetry/. ** The Arrival of Angst Winter, you are doldrums of the sleepy mind, plucked and weary connoisseur bearing din on gnarled limbs, your conceit conveys static like so much snow; how curious the way decay uproots a strange & delightful riddle with no echo. Heather Brown Barrett Heather Brown Barrett is an award-winning poet in southeastern Virginia. She’s the Membership Chair of The Poetry Society of Virginia, a member of The Muse Writers Center, and a former board member of Hampton Roads Writers. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, formidable Woman sanctuary, Black Bough Poetry, OyeDrum Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She’s the author of Water in Every Room (Kelsay Books, 2025). Website: https://heatherbrownbarrett.com/. ** Special Delivery I hear Rod’s heavy tread on the stairs and switch off my flashlight, bury my book in the bed, slow my breathing. Maybe Mom’s boyfriend will think I’m asleep and leave me alone. As if I could possibly sleep with the racket he and his buddies are making. In the yard below, laughter crackles and music thunders. And then Rod storms through my door, a dark cloud hovering over my bed. “Gettup. We’re outta ice.” It’s not the liquor. He always talks like this, like he’s trying to conserve syllables. He chucks a couple of crumpled bills at me, then heads back downstairs. I hear him slam the door and there’s a fresh gust of masculine laughter as he rejoins the party. Another not-so-New Year’s Eve. * Chondra looks at my pitiful two dollars and says, “Keep it. I’ll put it on your mom’s account.” Chondra is cool like that. My mom’s best friend knows our ice box is broken, knows Mom will probably never pay off her tab at Sip & Chips. Not with Rod around. But she dislikes my mom’s boyfriend more than she likes keeping her books in the black. “Where’s your mom tonight, honey? She driving the wagon, scraping up fools?” She doesn’t say “drunken fools like Rod.” “Yep.” Most of the EMTs have to work on New Year’s Eve. Mom will return tomorrow morning, weary from a night of booze-fueled smashups only to find the post-party yard carnage and a half dozen guys sprawled in our living room. Chondra peers out the storefront window. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to haul all this back in your bike basket. Why don’t you let me send it on over? Be there before you know it, better if it’s delivered, you’ll see.” My eyebrows are sky-high, because I know full well the Sip & Chips doesn’t have a delivery person. But if I don’t need to pedal home balancing a giant bag of ice on my bike, I’m not going to argue. “Okay, thanks. Happy New Year.” Chondra smiles and waves as I head outside. I’m gazing at her through the window as I unlock my bike, thinking how lucky Mom is to have a friend like her, when I see Chondra make a phone call. I’m not great at reading lips, but it looks like she’s saying, “a favour.” * Rod’s brow furrows when he sees me return with an empty basket and no ice in sight. “It’s gonna be delivered. Any minute,” I say and I’m through the door and upstairs before he can object. I slide into bed fully clothed, shoes and all, just in case. Steeling myself for the sound of boots pummeling the stairs. But all I hear is clinking bottles and guffaws and the steady pulse of the music. Until a metallic clunk and the music dies. One of the guys says, “Tha hell?” A yelp of pain. Sounds of shattering glass. I’m out of bed and at the window and all I see is ice. Not sleet, not hail, but a torrent of ice cubes, huge, falling, pounding down. Somehow, it’s not striking the roof above me, it’s almost as though it’s targeting the yard. And now I watch Rod’s friends running and covering their heads. I think they’re going to come piling into the house but then a sound from above, almost like a helicopter (like wings, gigantic wings beating), and I crane my neck to see. Below the guys are scrambling for their cars, driving off. Except Rod is running for our door and just before he makes the step he is nabbed by titanic talons. Then he’s aloft, his screams weaker and more distant. The yard is blanketed in ice. But all is silent. Until the phone rings and I pick up, saying, “Happy New Year, Chondra.” Tracy Royce Tracy Royce's words appear in The Mackinaw, MacQueen's Quinterly, ONE ART, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, a Touchstone Award, and a Pushcart. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking and bird watching. You can find her on Bluesky. ** The Year I Went Without This getting old was centuries ago. When the sun was still gold. And the stars would log in as “My Muse.” In the boldest of summer prints. When, all of one’s memories could fit, inside of one’s pocket. And talk you down from where tomorrow’s sorrows had peaked. Luck, calling you, by your first ever name. While one’s last ever name would go blameless. As it sat for its portrait. Or traipsed down to where the river. Once lived up to the village’s reveries. O how, snow, stuck to itself. And the swans, once the answer to everything. Were now only able to size up the world with their wings. Aw yes, the rest, is a blur. More topic points for the rubble. And it’s there, where I’ve been told, to cut to the “Cold.” Where one’s doubles will no longer be clouding one’s innocence. Or unleashing more doubts. On our ceiling’s so-called lapse of half decent judgment. When winter, silver-tined, when not wraith-white, threw its one voice towards the spring. And our appetites, tuned themselves, to the wind. Our shadows, went by light-fortresses, dash, still-will-take-flight-for-profit. And snow returned for its mittens, wool hats. And crows shat, on those wool hats, and the wool hats of our children. Do I see those trees, worshipping the gowns, they’ve slipped out from under. Or showing off their scars to the ice-silenced, thunder. Caring less for the messes we’ve made. The spells we’ve fallen under. Still convinced that we acted alone. When we dreamt up not only this madness. But the dark it called home. Mark DeCarteret Mark DeCarteret's eightth book Stop Motion Poets and Live Action Lit-Figures will be published by Bee Monk Press this Spring. |
Challenges
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