 Coffee House Kirkgate Market, Bradford, by Laura Mate (England) 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 Coffee House Kirkgate Market, Bradford, by Laura Mate. Deadline is April 24, 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 MATE 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, April 24, 2025. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters for challenge submissions. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! 16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.
0 Comments
 Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlands) 1490-1510  Outer Panels. Triptych Tip-Trick Eye-tracking glasses show viewers of Bosch triptych are drawn to hell […] The researchers discovered that the pupils of female visitors swelled from 5.2mm when contemplating the Eden panel to 5.4mm when observing the delights panel and 5.8mm when looking at the hell panel. Male pupils, in contrast, were most dilated (8.6mm) when beholding the delights panel, followed by the hell panel (6.8mm) and the Eden panel (6.4mm). The Guardian 21st June 2023 Boys, come ride a giant rodent, Flaunt an apple on your head, Climb inside a pink explodent, Use a mussel for a bed; You could hug enormous owls, Chase a fish to wondrous heights, Lounge on elephantine fowls: It’s the Garden of Delights! Girls, perhaps you would be gladder In a darker sort of place, With the chance to climb a ladder To an eggshell with a face; Launch a blade between two ears, Kiss a pig who’s nun as well, Or be stretched apart like shears On a harp: and this is Hell. But there’s something else, verschieden (Or verschillend, to be Dutch): An uncrowded sort of Eden – Nothing strange, or nothing much – Just one smiley, spiky sprayer With a bird’s nest (not that odd); But in this one, dear surveyor, You will have to deal with God. Julia Griffin Julia Griffin has published in several online poetry journals, including Light, Lighten Up Online, Classical Outlook, and The Ekphrastic Review. ** Upon Peering at The Garden of Earthly Delights How should one regard you? Should one study as if poring through a worn manuscript until a climactic punctus? Or trifle with musings up to denouement, up to acceptance, acquiescence? Circumflex or breve? Igniferous interrobang?! Mayhap. Presently, the eye is drawn to the foreground, shocked at the contrast the ossiferous cluster evokes. And then the orb expands its gaze. Berry blue apparatus, thaumaturgic flask of a fecund alchemy, oracular to natators among the cosmic chitinous structures, beings undraped by aeromancy, fallen mortals, silver mermaids and mermen (look, one bestrides a fish across the azure sea), the trees of this perfidious dreamworld shedding fruit willy-nilly. And close by, riders of all sorts atop oxen, horses, bears, griffins, and…tarrying rascal, prithee, tell, do we behold a unicorn otter strolling among bathing avians of startling mass? Ah, the impulse to cap that as finality, the terminal bow to a bacchic shebang. Natheless, there is a scene to the left, near the dragon tree, a setting more austere to the optic than preceding bacchanalia, a pulse of paradise by a pool of gloom, taken out of psychic conjurings from bestiaries of olden wayfarers, and the owl, astute, resting in its rosy spire, centre of the artwork’s west side, does the construction double as an aspersorium, could the night bird be soulfully aware of mortal designs? And so, the eye fares towards the caliginous gloam, millions of needles, piercings, visions that many fear have appeared to them on lucent scrolls of latterly days, when tidings can be acquired posthaste, humans as vessels for monstrous imagery, perpetually afore screens, laden with information endeleas, have not the ravagings of ugsome malefactions penetrated people’s minds through media in this day and age? And art, metaphorical mirror where nothing is spared, not even lutes or harps strummed by contorted bodies, the background of a Tartarean mise en scène of brutality, bastions, edifices, and dwellings vanquished to wreckage. A painter gazes blankly from the ruins. Could feathers of a triptych’s grisaille wingspread, which depicts a planet spawned through utterance, assuage stray witnesses, condoning to countenance the flux unbound by emergence and creation? Efren Laya Cruzad Efren Laya Cruzada is a writer who was born in the Philippines and raised in Texas. He studied literature, philosophy, and creative writing at New York University. He was shortlisted for the La Piccioletta Barca Prize, a finalist for a contest at The Ekphrastic Review, and a semifinalist for a Driftwood Press Short Story Contest. The author of Grand Flood: a poem, his poetry has appeared in many venues. He also enjoys traveling, practicing boxing moves, and playing video games in a foreign language. Currently, he is editing his first novel and making steady progress on developing his own little video game. ** The World in a Hollow Glass Shell Not at the pinnacle of Purgatory where the poet Virgil guided had positioned it, but serenely floating, round and flat, within a sheltering and fragile egg, an orb that we observe holding gathering cloud clusters over a castled, dun-coloured terrain, mid-hemisphere, in barely visible atmosphere, like a transparent gas balloon we see rise against a starless backdrop from a viewpoint no human eye was made to see. The exterior panel wings hide the triptych's tale that has progressed from paradise to sin to our predestined punishment, prefigured in a lion's kill, for all our fallen race. This odd, disturbing panorama was lost in our unknowing and we can not decipher all these symbols we misunderstood, until we see with Easter eyes a truer handiwork that shows a God who keeps on growing curiouser and curiouser. Royal Rhodes Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who studied the Classics and global religions. The enigmatic religious outlook of Bosch has long been an interest of his. The art on the folded wings, enclosing this triptych, especially fascinates him. ** No Sweet Pleasance Flanked on either side by visions of Eden and Hell, the center panel of the triptych swarms with human figures, all naked, smooth and oddly asexual, thick as larva on too- ripe fruit, eyed by oversized birds whose sharp beaks could easily pluck them up, though none of the bare and unarmed mannikins seem aware of any threat. Pitiful creatures, here in a world where only God is clothed, where in the Garden of Earthly Delights throngs of solemn people crowd, engaged in a strange environment where luscious fruits, too big to hold and carry away, swallow them instead, where their heads may be embedded in a huge berry, their bodies enclosed in a transparent bubble, or curled up in hollowed out giant drupes, trapped in a closing clam shell, or dancing under an owl. In the middle ground the naked homunculi ride bareback on horses, goats and boars, circling a lake, surmounted by ornate structures, bulbous, pink, elaborately spiked, neither castles nor cathedrals, offering neither shelter nor inspiration. In all of this fantastic garden, there is nothing that speaks simple comfort, and not one of all these busy figures looks even vaguely amused, much less delighted. Maybe they know there will be no mercy, maybe they are haunted by the promise of hell, waiting for them, dark and pitiless, just past the hinges, in the next panel. 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. ** opening my kitchen cabinet doors i turned the knobs on my cabinets and opened the doors to the picture inside and it must have been the cheap wine that hazelled my aura and i heard angels bloom and there was no william blake smile there no perception nothing opening up much more than doors no little tie dyed whites of my eyes filled with wrath or tears that bend to sloth the victims of a greasy countertop no excuses just the ghost of the last loaf of greed crumbs now and a small bag of pride sitting next to a new can of lust sealed in tin or steel and no dents no rusty edges just 100% pure it said on the can and a half full cup of envy lost on the wicked but spent by those good ones almost there ready to win the race or in the race the cans they stared back and the twinkle from my 88 olympics glasses free ones i got in a cardboard box filled with empty cd cases sitting on a lawn and i recited kipling twice just for protection just out of protection from gluttony my third empty glass of cheap wine and the bulk bag of chocolate covered almonds whispering and hissing soothing sweet sirens calling me from the second shelf and a little knowledge and an empty glass is a terrible thing to close the doors on mike sluchinski mike sluchinski is a recent pushcart prize nominee and adds dadaist, ekphrastic, stream of consciousness, and pop art elements to his punk and post punk collages, poetry, fiction, and non. ** A World Under a Dome Indescribable; indecipherable; an exercise in madness. Nevertheless, the traveler walks through this verdant landscape meeting barely created humans as they speak to their maker. He tells them all these animals are yours; the vegetation and waters are yours. Then the traveler sees more humans arrive bringing with them knowledge of flesh, lust, pleasure, and domination. Less space for gardens to flourish; more behavior to control; voices in circles drowned out by demands upon their minds and bodies. The traveler becomes lost in this bizarre lexicon of thousands of voices wanting to be heard. He stumbles, falls, and is swept up in a current of blackness and smoke. Awakens on a different shore, dark, twisted, filled with screams. Knowledge of death, decay, and suffering. Music of heaven no longer fills hearts with comfort. The traveler is led away into an empty shell to live out his final days contemplating where in the garden he can plant the seed that will restart paradise. 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. 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. ** Garden of Earthly Delights “I never asked for a soul.” —Dean Young It might be the garden and really seem to matter that the title’s just the fifth part of the triptych, if you count the zipped-closed cabinet’s cosmos door décor. Contrails fizz and drift mascara’d lashes, brush this screen glass, which means I’ve seen about as much as I’m going to look. Time of light the sun makes hazard of anything upright, which rules me down and out. Even indebted to Delight like this, that blue rutabaga juice lower left can’t be good, not on your knees with the squeezer standing, both of you sea monkey nightmare, shreds of my own pruned thumb panning through the delirium serum of this image. Today I can’t even see Q-tips, the family pack, and not think tank tracks, think Tehran. Scream face boils and howls from the soap foam down louder and louder. Upper-right corner of the picture plane, a Hormuz blue mine floats the Strait of the Seen. Now out here in our multi-tych, off the State Road shoulder vinyl picket fencing persists as memory in melted fallen liquid shadows someone lost of their controlled burn back, and for a little closer home you taste it. James D'Agostino James D'Agostino is the author of Nude with Anything, The Goldfinch Caution Tapes, and Build Your Castle Out of Sugar Cubes All Your Enemies Have Tongues (forthcoming). He teaches at Truman State University, where he just tries to keep up with his students. ** The Garden of Earthly Delights Lay and bathe in the clean air, Tongues untainted and fresh bodies bare, His place safe haven, well-made. We walk with Him, never threadbare, Liquid gold draws a veil– We failed. Taste, Sweet twang, Our full world of Revel, Conquer, and play. This place we’ve made with dripping lips, Shameless bare hips, Expect here no true day. We judge to our desire, So taste and stay. Upon dark music we wade, Famine, the green decay. It’s all the same. Our place betrays. After all we’ve made, we are bare once more— deep in old shame, Four trampling mares, we see them everywhere. Labour and war. Our only light, white embers in a reddened night. Melissa Beasley Melissa Beasley is a college student who aspires to write fiction and be a lifelong student of literature. In her spare time, she enjoys tea, drawing, and spending time with her people. ** Theme Park Surprise! I have a surprise trip for you! Said the father to his children. Is it Disney? No, but it has mountains. A state park? No, though there are lakes and animals. A zoo? Well, the animals are not in cages — we are going to The Garden of Earthly Delights. That settled it. They assumed they were going to some kind of a candy factory near a zoo. But, surprise indeed, they saw when they arrived at a new Sculpture Garden. They had been to the one created by Seward Johnson. The one with sculptures of real paintings. And the Metropolitan, with its Greek and Roman statues. But this looked different. This one was modern. It was filled with hundreds. Yes, it had marbles of naked men and woman, sure. Just like any big museum. But this one had robotics inserted in each statue, so they could move as if they were alive. And there were so many! They looked like real naked people running, sitting, riding horses, or hanging out. The kids first noticed a parade of the statues on horses, donkeys, elks, goats, and who knows what else, circling around the spa. The bathers were standing up to enjoy the spectacle. The kids wanted to join in! And they could. Right after the ticket booth, each child was handed a remote. Of course they experimented. Janis made birds with red splotches grow bigger than the statues and walk into water, even though they were not ducks. (She hoped they would not drown.) Matthew decided he wanted something more like Disney, more like a video game. He experimented with the remote’s buttons, and found he could make things grow into a new shape. So at the river he made fanciful castles from blue and pink flowers. He decided they needed weapons (not real ones) to act out a kind of video-game war. In a pink castle he created little rockets. He made one castle into a giant ball with spikes. But he made the other pink and blue castle hide their weapons to ensure surprise once his war started. To make it all the more complicated, he added a floating lighthouse in the water between the castles. It took a while to find the buttons and make sure all the robotics worked. Now the game could begin! Janis, meanwhile, decided she wanted to get into this game, to mess it up. She made groups of men push giants of whelk, fish, and mollusk, and other shapes and sizes which she hoped would survive in that river water. She’d make them ram the castles to misdirect the shooting. Just for fun. She made her men work in groups and go fast so they could all reach their goal in time. But just in case, on one side, she made sure all kinds of creatures left their pond, to start walking, running, and crawling, over to the river, to interfere, to distract the players, inside the castles. And while all these fun and games were delighting his children, the tired father stepped away to hide in the shade. He fell asleep, and dreamed. He dreamed of a dagger ear, a harp playing a ukelele, of arrows shooting through people, of boats, of jelly fish, so much more — all floating in and out of sight, and somehow under water, under shooting stars over a small island. Of course, in the end, even the kids got tired, woke up their father, said they ready to go. They handed back the remotes at the exit. Then, back home, tried to explain the whole thing to their Mom. She was so confused they ended up just making a painting for her. Lavinia Kumar Lavinia Kumar’s book, Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists, consists of short prose pieces of near 100 remarkable women writers, poets, publishers, painters, sculptors, abolitionists, suffragettes, and activists — primarily pre-Civil War.. Her three poetry books & four chapbooks include two about women. Her poems and flash fiction appear in a variety of poetry journals & three anthologies (most recently, Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War, 2026). She’s received four Pushcart and one Best of the Net nominations. Media: laviniakumar.net & lasummer.substack.com ** Reversing Out of the Garden Evil isn’t the end Nor is it eternity It’s the fight worth having A battle for balancing A wreck towards recentering It breeds the middle Of delicate members Where pains and pleasures Blend seductive mixtures Into an intoxication of pictures That we remember And attribute to sinners Whose shame starts naively In long chains of deceiving Until we close doors on believing Only then do we understand This globe is guided by commands And all is written, not assumed Ipse dixit et facta sunt Ipse mandavit et creata sunt 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. ** On Knowing Recall, I cannot, the grey of before just a warning: all except this Left in a beautiful bubble the lure of cool waters bare skin washed clean, again warmed by sun and touch of a man How could I have known? the depth of our longing, limitless now Ripe berries stain my mouth, sticky sweetness clinging to bodies that yearn and feast of this new knowing Feasting. Thirsting near fountains, their endless supply, Relieves and Refills insatiable, craving, taking this all in I need to know what He knows caught in defiance, my nature exposed Succumbed to the trap He left me Cast out. Evil? betrayal guised as surprise Now, somewhere else. Fated. to sour notes, forever out of attunement mauled, pursued, devoured, afraid. ladders to nowhere, splintered and broken Creation undone and undoing flesh He once cherished, sacrificed for his entertainment. Are You delighted, yet? Julia Harr Julia Harr is a narrative practitioner who lives in Queens, NY. She is happiest browsing the many art collections of NYC and writing shorts and poems in response. Professionally, you can find her practicing narrative therapy and offering narrative medicine workshops to other healthcare providers. www.story-ethic.com ** Inspired by the Final Panel of his Namesake’s Painting, Detective Harry Bosch Pens a Poem* In the dark hours, in the lost light, there is a darkness more than night. Tracy Royce *This is a cento composed of book titles in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series. Tracy Royce is a writer and poet with work appearing in 100 Word Story and The Ekphrastic Review, and forthcoming in Hot Flash Literary, Heavy Feather Review, and Best Microfiction (2026). Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, a Touchstone Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking and watching Richard Widmark films. You can find her on Bluesky. ** The Dome At lunchtime, Greck went to The Dome, a seaside amusement arcade. The buildings on either side had collapsed into rubble years ago, but The Dome survived, patronised by a mix of the elderly and unemployed. Most of these locals played the fruit machines; Greck, however, headed to the smell of fried food in a corner. From behind a counter, a man named Besco passed her chips in a polystyrene container and milky tea in a polystyrene cup. Greck nodded and placed the exact amount of money on the counter. She then squeezed ketchup on the chips and walked back out of The Dome to a bench. Greck chewed her chips, sipped her tea and stared at the calm sea. It had begun to recede from the stones, sand and seaweed that constituted the town’s beach. At her back, she heard two people emerge from The Dome. “I hit the jackpot, but the machine didn’t pay out,” someone said. “We don’t pay money. We give tokens.” “No tokens came out either.” “Don’t make trouble. Go home.” Silence followed this response. Another dissatisfied customer and Besco, Greck thought and finished her lunch. She dropped the container and cup into the mesh bin that stood nearby but didn't leave. A wooden crate on the beach had caught her attention. Washed ashore from where? she wondered. The crate lay on a tangle of seaweed and looked intact. Greck stood and strolled towards it. “Leave it,” came a shout. “Whatever’s in the crate, it’s mine. Everything that washes up on this beach is mine.” Greck halted and stepped to one side to avoid Besco as he hurried by her. She watched him kick the crate several times before he picked up a stone and used it as a hammer. The crate splintered and fell apart. Besco immediately pulled out cardboard boxes and ripped one open. “I hope my luck has changed,” he said to himself. The items that fell from the box, though, looked like placemats to Greck. She moved closer. Exasperated, Besco glared at her. “What are these things?” “Placemats,” Greck replied. “What? Do I need useless placemats? No, I don’t.” Greck shrugged. “You could always put them on tables, together with cutlery, for your lunchtime trade.” Besco grabbed some of the boxes and threw them at Greck’s feet. “Don’t you dare make fun of me,” he shouted. “You’re barred from The Dome, for life.” He spat and brushed past Greck. She ignored him, bent down and looked through the boxes. They all contained placemats. Each one had a laminated picture on one side and cork on the other. Greck recognised the pictures as scenes from a well-known triptych. The Garden of Earthly Delights, she thought and gathered as many placemats as she could carry. At the sea’s edge, she put them in the water, picture side up. They floated. Greck glanced back at The Dome and removed her clothes. With care, she lowered herself across the placemats and drifted away with the tide. K.J. Watson K. J. Watson’s stories and poems have appeared on the radio; in magazines, comics and anthologies; and online. ** The Demise of Bosch While The Poet Endures Every form, every style, every step toward new expression eluded him. The poem seizes the opportunity where the painter’s symbols end. “This is the crux of the matter,” cries the poet: “We saw the Event finished in the Garden before the painter laid his strokes—no one understood at what point in time.” Is this truly the style, the substance, the release the artist desired? Or does the deceased one mock the poet’s blood-red hands? Many wage artistic battles, few regard the expense. Carole Mertz (The poem, a Golden Shovel, borrows its line from Octavio Paz’s “Toward the Poem.”) Carole Mertz publishes reviews, essays, and poetry at The Ekphrastic Review, Oyster River Pages, Cleaver Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Color and Line published in 2021. Carole teaches organ and piano in Parma, Ohio. ** In Praise of Hieronymus Bosch Ladies and gentlemen, Pieter Brueghel the Elder here, Master of Ceremonies. We’ve gathered at the Prado in Madrid to praise my muse, Hieronymus Bosch. We never met, but his meticulous attention to minutiae, his genius, inspired me to craft small stories within a single canvas. I’ve assembled a triptych of artists to attest to his talent. Salvador, please start us off. I. I am Dali! My wife and I thank you, Señor Bosch, for your twisted mind on which I have based the twist of my mustache. The way you take ordinary, earthly things and dement them. You are my guiding light! II. I am Miró. I used to paint like everyone else. Until I considered your winged altarpiece in the Prado. I could take individual objects and paint them the way I see them. Distorted. Dissonant. Disconnected. Dare I say diabolical? I am forever indebted. III. Leonora Carrington here. Publicly I’ve stated that The Pleasures of Dagobert is loosely based on the Merovingian king of that name. Publicly I’ve stated that my creation sprang to mind as a result of the war. But, dear Hieronymus, not one brushstroke would have been possible without Garden of Earthly Delights as phantasmagorical precedent. I scrutinized your work. Imagined little spheres of debauchery owning their own section of the canvas. My work could not exist without yours as exemplar. Bravo! My dear friends and colleagues, let us bow our heads in praise of Hieronymus Bosch. Thank you for bringing us into your garden of unearthly delights. Barbara Krasner Barbara Krasner is a huge fan of Brueghel and surrealist art. A self-professed art junkie, she is addicted to art museum exhibitions and has a fear of missing out. She is currently shopping a Brueghel-inspired chapbook and putting the finishing touches on a full-length poetry collection written in response to female surrealists. Visit her at www.barbarakrasner.com. ** Angel The gardens rest as loneliness fills the space unconquered, broken into palatable shapes, we argue, only to fill time, to find peace. Unsure of anything but to disrupt the scene a senseless lake, hordes of skin in salad days a preference made at the beginning of time. Now, a thousand years later, or two I remember your words, wept into stone and I try to instill them, to fill my remaining days. Zachary Thraves Zachary Thraves is a writer and performer. His poems have been published by Broken Sleep Books, Juste Millieu, Nitrogen House and at Poetry Worth Hearing. His plays have been performed internationally and in 2023 he created a one-man fringe show exploring his experience with bi-polar, 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 Not So Distant World Intricate palaces surrounding the lake, each different, yet still the same. Decorated in pastels. mimicking flower petals. Lively gardens, full of entertainment. It can be found in every nook. Berry floats and butterflies that rest on flowers between dances. The races have started. Animals run laps, getting distracted by each other and the nymphs in the middle. The nymphs in the pond watch and giggle at the people running laps around them. They create groups amongst themselves, distributing racers to each one. Ensuring all racers can be picked at. A world of our own. Yet, still so very distant from what we know. Angelina Carago Angelina Carago is an American writer who writes from fabricated worlds. She can often be found surrounded by books and art. ** Trying To Find Earthly Delights In Kenya The girl's hair falls soft, breezy like the palms soaked in evening's light. Air brewed with fragrant heat becomes lush tea -- tinged with clouds splintering into cinnamon. Its mood makes her drowsy along with the elephants she has come to photograph. Wise yet lethargic -- with lake and insect life stirring between their gray sculptures, they remember the ancient. Days never shadowed by the herdsman's cloak or his wand prodding the bell-shackled oxen or cattle, Days of red dust swept by wind and then clearing to trees where moonlight stretched through leaves whispering under the clear sky, blessed by the watchful eye of Opala. Yet, within the skin of the elephant, she sees the wrinkled map of a town back home, her lover seething on a leather couch, sipping time from a brown hour glass of beer somewhere between their moon and a suburb of Kansas city. The air stills. She turns and silence translucent as the powder on her face blends with the soft, sifted gold of sundown. Tusks play quarter moons to dragonflies skimming the water's edge for diversion. Her nerves caught in the shimmer of their wings. Wendy Howe Note: Opala is the goddess of the moon in Massai/Kenyan mythology. She is known to be the protector of women and 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. ** The Garden of Earthly Delight When I lived in Madrid, I used to visit The Garden of Earthly Delight weekly. The Prado and I had a date every Monday at 10.00 am, before the hordes arrived. I wanted to dive into Hieronymus Bosch’s mind, discover the myriad of images, trying to understand a surrealist masterpiece created in the Late Middle Ages. Dalí, eat your heart out. I always started to ‘read’ this wonder the way it was meant to be read: from left to right, starting at The Garden of Eden where God takes Eve’s hand to introduce her to Adam, where strange animals roam, including an elephant, a giraffe (how did Bosch know about these animals in 1500 in Den Bosch, Brabant, a province of what is now The Netherlands?), what I took to be a unicorn, a variety of birds and a cat doing its cat-thing to a big mouse, a bird swallowing a frog—perhaps a hint at darker things to come. In the middle of it all is the Fountain of Living Waters, a science-fiction fever dream from 1500. The centre panel is The Garden of Earthly Delights. I always felt that Bosch used the title of his panel to explain his phantasies: "earthly’." From giant flora and fauna to bizarre architecture to some very naked frolicking, men riding the beasts of base animal instincts. There is lust again: very suggestive play and giant fruit, in other words indulgence and the fleeting nature of pleasure. More fever-dream creatures and some disapproval by the painter, I believe, leading us to the Musical Hell, a nickname given by art historians to the Night Garden, the third and final panel of this amazing work. Here we find the nightmare of heavenly punishments for the indulgences of the centre panel: the pale man beast, wearing a flat ‘hat’ on which some creatures are dancing around a pink swollen bagpipe-like apparition, his body a cracked eggshell, this man seems to be the observer. The party is over. A bird-headed monster devours humans, shitting them out into a dark pit, instruments are torture devices: one sinner is trapped under a giant lute while musical notes are being tattooed on his backside; other sinners are falling into black water while fires are burning in the background. In the lower right-hand corner is a pig dressed as a nun stretching its snout as if to kiss a man who definitely doesn’t want to be kissed, while another watches in horror. This part of the triptych is where I thought I’d just about began to understand Bosch a wee bit: he depicted mankind's lust and hypocrisy. Bosch turned objects meant for "heavenly" harmonies into tools of agony, a reflection, I thought, of what man does onto man. In the three panels of The Garden of Earthly Delight, Bosch is turning on the warning lights. The Last Judgment will come, but for now mankind is stuck in a cycle of lust, self-indulgence, and sado-masochistic pleasures. And when you close the triptych, there is the world before man spoiled it: a world where the earth was just sky, land, water, and plants. Still innocent, pure. And Bosch knew that she was round. 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/ ** To Hieronymus Bosch Regarding Garden of Earthly Delights You circumscribe existence shown as you believe it to be known -- time seen as task of God afar begun as darkness given star for firmanent and clime of earth in stillness of its virgin birth that would entwine as measured course with beasts evolving into source of circumstance unleashing man as image God became by plan to be the consciousness aware cogniton would become by dare the conscience of eternal soul to suffer burden of conlrol awaiting everlasting fate, immortal hope or Hell to hate. By use exquisite of detail you here expose how we prevail not seeming gathered to survive, but seeking pleasure to derive, revering falsely our disdain now disregarding fact of chain whose strength is but its weakest link where disrespect is armor's chink despite this warning we discern inside the doors you have us turn. 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. ** Diversions Although I pretend otherwise, I have no illuminaton to provide, no idea how to make the future easier to deal with, anticipate, or understand. I can’t tell you what will help you, although I have plenty of ideas about what will hurt. But let me show you the nightmare of my dreams--all of the possible answers rephrased into new more irrational questions, or maybe old questions reconfigured to stray further from solution into delusion, each new detail more incoherent and incomprehensible than the one before. Merely a conduit for your wishful thinking, I am both unable and unwilling to resist the charms and chaos of human folly—the empty promises, the flattery that pretends to affirmation, that mixes fantasy with reality, that offers only fabrications grounded in a false faith of invincibility, riddles entwined with vagaries meant to distract from the truth. I cannot save you—in fact I do not care about you at all--but I can entertain you as you fall into the abyss. dreams of hereafter-- a leaf trembling in the wind on bare black branches Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig: "I've written a few poems to this work of art. It seems always to reflect whatever world we happen to be living in." **  Glass Sculpture, by Belinda Scott (England) 2021 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 Glass Sculpture, by Belinda Scott. Deadline is April 10, 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 SCOTT 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, APRIL 10, 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.  Untitled, by Andrea Bogdan (USA) 2025 A Portal Opens Tonight, the night sky was all my own As if a private viewing, laid on for me And exactly as I always knew it would A third of the darkness burst into light The portal was here for me once again As a reminder that my return was due That outer ring was like a tear in space As if a green cloud had ripped through Encircling that glorious main invitation To look inside and view another reality Of white slashes made by cosmic knives A circular frame to a large orange hole And there in its midst, the portal waits I knew that my time here was all done As I was lifted off this planet’s surface Ready for the creation of another Earth 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. ** Moonglow The second moon was pasted to the middle of the sun. Green, encircled by what looked like a beard of Q-Tips. Blobby as an amoeba. Visible all day. A neon that Laura associated with highlighters and lizards. This new moon alarmed her. There was something aggressive about its presence, the way it leaked green onto the sky, grass, trees, people’s faces. Everything seemed smaller. Acrid and breakable. If the old moon caused the tides to move, what would this new one do? At the beach, Laura studied the ocean, which advanced and receded with race car speed. She gazed up at the green invader and nicknamed the moon Esme. After all, she reasoned, when you gave something a nickname it became a lot less scary. She decided to start a Substack for it. The scientists couldn’t figure out what was happening or why. It had to do with the lunar clock, they said. Apparently that was broken now. The new green moon affected rhythms and the reproductive cycles of animals and humans. Also, migration and navigation of birds, insects, even the lowly dung beetle. The earth’s rotation was speeding up. Each day, more time lost. Each night, a wobble. But why this was occurring they didn’t know. Nothing to do with climate change, they insisted. A green haze engulfed Rhode Island, where Laura lived. It reminded her of smog though she never saw smog up close before, only in the movies. Using the second moon’s voice, which she imagined to be scratchily seductive, she wrote poetry. Thirty-seven synonyms for green, including the best ones – chartreuse and emerald. My face is an oval lime, she wrote. My eyes are vinyl records. What is beauty – a look, a feeling, a farce? By Thursday she had nearly a million followers. The second moon clung to the sun as if it was competing for who could shine brightest. Scientists recommended wearing sunglasses all the time, even indoors. The first moon used to provide natural light in the evening but now it sparked, dimmed, and vanished entirely in a smoky whisper. Although some climate scientists said maybe it had morphed into a star that people could make a last, best wish on. A meteor careened toward earth. Laura watched its streaky glow with alarm. She knew the old moon would have been able to absorb its impact. But online, writing as Esme, she said, don’t fear what you can’t understand, and people took to the streets twirling in the heavy green glow, stumbling into one another like a bunch of drunken teenagers. Laura felt like a medium channeling the dead. Rejoice, she wrote. Then she deleted that because it sounded too religious and wrote, My lips are dead bees playing the clarinet. The mayor gave her a key to the city and the scientists took her picture. When the meteor arrived, not in a shower, as predicted, but in a sparkly trail of light like a costume jewelry necklace, Laura noticed a third moon behind it. A pentagon this time. Blue as fingers with frostbite, as the flame trapped inside a candle wick. A huge blue moon crowding out all the stars in the sky. She ran to get her laptop, but the moon was too quick, spilling blue onto buildings, ice cream, frogs, Laura, until it drowned the world in ink. Beth Sherman Beth Sherman’s novella-in-flash, How to Get There from Here, will be published in July 2026 by Ad Hoc Fiction. She has had more than 200 stories featured in literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres and Smokelong Quarterly, where she is a Submissions Editor. Her work appears in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025. The author of five mystery novels, she can be reached on social media @bsherm36. ** Handling Charge She holds whole world, palm of her hand; led by that hand, she would hold ours. What she sees, feels, her painting marks - our question mark, as we react. So reading palms (this palmistry) hands back to us an eroteme; where does it stir us, memories, or lead us in our mirror search? Or will we brush off what is asked from city where the angels named? For at a stroke our poise disturbed, indifference is, hear, deposed. Our current charge is being sparked to look again, respond to art, so play our part in dialogue, discover more about ourselves. 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 ** Unsuccessfully Twisting jumbled thoughts, trying to break from madness, unsuccessfully. 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. ** Manufacturer's Recommendations I did it all by myself Went to the drugstore Grabbed them from the shelf No research, no asking for help Then went straight home And jammed them into my ears Rolled and rubbed Between forefinger and thumb Tiny batons end-over-end spun Short bursts of pleasure With long-term impactions Trophies molded in wax collections Or, at least that's what I thought Those cotton swabs I bought Only scraped a surface layer Then shoved down deeper Masses of stratified settlements Like cerumen fossils cast in sediment And I wasn't hearing it The whispers of warnings Saying I shouldn't block my senses Or dam the flow of my canals Or build up a barrier between The world's wise instructions and me But now, reading the stacks of swabs Lining my bathroom countertop I know these aren't something to be proud of Instead, the piles of dashes and dots Encode admonitions from archeological plots In messy texts of ancient thoughts And these signals don’t hide in secrecy They resonate in high frequency Saying what is enough and what is fair Relaying when to enjoy and when to beware All I have to do is quiet my inclinations And listen to the manufacturer's recommendations 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. ** Now Home, Matchstick Girl Sweet little fire soul, you sprint through dark, snow-crusted alleys trying to spark customers celebrating the old year’s end to buy enough matchsticks to keep your family inside their home, breath inside your body. An impossible task-- no number bought will barricade the wind and ice from your bare skin and open heart. Before the next year starts, your life will have stopped. But beneath your burnt-out matches blazes a child’s golden soul, to be lifted by feathery arms into Heaven where you’ll grow fat on sky feasts, rest on cloud beds, laugh with other children frozen by Earth’s indifference, thawed by joyful embraces that forget the pain of being forgotten. So spread your arms like wings, let your gentle innocence pulse like a glowing beacon in the snow. Come home, child-soul. Come home, where you will never be snuffed out. Brennan Thomas Brennan Thomas is a Professor of English at Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, where she teaches creative writing and media studies. She has published short fiction and poetry in various online magazines, including engine(idling, Rue Scribe, and Right Hand Pointing. ** Liminal Highway The rural highway is lonely, stretching long into somewhere else, but it’s lined on both sides in an explosion of jonquils, like sunshine fell to earth. We coast to a stop on the shoulder so I can snap a picture, a liminal moment frozen in time when each flower was a song and altogether was a symphony of wild Mississippi. I imagine a time when this stretch of traveled blacktop was a secluded homeplace where a gardener’s calloused hands planted the first generation of jonquils to cheer up a weary hard-scrabbled life at the end of Winter. These few moments play like an 8mm reel projected on a sheet hanging in my mind where we are together again, if only in my memory, driving home from a day exploring forgotten country haunts. Charlotte Hamrick Charlotte Hamrick’s creative writing appears in a number of literary journals and is included in Best Small Fictions 2022, 2023, and 2025. Her debut chapbook of micro memoir & creative prose Offset Melodies, is included in Grieving Hope (ELJ Editions 2025), a collection of micro chapbooks. Her literary work can be found listed on her Linktr.ee and she writes frequently in her Substack, The Hidden Hour.. ** Somewhere in the Universe Lost somewhere in an unknown Universe Where vassals, all lined up, look like strange rafts. Each one fighting against their daily curse, Protecting their lands from invading crafts. All fight for Liberty to save their lives. Under an unknown and fragile power, Every faithful habitant survives In an unsafe and babelic tower. Meanwhile, light-years away, on planet Earth, Which was destroyed without any remorse, People dream of a possible rebirth On an untitled planet, their new source. Myriads of spaceships are used to invade their new home and kill it in a decade. Jean Bourque Jean lives in Montreal. ** Cotton Swab / I Ching What book to consult for the meaning of such cleromancy? An audio book to hear the flotilla sailing on the dark river around the sunbaked island foliage of one's mind? What infinite hexagrams can provide the answers, the course corrections for such journeys? dan smith dan smith is the author of Crooked River and The Liquid of Her Skin, The Suns of Her Eyes. Widely published, dan has had poems in or at The Rhysling Anthology, Dwarf Stars, Star*Line, Scifaikuest, Deep Cleveland Junk Mail Oracle, Gas Station Famous, Jerry Jazz Musician and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. Nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize, the Touchstone Award and The Red Moon Anthology, his most recent poems have been at Five Fleas Itchy Poetry, dadakuku and smols. ** The Importance Of Being I wanted to explain my thoughts on the nature of light and dark, of sharp and soft, of circles and rings. I thought I’d succeeded but no one understood me and I wanted to be understood. It was a puzzle I tried hard to resolve but no one understood me unless I called them by their names. Unless I call them by the names that they had created I am misunderstood, misinterpreted unresolved. But now, I think that I like this mystery that I have created. Though I am always open to interpretation. I am what I am. 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/ ** Score It in Light In memoriam Charles J. Fagan (1941–2026) At the centre a pale green glow opening into flame, orange and red, a radiance that knows itself. Around it, a ring of darkness: sunset burning outward, shadow pooling like mud at the rim of the cosmos. Across this ordeal, white scratches in clusters. They could be signs, not decoration, not accident, but tally marks, someone keeping count: I was here. I endured. I mattered. Or fragments of a hexagram or rune, messages breaking through. Or sutures, closing what the night split open. But Charlie never knew any of that. He would have called them memories, joys, labours, sorrows, years: fourscore and five. Two children. Four grandchildren. A divorce. Work that felt like a hundred years feeding the poor. Whispers in dim confessionals on Saturdays. The Host on his tongue at dawn. Decades of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, bead by bead through his fingers. Ancient Order of Hibernians, Our Lady of Knock Division. Grand Marshal, green/white/orange sash for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Whiskey laughter with friends. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Father’s Days. Christmas and Easter, year after year. Baptisms. Weddings. Wakes. A girlfriend. A loyal Labrador. Saltaire wind off the water. He believed in God, in a centre beyond himself, but he did not have visions. Leave that to saints and mystics. No voices. No ecstasies. No language for flame. Perhaps only glances, small gasps. An ordinary life lived among family and friends, repetition wearing its groove into time. The center spoke more clearly to others than to him. Still, light pressed quietly through, in thin places. The dark did not hold. Score it in light. StevieB. StevieB. (Stephen McDonnell) has lived a life of mystical and erotic adventure, trusting the body’s hungers as thresholds to the divine and wandering the soul’s leadings as a wounded healer—part priest, activist, therapist, and trickster. His work rises from queer eros reclaimed as prayer. In his sixties, he began shaping the prose of that journey into lyric poetry, apprenticing himself to Rumi, Whitman, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Anne Carson—and the great, mysterious in-between. He lives in an anchor-hold with windows in every room, beneath the wide sky over the farmlands of eastern Long Island. ** The Transfer There is a line of women whose hands run hot. One pressed her palm to canvas -- no brush between skin and pigment, no tool to cool the transfer. The orange went down first, then the green at the center, held there, not yet speaking, learning the shape of its own edges the way a root learns dark before it learns light. One read the bodies of children, feeling where damage had gone deep, knowing before the mind knew. Her hands worked until the joints turned on themselves -- the healer's fire with nowhere left to go, burning inward, becoming the very thing she'd spent her life releasing in others. One learned late. Found that her hands ran warm against another's skin, the fascia loosening under heat that didn't need to be explained. She uses them still. On friends. On animals. On the page, pressing language down without the safety of distance, without a tool between what she carries and what she makes. The green at the centre does not speak. Not yet. It is pre-verbal, still learning its own edges, still becoming. But it has been tended by fire that runs in the hands, by women who pressed directly in, who did not cool the transfer, who let what they carried through. When it speaks, it will have so much to say. 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. ** To Andrea Bogdan Regarding Untitled Untitled I cannot conceive, confessing humbly how I grieve an image orphaned from the thought and passion wed to have it wrought, here not as something else to see, but very moment meant to be the worth your soul has given weight by hand it guided to create, perhaps as thermographic sense, raw inflammation, heat intense, amidst the cooling underway of healing shedding spent decay becoming thus disruption stilled as treatise Seeming Unfulfilled. 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 Orange Mystery This Green Baby of infinity surrounded by a Q Tip World startles me. Reminiscent of this Orange Trump hyper vision that invades my senses. I cannot bear to look at it, or look away. This orange moon and aquiline sky dazzles, confuses and inspires. I visualize it in a circular swirl of notable dimensions. Rotating in a blessed sky making devotees of us all. Sandy Rochelle Sandy is a notable poet, actress, filmmaker, and voice over artist. A Voting member of the Recording Academy in the Spoken Word Category. Grammy and Emmy nominated. Publications include: Impspired, Dissident Voice, Verse Virtual, Amethyst Review, Wild Word, Haiku Universe, Cultural Daily, One Art, Poetry Super Highway, and others. Her Chapbook Soul Poems was published by Finishing Line Press. Sandy is a member of the Acting Company of Lincoln Center. ** eruptive sulphur hisses man’s death-dealer furious cauldron in doom’s crevice the matchstick fence is folly no defence iron-hearted core explosion from earth’s mantle vent the magma plume too deep to plumb fizzing caldera at the edge’s precipice land’s life-giver lava tongues speak volcano 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/ ** In the Time of Aries I fly through stratospheres. Across seas, serene with constellation. Towards pulsing, morphing orb. It would like to envelop me into its hope chest, winks a promise at me. This terrene wandering star. It took so long to flee earth, how keenly I’d made my roots there. Our spirits parted like a primal scream. My wound is fresh. Visible only to those who can see. Sometimes you look around you and question your reality. Then have to concede It’s true. The nightmare is real. The quickening doom. Before I left. And yet. I hope the blue planet, my once-home, is not lost. Will remake herself from dust and mourning. Despite warlords, villains, demons, plunderers. Must death be the only way for clearing? Still I pray good things unfurl unseen. Persist in gentle ways. To step out into the light. To bring about a face of earth it always wished to become. How many revolutions will it take? Still I long for my mother. One day. May she flourish and recover and never perish. I miss you, Earth. I love you. But I have a new assignment now. I am dispatched to a new planet. Whose orange suns beckon me into their orbit. This lone flight, my new form. Stronger and lighter. I have become. Electricity. I scent a change in atmosphere. A contortion of woodsmoke, a dream on fire. Something I can’t name. I draw close. What awaits me I do not know. Luminous sparks greet me as I tumble into the new realm… Nina Nazir Nina Nazir (she/her) is a neurodivergent British Pakistani poet, writer and fine artist based in Birmingham, UK. She has been widely published online and in print. She is also a Room 204 writing cohort with Writing West Midlands. You can usually find her surrounded by books, writing, or making art, which she sometimes shares on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir or on her blog: www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com ** The Call it a “Military Operation” The fires consume all. The rubble buries foe and friend. Missiles have no allegiance. Smoke from the bombed oil wells releases massive amounts of toxic pollutants. drastically altering the atmosphere with soot (black carbon), sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and various volatile organic compounds. The black smoke burns lungs. Thousands of living beings disintegrate; of her daughter they found a shoe. The djinn has left the bottle. The fires consume all. Rose Mary Boehm A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026/27. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/ ** since syntax after E. E. Cummings since syntax is second what will it matter if i say instead lost are wander who those all not; for god only knows what only god knows my soul relents, and colors are a bolder choice than composition lady i vow before the muses. Don’t dismay —the strictest order of the mind is weaker than orangish red around lemon green, which shouts we are free unto ourselves: then wonder, creating as you go for art is not a formula and the beholder’s eye cannot signify 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. ** Aware, a Painting When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. What am I not aware of? Painting... not aware, what am I doing? In my painting, I’m doing - not aware, of painting, of what I’m doing in painting. When I’m not aware, am I painting? When I’m doing am I aware? In my doing, painting. Robin White ** Exam “You shouldn’t do this,” the art teacher said. “I can’t be party to theft, Karen.” “Don’t worry,” I said as I grabbed a tied bundle of firewood from a lean-to and left the garden. “This house is a holiday let. The owner lives abroad and there are no visitors here at the moment. Who’ll miss these sticks?” The art teacher looked around. “Okay,” she said, “but let’s hurry.” I nodded and for several minutes led the way along a path to a former boat shed, one of the island’s many abandoned buildings. The art teacher stared at me and said, “What are we doing here?” “This is where I left the brushes and phosphorescent paint I took from your cupboard at school.” “What? You really should have asked me first.” “It’s all in the name of creativity.” “You must be the cheekiest pupil I’ve ever had,” the art teacher said with a sigh. “And I’m probably mad to allow you to drag me out on this so-called ‘art adventure’ that you say is your exam submission.” I decided not to reply. Instead, I shook the paint tin, prised it open with the blade of a penknife and began to brush phosphorescent white over the bundle of firewood. “Give me a brush,” the art teacher said. “Let’s do this as quickly as possible.” With a grin, I handed her a brush and placed the paint tin between us. When we’d finished, I put on a pair of disposable gloves and picked up the painted firewood. “You’re as prepared as ever,” the art teacher said. “So, what’s next?” Despite her earlier concern, I sensed that her interest in my art adventure had grown. “Follow me,” I said. We took a path that led up to a cliff. From here, we could see the two other islands that lay a short distance away. Between all three islands, the sea’s currents met in such a way that they formed a whirlpool. This phenomenon attracted visitors during the tourist season; today, though, at the end of winter, only the art teacher and I looked down upon it. “Now watch,” I shouted above the noise of the water and wind. I threw the bundle of firewood as far as I could. It tumbled down and hit the whirlpool at the circumference, where the rush of water caught it. For some reason, I now lost confidence in the effect I had hoped to achieve and turned away. “You might have to use your imagination,” I said into the art teacher’s ear, but she shook her head. “No, Karen, look. It’s wonderful.” I turned back. The phosphorescence of the firewood lit the water as the bundle spun down into the whirlpool’s centre. Red, orange, lime and blue colours appeared in succession before we lost sight of the firewood and the whirlpool’s habitual blue-black shade returned. The art teacher took a deep breath. I looked at her and asked, “Have I passed the exam?” She said nothing, just nodded. K. J. Watson K. J. Watson’s stories and poems have appeared on the radio; in magazines, comics and anthologies; and online. ** When the Sun Explodes If when the sun Says it’s done Gases that have been burning Since the dinosaurs’ first day Thrust their way to the surface Expanding, extending Out to Mercury and Venus and Earth And even further A mother’s embrace before her limbs rattle then collapse Just over eight minutes A grand finale of amber orange jade Blinding white Before just a maroon blackness remains Like snapping your lids against an intense light In the middle of a dark movie scene I have always feared pain I hope I’m not here And I will have no children whose Children will wave goodbye But perhaps by that time Humanity will watch from a nearby planet Until gravity quits and they fall And are taken in by a new heroic star. Samantha Gorman Samantha Gorman, a lifelong lover of books, lives in Western Pennsylvania. After taking several creative writing classes, she found her voice and had begun the adventure of becoming a writer. She writes poetry, short fiction, and is working on her first novel. ** Untitled Dream Or a blazing heart, like the sky in your eye, managed by a shepherd, the furnace fenced in. Distributed annually for the benefit of those who wish to remain anonymous, untitled, obscene. We shrink into porous stone of unfiltered anger, and dance as if the end of the world were one sniff away. Is that what we stand for? Is that the choice we offer ourselves over coffee, and a slice of carrot cake shaped into a supernova? Brought to justice as the midday breaks into a maudlin sense of self. If I blink in my sleep, does that create the black hole we are aiming for with our rockets? Shiver now, and pretend to forget. Let matchsticks embrace you as the winter night turns gold one final time. Dreams burning, and trying to emulate the empyrean shine; and our freedom is put to bed, in the hope that someone might remember to wake up, and switch the sun on again. 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. His plays have been performed internationally. In 2023 he created a one-man fringe show exploring his experience with bi-polar, and in the same year won best actor for portraying Charles Dickens. Zac is also a co-host on the podcast: The Outsiders. He lives with his partner in East Sussex. Find him on Bluesky @28hary. ** Matchless for Andrea Like a hand reaching through time, like a sun bursting through dark, glowing against the night, like a silken scarf around the neck of the world. 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 ** Untitled My finger finds the divot in his foot, fills the convexity with tenderness. The scar’s a souvenir of the stingray’s serrated barb, where the venom entered as my husband tried to exit the ocean. And when I ask him what it felt like, he points to this image of a painting, untitled, like the pain he stoically endured after an innocent swim, one sunny summer day. 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. ** Hedges The hedges are the backbone of this prehistoric land, They catch the wind that blows across the bleak landscape, They cast the shadows that hide the eerie secrets, The energies that drive this ancient world. The hedges keep the rough harmony between the elements, The air whistling and singing through the branches in winter and trapped and lifeless in the summer heat. The rolling, roiling water running around their roots, drowning and nurturing by turns. The fire held by the moss and tuffs of undergrowth, buried deep beneath the trunks. The earth that keeps them tethered, protecting the creatures, the flesh ones and the spirit ones. Those that belong in the other world survive unseen in the darks of the hedges, And on nights like this, when the moon lights the sky and blackens the ground, The energy bubbles up and escapes their gnarly grasp, Playing in the dead space between hedge and heaven, Until the watery sun banishes the shadows and the hedges rule again. Caroline Mohan Caroline Mohan is based in Ireland and writes sporadically - mostly stories with the occasional poem and mostly in workshops. ** Starlines Birds that build nests on rough black boughs must be bold. Timid or wise ones would resist nesting above red alchemical mists. Would anyone see them plummet, bodies impressed, like lead letters, onto the region the mist encircles, refreshed there by herbs, grasses, fruit bearing trees, seed within, each of its kind, pastured on a green-gold mind? When air cools, would they rise and ribbon back like a skein of geese guided by genetic maps? Or, like others, find the way by following lines scratched into bark as signposts? Common species use familiar positions of stars to orient their bodies in unfamiliar space, but the cleverest ones make their own constellations, place white horizontal sticks around their nests, symbolic starline guideposts. Margaret Flaherty Margaret Flaherty is a retired attorney living in Takoma Park, Maryland. She received a Masters in Poetry from the Ranier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University, in 2020. Her poems have been published in Passager and Yellow Arrow, Vignette. In 2023, she was awarded first prize in the Bethesda Urban Partnership's 2023 poetry competition ** Haiku We chased the sun round Into Earth’s molten center To burn together 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. ** Fracked It began when we no longer saw the stars at night. Floodlights surrounding the drilling site guaranteed we would no longer gaze at the Milky Way, the Leonids, the Big Dipper. Another artificial glow came from the creek, bilious B-grade horror movie sludge creeping its way downstream. Bones erupted from graves in the hilltop cemetery emerging not as recognizable skeletons, but congregations of similar morphology. Platoons of ribs lined up by eights, fibulae in groups of nines, rows of metacarpals, fourteen each. Fog rolled in across the valley, pulling tangles of woven corn silk into the trees. It ended in an incessant colossal flare Scorching the chasm that spawned it. Rebecca Hosta Rebecca Hosta is a mixed media artist and aspiring poet living in rural Ohio. When she is not stitching an art quilt or writing, she enjoys growing heirloom vegetables, walking through the fields and woods where she lives and working on a quest to bake her ideal chocolate chip cookie. Her entry for this challenge was also influenced by the uncertainty of the gas and oil drilling frenzy around her home, and the Qatsi trilogy of films by Godfrey Reggio.  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.  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. |
Challenges
|
