 The Sahara, by Gustave Guillaumet (France) 1867 Strange Comfort I have been leafing through a catalogue from the Musee d’Orsay while you sit reading near my bed. The book lies heavy on my outstretched lap, and I will need you or someone to take it from me when a nurse appears with my evening meds. Sadly I am no longer able to lift even the smallest brush to try and reproduce the golden bowl of Guillaumet’s sky, the grey, dun colour of the camel’s skeleton or the vast desolate Sahara. This painting somehow calls to me. I am surprised at the elegant way the bones of the camel’s long legs, once flesh and blood, are outstretched, not splayed. It is as if the animal felt death approaching and chose how to sink down onto the hot dry sand and accept its fate. The tiny caravan in the distance, on the horizon line, offers no solace, no story. “Sahara,” I say to you. “The title of this painting.” You lay aside your book and rise from your chair to stand by my bed, to see what I see in the painting. But your hand on my hand cannot hide your sadness, your dismay that this vision of death gives me comfort, something you can no longer offer, and I must forgive. Pamela Painter Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections, and her stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has received three Pushcart Prizes and her work has been staged by Word Theatre in London, New York, and LA. Her story, “Doors,” is being made into a short film. ** Emptiness The emptiness of grief through the eyes of a girl who is dreadfully lonely inside her mind better hope for heartful grief when I can write these words and release the wretched soul seizing in the lonely desert My mind forms this scene to make sense of the swirls of tides pouring over my tired body Go to the place of loneliness and hold up the form give it peace real love and there be life and colour once again pour out my ungrateful yelling onto the world to let the good life fill the empty desert in my mind Heather Sarabia Heather Sarabia is a writer and visual artist living in Madison, WI, who is on the autism spectrum. Despite being nonverbal, she is a prolific writer, typing out poetry and prose with assistance. Her writing centers on her lived experience and hope for justice. Through her work, she consistently strives to gain freedom from the systems of dependence that leave her feeling trapped. ** A Postcard from the Museum Gift Shop You would talk about pigment sources, about brush manufacture, the relative value of this painting on this or that market. You know those things about art. How it is done. How much it costs. What is popular now, and what was popular in the 19th century. “This frame,” you’d say, stopping at a painting by a French artist. “Worth two grand alone, easy.” What would I say to you? Nothing. Or, I would say the painting isn’t about the camel. It’s about the desert. It’s about how a thing will die when there is nothing to sustain it. How a thing will die, and no other thing will come to pick clean its bones because nothing, not even a vulture, can live where there is nothing. I would look at you, if you were here in this gallery with me, surrounded by oil paints and canvas and gilt frames, with tears in my eyes, with more water in my eyes than in the whole Sahara, the whole painting of the dead camel, the desiccating camel from which all the material goods it was carrying have been stripped. “Maybe it was a wild camel,” you’d say, your tone bored, your words flat and uninterested. Humouring me. No wild camel would let itself be caught like that, at the forefront of a scene, already almost a part of the sand. It had to have been a domesticated camel. Not a wild thing. Soon it will be half-buried, angles softened by drift, and I feel the sting of the sand that will scour the bones, that will dry the rough-hair hide to cracked leather. There’s a postcard of that painting here in the museum gift shop. I imagine sending the dead camel in the Sahara through the U.S. mail. The mail sorters would spare barely a glance, or maybe one would snatch the dead camel from the sorting machine just for a moment, show it to a co-worker. “Weird thing to send someone,” one might say to the other. The postal carrier, the one who delivers your mail to the out-of-fashion brass box next to your front door, would look at it, I’m certain, and would read the note on the back. “Wish you were here.” Epiphany Ferrell Epiphany Ferrell lives on the edge of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in more than 80 journals and anthologies, including Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Best Microfiction, and The Disappointed Housewife. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and a Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize recipient. ** You Never Made It To The Oasis You never made it to the oasis. It was there, but you didn't believe it. You didn't think you could have it all in one place: fresh water, cool shade from the sun, all the things you lack now. Instead, you carried all you thought you needed, but that's gone, too; it's just you, reduced to the colours around you. To the hot, dry air. To the hot, dry land. You can't live on these things, but they will live on you. The air will leech all the moisture from your skin, muscles, organs, and bones. The land will emulsify and reduce you to particles of itself. You thought the oasis was an illusion. But you are here in all that is disappearing. Rina Palumbo Rina Palumbo (she/her) is working on a novel and two nonfiction long-form writing projects alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al. You can find her work at https://rinapalumbowriter.com/ ** Concentrate Evaded A mirage - in the past preferred - romanticised, idealised, when Gustave, grand, but simple shows infinity in solitude. See on those waves, both beached, far reach - set crests, dips, statuesque through span - horizon hint of caravan, its passing, mirage as that past? Below mist mellow yellow sky, monotony, bleached bands of sand, old skeleton, cold, frozen tones, sole camel carcass in the waste. Alone, soul-search, did Guillaumet seek desolate to feel the real, as isolated wilderness revealed erased, evaded truth? Stretched parchment skin, yet sinew tent, parched bones to crumble into grains, for space, time aeons, concentrate, deserted places, Sahara. 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 ** On Guillaumet’s Sahara The world must have begun like this. “Without form and void,” we are told. In the beginning, life was not just missing—it was rejected, as the camel is rejected: You do not belong here. The beauty of emptiness must remain uncorrupted. Any life here is ephemeral. The distant caravan passes through the landscape, does not dwell in it, cannot survive on it. The camel did not. Others, too, if they do not feel urgency, will lie rejected here. Not decaying, never decaying, for few microbes avail to consume and digest in this aridness. The camel will remain desiccated instead, a warning as Ozymandias was warned: Only distance is eternal, life is not. The world must have begun like this, with only dawn to remove the chill of night, only dusk to grant its restoration. Void, and without form. Ron Wetherington Ron Wetherington is a retired professor of anthropology living in Dallas, Texas. After more than half a century of university teaching and research, he has settled on replacing scientific journals with literary magazines as an outlet for his writing efforts. He has a novel, Kiva, and numerous short fiction pieces in this second career. He also enjoys writing creative non-fiction. Among his published pieces are three in this Review. ** Sahara Trade Route The caravan slowly travels south past the carcass of a camel lost on a previous journey, travels through the desert under 102 degree temperatures in search of the next oasis when a northeast wind horizontally obliterates their forward movement with sandstorm particles. In the early afternoon the vagabonds pitch tents, wait out intense midday heat before the herd continues a dangerous trek until well after dark when the Sahara turns cold. On this forty-second day of the trip they approach an oasis where lemon and fig trees flourish where nomads exchange salt for gold, copper, and animal hides. Jim Brosnan Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Long Distance Driving (2024) and Nameless Roads (2019). His poems have appeared in the Aurorean (US), Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), Eunoia Review (Singapore), Nine Muses (Wales,) Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Strand (India), The Madrigal (Ireland), The Wild Word (Germany) and Voices of the Poppies (United Kingdom). He holds the rank of full professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI. Jim has also won numerous awards from the National Federation of Poetry Societies. ** You Desert Someone once told me that water is friendly. Free Our patron saint This place is barren of that elixir Arid one says Did God punish you? Did you eat of the poisoned apple? Oh Wait, no apples here, did you eat the poison cactus fruit? Did you take God’s name in vain? Did you forget green Or never know? Oh wait, perhaps desert lives in the slow lane, morphing slowly, slowly, so slowly we cannot discern, except perhaps at night when the owl swoops You are home Animals crawl across your scaly self Hide from the sun, thick skinned Plants get tough Proud to be resilient, canny They make do Are they your friends? Or is it just the law of the jungle, I mean the desert Harsh world, harsh truths Preparing us for water wars, to catch our notice. It takes patience to watch a world slowly emaciate itself of water, thin skinned, short sighted. We humans plod on in our juicy bodies Lie all is well, it is not. Listen, it is slowly ebbing away, hear it Listen to the desert, it will tell you how to hide in plain sight How to hunker down in dryness, solitude. How to disappear when danger comes. Pay attention. Doris Brigitte Ash Doris Brigitte Ash: "I was born in Munich Germany in 1943 during World War II. My mother tells of bomb shelters with my baby carriage. We escaped to the country, suffered diphtheria in 1945, emigrated to the US in 1948 to Brooklyn, then to upstate New York. I went to Cornell and then to the University of California Berkeley, received a PhD, taught at UC Santa Cruz for 20 years, now retired. I have been a poet and artist most of my life, often combining them in ekphrastic poetry. I write very personal poems, as my history lives within me." ** The Horizon Walks Down an emptiness that gets emptier. I see pink magnolia in white grains of sand devoid of revolt. A mirage or a miracle, swarming quiet parsing the unknown into freedom of sorts. Abha Das Sarma An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Silver Birch Press, Blue Heron Review, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru. ** Tough: A Sijo Sequence I. She died hard, and she died proud, with nary a complaint. Tough. Death’s freedom returned her to this Earth that she had worked tirelessly. Subtly stubborn and quiet, she would have wanted it this way. II. I, too, was - am - supposed to be strong. Steadfast. Unbreakable. Tough. My disapproved tears would have been met with a silent, shunning glare. She would have said to walk off my sobs and just get over it. III. We were never supposed to get lost - to survive a land this tough - to lose honest dreams to lying nightmares in this rotting abyss, goodness lost to this brimstone- and fireless hell we so wrongly chose. IV. She never got any credit. She simply soldiered on. Tough. Lacking the accolades of fine breeding, she went unrecognized, her courage, her strength, her hard work, and her kindness all unfeted. V. All our intergenerational traumas made us women tough. My own nightmares join the elite company of age old ones passed mother to daughter on repeat on ragged x-chromosomes. VI. We women die hard, and we die stubbornly, fighting and tough. Unrepentant for our sins, we become unwilling martyrs, surviving, thriving, and even tougher than we thought we were. Rose Menyon Heflin Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet, writer, and visual artist living in Madison, Wisconsin, although she was born and raised in rural, southern Kentucky. She has had over 200 poems published in outlets spanning five continents, and her poetry has won multiple awards. One of her poems was choreographed and performed by a dance troupe, and she had an ekphrastic creative nonfiction piece featured in the Chazen Museum of Art’s Companion Species exhibit. While primarily a poet, she has also published memoir and flash fiction pieces. Among other venues, her poetry has appeared in Deep South Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Salamander Ink Magazine, San Antonio Review, and Xinachtli Journal (Journal X). ** Desert Scene (High Desert, Palmdale California) Joshua trees have that power to be perceived as you need them to be perceived. Today as most days, they trod on dry ground -- grist scattered with brush; the mountains' stone temple in the distance. Gawkily, they stretch and stalk the high desert wind. Their bulge of leaves maintaining whatever moisture the night spawned. One tree lies fallen in the field, a carcass burdened with straw and crows on its back, struck by lightning or something else. We just stare and step away, following the others under a summer sun, heading toward the carved heights where cool water veils the rock; and dark pines like perfume burners honour the hawk, the hush of the living. Wendy Howe Wendy Howe is an English teacher and free lance writer who lives in Southern California. Her poetry reflects her interest in myth, diverse landscapes, women in conflict and ancient cultures. Over the years, she has been published in an assortment of journals both on-line and in print. Among them: Strange Horizons, Liminality, Coffin Bell, Eternal Haunted Summer , The Poetry Salzburg Review, The Interpreter's House, Stirring A literary Collection, The Orchards Journal, The Copperfield Review and Sun Dial Magazine. Her most recent work has appeared in Indelible Magazine and Songs of Eretz. ** Seeing The Sahara by Gustave Guillaumet We saw it on our final trip to Paris, you at my side as I mansplained meaning. If you look hard enough, I said, it's clear it means that nothing really matters. The sun is indifferent, the desert is indifferent, and the bones that were a camel don't care. They spend their days dead, awaiting their erasure by sands of time. He’s painted the future of everything; listen to the silence you can almost hear… But you urged me to contemplate the light: cool yellow wide across limitless sky, borderless dusk that could just as well be dawn. I can see it now. Where the end was born. Paul McDonald Paul McDonald taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, before taking early retirement in 2019. He is the author of 20 books to date, which includes fiction, poetry and scholarship. His most recent poetry collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange Press, 2023). ** Sahara Wadi O, wind in the dunes old wells, the aquifers mud houses “Kel Tagelmust,” the veiled people Sahrawi, Berber for desert along the river bed date trees, olive trees, figs humped camels, the zebu the wattle trees used for fodder and firewood sheep and the goats. O, everything flattens a field of bitter apple reed grass locust swarms. Ilona Martonfi Ilona Martonfi is a mother, an activist, an educator, literary curator, poet and an editor. Born in Budapest, Hungary, she has also lived in Austria and Germany. Martonfi writes in seven chapbooks, journals across North America and abroad. Recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2010 Community Award. Martonfi lives in Montreal, Canada. The Tempest, Inanna Publications, 2022, is her fifth poetry book. ** I Can’t Blame You There was no reason for you to stay. I was already gone, lost in the great Sahara of my heart. Acres of sand repeating the same denial, grain by grain, from here to the world’s blunt end, a place without mercy, that teases the eyes with visions of golden domes and towers rising into the blind white sky. Where the sun’s an anvil, each day hammered flat as sheets of metal too hot to touch, where no bird flies and no green seed dares unfold on the incinerating air. You did not see me there, bleak as the line of the horizon dividing burning sand from burning sky. You could not see through my eyes-still there but fading fast into the once green world, gone flat as a cardboard sign advertising hopes I can’t believe in. Here where my heart is a desert no one can cross, where even camels collapse like empty sacks, nothing more than leather and bones, a warning only the desperate can ignore. In this great nothing you will never enter with voice or hand or eye, where I’ve gone too far to catch, where the wind shifts sand to fill my footprints, erasing my faintest trace too fast for anyone to follow. Where no one will find me. Where I too am nothing, leather and bones, drying in the sun. Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, and recent issues of Gyroscope, 3rd Wednesday, Caustic Frolic, Inscribe, and Verse Virtual. Her collection How to Become Invisible is now available from Kelsay books. ** Deserted 1 Does the sky rise to meet us? It scatters our questions into lamentations of unshed tears. It seeps into our blood roots growing like branches between our bones. 2 The barren land holds onto our days. We keep knocking on its door but the only answer is dust. The dust turns us into ghosts. We try to find the one that is Death-- to claim it, clarify it, give it meaning. 3 Lost ground settles on the horizon. It exposes all we wish to be but are not, all that leaves us stranded, isolated, alone. Without a deity, what defines us? Belief comes and goes like anger, like despair, like all those tiny glimmers of hope. Kerfe Roig A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/ (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/. ** Deserted The new guy, most had called him, not bothering to learn the names that changed like a long-running show with an ever-changing cast and crew. At some point, someone noticed he was missing, a break in the chorus line, easily replaced. He lay there, not feeling the hot sand anymore--bleeding, blending, becoming a part of the desert. Downed by a scorpion, was it? He couldn’t remember anymore. He was floating on waterless waves in the sea of time. Drifting as night devoured the day. Were his eyes open? He was certain he saw the lights of the city, a radiant dance across the distant expanse of arid dunes. They murmur to him with the voices of forgotten loves, “come!” Stars glow in the eyes of the fennec fox. He yelps in excitement to his burrow mates, calling each by name. Merril D. Smith Merril D. Smith lives in southern New Jersey. Her poetry has been published in Black Bough Poetry, Acropolis, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Storms, Fevers of the Mind, Humana Obscura, and Sidhe Press, among other places. Her full-length collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was a Black Bough Press featured book. ** The Sahara, Gustave Guillaumet (1867) A skeleton is all a rotting camel leaves, just as the blazing sunlight sets -- without a trace of preying birds or mammals -- its death was due, perhaps, to unpaid debts in drifts of sand no human feet now trammel. Orientalists created fictions of the desert, luring and exotic, whose sand contained some secretive encryptions, as dreams made tantalizingly erotic. embraced by ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians. The desert is where we meet God alone -- the flat Sahara filled with nothingness -- while the wind like us prolongs a moan. Far back, across this treeless wilderness a caravan heads off to the unknown. It moves between two worlds in blinding gusts, across terrain that hides our history -- buried implements of war now left to rust, as the sky reveals its mystery: the arc of stars whose dust became our dust. Royal Rhodes Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who remembers various visits to the deserts in New Mexico, Texas, and the Negev. His poems have appeared in: The Ekphrastic Review, Ekstasis Poetry, Chained Muse, Snakeskin Poetry, The Montreal Review, and elsewhere. ** And You Knew Me I put city life behind me, turn my back on spires and “turf” lines. I follow my gut, those pressing urges whose origin grows from unformed substance. I never look up. I never look back. I set my face like flint and strike my own path in the desert. I know the names of every tumbleweed, every burnt stalk, every sunless shadow. I can lie down now, dream of what’s dew. mid-day shimmers in waves of shady green floating . . . floating Todd Sukany Todd Sukany <[email protected]>, a Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over forty years. His work appears in Ancient Paths, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. He and Raymond Kirk have co-authored books of poetry, Book of Mirrors (1st through 5th). Sukany’s latest book, Frisco Trail and Tales, chronicles a decade of running experiences. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing guitar, doting on six grandchildren, and caring for three rescued dogs and four rescued cats. ** visiting an exhibition in the rain rainbow hues of parked cars do not relieve the grey infusion of constant drizzle even museum corridors have absorbed the mood captured by the artist what pigment is this a muddle of avocado and coffee colors the stark Saharan landscape the desert brushed in varying tones stretches to an indeterminant sky where even the sun is muted with dust should I pity the mummified camel reduced to leather and bones neck stretched out as though reaching for one more step one more galactic spectacle of moon and stars was it the icy night that felled him or the nearness of stars that rendered him breathless outside dusk had chased the rain perhaps the night sky would blaze with that starlit brilliance Kat Dunlap Kat Dunlap grew up Norristown, PA and now resides in Massachusetts where she is a member of the Tidepool Poets of Plymouth. She received a BA in English from Arcadia University and holds an MFA from Pacific University. She edited two college writing publications as well as the Tidepool Poets Annual. For many years she was Director of the National Writing Project site at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and is currently the co-owner of Writers Ink of MA. Her chapbook The Blue Bicycle is being prepared for a spring launch. ** New Ekphrastic Contest!!!! Pick up our ebook of 50 pink prompts to inspire your ekphrastic practice.
You can enter up to eight of your pink-themed poems or stories into our contest, too. Click here for contest info: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ekphrastic-contest-announcement-tickled-pink?fbclid=IwAR1JelpV9gFQ43MJOPbpQDDsZ0avm8b8XhTkc0kNfPhtRvmFSLVZbI1_zBc
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