 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!
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