Alarum When I reread my book of spells, it hearkens straight to gods themselves who sit up and take careful note and seek to whom I fast devote this cunning magic’s potent brew and why this sudden cry and hue when sleeping secrets lie for ages undisturbed by fits and rages… Why this one enchanted nostrum, bound to make one’s courage blossom un-affrighted, wrath untethered, world warrior from humble shepherd turned capable of winning battle ‘gainst spirits, demons, raging cattle, fast with sword, and spry of foot, changing worlds where drops are put whether ‘neath a tongue or poured in ear this potion births a hellish fear. It rocks the planet pole to pole. And elder toverdoks will know because the past is prologue for what new wars wage, what fires roar, what madness shall now come to reign, what lessons shan’t be learned again. Truth be known, the draught’s for me, unhappy with what’s come to be, so tired of this weary strife of petty toils that entail a life. I seek destruction as solution: a nihilistic revolution. To make disparate fields all level the best angel becomes a devil. Gary Glauber Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He has five collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit), A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing) and most recently, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), a Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur finalist. He also has two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize. ** Asylum Even here behind locked doors and high walls meant to keep the world safe from my wild contagion, I can see the angels burning like witchfire in the winter-bare trees. Even in my desperate confinement, they come in choirs, in regiments, tongues flashing sharp as swords, brighter than the sun. They sing the numbers of my bones, promise power and salvation, escape from this shadow world where I crouch, vexed by grinning demons rising thick as smoke, tormenting me with jabs and pinches, nightmares chasing me down at every turn, reciting my sins so loud it drowns the angels song, pushing me into the last dark corner of these narrow halls, where I have no remedy, where no one listens, and I can only write it all down, glory and terror in the pages of my own magical bible, a Grimoire of prayers and spells in black ink figures pinned down and crowding the arcane marks of my litanies. psalms and parables powerful enough to make the devils blush and buy me some small respite from their mad unending torments. 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, the Blue Heron Review, and Verse Virtual. Her collection How to Become Invisible will come out from Kelsay early next year. ** Saint du Paradi Puritans and pandits, Parisian nudists strip, rid satin. Unpaid audits strain. Drains spirit in drips. Spirit spits rants. Asp in an urn, Isis snips – disrupts. Standup, upstand, What does it mean to be a man? Ruby Siegel Ruby Siegel is a second-year student at a women's college in Columbia, Missouri. She is a member of the Stephens College chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta English honour society and the staff of the acclaimed student-run Harbinger Literary Journal. ** Pistol Cocked Now you see it, now you don’t, odd pages, scattered leaves, The Fall, a paradisal loss before, cast spell-book here not lexicon, or primer, abecedary, but abracadabra as cabal. Claiming benefit of age this syncretistic patchwork quilt, symbols - sign of codes at work, for esoteric, in the know; tried toxic mix in undertow, a gnostic few tossed in the hue and cry for burning, which at stake but jottings, crowded, more provoked. See glyphs join graphs in saturate, asylum more in raw art script than institute for lunatics. But manic, more researchers’ work; fervour disputes delirium, psalmody, glossolalia, a solipsistic zealotry, cross rooster perched with pistol cocked. Vicissitudes of Lorraine space, where Magic, Revolution, Church, and chanted prayers not understood, by ritornelles, homophonies, compete to claim the paranoid, a wettersegen in the storm. Illuminated manuscript which it both is, but ’ting is not. 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 by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** The Magic Did Not Bring Her Back My Leah is gone. The magic did not bring her back. I desperately explored the passages, holding open the grimoire next to her while repeating the supplications. I incanted the liturgy as grief welled up inside. I sang the exhortations banishing the demonic from its imprisonment of her soul. I followed each instruction closely, and I wept. I fought in fury to revive her pallid form and there was no response. I spread the ochre as the text instructed, applied the resinous balsam in my anguish, the ancient balm from the terebinth of Gilead, tendered me through the merchants of Tyre. She lay still. I struggled in agony to command the forces of nature that had wrenched her from my life. Thomas of Chobham tells us that these forces are constrained threefold by sacred words, by healing herbs, and by magic stones. But I tried these, all, and Leah did not rise. The Apostle Mark tells us that invocation by touch is key: They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. I bathed her lifeless body in anointing oil. I cleansed her with rosewater to drive out the smell of death. I touched her pale lips with mine but found no warmth there, and Leah remained unmoved. Finally, and with effort, they pried her from my arms and wrapped her in the winding sheet of death. There was no entry through it for her soul’s return. They lowered her in reverence, into the pit of darkness, and my faith followed. I now tend Leah’s grave, scattering the roses she adored, showering the fragrances she prized. I speak to her of what we had. My tears keep moist the soil above her, and my heart laments its solitary beat, no longer harmonized with hers. Perhaps one day I will recover--but know this well: the grimoire failed. The magic did not bring her back. Ron Wetherington Ron Wetherington is a retired anthropologist living in Dallas, Texas. He has a published novel, non-fiction in The Dillydoun Review, Literary Yard, and The Ekphrastic Review, and short fiction in Words & Whispers, Adanna, and in Flash Fiction Magazine. ** mercy, blue angels don't cross that hexed picket line! the mighty blue angels are on strike doctors guard the entry to hospitals steadfast burns their righteous anger scalpels are swapped with placards appointment notes switched for banners gowned in-patients wait behind them ghostly smiles play on their wan faces and in the distant ivory towers of Whitehall what Grimoire holds the key to the deadlock? Emily Tee [Author's Note: Written on 19 September 2023, the first day ever that both hospital consultants and junior doctors held a simultaneous strike over pay in England, withdrawing their services except for emergency cases and basic ward cover. Further days of action are planned. Whitehall represents the seat of British Government.] Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. She's had recent pieces published in Willows Wept Review, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere online, and in print in some publications by Dreich, with more work forthcoming elsewhere. She lives in the UK. ** The White Owl Tell the one about the owl as a choir of angels, side by side, their wings as white as any snow squall. I can trace the alphabetical harbingers, I’ll know the songs as if born to the symbols, as if Jesus Christ could raise me from where I fell, over and over. No saint, I could never carry a tune, yet when the pages opened, caught me cruising interstate 84/285, trying to make home before the sun set and the snow began to fly. Hear me singing all the words, pretending I’m Grace Slick, or Annie Lennox, “Sweet Dreams,” calling on the saints, or believing I can become one on this road, when God creates the tunnel of snow, flakes that travel like stars, as if I am hurling myself through the Milky Way, headed for heaven, chanting because all the symbols have become magic in my mouth, the dream one of not dying, my world a loud chorus of hallelujahs, as the curve of invocations rides on the wings of angels, and the white owl, no lie, flew wide winged, and led me home. Michelle Holland Michelle Holland lives and writes in Chimayo, NM. She is currently the Poet-in-Residence for the Santa Fe Girls School and the treasurer of NM Literary Arts. Her poems can be found in literary journals, in print and on the internet, as well as in a few anthologies. She has two book-length collections of poetry, Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press, and The Sound a Raven Makes, Tres Chicas Press. ** Beyond the Sea The aether outstretches like parted hands of Christ, A hole in the sky of which divinity spliced. Fever world spin upon the axis degree, A withered white sun rises for a chosen three. Consider a pledge. Beyond the sea. Across cerulean desert and amidst salted air, The thaumaturge emerges bearing earthenware. Magic smoke rises obscuring turbid, lurking clouds, From incense censer’s foretelling demises and shrouds. Miracleworker born of shared red flesh, Sought forth lapis stone in place of success. Such visceral transmutations of cabalistic rites, Indulge runes, incantations and forbidden sights. The ladder to abyss reaches not the welkin, Ancient citadel fell upon knell whims. Thamuaturge stranger beckons the foolish and fair, Voici un vrai dieu remplaçant, mon frère. Malachite daggers, a comet’s bleak storm, Uphold your savior, mimic cruciform. Take the magician’s hand and be led afar, Beyond insect-bitten roots and moral abbatoirs. Angels plagued sick without Lord to call to, The theurgist who tricks and surrogate consume. Partake in discordant charms, partake a profane potion, Know now we are the sprogs of a since forgotten ocean. The husk of the Father calls forth the obscene, And the insidious Rex begs: Consider all a pledge to the ultramarine. Gehenna endured. Beyond the sea. Baylee Bleu ** Angels Descend The rising sun in holy sin, The lord has come. Bodies of ice, Blood undone, Angels call The time has come. In feathered skies, With silvered lies, Angels call Come with me, Children now– Your sun has set. Julie Wiley Julie Wiley is a senior English Major attending Stephens College. ** Evangelist It’s the Sunday morning in which Pierre Richard, a crazy and depressed French farmer (with whom, nevertheless, God likes to talk), begins to write. What did God, or Dieu, say to the French peasant? Did He talk to him about the upcoming Twentieth Century, and about a second millennium? That is the century of Arcadia, when intellectuals loved to tell people that life in the countryside is blissful idleness. Pierre Richard takes his grimoire, goes out on the balcony, and looks out over the countryside. He asks and, therefore, receives. The whole countryside is full of saints and angels like clouds of mosquitoes, a fleet of mosquitoes trying to land. The pages come towards him from the distance, and take the place of his eyes. He writes what he sees, but he doesn't see what he writes. Is he, Pierre Richard, the fifth evangelist? The evangelist Pierre Richard writes seriously, with a sense of duty about his encounter with glorious aliens. After he is returned to his Lorraine, he can’t stop drawing and thinking about their blue auras, not just halos – all the blue in the world. They have eyes so blue, that the blue is all around them. Like flames, as if they were surrounded by sky. Pierre Richard would like to join his hands in prayer, but he cups them and drinks everything. Angelo 'NGE' Colella Angelo 'NGE' Colella lives in Italy, where he writes poetry and prose in Italian and English, makes analog collages, asemic writings and DADA objects. ** Grimoire- Habi mas a denli fantien Great dark spirit hear my plea, bring forth my Request for power, most strong, call on all Immortal souls, I beseech thee, oh Master of blackest night, oh dark one, supreme Overlord – call on me your most loyal servant I do your bidding without pause, I draw upon your Reverence to slay those who oppose your greatness, Enemies of the night, unite in the quest! Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson writes poetry from prompts such as memories and nature, but especially enjoys Ephrastic writing. Her interests include books and music, she advocates for captive elephants and feral cats. Dickson holds a degree in Behavioral Science, has been a guest editor, served on two poetry boards and her work appears in over 65 journals, including Lorlorien, Blue Heron Review and The Ekphrastic Review. ** How to Slay a Demon Use singing bowls in the morning to lure it out from whence it hides. For they are ninjas at stealing in where they’re not wanted. Let it approach curiously. You’ll know it’s nearby as the wheeee sound of the sonorous bowl will change pitch slightly. Then capture it within and put a lid on it. Without further ado, place it in a sunspot somewhere on the patio all afternoon and smile as it shrivels. If you don’t have a patio, any sunspot will do. How they hate the sun. They like fire, sure, but not that type of fire. It’s too holy, too wholesome. Try and discover its name. Ask for the universe to show you a sign. Bear in mind it may be unpronounceable. Whisper it thrice whilst turning widdershins on the night of the full harvest supermoon and you’re home free. Cackle maniacally at anything you find funny. This will irritate the hell out of it. Burn some sage in the morning to bless your dwelling. The cliché is true. Demons hate the stuff. They’ll definitely leave the room. Better yet, smoke some in a joint to be internally as well as externally protected. Drape your pet python around you for protection as you go about your business (perhaps not when you pop to the shops). It approves of reptiles and will look at you in a new light and wonder whether you’re a demon from another realm and not actually a trickster. Either way, it will keep its distance for it is wary, nay, respectful of serpents. If you don’t have a python, not to worry, you can skip this step. Now, they are stubborn to oust for they insist on returning again and again until they get what they want - which is generally all-round destruction in one form or another as it’s the only entertainment they get what with being damned and all - so you have to remain one step ahead at all times and never slack on your demon-slaying routine. As a last resort, call upon the Archangels, the house sprites and the faeries of the garden and bid them cast their gaze upon the feral underling and evict it from your house. That will make it think twice about hanging around. It may end up loitering in the garden however, which could make the faeries think twice about lending a hand. Be as boring as possible. Perhaps spend all day reading books and doing nothing remarkable or noteworthy. Have no parties, watch no TV, spend all day in bed, paint your toenails, have a face mask, then lounge around reading yet more books. It will find you so tedious and dreary it will leave of its own accord. Nina Nazir Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani artist, poet and general creative bod based in Birmingham, UK. She's had work published in various journals, including Ink Sweat & Tears, Free Verse Revolution, Unlost Journal, Messy Misfits Club, Harana Poetry and Visual Verse among others. When she's not teaching, she's making art or poems. Other than that, she is never not reading. You can find her on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir and Twitter: @NusraNazir ** The Year I Went Without Being Saved I shall have come alone. Or not at all. And then I shall say. Let me stay on this chair, Lord. Here in the anonymous dark. For even the light switch is a reach. Is more versed in Your poor servant’s repertoire. And so, let me speak Your name. And the name of all Your associates. Deep inside of my mouth. In that cave of a thousand nights. Where I’ll have dreamt only of sleeping. And in that breath I’ll have held. Till it was the death of me. That haunted house I’ll have shared with not one ghost. Who thought of themselves as a ghost. Or not having a story to tell. O Lord, how a second word gives us a sword. And a third, something closer to You. And the wars you inspire. But then to write it is not. Worth it or the trouble. Mark DeCarteret Mark DeCarteret's work has appeared in 500 literary reviews. ** Hidden Prophecies A magic tome of symbols and spells, Unknown still in intent and meaning, Of writings within, only one foretells. Figures of green jointly compels Letters to words, together convening A magic tome of symbols and spells. Images of blue hides and propels Cabalistic clues weaving, intervening Of writings within, only one foretells. Birds, swords, heads repels Unwanted eyes from gleaning A magic tome of symbols and spells. Hidden messages in fading pastels, Detailing prophecies in brown, demeaning Of writings within, only one foretells. A masterpiece to see for all it tells, One day, of a reconvening. A magic tome of symbols and spells, Of writings within, only one foretells. Katie Davey Katie Davey is an aspiring author from the rural parts of House Springs, MO. She has worked on Harbinger Magazine as a staff intern. She plans to become a member of Stephens College’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta in Fall 2023. She will earn her BFA in Creative Writing, with minors in Equestrian Studies and Psychology, at Stephens College in May 2024. ** Before Camelot Beyond the dyke, dipping low my indigo clan— scrolling whorls and charms—wait Wait until tarnished knights stumble through the barbs They throng atop our steepled hill beating harmonies of death to ring around the stones Our hoary tongues tut curses that shift ravens from their crags and loose them as the whistley flight of arrows But still the hooved up Roman clods trample down and even crusty Merlin cannot draw the bloody gutter away from our green-bladed valley After all those that dwelt in the forbidden places filled now with chanting men pretending to be God die slowly their fingers out of place—red at the bone telling tales they did not know before I am swift—it has always been my thread to grace but even I cannot outpace the mist whispering at my heel So shrouded in the smoky breath of dragons I hurl Caliburn to crest the setting sun Its bloody pedigree bright and gone Pulled deeply down into the blue-lit world And seen only by the Lady waiting patiently in the lake for another to arrive Adele Evershed Adele Evershed was born in Wales and has lived in Asia before settling in Connecticut. Her work has been published in over a hundred journals and anthologies such as Every Day Fiction, Grey Sparrow Journal, Reflex Fiction, Shot Glass Journal, and A470, Poems for the Road from Arachne Press. Adele has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for poetry. Finishing Line Press published her poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places this year and her novella-in-flash, Wannabe, was published by Alien Buddha Press in May. Her second poetry collection, The Brink of Silence will be available from Bottlecap Press later this year. ** Untitled scribble scribble scribble. He is watching me. it must be right it must be holy it must be perfect. i am a scribe for the Lord and it must be perfect. Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews. one in the corner another in the middle. an angel here a demon there. He can see me. i’m doing everything i’m supposed to. i’m following His word. sigil sigil sigil one after the other. forgive me Father, for i have sinned but i’m doing my best i swear to you, Lord, i’m doing my best. River Louraine ** Philology Stanley the Cockroach, astral etymologist and subjective violator of many a scholarly work of biographical entomology, devotee of the Shrine of Libation to the Arcane Sigil, cloaked in mystique but bereft of the vanishing banknotes of Banksy, arrived at Singapore Airport after eight hours infesting an airline catering cube. Industrious vermin were paid no penalties. When there was a job to do, Stanley was no slacker. In defiance of a union ban on luxury travel, he jumped quickly onto a trolley bound for Helsinki, premium economy. Stanley took his fill of pre-packaged butter chicken. After twelve hours travail, when the head steward threatened to dip him in chocolate and serve him as petit four in place of sultanas, he took advantage of the sick leave provisions of his industrial award, pleading a gastroenterological emergency. His sole intention being rest and recreation, he rode in a taxi to a hotel at Ullanlinna, where the restful aspect of his lustful ambition was frustrated by a four o’clock check-in. Stanley waited, in this city where life starts later. When, at eleven, the Design Museum opened, he crawled across the threshold and skittered down the stairwell to playfully relieve himself across walls of graffiti that philologists were destined to misread, for several centuries, as modern Sumerian cuneiform. When, at last, his room was ready, he ran around foolishly, soiled the linen curtains, cavorted with the bed bugs—an afternoon of fun, finished by sharing the butt end of a smoking hot roach. Back at the museum, those philologists worked conscientiously on a theory of relationship of languages, linking the literature of ancient Mesopotamia with the damage done by silverfish to first edition Finnish print runs of the Kalevela. Among the reference sources attributed as seminal to this semiotic dreamwork was a hieroglyphic tableaux drawn by the nineteenth century alchemist, the Master of Moselle, whose grimoires turned up recently in an antiquarian bookstore in Metz. Stanley’s myriad offspring celebrate his naming day, in solemn memoriam of the time their ancestor revolutionised philology, the day he doodled all over the walls of the Design Museum. Andrew Leggett Andrew Leggett is an Australian author and editor of poetry, fiction, interdisciplinary papers and songs. His work has placed or been shortlisted in various literary awards including the Joanne Burns Microlit Award, the Bridport International Poetry Prize, the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Award and the IP Picks National Poetry Manuscript Prize. His latest collection of poetry Losing Touch was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022. In addition to medical degrees and postgraduate qualifications in psychiatry and psychotherapy, he holds a research masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland and a PhD in Creative Writing from Griffith University. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor with the James Cook University College of Medicine and Dentistry. He was editor of the Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy from 2006-2011 and prose editor of StylusLit from 2017-2022. ** how the king dances tonight stand on your throne, wretched beast, fur coat kissing the soil-stained floor. gurgle bloodied delight, teeth crimson-coppery and, we the peasants crawl in on raw knees, backs hunched with horror sing! folk, sing for your king, howl anger into symphony. how the earth rears her head, you ride her emotion, sobbing laughter through clenched jaws, pained, teeth clicking together and, strike the poppy tiles with your staff, cry! king, cry for the people from which you hung souls onto hooks and, tonight you step down take a peasant girl by the hands and, dance! monster, dance, face touching hers, and your eyes blaze concealed guilt. laugh! wretched beast, laugh the horror into cruelty, and the peasant girl screams into your shoulder: how the moonlight stares, silent, down upon a cursed dance. Aisha Al-Tarawneh Aisha Al-Tarawneh is a nineteen-year-old from Denmark and Jordan. Some of her favourite writers and poets include Vladimir Mayakovski and Nikolai Gogol. She enjoys watching KHL hockey and practicing recurve archery, as well as kickboxing in her spare time. ** To the Golden Son An Alchemist sits at his table, jars and glasses surround Lapis lazuli paint etches the pages, thoughts and theories abound. Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit The person searching for potions That are most arcane. Gold for the purest souls and lead the person’s bane. Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit Searching through the obscure, searching for something of substance. Refining matter to reach perfected amounted conductance. Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit Hoping to reach Jesus Christ and his four Holy Gospels, Following the teachings of His many heavenly apostles. Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit Documenting his research written in gallnut inklings, Searching through the angelic properties that are slowly dwindling. Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit The Alchemist diligently works to stand beside the Son. To work towards the Philosopher’s Stone that hundreds of minds have spun. Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit Mads Christiansen Mads Christiansen (any and all pronouns) is an author/illustrator from the suburbs of Chicago, IL. They are a member of Sigma Tau Delta in Stephens College. Currently, they are working towards finishing their English Bachelor's in May 2024 and plan to do their Master’s next in Library and Information Sciences. ** The Garden She had a vision—that’s what she told them, after. The ones who remained. In it, God promised that they were chosen to make a new world, an Eden. But she lied. There was no vision: no choir of singing angels, no holy fire lighting up a bush, no cinder that burnt her lips with the truth. Instead, there was a chicken. It stopped producing eggs, and so she wrung its neck like her mother taught her, and fried it up. She didn’t know what to do with the beak and the feet; it made her too sad to dump it like trash. She buried the beak, the feet, and the bones near a rose bush. It seemed a peaceful place to rest. A week later, a bulbous, baby head sprouted like a cabbage patch doll where the chicken bones lay. She should have drowned it in gasoline and burnt it to ashes. Was it guilt that stopped her? Or was it because it looked vaguely human—chubby cheeks, but green skin; brown eyes, but no irises. She found herself treating it like a stray kitten: she gave it water, fed it bits of the leftover chicken with her fingers, and scolded it when it bit her and drew blood. She brought out an umbrella to shade it from the sun, blankets to warm it by night. She sang lullabies for it to sleep, read Green Eggs and Ham over and over again, interpreting its quivering leaves as laughter. When it grew vines and scarlet flowers that smelled of sulfur and smothered her flower beds and veggie patch—she called its jealousy over zucchini and roses adorable. When the HOA fined her $500 for the unruly weeds, she laughed at their snottiness and threw away every other warning without reading it. In late Summer, the flowers died, leaving large husks in their place. The vines strangled her mailbox, creeped in the cracks of her windows and door frame, laid roots in her sink. Shoulder’s appeared, then a stomach, and webbed, finger-like leaves. The epidermis resembled that of a sunflower–dark green with a fuzz of prickles that snagged her shoe laces, her clothing, the ends of her hair. She started carrying around a pair of scissors, cutting off whatever got caught, be it fabric or hair. Her friends asked questions: had she heard from her ex recently? Was her boss acting like an ass again after the whole HR drama? Was she involved in any cult? No to the ex—fortunately. Yes to the asshat boss—unfortunately. And come on, a buzz cut is so anti-cult, she protested. The next door neighbor’s fourteen year old chihuahua disappeared around Halloween. By this time, the pseudo-sunflower stood like a scarecrow on two thick, leg-like stems. The bizarre head remained, wreathed by yellow petals, but stoic. Blank. It obliged her by letting her drape faux spider web over it. The husks had molted, revealing brown beady eyes and chubby cheeked baby heads. She spread a black tarp over them–to keep you warm, she explained—and dressed the tarp like a graveyard. The neighbors’ teenage kid knocked on her door, asking about the dog. She listened, then told her theory (coyotes). But when the kid stumbled into one of the obscured baby heads, she held her breath, waiting. The sunflower bent its head, a vine-y arm outstretched—and then the kid ran off, unaware of the danger. She knew then where the chihuahua went. It went where her chickens had gone. Where the zucchini and roses and her own hair had gone. She should have done something then, rather than stand and smile blandly at the creature towering over her. In December the not-so-new plants burst from the black tarp—head, shoulders, stomach, feet. She binged Hallmark movies, eating take out (she gave up cooking in the kitchen once the vines snaked from the sink, into the fridge). Hearing leaves rustling, she cranked the volume, telling herself that they wanted to watch the cheesy movies with her. When she left for work, she noticed that they were forming fake pine trees, winding leaves and vines around the youngest growths. They accepted the strings of twinkle lights she offered, but when she added a blow up Santa in the center—they popped it. A vine stabbed through its cheerful head. And when the first snow came, coating all of the growth in ice and white, it filled in the gaps between vines, petals, and leaves transforming them into something more substantial. The oldest of them, her nameless friend, appeared to have wings. She started daydreaming it was an angel, a divine bringer of justice. Somehow, it would make everything okay again. The boss who grabbed her breast “as a joke” would be fired and blacklisted. The ex who took the TV, the last roll of toilet paper, and her favorite fuzzy blanket, but left his dirty dishes on the counter when he moved out—would wreck his precious motorcycle. The annoying HOA president who called her every day at 6:45pm, threatening to sue her for negligence—would come home to find it burned to the ground. She came home that night. The fresh snow sparkled under the headlights of her car like the most delicious answer. She grabbed the leafy hand of the fake angel, ignoring how her skin burned from the millions of burs in its skin, and met its gaze for the first time. The truth—the ugly pointy reckoning—she destroyed the world. No vision prompted her, no demon or angel. It was just a question. She cultivated it for months, feeding and coaxing the decay until it was ripe with hunger. She only had to ask. Annalee Simonds Annalee Simonds writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review's Challenge series. This year she has read The Crucible five times in a row with her students and can't stop quoting it. When she's not teaching or writing, she dabbles with watercolour. She lives in Utah. ** Magic Magic is illusion we enjoy willingly suspending disbelief. Demons are diversions we deploy damning them as curse and cause of grief believed because of all that we deny, for which in worthy measure we're to blame, becoming random risk that we defy and innocence we falsely dare to claim is yoked to faith from which we've turned away that, glistening with envy's emerald green, we vainly see as augury of sway still there by incantation we can glean invoking without penance precious Grace dispensed as if by magic we embrace. Portly Bard Old man. Ekphrastic fan. 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. ** Blue Bowl "Some sorcerers do boast to have a Rod, Gather'd with Vowes and Sacrifice, And (borne about) will strangely nod To hidden Treasure where it lies..." Vingula devine "Kiss the day goodbye And point me toward tomorrow -- Can't forget, won't regret What I did for love... what I did for love." Marvin Hamlisch/Edward Lawrence Kleban What I Did For Love "In the blue eye of the medievalist there is a cart in the road..." Another November, Stanley Plumly I watched my daughter's fingers shape the earthen clay into a soup-plate, a shallow void in its center to hold the rain; shadows mingling in the water to prognosticate a pattern, why gypsy-lovers can't come back to cast their spell, telling fortunes in a tinker's wagon filled with tarnished silver. Aya is The apple of God's eye -- what I could never be -- my gift the tragedy of poverty born, as I was, into a time before I could know a divining rod is shaped like a sling-shot, a "Y"; how it sends a stone to skip 4 times across the pond beneath the Ash tree where Aya sits and reads of passion and success, magic secrets of The Grimoire Illuminee; why she will choose blue glaze azure as the sky, with v-shaped instructions on the manuscript page; and blue as the sea beneath a fat, full moon, a dotted "I" (God's Eye) over the turbulent ocean. We had no books in a sorry beginning, and no boats only our dreams, and magic that would lead me to this brilliant, fearsome night, illuminee where you would say I was to be your history, how we would wake to the call of the weathervane cock as nature funneled knowledge in the earth's vibrations -- La radiesthesie sourcier -- the children warned again not to swim in ground water; to wait (O God, spare the rod!) as prophecy promises gemstones and gravesites; forty-seven tones in Indian music; an angel with sword and lyre, and nine women floating through the spheres wearing hennis -- capriotes -- cone hats their metaphorical megaphone to hear the stars and the messages encoded in my daughter's plate -- Aya's scry bowl, rainfall itself a kind of divination tomorrow waiting in a dusty corner -- bless'd art thou in the future's workshop. Laurie Newendorp Laurie Newendorp's book, When Dreams Were Poems, 2020, explores the surreality of life itself as did the ancient "grimoires" used by magicians. At a time in history when Christianity was at a crossroads with old world magic and the tenets of religion, all forms of "magic" --necromancy, fortune telling, divining rods, scry bowl readings and Tarot cards -- were taboo in church doctrine. A study of Hindu mythology and old Irish language used in early legends required the poet's use of the Sanskrit Dictionary (a formidable task!) which revealed the multiple meanings of words such as Aya, used in "Blue Bowl." It is a feminine name meaning "wonderful, amazing, a miracle" with an underlying meaning of the strength of the goddess, forty-seven tones of Indian music, the ancient Indian science of the creative arts, AE as a letter in the Old English alphabet, the number 4, and the ash tree (like a blue tree trunk or spinal column on the page of Pierre Richard's Grimoire.) The capriote (cone hat) indicates the penitent's attempt through penance to get closer to God. It is remarkable for the complexity of meaning on Pierre Richard's page that it resembles a child's drawing. which seems to make the picture an example of primitivism, art naif, a magic "how to" to explain the artist's inner being.
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Greetings Ekphrastic Writers! I am pleased to serve as a guest editor for this ekphrastic challenge with art by Frederic Edwin Church. Being a native of the Buffalo, New York area, I spent many hours as a child around the Niagara River and Niagara Falls, on both the Canadian and American sides. The power of the great falls always intrigued me while I grew up. I am very interested to see what poems and flash fiction might come out of this piece of art. Special thanks to Lorette for allowing me to be a guest editor and I look forward to all of your submissions. Best Regards, Julie A. Dickson ** Julie A. Dickson has been writing poetry since she was a child, and is especially drawn to poetry prompts including art, music, nature and memories. Dickson holds a BPS in Behavioral Science, is a push cart nominee, has served on two poetry boards and as a guest editor for various publications. Her poetry appears in over 65 journals, including Misfit, Blue Heron Review, Masticadores, Medusa's Kitchen, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. Full length works are available on Amazon, including her last book, Village Girl: A Story in Verse (Sunrise Press 2023). ** 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 Niagara Falls, by Frederic Edwin Church. Deadline is October 13, 2023. 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. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.
Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. 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 CHURCH 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, October 13, 2023. 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. Uneasy Epithalamion (after Catullus) Who could enter and not think of blood? Florid cinnabar, dragon’s blood, coagulate Round the atrium, or the blood of sheep That chew the noontide grass to pulp, Soon to be spilled upon the pale floor Marmoreal, mingling with sacred myrtle And its blood-stained fruit. Even the blue silk Of steppe-dyed tapestries ripple with Parthian Bowmen, dark shafts poised to pierce the fluted Pillars. But let the tympani crash in time, The lyre tremble sweetly, io Hymen Hymenaee io! Hesperus guide the uneasy steps of the bride Who slides white and cloudy as lamb’s wool Over the musk-roses pink and maiden-strewn. Bless the carnelian petals wantonly spread Along the gliding path to the marriage bed, And leave not your evening light to cavort With night, but blaze with the torches and tapers Bright, the air thickened with burning myrrh. While the smoldering ram’s-head brazier Smokes and curls, sing io Hymen Hymenaee io! The servants follow with blood-dark wine, The same that once filled Circe’s cup, And changed clear-headed men to swine. Forgive then the bride one last glance, As the matron in vermilion ushers her Across the moon-white marble. Her eyes lock With an auburn-haired maid in clinging dress Of cobalt, or other pestle-crushed pigment. Brought to her knees, fading through the haze, Eurydice phantasmic at the last Orphic gaze. But like a cornered tortoise in a sunken pool, The procession moves blindly forward, inching Towards the soft cream bedding, with only hints Of the stains to come. Sing Hymen, O Hymenaee! Eric Brown Eric Brown is Professor of English at the University of Maine Farmington. His publications include the books Milton on Film and Insect Poetics and essays on Renaissance literature, film adaptation, and animal studies. His creative work has previously appeared in The Sandy River Review and Mississippi Review and was shortlisted for the 2023 Frogmore Poetry Prize. ** Letter To My Brother, Antonio, Before My Certain Passing Dear kapatid na lalaki, I returned from Japan to our once-beautiful island the minute I heard the devastating news: My little brother, youngest of our clan, was cut down, assassinated in the very light of day, by the butangero, murderous thugs sent by Janolino, who denies it all! Antonio, my heart can’t take the thought of you, brazenly fighting until the very end, dying in public, thirty wounds on your body, the bravest of the brave, my little brother, you died without me! I cannot recover. I know what it feels like to murder, although my war was very different from yours. Yet, the outcome is the same: People that died by our hands would still walk this earth, but for being cut down. Do you think of those that died? I suppose not, as your war was a just one, the war for independence from the Americans, drunks and thieves that they were, and still are, and always will be. My war was far less justified, the battle chosen by me, the dead my own. Dear Paz, wife and love of my life, and my hapless Juliana, mother-in-law to a murderous son-in law. Felix, her only son, was wounded, but lives, thank God! As you know, Antonio, they were not my enemies. As you also know, my only enemy was selos, rabid jealousy. Whether or not Paz was unfaithful, she didn’t deserve to die. I miss her sweet breath, her calming presence! But brother, I miss you more. I once read that you were an even greater painter than I, more talented in the natural sense. It may be true, and truer still is that you were always the better man. In the sciences or on the battlefield, you were sure-headed about your course of action. A scholar, chemist, and a general, you squeezed so many lives into your short years! My soul is so full of pride, to be your brother is perhaps my greatest blessing, after being a father. Brother, I shot them through a door! Without aim, trying only to scare Paz, I killed two and maimed another! Can you ever forgive my cowardice? You stood by my side, but you had to think I belonged in that cell. While you took straight aim at your enemy, for our people, I killed two of my very own because of pure rage! I couldn’t bear the mere thought of another man touching my wife. Thank you for minding Andres during my confinement, it was more than I deserved. I believe that winning the Gold Medal in Madrid got me out of that cell. A medal, and my brother among brothers vouching for me! Being a man that was wronged by his wife helped as well, of course. But it doesn’t help me now, brother, while my soul quakes from all of the blundering I’ve done. Allow me this: I learned my craft. I leave behind enough money for Andres, perhaps he will follow in your shoes and not mine. Hopefully, he will have the heart of a lion, the body of a beast,and like you, the mind of a scholar! Bless his motherless heart. Some say you were a hard man, brother, but I know the truth. You loved your men as hard as you led them. In a way, I killed you, too. My biggest life regret was involving you in LaRevolution! My wicked heart is about to burst, brother. I pray to see you again, in the clouds. Your kuya, Juan Luna* Debbie Walker-Lass *Juan Luna died of a heart attack in The Philippines in 1899, soon after the death of his brother, Antonio, who was the Lead General of the Philippine Army. Antonio was assassinated earlier that year. Debbie Walker-Lass, (she/her) is a poet, collage artist, and writer living in Decatur, Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Haikuniverse, The Light Ekphrastic and Natural Awakenings, Atlanta, among others. She has recently read live for The Poet’s Corner. Debbie loves beachcombing on Tybee Island and hanging out with her husband, Burt, and dog, Maddie. Big love to all Ekphrastic writers. ** Carthage Wedding, 46 BC Weeks after two families agreed to an acceptable dowry of rich farmland and gold coins, Lucretia arrives in a white tunic at the family home of Tiberius where she proceeds to the atrium with her mother. Crimson walls serve as a backdrop for blue silk curtains hung behind the banquet table. A musician clad in a bronze toga plays a wedding song as bridesmaids toss roses, lilies, fruit blossoms, and sage at the bride-to-be. Pheasant, wild boar, and venison grace the buffet accompanied. by olives, grapes, sausage, stuffed dates, and wine. Beyond this elaborate room framed by white columns reflecting on the blue-gray marble floor, the groom awaits her arrival in the reception room. Dr. Jim Brosnan A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Nameless Roads (2019) and Driving Long Distance (forthcoming 2024). 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), and Voices of the Poppies (United Kingdom). He holds the rank of full professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI. ** Upon Peering at Hymen, oh Hyménée! Incense shrouds the hall. Cinnamon, frankincense, a psychoactive calm for the nervousness and cheeriness of the crowd. The vapor veil soothes the bride, her gown muslin-like as she casts a glance at the onlookers. The boy in front raises the burning whitethorn, spiritual protection as the bride continues to be escorted to the groom’s chamber. Cupid, the little one’s power in this month of Juno, could grant Ceres rule over woodlands and make Mars strum the Aeolian lyre, snatching away metres from Ovid. Did the bride have love’s inward fever, its ache of needles? If Zephyrus whisked away the incense, what kind of air would there be? Unnoticed by much of the crowd, at the back of the clamorous hall, a goat silently crumples a lily. Efren Laya Cruzada Efren Laya Cruzada was born in the Philippines and grew up in South Texas. He studied English and American Literature and Creative Writing at New York University. He is the author of Grand Flood: a poem. His work has been published in The Light Ekphrastic, Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, Star*line, and other journals, with work forthcoming in The Tiger Moth Review. Currently, he is working on a poetry collection based on travels throughout Latin America and Asia. His day jobs have included coaching chess, teaching ESL, and writing for blockchain media companies. He now resides in Austin, Texas. ** O Hymen, o Hades Persephone looks back to see Cascades of flowers thrown by puzzled girls, Waving hands a substitute for smiles. The one she loves wears white in mockery: Hand on her head, she shows her disbelief. A sympathetic goddess turns away. Her own dress, coldly white, a travesty, The sunlight on the marble shimmers bright Like winter’s ice while darkness beckons her. The nuptial hymns, joyous on pipe and lyre, Strike funeral notes, don’t dumb the agony Of howls of grief and madness that pervade Her new kingdom. She’s heard them night and day. Behind her veil, she starts to lose her bloom. She can’t believe she must return to shade. Incredulous, she moves towards her groom, Too dazed to feel the stirrings of despair. Romantic, he’s insisted on full rites: Cup bearers proffer her a bridal toast. She looks away, uncertain, helplessly. He fails to understand the irony. The clouds of incense float across the room. Her mother, donned in mourning black, tight lipped, Bodice defiant scarlet, stands straight backed, Declining to surrender willingly Her daughter to the Kingdom of the Dead, Anger smouldering beneath cold dignity. She leads her to the darkness, full of spite. Her empty eyes stare fixedly ahead. She’s angry with her brother, that bold thief, Angry with the bargain that’s been struck, Angry with her for falling for his trick; Refuses to believe Persephone Can ever love the gloomy god of night. Her anger’s visible for all to see. Already the pale blossoms for the bride Lie scattered on the ground, begin to fade Despairingly. Carolyn Thomas Carolyn Thomas is from the Neath valley in South Wales, UK. After a career of teaching in Further, Higher and Adult Education, she is now enjoying the freedom to write. She has published poetry in Impossible Archetype, A Pride of Lions (Coin Operated Press), the UK online Places in Poetry project and collections published by Sunderland University’s Spectral Visions Press. She has reviewed for Stand magazine and her account of life as a gay woman in the 1970s is published in the Honno Press collection, Painting the Beauty Queens Orange. Stereotypically, she still thinks of Wales as home, sports a dragon tattoo and lives with a misanthropic cat. ** Where You Are, There Am I You wore black to my wedding Midnight silk shot with turquoise and amethyst A dark flower haunting the Spring bouquet of pastel-robed ladies They took me from my father’s home Customary to cry out, protest, shriek No play acting required on my part, The transaction not of my choosing Upon entering his home I was to call out the traditional Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia But I glanced back, and saw you Stooped, to pick up a fallen flower Cheeks and eyes reddened Creamy shoulder exposed Sorrow writ large across your face Upon entering his home I called out, while looking back, Ubi tu Gaia, ego Gaia Where you are, there am I. Athena Law Athena Law lives in the lush Queensland hinterland and her words have been published online by the Australian Writers Centre, The Ekphrastic Review and Reverie Literary Journal. She likes to tackle baking and gardening projects while she's mulling over the tricky plot points of her first novel. ** She Married For Love Women draw welcome songs at their thresholds as the day breaks and the roses bloom- little girls flutter in shiny silks, their faces lit with lamps. The incense trails, petals shower as the bride walks marking her feet dipped in vermillion and milk with vows of love. Her gaze shifts, eyes search beyond that room. Her mother too had married for love- a man met by chance, against her family. Alas, in love left her pursuit, stayed in regret until death. She led us high, taught us to be us, never cry when children left, when it was our turn. In bitterness She had held, needed to be held. 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. ** Quest for the Luna Tear His crime of passion, staggered shots, of wife, her mother, bloody soak; was this of marble, Roman court, arms raised in hail before the strike, Pantheon at each other’s throats? As rites of marriage, mark exclaimed, a spiteful arson, as assumed, lost, found, rejected bid for sale. This favoured loan, once savoured lone, its place, pedestal studio. Heroic, then, quest to display in splendour, Filippino known, this bronze Olympian of art from Paris, first, top-rated class, though even there Plan B ensconced. In Spain, yes, but not capitol - Palarong Pambansa, Madrid - while revolution in the air of France, less racial bias slurs, from chequered launch, returning soul. Of honeymoon, Venetian streets, the playful ludo, lido beat, in melding of subcultures’ themes, what stories in this canvas, bleak, or wear the garlands, so to speak? Acquittal of the favoured man, mere court costs for a cuckold’s fine, the artist’s passion called insane; these women framed, cause he enflamed, injustice claimed in now misnamed. So storeys tall of trompe l’oeil, some garret in a castle wall, what machinations, hidden, stall, the stop-go search to bring him home for nation’s birthday, Holy Grail. 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 by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** Hymenaios Naxos, the limit of Cretan territory. Beyond, the world belongs to the Hellenes. Should Ariadne pass beyond this sacred boundary, she renounces her right to the throne of Knossos. Theseus knows this, though he pretends that he is taking her to Athens to be his wife. Theseus believes that a husband is owed his wife’s birthright, that thrones are for kings not queens, that women are for taking and abandoning. The ship put in at Naxos to fill the water casks before facing the open sea. The crew made their noisy sacrifices to their gods, and now they are sleeping. Theseus thinks she has stayed ashore alone to look one last time at the stars of her home before giving her life and her stars to him. She tosses a myrtle branch into the little fire, takes deep breaths of the smoke. It hasn’t occurred to Theseus that she might be making magic, calling upon the Mistresses to turn her fate about and release her from the stupid pact she made with him. The smoke curls and dances, becomes misty gauze, tresses of unbound hair, the abandon of women in a trance. Ariadne does not know them for Maenads. They are not part of her culture, but they have been sent by the Mistresses, to disentangle her from this story that is now half-Greek. They sing in husky, breathless voices until they are out of earshot of the ship, and then the song explodes with shrieks of laughter, and joy that tastes of blood. They take her hands and she follows, through groves of olive and oak, bay and myrtle, to a clearing and a pool where a dark-haired man is waiting. The women fawn, licking his name with their tongues, Dionysus, stroking his face, their nails like the claws of wild beasts. He catches at their hands roughly and pulls them away. They throw flowers, their laughter rising to a frenzy. The man smiles at her, his eyes roving, his fingers itching to follow. Ariadne sees just another Greek, though this one claims he is a god. Can she not see? The women laugh, leap, splash into the pool, pulling Dionysis after them. They all drink, their faces flushed red even in the moonlight. The women draw her into a dance—she is the labyrinth dancer after all—but she drinks little, watches for dawn. At first light, Dionysus stumbles to the shore where the sailors are already preparing the ship to leave. Dionysus will send Theseus away, the women say. He will tell him you are his bride. No Greek would dare defy the desires of a god or deny his claim. Ariadne watches him return, his gait unsteady. She smells the wine fumes even in the salt wind. He walks straight to her, and without a word, pulls her to him and kisses her on the mouth. The women shriek with laughter, as musicians appear from among the trees, shadowy and with a feral smell. Dionysus claps his hands, a cup is placed in his fist, wine flows, sticky sweet, and through the gauze mist of the women, a youth appears, languid as a water lily, lying on the bank of the pool. He dips a toe in the water and blows a kiss to Dionysus. The women weave flowers in his hair, drape garlands about his neck. His tunic is awry, slipped over one shoulder. His skin is the colour of bronze, his lips too red and parted. Ariadne’s lip curls. She watches Dionysus, the dance of the women. Musicians play dark, wild tunes, food appears, all wear flowers. Ariadne narrows her eyes. She wants neither Theseus nor his drunken god, but the Maenads are all around her, and she is drawn into the circle, a locked circle. At its centre, Dionysis, heavy with drink urges the boy to his sandaled feet. With a gesture of ennui, the boy reaches out a hand, and someone tosses him a lyre. The women chant, Hymen, Hymenaios! The wedding song! Dionysus calls out, and Ariadne wonders who is the bride. Is it herself or the painted boy, or is it the wild army of Maenads? Sing, Hymen, and stir our blood. The Maenads let their tunics fall to their waists, spread their arms and let gauze, limbs, hair mingle in their uncoordinated dancing. Dionysus touches Hymen’s face, raises his cup to the boy’s lips, laughs when the sweet sticky wine runs down his chin, trickles down his chest. Then he turns his attention to Ariadne. The cup is refilled, he holds it out. With his other hand he beckons to her. The wedding cup. He grins and his teeth flash. I have sent Theseus on his way. He made no protest. Your lover is fickle, Ariadne. ‘My lover is a Greek,’ she replies, pushes the cup away, and begins her dance. None pick up the insult, none notice the thickening of the air, the Cretan air. Hymen strikes a chord on his lyre, and silence falls, all waiting to hear his voice, more lovely than the sweetest birdsong. When the first note falls to the ground, raw and rough, they imagine he is clearing his throat. None hear the growl of the Mistress’s lions. Ariadne dances, and the feral smell grows stronger, but the musicians have slunk back among the trees. The wild women cry out as they merge with skeins of mist rising from the pool, and Dionysus grimaces, spits, and pours black blood from his cup. Ariadne dances the lion dance, sings the lion song, and Hymen, silenced, claps his hands to his mouth. Blood seeps between his fingers. Ariadne hears no more, lets the dance transport her, and when she comes to herself, evening is falling, the glade is empty, and so is the sea. For her, it will always be empty. Jane Dougherty Pushcart Prize nominee, Jane Dougherty’s poetry has appeared in publications including Gleam, Ogham Stone and Black Bough Poetry as well as the Ekphrastic Review. Her short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Lucent Dreaming among others. She lives in southwest France. She has two poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers. ** A Backwards Glance O Hymen, O Hymenee, no way but forward now to my altar-bed, my moon-slung chambers! O my daunting bride, ethereal as haunted rose. O Hymen, my bride, fair as fruiting alabaster! Look upon me, my applecheeked bride! Look upon me, with blossom stung! Look upon me, foolish Hymenee! How tender the rose, not to touch. How tender the rose, save this tricky thorn! O Hymen, O Hymenee, O why do those sweet almond eyes bound toward the door? Danielle McMahon Danielle McMahon is a mom of two and occasional poet. Her work has appeared in Lammergeier, Rogue Agent, Storm Cellar, Tales from PA, and F Word. She lives in PA with her family. ** The Ode to New Beginnings their wedding jamboree / the mellifluous echoing of the undulating voices revealing the unmasked merriness / the fragrant aroma waltzing in the air teasing their taste buds / concealing the flaring nostrils with the servers soundlessly tending to the tiddly patrons is little to none / myriad suits hand in hand with their flawlessly attired halves / the whooshing hums of extravagant gowns whispering of the genesis that lies in wait / a boisterous procession ripping the air on the way to the couple’s new home / the rose petals shyly hovering / almost surreal / every impulse converging on the moment ahead / being initiated into womanhood / her hair standing on end / with anticipation / love / excitement / the shimmering lights of chandeliers spritzing abstract contours on the walls / her slim frame floating above the ground, in a trance / with gentleness she has come to know so well as he carries her over the threshold / uplifting sounds diminuendo as eyes meet / behind the closing door the world disappearing / their bodies surrendering, vehemently / an ode to a new beginning Andrea Damic Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and author of prose and poetry. She writes at night when everyone is asleep; when she lacks words to express herself, she uses photography to speak for her. She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/ ** Keeping it low key Karla wondered how she'd let herself be talked into being 'the bride' for Lexi's photo shoot. Lexi must be the ultimate sweet talker, based on how many friends she'd persuaded to turn up and wear her creations. At least she wasn't wearing one of the toga-like outfits, Karla thought. Now that the New Bride! magazine photographer had finished the shoot the toga girls were letting off steam, as were the three kids Lexi had found somewhere to 'add colour' as she put it. The toga girls were dismantling the photo set props, throwing parts of the floral displays hither and yon, a random phrase that popped into Karla's head. She consoled herself that at least none of her friends would see the pictures. New Bride! was niche, mainly for fantastical or historically themed weddings, and had only a small readership. Just as she was pondering these thoughts Lexi came up to her, smiling, and said, "I've just been looking at the proofs of the shots. There are some stunners in there. I think this collection is the one that will really launch my brand. There's one of you that's so good I'm thinking of putting it on a couple of prime billboard sites, one by the big road junction coming into town and the other above the main road through downtown. How great would that be!" Emily Tee Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. She's had pieces published in The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere online, and in print in some publications by Dreich, with more work forthcoming elsewhere. She lives in the UK. ** Hymen, oh Hymen Restorer! While living in Mombasa half a century ago, when dear mother earth was not on fire or flooded, when women's rights were in utero (who knew the birth would be ass-first breech), I shared a house with Red Sue (hennaed hair, Kiwi nurse, hymen restorer par excellence) and Black Sue (Tutsi mother, British father, blue stocking accent, snacker of crickets). Red Sue and Black Sue had lived in Kenya a good decade by the time I washed up on Mombasa's shores ragged from a 'forced' marriage to a roving dick, who said, 'If you don't marry me, I'll kill myself.' I should have said, 'Why don't you?' instead of 'I do.' Back in the intoxicated daze of no rights for women and girls in East Africa, males traded females like cattle, and as their value lay in blood on the sheets, grass mat, what have you, Red Sue and Black Sue offered assurance with virginity kits: herbal teas, syringes, vials of blood. A surety that brides would not be murdered by their young brothers (too young to be prosecuted) the morning after. Five decades later, would the Sues and I see a decrease in femicide? No. Lamentably. No. Across the globe, across cultures, across religions, thousands of women and girls are dishonourably murdered annually. Inexcusable (to so many of us) honour killings, crimes of passion, remain excusable (to so many others). And what dreadful irony in Juan Luna's painting! On a jealous rampage, Luna injured his two brothers-in-law, then shot his mother-in-law and wife to death. French law, circa late 1800s, allowed jealous husbands to commit murder. Luna was acquitted, paid 40 francs in court fees, and moved to Madrid. Donna-Lee Smith lives in a flat in Montreal & an off-grid cabin on a lake & a cottage on Gotland Island in the Baltic as she slouches towards 75 she finds her words spoken written slung increasingly politicised & she finds this deeply satisfying so much so, she wishes to thank tireless Lorette and her editorial coven for their brilliance & unflagging energy 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 Page from Grimoires Illuminee, by Pierre Richard. Deadline is September 29, 2023. 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. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.
Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. 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 RICHARD 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, September 29, 2023. 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. Dear Ekphrastic Challengees, Thank you all so much for submitting your Bowie pieces to The Ekphrastic Review. I have read and re-read your amazing words with admiration…and then read 'em again, such pleasure! This fascinating challenge has yielded a really beautiful compilation indeed, so: enjoy. Congratulations everyone, and three cheers for TER and the amazing Lorette! Thank you all, be well, Kate Copeland ** Heroes’ Odyssey Now Bowie, ten, a Bromley lad, just as was I, but up the street, a crow’s fly mile at most I’d say. My class desk in a row beside his Burnt Ash School; like Brixton’s fires, the riots of a bile unjust, piles pillars, bricks from racist wiles. Graffiti there, the poet’s tool, and walls, illumined manuscripts bloom words and storeys of new ways; a due home for once aliens, ‘no dogs, blacks, Irish’ labels gone. In inner city, outer strife gives way to carnival of life. They, Wolf Cubs, his gyrations thought were from another planet moves; from group to band, encore, again, most missing, songs of early years; would Bowie sheath or flick that knife, in search from Iggy, Ziggy flame with paranoia of his genes? Space oddity, an odyssey, to find his hunky dory name, androgyny to mask within his clouded eye from fist of friend. Cracked actor, music of the spheres, too many balls hang in the air, sheer stardust coming in to land. 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 by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** Goblin Queen What if I had stayed, joined the magic dance with you, left my infant brother to be raised by your bat-faced beasts? What if we played Marco Polo in the stone maze and let your voice draw me to you? What if I chained you up in the oubliette, and made you wait, made you beg? What if we had fucked in the tunnel of Helping Hands, and I couldn't tell who or what was caressing me? What if we threw our heads off and swapped them and kissed each-other and ourselves? What if we rode into battle on huge rolling rocks, and drove our enemies into the Bog of Eternal Stench? What if Escher’s floating stairs were a Tetris game we solved? What if the Venetian ballroom shattered into tiny stars around us, and we escaped together back into my suburban bedroom? What if you lost the wig and the leggings, nibbled my ear with your crooked teeth, and showed me modern love? Bayveen O’Connell Bayveen O'Connell is an Irish writer who has fiction in Centaur Lit, The Ekphrastic Review, Erato, Backwards Trajectory, Switch, Splonk, Janus Literary, MacQueen's Quinterly, The Forge, Fractured Lit, and others. Her micro fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction. Her writing is inspired by history, folklore, art, and travel, and she loves scouting for Sile-na-Gigs in situ. ** Ziggy This face of Bowie amidst cosmic spheres lets him be heard on painted, torchable brick and long after I pass to that stardust. Spare me from languor. The Spotify playlists. Keep my voice raw like the roaring boys bedded like rock stars until their time is up. If you are still listening somewhere amidst the lightning hear my songs, living squirming things echoing on these bricks and screaming. Royal Rhodes Royal Rhodes grew up listening to Bowie through those many, creative transformations. Like the "Man who fell to earth', he lifted us all to see the stars. ** Call Me Dave David Bowie came to me in a great big dream. I’d just finished talking with Salvador Dali, he’d been teaching me how to make a million by signing empty sheets of paper he’d left all his stuff hanging around. I said Mr. Bowie sorry ‘bout the mess He said hey brother call me Dave He threw his guitar into the air spinning spinning it shattered into a hundred stars. Look isn’t that beautiful he said I had to agree I hadn’t seen anything as beautiful since I’d seen a Sorolla burning in the middle of Madrid. We stayed a while watching the falling stars floating to the ground like butterfly's wings until he caught one in his open white hand and passed it to me smiling from his eyes. Art is nothing more than this he said. Marc Brimble Marc lives in Spain and when he's not teaching English he sits around drinking tea and dreaming. ** Bowie Mural David Bowie wall, duality of the mind, lightning and chaos. Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher ** Duality Lightning bolt mural. Living in duality, of vibrating minds. Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher has been writing since 2010 and has had many micro-flash fiction stories published. In 2018 her book Shorts for the Short Story Enthusiasts, was published, The Importance of Being Short, in 2019 and In A Flash in 2022. She currently resides on Long Island, New York with her husband Richard and dogs Lucy and Breanna. ** Bowie Wasn’t Just An Artist, He Was A Lifestyle I knew many people obsessed with recording artists in the late 70s. There was Fran, who punched a girl in the face for disagreeing that The Stones were the greatest Rock ‘N Roll band to ever have existed, period. And Penny, who convinced me to go to a party dressed exactly like her, twin Alice Coopers, garish eyeliner dripping down our excessively painted faces, scaring all the children. But my devotion to Bowie was at another level, way up in the stratosphere with Major Tom, a copilot, trying my best to right the rapidly swirling tin-can airship. Dashing home from the bus stop down the dusty country road with Amy, a semi-willing potential convert to Bowiemania, I dragged her down the hall to my room, where I blasted The Thin White Duke to “10” on my record player, mother and brother be damned, screaming out every nuanced, perfectly set lyric just in case my dumbfounded hostage couldn’t understand. Every. Single. Word. I cut my hair in the front to approximate the feathery style of “Ziggy Stardust,” and wore gold lame’ tops to school. My shoes were huge platforms, an homage to David in cracked rust leather, one of the many items I’d copped from Vital Vintage in “The City.” It was a way of being bigger, more daring, taller even. I stood out in our rural high school, and in retrospect, I wouldn’t change a thing. “All night” Bowie crooned, in his stupendously sonorous mix of Baritone and Tenor, “I want the Young American.” And we were them! We were Young Americans, Amy and me! “Where are the lyrics?” She asked, transfixed. The very next weekend, we hitched to Vital Vintage, twin feathered haircuts blowing in the gritty wind. Debbie Walker-Lass Debbie Walker-Lass, (she/her) is a poet, collage artist, and writer living in Decatur, Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Haikuniverse, The Light Ekphrastic and Natural Awakenings, Atlanta, among others. She has recently read live for The Poet’s Corner. Debbie loves beachcombing on Tybee Island and hanging out with her husband, Burt, and dog, Maddie. Big love to all Ekphrastic writers! ** When We Still Had to Adjust the TV Antenna When we still had to adjust the TV antenna I was a child in the 70s-glam rock era audiences loved him almost reverently, David Bowie's songs were otherworldly. People spoke often about his clothes, his hair, Famously, his two-coloured eyes, he had such flair: He'd split particle atoms with a purse of his lips, his fans were junkies; they were all absolute addicts. David was a visual artist, extraordinaire a meteorite from another stratosphere; characteristically charming and debonair a liberating experience back then and there. Said-to-have a voracious sexual appetite. He made love to a groupie, who lost her virginity, called Lori, guess-he-had-to later-expedite: Once he'd said ‘Lori-darling,' can you come with me? What a 'Space Oddity' it must have been when Apollo 11 launched with Neil A. Armstrong, to a new ascension, Oh, someone to follow, some brave Apollo but all I ever got from you was sorrow, sorrow. Mark Andrew Heathcote Mark Andrew Heathcote is an adult learning difficulties support worker. He has poems published in journals, magazines, and anthologies both online and in print. He resides in the UK and is from Manchester. Mark is the author of In Perpetuity and Back on Earth, two books of poems published by Creative Talents Unleashed. ** To James Cochran, Regarding Bowie Wall, Brixton London Pop culture you so well declare is common sky of planets where the stars aflame that rise and fall still loom as icons eyes recall that saw first hand the moments dared of brilliance they forever shared as music molded into soul of generations rendered whole by legacy and circumstance entwined uniquely shaping dance becoming step by step defined through luminaries you've enshrined in fittingly theatric art emerging drop by drop from heart. Portly Bard Old man. Ekphrastic fan. 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. ** Space Oddity "The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." William Butler Yeats "I was born upside down (I'm a star-star)" David Bowie, Blackstar If I could wake up with my head among the planets would I be seduced by cosmic music? Lyrics threaded in a rosary created by the stars? And if I could make a memoir with travel & devotion would I unveil that old black magic, Venus dancing much too close to Mars? * Chaos in the heavens and we were walking down a street in London looking for information: The Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley who, in the Battle of Blythe Road tried to put an astral siege spell on William Butler Yeats. The result (occult) was mayhem a brawl in 1900 with members of The Golden Dawn; Rider and Waite aligning planets when police came... * And in the modern world where I was doing research for Yeats & The Tarot, my daughter said "Crowley's dangerous, Mom! He uses bad magic! I don't want to go there!" The earth was clearly full of clashes even in the world of mystical perception called the magic of Magick -- good or evil, black and white -- that same ol' same ol' story of earthlings' oppositions -- like immigrants vs. the nouveau riche trying to gentrify Brixton: Survivors of WWII sailed from the Caribbean on the HMT Empire Windrush, bringing the advent of the multi-cultural Windrush Generation to Brixton Market; to Brixton, where David Bowie was born... * 1969, the year my daughter was born; and the year Space Oddity hit the charts -- David Bowie's first big hit, lyrics "born" to commemorate the first walk on the moon, a voyage that questioned terrestrial reality and the laws of universal gravity -- a Challenge to eclectic lineation, Tarot cards and the enchantment of surreality -- the reason I'm writing this poem to investigate critical questions: Do Tarot characters wear space suits? Do lyrics and spirits pass like fireflies in outer space their lights winking on a midnight canvas -- star-stars passing through the stars? Starman giving directions, Detach from station and may God's love be with you! The Empress answering with lyrics from Lucky Star And when I'm lost You'll be my guide, I just turn around And you're by my side! & The Magician (aka Starman) (aka David Bowie) (aka The Man Who Fell To Earth) has a few words to say: Some cat was layin' down some rock'n'roll -- Up front with his planetary guitar he's the singer on the wall -- the Bowie Wall -- a painting like a photograph of the musician, larger than life, standing face-forward so he can watch the people on the streets of Brixton. Like an audience, do they stop and imagine they can hear extraterrestrial sound emanating from his memorial his head, surrounded by dancing balls, the planets? Wonder why his face is slashed by colour, awakened by a bolt of lightning? & do they recall his lyrics -- glam rock and graffiti -- pop star, rock star, blackstar -- Planet earth is blue, and there's nothing left to do; I want eagles in my dreams and diamonds in my eyes -- to reach a universe of crystal clarity. Laurie Newendorp Notes: David Bowie was a pioneer in rock music. Influenced by the first moon walk in 1969, "Space Oddity" was his first pop hit. "Blackstar," with the line "I was born upside down (I'm a star-star)" was released two days before he died at 69 in 2016. The Rider-Waite Tarot aligned planets, astrologically, with Tarot characters. The "placement" of some of the smaller planet-balls in the Bowie mural are placed on impulse points and chakra spots on David Bowie's head, a human/astronomical connection. Quotes: Starman, Space Oddity, Blackstar, David Bowie; Lucky Star, Madonna. Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston. She studied Yeats and early Irish legend extensively when on her degree path in Creative Writing, Poetry, 1992. Her book, When Dreams Were Poems, 2020, has ekphrastic poetry that won a place in the Houston Poetry Festival, nominations for the Ekphrastic Reviews Best of The Net; and "Orpheus In The 21st Century" was listed as a Fantastic Ekphrastic. An earlier poem, "Forgive Us", written to memorialize the lives lost during 911, was a runner-up for the Pablo Neruda Prize. ** Sound and Vision "blue, blue, 'lectric blue" lightning flash, I see you too floating orbs, points of light shimmer-glimmer glowing bright it's a galaxy in thrall conductor there, midst it all Jimmy C, no novice he master of iconography depicts the trippiest ace of space to put his drip wall art in place colours, shapes seem to sway Bowie, central, defines the way his come down from Mars, far away "nothing to read, nothing to say blue, blue" Bowie sound and vision true Emily Tee Note: quoted sections are excerpts from "Sound and Vision" on the album "Low" by David Bowie (1977) Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. She's had pieces published in The Ekphrastic Review for its challenges, in Gypsophila Zine, Aurum Review and elsewhere online, and in print with Dreich Mag, with further work pending in other publications. She lives in the UK. ** “Let's Dance!" It’s the mid-90s, my best mate and I are sitting cross-legged on the carpet of her living room - vinyl all around us like scattered leaves, her dad’s old record player between us like a warming fire. The playlist so far has been Annie, Tina, Debbie Lionel, Lou, and Rod… My mate flips through the collection, lands on an absolute gem. Slips it out its snug sleeve, delicately places it on the deck like a delicious meal on fine china. The needle slowly lowers, brief crackle and static then suddenly and magnificently Ahhhhhh…Ahhhhhh…Ahhhhhh…Ahhhhhh! We’re up on our feet, cotton socks leaping about on soft beige carpet, eyes closed, heads nodding. It’s Sunday evening, we’ve got school tomorrow while colour colour colour colour lights up your face… but this is a proper education. Claire Thom Claire Thom is a Scottish poet based in the south of Spain. She is EIC & founder of The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. She has had poems published by a variety of presses, she was shortlisted for the Erbacce Poetry Prize in 2021, 2022 & 2023, and she is a Touchstone Haiku Award nominee. ** Nothing-Blue a Golden Shovel from the mural, Bowie Wall, by James Cochran, and the song, Space Oddity, by David Bowie Murals roll through the middle of town. Here tagged trains are exhibited, and I am sitting, stooped, idling on the porch, where I am zeroed-in on a red ball floating orbiting a pothole rain filled in. Would it fly out if it had wings? It’s my creative mind thrashing against this tin man skull, rusted, like that tin water can full of rain I dumped on the roses last night, when I saw him on the tracks, a glimpse of a man, guitar slung, pale face full of pain, his body a rail, in came the army issued to fly across the world to another desert. Is this Planet Mars, Hell, or the new St. Giles Rookery? Earth is the next-door neighbour’s backyard; it is wrecked with trash, a rusted swing set, a blue tarp over the roof of the meth shed, and one masking the weed-grow from the street; there’s crude music blaring from red-light cars, nothing but strikethroughs on paper. I am left with cool ashes, empty glass, no mood to write, only questions about what to do. Robert E. Ray Robert E. Ray is a retired public servant. His poetry has been published by Rattle, Wild Roof Journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and in five poetry anthologies. Robert is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University. He lives in rural south Georgia. ** Missing Bowie Ziggy colorful Velcro balls flung at a wall shedding stardust and sparkles falling to the floor Jareth lost in a maze shouting goblins, chasing childhood memories, haze of make believe Major Tom way out in the stars, not stardust but empty space floating alone David let’s dance, across the floor, Jared and Sarah or as himself stardust playing across his feet Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson loves to write poems to prompts as in music, environment and especially ekphrastic. Her work appears in various journals, including Lothlorien, Misfit and The Ekphrastic Review. She has served on two poetry boards and as a guest editor. Dickson holds a BPS in Behavioral Science, advocates for captive elephants and most recently can be found learning dinosaur names with her grandson. ** Starman I think of you often, in summer when the stars are warm, and the skies are blue, (blue, electric) blue, and Mars sings out red and raunchy. I watch the sky, looking for you, floating, not in a tin can, but on all the waves of all the seas and all the beams of light that stream, laughing with dolphins. I think of you when my face is a mess, and planet earth is too, and wonder if we even have five years. Because you can’t say no to beauty, beast or black star. My years are silver now, the golden ones wrapped in tissue paper with my red shoes, but not forgotten, as bright and tremendous as when we danced, because that was all we could do. Jane Dougherty Pushcart Prize nominee, Jane Dougherty’s poetry has appeared in publications including Gleam, Ogham Stone and Black Bough Poetry as well as the Ekphrastic Review. Her short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Lucent Dreaming and Enchanted Conversation among others. She lives in southwest France. ** Discovering the Door (for David Bowie) Planet Earth is blue, but let’s dance. Put on your red shoes, turn, face the strange. Planet Earth is blue, floats inside the cosmic mind, looking for portals. But let’s dance. Your red lipstick follows my heartbeat-- step through the mirror. Shoes turn, face the strange future that orbits, singing. Stars glitter us home. Kerfe Roig Kerfe Roig lives and works in NYC where the strange is a daily occurrence. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/ (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/. ** Millions Weep a Fountain, Just in Case of Sunrise Title after David Bowie, "Aladdin Sane" For what is the point of wasting tears when the final day arrives? To cry is to feel, and with good fortune, arise. Millions laugh and trip the light with exactly the same intention. Contemplate Aladdin Sane, Bowie’s post-Ziggy shooting star; face Kabuki brushed with white rice powder, split jagged by a bolt of red paint, head crowned with a glam-rock shag. On a Brixton wall his dissociative stare attracts the curious and fans alike to flock like those to Strawberry Fields. In time, murals fade, become graffiti obscured. Fame rises like soap bubbles, each iridescent sphere complete and intact until a wisp carries it aloft and away, and watchers feel a rumbling thrum under foot, as one by one the fleeting rainbows burst and disappear. Nancy Sobanik Nancy Sobanik is a registered nurse who writes and finds inspiration in the extraordinary beauty of Maine. Publications include Triggerfish Critical Review; Sparks of Calliope; Verse- Virtual; Sheila-Na-Gig ; The Ekphrastic Review and One Art Poetry Journal. Other selections can be found on poetscollective.org and The Maine Poet's Society Stanza. ** June 16th, 2000, Roseland Ballroom, NYC A mural across a wall stared back at me The night Bowie filled the stage Spheres of song tumbled along the ballroom walls Inside the galaxy of Roseland I was there Dancing on the shoulders of time Legs dangling over Jimmy’s shoulders Holding me above the crowd So I could see Waterfalls of lighting lit the band Sweating planets of 3000 bodies Turning pink and blue, yellow too-- Is that a fern dangling from the sky? In pointillist shimmer androgyny abounds With a multi-coloured bolt of lightning My arms rose in the wake of the warbling The crowd was one, then, In a flash radiating out to all of us Bowie pointed over the crowd To me, a dancer elevated in a magical realist dream, And through the pulsing sound system with eyes wide And lips still moist from Rebel, Rebel, he sang out, “See her out there, that’s where I want to be, dancing with you, On those generous shoulders. I love you so.” The waterfalls of lights that night never died, And years later when Bowie returned to stardust, So gracefully saying goodbye, My broad-shouldered friend, now older, like us all, Reminded me of the nod that night to our floating joy, Orbiting and glistening, like a mural rising with our memory Of the night Bowie played for hours painting the walls of Roseland with love. Emily Rubin Emily Rubin’s debut novel, Stalina (2011 HMH/Mariner Books), was a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest. Arecipient of a NYSCA 2022 Literary Arts grant, the Sarah Verdone Writer’s Award, a finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She co-founded Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that takes place in laundromats around the country. Her short stories and essays have appeared in journals including Good Works Review, Litbreak, Confrontation, IceFLo Press, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. She founded the Write Treatment Workshops in NYC and upstate NY cancer centres, and has taught fiction for Bard College’s LifeTime Learning Institute and Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program. She is working on a novel about urban homesteading and lives in Columbia County, NY. http://emilyrubin.net IG: emilyhrubin ** Tiny Bubbles, In The Air In the heart of Brixton, London, on the grand canvas of a wall, the spirit of David Bowie comes alive through an extraordinary mural by a native-born England, James Cochran, known as Jimmy C. Among the splashes of colour and the cosmic dance through his unique painting technique known as "drip painting," Bowie's visage emerges as a daring and tender tribute. The aerosol spray pain, a medium known for its urban and street art associations, was likely sourced from local art supply stores, contributing to the connection between the artwork and its environment. The purpose of the creation was to celebrate Bowie's legacy and connect it to the local community in Brixton. And there, upon this urban stage, Bowie's makeup design takes on a life of its own. Imagine standing before this colossal portrait. Bowie's eyes, twin galaxies of expression, windows to the cosmos, are adorned with a celestial palette. His eyelids are galaxies painted in swirls of metallic gold, like treasures stolen from the heart of a sun. The universe swirls within his gaze, inviting you to lose yourself in the depths of his artistry. His cheeks - ah, his cheeks - are adorned with ethereal hues reminiscent of nebulae and cosmic dust. Lavenders and lavas blend seamlessly, a testament to his ability to fuse the supernatural and the earthly, the mythical and the mortal. A playground for blushes borrowed from the gardens of distant planets. And let's not forget the alchemical kiss of his lips, bearing the colour of enchantment. A shade that hovers between the blood-red of passion and the soft blush of vulnerability. They are a melody frozen in time. A kiss that lingers in the minds of all who gaze upon this mural. The pièce de résistance is the lightning bolt- a jagged streak of red and blue crashing across his face like a cosmic collision frozen in time, symbolizing transformation, and reinvention. It is a bolt of artistic lightning, a thunderous declaration that here stood an artist who defied convention, an oracle of the avant-garde. The bolt crackles with the electricity of his music, a visual riff echoing through time and space. Bowie's face, a canvas of contradictions, was a masterpiece of rebellion and a declaration of vulnerability. His makeup designs are a symphony of paradoxes, a harmonious collision of the ethereal and the earthbound, the extraterrestrial and the intimate. Every stroke of colour on Jimmy C's delineation reflects Bowie's story—of a man who dared to be different, who reveled in the art of self-expression. Bowie painted not only his face but the very essence of his being. His makeup was a map of his journey through sound and time, a testament to the power of self-expression, and an invitation to all to embrace their inner oddities and flaunt them with fearless pride. As you stand before this tour de force, you can almost hear the echoes of Bowie's music carried by the wind. It's as if his spirit, persona, and art have all converged in this vibrant tribute. The makeup on Bowie's face isn't just pigment; it's a proclamation of creativity, a challenge to norms, and a celebration of individuality. It's a piece of the cosmos transposed onto a city wall, an invitation to explore the extraordinary within each of us. Ultimately, "Bowie Wall" is a vibrant symbol of artistic homage and community connection in the heart of Brixton. Judith Elaine Halek Judith Elaine Halek embarked on her writing expedition through a program called The Write Treatment and other local cancer writing workshops after being diagnosed with Stage III Lymphoma in August 2014. Compiling 350 plus compositions set in motion a collection of the pieces into a memoir documenting how a Stage III diagnosis propelled Judith from surviving to thriving. Peeking through the lens of self-publishing, Judith will be debuting her Heroine’s Journey when the book is ready to birth. Originally born and bred in Minnesota, Judith has nestled in New York City for four-plus decades. ** Coming Down From a Creative High and News of David Bowie for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means. Maria Popova on artists, creativity and Bowie January 10, 2016 Last night I lit candles and became the midnight sun. A carousel of planets spun around me. The rings of Saturn sparkled with dust; and that face on Mars (formed from red clay) turned pale and became the face of a china girl --. prompting me to write poem after poem invoking the grace of Lady Li Yi'an in her mother of pearl skin and silken gown. I understood how she moved from line to line and how the blank space surrounding the text was sacred as the words. A white flock of birds hovering over her ink-filled universe. And I wondered how long she would stay, or what might happen next. Yet at the momentum's height, dawn broke through the dream spitting out the first sprinklings of the year, while the soul of a musician crossed his final bridge in the damp and mist-swabbed atmosphere. With the rain, I fell to earth inheriting my shadow and the chill, the smell of sour milk and candle smoke. Whatever I let spoil or burn-out before I woke. And now the mirror's overcast with my image, a mood neither dark nor light just a desolate, still gray -- the winter woods, the sea gull on a lake of ice. the ashes of a moment left scattered on my windowsill. Wendy A. Howe Note: Lady Li Yi’an, is one of the most famous poets among Chinese women of high rank who wrote verse during the 12th century. Her poetry is celebrated for its original imagery, emotive language and lyrical pathos. At a time, when women were objectified as beautiful vessels meant to ornament the home and supply an heir, she, as David Bowie said of an artist in one of his last interviews, "steps beyond the water into depths of risk and stays afloat without letting their feet touch bottom". Wendy Howe is an English teacher and free lance writer who lives in Southern California. Her poetry reflects her interest in myth, diverse landscapes, 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, Silver Blade, The Poetry Salzburg Review, Eye To The Telescope. Carmina Magazine and Corvid Queen. Her most recent work has appeared in Indelible Magazine and Songs of Eretz. ** The Man Who Fell to Earth after the 1976 film starring David Bowie The alien said Yes to disco balls and audio waves and shiny, happy people wearing boots for glam, late-night benders. Maybe we clamor for more saxophone since listening to our tongues only seems to benefit the devil. This is just to say take good notes before returning home. At the library, he said Amen and again to books. We tend to ruin things here when we borrow. We wear wristbands to show we belong to something. Like a hospital or a concert outside at a ranch. The cashier at Cracker Barrel, where breakfast is all day, mentioned belonging. Like places inside us living in celestial space. Also rings to show commitment. Do you have this word? For the sweet everloving. For who we’re gone for. Gravity is different. And those other balls, Yes, look like planets but more like giant ice cream dots. Strawberry. Lemon. Blueberry. And the wall is the bottom curvature of a tangerine cup you hold. Let me show you. Take my hand. Crash landing in New Mexico is rough if you want to ship all that water back. Drought is yellow, a mouth that hardly speaks but its speech has seen plenty of distance. And don’t forget to take note of one, whole life. When we extinguish, we leave behind dust clouds, zigging in and out. John Milkereit John Milkereit resides in Houston, Texas working as a mechanical engineer and has completed a M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop. His work has appeared in various literary journals including Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Review, and previous issues of The Ekphrastic Review. He has published two chapbooks (Pudding House Press) and three full-length collections of poems, including most recently from December, A Place Comfortable with Fire (Lamar University Literary Press). ** Ziggy’s Last Act Outside Morley's ch-ch-ch-ch-changes to the architecture, this aerosol impromptu shrine an oddity of dots and colorful spheres floating in a most peculiar way, Bowie’s signature lightning bolt a nod to duality of mind, this fresco, just doors down from 40 Stansfield Road. The artist, was he under pressure or did internal desire move him to create this worldwide phenomenon? Rest easy now, Starman. Elaine Sorrentino Elaine Sorrentino, communications director by day, poet by night, has been published in Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, Global Poemic, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Agape Review, Haiku Universe, Sparks of Calliope, Muddy River Poetry Review, Panoply, Etched Onyx Magazine, and at wildamorris.blogspot.com. She was featured on a poetry podcast at Onyx Publications. ** it happens like this in the star dusted multiverse i was drifting on an astral plane when ziggy that special man materialized incandescent inside me except the fiery glow of spiders from mars just beer lights guided us when i floated away they flowed with me i sucked them into my mind i wondered were there laws in the corporeal free world concerning subtle bodies & laws of relativity the stars twinked admiring our astral bodies of light ziggy sang making love with my ego i'm not really female i whispered i'm not really my body i'm just taking my turn looking after it the spiders from mars signed when will it be our turn soon i replied your times are coming ziggy gazed into space from his screwed-up eye this is like a fairy tale he sang in sweet alto tones please forgive me i implored for all that i have done & left undone for all that i am about to do the spiders from mars webbed across my mind please let us forgive you away we floated wondering together as ones do in the bowie regions of their multiverse Donna-Lee Smith (With many a nod of appreciation to David Bowie and James Tate.) Donna-Lee Smith is an old Bowie fan and her ragged old heart did a wee flip when she saw Cochran's piece! ** Ziggy Stardust Erasure Poem Margo Stutts Toombs
Source: Musixmatch Songwriters: David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust lyrics © Chrysalis Music Ltd., Tintoretto Music, Chrysalis Music Ltd, Rzo Music Ltd Margo Stutts Toombs enjoys creating and preforming flash and poetry. Her work lives in FreezeRay Poetry, Untameable City - Mutabilis Press, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Love over 60: An Anthology of Women’s Poems, The Ekphrastic Review, the Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Contest, Equinox, and Synkronicity. She performs spoken-word poetry and monologues at fringe festivals, art galleries and anywhere food and beverages are served. Margo loves to craft video poems for film and video festivals. She recently won first place in animation at the Caucasian Short Film Festival in Lake Charles, Louisiana (2023). 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 Hymen, oh Hyméné! by Juan Luna. Deadline is September 15, 2023. 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. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.
Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. 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 LUNA 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, September 15, 2023. 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. Red Enso The wind blew clouds across the sky in rapid scrawl as streaks, puffs, and stacks—semaphores written across the landscape of Himalayan peaks, shrouded then revealed—I longed for one last glimpse of Mount Kailash before I climbed into the car, the flaps of my cap beat against my ears but held my hair inside, no strands whipped my face, but I could not walk to the open car door yet, I turned to my Ama-la, prayed this wouldn’t be the last time I’d see her, when the sun suddenly appeared. Everything fell still into the blue sky. Mount Kailash appeared. Ama-la clutched her apron, afraid to wave, I ran to her and held her tight. She embraced me. I shut my eyes tight, dots of light appeared against the red skin of my eyelids. I tucked my head into her shoulder and saw single red circle. I had not seen this circle with eyes open, now only one image appeared, not two, not one for each shut eye, but a single image, I wondered why with both eyes closed I didn’t see two images, but instead this single red ring as though painted purposefully by one hand, then I heard my mother’s voice: “Jampa my love, it is this circle of love that keeps us together whether perfect or imperfect, and I know you have seen it as I do with my eyes closed. We will never be apart in mind, only by distance, and you will always be my child, my beloved boy, though I must let you go, your journey from here may seem to go into a line of an unknown future, or an arc from young to vigorous adult, then to old, or as a series of circles, morning to night to next morning to night, that elapses in days, or months, year after year, but at the end of your life, this circle will tie you onwards to the next time you return, even when you take your last breath, you might recognize me as someone you knew before, I might be your child next time, so do not miss me. In parting, we'll meet again.” Annie Bien Annie Bien has published two poetry collections, flash fiction, and a pamphlet, Messages from Under a Pillow, that includes her own illustrations. She is an English translator of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures. Forthcoming is a historical novel on the Sixth Dalai Lama, co-written with Robert Thurman. https://www.anniebien.com/ ** To Jiro Yoshihara Regarding Red Circle on Black art renewing life reflecting -- imperfectly -- life renewing art Portly Bard Old man. Ekphrastic fan. 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. ** Obsidian Bold boiling lava hits icy ocean cold as mistrust misunderstanding and all other mis- It all happened too fast No time for crystallization Sharper than diamond and surgeon’s steel blade A giant black tape 0n the mid-melt mouth of the ocean Jiang Pu Jiang Pu, Ph.D., is an author, editor and translator of many textbooks, literature and children's books; and is the founder of NextGen Education. Her recent poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Caesura, Topical Poetry, among others. She grows a bee & butterfly garden in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first name means "a big river". www.jiangpu.org ** Choose You must decide-- inside or out. All black. That will ooze buckets about who you are—what spills and what is con- tained. Do not get seduced by the O ring—crimped. Choose your purgatory. Jay Brodbar Jay Brodbar: "My family here in Toronto and my writing practice are my two pillars, the latter getting a boost in coping with isolation in the time of plague. I have published in various journals including McGill Street, Parchment, Reform Jewish Quarterly. My poem, What We need Beyond the Pale, appears in the Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine, with proceeds going to PEN Ukraine." ** Only Night Knows For Sure A circle blazing orange-red against darkness. Snake aflame in the matte-black night. Fireworm corkscrewing through midnight-blue water. Night as it passes through the orange-red, crackling circle in Yoshihara’s painting like words an ear picks from the crackle of a flame. From the ravings of sooty beaks. A rave of ravens. Gathering secrets tucked beneath ebony pinions, clucked about in small talk and inuendo. What does night know of me as it pulls me through that circle? Pulling me by the eyes through an illusion of motion in the painting. Are they words as snake venom, which can stop a heart? As the neurotoxin in fireworm spines, setting the world into a tailspin when brushing past? My wife says I dwell too much on words and things passed long ago. Wheel in a rut. But can a circle go anywhere other than back as it moves forward? Follow the tread—a line of burning blood—and look at how it falls back onto itself over and over again. Recollections on an axle. Rumors turning. A conspiracy of ravens, gossiping within earshot. A scorching circle. The circle in the painting, going nowhere and round and round. My mother says, from among the dead, that I dwell too much on the pain of the living. It’s like the poet who says he’s studied and become intimate with the speed of darkness.[2] So fast it’s always here, coming from nowhere.[3] Circling in an ocean current. Burning at the slightest touch. Gravity pulling continually from the hole of a circle. On a current of air, caught in a feather. As if the cells which compose the hole crackled, ready to take the cells which fashion the circle with them. On a current of breath. A treachery of ravens, gathered and cackling. Glistening black marbles in feathered heads, taking in the entire world. Black news caught in crystal balls. My father says there’s something inside the hole, but best not to look too long or too deeply into it. A circle burning through the black background of a painting. A reverse brand, seen from under the skin, searing. Marking its own. The fireworm lands and the tingling from its spines begins. My brother looked long and red into the blackness of that hole, peeling apart its layers, before he finally fell through it. He’s still falling. I hear him in an owl’s screech. In the grinding rust between axle and white-enameled steel wheel on a red child’s wagon. The wheel turns, revolving around dead things, as ravens are wont to do. Searching with the whole eye. With the hole in the eye. The hole beneath a fiery brow. Night knows about this. About him. Is he why I fear waking in less than utter dark? In the turning of a worm—a word? —something burns through and is carried, floating. Playing the circle where it lies, in the truth toward which a golf game would return? My wife, who used to play golf, says to hit the ball and move on—the circle will take care of itself. Circle at the game/s end. Reversing, circling back as if gazing deeper at a painting. Raven in the hole at the circle’s core, cawing for the others in its unkindness. Trickster, roosting in the hole of my circle, pulling with its beak. The caw in the morning, an orange-red tear though myself. Is it actually the night wanting me back? Is it my brother wanting me back? Better to play the ball, move on. Jonathan Yungkans Jonathan Yungkans finds time to write while working as an in-home health-care provider, aided by copious amounts of coffee in the early-morning blackness. His work has appeared in MacQueen's Quinterly, Synkroniciti, Unbroken and other publications. ** Red Circle on Black Here against the black background of grief Love inscribes itself in a red circle which grief can never swallow. As long as I remain in that red circle eternally, darkness will not cover me. Elissa Greenwald Elissa Greenwald, a retired English teacher, now prefers writing to reading. ** The red ring is perfectly imperfect: a universe expanding, contracting, breathing a heartbeat an umbilical cord a circumcision a tick’s bite bulls eye unleashing a crippling palsy the burnished brass plucked on a carousel ride with cackling cousins a secured seal - what no human may tear asunder Grandma Flo’s jiggly, canned fruit filled bundt Jello mold cupping marks - a practice that failed to clear the fluid in time an unknowable centre adrift in the black of everything else Jeffrey G. Moss Jeffrey G. Moss was born and bred in Brooklyn, USA. After 32 years guiding 13/14 year olds in crafting their worlds he has finally started following some of his own writer’s advice. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Bending Genres, Cagibi, Hunger Mountain Review, Under the Gum Tree, and Hippocampus. Find him on IG @jeffgm. ** Temptation of the Circles Everyone at home was eagerly waiting for Diwali—Indian festival of lights which adds extra sentences to autobiographies and school essays every year. The walls of home had become fierce like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” The old paint had already started falling off the walls like the cascade of descending swaras. Festival brings offers, bonus and loans. Father had applied for a festival loan from his office to purchase paint. The good news was that his officer’s pen tagged Rescued screamed on the paper—-‘sanctioned.’ Money was drawn, paint accessories purchased and furniture was weaponed with tattered and unusable bed sheets, newspapers so as to protect it from falling wet paint. The room was already ready yesterday and whitewashing had started. Now what next? The next threat was Vani. Vani was their two-and-a-half year old naughty baby girl. They already knew about her unexpected quirks. Just six months back she graduated from crawling, zigzag to perfect walking. And see now—-she’s gliding! Her round, eyes on her round face reflect infinite energy! She would live like a butterfly hovering around every flower of the garden. At one moment she’s on the window pane at another she’s at the diwan. She would fall down, rehearse again, cry and laugh again, and then again run—-laughing, falling, jumping—- bare foot. All holes tempted her. Many holes are circles after all! Compelled by her instincts she’d go happy around inserting her fingers in running-electric-sockets or any other empty spaces she would come across, sometimes even hers or father’s nostrils. The pet Jimmy had mixed feelings of love, subordination and scare for her as once she startled him by putting her finger in his bum when he while asleep and was already being sniffed by one of his street opponents, in dream. While exploring her senses, yesterday, she poked her fingers on the newly painted wall. Two times she spoilt the paint. What can she do? Colours fascinated her. “Pappa..pappa…gimme colours papa,” Vani babbled, her eyes already hypnotised with ‘her’ expected answer, present in future, “Yes. Yes. Why not Vanu. These all buckets are for you Darlo.” The father turned towards mother and instructed with a flat high tone (mainly the first one) you only find in Mandarin, “You’ve to take care of this monkey before she spoils everything. I told you to send her to the play school but you denied. You never do what I say.” Listening the word ‘school’ Vani clenched mother’s legs and looked at the father through the green ripples of her sari. Mother caressed Vani with love. "She’s not even three. Don’t you remember how uncontrollably she cried when we sent her once?” Mother instructed Vani to bring her notebook on which she could write with a pencil. Vani ignored the pencil-book-idea and made herself invisible behind the door from where in half crying tone she kept insisting on dripping her fingers into the bucket of paint. Suddenly accompanying the drizzling sky, the Sun came to a position where it could enter the room through the window and reflect the mixed colours kept in the bucket forming young handsome rainbow on the white wall. “Alright Mom, pencil. Gimme one,” Vani babbled in a language which only her mother could translate. But there was no reply. Father had gone out to bring thinner for the paint and mother had gone to the veranda to collect wet clothes from outside. Vani knew that it’s ‘the’ opportunity. She ran towards her coveted aim like the best female sprinters of the would-be The Paris Olympic— 26 Jul, 2024. Like a philosopher holding his jaw on his hairy paws, Jimmy gazed suspiciously at her activities, hiding his ipseity with his fluffy tail. Vani inserted her fingers into the paint tub and scribbled circles on the wall depicting something which only she or her God knew. Droplets of colour poured on her arms, nostrils, lips and everywhere around the floor. She painted many many circles. Every circle was different. Enchanted by the magic of circles she made, she would poke her finger in the middle of it. She went on and on, destabilising centres, unexhausted. That wall was now an admixture of beauty and beast. After a while mother came inside. She saw Vani and the wall, the whirlpool of colours around her. Her mouth opened agape, the wet cloths she held on her shoulder fell down with a thud of Newton’s apple. She went running towards her and yelled, "Vani! Vani!!" Sandeep Sharma Sandeep Sharma is an Asst Prof of Comparative Literature at Government College, Diggal (HP), India. He is Associate Editor of the journals In Translation (Université Badji Moktar de Annaba) and Traduction et Langues (University of Oran 2). He received the Award of Academic Excellence (2022) by the Arab Translators’ Association for his contribution to research and linguistics. He has published his works with Impspired (UK); SIL International (US);The Yellow Medicine Review (Southwest Minnesota State University); PoetryXHunger (Maryland State Arts Council, US); Southwest Word Fiesta (Silver City, New Mexico); Lothlorien Poetry Journal (US); The Anguillian (Anguilla); In Translation (Algeria), HP University (India) and so on. His book on Translation Studies is made available as a reference book in the universities of Africa, Ukraine and India. His page, with 277k viewers, remains at the top 1% position on academia.edu. Here is the link to the page https://hp-in.academia.edu/SsandeepSharma ** caught in the crossfire he is a volcano threatening to erupt a gasp of thin-red-lipped fear a bloodshot eye on high alert a cigarette burn on flaky skin a target ripe for a sniper’s gun a hole in the heart erasing love a petalless poppy weeping blood a scarlet wreath laid at his feet Kate Young Kate Young lives in England and enjoys writing poetry, painting and playing the guitar and ukulele. Her poems have appeared in various webzines, magazines, and chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlet A Spark in the Darkness has been published by Hedgehog Press and her next pamphlet Beyond the School Gate is due to be published in the next month. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet. ** Onxy Mood O stony sorrow O sorry loss O loop too hollow O no tomorrow O woozy cocoon O poppy knot O ghostly blotch O cold clock stop O cross fox howl O owl scorn dollop O phlox blossom spool O sky myrrh-blown O bloodshot body O scorch of pox O colon clot O lot of horror O shock of drool O snort of rot O joy forgot My bowl of soot Helen Freeman Helen has poems published on various sites and magazines and regularly submits to The Ekphrastic Review. She currently lives in Durham, England. Instagram @chemchemi.hf ** The Nip Stare at red circle on black for mere minutes, then look away to a white wall. The image reverses, rehearses. Red turns green, black urns white. Boundless roundness. Rods and cones, my brain moans and gives up, spluttering, gasping for air. In the blink of an eye, the wink of trying to change things. Infinite jest, circle with a nip taken out by a hungry universe. It’s not perfectly round, more human, with foibles. The caged circle too contained by the dark. Chipped like her toenail polish, tonal dripping with blood. Wild and pacing, bracing for an escape. Never turn your back on the circle. Red eyes flashing in the dark. Lynne Kemen Lynne Kemen lives in Upstate New York. Her chapbook, More Than a Handful was published in 2020. Her work is anthologized in Seeing Things (2020) and several others. She is published in Silver Birch Press, The Ravens Perch, Fresh Words Magazine, Spillwords, Topical Poetry, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and Blue Mountain Review. Lynne stands on the Board of Bright Hill Press. She is an editor for the Blue Mountain Review and a lifetime member of The Southern Collective Experience. Her book of poetry, Shoes for Lucy will be published in 2023 by SCE Press. ** Poet’s Wudu Unroll the prayer rug. Surrender to surrender. Kneel in the pew, needing to be kneaded. Settle on the cushion cross legs close eyes. Bow begin the kata yin leading yang arrive where time neither ticks nor tocks feel the hand of Author True holding the pen of your life. Mike Wilson Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including Amsterdam Quarterly, Mud Season Review, The Pettigru Review, Still: The Journal, The Coachella Review, and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, (Rabbit House Press, 2020), political poetry for a post-truth world. He resides in Lexington, Kentucky, and can be found at mikewilsonwriter.com ** Blind Spot Early Christmas Day, she catches a glimpse of an unwanted gift: a grey dot, lingering like some weird charcoal patch, stuck over her right eye. It blocks her stars’ jazzy blues. It steals a host of angel shapes. It snatches the tree-lights’ dazzle. All she can see is a bright red halo, filched from Santa’s hat, beaming back at her like a Bloody Mary, half-drunk. Dorothy Burrows Based in the UK, Dorothy Burrows enjoys writing poems, flash fiction and short plays. Her work has been published both online and in print journals. She often doodles in circles. ** 無限 (Infinite) by squaring the circle, this unaccustomed stroke of artistic notion unknown by many a man you wonder if they’ll understand your dab of red on black as conjured in your mind avant-garde, you hope they exclaim as impasto flows by many a field and fallow but time will tell, you know as for all innovative lexes you ARE a pioneer of vicissitude in the realm of the inured *** oh, unblemished stillness unfolds in my mind as I try to fathom how it feels to be liberated from the shackled chains of the unyielding traditions in this Self of cyclic effort we call the perpetuation of Life Andrea Damic Andrea Damic born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and author of prose and poetry. She writes at night when everyone is asleep; when she lacks words to express herself, she uses photography to speak for her. She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/ ** What my heart yearns for now. L. She's only 6 years old but she swings the fire poi like a pro carving a perfect red right angle into the November blackness. Wrists and elbows flick sharp, fluid. She's Zorro. My heart is so full it could burst the Thames Barrier with an ocean of bluebells, king- fishers, Finding-Nemo-fishes, with an ocean of electricity all around the w w w w w w world. O. She's only 6 years old but she has the poise of a pro swooshing a perfect red circle through the November chill. Her arm spinning from her shoulder. My heart is so full of pride Scottish pipe bands march up my arteries, with kilts and drums. Red sparks light up face-painted faces eating toffee apples. Red sparks light up sheets of copper for the copper-bowl-beating. She lassos us all together with a perfect red circle of molten candy strawberry, raspberry, cherry. V. She's only 6 years old but she can write with molten glass in the air. She can spin and swing and change direction abruptly. Making a succession of red ticks, flick-booking on my retinas. My nostrils breathe smoke from the bonfire breathe cider, lentil curry, roasted pumpkin. In the distance snatches of sound from the singing workshop - chanting, clapping, laughing. My heart is a Venetian kiln full of Murano an Armada, a coastline of blazing beacons. Her fire trails whip us all together into a Big Top, into trapeze and clowns and elephants and funfair, into a circus. e. She's only 6 years old but she can spiral fire like candy floss like Celtic writing, like scarlet ribbons. Buzzards are mewing overhead. Clover and vetch grow under her toes. Red deer watch from the larches at the ruined monastery. She loops her red threads around us tying us all together, over and over. We hold our breath, scrunched up like empty packets of crisps in tight fists. Our hearts leap across the night, leap through my daughter's hoop of flame. saskia ashby saskia ashby is a UK visual/performance artist and poet. ** stillness [inhale] 1 2 3 4 [exhale] 5 4 3 2 1 [breathe]. ### Tonka Dobreva Tonka Dobreva is a writer and Christian life coach. Her work has previously appeared in Ekstasis Magazine and is forthcoming in The Amethyst Review. ** Ebb and Flow I chase my cousins into the laundry room. They shriek in laughter, tossing a wad of clothing back and forth, stashing it into the dryer, but I manage to peel away their fingers from the metal door—and it’s in that moment as my twin cousins have collapsed onto the floor with laughter, and I hold, triumphantly, a soiled piece of clothing--that I find out what menstruation is. I don’t remember when I first got my period. The doctors always ask me that, and so I estimate: middle school, 12 years old. For my mother, it happened in gym class. White shorts. Somersaults. Eternal embarrassment. She still winces when she tells the story. I’m diagnosed with PCOS–Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome–in college. Irregular periods, extreme pain, blood-clots-larger-than-a-quarter. But my breaking point is my first year of teaching. My roommate and I joke about how that first year begins to mirror the 10 Plagues of Egypt: lice, mice, and a three month long flood of blood. And it is a gush. I use triple layers of protection: super tampons, bedtime extra-long pads, specially designed period panties (black) that should never go in the dryer. I give up on wearing jeans and stick to black slacks. I stash tampons and pads everywhere—in my car, the bottom drawer of my desk at work, my purse, the pocket of my backpack. I drive with a towel over the seat of my car. I set alarms for 3:00 in the morning to remind me to take a pain killer or else I’ll never uncurl from the covers at 6:00. When my gynecologist appointment finally comes, my doctor warns me that if/when I try to have kids, it may be difficult. To solve the issue of my never ending period, she prescribes medicine to make my body shed all of the lining of my uterus. I cannot understand how there is still tissue and blood left to be sloughed off. But yet, somehow there is. The shedding continues a month into taking birth control before, finally, the madness ends. In the third year of trying for a baby, I buy the expensive digital ovulation and pregnancy tests because I can’t take the color game anymore. I need the shock of the answer in harsh, black lettering to believe it. No: you are not pregnant. No: you are not ovulating. Late at night, I google for hope: when will I ovulate if my cycle is 35 days long? 40 days long? 42? How heavy is implantation bleeding? How many days does implantation bleeding last? My period—both the lack of one and its reappearance—betrays me. In August 2022, the doctors inform us that my husband is missing something in his DNA; he can’t and will never be able to produce sperm. We both stop taking fertility medicine. We stop counting days and measuring colors and debating names. Instead, we research sperm donation, adoption, fostering. We cry. We question. We make depressing art. We vent about all the well-meaning nonsense we’re told. We promise to adopt a dog when Summer comes. We kayak in tandem and bicker about taking turns paddling. We dream about going on a cruise around Japan. We navigate the Chattahoochee River’s rapids and rocks in inner tubes, flip out into the two feet of cold water—and cackle as other pink and green tubes bump helplessly into us. And eventually, we loosen our grip on the grudges against our bodies. Annalee Simonds Annalee Simonds writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She dares her high school students to use semicolons and em-dashes in their own writing. When she's not teaching, she dabbles in watercolour. She grew up in Georgia, but now lives in Utah. ** Red Circle on Black Target with no center. Big apple without core. Aimless fruit in sleepless city. Bruised, but given to the poor. Laura Gunnells Miller Laura Gunnells Miller is a writer in southeast Tennessee who enjoys exploring rural backroads and creating travel photography books. Her poetry has been curated by Artemis Journal, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, American Diversity Report and other publications. ** Into the Darkness Graves under a November sky, dark memories of wilting poppies, red blood, black mud, flooded trenches. Mouths without faces, bodies without limbs, fingers,arms, feet; here a skull lingers. Scarlet tissue in a lunar landscape, the dark side of the Moon. Rings of fire, of sacrifice, of heroism, wreaths of poppies, pride, pomp, patriotism. Beyond - vacancy, darkness, the wronged wait in the blackness, the nothingness of oblivion, for the glorious mirage. Stateless, without passports, nameless, awaiting that other, promised country on which the sun never rises. Sarah Das Gupta Sarah Das Gupta is a retired teacher living near Cambridge who also taught in India and Tanzania. She started writing last October after a stay in hospital, following an accident. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies from ten countries, including US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, and Nigeria. Writing has been instrumental in learning to walk again. ** Can 0 Be More than Zero? Sometimes she pushes against the notch in the red ring, thinking it’s a hinge that will open to possibilities, but it doesn’t budge. + Sometimes she stands on a red cliff looking into the black face of a volcano, tired of trying to be chill. + Sometimes she walks in circles at the bus stop, creating the red strokes of a Japanese brush painting, but the bus never comes. Sandi Stromberg Sandi Stromberg’s full-length collection, Frogs Don't Sing Red, was published by Kelsay Books in April 2023 and includes several works nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Most recently, her poetry has appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, Panoply, San Pedro River Review, MockingHeart Review, Sappho’s Torque, The Ekphrastic Review, Waco WordFest Anthology: MOON, and Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose. She is an editor at The Ekphrastic Review. Her poetry, translated into Dutch, can be found at Brabant Cultureel and at https://wwwtransito-ah.blogspot.com/2023/07/sandi-stromberg-vak-27-graf-no-66.html. ** Unborn Eye After Jiro Yoshihara After Tomas Transtromer First thing What do see? What do see, before re-entering? Somewhere back in the iris dark, Still joining the stars. What do see before yesterday returns, Wearing reverential all white, The lining of a black suit worn inside Out, as day is to night. What do see see uncorrupted with your Unborn eyes? Quick, someone is coming, remembering. Christopher Martin Christopher Martin is a poet and Buddhist living by the mouth of the Tyne on the north east coast of England. His work has featured in various publications and events. His debut collection is due out 2024 @theblackcatpoetrypress. ** Blast Crater The surrounding perimeter formed a closed curve, rim still aglow with heat from the mountain of smoking rubble that had collapsed into its epicenter. Hot ash covered everything and hung in the air like a plague of sand flies, biting, blinding. We could see there were no survivors. Then a mild breeze created an updraft, which became a whirlwind whose writhing column soared far into the heavens. We prayed it was loaded with souls at peace. R. A. Allen R. A. Allen's poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, B O D Y, The Penn Review, RHINO, The Los Angeles Review, Maier Museum of Art Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry, Alba and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Best of the Net and two Pushcarts. He lives in Memphis, a city of light and sound. bodyliterature.com/2020/02/17/r-a-allen/ ** monoku 1. not a perfect red circle, like existence itself gembun 2. the black seems more like storm clouds when red is circled within a black background... how brilliant the sunset haynaku 3. enso sacred circle black creates red Daniel Brown Daniel Brown has just published at age 72 his first collection FAMILY PORTRAITS IN VERSE and Other Illustrated Poems published by Epigraph Books. He has most recently been published in Jerry Jazz Musician and Chronogram Magazine and has been included in Arts Mid-Hudson gallery presentation Poets Respond To Art in Poughkeepsie, NY. ** Aubade with Circle Game after Joni Mitchell Someday I’ll love the bottomless swamp. They will tell him take your time… which means to begin by contemplating a dot, and then to reflect on a line wiggling as a sparkling redfish that spirals close to a dark-blue boat drawn off the coast, beaches with plenty of compact sand, throwing perfect, an auburn frisbee feeling like vinyl, an LP ready to needle the future, then gulf fallen, but recovered by your lover’s hand when the sky was full with high cloudlets. Despite the sloppy throws and blisters, you keep throwing. And catching, captive on the carousel of time… I’ll eventually love August, days dripping by. And the seasons they go round and round. And the frontier of a small radio, jostling the antenna to work—clothes as costume—before wonder, before we caught a dragonfly inside a jar. Cartwheels thru the town. Round with decent looks, and later, we escape the escape room masquerading as an art gallery full of painted ponies we press fingertips on. Lights dot up lines under a starry night to reveal clues which help secure the Declaration of Independence and unscramble wooden blocks to spell: teamwork. A hidden door unlocks. We can’t return we can only look. Yes, I love kissing farewell to old, traditional paint, monsters left inside at palace altars. Dear, let us throw our gentle bodies into the swamp. Peat forms coal, fuel for the simple gesture of joining together, sheets of someday. No, dreams don’t lose their grandeur of coming true… Oh, for the elusive, pristine circle. John Milkereit John Milkereit resides in Houston, Texas working as a mechanical engineer and has completed a M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop. His work has appeared in various literary journals including Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Review, and previous issues of the The Ekphrastic Review. He has published two chapbooks (Pudding House Press) and three full-length collections of poems, including most recently from December, A Place Comfortable with Fire (Lamar University Literary Press). What a wild time it was- unbridled creation. Thank you to everyone who participated in our second annual ekphrastic marathon! Every one who tried this fun and gruelling writing event is a courageous soul. Reading the entries birthed during the marathon, and choosing some for this showcase, proved a difficult task, as always. What a wondrous variety of works were inspired. It was not easy to select a few from so many shining jewels. Congratulations to everyone whose work is here. They are in alphabetic order of author, except for the first two, which are the winning poem and the winning story. I am grateful to our editor Sandi Stromberg for her help choosing the winners. Congratulations to Roy J. Beckemeyer for his winning story, "Performance Memoir in Yellow" (which was inspired by two of the prompts!) Congratulations to Karen FitzGerald for her winning poem, "Manuela's First Baby." Let's do this again sometime! Lorette Flash Fiction Winner: Performance Memoir in Yellow He chose to misread her title, announce it as “Woman in the Wings,” so sat, stage left, alone in the spotlight, aglow, smoke curling from his Gitanes, and addressed the audience using his tobacco-thickened accent, described each step in a stage whisper as she danced it: how she unfurled her wings, there just off stage right, crooning “Oh, déployer ses ailes,” how she carefully revealed her slender nudity. Her blonde hair was the color of lemons, she wore the fragrance of Limoncello. He kept track of his place in his autobiography with his index finger, used it to feel the ink on the paper, to trace the words with which he had first described her, first revealed that she was his initial, his inimitable love, first told how his fingers would trace each wing vein from wingtip back to her body, how the wings might have been birthed by Caesarian Section rather than sewn as gossamer puppets, their intricate motions and movement controlled by her tapered fingers. He said nothing about how she eyed him from the cover of her folded arm, how she turned only enough for him to imagine seeing the slight swelling that would reveal her breast if she chose to turn a bit more, how she showed in the way her eyebrow arched to disappear into her cascading hair that she had had enough for one night. He glanced up, raised his own eyebrows, signaled for the lights to be darkened, left the audience only the afterimage of his radiance burned into the rods and cones of their vision, left them feeling (or imagining they felt) a slight swirling of air stirring the hairs on the backs of their necks as she whisked out from beneath the rapidly descending curtain, invisibly danced in midair the choreography he had described only moments before, their hearts aching with longing to see her, yet even then somehow satisfied to simply follow each move by sensing the evolving wake of her wings, feeling the delicate eroticism of his descriptions in the slight movements of air. They sat quietly in the fading golden afterglow of his memories, her ghostly absence, nurturing each recollection as if it now was one of their own. Roy J. Beckemeyer Roy J. Beckemeyer’s fifth and latest book of poetry is The Currency of His Light, (Turning Plow Press, 2023). Beckemeyer’s work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards and has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2019. He has designed and built airplanes, discovered and named fossils of Palaeozoic insect species, and has traveled the world. Beckemeyer lives with and for his wife of 61 years, Pat, in Wichita, Kansas. His author’s page is at royjbeckemeyer.com. Poetry Winner: Manuela's First Baby While body grows to carry you, my sweet baby, I press down worry and banish fears so that you, mi amada, may flourish in your readiness for my arms. I will cherish each pain that causes you to pass from my body into this world where you will be loved, nourished and named Esperanza. Doubt tumbles from heart like snow from an evergreen. Fertile family tree. Karen FitzGerald Karen "Fitz" FitzGerald is a genre fluid writer. She has an MA in English Lit from Sonoma State University where she was recognized for her work in language centered theories of human behavior (1994) . She currently enjoys the beneficence of The Sitting Room (https://sittingroomlibrary.org) who grants her the privacy of their writing room, under the Redwoods in Penngrove, California. Dusk&Dawn in/on the Streets&Roads of Lavapuri For my mother, Mona 1. The street hawker (from up North) continues to sell watermelons on the wooden cart parked right next to a manhole (without a cover)—which is, most certainly, at least a decade older than the fruit seller—shouting: FRESH & CHEAP! 50 Rs per kg! But such catchy sales mantras do not fool a seasoned bargainer such as my mother. 2. A stray dog and a bitch are interlocked; local town boys are throwing stones—even their worn-out Bata flip flops—at the pair to somehow dislodge them. (This scene: a perfect analogy to understand as to why/how the intimate relationships and marriages break and fail in such a social setting.) 3. The reflection of the sunrays off the surface of freshly laid asphalt is as bright as the light being emitted from a white hole; even the most expensive of the Ray Bans can’t seem to offer any respite for the ordeals of the retinas. Never mind missing the red and the amber and the green of the occasionally functional traffic lights—barely installed at the required legal height and distance. 4. The people continue to stick on to their favourite political demagogues like houseflies to sugar. Now they’re carrying our rallies against the “Foreign Intervention”; now they’re conducting protests to condemn the “Inflation”; now they’re organising sit-ins against the “Character Assassination”, and what have you. For a proper escape and/or catharsis, I’d dare suggest, the proper venue is: discos/clubs, pubs/bars, gigs/concerts, cinema, art, literature, poetry, sports, and tourism. 5. Left, right & centre, the check posts have sprung up like the Spring Gardens in the Netherlands! (Cynicism, distrust, and pessimism are the signature traits, here. The society and people are not to be entirely blamed, I suppose—after all, they’ve been played at the hands of the economic hitmen & terror/ism mongers for many, many decades.) 6. Oh, YES!—the clerics are definitely fond of all the (post)modern paraphernalia that The West has to offer e.g. big TV screens, huge-ass SUVs, sexy smart phones/tablets, fast double decker airplanes, can’t-breathe-without SM (Youtube, Metaverse, TikTok, WhatsApp, etc.), scary tanks and fighter jets and kalashnikovs, interest based banking system, and what have you. But at the slightest hint of a critique of their religious dogmatism / fundamentalism, they’re out & about on the roads & in the streets like the deadly swarms of locusts vandalising retail shops, bus stops, and setting buildings on fire—even setting people on fire (under the banner of blasphemy), if need be! Oh, YES!—hypocrisy happens to be a trademark trait of the clerics, after all! 7. The businessmen (far too many), the lawyers (many, many), the generals (many), the academics (merely a handful), the poet (merely a handful), and the philosophers (hardly any) are barely moved by the respective scenes; for, the majority of ‘em have been but only conditioned under such a commonplace. (After all, the in-your-face Social Class System works as the fuel to their raison d'être-fire! The verb named ‘Change’ is as if کفر/Kufr in their sacred books.) Saad Ali Saad Ali (b. 1980 C.E. in Okara, Pakistan) has been brought up and educated in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. He is a poet-philosopher and literary translator. His new collection of poems is titled Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021). His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. He likes learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities on foot. To learn further about his work, please visit www.saadalipoetry.com. X You offer your dreams like an open palm, cloud-like and beckoning. High above the earthen plane, laden with the people we were, you keep watch in the evening sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of our past selves in the future. But your eyes begin to bleed from the staring. The beauty that feeds your mind in the night causes pain in the light of the rising sun. I know you want to believe in Fate, or, that there’s something cosmic that binds us. I want to believe it, too, and some might say that’s enough. But whatever tie exists between us, it is not meant to bind. Keep my likeness on its pedestal, if you must. I won’t begrudge you that. Just promise me you’ll come down from your mountainous perch, find shelter from the storms in another lover’s arms. Brown with waiting, the torchbearer falls-- God is watching Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum is a writer and teacher from Wasilla, Alaska. She currently serves as CEO of Red Sweater Press, President of Alaska Writers Guild, and is working on her MFA in Creative Writing with Antioch University LA. She is also on the marketing team for Lunch Ticket, Antioch's online literary magazine. Learn more about her and read more of her work at caitbuxbaum.com. Love Crate Annie saw red when Jon told her “I just want to be fair and square with you: we’re at different stages in life.” She would bend his jagged thoughts into her straight-line itinerary diamondring-marriage-house-children-dog. She cooked all his favorite food for his meals: shrimp scampi with penne, goat cheese raviolis, pesto fusilli, stuffed him with rosemary pork chops and petits choux with pastry cream until the buttons of his shirt burst and she had to sew him up like a fat trussed goose. She roped him tighter, stowed him in her crate. One by one, she raised the rods to cage him in: no more guys’ night out, no more video games, tracker on his phone leaving only the tiniest square of yellow sun for his freedom. He grew blue, stopped eating until he became thin as a thread, slipped through his prison bars, and disappeared into the sky. Christine H. Chen Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in Bending Genres, Atticus Review, Visual Verse: An Anthology of Art and Words, and other journals and anthologies. Her work was selected for Wigleaf Top 50 2023, and she is the co-translator from French of My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming late 2023). Read more at www.christinehchen.com Fair Eva She is a writer’s daughter, and pictures him tearing pages from his pad, as vapour trails down soaking walls. He demands her to arrange the flowers, and her sister won’t do either: they paint. Early morning, her rosing thoughts direct domestic tea, her bird- eye’s view wins over a master. The salon starts showing her pastels, and she draws on a graveyard of time, fills a vase of passion. Have worlds always been turned down, settings ever so impressive? Colours grow, as petals weather on. She sneaks through careful flowers, and might mark: a men-society opens slowly to a woman. Silk and satin seem not real painting gear, but what climbs over patios, is right what she wants to possess, on purpose. The hope and dream are that she may be captured by collectors, alive, alive. Kate Copeland *Fair Eva is the name of a pink rose. Kate Copeland started absorbing books ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching & translating; her love for art & water to poetry…please find her pieces @The Ekphrastic Review, Poets’ Choice, First Lit.Review-East, Wildfire Words, The Metaworker, The Weekly/Five South, New Feathers, AltPoetryPrompts a.o. Her recent Insta reads: https://www.instagram.com/kate.copeland.poems/ Over the years, she worked at literary festivals and Breathe-Read-Write-sessions, recent linguistic-poetry workshops were via the IWWG (more workshops in the making). Kate was born @ harbour city and adores housesitting @ the world. Evening Itinerary of Two Septuagenarians We choose our TV dramas from the category “Scenic.” Why not disguise the demise of our own dazzle in someone else’s daydream? Hills drowning in soft mystery of moss, we board a fleeting train and settle into a dance staged long before we began. When the season ends, we’ve already chosen our next couched adventure - descent into Bordeaux’s distilled elegance, camera swooping over wineries castled in stone surrounded by labyrinth fields seducing us with sun stoked greenery, stirring the pleasure pot of memories of a rented car that swept us too between those winding vines of southern France. The plots are incidental, tired trails of handsome men and gorgeous women, the underside of their riches exposed in some tawdry murder. But dozing in the sustenance of our just finished dinner, we are unphased by their decay or the wit of the detective who uncovers all the clues we miss. We imbibe mountains, sunsets, turquoise ocean, sip ever half full glasses of rose. Joanne Durham Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). She finds Ekphrastic writing fascinating and won two awards for Ekphrastic poems in 2023: Third Wednesday's annual poetry contest and the Mary Ruffin Poole Prize. A Pushcart nominee, her ekphrastic poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Inflectionist Review, Dodging the Rain, and Litmosphere (finalist for Lit/South Award). She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ever artful ocean as her backyard and muse. https://www.joannedurham.com/ Peace Offering But what if the sign was a thick slice of layered cake, filled with sweet-tartness of lemon curd? What if you could taste my apology in each bite? Gabby Gilliam Gabby Gilliam's poetry has appeared in One Art, Anti-Heroin Chic, Plant-Human Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Vermillion, Deep Overstock, Spank the Carp, and others. It has also appeared in anthologies from Pure Slush, White Stag Publishing, Black Hare Press, Raven’s Quoth Press, Devil’s Party Press, and more. You can find her online at gabbygilliam.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/GabbyGilliamAuthor. All that Disappears the light is almost gone swallowed by clouds sky no longer blue a soup of green and brown day and darkness both the same cars rust in the fields erode in air with birds and trees nothing grows it’s silent here on Earth: glaciers melted oceans filled with smoke and glass empty rivers no voices it’s over Maryann Gremillion Maryann Gremillion: "For years and years I tried to fit in conventional work places that crushed my soul but provided a living. I don't have to do that anymore! Hurray! I am grateful to have found myself. Writing and art matter." Even After After the blood pooled and dried and dripped and flowed—because your kitchen floor was built on a slant you always meant to fix—after the police arrived—after they searched for a note—after they drove you away—body covered in a white sheet-- after the three weeks it took to locate a relative-- after the flames consumed your bones—after the death certificate arrived and I flew out of the chair, out of my body—after I screamed into the abyss of the Grand Canyon—after I lit candles and incense—after digesting the two words on the certificate located in the “Manner of Death” section-- Even after that, I still see you, all 6’2” of you, thin against an angry back drop of purple-black clouds, covered in camouflage, legs steady in the rushing current of the Housatonic River, your line casting with ease, the way a raven trusts its wings: without having to think about where to go. You’re home. Belonging only to yourself and the rush of water you couldn’t control, but learned to endure. Joyce Hayden Joyce Hayden is a former university writing professor. An advocate for underserved populations, Joyce has led generative writing groups for battered women, teens at risk and survivors of abuse. She continues to facilitate online writing classes and has taught a weekly Ekphrastic writing class for over three years. Her work appears in Al Jazeera English, The Yellow Arrow Journal, Manifest Station, and many other publications. Sing Sing to me with lute and lyre Sing to me on wind and fire Sing to me with lips and eyes Sing to me in truth and lies Sing to me of wings and birds Sing to me in loving words Sing to me in green and blue Sing to me in every hue Sing to me of magic beast Sing to me, then let us feast Sing today on river’s bend Sing tomorrow, never end Cathy Hollister Cathy Hollister is an older writer whose work celebrates treasures embedded in age, isolation, and continual readjustments. 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. Her work has been in Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Open Door Magazine, Humans of the World Blog, Beyond Words Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Poet’s Choice anthologies, and others. Her new book Seasoned Women is available at Poet’s Choice. She lives in middle Tennessee; find her online at www.cathyhollister.com No Longer Yesterday Hector sent me this small book—a handful of time—by messenger. A black book, white pages, dark lacey ink creeping all over the margins. A primer for how · All things grow rigid and bright · Stepping beyond the muddy smudge of shadow · Straight lines, sharp corners · Incandescence · Exposed bloom · Fire-found agonist · Wild sublimity · Sweep of land · Brokenness · Glistening Ending on the last page with · hatches and hatchlings · horizons of swoon · a dip Each line was a whole story, sediments of restless fish and tentacles//landed//lashing. At “dip,” I slipped off the planet—beyond the showcase of mullioned light into a puddle of possibility, just beyond the toes of my shiny, patent-leather shoes under my heavy, lamp-black skirt. I’m disappeared between the rough covers in the rough hands. What covers? someone asks. Some covers. Who asks? A covering. No one asks whose hands. · Swell · Swollen · Swoop · Slowly · Stallion · Smoke Who has gone back into the pages (me? Could it be me?) and added a layer of s’s? All this I was blind to. I stand by the window in the sunlight—no longer the woman who answered the door. Annaliese Jakimides Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and mixed media artist who grew up in inner-city Boston and raised a family on 40+ acres on a dirt road in northern Maine, growing almost all their food and pumping water by hand. She currently lives in a small city next to a library. She’s worked with environmental justice organizations, international arts groups, and people in prisons. Cited in national competitions, and nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, her works have been included in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, and broadcast on NPR. annaliesejakimides.com Butterfly Woman I wanted to know these fragile wings understand why some choose flight: time and tenderness and tomorrows strength and sorrows and salvation When I emerged fully whole in 1958 my wings were immediately clipped I was taught the words home & now I was reminded to be nice, not kind Nice doesn’t get one very far along it swells the tongue & doesn't last Kindness is damp soil & sunshine some gentle rain and deadheading Paper wings are fragile and light our backsides are strong & naked in the places, our wings once grew shoulder blades: winged scapulas & once, we had teeth named wisdom Patty Joslyn Patty Joslyn lives in Vermont. She’s fascinated with death and birth as passages into new realms. She has been published in El Calendario de Todos Santos, poetsonline.org, VOYA, (Voices of Youth Advocates), Tupelo Press-30/30 Project-March 2015, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and several anthologies. Patty’s book ru mi nate was born in 2017. Patty has never fully recovered from empty nest syndrome or the fact she can no longer do a cartwheel. Interior from Strandgade It is 1900 where you are hiding, being careful not to be seen by the exterior world where your head in a book would be looked on as frivolous or a waste of time when you could have been learning to sew, to cook, to make babies or to turn down suitors that are not in your heart wishing you could find a lover who would accept your books, your music, your curiosity about what lay outside that window, beyond the tree branches that you have starred at so many times. The squares on the window pain, the rectangles on the door, the refraction on the floor give you hope. And dear, you stand, tired of being told to sit still like a little lady, a proper lady. If you could close your eyes and transport yourself over a century would you be surprised to learn that your country, your Denmark, encourages women to work and provides care for your children? Imagine. Jennifer B. Kahnweiler Jennifer B. Kahnweiler is a non-fiction author of five books and a poet who is based in Atlanta, GA. A favourite aunt gifted her with a book of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems and she was hooked. She started writing poems during the pandemic, and received the Natasha Trethewey poetry prize from the Atlanta Writers Club. She has recently been published in the Avalon Literary Review and MacQueen's Quinterly. Music & Art Clasp Hands Meeting in the garden, flowers and vines encircling us. Birds in branches, peacocks displaying. Preening. We’re enfixed in fabric. Restriction of our movement in marked contrast to theirs. Yet the fabric flutters, print alive and moving. Music and art clasp hands. Ode to oud. Rattles rattle seeds. In the garden, we’re not resigned to the attics or nooses of society. We reign on Tuesday mornings. No grey–bright colours and forms. It’s a feast of senses. The whole garden is in dialogue, avian and Algerian Arabic. Who Who asks the owl as we twitter like birds. Lynne Kemen Lynne Kemen lives in the Great Western Catskills of New York and appears s in various literary journals. She published her chapbook, More Than a Handful, in 2020. Additionally, she contributes as an Interviewer and Essay Editor for The Blue Mountain Review, a culture-focused journal, and is a member of The Southern Collective Experience. Lynne's upcoming book, Shoes for Lucy, is set to be released in the fall of 2023 by SCE Press. Irish Swirl Ireland. Green hills. Fields of green where sheep graze. Long country roads past rolling, green hills. Small homes with thatched roofs touched by fresh moss. Friends pass on the country road and wave to the man by his small home. In the city. Dublin. Walking past Trinity College. Taking the way by St. Stephen's Green. "Look, there's Guinness Storehouse." Now the taverns. Fire glows on the pub side from the market stall. Drinks all around. Happy faces going red. In Belfast. One church. Another. We pass on opposite streets. We go, catching glares from shadows. The heat builds in our heads. Streets quiet. Then it comes. The bombs. Screams. Red haired children lie in sudden blood. Around the island, the ocean and the sea. The sea rises and falls in waves. Blue rolls one wave into another. Blue waves touch green Irish shores. Breezes blow fresh off waves and onto the land. The air becomes cool, clean, free. From hills by the shore, we discover open expanses. Norbert Kovacs Norbert Kovacs lives and writes in Hartford, Connecticut. He loves visiting art museums, especially the Met in New York. He has published stories recently in Blink-Ink, Ekphrastic, and MacQueen's Quinterly. His website: www.norbertkovacs.net. Four Aspects of Roses White, pink, deep pink, red. These colours cover all the aspects of love: Agape, storge, philae, eros-- Love of God, Love of parents for children, Love for friends and, then that deep love of one other that causes the wheel of creation to turn, arouses us to the beauty of the other three. I see these four colours joined, sitting in this vase and I wonder if my mother, a practical parent, not so demonstrative as other moms, a woman who eschewed poetry, read only blockbuster novels but who often filled a vase with roses such as these, in all four colours, all the colours of love, roses from her own garden. Did she understand more of love and its philosophy than I knew? Joan Leotta Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She performs tales of food, family, and strong women. Internationally published as an essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist, she’s a 2021 and 2022 Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net 2022 nominee, and 2022 runner-up in Robert Frost Competition. Her essays, poems, CNF, and fiction appear in Impspired, The Ekphrastic Review, Verse Visual, Verse Virtual, Gargoyle, Silver Birch, Yellow Mama, Mystery Tribune, Ovunquesiamo, MacQueen’s Quinterly and others. Her poetry chapbooks are Languid Lusciousness with Lemon and Feathers on Stone. heresy of paraphrase paraphrase is to say the same thing in less words / yet we attempt to suss meaning from / a poem, a painting, / a sculpture. / it is impossible / the exact nuance / the artist is trying to convey we each experience creative works from our own perspective / in this experience the meaning of art lies, / the essence of the thing is the thing, / it is a sacred other worldly thing, / goes beyond intent / intertwines with it / rumples the sheets and stays the night. Dane Lyn Dane Lyn (they/them) is a neurospicy, genderqueer, disabled, educator, poet, and glitter enthusiast in a love-hate relationship with Los Angeles, where they reside. Dane has an MFA from Lindenwood University, a ridiculous collection of succulents, and four scavenger hunt runner up ribbons. Dane’s work can be seen in Quillkeepers, Gnashing Teeth, Gutslut, and Imposter. They are currently finding out that editing an online poetry journal (Ink and Marrow) is both rewarding and a slog. Their debut chapbook by bottlecap press, bubblegum black, was released in early 2023 with rave reviews from their mom. They are on social media @punkhippypoet, and most of their published work can be seen at www.danelyn.net That Nagging Sense of Dread Can take me outside for a walk. I look up at the foggy sky, make out the image of the sea, Salt Island, a quick hike at low tide, is so murky it is as if it were a cloud that will float away. I have suffered such loss and heartbreak, but I know it can be easily forgotten and cast out by one gleaming moment of joy. The way one feels when a cloud finally parts and the heat of the sun warms the face, the whoo, hoo of Turtle Doves, or the sound of his flute echoing through our home, late at night when the rest of the world sleeps. I remember my mother, climbing with her to the top of the giant carnival slide, the lights of the fair pink, blue and gold, lighting our faces. A heart can ache from grief at unexpected moments and as I cross a path beneath the huge chestnut trees, I remember fall days when I gathered pails full of bronze prizes to show her. The vivid blue sky I see through the lush leaves reminds me of the wide world still waiting to be found, that would excite her so, and that sharp needle that’s been piercing my heart begins to melt. As I continue my walk, I come upon the soft green prickly pod with my toe. I lower my foot onto it to reveal its shiny bronze prize, the first of the season. Andrea Marcusa Andrea Marcusa's writings have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, New Flash Fiction Review, Citron Review, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Cleaver, Raleigh Review, Best Micro Fiction and others. She lives in New York City and is a member of the faculty at The Writer's Studio and is also a watercolourist. A Happy Death? This is what is left of you after seven centuries – a smiling face of beaten gold. Did you commission this piece before you died, knowing Death was near, or just because you knew you were Mortal even as you were worshipped, revered, holy, sacrosanct, divine? Were you granted the Happy Death? Did you know if you’d lived a good life? Were you at peace as the transformation from Life to Other approached? All we know is that we see you now as Happy. I hope you were. I hope there is Truth behind the mask. Laura McGinnis A Haiku Series Flowers like jewels Kaleidoscopic colours an orchard of dreams. Pomegranates ripe this tree is really a heart pulsing with strange fruit. Synchronised wonder: scarlet, crimson, royal blue seeds of tomorrow. Siobhan Mc Laughlin Siobhán is a poet from Co. Donegal in Ireland and has been published several times in The Ekphrastic Review. Her poems have been published in The Honest Ulsterman, Drawn to the Light Press, The Poetry Village, The Trouvaille Review, Bealtaine Magazine and Quince as well as others. She enjoys reading and writing ekphrastic poetry, both of which she finds is a meditative and transportive exercise. She blogs at www.a-blog-of-ones-own.blogspot.com Twitter: @siobhan347 Absent the Face Is that a finger or a nipple so erect it looks like a knife buried to the hilt where a nipple should be? The “standing” woman is headless, only her body shown. Against ochre ground, her dress would be ochre too except for the red wash on all the edges, even the tears on the left hip and the hole her left hand conceals where the genitalia are. The matching red legs wear stockings or blood. The red representations of shark teeth over her right thigh, parallel to her hidden mons and the valley beyond, say she is being eaten, washed in blood from vagina outward. The absence of head suggests she is personless, just wound, all body, for the face is the place of identity, of eye, mouth, nostril, the fragile loveable territory of the self which the Standing Woman may sell or surrender to whatever’s teeth are showing next to what might have been, in kinder times, love’s bower. Mary B. Moore Mary B. Moore’s poetry books include Dear If, (Orison Books); Flicker (Dogfish Head Prize, 2016); The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State UP, 1997). Chapbooks, both prize winners, are Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys 2017) and Eating the Light (Sable Books 2016). Recent poems also appear in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, ekphrastic.net, Nelle, Terrain, Georgia Review, 32 Poems, The Nasty Woman Poet anthology, and more. A retired professor, she lives in Huntington WV. The Hand, The Remorse of Conscience Maureen accepts the box at the door, remembering how she felt when her son moved out six short years ago. It had felt like someone had cleaved her heart in two, thrown half of it into the river. She’d watched her husband and son chat excitedly, pretending to tidy the emptying room so she could shed the occasional tear without their comments. She’d doted on Mark for 18 years and then worried that he didn’t have the skills to live on his own, kind of like his father, Stephen, who couldn’t make dinner or do a load of laundry. Or wouldn’t, but aren’t they almost the same? He might have learned by now, two years on his own after what happened. The stereotype is that divorcing parents tell the children, “We still love you, but we don’t love each other.” But Stephen had stopped loving Mark, and Maureen too, by proxy, because he said she enabled Mark by paying for his rehab over and over. “Insanity is doing the same thing but expecting different outcomes,” Stephen lectured as he packed his own boxes. Maureen had no tears to hide. She thought of cooking dinner every night, sorting laundry for individual loads each week, sitting with Stephen for a heart-to-heart he never heard. She should have left him first. She should have followed Mark to California, held him in the palm of her hand so he always felt her love and never had to seek it from other sources. Allison Renner Hope The night sky was smeared with stars. She recognized Venus through the smoke choking the port city. Eventually the bombing would end, the fires would die. Would her house remain? Would she? Her sisters, their heads bent, prayed at her feet. One got up to cover her in a blanket of colours scented with lavender and put a cloth dipped in water and vinegar to her lips. There would be no midwife, no doctor, no husband. In the morning, one of her sisters opened the shutters and looked out the window. The fires had become embers, and a layer of ash like fresh snow covered the rooftops. When the sun shone bright orange across the bay, she held a baby boy in her arms. It was the happiest day of her life. Marjorie Robertson Marjorie Robertson is an essayist, novelist, short story writer and multilinguist. Her first novel, Bitters in the Honey, was a semifinalist in the 2014 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Writing Competition. Her other interests include creating art + text, studying how visual and sound affect the written word, and teaching writing to English language learners and the 1.5 generation. Ode Magic In a meagre dwelling in the yard of the Hen and Chickens public house, lived a curious hook-nosed old woman, known as ‘Ode Magic’. She lived alone, and eked out her living by dispensing spells and charms, for five shillings a turn. Some folk said Ode Magic had three crimson teats. Some said she could turn into a hare. Some said she had suckled a peppery grimalkin. To cure toothache, that pain straight from the Devil, Ode Magic would take a live mole from a trap, cut off its paws before it was dead, exhort folk to wear them on a chain, around their necks. A mouse fried in butter, cured a child of whooping cough. Warts vanished when Ode Magic rubbed them with a hanged man’s hand. Mumps, shingles, rheumatism – Ode Magic cured common ailments with a handful of nettles, a starving pigeon held to the throat, blood drawn from the tip of a black malkin’s tail. To ease labour pain, she hired out a charmed stone, stolen from an eagle’s nest, Before long, Ode Magic’s fame spread. Known as ‘a wise woman’, she could now afford to move to a cottage in Hell Lane. The cottage had its own pigsty and well. It stood alone at the end of the lane, not a quarter of a mile from the Black Wagon colliery. Unsurprisingly, the colliery gaffer had heard of Ode Magic’s sorcery and decided to consult her, with a problem: the mystery of the disappearing candles. “Missus,” the gaffer said. “We’ve searched all of the blokes, ‘oo works the pit, but ower candles keep vanishin’. Can yow ‘elp?” Ode Magic said that the Devil was stealing the candles, but for the sum of ten gold guineas, she would dispense a charm. Once the gaffer had crossed her palm, Ode Magic first made various secret signs, and then told him what to do. As instructed, at midnight the gaffer and a gang of colliers went down to the deepest cavern in the pit, and settled themselves. After a long and weary vigil, they heard a strange scratching noise. The gaffer struck a match, raised the Bible in his right hand and the colliers started chanting the Lord’s Prayer, backwards. Several swore they could smell brimstone and sulphur but no demon appeared. More matches were lit, and as the black cavern illuminated, from the shadows scurried a swarm of greedy rats. In the corner lay a pile of gnawed wax. The rats had stolen the candles, not the Devil. At dawn the next morning, the crimson-faced gaffer hammered on the door of Ode Magic’s cottage, demanding back his guineas. But the canny old woman had vanished. The cottage was bare, except for a rickety rocking chair, a basket of apples, and curled up in front of the dying embers, a brindled cat. Jane Salmons Jane Salmons is from Stourbridge in the UK. She has a poetry pamphlet Enter GHOST (dancing girl press, 2022) and full poetry collection The Quiet Spy (Pindrop Press, 2022). Jane has stories published with MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and in Ad Hoc Fiction anthologies Dandelion Years and Flash Fiction Festival Five; and forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review. Her microfiction has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and nominated for Best Microfiction 2023 and Best of the Net 2024. She won the Pokrass Prize at the Bath Flash Fiction Festival in 2022. www.janesalmonspoetry.co.uk Aubade The river is a ghost before the sun, haunting the land with a thick mist, holding back the slime of monsters who stir, cut fins against the surface Water gurgles over shallow-drowned stones, bleeds across the sharp shale, is strained by the skeletons of trees, feet still stuck in the shallows mud My boat slices through in glide, oars dipping into the black surface, pulling us upstream for landing, a river town still sleeping this morn, it’s life still hidden by the fog By sunlight, we will be provisioned, and fast on our way, if this ghost gives up her spirit, if the day burns it clear, But I am possessed by the half-light, alive to the beauty of shadows, dark on dark growing lighter with the hope of a new morning. Michael E. (Maik) Strosahl A Migrant Couple Picks Tomatoes Here my love, red as our blood, picked at height of its blossoming dense as flesh, juiced with water smelling as the sweet dirt in your hair as it tumbles, as it tumbles through my hands. Our pantry will fill with its paste and berry, sauce and pickles. Taken from baskets that see know no ending, only the weight of our work and scarlet season our ripe hands prove. How full we are when our eyes rest on these crates of plump tomatoes. The weathered hands that touched skin so tenderly to get this far and the occasional crush and bleed. Rebecca Surmount Rebecca Surmont lives in Minneapolis, MN and has worked as a movement artist, physical actor, dancer, and collaborative teaching artist throughout the Midwest. Her poems have been appeared in journals such as Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Trouvaille Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and Topical Poetry, Minneapolis’ Southwest Journal, and The Anthology Seasons by Trolley Car Press. She works as a leadership consultant and coach. The Watermelon Seller In mid-summer, he loaded the gear-grinding International with his striped melons and me and headed down the country roads near the patch to sell to those residing along the path. We rounded bends and curves in silence, he absorbed in the fields of corn drying from the summer heat and the several weeks’ want of rain, finally coming to a row of houses in the middle of nowhere where he stopped and exited the truck like one in leg irons. At the tailgate, he cut the mint-green, dark-striped melon with his pocketknife to demonstrate to potential buyers the fruit’s freshness as it burped into perfect hemispheres, revealing the lush, crisp meat of red or yellow melon from which he cut the heart and offered on the tip of the knife to the kids. The twenty-five cents dug from overhauls and aprons, plus the children’s smiles, was enough, enough to make my sober-hearted farmer-father happy. Jo Taylor Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. Her favourite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it. In 2021, she self-published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire, and her second collection, Come Before Winter will be out early next year (Kelsay Books). She enjoys morning walks, playing with her two grandsons, and collecting and reading cookbooks. Sailing Away on Memory As long as memory lasts, I’ll continue to deconstruct that day – the onomatopoeic flap, flap, flap of the sail, crotchety buzz of the motor, laughter of the gulls as we headed out. I feel the wind tossing my hair, spindrift moisturizing my face. Not exactly a romantic day with his dad as skipper, but sailing on a calm sea with no sweater or sweaty weather came close to paradise. Silly teen that I was, I expected the magic to last. My first love threw me over. Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille was a pioneer coed at the University of Virginia, where she earned her degree in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. Alarie received the first editor’s choice Fantastic Ekphrastic Award from The Ekphrastic Review, and in 2022, her latest book, Three A.M. at the Museum, was named Director’s Pick for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art gift shop. Climbers 1. Tousled haired Lillian padded after Fletcher to see what he did next. “What are you doing now?” she asked. So curious for three. Fletcher gave her an indulgent smile, pruning shears in hand. “Cutting out dead wood, little girl,” he said. “I’m not little. Call me Lillian.” “I can do that,” he said with a laugh. “Or I could just call you Lil.” “Does it hurt them when you cut?” said Lillian. “I don’t suppose so, no. Cutting what’s not growing makes the roses grow better,” said Fletcher. “Oh,” said Lillian. “And stronger.” “Exactly,” said the gardener. “You’re a clever one.” “I know,” said Lillian and put her nose in a pink rose. “That’s not a fragrant one. Come take a look at this climber. Put your nose in that. But always check for bees. They may be working,” said Fletcher, “and not know you’re coming.” “Oh,” said Lillian and followed Fletcher’s lead. Stopped when he did, leaned, hovered and sniffed. She laughed as Fletcher’s scissors went ‘snip, snip. snip,’ avoiding thorns altogether. “I like the climbers best,” she said. By mid-June the rose garden was coming into its own. It had been planned and planted so as to succeed one another throughout summer into early fall. Splashes of color and fragrance abounded. Especially the old fashioned climbers white, pink, cream and apricot. Lillian’s mother arranged the roses herself in lovely cut glass vases. They decorated the house, even Lillian’s nursery. A perfect nook held a weighted vase with wands of roses and baby’s breath. II. Lillian’s bridal bouquet was a simple spray of her fragrant favorites. After their honeymoon in the Bahamas, she and husband Robert moved into her childhood home, aptly named, Garden Hill. “Aren’t we the lucky ones, Sweetheart?” said Robert. “Indeed we are,” Lillian said. “Garden Hill can hold us all!” A handsome three story brick house with black shutters, two acres of cultivated gardens with fruit trees, a swimming pond that substituted for ice skating in winter. Beyond that Fletcher’s cottage, a stone wall and wildflower meadow. III. Gray haired Fletcher was bent through the shoulders but in fit health otherwise. He never married. “Me, marry?” said Fletcher when Lillian was a teen-ager and working by his side. She’d become his unofficial gardening assistant. “I’m wed to Garden Hill. And you’ve become an excellent pruner.” “High praise, indeed,” she said. “I think that new yellow cultivar is going to be a stunner.” Fletcher, at 87, died peacefully in his sleep. It was full summer and the roses were at their peak. He left Lillian handwritten gardening journals full of snippets and drawings, all dated. They covered some forty years. How did he find the time? she wondered. Dear Fletcher. The journals were as valuable to her as the double stranded pearls Robert gave her on their 25th wedding anniversary. The sections on fragrant climbing roses were her favorite and most frequently read. Dog-eared actually. Revered and loved. Deborah Trowbridge Deborah writes flash, short stories and creative non-fiction in northwestern Montana. Most recently her work has been published in Fifty-Word Stories, "Bees," in March, and "My Papa, the Poet," in July. Her flash, "M. Binet," is forthcoming in print this fall in San Fedele Press' American Writers Review 2023. sleepy hollow not the stuff of headless horsemen commanding the evening pathways; dark ambiguity but the day’s offering the commerce of industry melded with pastoral hues; land rising and falling to showcase sweeping beauty Cristy Watson Cristy Watson is an award-winning novelist who loves to enter writing contests. She has poetry published in CV2 Magazine, Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press, 2022) and The Poetry Marathon Anthology (2019-2023). Having resided in Surrey, BC for years, she currently lives with her sister in Calgary, Alberta and continues to volunteer with the Surrey International Writer’s Conference. She will be presenting a poetry workshop at the Write on Bowen Festival of Readers and Writers in September. 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 Bowie Wall, by Jimmy C. Deadline is September 1, 2023. We are delighted to have Kate Copeland as our guest editor again! 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. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.
Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. 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 JIMMY C. 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, September 1, 2023. 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. Figure 8 Revolution With the right pen you find your voice and the notion of what’s love can be drawn in the sand with a stick. Your song moves me across the dunes at night and I draw a figure 8 in the sand before the fire. In time poetry takes place and watching the sunrise over coffee becomes a poem going up the side of the day. The 8 in the sand is still traceable for now. An ant crawls across the stick. Encounters another. They bow to each other in greeting. We smile in the golden light, good morning. Guy Biederman Guy Biederman is the author of Translated From The Original, one-inch punch fiction (Nomadic Press), Nova Nights poetry (Nomadic Press), Edible Grace, lyrical micro prose (KYSO Flash)) and three other collections of short work. A former peace corps volunteer (Guatemala ’81-’82), gardener, publisher, and creative writing instructor, Guy lives on a houseboat in Sausalito California, hosts floating word jams, and walks the planks daily. ** Disguised Self Creeps along a dark drooping tail unto its green beady eyes- breathing silence behind my silhouette. In wake for the veils to flutter, gently wave rhythm of colours onto the white georgette- pink, yellow, orange from far end of darkness. Little patches of red are shared by the dancing girls, golden tiaras and long necklaces. On a cold night open to sky, crouched memories spring to music, roses warm among the dead pretending to be life. 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. ** The Garden of Beautiful Things The artists, saying: which unexplains-- that unknowingly so-- bound simply by where the mirror takes it. And this, they said, In a grumble office, fantasizing of tread cloth that might emulate sun breaking. For sigh, testimony, more truths-- though none would claim the religiosity needed. Yet needed, lands vivid and ripe, long alp and straddled flume, laid out to the people vibrant, naked only in in their disproof of angst and couldn’t-be. Robert Henry Robert is a college student hoping to take his pen along the way. ** Homage to Nina Simone Goddam, miss a hippy & your shot will go all the way to Baltimore where the sinnerman sits in his colourful stew, cradling the Bill of Rights, whose brother, the Bill of Wrongs, with his golden hair the true length of their love, has left for the north of Europe where they paint with their souls, staining canvasses in history’s hues, black blood mixed in the toothy bite of little girl blue standing in the pink, left lonely in the Rue Rabelais where the devil sits sniggering in his Citroen, strange fruit hanging from his twisted mouth, white lipped & lusting after the long armed angels back in Philadelphia, you gotta sing for your supper in Atlantic City to be canonised the patron saint of rebellion, the German Shepherds are howling in Carnegie Hall, Baching at the colour of your skin, the sergeant stashes the cash beneath the bleeding fountains in the yard, climb, climb the piano & hang from the lilac tree screaming for your people, your purpose, your peace of mind, birds flying high, past all disappointment singing their show tune for all the ladies in the country of lies, lie down, take your medication & turn off the television, all the babies are cared for before they are born & your mothers keep whispering their prayers in the back of the police car, the handcuffs no hindrance to their rosary wringing, learn how to hide those tears, they’re no good for watering this pale land, if you wanna live in the palace its yessir yessir yessir, the raindrops will fall & it’s nobody’s fault but yours Simon Parker is a London based writer, performer and teacher. His work been published in The Ekphrastic Review and has been performed at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio, Hackney Empire Studio, The Place, Somerset House, Half Moon Theatre, Southbank Centre, the Totally Thames Festival, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Simon is an associate artist of Vocal Point Theatre, a theatre company dedicated to telling stories from those not often heard, and providing workshops for the marginalised. He runs creative writing and reading groups for the homeless, socially excluded and vulnerable. If you want to know more go to https://www.simonparkerwriter.com ** Indelible Moments These burning skies overhead draped in the scattering light of motley bubbles shadow a nimble jamboree of voices youthful and ripe rejoicing nearby the murmuring creek frolicking in the leafy shades their nakedness laid bare in a verdant meadow carefree about the world shading that which hides their flaws revealing the naiveté of their childish nature vulnerability in its purest form unmasked, for all to see awaiting the sun’s setting melody flushed in the colours of fall of crimson, amber and gold the mellow notes of guitar strings an undulating motion of their leisurely breaths evoking soothing contemplation about an indelible moment such as this impenitent in its distinctive nature reminding me of life’s transience as I hope to pencil in my legacy parietal art for posterity Like so many before me Andrea Damic Andrea Damic born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and author of prose and poetry. She writes at night when everyone is asleep; when she lacks words to express herself, she uses photography to speak for her. She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/ ** If I Were Nina Simone, This is What I Might Say Call me Eunice, for Nina is a lie. My father’s name is Divine, my mother’s Mary. Even so, and to my mother’s great disappointment, I was not the second coming. Just young, gifted, and Black. But by God, I could play the piano. The singing was just something I needed to do to earn a living. Funny, most people think of me as a singer, if they think of me at all. I hid who I was from my mother and my father, playing the devil’s music and living the devil’s life. I mean, I dwelt in Greenwich village – what did they expect? I even married Satan, though he looked like somebody else. Someone in a uniform. I suppose I hoped for order, but it just made things worse. Others followed. Some I loved, some I cursed; none helped me any more than he did. When I sing, I become Bach and Blue, for that is the tone of sadness. I spit bullets, I seduce. My songs are like my life, all over the place. I sing in search of a country, a new country. But in the end, I have no home. Do I succumb to the blues? Sometimes. Sometimes. That’s a truth. I sing sweet, I sing raging, and then I refuse to sing at all. How can I not turn blue with sadness, blue with anger, with all the colours that surround me? Wayne Garry Fife Wayne Garry Fife is an anthropologist and writer who lives in St. John’s on the island of Newfoundland in Canada. He writes micro fiction, flash fiction, short stories, memoir, novels, and non-fiction. His latest book, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is entitled Imaginary Worlds (Invitation to an Argument). ** To Match the World on Fire Red bodies chained to match the world on fire, predating our scorching summer. The origin of life, the in between. There is no amount of blue that may quell our haze, no amount of green that may bring us back To an original lie, to life, I meant to lie by a rock, scalding our backs. To lie by the banks of the river of fire, to lie. The three ages of Man replace the clouds, my eyes stray, strain itchy from the smoke around me. Air Quality Index 7, Severe Risk, my lungs wished to be those trees. Alveoli refuse to expand, even the guitar burns. Almost. Luciana Erregue-Sacchi Luciana Erregue-Sacchi is an Argentinian-Canadian art historian, poet, translator, editor, and award winning publisher (Laberinto Press) from amiskwaciwâskahikan (Treaty Six). Her creative-non-fiction has been longlisted for the Susan Crean Award. Her work has been published in Polyglot Magazine, Humber Literary Review (Canada), The Selkie (UK), Agni Magazine (US), and others. Luciana is a Banff Centre Literary Arts Alumni, 2019 Edmonton Arts Council Artist in Residence, and the WGA’s Horizons Writers Circle coordinator. Her debut chapbook titled Of Mothers and Madonnas(April 2023 through The Polyglot. Luciana loves walking everywhere, especially the Edmonton River Valley with her family and friends. ** Summertime Goddam “Summertime and the livin' is easy” bob painted his figures in all the colours for those who only saw Black & White knew eyes needed to really see magic figures, simple, symbols popping from the page more real than life moving, flowing in 3-d a fantasy of equality bob played his melodies mixing oils on the palette figures lithe as blue notes scatting across his canvas nina always the centre chanteuse adding her Goddam songs calling for change soul and sass and bad-ass rage I put a spell on you To be Young, Gifted and Black (nina and bob both knew) Feeling Good I wish I knew how it would feel to be free Backlash Blues Today is a killer Don't let me be misunderstood Ain’t Got No Life Let it be me The Desperate Ones Mississippi Goddam (and she meant every word of it) Emily Tee Note: the second half is a found poem using selected titles (with annotations) from “Nina Simone’s 20 greatest songs – ranked!" Alexis Petridis in The Guardian, 20 July 2023 Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. She's had pieces published in The Ekphrastic Review Challenges, Aurum Review and elsewhere online, and in print in some publications by Dreich and other places. She lives in the UK. ** Homage to Nina Simone We had danced with abandon all through the night as though a spell had been cast on us. We were feelin’ good as streaks of morning colored the sky and we collapsed, exhausted and settled on the grass to enjoy our dejeuner sur l’herbe, a picnic someone had brought. And while we ate, we listened to the woman with the guitar singing the blues. Gretchen Fletcher Gretchen won the Poetry Society of America's Bright Lights/Big Verse competition and was projected on the Jumbotron while reading her winning poem in Times Square. One of her poems was choreographed and performed by dance companies in Palm Beach and San Francisco, and others appear in datebooks published in Chicago by Woman Made Gallery. Her poetry has been published in journals including The Chattahoochee Review, Inkwell, Pudding Magazine, Upstreet, Canada’s lichen, and online at Poetry Southeast, SeaStories, and prairiehome.publicradio. Her poems are also included in anthologies including Sincerely Elvis, You Are Here: New York Streets in Poetry, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge: Poems About Marriage and Capital BookFest’s Family Pictures, Poems and Photographs Celebrating Our Loved Ones. Gretchen has led writing workshops for Florida Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress. Her chapbooks, That Severed Cord and The Scent of Oranges, were published by Finishing Line Press. ** Suzanne In the Morning She didn’t even plan to sing the Devil’s music for the crowd that gathered round To hear her warbly sound Her perfect pace an instrument tuned To honey silk unapologetically pure sugar sweet dagger sharp Suzanne In the morning To love Somebody Like Nina Simone High Priestess of soul Carolina contralto of equal rights Colour unspoiled by restraint You can listen today and it’s just the same Jessi Waugh Jessi Waugh lives at the Carolina coast with her husband and two boys. Her background is in science and education; her interests run all over the place. Jessi teaches yoga and writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She is having pieces published in Main Street Rag Literary Magazine, Sasee Magazine, moonShine review, and Last Stanza Poetry Jounral this year, among others. Find her online at www.reader-writer.com. ** Happening Electric colours rendered flat beneath the melding pastel sky; this young black, deconstructing art that’s old white for a hipper age, whose story, back, excluded hues. Thus dusky, husky sultry stage of bacchanal where lute is changed to strumming, groovy moody blues, of flesh, skin, simple idyl nudes, in Nina’s brew, sway. sinew swing. His riffing, shifting of techniques: they happened, all as Ginsberg primed, but barriers broken, abled vice, as burst, twist, stick, spill over, out to souls, mouths, eyes unscene before. ‘It’s just a feeling’ - homage thing, ‘you can describe’, but tell it, no. ‘But when it happens’, then ‘you know’ so ‘that’s what I by freedom, mean’; the Simone sermon, sane to see. He died as fast as he had lived, visceral pleasures, pains conjoined. To live in flesh so die there too; he’s disappointed, not surprised, no longer here; as he, so we. 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 published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** a spell fell over the people did not know they were the same, unclothed music made them sway and dance under the sky a spell made them one – music, earth a life celebration feeling good – people, all colours dawn of a new day Julie A. Dickson Julie A. Dickson has written poetry for most of her life, from memories, nature and prompts, having discovered Ekphrastic Poems, she was hooked! Her poetry appears in over 65 journals including Lothlorien, Misfit, Girl God and The Ekphrastic Review. She has served on two poetry boards and as guest editor on several journals. Her degree in Behavioral Science allows an interesting look into the nature of people. ** Atomic Energy Black is the colour of my true love’s hair, he’s my brown eyed handsome man and I’m falling in love again (can’t help it). He’s funkier than a mosquito’s tweeter and it might as well be spring, blue in green, I’ve got a crush on you. Lush life in sentimental mood, oh blackbird, light my fire, let it be me, won’t you dream a little dream of me? Turn turn turn my cotton-eyed Joe, give me lilac wine, fine and mellow. Brown baby, you go to my head. My funny valentine, you’d be so nice to come home to, why not take my hand, precious lord? Be my husband. Wild is the wind, but here comes the sun, I’m your little girl blue and I’m feeling good, I’m falling in love again (can’t help it). Helen Freeman Helen loves trying her hand at the prompts on The Ekphrastic Review. She also enjoys Nina Simone’s songs. She has poems published on various sites and magazines and currently lives in Durham, England. Instagram @chemchemi.hf ** frozen tears northern firs bear strange fruit blood on the needles blood on the snow our indigenous women our indigenous girls missing murdered Donna-Lee Smith (with a nod to Abel Meeropol's haunting lyrics) Donna-Lee Smith had the privilege to teach writing courses in First Nations and Inuit communities during her 25-year tenure with McGill University. Her students' laughter and innate story-telling gifts made every session pure pleasure. She learned more about life from her students than they ever learned about writing from her (she often told them this and they laughingly agreed!) Tragically, heartrendingly, inconceivably, there are over 4,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) across Canada. ** To Bob Thompson Regarding Homage to Nina Simone Your vibrant colours sing the praise of melancholy and malaise as tapestry of sea and shore becoming vivid metaphor -- the shards of shattered dream embraced as window stained that courage graced with disadvantaged discontent unbowed, unwilling to relent, and persevering to profess defiance of undue duress, clinging to unrest as gleam that glistened as her self-esteem in music letting jazz infuse Bach and gospel, soul, and blues. Portly Bard Old man. Ekphrastic fan. 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. ** Genitive Case At last! Re-dressed! Re-dreamed! Why it took them so long to leave Le Dejeuner Sur L’herbe and realize how ridiculously they were mocked behind those cravats, jackets and old verbal rag against her dazzling nude rebellious act? At last, they changed their minds, and redressed, I mean – undressed, in accordance to her vanguard stance, their long-imprisoned bodies raising red with anger for being so rudely misaligned with her exposed spellbinding vibe. No more. Here they come in matching demeanor happy to correct their interactive miss-manner, yet, instantly dashing all hopes, arriving at a splitting point: just as Manet couldn’t stop their chat, so Thompson couldn’t control their argument: - It must be to the left - one pointed. - No, to the right - another objected. - Aside! - Above! Red fingers firing a quest in a-la-Matisse dense color forest for the best setting of the new rebel muse, towering over her as over a threaten nest, missing to realize that resonance was not a matter of spatial precision, but of her whisky-soaked vibrato expansion. Pointers heat up until the brawl brims out of Thompson’s hand, and tumbles in Poussin’s Bacchanalia scene, where, as by the artist’s memoir, they mingle with other rebels and soak some tips for cool interactive skills. From Thompson’s modern brush via Manet’s avant guarde twists, to Poussin’s notorious classics, reflecting color revolutionary Matisse, and bouncing back in style, is, indeed, Salon de Refuses’ grand tour with solemn soul-and-blues allure. At this point her deep timbre intones the soul’s love of the single note, and her sun-soaked bold bearings start slowly departing from Manet’s polished porcelain daring. Then she sits – yes, she is plain grounded, but on the opposite side of the canvas to keep in check the other’s syncopations, setting an audience inducing entanglement, while the sunny mass of her voice rolls the rhythm of the embodied blues until it emancipates her body language from her counterpart’s strain phrasing reaching a guttural arch with a deep ecstatic urge. Her liberal musings come across the viewer’s wonderings igniting a flash behind the scene, where it seems she had seen the light of her dream, hence - the melting source of her swinging resolve, outshining the porcelain anticipation stronghold. Her spirited vibrato raises a stout jazz turnaround, replacing chords works a turn of phrase: her inflamed fulfillment pitch over the other’s chilled expectation launch. (The two ends of a genitive change.) By that time, behind the scene, the fiery fighters are on their knees before the altar of her voice in the soul of souls, breathing and praying each single note as a resolve to each of their piled trials and tribulations – in and out of: hard days, nights, streets, centuries, boundaries, back of busses and audiences – fiery soul and blues outbursts, live, piled in the timbre of her sun-soaked man-refused voice… Ekaterina Dukas Ekaterina Dukas, MA, has studied and taught linguistics and culture at Universities of Sofia, Delhi and London and authored a book on mediaeval art for the British Library. She writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning and her poems have featured repeatedly in the The Ekphrastic Review and its challenges. Her collection of poems Ekphrasticon is published by Europa Edizioni, 2021. ** All on That Day (for Nina Simone) Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Sinnerman where you gonna run to? Where you gonna run to? All on that day --traditional, African American unlimited this landscape as it echoes oh and oh again-- the essences naked, footsteps spiral bleeding red earth footsteps voices naked with dancing fire levitating the sinnerman entangled with the river river overflowing fire through the body of the sinnerman filled with the who and the what and the nowhere to go nowhere to go at all but to the devil waiting within the sum of all the opposites patched together from the opposing forces of toolate prayers that add up to nothing but please please please begging for mercy crying please and begging from the threshold of confession riding the currents of reluctant regret keep digging deeper past regret beyond confession beyond words beyond silence beyond hope beyond the unforgiving past of actions speaking too loud running through the labyrinthine lies filled with excuses excuses you have integrated into the stories you left hanging in the fragments of the wild wind the fragmented words that drown inside the whirlwind that is the power, the Power of Creation the power that questions every foolish footstep every hunger fulfilled with endless useless desires hunger that ought to be filled instead with prayer echoing oh into being--a landscape all the colours of amen 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/. ** A VIEW OF HEAVEN, GODDAMN "EVERYBODY" sang Nina "knows about MISSISSIPPI, GODDAMN" everybody knew the suppression of black folks voting the murder of CIVIL RIGHTS WORKERS for registering people for a basic HUMAN RIGHT EVERYBODY, EVERYBODY knew; who knew about this world of people EVERYBODY with skin so hauntingly bright unashamed NAKEDNESS REDS and BLUE a YELLOW woman kids with BLUE hair and some WHITE folks too; a world void of shadows, skin color so EQUAL, the sky is evolved into opaque swirls never seen this side of HEAVEN where lolling in the ORANGE grass listening to guitar, without FEAR means KNOWING, EACH and EVERYONE what it is TO BE FREE, and NINA'S surrogate PURPLE body hair piled AFRICAN GODDESS high comes prancing in to observe this KINGLY DREAM, while FUTURITY it may well be, she's put a SPELL on EVERYTHING. Daniel Brown Daniel Brown has just published at age 72 his first collection FAMILY PORTRAITS IN VERSE and Other Illustrated Poems published by Epigraph Books. He has most recently been published in Jerry Jazz Musician and Chronogram Magazine and has been included in Arts Mid-Hudson gallery presentation Poets Respond To Art in Poughkeepsie, NY. |
Challenges
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