Remedios Varo: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

Cold, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1948

Happy New Year to our wonderful ekphrastic family, every reader and writer in this community. We wish you an amazing year ahead, filled with creativity, beauty, love, health, prosperity, and joy.

Remedios Varo strikes many chords for writers. It was very difficult to choose, and even though we stuffed this response selection full to the gills, many fine works were left out. We continue to marvel at the variety of ways a single painting can inspire your words. Keep writing and bringing your voice into the world. There will continue to be new challenges every other week. We also have two anthology opportunities ahead- an ekphrastic poetry anthology and a collection of dark flash fiction. In other news, we are thrilled to have an Ekphrastic Book Club with the incredible Barbara Krasner- join us for a quarterly discussion of books about art. And check out our Ekphrastic Academy page- we have an ekphrastic scavenger hunt coming up, a zoom session on Picasso, one on pop art, and the new monthly Ekphrasis Anonymous, a generative writing session with a diverse curated selection of artworks.

It's going to be a chock-full year.

Thank you for making this journal and community so wonderful.

love, Lorette

​**

Thanatophoenix

to Stephen Marchand
​
I am not the end.
I am the condition.

I drain the colour first,
hear how the trees beg
leaves rattle like lingering questions.
The world forgets that endurance begins
in refusal.
 
I stiffen the compromised limbs,
what should have fallen, but stayed
out of habit.
 
I teach weight
to show what holds
when bending is no longer mercy.

Everything must suffer
all the way,
not halfway.
Not with hope clinging like lichen
not with rehearsals of green.

I require silence, so complete,
even memory loses warmth.
Only then does weight lift.
Only then does endurance learn its shape.

I give silvery stars, snow, and shadow,
collected at night,
hung on branches and eyelids alike,
finding roofs, spires
and the quiet fields of sleep.
The world stands, tempered,
pure enough to feel again.
 
When the burial is true,
I loosen my grip.
Ice fractures inward.
Something breathes
for the first time
stronger
forged for having held.

What rises will not remember me
only the steadiness in its grain
only the light it can carry now.
Spring will claim the credit.

That is my work:
to test life
and see it return
made whole,
unafraid,
new.
 

Angela Segredaki

Angela Segredaki is a Greek poet who lives in the Netherlands. She holds a Creative Writing degree from Oxford University and loves poetry and people. "Thanatophoenix" reflects how adversity shapes endurance and fosters renewal, imagining death and winter not as enemies but as necessary teachers guiding life toward rebirth. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, New Lyre, Mouthful of Salt, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Dawntreader, Snakeskin and elsewhere.

**

Stagehands

Gina, from high in the theatre rafters, sprinkled rice, styrofoam, and petals as rain, sleet, and confetti. Lucas swept them up at the change of set, at the interval, and after curtains closed from down below. She liked to watch him give closure to scenes; she thought he'd be as thorough with the brush of his lips. He wondered who was summoning the weather, playing the atmosphere: the one to whom he owed his labour. With all the weight of expection, and the Shakespeare season, Gina and Lucas were the Romeo and Juliet who spun invisible lines, missing each other at her break-neck balcony. Comedy or tragedy, they were the glue. And that was enough. 

​Bayveen O'Connell

​Bayveen O'Connell is an Irish writer who loves flash fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. She is inspired by art, myth, travel, and history. Bayveen has recently published a creative non-fiction chapbook called Out of the Woods.

**

Varo
 
Who ever sees the consequences of their actions?
Flying apparitions – a sprinkle of this and that.
A reminder of distinction, winking at my littleness.
An imposter spread the logos upon the earth,
a cold snap, refreshing as early dawn.
 
Sparkles of light fell on the sleeping town,
without the knowing of anyone below. 
These quiet times–
a hand gifting particles,
inviting a seeded wisdom rooted deep
within this town, this community… lives
        
…and then we died
 
Silence noticed a stir in the darkness, wildly alive.
 
…wildly alive
 
Silence, unnoticed, offered Herself–
 
A new beginning…
an emergence waiting for completion.
 
MWPiercy
 
Michael W. Piercy: “At the intersection of Art, Poetry and Contradiction, you will find my work, you will find me. Observing memories and the present moment , thinking with an eye that shadows the natural world. Philosophy, Theology, and Science are core of my writing - I have found that I am a synthesizer. Managing ideas which do not always cohere. A manipulator of ideas-“

**

Anqa عنقاء 

In another realm, the need for revival is blistering. A setting sun overthrows darkness. Bareness glows with a glare of courage; the dead ascend and the living survive a foodless sky. When doors in oceans open up caves of wisdom and mountains tear through roaring winds of ancestral echoes, it means the realm has shapeshifted its need for need. She arrives to the abandoned cold, dwells in the trees — no branch is childless, or bent from bearing phantom weight. Here, she seeds morality; watering from rainless stars. A false dawn in her reins is rays of sunlight no longer allowing the moon to call the light solely its own. She wears a collar of centuries, eating out of mercy, her voice spanning a lyrical elixir calming bellies that birth and decay in tranced tandem. She is complicit in witnessing, but through a whiteness of vision where she knows to distinguish pearls from stones. In the depths of dark-locked ages, she opens her wings, appearing at the whisper of every need to drown sunsets, and at the rise of true dusk as carmine exposure, every seed judged for karmic erasure— There will precede justice in the rubble of (dis)order when a throne will emerge from the shadows of cyclical ignorance, then when which side to turn will no longer be a matter of choice. There she will wait with flowers in her wings, telling her legion to hold still until the soft footsteps of sheerness tread nearer. There she will take flight, grinding her heels in a sky full of water--

Sheikha A.

Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her poetry appears in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Her poetry has been translated into nine language so far. More about her can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com 

**

Departure 

The trees
as a sign of surrender
have raised
their thin hands
above their heads.

The houses,
so as not to be seen,
have bowed their necks.

The bird of death,
with a glass cloak,
flies in the sky
and pours
a bucket of snow
over the city.

The clouds,
with contracted bodies,
have closed their eyes.

The first snowflake that
reaches the ground,
no one
will recognize
anyone else.

Marjan Khoshbazan 

Marjan Khoshbazan is an Iranian poet and writer based in Tehran. "One of my poems was selected in a recent challenge for The Ekphrastic Review, and I have also had work published recently in The Light Ekphrastic. My writing is largely image-driven and often engages with ekphrasis as a way of exploring silence, memory, and collective experience. After years of trying to write poetry in Persian, I tried to create a new language with the help of images that is not bound by geography, time, or culture, but speaks the language of humanity."

**

​Cold

From here, aloft, I pour the corn, scatter the black oil sunflower seeds.
My pale hands tip the fluted urn. The plowed driveway
shows the offering.

The wind slaps at my face, the snow coats my lashes, melts.
My shadow falls light against the snow, mirroring my pallor.
Below, bare trees spread like bird tracks.

No one is here right now, but I know they are watching, wary.
The cold. It's twenty-two degrees with wind, it feels like ten.
More snow is expected, at least two inches.

I settle onto the crystalline structure, take up my roost by the window.
Less than a minute later, a chickadee lands below, then another.
Blue jays follow soon after. Once four jays eat, one flies off,
returns with others.

The window is old glass, wavy. I try not to move.
I don't want to startle them.
Here, I am sheltered. They remain exposed.
Tomorrow, I'll scatter again. Twice. The new snow will cover what I've left.
Winter isn't just one event but many.

Lynne Kemen

Lynne Kemen is the author of Shoes for Lucy (SCE Press, 2023) and More Than a Handful (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in One Art, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination and serves as editor/interviewer for Blue Mountain Review. She lives in rural Delaware County, New York.

**

 
Wintering
 
Cold enters my bones,
spreads her skeletal pain
through joints and limbs
leaving flaked skin in her wake.
 
I watch her, cranium queen
eagled on an iceberg,
pale embryo form
scaling a north-easterly.
 
She controls me,
throws mood splinters into bruised sky
and I cry
for the brittleness of winter.
 
Look up, I hear you say,
see how her chiffon wings
drift into moonshine
softening the edges of darkness.
 
I lift my chin,
focus on forest glade
where snow is back-sucked
into iron, melts into light.
 
My world stills.
At the peak of pine
feathered hope skims the sky,
and rises. Keep rising, you say.

Kate Young

Kate Young lives in England and enjoys writing poetry, painting and playing the guitar, ukulele and mandolin. Her poems have appeared in various webzines, magazines, and Chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate have been published by Hedgehog Press. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet or on her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk

**
​
Tree-Lined Winter

What creature seeded clouds
with diamonds to encourage snow?
The frost parched the earth
that remembers rain on a meadow.
Here the cover of virgin white
is everywhere level and smooth,
and time, monotonous, static,
is not sequential at all
but all in the present and now.
A crackling of ice on the door glass
looks like arctic runes or maps
to sacred ice caves, hidden.
Through the large, double-thick panes
the great trees look distorted,
no longer linear, but in fact
each one is bending exactly
as they appear in the clear window.
The winter moon, like one in a poem,
sets diffuse light, not a single
tense line broken on water.
At the crossroads each path is blank.
What is there to see? A birch
and several small pine to the side,
tipped by the wind towards the road.
And if I could see their invisible essence?
I would see a single birch
and pines bent over an icy river..
But the river, crystal with ghostly water,
ceaselessly freezes our sorrows,
waiting to unleash them in Spring.

Royal Rhodes

Royal Rhodes lives in a small village in central Ohio, near to a nature conservancy, green cemetery, and Amish farms. He rejoices that the long-term forecast predicts a milder winter.

**

To Remedios Varos Regarding Cold

Jubilant seem trees as choir,
spared the role of warming fire,
where beneath the tolling spire
spirits mourn your monster dire

who would chill to bone the soul
living fear of lost control
dreading unforgiving troll
winter seems as devil's dole

hearts forever must embrace
healing where they can by grace
those dismissive kept in place
frigid as endangered space

never seeing spring renew
growing they have yet to do.

Portly Bard

Portly Bard: Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.

Ekphrastic joy comes not from  praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.

**

​Snowbird

Scrapped his wings, fashioned
a cape instead
On his ice-crystal steed
he skates through bleak clouds
scooping buckets of flakes
to shroud our wintry world

Infants feeling his force,
howl in the night
shattering whole households
But as soon as he passes
they snuggle in their blankies
suck on their binkies
drift back to sleep
and wake to crystal-white

Amrita Skye Blaine

Amrita Skye Blaine develops themes of impermanence, aging, disability, and awakening. In 2003, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, and in 2024, a PocketMFA in poetry. Two collections came out this spring. She has been published in fourteen poetry anthologies, numerous literary magazines, and is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology nominee.

**

Snowbringer

Whoever thought that snow was a natural phenomenon
When the ghost of winter skies considers that it is time
Sensing that any village, already shivering with the cold
Might appreciate the silent beauty of some falling snow
It swoops down from those threatening dark grey skies
And from a bronze bucket, gripped by skeletal fingers
Snowflakes like a white curtain, cascading gently down
Bare black trees appear unbothered, and almost shrug
Whilst all house red roofs await the delicate sprinkling
Then the ghost sweeps by on its diamond-cut ice ride
With its almost infinite supply of snow, to be let loose
On to more homes, fields, and a few looking upwards
Beyond and above snowflakes, to the ghost in the sky

Howard Osborne

Howard is a UK citizen, retired. Published author of non-fiction reference book, scientific papers and poetry. Interests mainly creative writing (poetry, novel, short stories, songs and scripts), music and travel.

**

Clairvoyance Runs in My Cherokee Veins
 
We rarely mention it, unless only to each other.
The news, good or bad, is transferred through our X 
chromosome. Whether it’s a gift or a worry, I’d rather
not know what I can’t control.
 
Unlike me, Mama and Grandma were proud to get warnings 
from the other side. I wanted no part of the fear.
When my college roommate and I moved out of our dorm,
our dreams danced just two feet from each other’s head.
I’d report a crazy dream to her, only to learn it had been
HER dream. 
 
Maybe my Cherokee heritage had nothing to do with my fears 
and everything to say about how women communicate. 
I try to turn off what my dreams tell me and use them to inspire
poetry. What one viewer may see as cold and fearful, another may
see as delight. Barren trees, a skeletal creature shaking snow
upon our village, how wonderful we each can decide what may 
happen next!

Alarie Tennille
 
Alarie Tennille was a pioneer coed at the University of Virginia, where she earned her degree in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. She has now lived more than half her life in Kansas City, MO. Alarie received the first Editor’s Choice Fantastic Ekphrastic Award from The Ekphrastic Review, and in 2022, her latest book, Three A.M. at the Museum, was named Director’s Pick for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art gift shop. In April, Alarie was proud to be named the 2025 Muse of The Writers Place.
 
**
 
Engineered Anarchy?

Bone pointy nose of bird-like skull,
is this herself on zephyr’s cloud,
much-travelled, exiled, with no home,
explorer in the search for health;
strange fingers’ work, that touched so much,
spill, spinning crystals in a whirl,
for cold, however warm the clime?

Anarchic, like her lovers’ ways -
unpublished or unfinished plays -
precise, yet, engineering plans,
mosquitoes laid beneath her lens;
objects of magic by her bed,
her life and times tumultuous,
those teen dreams now seen surreal.

She forged in destitution’s days -
with odd jobs, made survival wage -
from France and Spain escaped régimes;
though welcome found in Mexico,
with birds, her cat familiars,
Which was her soul-mate through these tides;
incongruent geometry?

Stephen Kingsnorth 

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated and published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review.  He has, like so many, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com

**

​Winter Comes

No bright angel
but a bone bare twig
goblin body with a pointed
plague mask face
fleshless and starved
freighted on a raft of ice
dumping snow like refusal
from a smudge dark sack
no blessing but a stingy curse
fine and dry as salt falling
to smother the roofs and walls
of houses too small to keep
the last heat of harvest
rattling like a wet cough
caught in your throat
as snow covers all the colours
of a world lost to hunger’s
aching white

Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Memory Palace, edited by Clare MacQueen and Lorette C. Luzajic, and issues of Verse Virtual, Third Wednesday, Earth’s Daughters, and Caustic Frolic, as well as others. She has been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her collection, How to Become Invisible,  an exploration of experience with bi-polar disorder, is available from Kelsay Books and on Amazon.

**

Waiting Out the Cold
 
it comes in on the wind
dumped out of buckets
as confetti from trumpets
collected on roofs trimmed
 
with sharp angled religion
and stripped tree services
for shivering sermons
radiating heat from sin
 
this is where it lives
at the corner of cures
with the year's clouded curves
seeking to begin within
 
we cover the ground till when
the sunlight clears and swerves
cuts with knives and carves swirls
for a remedy to win
 
but, the cold will leave again
fly on as it always does
bandaged in capes and coffins
we will warm, this cold will end

Brendan Dawson

Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy.  He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and journey as an expat.

**

Feathers

Our village: 
Black triangles reaching up,
Red triangles reaching down.

Wind whistles
Through branches
Where feathers fall like snowflakes,
Float shivering and shimmering
From a frosty diamond, 
Blanketing our village with starbursts
As soft and cold as snow.

Donna Reiss

Writer, editor, teacher, bookmaker, and mixed media/paper artist, Donna lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she is a member of the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, the Guild of American Papercutters, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Follow her on Instagram @dreissart

**
​
Humanoid
 
I wait to be received as I enter the world with gifts in my hand and a pretend smile.
I   enter on a blanket of tears.
A half  made up incomplete humanoid
I was never one of you with my smile -  pointed grin and grasping hands.
I  arrive on a condemned cloud.
With a gift, a false story, and  diamonds to win your favour.
A being of no consequence.
Once revered.
Once loved.
No longer a being of honour.
My face now revealed for what it is.
A disgraced angel.
No longer accepted by the Kingdom from which I came.
I come seeking entrance and absolution.
To enter again the world of acceptance, peace and love.
To be clean-to be whole, to be one.
 
Sandy Rochelle
 
Sandy is a widely published poet, accomplished actress, and filmmaker. Sandy appeared both on Broadway and off-Broadway. On PBS -hosting and narrating several series. And conducting poetry readings and performances nation wide.

**

Cold Haiku II

Coldness and goosebumps
Terrifying death’s shadow  
My home my refuge

Jean Bourque
 
Jean lives in Montreal. Happy New Year to the entire Ekphrastic team and to all readers and authors. Bonne et Heureuse Année à toute l’équipe d’Ekphrastic, ainsi qu’aux lecteurs, lectrices, auteurs et autrices.

​**

​Divine Reminder by Winter

The withering land warns of his
Approach. Permission given to him
By the Creator to keep the life mortal. 

Skeletal limbs, creaking.
The monochromatic, barren earth.
The bloodless skies covered with the mist of his breath. 

This land in sync with 
His own appearance;
Starving, bleak, empty. 

Reminding them all that what they need 
Does indeed come from the land
They attempted to conquer. 

He returns year after year, swiftly bringing 
about the cold that buries and hibernates within
The bones of the red roofed village.

Red roofs being
The only reminder of the life
That struggles to persevere.

The swiftness and
Urgency he brings to dull
Them brought down in the breeze. 

With what intensity he comes, they are 
Never sure yet they are always
Full of dread and unprepared. 

On the north wind he flies,
Dropping beautiful and pure white
damnation on all.

Not even the holy ground, 
A fortress they’re were so sure of,
Can keep his presence out.

Mary Elizabeth Bruner 

Mary Elizabeth Bruner is a graduate of Wofford College and lives in Greenville, SC. 

**

What Falls Your Way 
 
Look how the snow falls so softly 
from the heavens as when the voice 
of a loved one floods your body, settles, 
saves you. If only these fragile flakes 
meant granted wishes, answers to prayers, 
pleas for mercy that turn true when caught 
in your palm, absorbed through your arms, 
hair, skin, your yearning heart. If only
we all had saviors who swooped down, 
balanced on a glowing throne of crystallized 
quartz. This is not your guardian angel, 
fairy godmother, but a feathered wonder, 
a mammoth long-necked hen, with wise, 
almighty eyes, barbed beak, angular limbs, 
appalling claws. See how she clutches, 
upends the brass bucket, releases what wafts
down to you through a sky the purple of bruises.

Karen George

Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and the collaborative Delight Is a Field (2025).  She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in 2024. Her poetry appears in The Mackinaw, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Luna Luna, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

**

Los Exiliados
  
West to southwest, I retrace your escape
over your father’s Andalusia, 
the pueblos blancos, picture how you break
free, your flight to that port, Casablanca--
in transition, from an imperial 
to golden eagle. Sea change, surreal,
the language; the critics muse, your journey
of isolation and fragility, 
your head high, emaciated remains
balanced on a cloud, one crystalline mass.
                 We rendezvous in cold, liminal states.
Call it metaphysical existence--
ethereal beast, material nymph.
We turn. Inside out. To feel. For this, warmth.

Robert E. Ray

Robert E. Ray's poetry has been published by Rattle, The Ekphrastic Review, The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, Wild Roof Journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and in multiple anthologies. He has published five poetry collections. Robert is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University. He lives in rural southeast Georgia.

**

Cast the Skies
 
Darkness, cast the skies, on the fate of all days…
No one took notice, for they believed they were safe.
Yes, the innocent lay in slumber, within whitewashed walls, 
When, over the red tile roofs, the first barrage came to fall. 
 
Citizens, with their rosy cheeked faces, who thought none would dare,
They sit huddled on frozen ground shaking, clutching their knees in despair. 
The enchanted oak giants sit stripped of their waxy, green, summer leaves.  
Half frozen corpses, left posed as ornaments, sway in the breeze. 
 
Ropes creak, straining beneath the unmeasurable weight
Of the poor harmless souls who’d been doomed with such fate. 
When indifference was born, atop a prism of light,
A sorcerer came riding, streaking across the cloudy night skies.
 
Peering down through crazed and merciless eyes, 
Undeterred by the desperate, blood curdling, screams and cries.
Cloaked is this phantom, soaring overhead with no wings,
Who, from a worn burlap sack, unleashes the most terrible things.
 
Mounted upon a chariot of a thousand cracked mirrors
To reflect in their petrified eyes, the worst of their fears…
Terrified they worship bowing their heads toward the sand
Beseeching all Gods, for the creature, laying claim to their lands.
 
Yes, wickedness came calling in the dead of the night
People, once blessed, turned their backs to the light. 
Suddenly their sullen eyes burst open, but far too late to see, 
They’d succumbed to the madness the crow had unleashed.
 

John Ford

John Ford is a father of three, devoted spouse, blue collar, horticulturalist, with a passion for poetry. John has published numerous poems, flash fiction, and a one act play, in the college funded academic journal Parley.  His poetry has previously appeared in the Ekphrastic Review.  

**

Recycling Yeats' Words at Year's End*

The Old Year streaks across a leaden sky,
riding a meteor of disaster toward the horizon.
It passes through bruised clouds that turn and turn
in a widening storm that obscures the gyre of heaven.

Its gray and skeletal form, a chimera.
Beaked plague mask with spare and pitiless gaze.
Feathers cling to a frail human body, but its wings are gone.
Both hands and feet bear pale claws that grasp at nothing.

Trees in the bleak landscape below, their skeletal forms
black and scraping the sky. Not a light in any window.
The populace sleeps. Or huddles, vexed to nightmare
by passionate misdirection loosed upon the world.

As it departs, the Old Year opens a wrinkled sack,
and in a ceremony of corruption, dumps the ashes 
of the people’s hopes like dirty snow to cover 
the world’s sins—insufficient for the task. 

But somewhere in the shadowed east the New Year
slouches in a rocky aerie. A ghastly new-feathered beast,
its hour come round, screams and flaps rough wings
against the darkness, prepares to fledge.

Janet Ruth
 
*This poem repurposes Yeats’ words from “The Second Coming”

Janet Ruth is an NM ornithologist and poet. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world. Poems recently or soon-to-be published in The Nature of Our Times, Unlost: Journal of Found Poetry and Art, and Unbroken: Prose Poems. Her winning sonnet, “A World That Shimmers,” was set to music and performed by True Concord Voices in 2023. See more at redstartsandravens.com/janets-poetry/.

**

The Arrival of Angst

Winter, you are
doldrums of the sleepy mind,
plucked and weary connoisseur

bearing din on gnarled limbs,
your conceit conveys static
like so much snow; how curious

the way decay uproots
a strange & delightful riddle
with no echo.

Heather Brown Barrett

Heather Brown Barrett is an award-winning poet in southeastern Virginia. She’s the Membership Chair of The Poetry Society of Virginia, a member of The Muse Writers Center, and a former board member of Hampton Roads Writers. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, formidable Woman sanctuary, Black Bough Poetry, OyeDrum Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She’s the author of Water in Every Room (Kelsay Books, 2025). Website: https://heatherbrownbarrett.com/.

**

Special Delivery
 
I hear Rod’s heavy tread on the stairs and switch off my flashlight, bury my book in the bed, slow my breathing. Maybe Mom’s boyfriend will think I’m asleep and leave me alone. As if I could possibly sleep with the racket he and his buddies are making. In the yard below, laughter crackles and music thunders. And then Rod storms through my door, a dark cloud hovering over my bed. 

“Gettup. We’re outta ice.” 

It’s not the liquor. He always talks like this, like he’s trying to conserve syllables. He chucks a couple of crumpled bills at me, then heads back downstairs. I hear him slam the door and there’s a fresh gust of masculine laughter as he rejoins the party. Another not-so-New Year’s Eve. 
 
*
 
Chondra looks at my pitiful two dollars and says, “Keep it. I’ll put it on your mom’s account.” Chondra is cool like that. My mom’s best friend knows our ice box is broken, knows Mom will probably never pay off her tab at Sip & Chips. Not with Rod around. But she dislikes my mom’s boyfriend more than she likes keeping her books in the black. 

“Where’s your mom tonight, honey? She driving the wagon, scraping up fools?” She doesn’t say “drunken fools like Rod.”

“Yep.” Most of the EMTs have to work on New Year’s Eve. Mom will return tomorrow morning, weary from a night of booze-fueled smashups only to find the post-party yard carnage and a half dozen guys sprawled in our living room. 

Chondra peers out the storefront window. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to haul all this back in your bike basket. Why don’t you let me send it on over? Be there before you know it, better if it’s delivered, you’ll see.”

My eyebrows are sky-high, because I know full well the Sip & Chips doesn’t have a delivery person. But if I don’t need to pedal home balancing a giant bag of ice on my bike, I’m not going to argue.

“Okay, thanks. Happy New Year.”

Chondra smiles and waves as I head outside. I’m gazing at her through the window as I unlock my bike, thinking how lucky Mom is to have a friend like her, when I see Chondra make a phone call. I’m not great at reading lips, but it looks like she’s saying, “a favour.”

*
 
Rod’s brow furrows when he sees me return with an empty basket and no ice in sight. 

“It’s gonna be delivered. Any minute,” I say and I’m through the door and upstairs before he can object. I slide into bed fully clothed, shoes and all, just in case. Steeling myself for the sound of boots pummeling the stairs. But all I hear is clinking bottles and guffaws and the steady pulse of the music.

Until a metallic clunk and the music dies. One of the guys says, “Tha hell?” A yelp of pain. Sounds of shattering glass. I’m out of bed and at the window and all I see is ice. Not sleet, not hail, but a torrent of ice cubes, huge, falling, pounding down. Somehow, it’s not striking the roof above me, it’s almost as though it’s targeting the yard. And now I watch Rod’s friends running and covering their heads. I think they’re going to come piling into the house but then a sound from above, almost like a helicopter (like wings, gigantic wings beating), and I crane my neck to see. Below the guys are scrambling for their cars, driving off. Except Rod is running for our door and just before he makes the step he is nabbed by titanic talons. Then he’s aloft, his screams weaker and more distant. 

The yard is blanketed in ice. But all is silent. Until the phone rings and I pick up, saying, “Happy New Year, Chondra.”

Tracy Royce

Tracy Royce's words appear in The Mackinaw, MacQueen's Quinterly, ONE ART, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, a Touchstone Award, and a Pushcart. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking and bird watching. You can find her on Bluesky. 

**

​The Year I Went Without This

getting old was centuries ago. When the sun was still gold. And the stars would log in as “My Muse.” In the boldest of summer prints. When, all of one’s memories could fit, inside of one’s pocket. And talk you down from where tomorrow’s sorrows had peaked. Luck, calling you, by your first ever name. While one’s last ever name would go blameless. As it sat for its portrait. Or traipsed down to where the river. Once lived up to the village’s reveries. O how, snow, stuck to itself. And the swans, once the answer to everything. Were now only able to size up the world with their wings. Aw yes, the rest, is a blur. More topic points for the rubble. And it’s there, where I’ve been told, to cut to the “Cold.” Where one’s doubles will no longer be clouding one’s innocence. Or unleashing more doubts. On our ceiling’s so-called lapse of half decent judgment. When winter, silver-tined, when not wraith-white, threw its one voice towards the spring. And our appetites, tuned themselves, to the wind. Our shadows, went by light-fortresses, dash, still-will-take-flight-for-profit. And snow returned for its mittens, wool hats. And crows shat, on those wool hats, and the wool hats of our children. Do I see those trees, worshipping the gowns, they’ve slipped out from under. Or showing off their scars to the ice-silenced, thunder. Caring less for the messes we’ve made. The spells we’ve fallen under. Still convinced that we acted alone. When we dreamt up not only this madness. But the dark it called home.

Mark DeCarteret

Mark DeCarteret's eightth book Stop Motion Poets and Live Action Lit-Figures will be published by Bee Monk Press this Spring.