Women Artists Contest: the Finalists. Congratulations!

Congratulations to the finalists for the Women Artists contest!

The 24 pieces of poetry and prose (in no particular order) have given these artworks new life, approaching them in so many unique ways.

Participants worked from a curated collection of art prompts by women artists. (Although the contest has finished, the sixty works can continue to inspire your writing practice, so get a copy at the end of this post if you don't have one.)

Our special guest judge Alarie Tennille will choose the winner and two runners up from these finalists over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

The Finalists

Merkabah: Ascension, by Sheikha A.
The Travelling House of Spirits, by Suzy Aspell
​More Than Just a House, by Rose Mary Boehm
​Stolen Words Cross-Stitched From Harriet Powers’s Description of Her Pictorial Quilt*, by Dorothy Burrows
Las Playeras, by Shelly Blankman
Art is What We Are For, Actually, by Kate Copeland
A Certain Symmetry, by Barbara Lydecker Crane
Cut Flower Blues, by Helen Freeman
Changing Pastures, by Karen George
Group IV, No. 3. The Ten Largest, Youth, by Lynne Kemen
Embroidery, Lily Yeats, by Jeanne Blum Lesinski
Finches, by Linda Levitt
You Are Here, by Sheila Lockhart
Persephone, by Mary McCarthy
Sumair, by Anita Nahal
Self, by Stephanie Pressman
You Can Tell, by Michele Parker Randall
At Hôpital Auxiliaire 301, by Alun Robert
Aggregated, by Kerfe Roig
Taxi Rank, by Ravi Shankar
Melancholy: Homage to Constance Marie Charpentier, by Sandi Stromberg
Widowhood, by Sandi Stromberg
Red Dress, by Fran Turner
Taxi Rank, by Sarah Wyman

The Passage, by Kay Sage (USA) 1956

Widowhood
  
"Yves [Tanguy] was my only friend
who understood everything,"
            —Kay Sage
 
Devoted to the surreal, she wandered
torturous mazes, painted empty
scaffolding when her husband suddenly died.
Depression and decreased eyesight haunted
“Watching the Clock” and “Tomorrow is Never.”
 
It was “The Passage” she didn’t want
and yet brushed onto canvas. A woman
shorn of lover-wife persona. The landscape
of widowhood, its barren fields and
rocky support. Her art’s geometry.
 
She remained faithful curator
of Tanguy’s art. Until she painted
“The Answer Is No.” Until she chose
a bullet, had their ashes
offered to Brittany’s wild coast.
 
Sandi Stromberg
 
Sandi Stromberg’s poetry has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and for 2020 Best of the Net. She is a dedicated contributor to The Ekphrastic Review and recently contributed a Throwback Thursday (May 22). In 2021, the Review awarded her a Fantastic Ekphrastic Award for her contributions to the genre. Her poetry has appeared in many small journals and anthologies, including San Pedro River Review, The Ocotillo Review, Houston Chronicle-San Antonio Express-News, Snapdragon, Words & Art, Visual Verse, Weaving the Terrain, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and in Dutch in the Netherlands in Brabant Cultureel and Dichtersbankje (the Poet’s Bench).

Taxi Rank, by Clarice Beckett (Australia) 1931

Taxi Rank
 
Words chant water 
wash of oils 
where taxis wait 
a foggy Brisbane evening 
after the sun sank 
without notice and tender lights 
that edge the awnings 
glow their beckoning call 
but lovers hurry to their hired ride 
making their slow streak 
through the wet streets.

Sarah Wyman

Sarah Wyman writes and teaches on verbal / visual intersections and lives in the Hudson Valley where climbing feet kick dust down to a river-sea.  Her poetry has appeared in aaduna, Mudfish, Ekphrasis Review, San Pedro River Review, Potomac Review, Petrichor Review, Heron Clan VII, Chronogram, and other venues. She is the author of Sighted Stones (Finishing Line 2018) and Fried Goldfinch (Codhill 2021).

**

Taxi Rank 

"My pictures, like music, should speak for themselves." 
Clarice Beckett 

A train ride from the cliffs of Beaumaris, 
far from the arrays of vertebrate fossils 

buried in a gravelly bed, the seal bones
and shark teeth, corals and crustaceans,

a solitary woman pulls a homemade cart 
of paints in the rain. It’s hard to explain 

atmosphere. Overcoats and shoegazing 
umbrellas smudged in streaks of light, 

hazy with the ache of waiting for a taxi 
in the mist to return to care for an ailing 

mother and a bank manager father who 
would set ablaze most of his daughter’s 

canvases, painted en plein air, soon after 
she died of pneumonia. Distant intimacy 

or intimate distance glistens, almost still 
wet, blurry, a viola solo faintly rising 

behind a windowsill no more than a story 
above your head, beckoning but always 

just out of reach like the memory of a trip 
you have yet to take this life and never will. 

Ravi Shankar
​
Dr. Ravi Shankar, is a Pushcart prize-winning poet, translator and professor who has published 15 books, including the Muse India award-winning translations Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess and The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he co-edited W.W. Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond called "a beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in print, radio and TV in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, BBC and the PBS Newshour. He has won awards to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, fellowships from the Rhode Island and Connecticut Counsel on the Arts, founded one of the oldest electronic journals of the arts Drunken Boat, and recently finished his PhD from the University of Sydney. His memoir Correctional is forthcoming in 2021 with University of Wisconsin Press.

Las Playeras, by Ceila Castro (Chile) 1889

Las Playeras

From daybreak until dark, days are the same 
for the playeras — beachgoers. No one knows
their names. No one cares. Every day they trek

side by side, madre and hija — mother and
daughter — across the long stretch of beach
between the dock and village to carry goods 

to market. They sell or they starve. The goods
are stacked, carried on their heads, leaving 
their arms free for carrying baskets for more goods.

It’s a delicate balancing act, an art handed down 
from one generation to the next — from bisabuela
to abuela to madre, and now to hija. But 

muscles are slow to grow. It takes years to learn
to balance a cumbersome bundle of wheat or wood
on the head, leaving hands free for baskets full of

extra goods and still move as quickly as possible
against the wind over stone-cold sand to reach 
market before dark. Madre scrutinizes her child

with the keen eye of a hen watching her hatchling.
“Bien hecho, mi querida, bien hecho,” she whispers.

Shelly Blankman
​
Shelly Blankman and her husband, Jon, live in Columbia, Maryland, with their three rescue cats and foster dog. Their two sons, Richard and Joshua, live in New York and Texas, respectively. Shelly has spent most of her career in public relations and journalism, but her first love is poetry. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Ekphrastic Review, Halfway Down The Stairs, Silver Birch Press, and Muddy River Review. Most recently, Richard and Joshua surprised her with a book of her own poetry, Pumpkinhead,  She also enjoys making greeting cards, scrapbooking and, of course, refereeing pets

Magician, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1956

The Travelling House of Spirits

Come one, come all, come see magical tricks,
here next to my mystical house on wheels.

Watch, behold the juggling string of spells,
one for you, many for me, treat from a flick 

of my hand. Raise your blank eyes back 
to my mother of pearl face, one star-flash

will beguile your bewildered hearts.  
No longer wearing grey, you too will don 

a red cloak of mystery, sell spells to friends,
carry owls in nimble legged chests, 

point goats at celestial skies and tame lions 
to worship at your feet. No more shadowy 

entrances and exits will pursue your steps. 
Wearing auras of billowy, silvery cloaks 

you will wizard leap into the air, sip smoke 
swirling flutes of riddle brimming elixir.

Come, stare at my flickering hands, 
I’m twirling stars of hope into a rope of illusions. 

Suzy Aspell
​
​Suzy lives and works in Bedfordshire. Her work has appeared in Sledgehammer Lit and will be published in Spelt Magazine early July. Suzy wrote and directed two plays for the Civic Centre in Tainan, Taiwan, on British pantomime theme and is currently working on a pamphlet exploring feminine cultural and historical traditions. Writing ekphrastic poetry allows Suzy to combine her love of art and poetry, she loses herself for hours. Suzy is branching out into fictional short stories and is relishing the challenge. Suzy works in the travel industry and tutors English Language and Literature.  Suzy tweets @susisu371

Portrait of Carl Van Vechten, by Florine Stettheimer (USA) 1922

Art is What We Are For, Actually

there's coincidence, fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, a naivety
the books that tend to grow, poems up in piles, right up to ceilings 
and past frames, your suit an armour, your look an Annie Lennox

roses on carpets and more cats to claim the dinner table,
there is chicken breast for tea and chocolate to finish, 
a romance like a Marlene Dietrich movie 

and for a while it seemed that for every wrong thing each day 
a sweetness rose, a car being civil or a boy our son's age sun-smiling, 
never a you-haven't or I-won't as later, 

when the rain drained from a dawn sky
when the skyscrapers swayed in infrared 

and whilst never a diary forgotten, a word you said missed, 
not one Saturday without opera or the Wednesday without notes,

never more will the wild playing under flying stars
nor your letters as leaves, typed up on the dot, bundled 
in an Indian tobacco box, never more the view from the salon 

and ever again, other wings then your own, loving, 
living insist on a lot of energy

when did you decide to doubt desire into undesired? 
the art won't mind and I have no idea whether we live or create again

Kate Copeland

Kate Copeland started absorbing stories ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching and translating some silvery languages. Her love for art, lyrics and water has led her happily to -ekphrastic- poetry ... with some publications sealed already! She was born in Rotterdam some 51 ages ago and is fond of housesitting in the UK, the Americas and Spain.

Sumair, by Amrita Sher-Gil (India) 1936

Sumair

Like Mona Lisa, I carry secrets. Who doesn’t? I’m not smiling like Lisa, though. Amrita wanted me to be me. Sensual eyes and full silent lips. Forgotten stories seek answers. The slight bend at the shoulders, whispers I’m carrying, bode burdens and then some. Choosing green and pink, so I’d be close to mother and the marsh flows around me, flowers float on the marsh. He said he’d be home early. Wedding anniversary is not to be missed. The food now is icy. Candles have pulverized. And winter outside is relentless. I don’t feel like changing clothes. Shoot, it’s already morning. Thickened and darkened now is the marsh.

Anita Nahal

Anita Nahal is an Indian American poet, flash fictionist, children’s writer and columnist. Anita has two books of poetry, one of flash fictions, four for children and three edited anthologies to her credit. Her third book of poetry, What’s wrong with us Kali women, is due for release by Kelsay Books in August 2021. Two of her books are prescribed in a course on multiculturalism and immigration at the University of the Utrecht, The Netherlands. Anita teaches at the University of the District of Columbia, Washington DC. Anita is the daughter of Sahitya Akademi award winning Indian novelist, Chaman Nahal and educationist, Sudarshna Nahal. Anita resides in the US with her son, daughter in law and golden doodle. More on her at:  https://anitanahal.wixsite.com/anitanahal

Praying Girl, by Mufide Kadri (Turkey) c. 1903

Merkabah: Ascension

for Saad Ali and Laura M. Kaminski (Halima Ayuba) 

The month approaches when the Ka’bah
shall receive a new robe. She doesn't pray 

for world peace. She has seen a picture 
of black sails against a descending sun;

an alcove of peace where music flows 
as piety; the san'aa has risen like a beacon 

on the rooftop of skewing daylight – 
she is reminded of the need to break

in order to structure; to scatter to align. 
The month will end the year of yearning 

to probe towards mourning. Old shroud 
on the stone of salvation will be lifted

and all that is and was shall be exposed. 
Pristine pearly flooring beckons locusts, 

these in another land of another shrine 
are welcome as warders; here, they swarm

to be trampled on, almost willingly, 
under burdens of beasts of human 

embodiments. Their feet are large 
and small, heavy and light – disposed 

of colour – their heels are rivers 
of cracked destinies that still stomp 

loud, without care, on the bridge of light. 
Their prayer is a coarse bed of soft flakes. 

She isn't where she is – soul floats 
to greet pigeons that house the roof

of God. They were put there to be saved. 
She tells them she doesn't want peace;

her visit through raised hands to the sky 
search for Him and her understanding of

His presence where there is need to be
saved. She sits across burning coals 

and rusty incense, asking to be immersed – 
the need to scatter the need to align.

Sheikha A.

Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her works appear in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Polish Italian, Albanian and Persian. More about her can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com

Ndebele House Painting (South Africa) 1890s to contemporary times, photo by Angela Abel, CC BY 4.0- Wikimedia Commons

More Than Just a House

Woman creates beauty. Owning a house is not enough. When your grandmother didn’t have colours, no brushes, her fingers would do. Dip, dip into white. Dip, dip into black. She made patterns. Her statement. Her art. You though have colours. You have brushes. You have yellows, pinks, blues, reds, purples… How about a ruler for your geometric designs? Esther Mahlangu uses only chicken feathers! Your husbands gift you gold bangles, beads, necklaces, pearls, cloth for the goddess that is you. You are waylaid by shiny things, but you never forget that the whole village, every house, is your canvas to create your home.

Walking tall
Ndebele woman shines
Divine excess

​Rose Mary Boehm

​Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her fourth poetry collection, THE RAIN GIRL, was published by Chaffinch Press in 2020. Want to find out more? https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
​

You Are Here, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2021

​You Are Here

watching a bumblebee
squeeze its furry abdomen 
into foxglove fingers
you’re trying to work out 
how long it takes for a pollen molecule 
to travel from the soil up to its calyx 
you’re getting close      but now you see
another galaxy has formed  
a splotch of swirling grey 
in a pink universe    how many is that now?
you count them   one two three 
five hundred and sixty seven
and the letters too   
directing pollinators to the hidden source 
of happiness     and why not you? 
a message for bees 
can’t be that hard to decode 
it’s alphabetical after all    a matter of 
triggering the right responses

now the rain splashes silver curtains 
smearing pink and cream 
blurring outlines  
its drops tap-tapping on cups
their pipes vibrate with fugal harmonies
truths which must be recorded 
with mathematical precision
using special symbols on graph paper
no easy task     but the beauty of it
oh the beauty of it makes you weep
if only you could grasp   its exactitude 
its magnificent systems   everything
would be     clear

there was a time you could enjoy 
simple pleasures of line   patterns of colour    
as you would looking at an abstract painting
no need to search for meaning everywhere
until one day you started counting
the number of flowers on each stem
the number of bees  ones twos threes
stacking up behind your eyes
and you began to see 
how every flower contains a universe 
that demands investigation
how you could read their messages 
how they insisted on it

you’ll have the answer worked out 
very soon    you just need one more 
tiny calculation 

Sheila Lockhart

Sheila Lockhart is a retired art historian and social worker living in the Scottish Highlands near Inverness, where she doesn’t do very much except look after some horses, a husband and her garden. She started writing poetry five years ago after her brother’s suicide and has been published online and in print in Northwords Now, Nine Muses Poetry, Twelve Rivers, StAnza Poetry Map of Scotland, Writers’ Cafe, The Ekphrastic Review, Re-Side and The Alchemy Spoon. ​

Group IV, No. 3. The Ten Largest, Youth, by Hilma af Klint (Sweden) 1907

Group IV, No. 3. The Ten Largest, Youth
 
Burnt orange background for warmth
roundness, spirals, buttery pinwheels-
nothing pointy or masculine.
Seashells, wombs, 
easter eggs in a basket
 
Comets cartwheeling, planets spinning
You are here.
Rolling baked rolls with cinnamon-
spirals, round, soft
tops, toys, skeins of yarn, tails trailing.
 
Roundness reaching into hugs,
sweet embrace, delicate writing
loopily scrawled,
no signature, you know it’s me.

Lynne Kemen

Lynne Kemen lives in the Great Western Catskills of Upstate New York. Her chapbook, More Than A Handful (Woodland Arts Editions), was published in October 2020. Five of her poems appeared in Seeing Things Anthology, Robert Bensen, Ed. She has been published or has forthcoming poems in La Presa, Silver Birch Press, The Ravens Perch, Blue Mountain Review, What We See In our Journeys Anthology, Martin Willitts, Jr, Ed.

**

Aggregated

Why must we always quantify?  4, 3, 10.  Add, subtract, multiply.  Divide.

Not earth.  Not fire, nor sea.  Air.  Wind, light.  Can you measure it?  Will gravity seize these circles, still them, turn them into directions, lines with destinations?

Spinning.  We are.  Always spiraling in and out of multiple centres, carried on particles with paths that can be seen but not located.

The context manipulates and deconstructs us.  The contours have no edges.  We are always incomplete, impossible, imaginary, irrational, walking a metaphoric labyrinth after portents that do not exist.

Implied, incongruent.  A fraction of capacity.  A composite of probability.

Add, subtract, divide.  Multiply.  The answer always remains.

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/, and see more of her work on her website http://kerferoig.com/

The Scottish Women's Hospital: In The Cloister of the Abbaye at Royaumont, by Norah Neilson-Gray (Scotland) 1920

At Hôpital Auxiliaire 301
 
Wheeled us on makeshift beds
heard our cries
felt our curses
smelt mustard agent in our lungs
tasted blood
dressed contusions
extricated shattered limbs
saved expendable lives
sanitised with vigour
stitched up our deep wounds
fed us Maconóochie
on beds in the Cloisters
witnessed shell shock
did not know how to treat it.
 
Wheeled us off back to Blighty
to mothers
to lovers
to wives of the dead
and fatherless children.
 
Wheeled in the Mistress Ivens
CMO Royaumont
for honor and recognition after
the trauma of the Great War
to Palais de la Légion d’Honneur
on the left bank of the Seine
as saviour of stricken soldiers
in the war to end all wars.
 
Alun Robert
​
Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical free verse. He has achieved success in poetry competitions across the British Isles and North America. His work has been published by many literary magazines, anthologies and webzines in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, India, South Africa, Kenya, USA and Canada. Since 2018, he has been part of The Ekphrastic Review community particularly enjoying the fortnightly challenges. He is a member of the Federation of Writers Scotland for whom he was a Featured Writer in 2019.

The Fortune Teller, by Adele Kindt (Belgium) 1835

A Certain Symmetry
 
Around her girth, a heavy cloak conceals
my friend’s condition. She’s doubtful cards will show
her baby’s birth; her trace of smile reveals
amusement. But she suggested this tableau,
this study of extremes, for me to paint–
one woman young and lovely, dressed in silk
to show how she can spend without constraint–
the other old and worried, of some ilk
that’s foreign, born to struggle on the fringe,
with beaky, furrowed face and sallow skin.    
The disparate pair do share a sort of hinge,
however: I paint the same black cloth wherein
if cloak and shroud of hood were joined, they’d fit.
The women share the fate they can’t outwit.

Barbara Lydecker Crane

Barbara Lydecker Crane was a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize in 2017 and 2019.  She has won two Pushcart nominations, two Laureate’s Choice awards from the Maria Faust Sonnet Contest, and First Prize in the 2010 Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest. She’s published three chapbooks: Zero Gravitas, Alphabetricks (for children), and BackWords Logic.  Her poems have appeared in Able Muse, Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, Think, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Writer’s Almanac, many others, and in several anthologies. She’s also an artist.

Still Life With Flowers, by Rachel Ruysch (Netherlands) 1700s

Cut Flower Blues

I’ve lost my soul.
Have you seen it?
Somewhere between 

the ruffle and splay
of a petal – it slipped. 
Did you take it?

I’ve sifted 
through pollen,
past stigma and stamen,

followed stem lines
behind leaves,
peered under a portly bee

inside a chrysanthemum.
Where’s it gone?
I’ve listened to bluebell,

wing whir, leaf drop,
the slurp of nectar,
the pop of bud clasp.

Soil calls me home,
my tubes weaken,
my phantom roots rummage.

Helen Freeman

Helen Freeman has been published on several sites such as Ink, Sweat and Tears, Red River Review, Barren Magazine, The Drabble, Sukoon and the Ekphrastic Review.  Her instagram page is @chemchemi.hf.  She lives in Durham, England.

​

Embroidery, by Lily Yeats (Ireland) c. 1900

Embroidery, Lily Yeats 

Dark hair swept up over her head, Susan Mary sits straight backed at the Dun Emer work table. She stares dark-eyed down at her work-in-progress held in a wooden frame. Hand poised over an apple orchard in pink and white bloom, the ground a pale sea of spring, she holds magenta silk thread in a wide-eyed needle: 

At the bottom of the panel, like the proud painter she is, this craftswoman stitch-signs her needle name in flaxen yellow silk: Lily Yeats.

Jeanne Blum Lesinski

Jeanne Blum Lesinski’s works have appeared in journals, lifestyle and gardening magazines, anthologies, and online. When not at her computer, she may often be in a garden or on a bike path. 

Melancholy, by Constance Marie Charpentier (France) 1801

Melancholy: Homage to Constance Marie Charpentier
 
Her right arm rests listlessly across her legs.
The left arm limp, palm upturned as though
waiting to be filled. Her head a sad flower
 
under a weeping cloud that Keats knew so well.
The lamentable familiarity.
One might wonder why the Greek and Roman
 
pantheons were bereft of a goddess
of doubt and self-questioning. Why was it left
to Hippocrates to propose Melancholy?
 
She who embodies those qualities
of suffering and sadness he called black bile.
How like autumn this depression, as leaves
 
fade and die with the summer. Torpor sinks
into the soul, pensive, forlorn—                                
the upturned palm waiting to be filled.
 
Sandi Stromberg
 
Sandi Stromberg’s poetry has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and for 2020 Best of the Net. She is a dedicated contributor to The Ekphrastic Review and recently contributed a Throwback Thursday (May 22). In 2021, the Review awarded her a Fantastic Ekphrastic Award for her contributions to the genre. Her poetry has appeared in many small journals and anthologies, including San Pedro River Review, The Ocotillo Review, Houston Chronicle-San Antonio Express-News, Snapdragon, Words & Art, Visual Verse, Weaving the Terrain, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and in Dutch in the Netherlands in Brabant Cultureel and Dichtersbankje (the Poet’s Bench).
 

Two Girls, by Tina Blau (Austria) c.1900?

​You Can Tell 
 
I skip the dresses & shoes, costumes plumbed & plumed  
from a dead bird’s tail. Last year, my Met calendar stayed 
on my son’s birthday for a week. He’s fine. I blame Degas;  
 
he catches the moment between movements, brushes 
the same shaft of light onto dancers with hand-to-hair,  
hand-to-shoulder poses. I seek out my own birthday- 
 
art-day as the box opens, a fortune teller to show my future,  
offer up a sign. Will this year be drawn raw, sunsetty  
colors like last year’s Renoir? But, if the image reveals  
 
a copper & gold spur from 1400s Catalonia (sorry, September  
4th babies), I’ll flip by in search of Waring’s Girl in Red,  
that ringed finger, & how the shadow becomes her. I find 
 
comfort in Blau’s Two Girls, the upland scenery that calls 
to me like Florida’s salt marshes in winter. Reed movement 
answers in the water. Something about sky, the graying day.  
 
Michele Parker Randall

Michele Parker Randall is the author of Museum of Everyday Life (Kelsay Books 2015) and A Future Unmappable, chapbook (Finishing Line Press 2021). Her work can be found in Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.

Pictorial Quilt, by Harriet Powers (USA) 1895

​Stolen Words Cross-Stitched From Harriet Powers’s Description of Her Pictorial Quilt*

Dorothy Burrows

Note: These words have been taken and rearranged from  Harriet Powers’s description, published online by Boston Fine Arts https://collections.mfa.org/objects/116166

Based in the United Kingdom, Dorothy Burrows enjoys writing poetry, flash fiction and short plays. This year, her poems have been published by various journals including The Ekphrastic Review, Spelt Magazine, The Alchemy Spoon, Dust Poetry Magazine, Visual Verse and Wales Haiku Journal. She tweets @rambling_dot

Two Sisters, by Nina Arbore (Romania) 1940

Finches
 
Nina and  
Ecaterina 
look out 
to the gleaming water 
to the hollow sky 
a bowl of plums
in Nina’s arms 
Ecaterina 
placid in her robe 
considers  
the morning 
and what wisdom 
may alight 
on her shoulder 
like a finch 
shaking its feathers

Linda Levitt

​Linda Levitt lives in Deep East Texas, where she teaches communication and media studies. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University and a PhD in communication from the University of South Florida. She reviews books for PopMatters and Spectrum Culture and published her first book, Culture, Celebrity, and the Cemetery: Hollywood Forever, in 2018.

A Paradox, by Frances MacDonald McNair (Scotland) 1905

Self

motherhood babies warm
squirming    infants giggle
at games    skin blushes
deep pink    roses    sweet
smell of the nape briny

the three of them ma-ah-mam-
ing all the   time juggled   for each
for all    for him     for her
for the cat    for study
for writing   for painting

drive home   from class
drive   keep driving   leave
motherhood ropes the car
turns it at the exit
turns the key   in the door

wanting   not wanting
them    wanting not
wanting self   to emerge
as roses do    bare branch
to lush foliage  startling bloom

Stephanie Pressman

A graphic artist and lifelong poet, Stephanie Pressman earned an MA in English from San Jose State University, taught writing at community college, and is the editor of her small press, Frog on the Moon. She served as co-editor of Cæsura and americas review. Her work has appeared in many journals, among them Bridges, The MacGuffin, Sing Heavenly Muse, Cauldron Anthology, Cæsura, The Broken Plate, and California Quarterly as well as on-line in Newport Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Red Wolf Editions, The Ekphrastic Review, The Collidescope, Carmina Magazine, and others. Her long poem Lovebirdman appears in an illustrated volume published in June, 2018.

Girl in a Red Dress, by Laura Wheeler Waring (USA) 1935

Red Dress

You came out of this belly, a slimy, squalling heap, already reaching. I want to feed your hunger. I try to give what you need.

You’ve always frightened me with your yearning. Once I overheard a story of a beauty, a Trojan beauty who incited invasion and war. Beauty incites.

But I want your dreams to flame into life and light of day, to burn through the night. When you saw the drape and danger in the fabric, you wanted the red of it, dreamed it into a dress. That’s why I bought red thread, borrowed the old woman’s sewing machine. And sewed the delicacy of this dress for you as once I’d sewn my own delights.

I’m afraid to tell you that you are beautiful, but you are. Your eyes lower, not in modesty, but in silent confidence that abides no noisy intrusion of doubt.

Here, this ring was given to me once, slipped onto my finger without thought of promise. It made my hand shine too.

Fran Turner

Fran Turner grew up on a farm in southern Ontario but she finds herself more at home in Toronto where she has lived most of her adult life. She has worked in nursing, cancer projects and cancer advocacy and taught at her own Aikido Dojo for many years. Writing is a recent and growing passion. Her short fiction has been published in online journals Dodging the Rain, Adelaide Review and The Ekphrastic Review.

Changing Pastures, by Rosa Bonheur (France) 1863

Changing Pastures
 
Cool early summer afternoon on the channel, brisk wind not ideal for keeping a flock of thirty calm in a rocking boat. Between bleats of packed lambs and cries of kittiwakes nesting on chalky cliffs, my ears throb. The stink of sour ale wafts from my rowing mate, mixed with the gamey musk of hot, wet wool coats, queasies my stomach. 
 
I take shallow breaths, concentrate on sun silvering blue-green water in the distance, not the sharp peaks of dizzying waves alongside us. Iridescent moss mantles the valleys. I imagine the crimson clover, ox-eye daisy, and buttercup I saw when last visiting with my love, Elise.
 
The sun soothes my arms, back, neck, matches the warmth of the ewe’s rhythmic heave against my shins. 
 
My arms ease into the cadence of tandem oaring. The white-haired sheepherder at the bow launches into a rousing sea shanty about a drunken sailor. My oarsman groans. When I inhale to join the song, I taste the water’s whiff—elemental, briny-sweet, wild.

Karen George
​
Karen George is author of five chapbooks, and the poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and forthcoming Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2020). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Juniper, I-70 Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online. She reviews poetry at Poetry Matters:  http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/. Her website is: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

Spring, by Romaine Brooks (USA) c. 1913

Persephone                                              
 
Still wearing winter’s shadow
like a cloak over her shoulders
she rises pale as the new moon,
a whisper of light
promising to wax full 
above the softening earth.
Like the first spring greens
waking from a long dream
her thoughts are folded close, 
seeds praying for release.
She steps into light
like the gate of morning
breathing flowers
onto the lambent air.
 
Where each day is the first day,
and she forgets there was ever
any other season 
past her last grey dreaming
in the cold underworld,
where she slept and waited
cradled in the roots of trees,
listening to the songs
of rock and water
that kept her company
until she grew ripe enough 
for resurrection.

Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy is a retired RN who has always loved writing and art, finding both inexhaustible sources of inspiration. Her late discovery of ekphrastic work suits her natural inclinations, deepening the experience of appreciation and creation , making the journey from image to words both an exploration and an adventure.  Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, most lately in The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, and the latest issue of Earth’s Daughters.
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