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Joseph Van Bredael: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

12/8/2023

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Picture
The Adoration of the Magi, by Joseph Van Bredael (Flanders) before 1739

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 The Adoration of the Magi, by Joseph van Bredael. Deadline is December 22, 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.​

Voluntary gift of $5 CAD with submission.

YES
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 VAN BREDAEL 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, December 22, 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.
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Dusti Bonge: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

12/1/2023

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Picture
Whirlpool, by Dusti Bongé (USA) 1956

​Dear Writers,

Thanks for all the fascinating submissions to the Bongé Challenge. 

These biweekly offerings are actually challenges on two fronts: first for the writers, second for the judges. 

Choosing from so many intriguing takes on this abstract piece was its own swirling whirlpool of words and images and reflections. 

I hope you enjoy reading these selections, and that, like me, you will appreciate the perspective that each writer brings to this work of art. 

With best wishes for your continued creativity,

Sandi Stromberg

**

 
Dusti Bongé Exhibit, Hollis Taggart Gallery, 2022
 
Bring Dusti back to New York,
sunflowers in one hand,
Biloxi oysters in the other.
Yellow. Orange. Green. Blue.
 
In the Ab Ex Boys Club of Gorky,
De Kooning, Gottlieb, and Pollock,
a woman wielded her own brush and
palette knife, stretched her own canvas
 
on beams of Southern pine. Scents of
turpentine and linseed oil seeped
into the waves of her long blonde hair.
It was the 1950s. Paint exploded.
 
Betty Parsons picked her up,
begged her to stay. Canvas gessoed,
scratched in purple, blooming red,
floating angles, falling water.
 
Back in Harrison County, rumors flew,
all the details—real and imagined—whispered
loudly at Christ Church the Redeemer
Ladies Club Weekly Potluck Supper.
 
The men of Biloxi watched her slim arms
plant red lilies across a driveway,
graft camellias, hide narcissus
bulbs deep in the Mississippi soil.
 
She stirred fiery pots of gumbo,
lifted cast iron skillets of cornbread,
wore white on the hottest days of August,
sipped her Chardonnay with ice crystals.
 
Today, back in Chelsea, a solo show.
Opening night, a sea of pearls, silver trays,
the flutes of Veuve Clicquot, deconstructed sushi,
Sanskrit tattoos, and violet lipstick.
                       
Suede jackets, Armani pumps, triple-pierced ears,
all the black-stockinged legs stand in awe.
Manhattan bows. The artist smiles. From a grave
in the South, she is still holding her own.    

Gabrielle Langley     
 
Gabrielle Langley is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Fairy Tale (Sable Books, 2023) and Azaleas on Fire (Sable Books, 2019). With work appearing in a variety of literary journals, she has been awarded the Lorene Pouncey Poetry Award and the Vivian Nellis Memorial Award for Creative Writing. She has been Houston Poetry Fest's Featured Poet, a national ARTlines finalist, and a recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations. Ms. Langley was also a spearhead and co-editor for the anthology Red Sky: Poetry on the global epidemic of violence against women (Sable Books, 2016). Additional information about this poet is available at http://www.gabriellelangley.com.
  
 
**
 
Whirlpool
 
America’s top diplomat says “far too many Palestinians have been killed.” 11/10/23 NYT 
 
In a cold and relentless prairie wind,
here in November west of Chicago,
the trees have lost track of their leaves,
swirling down in ocher, red, and gold.
But what’s it like to be a tree, losing
its children, rooting deeply and dark,
praying to withstand even further loss?
 
Laurence Musgrove
 
Laurence Musgrove is a professor of English at Angelo State University in Central West Texas where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing from a Buddhist perspective. He is the author of, three volumes of poetry: Local Bird (2015), The Bluebonnet Sutras (2019), and A Stranger’s Heart (2023) all from Lamar University Literary Press.
 
**

A Little Man

A little man, a vaguely
yellowed apparition
holding up
the whole
evolving universe
of everything
entangled
 
in the garden,
summer roses,
fallen
autumn leaves
scattered,
lonely,
 
spindly trees
stretching, longing,
reaching up
beyond the darkly
narrowed confines
clearly
 
to the sun,
a simple bird
arched studiously
aside,
entangled
in the fabulous
invention of
 
a little man,
curiously
portraying, purposely
displaying
the complicated
contours
of his own creation.  
 
Enrico Cumbo                                                    
 
Enrico Cumbo was born in Sicily in the last century and emigrated to Canada when 9 years old. He is an historian (Ph.D, University of Toronto, 1996) and has just retired from teaching in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at a school in Toronto. He now has a great deal of time on his hands which he uses for ongoing research (in ethnic studies and historiography), rediscovering family, writing poetry, and generally contemplating the state of the world in this century, an increasing ordeal. 
 
**
 
There is Light 
 
A prodigy at eleven years of age, she wondered where all this would lead. She focused on experimenting with a stub of black eyeliner from her mother’s bathroom, deviously hid it inside a shiny red pencil box which sat on the top of an old cedar hewn dresser, within plain view. She horded hours, traced the maze of black stairs swirling ever upward, reaching for the plexiglass window at the very edge of the slanted attic roof where she yearned and struggled to set aside pre-teen angst and fly into the music like Poe’s black raven, feel the sheer joy of release from a dark, dank, blackened hole as it worried within her mind. A violin, her violin, handed down from virtuoso to virtuoso, inside a scarred, dilapidated case that touched, traveled to Bergen-Belsen and came out intact, had heard it all: the continual dirge of lost freedom, lost hope, despair as the bow cried for new life, new beginnings and somehow reunited with her family, her hands, her growing understanding of the pull, the call held within those two white nooses of trailing tomorrows.   
 
Jane Lang 
 
Jane Lang’s work has appeared in online publications including Quill and Parchment, the Avocet, Creative Inspirations, The Ekphrastic Review, and published in several anthologies. She has written and given two chap books to family and friends in lieu of Christmas cards. Jane lives in the Pacific Northwest.     
 
**
 
Charybdis

I believed suffering real,
if God existed or no god existed,
this did, even if untouched by it,
passing through other patient faces
or the frozen grimace on some.
Nothing had hurt me, nothing,
not even nothing itself could harm.

               *

Why do we look for pain in eyes,
photos of eyes, open in death,
weeping, or blank reflectors of sky
passing, unburdened of any meanings?
Why not use the lanky body, naked,
as the news repeated, naked,
moved face down on the cold floor.
After the harm was done, nothing
helped, nothing recycled the breath,
not even the protocol of massage, rough
on the dying skin, or to open those eyes
where our eyes see only nothing,
except ourselves staring back.

               *

All night digits of twigs
and rigid branches scratched
the old wood of the window frames.
The web they made contained nests
of shadows where a few leaves left
through the winter filled places
where other leaf-shapes failed
this year to come. Do trees
feel like veterans who wake
with nightly pain in phantom limbs,
flexing a tight glove of hurting
around a hand permanently gone,
or a leg's weight pressing nothing
where a foot once stepped,
or once danced or stamped the earth?

               *

I had alone escaped the seven blazes,
the ancient curses we inherit.
The file of razor teeth, the roar
of blood on a predator's jaw --
these had never even nicked my skin.
The lion was caught in a net
lying among lambs, at peace,
with their soft-leather tongues
licking milk like its cubs.
And the dark stone of cursing, falling
on me, tumbling me down to hell
where the seven judges silently wait,
rose, instead, like a buoyant meteor.
The black waters -- flooding the land,
filling lungs -- that flung lifeless
forms in whirlpools to the bottom
retreated when they barely touched me.
Nothing could ever hurt what is nothing.

               *

And then there was you
your damp hand on my neck
as you kissed the top of my head
"You are all right," you said
"Everything will be alright,"
you repeated to me, over and over,
in those few soul-murdering words.

Royal Rhodes

Royal Rhodes, poet and retired educator, studied and taught classical Greek and Roman texts for many years. He resides now in rural Ohio.
 
 **
 
Awakening
 
Swirling dark chaos,
enclosing in our minds,
awakening truth. 
 
Clasping
 
A darkening sight,
swirling in states of abyss,
clasping sanity.
 
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.
 
**
 
To Dusti Bongé Regarding Whirlpool
 
Where freedom and constraint collide
my eye is drawn to depth inside
the static swirl of gifted mind
awash in wonder where I find
 
that things perhaps still yearn to be
what would have been where now I see
that suction of impulsive brush
has blurred creative plunging rush
 
to sink tradition into trend
where means themselves become the end
though books  —  I swear  —  and manuscripts
still waken wisdom, moving lips
 
to signal, as they drift apart,
preoccupation proving art.
 
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.
 
**
 
Vortex
 
There I was:
resting
but not enjoying it,
as rest first requires work.
Brown soggy, leafy weeds,
fragile bleached reed tips
hinted connection to
submerged, drowned, obscured earth.
 
My foot on the wet rock slipped,
elbow off knee,
chin off hand,
body off smooth, tilted boulder.
 
I made little splash for all my dread,
sucked into murkiness in silence.
Optimistic feet stretched down to greet the bottom;
body followed in submission,
anticipated the upward spring.
 
The bottom wasn’t there.
 
Hands and feet flailed in uncoordinated panic.
Gravity was bested by centripetal force,
current I’d overlooked
from my listless perch.
 
A gang of smarmy stalks,
rangy and spastic,
surrounded me;
the more I fought, the more they
wrapped slimy tendrils
around limbs and trunk.
 
I thrashed: a fish on a hook,
twisted in twining weeds
until I did not know up from down.
 
I opened underwater eyes,
glimpsed dim light.
 
I retracted my extremities,
wrapped arms around knees,
tucked head.
 
Vines lost their purchase.
The torrent ejected me
for being unwilling to spar.
 
I bobbed to the surface,
buoyant and still.
 
Sheila Murphy
 
Sheila Murphy writes poems to slow down. She is a spiritual director, cancer survivor, retreat leader and adventurer. She is a music director and pub fiddler. She has published poems in Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction and The Ekphrastic Review. Sheila lives in coastal Maine, is married and has two adult offspring. She plays fiddle, guitar and piano.
 
**
 
In The Beginning
 
It was not only the swirling
whirling of wind and water
that began it all.
 
Not only the sharp grey slabs
thrown up and dashed around
or rocks coated brown with mud.
and slime
 
No, beneath all of that was fire
the burning heart that flamed 
towards the surface 
ready for that day
when everything
would be burned.
 
Lynn White
 
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com///www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/
 
**
  
Lucky Escape

What started as a stiff breeze whipped up all of a sudden.  We were walking under the canopy of the autumn trees, green, brown, red, orange leaves flying about us, eddies swirling, tumble twirling in a maelstrom, like a whirlpool, season's icy breath a cool reminder of unease as stormy rain began its spritzing. Shrugging farther into coats we hunkered, the path now rising with tree thickets bunkering as we neared the railway bridge, our footfalls on the natural ridge beside the valley with tracks below.  Then we heard the rapid steps approaching, almost tip-tapping, clopping.  It made us glance around, nearly stopping, expecting to find a stray dog, a hound of large size coming round that bend within the bridge's walls.  To our surprise and also shock it wasn't a canine shape but a large buck, head low otherwise we'd have clocked the rack of antlers.  Our eyes locked.  The beast had a feverish look, the alarm within them not to be mistook, and it turned, leapt and then was gone.  We checked the bridge - empty, none crossing there, but by the corner a gap large enough for a deer?  Perhaps. We chose to turn around the way we'd come. Seconds later a large oak tree fell blocking the bridge where we'd have been walking.   The leaves flew still and the storm raged on so we fought the storm's whirlpool lashes to get home. And in the calm and warm and dry we asked where the deer had come from and why. We asked ourselves did we believe it - was the magnificent creature really there? Did we really see it?  And in the stillness away from the storm, we wondered if it was the forest's spirit charging us down?  Was it just there to chase us off, to warn, raise the alarm?  Whatever the creature was, real or make-believe, we were very grateful for our reprieve.
 
Emily Tee
 
Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction.  She's had recent pieces published in Visual Verse, Blue Heron Review and elsewhere online, and in print in Poetry Scotland and Sunday Mornings at the River's Poetry Diary 2024 anthology. She lives in the UK.
 
**

A Song of Survival

Entwined–the vermilion bud, the flower, petalled cream-
blossom through hurricanes, chanting their anthem ‘Matter, We Matter.’
Two’s not just a number. Two’s all they need. Two’s a team.
Entwined–the vermilion bud, the flower, petalled cream-
whirlpool the icy winds. Pungent the thorns. ‘Touch winter’s beam,’
challenge the tangerine storms. The petals shoot, spark, spring, scatter
their scent across squalls’ chatter. Entwined–the vermilion bud, the
flower, petalled cream-
blossom through hurricanes, chanting their anthem ‘Matter, We Matter.’

Preeth Ganapathy

Preeth Ganapathy is a software engineer turned civil servant from Bengaluru, India. Her recent works have been published in several magazines such as Star 82 Review, Panoply Zine, Visual Verse, Quill & Parchment, Shotglass journal, Sparks of Calliope, Tiger Moth Review, The Sunlight Press, Ink, sweat & Tears and various other journals. Her microchaps A Single Moment and Purple have been published by Origami Poems Project.
 
**
 
Becoming Acquainted with Dusti
 
As Thanksgiving approaches
on the American side of the boundary
and my country has become a whirlpool of dark foreboding,
slashes of hatred, violence, vengeance and lies,
with fire reds and oranges burning in the background,
I become acquainted with the artist Dusti Bonge
born in deep Mississippi at a time
when dark foreboding whirlpools of hate
and lies was like daily bread, common and ordinary,
perhaps her painting 'Whirlpool' uses
slashes of dark trees and twisting shapes pulling 
the viewer toward burning reds and oranges,
as a warning, a way of saying "no", I can't write
of her motives only that becoming acquainted
with an unfamiliar artist such as Dusti 
and viewing her remarkable body of work 
as the seasons change to an unknown new year
somehow makes life a little easier to accept
and a grace of thanks is a little easier to recite.
 
Daniel Brown

Daniel Brown has recently published at age 72 his first collection Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems through Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY. He has most recently been published in Jerry Jazz Musicianand Chronogram Magazine and was included in Arts Mid-Hudson 2023 gallery presentation Poets Respond to Art in Poughkeepsie, NY.
 
**
 
Outlier
 
In Whirlpool, by Dusti (Eunice) Bongé,
the white’s so bright it shimmers on the edges
like sunlight, 
and winds its way out of the black 
like water.
The two big patches of colour
eclipse the dull background
They float atop stands, or stems
like a showy pair of flowers
in a wrought-iron enclosure.
Clearly the white and red are too much, and need to be held in
by those curved black bars.
 
Welcome to the 1950s, heyday of abstraction!
While some artists stuck to two dimensions
and others smeared thick paint across the canvas
Dusti valued depth and composition.
Whirlpool is composed, planned,
red and red, black and black, white and white
balanced around a central point.
 
Such a dance between freedom and restraint!
Above the white paint pooled at the bottom
the black forms a shape like ancient writing.
Depth, control, gold triangles, black bars
The red and white burn on, but nothing escapes the cage
except the meandering line of light, or water, 
the bright white blob, like a tiny fish,
and on the bottom right
a little gold explosion.
 
Karen Kebarle
 
Karen Kebarle was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and now lives in Ottawa, Ontario. She holds an MA and PhD in English and has taught literature, writing, and English as a second language. One of her favourite jobs was her two years working as an art interpreter at the National Gallery of Canada, where she got to experience works by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Marcelle Ferron, and other abstract painters.
 
**
 
A Drift
 
I have become an abstraction,
more linear than fully formed.
 
A mere echo of the body
that once contained me
.  Disruptions
 
leave me stranded in my mind.  Full
of sound, fragments of shadow-thought.

 
Words fail to cohere.  The shift is
subtle, deft, and nearly complete

 
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/.

**

Walking into a Burning Forest
 
Once I whirled in
light roped for cedar scent.
The space between branches
splotched softly as white ash.
The last occurrence was
thirty-eight years ago. I lost
the pathway of ferns
singed when my lover died. 
The smell is now ripe orange clove.
 
My knees are missing.
I want creamed apricot
antenna that touch.
Oh, for joints to knot. If I 
could own quartz and tiger’s eye.

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 The Comstock Review and  The Ekphrastic Review. His fourth collection of poems, Lost Sonnets for My Unvaccinated Lover, is forthcoming soon from Kelsay Books.
 
**
 
Maelstrom
 
school confuses him
especially words
all squiggly print and swirls
his belly awash
with the swash and churn of learning
 
he thinks of the spin cycle
of his mother’s machine
or the whirlpool he saw on YouTube
undercurrents dragging him down
in the turmoil of tides
 
back home his grandmother
sits in the recliner
stirring tepid tea
watching small bubbles
like the froth that fills her head
 
her words are long gone
rusted in the grind of age
but she silently strokes his hand 
the circular motion
surprisingly soothing
 
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 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.
 
**
 
Whirlpool Ode

Wonder of a draining tub,
How we played together,
Me, plunging my fingers into you,
You, dis- and re-appearing like
A magician’s trick. How I have stirred
You into tea/coffee/soup/juice/milk
Anything that mixes–you, the blender’s
Secret, sucking every ingredient towards
Oblivion, the center mess of spinning blades.
How I imagined you in video games:
Transport to another world, the opening
Mouth of an impossible monster,
Entrance to the ship graveyard,
An endgame spell to seek out.
How you have come around and
Around in every stage of life:
You, clockwise/counterclockwise myth
Of the hemispheres’ flushing toilets.
You, vortex of Pirates and Little Mermaids,
You, Yates’s Widening Gyre, You, symbol
Of the spiral curriculum, You, coming back
‘Round again, You, sweeping lines on Bonge’s
Canvas, the top of you, an open eye, the
Bottom of you pointed in like the legs
Of a tomato cage, a black wire
Funnel sifting beige, bending
More like a wooded path
Than an endpoint.

Inverted swirling water cone,
I am caught in your drift, and have been
For years, a penny circling the rim of
The donation jar, ever-descending in
In tighter arcs awaiting that final,
Inevitable
Drop.
 
Ian Evans
 
Ian Evans is a writer and teacher with a B.A. in English and an Ed.M. in Secondary English Education and the 2023 recipient of Somerset County Teacher of the Year. He has previously co-created “The Mechanic,” a graphic poem, and his words have appeared on Thanatos Review and The Ekphrastic Review. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his wife, who is also a writer and teacher.
 
**
 
Skylight
 
that let the moon slide
by the walls long rusted--
the night of white shadows
moon spread over you.
 
That night of fragrance and the earthen lamp
when the incense burned--
the flame crawled into cracked corners
and peace rested on your face.
 
I kept the flame ablaze,
watched the ashes drop.
In silence, by the writing desk until
the light broke the night--
the night of fragrance and the flame.
 
Each day the birdsong fills the air,
by now I set the stalks of tuberoses.
 
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.

**

Dream Whispers
 
Haunted by rural
landscapes clad
in frozen pellets
from last night’s
storm, I am touched
by shadows of shag
hickory, sassafras,
and choke cherry
boughs as I search
for the trail’s opening--
beyond the underbrush,
a fog-laden field
is faintly outlined
by silent silhouettes
of towering hundred
foot white pine.
Maybe I’m still
daydreaming
about our time
together under
cranberry sunsets.
 
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.
 
**
 
Watery Grave
 
When Charybdis 
swirled Ulysses 
into her vortex 
Scylla laughed 
her heads
off
 
When his ship 
of fools 
sailed into allegory 
between the devil 
and the deep 
blue sea 

The heinous ones
chose the lesser 
of two evils
 
And thrust 
Homer
onto the horns
of his own 
dilemma 
 
Donna-Lee Smith
 
Donna-Lee Smith so appreciates what she learns from exploring ekphrastic challenges. For example, she was woefully clueless about Homer’s work spawning so many allegories.
 
**

Iron Corsets           
                      
                                                                                Corps de Fer, 1739:
                                                                   " A bodice with small iron plates       
                                                                     for badly grown girls."
                                                                                French-German Dictionary 
 
                                                                    "By 1944, Kahlo's doctor had recommended 
                                                                      a steel metal corset instead of plaster."  
                                                                                   Frida Kahlo, Wiki Biography
 
                                                                     " Once there was a machine for breathing.
                                                                        It would embrace the body and make a kind of love.
                                                                        And when it was finished, it would rise
                                                                        like nothing at all above the earth."
                                                                                            "The Iron Lung" Stanley Plumly   
 
The colours of the Fall evening were somber.    The brightly coloured leaves --
the deciduous ones -- had been lost in a heavy rainfall.     Storm faded
 
for the promise of the first snow;    the wind whispered a silent prayer
for the left-over leaves, now like left-over fabric --    the remnants of fashion
 
in burnt sienna and yellow ochre     with flashes of white and red (blood
and moon)      a memory of work stored in a funnel-shaped,
 
black wrought iron container     its bars like a jail, or a door closed
in a dungeon beneath the court of Catherine d'Medici     a Queen in a gown
 
of odd olive gold     like fabric that showed through the slated sides
of a black iron cage in the deserted costume room.    It had been suggested
 
(and later disproved)     that Catherine was the first to wear a metal corset,
her body like a rigid hour glass;     and it's hard to imagine, in the 21st century,
 
an armourer (or blacksmith) bending over corsets    hammer held to shape
"lingerie" heated by fire, not love.     Cate paused to read information
 
on a playbill, an historic adaptation     of the Medicis' belief in prophecies;
in the predictions of Nostradamus     a political figure in Catherine's Court
 
where armor and fashion were closely entwined.     In medieval French,
the word corset referred to doublets and gowns and body armor.     Reading
           
the playbill, Cate thought of Jean d'Arc wearing a breastplate     her spiritual
strength a vision     as the morning light made the shining metal a mirror
 
of the Crusades, Knights and the vagaries of life and death:     When  Men's
& Women's bodies are crook'd  and deformed      medieval definition goes on to say,
 
they wear iron bodies     and will endure anything to make them straight again
(Sermon, 1632, clergical author unknown.)      On a stage in the Great Hall
 
of the church, Cate had played Frida Kahlo     wearing a white peasant blouse
and the blood-red patterned skirt  of a gypsy     part of the material pieces
 
left behind by a costume seamstress     like hope for a miracle, Kahlo
living after her body     was impaled by a streetcar railing in Mexico City.
 
For months she lay in a hospital     her time occupied by painting flowers
on the heavy plaster body cast     that held her, broken and immobile
 
until the plaster was exchanged for a metal cage     to protect the pieces
of her broken spine.      Dark-haired Cate -- eyebrows reaching up
 
like blackbird wings --     had been, she supposed, a "star" playing Frida,
teardrops falling as they had     in Kahlo's self-portrait, Broken Column,
 
her performance motivated by tragedy --     the prediction that Kahlo's
injuries were so great she would die.....     But she survived, and the director
 
had added a songbird in a cage --  an ethereal double --     a way for Kahlo
to move upward --  to fly --     her imagination guided by life-giving dreams
 
of an alternate world;     one like her cousin had dreamed, a reality outside
her body, trapped in an iron lung     before Jonas Salk discovered a polio vaccine.
 
Preparing for her role, Cate thought of the centuries of pain --     like a vortex
individually illustrated with tattered images of history --      time spiraling
 
downward to a single, simple everyday moment     when she stirred her cafe latte,
flecks of foam swirling in a caffeinated cosmos;     or pages in a playbook
 
caught in a maelstrom of words --     a dialogue of life and death -- a whirlpool;
                                                                   or an artist revealing the spirit fruits of heaven
                                                                                 as Diego Rivera painted watermelons.
 
 
Laurie Newendorp
 
Laurie Newendorp writes of Frida Kahlo, a free spirit threatened by serious injury.  Dusti Bonge is considered the first Abstract Expressionist in Mississippi. Kahlo appears in Iron Corsets, a poem suggested by Bonge's Whirlpool, because of the seeming rigidity of the black bars restraining the movement of the painting's colour swatches.  Linked to crossing time as was Newendorp's poetry thesis, Crossing Time Lines: The Grandfather Journey (1992), Iron  Corsets travels from the 16th century Medicis to Kahlo's crippling injury; and to Stanley Plumly's beautiful poem, "The Iron Lung," his impression of what the mind can create when the diseased body is immobile. Laurie Newendorp's book, When Dreams Were Poems, attempts to weave poetry and art with nature and life.  Honoured many times by The Ekphrastic Review challenges, she lives in Houston, her writing enriched by ekphrastics as she works on her next book of poems.
 
 
 
 
 





​
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Ekphrastic Writing Challenge: Charles A. A.  Dellschau

11/24/2023

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Picture
Flying Machines (double sided artwork), by Charles A.A. Dellschau (USA) c. 1920
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 Flying Machines, by Charles A.A. Dellschau. Deadline is Dec. 8, 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.​

Voluntary gift of $5 CAD with submission.

YES

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 DELLSCHAU 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, December 8, 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.
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Fernando Vicente: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

11/17/2023

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Picture
Hamlet Shakespeariana, Serie Heroinas Literarias, by Fernando Vicente (Spain) 2022. Used with artist permission.

Dear Ekphrastic Challengees,

Thank you so much for submitting your Hamlet Shakespeariana pieces to The Ekphrastic Review. 

I am ever so content that you have responded to this prompt with such enthusiasm, wit and craftsmanship…it was really a delight to read your words! Thank you!! 

This amazing challenge has prompted a heroic compilation indeed, I hope you will enjoy reading it. Congratulations to everyone, hurrah for TER and The Amazing Lorette, and…

Fare ye well!

Kate Copeland

**

Alas
 
I may have known him well
but he did not know me
 
He thought so, but as I hold
his head in hand, I see him
 
crowned of nothing but laughter,
yes, provided that but none else
 
and looking on his demise, it’s clear
that our fate of life and love
 
does not imply understanding, nay
truth spoken in fact knows only death
 
Julie A. Dickson
 
Julie A. Dickson writes Ekphrastic as well as other forms of poetry often, from prompts, memories and nature. She advocates for feral cats and captive elephants, spends time with her young grandson crafting in play doh, and reads voraciously.Her work is seen in over 70 publications, including Blue Heron Review, Lothlorien and The Ekphrastic Review. Her full length works are available on Amazon.
 
 
**
 
Ophelia’s Dream
 
The sky was blue, balcony strangely light,
Quite different from bleak Elsinore.
 
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
 
A dagger by my side, I wore
Lord Hamlet’s shirt, his promissory ring.
 
My crown I am but still my griefs are mine.
 
The skull I balanced, fingers outstretched, fine,
Bore a strange antique script. I looked instead,
Impassive, undisturbed, without a frown,
At kingship’s symbol on the dead man’s head.
 
Uneasy is the head that wears a crown.
 
I am alarmed this dream bodes ill for all.
Lightness, attire, skull, calm - fears won’t cease.
 
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
 
I dread the outcome this vision portends:
Some evil act will lead to cruel revenge,
To bloodshed, madness. What it means for me
I cannot understand but sure I am 
‘tis not
 
Divinity will shape our ends.
 
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, The Ekphrastic Review (Luna Challenge), A Pride of Lines (Coin Operated Press), the UK  Places of 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 a woman in the 1970s is published in the Honno Press Collection, Painting the Beauty Queens Orange. She now lives in Tyneside with a misanthropic cat and sports a dragon tattoo.
 
**
 
Alas for Laughs
 
A lass for Yorick—would she show and tell,
orating of the finite jests she bore
upon her back; the way his fancy’d swell
a thousand times, yet which she would abhor?
 
His loose-hung lips no orgy would arise;
she’d mock the grin she’d never dare to kiss
yet gamboled him with gibes of laughed surprise,
her gorge restricting entrance to his miss.
 
Chop-fallen, then, her chamber locked up tight,
no ride upon her back—nor she on him.
Imagination put off one more night,
the paint they both wear fades upon life’s whim.
 
The lass’s time would also come, they tell,
but long before, it seems she slew him well.
 
Ken Gosse
 
Ken Gosse prefers writing metric, rhymed verse, usually humorous, often with traditional forms. He was first published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, and since then in online and print anthologies by Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Pure Slush, The Ekphrastic Review, Home Planet News Online, Spillwords, and others. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife live in Mesa, AZ, usually with rescue dogs and cats underfoot.
 
 
**
 
Ophelia Unveils it All
            --  an alternate reading
 
Gothick script that inks your skull
gives dreamlike memories to mull.
Did I kiss your fleshy lip
and ride your playful, bouncing hip,
as stoic nobles forced a smile,
while fancy masks disguised their guile?
I quickly learned their courtly art --
how shards of ice had filled each heart.
Within these walls of Elsinore,
they curtsied -- rotten to the core.
A schoolboy, late from Wittenberg --
a place that stumps each dramaturg  --
proclaimed: To be or not to be,
but showed no interest in me.
He seemed so jealous of his mother
and how she bed his father's brother.
Hamlet's lover, Laertes
(flirty, yet who feared disease),
used Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
as playthings when they took their turn,
and made the English execute
them, lest their gossip bear some fruit.
And then they tried to tell the town
that, heartsick, fate led me to drown.
But I survived this clueless lot.
Alas, that Avon scribbler's plot
now starred a melancholy prince,
whose monologues should make one wince.
He told me: Seek a nunnery
where wanton girls greet lechery.
But see today: Ophelia rises!
And women claim their rightful prizes.
Male egos pose as history,
but women wove the tapestry.
So Yorick, here beside your grave
we see that Death makes kings its slave.
 
Royal Rhodes
 
Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who lives in the farmland of Ohio. His poems and humorous works have appeared in: Snakeskin Poetry, Lighten-Up, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis, and elsewhere.
 
 
**
 
Note to Fernando Vicente
 
What would they make of your Hamlet?
My students of the millennium, age 17,
sitting in college-prep English.
 
Most tried to get Shakespeare’s English,
but as one girl said, “Spanish is easier”.
The only foreign language offered.
 
I referenced the King James Bible, but
even then in rural Bible-belt Missouri
church and Bible reading was falling away.
 
I supplemented with the decade-old movie,
macho Mel Gibson as Hamlet drowning
the “This is so gay” back-row chorus.
 
Still every red-neck male sneered
when I emphasized the poetry of lines,
the sensitivities of Hamlet’s deliberations.
 
They struggled over words and struggle
still over their own children’s choices.
The tattooed neck, the ruffled collar,
 
The high cheek bones under a blush,
the manicured nails. Their nails wore
lines of grease or were chewed to the quick.
 
Fernando Vicente, you’ve captured
well that duality I saw in Hamlet, but
dared not dwell on. Did I betray
 
that student who came out in college
and the boy who later became a senator
passing laws against gender transitioning?    
 
Did I betray the girl who as a doctor
had her clinic shut down? Was I
too cowardly to act?
 
Yorick’s skull made the play for them.
Girls screamed “Yuck.” Boys cheered.
Thank you for crowning it. 
 
Victoria Garton 
 
Victoria Garton’s books are Venice Comes Clean (Flying Ketchup Press, 2023), Pout of Tangerine Tango (Finishing Line Press, 2022), and Kisses in the Raw Night (BkMk Press,1989.) The anthology, From K.C., MO to East St. Lou, (Spartan Press, 2022) featured ten of her poems. Recent acceptances are from Cosmic Daffodil, I-70 Review, Proud to Be, Sparks of Calliope, WayWords Literary Journal, The Penwood Review, The Seraphic Review, Thorny Locust, and Vital Minutiae.
 
**
 
Something is Rotten in the State
 
What use is a golden crown atop a skull? O,  
why do we seek power at any cost, so that
our dominions grow, enemies perish? This
lust for control, power, revenge - is it too
predictable, driven by our long histories, too
easy to fall into the old destructive ways, solid
in our faith that we, and only we, are right?  Flesh
and bone, tooth and claw, an eye for an eye. Would
we have it any other way?  And victory? Foes melt
away, destroyed.  Bones ground to dust.  No thaw
in our icy will, we must stay strong of purpose and
not be fooled by appearances.  The enemy's resolve
never wavers in their desire to hurt and kill, itself
enough to warrant their demise, all of them, sent into
oblivion.  We'll stay strong, ignore the laments, wails. A
bloodied toll paid by all, the red mist settling like dew.
 
Emily Tee
 
[Note: A Golden Shovel poem using the quotation from Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 2:
”O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!”]
 
Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction.  She's had recent pieces published in The Ekphrastic Review, Visual Verse, Blue Heron Review and elsewhere online, and in print with Poetry Scotland. Emily is the editor of the new monthly Ekphrastic Challenge Contest by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.  She lives in the UK.
 
 
**
 
Aspect Absent

His crown kind of matches my hair, but I wonder where the bottom of his face is. Not the fleshy meaty bits, I get what happened to them, but the hard bony part. There was a lower jaw once, and teeth, an arc of them. I don’t like the way his uppers rest on my palm. It’s undignified for him, and he wouldn’t approve. I go along with that.

If it were here, the lower jaw, would the mouth be opened or closed? When a skull sits with the mouth closed, complete and on top of a whole skeleton, the grin can look scary and grim.

Let the same skull display with the lower jaw hanging and the mouth wide open, it’s a happy aspect, silly and shouting Howdy at anyone looking in.

This is likely a mouth closed skull if we can ever find the rest of his face. A word like Alas doesn’t match up with Howdy very well. Poor feller.
 
Carl Damhesel

Carl Damhesel lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is a member of Old Pueblo Playwrights and his plays have been presented as in their annual New Play Festivals, and also in the Tucson Community Players' One Act Play Festival. He has had poems and short works published in The Ekphrastic Review and in  joyful! magazine.
 
 
**
 
Breeches Buoy

Translate the complement, to be
in roundel gloss, fine fingers, frills,
bone china, zygomatic arch,
inked neck sans Adam’s apple lump.
Scene balcony, scape, nimbus cloud,
but jut of jaw, rouge, ginger flow
cannot distract from focus, skull,
or is it crown draws, overcomes?
To fore lies gothic Yorick script -
not centred so we see entire -
alas, our lass must nail the weight
of cranial, so teeth on edge.
The canon roars - survey the field -
with tragicomic histories,
in human makeup lie the flaws,
those doors through which the mighty fall.
In genderbending stagecraft art,
bright entry from the upper left,
from groundlings’ yard to heaven’s roof,
in tiring house, the globe, the world.
This player, smokescreen, Hamlet seen,
an acting man, proscenium,
but what has been for what to be,
war theatre, stage exeunt.
 
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
 
**
 
Yorick
 
Hello poor Yorick
At last
we meet,
for the first time
alas.
 
You still have your crown
worn often in irony.
What a joke
that was
when you pranced around
in jest
to entertain
the one whose head
wore a different crown.
 
Both gone now.
Long gone.
Which king was he?
Alas
no one remembers.
It’s you
Yorick
who’ll be remembered.
 
Your name is writ 
large
and,
at last,
inked
on your boney forehead.
So it’s you 
who’ll last
forever,
at last.
 
Lynn White
 
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Consequence Magazine, Firewords, Vagabond Press, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com///www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/
 
 
**
 
Talisman: tattooed, lucky charm, bone on bone, a string of light, the half of me who knew the ownership of words and immortality long before I could walk or talk. My powers paled. The death of my womb and soul mate left me with no authority, no looking backward nor forward. Shared bone structure did nothing but remind me I was still alive; lean and mean, most suggested. It’s impossible to look into the eyes of what once was. A twin no longer: Me in my tower, forgetting there was horizon or river or the Most High. And though, long ago, I’d arrived minutes earlier, I’d long prayed to be the first to leave.
 
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. www.22pearls.blogspot.com & www.22pearls.org
 
 
**
 
Can You Ever Really Know Someone?
 
You took me to your favourite play and when I asked why Hamlet?
You said because Ophelia kills herself for the love of a broken man
 
We swapped stories of death
Your father—my best friend
And I thought those blue bands
Would bind our claws forever
 
We walked through our backstories
Your mother’s strange remarriage
My home with the blue mountain view
Stumbling over all the things that might have been
 
We must have laughed sometimes
But I know the very bones of us
Were laid in loss and longings
And always in the wings your hungry ghosts
 
We must have kissed a thousand times
Yet I never saw the vicious thorns
Trapped beneath your turned up collar
Or the dagger neatly hidden behind your back
 
All these years later I visit your grave
To try and put to rest the tragedy of us
A kindly gravedigger asks me if I’m okay
I nod and say ‘”You see I knew him once.”
 
Adele Evershed
 
Adele Evershed was born in Wales. Her prose and poetry have been widely published. She has been nominated for the Best of the Net for poetry and the Pushcart Prize for poetry and short fiction. Finishing Line Press published Adele’s first poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places, in July. Her novella-in-flash, Wannabe, was published by Alien Buddha Press in May. Her second poetry collection, The Brink of Silence, is available from Bottlecap Press
 
 
**
 
To Fernando Vicente Regarding Hamlet Shakespeariana 

Here face to face with cusp of fate
young Hamlet well you illustrate
as princely heir to sexton's wit
that hallows truth of hollowed pit
 
where layers of remains abound
beneath the sacred abbey ground,
forever rotting in their place
to make, for yet another, space
 
where flesh to water giving way
is soon the dust again of clay
but bone will longer stay intact
to hone for death its artifact
 
like skull of fool beloved in hand
as weapon Hamlet could command
in "madness" feigned to ably joust
with comic spirit he would roust.
 
"So even here you entertain...
...where heart I've loved will soon be lain
no longer fearing whether sane
or victim of the inhumane
 
"whose lust for power blood has wrought
in veins of those who never fought
descended as competing heirs
to realm embattled seized as theirs
 
"from others who had claimed it too
so long as strength let them subdue
the conquered who became possessed,
and yet obliged to feel as blessed,
 
"by those so noble who so vain
would murder kin with sheer disdain
convinced that reign indemnifies,
by crown that church solemnifies,
 
"whatever evil must be done
to see that faith in power's won
despite no basis where decay
will mark damnation's final say.
 
"Oh, Yorick, still you are the balm
that humours dank and dreaded calm."
 
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.
 
 
**
 
Questions Before Students Read Hamlet 
 
l. Has a death ever made you feel like that person or animal remained close by for several days? If yes, did you share this with anyone else? 
 
2. Has a dream inspired you to do something unexpected? 
 
3. Have you ever watched a TV show or movie that resonated with what your life is like?
 
4. Do you know a young man who seems confused? Or worried? A young woman who is in love but sad? 
 
5. Do you know an old person who gives unhelpful advice? 
 
6. Have you done something you didn’t want to do even though it seems like the right thing? 
 
7. Has one of your parents ever disappointed you? 
 
8. Do you have a brother or sister who would protect you when you are in danger? 
 
9. Have you ever found yourself talking to a dead person? Or to the skull of dead person? 
 
10. Do you ever feel the world would be a better place if you did exactly what you feel called to do? 
 
11. Is the world you know at war? Have you experienced chaos? 
 
If you are able to answer yes to more than two of these questions, you will understand the play. If more than two, start talking to a friend. 
 
Tricia Knoll
 
Tricia Knoll is an aging Vermont poet who taught high school English – including Hamlet–for ten years. Her work appears widely in journals, anthologies, and seven collections. Her newest chapbook The Unknown Daughter is on pre-sale from Finishing Line Press through January 5, 2024 for a March 1 publication. Website: triciaknoll.com 
 
 
**
 
Sacred Crown
 
Luminous red head,
exquisite in ruffled white,
holding sacred crown.
 
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.
 
**
 
memento mori
 
yorick
you ol' fool
forget me
knot
 
tis in
the memory
of it
 
wherefore
art
the key 
of it
 
your ghost
runs clear
my chthonic
friend
of every 
lasting
suffering
 
for my second
coming
hamlet dear
a daisy chain
wouldst 
keep me
afloat
 
Donna-Lee Smith
 
Donna-Lee Smith resides in Montreal with Sir Henry, a Norwegian Forest feline of some personality & weight.
 
 
**
 
The Ghost Inside a Dream
 
                    Serie Heroines Literarias, "Hamlet Shakespeariana," Fernando Vincente (Spain) 2022
 
                                                   "Sometimes in the night I feel it
                                                    Near as my next breath, and yet untouchable.
                                                    Silently the past comes stealing..."
                                                                       “Ghosts,” Dan Fogelberg (lyrics)
 
                                                    "Ah!  Mounte sou le bel Troubaire
                                                     Mestre d'amour!"
                                                     (Where is he, the handsome Troubadour?
                                                     past master of love?)
                                                                               Strange Images of Death, Barbara Cleverly
 
                                                    "Send her outside when the room rises..."
                                                                                 film, Woman Walks Ahead
 
                                                     "Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him...a fellow
                                                      of infinite jest, most excellent fancy."
                                                                                 Hamlet, William Shakespeare
 
      You said my red hair was a talisman of the Sun;    and of the earth -- the copper
      mined in Falun -- where, beneath our reality    (the awfulness of death lay precisely
 
       in the absence of consciousness)*    someone had scrawled a picture of a Tree,
       a pine in the shape of Christmas    decorated with glyphic initials, tattooed
 
       by winter spirits    when ice on the canals were frozen in Sweden and Denmark,
       a dream in cold and midnight blue.    The world seemed perfect when we married --
 
       I wore the rings of Saturn, platinum as the moon.    Ophelia drowned in the bathtub
       of a Pre-Raphaelite artist, her red hair    waved with roses in the water, and I came to life
 
       on a Spanish canvas.    We never spoke of my past love, Yorick, the symbols on my arms
       made with a dove's beak.    And Pierrot's beautiful Columbine (he was her funny clown)
 
        had a name that meant she was his little dove.    I wore a blouse in pearl-white satin,
        an attempt at purity because my ancestress said red hair    meant I was a witch;
 
        she prayed to save me from a proclivity for sexual suggestion.    Your lips, soft
        as the touch of a paint brush.    You did not know, when you were consumed
 
        by your work and did not come to bed    I consulted Yorick, whose sweet skull
        gave me thoughts, swirling like snow flakes;    how we'd shared the message
 
        in a crystal ball, the past and future    like the moment when you felt the emptiness
        of space where once my warmth had filled your arms.    I laugh out loud sometimes,
                                                                                                  a victim of your timeless charms.
 
 
Laurie Newendorp
 
Laurie Newendorp's love of literature led to a semester with Shakespeare's language and his unforgettable characters Shakespeare is timeless and so Fernando Vincente is influenced by his work in the 21st century in his series Heroines Literarias.   Some of the canvases are more visceral, as Lady Macbeth, her clasped hands covered with blood; but in Hamlet Shakespeariana, there is an intimation of purity, Ophelia in white, drowned as a virgin in a royal suicide.  Vincente "modernizes" his Shakespeariana by giving Ophelia (and Yorick's skull) tattoos, her copper-red hair flaming above flowers tattooed on her throat as if Shakespeare is both her voice and Vincente's art.  Laurie Newendorp's book, When Dreams Were Poems, focuses on the relationships between poetry, life and art.  She has been honoured many times in the ekphrastic challenge and continues to embrace art as a muse.
                 
 
**
 
Cordelia’s Recollections
 
I knew someone with the same name,
I said as the museum attendant handed
me the skull from the Elizabethan display.
I recalled Yorick as an elderly cashier
 
at Burger King where my mother
and I went for lunch once a week
when I was in preschool. On every
visit he would place a colourful
 
paper crown on my head before
I left the front counter. Staring
at the skull, I paused and wondered
years later what happened to him.
 
I hoped he hadn’t spent his entire life
preparing flame-grilled Whoppers.
He told me many times I was cute.
If he could only see the mature
 
version of that little redhead now--
a pale face powdered with makeup,
white ruffled blouse accented
by a bead necklace, the black
 
and white tattoo on my neck,
haunting blue eyes staring
into sunken sockets
wondering if he would even
 
remember that four-year old
as I stand near a museum window
totally oblivious to gathering cloud
formations hovering over distant hills.
 
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), CrosswaysLiterary 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.
 
**
 
To Be, or Not to Be 
 
I turn the crumbled earth,
seeking reminders  
of permanence:
 
a golden crown,
skull marked in ink,
delicately held remains
 
of the dead. I watch 
as daybreak announces 
fate's farflung cry, 
 
circuitous and 
transient. 
 
Elanur Eroglu Williams

Elanur Eroglu Williams teaches reading and writing at an Adult Learning Center in the Bronx. In addition to her work as a GED Teacher, she is a writing tutor for elementary school students. She lives and writes in New York City with her husband and her dog, Luna. 
 
**
 
Shakespeariana
 
Stay here, stay close, but pray stay you away
from those who would remove you from my sight--
speak softly to me, lest your speech betray
the anguish that is burning through my heart.
 
If you don’t love me, don’t tell me—tell me
a story instead—help me to hold on
to life—tell me secrets in poetry--
hide your apathy, seduce me with song.
 
Once we have threaded the needle, what then?
entanglements are inevitable--
deceptions, distrust, interrogation--
each subplot possible, impossible.
 
It matters not who committed the crime--
We stand here ensembled—cast out of time.
 
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/.
 
**
 
Listen Well, Listen All, of My Tale to Caution All 
 
You see her from afar: 
sun glinting in her auburn hair, 
fair skin glowing in the light, 
the red of her lips and the blush on her cheeks. 
She looks feminine except 
for the slanted, curved sheath 
and handle of a sword 
secure at her hip, 
and a dagger hidden within the folds 
of her white linen shirt. 
She has your heart as soon 
as her cerulean blue eyes 
Turn to stare at you. 
 
Within days, you’re married, 
no doubt in your mind. 
You don’t know each other, 
but you make the time 
to learn about the other. 
You find common interests, 
and you learn things that were hidden. 
She finds herself with you 
by her side, where she no longer 
has to be someone 
that she despises. 
She wears breeches, tunics, 
her hair short as her golden jewelry 
glints on her fingers and ears 
with an added pearl necklace 
the only thing that declares: 
“I’m a woman and the Queen, 
don't mess with me.” 
 
You rule the kingdom 
in fairness and love. 
Not a soul complains 
of a starving home, 
or a suffering family 
for all are cared for, 
and are known, 
to the rulers of their land. 
Your people are happy, 
celebrating life and liberty. 
 
But then one day 
it all changes. 
It all falls apart from one 
ill-timed mistake. 
Visitors come and look upon 
this lovely land in wonder. 
One particular set of eyes 
catches your attention, 
and just like that, 
it is all over. 
 
Your Queen looked at you with love. 
She gave her all to you, 
body, mind, and soul. 
But when you cheated, 
she took inspiration: 
“Off with your head, 
Crown and all!” 
 
You’re no longer King of York, 
but a Dork jester: 
forever forgotten 
from the kingdom 
you reigned over 
together. 
 
Katie Davey 
 
Katie Davey is an aspiring author from the rural parts of House Springs, MO. Her first published piece was for The Ekphrasitc Review’s Richard Challenge, titled Hidden Prophecies. She has worked on Harbinger Magazine as a staff intern and is a member of Stephens College’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. She will earn her BFA in Creative Writing, with minors in Equestrian Studies and Psychology, at Stephens College in May 2024. 
 
**
 
Lady Hamlet
 
Framed in a Renaissance style vignette,
Like Mary and Gabriel, an Ionic column to the left,
A brilliant blue sky with cumulous clouds in the center,
And the ever-present mysterious city on a hill
To the right, we find our modern lady
And the person who commands her attention.
She has done so much to decorate herself--
The hair dyed red, eyebrows plucked,
Blush, carefully brushed up her cheekbone.
We only see half of her in this silhouette,
But two rings circle her wedding finger, 
Her nails are long and manicured, 
Her left ear pierced with another ring,
And the right ear also, probably.
On the side of her long neck, a large tattoo
Of two familiar bunches of flowers
Takes up all the space.
She is bony and thin, anorexic perhaps,
Her hair, tucked down the back of her ruffled
White blouse, and of course the hilt of a sword 
At her side and a skull in her hand.
After all, she is Hamlet, with her puffy sleeves
Tied at the wrist in bows.
And on the skull, with a gold crown, somehow still attached,
Or perhaps posthumously added, are the letters
“Yor,” for Yorick, in case we hadn’t noticed,
Since the artist only shows us half of her,
And half of poor dear Yorick’s dead head.
Underneath this painterly facade,
Is she more interesting than Shakespeare’s anxious prince?
Does she share his regret, his seething anger, his hopeless despair?
Can she speak his wistful words?
Maybe we need to listen, watch and 
Even read the play.
 
Rose Anna Higashi
 
Rose Anna Higashi is a retired professor of British Literature, Shakespeare, Japanese Literature and Poetry. Recently her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Poets Online, The Avocet, The Agape Review, Americamedia.org, and Integrated Catholic Life. With her niece, Kathleen Pedulla, she is the co-author of thewebsite myteaplanner.com, which also publishes her monthly blog, Tea and Travels. Many of her haiku and lyric poems appear in these publications. Rose Anna lives in Honolulu with her husband of sixty years, Wayne Higashi.
 
 
**
 
Infinite Jest

I could tell by her face she was
a thinker, the type who sees
beneath the layers, my skin, my skull
on show, my own teeth grinning
at my patent status as a fool.
 
I knew I'd remember her,
even after death: her shining
copper hair, gorgeous as autumn,
her ice blue eyes eager as a
Danish winter. She’d laugh at
 
my jokes, and I'm proud of that -
men are made immortal by less.
She was buoyed by my smile,
and I cherish that too. The best
I can hope is that she'll
 
think of me, perhaps in a dream:
my face in her hands contemplating
eyes that always saw the funny
side, and remember the wisdom
only foolery can teach.
 
Paul McDonald
 
Paul McDonald taught at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, before taking early retirement in 2019. He is the author of 20 books to date, which includes fiction, poetry and scholarship. His most recent poetry collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange Press, 2023).
Paul McDonald Amazon Author Page
 
**
 
If I could speak to you again, I would hold
your royal head before me and tell you this
 
If I had known you would arrive, back then,
when I was withering away, shriveling from
neglect and despair—if I had known, would I
still have stood in line at McDonald’s, listening
to the Beatles sing “Will you still love me
when I’m 64?” Would I have turned
to my husband, who had one foot
out the door, with that question lingering
in my ear and his eyes answering, “No”?
If I had known it was you in that dream,
jumping up and down on the bed
like a five-year-old. You who would quote
Shakespeare and walk me back into possibility.
If I had known in that fast-food joint
that I was near where the double-decker
of happiness was about to pass,
I would have let go of that man
who looked at me with dead-
fish eyes. I would have run sooner
toward that magic bus stop singing
 “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
 
Sandi Stromberg
 
Sandi Stromberg’s full-length collection Frogs Don't Sing Red (Kelsay Books, April 2023) includes several works nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an editor at The Ekphrastic Review, edited Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press, 2015) and co-edited Echoes of the Cordillera (Museum of the Big Bend, 2018), an anthology of ekphrastic poems in conversation with the photography of Jim Bones. Her poems have appeared recently in Panoply (new Pushcart Prize nominee), San Pedro River Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and MockingHeart Review. Translations of her poetry into Dutch can be found at Brabant Cultureel and on the website of Dutch poet, Albert Hagenaars.
 
**
 
Not to Be
​

Wrong time, wrong place, wrong man.
Power is the clash of swords
Dawn attacks over the ice
Nights on the bare mountain
Carousing of wine, bawdy laughter
Using, abusing of women
World of physical challenge
 
Thoughts, ideas, philosophies
Doors to the female psyche
Death a feasible proposition
that lies beyond the battle?
No decisions can be made
Before they are outdated
Out of joint, at war
with his moment
 
Sarah Das Gupta
 
Sarah Das Gupta is a retired teacher from near Cambridge, UK who has also taught in India and Tanzania. Her work has been published in many magazines/anthologies from over 12 countries, including: US, UK, Australia, Canada, India, Germany, Croatia and Romania.
 
 
**
 
I Can’t Feel My Face When I’m With You*
 
because the map of your skin unfolds
and resists refolding
 
because the map of your skin strikes matches
against my decorated skull
 
because the map of your skin is visible only
in certain light (candle)
 
because the map of your skin is outlined 
in black ink, still decipherable under water
 
because the map of your skin is smooth to the touch, tip, tongue,
this loose goose chase you lead me on
 
because the map of your skin sends me 
sureño again and again 
 
in search of stolen minutes,
miles, smiles I would voluntarily drown in
 
if drowning is the punishment for such
witchery, I’ll take it
 
because look, my love, how perfectly we fit together
 
Crystal Karlberg 
 
*Title from Can’t Feel My Face, written by Max Martin, 
Peter Svensson, Ali Payami, Savan Kotecha and the Weeknd
 
Crystal Karlberg is a Library Assistant at her local public library and a speaker for Greater Boston PFLAG.
 
**
 
Comeuppance
 
If his arrogance wasn’t so off-putting, if she hadn’t resented him for the years of denigration, wordlessly bottling up negative emotions emerging in their marriage, unsure if Indifference would have saved them; hadn’t he made her feel like a shattered porcelain doll with every snide remark delivered in a condescending voice, putting up with his belittlement for as long as she could remember; hadn’t she lost the gist for her artistic expression after his narcissistic Self hijacked her grand opening last month, knowing full well how much it meant to her career, peer recognition, blaming it all on her insecure nature once confronted; ohh… and that sarcastic look in his eyes melting her into a puddle of self-doubts, shattering her spirits to smithereens because that was his power over her; she wouldn’t have allowed herself to lose control under the thousands of shimmering lights in the gloaming of her bare spring garden as the skies wept for her, but what’s done is erstwhile and silencing him was the only way to tip the balance of power.

A glance through the bedroom window at the exploding beds of asphodel and white lilies, a tiny sting of remorse vanishing at the speed of light, the memory of last spring expunged with the pure willpower of constraint before it took root.
 
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 thinks there is something cathartic about seeing your words and art out in the world. Her literary art appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Sky Island Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/. 
 
**
 
With Sappho's Blessing
 
I had her paint on your skull
like she would with a needle.
Bearing your last name -  
which should’ve been mine.  
You’re my one thing from home
he said I could bring.
There is nowhere I’d go
where you would not come.  
 
This crown on my head
should be on yours.  
We could be the first.
Queens together. No king.  
But I’m sorry, so sorry,
this must be my fault.  
If I could’ve been normal -  
we would be together.  
 
Now he has taken me
to rule in his kingdom.  
He’s fine, he’s knightly.  
But he’s not you.  
My beloved, I need you.
I’ll miss you forever.  
My everything, darling.  
The queen to my queen.  
 
Maeson Roucoulet
 
Maeson Roucoulet (they/them) currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and is originally from Connecticut. They've been writing poetry since around the fourth grade, and were published in The Ram Page and The Ekphrastic Review. Maeson is now interested in creative writing, literature, and music.
 
 
**
 
Where be Your Jibes Now?
From Hamlet, By William Shakespeare
                                                                                                       
I gaze into the sockets of your eyes,
See mischief there, embedded in your skull,
As if pale bone and shadow could disguise
The memory of jest, before the days were dull.
 
And now my one true love Ophelia
Has slipped beneath the lake, her golden hair
threaded into the silky weeds, skin a
ghostly shade of moonshine cast in prayer.
 
Yorick, is it fair to seek revenge?
I miss the rhythmic skip of childhood,
Your smiling face and mine a mirrored lens
But nothing breathes where once you stood.
 
We all return our bones to soil and earth,
We are but spectres, we have no worth.
 
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.
 
**
 
Eternal Grin  

You made us howl,
primed our pumps with spurts of laughter
that - at last - exploded in geyser guffaws,
soaked with tears.
Your last line echoed inside,
erupting in spastic dribbling giggles
long after your schtick was done.
 
As a child, I assumed
you fed us funny fluff.
Later, I noticed
glinting diamonds in the mix,
brilliance for the brave,
razor edges making their mark.
 
You mocked everything,
even the King, to his face.
You grabbed your manhood
to proclaim my father as
ever-protective of the Crown Jewels.
Or not.
Reckless, foolish, suicidal.
 
Honest.
 
Beneath your eternal grin,
you still mean it.
Life is brief;
Choose with the end in mind.
 
What constitutes an adequate choice?
 
One in which you die trying
and never miss the Joke.
 
Sheila Murphy
 
Sheila Murphy writes poems to slow down. She is a spiritual director, cancer survivor, retreat leader and adventurer. She is a music director and pub fiddler. She has published poems in Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction and The Ekphrastic Review. Sheila lives in coastal Maine, is married and has two adult offspring. She plays fiddle, guitar and piano.
 
**
 
A Reflection Of Dignity

“While if not in jest; we speak of life.”
One should easily be able to distinguish the premises-
What is Good and what is Right. My death…
A concept-
Of past lives lived-on to recount new visions.
This skewed view of progress-watched.
From above.
Recounting-
Having grown old enough to see-
Bones that rejoice!
Flesh,
and the air !
I had loved.
Once
 
Michael W Piercy
 
"At the intersection of Art, Poetry and Contradiction you will find my work, you will find me. Taking on memories and the present moment. Thinking- with an eye that shadows the natural world. Philosophy, Theology and Science are at the core of my writing. I have found that I am a synthesizer-managing ideas which to not always cohere. Trying to manipulate- Ideas." Michael W. Piercy
 
 
**
 
I hold
 
in tattoos
the diary pages,
fossilized last spoken
now I want no more-
I hold
the hollows of time
soaked in cries,
I hold an evening
falling quiet.
 
Beyond
ashen white
is coloring the sky,
dusty gold mounting
in steppe meadows-
impregnated air
falters forgiveness
into hollows
in my hand I hold.
 
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.
 
 
**
 
Hamletiana Shakespeariana
 
Heavy is the golden crown -
its cold pushing from top down
until history’s contender,    
once mouthful with pride,
is reduced to clenched teeth
fitting even into a girl’s palm –
Zen flesh, Zen bones –
fixed gaze taming the ghost
caved into the bony orbits,
while her other hand
gracefully guides her intent
to pat the being that is not.
What fancy drives this curiosity?
To touch or not to touch the un-being?
That is the moment of Vicente’s screening
into the trial of a Zen flesh to extract
from a Zen bone the meaning.
To be or not to be?
Was Hamlet right or wrong to pose
that brief and fateful polar question  
that bites the mankind’s lips ever since
he aired it on that eventful Shakespearean page –
as if on the heavenly stage. To be or not to be?
Was he asking the earth or the heaven?
This is uncertain, so, as each forfeits the other,
Hamlet stood between these two contrary judges,
who live in balanced tension for all ages,
while he - pained, alone, to crown sworn,   
mind on earth, heart in heaven,
took the enemy’s blade
while his hand dropped his sword
into the heart of his unrequited question.
Now she tries to draw the answer
from the teeth clenching it -
maybe or maybe not -
her pat may un-bite that tight knot,
but until then while looking straight
into his un-being eyes as in a trance  
she tells him her answer:
thinking outside the box,
be it golden crown or carton hoax,
and being not prince Hamlet
but from any hamlet on the planet
freely flying my orange banner of a hair,
over my white romantic frills,
covering my heart’s beats,
above my eyes’ inquisitive trills,
seems a sufficiently noble reason for being
and never put anything squeezing
over my head, save heaven –
a crown for each and all,
auspicious for the mind’s orbital descend
to the voiceless sound of Hamlet’s answer
as written in the stars and these Zen bones.
 
Ekaterina Dukas
 
Ekaterina Dukas, MA in linguistics and culture has studied and taught 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 feature on often on The Ekphrastic Review, among others. Her poetry collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europe Edizioni, 2021.
 
**
 
Ophelia Lives
 
On a different balcony,
Or on a different page,
The fool’s skull wears the king’s crown,
And Ophelia lives
To have an existential crisis of her own.
Hamlet had hated the neck tattoo,
It (nearly) drove him mad.
“But you know how I love flowers, love,” she said, 
But he didn’t seem to hear.
 
“Alas, poor Yorick,” she said to the skull,
“You poor memento mori, you prop,
Nothing more than what you stand for now, not what you really were.
You were a man of infinite jest, but no one is laughing now.
Only a man would harp on the inevitability of death 
Instead of remembering the possibilities of life. 
Life is only futile to those who fail to truly live.
Sure, Alex the Great is naught but dust now, 
But damn did his life seem fun.
Pillage and plunder and all.”
 
Ophelia put down Yorick’s skull, tucked her long hair into her shirt to create the illusion of manhood, and felt the hilt of her sword at her side. A voice called her name from off stage.
“I do not know, my lord, what I should think,” she answered, gripping the sword and smiling. “Though I have a few ideas.”
 
Maggi McGettigan
 
Maggi McGettigan is a writer and literature lover living in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Her work has most recently been published in the beautiful Creatopia magazine, Capsule Stories, and The Stonecrop Review, and can be found at maggimcgettigan.com.
 
 
**
 
Alas, Poor Yorick, You Knew Me too Well
 
You, the Fool, most often recognized
as the smartest man at court, but only
to those with sharp minds themselves –
you remain masked by buffoonery, me
by beauty, both locked into our accepted
roles.
 
Such a shame! Two star-crossed lovers
who could have had it all, but for your silly
obsession with virtue. That second night
after my arrival, you s o m e r s a u l t e d
across the banquet hall, a rose between your lips,
as you bowed and presented it to me.
 
Milady, the rumors are true!
But your niece Ophelia is a pale version
of you. What remarkable beauty for a woman
of 517 years! A cacophony of laughter eclipsed
the band of musicians. I laughed, too.
 
My dear Yore? Yock? Yammer? Pray you,
forgive my forgetting your name.
You are so kind and generous in your praise
for a woman of 666 winters.
 
Laughter exploded again as our eyes locked
on each other, recognizing the truth.  We
could neither one be trusted to keep
the other’s secrets.
 
You would lie dead within the week.
Death upon death, madness upon
madness followed according to plan.
Yet, all these years later, you remain
my only regret.
 
Alarie Tennille
 
Alarie Tennille graduated from the first coed class at the University of Virginia, where she picked up her B.A. in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. Retired now, Alarie delights in having more time to read, write poetry, and hang out at The Ekphrastic Review. Alarie was thrilled to win Lorette C. Luzajic’s first Editor’s Pick for the Ekphrastic Fantastic Award and to have her latest book, Three A.M. at the Museum, named Director’s Choice at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2022. alariepoet.com
 
 
**
 
Reality Mends Cowards
 
I ate some food today. I don’t remember
what I ate. Just that I wasn’t hungry. 
What terrifies me more than grief and fear?
It’s apathy. Indifference. I think.
The numbness spreads and suddenly I have
another tattoo. Still can’t feel the grief.
They know not getting out of bed is a sign.
The only thing that makes me eat is habit. 
All everlasting kingdoms fall to dust
and here old Yorick stands, a mockery.
I don’t think people understand all this.
If they understood, maybe they’d offer help.
All power stripped away and nought remains.
I smiled for the first time in a year.
It felt unsettling, like the wrong size shoe.
Is depression made only for princes?
 
Maureen Martin
 
Maureen Martin is an aspiring writer from Ohio. Her passions include Shakespeare, literature and film criticism, overindulging in herbal teas, and working as an underpaid English and Theatre teacher. She has acted, directed and written her way through her undergraduate years, which are now safely behind her. She is a published poet, with several pieces appearing online at the The Ekphrastic Review.
 
 
**
 
Your Dagger Look
 
Hello again
fine-fashion crisp 
murderess. Here we are, 
some time since my pooled blood 
washed-up in the lure of this blind-white-white,
 
and all the blues  
have cooled, less royal dark 
than I recall. They no longer arrow,
but bend lithe over the curve of your iced 
lyse-blue eye, onto classy cuff-ruffles, silken 
 
but stiff enough 
to hold in the tonnage 
of leaden deeds. Here now, touching dabs 
of child-green accenting, clean, clean. And a grey-
tinged green veins along through, like a sequined spider’s 
 
micro-snipped web, within 
your sprawling neck tattoo, then wisps 
up into the reign of (oh-wow-it’s-grown) 
an ever-sharpening—nearly a jab of rosy cheekbone.     
 
You must to be sure, again, I am still tangibly dead. 
 
(my yellow-gold skull 
un-convincing)          And so, 
can only threaten you from afar. 
But the dead have little to say on matters 
of state. You must keep piercing me however 
 
long it takes 
to sever a word 
or stab one clear out, 
clueless to what the rest of us access first: 
the little the dead have left to give, poor we are
 
in words. We’re numbers 
of globed worlds away from 
where this is. And you won’t reflect on 
how like us you really are, as your framed 
word-pearls empty-out officially at the end of every day, tip
 
elegant, back to the base 
of your taut neck, too rigid to ever 
betray—but in the flattened press of dirty red hair 
blunt cut just yesterday, there it is, a redder red-trickle
along your severe midline part. You cannot see it very well
 
in the million mirrors 
turning to follow you. Your brutal 
cold eyes pin you apart               from a critical view.
 
SP Singer 
 
I hope to always be starting over as a poet, satisfaction a good stretch ahead, 
blind-illumina colours in most directions as I slowly go.
 
**
 
Yorick of Mine 
 
Alas, Yorick, lover of mine,
I stole your life,
As you stole my heart. 
 
You loved Ophelia best,
My poor sister,
Not of blood, but of my soul. 
 
You, my silent king,
I still watch you closely,
Searching for your fancy.  
 
Corrie Pappas
 
Corrie Pappas is a small business owner living outside Boston. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review and she is the author of the children’s book, Come Along and Dream.
 
 
**
 
Memento Mori
 
Yorick, you are beautiful in death
I rubbed your skull with soft cloths until it shone
And wrote your name in black letters on the front
So no-one would mistake the skull for mine.
 
On your head, I placed a golden crown
To remember that this is how all mortals end
Kings, and the sons of kings, and the kings’ fair daughters
My books, my spotless linen shirt
My lustrous hair, of which I am so vain
Will turn to dust, will crumble into earth.
 
As an aside, what gives, Señor Vicente?
At least, unlike my sisters, I have clothes
Still, I’m in some kind of pre-Raphaelite freak show
My neck’s too long, my hands, impossible
A hundred years from now, when gravediggers find my bones
Beneath crumbling stone, the letters worn away
They will call me Spider
because of my long, long hands.
 
Karen Kebarle
 
Karen Kebarle was born in Edmonton, Alberta, but has lived in Ottawa, Ontario for the last 27 years. She holds an MA and PhD in English and has always had a soft spot for Shakespeare. She has taught grade school, college, and university, and now teaches English as a Second Language to public servants in the Government of Canada. One of her favourite jobs was her two years working as an art interpreter at the National Gallery of Canada.
 

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Dusti Bonge: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

11/10/2023

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Picture
Whirlpool, by Dusti Bongé (USA) 1956

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 Whirlpool, by Dusti Bonge. Deadline is November 24, 2023. 

Curator and judge for this challenge is TER editor Sandi Stromberg.


You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

**

Dear Writers and Lovers of The Ekphrastic Review,
 
One of the wonderful gifts of being an editor at The Ekphrastic Review is that on occasion I’m able to offer a biweekly challenge. The possibility has me constantly on the alert. As I wander through museums, galleries, art fairs, thumb through books on art, I’m always considering possibilities: Would this artwork be evocative enough? Would this artist’s life intrigue? Would writers feel driven to respond, to commit images and thoughts to paper?
 
Recently, in one of life’s delicious moments of synchronicity, I became friends with a man affiliated with the Dusti Bongé Foundation. As he told me about this remarkable artist—who is finally receiving the accolades and recognition she deserves—I was intrigued. I hope you will be, too. See her short bio below with news about her current exhibition and a video in which she shares her Life as an Artist.
 
In the meantime, I offer you Bongé’s Whirlpool and hope it will inspire!​

Sandi Stromberg

Dusti Bongé (1903-1993), née Eunice Swetman, was a member of the first generation of abstract expressionist painters. A native of Biloxi, Mississippi, she showed with the groundbreaking Betty Parsons Gallery in New York from the 1940s through the 1970s, in the company of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the other major players of that time. though her part in that revolutionary chapter of American art history is only now being recognized. 30 years after her passing. Dusti Bongé: The Creative Life is currently on exhibit at the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama, July 13, 2023-September 14, 2024. A video of her in her studio discussing her life as an artist is available here Dusti Bonge' | MPB.

**
​
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.​

Voluntary gift of $5 CAD with submission.

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​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 BONGE 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, November 24, 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.
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Ekphrastic Writing Responses: Reverse Glass Painting

11/3/2023

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Picture
Untitled, reverse glass painting, Qing Dynasty (China) c. 1800s

Upon Peering at an Untitled Reverse Glass Painting

Fir trees surround the halls
of the courtyard complex
with reverse-facing rooms, side houses,
and an entrance gate shielded
by a spirit screen of inkstone
engraved with terrain mirroring
the landscape beyond the walls.
Bellflowers are somewhere.
Plum blossoms are somewhere.
Floral motifs decorate red and blue garments.
A pearl necklace adorns a neck
and a headpiece is like a flat crown.
Someone points to the sky.
He says things with confidence.
Someone sighs.
Her court needs to tend to other matters.
Messengers argue.
Fog thickens around the terraces.
No page walks through a courtyard.
Moss grows on sculptures in a rock garden
and stone arrangements resemble far-off mountains.
A passerby cups a blossom,
pondering a trek through Huashan.
Lilac wisteria spirals around a monument.
Flute melodies reach the court from a distant chamber.
Tempos sync to phoenix birds
twittering above the Hill of Wang Fu.

Efren Laya Cruzada​

Efren Laya Cruzada is a poet who was born in the Philippines and grew up in a small town 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 poems have been published in several journals, with work forthcoming in The Tiger Moth Review, The Stardust Review, and Tiny Seed Literary Journal. Currently, he is working on a poetry collection based on his 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.

**

You Dare And Impress 

What a pose!
A beauty that glows 
Your hands you unfold 
Able to power hold
You assert authority 
And bury fragility 
A voice not to suppress
You dare and impress
A myriad of pearls
You earned with no fears
You uncover stories
True fights not fancies
You rise within an Empire
A tiger’s fur your attire
Your high ranking a pride
Reversing history tide.

Besma Riabi Dziri

Besma Riabi Dziri is a teacher of the English language in high school in Tunis. She was born in Tunis, Tunisia on September 20th, 1966. She graduated from Manouba University of Arts. She has a great passion for creative writing. She writes short stories and fables. Poetry has gripped her very ink and captured her heart and soul. Through her poetry, Besma Riabi Dziri expresses her thoughts which include serving and enlightening Humanity, tolerance of beliefs and the importance of Love, benevolence, forgiveness in the soul’s renewal and growth. She avidly believes in the ability of poetry to transcend our limitations as human beings, beautify and elevate the soul and shine Love and Light into Humanity. 

**

The Qianlong Emperor's Consort
Being Entertained in His Absence


The windows on the universe were closed
behind translucent screens. His senses: eyes
and nostrils, ears and mouth, the hours he dozed,
noted no new kingdoms fall or rise.
Jade and jewels stud the mural walls;
inside and out, extinctions multiply.
The skies are overheated, fire falls
when stars explode, the oceans pale. We try
to kill whole species, not just one by one.
Preserving what is wild is self-defeating.
We mourn the glut of nature, saving none,
but creatures do not mourn our moral bleating.
A sage once dreamt he was a butterfly.
Or was the dream the insect's? Toss the die!

Royal Rhodes

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who has had a long fascination with the art and history of the Middle Kingdom. He has taught a large number of students from China. His poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Lyric, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and a number of other places.

**

​Red

I was spat forth from the mouth of Changbai, the volcano:
my beautiful molten self so red hot
I ate everything in my path.

I leapt off the orb of the sun:
I crept into rowan berries and the goji,
the lychee and the jujubi.

From there to the palette of Zhu Da,
diminutive painter of emperors and empresses;
thence imperially decreed the royal colour
on robes, pennants, standards
such a red as I am!

Piercing the sky with victory and valour
primping the chests and Pom poms
of warriors and court eunuchs alike
billowing in the breeze - oh ecstasy! -
across the mountains of Guangdong.

There will be other colours, of course,
dull lapis lazuli or insipid egg yolk yellow-

but I am the colour of China.
Taste, touch and feel -
I am everywhere. 

Lucie Payne

Lucie is a retired Librarian who is writing in and around Oxfordshire and Sussex; sometimes getting published in the wonderful Ekphrastic Review and other places.

**

​The [A]lternative [W]orldview
for Shaohua Yan

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth."
J. W. von Goethe
 
1.      Book Time
 
“Voila! … Now, this discourse – 1421: The Year China Discovered America (G. Menzies) – is Le Portal to the [A]lternative [W]orldview—id est, contrary to the (in)famous Christopher Columbus, The Explorer, grand narrative,” I ensure that I’m amply audible to her eardrums, so she knows ‘tis Book Time for me, “ … the Chinese were the original inventors of: paper making (105CE) AND type printing (960–1279 CE) AND gunpowder (1100 CE) AND compass (2nd century BCE–1st century CE) AND mechanical clock (715 CE) AND tea production (2,737 BCE) AND silk (4,000 BCE) AND umbrella (300 CE) AND iron smelting (1050–256 BCE) AND earthquake detector/seismograph (132 CE) AND rocket (228 CE) AND kite (muyuan: wooden kite) (1,000BCE) AND seed drill (1,500 BCE) AND paper money (9th century CE) AND acupuncture (300s BCE) AND … .” But, I don’t read this chronological account out loud, ‘cause I don’t need to, ‘cause she’s CHINESE – she knows her [H]istory! … “Now, that’sNews! This definitely calls for the Grand/Meta-Narratives—especially, the ones floating around in the West (under the canopy of Modernism)—to be revisited! … [Re]visited in the manner of a Deconstruction of the Civilisation – exempli gratia, in the Post-Modernist / Post-Structuralist context!”[1] The philosopher in me is provoked, but I keep the agitation(s) from treading onto the tongue.
 
2.   Rhetorical Questions
 
“Hmm. So, how come the Arabs (the Bedouins) still had to use the animal hides to document their folklores and poetry and songs back then (6th–7th century CE)? Hmm. And would the conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) by the Turks—by Sultan Mehmet II (The Fetih/Gazi) (1453 CE)—even have been possible without the gun powder/guns/cannons, in the first place? Hmm. And what of the Islamic Renaissance – with the Al-Mu’tazilites et alia (8th–9th century CE) –[2] and the European Renaissance – with the Medici Family et alia (15th century CE) –[3] would these historical epochs even have materialised without the Chinese Factor? Hmm.” I can see/hear/smell/touch these – and multifaceted other – rhetorical questions ricocheting off each other inside my thalamus now; but, I spare my grey matter the immaterial labour.
 
3.   Bedtime
 
As I contemplate braving the idea of turning a dozen+ more pages over to sort the assist of the said scholar with the hunt for the theses to the aforesaid hodgepodge in my walnut shaped mind: enveloped in the Chinese-red nighty, wearing my favourite Eau de Toilette (Floral Aquatic Cool Water – Davidoff), 2-3 wine glasses of La Rosa down; she relays a signal to me with her cat eyes: (put the book away // screw the cap back on the pen // switch the table lamp off) ‘tis Bedtime!
 
Saad Ali

[1]. Postmodernism/Poststructuralism: An Intellectual Movement that rejects the objectivism/determinism/rationalism of the (European) Modernity, or the so-called Age of Enlightenment (18th–19th century CE), i.e., ‘one frame fits all the portraits.’ The movement professes relativism/pluralism/subjectivity as opposed to the ideology of the ‘universal truth,’ or ‘universal meaning,’ or ‘universal language,’ or ‘universal human nature,’ et cetera, i.e., there’re multiple truths/realities and meanings, and that every culture and language is valid in its own (unique) way.
[2]. Al-Mu’tazilites (The Separated): A Philosophical/Theological School of Thought—proponents of: 1) ‘something comes from something’ metaphysics, 2) atomism (following the classical Greek tradition), 3) speculative theology, 4) man’s free will, 5) power of human intelligence and reasoning, et cetera. Some of the significant figures of the Movement included: Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Ishaq, Al-Mahamali, Al-Asturlabiyya, et alia – who were also the key members of the Graeco-Arabic Translation Project.
[3]. The House of Medici: The Family is also known as: 1) The Godfathers of the (European) Renaissance, and 2) Makers of Popes, Queens, and Artists. They are also famous for funding the inventions of the piano and opera, and being the Patrons of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Galileo, et alia.

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). He is a regular contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Ovid, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Tagore. He enjoys learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities/towns on foot. To learn further about his work, please visit www.saadalipoetry.com, or  www.facebook.com/owlofpines.

**

Come to Us, Come to Us

Come to us, come to us,
our empress beckons you forth. 
Shout to us, shout to us!
What news brings you from the North?
Tell us this story,
what is it you know? 
Your brave tales of glory, 
none more filled with woe. 

The bard starts to laugh! 
A victory song!
Bring our carafes! 
We're here, we belong!
You needed success, 
my empress, we brought it.
We'd bring nothing less, 
you've said it, we've fought it. 

Please, celebrate, all!
Today is so joyous!
No need for more brawls.
No one can destroy us. 
Relax, my brave soldiers. 
Lay down to rest. 
No more weight on your shoulders.
From you, we are blessed. 

Maeson Roucoulet

Maeson Roucoulet (they/them) currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and is originally from Connecticut. They've been writing poetry since around the fourth grade, and were published in The Ram Page. Maeson is now interested in creative writing, literature, and music.

**

Composition in Green

The empress calls her court the Qing — 清 — qīng --
compounded splash of 'water,' block of 'green'
yet not just one but all the shades of spring
             signify together Pure. Bright. Clean.

'Green is from blue and green is more than blue.'
From inky depth flows life into the sheaves
each year edenic. Troops scythe pale bamboo
             among blue hills, green ponds, black leaves.

Thus she knows herself immortal: all is one
blurred coluor swimming in the sleepy grass
blooming at edges. Belly-up the sun
             pours half-light mediate through glass.

Katy Borobia

Katy Borobia is a recent graduate of Hillsdale College. She studied Mandarin Chinese for four years. Her poems and prose have been published by Ekstasis, Glass Mountain, and several others. After trying her hand at service, horticulture, 4-H education, and editing, Katy still doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up.

**

The Qing Dynasty

As the youngest,
one must earn her respect.
I dance and twirl
trying to win mother over.
A facial heatwave
when I make the connection:
My siblings before me
received life on gold platters.
Their smug stares
burning holes in my backside
She glares,
I know she reads minds.

Ellen Canarelli

Ellen Canarelli is a lifelong artist and writer who resides in Cassville, New York, where there are more cows than people. She spends all winter skiing, something she'd loved doing with her family since she was a very little girl. In the summer, she spends her days running for miles, soaking up the sun. 

**

​Celebration

Cheerful noise fills the area
dancing, laughing, and joy
As I sit on my throne 
and look from afar
I appreciate nature's beauty–
the trees swaying “hello”
and the wispy smells 
from the garden
Today is a day of celebration
As they continue
to laugh and dance
I sit on my throne
feeling content
  
Tyler Carr

Tyler Carr is a writer from Middletown, New York. She enjoys journaling and photography during her free time.

**

The Purity Shines

The purity shines
hiding the hostility
reds and blues
draw the eye
away from the pain
the violence
the individual
hides their face
behind the glass
ignoring the blood spilled
mixing with the paint

Mo Flanagan

Mo Flanagan is an author out of Boylston, Massachusetts. They enjoy reading prose and poetry. ​

**

About-Face

Who can shade upside down?  
Not one from the comfort of a death-
rattle recliner or from boots tied
to a gallows rope. Not one from
the other side of the equator.  

Reverse engineering. Deconstruction.  
The first is the first and the last
shall be last (in a non-Biblical
manner). Facial hair. Beards. Brows.
Lashes. Darks and blacks. Smirks.

Crooked lines of nostrils. Crowns
and caps. Clothes. Outer layers
wait on belts and swords. Shameless
hubris of cheeks lie tidy before the already
shadowed hands brush their spears.

Todd Sukany 

Todd Sukany, a Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over 40 years. His work recently appears in The Christian Century and Fireflies’ Light. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing music, and caring for three rescue dogs and three cats.

**

Besotted

I'll hold a parasol above your head, 
though my palms sweat blood on the handle, 
fingers close to breaking with the strain,
the long hours. I'll present you with a 
scroll, lacquered tube to hold it, hung with 
braided tassels. The scroll will say I love you, 
calligraphed a thousand times in sumi ink. 

I'll have my dancers dance for you in 
soft leather slippers, embroidered cloaks, 
gold-threaded caps with scarlet pom poms. 
Their beards will be clipped for the 
occasion, waxed to a point a yard beneath 
the chin, scented with the sweetest mountain 
flowers: harebells, pennyroyal, peony. 

My jesters will impress you, tugging jokes 
from their throats like knotted scarves: 
endless hilarity, enough to make you helpless. 
They'll cease at my command, but I'll bide 
my time, waiting till you turn to me with 
wonder, gratitude, and love. Look what he 
can do, you'll say, this besotted man, 
devoted bearer of the parasol: he commands 
the sun, and everything beneath. 

I'll take your face in my aching hands, 
kiss your pale, shadow-cool forehead, 
my triumph tinged with sadness: 
we both know in our hearts I'll regret it, 
except in that moment when I had it all.

Paul McDonald

Paul McDonald taught at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, where he ran the Creative Writing Programme before taking early retirement in 2019. He is the author of 20 books to date, which includes fiction, poetry and scholarship. His most recent poetry collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange Publishing, 2023)

**

Was This Richard Scarry’s Inspiration?
 
Was this 1800s Qing Court scene 
Richard Scarry’s inspiration for 
his ultra detailed portrayals of
modern homes, schools, 
even plain air pictures?
Or perhaps he traveled through
time and saw for himself that
Empress holding court
her jester, her advisor, her garden
and the lands beyond? Perhaps
he’s the one who painted it?
 
If there are symbols here
among these elements
my old eyes, my mind, both
flummoxed and distracted
by so much detail, leaps from
place to place in the painting.
Scarry was a favourite of
my laser-focused daughter
who easily moved among
Scarry’s many points of interest
cataloguing , organizing
all in her logical mind.
My son and I put Scarry aside
preferring pictures with 
fewer foci.
 
Here, I note the Empress is smiling
from under the arbor, and that she
is robed in red silks of happiness.
Perhaps her smile is aimed
at the entertainer—is he swallowing a snake 
or sword or juggling for her? 
The others are so serious—maybe they will smile
in the next picture, released from sober
countenance only after the Empress smiles?
 
My safest point of reference,
if this were my only picture 
of the court, would be,
are the two  birds in the far-left corner
gliding above, maintaining 
a  good distance
from all of this human interaction
while gracing the sky with 
their gentle presence.
I think my son would
also have liked them best.
 
Scarry drew his 
equally busy scenes for children
to give them a safe view of 
the busy adult world all around them.
I wonder how many Chinese children
“read” about the court using this painting?
I wonder how many of them, like my son
and I were tired by these views and
wished the painting and 
real life was simpler?
 
Joan Leotta

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She performs tales of food, family, strong women. Internationally published as an essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist,  she’s a two-time Pushcart nominee, twice Best of the Net nominee, and a 2022 runner-up in Robert Frost Competition. Her essays, poems, CNF, and fiction appear in Impspired, Ekphrastic Review, Verse Visual, Verse Virtual, Gargoyle, Silver Birch, Yellow Mama, Mystery Tribune, Ovunquesiamo, Synkroniciti, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SoFLoPoJo, and many others in US, UK, Australia, Germany, and more.  Her poetry chapbooks are Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, (Finishing Line) and  Feathers on Stone, (Main Street Rag). 

**


Victory Celebration
 
On a mild spring
afternoon ginkgo 
and Chinese elm
trees gently sway
in a light breeze
while a rust-coloured 
sky embraces 
distant mountains. 
Adorned in red 
ceremonial attire 
embroidered in gold
and silver threads, 
Empress Cixi
is ensconced 
on a hand-carved 
wooden throne,
where she holds 
court with artisans.
Like a victorious 
soldier, I hold the red 
dynasty victory 
banner behind her. 
Wei, a musician,
plays the erhu for her
listening pleasure
until the last 
orange strands 
of daylight pale. 
 
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.

**

The Noble Dowager

(for Kenneth Rexroth)

Everything is ornament for her
brocades and lavish swirls are the formal dress
of a seated Empress along with her courtiers
and palace guards in their plumage.
Vivid Autumn colors that shame the trees and sky,
The extravagance of each costume is a temple unto itself.
I realize Lady you are the pure light of heaven
though from a distance to a man
whose crops are dust and who watches 
his family starve all this grandeur and pomp,
these most intricate patterns are not beautiful
but are a fire raging through his country and
his belly.

Daniel Brown

Daniel Brown has recently published at age 72 his first collection Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems through Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY. He has most recently been published in Jerry Jazz Musician and Chronogram Magazine and was included in Arts Mid-Hudson 2023 gallery presentation Poets Respond To Art in Poughkeepsie, NY.

**

The Emperor of the Moon

Since antiquity, there have been many emperors. 
The emperor of the moon is the most mystical.
Riding bareback above clouds like a lost explorer
Galloping towards white stars, he grew critical

Looking for his bride; oh, where art thou my - Juliet? 
I have remained faithful during my ceaseless searching
But your distance has always remained the same, I regret.
There are too many stars twinkling that are pretending-

To be in keeping with my carnal desires, but those, 
Those stars were never in his thoughts, never his tempting.
The emperor of the moon was now predisposed
To idly hiding or occasionally peeping 

Rather than dashing across the skies, he hid in the dark
Rather than crying, oh, where art thou my - Juliet? 
He sent his people to look; he sent a meadowlark
Men did shout, and the meadowlark sang the alphabet.

His men returned to their quarters each evening solemn 
The meadowlark flew and flew, singing in the heavens 
The emperor felt abandoned and in the doldrums
As each morning, it sang and was lit incandescent.

Why on earth does it sing so triumphant and happy? 
And while his back was turned, he felt a glowing warmth.
And his men came running; here is your bride and aptly
She arrives behind your throne brightly and adorned.

The emperor gasped at her radiance of gold
In all his endless days of looking, he couldn't find her
Until she found him in a story that is often retold
A few centuries later - about how he found her?

Mark Andrew Heathcote​ 

Mark Andrew Heathcote is an adult learning difficulties support worker. He has poems published in journals, magazines, and anthologies 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.

**


Whom Shall I Blame or Groom? 
 
I’m cleaned, prepped, reversed, glistening. Lying in greedy-hungry, heavily scented, oiled-soiled palms like stolen gold coins, ready to play. In beds or casinos. My disrespect is not sanctioned by Gods. So, whom shall I blame for breakage, confusion, pain-leaving, bloody stain? Or whom shall I groom for luck, rethinking, piety, improved-swapped mentality? Or whom shall I groom in wonderous faith? Humans? Animals? Animals may not seek mirrors, glass, or gold. And the mean don’t see them; they just destroy. And court jesters are punished, ridiculed, never to be set free. Roads are blocked. Passages gloated. Brains are lard-clogged. I hang my coat on the stand. Throw open the tight, molding windows. Watch the queen on the throne. Watch the hungry men drool and prepare for antics. Watch nature mingle with my thoughts, my fears, my smiles, and my promises, like nervous pregnant mothers, human or animal, just before delivery. Whom shall I blame, and whom shall I groom? 

Anita Nahal

Anita Nahal, Ph.D., CDP, is a two-time Pushcart Prize-nominated Indian American author-academic.  Her third poetry collection, What’s wrong with us Kali women? (Kelsay, 2021) was nominated by Cyril Dabydeen as the best poetry book, 2021 for British Ars Notoria, and is mandatory reading in a multicultural society course at Utrecht University. Her just released novel, drenched thoughts is also prescribed in the same course and university. Anita is the editor of the Newsletter, Poetry Virginia Society and secretary of the Montgomery Chapter, Maryland Writers Association. She teaches at the University of the District of Columbia, Washington, DC.  Anita is the daughter of Sahitya Akademi award-winning Indian novelist, Late Dr. Chaman Nahal, and educationist Late Dr. Sudarshna Nahal. www.anitanahal.com

**

​

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Fernando Vicente: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge, with Kate Copeland

10/27/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
Hamlet Shakespeariana, Serie Heroinas Literarias, by Fernando Vicente (Spain) 2022. Used with artist permission.

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 Hamlet Shakespeariana, by Fernando Vicente. Deadline is November 10, 2023. 

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

We are thrilled to have Kate Copeland as our challenge editor and curator for this session. She has been a guest editor several times already, and brings a wonderful variety of artistic styles and talents to our attention. We are also delighted to announce that Kate has joined our editorial team here at The Ekphrastic Review and will continue to serve our readers as a challenge editor approximately every other month. Please join us in welcoming her. She generously shares her time and her curious eye on behalf of the journal, our writers, and our readers. THANK YOU KATE!!!!

**

Dear Ekphrastic Challengees,

This  ekphrastic challenge offers you the incredible work of Spanish artist Fernando Vicente! 

Fernando is a self-taught illustrator, whose work was first published in magazines during “la movida madrileña," the countercultural movement in Madrid during the Spanish transition to democracy. His art has appeared in newspapers and various (cultural) supplements, Fernando has also illustrated book covers and record sleeves. 

Find his work via: https://www.fernandovicente.es/en/


The artwork I have chosen is part of the series Heroinas Literarias and is called Hamlet Shakespeariana (see for the whole series: https://www.fernandovicente.es/en/fine-art/heroinas-literarias/ ). It is an amazing piece and I know it will just prompt you into writing the most beautiful lines and stanzas! 

Thank you so much for submitting your writing, I am very much looking forward to reading your work.

And thank you Lorette, for having me on board as challenge-editor and curator for  TER, I am looking forward to choosing art and reading beautiful words every two months indeed. I feel very honoured to be included in your wonderful Ekphrastic Review!

Enjoy the Vicente Shakespeariana challenge everyone, 
Kate Copeland

**


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.​

Voluntary gift of $5 CAD with submission.

YES
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 VICENTE 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, November 10, 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.
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Frederic Edwin Church: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

10/20/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
Niagara Falls, by Frederic Edwin Church (USA) 1857

Dear Ekphrastic Writers and Readers,
 
I was mesmerized and intrigued by the submissions received for this challenge. Since I grew up on the banks of the Niagara River with picnics near thundering falls, words like these bring me back to my childhood. I was enamored with poems/words that captured the sheer power of the falls, making me feel its pull, drawing me back to that time. I recall the tiny speck Maid of the Mist, seen from the railing, walking clad in the thick yellow slickers and boots provided, later, a disposal poncho through the Cave of the Winds, marveled at the spectacular rainbows, dry rocks in 1969 when they diverted water from the falls, on the Canadian side from the top of the Skyline tower restaurant in 1964, the view breathtaking.  I also enjoyed a few renditions of those who also have Falls memories. Thanks to all who sent their work – so many poems/ stories, it was a difficult decision to choose…
 
Special thanks to The Ekphrastic Review editor Lorette C. Luzajic for allowing me to serve as guest editor for this wonderful publication!
 
Best Regards,
Julie A. Dickson
 
**
 
Spellbound  
 
The last time I knew innocence
I was surrounded by breathtaking 
 
steadily booming over the falls
misting our awe-struck faces 
 
confirmation we are mere specks
in the realm of natural wonders.

I could have lingered there forever 
drinking in its mesmerizing thunder 
 
unknowingly balanced on the fraying
thread between well-being and illness  
 
before scalpels, needles, chemical
treatment made their grand entrance; 
 
momentarily living in the presence
of ferocious power, I could not get enough.  
 
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. 
 
**
 
 
To Frederic Edwin Church Regarding Niagara Falls
 
So much like ours, your river's course
becomes the path of nature's force
embracing ever lower plane
and carving ever deeper main
 
except where soil is bared to rock
or rise becomes a stubborn block
that, barring flood, will be its bound
or island it will flow around
 
as ending tributaries merge
and hasten more the mounting surge
to roar of sudden, fated falls,
the splendor eye so well recalls
 
by glimmer of prismatic twist
in fountain of its risen mist.
 
Portly Bard
 
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.
 
**

An Item on my Old Bucket List
 
Niagara—some say the name is a bastardised form of the Iroquois "Onguiaahra." They say it means "The Strait." Now "Niagara" has become associated with a thunderous image. That I can feel.
 
I only ever imagined its deafening voice,
its power, its white foam, its cold spray,
imagined myself in a slicker with a hood--
preferably blue (or red)--
on a boat, getting nearer, nearer, nearer,
before we are being sucked into unimaginable
depths, Charybdis and Scylla,
my fellow passenger quiet
in the face of such a relentless force.
 
When I close my eyes
I see dark clouds pulling up,
attracted like magnets to a cauldron
of deep water, angry foam, killer rocks.
The door to Hades.
Who will pay the ferryman?
 
Rose Mary Boehm
 
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, once for the Best of Net. Her latest: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), and Saudade (December 2022) are available on Amazon. A new collection, Life Stuff, has been scheduled by Kelsay Books for February 2024. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
 
**
 
The Ice Crack’d, 1912 
 
Let’s go back to a time forgotten-
Time when all stood still at this reckoning
When the stars spewed light like a string of shiny pearls
Gleaming, coyly placed, half-hidden in a breast
To enkindle the earth with heavenly illumination
And begin Niagara's immaculate creation
Falling, tumbling river dodging over rock formations
Over and over: an international maritime border
Canada’s pride
America’s daughter

Danger lies in beauty wild and unforgiving
Many years Niagara made a sparkling temptation 
When Honeymooners and brazen lads took the chance
To walk upon the icy bridge made of water
It seemed a game, not risking life in great parlance
The tall, strapping boys built a warm beverage station
Canadian citizens welcomed
Americans as close relations

The menacing sun appeared as a propitious omen,
Settling over that imagined, glassy isthmus
Until a fatal crack shuddered out a warning:
Jagged flaws in the ice were quickly forming
Honeymooners from New York were taking in the sights
The young Quebecians downing cups of hot chocolate 
All looked to one another, faces full of fright
 
Far too late to make preparations
 
Crossing an international border without immigration 
Was a delightful idea with just the right amount of mystery
Until the couple, sharing one last kiss
Before rushing waters pulled them apart, taking their breath
Were noted in the annals of Niagara's history
By boys turned into men by cheating death.

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 Mediterranean Poetry, 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. 
 
**
  
Nik Wallenda Walks a Wire Across Niagara Falls          
 
Into a theatre of wind and mist 
            a cable dips, disappears. 
 
He moves steadily, 
            each step shortening
                        the improbable.
                                    He dissolves into thunder.
 
The camera loses      then finds his face 
            soaked, focused 
                        on distance relenting.
 
In shoes his mother made 
            elk-skin suede
                        his feet curl along the wire. 
 
He tells the cameraman 
            his arms are numb.
                        Weighs the long pole
                                    in sighs, side to side.
                                     
And we can see 
            the waters waiting
                        the letting go
                                 the urge to.
 
He inches ahead
            each second of inertia 
                        a pinpoint 
                                    from which we too
                                                step forward.   
 

Diana Cole

This poem was previously published in Muddy River Poetry Review. 
 
Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has had poems published in numerous journals including Poetry East, Spillway, Cider Press Review, The Public's Radio 89.3, Friends Journal, Verse Daily, The New Verse News and Orison Books. Her chapbook, Songs By Heart was published in 2018 by Iris Press. She is an editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal and has taught a number of poetry workshops. Her full length book, Between Selves, was released this summer by Indian Press, Cyberwit.net.  She has been published a number of times in The Ekphrastic Review. When not writing she is a stained glass artist. 
 
**
 
Dad, You Have Left Us 

with this falling desire to find
the most magic breezes,
the best of both worlds, to drive
some mighty drives.
 
Let us go back to 1986,
when my parents opened shop
then proudly spent the money 
in big cities, on bigger cars,
at biggest waterfalls.
 
A road trip, and all is grand, all goes 
fast, and y’all say how-ya-folks-doing.
Yellow taxis, subway steams,
rush-hush diners, sneakers' streams.
 
We got culturally confused over 
morning coffee with no menu, 
the fries on every sandwich, the toppings 
on every sundae, in every National Park.
 
No end to the eye, no end to the sights. 
Wonderstruck, we got
and our giant car past traffic lights 
swinging from wires, we got pulled over 
on I-90, by shiny-sunglass-sheriff.
 
Onwards to Graceland, for the King,
forwards to the Falls, for dear Marilyn. 
Liquid silver river, blue-green falling 
with no fear for borders, 
or for yellow ponchos.
 
Nature is a thunderous wonder,
nature at its thunderous best.
Feeling like film-living in the mist 
of rainbows, the foredeck pointing at  
caves and hidden myths. 
 
Dad, you have left us
with this healing desire
to hold on to memories, of cities,
of road trips, the water. You have
shown us your tall way, to fall without fail.
 

Kate Copeland

(To my dad, October 1997)

**
 
Falling Days

Now the gulls
have chased away
the long- and lacewings,
 
Now the silt has risen 
from the river floor 
to overturn her days and ways,
 
and now their boat trip 
has not shown the mist
she had hoped to see,
 
she sees that rainbows still fall on,
that tides rest at her feet
and barrels drift away anyway.
 
He might brighten up
once they drive down to the lakes,
once he stops mocking her love 
 
for the waterfalls that make her 
think straight, he wants to 
control her rise and fall
 
but her moods to sing like birds 
and butterflies, is a step further
towards the edge of
falling days, where her best choice
is, to choose her road carefully, is 
to be aware of plunging 
 
without sinking. To see he might just
be in her way. Dive in, dear girl, 
but rise, down the shiny waves.
 
Kate Copeland

Kate Copeland started absorbing words ever since a little lass. Her love for language led her to teaching; her love for art & water to poetry…please find her pieces at The Ekphrastic Review, First Lit.Review-East, Wildfire Words, The Weekly/Five South, AltPoetry and others. Over the years, she worked at festivals and Breathe-Read-Write-sessions; she is now curator-editor for The Ekphrastic Review and runs linguistic-poetry workshops for the IWWG this year. Kate was born @ harbour city and adores housesitting at the world.  https://www.instagram.com/kate.copeland.poems/  
 
**
 
Memories of a Niagara Falls Morning, 1856

White. Cold. My first noticing was the dense mist.  Not tendrils curling around like fingers but thick like a blanket, moisture-rich, like being inside a cloud.  It would burn off later as the sun climbed in the sky.  I needed there to be good visibility for the crowd. Next, as always, I noticed the noise.  A pleasant natural cacophony at a distance, it became a pounding, rushing freight train as I walked towards The Spot.  We'd scouted it weeks before, using word-of-mouth and triangulating with newspaper reports from a few years back.  The crushing sound, the energy of the spray - it really made me feel alive.

My good friend Itzak was already waiting, well wrapped up in his long greatcoat with the collar turned up, thick padded leather gloves, his long mutton chop sideburns slick with the water vapour and his dark curls were straggling from under his peaked cap.  Itzak's lips curled into a smile at my approach and he had that devilish twinkle in his eye confirming why he was the only person I could have trusted to help me with this caper.

If - no, when - I made it to the bottom of the Falls I'd be famous.  No-one else had ever managed the journey and survived, and certainly no woman, though truth be told very few had tried, and even then not voluntarily.  The last poor fellows had fallen, one almost rescued then pulled under by the cruel currents.  My journey would be sensational in a different way.  The reporter would be here soon, as would the usual troupes of tourists, as soon as the dense fog lifted to unveil the splendour of the Falls.

"Who's that? Is he the man from The Gazette?" I asked Itzak, pointing to a tall stranger.  He looked old, probably as much as thirty. The man nodded in our direction but seemed preoccupied as he turned to look at the water cascading over the edge.

"Him?  That's Frederic.  I spoke with him yesterday afternoon.  He's some sort of artist, sketching the Falls.  You know how popular it is for postcards and pasting onto tourist tat."

"He's not drawing us, is he?" I was suspicious of the detached, aloof stranger.

"No, no worries there." Itzak flashed me another smile.  "He told me he's only interested in the Romantic Ideal of nature.  He won't even paint what he sees, but only the best version of it, he said."

"Hah! Perhaps he'll have a new romantic ideal in mind later!"

Itzak smiled again and stepped to the side to reveal the barrel.  It was large, dark, heavy - befitting the seriousness of its purpose.  Painted on the side in large white letters was "Bella D'Angelo, Niagara Falls, 1856".  Inside, it was packed with soft, cream, newly spun wool.  My playful mind suggested that it would be just like climbing into the clouds themselves, although thankfully drier.

"Are you sure you'll have enough room in there?"

"We've tested it out, Itzak.  There's enough room for me to snuggle down, for you to add the last soft pillow of wool on top and bolt on the lid.  As long as Bertrand is ready with the boat at the bottom all will be well."

"Ah, here's the reporter now. Let me help you in and you can talk to him from there before you nestle down.  That will make it more dramatic."

And that's where it all went awry.  It was a combination of the slippery rock under Itzak's foot as he helped me, the proximity of the barrel to the edge - after all The Spot was the perfect launch place for a reason, that reason being ease of falling – and the power of gravity sucking at the weight of the barrel with me half in it.

I'll give The Gazette reporter his due. As obituaries go, it was nicely written.  I'd get the fame I wanted but not quite in the way I desired.
 
Emily Tee
 
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 other work forthcoming elsewhere. She lives in the UK.
 
**
 
Niagara November 1978

After Thanksgiving dinner in North Tonawanda
We drove to Niagara through chilly evening fog,
parked and walked carefully toward the falls.
The sidewalks and grounds were frosted lace,
along the path branches of flash frozen trees 
had spent blossoms suspended like icicle earrings.
Although we remembered 4th grade science
and the hydraulic water cycle
we forgot to realize that when they melt
the radiant ice diamonds 
will mingle with human breath
mist their way to heaven
before returning to earth 
in never ending rotation
to churn and crash over the falls
as they had for Frederic Edwin Church in 1857
when his breath and artistic vision 
captured and contributed to the movement 
of the eternal roar.
 
Daniel Brown
 
Daniel Brown has recently published at age 72 his first collection Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems through Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY. He has most recently been published in Jerry Jazz Musician and Chronogram Magazineand was included in Arts Mid-Hudson 2023 gallery presentation Poets Respond To Art in Poughkeepsie, NY.

**
 
Hearing the World Differently
 
The gallery lies in silence.
Clusters of faces pause
canvas to canvas
lips miming words,
the unheard musings of the many.
 
I inhale their movement,
jackets and backpacks jostle
the canvas to my right
the vertical drop of Niagara Falls
drawing us into its power.
 
The tide turns.
My eyes conjure sounds
only I can hear,
decibels of cyan and teal
the roar of acrylic licking the frame.
 
I taste the grit of salt on teeth,
sea-spray fresh on my face.
Violet tones colour my mood,
the distinctive tang of oil on wood.
I open my senses, hear it all.
 
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.

**

Uncertainty
 
Dichotomy of light and shade
rainbow blurred in cloud and rain
white suicidal water
tangible tears of spray
rocks of despair, eddies of grief
days of uncertainty and loss
 
Still the blue face of control
cascades of courage and resolution
accepting the crags of destruction
the far horizon of the past
tethered on the edge of memory
  
Sarah Das Gupta
 
Sarah Das Gupta is a retired teacher living near Cambridge, UK who has taught in India and Tanzania. Her work has been published in over 12 countries including US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Croatia and Romania
 
**
 
Hear Me Roar
 
The roar of Niagara Falls, while eluding sound, doesn’t fail to irradiate
sight with its jazzy waves and frothy strokes of jade — these sweeping

illusions, swallowed whole by the Deep, howl against deafening winds, westward and warbling — veiling the fading sunlight holding Hope hostage --
 
as renegade avalanches are welcomed by a deluge of stratus tears wailing louder than the Sky itself — the gaze lustily cascades over escarpments of

 towering cliffs while the river’s limbs engulf the clamoring boulders — dark talons of the night threaten to eviscerate the roaring cacophony of
discord with the manifestation of gloom alone— if the eyes can imagine the jaded purging into the Deep, can that which does not roar still be Heard?
 
Ann Marie Steele
 
Ann Marie Steele, who resides in Charlotte, NC, America, is a writer who dabs in poetry, essays, and short stories. She holds a BS in Journalism (News-Editorial), and an MA in Secondary English Education. Ann Marie pens pieces about love and loss, and what she observes and experiences. The loss of her youngest son, Brandon, has influenced much of her writing. Her poetry has been described as “resiliently defiant.” Ann Marie has been published in The Ekphrastic Review with her pieces, “Every Lilly Donned with Grief” and “I Dare You, Pretty Please.” When not teaching high school English, Ann Marie enjoys partner acrobatics, where she can often be seen flying upside down.

**
 
Looking at Church’s Niagara Falls on the Web
 
Niagara is a revelation of the cosmos to each and every man.
David C. Huntington
 
Sure, I’ll breathe poetry there. My mind will be an embouchure
through which your powerful waters pour thunder. I will hear
nothing else, not the sharp sound waves spearing my bellows, 
nor honeymooners whose croons you swallow into white foam
and spew out as a shimmering arch of rainbow. You’ll teach me
about the cosmos by proving the paradox of water in motion:
that its motion is a stillness, that its stillness is ever in motion.
My body will be a speck of silence swallowed by your howling
emerald olivine chrysoberyl pale blue ice snowy pinnacles,
your ten-thousand-year-old ceaselessly cataracting avalanche,
your constant breath ever billowing through one diapason,
yet not one prism in your mist ever splits light the same way.
 
Like that bared jagged root snagged on your brink, I’d abide
inside your relentless remaking. Eyes on a digital or hands 
on a canvas covered with smooth strokes would never equal 
the whole of me, mind, body, heart and soul, all immersed 
in the whole of your eloquence greater even than my whole 
world, you patient shale-shaper, finale of the Niagara River, 
you Ice Age’s fossil water, you rhapsody of ancient glaciers
ever burgeoning into new birth, you under whose arcades
lovers sport crowned with bright sprays, you whose sheer
impetus splashes the sun’s and moon’s incandescent faces,
I keep calling you Whirlpool, Horseshoe, Luna Falls, Iris Falls
and you chant to purple clouds a booming Gravity is Grace.
 
Lucie Chou
 
Lucie Chou is an ecopoet working in mainland China. Currently an undergraduate majoring in English language and literature, she is also interested in the ecotone between ekphrasis and ecopoetics, and in exploring the magic presences of other-than-human living beings bleeding into the lonely arrogance of human experience. Her work has appeared in the Entropy magazine, the Black Earth Institute Blog, the Tiny Seed Journal website, The Ekphrastic Review, Transom, and in the Plant Your Words Anthology published by Tiny Seed Press. A poem is forthcoming in from Tofu Ink Arts, both in print and online. She has published a debut collection of ecopoetry, Convivial Communiverse, with Atmosphere Press. She hikes, gardens, and studies works of natural history by Victorian writers with gusto. In August 2023, she participated in the Tupelo Press 30 / 30 project where she fundraised for the indie press by writing one poem each day for a month. She writes for a constellation of brilliant readers hopefully including street trees and feral animals she encounters in each city she travels to.
 
**

Vantage Point
 
Strands of darkening
tangerine twilight
tantalizes
an Ontario skyline
near Horseshoe Falls
sending frothy waves,
sheets of water
cascading over
rocky outcroppings
into the Niagara River,
as we stand
on the observation deck
at Skylon Tower
mesmerized
by its sheer force
hours before
moonlight casts
its glow on a dark
June evening sky,
before we whisper
under the stars.
 
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.
 
**
 
Leaping


The first time it happened was on a family holiday when the parents piled the four of us into the back seat of our wood-panelled Plymouth station wagon, circa 1959.

Dan 10
moi  9
Deb  5
Dave 4

I hear ya, the 4 Ds, what were they thinking?

We piled in, we were piled on, we were on a camping trip from Ottawa to see the falls, the mythical falls!
 
A long day journey with moi pleading car sickness so I could sit up front and not stay squished in the back with the squabblers.  I know, you're wondering how can 4 kids be packed into the back seat of a station wagon: no problem: this trip was 20 years prior to that belt legislation. Plus, we had Heidi with us, a usually sweet dachshund, but cranky car companion. What were they thinking?
 
Am writing this in the throes of slouching towards 75, can't remember anything much about the actual road trip. But we must've played horses and cemeteries. You get points for horses you see in the fields and you lose all your points if someone yells 'cemetery'. This requires lots of I saw it first. 
 
But I do remember the awestruckness of seeing the falls, feeling the mist, the magnetism of the cataract, the thunderous roar, the trembling...and the irresistible desire, more the irresistible need, to leap. To be one with the shoots, the flumes, the brume....
 
Even today, with small cascades, like Hogsback Falls on the Rideau River in Ottawa, I want to leap. 
 
Anyone out there feel the same tug?
 
Perhaps Annie Edson Taylor did when she first saw Niagara Falls. To design and build a barrel, at age 63, and throw herself into the river and over the falls! We're talking a drop of 160 feet, a flow rate of 85,000 cubic feet per second! Though she was the first person to survive this remarkable feat, she was not the risk taker you might take her for: she sent her cat over the precipice a few days earlier, and he survived.
 
You? Would you go over Niagara Falls for fame and fortune? 
 
Donna-Lee Smith
 
Donna-Lee Smith resides in Montreal, Canada and has a hankering to leap.
 


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Qing Dynasty: Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

10/13/2023

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Picture
Untitled, reverse glass painting, Qing Dynasty (China) c. 1800s
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 Untitled, by unknown artist of the Qing Dynasty. Deadline is October 27, 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.​

Voluntary gift of $5 CAD with submission.

YES

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 QING DYNASTY 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 27, 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.
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Pierre Richard: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

10/6/2023

1 Comment

 
Picture
Page from Grimoires Illuminees, by Pierre Richard (France) before 1879

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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