Klee at Carthage

Colour possesses me.  
I don’t have to pursue it.
Paul Klee, Notebooks

That April in the sea-lit town, under fractal skies,
awakened to the sparkling syntax of the waves,

he followed shadow down the narrow alleyways
and climbed through olive-shouldered hillside groves

to seek out new complexions for the mind to wander in,
new towns where solids seemed to hang reflected

in the shimmering air, as though he’d found – as wave 
collapsed in particle, and promptly fluidized as wave again –  

Creation in an older state than in that garden where 
our naming voices claimed their firm possession of the light.

The Barbary sun enrobed him in its startling hues,
and wove an unnamed music in his sight, and all at once,

among these fragrant oleanders on the road, demanded 
he apply to light the quanta of a finer scale, the haunting

microtones he’d heard in Persian song, the countless words 
for sand among the Bedouin, for ice among the Inuit.

​DB Jonas

​DB Jonas is an American poet living in the mountains of New Mexico.  His collection, Tarantula Season and Other Poems, is available on Amazon.  His second collection, Flight Risk, Poems and Translations, is forthcoming.

​
​Bath Towels in Marble
 
On ordinary chrome towel racks— 
much like those on which I hang 
my damp, frayed own—they look thick 
and what the ads would call 
luxurious. I tilt my head against the wall,
but nothing can convince me 
that they’re not Egyptian cotton.
One looks as if it’s just been flung 
there—bunched, off-centre, 
casually draped—while the other 
 
is folded, Montessori-like, in thirds 
and hung so that the cross hems 
meet and cast a prudent shadow.
The yin and yang of domestic life
fashioned so convincingly
it makes you want to grab one, 
flinging it behind your back and pulling 
first one way and then the other, 
as if to smooth the pebbled skin raised
by stepping from the shower. My husband tosses 
 
his in the general direction of the towel bar, 
from which it looks as if it’s trying 
to escape. But in this work 
I also see the man I didn’t marry,
whose shirts and trousers were arrayed 
with military care and grace, whose hair 
lay tame in graven waves, and whose features 
I might once have called—before I’d seen 
the skill involved in freeing what is human 
from Carrera marble—chiseled.
 
Sue Ellen Thompson
 
Sue Ellen Thompson’s most recent book, Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems appeared in 2022 from Grayson Books. She is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1st ed.). She lives on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay and teaches at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD. In 2010, she received the prestigious Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association, which is given to a poet once every four years for his/her body of work.

 Blossoms

deep gray rumblings churn 

under torquing 
onionskin
and gentle shards 
of silk 

while blooms 
of linen

tumbling, 
carry twisted 

pink light
 

In the gallery, the plaques say
the collector called 
these exhalations
Blossoms

An article says
the artist (did he go by Brad?)
sought perfection 

which begs all questions
about form and beauty 
and exquisite edges
of terror and light

and brushstrokes
viewed from safe houses
oceans away

or words and sounds
read from safe house
decades beyond


If squares are blossoms

They are perfect petals

blasted from cratered
gardens;

they are blooms

of woven bed linen

mutilated in morning light


strewn mid-air
where words and sound
twist and choke

bandages unraveled by sound

silken handkerchiefs torn

pages ripped 

from countless holy books


Unreachable

by hands in dark earth,
mourned not mourning,
blast-crumpled or
sculpted into stillness,
arrested in desert rubble

From his safe house
the collector
called these squares
Blossoms


If they are blossoms

they are perfect petals

blasted from cratered gardens 

shredded linen blooms 

unraveling shards of silk

silent sinking paper


fading into pink and twisted light

Mary Kay Delaney
 
After living half her life in North Carolina, Mary Kay Delaney, educator and poet, moved to Denver, CO where she lives now. She has served as a Professor of Education at Meredith College and a Visiting Clinical Professor at the University of Denver. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Foundations of Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the co-editor of Professing Education and a 2021 graduate of the Poetry Collective, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Denver, CO.

Lorette is teaching two four-week courses, with Hooked on Ekphrasis beginning next week, and Writing Prose Poetry starting in November. Hope to see you at both of them!

Hooked on Ekphrasis: Creative Writing From Visual Art

Get more information here:
https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_Ekphrasis.html

Ekphrastic writing is the practice of creative writing from visual art. People who love ekphrasis describe being hooked once they start, because it is a wonderful way to expand our imagination, grow our writing, and learn more about visual art. In this class, we will look at the 3000-year history of ekphrasis, and explore fun ways to create our own. We will read inspiring examples, find ideas through brainstorming and writing exercises, and talk about how and where to submit our ekphrastic poetry and stories.
​
Format:
4 weeks for 120 minutes in person via Zoom each week: Wednesdays, 6 pm - 8 pm EST. Dates: October 9, 16, 23, and 30. The class will include time for sharing in class and peer comments. The instructor will also offer feedback on two drafts of ekphrastic writing via email.

Writing Prose Poetry

https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_ProsePoetry.html
​
Prose poetry is the black sheep of the poetry world, with many saying it is an oxymoron or that it doesn’t exist at all. This is no surprise, as its rise was an act of rebellion against the restrictions of formal poetry. Many writers find it liberating to create. Others are surprised at how writing poetry in the prose form improves their writing in general. In this class, we will read, write, submit, and explore prose poetry, briefly looking at its history, its greats, resources, and starting or continuing our own writing practice.

Format:
4 weeks for 120 minutes in person via Zoom each week: Mondays, 6 pm - 8 pm EST. Dates: November 4, 11, 18, and 25. The class will include time for sharing in class and peer comments. The instructor will also offer feedback on two drafts of prose poetry via email.

​Bride 
 
I have never been made of much:
sloping curves, borrowed fabric to hold them
long slick silken hair, fine as millet grass 
a hollowed throat.
 
By these green leaves:
a marriage is fragile, like a broach on a collar 
like threads of bobbin lace 
like the blue-gray in limbo of black and white 
 
No one is coming to get me.
Would they like it if I walked in 
cock-headed and sneering, taking large steps 
with shoes mismatched and legs bowed?
 
If I did it all goat-like and mad, screeching 
at the donkeys and the guests 
far bigger than the pastures and bigger than I ought to be
My hat a window, my gloves grieving

I am waiting at the door to make a tiptoed debut 
my dreams are flimsy birds that know nothing, 
children sleeping in my silent nest
He waits below with open arms and gleaming teeth

​Molly O’Toole 
 
Molly O’Toole (she/her) is a young writer and recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame. She is originally from Arlington, Massachusetts, but currently living in Sacramento, CA, with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Her favourite body of water at the moment is the Passagassawakeag River in Waldo County, Maine.

Woman Viewing Las Meninas, 2019

As a person of privilege,
I paid the Prado
for a private hour with Velásquez 
and Las Meninas,
time enough to look 
into the painter’s trick mirror,
join the king and queen,
and take in the scene

of the Infanta with her maids of honour,
mid-breath in sunlight,
encased in silver lace and panniers 
hiding knifepoint slippers,
the subtle armor of women 
holding off the world of politicking men.

Women look out 
from the painting at me, 
another woman costly dressed
today in neoprene surcoat,
iron gray bandolier bag, and designer
running shoes. 
They see I’m still in the frame 
of a world they know well,
one that’s not so much changed 
from the Spanish court of 1656.

Leta Bushyhead
 
Leta Bushyhead wants to be like Sappho whose words survived to let those of the future know our hearts beat the same. 

​Stillborn 1907
 
I met you only once:
in September ’42
at Buffalo’s Genesee Hotel,
where rooms were a dollar.
A dime could buy coffee
in the diner downstairs.
Thirty-five summers brought you there,
through Depression, divorce,
       nine months of war.
 
Your bleached rumpled hair rippled
in the 30-mile wind.
Your right arm, flimsy paperweight,
fought to restrain your blue cotton dress
from slapping your face,
your mask of determined          terror.
Your legs, unstable enablers, shuddered
outside the window of your eighth-floor room.
Your left hand fluttered –
       a quiver
of your despondent intentions.
 
No words could
dissuade the step.
That fall, you fell your eighty feet:
No explanation
       for the erasure of your existence.
 
There’s a photographer in Albany
who still can’t believe he shot that frame,
ten feet above your death.
 
Gary P English
 
Gary P English (they/them/their) lives in Baton Rouge, LA, where they and their partner share a home with a dachshund and two cats. Besides writing, they paint and play the guitar. Their poems have been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Home Planet News, and Stonecoast Review.

​Ecce Homo

Look—you cannot look
away from what you’ve been told
is a man. This piece of work,
 
this lost Caravaggio, sold
into oblivion, now hangs on view
in state, alone, in Spain. The room is cold.
 
This beautiful linkage—Gentile, Gentile, Jew,
bound in the embrace that all men make
before they do what they’ve been told to do--
 
will break when the Roman, who still takes
his stairs in twos, hesitates to drape 
the royal shroud across Christ’s back to make
 
the joke stick, or stop the wounds, agape,
from shining. Be gentle. He is a man, yes, 
but young, and unaccustomed to the shape
 
of these proceedings.

​The Denial
 
Simon, Simon, Satan
demanded to have you
that he might sift you
like wheat
 
I.
The servant girl sees 
as he sits in the light, not for light, 
but for heat, and she says,
When he speaks, he gives himself 
away--
 
II.
The falling saint shifts his gaze 
to the fire beyond the frame.
By this light-dark they caught him,
the soldier and the servant,
and he turned his hands inward, the faint
smell of scales still on them,
as if to do the old work,
the terrible work,
of hauling in a net.
 
III.
The rooster we do not see
accuses the darkness of a dawn
we cannot see
and so, anonymous, we
sit and wait outside
and shun sleep
to see the end,
but mostly to keep warm.

IV.
And it was night, still, when He 
turned and looked at me when I 
was not far off--
about a stone’s throw away, and I 
don’t know if it was the knowing 
or the morning in His eye, 
why I, too, went out, 
and wordless, wept.
 
V.
After the murder,
fleeing for his life to Rome,
Caravaggio painted a man
called Simon called Peter
pointing to himself
smothered in shadows to belie
the new tremor in his eye and in his hand.
 
VI.
Behold, the man.
The weakness is in the hands.
 
VII.
The fallen saint hangs 
in a corner of the Met—sold
from hand to hand,
the caption says,
to pay a debt.
 

Of All Things Seen
 
Light costs two euro.
In the corner, Caravaggio
does the thing he does with light
on the stripped form 
of Peter, a favourite, beginning 
to die. Someone pays, as someone
always does in front of pretty things.
I, being Protestant, protest
by looking away, but not for long--
I have long been transfixed 
by slaughter, or rather, unable 
as I am to look anything I consume
in the eye, by the image of slaughter, 
by its slanting. This is the preferred angle 
of angels, saying, singing, Do not be 
afraid. Money. The light, again. 
It does not occur to me to like it. 
I follow the saint’s line 
of sight, past the new astonishment 
of the stake in his hand, his head inclined
in the beatific tradition of the beaten
toward the one with the hand and hammer, 
raised like your hand
in the final letter where you declined
to write my name, the same
as raising a palm to stroke a face
or strike it.

​**

And Unseen
 
This is not a poem
about crucifixion--
the nails are already in--
but rather, the inveterate art
of doing what must be done. 
Consider the labourer propping up the cross.
One needs help to die
to self. He will go home, the faceless man
on whose back this device depends, and, 
as an afterthought, turn the neck
of the small chicken in the yard, 
set it upside down, and wait. 
 
Lauren Delapenha
 
Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, and a Pushcart nomination. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut.

Hello, TER friends. I imagine most of you agree with me, that our two moderate seasons are your favorites. Maybe not if you’re into winter or summer sports or perhaps you prefer summer because you aren’t in school. 
 
I love autumn for its memories and nostalgia, for the changing of the leaves and the feeling of gratitude that continues to build toward Thanksgiving. Yet it can also make me melancholy. We poets are like that. I hope you drop by TER’s website from time to time to look back at the nine years of expanding treasures. Here are a few poems I especially admire that touch readers with sadness, joy, nostalgia, or a blend. This first poem breaks my heart with its mix of tenderness, guilt, and loss. I’ll try to blend in some more celebratory choices, too. 

Alarie Tennille
 
**

The Deer, by Lynn Pattison

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-deer-by-lynn-pattison

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These next two selections throw in some extra tips on how to write to art.

How to Remember, by Todd Campbell

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/how-to-remember-by-todd-campbell

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Autumn Grasses in Moonlight, by John Tessitore

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/autumn-grasses-in-moonlight-by-john-tessitore

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I loved seeing that George Franklin practices law. It’s an attorney’s gift to piece together what has not been said, to imagine what might change our verdict.

What Brueghel Might Have Painted But Did Not, by George Franklin

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/what-brueghel-might-have-painted-but-did-not-by-george-franklin

**

October blue skies are definitely a wonder. But isn’t it a surprise when the simplest thing, like this colour swatch by Yves Klein, somehow holds us enthralled, just as the painter was?

“He painted blue and it didn’t mean anything which felt like a relief after so much caring and that’s / what he probably liked best about it.”

Of course, Meg Pokrass gets a lot of the credit by adding her own creativity. Remember that art is give and take. The writer could possibly be way off track from what the artist thought he was saying, but the meaning lives with each of us once the art stepped into the world.

The Painter Who Painted Blue, by Meg Pokrass

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-painter-who-painted-blue-by-meg-pokrass

While Pokrass demonstrates that the simplest art can toss our thoughts into the wind, Barbara Lydecker Crane’s poem makes me wonder how many bored models are writing their own secret monologues, trying to tell us things the artist never had in mind, or did he? Are there two authors to this story? Perhaps we ekphrastic writers can imagine companion poems, told separately by the artist and model. 

​**

My throwback to autumn is subtle in most cases. We don’t see many landscapes to tell us the season, but this model is clearly an autumn in the fashion world, and her monologue carries the melancholy of winter coming on.

On My Terms, by Barbara Lydecker Crane

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/on-my-terms-by-barbara-lydecker-crane

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My Seventh Wonder of this Thursday Throwback celebrates the sure voice of the author as artist, certain that a gray pencil portrait is warm, golden, and carries the smell of apples which are nowhere to be seen.

Ethel Bartlett Sits for the Artist Laura Knight, by Neil Douglas

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ethel-bartlett-sits-for-the-artist-laura-knight-by-neil-douglas