The Artist
She jumped out the patrol car’s backseat, indifferent to being let go with just a warning and angry that they kept the spray-paint cans when they picked her up on the other side of town. They’ll probably use them to paint their kid’s bikes or wagons, or some stupid table in their garage. The air smelled like rain, so she hurried to the closest bus stop and rode until reaching an area where it looked like the cops would have more serious crimes than graffiti to worry about. She laughed when she jumped off, stepping down almost straight into a hardware store. The itch surfaced as soon as she reached the aisle that mattered. Her fingers trailed along the cans, tapping the caps when she came to a favourite colour. She couldn’t help it. It’s not like there were regular art supplies at the foster home she’d been dumped in this month. Or any of the other foster homes in any of the other months for that matter. Mr. and Mrs. Foster were just as interchangeable to her as she was to them. “Can I help you miss?” an elderly, aproned employee asked. The way his shaggy white eyebrows arched made her feel guilty. Not like she was going to try and lift something – more like, why wasn’t she at school this time of the morning? She was almost eighteen, but not quite; the last thing she needed was this old geezer calling the boys in blue. “No thanks. I was just looking for a clear coat,” she said with a toss of her hair that made her look like every other idiot teenager. “It’s for an art project I’m finishing today at school.” He walked away and picked up a broom that leaned against the wall. She watched him sweep for a moment then walked down the next aisle. Rifling through her pockets, she came up with a dollar in quarters and three nickels. Not enough for even one can. She wasn’t a thief, no way. She walked toward the entrance. When she reached the part of the floor that tripped the automatic sliding door, a large yellow cardboard sign advertised stacks of blue electrical tape - two for a dollar. She picked one up and rolled it around in her hand, then picked up another and made her way to the cash register. The man stopped sweeping and came over to check her out. She smiled at him sweetly and like she often did with strangers, wondered if he could be her grandfather. She wandered a few blocks in one direction, then another, looking for an inconspicuous target. The main avenue ran north and south, so she turned right at a light and headed east. A few antique stores and galleries dotted the street, but you could see auto repair and construction supply businesses encroaching into what probably had been an arts district not too long ago. The abandoned building cried out to be something more, with its rounded corners and glass block windows. She looked around to make sure no one from the neighbouring businesses had a reason to come her way. Confident, she walked around the entire back wall and placed her palms against different spots as if she were feeling for a heartbeat. She worked randomly, furiously ripping the blue tape into short and long pieces. The work evolved minute by minute. She reached up and then quickly crouched to the ground, leaving one thought unfinished and moving to the other end to start something completely unrelated. Her fingers hurt from rubbing the strips down into their shapes hard enough to make them stick. Shadows began to cast over the building from the low hanging clouds, which suddenly appeared. Her stomach growled. She stood up and stepped back, wiping away a tear and wishing she still had her cell phone so she could take a picture. With no money left, a bus ride back was out of the question. She started walking back toward the main road to thumb a ride. The Fosters would be angry when they got another message from the high school that she hadn’t been in classes. Five months. She’d be eighteen in five months. Out of the system and free to go wherever she wanted. She’d heard graffiti was considered an art form in New York City - maybe she’d go there and teach them what you could do with blue electrical tape. Vicki Roberts Vicki Roberts is a writer and graphic artist who lives on Florida's east coast. Her first novel, Oldsters, was published in 2017. In between writing short stories, which have been published in various magazines and anthologies, she is at work on her next book, The Year of Gwendolyn Presley Flowers. Her life selfishly revolves around literature, music and art. Catch up with Vicki at https://iamvickiroberts.com
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Pieta Rondanini
Her grief is mild, contained. It is a practiced anguish. She folds herself around him as he collapses—culmination of these thirty-three years anticipating this. Just this: how the world cannot receive the gift of perfect love. How we don’t trust it, don’t believe in it. Perfection is a terrifying suggestion, even as presented by this lamb, and hers was as great a sacrifice—greater: what she must have agreed to, embryonic promise still swelling in her belly--yes, she says, and please. Oh. These people, these eyes. Sightless. He is blameless, beautiful: pure gift of light. More than flames, more than real. More than he—we. She doesn’t weep or tear at her hair. Her jaw is set, but she will not gnash her teeth tonight—some kind of betrayal in indulging her grief like that. They both emerge from the stone—or are they being swallowed by it? Michelangelo rests too peacefully, for too long now, for us to ever know. My son, my love, she croons, softly, softly, and her love becomes the whisper that moves along his pale temple and spills down over our heads: compassion of the feminine divine. Kim Cope Tait Kim Cope Tait’s work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. Her chapbook of poems called ‘Element’ was published in 2005 with Leaping Dog Press. Her full-length book, ‘Shadow Tongue,’ is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press. Llama, 1957 (a haibun)
I’ve travelled 60 years back to this black and white day on West 44th St., not to see Judy Holliday in “Bells Are Ringing” at the Shubert, or Roz Russell in Auntie Mame just down the street, but to see you, you silly thing, poking your long neck out a taxi’s rear window as if you are the main attraction, your long ears stiffly up like antennae, listening, no doubt, for applause, or, maybe, news from the future, the latter of which I have: fins on cars (like that Plymouth behind you) went the way of girdles and telephone switchboards. However, perhaps you are prescient in at least some things traffic as there is no human in your taxi and we are working on that very concept right now. Mame, I’m sure, would approve, but probably not Holliday’s answering service lady, who is, perhaps, too fond of girdles and telephone switchboards. And, you silly thing, I suppose I must grudgingly concede that on this one particular black and white day in ’57 you are, after all, the headliner, the prima donna, the superstar, applause, applause. Just one favor though, if you don’t mind, sweetheart: Stop staring with those black onyx eyes as if I’m the oddity here Robert L. Dean, Jr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, River City Poetry, Heartland!, and the Wichita Broadsides Project. In April 2017 he organized a program of poetry and improvised music at Fisch Haus in Wichita. His haibun placed first at Poetry Rendezvous 2017. He was a finalist in the 2014 Dallas Poets Community chapbook contest. His haiku placed second in the 2016 Kansas Authors Club competition. He has been a professional musician, and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas. Libyan Sibyl
I did not expect to see you in the flesh of an olive tree, thigh-deep in dust and gravel, pelvic torque powerful enough to draw dampness from the dark heart of the hillside. Hips and shoulders twist in ecstatic offering, fingertips lifting shallow bowls of long-leached water to the sun in exchange for a wreath, laden with oil-ripe clusters: a glaucous icon of virility. I reach into your throat, tapping. Weathered knots give wooden notes: a seer does not sing without a question. Peter Tolly Peter Tolly has studied and practiced creative writing at Northwestern University--where his poetry earned the Faricy Award in first place and appeared in the campus literary magazine Prompt--and more recently at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Paros, Greece. He is currently based in Wisconsin. La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses Célibataires, Meme
Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels. Mechanics of lust drawn like blueprints of the impossible design, transparent but impassible. Nine flat malic molds, or Eros Matrix (Duchamp played tricks like a dominatrix), The bachelor apparatus: a pain of glass that sits below the bride’s domain, all cut off from the tarot’s hangman bride, the open space where meaning would abide. Freestanding, over nine feet tall, you move, it’s still, the “runners sliding in a grove.” It won’t tell why, or what will come to pass. So why should I write clearly of this glass? The Large Glass If every line’s a fragment of a thought that links up to the next, all leading to completion, it does not reflect our age. But we should not reflect, like mirrors wrought and polished, just to disappear. Sing, you, of objects in themselves, or turn the page: A wave goodbye. A great white wave capsized this text, and settled down. Let’s see a swan float now, where that whale had been, metaphor or not, but questioning what we surmised was next, like colors in the ripples, drawn in feeble memory. Stood on the floor, the glass is cracked, the dust has settled there. The bride is gone. The frame is everywhere. Eric Fretz Eric Fretz has been a student of contemporary visual arts since they were modern, and not contemporary, and a long time reader of modern poetry. He is a published author of art criticism and history, but has only recently been persuaded to share his ekphrastic writing exercises. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Beacon, New York, and between art and politics. Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death, and Devil
The whole night was a Dürer etching. I wore my rabbit fur coat. On Knight, Death, and Devil, Borges wrote: There are two ways to open: one of them is nasty, one of them is short. The night was a triptych. Even I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been painted onto the black and green sky, onto my blue melancholy baby body. I couldn’t believe night was etched with a cold chisel on copper. The night was Teutonic, oblique, and practical: seek grace, Albrecht urged, you may die at any moment. Jennifer Martelli Jennifer Martelli’s debut poetry collection, The Uncanny Valley, was published in 2016 by Big Table Publishing Company. She is also the author of After Bird from Grey Book Press. Her work has appeared in Thrush, [Pank], Glass Poetry Journal, Cleaver, The Heavy Feather Review, Italian Americana, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Jennifer Martelli has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is a book reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly and Ovunque Siamo, as well as the co-curator for The Mom Egg VOX Folio. The Birthday of the Infanta 1 As a girl, I went an entire day once without eating to walk with the Duke in the Queen’s perfect, geometric rose garden, my waist no larger than the clasp of his hands. When we walked in the garden, the Duke kissed me, a brush of his whiskers near my face drawing me into his world of tobacco and male scent. This man who would give me fifteen children and become my comrade for decades, was older than my oldest brother Diego, but I did not mind. He was polite, and I knew marriage to be my duty; besides, I thought in my child’s mind, he will die and then I will have my children to play with and a palace to dance in, where I will strew rose petals of every colour in the rainbow. It is alive in me today, this time so long ago in the past. Is it because I am dying? I watch my breath travel in and out of my ancient lungs and know that soon all this will end. The wise men say that when we die, we return to the place of our birth, though the priest told me I will travel to heaven or hell, according to the life I have led. And what of that life, which will be my fate? As a child, I thought nothing of death, only the future that lay before me like some great green meadow, the sun on my young skin, with no thought of what comes after. You may marry a man or the Lord Jesus, my dears, the Holy Mother told us. She was a good woman, kind in her black robes and paper-white skin. At night when the convent was silent and only lit by the moon, a girl named Maria showed me her playing cards and laid them around us in a circle. She giggled so in the moonlight, yellow curls on her cheeks. My God, how beautiful she was! An angel does not describe her fairness. We each chose a different card, mine snarled with a snake and a shining star, hers with the Lord Jesus. So that was our destiny—I would take the path of the world and the serpent, she of God. We brought our lips together to seal our fortunes and swore to be friends forever. I held her face in my hands and looked deeply into her eyes. “You are my sister,” I said. “I will love you as no other. I swear to this.” We pricked our fingers and tasted each other’s blood, though by the time I walked with the Duke in the garden, I had forgotten her. For a girl of my station, the preparation for marriage took months. I prayed often as the nuns instructed me in my duties—to my children, my husband, God. After my walk with the Duke in the Queen’s garden, there were more prayers and recitations. I was so famished that day, forced to wait until the sun sank below the mountains and my servant unwrapped my engagement dress from my body. How good to be unsealed from that coffin of lace and feel a breeze against my naked skin. I took a sip of chocolate, my first food of the day, one chicken wing, a basket of cherries. My mother said I was too fat and needed always to allow the Duke to encircle my waist with his hands. Other girls were more slender, their breasts small. Once when we played at the ocean, I saw Maria’s breasts silhouetted against the sky, and her beauty left me breathless. I could have been taken for a boy, were it not for my head of brown curls and small lips. Still, in the garden, the Duke said I was a bird, a starling or a humming bird. “I am marrying air,” he said. For the hundredth time that day, I wondered if I would be frightened when he came to me, or if, like a sea captain, I would ride the waves of my destiny into very old age, when Maria and I would meet again, never breaking our promise of love. I saw my future husband one last time before our vows, on the day of the Infanta’s birthday, when gifts from all the royal courts of Europe were opened and my brother’s painting of the Infanta unveiled. I wore the same dress that day, black lace cinching me tightly at the waist, ruby jewels around my neck, and when the Duke gazed at me, I felt excitement for this new world I would inhabit, led by the serpent and the flesh. But now, when I remember that day, I think mostly of my brother’s painting of the Infanta: the tiny child in her white satin dress standing out hard and straight from her body, dogs and dwarfs playing at her feet; the King and Queen at the door, anxiously peering inside. Diego’s canvas was huge, rising all the way to the ceiling, and he had put all of them in it, including himself. “Why not?” he told me. “They were here each day when I painted the picture—the musicians, the dwarfs, the King and Queen, Las Meninas, the ladies-in-waiting. It was a carnival. Why should art end simply because of a picture frame?” 2 “Quieres que tu chocolate, ahora senora?” A girl stands before me with a pitcher of steaming chocolate and I nod. I have come to the palace one last time, to sit in my place before my brother’s painting and ponder its meaning. So much has changed since he painted it. Philip is dead, I am in my eighth decade, and Spain is no longer the centre of the universe. Once Philip’s empire stretched three billion hectares to every corner of the earth, but no longer. The English have supplanted us, though the fame of my brother’s painting only grows. Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez, knighted to the court of Spain for his service to the King. Painters as far away as Italia and Inglaterre come to view it, to study his greatness and learn from his work. Diego was ambitious. To qualify him for knighthood, a tribunal of the Inquisition had first to investigate our lineage, to show no Moorish or Jewish taint. The ordeal took seven years—the auto-da-fé waiting—that yearly spectacle where heretics are burned alive to cleanse the faith. Today people gather in greater and greater multitudes to witness the pitiable sinners. It is Spain’s holiday, to which knights and representatives of neighbouring cities are invited, the windows of the houses closest to the burning reserved for the most wealthy. The autos last from seven in the morning till deep into the night. I went only once, where I saw two sodomite lovers burned alive. Those gallant souls could not touch, but they looked into each other’s eyes and remembered the time they had shared, knowing that love like that is always worth death. Later the Tribunal flayed a child alive for refusing to bear witness against its parent. Our family was proven spotless, thank God. Philip was glad. He told my brother that he once saw a Medici cardinal torture a mouse on a tiny rack for stealing cheese, and after that he wanted none of it. He would be the Planet King: his dominion stretched to every corner of the earth, and besides, he was the fourth Philip just as the sun was the fourth heavenly body to encircle the earth. He surrounded himself with artists and dwarfs, filled his castle with dancing bears and giants imported from Russia. Every spring theatricals were held, and my brother was given a private residence in his court. Philip admitted all to celebrate the birth of the Infanta Margaret Teresa, from scrubwomen to lepers, and now she was five. On the day of her birthday and of the painting’s unveiling, all were in attendance: the dwarfs, the lepers, the ladies-in-waiting, even a family of gypsies that lived outside the castle and had been invited to read the Infanta’s birthday fortune. The woman predicted only rosy children and gold-tinted clouds for the child. How could she do otherwise? A servant pulled a cord and a curtain slid to reveal the canvas. Philip stood before it for several seconds, then asked Diego for a small brush dipped in red so that he might make a final flourish, painting his family’s coat of arms on the chest of Diego’s self-portrait, knighting him in the painting as he would soon do in real life. Slowly a smile spread on Diego’s face, and he laughed. He grabbed Doña Isabel, one of the Meninas, the ladies-in-waiting, bent her backwards, and kissed her. It was clear they knew each other well. For the remainder of the afternoon, she sat on his lap as he and Philip drank wine and ate from a celebration table heavy with all manner of food and libation. Four years later, my brother died of a fever. He accomplished so much in his lifetime: over one hundred canvasses of royalty and humanity and this masterpiece of the King’s child that stares at me each day daring me to decipher its meaning: why does Diego show us this world inside his canvas that is like the real world and at the same time not? It is a hall of mirrors. He has put himself in the centre of it, brush in hand, peering at me from behind the back of a huge canvas as his subjects do as well: the Infanta, the Dwarf, Las Meninas, the dogs. A nun and others cluster about. There is no separation between art and life, Diego once told me. Is that its meaning? Behind all of them, reflected in the glass that Diego put at the rear of this invented world, are the Infanta’s mother and father, King Philip IV and Queen Isabella of Spain. How Philip loved his daughter. Though the gypsy gave her endless decades, she only lived to twenty-one, the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, before dying from the birth of her sixth child. Her husband who adored her was beside himself with grief. And I have outlived them all. 3 I will leave this body soon, this shelter that cloaks my soul. At night I do not sleep. The girl has moved my bed next to the window, so that I can gaze at the moonrise and watch the transit of the stars. A year after my marriage, I saw the young novices walk toward their vows, their pale bodies dressed in white, faces lifted to God. The girls chanted as they walked, looking into their future, toward all I would never know. I was not jealous, for was not my path equal to Maria’s, and does not all life lead to God? But now I am not so sure, and I wonder if Maria’s life was not the luckier, spent in her devotion. The Duke was a respectful husband and we enjoyed each other. I will speak of it frankly. The seas we rode together were warm. He gave me so many children that on my celebration day, I am surrounded by generations—the smell of leather boots and young boys’ tousled hair; the frothy petticoats of girls. But what is that next to the mystery of the universe? There is a natural philosopher in Italia, I have heard, who has looked at the heavens through a special device that tells him the earth is not the centre of all there is, that instead we are no better than any object in the sky whirling in the blackness, and if that is so, only God can explain our meaning. The Tribunal does not burn him, but they have imprisoned him and destroyed his work, and still he will not recant. Diego told me once that he painted the picture as he did, because his purpose was to capture the truth of the girl in the studio, the dogs, the dwarves, Las Meninas, rather than concoct a deception. What we see is sacred, he said, because it is true and where truth is, God is. Truth, he said, is a reflection of the divine. Judith Dancoff Judith Dancoff’s fiction and essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Tiferet Journal, Alaska Quarterly, Other Voices, and Southern Humanities Review. Her stories in Tiferet and SHR were both awarded best story of the year, and she has received residencies from Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and an upcoming residency at the Djerrasi Resident Artists Program, June 2018. She holds an MFA in writing from Warren Wilson College, and an MFA in filmmaking from UCLA. Before the Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi
Lucrezia, grand on the drawing-room wall, reflecting your green transparent eyes I braid up bead-roped hair, compose my brows into swans. We smooth our pride’s four-hundred-year-old lace. No painter can part these small tight lips. Crimson shoulders bunched in satin sleeves, we stiffen from the darkness’ warmth and let long fingers barely touch the dove-tailed arms of polished wood, the lustrous, heavy folds. A little red book in our lap deflects light from the wedding band’s black stone. Tiny gold letters circle our neck: Amore—a word we no longer know. This massive filigreed frame transfixes our silence like pearls. We look through illusion, permit time’s brush its stroke —our long fine nails rigid and sharp. Susan Ioannou This poem was previously published in Susan Ioannou's collection, Clarity Between Clouds, Goose Lane Editions, 1991. Canadian writer Susan Ioannou has published stories, literary essays, novels for young people, and several poetry collections. Her books of poems include Clarity Between Clouds(Goose Lane Editions), Where the Light Waists (Ekstasis Editions), Looking Through Stone: Poems about the Earth (Your Scrivener Press), Coming Home: An Old Love Story (Leaf Press), and Looking for Light (Hidden Brook Press). Her full Literary CV is online: www3.sympatico.ca/susanio/sioancv.html Van Gogh’s Les Racines Seen in Summer
Beside a window out to a world covered in leaves, these roots express winter, the winter we will soon have this far south. Not the northern photographs of marble snowbanks flecked with sun, stiff jade pines, and pearly-pink skies decorated with empty, lacy trees. But this winter in black and white, brown and gray, of pencil, ink, and black chalk. In August, we are headed to the paper-coloured river tinged with stray chalk from trunks and roots. The empty tree stands stark on the bank. It commands attention while turpentine pervades the air. Ghosts of other trees curl up like smoke. Sunlight is a thin, brown wash, not cold but warm. Colour returns with spring, flecks of yellow and green, scents of mud and water, carrying us back to August when these roots are exposed. Marianne Szlyk Marianne Szlyk edits The Song Is... a blog-zine for poetry and prose inspired by music (especially jazz). Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, is available on Amazon. Her poems have appeared in of/with, bird's thumb, Cactifur, Solidago, Red Bird Chapbook's Weekly Read, and Resurrection of a Sunflower, an anthology of work responding to Vincent Van Gogh's art. Dreamer: Girl and House Cat
Girl and house cat walk side by side he as tall as she among lily-flowered tulips the colour of words like snap sizzle slash and pointed in all directions like ninja stars their centres open to twilight. Around heads of girl and cat bats tumble in air pierce remaining light with wing bones and weave unseen skeins on sky. Pines in the distance serve as green-black petrified flames soon to be consumed by the finality of night. Girl and house cat converse in this sea of tulip bat pine silently silently so as not to wake the dreamer. Taunja Thomson Taunja Thomson’s poetry has most recently appeared in Claudius Speaks and Pink Panther Magazine. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: “Seahorse and Moon” in 2005, “I Walked Out in January” in 2016, and “Strum and Lull” in 2018. She has co-authored a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry entitled Frame and Mount the Sky that was published in 2017, and her chapbook Strum and Lull placed as a semi-finalist in Golden Walkman’s chapbook competition (2017). She has a writer’s page athttps://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter. |
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