Buddhist Votive Stele, Art Institute of Chicago
In the Asian gallery, a slab, monument to repetition, solidly meditative: immortal souls seated on lotuses. My friend remarks on the tedium--do you suppose the guy carving this went home each night and reported his progress to his wife? The sculptor, out of sorts and aching, complains while she steams the rice, “Today I managed only seven Bodhisattvas. Two hundred seventy-two to go—what a grind!” We calculate: eleven souls down by twenty across times two, minus one row on one side plus two narrow sides eight down, three across…though the stele’s broken, missing a few of the blessed, we figure the figures although we know that an accounting (or counting) is not the purpose. Nor is art the purpose; repetition a form of discipline, contemplation via uniformity, surprise residing through near-indiscernible differences. The sculptor’s fist warm and human, the chisel handheld, handmade. Maybe the purpose was reverence, or reminder, maybe the stonecutter had no wife or was, grieving, a widower repeating sutras to empty his mind of sorrow while chipping away one bodhisattva after another. 300 niches harbour 468 reminders of one immediate present. The joke’s on us: Bare trees, marble stairs-- in this temple to art 500 Buddhas laugh… Ann E. Michael Ann E. Michael grew up loving art and art museums but, after many years of art school, realized she lacked the temperament and ability to be an artist. She also loved literature and writing, however, and is now writing coordinator at DeSales University and author of several chapbooks and the collection Water-Rites.
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Picassoesque And so you wake up from a siesta in the blue years of that great painter. You see blue statues, a blue guitar, and blue jazz pouring from a decanter. A blue nude swims in the bedroom shallows. Did you remember or create her? Beyond the unmade sheets and pillows the birds in the blue palms make a stir like scats of jazz. They blow you to bliss; and you can call this ‘happy hour’. Hello-goodbye curaçao kiss. She turns her back as she turns sour. The blue skyline is a peeping tom. She up and leaves you, elegantly as night steps in where the blues come from between the end of sky and sea. Chris Mooney-Singh This poem previously appeared in the Singaporean print anthology, Anima Methodi, Squircle Line Press, November 2018. Chris Mooney-Singh: "Australian-born, I live and teach poetry in the M.A. programme at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore. My last collections included The Bearded Chameleon (Redwheelbarrow Books, Singapore / Black Pepper Books (Australia) and The Laughing Buddha Cab Company (Red Wheelbarrow Books, Singapore) supported by the National Arts Council. In 2015 I completed a Phd in Creative Writing at Monash University, Melbourne and my verse novel, Foreign Madam and the White Yogi, was commended in the unpublished fiction manuscript category of The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, 2015. My website can be found athttp://chrismooneysingh.com Morning Sun
Enters a room no body can warm. Bleached sky, blank walls, a face where morning spreads a story of distance, thin as a chemise, light as light is strong. The space swells with a solitude that won't let her open. Free of distraction, she absorbs shadows. Early hours offer only pastels, mute shades that refuse brightness, a palette muffled by unspoken limits. Geometries of window and wall make the bed another interior block where she is static, absent expression of what the day wants. Between thought and motion, she feels less important than the rays that etch her world, its intricate vacancy, the frieze of her own ineffable mask. Steve Abbott Steve Abbott is a former alternative press editor/writer, criminal defendant, delivery truck driver, courtroom bailiff, private investigator, information director for a social service agency, and college professor. He is founder and remains a co-host of The Poetry Forum, a weekly reading series now in its 34th year in Columbus, Ohio. He has edited two anthologies and published five chapbooks and a live CD. His full-length collection A Green Line Between Green Fields (Kattywompus Press) was released in 2018. He has never danced the macarena. The Lopsided Ticking of Dali’s Clocks
wake me from a deep sleep that hoards no memory. I stare into the dark, listening to the uptick of a second hand shoveling seconds into a battered tin cup, and wonder if these lost hours log my wandering in a desert that’s cold and still and strangely sealed off from the world of possibilities. There are no footprints here; yet I can see through my milky eyelids like a freshwater eel that lives long enough to return to the sea of its making. I wait patiently rocking in the wind’s undertow where shadows speed past me with waves, tumbling to tap me hard then soft—waking me up, once again. M.J. Iuppa M.J. Iuppa ‘s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017). For the past 30 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew. After Viewing Art with Four Strangers
After I left you, I walked towards the avenue. It was the wrong avenue, and I walked back and I passed you. You didn’t notice. I walked north on Eleventh and turned on Twenty-Fifth street to find the garage where I’d left my Honda Civic. The attendant was Hispanic. I was glad for the comfort. Ticket, payment, and car in my native Spanish after walking in uneven rain to galleries that the poet had picked out for us in Chelsea, after meeting you, four strangers. Though there was history in your faces. At the first gallery I felt the loaded brushstrokes on boxes thick on my skin. Drawings of waves and tablets and sky pleaded: Truth. Moby Dick spread a green blanket at our feet. I stared at a “Black, Spanish-American family,” a mother and well-cared for children. Blue dress, a fragment of lace, the braids on the girls, lipstick on the woman. Portrait of motherhood and dignity. To blue. To ruffle. To braid. To red. To black. To love. We were at a world-size party. So many voices. So it came as a relief six hours later to arrive at my car, punch in the ignition, already out of the habit of turning a phantom key. I made it home on autopilot, and when I arrived I found the door unlocked. I shook my weary umbrella. I went to the kitchen where I found an oatmeal scone bought days ago. I cut it in half. I cut a slice of sheep’s milk cheese with rosemary ground into the rind. I ate standing at the sink. Marlena Maduro Baraf Marlena Maduro Baraf has a knack for raising orchids. She immigrated to the United States from her native Panama and her writing is coloured by this dual identity. She has been interviewing Latinos from all walks of life for a series titled, Soy/Somos, I am/We are. Her work has been published in Sweet, Lilith, Lumina, Read 650, and Latino Voices at HuffPost. Her memoir, At the Narrow Waist of the World, is forthcoming in the fall of 2019 Capella Sistina
Adam with his arm outstretched toward God and his congregation of angels. The striations in their muscles proclaim their yearning to touch; but Adam’s lax wrist fell short of God’s hand-- man’s lack of faith keeps him apart from God. Michelangelo was twenty-five when he painted Vatican City. No one else worthy enough to be harnessed beside him, holding a brush. Solomon Beoranje Solomon Beoranje. California State University of Long Beach. Ekphrastic Writing Challenge
Thank you to everyone who participated in our last writing challenge featuring the work of Franz Kline, which ends today at midnight. Accepted responses for the Kline challenge will be published on January 18, 2019. The prompt this time is Pharmacy, by Joseph Cornell. Deadline is January 25, 2019. A very special welcome to our guest editor for this week's challenge, Bill Waters. A message to you from Bill: "Hi! My name is Bill Waters, and I’m in love — with poetry! Many thanks to Lorette for inviting me to be a guest editor. I look forward to reading all of the work that you, dear poets, submit for this ekphrastic writing challenge!" Bill Waters is a New Jersey-based writer whose poetry is everywhere you look. He is best known for short poetry and compressed prose, drawn to creating haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry as well as tiny free verse and flash. He's a longtime contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, having participated in many of the challenges from the start. Bill also runs the Poetry in Public Places Project, a Facebook / real-world group interested in creating and promoting poetry in public spaces. He lives in Pennington, New Jersey, U.S.A., with his wonderful wife and their two amazing cats. Visit him at https://billwatershaiku.wordpress.com/. Thank you so much to Bill for being our very first guest challenge editor. 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 painting 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. 3. Have fun. 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 CORNELL WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line in all caps please. 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. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your poem. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is January 25, 2019. 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. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! NEWS We are so happy to have Bill Waters with us for this prompt, and excited about other guest editors judging some of the challenges in the year ahead! Alarie Tennille is up next, and in the near future we welcome Devon Balwit and Shirley Glubka. We're hoping this will inspire us in unexpected ways, add new flavours and perspectives to the journal, foster community, and widen readership. When a challenge has a guest editor, it will be announced in advance as well as in this space the day the prompt is posted. We're excited about this and about having a whole year of challenges, now that we've found an ekphrastic prompt system that is working in terms of consistency and longevity. Many great poems are about to be written! On Seeing On the Tow Path—A Halt
Theodore Robinson, where is your boy in brown cap, brown coat, brown britches rambling to down a dirt pathway? If a snake slinked in front of his horses, I bet he’d handclasp the reins as the white and brown brutes trample greenery dabbed on a steep mountain slope. He’d hock spittle and brush off his pant legs before casting again a dogged stare that your brush arrested in the minute when he might’ve looked back at his rundown daddy who decided it was time for a son’s journey under blue laundered sky, the morning a boy becomes a man. Kevin J. McDaniel Kevin J. McDaniel's poems have appeared in Artemis Journal, Cloudbank, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Good Works Review, Illuminations, Sand Hills, Temenos, The Ocean State Review, The Offbeat, and others. He is the author of two chapbooks, Family Talks (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and At the Foot of a Mountain (Old Seventy Creek Press, 2018), in addition to a forthcoming book of poetry, Rubbernecking (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2019).
Wedding In Chagall’s painting, The Wedding, reproduced in glass and hanging from my bedroom window, the bouquet rises like the moon in full blossom—all white daisies and purple stocks— behind the bride’s pink gown, her simple veil, the groom’s orange-checkered trousers. His arms wrap tightly, protective around her shoulders as they ride sidesaddle on the white rooster, big as a horse, that carries them into their future. When night descends outside my window, night falls within the glass-enamel picture, and the couple weds in darkness, under the silence of stars, in secret, stealing, without fanfare, past the sleeping Russian village. But when my sun rises, so too are the couple bathed in light, and they are different now in a swirl of colour and celebration, the rooster with a dance in his step, the village awash with good tidings. I know now it is meant for each of us, this one day to celebrate love, the simple good luck of finding one another. I embrace the cheers from the street, simple veil, being wrapped in the arms of the one I love, crescent moon, rising sun and the sweet, feathery comfort of a big white rooster carrying us away. Hayley Mitchell Haugen This poem originally appeared in the poet's collection, Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a Ph.D. in 20th Century American Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University Southern, where she teaches courses in composition, American literature, and creative writing. Her chapbookWhat the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To appears from Finishing Line Press (2016), and poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Rattle, Slant, Spillway, Chiron Review, and many other journals. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) is her first full-length collection. She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online: https://sheilanagigblog.com/ and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. The Horsemen In the depth of a dark dark night down in the ravine the wind comes up & stirs the leaves of the myrtle trees where a corral of shadowy horses grow restless Your approach is barred by a rider on a red horse his hand rests on the hilt of his sheathed sword You ask Whose are these and why are they here? His reply Come and see But that’s when a thundering voice shouts Come & a powerful white stallion pulses from the black woods Its rider has an arrow notched in his bow The wreaths blow back from his hair & from the garlands in his horse’s mane We are the ones sent to roam the earth the first rider says to ride to the four compass points & to hold back the wind Beware the coming of pestilence he continues Beware the coming of wild beasts that leave a country childless the coming of famine & the one he adds as his heel digs into his horse’s flank the one who brings a sword He too rides off as the voice roars Come leaving you alone beneath the breathing myrtles You walk toward the whinnying herd & see starlight shimmering on their coats brown & black & white red & dappled Come the voice echoes through the ravine & a black horse & rider race past almost hitting you with the scales he carries He shouts No bread no bread but plenty of distractions for the well fed You feel drawn to pick up a three-tined pitchfork & toss hay into the corral The strong horses push against each other begin to kick & bite You offer hay to a skeletal pale nag He doesn’t fight as you impulsively climb onto his back You lift the trident in your hand With unexpected strength he surges to a gallop at the sound of the command Come D.S. Martin This poem first appeared in the journal Three One Six, and in the poet's collection, Poiema (2008, Wipf & Stock), and in the anthology Adam, Eve & the Riders of the Apocalypse. D.S. Martin is the author of four poetry collections, including Ampersand (2018), & Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis (2013) -- both from Cascade Books. He is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series, and has recently edited two anthologies -- The Turning Aside (2016), andAdam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse (2017). He and his wife live in Brampton, Ontario; they have two adult sons. |
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