The Blue Rider Felled
  
            2011, at Kochl, Bavaria.
 
Franz Marc, 
my eyes cantered with your blue horses 
over peaceful Alpine meadows
in your gallery at Bavarian Kochl
before I leaped upstairs for your later art,
where bright colours dissolved into abstraction,
Futurist shards piercing and purifying reality
mechanising animal dreams of blue horses 
until you were called away to ride warhorses
destroying  the old world of greed and empire,
but your exhibition was unfinished,
your brushes stayed,  
when your war took all with it, 
dissolution of your bright coloured world.
 
            1965, at Verdun, France.
 
I once saw your purple hills of Verdun,
their forests uniformly immature
like stubble bearding the rough face of old battle,
where bayonets parried by your comrades’ bones
were still jutting from hardened mud.
 
            1916, at Verdun, France.
 
I imagine a dredged wilderness of ashen battle lines
where you were not supposed to be,
forgotten by war’s bureaucracy,
halfway to the city where you’d once copied art
in Parisian galleries and dined with the great,
when a vagrant shard shattered your skull
before your discharge note could arrive, delayed.
 
           2011, at Kochl, Bavaria.
 
Canvases you should have had time to paint
for a higher floor above your gallery
are discarnate in abstract non-existence. 
The only horses I imagine galloping
over the invisible meadows of your intention
are the four snorting steeds of the Apocalypse.

**

Author's note: "In 1965, I visited the Great War battlefield of Verdun where the Expressionist artist Franz Marc was killed in 1916, and in 2011 I visited his Blaue Reiter [Blue Rider] gallery at Kochl in Bavaria."   

    Blaues Pferd 1 (Blue Horse 1) 

    Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.
  
    Is this a foal’s own life plan,
    floating strong and free
    from wild brutal earth,  
    turning from clawing plants
    to eye the purest grass,
    strong and free in soulful blue,
    enlightened heart and mind
    banishing shadow to its perimeter,
    ahead of the possibility 
    of yellow serenity, rising steps 
    of multicoloured evolution
    to blue spiritual summits
    under the joyful orange cosmos, 
    or a self-portrait as a horse?
 

Traumendes Pferd (Dreaming Horse)

Solomon R. Guggenheim  Museum, New York
 
A foal dreaming into consciousness
awkwardly on a bench of angular suffering,
red and black, the vision spiralling blue and free
into a sealed world of bundled experiences,
makes a shaft of green heartfelt hope
rise beyond the bounds of imagination,
while its sleeping head greens the bench,
having found peace in a hard world.

​Raymond Garfoot

​Raymond Garfoot: "I am a retired Methodist Church minister living with my wife Ingrid in Peterborough UK. I have degrees in Geography at Oriel College Oxford, and theology attached to Fitzwilliam College Cambridge.  I have written many poems over the years and feel that now is the time to try to publish them. My other projects include research into Jesus’ life and spirituality as well as writing about family history, and I am also interested in music and art."
​

Netted
 
Andy thanked the actor, stopping her mid-monologue. As he escorted her to the door, he heard her exhale a little lip trill, as though blowing bubbles. Perhaps she was just as eager as he was to wrap up this audition. He thought how much he would like to escape into the salty afternoon air. 

The bungalow the producer had reserved for auditions was sweltering. No sea breeze inside, just busted air conditioning. Why had Andy worn black in August? Because directors wore black. Because that was his signature, like sleazy B-movies.

And now he’d sunk to directing a mermaid flick. Worse, he was saddled with this producer, a legendary meddler, demanding they hold an open call here at the beach. It was an obvious publicity stunt. The producer had said, “We’re casting a wide net,” and Andy had winced at the pun, but also at the knowledge that they were wasting their time. These women’s time too. The lead in this aquatic travesty would most likely go to one of the producer’s casting couch conquests. And even if a genuine mermaid washed ashore, those imbeciles at the studio would probably find a reason to toss her back.

Standing on the bungalow’s threshold, he surveyed the remaining hopefuls still waiting to be seen and he wondered when these maxi-dresses would finally go out of fashion. All lined up in two tidy rows, the actors appeared not only identical, but vaguely piscine, eyes vacant and bulging. He shuddered. Fish, women, fish-women. 

“All right, folks, listen up: we’re going to take a little break here, so you can all stretch your legs. Don’t worry, we’ll get to everybody today, I promise. We’ll resume in...” How long could he get away with? Ten minutes? Fifteen? He surprised himself by saying, “A half hour.” He expected groans, or perhaps nervous chatter, but as he strode away from the bungalow, the women didn’t stir.

He walked away, the breeze teasing the brim of his hat, and for a moment he wondered whether he should say the hell with it, hop this wall and allow the tide to wash over him, or at least lap at his feet. Maybe he’d be greeted by a school of real mermaids. Sure. He’d be just as likely to encounter his artistic integrity stranded on the sand. Andy trudged along the path, toward distant cliffs. 

Tracy Royce

Tracy Royce is a poet and writer whose words have appeared in / are forthcoming in 100 Word Story, Five Minutes, The Mackinaw, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking in the region’s many mountains, playing board games, and obsessing over Richard Widmark movies. You can find her on Bluesky. ​

Music Not Reason
 
spiraling down 
the mobius strip staircase
 
circular logic 
no end in sight
 
crazy scene I enter
New York Jazz at night
 
a world that’s tripping
lit by laudanum
 
everything spinning
tables, chairs, drinks
 
deep in the shadows 
four musicians emerge
 
appear to ride 
the same wavelength
 
strike up instruments
settle into the groove
 
plunge into the abyss
of beat over reason
 
snare of the drum 
tone of the sax
 
stride of the piano 
syncopate in shadow
 
to see not be seen 
listen not be heard

Kirk Lawson

Kirk Lawson lives in Ulster County, New York and the Shawangunk mountains. He enjoys poetry as a creative outlet to deepen meaning in living. Publications: Discretionary Love, Months to Years, Thorn and Bloom, Pulses. Grateful to husband Jim and dog Leo for joining his journey.

Join us for a unique creative experience!

The Ekphrastic Scavenger Hunt is an asynchronous event. You will work independently on your own schedule over the weekend, while connecting in a private Facebook group. 

Lorette will respond to three stories or poems inspired by the discoveries you make. 

There will be a wide assortment of open-ended clues that you can uncover. This will unleash a wealth of inspiration to last the whole year and grow your ekphrastic practice in unexpected directions.

There will be a wine and zoom celebration Sunday evening for writers to connect and share.

Start your year off with a maze of ekphrastic inspiration.

This is our first event of this kind and we are excited about a new creative experiment!

The price is $100 Canadian dollars, or approximately $72 USD.

Dive into Butterflies 
 
Only crickets breathe in darkness, 
their voices in the pitch black.
 
Thin chirping, whispers whispers of being.
 
Dead fall, 
their spirit in silence.
 
She wakes and sees.
 
A dim line of words 
fades into the quiet --
into fear.
 
Thin legs leap above the earth, 
emotion collapses within her. 
 
Breath pounds in a woman's body 
crumbles into her own dust.
 
A rainbow's appearance in cloud, 
is the appearance of a dream unmet.
 
A woman gathers windflowers, 
air garment covers her skin.
 
Butterflies, butterflies --
thin wings break.

Michal Perry
​
Michal Perry is a poet, writer, painter, and multidisciplinary artist, born in Jerusalem.  Michal was awarded an Honorable Mention in the prestigious Haaretz Newspaper's Short Story Competition 2025 (Israel). Her poems have appeared in leading journals and she has three poetry collections in Hebrew: Like Waking up From A Dream to A Dream (Emeda Publishing House), Lost Space of Time (Ktav Publishing House), and Between Light and Light (Argaman-Meitav). Michal Perry was manager and curator of the Klarfeld Perry Gallery. In addition, she presented solo exhibitions and participated in international group exhibitions in the US and Europe. www.michalperry.com

Babyman, unable to look Reason in the eye

stares blankly over his head instead. Ruminating, 
we might guess. Pouting. Call it a liminal state--
 
a place where Babyman is king, where he climbs
to the top of his castle and Reason never follows. 
 
Where he builds a ballroom bigger than his castle 
and Reason never intervenes. Babyman has plans.
 
Building a brand-new casino on the ocean’s island 
of trash—prime real estate. A deal with Dyson 
 
for a vacuum that will suck every bird left from 
the sky. Wait. Forget Dyson. Babyman will whistle 
 
and every bird will obey. He’ll fill the new casino
with the best cages anyone has ever seen—gilded
 
cages. Solid gold. And anyone rich enough to sail 
to the island on their puny yachts—Babyman has
 
the best yachts, the biggest yachts—will pay extra 
to see the birds. The most beautiful birds. Young
 
birds. Birds like you’ve never seen before because
Babyman? He invented birds. He taught birds to fly. 

**

​Babyman, with trinity knot tattoo,

lies, quite often. He tells the papists that the symbol 
stands for Father, Son, Spirit. Then he tells the woke 
it really means Past, Present, Future. Anyone wearing 
a uniform is told it honours the troops who protect us 
by Land, Sea, and Air. Babyman smiles, every time, 
knowing the circle inside the knot has always meant 
just one thing: Me, Myself, and I. 

**

​A Map of My Heart 
 
Red 
 
(You are here) floating
 
pools of blue surround you
waves splash against
 
black 
 
the past like notes
in a music composition
circles, squares, twirling 
 
An X 
 
U’s trap memories
winding roads wrap around places 
and people etched inside
 
ghosts of paths long left 
behind fade and make space
for new journeys
 
white 
 
hope 
spaces yet to fill
 
Labyrinths
Interlocking hooks & chains that
overlap with you.

Leslie Archibald

Leslie Archibald, a graduate of the University of Houston, writes poetry, flash fiction, and nonfiction in a tiny home office in Houston, Texas. When she is not writing, she is likely roaming the city photographing Houston’s unique character, dabbling in watercolours, and exploring multimedia literature. She was the board treasurer for Writespace, a Houston literary arts centre, and currently works at a full-time office position while writing and editing part time. Leslie is a slush reader and nonfiction writer for Interstellar Flight Press. Her work appears in The Best of Tales of Texas Vol 2 and Synkroniciti Magazine Vol 5 No.4 and Vol 6 No.4.

Under the Waterfall
                        
It all began on a Summer solstice dawn: the sun disappeared in a
fiery sky of molten marigolds and blood flowers tainting misty
waterfalls all the way to the swan cove. And the startled swans
wandered around mounds of featherless flesh lying pell-mell,
sleeping forms with sparse down crowning their heads, a burnt
umber field of sepia limbs sprouting from broken shells, their
strange, acrid smell terrified them: flapping their immaculate wings,
they kept bathing in the purifying waters, came back to the inert
bodies in maddened circles biting their own tails amidst the dormant
newborns: had they heard of Andersen’s tales they’d wonder why
they were all cursed at once with ugly little ducklings, unaware they
were witnessing the origin of the human race.

Hedy Habra

This poem was first published by Diode. It appeared in Hedy Habra's collection, Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015).

Hedy Habra's latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? won the 2024 International Poetry Book Award and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award; The Taste of the Earth, won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Poetry Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Poetry Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa, She is a twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. https://www.hedyhabra.com/
 
​

​Stone Carving
 
In fifteen years of teaching study abroad classes in Italy, I had never seen the David. I had been to the Uffizi several times for day trips, always at the mercy of the same guide who went into painful detail about each work, not caring that I had a baby or a toddler on my hip, who I would pass to Dan, who after a time would pass him back to me, and so on…as if we were in a game where we passed a really heavy fish back and forth trying not to let it get away, and trying to keep anyone from noticing the fish. 
 
Last year, I stayed in our home base of Viterbo with Covid while everyone else saw the David.  Even this year, just outside the entrance to the Galleria dell'Accademia and feeling the weight of this anticipated moment, a group of female students mustered up courage to tell me they were chased the day before into a café in Rome by a man who had unzipped his pants when he saw them.  Life carries shadows that make experiencing art, searching for it, seem futile, ridiculous even, secondary to the business of “real” life.  I talked with Dan about the necessary things we needed to do, how we could best help our students and report it to Title IX, as we made our way into the front room filled with bright paintings (reds, blues, greens), and then moved into a hallway with Michelangelo statues—each unfinished, but seen together, offering a lesson in sculpture processes.  There were so many, and they were huge, larger than life, and each in various stages of completion. 
 
As I grew to realize, the interesting thing to see was how each part of each statue was in a different stage of completion from every other part.  And even unfinished, how beautiful each statue was. 
 
The pieta statue with three figures, for instance, showed faces that to a novice might be from three different styles or artists.  In this statue, Mary is upright and looking toward Christ’s face, who has fallen backwards on her, his head leaning on her shoulder. By Mary’s side, a girl strains to help support him.  She does not look at Christ, but instead focuses somewhere ahead toward where she thinks they need to take him.  Christ’s face is smooth, but made of shapes that are still sharp—the nose a smooth straight line from the forehead, but with edges along the sides, like a sandcastle brick that hasn’t been rounded or smoothed away.  Mary’s face behind him is also made of shapes, but with additional tiny rice grains of brush strokes all around, like wind current patterns, or like Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  These tiny marks are even more pronounced on the sidelined girl, whose face looks the way a face under a cloth might look—ill-formed, smothered—but with so many tiny strategic ruts.
 
It is interesting to think about whatever Michelangelo’s process must have been, not just how a face is made from stone, but also what things Michelangelo chooses must wait while he works on other things.  Christ’s face waiting unfinished while the women take shape.
 
Of course, the other thought in this room is how many works and faces Michelangelo started and did not complete, each one made to such great effect and on such a grand scale and still left unfinished.  None look ruined or worth abandoning.  In the museum, the crowd moves you, you move with the crowd, catching glimpses of these giant sculptures, until you see at the end the one with the name you know, the David, larger than even these prefatory statues, and perfected.  It waits at the end of these other attempts, centered and standing in light that is yellow and that exists around it alone, and all the people circle and hover and move around it like dust particles in a shaft of sun.
 
It is an experience of the mind, not just the eye.  A chance to think about a person who had a genius for seeing space where there was rock, for seeing exact shapes and measurements, who could fix these shapes in front of him, who could do this party trick again and again without mistake, who nevertheless worked in time like the rest of us, who lived in many moments of incompleteness, who left a trail of projects for any finished one—and that finished one even more a miracle for all the ones not completed.  You see the David, and in the same moment of seeing, you are thinking about Michelangelo, whose name on the plaques by each drafted sculpture is spelled Micheliangilio—the “i” a reminder of a story more personal and human than you have been able to pair with the idea of genius you have been given leading up to this day.  You stand facing a pedestal made not for the man above men, but made for the achievement of the man who lived on the ground with the rest of us—his genius and talent something to be dealt with like stone, a constant cutting away of time.
 
At the end of the tour, students collected in groups by the gift shop. We waited for everyone to finish their wanderings, to make what purchases they would make, and we began the walk in the sun back to the hotel, through streets that were narrow and that caused us to walk in small groups.  We carried our so-many conversations with us through Florence, but I don’t remember what they were.
 
Ginger Hanchey

Ginger Hanchey is the Director of Literature and Creative Writing at Baylor University and the Director of Core Curriculum in the College of Arts & Sciences. She has poems published in such journals as Nashville Review, Foundry, and Tar River Poetry.  Her chapbook, Letters of a Long Name, was published through Finishing Line Press.

San Francisco Skirts
  
In San Francisco circa 1930
where Frida lived before New York and Detroit
there was no shortage of illegal spirits for sale
but Frida spent her precious coins on silks. 
She loved Chinatown, the joyful clamor 
of the shops. Toys, trinkets, silks of infinite 
weights and patterns, hand-sewn birds, flowers, 
tiny figures in peaked hats.
She loved the Chinese style of dress, how the Chinese stayed Chinese
in America, the way she stayed vividly Mexican
wherever she went—precisely, Tehuana--
of the Isthmus from whence her mother came, where women wear and keep the gold
and hold their bosslady heads high.
A few of Frida’s San Francisco skirts survived the comings and goings
between Mexico and the States.
I, the bright yellow one, the colour Frida said the ghosts wear,
was her favorite, but we all could take her back rápido
to the heady days of firsts when she was twenty-three,
not twenty like she’d have you believe.
First year of marriage to Diego.
First trip outside her homeland.
First glimpse of the ocean, first
sea-swell leap into her yet-to-be-landed life. 

**
 
Underskirt of Matilde Calderón de Kahlo 
 
You’ll find no picture of Frida wearing me,
an ankle-length underskirt of organdy cotton and Valencia lace.
Frida wrote to her mamacita nearly every day
but never let me grace the hemline of her radiant rabonas,
not even after her mama passed.
She couldn’t bear to wear me
or to give me away, belonging
as I did to her mother’s firm Catholic body,
Matilde Calderón de Kahlo
whose love was
solid as the table you’ve laid me on so carefully
to assess the damage and the beauty,
the beauty and the damage.
When Frida brought the trunk of Matilde’s things 
to Detroit, she left me behind in Mexico.
How can such a daughter come from such a mother, you ask?
One was all prayer and discipline, the eldest 
child of a Spanish general and a Tehuana.
The other was all pleasure and impertinence.
It’s a mystery as intricate and delicate as my lace:
a daughter’s love for the woman she is distinctly not,
but without whom she doesn’t exist.
 
**

Skirt Trio
 
You see me in the well-known Kodachrome 
image shot by Frida’s lover Nickolas Muray 
on a New York City rooftop, circa 1946. 
A blue so infused with light it doesn’t look real.
The colour, Frida said, of electricity
and purity love.
Of sky and sky and sky.
But I’m really that blue.
That blue exists, and I am it.
Or I was, once,
before Diego locked me up,
part jealousy, part protection,
but not in equal proportion.
 
*
 
Of all Frida’s skirts, we’re the most depicted,
if not the most beloved—military green,
the drab olive Frida called
the color of leaves, sadness, science, the whole of Germany.
You see us in My Dress Hangs Here, finished in 1933, 
and also in Memory, from 1937,
and The Two Fridas, 1939, with slight alterations:
twin bands of red ribbon, an increase of lace.
We’re the hue of desolation, of far from home.
Of pain, dislocation, 
putrescence,
a country drunk on the black milk of hatred, 
dragging the world back to war.
 
*
 
I’m made of printed Manchester cotton 
of the kind adored by Tehuanas and thus in good supply 
in Mexico. An immigrant fabric
with a deep lace-trimmed flounce.
But Frida loved me.
Someone who knew this arranged me on her bed 
after her death, in a semblance of fullness.
Gisele Freund photographed Frida in me in 1953.
She said, don’t look at the camera, 
just lie in your bed like that, 
with your world all around you. The books, fresh flowers, a few 
small paintings, but not the medicines and syringes 
Frida kept in the bathroom, the Leche de Magnesia,
the hand-labeled bottle of chloroformo.
Frida’s fully dressed in her narrow bed, fingers bejeweled, 
staring into space with a ferocious, calm focus.
She isn’t well. Her legs ache. Her spine. 
She is tired. Of injury, the marathon of healing, even loving.
In her last years, she often needed
to lie down like this and stare out the window,
especially after working, as she did that morning
on a portrait of her beloved late father. 
She knew it would be her turn to go soon
but not that she’d lose a leg first.
I kept her secrets for so long and would 
have gone on keeping them. 
A limp, the touch of lovers, 
the blood and wind and briny woman smells,
the half-leg stub after the amputation. 
After that it didn’t matter what Frida wore--
the devastation couldn’t be contained.
She wrote in her diary: I hope the leaving is joyful--
and I hope never to return.

**

United Skirts of the Casa Azul

Incarceration in Frida’s rooms for fifty years
is no way to treat us
who so faithfully served our mistress.
Diego was crazed with grief when he made that decree.
Is it 1965? 1982? 2030? We can’t say,
only that it’s been too long
since we’ve seen the sun and the moths 
never relent. We’re not alone here.
There’s lipstick, perfume, sketches, paintings, 
diaries, medicines, boots, 
corsets, prosthetics,
huipil and rebozo.
But we don’t speak for such things.
We only speak for skirts.
Specifically, Frida’s.
What would our mistress have been without us?
The eyebrows were only part of the overall effect.
We were as precious to Frida as her paints and brushes.
Because skirts have powers.
Not the least of which: freedom of movement.
A skirt can conceal or reveal. A skirt swishes and sways
or hangs straight, can change hearts
and steal minds. Skirts know
things only skirts can know.
We grant that sometimes Frida wore pants. 
But let’s be clear: a skirt isn’t just a woman’s 
garment - imagine how history would be 
different if more men
wore skirts.

Colleen Morton Busch

Colleen Morton Busch is the author of the nonfiction book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, published by Penguin Press and named a best book by Publisher’s Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble. Her poetry collection, Smolder, won Ex Ophidia Press’s Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest, judged by Felicia Zamora, and will be published in summer 2026.