There Would Be Feathers
​ 
My eyes are still the same. Dove gray, the right one
slightly wider so it looks like my patience is depleted.
Face Kabuki white, layers of powder obscuring pock
marks, moles, imperfection, tears. Porcelain doll lips
painted scarlet, brushstrokes that slur when you’ve
had too many Kir Royales.
 
My chin resting imperiously on a black boa. I
knew at five there would be feathers. Hundreds of
feathers cut from the wings of forgotten swans.
I’m sweating in the rented dress, cinched tight
at the waist. I try to hide my hands, bending
them away from you. Later, when I kick
my toes above my curls the men in the last row
will grunt like pigs, stupid with desire.
 
We are two freaks in the Paris night. Dwarf and whore.
Voyeur and fly trap. Impervious to name calling or
the dull vagaries of life: the unwashed cup, the
stocking that needs mending, the pain in twice scarred
thighs. People gaze at us a beat too long, re-arranging
pieces in their minds, but the puzzle refuses to fit. If
you’d finished the portrait, chosen a proper background
instead of dirty cardboard, they’d take me for
royalty. No mirror please. No promises or whispers
of false adoration. You knew the chrysalis would have
to burn, the butterfly damaged, wings dazed with fire. 

Beth Sherman

Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her fiction has been published in Portland Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Blue Lyra Review, SandyRiver Review, Gloom Cupboard, Delmarva Review, Panoplyzine, Sinkhole, and 
Sou’wester. Her poetry has been published in Lime Hawk, Gyroscope, Rust + Moth and Silver Birch Press. She is also a Pushcart nominee and has written five mystery novels.

How to Paint Pain
​
Canvas must be skin.
A hide pulled tight.
Gesso the canvas by allowing
a gossamer stream of saliva to fall
onto your palm. Rub into skin.
Like a balm softening the hide.
Now split yourself open.
Use a scalpel to find the fissure
where muscles and tendons open.
Stretch one across for texture.
Snap off the radius where it meets the ulna.
Dip the heart shaped end to
the pool inside your elbow.
Hold it over your head like a half note.
Wave long and short strokes onto the
canvas. Circle your abdomen
until the skin swirls open exposing
the coiled intestinal maze.
For a balance of earth tones:
Take what is left in the bowels
with both palms. Carve yourself
open to the clavicle. Break off
the smallest rib for finer detail.
Open your lungs to lacquer over the clotting.
Plunge a fingernail into your inner ear.
Now blow to heat what lingers there.
Use this encaustic to seal the layers.
Now you may sign your work
by pressing the veins
of your heart against its corner.
If you’ve created something you
could live with daily on your wall,
begin again.

Jennifer Bradpiece

Jennifer Bradpiece was born and raised in the multifaceted muse, Los Angeles, where she still resides. She remains active in the Los Angeles writing and art scene, often collaborating with multi-media artists on projects. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, journals, and online zines, including Redactions, Degenerate Literature, and The Common Ground Review. She has poetry forthcoming in Black Napkin, Nowhere Poetry, and NeosAlexandria: The Dark Ones Anthology among others. In 2016, her manuscript, Lullabies for End Times, was acknowledged as one the final ten favorites in the Paper Nautilus Debut Serious Chapbook Contest.

Painting the Blackboard, or Writing            
​
To shuttle: to travel back and forth.
Here to there.
There to here.
Across the width of this room, here. We, two.
You are the mode
and I am the transported. Wavering, with my heel dug
into your side.
The clasp as you start back.
The vehicle I use.
 
What is that word?
Conduit.
 
Your trembling legs and lurch and
my uplift of arm. The heady scrawl. There, that’s it, now
we’re onto something.
 
And now, go!, my arm sweeping
and the paint nothing special – crazed
on the front porch, where the sun has gotten to it –
and the wax crayon ground down.
 
Who were you?
 
They’ll stand in the room

years later and want to trace my scribble,
my chicken scratch, as my grandmother used to say.
Seeing meaning.


Kelly R. Samuels
​
Kelly R. Samuels lives and works as an adjunct English instructor near what some term the “west coast of Wisconsin.” Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appeared online at apt, Off the Coast, Burningword and The Summerset Review.

At the Guggenheim, or Working-Class Girl Meets Rothko
​
My first time walking up the Guggenheim ramp, colour took me over:  two stacked rectangles, orange and yellow-green, that shimmer in my mind decades later.  I stopped knowing where I was – fell into some sort of zone, the Saturday museum crowd vanished.  I'd never been alone with orange before.  Mine had been a sepia childhood with regular bursts of fireworks.  Sunset was dangerous, a time to look toward ground, fathers due home and mothers flashing red, when a flaming 3-D orange ball would be tossed back and forth, no attention left to pay to the incidental sky.  While my lover had tutored me in sunsets – the fine art of looking out and up, the peaceful co-existence of reds, purples, greens and blues – he hadn't prepared me for Rothko, how a shape of colour lifted off the canvas.  Orange had always meant marigolds, green-yellow the lawn during a dry spell.  And how those beckoning rectangles could hang there so stridently, for no practical reason, two wide swaths radiating waves.  Two separate colours bleeding into each other – but neither capitulating – to become something larger.  Orange and Yellow, 1956, cloaking me, staking its claim.

Nancy Hewitt

This poem was first published in Connecticut River Review, 2017.

Nancy Hewitt received her MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2002.  Her chapbook HEARD was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press.  Her poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review (Editor’s Prize), Phoebe, Connecticut River Review, Ellipsis, Off the Coast, and other journals.  Her awards include nominations for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.  She recently retired from her private practice in psychotherapy in Salem, MA, in order to focus more fully on writing.  She divides her time between Swampscott, MA, and East Randolph, VT.

Jean and Suzanne

He can’t draw, 

and she’s 
afraid of 
everything.
 
(Her lovers know the rules: 
no guns 
in the bedroom.)

He says his paintings 
are jazz. He cries
over Billie 
Holiday’s 
unmarked grave.)


Once upon a time, 
a man 
who can be counted among 
the great loves of your life
told you about Jean, and 
you grumbled something
about overrated outcasts.
(You were still too young to know 
anything worth knowing 
in those days.)



This same man once
kissed you because 
Tom Jones was singing 
on a jukebox at the 
Winchester Arms Hotel
(now a Starbucks.)
Kissed you like you never thought he’d kiss you
and never kissed you again,
no,
not like that,
and you never wanted him to,
because it might take away
something from that night.



It was this man, too,
who said your work reminded him 
of Cy Twombly’s.
There was no Google then; 
it was not until
later
that you read how only Cy
of any painters
was allowed
to make pencil scribbles
on his paintings.
Ah, well, you did not know.
And all your work has pencil scribblings,
and it is too late to stop doing
exactly what you are going to do, 
to stop doing
exactly what you want.
(And that is what this man who kissed you
with an audience of irate bikers
who did not like Tom Jones
at the Winchester Hotel
saw about you and loved.)

You do not recall the complete details
of all those afternoons 
spent swaddled in the arms
of red wine.

But, 
it is also true 
that love 
is brutal and lonely;
it means spouses, choices,
death, children

and 
other
disappointments.


Now you are almost forty.
You still can’t draw, 
but can’t has never stopped you, 
not from anything but success, that is.
You fill those canvases,
you fill those pages,
the terrible law of averages
means obscurity for the great and for the small.
You accept that.
Who will read your books?
You will still write them for those 
few, for this man, 
the one who was always up
for another long story, long after 
all the others 
had gone on.

And now 
he too 
has gone on,

and  that is how 
it goes-
those 
who loved you 
have turned
to ghosts. 


And how do you live a life
when all the living has gone out of it,
when everything you knew
has turned to dust?
You also miss the one 
you married by mistake,
the one who changed you,
the one who told you
to go and meet  your fate.
The one who gave you new eyes,
and then gave you coins 
for his.
Now here you stand:
the whole earth is his grave.



But you live.
That is what you do,
it is what you can’t help,
this hunger to create,
which you will do even if
no one is left to see it,
or no one wants to.
It is why you are here.


But once upon a time, 
oh the parties, 
oh, you would not believe
oh, you would not believe  
the music. 
You could see in voodoo. 
You were still up to see
the sunrise flooding the world with light.
And you were still up to see it go down.
And oh, the magic, 
of those potions and those powders.
They caused the great and
whole empires to crumble,
so you forgive yourself.
It was so beautiful at first
to be so cosmic.
Oh, the music, it was too much.
How it could move over the beach and
out across the water,
oh, how the stars 
would dance.



And after,
way after, 
after you had moved on,
the way you always will,
to wrench every poem 
out of every ordinary moment,
to paint, to live alone, working furiously
you showed some work.



They were
big white paintings.
They were about clean,



they showed your emptiness
to anyone who cared to look
and few did



but some did,
the man did, 
he was there
he was always there, 
even when he wasn’t.
There in your aloneness 
at the edge of
the end of
the world,
there he stood
looking at those big white paintings,
those paintings about emptiness and clean,
looking into your devastation and sorrow
hand on his chin
searching them
his eyes far away
then he turned
and said,

This is your best work yet, baby
you know that don’t you?
As if I was a real artist or something.

Lorette C. Luzajic

This poem first appeared in the author's book of ekphrastic poetry, Aspartame.

Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and the author of four collections of poetry. She is a visual artist showing regularly in her home town Toronto, and has recently exhibited in Tunisia and Mexico. Visit her at www. mixedupmedia.ca.

 Captive

   He sits in the back of the class wishing he could be
anywhere but there. 
   His father beat him when he saw his report card, took
his bicycle away, and told him there’d be no more desert 
until he improved his grades.  
   He sits there watching the teacher diagramming sentences
but the only word he hears is the pronoun, “She” which makes
him direct his attention to Veronica Miller, the pretty blond
girl sitting in the front of the room, who he’s secretly been
in love with since kindergarten, who’s smart, funny, and
popular-- who hardly even knows he’s alive.
   He stares at her as she nods her head from time to time
at what the teacher is saying, and wishes he were the teacher
receiving her attention. He wonders what it must be like to be
that powerful.
    Finally the bell rings and he gathers his books and puts them
in his sack. He leaves the room with his head down and slowly
walks in the direction of his home, wishing he were a different
person, in a different time, and a different place.
     And he ‘d never come back. . .

Jeffrey Zable
​
Jeffrey Zable is a teacher and conga drummer who plays Afro Cuban Folkloric music for dance classes and Rumbas around the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and anthologies.   Recent writing in MockingHeart Review, Colloquial, Ordinary Madness, Third Wednesday, After The Pause, Fear of Monkeys, Brickplight, Tigershark, Corvus, and many others. In 2017 he was nominated for both The Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

The Lynx Speaks

Locked in winter, 
mine is the stare of hunger.
Crouching under white spruce, I wait.
A squirrel? A snowshoe hare?
One grand spring—its neck
will snap in my fanged jaws.
I wait. I prowl. I wait.
—A ptarmigan? A vole?
Not even the tatters of a wolf-killed moose
to gnaw on?

Day and night, 
mine is the glare of knowing.
My gaze hypnotizes the Two-Legged
hunters panting to warm themselves
in skins of my frosted grey fur.
My eyes burn 
through lies, through fears, through you
—all secrets my brain buries beneath 
great truths Ancestors whispered
down the long black tufts of my ears
and rituals they promised
my spirit to ease into death.

Alive, I stalk alone.
Mine is the snare of patience.
My paws slide soundless
circling this frozen forest. 
Invisibility is my Medicine
slipping between 
dimensions and planes.
Look hard,
you may never glimpse me again.

Susan Ioannou

Editor's note: The illustrating bronze is a placeholder image. Susan wrote this poem in response to the incredible Inuit sculpture, by Manasie Akpaliapik, Respecting the Circle, 1989. Please visit this link to view it, in order to receive the complete experience of the poem:

https://ago.ca/collection/object/96/1294

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

The Merchant's Pearl

girl, he'll tell you anything and everything
to get what he wants, didn't your mother tell
you anything of the deceits of men?
it's going too far to say it like this,
but how else are you supposed to learn?:
the pearl he wants is between your legs and
he doesn't care about your pleasure, your
name, your dreams, the things going on
inside that darling head of yours, no...

and so what if he's your father, the truth is
that his is the kind of love that
suffocates, and if you don't know already,
you will soon enough,
you'll look back on this moment as the
awakening you should've had...

for now he thinks you are the virgin, that
no one's ever crept up to your room,
that none have curled up next to you
under the bushes in the wastelands
where no one could hear you.

let him think what he wants,
he's going to anyway, and besides,
you'd only be another whore if you
told him, whereas were you his
son, there'd be afternoon tea served from the dallah
on that carpet with him leaning close and still closer as
he smiled to ask what she was like,
this woman who in the light of day,
doesn’t even exist without a father’s judgement

Garth Ferrante

This poem was written in response to the sex and art ekphrastic challenge.

Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity.  He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless.

Adieu

it's not going to happen all at once--
in fact, this moment of suffering will turn
into several eternities: it's just how these things
go, 
the time will creep by and you'll do nothing
but hate god and yourself for not having saved
her: all these things are normal, even your pain,
especially your pain...

but they won't tell you about reliving
that moment in your heart till
time "runneth out" and they won't tell you
you'll wish you too were dead even though
as your beard greys and the eyes dim,
you won't be able to tell much difference
between life and death,
so that your misery will 
come to feel normal, like something
that is good and wholesome because it reminds
you of her... 
until you remember what she was
really like and you'll despise yourself for
replacing her with this disgusting substitute
that could never be her, that she never would have
approved of you curling up with, for
where is your life now?

you can point to this image and say there,
right there! but that was then, and you are more 
than her loss, aren't you?
they'll want something transcendent here,
something lifting them up to where their
own wisdom could never take them,
and so you point to her death, to your lamenting,
and say forever that this is who you are,
even as you know she is shaking her head at you
from beyond...
where is the part that says you will do the same,
that you will leave her as she left you?
if she hated dying, you can hate to continue
living, but still, you must go…
yet in spite of knowing this, you
stay

Garth Ferrante

This poem was written in response to the sex and art ekphrastic challenge.

Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity.  He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless.

Hot Heat Jazz

Call and response notes float over killing fields,
spiritual stories – nuggets of blackgold
boldy hollered across snowy cotton fields,
sound of music hanging in air laying bare
                        a hard day’s nightache

Rising from rags in time into the mix, European clicks
Irish jigs, German waltzes, French quadrilles
New Orleans schmaltz and sass
                            all that jazz
Ragtime!
Flappers chop their hair
Americans throw caution…
swing to new rhythm,
synchronicity glides,
shades of  blue

Gillespie-life fizzy
notes spinning ol’
black magic Dizzy,
and  the dancehall born,
till wartorn cries screech
down time’s elevator shafts,
a man with no notion of rhyme –
rises up speaking guttural,
drowning out music
and the dance halls close,
all the good players
shipped off to die –
them white folk found no one
to make dance hall songs fly,

but the beboppers gathered
listening  to intricate sounds
strain as the moustachioed man
manically barked hate
spewed pain –
notes in the gutter,
yet music tinkles in stars.

Bebop to freedom,
Monk obeys scatting,
free chatting,
scatterbrain natting
Thelonius speeds up the music,
too fast for dance.
From fingers to brain –
Blitzing warpain
Blues fuses with jazz.

Out of smoke-choked bars notes rise, drift across plains
once again, sweat drops drip onto white cotton-
picking fields, melodies drift back, drift  forth; so gentle,
so sweet, clever and  fulsome and deep.
Oh, those hot steamy nights –
                        nights that jazz was born.

Maria Straw-Cinar

Maria Straw-Cinar is a poet, writer and teacher. Her recent projects include a T.V Drama, Wild Women of Paris, about the female artists and writers living in Paris in the 20s. She hopes to continue to develop strong roles for women in her future writing for theatre, film and television. Her debut novel Girl, was short-listed for the Cinnamon Press Novel award in 2010 and is available to purchase online. In 2016  year she published a poetry collection Flamenco with Lulu Press, and her play, Vinegar Alley was long-listed for the Papatango Writing Prize and went on to have a staged reading in London (BAME/The Great Pretenders). She has a poetry website, Poetry and Other Pleasures mstrawcinar.wordpress.com. 

Over the past year she has been involved in a mentoring project with the editor of Cinnamon Press, inspired by the work of artist Lito de Silva to create an ekphrastic poetry collection, A-feto