Hummingbird Facts
My mother, who knows nothing about birds, points to the nest. The eggs have hatched and all we can see from afar are three, thin, little needles bobbing up and down towards the sky. If we stop talking for a second, we can hear the high-pitched cries of the hungry chicks. "I wonder where the mom goes off to." My mother says. I know exactly where, because I've been out here perched on a ladder watching birds for hours. I signal to the top of the Pine Tree. For the first time, we see the mom with another hummingbird in flight. “Look,” my mother says. “There’s the dad.” “Probably not.” I tell her. Hummingbirds are the least romantic of birds. Soon after mating, they each go off to another partner. They don’t even stay together to raise their young. The female builds the nest alone. She also cares for them all on her own. My mom doesn’t ask why I know all these hummingbird facts. Rebeca Ladrón de Guevara This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic challenge on birds. Rebeca Ladrón de Guevara received an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. Her fiction has previously appeared in Chicago Literati, Genre, Sonora Review and Badlands Literary Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry and Ekphrastic Review. She lives in Los Angeles, California where she watches birds all day, every day.
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Petals and Garden of Nymph Ancolie A friend and I attend the exhibition at The Menil. The Max Ernst mural served as backdrop to the dance floor of a Zurich nightclub, 1934–smoky room with zebra-striped upholstery, jazz band, stylish dancers gliding across the polished floor. In the painting, a bloom suggests the head of a heron. Tendrils of exotic flowers–vibrant red, orange–curl between four-fingered hands. Curve of a woman’s leg lazing against a shapely pool of blue. Plant, animal, human entwined. Playful, strange and pleasurable. I mention a contemporary artist whose exhibit I've just seen twice. My friend smiles. She'd seen it, too. We discuss the significance of birds in both men’s work, the political undertones. She lowers her voice and tells me– years before, she and the artist were lovers. She speaks of art, but I want to hear more of life. At dinner, she promises. Outside, absorbed in her revelation, I rummage for my car keys. Look, she says. Dusk has brought a fine mist to settle in the grass and low limbs of the live oaks while above, the air is clear–as though we’ve stepped into two halves of a world. Fog silhouettes a couple strolling, a man tossing a stick to a dog, and one of those birds I’ve seen here before– a yellow-crowned night heron. The bird seems here by design. How perfectly its elegance and colours–grey, black, white– complement the museum. The delight of one thing playing off another. Later, over a glass of wine, she tells the story while I picture her younger, dashing to his studio in a cab in Manhattan (so very New York, she says). I’m seduced by her daring, the delicious interlude. Laura Quinn Guidry Laura Quinn Guidry grew up in New Orleans and currently lives in Carmine, Texas. Her poetry has been published in The San Antonio Express-News; journals including Louisiana Literature and The Texas Review, and in anthologies including In These Latitudes: Ten Contemporary Poets. Her first full-length volume of poetry Between Two Gardens was published by Alamo Bay Press in 2017. Go Back to Finger Painting Remember the smeary freedom and tactile bliss? How you could fill the page as it curled with fire and became uniquely yours, yellow never just yellow and red never lonely red. The fluidity of identities, a meld of hues and primaries, of places, lands and waters crossed, capsized emotions. Light and its absence, the greatest sorrows, fragmented and unpredictable. By the time you finger your colour it’s already changed. Take Klee whose watercolours shift according to your gaze. His Architecture of the Plain depends on conjecture. Some days deliver its pleasing synchronicity – darker blues and greens defining margins left and right – and the coloured rectangles overlap, now raspberry, now vermillion. Fleeting moments pass and all you see is collision, hear a noisy argument, colours clamouring for space. Klee knew what he was doing – flat as a checked shirt pressed on an ironing board, yet there’s such depth to the painting, you want to put your hand through the paper and feel around, you want to wear your shades, tag your name graffiti-style to the lowest rainbow stripe. This is a multicoloured manifesto of love. Darkness and light in perfect Greek proportionality, an artful construction based on math and spontaneity where form is all there without being too visible. Look carefully: the ratio of the smaller part (the yellows, say) to the larger part (the reds) equals the ratio of the larger part to the entirety (the painting). Even your fleeting childhood, even your fingers painting reflect a perfect symmetry where yellow is to red equals red is to (yellow plus red). See what I mean? The painting is greater than the sum of its brushstrokes. Cora Siré Cora Siré is the author of three books. Her latest novel, Behold Things Beautiful, was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2017. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Arc Poetry, Literary Review of Canada, Geist, The Puritan, carte blanche and Montreal Serai. Based in Montréal, she often writes of elsewheres drawing on her encounters in faraway places and her family’s history of displacement. For details, please visit her website, www.quena.ca. Another Take, with Prologue, on Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
As youth will, knowing nothing but to soar on a spring day’s rush of baby-green sprout and lemon haze, too much aching to resist, he ignores warning; hoots and yowls as he climbs the thermals, pushes up and up, vein-bulged arms and legs pumping, swimming the clouds, gasping his ecstasy, watching farm and hill give way to the coast. Drums out over the sea’s cerulean heave, thrusts higher, higher, as it recedes, appears a puddle, prone to dry to saline flakes before day’s end. Now the sun grows attainable, a wild tale for his grandchildren, and he pumps higher, pores weeping in the effort (easily cooled once he’s made history). Higher still, heat, sweat, hot drops on shoulders, more hot drops and wings have grown smaller; the sun suddenly farther. When survival keeps grown-up heads down in planting’s and herding’s urgency, dinner’s catch, and shipping’s commerce, why worry strung feathers, bits of congealed wax, two legs kicking sudden on sea’s surface. Splash. A young fool’s foiled. Bernadette McBride Bernadette McBride, author of three poetry collections, most recently, Whatever Measure of Light (Kelsay Books, 2016), is poetry editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a Pennsylvania county Poet Laureate, and poetry winner, second place, for the International Ray Bradbury Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review, Cider Press Review, Philadelphia Stories, and Ragged Sky Press as well as journals in the UK, Canada, and on PRI's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. She welcomes your visit atbernadettemcbrideblog.wordpress.com. Millennia Insecta I have known the eons-long longing of insects gone to stone, the empty wishes of disjointed plates no longer encasing throbbing thorax, fecund abdomen, the despondency of coxae that once cupped flexing femurs, the weariness of wings become limestone lithographs, the layered years hardened against weather: sturdy siltstone, kiln-baked mudstone that hold the compressed millennia of wisps of beings that whisked the air mere days, then died. And I have seen a day pass from horizon to horizon in the instant I looked up from stone to sky, the split second I became aware of buzzing and flapping around me, the flicking wings, the whirring flags of chitin and scales, the jumping, hopping, stalking, searching, pulsating life arisen from these very foundations of their world. Roy J. Beckemeyer Roy J. Beckemeyer is a retired engineer and scientific journal editor who lives in Wichita, Kansas. He currently studies the Paleozoic insect fossils of Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and writes poetry. His poems have appeared in half a dozen anthologies as well as in many print and on-line literary journals. His first book of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, Lawrence, KS, 2014) was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He won the Beecher’s Magazine poetry contest in 2014, and the Kansas Voices poetry award in 2016. He recently co-edited (with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg) Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, Pittsburg, KS, 2017). January the Tenth In a far corner of the room, the Christmas decals, peeling from the edges, but still enough intact to reflect off the rain on the window, retain some of the light of the season, but only when the traffic signal so many floors below changes from red to green and back again in its predictable rhythm. The gateleg table--so practical the way it could hug a corner and still seat sometimes five or six for holidays, but not if they were too full-grown-- now’s on its way to being antique, though purchased new from a small shop in Buffalo, soon after the war, when all seemed possible. But the cards we place upon it don’t always want to remain upright, though if they fall, we fix in passing, without thinking much, even at this late date when they could just as soon be gathered up and tossed. We’ve mostly forgotten who sent them, as friends we’ve known grow farther away, and many more each year exit our life and, we only hope--how silence follows silence--not their own. Though even this perpetual not knowing can be comfort as time hurries by and another Christmas, with any joy we’ve remembered to share, dwindles in January’s own sharp cold and unkind light. Alan Walowitz Alan Walowitz’s poems can be found on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College and St. John’s University. His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing. Go to alanwalowitz.com for more poems and more information. Tim Savage (artist), a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru, is a graphic designer, fine artist, and teacher of art, calligraphy, and web design. He’s won numerous awards in watercolor, oils and pastel painting and is a published illustrator. Tim’s a member of the Art League of Nassau County, the National Art League, and is an active volunteer in the Inkwell Foundation, an organization that brings cartoonists and illustrators together with children in need. He can be found on the web at http://timsavageteacher.com/ The Hold Of course it takes time, like studying a contact sheet, frame by frame. So how does this work and where does wanting end? No such lines, just blur like chalk on an old blackboard at three in the afternoon, like a sketch left out in the rain. Have you ever wrestled something for so long that you were worn out, ready to call it quits? Sometimes a lover makes a face-- sometimes you make a face-- that in a silent film could be pleasure, pain, or a premonition of both. What if you get everything you long for, but not for long? Sometimes you’re on top, then the reverse. Maybe love sets you up for the takedown. You’re all in, stripped down and exposed. Then he cheats or leaves or takes his own life, and you have to take it-- held there like that, shoulders against the mat. Matthew Murrey This poem was written in response to the surprise ekphrastic poetry challenge on sex and art. Matthew Murrey: "My poems have appeared in various journals such as Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, and Rattle. I received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry a number of years ago, and my first book manuscript is seeking a publisher. I am a high school librarian in Urbana, Illinois where I live with my partner. We have two sons who live in the Pacific Northwest. My website is https://matthewmurrey.weebly. com/" Etsy Sale on Small Artworks by Lorette C. Luzajic
Don't miss this Valentine's Day sale on original artworks at Etsy. Click here! You can support The Ekphrastic Review by buying a small artwork. If you love this journal, please consider buying an original painting (or supporting us on Patreon, top right sidebar.) Did you know? I spend about 40-50 hours a month on Ekphrastic- more than a work week. I'm not in this for the big bucks, but appreciate your support if you are able. Lorette The Lovers
The lovers are kissing each beneath a separate head-covering cloth. The man’s nose is a peninsula jutting into the shadowy sea of the woman’s cheek – but they have no eyes, no hair, just a presumption of mouths, the shrouded point where their faces meet. I have heard the commentary: the artist’s mother’s dead body pulled from the water covered with the cloth of her wet dress – some think it’s about death: the death of love, maybe, or the isolation of lovers, hidden identities, mystery – so what? You show what you want them to see, they see what they want to see; in the end, what does it matter? Love is a blessing no matter how it arrives: real or imagined, behind a gray muslin shroud or unclothed in the doorway, brilliant with the joy of being loved and loving back. Tamara Madison This poem was first published in the author's poetry collection, Moraine, from Pearl Editions. Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook “The Belly Remembers”, and two full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine”, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac and other publications. She is thrilled to have just retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. The Slave Ship*
Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay; Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds Declare the Typhon's coming. Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard The dead and dying - ne'er heed their chains Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope! Where is thy market now? J. M. W. Turner (1812) If one looks quickly, passing this painting at the Fine Arts Museum in Boston, one may see only a spectacular sunset, as only Turner could conjure, harbinger of some biblical storm or maritime disaster and miss entirely the sharks and gulls in the lower right foreground feeding on bloated corpses, which were not quite lifeless when they were tossed still chained into the palegoldenwheat waves. If one looks quickly, one may see only the purplebloodred fury of an approaching storm, as only Turner could conjure, about to wreak its fury on a skeletal ship, and perhaps feel sorry for her captain and crew, without knowledge of her worthless, but valuable, cargo. You can easily miss such small details when measured against a magnificent sunset. Neil Silberblatt _________ *In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered his crew to throw 133 sick or dying slaves overboard so that insurance payments might be collected. The incident inspired J.M.W. Turner to create this painting. Neil Silberblatt's poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetica Magazine, The Aurorean, Two Bridges Review, Oddball Magazine, Verse Wisconsin, Naugatuck River Review, Chantarelle’s Notebook, Canopic Jar, First Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Nixes Mate Review, and The Good Men Project. His work has been included in the anthology, Confluencia in the Valley: The First Five Years of Converging with Words (Naugatuck Valley Community College, 2013); and in University of Connecticut’s Teacher-Writer magazine. He has published two poetry collections: So Far, So Good (2012), and Present Tense (2013), and has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. He is the recipient of a grant from Wellfleet Cultural Council. Neil is the founder/director of Voices of Poetry - which, since 2012, has presented poetry events at various venues throughout CT, NYC and MA. He is also the host of Poet's Corner on WOMR/WFMR (out of Provincetown, MA), for which he has interviewed acclaimed poets & writers on and off the Cape. |
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