What Kind of Name is Rudyard? When you grow up, and don't worry, there's still time, try not to be too serious, always keep an open mind. Think for yourself, but don't blindly trust those thoughts. Learn how to learn from others, as well as be self-taught. Ask everyone, everything, and yourself, why? how? when? who? where? and listen to the answers, though some might not seem fair. When you grow up, don't worry about luxury, or power or becoming a billionaire. Make sure to never lose your sense of wonder. Strive to be a questionnaire. Jason L. Lacewell Grow Up Between a flower and a weed, what’s the difference? One’s proud on a trellis the other stares thoughtfully through the fence One needs only modest accommodation satisfied with mock rains, clotted earth, and junk yard nutrition. The other begs to be pampered, looked at, cared for. Showered with the compliments of one hundred flitting visitors. One is ugly But hardy and clever. In urban neglect, it finds opportunity The other is beauty But wilts in the wind, dies under the weight of a single indignity. They both risk the same though, to be trampled, pulled out by the roots, or snipped. One out of scorn, the other as a gift. Between a flower and a weed, what’s the difference? Maybe a flower’s a self-absorbed weed and a weed’s a humble flower One has common, while the other, fashion sense. Jason L. Lacewell Jason Lacewell is currently serving time at the Florence Prison in Arizona. He is working on writing with a mentor, Jason Kitts. Justin says of Jason, "Jason Lacewell and I met in Yuma Arizona on a medium security prison yard. I was doing four years for a fatal DUI and he was my Spanish teacher. Jason and I became fast friends and still talk every week. We started an art production company and call it Cardiac Leather Works LLC. Jason has three years and some months left before he comes home. He continues to produce art and writing which he sends to me. I do my best to promote it for us until he comes home. Jason Lacewell is extremely intelligent, knows multiple languages, plays every instrument he touches and is a fantastic artist and poet. He's also my best friend and my son's Godfather. Jason encouraged me to start writing again. If anything, he is my mentor. I'm extremely proud to call him my friend. Please keep an eye out for his name and his art.”
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Surreally Good Apple While waiting for Magritte in his garden studio, I pluck an apple from a canvas and eat it. Magritte enters and sees me devouring the apple, beside a freshly unpainted canvas, and shouts about how that image was clearly marked not an apple! I didn’t see that. It just looked delicious and it was. He points to a pipe and tries to explain the treachery of images. What treachery? All I see is a pipe I could reach out and touch, so I pick it up and light it. Magritte stares blankly at me and the second emptied canvas. “Do you know how long it took me to create that apple? That pipe?” “It’s just that you’re so good,” I say. “These were so real, but I don’t get the other stuff,” I admit, with a puff, and ask him to explain. “It’s all surreal,” he answers with a broad, sweeping stroke. “Well,” I say, “the apple and pipe are so real, but the rest, I really don’t get.” “It’s all surreal,” he repeats, waving his paintbrush, spraying the room with applesauce and ash, spinning in the space of impossible portraits and wild absurdities, apples, clouds, boulders floating without the slightest care for reality or the serious nature of gravity, “Surreal! Surreal! It’s all surreal.” “Okay, it’s so real,” I agree, to be polite, adding, “Maybe it’s me. I don’t get a lot of art.” But the apple and the pipe I enjoyed immensely. Linda Eve Diamond This poem first appeared in Encore: Prize Poems 2019. Linda Eve Diamond’s poetry has been honored with several awards, including Grand Prize Award in the Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Contest “for exceptional poetry that inspires dance and for furthering intercultural understanding and peace through the universal language of the arts.” Her poetry has been published by numerous literary journals and websites. Find her poetry collections, selected poems and more at http://LindaEveDiamond.com. Banditti at Rest silent stone, breathe, wait, our legs ache Light a cigar with me, watch the flame burst, so still yet so alive, dance with me among the smoke, among the ruins. we have seen many here, they pass through much too fast Deal the cards, place your bets, lay them down, 1 2 3 collect your winnings, let’s go again. there are children this time, they will also age, let moss green their crown Clatter your guns against the steps, blow your horn, vibrate our chests, now sit for just a second. when they leave, we are left much as we were: silent stone Sy Brand Sy is a queer non-binary person living in Edinburgh, Scotland. They write through the haze of cat-/child-induced sleep deprivation to try and make sense of gender, relationships, and ADHD. You can find them on Twitter @TartanLlama and their publications at sybrand.ink. Guernica The eye works by adjustment. In the museum the eye presents fruit bowls unnervingly still. Platforms and shadows, the eye aligns colours, the eye dreams a unified field. Like a great car mirror how the eye has cavorted. The eye has seen gothic chapels, the eye has seen Guernica, the woman in flames, the agonized horse. We were inside the Reina Sofia. You stood behind me in front of the painting. An object refracted appears falsely close. Though one could rip out the cornea. Sever the optical stalk. No twisted image, only pure sight in the white room, sight and the dissolution of all other ability. Madeleine Cravens Madeleine Cravens lives in New York. She attended Oberlin College, where she studied political science and creative writing. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Best of the Net 2014, the Adroit Journal and IMAGE journal The Forest of Questions some rocks seemed blue as sky but this rainless sky was bluer the clouds swooped happily unladen with intimations a few shadows glowered on the flowing golden paths someone who was not a gardener wandering plausibly among trees florescent as baroque fountains expanding in dissimilar color suspicious that not one had a mate implied by the absence of seeds the dead trunks twirled upward like lightning doing handstands upon examining the inanimate perhaps not all of them random some of them were once human a mossy rock that had been a man pale stump that had been a woman frequent tree skeletons signaled unequivocal evidence of malice amid the deceptive flowering F.J. Bergmann F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. She has competed at National Poetry Slam as a member of the Madison, WI, Urban Spoken Word team. Her work appears irregularly in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov's SF, and elsewhere in the alphabet. Her dystopian collection of first-contact expedition reports, A Catalogue of the Further Suns, won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest and the 2018 SFPA Elgin Chapbook Award. Keya Pouch Wašícu call me "mixed media" They described me as craft Then they labeled me art So they could display me Inside me I cradle (and cradle still within) The corded tissue from the baby girl Which stitched her to her mother which Her mother cut and sewed inside of me With this hard shell I protect it I beam to it a safety which seeps From my constellation studded In the stars to her tiny fingers I will not be displayed nor admired I am to be worn; I shall comfort I will protect and resist; I’ll cradle Thomas E. Simmons Thomas E. Simmons is a professor at the University of South Dakota School of Law in Vermillion, South Dakota and teaches courses like Trusts & Wills, Professional Responsibility, and Estate Planning. His legal scholarship touches on the same topics. His poetry, however, is varied, obscure, and typically unpredictable. Lavender Mist With your pots and paints on some faraway Long Island. Lucky Strike burning in your mouth. Lee on eggshells looking in. Coffee cans of rubbed-out butts. Shaky hands spinning away your limitless craft. What colour next? What brush? Sand flies outside waiting. Drunk on the vapors of flying paint. Tossing out lines of falling light. Each space bearing the weight of its reckless cargo. Fixing in place for all time this moment itself forever gone. Standing before you as a child I thought it strange they let you do this work. But you had no choice only the green of sandy pines, the dull buff of forgotten footprints and the waves exploding colour on that Montauk ocean and all the oceans after that. Henry Crawford Henry Crawford is a poet whose work has appeared in several journals and online publications. His first collection of poetry, American Software, was published in 2017 by CW Books. His second collection of poetry, The Binary Planet, is scheduled for publication by The Word Works in the spring of 2020. His poem "The Fruits of Famine" won first prize in the 2019 World Food Poetry Competition. His poem "Blackout" was selected by the Southern Humanities Review as a finalist in the 2018 Jake Adam York Witness Poetry Contest. His poem "Making an Auto Insurance Claim" was selected as an honourable mention in Winning Writer’s 2019 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. His multi-media poem, "Gettysburg Auto Tour" is a finalist for this year's Deanna Tulley Multimedia contest. His website is HenryCrawfordPoetry.com and his online gallery is HenryCrawfordPoetry.com/poems/online. Beauty is the Daughter of Death In the end, beauty did what she was told, obeying orders. Blouse of white roses dressed the casket. Flutes of white lilies, too, Isabel's favorite, tipped crystalline to suggest dew, a floral chorus of voices. Dutiful beauty weaving willow into wicker, a coffin fit for Ophelia, and supervising even the means of its transport, no usual hearse but a glass-sided Victorian carriage, Cinderella style, black lacquer, filigreed border, drawn by six giant bay horses, that pranced on the road to the cathedral, ostrich plumes bobbing on their heads, a funeral festive in its way. Upon a female bust, the beloved Phillip Treacy hat in the form of a miniature black battleship roiled by the high seas, its majestic sails puffed out, special effects thanks to the fan hidden behind them. Doesn't beauty think of everything!!? Even the corpse, painstakingly dressed by McQueen who chose for his muse one of his golden coats tipped with ocelot fur, because she was a royal, a female pharaoh, his double. Another hat featured, this one on her head, a stuffed pheasant hat, in ostensible flight—Isabel had specified that, this time real. At her dutiful best, our girl Beauty kept up appearances, the good daughter, eager to please her exacting mother, who had never looked this gorgeous. ** Breast Plates "I love breasts. They're so old-fashioned." Isabella Blow In her trademark dance in boarding school, they were her eighth veil. All that insistent shameless flesh, ambitious cleavage, a calculated wardrobe malfunction. Once, in the Vogue conference room, popped from her corset top, a faulty cantilever, out tumbled those breasts. Later, when her sari unwinding, slipped to the Manhattan street she walked out of it, knicker-less, nonchalant: she made a habit of it. For the famed Nipples in Naple fashion shoot, she forced her assistants to expose their breasts, or they'd be fired, and the photos show modern Amazons, in crisscrossed strapped black swimsuits, a mockery of porn, their areolas tightly capped, the nipples like lit wicks, visible through the open spaces in the X's. The model Sophie Dahl, in another spread, holds one of hers like a cigarette. But for all of Isabella's blow, she's still the hopelessly old-fashioned girl dying to come back in style with her historic pair, vintage Victorian, neither period pieces nor props, and meant in the end for children. ** Dog in the Hunt Unlike those suggesting mystery, feminine wiles, Chanel, Joy, Nuits de Paris, Isabel wore the signature in-your-nose scent, the head turner Fracas, whose name means a noisy street disturbance, a heated quarrel. Isabella was no wallflower. As an early feminist, probably lesbian, Cellier, the inventor, strove for a fauvist scent, for a sustained dissonance, none of these tepid odors, but one with silage, a strong olfactory trail like those left by animals. All knew when Isabella arrived at the office, just a whiff preceding her, as she approached her desk. The perfume's initial spritz, its top notes, start out sparkly, all orange blossom, and citrus, upbeat, but soon darkness upwells with the heavy presence of tuberose, called bone flower by the Aztecs, favored in leis, Victorian funerals, a carnal scent, same as the odor of armpits, flesh warm after sex due to its voluptuous indoles, molecules found in part in excrement, this sweet heady smell, commotion of white rich florals, a liquid velvet, the lead flower joined by a forced consensus of jasmine, jonquils, iris, like a girl desirous and not, complicated this business of sex and love. Isabella, the seeming slut who delighted in everyone's discomfort as she took out her breasts, but covered up her horsey face. In the dry-down, the last stages, when theme stays put, becomes its most substantive state, the scent of a deep woodsy base, scraped oak moss emerges, surprisingly matronly, and, she must've caught the elusive scent, fox in her unwitting hunt for the selfsame ingredient, found in her mother's powder ** Hats Off For our Isabella, make a pink papal hat (which looks, she said, like a hard on); an alluring spiders' web; a scary alien from Roswell; a crocodile, high concept headdress for a shaman; a mourning cloche with a hundred veils to absorb the tears. Treacy obliged his muse her pushy visions, he was her hat slave, her stocked preserve, mounted trophies in ready supply. Exotic feathers were often favored, plucked from flamingos, peacocks, bird of paradise, feathers that swept across the planes of her face, a peek-a-boo, sophisticated fort-da. Hidden were her yellow equine teeth, her bulbous English nose, except for her beautiful eyes, risen blue suns above the horizon. Yet she loved the common pheasant hat best, left mostly as is, though headless, stuffed, mottled brown shaded bronze, chestnut, copper, buff, worn jauntily, like a mounded fedora. "The feathers" she effused, "tattoos, inscribed like grain in wood-- and the smell of its rotting flesh, so beautiful, still flurried like it's about to mate." Even though it cost her, she bought it. Not a rare bird, a strange bird, but a game bird familiar to the sporting set, this nest of a bird, her burial hat, snug on her head, caught in movement, as close to a life as she could get. ** Her Manolos She'd die first before she'd put on Birkenstocks, loin clothed, pedestrian cave girl! If she sank her heels into the mud, ruined them, she'd buy another pair. She had to. They were her true feet, those Manolos! Hi jinx and fun, glamour amour. A knight, an assassin the heel a stiletto, Italian, hooves of the devil. She was watercolours, a cursive script, loopy and curvy, the arch of her feet uplifted and sinuous as the necks of water birds, the exposed toes upswept, plumage of swan tail, for that matter the whole of her avian, transformed, legs longer, derriere out, breasts forward, and still a goddess of earth, gentle and vegetal, shod in the sandal he designed for her, green satin and suede, the straps vinous and leafy, tendrils entwining her calves and the crystal acorns, braceleted at the ankle— so when she leapt from the A-11 bridge wearing these shoes (or succeeded later with weed killer), it was not because she fantasized flight, but hoped for fertile dirt, the ground where she could land, root and plant herself, at last, along with all the other lives, growing around her. ** Last Will and Testament She willed her head to McQueen, her heart to Detmar, where her body parts would serve real purpose. She was undecided about her "snatch," which is why she often went without knickers, exposed herself, oblivious, for anyone to take, a sparkly bauble the magpies could feather their nests with, her vital intimacy only an accessory, like a cloche for the penis, the sex she didn't much like, a fake flower pinned to a dress, a ruse of a purse, some vintage padded Chanel, hung from a gold chain, its contents a compact and a lipstick. It was good for nothing. Give it to fucking death with all its massive impotence. She'd flout herself then, oppose its resistance to disguise, one she couldn't dress, or cover, or pass on because it just wasn't having it, heir to no one, as she had always known, a failed keepsake, a lost estate, sealed off conduit of creation. ** Lip "My brother died, I remember the smell of the honeysuckle and him stretched out on the lawn. My mother went upstairs to put her lipstick on. That might have something to do with my obsession with lipstick." Isabella Blow Naked lips recede into the face; kisses, their best effects, are transient, vanish after delivery. They supply no lasting evidence of life. But lipstick buys some time, augments connection, a promised prophylaxis. Her lipstick looked like a gash or wound, blood on her teeth, though really it was a repeated statement of heart, not some cosmetic accessory, but a supportive BFF without jealousy, a female knight in her crusade for a child, constantly applied, ever refreshed monitor. She advertised her labial surrogate instead, to arouse her misanthropic ovaries. No wonder, she boasted of her oral skills, leaving her traces of lipstick without smear, the shocking trademark fuchsia, precise as a bulls' eye, a soft quoit around the stake, as she played God, just in this respect, giving her dormant Adams, breath from her big donkey mouth, an EMT on the job, able to resuscitate. Since she and Detmar, like two exotic fruits who couldn't breed, this option might work for her, another life entering her this way, a reward for sucking it up. ** McQueen’s Side At first it invigorated me following her fixations, the calisthenics of her push up bra, black lace Atlas of her cleavage, the bathing cap studded with crystals, a sphere of lights as she swam under the water. Fun, too, Treacy's crocodile hat like a sophisticated Muppet on her head, which she wore as always with studied nonchalance. I liked the glamor and the adventure of being paid for handsomely, her wallet splayed open, small fortunes spent. The trips abroad, where masked and caped, a matador of wind and sand, she stood to be photographed cavorting in the desert, as soldiers mustered in Kuwait a few miles off. What cheek! the mortar board hat fanned with peacock plumage, worn to the opera, blocking the view; or when on her first day of work, at Vogue/London, she arrived in a gold chinchilla coat to the floor, like a queen's robes, even her scent a statement, her typewriter keys cleaned with Chanel #5, like lifting her fallen aristocratic leg up, a high-class piss elegance. She didn't exist unless she was outrageous. Am I trying to justify my involvement with her, my fascinations? As the demands began to escalate, hazardous— the diaphanous dress forced to hold up during a snowstorm, the Manolos, instead of more suitable espadrilles, on the cobblestone streets, where her heel snapped and she had to be hospitalized. All the frenzied changing of clothes, four and five times a day, anywhere, brazenly, backseat of the taxi, on the streets, a McDonald's. I may have been exhausted but I was never bored. She would flatter, then turn on me-- my McQueen dropped in a heap on the floor, the armpits stained, singed bird feathers at a dinner party when she leaned in too close to the candles. Not quite abusive, since I gave my aesthetic consent, to the whip-like piping, the chainmail, the black leather dress and leg irons. But I admit I changed, as we stalked London in the dapper black frock coat, lined in red silk, from the Jack the Ripper collection, curled lock of hair in the inside pocket, murder made gorgeous, and the cut, like a god's, she said. Just symbolism. The creatures of the night, the raptor get-ups, when I invoked carnage, simulated the brutal movement of flight, for a bloody trembling rabbit, or stood in a tattered nightgown, beneath a Scottish tartan, like two sides of the same coin. You must understand, she broadened my frissons, revealed my contradictions, for which I will always be grateful. Yet, given my true nature, I was never in too deep that I couldn't turn back. She wore her favourite striped fuchsia dress in the ambulance, refused the johnnie, insisted on her silver lame blouse, which she would not take off, ever. The weed killer, a chartreuse liquid, did not match. I wish I could say that I stayed with her to the end. But the doctors mostly banned me, prescribed calm dress— jeans and running shoes, no hats. She had said she was only hat and lips. Now she was just lips. Pain is pain, unless you work with me. Had I stayed, I doubt that I could have saved her. ** Talking Dirty "I once had the insight deep in a profound depression that it was the beauty I shielded myself from, not the trauma. I was afraid of how it would feel to be filled with hope-- so naked, so fragile. Terrifying." Isabella Blow Better to talk dirty, flash my silvery scales, than swim like a fish who knows where, lips saying in their speech of blue and hot tongs, doitdoitdoit, plug the prong in the socket, my brassy stories, you want to hear another? Hail the taxi, there's a blow job in it for you. Doing it doggie style, I'm a doggie, or however four-legged mammals do it, lions and tigers, you tell me. My face off limits. Spin my wheels, boyfriend, a toy truck, or undress me, like a doll, dress me. Really do saw me in two, break your wand. Between my breath and your bellows, fan me into the same signature fire. Crash your plane down on me, kiss me everywhere except my lips, never call me beautiful Deborah Gorlin Deborah Gorlin has published in a wide range of journals, including Poetry, Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, Bomb, Connecticut Review, Women’s Review of Books, New England Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. New poems appear in On the Seawall, Chicago Quarterly, Salamander, and Plume. Before winning the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for LIFE OF THE GARMENT, Bauhan Publishing, she won the White Pine Poetry Press Prize for her first book of poems, BODILY COURSE, in l996. Recently retired co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she is currently a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Lovers in Small Boat, by Maximilian Pirner. Deadline is February 21, 2020. 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 artwork 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. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 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 PIRNER 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. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. 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 midnight, February 21, 2020. 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!
Shards See where the petals blue and black nuzzle each other’s curves curves that fit together like hill and sky Larkspur offers stems that bear weight hold hollyhock to earth encourage hedonism of leap and gambol pulsate and shiver when wind strikes Hollyhock brings a starfish- shaped galaxy in layers of algae rosette cloud blaze steadies centre for larkspur’s entry into its umbra and flash There is a moment in between where a tendril of shiraz curls into shadow-- a crepuscular pause before the delusion of two shatters into shards of night t.m. thomson This poem first appeared on Lexington Poetry Month’s website, June 2019. t.m. thomson’s work has most recently appeared in io Literary Journal and The Athena Review, and will be featured in upcoming issues of Darkhouse Books, Whispering Prairie Review, and Redheaded Stepchild. 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 Frame and Mount the Sky, a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry (2017) and is author of Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She has a writer’s page at https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter/. |
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