 The Blue Boat, by Winslow Homer (USA) 1892 The Fishermen The melding of colours, like water, flows through the slough. Ripples from the paddle stir up the bottom, mix with the shoreline. The men are looking for a likely spot. One looks past the edge of the frame, the other steers their course. The pine barrens beyond are hinted at by dabs of olive and black. Tiny spars, thin brushstrokes, line the horizon. An empty bog, lonely, fills the canvas. It’s a dark day for fishing; the men are dressed for the weather but cumulus clouds, heavy with rain, are likely to cut the outing short. Cattails rim the water’s edge. The boat glides through a waterscape of lily pads and turtles. The men are as silent as the scenery, alert for possibilities in this place. Details are blurred in a mélange of muted colours, a wilderness of tamarack and labrador tea. Gregory Opstad A graduate of the University of Arizona (BA Speech/English) and the University of Minnesota, Duluth (MEd), Gregory Opstad is a retired special education teacher. He divides his time between homes in Cloquet, Minnesota and Cochiti Lake, New Mexico.His poems have appeared in The North Coast Review; The Rag; Migrations: Poetry & Prose for Life’s Transitions; Trail Guide to the Northland Experience; Liberty’s Vigil: The Occupy Anthology, 99 Poets for the 99%; More Voices of New Mexico; Manzano Mountain Review; Thunderbird Review; Bringing Joy; New Mexico Poetry Anthology and Apaja’simk Journal. His chapbook, Lake Country, was released by finishing Line Press in 2013. Bringing Joy won 2022 Best Written Community Creative Work in the State of Minnesota, Minnesota Author Project Award.
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 The Healer, by Nancy Josephson (USA) 2020-2021. Click image to visit artist site. The Healer A multicolour-beaded rabbit sniffs her forearm, seeming to know she holds cures in the vials of lavender, rosemary and ashwagandha seeds that hang all around her head, neck, bust and arms. She faces forward, resolutely, solemnly— white eyes in her black tightly-beaded head, ringed with rounded rhinestones. Perfect gold eyebrows match the two striations on each cheek, markings of honor. The rabbit sniffs again, forepaws surround her upper torso in protection or prayer, stiff cotton tail, stark-still. The air suggests they both are in a moment of meditation or recalibration—for the healer has eons of restorative mending yet to do. Her left eye starts to emit a golden glow as her head tilts up toward a distant sun, beyond all earthly places where she brings compassion and psychic elixir to eager souls. Rabbit knows her mystery magic and remains silent near her glowing emerald waist, waiting for a visitation-- numberless supplicants advancing.  Flow-Through, The Time Marker Series, by Nancy Josephson (USA) 2020-2021 The Time-Markers as told by Nancy Josephson, artist, of Flow-Through, The Time-Markers, busts built during the Covid pandemic of her emotional landscapes Like Damballa in the pantheon of Vodou spirits, I start the pandemic in March 2020 in hope. Building my bust of beads and tangle of snakes in my snood, I think the incarceration will only be two weeks. Although my whitened face is slightly red, my orderly breastplate of tiny white beads and high-necked rhinestone choker suggest serenity: Two more weeks, two more weeks Months go by, and now I am the Fire-Starter, furious that our leaders trade power for compassion. I construct a fierce bust of black beads, a wild spray of golden dreadlock hair, topped with three candles that glow angrily. Hot wax drips from smaller clumps of candles on my shoulders, a sharp sword-like triangle on my neck suggests murder: I want to kill, I want to kill Two years pass, I am coming to New Light, humbled, transformed, but still not calmed. My face an opaque white, small fissures track down my temples to my ears. My hair, a heightened helmet of bead strings underlit by blue-white mini-bulbs. My mouth and bust silenced by netting, I dub myself “Caul.” Infant, crone, priestess: Wait, watch, Wait, watch Wait Lee Woodman Lee Woodman rites that she doesn’t choose a work of art. It chooses her. “From childhood I have been fascinated with artworks and evocative language. I find it strange but thrilling when sculpture beckons, like these stunning Nancy Josephson busts. Then I have to write!” She was honoured to win the 2020 William Meredith Prize for Poetry, 2021 Atlantic Review International Poetry Merit Award, and 2022 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship. Her four published collections: Mindscapes, Poets’ Choice Publishing 2020, Homescapes, Finishing Line Press 2020, Lifescapes, Kelsay Books, 2021, and Artscapes, Shanti Arts, 2022  Horse’s Skull with White Rose, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1931 Bones I think it’s the rose at the crown of the skull that speaks. she makes death dainty this horse with the long head her skin shed long before she propped it up to model for a painting. I think it’s that she died in the desert and let herself be found. I think it’s her loneliness, her white on black. Her duality. I think it’s the curved teeth tilted to the left a bite of the black that does it. I think it’s that I like to think about dying not because I want us to die but because it makes me feel safe prepared for an event marked in pen on my calendar a long-standing invitation most shy away from when circled in red. I think it’s the three holes burrowed in her skull like hands and feet to a cross. I think that it’s not religious but religious in the way that everything is a fake answer to a question like any object we try to name. I think it’s the boldness. I think it’s the shadow that might hide the body or might not. I think it’s the curves that open at the missing eyeballs. I think it’s how whole it is. How plain. ** bouquet i’m looking at the cow skull carried in the hands of my Georgian friends as they walk from an abandoned farm deep in the thrush of my family’s property; someone’s going to bleach it they say someone’s going to take it home to Brooklyn and hope they don’t smell the death by their bed. i’m looking at an invisible body swallowed by the black, maybe never existing at all carried out of the sands and most likely mounted picked to pieces and topped with a floral crown while we make plans to be stored in tight coffins – a million bone portraits that’ll never be made. i need you to understand that i’m protective that even the dead can glow from an eye and wear white to a wedding. i need you to look at it flinch when the skin is sucked from the bone flinch when you see how easily it can be broken flinch when you know the sound of bone in the desert when the sun bakes life into your name. Kasia Merrill Kasia Merrill is a fiction writer based in Maryland. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction International, Breadcrumbs Mag, and The Appalachian Review, and she has been a GRITLit contest honourable mention and a Best of the Net nominee. In 2022, she was selected to be a Peter Taylor fellow for the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop. She is currently at work on her first novel. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
June 2026
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