​The Persistence of Memory
 
Time slides through the slats
of barracks, melts in my hand
in frigid air. I want to slurp it up
in my bowl, but the carcasses 
around me demand its syrup first. It
cannot revive them. Clock
after clock, roll call after
roll call, nothing changes. Day
is night. Night is day. One day
melts to a week, a month,
a year. I think. I don’t know
how long I’ve been here.
I can’t remember a time when
I wasn’t. If I’m not careful,
a dead body will cover me whole,
and then no one will capture
melting minutes. The bare branches
reach out for me, waiting
for my embrace.

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

The war is over, nobody cares what you went through
The blocks of brick barracks in neat Teutonic rows
Minutes, hours, days, years melted in gutted fish
Bullets
Bullets
Bullets
Memory breaks down into pellets
The mortar only grains of sand
Does anyone remember the slaves who built the pyramids?
The slaves who crafted the bullets?
The slaves impaled on electric fences?
A great hammock lies across the Atlantic,
Lean and taut, no room for explanation or questions.

Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured previously in The Ekphrastic Review, Here, Caesura, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey and can be found at www.barbarakrasner.com.

​Odysseus and Ithaca 
 
I am only as good as my word 
which is a bond, I’ve been told, keeping us 
here, you and me, tethered together 
like Odysseus and Ithaca.
 
Let me take the long way 
to my point — it was never the wife 
he hoped to find again, but the home 
that raised him, its familiar corners 
from which he sailed long before. 
 
He was a different man 
when he touched those shores again, 
and this was a different beach, 
with different rocks which over decades
had been emulsified into something
smaller and more pliable. 
 
He swears there was a reason he didn’t return 
sooner — he lists the obstacles, promises 
their credibility, but it won’t change 
that home is different now 
 
and always would be. 
From the second you left 
 
it would never be the same 
whether you came back in two years 
or twenty, 
 
which is all to say — you cannot keep it, the moment
already passed and become memory, 
muddled with time like a story 
 
told a million ways. Tell me the long way, 
the one that takes a while to arrive 
and I’ll consider the following: 
there was never a before to go back to

Emily Zogbi

Emily Zogbi is a writer and poet from Long Island.

Join us for the epic event of the year.
You won't be sorry. It is wild, exhilarating, exhausting and wonderful.
A day of pure creation. Play. Brainstorming. 
​Join us on Sunday, or do it on your own time over the following weeks.
This year, to celebrate ten years of The Ekphrastic Review, an optional Champagne Party follows the marathon on zoom.
Details are below.

Perfect Ten: an Ekphrastic Marathon
 
Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating ten years of The Ekphrastic Review. 
 
Join us on Sunday, July 13 2025 for our  annual ekphrastic marathon. This year we are celebrating ten years!!!!!

This is an all -day creative writing event that we do independently, together.

Take the plunge and see what happens!
 
Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone.
 
We will gather in a specially created Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. 
 
Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, before the deadline for submission. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2025). 
 
Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site.
 
One poem and one flash fiction will win $100 CAD each.
 
Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year!
 
Marathon: Sunday July 13, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks)
(For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 13, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.)

Champagne Party: at 6.05 pm until 7. 30 on Sunday, July 13, join participants on Zoom to celebrate an exhilarating day. Bring Champagne, wine, or a pot of tea. We'll have words from The Ekphrastic Review, conversation as a chance to connect with community, and some optional readings from your work in the marathon.   
 
Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2025
Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less
 
Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 15 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors.

If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll sign you up. 
​
Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September.

​Sign up below!

The Invitation of Pastel

Pale and light in colour. Even a shadow
Of the filling station's mauve
In front of the pump. You could say
The place is relieved of primary colour,
Unburdened under the sun. It is
Either the end of things or a step
Into a new world. The great Southwest,
A little dog beside a forties car. A pool
Of light on the turf in little Raton.
Here there is a quiet choice:
Saturate the scene, pour yourself
Into the picture, colour it over
With your fascinating darkness.
Or listen to the restraint 
Of the vast terrain, make yourself
As small and absent as you can,
Give the light its head, its choice
Of breath or breathlessness.
Accept the invitation of pastel.

David M. Katz the author of five books of poetry--The Biographer, In Praise of Manhattan, Stanzas on Oz, and Claims of Home, all published by Dos Madres Press, and The Warrior in the Forest (House of Keys). Poems of his have appeared in Able Muse, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere. He is a co-host of the Morningside Poetry Series in Manhattan and posts frequently on his website, The David M. Katz Poetry Blog. He recently starred in Gully's Paradise, a feature-length film by Shalom Gorewitz.

Thinking of Bertha as I Gaze at Paul Signac

upon viewing The Pine Tree at St. Tropez by Paul Signac
​
I must have been eight or nine when I first explored my grandmother’s dressing room, a concave wall of built-in cupboards and drawers shut tight, adorned with transom windows above and tufted benches below.  A long mirror covering the mauve-coloured wall space centered in-between. This was her secret place, and it became my playground. There were spaces just for shoes, drawers for bras and silk panties, and long closets where dresses hung in disarray like tangled tree vines. There I tried on her red spiked shoes (they swallowed my small feet) and her black opera gloves, designed to extend in smooth seduction from each hand to each forearm, instead covering my miniature arms beyond the very top of my imperceptible shoulders. And her ornate fringed shawls of yellow and turquoise that would cover me whole like a wild animal’s skin. Grandma owned many dress slips of differing lengths (do these even now exist?), some white, some black, some in colours I only learned the names of many years later: lipstick red, coral, cornflower and bronze champagne.  
 
She would let me enter this special place, to do what I liked, and I would make my magic there, trying on any piece of clothing I wished, so long as I was careful and made the effort to put back what I had gathered. The room easily filled with sunlight. And I cannot forget the carpet, as it was pink. Not a bright pink or pastel, but a muted maroony pink that you might call a shade of strawberry.  Even the walls of the bedroom she shared with my grandfather were that pink, yes… about the same shade as the carpet below.

Perhaps my grandmother, having learned early that life can shatter you, chose colour so as not to dwell in the dark spaces. Her father had died from tuberculosis when she was 12, or so I remember being told this from some family member (perhaps my grandfather) at a time when I could not fully appreciate the meaning of death.  I did not learn the details of what next happened, other than my grandmother having no choice but to find a job to help the family survive. I know colour can heal us. Colour can be a choice, to restore hope, to make room for delight. My grandparents lived in the house with that wondrous room for more than fifty years. I like to believe that she surrounded herself with rainbows if only to lift her heart high and dull the pain of a childhood she could not enjoy.

As I explore the colours of Signac’s painting, his unnatural world first shocks me. How can there be blue and purple leaves on trees and green scales of sky? What compelled him to rearrange the expected, to reinvent what should be earthy hues: the browns, the muddy oranges, the forest greens, the greys of the world? Perhaps he found some solace in altering his reality. Perhaps, like my grandmother, he experienced the near erasure of all colour from his life, compelling him to recreate what he knew.  And to bring more colour back, to bring it everywhere. To create vibrancy, however and wherever possible. I wished I had asked my grandmother, before she eventually lay shriveled in her hospital bed almost two decades later: why the red so glamorous, why the coral like fire?

Marna Brown-Krausz

​​Marna Brown-Krausz is in Fairfield University's MFA in Creative Writing program, and is a reader for Brevity.

Green Man

Indistinct shapes hover 
on a canvas of primary colours
as mellow notes drift 
from a distant saxophone.

Lights reflect on wet streets,
and in the margins,
a green man waits.

Throbbing, portentous thoughts 
mix with the patter of raindrops.

The appearance of his spirit 
illuminates the shadows 
with a transient flash of luminosity.

Brooding uncertainty is replaced 
with the scent of sunflowers.

I hear footsteps fade away. 
I look again and he is gone.

Henry Bladon

​Henry Bladon is a poet, writer and mental health essayist based in Somerset in the UK. He has appeared previously in The Ekphrastic Review.

​The Cancer I Don’t Write About
 
Like Dali’s wife, Gala, I too had uterine cancer
wrenched by robotic arms from my body--
uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes—a total loss
of fifteen ounces of tools and platforms
no longer needed. 
 
I did not feel any blood. I did not feel 
piercing rose thorns or scalpel blades. 
I thought I might feel less
like a woman, but I didn’t. 
 
I wanted to rock-block those cancer cells 
like those combative robot toys 
of the 1970s. I had nothing to hold on to
except my doctor’s promises and my son’s
unconditional devotion to buying me action
figure Ben of the Fantastic Four. Because
I was going to beat this, beat the cancer rock
to a pulp and let it drip like days-old coffee
out of my body without gaze.

Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured previously in The Ekphrastic Review, Here, Caesura, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey and can be found at www.barbarakrasner.com.