Bit of White China
Flash goes the camera but the cat is immune. Facing more or less our way, she gazes past us into a room where her eyes provide the only light. The cat sits on a tabletop, ginger fur pressed to bare wood. And another presence, a jade plant. The colour green made its first earthly appearance in the leaves of such a plant. The cat ignores this thought and gazes within with jade green eyes. Near the plant’s base a bit of white china, shaped more or less like a cat. A work of art. Ears up, on the run. Marjorie Power Marjorie Power’s poetry collection, SEVEN PARTS WOMAN, is forthcoming in September from WordTech Editions. Her poems appear in one previous full length collection and six chapbooks, all from small presses, as well as many journals and anthologies. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband. They have six grandchildren.
0 Comments
There Is No Killing What Can’t Be Killed
Pull off a butterfly’s wings and crush its body in your hand; poison the water and the air with plastic bottles and pesticides, but there is no killing what can’s be killed. Watch at your leisure the picador’s lance and the matador’s taunts and final thrust; drink the water from a tainted well filled to the brim with arsenic and lead, but there is no killing what can’t be killed. Slay the dragons shoot geese from blinds lay the pipelines and fracture the earth but there is no killing what can’t be killed. Neil Ellman Neil Ellman, a poet from New Jersey, has published more than 1,200 poems, most of which are ekphrastic and based on works of modern art, in print and online journals, anthologies and chapbooks throughout the world. His latest chapbook, Mind Over Matta (Flutter Press), is based on the works of the Chilean abstract-surrealist, Roberto Matta Echaurren. Beauty in Broken Pieces...
Perhaps it was once a deep blue vase, holding seven pale pink peonies freshly cut one May morning… the silence shattered suddenly when she lost her balance, grabbed the oval table and together crashed down, one in splintered pieces, the other dazed watching the water slowly spread under the petals. Or perhaps… it was packed away in a doctor’s study, an old cabinet filled with bottles… cobalt blue bottles with faded labels, the dark blue hinting of hidden secrets, dangers that lay in long-dried residue of those bottles that were shattered and thrown upon a fire that raged for hours, flaring up in vivid hues of acid green and mustard yellow, tipped with amber, azure and moon, the air once heavy with poison and dreams. Or…maybe there was no story. Do you believe the whole really is bigger than the sum of its parts? And please, don’t let’s forget there is always perspective. Large things are large, but small things are also large if seen close up. It is lovely, this small mosaic made of glass in shades of blue, blue so dark, it might still hold the sound of the ocean from the sand that washed up and back over and over dancing on the ocean floor before it became the glass we see… for what is glass but sand and fire, beach and star even a simple spiral mosaic in shades of blue and silver might hold the deep bass song of the darkling ocean, the glimmering whispers of clouds above, patterns spiraling through nature like our thoughts about beauty, reality or memory’s truth Fibonacci gave it his name, the Greeks gave it meaning with their golden ratio… it exists everywhere … a simple nautilus shell, the sunflower’s seed head that turns to the sun, and following its cue, the pinecone, the hurricane, even the galaxy, the cosmos and here with this Irish glass spiral we come full circle of a woman with camera, snapping a photo, capturing the balance of silvery bits to blue done just so . Mary Kendall This poem first appeared on Mary Kendall's poetry site, A Poet in Time. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her current work and publications can be found on her writing blog, A Poet in Time (www.apoetintime.com). She is the author of a chapbook, Erasing the Doubt (2015) and co-author of A Giving Garden (2009). Van Gogh: Road with Men Walking, Carriage, Cypress, Star and Crescent Moon Vincent’s night is never night. He drinks the darkness, tosses a burning tumbleweed into the sky, sets cane fields ablaze against the dark flame of a cypress – the road a silver stream. Vincent’s quiet is never quiet. The moon cups an ear to hear the muffled French of men making their way home, the sound not eclipsed by the slow hooves of a horse but by the screams that reach our eyes in every brush stroke. Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia in the first class admitting women. She became fascinated by fine art at an early age, even though she had to go to the World Book Encyclopedia to find it. Today she visits museums everywhere she travels and spends time at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, where her husband is a volunteer guide. Alarie’s poetry book, Running Counterclockwise, contains many ekphrastic poems. Please visit her at alariepoet.com. Cassatt
1. Tired of Bonaparte with a face plumped with flattery, tired of Queen Victoria’s stony stare, she craved a subtle narrative. The artist arrives with a canvas, an easel, a palette, brushes, and a cloak caked with dry paint, fabric of fixed comet tails, to watch the mother dust, cook, feed, and sew or do whatever mothers do. The girl twirls around her, asking about paint and could she hold the brushes, mix the colours? Other children run in and out, while the mother tends to one, then to the house, then to the next child with a hummingbird’s quick precision. The artist thinks she will paint her with a bird’s slim head, elegantly feathered. 2. It’s easy to mistake this for devotion: The child anchors her weight to her mother’s thighs. The mother scrubs dirt from her daughter’s feet. Calm although her dress bruises with watermarks, she cleans the child’s limbs slowly as if polishing silver. Now imagine a cool evening draft, the fire gone out. 3. The painter sees rivers: wallpaper blurs with rivers, rivers course down the mother’s dress into the basin. She hears rivers: the trickle of water from the sponge, the girl’s light giggle. 4. The mother names every tendon and muscle, notes every birthmark and dimple under her breath as she did the day her daughter was born. 5. Propelled not by gravity, but exigency, she begged the baby to leave her body and not break it. Hours later, the baby cried, and climbed to meet her mother’s scent. 6. The river runs into a garden: rose in the mother’s dress, roses on the wall, rose in the rug, rose in the pitcher, rose in the hue of their skin, rose in the rim of the basin. 7. A vacancy, her flaccid torso. After the midwives took the baby to be weighed and measured, the mother plunged her hands in water, reclaimed her body with a soft sponge. 8. The painter finds the mother’s eyes. They dart from the child’s body to the rug to the wall to the fireplace to her feet to the hearth, to the children, then flicker in the basin water like stones on the bottom of a lake. 9. The mother sees stillness. She wants the water to cover her, to course over her body and hold her. She dreams of falling into the painting. She finds her reflection swimming in the basin, a dim minnow in a shallow pond. 10. The artist mixes whites and browns. She paints the basin over and over. Her brush siphons colour from air. More blue, some grey, some pink, and rose. Bristles splinter and fall. She evokes eyes stirring below the surface: The mother’s eyes rise then disappear. 11. The mother strokes her daughter’s foot, steals a glimpse of naked tree branches offering prayers to a gunmetal sky. 13. She hears the sudden hiss of water trembling over a pot. Wood-shock of the door closing. Catherine Prescott Catherine Prescott is the author of the chapbook The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have recently appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cumberland River Review, Linebreak, MiPOesias, Poetry East, Rattle, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU. Catherine lives with her husband and three school-age children in Miami Beach, Florida, where she teaches poetry workshops, runs a copyediting business, and grows school gardens. www.catherineprescott.net Eros at the Train Station
There are trains at night stopping at stations, abandoned by switching yards, immersed in a deafening silence. Nobody listens to them but me. I am standing on the platform wearing a red coat, naked as a skeleton underneath. A solitary “Nude Bathing in the Moonlight,” awaiting a lover who never arrives on time. The station-master’s home is all lit up, the moon is a tightrope walker on the cable, and I keep lying to myself. Maybe Love has fallen asleep in one of the carriages. From the poles shadows fall in lines. I roll them up as a ball of wool and knit myself a warm gray heart. Eros has deserted me, one more time, tonight. Alessandra Bava Alessandra Bava is a poet and a translator living in the Eternal city. She is the author of 4 chapbooks: Guerrilla Blues, Nocturne, They Talk About Death and Diagnosis. Her poems and translations have appeared in Gargoyle, Plath Profiles, THRUSH and Waxwing, among others. She has a new chapbook coming out from dancing girl press as well as her first poetry collection in Italian later this year all while she keeps working on the biography of a contemporary American poet. Bleeding Heart
She died of a broken heart, they said, abandoned by her lover, no words, just a scribbled note. She crumpled it and sobbed softly in the darkness, so broken she could not speak, too weak to stand, too empty to care.This was her life now, her heart bleeding, her mere essence as fetid now as the fruit she ate until sick. Day after day she waited for him, losing count of sunrises, peeking through ivory lace curtains until moonrise, slipping now and then into dreams of him there, holding her, his warm chest against hers, their heartbeats as one, like sweet chords. He stroked her hair lovingly, swept strands gently from her face, so he could look into her beautiful eyes that shined like sapphires. He had always told her that. And in the calm of his strong arms, her shivering stopped. Except dreams lie and hearts break and blood drains and pain lingers. Weeks passed before they found her, tearless and peaceful, on the floor by the window, curtains drawn. They said her heart had given out. They didn’t know. Hearts don’t talk. They just bleed. Shelly Blankman This poem was written in response to a Weekly Prompt. Shelly and her husband, Jon, live in Columbia, MD sharing their home with 4 cat rescues. Writing poetry is a passion for her, when she is not doing scrapbooking or cardmaking. Shelly is the mother of Richard, 31, who lives in NYC and Joshua, 29, who lives in San Antonio, Texas. They are the prides of her life. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you. Join us on Facebook:
Tickled Pink Contest
April 2024
|