Fate
These sombre shades stand by like broken effigies. Scooped out, expressionless: five icons of fatigue. It’s not the nakedness that shocks you, but the dull compliance, staring out across a century of perpetuity. Waiting, with their lush curves, harsh lines, eyes widened, thick with flesh: a hand up there, a chiselled nose, a mask of ancient womanhood, an elbow, breast, thick thighs, and yet the edges stick – a curl of burn that presses in, encapsulates their umber form, their solid state – in limbo in the world, exposed, for what? Like mermaids sculpted out of plasticine, existing out of time, they gaze back at your own ungainly frame, caged-in like pigeons, on all sides, awaiting the inevitable fate: more of the same. Rachel Carney Rachel Carney lives in Wales, in the UK, where she is currently studying an MA in Creative Writing alongside her day job. She’s had poems published in a few journals including Sarasvati Magazine, the Open Mouse and the High Window Journal. She is also a book blogger at www.createdtoread.com and has had articles published in Wales Arts Review, the Welsh Agenda magazine and The Poetry School website.
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Haiku
barren trees and the winter of things - silence sweeps the land Dan Franch Originally from Chicago, Dan Franch currently resides in the country of Estonia. Currently a language teacher in Estonia, he has traveled extensively, has lived in six countries, and has had a wide variety of random life experiences. Restless by nature, Dan is doing his best to settle into an extended stay in his children's homeland. Virginia Woolf’s Walking Cane at the New York Public Library
I should be in Hyde Park Gate, or Monk’s House, or St. Ives, or with Vanessa’s grandchildren, who remember us, gladly, the strolls we took, there was rhythm in your long stride, we made our own waves —one two three, one two three, our tips clicking down the stairs of your Bloomsbury flat. On our final walk, you raced me to the river Ouse, your pockets bulging with rocks. I was all that floated that day. Someone found me, returned me to Leonard, he kept me until he couldn’t, then, like you, set me free. But here I am, in a glass case, the top half of a question mark, still bearing your weight. Joanne Rocky Delaplaine Joanne Rocky Delaplaine’s first full-length poetry book The Local World, will be published in 2019. Her poems have appeared or will be forthcoming in Poet Lore, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Innisfree Poetry Journal, International Literary Quarterly, The Northern Virginia Review, Potomac Review, Free State Review, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. Her poems have won Best of the Net (2015) and first place in the Bethesda Literary Festival Poetry Contest, 2014. She co-directs the Café Muse poetry-reading series in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and teaches Iyengar yoga with a specialty in back care. Unpacking the Batik Painting When I returned from Indonesia in January of 1970, my house in Kota Belud, Sabah, Malaysia smelled musty. Mold grows quickly in North Borneo when rooms are left closed and unaired, and I had been away during almost two months of school vacation. I had completed over half of my two-year assignment as a Canadian volunteer teacher at Kota Belud’s secondary school. I really missed Rebecca, my traveling companion in Indonesian. Before flying to Singapore, I had dropped in to see her at her school in Sarawak and invited her to join me in Central Java, after her classes ended. I had been somewhat surprised by her spontaneous acceptance. I played my new Bob Dylan LPs on my little record player—“Girl from the North Country” and “Lay Lady Lay.” The songs brought back my time with her. While the music played, I unpacked and sorted my belongings. I took out the only cultural memorabilia I had collected along the way, a batik cloth painting purchased in Indonesia, which I unfolded and tacked to the living room wall. It was bright yellow-orange on a black background—more shocking than I’d remembered—with the artist’s name and date inscribed in the bottom righthand corner: “Bambongodoro Wokidjo 1969.” As I stared at the painting, the whirling ceiling fan caused it to shudder and come to life. Its intricate elements rippled, stirring up my experiences during the past few weeks. The four-legged beast at its center, lurched downward. Another beast’s head, emerging from the upper left, had cat-like whiskers and scary eyes, but both had ears like delicate butterflies. Strange fish-like creatures with ornamental tails flew in the dark sky. Detached eyes and volcano-like formations erupted in winged patterns. Streams of a blood-like lava oozed downwards. The whole scene flowed counter-clockwise, chaos emerging into a kind of symmetry; pockets of stars pulling me inwards towards black spaces of unpacked memories. *** Just a few weeks earlier, I had been lying on a straw mat on the deck of a freighter, gazing at the stars. I could see the Southern Cross near the horizon. European explorers of long ago, the first to venture into the southern hemisphere, discovered this constellation as guidance in navigating these waters, where they could no longer sight the North Star and Big Dipper. For me, as for them, it was a beacon in the night sky, inviting me southwards into the unknown. The all-Indonesian crew had fed me well and seen to my bedding needs. I only needed a sheet over me with a light blanket on standby. I grew sleepy, rocked by the waves of the South China Sea meeting the Java Sea. A warm breeze blew off Sumatra towards Borneo, enveloping me. In the morning, the sweet smell of clove-scented cigarettes woke me, almost certainly Dji-sam-soe 234, the most popular brand in Indonesia at the time. I got up to view our progress from the bow. We had left Singapore the previous morning and were now well south of the equator, bound for Tanjung Priok, the port serving Jakarta, Indonesia. As we sailed further south, I got to know the freighter’s crew. I had started to converse with them in my basic Malay the day before. Malaysian and Indonesian are derived from the same root language but some words have different meanings, providing puzzlement and humour in our exchanges. Before we reached the port, I took a group photo of the crew and exchanged addresses. They asked me where I would be staying in Jakarta. They became concerned with my answer, “Saya tidak tahu,” I don’t know. For them, only vagrants or homeless people wouldn’t know where they were going to sleep. To reassure them, I told them I had the address of a youth hostel in Jakarta, which a traveler in Singapore had recommended. The ship docked in Priok and we said our goodbyes. I walked towards a group of bemo drivers, all competing for my attention. Bemo are three-wheel scooter taxis for longer distances. I took the first one and showed my driver the hostel address. We were off with much smoke and fury, an unpleasant contrast to the pure sea air I had just left. Jakarta was a city of chaos. Driving an ordinary car through this confusion would have been a very specialized job. My bemo hit a wall of bechak, trishaws in which passengers sat in front, as if it was their duty to act as buttresses to oncoming traffic. When I arrived at the youth hostel, I met a student, Jamil, a handsome guy in his early twenties. He introduced me to Jamsudin, the more senior of the two. I couldn’t really figure out who owned the facility or how it ran. They didn’t have a register; in fact, they didn’t assign a specific room to me. I don’t recall meeting any other guests, but when I asked them where I could sleep, I was taken to a poorly-screened verandah at the back, where they showed me an old wooden door resting on two sawhorses. I was careful not to show any disappointment; after all, how could a poor traveler look such “gift horses” in the mouth? They didn’t provide a mattress, not even a pad, nor a mosquito net. At least I would be dry in case of rain, I thought to myself. In the evening, we went out together to a night market for some curry and rice. The market was filthy, garbage strewn all around. I was sure I would get diarrhea from this hospitality but I felt compelled to accompany my friendly hosts. I probed a bit into what it was they did, what they were studying, and where they came from in Indonesia. They told me they were both from Jakarta, itself, but remained vague about their activities. They briefly mentioned the 1965-66 right-wing coup and revolution the country had gone through, but I couldn’t figure out their opinion of or role in this upheaval. After eating, we wandered through the streets and they took me to a one-story house surrounded by a wall. It was full of young Indonesian girls. At first, I thought they were sisters or cousins. We joked and laughed and drank some beer with them and the older “aunty” who was present. We sat on some plastic chairs in the outside hard dirt compound and passed around a joint of marijuana, called ganja. I got a little high. In spite of my state, or perhaps due to my increased acuity, I soon realized it was a brothel and that I was being matched with one of the “sisters.” She was just as attractive as I was sexually frustrated. Besides, I felt I couldn’t refuse my new friends’ hospitality, lest I offend. Jamil and Jamsudin also went off to separate rooms with a couple of girls. It seemed like they were just following a frequent pattern. Making love with this girl was mechanical and unfulfilling. It was over in a minute and I was out of there. As I emerged, I immediately regretted it. The brothel didn’t have any condoms and I wasn’t prepared. I knew I could get gonorrhoea or some other sexually-transmitted disease from this encounter. I can’t remember who paid—probably my new friends. My own payment was yet to come. When we returned to the hostel, I told Jamsudin and Jamil that I was tired and would go to sleep. Jamil casually said, “You’re safe with us.” In unison they suddenly brandished their pistols, grinning ear to ear. Alarm bells rang in my brain. What had I gotten into with these guys? I could have kicked myself for being so naïve. Most law-abiding people didn’t own handguns in Malaysia or Canada, and I doubted if they were allowed in Indonesia. Since it was too late to find other accommodation and probably too dangerous to go out alone in the dark, I kept my cool and went to my “room and board.” That night, different scenarios darted around in my head as I drifted in a state of semi-consciousness with the sounds of Jakarta traffic, the scuffles of distant dogs, and the drone of mosquitoes penetrating the warm, polluted air. Towards dawn, roosters warned me more than thrice. Signs of my impending doom? At the time, open wounds remained on the land and Indonesia’s psyche. Only three years had passed since a band of rightwing generals had overthrown President Sukarno’s nationalist government. With the help of the CIA and State Department, the American military had educated and trained these rebels who were led by General Suharto. He had taken over as President. Clearly, Sukarno had been too nationalistic, too leftist, and too friendly with Communist China for American tastes in an era when the “Domino Theory” was still in vogue. Americans believed that if Vietnam was lost to Communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow suit. The assassination of six rightwing generals by Sukarno’s supporters in the Indonesian army led to counteraction from the right, pitting opposition parties, anti-communists, and right-wing Muslims—including militant youth groups—against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its national apparatus from the top down to the village level. Terrifying beasts lurched through the land. Many people were accused, rounded up by gangs, and imprisoned without trial. Between half a million to a million men, women, and children were shot, decapitated with swords, or hacked to death with long knives, called parangs. Village forces, in consort with the paramilitary Komando Aksi, executed people in a systematic way, bringing thirty to fifty victims at a time to designated places, often riverbanks, to be slaughtered like cattle or goats during the night. The rivers of Indonesia flowed with blood, body parts, and the putrid remains of corpses. Only a scourge of crickets sang about these deadly deeds. Most people remain silent to this day. In the morning, Jamil and Jamsudin offered me a breakfast consisting of egg curry with roti, a flat pan-fried bread. They seemed quite normal, with no signs of hostility or intention to harm or rob me. I didn’t know a lot about the situation in Jakarta, but I concluded there must still be active factions within the student population and their pistols were some sort of insurance. For the next couple of days, I explored the city, staying out long enough in the evening to avoid being pressured to return to their brothel. I had a few meals in a modern hotel, a little too expensive for me, but I couldn’t afford getting sick. Jakarta was a dingy, dirty, disorganized place—garbage strewn everywhere. The water in its canals moved ever so slowly through cesspools of paper, plastic bags, feces, dead animals, offal, and oil. After three nights with Jamil and Jamsudin at the student hostel, I took a morning train to Yogyakarta in Central Java, a scenic ride which cleansed my mind of the grime of Jakarta. Rebecca, coming from Sarawak via Singapore, flew into Yogyakarta airport. She was attractive, cute actually, with short dark hair and long legs—taller than most Indonesian men. She also looked fit and able to take care of herself. But at the time, it was considered unsafe for women—especially Western women—to travel alone in Indonesia. Many Indonesian men generalized from the behaviour of female film stars in Hollywood movies and assumed Western women were loose and available. Our first destination was Mount Merapi, a name which means “the one that makes fire” in old Javanese. It’s an active volcano in Central Java near the City of Yogyakarta. Merapi erupts, on average, every five years, according to records dating back to the 1500s. The last eruption had taken place five years before our visit, but we were told there would be signs if it wasn’t safe enough for us to explore with a guide. Looking down from the top of the crater, the cauldron radiated much heat and stank like rotten eggs. The boiling orange pot and shooting streams of lava reminded me of the volatility of this country. The killings in some parts of Java had only ended a year before our visit. After descending from the crater top, we took a taxi to the nearby ancient Buddhist temple complex of Borobudur. We carried a tourist brochure with us—“Borobudur Temple Compounds”—to understand the layout and history. The temple had been built during the 8th and 9th centuries C.E., after Eastern Indian traders and missionaries brought Mahayana Buddhism to the island. But volcanic eruptions had necessitated moving the seat of the empire, and gradually, the temple complex was covered by volcanic ash and then jungle, lost to memory with the coming of Islam in the 1500s. The Dutch completely unearthed it by 1835 and the work continued during our visit by the Government of Indonesia. I had purchased some ganja from Jamil in Jakarta (one of his income-generating sidelines, I concluded) and decided to bring it along for our excursion. We smoked some before we entered the temple complex, a giant hill of elaborately carved stone. Borobudur’s floor plan is like a huge mandala, a physical representation of the spiritual universe. Pure symmetry. For a couple of hours, Rebecca and I wandered in silence, feeling at peace. The stone reliefs spelled out the law of karma, the birth and life of Gautama Buddha, and his search for enlightenment, which I had studied. We progressed from kamadhatu, “the world of desires” to rupadhatu, “the world of forms,” finally arriving at arupadhatu, “the formless world.” I knew that the Buddha’s final destination was the ocean of nirvana, a pure, liberated state, void of self; however, this was the first time I had experienced these ideas without the encumbrance of analytical thought. For a couple of hours, we floated, thankfully without a guide, meandering through the many statues and stupas until nearly sunset. These experiences brought Rebecca and me closer. We talked and laughed a lot, comparing our boring North American culture to this exotic place. We sat close together while taking a bus back to our hotel in Yogyakarta. We were both hungry and went out to eat and to shop. It was then that I impulsively bought the batik painting at a local art store. It was in the shop that a new kind of “volcanic eruption” began. I had felt mild pings of pain during the day, but now the wicked beasts of gonorrhoea had come down upon me, a full-frontal attack. Rebecca and I were sharing the same hotel room, and as we exited the shop I confessed my problem to her. She was really cool about it, kind of matter of fact. I took her back to our hotel in bechak, and then told the driver to take me to a clinic. The Indonesian medical staff I met were equally cool. They knew the symptoms well—just jabbed me in the rear with a shot of penicillin, and sold me a course of penicillin pills to take for the next ten days. In the meantime, they told me to avoid sex. This was a very depressing development for a young man traveling with a beautiful woman. I knew Rebecca had another guy on her mind, but before my embarrassing situation arose, I was privately wondering if she might want to make love with me. I had really blown it. How stupid could I be? Fortunately, she didn’t express any disgust, just laughed it off. I had to become Buddha-like and quell my passions—focusing on talking and enjoying the architecture, art, food, and people of the land in which we were temporary guests. From Yogyakarta, we traveled by train to Surabaya, took a bus to Ketapang, and a quick ferry to Gilimanuk on the island of Bali. We rode on the back of a truck to Denpasar, where we stayed in a very cheap guest house on the beach. We swam and walked, searching for sea shells. Our visit took place long before major hotel chains and package tours invaded Bali. Food was very affordable and tasty; people friendly and welcoming, no hustling or pressure to buy. It was a “take it or leave it” place: “Do join us but please don’t disrupt our way of life.” The appearance of the land belied Bali’s turbulent history: Early humanoid migration followed by Austronesian peoples seeking its rich volcanic soils for their rice and fruit trees; Indian traders and missionaries; the establishment of Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms; the arrival of traders from China; and centuries of domination by Javanese and Muslim sultanates. Then, in the early 1800s, and in quick succession: the Dutch alongside the French, the English, followed by the Dutch again in 1816. During the next century, the Netherlands gradually consolidated their control over the whole Indonesian archipelago, including Bali, where they fought local rulers under the pretext of controlling the smuggling of arms, opium, and slaves. Then, Japan invaded in 1942 and carried out equally brutal occupation policies. Bali, along with the rest of Indonesia, was returned to Dutch control in 1945, when the Japanese were defeated. But by then the people had suffered enough and they reignited their anti-colonial struggle in-earnest, finally gaining independence within the Republic of Indonesia in 1949. However, the island was not saved from the horror-filled, anti-communist killing spree that had decimated Java and Sumatra during the years of 1965-66. This violent history mirrored Bali’s many layers of volcanic soil. In 1963, Mount Agung had exploded after a hundred years of slumber, destroying many villages, and killing more than a thousand people. At least twenty-five significant volcanoes were still active at the time of our visit. Rebecca and I rented a motorcycle and ventured into the volcanic hinterland by day, visiting vibrant villages and Hindu temples, both old and new. People smiled and waved, including confidently bare-breasted women surrounded by multi-coloured flowers and birds, palm trees, and ferns—visions of the Garden of Eden before the fall. Children, we remarked, seemed to be everywhere—an overabundance of human fertility too. We were reluctant to leave Bali when our time was up, but boarded a flight to Singapore. I completed a large counter-clockwise circle of over 2,000 miles (3,218 km) —from Singapore to Jakarta, through Java to Bali, and back to Singapore again. By that time, I had also completed my course of penicillin and the beasts within me had been quelled. During that last night, Rebecca and I finally made love, the climax—so to speak—of a memorable, if somewhat frustrating, journey. I didn’t know then, and never found out, what her motives were. Did she feel anything more than friendship for me? Had our relationship grown to the point where she was forgetting about the other guy? Afterwards, I felt that night may have been only a reward for my role as a good traveling companion—just a pat on the back. The next day, I boarded another flight to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, and then drove my motorcycle to Kota Belud. Rebecca had a shorter flight and bus ride to her post in Sarawak. In spite of my doubts about her, I already missed Rebecca a lot. Being so close to a woman on a similar wavelength, and then returning to my isolated town of Kota Belud, was an immediate downer. But I had to be realistic. We were based far away from each other and had our teaching assignments to finish. Letters would be our only connection. *** I woke up in my comfortable chair in Kota Belud, the batik creation before me—its beasts and the blood they sought, the volcanoes and explosions of stars. The music had stopped long ago, the needle returned to its resting place. My little bungalow was completely still. Eerie, actually. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep, feeling some panic. I got up, put on my shorts and a shirt. I slipped on my thongs, walked up the road and around the corner. Looking south, towards the solid silhouette of Mount Kinabalu, I searched the horizon for the Southern Cross but I was too far north. Other stars framed the mountain and a warm breeze coming from its direction, touched my face. I could only hear the familiar cheers of crickets and the muffled sound of water buffalo munching on grass down the road. My pulse subsided. I had returned from chaos back to symmetry. Neill McKee This story is adapted from Chapter 9 of Neill McKee’s first travel memoir, Finding Myself in Borneo, https://www.neillmckeeauthor.com/buy-the-book, which won a bronze medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, 2020; the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards 2019 for non-regional Biography / Autobiography / Memoir; and a Readers' Favorite Awards 2019 in the travel book category. Neill McKee is a Canadian creative nonfiction writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, https://www.neillmckeeauthor.com/. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree, from the University of Calgary and a Master’s Degree in Communication from Florida State University. McKee worked internationally for 45 years, becoming an expert in the field of communication for social change. He directed and produced a number of award-winning documentary films/videos and multimedia initiatives, and has written numerous articles and books in the field of development communication. During his international career, McKee worked for Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO); Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC); UNICEF; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland; Academy for Educational Development and FHI 360, Washington, DC. He worked and lived in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, and Russia for a total of 18 years and traveled to over 80 countries on short-term assignments. In 2015, he settled in New Mexico, using his varied experiences, memories, and imagination in creative writing. Max Beckmann, Self Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927 "It is my fortune, or misfortune, that I can see neither all in black nor all in white. One vision alone would be much simpler and clearer, but then it would not exist.” Max Beckmann Facing you, my audience, with this impassive frontal stare, I am twentieth century Mittel Europa’s flower, man of the hour, not poor bare unaccommodated man, but the thing itself, civilized product of the culture of a continent. Composed, in a stance of command, I am the owner of my face. My suit is armour, the drawing room’s armour, salon’s, the city’s. Promethean man, I am owner of fire; the cigarette in my hand tells you I command it. There is nothing ambiguous about these statements. They are declared in the black and white blocks of colour in my portrait, black tux, white evening shirt, black tie, the black and white patches of shadow and light on my face, hands, white dash of cigarette, blocks of colour that define my absolute authority, unquestioned, unquestionable. Have I given you enough reasons to question? Sandra Kohler Sandra Kohler is a poet and teacher. Her third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of the 2002 Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many others over the past 40 years. Dusk at Baie des Anges, 1932 poem based on an excerpt of the painting Dufy studied couleur-lumière, the effect of light on colour, turned the Mediterranean into a pool of flat cerulean. No wind riffles the water; this is sea as satin tablecloth or slab of marble. That smooth. That cool. Here in Virginia, blue jays have been interrupting my morning with their imperious squawks. Their feathers, the blue fire of the Côte d’Azur in summer. In Dufy’s oils, the sky sings hyacinthine. There is no motion; even the lone palm on the right hand side of the painting holds its breath. The figures in the foreground are poised, waiting for night to come down and paint them midnight, cold steel, indigo. . . . Barbara Crooker This poem is from the author's book, Les Fauves, C&R Press, 2017. Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and has published eight full collections and twelve chapbooks. Her latest book is Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017). She has won a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. A VCCA fellow, she has published widely in such journals as Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Green Mountains Review, The Denver Quarterly, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. website: www.barbaracrooker.com Gold Leaf
Audacious to lure the eye from the holy hours to the hungry vine, fruits entangle, gleam, name the edge, the end of words, begin: A absorbed by acanthus, apples, a monk with an ax, Anthony atop a demon, what grows given half a chance, a thumbnail of dirt, as every wall succumbs to hunger, will fall to the wrenching or amorous arms wrought by a seed. Marilyn McCabe Marilyn McCabe’s book of poems Glass Factory was published by The Word Works in 2016. Her poem “On Hearing the Call to Prayer Over the Marcellus Shale on Easter Morning” was awarded A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize. Her book of poetry Perpetual Motion was published by The Word Works in 2012 as the winner of the Hilary Tham Capitol Collection contest. A grant from the New York State Council on the Arts resulted in videopoem "At Freeman's Farm," which was published on The Continental Review and Motion Poems. She blogs about writing and reading at marilynonaroll.wordpress.com. Art Clips
Og painted bison on cave walls. the Pre-Renaissancers depicted saints. Van Eyck composed exquisite details. De La Croix presented the heroic. Then the Impressionists came along, soft and shimmering, made it difficult at first for common folk to grasp, but they finally caught up just in time for Kandinsky to divorce realism. From that time on critics intervened between artist and viewer, glibly explaining what we're looking at. Gary Beck Editor's note: The image provided is for illustration, selected by the editor. The poem was not prompted by a specific artwork. Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theatre director, and as an art dealer when he couldn’t make a living in theatre. He has 12 published chapbooks. His poetry collections include: Days of Destruction (Skive Press), Expectations (Rogue Scholars Press), Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways, Displays, Perceptions, Fault Lines, Tremors and Perturbations (Winter Goose Publishing) Rude Awakenings and The Remission of Order will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. Conditioned Response (Nazar Look). Resonance (Dreaming Big Publications). Virtual Living (Thurston Howl Publications). Blossoms of Decay (Wordcatcher Publishing). Blunt Force and Expectations will be published by Wordcatcher Publishing. His novels include: Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press), Flawed Connections (Black Rose Writing), Call to Valor (Gnome on Pigs Productions) and Sudden Conflicts (Lillicat Publishers). State of Rage will be published by Rainy Day Reads Publishing, Crumbling Ramparts by Gnome on Pigs Productions. His short story collections include, A Glimpse of Youth (Sweatshoppe Publications) and Now I Accuse and other stories (Winter Goose Publishing). His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City. Matisse Loves Cookies
"The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes." - Eugene Delacroix An invisible curl, snap, the chocolate-assed florentine. Her game had rules. The wads of pfeffernusse between tallman and thumb, the logic with which she handled hermits, opened her fingers like a beach of shortbread gritty and malleable after a rain, charmed even the most awkward around children. Uncontainable now, my daughter rises naked and wolfish from her crib, no doubt swept up by a likely squall of ginger, a twister of Madame Bu Wei's Dot Hearts, some prodigious chaos so unlike the calm of Matisse's "Open Window." From her high chair, she regards its dock and geraniums rising over the sill of our dining room table. Her hands relax beside a half-eaten apricot. Matisse loves cookies, she says. Not that the spars of ships flicking in the pink harbour could be mistaken for langue de chat, or that the strokes of ivy about the parapet, the bluegrass wall, clay baking on the salt sea ledge seemed to her - iced like a tray of Christmas spritz. Perhaps, she sees the artist himself seated in his room of fluent morning light. He works on an empty stomach but the smell of the Mediterranean is sweeter than anise and he is tempted to run downstairs for a snack. Almost crazy with desire, suppose he ducks behind his canvas, knowing the cookie eludes him. Shelley Benaroya This poem was previously published in Edison Literary Review, Fall 2004. Shelley Benaroya is founding director and teaching artist for the Writing Center for Creative Aging (www.writingcenterforcreativeaging.org). Her poetry has appeared in Diner, The Edison Literary Review, Ekphrasis, The Lyric, Mobius, Thirteenth Moon, and elsewhere. In 2017, she received the Ekphrasis Prize and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Looking at Saint Francis in the Desert, Two Days before War
Today at work they trained us in dozens of blistering ways to die, how to run from smells of almonds, geraniums, fresh-cut grass, how we need to be lucky all our lives but the terrorist needs luck once. The best way to leave a room fast? Skirt the walls, don’t run straight. Now that we all know this, we can run into each other along the walls. And the gas masks and protective suits aren’t available, last only three hours anyway, and do you really want a suit if the only way to relieve yourself is down into your boots? Yes you do, or else you die, or so they say. And what if this gallery were empty for 200 years, a dirty bomb’s half-life? St. Francis would still stare to the left, up and holy, presenting his heart to the light, slack, awed, without his self, with bliss. His hands open beside him, a la garden statue, though no bird lights on them yet. The canvas shines, tiny sparks in the daylight sky, glamorous, real. The room smells of grandmotherly upholstery. The canvas’s wormholes were filled in 1928. The guard paces slowly. The rabbit looks at the artist. Whatever the saint contemplates, I see the opposite. In his spring, the donkey stands beneficent, the desert blooms, the wounds appear out of adulation and empathy. We will run, perhaps bleed out, if we smell that garlic in the grass. Tina Kelley Tina Kelley’s third poetry collection, Abloom and Awry, came out in April from CavanKerry Press, joining Precise (Word Press), and The Gospel of Galore, winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. Ardor, her first chapbook, won the Jacar Press chapbook competition and appeared in September. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and reported for The New York Times for ten years, sharing in a staff Pulitzer. Her writing has appeared in Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009. She lives with her husband and two children in Maplewood, NJ. Her blog is tinakelleypoetry.wordpress.com |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
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