Sticks and Bones
In the end, intertwined, ball and socket, fitting. Double-jointed and anointed in the thin shroud of their skin. Scars and old wounds are healed over – salved and resolved under protective cover of love. Joined at hip and shoulder, still connected even when all else is stripped down to bare bones still warm, in love’s glow, as sunrise shines on tendons, and the knobby spine and ribs form brittle branches on the tree of life. Betsy Mars This poem was written in response to the sex and art surprise ekphrastic Valentine's Day challenge. Betsy Mars is a Connecticut-born, mostly California-raised poet, educator, mother, and animal lover. She holds a BA and an MA from USC which she has put to no obvious use. Her work has recently appeared in Verse Virtual, Praxis, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others.
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Woman, Dakota Territory
with appreciation for Harvey Dunn’s painting – Dakota Woman – and for my family’s history She would sit for hours absorbing all the colors of the prairie naming them even reciting them to herself as though she knew repetition would help her eyes remember the honeyed blond blankets of wheat the dancing bitter green of wild grasses outcroppings of vivid cornflower blue columbine red. She learned to recognize the scarlet lake of devil’s paintbrush and the vibrant purple of the sharp-tipped thistle. She memorized the plaited evening skies smoldering gold dove grey pink the surprise of deep periwinkle. Even the dirt though it darkened her children’s clothes called out to her a rich peat shot through with threads of blackened burnt ochre. She gathered those days to herself while her husband gave away land telling eager settlers which parcel of prairie they could claim as their own. It seemed to her that the land belonged to the sky. Her son didn’t drown until after they’d gone back east. He couldn’t navigate the gaping hole the sudden unexpected pit opening in the shallows of the river. But for all the years to come one image of him always in her mind always on the Dakota plains his solemn grey eyes fixed on hers behind his head a thin line of amethyst stretched along a wide horizon. Melissa Huff This poem was first published by Highland Park Poetry in the book, 2017 Poetry Challenge. Melissa Huff has returned to her love of writing after fifteen satisfying years immersed in making one-of-a-kind jewelry (www.melissahuff.com). When she needed to use more of her intuition and craved a less linear creative process, sculpting poems by folding words around images and ideas turned out to be just the thing. Melissa enjoys exploring both formal poetry and free verse, for which she has garnered awards from the Chicago-based Poets & Patrons as well as the Illinois State Poetry Society and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her publishing credits include Highland Park Poetry, Winterwolf Press, Glass: Facets of Poetry and River Poets Journal. She currently serves as secretary of the Illinois State Poetry Society. The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin
In the 20 years since I brought this gift-shop print home from the Louvre, I’ve been eye to eye with a powerful early Renaissance man. His russet brown surcoat is covered in gold embroidery. He’s kneeling, on the left side of the image, at a lushly draped prie-dieu, his graceful fingers pressed reverently palm to palm, an attitude of prayer. Below those folded hands I see an illuminated book of prayers, more evidence of wealthy piety. There’s nothing just “off the shelf” in this man’s world. As I sit at my desk, his picture hangs to the right of me. To my left, my third-floor windows present a background of sky and a foreground of American elms, centenarians taller than my house. Sometimes the trees and sky are just what I need: visual respite for computer-tired eyes. Varieties of green in summer or branches loaded with blizzard-dropped snow. All seasons, the rich guy waits patiently for me to look his way. In the other half of the foreground, a richly-clad Virgin holds the Christ Child on her lap. Above and behind her, a hovering angel (with rainbow-coloured wings) holds an elaborately jeweled crown. The Virgin looks down, not out, as if aware that her function here is as a throne for the child on her knees, who holds a crystal orb crowned with a jeweled cross. That child has both an old man’s face and a chubby baby’s body. He is King of the World, the orb shows, but he holds it in a plump baby hand, his arm supported partly by his mother’s light grasp. His wise old gaze is turned to the kneeling man, and his other hand is raised in blessing. The man does not look back at him. I do not turn deliberately toward this image, (or I didn’t in the early days) but I sweep my eyes over it, when I’m moving right to change my music or maybe when I tilt back my chair and catch his eye. And then I’m gone, deep into the details. I’m drawn like a magnet into his face, his world and I forget about time. Three human beings occupy that foreground, but only one of them looks in my direction. Only one shows a countenance that is not fully confident of what’s being re-enacted here. The Virgin and Child have their tasks and they have completed them. Mother and child share a common complexion, a light blush across the cheeks. Only the man looks askew, with a weathered countenance. The nose, the upper lip, the cheek all are roughened red. By shaving, by weather, by living. The dark pool of his right eye (because of the angle, the only one visible) does not reflect light. It is a dark pool, matching the darkness of his hair. I can’t decide if I would like to sit across a table from him or would fear his power. His slightly turned head seems to jut out of the flat surface plane. The artist’s oils play up the skin surface, the vein descending from his temple, the furrow between his brows, that slightly sagging jowl line meeting the folds in his neck. That face, with its cragged determined particularity, and the lighter colour of its skin, stands out against both the dark and patterned space of the foreground (the checkered floor, the carved capitals) and the open sky, buildings, fields and vineyards, seen through the arches that open outward behind him. His costume and surroundings proclaim his wealth, but the face says it hasn’t been easy. Over and over, the textures and patterning and above all the face, draw me in. No monkey mind can escape the power of this meditative object. Stay still, look. And look again. I go back to his face, that human being, I can’t figure out that face. Something surges beneath the surface. Pain, pride, determination, steely reserve? In life, we often think we know a great deal about people whom we frequently see. The man is more like a fellow CTA passenger with a face that shouts, “Story here!” We have only a few stops and with a safe angle for viewing, we start guessing. And then the person’s out the door. This commuter, the one on my wall, never exits. Recently, thinking to deepen my meditation by learning more about the painting, I went surfing for more knowledge. Then, I discovered my mistake. I searched for “Memling,” “Virgin and Donor” and found nothing. Jan van Eyck, not Memling, painted this image and the man is Chancellor Rolin, a powerful figure at the 15th century court of Philip III of Burgundy. At age 60, the Chancellor commissioned this portrait for his parish church in Autun. It now hangs in the Louvre. How I made that mistake is another story. What’s important here is that the image’s ekphrastic power over me came from the image, came not from what I knew but what I saw. I love the agile, dancing smartness of art historians but I didn’t need it. For 20 years I have been free to follow my own thoughts, to begin sentences with “I,” to meditate on how difficult it is to know another human being, or on how far apart divine and human spheres are, even when painted into the very same room. I was freed from pondering the embroidered border of the Virgin’s robe or the Angel’s wings. I am not scrambling for glory in an art historical world. I gaze, I fall deep into the details, and I am freed from time and space, from the “I” of my self. Chancellor Rolin is still on my wall, waiting for me. (“The Chancellor” is better than “the rich guy,” so that’s a plus.) I hope we have many more years before us, eye to eye. Next summer, I’ve scheduled a visit to Paris, to see the Chancellor again, up close. Mary Harris Russell Mary Harris Russell, a retired English professor, lives in Chicago, meets regularly with memoir writers and, though she does not sail, has an app for the Beaufort Wind Scale on her phone. NB: The author believed this print to be from Hans Memling (15th century, Flemish). The painting is called The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (or, The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin), by Jan van Eyck (Netherlands). circa 1435. La Llamada (The Call), Remedios Varo (Mexico), 1961
In the courtyard of stone caryatids one figure comes to life a woman bathed in gold starshine, her robes emanating incense and light her face, the face of the Madonna her hair, wild orange-red, a swirling umbilicus still tied to the evening star, Venus high in the dark sky above this massive courtyard where women’s figures emerge from limestone walls surrounding her, yearning for her freedom and life Kendall Dunkelberg Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women, where he also directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium. Dunkelberg has published the poetry collections Barrier Island Suite,Landscapes and Architectures and Time Capsules, and a collection of translated poems by the Belgian poet, Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including recently inThe Texas Review, About Place, and Town Creek Poetry, Postcard Poems and Prose and in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vo. 2: Mississippi. His introductory multi-genre creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft was published by Palgrave MacMillan, and he is editor of Poetry South and advisor for Ponder Review. www.kendalldunkelberg.com Maria Considers Her Husband’s Painting, The Dream
"Battles, wounds, motions, all appear so mystical." -Franz Marc’s letter from the front, 16 February 1916 His horses pour through meadows of red; those may be poppies. A river that starts at Verdun, it seems and flows backwards through canvas. In dreams, there's no perspective. The sleeping woman wrapped in vermillion must be weary from her labours weaving walls to hold the light when the yellow house falls. We see the lion in the corner, or he sees us, those slashing eyes. The sky would be black and soundless. It reminds me of the dark inside a child's fist. Unperturbed, the blue horses dream the woman who is dreaming them. Notice her tilt as though the tree can't hold her, and look, her foot is melting, unfinished. The last work before he left. Still the horses seem to me an ocean of contentment. A letter from the front arrived--he says he's painting canvases to camouflage the stables. What stroke is protection from guns at 20,000 feet? Blue used to mean the spiritual. Perhaps he should try the late style of rain. He says spring is coming on; and we must purify the world. Why do you imagine he always closes the eyes of the blue horses? Kim Hamilton Kim Hamilton has published in Spillway, Switched-On Gutenberg, DMQ Review, and Raven Chronicles. In 2014, her collaboration with artist Carolyn Krieg, Visitation, was published. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Kim Hamilton holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and writes, edits and teaches poetry in Southern Oregon. West Wind
I. She’s a smudge, although she doesn’t know it; doesn’t see enough of her surroundings to know she blends in to them: sage and brush brown, her skin obscured, eyes dim from the cold. If she knew, she would paint herself red in heather berries, soak her clothes in mulberry dye, dip her arms in up to the elbow before she went out into the world on the edge of a storm. She doesn’t know. Why would she need to be seen? II. It’s the height that she doesn’t understand, the rain only baffles her as it comes on sideways and sharp. And the purple above the cloudline twists her stomach, so she doesn’t look up. She would worship older gods if it weren’t too late. She would become them in one motion, like the grasses and the buffeted flaps of her clothing. She would become. If only she knew how to. III. A woman carries a basket of berries across the heather, looking out at the roaring maw of the sky in apprehension. She must remind me of cave drawings, the way I am drawn to her, sculptures that were brown-wood and womanhood, carved by men in their free time, unaware that years later it would be art, and they would be artists; years later and the sepia of her common dress (and arm and hat and basket) would remind me of them. That their art had become self-aware. IV. She would bleed into the sky if I let her, her pigment twisted by wind shown only by brushstrokes, her definition lost, her gale-swept outline now infinite, growing. Become cloud, become rain, become wind, become the colors of the heavens before a storm: purple, grey, sepia. V. Does she know she’s on the edge of the world? Does she know that the sky might be white or blue or midnight green somewhere else? Like when yesterday on the bus I complained about the darkness of early afternoon in winter, and Sarah told me all the places it was early morning at that exact moment, which helped. Therapy is imagining the theoretical and accepting it as reality. Therapy is standing in the sun on purpose, or searching out all the non-existent colours in the sky, or looking at brushstrokes that trick the mind into imagining the concept of wind. Norah Brady Norah Brady is a fifteen year old poet, actor, and wanna-be author. She’s most at home anywhere she can write, preferably with two cats and quite a few books. You can find her work in Rookie magazine, The Blue Marble Review, and Write the World’s 2017 collection: Young Voices Across the Globe. Thinking of Him This was Hollywood hung in primary colours. Daddy’s little princess turned out with the trash by a fast young man who could wear a suit and shoot the breeze from the wheel of a Pontiac Bonneville. Your baby doesn’t love you anymore. Candy waits for Brad to call, her thoughts full of his blue serge suit and player’s jaw. A cheated sweetheart not quite pretty or complete; Her yellow hair throws curves and she cries silver. You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore. A thin faced New Yorker stands in front of her neurosis stretched across his canvas sheet; and Roy declares in hard black lines a scene with dots that replicate a moment – It’s over. It’s over. It’s over. Shadwell Smith This poem was previously published in London Grip New Poetry. Shadwell is a school teacher who lives in Dunstable, England. He has entertained spoken word audiences across London and the home counties for many years. His poems have also appeared in a number of print magazines and e-zines, such as Butcher’s Dog, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears and London Grip. Pepper's Ghost
Dancing on a pinpoint of hope, like a lingering whisper you fly, hazy and billowing, circling in liquid air. Your silence is a siren call. As I sail in my ship of grief, I glance toward the sky to find the trail of stars that will take me to Arcadia, your hallowed space where lights blaze and dark places are dark no longer. A ghostly mirage, you’re pale-faced in the gloom, and yet you glimmer, like a candle in a distant window. You’re the faith that restores promise, despite haunting fancies swimming, knocking at the backdoor of the mind. Though melancholy fills my lungs and weighs me down to sinking point, I see your outstretched arm and rise A breath away from breaking your enchantment, reaching consciousness enough, I touch the fluted edges of your dress. Enigma, gossamer flower, you diminish. My fingerprint, a labyrinth, home to earthen soil of growth and love and blood, corrupts you. Waning in the glass, your chiffon ruffles melt into a distant nebula, blurred form that taints me with sorrow. Your presence clings to this dusty air, much longer after you’ve gone. Ellie Nevin Editor's note: This poem was written in response to Kate Moss wearing designer Alexander McQueen's Autumn/Winter 2006 Collection. Ellie Nevin is a Yorkshire lass who is living in Lancaster to study a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. She is a poet at heart but also dabbles in other creative areas such as painting and sketching when she has the time! Old Home, Ogunquit, ME
I. Home is where the women wear sleeveless summer dresses. They sprawl on the lawn or lean against the trees, the bench, the frame. Light pours into the painting from wherever you are. The houses are one-sided, dimensionless. The women cast no shadow. The smooth, blank ovals of their faces reflect the light. They could be the same woman in different dresses or no woman in particular. They could belong to anyone, these women. Their summer dresses are long, bright their bare arms long in the long light. II. The light grows long in late summer, leans in the afternoons. The long light slows time, that’s why these women are here. They could belong to anyone these women. Their faces are not forgotten but worn smooth from touching and touching again. They have been lathed by years in the mind. The light changes what it touches, makes it different each time. III. How can I tell you about the light, except that it’s where the women are? I can give you the words but not the light or the way it clasps the sides of the houses. I can’t come to your house on a cold night, pour it into your sleep. Just the women on the lawn, barefoot or sandalled, hands behind their heads or languid in their laps. I can give them to you lying on the grass, dry at the end of summer, pricking their bare arms. They are counting the feathered seeds in the air, the blades of grass on the backs of their necks. Counting the days left in summer, the swallows in the almost-night sky. The mower a block over shuts off, and there are insect noises, music from a passing car. The smell of cut grass, of the earth opening itself to their limbs. The light pours into them like breath. They could belong to anyone, these women on the lawn. It is the end of summer. The grass is dry. It will hold their shape when their bodies are gone. Liz Hutchinson Liz Hutchinson is a writer and gardener living in the North Shore area of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poetry, Animalalia, is available online. worlds between
cloudy pink tiles forest floor trees reach like sylvan cathedral columns branches arch to gothic points form windows stained by starry night that welcome prayers from trunk and twig planed pews worlds between Nancy Jentsch Nancy Jentsch has taught German and Spanish for over thirty years at Northern Kentucky University. She has published scholarly articles, short fiction and poetry in journals such as Journal of Kentucky Studies, Eclectica, Aurorean, and Blinders. Her chapbook, Authorized Visitors, has been published by Cherry Grove Collections, an imprint of WordTech Communications (2017). Seven of her ekphrastic poems appear in the collaborative chapbook Frame and Mount the Sky (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her Facebook writer’s page is https://www.facebook.com/NancyJentschPoet/. |
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