Cézanne, The Pond 
 
Looks like spring has arrived 
on my Cézanne calendar. 
She often makes fun of me, 
asks who has a wall calendar
anymore, but this morning, 
a Monday, when it’s back to 
work, I look at these couples 
lounging on the grass by a pond,
and find myself somewhere in 
the French countryside. One man 
lies down, hat covering his face, 
his lady leaning over him, as if 
about to whisper something dirty, 
his right hand raised toward me, 
all but one finger blurred by 
brushstrokes, which I’m certain
is the middle one.

Clint Margrave

Clint Margrave is the author of the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and most recently, Visitor, all from NYQ Books. He is also the author of the novel Lying Bastard and editor of Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin (NYQ Books). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He recently served as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Bulgaria, living in Sofia, and teaching creative writing at Sofia University.

If you’ve been staring at a blank page all week, this is a gentle nudge.

I’m teaching a small live Zoom workshop with Litro Magazine starting 9 April: The Joy of Ekphrasis - writing from art as a practical way to generate fresh material quickly.

It’s capped at 15 so it stays hands-on and supportive. If you want structure, prompts, and a real push to draft new work, you’ll like it.

Link: https://www.litromagazine.com/masterclasses/courses/joy-of-ekphrasis/
​
Hope to see you there!

Lorette

Wrath

Mighty waves lash out at the craggy shore,
strong gusts bend trees against their will,
giant cliffs loom over the restless waters,
the tide is menacing and nothing is still!

Loud and thunderous, the skies rage on,
violent is the storm and cold is the breeze,
streaks of lightning strike the highest rock
when small pieces fall into unsettling seas.

Sunlight has abandoned all hours of day,
the boats overturn with shattered masts,
massive waves weather the bare rock face,
the cliffs are sprayed with rain-filled blasts.

When Poseidon unleashes his deadly wrath,
deep darkness descends and shuns all light;
rising and falling against the rugged shore,
the dark waves break into dazzling white.

Billowing gray clouds amass over the seas,
severing the coast from the warmth of day;
swelling waves approach with frantic haste,
devouring mammoth rocks along its way.

The earth trembles and the heaven shakes,
unnerving the waves of the troubled seas;
terrible is the wrath of the surging tide,
crushing sail-boats and uprooting trees!

Leah Chrestien

Leah Chrestien is a Machine Learning engineer by profession, who lives in Prague and writes poetry in her free time. Her poems have appeared multiple times in Our Daily Poem, Westward Quarterly, Leading Edge Magazine, Spillwords, and The Raven Review. Her personal blog can be found at theecstaticstoryteller.blog.

Opening Speech at the Women’s College of Juggling
 
Welcome to the Women’s College! You’ll have to learn to juggle. Your own responsibilities as a future wife, mother. Your husband’s needs. Your children’s. Join the PTA and the Garden Club. Manage your husband’s books and the weekly butcher orders. Take the kids to piano lessons and remind them to come in when the streetlights come on. Juggling is a skill. It can be taught. Know that you will drop some balls. Heavy or light, they will hurt your toes. They do not bounce. Your grades here won’t really matter. Only that you get a degree, so you can make your husband look good.
 
                                               Drape drab shawls to arm
                                               yourself for a hum-drum life
                                               til death or divorce.

​Checkmate
 
She strides through the forest of bias along checkerboard’s grout. Shoulders back, cloaked in confidence, she exudes mystical powers of protection, deflects negativity. Always moving forward, one click-clack stiletto at a time. She is Woman. The paparazzi land their laser beams. But Woman’s bare hands flick them into faerie lights. Everyone and everything here to serve her.

​Crafty
  
I pierce life’s fabric with my needle,
pull variegated thread to create
saffron cloth. The cross-stitch
to ward against disease and hatred.
The feather stitch to add humility
and humor. The bullion knot
to fashion flowers and foliage.
 
With my sisters in our high tower,
we look down below at the burning
world. We need to work ever faster,
combine our gossamer talents
to allow our cloth to drape 
the land, sea, and living beings
in protective velvet nap.

​Strings of Fate
  
The colour of our threads dictates the tension in the wheel of life. Each colour, like the lines in our palms, predicts our future. White suggests a long but bland life. Red means a brief but brilliant life. Blue wraps itself tight around the spool but is elastic enough to withstand daily pressures. Blue is the colour of perseverance, a life well lived, no matter its duration. There in the distance is the Rumpelstiltskin gold, glimmers of spun greed. That produces the shortest life of all, one without challenge or sacrifice, one without the joy of creation. One without a higher order controlling the feed and speed of the thread. One without tethers.

​Sky Studio
  
In my upstairs studio, I let the clouds fly in and out of reach, spin them as interfacing to stiffen my resolve. I spoon the moon my ambition’s porridge, careful not to overwhelm. I hold the crescent captive so its light shines only on me. It came up here once, looking for its other half. I couldn’t let it go. Now the moon depends on me for its very life, and my feet are planted firmly in thin air.

Barbara Krasner

Dubbed "The Ekphrastic Warrior" by editor Lorette C. Luzajic, poet Barbara Krasner is the author of ten collections, including Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025), The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (Dancing Girl Press, 2026), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026), and Memory Collector (Kelsay Books, 2027). Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com.

​Beginning Again
 
When, finally, she accepted his absence,
she dared to gaze out the window.
 
The River Elbe, 
ascribed to the northwest lane 
and its draughts
(the mind of the ship 
having taken that route, too)
commences in the mountains
of the Czech Republic, 
twines through Germany,
is even Bohemian for a moment,
(which piques her interest)
and even after all these years,
the breeze dreams in lurid colors
before emptying 
into the North Sea at Cuxhaven,
all of which inspires her 
to follow the poplars
dancing graciously 
in dreams of the southeast,
the Sandstone Mountains, the Ores,
the Lusatian Mountains,
and the loftier Bohemian Massif, 
its conspicuous brickwork,
arboreal highlands, 
and abundant marble creations 
from which she,
she believes,
she will feed,
and live,
for a time.
 
John L. Stanizzi

John’s books are Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Chants, High Tide-Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Hallelujah Time,  POND, Tree That Lights the Way Home, Sundowning, Feathers and Bones, and SEE. His new collection, Entra La Notte, will be out next month.Johnnie is a former New England Poet of the Year, a Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, and he received a Fellowship in CNF in 2021 from the CT. Office of Arts, Culture, & Diversity. He took first place in The Ekphrastic Review’s Ekphrastic Marathon in 2024. He is currently among the poets nominated for the honour of Connecticut Poet Laureate.
​

Ekphrastic poetry is something I've been doing for a long long time--much before I knew there was a term for  it. As a child, I used to imagine myself entering paintings and having adventures there--the book  The Counterpane Fairy by Katherine Pyle (A boy "travels" into quilt squares and has adventures) was an influence. My aunt was an artist and the Carnegie Museum awas free to enter--and I went often.. 

My first awareness of writing ekphrastic work came with the website Visual Verse where writers were challenged to prepare a piece within one hour. I was one of their most frequent contributors, and was asked to write a couple for them before they closed up shop a few years ago! When I found The Ekphrastic Review, Lorette, I knew your gentle way of working with writers, made it a place I wanted to be.published.

Each time my work appears in TER, I am so excited! And when it appears in a cohort with others as in the bi-weekly challenges, or contests, I am simply amazed by the variety of ways people respond to the art--it is enlightening and exciting to read them all!

One of my favourite stories to tell as a performer is one in which the artist paints pictures people can enter! I've never quite given up on that idea it seems.

Here are three of my personal favourites from my ekphrastic poems on this site.

Joan Leotta

**
​
Addressing the Lady, Wearing a Green Kimono as She Sits on the Blue Chaise

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/nine-lives-marathon-poetry-responses

"The kimono is so like things she wore--
'Redheads look good in green,' she would often say."

**

Magritte’s Apple Explains It All

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/magrittes-apple-explains-it-all-by-joan-leotta

​"Dreams, those moments when the conscious mind relaxes
when life’s everyday reality joins with matter deep inside..."

**

The Golden Day

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-golden-day-by-joan-leotta

"My friend, on seeing my photo 
of dawn’s bright gold spilling into our pond..."

​**

Piece by Piece

after Beach Scene, by Eric Fischl (USA) contemporary
https://www.1stdibs.com/art/prints-works-on-paper/landscape-prints-works-on-paper/eric-fischl-beach-scene-beach-eric-fischl-aquatint-etching-nude-woman-ocean/id-a_5643452/

Oh, the ease of waves this morning, mimicking the skyline of low Shenandoah mountains, soft in their aqua green blouses. Waves shy at first with filigree at their tips, unsure, their bellies nervous underneath. Then the shiver before they fall. An inevitable overreach. In this case, the explosions are rather modest, foam reaching to the shore, withdrawing, skein-like, stretching that filigree. A heartbeat of three before the next release. 

Green and white striped umbrellas quivering in the wind, the fluttering edges like an emerald skirt. Gusts are the principal directors lifting the borders, skywards. Palm trees bowing, recovering. The lounge chairs match the umbrellas, empty and silent. For suddenly all the children and their parents have vanished. Headed to school, most likely, the beach replaced with elders—their thinning, gentle-gray hairs. She watches them as a breeze picks up, displacing their longer strands. The beach has a strand too. Close to the water where the sand is packed, hardened, much easier to walk on. The upper half of the beach, however, is full of hummocks. Tottering, staggering on this sand isn’t easy, an ankle might twist. 
​
Or, once in a while, a broken sliver of shell works its way to the surface of the strand, slicing into a walker’s foot. There is blood. There is no place without blood. And clam shells, mostly, with no clams. She too was falling apart, inch by inch, the seam of her bathing suit worn till it broke open. Words abandoning her. She felt like that exhausted bit of clothing, no chance of recuperating. Why not just walk, walk, step by step into the ocean, swim with the fish, piece by piece. 

Sarah Gorham

​Sarah Gorham is a poet and essayist, with a recent essay collection, Funeral Playlist, from Etruscan Press. She is the author of Alpine Apprentice (2017), which made the short list for 2018 PEN/Diamonstein Award in the Essay, and Study in Perfect (2014), selected by Bernard Cooper for the 2013 AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. Gorham is also the author of four poetry collections— Bad Daughter (2011), The Cure (2003), The Tension Zone (1996), and Don’t Go Back to Sleep (1989). Other honours include grants and fellowships from the NEA, three state arts councils, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Reeds, Hall's Pond Sanctuary
 
At the pond a heron uses backs 
of terrapin to cross October's jaded silt 
 
in the mottled shade under paperbark birch
breeze vibrates reeds tuning an orchestra 
 
a geometry of origami birds trace 
an elegant cursive       
 
our paired bodies faking decomposition 
moving the mobius strip of fate back to start

Kerry Loughman
 
​Kerry Loughman writes about nature in the city, fractured families, long marriage, and small moments. She  loves connections, but also the spaces in between. Her spirit animal might be a Great Blue Heron. Her poetry has appeared in The Main Street Rag, Nixes Mate Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Jackdaw Haiku. A retired photographer and educator, she lives in the Greater Boston area.  

Kalman Zabarsky is an artist and professional photographer now retired. He still uses a 35 mm camera to take photos. He also lives in the Boston area.

​Review of Blue Lovers by Elizabeth Paul (Yavanika Pr. 2024)
 
Elizabeth Paul’s ekphrastic chapbook, Blue Lovers, is a homage to Marc Chagall and an incredible series of love poems describing the speaker’s love for her partner, and Chagall’s love for his first wife, Bella. The chapbook interweaves the two sets of lovers in fourteen prose poems. For example, in “Birthday,” the speaker compares quirky details, such as the orange floor in Chagall and Bella’s house to “our first one” (10). Similarly, in “Lovers Over Paris” the speaker announces:

Our love makes postcards of every place, bouquets of trees, music of sky  Every other person is a witness of how you can’t hold me close enough, of how my feet can’t find the floor (3)

This description could be one of many of Chagall’s paintings of lovers waltzing through the sky.  Like other prose poems in Blue Lovers, “Lovers Over Paris” is titled after a painting by Chagall. Paul’s poems are not simple descriptions of Chagall’s paintings, but impressionistic pieces in the spirit of the paintings. The poems have minimal punctuation (commas, question marks, but no periods), which enhances the tone of dreaminess, similar to the dreamy, floating tone of Chagall’s paintings.

Although the poems in Blue Lovers are titled after works by Chagall, they do not follow the chronological order of his paintings. Instead, the sequence is a loose expressive order based on the chronology of the lovers’ relationship. The first poem, “Time Is a River Without Banks” describes the lovers’ “beginnings” as a time of “charmed hour of quietude and all questioning hushed” (1). This first poem sets the comparison between the speaker and Chagall through the repetition of the phrase “I would be that Chagall couple.” 

By the sixth poem, the lovers have moved into “middle age,” an era described as a surprise which “feels swampy, landlocked with a view in every direction but no opening” (“Paris through the Window” 6). The middle poems also move into dreams, including the speaker’s dream that her lover has lost an arm, and a dream that “[y]ou were me and I you” (6). Another poem describes a dream of separation in which she has “almost forgotten [her lover]” (7). 

The speaker misses the world and longs to be alone or separate in “Les Amoureux de Vence” (4). This theme of merging and separation constitutes a major tension in the lovers’ relationship. In “The Poet Reclining,” the speaker addresses the painter: “Marc, I imagine we don’t have much in common, but I see we both chase the feeling of skying pink or greening nubile to a forever twilight and romantics that we are we both seek it in someone else” (5). The poem asks: “How do you thrive on the conundrum?” In other words, how does one accept the merging with another? By the end of the collection, the speaker is at peace with “sinking into the shape of us” in a stillness that reflects “perfect maturity, not one waiting bud, not a spent bloom” (“Lovers in the Lilacs” 13).

As suggested by the title of the chapbook, the emphasis is on blue. For Chagall, blue is not a colour symbolizing depression (as in Picasso’s blue period), instead, blue symbolizes the imagination and the sacred. In both Chagall’s paintings and Paul’s poems, there are “blue lovers,” who float “in an all-consuming Blue—something much bigger than adoration, something humbling, making holy clowns of us” (“Blue Lovers” 7). Likewise, in “Cirque Paris,” the speaker has “relaxed in my daring acrobatics” and come “[f]ace to face with you in this beautiful fall that is ever a fall and never a fall” and has learned “to think in light and shadow, breathe in the Big Blue” (12). 
​
The relationship between the lovers is sacred and fleeting, as Paul indicates in “Paris through the Window”: “We often stand and look out the window  I thought it was for the view, but it’s for this image of us, the waking dream to create to see what we need to know” (6). The speaker and her lover use everything in the mundane world to express their love, just as Chagall does in his paintings. These everyday objects may or may not rise to the level of the symbolic. In “Birthday,” Paul declares with a painterly eye that 

when we try to show our love, we have to use everything  The street we walked down, the park, the cherry and apple blossoms, the chill pinking our cheeks. The embroidered coverlet, the fringed window shade, block stool, the small white plates with the painted flowers, the condensation on the glass of cold milk (10)

As in Chagall’s paintings, the lovers exist to be witnessed; like the paintings, the poems exist to witness love. The final poem, “Couple in Blue,” shows acceptance of conundrum and change in the line “I’m part man, part spirit  You’re part beast, part bird” (14). The poem shows reconciliation to the mysteries and mystical qualities of love and growth, to the lack of boundaries and certainty: “I’ll take any messy, monstrous, hybrid answer to such a never-ending question” (14). Paul’s exquisite prose poems revel in the spirit of love, and like the paintings of Chagall, are quirky and playful, passionate and vulnerable, reminding us to honour and celebrate those closest to our hearts, and to “breathe in the Big Blue” (“Cirque Paris” 12).
 
Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres is a poet, lawyer, and translator from the Spanish. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. She has studied Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, practiced karate for nine years with her son, and now spends time in Texas writing, collaging, teaching, and practicing tai chi. Her chapbooks are Walk Like the Bird Flies (Finishing Line) and Red Cardinal, White Snow (Main Street Rag). Visit www.psusanayres.com.

​Elizabeth Paul's work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Briar Cliff Review, Duende, and Sweet Lit, among other places. Her chapbooks Reading Girl (Finishing Line Press) and Blue Lovers (Yavanika Press) are ekphrastic explorations of the work of Henry Matisse and Marc Chagall, respectively. She teaches at George Mason University in the English Department where she serves as the International Students and Programs Coordinator and on the Composition Program’s Linguistic Justice Leadership Team. You can learn more about Liz and her work at elizabethsgpaul.com.