The Photography of Robert Cadloff (bomobob)

The Ekphrastic Review: What is it about text and typography that appeals to you so much on a visual level?
 
Bob: Typography adds an artistic dimension to simple written communication. Words suddenly take on a visual aspect, and the type of lettering used, but style and physical structure, can add so much to an otherwise basic message.
 
Ekphrastic: Where do you find all of these interesting and unique signs?
Bob: I love going on road trips, exploring the back roads of North America, looking for remnants of a time when style was so much a part of signage. It was the golden age of the automobile, and remaining roadside signs and motels reflect that.
Ekphrastic: What kind of work do you do after the snap to get your distinctive style and palette?
 
Bob: My goal is usually to recreate the way our memories have been programmed to look at old signs. I try to use the colours and hues of faded slide film to evoke those memories, holding old Kodachrome slides up to the light.

Canadian photographer Robert Cadloff lives in Montreal. Visit his amazing Etsy store here for gorgeous, affordable prints.

Man on a Bench
 
Walking through a gallery, two hours in,
I glimpse a brother in weariness.
I know what he is feeling,
his shoulders slumped, hands listless,
leaning on his elbows.                              
I wear jeans and boots,
not polyester putter pants,
white socks and old man shoes,
but I know the old man gaze,
too long in a museum, glad to be sitting,
feet aching, knees that will creak when he gets up.
My father had a watch like his,
wore a polo like his, had that look,
waiting, waiting, waiting to die.
 
Above and to the right is a small sign,
identifying the artist and naming
the Man on a Bench.
My brother in weariness won't respond
if I greet him, won't scoot over,
invite me to sit down.
Still, we know each other,
know what it is like to be waiting.

Edward H. Garcia

Edward H. Garcia is retired from teaching composition, literature, and creative writing in the Dallas County Community College District.  He has published reviews, articles, stories and poems in The Dallas Morning News, The Texas Observer, The Texas Humanist, Pawn Review, Texas Books in Review, Tex!, County Line Magazine, Bewildering Stories, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Rio Grande Review, Amarillo Bay Literary Magazine, The Avalon Literary Review, Southwest Historical Quarterly, The Blotter, The Acentos Review and SFWP Quarterly. He is represented in Texas in Poetry 2, Texas Short Stories 2, Literary Dallas, and in two anthologies of writing by DCCCD faculty and staff, Out of Dallas and Voices from Within.  Some of his poems have been translated into Albanian and published in an anthology of American poetry: Poezia: bashkekohore amerikane. He lives on the upper east side of Texas with his wife Rica.

 Chacán-Pi Speaks
 
(dedicated to the boy trapped briefly in my giant vagina)
 
Planted here since 2001,
public face of a German institute
for microbiology and virology--
woman as a plague upon the earth?
Visitors snicker at my name, snap
a selfie, move on, while I continue
to be rooted in frustration.  
 
Chacan-Pi means making love,
according to De la Jara, my sculptor,
who stripped me to the essential
equipment, thirty-two tons of red
Veronese marble, vulva-shaped. No
other erogenous areas, no lips,
no breasts, no navel, no labia,
just me, a stone vagina, virgin
gateway to the world.
 
Until last year.
Adventurous twenty-year-old,
American exchange student--
love their naïve impetuosity--
decided to spelunk my innermost folds,
crawling deep inside me, wriggling
and wriggling until thoroughly trapped.
 
When his friend realized I could not,
would not, unclench him, he called
for help—five fire trucks, twenty-two
firemen laboring with their hands
without the application
of tools said the mayor—I might have
welcomed a few insertions, who knows?
freed the lover I yearn to return.  
Could you post a sign right down there?
Something along these lines:
Touch the Statue, Please.

SuzAnne C. Cole

 SuzAnne C. Cole, former college English instructor, writes in the Texas Hill Country.  Both a juried and featured poet at the Houston Poetry Fest, she’s also won a Japanese haiku contest.  Her poetry and fiction have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also writes essays and plays.

"Rules of Encounter started out as a book that I found in a pile of discards. The book was called Groups: First Facts, and it looked at various types of psychotherapeutic group encounters. I knew I wanted to dig into the book, so I began to do so quite literally, letting the words and phrases I came across guide me. It became a meditation on communication, with birds."

Devora Levin

Devora Levin lives in Toronto, where she makes art, writes poetry, teaches and goes for walks.

 
On The Lady and the Unicorn
 
She touches the horn just so--
Enough to glimpse
Into the maidenhood she loses.
Frozen by the taste she's aspired to deny,
She’s unable to jerk her hand
Away in complaint.
 
Now every note she hears
Is the climax of God,
Dripping on fair skin that
Shivers in a velvet dress
Among staring animals
That embroider her environment.
 
She no longer hunts for nature--
It spreads her open like a trough,
Leaving its heredity
To collect in her lips,
Screaming in her ears
With the birth
Of its hungry larvae.
 
She inhales the odor
Of nature’s perversion
Through her elfish nose,
Then checks herself in the mirror
To eliminate mistakes.
 
The bounty of senses consumes her,
Jumping in her lap
To tell her lies about
The purpose of breathing,
The purpose of breeding,
The purpose of bleeding--
Now she understands.
 
 Danielle Nicole Byington

This poem was published in The Mockingbird, spring 2015.

Danielle Nicole Byington's work can be seen in journals such as RIGHT HAND POINTING, RUST + MOTH, and JERSEY DEVIL PRESS.  While completing her English-MA, Danielle is serving as editor of East Tennessee State University’s literary/arts magazine, THE MOCKINGBIRD.  Her academic work focuses on creative writing as well as Medieval and Renaissance literature, joining the two areas with an interest in aesthetics.  Danielle enjoys life with her Shakespearean better half and three ridiculous cats.
 
 

Night Tunnel

There are more shades of darkness than of light--
ashy evenings, moonless, muffled by clouds.
The cold blue of December, sharp and bright.
Then there’s the absolute pitch of hurtling, sleepless,
through night on a fast train, an absence
that makes us seek with all our stymied senses
the something we suspect is there,
a suggestive blankness evoking death,
or what we think we know of it,
reminding us of other lives we’ve had
but then forgotten, other deaths.
We lose them, except in snatches,
like old songs. Darkness framed in light
burning just there, around the edges.
This tunnel must resemble death, except
we will remember how it felt to be inside it
when we emerge into the light of the other side.

Robbi Nester

Robbi Nester is the author of an ekphrastic chapbook titled Balance (White Violet, 2012) and other poetry collections. Her work has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Cimarron Review, Broadsided, Silver Birch Press, Poemeleon, and Inlandia.

 
 
Echo   
 
             ...there is no break between the two substances, and no limit.
                                                                        ~ Rene Magritte
 
Magritte's woman stares as if in a trance --
black hair, red lips, oval face, black almond eyes
held still. Wood-grain strands swim onto her right hip,                     
her midriff, and higher to striate her breast. Mahogany
grain swirls onto her right arm, up the hill of her shoulder,
then drops to engrave her left forearm. Seductive fingers
sliver forward to impregnate her. They graze
her lower lip, evoke a shadowy smile.
                                                  
                                    *
 
I imagine my grandfather, a cabinetmaker,
chiseling design and shape onto slabs
of wood.  Lost in its fragrance, its pliant spirit,
he hums as his tools work their magic. The wood
guides his leathery hands the way stone leads
a sculptor's. He engraves patterns onto edges
of a table, the wood feeding through fingers
no longer his own.

Marcia Pradzinski

Marcia J. Pradzinski, an award-winning poet, lives in Skokie, Illinois. Her poetry has appeared in print journals, anthologies, and online. Her most recent publications have been in Mom Egg Review, The Poetry Storehouse, and RHINO 2015. She has a poem in the Winter/2016 Issue of Blue Heron Review, and another to be featured in the Summer/2016 Issue. Two  poems are forthcoming in The Chronicles of Eve anthology at Paper Swans Press, U.K.  Her first chapbook of poems, Left Behind, was published by Finishing Line Press in December, 2015.