One Viewer’s Response to Antoni Tapies’ Blue with Four Red Bars

A blue man walks into
four red bars (sequentially,
 
of course; not all at once).
“I’m blue,” he says. “Melancholy,
 
morose. What should I do? And
why are all the bars in this town red?”
 
“Drink this,” each barkeep would say.
“The bars have been red for a decade.
 
Where are you from, anyway?”
And so the night goes: a blue man
 
stumbling from red bar to red bar
till rosy-fingered dawn strikes fire
 
from the wine-dark sea.
Penelope!
 
The wanderer sets his course
for home.

Bill Waters
​
This poem was written as part of the 20 Poem Challenge.
​
Known primarily for his Japanese-style micropoetry, Bill Waters also writes ekphrastic poetry, found verse, book spine poetry, and all manner of short prose. He lives in Pennington, New Jersey, U.S.A., with his wonderful wife and their two amazing cats.

Personal Assistance

You haven't felt the same about peonies since
hearing that the ants crawling over their buds
chew them open and cause them to bloom. Maybe
every beauty needs an incubus, a demon servant

behind the scenes. The maid-service slogan reads
“We work while you're at work.” All those mites
and fungi that patrol your paper-pale skin, prickle
your delicate ears: invisible servitors—of something.

Whose hands stroke your soft, milk-white pelage?
Who draws you under the cloud-cover of dreams?
Who will open you now with his insectile jaws?
Whose hyperbolic horns herald adventures to come?

The peonies linger as fragrant memories in the gold
chaos of late summer's burning sky, under its red sun.

F.J. Bergmann

F.J. Bergmann edits poetry for Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (sfpoetry.com) and Mobius: the Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. A Catalogue of the Further Suns, winner of the Gold Line Press chapbook contest, will appear in 2017.

Dear Faithful Reader and Patient Contributor,

Please forgive the recent slower pace at the Ekphrastic Review. I am in Tunisia at an arts symposium! I will return to my desk after the first week of May and catch up then.

Thank you for your understanding- we have great feats of the literary imagination ahead, so don't go away!

​love, Lorette

​At The Frick 

Andrea del Verrocchio, the goldsmith, fecit,
brought he up curls intact from the marble--
the ties of her corpetto visible
above her gilet, the clip that adorns her
a gilded leaf. This man knew gilt,
embroidered it in stone on her upper arm.
 
Hogarth pictures his patron, Miss Edwards
and Miss Edwards’ spaniel
and Miss Edwards’ spaniel eyes,
and Miss Edwards’ dress, a scarlet pennant,
drawing our eyes to her torso, her dog
gazing up at her, pre-or-post snarl.
 
Joshua Reynolds, portraitist, produced
In Lady Skipworth, ennui. She engaged more
with the pink roses fairly leaping off
her bodice, with the lead powder, dead-white
on her forehead. She pouted at him from under
her blue-ribboned tulle and satin chapeau.
 
The women in pastels, in circus colours, promote
the ideal female form in body, in objects--
the bend of arm or hat brim, the curve of breast or scroll.
The ladies, aristocrat and peasant, with their curls
and dogs and ribbons demonstrate
how to die for beauty, be fondled by art.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of two books, Reading Berryman to the Dog and Discount Fireworks and five chapbooks, most recently, They Went Down to the Beach to Play from locofo chaps and Chap Book from Platypus Press, UK. For more information, check her website at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com. 

​Photo by Todd Klassy. To see more of Todd's rural photography, visit www.toddklassy.com.

One Viewer’s Response to Todd Klassy’s 4 Round Bales

In a cloudless landscape
everything but the sky
looks small. Man-high bales
become rounds of cut timber,
 
and a snowy, furrowed field
becomes a white-sand beach
beside a sea so smooth and blue
that it merges with the sky --
 
no waves or boats,
no flashes of sun,
no horizon to separate
water from air.

Bill Waters 

This poem was written as part of the 20 Poem Challenge.
​
Known primarily for his Japanese-style micropoetry, Bill Waters also writes ekphrastic poetry, found verse, book spine poetry, and all manner of short prose. He lives in Pennington, New Jersey, U.S.A., with his wonderful wife and their two amazing cats.

Horizons 

"Back toward the time when
the world, without footprints, broke open."
- Ginger Murchison, from her poem, "On Stone Mountain"

A backhoe paws its single front
     leg onto gray shale, shatters, pulls,
breaks, delaminates, lays waste

the traces of  Edaphosaurus
     dog-paddling hot, briny estuaries
under equatorial Permian sun,

rips the pages of ancient stone
     texts, devastates the cuneiform 
signatures of reptilian claws, 

the clay tablets of millennia 
     of evolution's accounts: the world, 
with footprints, broken open.

​Roy Beckemeyer

Roy Beckemeyer lives in Wichita, Kansas His poems have appeared in a variety of print and on-line literary journals including Beecher's Magazine, Chiron Review, Coal City Review, Dappled Things, Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, Kansas City Voices, The Light Ekphrastic, The Midwest Quarterly, The North Dakota Quarterly, The Syzygy Poetry Review, and Zingara. His book of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Review and Press, Lawrence, KS, 2014) was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He won the Beecher's Magazine  Poetry Contest in 2014, and the Kansas Voices Poetry Award in 2016.