Life Size
You’d paint your immaculate petals tiny as life if we had time to look. I lean eye level with pageants of colour disarrayed with yellow dust hints of nectar where bees feed. You merge intimately with your blooms or disfigure them bleached with desert skulls exposed to living eyes. I never walked your purple hills where variegated leaves concede to russet but I hang lines of clouds in a box of a book that fits my pocket. I have lived above those clouds without losing my way and I look for myself in your adobe barns whenever I come to earth. Mori Glaser Mori Glaser grew up in the UK and moved to Israel 30 years ago. Her poetry appears in journals such as Unbroken; Crack the Spine; Vine Leaves coffee table book; Between the Lines Anthology of Fairy Tales and Folklore Reimagined. She won 3rd prize in The Molotov Cocktail’s 2017 Shadow Award. Her flash appears in Arc 24 and Akashic Books web series Thursdaze.
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Handle With Care Sherry Barker Abaldo
Sherry Barker Abaldo has degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California film school. She is the recipient of an Emmy and a Dibner Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Northern New England Review, The Aurorean and more. She gives poetry readings and lectures in Maine and Los Angeles, CA. Forthcoming is a melopoeia cd of her poetry recorded as interaction with classical musicians. She lives and writes on a pond in midcoast Maine with her husband and has two kids in college. Twitter: @sherryoceans He Scaffolds the City
The man is all exoskeleton and internal elevators. He is snakes-and-ladders skull and continental shelf. What was he thinking, being born into a cityscape of rental shops and tool sheds, into this violent canvas of flea and leech slow-sucking brain sap as subtle as a mocktail? What. The man is writing hate mail to himself, thinking of ways he can make his flesh salt. The man wants sky to suck the marrow from his shin bones, he wants to dehydrate back to stardust. He wants to know thirst like a tall god knows the mesosphere. He wants to see constellations that fix beyond the weather balloon’s jellyfish peel. He wants the sun. The man is a hot mess. Somebody has thrown a lifesaver into the canvas, but the man is more lungs than arms. He is cartoon skeleton, flailing amputee, faced towards a doppelgänger who's white as a sheet. I’m not going to lie. It’s chaos. Everything is drowning in everything else. Everything is indebted to everything else. Elizabeth Morton Elizabeth is a writer from New Zealand. She is published in Poetry NZ, Narrative Magazine, Literary Orphans, PRISM International, Crannog, Cordite, Island Magazine, and The Moth, amongst others. She is included in Best Small Fictions 2016. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published with Mākaro Press in 2017. She likes to write about broken things and things with teeth. Expanded Expansion
Once there was a curtain, between the holy and the holy of holies, a divide between you, and by the time you finish this sentence, me; a cheesecloth screen such as might appear in an operating theatre of the skull, beautiful and thin, like the soft, insecure skin of Saoirse Ronan. Suspended between fibreglass poles, thirteen diaphanous actresses - Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Amanda Seyfried, et cetera - raising between the living and dead a short-lived skene, a prophylactic contraceptive against dread - that benign expansion of the mind into timelessness - and a screen behind which to undress unseen underneath Sarah Gadon's shadow projected against quarantine tent walls, her contours expanding then shrinking, creating illusions of distance between quick and quickless that cannot exist, like empty pyramids, full of darkness, naked flames, and no Pharaoh, just Elle Fanning, laid out by the fire, warm embers, a little light; Thirteen lengths of hand-flayed skin, borrowed from Alicia Vikander to lampshade horror's brilliant filaments, her tattoos shadow puppets thrown around the room. Each exit being commensurate with that of Kristen Stewart, who from the Maloja Pass vanished outright, who am I to roll out snake-like clouds to curtain certainty? Or who to clothe the elderly actress who is presently debarking as Stacy Martin? A sculptor, whose materials - youth and beauty - are not chosen for their strength or durability - there is nothing young about stone or bronze, and nothing living about those illusions, those chiselled apologies, graven tautologies; Roomfuls of Pharaohs and copper serpents. Ella Purnell behind a sudden motel shower curtain. The latter foreshadowed by the former's lack. And you, you will visit the synagogue, one kristallnacht, to withdraw the scroll of the law from the holy ark and you will find it torn. And after its fulfilment the rituals will go on, the priest-curators, recalling the old koans, restoring worship, turning prophecy to paradox “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killer of the prophets” in sheepskins, goatskins, Chloë Grace Moretz. Skeleton of brittle sticks, and bandages slung between limb after limb, scavengers closing heavily in, thumping their wings and blustering sand, in the desert wind barely stands, pressed and wrung, Odessa Young. Or leaning, propped against a wall, between crutches, Adele Exarchopoulos; the weakening structures that roam through hospices, cancer wards, and halfway homes, are left hobbled, locked away like prophets who talked us into feeling too ashamed; locked away and only ever rolled out during earthquakes, typically the girl’s body swapped with an imposter’s, a plastic mannequin, or an immortal spirit, instead of Mia Wasikowska. Exegesis My poem aims to describe the sculpture ‘Expanded Expansion’ by Eva Hesse. Hesse’s sculpture, which originally resembled a clean, white shower curtain, consists of thirteen lengths of latex-covered cheesecloth hung between brittle fiberglass sticks reinforced with resin. More than half a century after its creation, the ‘curtain’ now looks more like an ancient scroll or parchment. The piece was included as part of a 1969 exhibit at the Whitney called ‘Anti-Illusion: Process/Materials’. Hesse’s artwork was ‘anti-illusion’ in the sense that it defied the fantasy of immortality typically pursued by sculptors employing more durable materials, such as stone or bronze. While such sculptors might hope to achieve immortality through their work, Hesse aimed to create a work that would realistically reflect her mortality, of which she was more than ordinarily aware, having already developed the brain tumour that would soon kill her. My poem approaches Hesse’s sculpture simultaneously from several different angles, but most conspicuously through the naming of contemporary actresses. Debates about the use of pop-culture references in serious literature have often centred around their lack of durability as reference points. My pop-culture references are specifically chosen for their transience. The actresses named in my poem are not the subject of my poem but the materials, chosen for their youth, beauty, and lack of durability. If the poem is successful, the reader encountering these names will experience a sense of the poem’s mortality, and easily foresee a time when the poem’s exact effect will become worn, decayed, and fragmentary. My use of Sapphic stanzas reinforces this through its association with Sappho, whose poems have come down to us mostly in fragments. I chose actresses (rather than male actors, for example, or singers) because of their acute susceptibility to ageing, in an industry and culture that perceives them as disposable, once their looks begin to ‘fade.’ As such, they are representative of a more immediate mortality than are the majority of people. Joel Martyr Joel Martyr studied at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. His work has previously been published in The Explicator and on his website Fork’s Pass Poetry. He currently lives with his wife in Bristol, United Kingdom, where he teaches high school English. Death and the Miser Death enters through a door shyly, almost diffidently. His delights are earthy. He comes and goes as he wishes. Still, why not be polite? The man with all the money, his name on everything from his underwear to the building he lives in, thought Death would never come for him. Mr. D draws an arrow stolen from the corpse of Eros-- another story, a funny one. The miser’s decrepitude looks delicious, his pallor pleases as much as a demon’s breath. Dread becomes him. Mr. D shuts his eyes, the better to aim (he works best in the dark). How sweet the arrow’s flight, the thud home, the miser’s moan, sycophants and monks shriek, a black-cloaked Dominican grabs his silver and runs for his life-- the only indulgence that matters. Charlie Brice Charlie Brice: "I am a retired psychoanalyst living in Pittsburgh. My full length poetry collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, is published by WordTech Editions (2016) and my second collection, Mnemosyne's Hand (WordTech Editions), will appear in 2018. My poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Hawaii Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, The Dunes Review, SLAB, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Plainsong, and elsewhere." Hitchhikers in Mississippi, 1936 The trees have forgotten summer, have drawn up slim and dark against the morning's gray cold, like the woman standing by the man. The canvas bag at their feet shows black beneath the dust. It holds everything but the clothes they've worn since yesterday; her purse, its emptiness punctuated by handkerchief and hairbrush; and the cigarettes and matches a stranger gave him last night. They are husband and wife, or lovers. They are childhood sweethearts become best friends against adversity. Or supplicants, praying for tomorrow. The road behind them curls like a river taking the easy way, not really caring where it goes as long as it's someplace else. Lennart Lundh This poem was first published in Hitchhikers in Mississippi, 1936, by Lennart Lundh. Lennart Lundh is a poet, short-fictionist, historian, and photographer. His work has appeared internationally since 1965. Len can be found on Facebook, and his books are available from the VisionsWords store on Etsy, as well as on Amazon. Collaboration Interview: Devon Balwit and Lorette C. Luzajic Devon Balwit, a longtime contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, and the Review's editor, artist Lorette C. Luzajic, collaborated on a book called Risk Being / Complicated. Balwit was inspired to write dozens of ekphrastic poems inspired by Luzajic's mixed media collage paintings. They are presented side by side in this full-colour poetry collection released this year. To explore the process of writing, painting, and collaborating, and share it with you, Lorette and Devon interviewed each other. Lorette Interviews Devon Lorette: How do you approach looking at an artwork when you write ekphrastic poetry? Devon: I look at a piece and ask myself, "Where can I enter this work?" "What is the gateway?" "What is its salient feature?" "What is its mood?" "What entity does it evoke?" Colour, form, content, and even the title of the piece all play a role. I usually move on to a different piece after the initial one as I have the sense that once I have addressed a poem to it, its story has been "told." I have yet to explore whether the same work could inspire a multitude of poems. The same artist certainly can, but I haven't tried writing a sequence of poems about a single canvas. Lorette: What moves you in art? What catches your attention, and what turns you off? Devon: I'm turned off by manga. There's something about the predictability, sameness, and rigidity of the forms that is nightmarish. Also, I'm put off by work that doesn't have enough soul, enough intentionality. This might be hard to explain, but some work feels made to fill a space--like pure interior decoration. It's simplistic. It's not work I'd choose to engage with because it doesn't take me anyplace surprising. It doesn't ask enough of my brain. When I was a child, I didn't "get" non-representational modern art, but now it's my favourite genre as it evokes so many questions. Lorette: In what ways does creative collaboration contrast for you as a writer with working solo? Devon: I enjoy word & hand exchanges--crossing boundaries between genres and working with visual artists in different media--painting, collage, sculpture, and drawing. I also like to use instrumental music--jazz or classical--as a jumping off point. The non-verbal nature of these other media push the boundaries of my subject matter. There's a rich potentiality in the non-verbal forms that attracts me. I prefer it to collaborating with other poets, which I find challenging. I'm not even comfortable sitting in a cafe writing alongside people I know. I get too distracted by the other writer--How fast are they writing? Have they already finished? Are they impatient? It brings in a social dimension which hinders my concentration. When I'm not at ease, I can't get to the deep place from which my work springs. I think I'd be fine having a poet mail me their work and then responding to it from my own space and in my own time. It's not the exchange that bothers me, but the sharing of space while I work. I need "A Room of My Own" to create. I've never tried to write in an artist's studio. I'd be curious to see if the "interference" was less as the nature of the work differs. Lorette: How has your poetry changed with age and experience? Devon: My poetry has changed quite a bit over the past decades. When I was in my twenties, I was under the impression that narrator of a poem was coequal with the poet. Poetry, therefore, meant "confessional" and "true" in a limited sense of being "about" me. Given that my life in my twenties consisted of exploring relationships, my work had a much narrower focus. Writing poetry in my 50s, I'm much less interested in "me." This isn't to say I don't sometimes write poems that touch upon various aspects of my "real" life as a partner, teacher, parent, mature woman, but now I'm more interested in writing persona poems and poems rooted in other people, places, and times. I take on historical and scientific subjects. I'm enchanted by ekphrastic poetry. I've broadened my scope. Similarly, I used to write predominately free verse. If I wrote any formal verse at all, it was only Shakespearean sonnets. Now I explore a variety of forms: sestinas, villanelles, ghazals, abecedarians, specular poems, golden shovels, and more. The "constraints" of the forms keep the writing process fresh. Also, now I'll accept almost any prompt whereas in the past, I was more interested in documenting my own lived experience. Devon Interviews Lorette Devon: What drew you to collage as a medium? Lorette: The "everythingness" about it is the most important factor for me- I have always been hungry to know more, to explore, to discover, to put things together, to compare and contrast, to research, on such a wide variety of subject matters. Collage in art is like reading for me- I can read about the history of past cultures, I can read about cutting edge medical innovations, I can read about women poets, about how the search for spices fuelled exploration. I've never been good at focusing or narrowing things down. I get excited about the vast wilderness of possibilities and how many things there are to know. I have always thrived on voracious consumption of human ideas and creativity, and in turn, processing all of that needs an outlet that can match the intensity. I understood instinctively from the beginning that with collage, the entire world and everything in it could be my palette. In addition to the conceptual, the aesthetics are also incredibly appealing. Contrasting, moving things around, anthropomorphizing, remixing, changing, combining, adding, subtracting. Using repetition, patterns, contrast, texture, allusion, shapes, text in different ways provides so many different results. It's endless and I love that. Devon: How do you come up with the innovative names you give your pieces? Is titling hard for you? Lorette: The titles are part of the collage. Collage means "to glue images together" but to me, it's also conceptual. I use mixed media as part of the collage, using as many kinds of markmaking and colouring tools as I can- pencil crayons, glitter, gouache, spray paint, Crayola, found papers, etc. And beyond cut up images or text and diverse media, I am also combining concepts, ideas, genres. I work to music, incorporating the rhythm and composition into my paintings. I beg, borrow, and steal from other artists, and extensively from poetry and writing, another major passion. I take words or pictures from passing strangers and they end up in the art. My titles are often lines of poetry, song lyrics, or overheard conversation. They are snippets I catch, and they are part of the collage. Devon: How has your art changed over the course of your artistic career? Lorette: My visual artwork began as pure collage, that is, as analog cut and paste paper and images. Glue and pictures on paper, nothing else. It was much more likely to include complete and coherent recognizable imagery, where as now it's often in layers where only snippets and suggestions come through the paint. This will change again. My early work was very dark, too. It was cynical and nihilist. I was immersed in that darkness and deeply invested in it. My identity depended on it, that stereotype of the volatile tortured artist really resonated with me. My writing and visual art was a way to sort out and express the mess of me and my hostility at the world. There was a lot of severe mental illness, dysfunction, and abuse growing up in our family and that moulds a person. It took a long time to find my way out of the shackles of depression and addiction, a long time just to realize it was possible to exist outside of that paradigm. My work can still show a certain noir quality from time to time, but it's much deeper and less self absorbed, it is much more often a celebration or a serious inquiry, not just a giant middle finger or a glorification of self destruction. Devon: How do you feel about collaborating across media? Have you ever felt that a collaborator got something "wrong" about one of your works? Lorette: The nature of my work, of culling ideas from everywhere and everyone else, extends to its viewers, so I let people experience them in their own way and consider that part of the art. My intentions aren't the ending of the work. In that sense, they are open ended and every viewer responds differently and there is no right or wrong way to perceive them. Collaborating is fun and it's a meaningful way to engage more deeply with my work because I am finding still another perspective or way in. Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and two collections out or forthcoming, among them: We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/Complicated (A collaboration with Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic); and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found here in The Ekphrastic Review as well as in The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, the Aeolian Harp Folio, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Red Paint Hill, Peacock Journal, and more.
Lorette C. Luzajic is a mixed media visual artist and writer in Toronto, Canada. She is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca. Physics Will Not Have It
To be like glass, throwing patterns of light instead of dark shadows, pools of daytime art in infinite detail, every filigreed ripple of love and fear and guilt and torment, the excruciating minutiae of the broken heart spilt on hardwood floors and asphalt roads, climbing brick walls into dimensions we dare not dream of; but physics will not have it, physics was born before love, what does it know of spaces with no rules, of pain, keeping us tethered to the earth while the sky whispers urgently each dawn; by noon I am reading the murky shapes like tea leaves, trying to find tomorrow in whatever is left behind, by dusk, the blur stains the window, the corners are drawn one by one into the centre, by then, by then it is too late. Rajani Radhakrishnan Rajani Radhakrishnan: "I am from Bangalore, India and post my work on thotpurge.wordpress.com. Some of my poems have recently been featured in The Calamus Journal, Quiet Letter, Visual Verse and Parentheses Journal." After a Stroke, My Mother Examines a Picture of the Icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, by Tom Daley4/3/2018 After a Stroke, My Mother Examines a Picture of the Icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe Lady, why is your countenance the color of vole feet draggling from the jaws of a cat? What tribe of mud daubers stung stars onto your mantle? Who names the fumbles that topple from your breasts? Your counterspell blunts the jagged crescent of every campesino’s charmed and smoldering scythe. Your spooled mouth waits to unfurl the ticker tape of your vow. In torchlight, your eyebrows fly to heaven on thin wings of soot. Only the moon survives the crush of your heel. Virgin of Guadalupe, I pray for your handshake, I pray for your ribs, I pray for your hips, the ones tugged dry while expelling that bountiful head ordained to gnaw all the hangnails of history. Steer me, Lady, through the lightning that browns the mountains. Drown the infections that flush my cough into a gargle. Virgin, who never burned a supper, strip me of strangles, grizzles, knots, of scratched jazz skipping the shadows out of my sleep. Princess of the Aztecs, thread my poncho with roses this winter that I might adorn that tomb slab where even cayenne would cool, where your son’s brain was looted of its chemical salves, and where his feet, which stretched the sea smooth as a conga head, refused to rest at right angles to the ground. Kiss me, mother of Mexico’s hope-- your little mouth is still rusty with smoke. Tom Daley This poem was first published in Rhino and in the poet's book, House You Cannot Reach--Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems. Tom Daley was a machinist for over two decades. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. Recipient of the Dana Award in Poetry and the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Prize from the Academy of American Poets, he leads poetry writing workshops at the Online School of Poetry, Boston Center for Adult Education, and Lexington Community Education. A Street (1926)
There is no horizon on the streets of New York City. Open space lives up. It's so scarce there, even air has a price. O'Keeffe's version of a street: skyscrapers, brown and windowless on each side, trap the pale sky, darker the farther eyes go down. Unlit solitary street lamp waits, focal point. Sunrise or sunset, she knew how the buildings' shadows dictate lives, warp our perceptions of space and time. Courtney O'Banion Smith Courtney O'Banion Smith teaches, writes, and attempts to raise her two boys in Houston. Her work has appeared in several publications including Southwestern American Literature, alba, and a recent featured guest post for the Writer's Digest poetry blog, Poetic Asides. Her chapbook of poems, Abundance, (Domino Dog Press) was released in March, 2018. |
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