washerwoman her back yields to the confessions of Linen Chemise Lace Stocking Undershirt Cravat she absolves in lye baptizes in the seine bleaches with milk hands chafed grating soap rubbing fabric knees sore bent in prayer at water’s edge skirt stained with grass loam and laundry blue anointed in yellow headscarf a poor halo she acquires their sin cleanses with the Great Wash she is saviour redeemer to the blessed transgressors Rebecca Weigold Rebecca Weigold’s poetry has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tishman Review, BlazeVox, Winamop!, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and other publications. She lives in Kentucky. We are grateful for Rebecca at The Ekphrastic Review because she generously donates her time to take care of growing our Twitter presence online.
0 Comments
On The Herring Net Two men are in a wooden boat-- a father and son perhaps-- slick with the spray of saltwater, heads and bodies bowed as they haul a netful of silver- bellied herring over the gunwale. I cannot see their hands, though I imagine them expertly unhooking the fish from the net, thimble-fingered and intent beneath the muddy sky. They are not here; they died over a century ago, if they ever lived at all. When I was young, we camped on the shore of Lake Sebago. I had just read a story in which a child's toys came alive as he slept, and I was busy imagining a new world of living things just beyond my sight. The trees spoke to each other, passed signals through intertwined roots like phone wires; the butterflies’ wings beat in Morse code, and beneath the silver- blue stillness of the lake, bass skirted among the tall, green weeds, warning each other of my father’s gleaming hook. This morning, I read that Benjamin Spock “found childhood” back in 1963 and wonder-- Where was it before then? Were we all like the fishermen in Homer’s painting, teetering on the edge of our boats, deaf to the swells of a violent sea and the whispered songs of the fish below? Just last week, the mothers lost their children. We pried their small, warm bodies from their arms, like herring from a net. And I remember my father grilling the big-mouth over the fire, the horror as he hooked his calloused finger beneath the fixed, dead eye of the fish, popped it from the socket, and swallowed it whole. Tracy McNamara Tracy McNamara teaches English and Creative Writing at a public high school in New Jersey. She is currently pursuing a MA in Creative Writing and Literature. Wild Women in Old Movies I always wanted to be like the wild women in old movies who have whole storm systems of electric hair, who are earthy and hotten things up and whose great talent is in letting themselves go, go, go. Oh, let it be me, Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity with her killer ratio of hip to waist, her hand dangerously gemmed with red-fanged cigarettes. Raw martinis have turned her guts and voice phosphorescent green and silver. Her rouge burns, irremediable rose through smoke. If you bounced a rock off her adorable pompadour the rock would break. She incites to murder so casually in her vaginal voice, lets slip that she wants her old man wearing clothes of sand. But even more I wanted to be Dolores del Rio in Bird of Paradise: that scene, that scene where with star-shaped tears and not one word she slowly chews the pomegranate, then puts her lips to the feverish lips of her sailorboy and tongues the fruit into his mouth: one last look: then goes away, doomed, gorgeous, to throw herself into the volcano. Margaret Benbow Margaret Benbow: "I'm a poet and fiction writer whose first collection of poetry, Stalking Joy, won the Walt McDonald First Book Award. My debut book of fiction, Boy Into Panther and Other Stories, won the Many Voices Project prize and was published recently by New Rivers Press." Ceasefire Red apples spill across the road. She wheezes, lying on her back next to the canvas tote. The fruit is too far away for her limp fingers to touch. Three hours ago, we sat on a couch covered in primroses. From the screen, a tinny voice told us the news. Papers signed, hands shaken, an accordance in accord. "This time, there is hope," she said. Click clack click went the rosary beads passing through her gnarled fingers. "Maybe this time." I shook my head. "Peace in one hand and a weapon in the other." "Maybe this time," she repeated stubbornly. The staccato language of guns speaks around me as I kneel in the dirt road by her head. The sound fades into raindrops on dry asphalt. The dry tick of a metronome. Not quite as fast as a heartbeat. There are splashes of red on the dirt around her thin, white hair. The wound gapes in her throat, a second mouth below the first. It speaks loudly. I take her hand. "Grandmother," I say. "How can I help you, grandmother?" She blinks milky eyes. There is dirt on her face, and I wipe it away with the edge of my sleeve. Her lips move, but it is a whisper of lost sound. I lean closer to listen. “Forgive,” she says. Another bead falling through her fingers. I listen to the rasp of her breath go in and out, and I hold her hand as the sun moves across the sky. The sound of rain falls over the shadowed lines of her face. The air is scented with the fragrance of murdered apples. Alison McBain Alison McBain is an award-winning author with nearly 100 short works published, including prose/poetry in Litro, FLAPPERHOUSE, and The Airgonaut. Her debut fantasy novel The Rose Queen was named one of the best books of 2018 by the reviewer website Bookshine and Readbows, and she was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize for poetry. In her spare time, she is the Book Reviews Editor for Bewildering Stories, and lead editor of the small press publisher Fairfield Scribes. Ekphrastic Writing Challenge
Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. Thank you to everyone who participated in our last writing challenge featuring the work of Yves Tanguy, and guest edited by Shirley Glubka, which ends today at midnight. (Click here to see the Yves Tanguy challenge.) Accepted responses for the Tanguy challenge will be published on April 12, 2019. The prompt this time is Louisiana Zombie Afternoon, by Jenn Zed. Deadline is April 19, 2019. We are excited to feature regular contributor Jordan Trethewey as guest editor for this challenge! Guest editor's note: Hello, ekphrastic-philes! Welcome to your next bi-monthly challenge. Lorette has given me the keys. I said all the right things, set her mind at ease about my driving habits, and now I’m going to put the pedal to the floor and see what this puppy’s got! For this challenge, I chose a piece by an insanely talented, and diverse, visual artist from the UK named Jenn Zed. I have been a fan of hers for years. Her creative drive and body of work is staggering. I am also a big fan of street art as a visual medium for storytelling. This piece caught my eye, reminded me of a Bansky. The silhouette of the little girl with a gun, smoking a cigarette, facing the glare of an indifferent sun, should give all ekphrastic minds out there a running start. Use the title to inspire you, or don’t. I love the undead genre, but am also excited to see how you folks might interpret this scene outside of that context. Have fun. Fire something off. I’m wearing Kevlar. Jordan The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything. 3. Have fun. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include JENN ZED WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line in all caps please. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your poem. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight, April 19, 2019. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! NEWS We have been featuring occasional guest editors for the ekphrastic challenges. We're hoping this will inspire us in unexpected ways, add new flavours and perspectives to the journal, foster community, and widen readership. Upcoming guest editors include Shirley Glubka, and Joan Leotta. We're excited about this and about having a whole year of challenges, now that we've found an ekphrastic prompt system that is working in terms of consistency and longevity. Many great poems are about to be written! The Grim Reaper in Their Midst From the ledge in variously negligent attires looming over the ghostly shadows and peeling paint confident people pretend to know what they’re doing as they maneuver the soldiers underneath with sword-like contraptions. The soldiers in various stages of coherence look at us or at each other or at the Grim Reaper in their midst. Are they being stabbed or guided as they stab each other? A man in the back wonders if he himself is a puppet. The Grim Reaper is bored and stressed and has better things to do with his death. If photography had been more common the cleverest soldier could have taken a photo of the audience, or John Singer, or the mountain range outside. As it stands, no one is having much fun, not even at the auction at which the painting is being sold as you read this. The auctioneer would love to set the room on fire or at least bring in a few water buffalo to discipline the guests. But he can’t even think of a single joke. Anton Yakovlev Anton Yakovlev's latest chapbook Chronos Dines Alone, winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize 2018, was published by SurVision Books. He is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Measure, Amarillo Bay, and elsewhere. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, is forthcoming from Sensitive Skin Books. https://www.pw.org/content/anton_yakovlev Stare "Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." Walker Evans The small town windswept streets, their flophouses and weatherworn sharecropper porches hold the stare and want and will of those who people them. The speech of image, already past tense in the snap of shutter, still endures like deep south rural main streets impoverished as dust bowl fields, yet resilient as life itself. Andrena Zawinski This poem was written in response to a whole exhibition of Walker Evans' work, not a single photograph. Walker Evans Cantor Arts exhibit at Stanford University, 2012 Andrena Zawinski has authored nine poetry collections of which three are full books, the most recent being Landings from Kelsay Books; a PEN Josephine Miles Award winner, Something About from Blue Light Press; and a Kenneth Patchen Prize, Traveling in Reflected Light from Pig Iron Press. Her poetry has received accolades for lyricism, form, spirituality, and social concern. She founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com Happy Birthday Art Sale
I'm getting older, you get a gift! Buy one, get one free on all square foot artworks by Lorette C. Luzajic (editor, The Ekphrastic Review) until midnight, April 18, 2019. $250 Canadian dollars, free shipping- for both!!! Please leave a message that you saw this on Ekphrastic in the notes section- any sales through this channel will be used directly to dedicate time, maintenance fees or promotion of The Ekphrastic Review! Click here to see inventory and/or purchase securely. Email Lorette at theekphrasticreview@gmail.com with any questions. We Are All Dreamers Gaston Bachelard writes, “Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost” (The Poetics of Space). Standing in front of María Brito’s El Patio de Mi Casa, two worlds blended or bled into each other, colours and images breaking through the wall of her evocative kitchen and patio. Inside outside, outside inside. Nightly dreams more vivid, and I awoke with the taste of memory in my mouth. When I ran my tongue against my palate, along my teeth, over my lips, the dreams shuddered within me, the strong scent and taste of blood and earth in my nose. Like the meeting of light and shadow, kitchen and patio, night and day, memory and dream became one. María Brito’s beautiful art returned to me lives I almost lost forever. In California there’s a young man who knows hardly anything of his family’s live-in housekeeper. All he knows is her first name, Carmen. In one of his university classes he’s given an assignment. Wonders if he can interview Carmen. He learns of her hunger and poverty as a child, her migration to the US, and the violence she endures once here. (Maybe he wonders more: was your journey a dream or a nightmare, Carmen?) She tells him there was a day when she decided she must change her life. She begins working three jobs to help her brother go to school. Now Carmen works six days a week. She is given a small room to sleep in. A housekeeper until the seventh day, when she visits her family. The young man tries to thank her. Carmen thanks him. Why? “Because every night I come up to my room and I lie on my little bed,” she tells him, “and I tell myself the story of my life—just in case someone should ever ask.” When I turn a page, steal a moment to write, I remember the many Carmens living in small rooms across America. Face the evidence of the boys and young men who travel dangerous distances. South America, Central America. Wonder how, like my father (like countless fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles), how can they begin working at such a young age. Small, dying Midwest towns brought back to life as Latinxs create a home. All these lives and migrations with and without words. How to express the pain of being deported back to a country that you never knew, since the United States is your home? How to express some 2,500-6,000 children separated from their families, sent thousands of miles away to a chain-link cell, a thin reflective sheet for the night as they cry for their mothers and fathers, cry in fear for not knowing where they are, why they’ve been taken away? How, out in the moonlight, how to place your ear to the ground and listen? Writing has become more and more an embrace--un abrazo fuerte—discovered through an act of witness. Or, better yet, listening. Listening for the lyrical place, the ground of song, canto hondo, inside/outside fences. To sow the peoples, places, and stories—the words—into the earth. To break open a small furrow near the heart so others will finally listen. A small furrow that contains earth, seed, water. Life, lives. And sometimes in the night, when her hands are at rest, clasped there on her chest or stomach, sometimes Carmen surely dreams. In her right ear: a charred tree, moonlight, a crib, a photograph of her and all her primas in white dresses, some smiling, some frowning, squinting in the glare of the sun. She hears a hummingbird in the window. There’s a black pan and a silver knife on the kitchen counter, cold, clear water falling from the faucet into a tin pail. “The great function of poetry is to give us back our dreams,” Bachelard writes. Yes, we must accept this poetry, ecstatically, as we imagine and dream a place where words are like birds or hands or tears or laughter or rain or song. Write it in the earth, shout it in the streets, talk it out in our bright pink patios: we are all dreamers. Let us break bread, the bread that we have harvested, and then begin tearing down the fences. — for José Andrés and with gratitude to Barbara Myerhoff and Christine McEwan, for sharing Carmen’s story Fred Arroyo Fred Arroyo is the author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions, shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and The Region of Lost Names, a finalist for the 2008 Premio Aztlán Prize. A recipient of an Individual Artist Program Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, Fred’s fiction is included in the Library of Congress series “Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers.” Fred has published widely in a variety of literary journals, and is included in the anthologies Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity and the Natural World. In the spring of 2017, Western Humanities Review published a portfolio of brief ekphrastic prose Fred edited in conjunction with the Smithsonian exhibit Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Fred is completing a new a new book, Sown in Earth: Essays on Memory, Place, and Writing. He’s also at work on a book of short fictions, The Book of Manuels, and a collection of poetry, Before Birches Blue. Fred is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Middle Tennessee State University. On El Sarape Rojo 1918 Alberto Garduño, a Mexican artist, died in 1948. Compañero in the monumental glorification of the civil war that tore through Mexico earlier that same century, Garduño rides a white stallion alongside others—Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros—whose monuments stamp walls with symbols of collective ghosts, shared hauntings. His oil paintings hang in museums. The nation’s history, the artist’s canvas. The images stand witness on and in public buildings. In paint and brushstroke, they chant, “Viva la Revolución Mexicana.” Flash point for so many other revoluciones to come. Setting: the iconic desert. A background drenched in chlorophyll. A vegetable palette with darkening borders. In shades of green, the human eye discerns hues more varied, diverse, nuanced, and abundant than in any other slice of the colour spectrum—an adaptation with its own adaptability: an advantage for the hunter, a defense against predators. Green is the colour of my true love’s eyes. Lorca’s green, a gypsy green, verde que te quiero verde. The sap runs over the greening world. Foreground, the sole figure of un muchacho sits bundled in arms and knees drawn close under a wide-brimmed woven hat that shields him from a too-harsh sun. His back to the green forest of nopales. Rural Mexico, los ranchos, el desierto, las montañas. Already, always nostalgic. The cactus blushes its reddening fruit, latuna, the prickly pear, to shame the desert. In its sweet, seedy pulp, the blood-red fruit hoards summer rains from parched dusty earth. Garduño’s warrior sits, his back to a fibrous green wall that is la tierra for which, in which, which he fights. Is it a respite from battle or the defeat by betrayals or a moment captured in pigment of campesino life? The artist dips the figure in earth tones of umber, bares his eyes and toes, swaddles him in a blanket dyed bright crimson, a bursting wound that marks the target for a bullet fired many years ago. Becky Boling Becky Boling is the Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of Spanish and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. Besides scholarly articles, she has published poems in the Martin Lake Journal, has won the Northfield Sidewalk Poetry Contest in 2016 and 2018, and has read prose and poetry at Writers’ Night and other local events. From southern Indiana, she shivers in the colder but more welcoming state of Minnesota where she has raised a son and badly tended a garden. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you. Join us on Facebook:
Tickled Pink Contest
May 2024
|