The Flying Nun Rests Against a Lifeboat Sally Field, between takes, leans against a wooden lifeboat, beached. It’s January. Her bare feet look as cold as the remnants of snow on the sand. Under her nun’s costume she wears a harness that gives her excellent posture. She cannot slouch like the costume rosary sliding off her lap. Her white headdress looks like gulls’ wings. In fact, two distant gulls like mini-nuns soar by. Beneath this gray sky she cannot imagine giving Forrest Gump advice and chocolates, or spilling her guts over a daughter’s film-set grave, or standing up for union rights and winning an Oscar. We already like her, but she doesn’t know it yet. Her feet hurt. She’s been up since four a.m. for makeup and wardrobe. The script changes she has memorized are as bad as yesterday’s. This could be the end of my career, she thinks, unaware of the convent behind her, nuns inside peeking out the windows at Sally and the lifeboat, wishing they, too, might don a harness and soar through the heavens, their white veils billowing like sails. Pat Valdata Pat Valdata is a poet and novelist. Her poetry book about women aviation pioneers, Where No Man Can Touch, won the 2015 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her other poetry titles are Inherent Vice and Looking for Bivalve. Her poetry has been published in Ecotone, Fledgling Rag, Italian Americana, Light, Little Patuxent Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She has a new novel, Eve’s Daughters, out from Moonshine Cove Publishing. Her other novels are Crosswind and The Other Sister. Pat is a retired adjunct professor who lives in Crisfield, Maryland, with her husband Bob Schreiber.
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Georgia O’Keeffe Something about having my ashes scattered about Ghost Ranch, and the unsanctimonious decision by Arthur Pack to turn my beloved sanctuary over to the Presbyterians so they could make of it a retreat (and thus my remains, trampled on by these pilgrimages into my lovely hills), this irony, has caused me to think of you, my dear Alfred—and all the things we left unsaid, and though I wish I could put down on paper and let these few words serve to manifest something of my vitality to you, death disallows it, and even these few thoughts I wish to speak to you, knowing they won’t ever actually reach you, and as I stated, something about the pious nature of my beloved Ghost Ranch hints toward a final confession, but not as a penitent confesses will I, for I ask for no forgiveness, as none is needed—only understanding, and this for myself more than from you as I hash over our life together and try to resolve something of the substance. For I feel another breakdown coming on, Alfred. It’s as if everything is dissolving, washing away, and you know how waters terrify me when I reach this mindset. I’ve been thinking lately how distance always managed to clarify our relationship more so than being in each other’s presence. Absence, or the negative space in both our respected Arts, appears, or more accurately—it disappears to petrify and complement existence and psychological mood more than physical presence ever could. But absence, without the knowledge of a future reunion is it not just another form of loneliness? I know you are buried near your lake and surrounded by the phalanx of pines to keep you company. I would get claustrophobia in such a cramped space with such a limited view of the sky through the trees. However, I pray they throw a loving chiaroscuro upon your plot of earth when the sun rises each day. The photographer in you would love that. Do you know, Alfred, I never felt like I was in such able hands as the times you photographed me, especially when I made myself most vulnerable and allowed you to photograph me naked. It felt invigorating to be the subject studied. In these instances, I never minded the puritanical claims of sinful eroticism. In fact, I loved such claims, and with my ethics instilled in me by my mother, and applied to highest standard of Art by me, and her teaching her children from an early age what an woman could and should be (not as society saw it, for she believed in her girls, that we could do and be whatever we wanted, albeit she would have been most offended by my nudity, never my audacity), brought out the fight in me, and I turned my nose up to such unenlightened and insulted mentalities and scoffed in the face of public outrage. Over all these years, Alfred, some things have not changed. I still feel defiant towards society, and that an artist must remain aloof from it to keep an outsider’s eye. I still prefer a flower to a person. You remember me telling you, “When I hold a flower in my hand and really look at it, it’s my world for the moment?” I sometimes think I did not paint my flowers large enough. Perhaps, I should have tripled the size of the canvas. Feminine beauty, larger than life, unfettered and unfraught by the cabal of patriarchy you and your artists clung to like the one true dogma of divinity. My paintings were not meant to offend you, rather to frighten. At the center of your fright, staring back, not in some Freudian embellishment of woman’s repressed sexuality as you and your critics might say to disguise your fear, but in duplicated glory: the flower, blossomed open to expose that at the heart of that voluptuous intimacy and sweetness, an ovary—dark, frightful and beautiful for being nothing more than a simple flower. Nature’s mirror in my paintings often frightened you and made you seek protective rights over me, as if I were the only vulnerable one. Alfred, l must confess that your affair with that Norman girl affected me. Don’t push on me once more that bohemian tale about artistic entitlement. Could we just call your lust what it was? I had my code, and though I lived by its strictness, that nothing take precedent over my Art, I never once expected you not to live out your intemperance under the guise of “for the sake of Art” as well, though we both know what it really was. So, I remained silent. The gap between us grew. But Alfred, I never applauded you for hurting me the way you did. That hurt, caused by you, opened doors to burgeoning emotive powers that had been trapped within and would have stayed there were it not for you. The hurt helped me see New Mexico like a tragic book laid open and read to the middle, half my painting had already been done for me. Your infidelity contributed to the last half. Thank you, Alfred, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. I wish you could see this New Mexico you helped me create. It is this barren, desert landscape with mountains rising in the distance, and hills as variegated as zebra stripes, but with many more colors than just black and white. And the reds. Oh Alfred. If you could see the reds like streaks of blood in the siltstone and shale. Or the forlorn crosses atop the hills, making each hill a Golgotha and a suitable spot for crucifixion, like the land itself suffered as much long ago and speaks of endured agonies over geological periods. And yes, Alfred, after all these years, I found my view of the sky the way it should be painted. From the ground, it’s blue for miles upon miles upon miles in every direction. And then the clouds form overhead during monsoon season. And I have the most amazing seat to watch the drama unfold. This communion between sky and earth is untarnished by the likes of your beloved trees. Lightning from above touches the haunches of earth below and animates it all for a moment. It truly is breathtaking. As it starts, Alfred, the morning is peaceful and blue. Out of nowhere, the most beautiful and puffy white clouds appear in uniformed rows with a frame of blue between them. As the heat of the day climbs and the moisture from the earth evaporates, more and more of these clouds smack against anything, it can be as small as an anthill (forgive the exaggeration), it seems, and gather into one gigantic thundercloud with an underbelly dark with bruises, and then a fantastic lightning bolt can be seen twenty miles away, as it flashes out in a network of white light at Pedernal Mountain. When this happens, distance becomes this proportional riddle that seems not to exist, as everything appears closer than it should be. And the bones. Alfred, these bleached bones that are found in the strangest places appear to be the harbinger of a life lived before modern society and its trappings. Sometimes they speak to me of dreamscapes, of an unconscious living where life went on and on, and nature, though it acted as a cruel agent, it couldn’t be said to be cruel of itself, rather indifferent. The hills speak of the other aspect of nature, this softness amongst the harsh elements. They roll out of the earth, like a plump, naked baby on a mother’s bosom. And you take the adobe houses that do the same kind of rising out of the earth, only symmetrically straight lined, and you add the metaphor of the ladders adorning each house, and, oh my, Alfred, it just becomes too much, it overwhelms the senses, and after painting feverishly to capture this essence, one wants to fall and have the earth open and swallow her whole, take her back. I just wanted to let you know that I am losing my identity, Alfred. The stubborn substance that made our relationship flourish, or that made me paint the way I did, is disintegrating, for Earth does seem to be taking me back, but not as I supposed. It saddens me to think that year by year, the theater between the storming sky and desert earth that attracted me to my New Mexico is the mechanism of my undoing. It’s washing me away from my beloved place, little by little, piece by piece I go, into the arroyos, down the Chama and into the Rio Grande. Until, one day, all of me will have drifted down through Texas and into the Gulf of Mexico, but I am no longer afraid of this water, of its appeal to nothingness. Alfred, I do confess, I wish you were there to greet me, or at least that part of you that might still exist. If you ever do find a way to get out of that pine box, I pray, come join me. We can dissolve together. Wouldn’t that be lovely? Alec Bryan Born and raised in Ogden, Utah, Alec Bryan has called Albuquerque, New Mexico home since 2016. He works for the Bureau of Land Management as a Rangeland Management Specialist. He enjoys birdwatching, photography and wandering over vast tracks of land looking for shed antlers. Alec is the author of one published novel, Night on the Invisible Sun (Aqueous Books, 2010). His short stories have appeared in Pank, Kill Author, Thrice Fiction, Bluestem and Untoward Magazine. Boys in a Pasture Two boys rest in an oat field ready for harvest. Late August, hats against the sun, one straw on the smaller boy, one black pot-hat of cotton on the other. Rough white long-sleeve shirts, leather britches. Barefoot, the bigger boy with a bad big toe. He looks beyond the fence to the barn where dad cinched up the Belgians. His brother looks the other way, dreaming of ramming a Minni ball down a musket barrel. At their feet are wild daisies, meadowsweets, pink delights. It’s the pasture’s edge. They’re not working, they’re watching—wondering who will bring in the sheaves since father and Uncle Jeremiah are off fighting in the war in Virginia, one on horseback, one on foot with a musket. Mike Lewis-Beck Mike Lewis-Beck writes from Iowa City. He has pieces in American Journal of Poetry, Alexandria Quarterly, Apalachee Review, Blue Collar Review, Cortland Review, Chariton Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Ekphrastic Review, Guesthouse, Heavy Feather Review, Inquisitive Eater, Pure Slush, Pilgrimage, Seminary Ridge Review, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, and Wapsipinicon Almanac, among other venues. He has a book of poems, Rural Routes, recently published by Alexandria Quarterly Press. At the Exhibition of Japanese Ceramics, by Roman Khe, Translated from Russian by Sasha A. Palmer4/10/2021 Russian: НА ВЫСТАВКЕ ЯПОНСКОЙ КЕРАМИКИ Блуждаю по залу, ускользая как лис в узкое горлышко гудящего кувшина, плачущего музыкой, знакомой мне с детства, где я витаю прозрачной дымкой рассвета, откуда на свет появляются странные иероглифы на поющем свистке протяжного времени, из плена у которого вырвусь, лишь став пронзительным свистом, лепетом, болью, иль каплей воды на голубой вазе, похожей на огромный лист лопуха, под которым мне хочется мокнуть с тобою от тёплого ливня и от восхитительных слёз любви. Roman Khe At the Exhibition of Japanese Ceramics I wander the hall stealing away like a fox through the narrow mouth of the humming jug that is crying with music I have known since childhood where I am the hovering pellucid haze of dawn, out of which strange hieroglyphs evolve entering this world carved upon the singing whistle of the long-drawn-out time that will hold me captive unless I become the sharp whistling babble, pain or a drop of water on the blue vase that resembles an enormous burdock leaf beneath which I want to get soaked with you caught in the warm rain wet with delightful tears of love. Sasha A. Palmer
Roman Khe, an acclaimed poet, singer-songwriter, and translator, was born in 1949 on the Sakhalin Island, to a Korean refugee family. Fully bilingual, Roman Khe has been writing poetry since the age of nine; first in Korean and, after his twenty-fifth birthday — in Russian. Roman Khe is the author of five collections of poetry, prose, and translations. He lives in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia. Sasha A. Palmer is an award-winning poet, and translator. She is the recipient of the international translation Compass Award for Russian poetry in English. Sasha’s poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in Writer’s Digest, Slovo/Word, Cardinal Points and elsewhere. Born and raised in Moscow, Russia, she currently lives in Maryland. Visit Sasha at www.sashaapalmer.com Click here or on image above to read numerous responses in poetry and prose to this Easter painting. Did you know? We are always seeking translations of ekphrastic poetry. If you translate literature or write in English and another language, please submit!
We need the permission of the original poet or writer to publish their work. Ekphrastic work only! Check the submission guidelines in the menu bar above for details. Here are several translations from our archives. ** Blossoms in the Night: Ericka Ghersi and Toshiya Kamei. Ericka Ghersi’s Spanish poem on a Paul Klee painting is translated by Toshiya Kamei. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/blossoms-in-the-night-1918-by-paul-klee-by-ericka-ghersi-translated-by-toshiya-kamei ** Flamingos: Lorette C. Luzajic, Translated into Urdu by Maraam Pasha and Saad Ali This prose poem by yours truly is from my book, Pretty Time Machine, and I was honoured to have Maraam Pasha and Saad Ali translate it into Urdu. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/flamingos-by-lorette-c-luzajic-translated-into-urdu-by-maraam-pasha-and-saad-ali ** In Memory of Murni, by Wayan Jengki Sunarta, translation by Brian A. Salmons Wayan Jengki Sunarta remembers an artist from Bali in Indonesian, and Brian Salmons translates. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/in-memory-of-murni-by-wayan-jengki-sunarta-translated-by-brian-a-salmons ** Užrašytos fotografijos/Annotated Photographs A series of poems by Marius Burokas, translated from the Lithuanian by Rimas Uzgiris. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/uzrasytos-fotografijosannotated-photographs-by-marius-burokas-translated-by-rimas-uzgiris ** A Special Showcase on Will Barnet, by Salgado Maranhao and Alexis Levitin A selection of poetry on Will Barnet, by Salgado Maranhao, winner of all of Brazil's major poetry awards, translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/special-ekphrastic-poetry-showcase-salgado-maranhao-on-will-barnet-translated-by-alexis-levitin ** Zelfportret, by Albert Hagenaars, translated from Dutch by John Irons Poetry in Dutch and English on Van Gogh’s portrait. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/zelfportret-by-albert-hagenaars ** Mission, by Aymui Nakamura, Translated by Toshiya Kamei A short story in Japanese and English on a Kandinsky painting. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/mission-by-ayumi-nakamura-translated-by-toshiya-kamei ** Buddha in the Mandorla, by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translation by Susan McLean We are fortunate to have had many translations from the German by poet Susan McLean. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/buddha-in-the-mandorla-rilke-translation-by-susan-mclean ** Flock, by Nina Kossman, in Russian and English Nina Kossman writes in Russian and English on her own painting. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/flock-by-nina-kossman-in-russian-and-english ** We Want Your List of Favourites From the Archive! There are almost six years worth of writing at The Ekphrastic Review. With daily or more posts of poetry, fiction, and prose for most of that history, we have a wealth of talent to show off. We encourage readers to explore our archives by month and year in the sidebar. Click on a random selection and read through our history. Our new Throwback Thursday feature highlights writing from our past, chosen on purpose or chosen randomly. You’ll get the chance to discover past contributors, work you missed, or responses to older ekphrastic challenges. Would you like to be a guest editor for a Throwback Thursday? Pick up to 10 favourite or random posts from the archives of The Ekphrastic Review. Use the format you see above: title, name of author, a sentence or two about your choice, and the link. Include a bio and if you wish, a note to readers about the Review, your relationship to the journal, ekphrastic writing in general, or any other relevant subject. Put THROWBACK THURSDAYS in the subject line and send to theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. Also, send a vintage photo of yourself! I/Object Text used: Carl Goldhagen’s artistic statement “Paintings 2014-2018” https://www.carlgoldhagen.com/statements.html Kari Ann Ebert
Kari Ann Ebert is the Poetry & Interview editor for The Broadkill Review and the Project Director of Downtown Dover Poetry Weekend. Winner of the 2020 Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry, the 2019 Crossroads Ekphrastic Writing Contest, and 2018 Gigantic Sequins Poetry Contest, Kari’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Mojave River Review, Philadelphia Stories, Main Street Rag, The Ekphrastic Review, and Gargoyle as well as several anthologies. She has been awarded fellowships from Delaware Division of the Arts (2020), The Shipman Agency (2020), BOAAT Press (2020), and Brooklyn Poets (2019). A few more weeks for our Bird Watching flash fiction and poetry contest!
Get our ebook featuring forty bird-themed art prompts, carefully curated by The Ekphrastic Review. The ebook is $10 CAD. One winner in flash fiction and one winner in poetry will each receive $100 prize. We are excited to have Tricia Marcella Cimera as our poetry judge, and Karen Schauber as our flash fiction judge! Each participant can enter up to five poems, five stories, or a combination of both. Entries must be inspired by one or more of the artworks in the ebook. Selected entries will be published in special showcases throughout the month of May. The cash prize winners will be chosen and announced by the end of May. The winning fiction will be published again by Karen at Miramichi Review! The winning poem will also appear in Tricia's Fox Poetry Box! deadline: May 1, 2021 email: theekphrasticreview@gmail.com subject line: BIRD WATCHING SUBMISSION number of entries: submit up to five poems, five stories, or a combination (all together in one email) word count: poetry and flash fiction to a maximum 1000 words (yes, we love microfiction under 400 words, too) Submit with your work a third-person bio, no longer than 200 words. No simultaneous submissions for this contest please. Send ONE email with all of your entries. Edvard Munch: The Disease of Watching My sufferings are … indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings. ― Edvard Munch Years later, he described that night, crossing the bridge at sundown. Unspeakably weary, he leaned on the rail and let his friends walk on without him. Tongues of blood and fire roiled the heavens. Earth had burst its horizon line. Something was screaming. But where in this painting is the source of the scream? Erupting from the distorted figure gripping its gaping face? But clearly the couple on the bridge hears nothing. In the lurid hues of the blood-bruised sky? And yet, in monochrome lithographs, The Scream unsettled the parlors of Europe. In the tormented mind of an artist who now would never be anything other than the man who painted The Scream? Yes. Maybe there. Across the bottom of a later version, he penciled: Can only have been painted by a madman. But if the scream arose from his madness, how to explain us. We hear it as ours, that scream, released from the rusted hinge of time to give voice to our shattered age. Who was he that night at twenty-nine, as he set out across a bridge with his friends? And after: who was he then? It must have been awful. Like living again and again through something you did not survive the first time. There are paintings like that. Encyclopedia Britannica, first edition, 1771: If you’re looking for insomnia, you find, “The Disease of Watching.” His was a lifelong insomnia. Years of absinthe, bouts of depression, anxiety, voices, incarceration, but it was the sleeplessness that brought him to the limit of his endurance. Through all those years, Munch watched the muddy, coagulated flow of his sufferings, and he painted himself-- Self-Portrait in Hell, With Burning Cigarette, With Lyre, With Bottle of Wine, Self-Portrait Beneath Woman’s Mask, With Cod’s Head, `With Skeleton Arm— each canvas torn from his mirrored flesh like a tissue of skin to become the face of a man who no longer existed. He couldn’t paint a self- portrait fast enough to be true. At his death, there were seventy of them. More. A lifetime of faces to drag through his nights, drag like a shadow across the floorboards. Drag like a lake. Consider two: The Night Wanderer (1924): He is 61, living alone, a stooped and sour old man walking the rooms of a darkened house in the hours before dawn. His hands are not shown, deep, perhaps, in his dressing gown pockets or clasped, as the elderly do, at his back. He has tried to bury his eyes. Imagine the mind of the man who painted The Scream, shuffling night after night through this hall of mirrors, floors tipped forward, walls out of plumb, a memento mori peering from every reflective surface. His skull-like face in the polished leg of the grand piano, in the bone moon at the tall window glass, in the sheen of the floorboards, in the face on his easel, half-formed, eclipsed by two ghastly cavities, as if two thumbs had put out his eyes like candles. Each self-portrait was his last. (Each self-portrait was his last but one.) Why go on trying? After a lifetime, who among us deserves a face? Self Portrait between the Clock and the Bed (1943) A stick of a man, erect and proper in a formal coat, he stands between a clock with no hands and a narrow, neatly made bed. Paintings, his own, selected from over a thousand, hang at his back. `Everything arranged. But first, this face to master. His last. (His last but one.) How does such a man die? He died the following winter. Sleepless, he wandered into the frozen night and caught a chill. It `was, in the end, that simple. He was found in the morning shaved, fully dressed, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot open beside him. Marjorie Stelmach This is an altered version of the original poem, with format modified for the web. Marjorie Stelmach has published six volumes of poems, most recently Walking the Mist (from Ashland Poetry Press. Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Image, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and others. Nantucket West By the time I finished reading Moby Dick, I’d think about whales 24/7: harpooning leviathans, slicing them into pieces, and melting down the blubber. Thank god Cindy convinced me to chill and take her to the Bloedel Floral Conservatory in Vancouver, British Columbia. Under the triodetic dome, my life changed for the better as I immersed myself in jungle plants and listened to exotic birds singing and scolding onlookers. That night, we celebrated Cindy’s 22nd birthday at the Gotham Steakhouse. All signs pointed to a romantic conclusion to the perfect day. Oddly, when her rare prime rib dinner arrived, Cindy methodically carved ample fat at both ends of the 24-ounce cut. Next, she began to feast on the warm, juicy marble. Hey! I was cool. I acted amused. I watched her roll her eyes and savor her favorite meat. Then she forked a white hunk of fat in my direction and ordered, “Open wide!” Obligingly, I chewed on the tasty suet. However, after only ten seconds, Ahab beckoned. Next, I began to hear salt water waves lap against the Pequod’s hull, smell pungent whale blubber boiling in try-pots, and envision buckets of spermaceti being decanted in casks. Unwittingly, Cindy, sent me back aboard with Melville. Sterling Warner A Washington- based author, poet, educator, and Push Cart Nominee, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared in such literary magazines, journals, and anthologies as the Atherton Review, Street Lit, the Shot Glass Journal and Metamorphoses. Warner’s volumes of poetry include Rags and Feathers, Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Edges, Memento Mori, and Serpent’s Tooth: Poems. His first collection of fiction, Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories, debuted in August 2020. |
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