Devotion
​
Creation smokes slow
through the prism of dutiful care
artful hands turn    over spans of light and dark    the cosmic mind burns
 
Each shaded wing tip, brightness at breast and crest, fine fibres of nerve
A currawong, a bower bird, a black-backed gull, a hummingbird
Who will ever comprehend        how this ‘painted bunting’ could live and breathe?
All senses tuned ever more subtle    time wise time long , headlong into fate
A line flows straight
         Each day thins to a wisp, extinguishes almost, begins again. Species are fading.
She glows electric bright, calm, charged with a clear fury and unerring duty  
Draws on, draws on everything around her to make, to make up
For loss, to gain ground, get ahead of the tiny deaths, one after one
The newborn sitting hooded with tissue still                dazed, testing damp feathers
She has no time to help the fledglings to their feet   into flight
Little flocks accrue in corners then make their way away    she can’t stand to see them off
Waving in eternal murmurations    leaving and waving    leaving in waves unseen

 Jay Bond

Australian who returned in 2020 to her city of birth, Melbourne, after a few decades teaching in Asia and the United States, now refocusing on writing. Published writer of poetry: Luna and Meanjin magazines, early 1980s; more recently in Litterateur Rw magazine, Argotist Online Poetry.

by Moonlight

for S.P.
 
The water in the print is fading from sun and years
but there is still a white shine on each wave
from the moon in the vast sky.
It’s Turner’s
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight
though I didn’t know his work when I hung it.
 
It was my mother’s, wedged behind another print
in a frame, and now it is mine. It doesn’t make me feel
any particular way—sun-bleached as it is, so Turner’s fading sky
 
fades faster. There are torches burning in the right corner,
perpetually, debris floating away from each keel.
 
The figures at the horizon are almost imperceptible--
they may be mountains. After your book on Turner, I returned
to the print, assuming it would open itself to me.
 
I visited the gallery in DC and stood at the real thing
thinking only your thoughts, I stood inside your ghost.
 
In the shadow of eternity, the sky holds smoke
from the fire, rising and arching over the water. It holds the moon
 
there at the heart of it, though one could almost miss it—the sky so blue
and bright white. For the Keelmen, it is always the end
of a long night. It looks like morning.
 
Amanda Allen Stallings
 
Amanda Allen Stallings holds a BFA in Poetry from SUNY Potsdam, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland College Park. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, and Glass Mountain. She currently teaches academic and creative writing at the University of Maryland.

  
Icarus Above Wall Street
 
Tangled in this shimmering cloak and sprawled
across a moment between ecstasy and the frenzy
of glimpsing my wings of wax melt, I fall
 
releasing my dreams as a cluster of peonies,
petals floating in air like lights in the club
the whole world blush with transiency
 
Have you seen the way ants circle the bulb
I’d rather imagine the way it seems
the peony needs the ant to open the nub
 
The sun burns a hole in the stitch at the seam
yet even as I fall, I circle my dream
 

Daedalus Calls Out
 
Son, I called out, but it was too late, you started to fall
much sooner than this—I was late to hockey practice,
to your birth, I missed your first word, first steps, first
fist fight, that night you came up behind me to give
me a hug. I’d fallen asleep, startled awake at your touch,
the glow of the television burning my eyes like light
from gunfire down in that dark trench, your arms around
my shoulders disappearing, so I missed the chance
to hug you back, you ran out the front door
 
I was already dreaming we were running together,
not apart, toward the same sun, toward the same light
 
Sheri Doyle
 
Sheri Doyle is a poet living on the treaty lands of the Six Nations of the Grand River within the Haldimand Tract. Her poems have appeared in literary publications, such as The Antigonish Review, untethered magazine, and Rhapsody Anthology. Her chapbook A Dress Made from Light was published by Vocamus Press in 2022. A perfect day includes coffee, conversation, reading, writing, music, and walking—probably in that order. 

There are almost eight 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 occasional Throwback Thursday feature highlights writing from our past, chosen on purpose or chosen randomly. 

Would you like to be a guest editor for a Throwback Thursday? Pick 10 or so 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, or a pull quote line from the poem and story, 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 [email protected].

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Let's have some fun with this- along with your picks, send a vintage photo of yourself too!

​Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate
​
Paolo & Francesca frozen
in relief, in Cam’s colder
climate. Caught askew, still
clutching at the Cyprian’s
prized amulets.
 
You with your undulant, half-
Italian, Janey Morris hair;
and me ventriloquizing 
a 21st Century Vita Nuova.
 
Intertextual, our meetings?
Not really; more like a
manuscript of misalliance,
a bleeding nuisance.
 
Blown out of our parchment
skins at the Picturehouse bar-
cafe: reckless, trembling
at the labials . . .
 
Or were we captioned out?
Agape & gazing at some canvas
or sonnet-block by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti? Left imagining our
twinned mythopoeia?
 
Amor’s dredged-out summer
bleeds us now into the auburn of
early middle age, patronizes us
with sedatives, fine art, fine wine,
these peripheral trappings.
 
Envisioning steely rain outside the
British Museum, as you bent to
cut the ceremonial rope like
a monochromatic midwife,
surrendering me to Lethe’s
thick & soupy firmament, to
yet another meta-fiction.
 
Before you moved slowly,
majestic even, into the
Earthly Paradise
 
alone.

Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, Tears in the Fence, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Syncopation, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, Syncopation, Anvil Tongue, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.

The Artisan’s Studio, Cedar Rapids, 1924
 
At this window bench Hattie would survey
the bustling alley behind First Ave.
Here’s the telephone niche – one shelf for her
to converse while reclining on the bench, 
 
a higher shelf so he could chat standing 
beside his easel, paintbrush in one hand, 
smoldering fag in the other. Outside 
the window, under the gable, a large 
 
iron eye that once held block and tackle
used to haul bales up through the hayloft door. 
The hissing steam heat, free from pipes beneath 
the streets, and the radiator cover, 
 
tin stamped by his devoted junior high
art students in a pattern of flowers –
calendulas – to which he would apply
paint and tinted glaze to give a bronze age. 
 
And filling the floor gap where hay was once 
tossed down to the manger for the horses, 
a sunken bathtub so he could stand up- 
right in the tiny room while showering. 
 
And where he bumped out a wall to add light,
a window for afternoons and sunsets, 
he built an array of compartments and 
pigeonholes, and near the top, seven feet 
 
off the floor, a small drawer, where he kept
vestigial echoes of his heart’s secret. 
 
David Duer
  
David Duer is currently a docent guide at the University of Iowa's Stanley Museum of Art and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, where he’s come to know the works he writes about intimately. His work has been published in Ascent, Exquisite Corpse, Milkweed Chronicle, North American Review, and Poetry, among others.