Autumn — Portrait of Lydia Cassatt (Mary Cassatt 1880)

You were your almost-famous sister’s 
favorite model, posed on a mint-green park bench,
shawled in a blanket. 

It’s the coldest Impressionist painting I know, 
colder than Monet’s sun-scrubbed Haystacks in Winter

but that’s because I know too much. 
Your black bonnet and knotted scarf, those 
knitted gloves, the way your sister 

tucked the blanket around your lap and legs 
with more than sisterly concern 

for the damp chill rising off the Seine … You’re dying,
your failing kidneys 
flooding your body with the toxic waste

of being alive — your pale, precisely limned face, 
both cheeks lightly kissed with fever flush,

the only still point in the painting.
Seven years Mary’s senior, 
you were her designated chaperone in Paris

once she decided America had nothing 
left to teach her about art.

Dutiful, first-born daughter
of Philadelphia’s upper crust, 
free to learn nothing 

more practical than knitting and needlepoint.
Mary painted you at both, blank canvas 

she turned to again and again,
crocheting in the garden wearing a gauzy white
frilled bonnet and French blue dress, 

or sitting at a tapestry loom, keeping
a careful eye on the work at hand, 

while the dark wall and window dissolve
in a bright white column 
that’s beginning to claim 

a sturdy, lathe-turned table leg.
A more ominous dissolve stopped me 

the first time I saw you 
on your green bench: Mary’s scraped 
and reworked the bottom of your blanket

until it’s the same reds and sulfur
of the bare flower bed, painting you

out of the picture. But is it from grief
at losing you or rage at what’s taking you 
from her? Or had she discovered 

there’s no difference? 

Aaron Fischer

​Aaron Fischer’s poems have appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Five Points, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine poetry contest, 2023 Connecticut poetry prize, 2023 Naugatuck River Review poetry prize, and the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest. He’s been nominated for a 2024 Pushcart.

My Room is a Comfortable Cage
 
Each day I see
the big bold sky
she tells me hi
so then I say
do I stay
or do I fly?
 
My things are here
in my safe cage
all is clear
life is ordered
life is neat
my routine
is quite complete.
 
But some days I think
what does sky hold
beyond the comforts
of sweet home.
 
Do I dare
dare to roam
do I attempt
the great unknown?
 
Am I so bold
to spread my wings
it might be grand
to feel so free,
 
but then a thought,
maybe it’s not.
 
When the rain
and lightning strikes
when thunder
booms into night
 
I have no cage
of comforts near
what would I do
that’s not so clear.

Now every day
this thought haunts me
do I try
Infinity?
 
Or do I stay
here in my cage
I can’t decide
maybe I’ll fly
another day.

Sara Castaneda

Sara Castaneda is a poet/writer living in Dallas, TX.  Newer to submitting, she has been published in The Zebra Ink and Space and Time Magazine. After nine proofs she finally finished her chapbook of poetry, Underdog Bet, much to the relief of her editors, being released this year. Formerly an actor in television shows and theatre in New York and Sydney, she is oddly at home in the world of rejections with some kudos that go along with poetry.  She and her husband are proudly owned by their dog Mac and three cats Oscar, Sketchy, and Mr. Davis.  

Corridors
​
The trees drowned by the reservoir engineers surprised me. I had already
found the late winter bluebirds by the shore ice. And a pelican swimming so
close to the bike path in this water made dark by trees that I am told will
soon fall or be cut down. And a striped yellow bird hesitated just long
enough that I caught it forever against driftwood and icicles.
 
Cold, I drove toward the park gate home, but then this swath of trees
stopped me where one mirrored pelican floated above and below the winter
water, a wake of blue strung behind it. What is sky? What is water? I asked
myself. What tissue finite as spider silk suspends itself between this bird of air
and the blind carp that sways just below it?    

There was something about the trees. How reflective they were, how blue
they crisscrossed down to that blur of shore snow I stood in and its chittering
of grass heads that my memory now knits and unravels and knits because
each time, snagged there, is the white bird or the hollow bone of the wing I
once held as a child.
 
When does a photo become an image become poetry? You see, I cropped
out the billowing sky-burst of tree branches and left the pelican so content in
their mirrored scratches. And those small lit cubes of tree trunks where the
sky should be? I left them too, like a chain of paper lanterns calling back all I
love.
 
Kathryn Winograd

"Retired,” Kathryn Winograd writes with her golden doodle daily on the back screen porch of her Littleton home and her hummingbird porch up at her cabin near Phantom Canyon. With camera in hand, she has taken to haunting the wetlands around the neighbouring reservoir and South Platte River and the ranchers’ summer grazing land above the canyon. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and publications and her photography in a growing number of exhibits. More here: kathrynwinograd.com

  
for Nikolaos Karfakis, Cameron Batmanghlich & Nashwa Y. Butt
 
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
—Francis Bacon 
(excerpt from “Of Friendship”)
 
     1
   Shadows and Personas1
 
   Ceaselessly swimming – for > a decade+ years – in the nuisances ‘n intricacies of the polis, I’ve carelessly swam a million miles away from (my)Self. The character this polis puts on display fits the bill of an age-old old chestnut: the horses are knackered; the dogs can’t help barking (they’re yet to learn to bite); the (holy) cows can’t evade slaughtering, no matter how hard they scheme; the hen/geese won’t lay a golden egg(s); the pigs can’t have enough of laugh! 
 
   This polis is analogous to one Matsya incessantly pullin’ the Boat – with one Manu ‘n Saptarishi (Seven Sages) – through the river-of-duality without fruition.2 Exempli gratia – the sun neither rises nor does it set! Or even better revisiting of the famous proverb would be: the sun neither rises in the East nor does it set in the West! BUT, this polis is as if a million miles away from (scientific) Rationality; a million miles closer to clichés, grand narratives, obsolete idioms, and what have you! And enveloped by her cloak-of-dualism, I’ve inadvertently begun to resemble more a (postmodern) chimera, too – with a mule-like head of religiosity, cow-like torso of (social) democracy, horse-like limbs of (corporate) capitalism, dog-like tail of monopoly/oligarchy, and hen-like wings of utopia!
 
     2
   The Peepal and Buddha
 
   This polis suffers neither from the dearth of all manner of native trees – Ditabark, Sunbal, Chanar, Banyan, Sukh Chayn, Shisham, Neem – nor one Buddha-inspired youths (Generation Z & Generation Alpha). Yet, without satisfying the primary precondition, id est, Principal of Solitude, they’re relentlessly found blowing the trumpet of being the Sages-of-AI Age. And the complexes-of-landscape immediately refreshes one Baba Bulleh Shah vis-à-vis (self-)Reflection: Many a thousand scriptures, you’ve read / The Book of Self, you’ve never read / To the mosques ‘n temples, you’ve constantly rushed / The deep inside, you’ve permanently hushed.3
 
   Every so often, on concluding a brief post meridiem potter, I find myself shedding-the-skin under a Peepal in the Bagh-e-Jinnah (formerly: Lawrence Gardens; modelled on: Kew Gardens, London, UK) with “A Million Miles Away” by one R. Gallagher: Why ask how I feel / Well, how does it look to you? / I fell hook, line and sinker / Lost my captain and my crew / … / I’m a million miles away / a million miles away. (Every time, the guitar chords induce the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response).)
 
   ***
 
   On a rather serious (metaphysical) postscriptum, though: more often than not, ‘separateness’ is the vessel of ‘closeness’ – when observed in the context of (material) Detachment. On the contrary, this polis is a potent potion for inducing (self-)Estrangement.
 
     3
   Puppet of Tales
 
   ‘Tis a commendable trait – being an aficionado-of-tales. Better still is being an artisan-of-tales – tales that function as muses and invite others to re-acquaint themselves with the(ir) shadows and personas. 
 
   Wo/man is terribly delusional – lives in a fallacy of being the master-of-tales. IN FACT, ‘tis precisely the other way round: s/he gets devised and structured by the tales. AND ‘tis tales that terraform wastelands into lush green forests.
 
   ‘Til the present day, I’ve not known of any human epochs, when the aforesaid aphorism ever failed to hold its ground!

Saad Ali
  
1. In Carl G. Jung / Analytical psychology: Shadow (unconscious): an individual’s ‘dark side’ that the ego (sense of purpose and identity) hides from the others; Persona (conscious): an individual’s ‘(theatre) mask’ – worn for the society on behalf of the ego.
2. Ancient Hindu Mythology / Mahabharata: Manu: The First Man (human being) and/or 14 Rulers of Earth; Matsya: Fish-Avatar (Saviour) of the god Vishnu or Brahma. According to the said epic, Matsya saves Manu, Seven Sages, plant seeds, and various animals from the pralaya (deluge) and takes them to a safe haven in the Himalayas. 
3. Excerpt from a lyrical Punjabi poem, “Parh Parh Ilm Hazaar Kitaban” (Many a Thousand Scriptures), by Bulleh Shah – a revered pre-modern Punjabi Sufi Poet-philosopher (1680–1757 CE). English Translation: Saad Ali.

Saad Ali is a  poet-philosopher & literary translator from the UK and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and MSc in Management from the University of Leicester, UK. His new collection of poems, Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse), is an homage to vers libre, prose poetry, and ekphrasis. He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrases into Urdu. His work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, Synchronized Chaos, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Lotus-eater, BRAWL Lit., and several anthologies, including Poetry in English from Pakistan, by Ilona Yusuf & Shafiq Naz (eds.). He has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and Best Microfiction. Influences include Vyasa, Homer, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Jung, Kafka, Tagore, Lispector and more. www.saadalipoet.com 
​

Don't miss our upcoming zoom session on Yayoi Kusama. Kusama is the most successful woman artist of all time. Her eccentric body of work is bold, conceptual, and inspired by her personal mythology as a response to severe mental illness. Her life story is incredible. Kusama is in her 90s today and still working and growing. We will look at how her early work was overshadowed by male artists who benefited from her influence while she receded into the shadows. And how she didn't stop, eventually breaking out into epic fame. We will do creative writing exercises using her intriguing art. ​

Warrior Queen   

I sing your praises 
Warrior Queen,
red hair badged with blood, 
mouth a howl of rage 
in blue tattooed face 
as you roared into battle 
on your chariot, 
javelin leaping 
from your hand.

Was there ever an epitaph for you?
Bards scorned the written word -
shameful not to have it by heart,
the mead hall of the Iceni destroyed.

We have only your conquerors’
story, those who 
stole your inheritance 
gang raped your daughters
flogged you to the bone. 

Tall as a man, your glance could kill,
a mass of tawny hair reaching your hips, 
voice harsh as a raven
your battle cry terrified.

Your vengeance was like the Furies. 
They say you called on Andraste,
War Goddess of the Celts
your hands rising to the heavens
in ecstatic appeal,
a sacred hare under your cloak. 

You rallied
over a thousand warriors,
you were politician, 
strategist, tactician, 
Queen of the Celts 

At the last
Eighty thousand of the enemy fell,
 for the loss of only four hundred Romans
so Tacitus tells us.

channelled into chaos 
by the Roman war machine. 

He said you took poison. 
You probably did.

You were never going to paraded 
through the streets of Rome
enslaved and shamed.
 
What would you have thought 
of your statue high over London, 
icon of the British Empire 
a layer of red scorched earth 
deep under your chariot wheels?

Sue Mackrell 

Sue Mackrell is a grandmother, gardener, poet and writer from Leicester, UK who loves art in all its forms.  Many of her poems, short stories and non-fiction historical pieces have been published online and in print, including in Agenda Poetry, Bloody Amazing, (Dragon Yaffle) and currently in Whirlagust (Yaffle) and The Dawntreader (Indigo Dreams.) Highlights have been having her poems displayed in Ladies’ toilets in Leicester as part of a Wee Poems project and winning an Archaeology Festival Haiku prize – the most lucrative 17 syllables of her career! She is extremely proud to have poems already in The Ekphrastic Review  

​

The Four Daughters of Edward Darley Bois        

Each child takes her post: The youngest, Julia, age four, on the carpet, an over-dressed doll lying in her lap. Might as well be a baby. She believes it to be a baby, and here are the clues: the tender touch, her hand on the doll’s shoulders, her in-turning feet that create a protective box around the doll. Her straight cut bangs are the sign of a petite trooper, white dress, black tights and shiny patent leather shoes. The doll is a message to her sisters, mine, mine, mine, not yours, while she eyes the mother hovering outside the frame…

On the left, is Mary Louis, age eight. A bright light shines on her too. She’s old enough to wear a white pinafore over her maroon dress, hair falling past her shoulders, though half her face is in darkness. But why? Will she be an in-between girl, patient enough to have her bangs touched up with a curling iron, but still uncertain about who she is. Maybe she’s thinking, you’re such a baby, Julia, you’ve still got a doll. Her best defence.

In the rear, two seven-foot Japanese-blue vases flank the opening to a dark hallway. Upside down, they might be the shape of a woman. Here they are merely vessels, nothing inside but darkness. Daughter Jane, age twelve, is also an in-between child. She faces the painter head on. Normally she likes to hover in the background, accepting her status, not quite as smart as her older sister. Ah, but she has whimsey. She knows how to tease her siblings, pulling the sheet out from under a sleeping sister, for instance. Or stealing her mother’s lipstick and tying socks on the family hound dog, while he sleeps. Grrrr, she growls close to its ear. The animal jumps, prancing like one of Santa’s reindeer. 

Florence at fourteen is the eldest and tallest, also standing in the hallway. She leans against the enormous vase, shadows from the hallway nearly engulfing her, except for a thick slice of pinafore, a slightly dingier white. She’s been waiting so long—the most ambitious, most likely to be trusted and yes, maybe a little bossy. She tolerates her siblings, but occasionally explodes will you please go away, leave me alone. She needs to get out of the house and begin her own life. She can hardly contain herself, imagining travel—France for the first time, reading alone on the train to Paris. Maybe, she’ll kiss that boy who’s always peering in their windows, hanging out in their tree. Good practice for someday falling in love. 

The painting denies what happened before and after this sitting: There was a first son by Isa Boit, also named Edward, known as Neddie, after his father. He suffered from severe mental retardation and was living in an institution. At one point, the couple made the heartrending decision to emigrate to Paris or stay in Boston to near him. They must have settled on the unfortunate fact that their son didn’t recognize them, and could not communicate. 

John Singer Sargent’s painting is large, a perfect square, the girls held in place—islands of their own—each of them meant to be equally important. If we drew a line from the youngest to the eldest it might carve out the letter Z. A long path to maturity for Julia, less so for Mary Louisa and Jane, and then Florence at the head of the three. Critics have called the painting “wooden,” or “psychologically unnerving,” or “unsettling.” Or, as Henry James saw it: “a happy play-world…of charming children.” Which is, in my opinion, the creepiest description of all. 

None of the four daughters depicted in the painting married. The eldest, Florence Dumaresq, died in 1919, aged 51. The second born daughter, Jane Hubbard Boit, had suffered a nervous breakdown and never completely recovered. Her father was concerned that she would end up in a mental asylum like his first-born, Neddie. She improved and in fact, went to live on her own in a Paris apartment. She died in New York State in November 1955, aged 85. Mary Louisa Boit, the girl who stood alone on the left of Sargent’s painting, looked upon as the prettiest of the four girls, died in New York in June 1945, aged 71.

Julia Overing Boit, the youngest, emerged as a talented watercolour painter. Often her letters contained small watercolour sketches. The work was displayed in many exhibitions. In March 1929 at the Copley Gallery in Boston, sixty-six of these watercolours were exhibited. She died in February 1969, aged 91.

What might have been interesting, a second chapter, where the girls relax into their actual selves, a mixture of early childhood and nearly adult. The daughters all agreed to turn over the painting to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where they are imprisoned today.

Sarah Gorham

Sarah Gorham’s recent essay collection is Funeral Playlist from Etruscan Press. She is the author of Alpine Apprentice, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein Award, and Study in Perfect, selected by Bernard Cooper for the AWP Award (both University of Georgia Press books.) Other books include Bad Daughter, The Cure, The Tension Zone, and Don’t Go Back to Sleep. Grants and fellowships include the National Endowment for the Arts, three state arts councils, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Media coverage included Salon, NPR, Utne Reader, Slate, and Real Simple. She co-founded Sarabande Books, inaugural winner of the AWP Small Press Publisher Award

 
​Harbinger
 
In 1941, Grant Wood could not 
have missed the impending fires of world war
on the way. You can see it in the green
sky here: a tornado coming. A plot
of ground dark as new graves. Is this farmer
planting or digging? Seeding or mourning?
 
Townspeople going about everyday
life —clotheslines and lawnmowers. Pearl Harbor
just months away. In Europe, shirtless men
like this one dying in showers. Someday
                           soon, he’ll wear Army green.

                                   
Maman

after Louise Bourgeois, Tate Modern 2007
                              
Inside the straddled legs, I’m catapulted back
against the fortress of my mother’s corset;
 
under the glass ball sac, on threadbare chair, 
her creature, safe from the reach of pouncing limbs 
 
that grab my siblings to bang heads. Mid shrieks 
I swallow horror, silence my inner scream,
 
and let betrayal, the habit of glancing past, 
embed as inner canker. Bound to escape ten heads
 
jammed in a family web, to vamp myself
I’ll turn to missile, fuelled by fission.

Prue Chamberlayne

​Prue Chamberlayne grew up by the river Severn and lives in London and the Aveyron in France. After feminist comparative social policy, biographic-interpretive research, and a rural project in Uganda, came poetry, with a collection Locks Rust in 2019, and a corona chapbook Beware the Truth that’s Manacled with erbacce-press in 2022, on the psychic underworld of racial experience, particularly regarding "whiteness." She has a ready a pamphlet Love’s Pendulum on inter-racial love and parenting. A forthcoming second collection is called Lizard Looks. Recent journal acceptances include Dawntreader, Green Ink Press, Galway Review, Wild Court. You might like https://poetrywales.co.uk/prue-chamberlayne-on-how-she-writes-a-poem/.