Words that Wound
One mouth frozen twisted with such hate it becomes obscene like a snake about to reel and devour itself again. Her words have been forgotten but they have no less power to wound–the words thrown like a dagger: the words that prompt the dagger itself. How can one speak with so much venom without choking on the poison and slowly dying from within? We become what we say: Fill us with blackened charred words and we eat ash, swallow fire, and slowly burn with hate from the inside out– But fill us with love and light and let us shine so brightly that our pores become stars, a constellation of hope, and we will file the sharp edges off their words, pack them in downy daisy fluff, create a spoken font so soft until there are no words left to speak except in green and gold song. Ariel S. Maloney Ariel S. Maloney teaches literature and writing to high school students in Cambridge, MA. She has published multiple op-eds about educational policy issues online, and her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in local publications such as The Inman Review, the Harvard Summer Review, and Around the World: An Anthology of Travel Writing Collected by Harvard Book Store.
2 Comments
Pulling out the Phials from Joseph Cornell's L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode: cours elementaire d'Histoire Naturelle and Examining Each One, Causing Blanks
Overindulgence, waste, and extravagance are off limits. Here we see sand from a polluted beach, some aluminum, some crab shell. It's not that this is insanity. How do we know this contains the granulation of fingernails? The appropriate choice is, of course, to continue on, to continue on. Like crushed love beads, the colours are giving me a headache. From now on, let's suppose the mathematical dilemma facing us has already given up on us. Choosing liquid, something blue, not like sky but as in frescoes. We should move wrist to wrist, froth up sheets of greasy spheres. The chaos which would arise if, say, a man loved someone. A matter somewhere between shame and hope at leafing through pictures. Stirring up coffee grounds floating shallow in the painted cup. Butterflies whose wings beat as fast as our hearts beside what we have done. When all of it together comes out to be more than what any could have been alone. What we expected, bending to wrap our hands around bottle shards or just air. Magdelyn Hammond Helwig Magdelyn Hammond Helwig is an Assistant Professor and the Writing Program Director at Western Illinois University. She received her MFA in poetry in 1999 and PhD in English in 2010 from the University of Maryland, College Park. Having published and presented academically on ekphrastic poets such as Frank O’Hara, Ted Hughes, C.D. Wright, and Walt Whitman, she is now turning her pen to writing ekphrastic poetry herself. The Scarecrow (for Matthew Shepard)
With you pinned up in the sky like a scarecrow in a field of apples, knowing for hours you were going to die, it was almost Christian how you gave up the ghost. You were a bruised light tethered and softer than a pale blue dust shard. You were psychedelic in the papers, as they whirled you into hero, target victim, saviour, shame. Yet you were only the Hanged Man, baffled by the things that this world lacks, how few devices in it left to save you. Lorette C. Luzajic This poem is from The Astronaut's Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, Handymaiden Editions, 2006. It is reprinted here today in memory of our fallen friends in Orlando, Florida. Clothed Artist and Model He is leaning away from her, but only to gather himself for further motion, pulling his body back like a slingshot. In this return—which will never take place—he’s about to push off his left foot, to glide back to her. His gaze intently marks her body, but she, too, is going nowhere, encased in an open robe of plaster. He seems unaware of his own frame, his sad-seeming slouch, his mess of clothes, his slack, crooked chin. In his concentration, he sees all of her, none of himself. With respect to her body, he is omniscient. She is leaning back, luxuriant, letting his omniscience occur. Whether this is a matter of adoration or lust or mere monetary transaction is unclear. You can assume she’s been paid to be his model, a nude figure to be covered in plaster-of-paris. Their intimacy is undefined by language or voice, for they are forever silent. Who are they? What is their story? There are some clues, small details you might consider. Yet these clues are merely things that inform and heighten your subjectivity—any conclusions you make are offshoots of you, the viewer, and your cosmos. The male gaze captured in a museum. Pornography as art. Or is it art as pornography? The female as object to be consumed, to be owned, to be casted in thick, gooey plaster. Iris, retina, lens. Rod and cone. Neuron and synapse. Image written into memory. A work of art of a work of art as it’s being made. Process as product, cast of a casting. How ironic: in its completion, the work is of something forever incomplete. Perhaps this is a metaphor of our lives, how we’re always making ourselves but never really finishing. Our corpus. We concentrate. We try. But in the end we change very little. The zen of sculpture, the forever-frozen moment, the sad and lovely truth of the body—which is the truth of our lives, really—laid bare. The body after it has passed the apex of youth, when cells begin to die away more quickly than they are replaced. The brutal, slothful erosion of time. But these two, they are forever—as long as the museum curators take proper care of them. They are several feet away from one another, and in this space there is loneliness, even though they are intimates and we are intimate with them, in this dark room in a museum in the center of Denver, a bustling, dusty town. The nude: a counterpoint to striptease? The light and dark in the room, the tilting poses of model and artist. Adam and Eve without The Apple or The Garden. Or Eve and Yahweh, Him sculpting her from a single rib, the apple yet to be painted red. His boots, the chair, his pants, all trashed. Her luxuriant robe of plaster. She is cold, her nipples erect. Her mons shaved clean. Her long auburn hair is bobby-pinned into a bun. He must feel some sensuality in all this, artistic vision be damned. His hands hang limp and in his eyes there is not the brilliant flash of desire or creativity, the twin (and perhaps related) lightning bolts of lust and inspiration. This is a messy business, draping plaster on a woman’s body. Worse than spackling a wall before you paint it. Though both are a kind of work. Maybe all art is merely this: work, mess, desire, the loss of self that goes both ways—seer and seen. You see and then you know what you want to know about them, which is perhaps what you want to know about yourself. Not their stories—artist and model, for who could ever know the trajectories and vectors of their hearts?—but yours. The heart you know but often fail to recognize. The one true story that floats like a cloud in your brain, but you never take the time to figure out the denouement. When you’re open, when you allow yourself, art sometimes does that for you. Art shows you your truth, as austere and cold as the empty corners of the museum itself. A shard of knowing, and sometimes, a certainty. Nakedness, sure, but what do you see? The self and making and want laid bare against the grind of time. Michael Henry Michael Henry: "I’m co-founder and Executive Director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, an independent literary center located in downtown Denver. My poetry and nonfiction have appeared in places such as 5280 Magazine, Georgetown Review, Threepenny Review, Pleiades, and The Writer, and I’ve published two books of poetry, No Stranger Than My Own and Active Gods." Carte Blanche
One afternoon out of eternity into a forest rode a woman on a horse through the trees standing in the spaces of the forest. She held the bridle with white-gloved hands. Through the spaces in front of behind the trees rode the woman on the horse in her white turtleneck, gray riding suit and cap; this happened one afternoon in a painting. Between the trees you can see the woman on the horse and through the woman on the horse you can see the trees as if time has been sliced into ribbons and she like the forest is there and not there, glimpsed from the past through the trees into the forest of the woman’s vacant smile as she peers into the spaces ahead. Perhaps she like the forest is an illusion and never in the whole history of the world have either existed and here we are fussing about them, while she rides from one eternity to another, from a canvas to the forest of your mind, where the trees stand tall and are never cut down and the spaces are grand, grand. Daniel Hudon Daniel Hudon, originally from Canada, is an adjunct lecturer in astronomy and math in Boston, He is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book about the biodiversity crisis, Brief Eulogies for Lost Animals (Pen and Anvil, Boston), as well as a nonfiction book about astronomy, The Bluffer's Guide to the Cosmos (Oval Books, London) and a chapbook of prose and poetry, Evidence for Rainfall (Pen and Anvil, Boston). A big fan of Magritte, he lives in Boston, MA, and can be found at danielhudon.com and @daniel_hudon. Principles of Light and Distance
She can tell how far she is from herself by the light. The moon streams in her late-night window as she dances before the mirror and holds a pane of glass. The reflection reminds her that she is right here, and couldn’t be closer to herself. The glass reminds her that she cannot trap all the rays, and they will escape this transparency, fanning into the world and out of her control. What has bounced off her dancing body could be miles away by now. The moon reminds her that light can be second-hand, reflected, and everything that hits her through the window took at least eight minutes after being fired off from the sun, while the moon, that great mirror of dust, is only the messenger, and the mirror on her floor is no better than a moon. In this nexus of light, she feels strangely blurred, like a ghost in a prism. Bruce W. Niedt Bruce W. Niedt is a recently-retired civil servant and southern New Jersey native whose poetry has appeared in Writer's Digest, The Lyric, US 1 Worksheets, Chantarelle's Notebook, Spitball, and many other publications. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. His latest chapbook is Hits and Sacrifices (Finishing Line Press, 2016). You can visit his blog, "Orangepeel", at bniedt.blogspot.com. Artemesia Gentileschi Painting Judith When my father let him take me away, not as prisoner, but as wife, it was the first time I thought of you easing your fingers in Holofernes’ black hair, pulling the head back so his knotty white neck jutted up like an unmarred landscape, so his face was facing yours and the cool pressure of the sword. You came for me like this at night, took my hand and traced the path of blade across skin. When I could not last, and left, I still could not escape you. Each night, the sword, the bulging vein, the arc of blood smudged across my canvas. I made your body as round and strong as my own. Seducer and killer, in my dark room, you never let me work alone, your hand easing into mine, these slashes, my brush, tender and tangled. Magdelyn Hammond Helwig Magdelyn Hammond Helwig is an Assistant Professor and the Writing Program Director at Western Illinois University. She received her MFA in poetry in 1999 and PhD in English in 2010 from the University of Maryland, College Park. Having published and presented academically on ekphrastic poets such as Frank O’Hara, Ted Hughes, C.D. Wright, and Walt Whitman, she is now turning her pen to writing ekphrastic poetry herself. |
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
April 2024
|