Parallel Herstory: Una in Her Own Voice and Phoebe Retold I Thus they fured forth upon that dreadful quest… They told me Power lies in Truth. My body creates the walls of the Church. My voice sings the chorus of every hymn and psalm ever written. I am Truth. I am Power. It takes more than Truth to vanquish Lies, that much I know. The knight insists on leading tho’ I know the path and its turns and the danger waiting at the end. I ride my white mare two steps behind. Keep my hands busy by gathering the flowers that snag onto my dress’s hem. I know it’s not the time to protest. I preserve my voice. II When she was twenty years old, Phoebe skipped home and told her sisters I’m going to marry a professor. She spent one afternoon showing him her drawings—the attentive pencilwork she learned in school—and plucked her future in her hands. Pulled off flower petals as she reiterated, he loves me, he loves me, he loves me as she followed him to Edinburgh. III And while his lady pray’d with one good thrust he pierced that false tongue… When the dragon appears, I flee. I know better than to stay in range of its scaled talons and needle teeth, how fragile Truth is when it is held in flesh. So I abandon my flower petals and throw back my hood as I run far up the path. I must be alone. The knight wields his blade. I release my voice. I fall to my knees. My body a constant altar, my mouth a vessel for messages sent directly to God’s ear. My voice shatters the bank of clouds spiralling over our heads. I press my fingers together and gather prayers in my cupped palms. The words wash over me. In the distance silver blade strikes through the dragon’s mouth. IV When Phoebe ran to Italy with a curator, I’m sure her behaviour was deemed inherent. Her red hair gifting her with headstrong independence. Was her flame doused by domesticity, from illustrating aquatic fossils? Did she go out in search of a spark for reignition, to follow a new trail to a new passion? The papers would later marvel at her mysterious knack for Early Renaissance style without ever seeing the Old Masters. Tongue-in-cheek dancing around the truth, around a scandal. V With true tongue I summoned his power, moved from my lips to his blade. So shouldn’t it be me who pierced that false tongue, my name appearing next to the knight’s as hero? He kneels before me, his gesture of reverence to Truth, to Power. But I want it to be known. I pressed the knight’s name into his lips with my own. And from above I hear the angel’s voices, but their song imitates my own. And the sun reflects off my hair, but I still hide my face, buried in George’s. Power lies in Truth. My power rests on the tip of my tongue. Alex B. Wasalinko Alex B. Wasalinko got hooked on the ekphrastic bug and followed it to Glasgow, Scotland where she spent a year exploring feminist styles of the mode. She firmly believes ekphrasis can be the tool to dismantle the male gaze once and for all. In the past, Alex’s art and poetry have been published in Esprit: The University of Scranton Review of Art and Letters and in friends’ zines. She currently lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania with her best friends and constant companions--her dog, Hamlet, and Elder Cat, Sasha.
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The Fates: Why Boast? Why boast? Young Clotho spins life’s slender thread. Mature Lachesis measures it, and with abhorrent shears, grim Atropos – gaunt, sunken-faced – then snips it, and we’re dead. Terry L Norton
Terry L. Norton is a retired professor of literacy education from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where he taught courses in literature for children and young adults to teachers and librarians. Along with articles on multicultural educations, he is the author or co-author of three books: Cooking with Mother Goose, 50 Literacy Strategies for Beginning Teachers K-8, and Cherokee Myths and Legends: Thirty Tales Retold. Cooking with Oils He slipped behind me, a chef’s blade in his hand, Imagine, he whispered, being caressed by knives. I couldn’t imagine, and said so. But he smelled of good oil paints, and his voice fell through my shoulders to linger in my knees. Sometimes, in the kitchen-- cutting tomatoes, slicing bread-- I’ll get a sense of him and breathe it in. Pamela Joyce Shapiro Pamela Joyce Shapiro is a cognitive psychologist intrigued by memory and language. She teaches psychology in Philadelphia and writes poetry to capture thoughts and moments otherwise forgotten. Once upon a time, she studied drawing and printmaking at the Philadelphia College of Art and Tyler School of Art. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Breakfast and Better Than Starbucks, The Ekphrastic Review, Unlost, and One Sentence Poems. I, Sofinisba, Plot My Future There's a story about how, when Sophinisba Anguissola was taken to Rome when she was in her teens and introduced to the great Italian Renaissance painter and sculpture Michelangelo, she showed him a picture she had done of a laughing girl. He told her that was too easy an assignment, then challenged her to make a picture of a crying boy. She did it easily. I’ll bet he thought I couldn’t do it, that Michael of the Angels whom they brought me to, to measure my worth, no doubt. But really it was no problem. What’s so hard about drawing a boy crying? The eyes squinted shut, the corners of the mouth pulling down. You can’t see them yet but there will be tears. And blood. Didn’t anyone tell him I have a brother, who cried almost daily, when he wasn’t laughing. Well, we all were that day, even me, while I rushed to get their chess game down on paper in conte, pre canvas. Can you spot our Minerva on the right, so sure she’d win, while the rest of us could see — even little Europa — that Lucia had it in the bag from the start. One simple move plotted ages ago and that King was as good as dead. Linda Brandt Myers Linda Brandt Myers has a BFA in painting and an MFA in fiction writing from Cornell University and has had several good teachers who liked her poems, among them poets Alice Fulton and Joanie Mackowski and writer Irene “Z” Zahava, and included them in such small anthologies as Battered and Shiny as the Moon and 06/06/06: A Diary Project. She has been a contributing nonfiction writer to various Cornell University magazines for 35 years and has won a CASE (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) award for that writing. Advice For a Wayfarer Bid the cage welcome, rusting as you pass, the leaky barrel, shattered glass, the shutter dangling, canine mange even, pissing poltroonery, the benighted roofless, their ruthless importunity, all tumble-down tumidity. For I know you know to take the rain, your fill, only from the dawn, flame from the hard earth dew. Shillelagh and blade are true; your ladle, awl, they’ve served you well; though fowl and swine gorge, leave only dust, mud and grime, don’t turn askance; look there too for what you seek. Any bird, bound or free by circumstance, may sing. There’s more than one way for you or I to go: skin a cat, beat the path, unhoof a stag, or doe. Alan Girling Alan Girling writes poetry mainly, sometimes fiction, non-fiction, or plays. His work has been seen in print, heard on the radio, at live readings, even viewed in shop windows. Such venues include Blynkt, Panoply, Hobart, The MacGuffin, Smokelong Quarterly, FreeFall, Galleon, Blue Skies, and CBC Radio among others. He is happy to have had poems place in four local poetry contests and to have a play produced for the Walking Fish Festival in Vancouver, B.C. Tronie "Jan?" "Mmm?" "Can we speak?" "I’m rather busy, is it important?" "It surely is. The girl’s just come back from the market." When he didn’t take his gaze from the canvas, she added. "With nothing. No food, nothing to drink, not even yesterday’s vegetables. Our credit’s run out Jan, the traders want guilders." "Can’t your mother—" "I’m tired of running to Mama to get us out of trouble." The sob was evident in Catharina’s voice. "Why can’t you sell one of your paintings? It’s supposed to be the Golden Age, why won’t you send some to the Gallery? You belong to The Guild, I thought that was set up to market your works?" "My paintings are worth more than people wish to pay. I will wait until I can get a realistic price." "And in the meantime we starve. All of us." She sighed. "I think we have to let Griet go, she gets thinner by the day. It’s not fair on her, we cannot afford a servant." "She’s going to sit for me. I think I can make a good tronie which will sell. I’d like you to dress her up." "Can’t you do that in your spare time? I’ve heard the brewery by the river is closing. It’s going to be used to make porcelain. The talk around the streets is that it will put Delft on the map. They’ll be looking for people to paint local scenes. You could do that." The look he gave paused her, but having summoned up courage, she continued. "You could paint for the weavers, that would be regular work." "Catharina, I’m an artist. Dress the girl up, I’ll start tomorrow. And see if you can find an item of jewellery to brighten up her face. It’s rather plain." Roger Noons Roger Noons has been taking pictures since the 1960s. He also belongs to some writing groups, and writes or edits something every day. The Muralist, Allen Tupper True (1881-1955) What he does get right is: the Lakota hero’s after-death scene this stop-motion shot last breaths puffed tobacco mist blue heron wings fanning sage smoke. He knows how the center-stage figure recedes another story a river-mist sky. Ghost grandparents step into foreground. Shake the juggler’s scarf inside out. What is living disappears What is absent comes into focus. What he forgets is how pigments fade. Spin the colourwheel red yellow blue. See pink lemon gray. In another century pastel residue traces its own invisible shadow. His vision of another man’s vision dissolves into primer white its unraveling of outlines. Denise Low Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, won Red Mountain Press Editor’s Choice Award for Shadow Light: Poems. Other recent books are Turtle’s Beating Heart, memoir (U. of Nebraska Press) and Casino Bestiary: Poems (Spartan). She has won 3 Ks. Notable Book Awards and other recognition. She teaches in Baker University’s MLA program. www.deniselow.net Peace of Mind Let life be dance of heart and feet to rhythms of the soul and street that are the song of where you're found... and where you've been...and where you're bound that sings to glimpse of bluer sky and path perhaps less traveled by becoming all that might converge in being you will see emerge from shadow now you merely seem of warmth and love that dares to dream and quicken pace of shuffled gait to skip that does not hesitate to show the world that peace of mind is how you feel...not what you find. Portly Bard Bio: Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent of verse becoming complement... ...and by such homage being lent... ideally also compliment. Rhabdomancie (or) Hallucinations The old woman sits on her bones just where the alley widens for the garbage trucks. She is always there. The bones always surround her. She is writing a letter. She is stabbing plastic bottles with her pen. She never turns or speaks. The wind flips open the letter. It tells you a man has slipped out the window of the local nursing home. If you look now, you can see him. The helicopter he built is taking off, the propeller whirling high and left. The propeller blades are spokes from his wheelchair, the landing gear is a structure of bone. He is going to Alaska, the letter says. He has a bundle of rods--a rhabdomancie-- to douse for gold. His gold mines stretch like northern lights across the whole horizon. He has three thousand head of cattle. One of them you can see in the goldfield—wide nostrils and standing on a single leg. The old woman snatches up the letter, adjusts her three-tiered skirt. She pulls out a bundle of dousing rods, says nothing, but shoves them toward your feet. You do not know what you are meant to do. You do not know why fear is trickling down your vertebrae. If you reach for them and your hand encounters nothing, will the old woman and all her bones disappear? Will you be alone in that alley as darkness sifts down? If you touch and heft them, feeling their weight, will you enter the gold field? Will the old woman speak? Will she tell you why no one else has seen her? Why given time and circumstance, our very thoughts can turn to bone? Sonia Gernes Author’s Note It would be fitting to consider staying silent. Like bronze figures or stone under moss. With an undisclosed plaster hush, my mum was gay on the quiet. To get it out right I convey the shame when I overheard my best friend say, They’re lesbians but they're alright. So I cast mum and Jules in London Pride, civic and in solid. About the lines, clay and scale maquettes I plagiarise and stoop to plinths. Feel what meanings fit. Cai Draper This poem is from a longer sequence of poems called London Pride, based on works of public sculpture along the Thames. Cai Draper is a poet from south London, based in Norwich. His work has been published by Burning House Press, Poetical, DRAFT London, Salo Press & Eggbox. He has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from UEA. @DraperCai |
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