Second Plum Do you blame plain bookish me? It called so urgently, promised sexuality, this wild voluptuous tree. Tricia Marcella Cimera Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Her work is found in many diverse places online and in print. Her micro-chapbook entitled GO SLOW, LEONARD COHEN, released through the Origami Poems Project, contains the Pushcart Prize nominated "plum poem." Tricia lives with her husband and family of cats in Illinois, in a town called St. Charles, by a river named Fox, with a Poetry Box (also named Fox) in her front yard.
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After Eva Hesse’s Oomamaboomba Here the recorder and its chosen rhyme – that tune, that ditty. All the mice blind, the sheep only wanted for their wool. Those troublesome lyrics not heard. And the tone block with its grooves – only the well behaved trusted with its mallet. Only the measured with the bells. How we shook the maracas! While the lone one stood with the triangle, waiting for the cue. Ants in our pants and the crash of the cymbal, later let loose on the playground to hang from the bars with our wet hair clinging to our brows. And then later, lying on mats – the refrain still somehow there, lulling. And then years later – reclining, song in ear and the gentle tap on shoulder to rouse. After Eva Hesse’s Legs of a Walking Ball Runnels in the sand made with a stick, with the driftwood hauled from the water. First time seeing the ocean led to this gentle cultivation and spinning, and running – a kind of letting loose. An invitation to not worry about the cut knee, skinned palms. Sure, buried glass, its jagged edge, and the injured sole, but never confirmed. Just rushing and then settling and then rushing again – a kind of mirroring of the water’s act. Emulation: for the sandbox and the tiny lake did not compare, were only practice, as we suspected. Some father called out yellow, called out red, instead of slow, instead of stop – a kind of softening of restraint we did not heed that particular day. Nor sometimes much later.
After Eva Hesse’s Cool Zone Morning light. Only a memory of the moon – full, a disk. Talk of werewolves in the gym, the weights ringing slightly when set down. Here, carefully, and now with the rope, jump. Girls knowing the rhymes, collaborating – trailing the ends along the floor like the ribbons on their wands. Later leaping to spike the ball. Some with bruises on a forearm, tape on a finger, while the boys run – swiftly passing. Smooth, so smooth. Eying from the side. All the nets strung and the clock’s face caged. Kelly R. Samuels Kelly R. Samuels is a Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line). Her poems have appeared in RHINO, Salt Hill, DMQ Review, The Pinch, and Quiddity. She lives in the Upper Midwest. Find her here: https://www.krsamuels.com/ 14 Stations, Portrayed by Fr. Bill Moore and Louisa Jenkins Sasse Museum of Art, 2020 (37 pp) https://view.publitas.com/inland-empire-museum-of-art/14-stations/page/1 14 Stations – An Experience of Despair and Faith I sit alone in a room on this Friday night before Palm Sunday as the COVID-19 virus roars through the world. At times it feels as if this bleak distancing will go on indefinitely for all of us. And on top of social deprivation there is the sense of a slow but steady flattening of my senses. The effects are disorienting. Disturbing. I open an eBook, 14 Stations, published by the Sasse Museum of Art, moving past the introductory pages and am immediately struck by the intensity of the art—paintings by Fr. Bill Moore and mosaics by Louisa Jenkins, vivid and luminous, rich in colour and depth. Almost a sensory overload. - Journal entry, April 3, 2020 In the face of these challenging times, what would a book like 14 Stations, focusing on a very Catholic subject, have to offer a non-Catholic, a non-Christian, or even an atheist? What would this book, recommended by a friend, have to offer me, an occasionally struggling Episcopalian? How could a book like this show any of us a path away from isolation, darkness, and despair toward hope, faith, and meaning? As a remedy for the dulling weight of social and psychological distancing, this book was and is stunning, confronting us with interpreted scenes from the last day of Christ on earth, his suffering and death, in all their horrific immediacy. Stations of the Cross, a series of devotions commemorating this last day, began as a practice of medieval pilgrims unable to make the journey to Jerusalem, to “follow” the Via Dolorosa, the actual path followed by Jesus on the day of his crucifixion. The devotions focus on 14 moments, beginning with Christ’s condemnation and ending with his being laid in the tomb. The art of 14 Stations, which is the heart of the book, is arranged in couplets—Fr. Bill Moore’s abstract paintings (mixed media on canvas) on each left-hand page and Louisa Jenkins’ mosaics on each right-hand page. This positioning, where painting and mosaic appear to speak to each other, allows us to become a part of the art’s conversation, intimately sensing through seeing, the despair that must have accompanied Jesus on his final earthly walk. Each couplet of art represents a Station of the Cross. Each artist has accompanied his/her individual pieces of art with comments. Louisa Jenkins’ comments on her mosaics are short, composed and careful. They focus on details. Fr. Bill’s comments on his paintings, equally brief, are breathlessly impressionistic and suggestive. In many ways, the style of each artist’s comments is reflective of their art. In the service of the Stations, the participants move from one image to the next, each of the 14 images laying out the stark circumstances of the moment. At each image prayers are recited, and one meditates on the meaning of each of these moments on the day of Christ’s death. The book’s design and layout, created by Fred Hartson, allow us this same journey. As we move along in the book, we see the path of stones laid out along the bottom of the pages, and we walk the Via Dolorosa ourselves. We feel the hardness of the grueling path of Christ on the day he died. We sense the fear and cruelty which led to those awful moments. And our own challenges, our own feelings of loss, aloneness, and uncertainty, become small. On the surface, there seems to be a separation between the two artists’ works: Louisa Jenkins’ mosaics are stable and set in place. Created in 1951, and composed of a rich variety of textures and materials, including many in tones of gold, they are now located in a Benedictine community of faith at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon. Each mosaic echoes the stylized, iconographic tradition of Byzantine mosaics in stark and stiff abstraction. Fr. Bill Moore’s paintings, created more than fifty years later than the mosaics, are richly and deeply fluid in their expressiveness. They seem vibrant and alive, moving almost musically on the canvas and yet calling up a stillness in the viewer. They often include “found objects” placed quietly in the work. Their abstractness allows the viewer to enter into the paintings and find an individual meaning. Both artists see a singular and significant reality in the events memorialized by the Stations of the Cross, and both aim to strike at the heart of that deeper reality by abstracting it. They seek to touch a truth that can only be reached if it is not made visually obvious, if it does not conform to our usual expectations of the physical world. In 14 Stations, Jenkins’ iconography and Moore’s abstract expressionism meet on the pages to call forth the essence of a faith in redemption and salvation through sacrifice. In much the same way, the words which accompany each of the 14 Stations are suggestive of deeper truths. For the 10th Station (“Jesus is Stripped of His Garments”) Jenkins writes, almost poetically: “The world’s rude hands leave Jesus with nothing, naked and beholden to all. Again the path begins to climb.” With these words, she is pointing toward details of the mosaic, but leaving the implications of this moment to the viewer. Father Bill’s text accompanying his painting of the 10th Station states simply, his words almost a mosaic, “This station is awash with light. At the Transfiguration, with a glimpse of divinity, Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white. Here they have been torn from his body.” One of the greatest virtues of the comments which each artist attaches to his/her work, is their brevity. Like the art itself, the words do not distract. They lead the viewer/reader to more reflection—to a more profound reality revealed. This book was published at a time when we were shrouding ourselves with self-protection, isolation, and social deprivation. 14 Stations shows us moments in a much larger act of horrific sacrifice, an event that has become one of the foundations of western civilization. But the works of Jenkins and Moore also reveal an undercurrent of faith in a significant reality—that such sacrifices, such pain and loss, can lead to extraordinary transformations of the heart and soul. Louisa Jenkins’ faith in the existence of that deeper reality, beyond what is presented in the physical world, ultimately led her beyond Catholicism and mosaic-making in her later life. Her journey caused her to spend time in a Zen monastery in Japan and to shift toward scroll-making in her artistic work. She never went back to mosaic-making. Fr. Bill Moore continues his life as a priest in the order of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts. He continues to seek communion with a deeper reality through the melding of his art and the work of his order: helping the needy and abandoned in the world. For Jenkins, at the time she fashioned the mosaics, the path to a more significant reality, was found in the simplicity, symbolism and iconography of the mosaic form. In her book, The Art of Making Mosaics, she describes the artists who created the Byzantine religious mosaics: “[They] deliberately adopted these techniques to convey staggering truths which had no counterparts in nature, which could be told in no other way.” Referring to the dark path of marble chips that thread through her Stations mosaics (easily visible on pages 4 and 5 of the book), she at one time commented, “That’s the road we’re all on.” In his artist statement, Fr. Bill Moore says, “My art is all about hope in, and love for the physical world, which according to my beliefs and traditions, can link us to the spiritual realms—to God.” It is in those moments of linkage that the transformation, the communion, occurs. In a conversation with him, I learned that Fr. Bill has a deep appreciation for things of the senses: things from the earth, music, found objects. But not for their own sake. They are transformative ways to connect with "The Other", "The Divine"—he understands that others use both terms interchangeably with "God". These two artists have faith in the transcendence of art and its power to connect us to deeper realities. They fully offer that faith to us in 14 Stations. It is the kind of faith that each of us must find in order to weather today’s and tomorrow’s loss, despair and fear. It is a faith in the potential of the human spirit to express the inexpressible, to find linkage with things only the spirit can know, to uplift and enlighten. Kate Flannery Kate Flannery is a writer and practicing attorney living in Claremont, CA. Her other published works include short stories, flash fiction, poetry and literary reviews. After Influenza Painting quickly, still a little weak from my abysmal bout with Spanish flu, I stare with baggy, bleary eyes. I streak a bilious green around my mouth, gray-blue along my jaw, vermillion over brows (the fire of my fever) and a brown dent centered in my forehead. This flu allows reprieve but hereby marks me to repent, confess. My health has never been robust and I am nearing sixty. What right have I to live? What kind of God would entrust health to me while letting millions die when in their prime? I can only pray this menace will not strike another day. Barbara Lydecker Crane Barbara Lydecker Crane, a finalist for the 2017 and the 2019 Rattle Poetry Prize, has won awards from the Maria Faust Sonnet Contest, the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest, and others. She has published three chapbooks: Zero Gravitas (White Violet Press, 2012), Alphabetricks (Daffydowndilly Press, 2013), and BackWords Logic (Local Gems Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, Lighten-Up-Online, Measure, Rattle, Think, Writer’s Almanac, and several anthologies. She is also an artist. Keats in the Bay of Naples Dying All around—in the air, in the bell deeps of the admiral-blue sea-- about the bodies of the fairest reflections of shoreline mixings-- the most sensual then, glistening, O the simplest breezes shimmered in expectation, caresses of noonlight, glances on waves, and in all things the delirium of days. Michael Gessner Michael Gessner has authored 12 books of poetry and prose. His work has been included in American Letters & Commentary, American Literary Review, The French Literary Review, JAMA, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Oxford Review (UK,) Pacific Review, Sycamore Review, The Yale Journal of Humanities and others. He is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle. Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Untitled by Congo. Deadline is June 26, 2020. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. Have fun. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include CONGO WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your poem. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight, June 26, 2020. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 12. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! The Plain *Sauron’s wide yellow eye accompanied by a murky underpass in the ether regions. “Come, talisman, come!” Pastel park made of dunes, crawling with a mirage of locusts. Wintry hills collide with spring, polar-verdant, the tap’s on. Zipper the tent, drink your tea black before the earth decides what it wants to be. Samuel Strathman *Note: Sauron is the main nemesis in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. He uses an eye to try and find the hero, Frodo, with an all-powerful ring. Samuel Strathman is a Jewish poet, author, educator, and editor at Cypress: A Poetry Journal. Some of his poetry has appeared in Ice Floe Press, Feed Magazine, Mineral Lit Mag, and elsewhere. His first chapbook, In Flocks of Three to Five, will be published by Anstruther Press later this year (2020). He lives in Toronto, Ontario. Madame Recamier René Magritte was fourteen when his mother drowned herself in the Sambre River hooded in crepe smelling of old clothes and mal intent. He searched her face for a glimpse of eyeholes for a way in, a warning as to what his fate might be without her. Upon a backless daybed her sarcophagus is set in place bronzed fruit of buried mourning absent of air. Her drab casket sits up like a child. It is not a pipe or a fish or a sculpture but an ill-shaped coffin conceived in grief and grizzly jest. It is his mother immortalized in a funerary box with wreathed handles, madder-brown, darkened with age. A chime sounds on the other side of the wall a mirror padded with memory. A boy becomes an artist. Bill Ratner Bill Ratner is a Poets & Writers Readings and Workshops Grant recipient, his spoken-word performances are featured on National Public Radio’s Good Food, The Business, and KCRW’s Strangers, he is a 9-time winner of The Moth Story Slams. His poems, essays, and stories are published in The Chiron Review, The Baltimore Review, Rattle Magazine’s Rattlecast, Pleiades, KYSO Flash, South Florida Poetry Journal, Willawaw Journal, Missouri Review Audio, and other journals. Bill is a voice actor for cartoons, computer games, documentaries, and movie trailers. More info at http://billratner.com/author • @billratner Spring on the Alley Sharp sun cut the April cold, opened daffodils all over the Northside, spread the art students over the alleys and on curbs of the red brick street-- holding pads, pencils and eyes on the move. Behind my old Model-T garage Eugenia graced the gravel, sketching the multi-unit white storage shed where Tom housed trucks and toilets.\ I showed off my blue writing pencils— F grade. She showed the same pencils, just harder tip, not wanting a full shaded shed, only imply it, hoping the viewer could fill in. Like verse, I said. Harold, a landscape artist down three garages, played at bagging rotted leaves next to another student, a lefty, lining out the rot. Catty-corner from my garage Bud dropped a wrench and yelled if she knew Edward Hopper. Eugenia said for class models they had raptors. Mike Lewis-Beck Mike Lewis-Beck writes from Iowa City. He has pieces in American Journal of Poetry, Alexandria Quarterly, Apalachee Review, Big Windows Review, Cortland Review, Chariton Review, Guesthouse, Pure Slush, Pilgrimage, Rootstalk, Seminary Ridge Review, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Writers’ Café and Wapsipinicon Almanac, among other venues. His short story, “Delivery in Göteborg,” won a Finalist prize from Chariton Review, 2015. “My Cherry Orchard in Iowa,” was named a ‘Notable Essay’ in Best American Essays 2011. He has a book of poems, Rural Routes, recently published by Alexandria Quarterly Press. Acc(i)dents (Do)n’t Happen Hand over their snapshots, I’ll make them somersault through their summers back into my childhood kiddy pool I’ll see them reanimate into an alternate timeline where accidents don’t happen How will our future generations reconcile us with this moment presented to them in a poem: his chest caved in, fingers dismembered eight feet below him in the deep, her dive like a cat thrown from a high window: right-angled legs stiff with cramps fists creepy crawly obtuse. Whose water pistol was that? Did you bounce your baby sister’s head off the backboard? Was it an accident? He braces for the impact of skin with concrete water: the murderous thunderclap chides us inside. Maybe I hyperextended his back too far. I may have splayed her arms too wide at play time. Chlorine spilled from their throats onto my sleeves and burned my skin. The board broke before I could fall up the final steps Maybe I had a hand in this: brace for impact—Maybe I wanted it to break like that. Sean West Sean West holds a BFA in Creative and Professional Writing. In 2019, he was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. His work has been published in StylusLit, Stilts Journal, and Baby Teeth Journal, among others. He lives and works in Brisbane. Find more of him at www.callmemariah.com. |
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