Piers (In Silver Gelatin)
 
with glosa from “Losing Form in Darkness” by David Wojnarowicz
10.16.23, 10.17.23, 10.23.23

after Mural at Canal Street Piers, by Peter Hujar (United States) 1983. Click here to view:
​artblart.com/2017/04/25/exhibition-peter-hujar-speed-of-life-at-fundacion-mapfre-barcelona/19-web-4/

1.
Seeing the pale flesh of frescoes come to life
Faces Byzantine and Cycladic gaze from shadows
Onto all that remains: chamber of wreck and wet boxes
Washed downriver with the spilled champagne of last farewells,
Memories of horn-blasted honeymoons at the lost casinos of Cuba,
Einstein’s refuge, the rescue of drenched survivors, bananas.
the smooth turn of hands over bodies
the taut lines of limbs and mouths, the intensity of energy
Bended knees and thrusting hips recite
Sacraments of new religion and ancient ecstasies
While witnesses deep in shadow whisper prophecies
Divined from broken windows and paid-up tariffs,
Foreshadowing the doom of decades to come.
brings others down the halls where guided by little sounds or no sounds
Dark shapes recall the last Christian priest of New Rome
Who rather than perish to Ottoman swords
Vanished into the walls of Hagia Sophia,
And returns now to bless the celebrants as
they pass silently over the charred floors.
 
2.
Enough with the metaphors. Here it is.
The acrid rot and mildew scald my nostrils--
Fetid Hudson River summer.
I left the shop late to put on filthy jeans, T-shirt
Strategically torn to bare nipple and navel.
Nails and spikes menace my shoddy Keds.
White faces loom from cracked walls
Scanned by clandestine flashlight, passing beams
of a tug and a smoky moon, all background
to the hunt, the stand and stare.
We see nothing but ourselves, blind to holes that drop
To oily water, to tread-less stairs, to missing walls.
By day, I am pissed we’re left to forage like rats on a wharf.
By night we are the slime of the Underworld
Feeding on the living corpses we crave.
We’re just horny guys, free at last
To play the games we missed as kids,
or loved too much even then.
They can paint all they want--
Sure. Wait, let me pose for you--
But the pictures are not the point,
Even if they’re all that will be left of us.
                    
Bruce Whitacre

Good Housekeeping (Poets Wear Prada) is a BookLife Reviews Editors Pick. The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks, placed 2nd in Contemporary Poetry at The BookFest Spring 2023. Bruce Whitaker’s crown sonnet about the culture of violence won the Nebraska Poetry Society’s 2023 Open Poetry Contest. He has been published in Queensbound and many anthologies and journals. “Leave Meeting” is included in Diane Lockward’s craft book, The Strategic Poet, Terrapin Books, 2021. Nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net. He lives with his husband in Forest Hills, NY. www.brucewhitacre.com

​Christina’s World

My world is filled with huge skies –
untroubled by clouds or rain –
where blades of grass
wave endlessly in the breeze.

My world is a worn clapboard house –
weathered to a pale grey –
an island sitting on the horizon
where I crawl like a crab
on a New England shore.

My world is the heady smell of grass,
warm in the summer evening,
below me rich crumbs of earth
which I grasp in my stained hands.

My world is the constant hum of crickets,
mice and ants moving briskly beneath me,
my dress pink like faded lobster shells
in the swell and curve of a limitless field.

Annest Gwilym
      
*Text in italics by Andrew Wyeth

Annest Gwilym is the author of three books of poetry. Surfacing (2018) and What the Owl Taught Me (2020), were both published by Lapwing Publications. Annest has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, both online and in print, and placed in several writing competitions, winning one. Her third book of poetry – Seasons in the Sun – was published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch in September 2023 and was Poetry Kit’s Book of the Month in November 2023 as well as being one of their Christmas reading recommendations. She has been nominated for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2024.

Man and Large Dog
                       
Big dog, big hat.
You’re polka dot happy
to show the world that
you can drag agony around with the best
of them, and one better--
create it, too, with that leash
that’s worth its weight in stories told--
how you got him, what you paid,
how tight it has to be
to see the tongue displayed,
for that is the mark of the finest kind
of beast—reddish pink like pedigree’s flower
or something truly rude and ready
to joust.
Look at those teeth—museum quality.
It must be a pleasure to pull the leash
and hear the snarl
rise up
for a country mile.

Mark Dunbar 

Mark Dunbar is a former teacher and writer originally from Columbus, Ohio, and now living outside Chicago. He attended Kenyon College where he was the recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award.

​

Don't miss this very special Zoom session on Sunday- Redheads in Art. We will look at the portrayal of redheads throughout art history, then work with brilliant flash fiction writer Kathryn Kulpa on some exercises and drafts inspired by incredible paintings. The Ekphrastic Review is thrilled to team up with Kathryn and it's going to be an unusual, inspiring workshop. 

Click on image above, or link below, to sign up. 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrasticwritingworkshops.html

We have all kinds of Zoom sessions coming up on craft, art history, and generative writing. After Redheads in Art, we have a session on surrealist and icon Leonor Fini, on how visual art history inspires Madonna as a collector and as an artist, on death in art, on what it means to show, not tell, and much more. All are welcome! 

Hopper’s Gun

It’s not for nothing
that the kitchen door is closed,
dark eye shut.

If a black line bisects
a coffee urn, at some point
it’s sure to explode.

We’re outside the window
for our protection,
they’re not conscious of our inspection.

Awash in the aqua night,
keep all the players in your sights,
keep your eyes on that door.

Look wherever there isn’t light,
a painter’s sleight of hand
can distract you from the cash.

Looking at your hands, red knuckled,
so absorbed in the bulge and groove
around the wedding band, you don’t move.

The yellow wall warns, be alert to the immediate, 
to the actual smell of your armpits,
fear sour as skim milk.

Any moment you could crash
through the glass, take off your mask,
escape before your face turns to ash.

​Heather Nelson

​Heather Nelson has been a student of poetry since college, where she developed her thesis project under the guidance of CD Wright at Brown University in 1991. She returned to writing in 2011 and has since been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Lily Poetry Review, Spoon River Review and others. She currently leads a local free-write, runs creative writing workshops and hosts a book group in Cambridge, Mass. She has been active in the Boston area literary scene since she began writing, and has taught classes at Grub Street, planned events for Litcrawl, organized author talks and other activities.

​Guilty
       
She is anchored with him on the precipice,
in unhappy matrimony.
Her beauty destroyed,
her lust laid to waste,
 
she is a poet with no reader.
 
Her ungrown leaves cannot glide
to the wind in reunion with the earth.
The compost cycle broken,
there will be no re-giving her self
as food for thought.
 
Her parched skin rakes the air,
barking mad with thirst,
but his treacherous hands have left her
with no mouth to drink
no cheeks to hold water
 
or teeth to bite sun.
 
Around her, the air stings with silence,
underscored by the rasping remains
of her dry twig tongues.
Tongues unable to speak on the cold metal taste
of his tool.
 
Her past has no future.
 
And yet she stands with him,
still,
his ghostly wife
exactly where he planted her.
 
One final red root, her first radicle
burning ever alive
from the core of his abuse,
dangles down
 
and writes her question
on the soilless
on the soulless
on the empty
                                        air
 
Standing on the tip of God’s pointed finger,
                                       how will any of us fall
                                                                  into his hand?
 
On her precipice, we all stand.
 
Accused.
 
Sheila Shrivastava
 
Born in Scotland to a German mother and Indian father, Sheila Shrivastava was raised in Massachusetts, educated in New York City and Philadelphia and lived, worked and mothered in Berlin for 20 years. She currently does the same while living, once again, in NYC. Her poetry is influenced by her wandering lifestyle and attention to the outside of the story. That is the region of the world where she has been issued her most frequently used, if imaginary, passport. 
 

Cardinal Borghese Views Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne
 
1625, Rome. Cardinal Scipione Borghese finally sees young Bernini’s finished marble sculpture of Apollo and Daphne. (He was only 27.) It is the last of four sculptures that the cardinal had commissioned from the great sculptor for his Villa Borghese.
 
At last, Bernini, and fully worth the wait.
Of course, the other three are wonders too:
The fierce abduction of Proserpina by Pluto,
Aeneas leading his family out of Troy,
Tense David as he releases Goliath’s doom.
All of them carved with scrupulous detail.
 
In preparation for Apollo and Daphne
You clearly read the Metamorphoses,
Where Ovid spins his tales of transformation.
Now let me see if I recall correctly.
The god Apollo insults and angers Cupid
Who strikes him with a magic golden arrow, 
Arousing love for Daphne, virgin nymph,
A follower of the chaste goddess Diana.   
When pierced by Cupid’s lead arrow that spurns love,  
Young Daphne flees the ardent god. As soon as 
He overtakes her, she begs her river-god father
To change her body, and thus preserve her virtue.
And so he does, transforming her just in time.
I stare at her toes becoming roots, her hair
And hands becoming leaves on slender branches,
Her quaking flesh the bark of the laurel tree.
While some say it was love, while some say lust,                                       
Apollo named the tree his sacred symbol,
Decreeing evergreen laurel wreaths for victors.
Superb detail, Bernini, such delicate leaves.
You say one should view it from the right. Ah yes,
I feel the movement now, the wind of the chase,
The magnitude of Daphne’s open-mouthed terror.
 
Of course these myths can captivate the senses,
And that is why Pope Urban VIII affixed
A carved tablet to the finished statue’s base,
To warn us of the dangers of seeking pleasure.*
But back to your achievement. All will say
That it is a marvel, but I will be the first.
 
Carolyn Raphael

*The presence of this pagan myth in the Cardinal's villa was justified by a moral couplet composed in Latin by Pope Urban VIII and engraved on the cartouche on the base, which says: "Those who love to pursue fleeting forms of pleasure, in the end find only leaves and bitter berries in their hands.”
​
The quotation is reproduced with permission from the Web Gallery of Art (https://www.wga.hu/) The photograph of Apollo and Daphne is also reproduced with permission from the Web Gallery of Art.

Carolyn Raphael retired from the English Department at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, after more than thirty years of teaching. Her poems have appeared in journals including Oberon, Measure, and Mezzo Cammin. She is the author of five poetry books, the latest of which is Travelers on My Route, published by Kelsay books in 2023.  She is the poetry coordinator of Great Neck Plaza in Great Neck, New York, where she works with Mayor Ted Rosen to organize the popular annual poetry contest and awards reading. Her website is carolynraphaelpoetry.com