​How to Vanish

He thinks he’s hidden, 
the man in the black coat. 
Stiff and still, he stands like a shadow, 
lurks like the Babadook, 
slippery as an oil slick, 
a long, lean knife of night. 
Behind a spray of flowers, he waits, 
speckled by the undergrowth, 
confident he can’t be seen.
 
But the woman beside him? 
The woman in green? 
Squint. 
Lean into your screen. 
Slide your fingers. Zoom
until you find her. 
Now she knows how to 

vanish.
 
Quiet, 
discreet, 
she nearly bleeds into the trees. 
 
I wonder if she has a thousand dresses 
in a thousand tones and tints 
to hide inside a thousand different scenes, 
or if, like an opal, 
this one garment shifts 
to match whichever place 
she finds herself.

Glenn Schudel
​
Glenn Schudel lives in Florida with a neurotic dog, a malevolent cat, and several overgrown bonsai trees. He holds an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance from Mary Baldwin University and teaches Creative Writing at Ringling College of Art and Design. "How to Vanish" is his first poetry publication.

 Charts & Graphs & Caillebotte
  
There's a famous scene in Henry James's novel The Ambassadors where his protagonist feels as if he's walked into a painting. While I've been going to museums in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe for decades, I'd never experienced anything similar until early in December 2024.

It started when I was sitting in my warm, book-filled study finishing a second cup of freshly-brewed, mild Gevalia coffee and my husband called from another room: "Hey! Shouldn't you be at physical therapy? It's 8:00."

The question was as shocking as the clamor from one of those silvery, round, old-fashioned alarm clocks with a bell on top. I've never been late for PT and I was sure the appointment was set for 8:30—which meant that I still had plenty of time to enjoy my coffee. 

Not so. A super-quick check of my Google calendar made it clear that I'd gotten the week's Tuesday and Thursday appointment times reversed.  I shouldn’t have doubted my husband was correct since he has an unerring sense of what's ahead on our calendar and even remembers dates from years ago. So if, for instance, I ask when we bought our last dishwasher or had the new front door installed, he won't hesitate: he'll reply with the year, the season, and the month.

Before this PT goof, I would have brushed off my mistake as absent-mindedness or a result of too much multi-tasking. But when I hurried into a coat and gloves, calling ahead to the physical therapist's office to say I was en route, I knew that my "number dyslexia" was the cause.

The awareness of this issue had hit like thunder only weeks before when I told my voice teacher at Michigan State University's Community Music School that I'd always had trouble with sight reading music. That's the case even though I have a good ear for music and in my teacher's words, "terrific audiation." What does that mean? I can hear the notes, hear the music, in my head. In our weekly lessons whenever he's asked me to try a new vocal exercise and he's played it on the piano, I've had no trouble singing the right notes. Maybe I need to work on fine points of technique, but my accuracy has never been an issue.

He suggested in this pivotal lesson that I might want to try what’s called "Solfège" in music. That's where you use the do-re-mi etc. labels to replace the names of the notes and this apparently helps people read music better. We spent about ten minutes working with that in the too-bright practice room where the baby grand piano loomed over a swarm of black, plastic stackable chairs and matching metal music stands. 

My teacher is tall, blond, young, enthusiastic, and profoundly encouraging. Our lessons have always been educational and fun for me—sometimes even thrilling when I do things I didn't know I could, like sing something "piano" with full and steady release of air so that the sound is crystal clear. Whether singing a song by Sondheim or Schumann, I've always feel at ease.

He often grins when he introduces something new and asks if I'm willing to try it. I've said "Yes" because it doesn't feel risky or embarrassing—even the first time he asked me to sing while walking around the crowded room. That was a bit complicated because I had to concentrate on not bumping into any of the myriad chairs filling the large practice room, but it also freed me from thinking about what I was singing. It was fun and I just sang with more expression and nuance than before.

But this do-re-mi approach was different. I felt some vague inner qualms about what we were doing when he played notes in an arpeggio and asked me to sing their Solfège names—it was like a pop quiz. 

We moved on after this brief foray into Solfège, and back to familiar territory,, I felt what I realized only later was relief. I had lots of errands to run when the lesson was done and didn't think more about it until that night in my den when I started reading about Solfège online and checking out videos from various music teachers. 

The den is my "music room," a quiet, cozy room where I replay my recorded lessons with headphones on, make notes in a weekly voice diary, and practice. The walls are painted apricot and they're dominated by a huge poster of an Art Institute of Chicago Caillebotte exhibition from the 1990s that makes the room both larger and more intimate at the same time. It's the painter's famous rainy Parisian street scene from 1877.  Considered his masterpiece, the original is monumental, with life-size figures, and it's been my first stop at the Art Institute every time I visit.  Matching French-style twin bookcases opposite that poster are filled with art books, history books, and museum exhibition catalogues, recording my grand passions and decades of museum tourism across the U.S., in Canada, and Western Europe. 

But the always-soothing atmosphere in the room was shifting as I sampled more websites and YouTube videos about my problem with sight reading and finally gave up in frustration. Then it hit me: how about asking Google if some singers might have trouble with sight reading music? Was that even a thing?

It is, and that's how I discovered number dyslexia, whose technical name is the cold-sounding "dyscalculia."

There are various levels of this neurodivergence and mine is on the low side. It has never undermined me as a writer, teacher, or public speaker, but I can't do arithmetic in my head very well and never could. That's why I love the tip percentages they show you at restaurants when you pay your bill, either in the server's handheld device or at the register. 

Multiplication tables were a particular problem for me in elementary school and no matter how many flash cards I studied with my math whiz mother, when I got to class the next morning, whatever knowledge I'd stored the night before had drained away. If I got something right, it was likely thanks to a lucky guess. In high school, any kind of chemical or mathematical formula looked like hieroglyphics to me and they all existed in some parallel universe of learning because I excelled in subjects like English, History, and French.

Nowadays, I sometimes enter the wrong figure in the correct column in my Excel spreadsheet of personal expenses, or the totally wrong date in that Google calendar. Luckily this is a joint "household calendar" and my husband usually queries me in advance if he finds something that looks like an error. Sometimes I'm off by a day, sometimes a week, and occasionally a whole month. 

When I come across a long newspaper article filled with charts or graphs that illustrate the major points, I can feel myself tuning out. They seem like castle walls I could never possibly breach. After half an hour with our jovial, white-haired accountant going over various facts and figures and examining one computer screen after another, I am barely present. It's as if I have a migraine without the pain, and I feel almost suffocated. 

That evening after my voice lesson, I felt like the lonely-looking man at the centre of Caillebotte's painting. Until I realized he wasn't frozen. Like everyone else in the painting, he was going somewhere. And that's when I decided I had to explain number dyslexia to my voice teacher so we could drop the idea of Solfège and keep working together as we always had. I was briefly embarrassed at the thought, but then decided I would enter the Caillebotte painting during the lesson and stay there as long as I needed to.

Lev Raphael

Lev Raphael's personal essays about art, music, travel, family, neurodivergence, writing and publishing have appeared in close to 90 online and print journals since the height of the pandemic, including The Ekphrastic Review, Black Fox, Lit Mag News, Spellbinder (in London), and most recently Mystery Readers Journal.

​The Shadowbox

Cornell sat in an Adirondack chair under the shade of the quince tree in his backyard. The chair was gray and weathered, much like himself, but it was comfortable in the way old wooden objects often were: firm, reassuring, present in the moment. For someone whose work was rooted in the past, this chair was an anchor in the now, although the idea of “now,” he found, was often a slippery proposition.
            
What did he know for sure? He knew it was hot and that the date was July of 1967. He could hear the movement of traffic from the boulevard and the song of robins in the tree and a droning lawnmower or two. He was reasonably certain it was around three in the afternoon and that he was not in the slightest bit hungry, although the last thing he had had to eat was at seven that morning, a slight meal consisting of a thin piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk. The grass behind his house probably needed to be mowed. He was unconcerned by this. A few gnats gently teased his face. He crossed his legs at the knee. He wore an off-white, button-down, short-sleeved shirt, brown trousers, and brown lace-up Florsheim’s. 
            
Sleep pulled at his eyelids. He’d been in his basement working for most of the day. He was the last of his family. His mother had passed the previous fall, and his poor wheelchair-bound brother the year before. His assistant had the day off.
            
What else did he know? Death was approaching. His clothes, always a size too big, ballooned around him as if he were made of nothing more than wooden sticks. He was fading. Dissolving. His body was a living act of mummification. He was constantly startled by the sight of his ancient hands.
            
A robin split the air and glided onto a sunny spot of grass, cocked its head, and listened. He stared at it. Its eyes were infinitely deep black holes. The unblinking character of birds had always fascinated him. He was unsure whether their serene staring was merely a biological act of vigilance against predators or something else, possibly other-worldly. Surely, he thought, a bird could daydream. Could it relive its raptor ancestry in eternal self-examination? It certainly saw what there was to see: the trees, grass, power-lines, other birds, feral cats, the infinite city. A bird could not function without this ability; otherwise, it’d be a mere blind bat. What intrigued him was the possibility of overlay, of its bird-sight mapped onto some secret matrix of birdness that was at once seeing and an interpretation. In short, a whole other world. To blink was to lose this double-image, to lose, in fact, the world beyond the world. It seemed to Cornell that this world was obviously precious to them, these watchers.
            
            
Of course, birds could travel. They could see the world beyond the boundaries of Utopia Parkway, beyond Queens. They could see the past overlaid by the growing city, the trees that were never felled, the undulations of land and river. It was safe to assume they could see things one cannot. 
He often imagined that birds were somehow inhabited by the spirits of the recently deceased, perhaps enraptured within those tiny bird skulls as they swooped and soared unblinkingly above the curve of the Earth, pure joyful flight of souls now unencumbered by the petty worries of tick-tock time, gravity, and death itself.
            
And when the bird met its own inevitable end? What of the soul inside? Was it transferred to another bird for further amazing adventures in the sky, more delectable meals of worm and moth and berry? Or was the soul, after this sojourn in an avian way-station, sent on its merry way down the line to the next stop of the ineffable?
            
When he used wooden parrots in his art, they all had one eye directed at the viewer.
An image of a train now came to him. There was no logical connection of a train with a bird, so there must be something illogical and deeper linking the two. Or so he liked to think. 
            
He did not particularly like trains, although he had ridden them most of his life. They were convenient to get into and out of Manhattan. In and of themselves, they were fine and functional. They held no magic for him, as they seemed to do for others; Magritte, for example. The steam-engine bursting from the fireplace, one he had used in a construction, bore the frisson of superposition, like the first bite of cake on a stale tongue or the sight of a beautiful woman amid a crowd of otherwise quite ordinary humanity. 

However, his constructions had become a bit tedious to him. Too much work, too much repetition. It was expected that he make boxes. He wanted the unexpected. He wanted to fall in love.  
            
The bird was gone, the shadows crept deeper into the yard, and all the lawnmowers and traffic and jets far above, and even distant trains, roared as if making noise were their prime concern. 
            
He sat up in the chair and wiped a thin rivulet of drool from his chin. A blue and white ball suddenly came bouncing into his yard via his empty driveway and settled into the tall grass near where the robin had landed oh-so-long ago. The ball was interesting. It was plastic and bright. He thought it might do something for him.
            
He could hear footsteps coming nearer, then slowing and tentatively shuffling.
            
A girl appeared in his yard. Her hair was brown and long, her face tanned by the summer sun, her knees scabbed by concrete experience. She wore a halter top bearing the image of a winking cat’s face, a pair of red shorts, and dirty sandals on her equally dirty feet. He could see from clear across the yard (and perhaps time) that her eyes were wide and brilliant.
            
“Mr. Cornell?”
            
“Hello, Rosie.” She was a child from across the street. He knew most of his neighbors. He’d been here for decades.
            
“Joey threw my ball over here. Can I get it?”
            
Cornell set his scrawny arms under him and pushed, standing. “Oh, certainly,” he said, the yard wobbling slightly as his blood pressure swooped and dipped for a moment. “It’s right over here, actually.” He pointed a thin finger and shuffled in the ball’s direction.
            
A voice called from behind and beyond Rosie, who turned and bellowed, “Shut up already, I’m getting it!” and then turned back to resume her affable, adult demeanor. She was ten. She stepped further into the yard.
            
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Cornell.” Her mother had told her that he was some crazy old artist, polite in his way. What he was doing living out here, instead of glamorous Manhattan, was anyone’s guess. 
            
“Oh, not at all, not at all,” said Cornell. Their vectors met at the intersection of the ball but neither picked it up. Rosie looked around the yard, analyzing. This was the yard of an artist? It looked like every other yard she’d ever seen. There was a tree, a couple of old chairs, grass, a fence, and a brick apartment building just beyond. 
            
Cornell studied her eyes. A moment of dizzying recognition stirred him.
            
He was sure. They were exactly the same. He was amazed that he’d never noticed it before.
            
“Did anyone ever tell you,” he said, placing his hands on his knees and bending down, “that your eyes are identical to Lauren Bacall’s?”
            
“Who?”
            
“She was an actress. Is, still, I believe. A very, very beautiful woman.”
            
Rosie stared at the tip of Cornell’s nose. “Oh. Thank you. You don’t look like no one.” Her eyes shifted to study his forehead. “Maybe a praying mantis.”
            
Cornell thought he did indeed look like a praying mantis. He thought he should feel delighted by this correlation of a personal observation. However, he felt his face flush and drew his shoulders in as he uncurved his spine. Once, at the 42nd Street library, a passing woman had pointed out to him that he had a stain on his necktie. In horror, he looked down and saw a longish streak that at first sight very much resembled an errant bird-dropping, but on later reflection was probably some pistachio ice cream from lunch. An audible “Oooo” escaped his lips, an “Oh” that had morphed into a note of despair when he raised the tie between two delicately pincering fingers as if lifting a dead mouse.
            
“That’ll come out with a little club soda, I bet,” said the unhelpful woman in the lobby of the library known (and depended on by Cornell) for its sombre air of dignified learning.
            
He could only mumble a “thank you” and flee to the nearest men’s room, where he quickly removed the befouled tie from beneath his bright red face and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He stood at the sink and stared at his reflection until he thought that the woman had gone from the lobby.
            
He now pointed indifferently at the ball at his feet. “There it is,” he said and turned back to his chair. The sun had just gone behind the apartment house, bathing the square backyard in shadow.
            
Rosie said, “Are you mad at me?”
            
“Not at all,” he said over his shoulder, resisting the urge to stuff his hands in his pockets and slink away as he had on so many other embarrassing occasions when dealing with women.
            
“You could show me her picture,” said Rosie.
            
Cornell paused, a foot from his chair. He looked back. Rosie had the ball in her hands. She appeared to be genuinely worried that she had offended him. 
            
“I have some photographs of her inside, if you’d like.”
            
Rosie dropped the ball at her feet. “OK. I like going in other people’s houses.”
            
“Do you?” said Cornell, somewhat mystified. “Why is that?”
            
She shrugged. “I’m nosy. You need to cut your grass, you know.”
            
“Hmm.” He began his shuffle to the backdoor, Rosie following just behind him idly humming the notes to a song.
            
“Rosie!” A slightly younger and male version of Rosie poked his head around the corner of the house. “Whaddayadoin?” At the site of ancient Cornell, the boy’s eyes widened as they always did, as if surprised to see a corpse walking around. He chirped, “Hiya, Mr. C.”
            
“Hello, Joey.”
            
“We’re going in to look at some pictures of a famous actress. You wanna come?” said Rosie.
            
“Where’s the ball?”
            
Rosie pointed and Joey ran to grab it. “Is it OK I don’t come in, Mr. C?”
            
“Certainement, Monsieur,” said Cornell with a smile that did nothing to improve the cadaverous features of his face.
            
“Huh?”
            
“That’s FRENCH, moron,” spat Rosie. 
            
“I thought he was like us,” said Joey, frowning at Cornell. “Ain’t you American?”
            
Cornell said, “As apple pie.”
            
Could these two have been his children? Could he have been a father? He could think so, but the image that came to his mind was remote, flat, and false, like the buildings of Manhattan glimpsed from a moving train some miles away, potentially real yet existing somehow only over there, like stars light-years from Earth, unreachable. 
            
The kitchen was dark and cool, like walking into a cave. Rosie was instructed to sit at the metal table while Cornell disappeared down the basement stairs. Two cake boxes sat on the cluttered counter. The refrigerator, which looked as old as Cornell, wheezed in the corner. The house did not have an odor. She found this odd. In all the homes of friends and relatives she had entered in her short life, every one of them offered some sort of smell. Mr. Cornell’s house was absent any odor, except perhaps a faint trace of paper or wood. That was all. 
            
As quietly as she could, she tiptoed over to the refrigerator and pulled the curved handle, revealing a bottle of milk, some bottles of soda-pop, and pats of restaurant butter in a bowl. No wonder the guy was so thin, she thought. The stove looked unused. She peeked inside the oven door and blinked in wonder at the bird nests clustered on the wire racks. She counted four. The sink was full of very clean glassware. The white Masonite counter with the cake boxes also held bags of peanuts, little toys from the five and dime, bottle caps, postcards from somewhere not America, marbles. The curtain over the sink was drawn and the cupboards contained plates and dry-goods that looked like they had been put there in 1940 and not touched since.
            
She sat once more at the table piled with papers and drawings and magazines, some of which she idly flipped through, looking at the pictures, wondering what was taking the old man so long.
            
At some point, as the kitchen darkened and her stomach rumbled, she put down a hand-drawn picture of an elephant balancing on a ball (Robert Cornell was signed at the bottom) and wondered what time it was and how long she had been sitting here in the quiet, when music began to seep up through the kitchen linoleum from the basement below. Rosie decided to investigate.

At the bottom of the cellar staircase, she found Cornell standing completely still before a workbench, staring at the floor joists above his head, surrounded by shelves stuffed with shoeboxes bearing hand-written descriptions of their contents: buttons, twigs, balls. A record was playing on an old wind-up player in the corner. 

Rosie did not want to disturb him, he looked so happy. Instead, she allowed her curiosity to lead her around the basement, and ran her fingers over boxes with glass lids that held all sorts of wonders. She had no idea what all this stuff meant or why it was down here. 
            
Soon, Cornell noticed her. He said in a voice even more ethereal than his usual, “Let me show you this.”
            
Rosie stepped over to him, where the light was brighter. The smell of dust tickled her nose. Cornell moved aside to reveal, on the bench next to the record player, the picture of a woman with shoulder length hair and an intense yet alluring stare, directed not at the viewer but somewhere off to her left.
            
“Who’s that?”
            
“That is Lauren Bacall. The film actress I was telling you about. Your eyes and her eyes are remarkably similar. Do you see?”  
            
She bent closer. The woman had eyes, all right, but she didn’t see any resemblance to hers. Then again, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d really looked at her own eyes. 

Rosie then considered Cornell, bent over her shoulder. He smelled like nothing, like his house. His thin lips were compressed into something similar to a smile, a small intensity of pleasure.
            
She said, “Yeah, look at that. Pretty neat.” 
            
“Rosie,” Cornell said softly. “Do you know how delighted I would be to meet this woman?”
            
For a moment, Rosie felt the unfamiliar impulse to run away. It suddenly occurred to her that she was in the basement of a strange house, alone with a man who may not be (in the words of her hard-bitten grandfather) “right in the head.”
            
And then his eyes focused on hers and it was like staring into the eyes of an infant or a baby bird. Her brother had eyes like that when he was little, eyes that were fascinated and sad at the same time. Perhaps Cornell’s were sadder than most. 
            
She said, “Are you lonely?”
            
His faint smile did not disappear. He straightened up and drew his arm around the room, gathering into this gesture the many boxes and cups and treasures and weird glass boxes that contained birds and dolls and glass cups and the stars. 

“How could I ever be lonely with all of this?” he said. 

Reaching up one skeletal arm, he withdrew from the rows of objects a rectangular wooden box, fronted with glass, and said, “I would like you to have this.”

The interior of the box held a blue, imprecisely painted wooden grid. There were twelve squares in all and pictures of Lauren Bacall at various ages were in four of them, taken from old magazines and pasted onto the back of the box. The rest of the squares contained a menagerie of small but eye-catching objects: a chartreuse glass ball, a wooden block etched with a cockatoo in profile, a tangle of copper wire, a worn wooden bobbin, a simple nickel ring hanging from a white painted dowel, a sealed glass jar containing a broken. The square at the lower right was empty. 

Rosie took the box, struck with wonder. She had heard that Cornell made such things, but it seemed that the box was ancient, like something he had dug up. The wooden sides were chipped and discolored; the joinery imprecise. It felt like holding history.

He said, “This is an early attempt with Ms. Bacall. My later constructions were much more…resonant, I believe.”

“And I can have it?”

“Certainly.”

“Okay. Thanks.” 

Rosie didn’t tell her family about the box. She managed to sneak it into her house across the street and up into her bedroom without being seen; her brother was down the block roughhousing with some kids from Crocheron Avenue, her mother in the kitchen working on supper. She slid her treasure under her bed as far as it could go, almost to the wall but not so far that she couldn’t reach it. 

She knew, instinctively, that what Cornell had given her was precious, even though the box itself was kind of a wreck. She did not want to share it with anyone, not even her own family. It wasn’t that she was worried that her mother might insist she give it back, or that her brother might destroy it (although there was always that possibility). What she’d discovered was that her eyes did indeed look very much like Bacall’s. She’d gone into the bathroom soon after shoving the box under her bed, and stood on the stool she used when brushing her hair, peering into her eyes in the toothpaste flecked mirror over the sink for so long her mother knocked on the door asking her if she had fallen in. Staring back at her were the same eyes that Lauren Bacall had in the pictures in the box. 

From then on, once a day, she would slide the box out from beneath her bed and study the oddly soothing collection of contents, study the pictures of Bacall, then study her reflection in the mirror. She happened to catch Key Largo while she was flipping through the channels one rainy Saturday afternoon and sat mesmerized as she watched her own eyes squint through cigarette smoke at tough, skinny hero Frank, or drip hatred at the bad guy Johnny Rocco. Joey tried to change the TV to the Three Stooges when she went into the kitchen for a snack during a commercial and she slapped his hand so hard her mother sent her to her room until supper.

Rosie’s fascination with Bacall’s eyes slowly dimmed, as the vicissitudes of life brought new concerns and interests to the foreground.

Cornell’s box sat neglected, and ultimately forgotten, under the far corner of her bed. Cornell himself died in his sleep a few years later but Rosie, in high school by then and deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day dramas of boyfriends and school-work, barely noticed his passing, or the fact that his house across the street was soon up for sale.

After graduating, she got a job as a receptionist for an internist and eventually moved out of Queens and into an apartment in Midtown with a friend who had a job with an advertising firm on Madison Avenue. She took her clothes, her makeup, her books and her records, but she completely forgot about Cornell’s box under her bed. Years later, on her second marriage and fourth kid in Hackensack, she came across a newspaper advertisement for a retrospective exhibit of the works of Joseph Cornell at the Museum of Modern Art. She thought briefly about taking her youngest (who liked to draw) into the city to see it, but she never got around to it. 

Every once in a while, though, when things were tough, when the children from her first marriage pretended that she didn’t exist, or the scare she endured after finding a lump in her breast after her fortieth birthday, she would retreat to the bathroom and lock the door and stare at her eyes until she could see Lauren Bacall’s again.

Her mother, alone in an apartment too big for her (Joey had left soon after Rosie), decided that it would be nice to be closer to her sister in Union City, so one day in the summer of 1984 she packed up everything she wanted to take and set everything else out on the curb. When she pulled out Cornell’s dust-covered box from under Rosie’s childhood bed, she had no idea what it was supposed to be. She knew, of course, that there had been a famous artist who used to live across the street, but as she had little interest in the arcane world of art, and had always been somewhat repelled by the sight of pallid Cornell, she had never investigated his work. She assumed that the box was some long-forgotten school project of Rosie’s and promptly took it down to the curb and chucked it atop the old suitcase with the broken hasp, the toaster that only toasted one slice of bread, wads of clothing from early in her failed marriage, and all the unwanted remnants of a life lived for over twenty years on Utopia Parkway.

A cardinal alighted on an overhanging branch of a near-by oak tree. After assessing the situation for a few moments, carefully studying the passing traffic, listening to the roar of the train on 39th Avenue and the steady thwock thwock thwock of a tennis ball being thrown by a child against a brick wall somewhere, the cardinal summed up its observations with a squirt of shit that fell precisely onto the glass lid of the box, partly obscuring Lauren Bacall’s face and her piercing, knowing eyes. Then it flew away.
 
K. J. McNamara

K. J. McNamara is a former chemist and science teacher living in Binghamton, NY. His stories have appeared in Coneflower Café and Apricity Magazine.

Shading
 
after some drawings of Lorraine Simms
 
i - Still Life
 
The light shed on the glass table top disposes
the most engaging shadows, the dust on it
producing a speckled sphere that encloses
an outline of an overweight cat,
the combination cast by my black hat
and an electric fan while the shape of an owl
has been made by a jug, its lip and handle
the orbits of deep set eyes in a white mask.
What could cat and owl be saying? No need to ask.

ii - Pheasant
 
A shadow emanates from the undergrowth,
a cautious jerky head, call spoofing a klaxon 
then sprinting out in front of us
shaking wattles of fire-alarm red
on to a field of flints and stubble
though oddly robotic with its manic straight line,
crying “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,”
before hurtling into the air in a low trajectory
round a corner of the wood’s blurred penumbra.

​iii - Pipistrelle
 
The one I found in my cabin I first thought
was a little patch of damp on the window frame
or some kind of darkness, an umbra, as the shutters
idled open, swung to with their shadows never still
from moment to moment. But it was a pipistrelle,
snub-nosed, head full of echoes, those shadows of sound.
I touched it with the tip of my little finger
and it took off straight to the chink it had found
to enter through the kitchen window without terror.

​iv – Fruit Bat
 
The dead bat reclines, wings spread, a round belly
as if she has just fed on mango or banana
although the running cross-stitch from sternum
to pelvis hints at a Caesarean delivery of her pups.
Floppy-eared, hooks at her elbow joints, her thick necked
shadow has thrown a cloak about her body
against foul weather or the honking of her mate.
She had no device to transmit ethereal halloos.
She just had to make do with acute vision and smell.

v - Lion Bones
 
The lion skull contemplates roaring
to disturb our sense of touch
not hearing, despite the pencil’s whisper
meditating sheer silkiness on sheer silk.
The lioness bone’s dark, wasp-waisted
being casts shadows the way voices echo
voices, echo inhuman cries,
echo a beast, a bestiary
world calling, language echoing desire.

​
​vi – Tiger Shoulder Blade
 
Tiger scapula: delicacy
not the ponderous movement of shoulders
out of thick undergrowth at daybreak
then along the bank of a river
wheeling leftwards to the rising sun,
flesh and blood as woven stuff, wing-like,
wavering yet with a purpose
coming at me or away from me,
wheeling leftwards certainly from where I sit.

​vii – Tigress Skull
 
The pitted bone, a friable hollowed rock
(Don’t touch! Don’t touch!) but at the centre
a debutante at her coming-out ball
holding the hem of her gown as a plump fool
lifts her in the waltz on the lawn
before the twin turrets in the background, 
the pencil mimicking the memory
of being, not the consequences
of action. I am. I was. I won’t be.

​viii – Bison Skull
 
Clouds moving very fast above the prairie,
shadows of rain fallen or rain to come,
clouds moving very fast above a hurtling darkness
which is not cloud shadow, but thousands of beasts
drumming on the earth as they gallop away
from fire or homo sapiens sapiens with rifles,
a finished drawing of horns doubled by shadow,
shading thickened to opacity around the muzzle
of something flayed then left for insects to strip to the bone.

​ix – Polar Bear Skull and Paw
 
Skull a tobacco-coloured warrior helmet,
incisors with an overbite not to be gainsaid,
his shadow a centred darkness, shading 
on shading, appetite on appetite;
paw bones, radius and ulna, powerful yet
refined like the hand of a pianist,
Rachmaninov’s stretch of a thirteenth interval
to be splayed over the white keys of ice and snow
shuffling, then padding, then dancing to its prey.

​
​x - Leviathan
 
Right Whale vertebra, an image
from Jan Miró, a spiritus oceani,
billow of a water spout above waves,
then a whale soul with paddles,
protoplasm laid on protoplasm,
embryo gazing with old eyes,
scalar presence twisting into forms,
the evolution from inertia
moving with tides in and out of storms.

​xi – Pencil Sharpener
 
I’m copying this hearing the rhythm of my pen
in my notebook for penultimate drafts
and, on the floor on flimsy print-out paper,
the scratching of coloured pencils made precise
by the Dino Family battery sharpener
with soft rubbery spines and a motor,
a blue eyeless monster with a round maw
into which my granddaughter has pressed blunt tips
and retrieved, much to her delight, fine points.

​xii - Draw
 
Draw me the shadow of a tiger.
Draw me the shadow of a bear.
Draw me the shadow of a dinosaur.
Draw me the shadow of the sea
and Leviathan that swims therein.
Draw me the shadow of our planet on the moon.
Draw me the dark matter between stars.
Draw me the shadow of the Big Bang.
Draw me the shadow.

James Sutherland-Smith

James Sutherland-Smith was born in Scotland in 1948, but has lived in Slovakia since 1989. He has published eight collections, the latest being Small Scale Observations from Shearsman. He has translated a number of Slovak and Serbian poets, a selection from Eva Luka’s poetry being due from Seagull Books in 2025.

Lorraine Simms explores our relationship to the natural world through paintings, sculptures, and installations. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and in the United States in private and public galleries including the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Tom Thomson Gallery. Simms’ work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and Parachute. Simms has participated in many residencies, including two at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2018 and 2019. She lives and works in Montreal where she is represented by McBride Contemporary.

​Keepsake
 
“So much cobalt?” Sarah’s tongue, accusing. Shrill. Her pointing finger, a skewer, a fury. A mumble of agreement, habitual, tumbles from Beth’s lips as she grips the easel, dizzy from the censure and scorch. Beth thinks of the time Sarah mocked the bluebird picture she drew for their father when she was so young. She’d withered under Sarah’s scorn then, too, but their father scolded Sarah, framed Beth’s artwork, and placed it high on a bookshelf in his study.
 
It’s been years since Beth first picked up her older sister’s sable-tipped brush, dipped it in blue: a child’s adulation. She wants to whip ’round, nip off the tip of Sarah’s digit. If Sarah dies first, she’ll shave off a slice, encase it like the mustard seed in the glass pendant their mother wore, a gift from their father who’d faded away long before Beth could complete his portrait. A sliver of Sarah’s skin would make a fine keepsake, like the locket filled with ferret fur Sarah keeps wrapped in lace in the back of her dresser and flaunts at her exhibition openings.
 
That night, Beth dreams of shame drooling on her painting like sludge. Her hands corkscrew and tighten around her brushes as indigo cracks open the studio door, crooks his bony finger at her, tangos towards her, draws her in. 
 
The next morning, Beth arises early, adjusts her father’s unfinished portrait on her table-top easel. She squeezes out the last dried bits of paint from crumpled tubes, grabs the turpentine. She takes a deep breath and applies herself to the task of thinning Berlin blue with a slight tinge of ultramarine to fill in his eyes, now like blue copper ore, now like the flax flower. Like hers. 

Mikki Aronoff
​
Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2024.

​Ode to a Barefaced Longfellow: a cento in his words
 
His presence haunts this room to-night
footprints on the sands of time.
The lamps are lit, 
the fires burn bright,
a golden room we find
there is no death
for the artist never dies
ever living in these walls of time.
Time is the Life of the Soul.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
Know how sublime a thing it is
A form of mingled mist and light.
So come to the Poet his songs.
Next to being a great poet, 
is the power of understanding one.

James Penha

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @JamesPenha.bsky.social

Writing on Love and Loss: an ekphrastic immersion

Take your writing to the next level with community, discussion, engagement with art, and a deep dive into themes of love and loss. This program is for those who have embraced the ekphrastic life and want to immerse themselves in their ekphrastic practice and an intimate experience with a community of like-minded people, writing on deeper themes. It will offer accountability, discussion, feedback, and connection. 

Each week, writers will respond to a selection of artworks on the theme of love and loss, directed by questions and creative exercises, in a 1.5 hour zoom.  We will gather to share our words, discuss the paintings and our process, and share our ideas and progress. Lorette will offer feedback on six finished drafts per writer, whether poetry or small fictions. Writers will also connect inside a private Facebook group for the duration of the program, where we can post drafts, comments, discussion, ideas, suggestions, artworks, questions, etc.

The goal of this circle is to connect with each other, create a safe space for vulnerable discussion on essential but difficult themes, learn more about visual art and use it to trigger meaningful conversation and inspiration, bounce ideas and work in progress off other writers, and to create a small body of finished work.

Participants’ best works will be gathered into a chapbook that The Ekphrastic Review will publish and share with the world. Each writer will get three author copies. The price will be kept low to be accessible to all readers, and offered free to the public as a pdf.

Limited to ten participants.

Cost $200USD/$275CAD
​
Dates: Thursday, August 7, 2025- 6 pm to 7:30 eastern time
Thursday, August 14, 2025- 6 pm to 7:30 eastern time
Thursday, August 21, 2025- 6 pm to 7:30 eastern time
Thursday, August 28, 2025- 6 pm to 7:30 eastern time
Thursday, September 4, 2025- 6 pm to 7:30 eastern time
Thursday, September 11, 2025- 6 pm to 7:30 eastern time

The Tortoise Trainer
 
The room is heavy with the scent of dusty scrolls and the faint musk of ancient parchment. In the center, a man sits cross-legged, watching over a group of tortoises, his eyes as steady as the creatures themselves. The tortoises move at their own pace, slow and deliberate, while he guides them with a tender, almost reverent hand. He isn’t a man of many words, and his discipline is one of patience, his mind fixed on something distant. The rumour has it he’s a descendant of a long line of scholars, men and women who have spent their lives studying the quiet wisdom of nature. His hand raises slightly as if to prove a point, a subtle gesture that directs their movements. Yet, there’s something else he trains—not just the tortoises, but the very act of stillness, the quiet rebellion of time that refuses to be hurried. The tortoises have taught him more about life than he ever expected: that to move slowly is not to be weak, but to endure. He wonders if the world will ever understand that lesson.

Girl with Pink Cap
 
She stands there, a child caught in the threshold of an age she doesn’t yet understand. Her pink cap, almost too large for her head, gives her a look of vulnerability, as though she has been placed in a world that doesn’t quite fit her. Her eyes, deep and thoughtful, don’t quite belong to her small frame. They are the eyes of someone who has seen too much already, someone who is already beginning to know the weight of silence. The room behind her is dark, as though it holds secrets she hasn’t yet uncovered. She seems distant, as though she’s caught in a reverie—looking at something or someone far beyond the canvas, her hand casually tucked by her side. There’s an innocence to her, but it’s fleeting. She has just enough awareness to realize that the world outside that room is not as gentle as the one she holds in her imagination.

​Gun Salesman
 
The man stands confidently behind the wooden counter, the polished barrels of firearms gleaming in the light, each one a silent promise of power. His eyes are sharp, calculating, and the weight of his gaze is enough to make anyone pause. There’s something unsettling in his calm—he’s too comfortable in this role, too familiar with the dangerous goods he sells. His face is unreadable, his posture stiff, as if he’s not just selling weapons but something much more valuable: control. He doesn’t need to convince anyone; the weapons speak for themselves, their metal surfaces reflecting a world of conflict. Yet, there’s a tension here, an unspoken question: is he the one who wields power, or is he simply the hand that supplies it? His face betrays nothing, but the air in the room hums with the knowledge that what is bought here may never be returned.

Lilac Collecting Girl
  
The girl bends low to the earth, her hands steady as she gathers the lilacs, the purple flowers so bright against the green of the meadow. She moves with grace, each petal she collects a small treasure in a world that seems to pause around her. The breeze shifts the hair on her head, but she doesn’t notice—it’s the flowers that occupy her mind, their sweet scent filling the air and wrapping around her like a secret. She is part of the landscape, as if she’s always belonged here. The flowers she collects will never last long, and yet, they don’t seem to need to. There’s something in the act of picking them that feels eternal. She’s a part of a fleeting moment, a whisper of summer, a reminder that life is as fragile as the blossoms she gathers—beautiful, temporary, and gone too soon.

A Lady of Constantinople
 
She stands like a queen among her surroundings, a figure of elegance, but there is more to her than just the finery. Her velvet gown, rich and dark, contrasts sharply with the delicate glow of her skin. Her gaze, soft yet unwavering, is turned slightly away, as though she’s watching the world without fully engaging in it. Her hands are placed carefully in her lap, holding nothing but the stillness of her presence. She is not just a lady of Constantinople; she is a monument to the city itself, both a part of it and set apart from it. There’s a hint of melancholy in her eyes, a sense that she carries the weight of history with her—something unspoken yet understood. Her beauty is not only in her appearance but in the quiet resilience she embodies, the grace of a woman who has lived through seasons of change and still stands, unmoving, watching the tides of the city ebb and flow.

Sarp Sozdinler 

A Turkish writer, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, and Fractured Lit, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam

Against the Wind
 
The painting is a tall window I can lean out of. On the hill of Montmartre, sunlight falls at an angle upon chestnut trees that huddle in domed conspiracies, breathing with the clouds. Everything bends against some wind, buoyant wooden ships tossed on waves, pliant and billowing as canvas sails. Housefronts the same elongated shapes as three odd windows, with diamond-shaped roofs shuddering like kites. Shadows lift everything into light, a watery blue above the clouds and sheltered in street alcoves, shadows in triangles, curving away. 
 
The most precious pigment glows where light falls brightest, whitening earthen browns into the scalded sand of beige roses. It must be in summer; the trees are so full. Late morning with the sun breaking through after hard rain, the air fresh and the day stretched out ahead. A lightness comes to his brush. Even the darkest shadows hold promise, pitched into the wind.
 

 Pitched at an Angle, the Table
​ 
1.
On rue Ravignan, the blue evening carves shadows into chestnut trees beyond the window. A wrought-iron grille frames a different canvas. Light survives in strips and shards, bright emerald and ruby, a glowing canopy of leaves. The window squares a world: a book, a glass, a bottle of Médoc, each fastened by an image of itself, headlines unending, a wineglass forever half-full, the war far off, the street empty.
 
No one has passed by in years. The street lies waiting, propped open like a book. Objects come to rest on the table, saved from gravity and the darkening street, now ultramarine. Pitched at an angle, the table grants permanence. It stands always in Gris’s studio—one of the few things he kept from Le Bateau-Lavoir.
 
2.
In June 1915, a window shutter folds into the room, unable to keep out the cobalt light. Evening comes, streetlamps unlit, cloaked in juniper and gray. In Paris, explosions survive by second and third hand; farther east, genocide in Armenia. Le Journal doesn’t mention this. The food, the coal, the light—all rationed.
 
Night collapses into the room. Iron fencing, at first transparent, turns now opaque. Wallpaper braces the walls, keeping the world at bay. Objects grow heavier under stubborn evening light, boots caught in mud.
 
3.
Gertrude Stein would remember the first time she entered the studio where Gris was to live out his martyrdom.
 
Max Jacob names it Le Bateau-Lavoir: filthy, wooden tenements moored uncertainly to the hill. Looking for Picasso, Kahnweiler sees Gris sketching in a window. The dealer always found Gris hard at work in the small studio to the left of the door to the street. What struck one about his face were his very large brown eyes, the whites of which were bluish. That strange blue in a cracked mirror above the washbowl, in the jagged planes of Gris’s face.
 
In a shop at the far corner of the square, a carpenter works, as though raising the backdrop for a painting. With the window open, Gris hears the rhythmic hammer-blows.
 

Jonathan Blunk

Author's note: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s quote in part 3 is from his Gris: Life and Work. Gertrude Stein is quoted from her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Jonathan Blunk’s authorized biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), earned praise from The New York Times Book Review, where it was an Editors’ Choice. The Georgia Review has published his essays and reviews, including forthcoming work. Blunk’s poems have appeared in FIELD and other journals, most recently in Nixes Mate Review.

A Seasoned Painter
  
He rises, fully clothed in the breaking saffron-dawn,
gathers his faithful boots - they’ve walked him 
 
many miles in Saint-Rémy - his paints, easel, and pipe. 
He must make haste to capture the sage-green cypresses 
 
standing to attention like soldiers against the swirling 
sky-blues before the heat sets in. His hands whirl 
 
as colour explodes onto his canvas: a sea of golden 
wheat, butter-thick, basil grasses. He will never see       
 
the winter of his life, paint the salt-crusted air. His beloved 
fields forever covered by snow, his sky peppered with crows.

Rosie Copeland
​
Rosie Copeland is a New Zealand writer and artist. She is currently writing a novel for YA. Rosie belongs to several writing groups. Mayhem, Reading Room, and Tarot have published her work, and she has also been a finalist in several poetry and fiction competitions in New Zealand. She has also had poetry published in the USA and several NZ anthologies.