Two Epigrams on Michelangelo’s Night, Translated (and Answered), by Julie Steiner

This Night you see asleep in soft obliques
of sculpted stone? An Angel was her maker.
And since she sleeps, she must have life. Just wake her,
if doubtful; you’ll believe it when she speaks.

Giovan Battista Strozzi, ca. 1544, translated by Julie Steiner

“Sleep’s dear to me -- to be of stone, yet dearer --
while what goes on is shameful and distressing.
Not seeing, not perceiving, is a blessing.
Don’t wake me, then! Speak low, and come no nearer.”

Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca. 1545-6, translated by Julie Steiner

Belly in folds, stone breasts skewed left and right,
I, too, have slept propped awkwardly, exhausted,
oblivious while chaos has accosted.
Your limbs speak new-mom semaphore, good Night.

Julie Steiner, 2026

**
​
La Notte che tu vedi in sì dolci atti
dormir fu da un Angelo scolpita
in questo sasso, e perchè dorme ha vita :
destala, se nol credi, e parleratti.

Giovan Battista di Lorenzo Strozzi

Caro m’ è ’l sonno, e più l’ esser di sasso
Mentre che ’l danno e la vergogna dura :
Non veder, non sentir, m’ è gran ventura ;
Però non mi destar, deh! parla basso.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

**

Translator’s Note: In Greek and Roman mythology, Night was the mother of several offspring, including in some versions the twins Death and Sleep. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) of Florence carved this figure of Night between 1526 and 1531, for the tomb for Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici (1479-1516) in the Sagrestia Nuova of the Church of San Lorenzo, Florence. The sculptor’s reply to the epigram by the Florentine noble and songwriter Giovan Battista Strozzi (1504-1571) implies criticism of the governance of the then-current duke of Florence, Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574).

Julie Steiner is the pseudonym of a recovering classicist in San Diego, California. Links to many of her published poems and verse translations are posted at Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus (offpisteonmountp.substack.com).

The Torch-Bearers

Cassatt bathes innocence, mise en scene.
She cushions mother- and child-hood to show
That life is love, intact from anywhen,
Like air in a room or water stopped mid-flow.

Kusama’s infinite mirrors, deep and sleuth,
Make angels flit beneath perception’s brow.
She reflects mystery to invoke the truth
And dissolves the borders of the here and now.

Frida Kahlo made her accident 
Her art. The rod that skewered her became 
A crucifix. Her tears do not repent.
Subdued brushstrokes beg me to say her name.

Walker’s silhouettes portray a screen
Where lynchings mix with Disney innocence.
One-time wallflowers step into the scene
To shred the portraits out of self-defence.

Light peach to faun grey; her colours combat rage.
A figure-eight that’s yellow uterus,
Deflated pufferfish, or open cage.
We’re trapped by af Klimt. Her joy is mutinous.

Sherald paints carnivals. They pump the hearts
She’s dressed in factories, a flag, flowers.
Landscapes overtake their body parts:
A wrist is a dune; bent knees, the Twin Towers.

Spinning desire with spider legs that bait
Viewers, turn nightmares to conventions,
Bourgeois’ moulded shadows amputate
Our expectations of the three dimensions.

O’Keeffe shows clouds reflecting on a lake,
Shaded hillsides, beaches, a green wood.
Why does the mirrored sky, semi-opaque,
Appal oglers who call it maidenhood 

When through her eyes there is no blasphemy?
She’d find cosmos inside a hyacinth’s
Stigma or murmur us to ecstasy
Within the folds of mountain labyrinths.

A whisper on the lips of a thousand sisters,
A secret scribbled in a thousand stalls,
It’s coded into thousands of tongue twisters,
A candle lit in dormitory halls.

A queen of media, she’s given us
A testimony of our dignity
That others have dismissed superfluous
But is the gateway to eternity. 
 
Traci O'Dea​, a personalized translation of "Les Phares" by Charlies Baudelaire
​
**

Les Phares

Rubens, fleuve d’oubli, jardin de la paresse,
Oreiller de chair fraîche où l’on ne peut aimer,
Mais où la vie afflue et s’agite sans cesse,
Comme l’air dans le ciel et la mer dans la mer;

Léonard de Vinci, miroir profond et sombre,
Où des anges charmants, avec un doux souris
Tout chargé de mystère, apparaissent à l’ombre
Des glaciers et des pins qui ferment leur pays;

Rembrandt, triste hôpital tout rempli de murmures,
Et d’un grand crucifix décoré seulement,
Où la prière en pleurs s’exhale des ordures,
Et d’un rayon d’hiver traversé brusquement;

Michel-Ange, lieu vague où l’on voit des Hercules
Se mêler à des Christs, et se lever tout droits
Des fantômes puissants qui dans les crépuscules
Déchirent leur suaire en étirant leurs doigts;

Colères de boxeur, impudences de faune,
Toi qui sus ramasser la beauté des goujats,
Grand coeur gonflé d’orgueil, homme débile et jaune,
Puget, mélancolique empereur des forçats;

Watteau, ce carnaval où bien des coeurs illustres,
Comme des papillons, errent en flamboyant,
Décors frais et légers éclairés par des lustres
Qui versent la folie à ce bal tournoyant;

Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues,
De foetus qu’on fait cuire au milieu des sabbats,
De vieilles au miroir et d’enfants toutes nues,
Pour tenter les démons ajustant bien leurs bas;

Delacroix, lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges,
Ombragé par un bois de sapins toujours vert,
Où, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares étranges
Passent, comme un soupir étouffé de Weber;

Ces malédictions, ces blasphèmes, ces plaintes,
Ces extases, ces cris, ces pleurs, ces Te Deum,
Sont un écho redit par mille labyrinthes;
C’est pour les coeurs mortels un divin opium!

C’est un cri répété par mille sentinelles,
Un ordre renvoyé par mille porte-voix;
C’est un phare allumé sur mille citadelles,
Un appel de chasseurs perdus dans les grands bois!

Car c’est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur témoignage
Que nous puissions donner de notre dignité
Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d’âge en âge
Et vient mourir au bord de votre éternité!

Charles Baudelaire

Author's Note: 
​
"A translation of Baudelaire's "Les Phares," in which he names the most influential visual artists on his life: Rubens, de Vinci, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Puget, Watteau, Goya, and Delacroix. I have replaced these with the most influential visual artists on my life and work: Cassatt, Kusama, Kahlo, Walker, de Klimt, Sherald, Bourgeois, and O'Keeffe. I use Baudelaire's metre and rhyme scheme as well as some of his own words that resonate with the work of the women painters."

Head of Humanities at H. Lavity Stoutt Community College in the British Virgin Islands, Traci O'Dea has published two collections of poetry: Waving (Assure Press 2021) and Restricted Movement (Scotland Street Press 2021). The audiobook for Restricted Movement was released in 2022. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Fiddlehead, A Room of One’s Own, and elsewhere. Her short story “American Bully” is forthcoming in Virgin Islands Noir. In her spare time, she teaches ekphrastic poetry workshops at art galleries, reads submissions for Smartish Pace, and eats exotic things that grow on trees which sometimes turn out to be poisonous.

​Double Portrait of Frank O'Hara, by Larry Rivers (USA) 1955

Unable to capture the whole man in one
you’ve doubled him.

He looks out, intently,
mouth open, about to speak.
Small, intense blue eyes, gaze steady
under wide open brows
that declare his honesty.
Frank, rightly named.

He looks to the left, down 
and away, not seeing us.
His eyes are coldly paler, brow furrowed
rising hairline cruelly visible
full lips together.
Fiercely inhabiting another place.

You give us stereoscope
the man in three dimensions.
He completely lives life 
and writes it.

Kathleen Palmer

Kathleen Palmer is a freelance art curator and poet in progress, based in Surrey, England. She has long seen exhibitions as story-telling in three dimensions. Partly inspired by working with poets in museums, she returned to an early love of writing. Her work has appeared in The Alchemy Spoon and Lamp Lit. She can be found on Instagram and Threads as @kathleenpalmer_101.

Planning the Breakout

We began as greenbones barely 
knowing to crawl: bumped against walls of the home cave
painted thick with ragemaster God, more hair
than a pack of wolves, and our own
perennially fruiting madonna whose sweet bell shape
was wrapped in lamb-smelling cardigans.

It was usually winter. The cold was a glittery grizzly,
with palisades of claws. We learned our place.
Northerners mate, ride and die on glaciers,
where the bride's dress is an icefall of lace
and the corpse's full beard snows over his earth suit.
Red twilight turned to black frost

and the red brand of the home
saved as it burned. The hive of the family
provided abundance of sweet.
Still, the year came when I (mama's pearl,
papa's youth of flint) thought
canaries die here
and plotted my own abduction.
Rock bricked me up,
front, bottom, top and sides. Cave fire gilded
the coma of time. Never mind. The young,
like murder, like art, will out
in the most surprising places. And stubborn blood
melts rock.

Margaret Benbow

Margaret Benbow's poems and stories have been published in The Ekphrastic Review, The Georgia Review, Triquarterly, The Antioch Review, and in other magazines and anthologies. Her first collection, Stalking Joy, won the Walt McDonald First Book award and was published by TTUP. she has recently finished a new collection, Wild Peter Thinks About His Humans.

Eleanor Crosses

Late November, 1290

They snipped me open and tugged out my heart, my lungs, my guts, seat of all my appetites. They get their own burial here in Lincoln, a tomb, and even chantries. Imagine holy men singing prayers to your stomach, or the snakes of your intestines, even your womb. You can’t, can you? That is because you are not a Queen.

My heart is to journey with us, in its own special pewter box. Part of the royal cortege back to London. I took a peek before they sealed the lid. The colour of damson tarts, but such a limp little thing. Curious to have been the place of so much passion.

So I am now simply me. Eleanor, undiluted. A brain atop a hollowed out corpse. It’s not unlike the sudden emptiness after the yank and pull of the midwife and the whoosh of blood and babe and placenta. After months of feeling confined in my own body, out of breath, elbowed from the inside, to suddenly be alone and myself again.

***

Now begins the long journey back to London. For much of the journey north I was unwell. Edward sent my fools home, while in my feverish state, plans for the funeral began to obsess me. Edward pleaded for me to rest but I pushed him away and demanded my daughters, for them to bring me more paper and ink. They would not plead with me. They feared me too much. My poor girls. Rudderless now. 

I have arranged good marriages for them. Good for them and advantageous for the kingdom. They will soon be too busy with households and babies to lament me. Yes, when it came to my children, I did my duty.

***

My body still breathes – my soul goes in at dawn, rests in its familiar flesh, and as the sun descends, I am released as an exhale. As the days go by, as the sun loses its power shows itself less and less, I am less myself. Less Eleanor, more just a breath of air. The light of a candle rippling over a pane of coloured glass.

I flit about, now with Edward, now with his coachman when Edward’s weeping becomes too oppressive. Lighten up, I want to tell him. It’s only death. It’s only a body. Imperfect, impermanent thing. But I am being unfair. He is still trapped in his and doesn’t have my perspective.

He’s not used to this, this constant change in the body. I have been so many shapes, contained so many lives. He has only been himself and now, growing older, fatter, full of inexplicable aches, he doesn’t know how to handle it. How to surrender and let the changes take him.

He denies the evidence of his body, despises the signs of age as weakness. Sickness and decay are aberrations. He will marry again soon, I have little doubt, if only to trick himself into feeling virile again. He’s always been good at beginnings. He’ll leave the messy endings to others, to the women who clean and dress the body. Even these crosses he’s started planning to have built in my memory, to mark each place the cortege rests on the way to London, he’ll leave the design and execution to others. Just watch.

***

I don’t see my little ones now. The ones that passed too early. Little Katherine, Joanna, John, Henry, Alphonso. And the ones too tiny even to have borne a name. I thought they would be waiting for me. Perhaps it is to do with the removal of my heart, but I don’t mind their absence. They would only have distracted me.

I flit and glimmer. Sometimes I am the road, the horse, the cold wind, the racing hare. I do not think Eleanor as I have known her will make it to Westminster.

***

Poor Edward. His senses keep seeking me out, the sound of my voice, the weight of my hand on his arm. Even the taste of me. He would never confess it, but he craves the way I tasted before age, children, cracked teeth and the constant smell of cloves. He wants my sweetness. He wants me at thirteen. The year we were married.

The girls, forlorn in the other carriage, want my authority.

***

I spend the night out upon the ground. No, I am the ground. I am the earth. I slip down into it, the busy soil, teeming with tiny creatures constantly munching and moving and multiplying, life life life. The earth, I discover, is always eating itself. Fecundity and decay in equal measure.

How can I return to my body after this? I can’t lie in my fleshy shell, where my stinking decay had been barely slowed by bunches of smelly herbs. In the morning I follow the cortege on the wind. I blow the horses’ tails into fans and tickle my husband’s ears. 

He pretends he hears my voice. He replays my tired phrases, our old jokes, the Spanish expressions that used to grate on him so when I was alive.

***

He doubts the men in the monastery, the supposedly holy men, who are charged with praying my soul into heaven. He is right to doubt them. My soul is here, with him. It’s not going anywhere.

But those men, they were too sleek, too well-fed and earthly in their pleasures for true piousness. The common people, though. They are, for the most part, slight enough. Half-starved, some years, though Edward does not care to have the connection between their state and his endless costly wars pointed out. He sees their simplicity as akin to purity, their earnestness in trying to please him makes him see their prayers as stronger, worth more in the eyes of God. That is how the idea for the crosses is born. Stone memorials for every stop from Lincoln to London. A natural route for pilgrimage. Barely twenty miles a day. Enough to make its pilgrims work for it, not enough to burden them.

In Grantham, Edward dreams of the crosses. Slender and straight, as he pretends my fingers had been. Already I am transitioning into sainthood. The crosses will point to heaven as reminders that he has been focused on all the wrong things. Reminders of his soul, as well as mine, and their need for salvation.

It is all absurd.

***

My soul is drifting through the fog. I am diffused with every drop of water suspended in the air like stars. They move through me and I through them, spreading myself thin, bunching myself up like a bundle of laundry. I pull silly faces at him through the fog. He pulls back from the window, petrified.

***

When the carriage breaks an axle in the thick mud, Edward seizes on the opportunity for penance. He trudges through the rain, refusing all comforts, even a horse to cover the miles more quickly. Oh my love, don’t you remember the night in Caernarfon, after putting down the troublesome Welsh, we danced so raucously the floor gave way? 

Somewhere between Stamford and Geddington, the chest containing the royal bedding and furs developed a crack and rain seeped in. The King must sleep under a stranger’s blankets for a night. He refuses to suffer the same indignity a second night and so is tormented by the smell of damp wool and musty sheets every night thereafter. He would have complained to me, if I had been there, and I would have calmed him, pointed out the ridiculousness of sleeping under damp blankets, and he would have grumbled and made do with the substitutes. Instead, he rages at the girls, at his steward, and no one can assuage him. He can no longer find my smell in his bed.

***

While the cortege rests at another small town, winter cold steals over the land. The mud hardens, the grasses glitter with frost and the small pools of water that gathered into the tracks will crack like glass underfoot. Before the sun rises much higher, I slip into the pulse of a lone red fox, trotting along the bottom of the hedgerow, a mouse dangling from its jaws.

When I turn into the wind to catch up with Edward, the procession passes through the ancient walls of St. Albans to be greeted by the bishop. It’s a shock to realize it is already Advent. The church has been caught out in its preparations for Christmas by the royal arrival. There are too many people. Too much noise and rancid breath, too much limp mistletoe and dying holly draped over doorways and along windowsills.

I slip out, past the servants, the guards, the clergymen, out beyond the confines of the town to where purple evening shadows gather. The wind brings me to the warm rush of blood, the steady heart-thrum, the puffs of warm breath in the cold air, of a stag.

***

Oh this stag is alive. And I am alive again within it. And he - I - we are hungry. The winter world, the world that darkens a little more every day, is growing thin. Food is getting scarce.

His - my - our antlers are heavy. Strips of velvet like pennants dance weakly in the breeze. He will shed this rack when the winter is over, when the days are long, and there is no more need to grow a protective forest out of his head.

There are men nearby, talking, not deviating from the path through the woods. He - I - we are invisible. We are the colour of the barren trees, the leaf-littered earth. We melt in and out of view at will.

We scent a female nearby, a docile thing, one who has borne us on her back before. We could roar, let her know we are here and ready. We pace, puff out frosty air, lift our nose to smell her scent again. Perhaps it’s my presence that holds us back. The stag knows he’s not alone. Or perhaps tonight just isn’t the night. We keep silent and watch the creeping gloom gather in the forest instead. The grasses we fed on earlier revisit our mouths for another ruminating chew. It is all life in here, all strength - the blood, the vigorous heart, the lust that holds us almost in its sway -

***

My face may last as long as my tomb endures, as long as the crosses Edward dreams of point the way to heaven. But I am faceless. Formless. I have become forest and marsh. I am the tilled field and the wind that strokes its back. I am every scurrying creature and its hunter.

I am nothing at all.

***

I hope Edward will keep my fools. They could make him laugh again.

Jennifer Falkner

Jennifer Falkner (she/her) is a short story writer living in Ottawa, Canada, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe First Nation. She is the author of Susanna Hall: Her Book (Ottawa Book Award finalist) and the short story collection Above Discovery.  www.jenniferfalkner.ca

True Colours
 
Royal rolled over and still couldn’t find sleep. It was too crowded here, on the inside. 

He’d been warned, so why hadn’t he listened?

Johnny Chartreuse had talked to him like a Dutch uncle. Johnny had more insight than most, understood the warmy mindset. “You seen their circus colours? Buncha clowns.” Johnny spat. “But warmies stick together, kid. A warmy wants to meet with a cool, he don’t have no truce in mind. You stay home with Periwinkle.”

Yet, Royal had kissed Periwinkle goodbye, gone to the park anyway. Because Pinkie had invited him, Pinkie from the old neighbourhood, before relations between their families frayed. Maybe he and Pinkie could bring everybody together. Mend things once and for all. 

It had been a gorgeous day. Clouds like ribbons in an azure sky. And sure, he’d been surprised to see Pinkie wasn’t alone, brought his warmy buddies. Even Rusty was there. Royal thought, I didn’t think anybody liked that guy. Rusty’s unspooled. But everybody’d been friendly enough. The pyramid had been fun, with Pinkie and the others stacked on Royal’s steady shoulders. Until somebody above shifted and Rusty tumbled into the pond. 

By the time Officer Brick arrived, Rusty had sunk. And then the warmies fingered Royal, said he’d jostled everybody. The whole thing had been one big, lousy setup. That rat, Pinkie. 

So they’d framed him up neat, and now here he was inside Sew-Sew, crammed in the basket next to Big Yarn. That guy will talk your ear off. 

But one day Royal would get out. And when he did, he was going to pay Pinkie a little visit, maybe bring Sammy Needles with him. Then they’d see who was cool. 

Tracy Royce

Tracy Royce’s works have appeared in The Mackinaw, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and ONE ART. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and a Pushcart Prize, and was selected for Best Microfiction (2026). She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking and watching Richard Widmark films. Find her on Bluesky.

Tea and Persian History
Wading Through Time
 
Last week I time-traveled
But my memory faded almost instantly
I remember drinking tea and
Having my fortune read by tasseomancy
It was the 1860s
One hundred years before
I would break out of
Shyness and autism
Becoming a radical hippie
Forgive the digression, dear reader
Maybe I should start
With my love of Persian art
When a friend sent me a painting
By Isma’il Jalayir
Women Around a Samovar
(Popular name according to
The Victoria and Albert Museum)
I do love samovars
And Gran taught me how to read
Tea Leaves
So I gazed at the amazing women
In their long dresses
But on the left is one
Wearing a short skirt
And I think
How can this be?
Who is she?
Reminiscent of me
Dark, curly hair
Not pretty but a certain ancient beauty
And I wonder if she is an ancestor
Triggering genetic memory
Then I notice
All the women are dressed oddly
An alternate title of the painting is
Women Dancing Around A Samovar
And one writer feels they are a harem
Perhaps being entertained by a ballet troop
I look for a tasseomancer
Reading their leaves
I move among them,
Invisible,
In my time machine
Here is one with a pipe
And the aroma of cherry wood
Drifts among the bamboo bouquet
Of Lapsang Souchong
One of my favourites
I look at the women
Who strangely seem wooden
And find myself trying
To become visible to the one
In the blue skirt
Perhaps she was descended from family
When India exiled the Roma
In the 11th Century
Is she a great, great, great aunt of mine?
The Romani diaspora
Carried families to all parts of Asia and Europe
Perhaps she was from a family
Of tea leaf readers
Or
Part of the harem
Once captured by the Ottomans
While they warred with Vlad the Impaler
In the wilds of Roumania and Hungary
Birthplace of my father
I get as close as possible
Sniffing her cup of tea
As she drinks rapidly
Wanting to hear her future
Or impart one to others
But then the darkness swirls
And the 21st Century
Drags me back
And I am left with the painting
On my computer screen
So I brew a cup of
Bamboo-laden
Russian Caravan Tea
To see
Where the Time machine
Will next carry me…

​Clarissa Simmens
​
Clarissa Simmens holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and various practitioner certificates in Herbal Studies (first learned from her Grandmother), Traditional Chinese Medicine, and G-Jo Acupressure.  She makes her home on the edge of a small swamp in Florida as a drabarni (cartomancer and herbalist.

Between

Snow is not a surface.
It holds
what is already leaving.

The hunters enter
the field pulls them in.

Their backs, hills
taking on flesh.

The dogs, wind
lowered to ground.

The lake begins to sound
at the blade’s edge.

A sound slides
and is gone
into white.

The day slips its face.

Smoke tightens
on a spindle of air.

No one speaks.
No seam, only spin.

Natalia Gerasimova

Natalia Gerasimova is a Russian-born writer living in India. Her work explores perception, silence, and the limits of representation, often engaging with visual art and ekphrasis.