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Ekphrastic Writing Responses: Giorgio Morandi

7/31/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
Still Life, by Giorgio Morandi (Italy) 1956


Arranged Order
 
The table
Wears it all -
Contour, space, 
Dust, shape -
Like an amulet
 
John Stickney

John Stickney is a poet and writer, newly relocated to Wilmington, NC from Cleveland, Oh.

**

life still rises

it’s
still life
alone

even if we don’t celebrate
or meet together anymore 
it’s still all right to share a drink
or talk with grandma at the home
suspended in a box
people softly chatting smiling
and strangers mingling virtually
our friends connecting through the phones
we press our face into the screens
zooming conversations

they wear the shock
they wear a mask
or not

still 
quiet
lonely

let’s celebrate what joy we can
before our time dissolves on earth
before our souls arrive with God 
let’s drink to fragrant memories
and vibrant hopeful days
don’t conjure thoughts of coffined graves
or moldy asiago cheese.
instead let’s shine the light of God
let’s storm in spite of Covid-fears
the gates of courage not defeat

in pixelated homes
and solitary prose
because

life
still
rises

Patricia Tiffany Morris

Patricia Tiffany Morris gravitates toward inspirational messages of hope and encourages others to find their inner artist. An eclectic Christian creative with a geeky-tech affinity and a poet with three names, Patricia writes fiction, picture books, and prose, using both sides of her brain. She discovered her love for digital artwork and now creates acrylic and alcohol-ink painting illustrations on her iPad. Patricia Tiffany adores hashtags and Pinterest but finds Twitter quirky. A member of Word Weavers International, ACFW, WFWA, SCBWI, OCW[TI1] , and loads of FB groups, Patricia runs Tiffany Inks Studio.

**
​
Bacchanal
 
Cheese:
           Havarti
           Kashkaval
           Port-Salut
           round of Brie
 
Drink:
           Beaujolais
           Chardonnay
           Zinfandel
           jug of beer
 
Feast:
           gormandize
           lift a glass
           laughs, bellows
           raucous dances
 
Judy Oliver
 
Judy Oliver: "After retiring from teaching elementary and middle school, I joined a poetry group that was offered by LifeVentures Adventures in Learning; Roy Beckemeyer was the leader. Those weekly writing and critique sessions encouraged me to try different poetic forms." 

**

Still Life

One stopper, three bottles.
Holding a six year Barbera
Or the blood of Christ?
 
You tell me, it depends 
If it’s the Sabbath
Or a day for sinners.
 
Seeing as how I can’t remember 
Which day turned over the 
Horizon, nor where I placed 
 
The two missing stoppers;
I assume it is a weekday
And I am late for work.

Mike Mortensen

Mike Mortensen is a mental health therapist who specializes in trauma and addiction. Grand Prize Winner of the 1st annual Provo-Poetry competition, his work can be found in various journals such as Ink & Nebula, Gasher Journal, and 15 Bytes. His work has also been displayed in a multiple discipline art gallery at the University of Arizona, Tucson for poetry and printmaking. He lives in Southern Utah with his dogs and family.

**

An Empty Life
 
There you are standing still waiting for guidance.
Unsure.
Unable to move-only to be seen.
The vessel of faith and hope so close.
Complete your destiny.
With the blessings of the world.
You may endure pain and judgment.
A star or a crucifix. 
All things are open.
All options possible.
We must choose.
We must choose well.
To caress with kindness this still and empty vessel. 
 
Sandy Rochelle

Sandy Rochelle is an award winning Internationally published poet. Her film, Silent Journey, streaming on Culture Unplugged is dedicated to films of social and spiritual significance @ http://www.cultureunplugged.com/storyteller/Sandy_Rochelle

**

Looking Hard at What You See

I am going to simplify my life,
wear muted clothes, brown skirts
and white shirts, sensible shoes
a gray hat.

Who wouldn’t want to be that
humble in harmony with those
leaning in to touch another 
quietly

and experience how supple
an edge can be. How shadow 
suggests the rounding out
of surface. 

To be both squared and solid
containing the salt of the earth.
and a vessel to keep oil ready
to pour.

I don’t need to stand out
in red heels or consider if purple 
earrings go with a pink
pencil skirt,

always the painted lady
running errands in bright sun.
I had my heyday, now
I must blend in

rest, welcome a diffused 
light, the illusion of space
with no need to move through it.
To be still,

allow dust to accumulate on lips.
permit myself to float free
of the shelf, the table and become
a pure geometry.

Diana Cole

Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has had poems published in numerous journals including Poetry East, Spillway, the Tar River Review, the Cider Press Review, Friends Journal, Verse Daily, The Ekphrastic Review and the Main Street Rag. Her chapbook, Songs By Heart was published in 2018 by Iris Press. She is an editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal and a member of Ocean State Poets whose mission is to encourage the reading, writing and sharing of poetry. When she is not writing, Ms. Cole is a stained glass artist.

**

​Three Blocks and a Round
 
White of pitcher handle and a bottle beside balanced 
by rind of a round of cheese below
 
How do you achieve aesthetics in a row of four?      
By making it about the two
 
Rows  
 
By concentrating on the couple
the tension between the two 
 
Enough to spark the night with neon
over the colour of the beach where they always laid
 
Created three children 
possibility of a fourth just there off to the side
 
Waiting
 
Kyle Laws
 
Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

**


Plainsong

I do not want to eat the artist's cheese.
I do not want to drink the artist's wine. 

I would consider accepting a glass 
of clear water from the copper pitcher

in the plain still life of the plain 
still room with its plain still table 

if I were allowed to return the pitcher to its 
perfect spot and if I were allowed to return 

to my place and watch quietly and learn 
how it is one moment eternally rests.

Shirley Glubka

Shirley Glubka, whose work has appeared often at The Ekphrastic Review in the past, is a retired psychotherapist, poet, essayist, and novelist. Her most recent chapbook is Reflections Caught Leaping: poetry and related prose. Her latest novel: The Bright Logic of Wilma Schuh. Shirley lives in Prospect, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes. Website: http://shirleyglubka.weebly.com

**

Still Life, Real City
 
Emptied of pride, 
Prosecco, and flowers,
pitchers, vases
tower over squat rectangles
leading to the round
piazza of perfection
hugging the horizon line
of still life, where table 
meets the wall.
In my mind, I have
trekked this path,
past the high and low
to that place of rotund
solace where lovers, 
freed from rigid lines
mingle, laugh, 
watch fountain, by day
grab a quick espresso, or
in pomeriggio, with appertivi
indulge in a Prosecco,
gifting flowers to fidanzati.
 
Joan Leotta

Joan Leotta tells stories on page and stage. Her fascination with art began at an early age and she loves to write and tell about paintings, sculptures and more, Her ekphrastic poems and tales have been presented on these pages, on Visual Verse, at the Ashmoleon Gallery in Oxford England and the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC and others. She, like Morandi spent a lot of time walking among towers, pitchers, rectangles and circular piazzas--Bologna's main piazza is not circular, but that of Sienna is a well-known circle.

**

Still Life

The sky is beige and free of blandishments. 
Soon, I am off to the Muses --
his bottles and jug on a stage
arranged like tailors’ dummies. On a plaza 
in Ferrara — or maybe just a table --
I am seeing cheese and a tub of margarine.

Since lockdown, mystery exudes in rooms 
with no loving presence. Bare minimalism. 
I’ve tried hard, though I can’t stay here 
forever, off again to thoughts of futurism 
or long afternoons in front of a mirror:

pushing my lips against the true stillness, 
tilting the glass, seeing the floor slide away, 
praying for an escape to another dimension.

Patrick Wright

Patrick Wright has a poetry collection, Full Sight Of Her, forthcoming by Eyewear (2020). He has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and his poems have appeared in several magazines, most recently Agenda, The High Window, and Wasafiri. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, on the ekphrasis of abstract and monochromatic art, supervised by Jane Yeh and Siobhan Campbell. He teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University.

**

​be still 
 
be calm

escape
chit chat, politics,
long-distance travel, 
parties, anything modern,
glamour, wealth,
notoriety,
lust
 
think
simplicity, shape,
space, light, colour,
humble gradients of grey, 
shadows on white,
village ochres, 
browns
 
focus
on bottles, boxes
a dull jug, this room,
the pattern, order, the shift,
back and forth, up, left,
swivelling angles 
slightly
 
create
harmony in line, in rows,
in shade, tone, brushwork,
right now, with hands, eyes
and brain together, 
make art, be 
calm
 
be still
 
Dorothy Burrows
​
Based in the United Kingdom, Dorothy Burrows enjoys writing flash fiction, short plays and poetry. This year her poems have been published on various ezines including Words for the Wild, Another North and Nine Muses Poetry. 

**

The Poverty of the Affluent
 
They will never know
the sponsors and investors
the buyers and admirers
that the purest lines contain the widest worlds
emotions fathoms deeper than their sparkling pools.
 
They will never feel the cool
of limewashed walls
in afternoon heat
the smell of new bread and ewe’s milk cheese
basil in pots on a sunny window sill
 
hear the peaceful drone of cicadas
above the poolside chatter
and the air conditioning.
They will never know what it is
to feel the pulse of the day in clay
 
the clean sharp folds of white linen
and the way the light falls
slantwise
beneath the half-closed shutter
across a floor pattered by a child’s bare feet.
 
Jane Dougherty

Jane Dougherty lives and works in southwest France. Her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, Hedgerow Journal, Visual Verse, ink sweat and tears, Eye to the Telescope, Nightingale & Sparrow, the Drabble, Lucent Dreaming and the Ekphrastic Review. She has a well-stocked blog at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/

**

The Pecorino in Still Life, 1956 responds to Giorgio Morandi’s Nudge

I’m khaki-topped again, almost camouflaged,
without even a hint of shine 
and now you shunt me off to the side 
behind this row of uneven 
boxes? For all to see? Forever? Really?

You know you could arrange me on a fancy porcelain platter
and slice me open to release a heady aroma?
Why not take a bite or two to show how irresistible I am?
But who’s going to discern that? 
It’s always just the same old muted palette – 
beige, grey, pale, powdery.

If only you’d wrap me in parchment or crimson batik, 
drape cheese cloth round my curves begging to be torn off 
and place me downstage-centre, spot-lit.  
No? Even after all these hours of tweaking?

So here I sit, the epitome of Everyday Cheese Wheel
skulking among these familiar utensils
that no-one is ever going to oooh and aaah over.
Have you even forgotten that I’m edible?

The bottles never gurgle with Chianti or Lambrusco 
and I’ve just heard the white vase sigh.
It’s desperate for a peony or sunflower.
I dread to imagine what the boxes will have to say
when they emerge from their tight-lipped sulk.  

Don’t you reckon it’s the hod though, 
that could be redeemed? I do.
Snuggled close to the white vase,
its handle, like a cat’s tail curling 
round in ownership, makes it beam. 

And possibly those two black bottles 
angled together? With hats and coats on 
like an ageing couple, they’re heading out 
for a stroll round the block, leaving me 
on the shelf turning blue. 

May mould flourish in your walls with reckless 
abandon and may the stench of ammoniated cheese 
permeate your monastic quarantine forever.

Helen Freeman

Helen has been published on several sites such as Ink, Sweat and Tears, Red River Review, Barren Magazine, The Drabble, Sukoon and the Ekphrastic Review.  Her instagram page is @chemchemi.hf.  She lives in Durham, England.

**

Private Arts

Monaco springs with vibrant pulse,
spin low tax, grand-prix, roulette wheels,
sum wealth, full fashions for display.
Il Monaco, the monk, as known,
Bologna cell for eremite;
here brush the tranquil of still life,
years spanned as Studiorum stands.
Bottles and boxes, vases, jugs,
as dun baked village on the hill,
San Gimignano and the sky.
The monumental brought to ledge,
all labels gone, letters erased,
glare glass reflections glazed with matt.
Provincial tag, intended slur,
but early buds showed renaissance, 
light slowly passing into night,
serial time encapsulate.
So paint the seen and not the scene -
that is the space that needs the art -
as most find time for neither part.
Some private prayer externalised.

Stephen Kingsnorth

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had over 150 pieces published by on-line poetry sites, including The Ekphrastic Review, printed journals and anthologies.  https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/

**

Luna Moth
 
Spare still life
 
shades of taupe grey
oil on canvas
 
body no longer that soft white colour
I wanted to give it a clear
 
night with a full moon
take it up a mountain close by
 
allow the same light 
 
to fall on its grave
pale bleached grass
 
distances increase
 
I place the moth in my hand
and tell it how sorry I am
 
her life is ending
shredded sea green wings 
 
frayed. Worked, muted
 
take it up there to be released.
 
The day after my sister died
in the time of blue plum.

Ilona Martonfi

Ilona Martonfi is an editor, poet, curator, advocate and activist. Author of four poetry books, the most recent collection is Salt Bride (Inanna, 2019). Forthcoming, The Tempest (Inanna, 2021). Writes in journals, anthologies, and six chapbooks. Her poem “Dachau on a Rainy Day” was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. Founder and Curator of Visual Arts Centre Reading Series and Argo Bookshop Reading Series. QWF 2010 Community Award.

**

Il Monaco (The Monk)
        
Afternoon light sifts through the bedroom
window facing the street Via Fondazza. 
It falls on bottles of wine & blocks of cheese
on the table. There’s nothing special about
them, just every-day non-descript things
from the kitchen. But in Bologna, the wine
and cheeses are exquisite. They will go with
the meal that his sisters (Anna, Dina and
Maria Teresa) are preparing: roast lamb and
un piatto di tagliatelle ready for the robust ragu,
a Bolognese sauce for the delicate egg-pasta.
The Parmigiano Reggiano, ready to be grated,
and an uncorked bottle of ruby red Barbera
is breathing in the rich air. Today he’s not a
                         recluse.
At the dinner table, Giorgio and his sisters
discuss art, Natura Morta (Still Life), and the
use of muted whites, grays, and tinges of colour
for jars, bottles and pitchers sitting silent and
humble, not boasting to be admired, somber
with a dull matte appearance—utterly without
pretension—arranged in deceptive simplicity,
yet, it took weeks of obsessive shuffling
to achieve the right composition. They talk
about Mussolini. It was a good thing for Italy
his execution eleven years earlier this month.
They raise their glasses, nod with approval.
A perfect balance is essential to enjoy life
more fully in art, in food, and even politics.

John C. Mannone

John C. Mannone has poems appearing in North Dakota Quarterly, Le Menteur, Blue Fifth Review, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, 2020 Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, and others. His poetry won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest (2020). He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His latest collection, Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry, is forthcoming from Linnet’s Wings Press (2020). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A retired physics professor, he lives near Knoxville, Tennessee.

**

The Blocks and the Jug and the Bottles Dance

It had taken days to choose them.
The subtlety of their form.
Their tones, the textures.
How they would reflect the morning sun.

It had taken hours to arrange them.
The composition of the group.
In front, behind, alongside.
How they would complement each other.

It had taken minutes to draw them.
The finessing of the lines.
Horizon with perspective.
How their shapes etiolated my cartoon.

It took me aeons to paint them.
The colours, hues, shadows, the dark.
Took me forever to sell it.
Many flies have feathers out there.

Yet it took death for recognition.
Lung cancer won its battle. The blocks
and the jug and the bottles dance
beyond Bologna, beyond my tomb.

Alun Robert

Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical verse. Of late, he has achieved success in poetry competitions and featured in international literary magazines, anthologies and on the web. He particularly enjoys ekphrastic challenges. In 2019, he was a Featured Writer of the Federation of Writers Scotland.

**

Still Life

We are lined up for our shapes
and colours. We weren’t asked, but told,
forced to stand here like women
punished for obeying what we are, for complicity
in madness, not capable of speech, though we say much.
We’re given chalk to eat. And dust. And one hour that goes on forever.
Stand there, he says, the man, who only
yesterday fed his argument with life
a few tubes of oil. Stand there and dance lonely
until the light changes.
We are tired of dancing and thirsty for yellow 
or even a touch of blue. 
Instead we're given stormlight, a dress
made of shadows, old blocks of stone. 
We pray the light changes quickly.
We pray it will be over soon.

Lenny DellaRocca

Lenny DellaRocca is founder and co-publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal. He has four collections of poetry. His has a poem forthcoming in Mom Egg Review. Other poems have appeared in various literary magazines since 1980. He lives in Delray beach, FL where he wears a mask.

**


Gardens

I pour two glasses of wine and 
wish I had made the time to stomp 
grapes with you. 

I nibble at herbs in olive oil and
remember when you begged me
to start a garden. 

The apartment was too small, I had said. 

Fresh rosemary now sprouts from 
the kitchen’s windowsill. I use it when 
following your recipes––you were a 
better chef than I will ever be.

Niko Malouf

Niko Malouf: "As a teenager living in Los Angeles, I enjoy writing about the things that surround me, stimulate me, the events of my adolescence as well as the happenings of the world. I hope to share my experiences and perspective with others and inspire them to do the same."

​**
     Sky Over Bologna

                                      "...if we could see all wavelengths simultaneously
                                          there would be so much light that we couldn't
                                          see anything.  Or rather we would see every-
                                          thing and nothing simultaneously.  The excess
                                          of light would leave everything in a senseless
                                          glow."

                                                       the poet contemplating light and physics

                                           "What interests me most is expressing what's in
                                             nature, in the visible world, that is."

                                                                                                Giorgio Morandi

         i.  Landscape

          In the brash collision of clouds
          over the Porta Ravegnana,
          the summer sky
                                       was ignited by sheet lightning...

          To Maria Theresa, Anna and Dina
           Morandi, sitting under awnings
           in the arcade
                                    as they waited for the rain to come,

           the sky's sharp contrast was unlike their brother,
           Giorgio, a quiet man, and shy, his art created
           with unexpressed emotion,
                                                            his paint pigment

            filled with so much light his Natura morta
            is more subtle than the storm, painted in colours
            of unbleached linen and silk,
                                                               a memory of textiles

            rationed when art was a component
            of fascist society, a strange lifeless bubble
            without tones of grey to white,
                                                                   waves cresting

             when storm threatened the Adriatic
             in the girls' memory of a trip made to the beaches
             before winter came.
                                                  Giorgio did not like travel,

              and escaped the heat in mountains south of Bologna
              until he returned to his studio on the Via Fondazza
              to work alone --  Il Monaco -- The Monk --
                                                                                             his metaphysical

              identity as he created empty city squares --
              Scuola Metafisica -- with their sense of stillness,
               the nostalgia of the infinite
                                                                hidden in light and shadow,

                mysterious, melancholy and poignant, perhaps,
                as the death of his younger brother, "architecturally"
                like the smaller medieval tower,
                                                                         Garisenda, adjacent

                to the Porta Ravegnana, and leaning closer, in time,
                to the taller tower, Asinelli, although both Towers were still
                and silent beyond the arcade,
                                                                     the only visible movement

                in the sky, the churning clouds out of reach
                and imagined in Giorgio Marandi's art, ghosts
                permeating his landscapes,
                                                                 dream-like and eerie.

                ii.  Still Life

                The main purpose of a telescope is to gather light, 
                 so the deliberate use of pale colours by Morandi
                 creates inward-looking paintings
                                                                            sensitive to the objects

                 portrayed, the artist's eye an objective lens
                 focused on an interior image, as when a bucket
                 of afternoon sun
                                               is emptied on a high, arched window

                  in Morandi's studio, and its profusion is steadied
                  by a pitcher, a bowl, three jars and three bricks
                  on an olive-grey shelf
                                                         braced by a wall, its paint colour

                   a pigment called pale dove's wing.  The pitcher
                   & the bowl are a signal of spiritual innocence,
                   the three bricks
                                                (one ecru, two skin-tone buff)

                   are made with colours of the Italian earth,
                   sun-dried symbols to build a visible definition
                   of house walls -- the outside --
                                                                             coming inside

                    where the pitcher, if filled with holy water,
                    could be poured in the bowl to baptize new life
                    with the colours of day and night,
                                                                              one jar in white,

                    and two in black, jars where colour and movement
                    are hidden in a potential created by the vessels
                    contained in the painting,
                                                                 the possiblity of jarring

                    in Morandi's Natura morta, the vases and bottles
                    created with an invisible essence, objects arranged
                    in a unifying atmospheric haze,
                                                                            light coming to life

                    on a winter night when the moon is metaphysical
                    and full, a ripe canvas in the sky over Bologna
                    where nature hides colour,
                                                                    like a hat, wearing a lunar halo.

                     Laurie Newendorp
                 
                     Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston.  Her book, When Dreams
                     Were Poems, 2020, has ekphrastic poems, one a still life with a bowl-shaped
                     soup tureen painted by an artist who served moon soup as a child, reading
                     fairy tales where pumpkins become coaches for Cinderella, and the household
                     cook makes pumpkin soup in the French countryside.  Listed with ten Ekphrastic
                     Fantasics, she finds art an inspiration where still life is animated by its artist.
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the glass ball turrets sit in lines in the factory, by Alli Hartley-Kong

7/31/2020

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Picture
This girl in a glass house is putting finishing touches on the bombardier nose section of a B-17F navy bomber, Long Beach, Calif. She's one of many capable women workers in the Douglas Aircraft Company plant. Better known as the "Flying Fortress," the B-17F is a later model of the B-17 which distinguished itself in action in the South Pacific, over Germany and elsewhere. It is a long range, high altitude heavy bomber, with a crew of seven to nine men, and with armament sufficient to defend itself on daylight missions. Photo provide to US govt by S. Washburn, her grandson. photo: 1942. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.


the glass ball turrets sit in lines in the factory
 
and the woman in the red uniform with the soft makeup
welds pieces of metal to the glittering glass orbs and wishes
to burst out of her body fly to the ceiling watch the turrets
sitting calmly waiting like eggs for market in rows and rows and rows
 
her head emerges from the globe of glass the B-17
she is casting, she is doing her part in manicured nails and
diamond ring, doing her part for her kids and for her country
and the man who will cocoon in the naked belly of the B-17
because she doesn’t want him to be alone because who does really
 
not even the navy men on the dock they don’t want to be alone
especially not the navy men who are waiting on the dock
for one last fuck before they line up in rows to die and die and die
 
she is going to the dock after the nightshift, after the nightshift
she is going to the daycare, to the nightcare and after the nightcare
she is going to the dock the boys there are warm and alive
and they don’t insist that because there wasn’t a body to bury
the telegram was sent by mistake, they don’t ask when daddy’s coming home
 
she is rosie in red uniform rivets and all fingers nimbled on the flying fortress
the B-17 and sometimes when her flaps of skin catch in the rivet gun
they bleed and she likes it, she likes to have evidence of being alive
 
that’s why the woman presses her thumbprint to the glass on each B-17
and imprints herself on the desperate men on the dock so eager
wet and panting to show her they are alive too at least alive for now
and she peeks her head beyond the glass of the B-17 flying fortress
because she needs to emerge she can emerge not like her husband he’s not coming back
 
she knows that someone will die when the turret shatters
over germany and her fingerprint will unthread and shatter to pieces too
 
someone will die little pieces in germany
or maybe japan where scraps of men float to the surface
god there are so many places to die
 
shards of glass trickle from the sky
pieces of soldier are falling from the sky

Alli Hartley-Kong

Alli Hartley-Kong is a historian, museum educator, poet and playwright from northern New Jersey. Her poems have appeared in Stylus and
The Human Touch Journal.
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Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, by A. Robert Lee

7/28/2020

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Picture
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940

Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

I think it’s the audacity, the insouciant composure.  
Christ’s martyrdom appropriated.
Mexico, and life-beyond, she had her own calvaries.
Polio. Traffic wounds. Pierced womb. Amputation.

But no Santa Teresa. Flesh and politics pressed close.
Rivera always, but Trotsky and La Baker. 
Her own visited self of a half-hundred portraits.
Staring. Defiant. The certainty bred of pain.

You can do the symbolism.
The hummingbird spent of luck and good fortune.
The Poe black cat with warning stare.
The spider monkey all fidget and chance.

Her body mocks supplication, even the white robe. 
The neck vaunts its necklace crown of thorns, a splatter of blood.
The bunched hair wears butterfly clips, the dragonfly hovers.
The moustache refuses depilation, maquillage.

The eyes repudiate your might-be sympathy.
The eyebrows double-arch in black, a bold frown of challenge.
What to make of those jungle leaves, green, yellow?
Exotica, the plant growths of an inner self?

Magic-real, surreal, does not quite fit the bill.
It’s Frida’s sense of alien presence, her own.
A force of being held from outside herself, displacement.
Sumptuous, exact, the un-bodied body.

​A. Robert Lee

This poem first appeared in  Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines.

A. Robert Lee was Professor in the English department at Nihon University Tokyo, 1997-2011. British-born, he previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His creative work includes Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of       Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line (2011), and the collections Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012), Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013),  Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013), Off Course: Roundabouts and Deviations (2016), Passsword: A Book of Locks and Keys (2016), Written Eye: Visuals/Verse (2017), Alunizaje/Lunar Landings, with Blas Miras (2019), Writer Directory: A Book of Encounters (2019) and Suspicious Circumstances. What? (2020). Among his academic publications are Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004, Modern American Counter Writing: Beats Outriders, Ethnics (2010) and The Beats: Authorships,        Legacies (2019).  Currently he lives in Murcia, Spain. 

​
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Field of View, by Nancy Murphy

7/28/2020

6 Comments

 
Picture
Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1948

Field of View
  
I am a stretched canvas. My mother’s
yearning background color. Dress dusty
 
pink the color of my first ballet slippers,
hair putting up a fight. Thin black belt around
 
my nickel of a waist, it takes me years
to become a body. Walking even longer.
 
The field is everything to me. The way sunlight
wakes up the colours, the way the hint
 
of a road slices space into before
and after, the way home keeps moving
 
away. Collapsing onto the grass,
oblivious to how it can stain you,
 
mark you as a child. When do we start
seeing the world as wider than we can
 
hold? I paint myself away from the edges
of the picture, on another coast, different
 
weather. I paint the story of my mother
and what she wanted. I remember when
 
she gazed on me, and when she gazed not
on me. I carry hollowness into the rain.
 
Nancy Murphy
 
Nancy Murphy is a Los Angeles based writer and performer. Previous poetry publications include: Stoneboat Literary Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, glassworks, The Baltimore Review, Eclipse, The South Carolina Review, Altadena Poetry Anthology and others. She studied writing at UCLA Extension Writers Program and Beyond Baroque, and with various private teachers and workshops including the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Originally from the East Coast, Nancy has a B.A. in American Studies from Union College, Schenectady, NY. More at website www.nancymurphywriter.com


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Naming Birds, by Sandra Frye

7/27/2020

2 Comments

 
Picture
Landscape With Yellow Birds, by Paul Klee (Germany, b. Switzerland) 1923

Naming Birds

Because I never learned the names of birds
I practiced saying “cormorant” with my sons
reading Ping to them at bedtime. We tasted
the name, three syllables stretching into pre
historic wings, flapping inside our mouths.

Mother owned field glasses to view
warblers, woodpeckers, waxwings
until winter when cardinals collected
in flocks on pine trees. She knew the
names of birds—chickadees, swallows,
meadowlarks, owls, orioles—these she
loved with tender heart saved just for them
as well as for wrens, doves, swans, geese,
a colony of gulls... anything that flew.

Because I learned the names of poets,
I owned books, read Shelley, Dickinson,
Poe. I knew nothing about tertials, nests,
wingtips, hatching, or migration. Mother said 
birds have light but strong skeletons and a
four-chambered heart. I said Harper Lee wrote
about mockingbirds, they never hurt anybody, 
that it’s a sin to kill one. I greeted Mother, “Hail
to thee blithe spirit!” as she peered into trees.
That’s Percy Shelley speaking to a skylark.

Wallace Stevens said there’s thirteen ways to look
at a blackbird. But I knew none. Not even one.

I have, since Mother died, become absorbed with birds.
Ping was a little yellow duck, the last to return, and
almost devoured. These days I pronounce “cor-mor-ant”
slowly, like a prayer, the same way I say “sand-hill-crane”
“chick-a-dee” “car-di-nal” as I offer the names of birds
like little poems like pieces of bread to my mother.

Sandra Frye

Sandra Frye is a retired English teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Sandra has been writing poetry and stories since the age of ten. After teaching for thirty years and raising four sons, she can finally focus her energy on creative writing. She has written two books and is currently working on a third. She is also working on her first book of poetry, Leaving Lessons. Her first book, African Dreams: A Memoir of Service and Salvation, is about teaching English with the Peace Corps in Malawi, East Africa, from 1969 to 1971. The second book, Fatherless: A Memoir of Acceptance and Forgiveness, is about growing up in the midwest as a child of divorced parents in the 1950s.
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Dark Ladies & Other Avatars: Poems by Joan Roberta Ryan- Review by Devon Balwit

7/27/2020

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Picture
Click on cover to view or purchase on Amazon.

Dark Ladies & Other Avatars: Poems by Joan Roberta Ryan
3: A Taos Press, Denver CO, 2017, 97 pages, $24

The child of a painter and a photographer, I grew up in art museums and art galleries. I learned about the secrets of the body from crafted nudes, both two-and three-dimensional. An only child, I used to spend hours telling myself stories about the color plates in the art books on our shelves and as I drew my own. In her collection, Dark Ladies & Other Avatars, Joan Roberta Ryan reveals a similar sensibility.

The first section of her book is dedicated to ekphrastic work, explorations of Cranach, Titian, DaVinci, Caravaggio, De Hooch, and De La Tour. Ryan deftly weaves research with attentive looking in her treatments of these paintings. This section allows her the most reach with her rich vocabulary. Children “nimble” their way. Weavers don’t just used coloured thread, but strands of “Tyrian purple, / crimson kermes, blue woad, saffron, madder.” Abandoned wives cook “lamb printanier and blanquette de veau.” Some poems, like "Viola Revisited" and "Links to Lena" come with their own lists of words down the left-hand margin, in the former, seemingly a gloss on each line (abstemious / prig / elusive / aberrant) and in the latter a prompt for each stanza (rose of Sharon / gamine / inklings). In this section, along with mythical women, religious and secular, Ryan depicts artists and their models, and the wives of better-known characters, such as Rip Van Winkel and Prince Charming. Her female figures reveal complexities of ambition and desire.

The second section moves into darker territory, and yet for all that, remains buoyant. Ryan’s poems explore mental illness and physical decline. In the poem "To the Voices," the speaker asks, “Who are you—and why do you haunt / my sister, forbidding her to walk through the park / on Sunday, eat red berries or repeat what you say?” In the poem "My Father’s Hands," about a father stricken with Guillain-Barré, the speaker observes hands “suddenly as blind to touch as if / encased in leather mitts, indifferent / to command as a dozing cat, hitting / too hard, too slow—bereft of feel.” In Pentimento, she describes how her elderly mother, stricken with dementia, is losing her words: “larkspur, columbine, asters, / foxgloves, all withered to lovely flowers—” These poems trace our inheritance from family members—memories, keepsakes (many of questionable provenance), physical qualities like hair colour, and even ashes. The relationships that Ryan documents are complicated but serve, somewhat guilt-inducingly, as fuel for her work. 

“To whom,” she asks in "Close Kept," “would I reveal / her secrets, dear reader, but you?”

The final section brings us closer to the poetic speaker herself—her relationship to her body, her sexuality, the landscape within which she moves, and her family—husband, children, and grandchildren. These poems are suffused with sensuality, as in "Barcelona," where the Cava-tipsy focus of the poem “blushed her way / back from the damas and / handed him under the table / a small damp ball / of black silk.” In "Past Meridian," she describes the transition of youthful desire to an older flame: “every oenophile knows, / raisins make a fine rich wine.”

In short, spending time with Ryan’s work is like luxuriating on a bench before a beloved canvas, pouring over a treasured photo-album, or like being a guest in someone else’s well-appointed home. You continue your day glad to be human.

​Devon Balwit

​Devon Balwit sets her hand to the plough in the Pacific Northwest. Her poems and reviews can be found here in The Ekphrastic Review as well as in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Rattle, Apt (long form issue), Tar River Poetry, Sugar House Review, Poetry South, saltfront, and Grist among others. Please visit her website at: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet
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Clyfford Still’s PH-401 (1957), by Cyril Wong

7/27/2020

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Picture
PH-401, by Clyfford Still (USA) 1957

Clyfford Still’s PH-401 (1957)
 
To no longer be beholden to any side
in the painting’s argument of falling reds
and jagged black, yellows and greys 

like smashed birds barely extirpated
from the canvas – how traumatised existence
has appeared to me. How I long

to be the framing wall, or the mind
of some enlightened viewer floating away
like a kind of bird, abandoning duality.

Cyril Wong
​

Cyril Wong is a poet and fictionist in Singapore. His latest book of poems is Infinity Diary, published by Seagull Books.  
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Henry Ford Hospital, by Hannah Wagner

7/26/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
Henry Ford Hospital, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1932

Henry Ford Hospital, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1932 

Henry Ford Hospital
outside my window the city goes to sleep
husbands and wives turn their lights out
and let the day go
 
but like the peach to its pit
my flesh still clings
 
let me hold you
 
you’re cold as fresh clay 
burrowed into yourself
dry to the bone
 
moments ago you filled me with life
a market of raisins    prunes      mangos      broccoli
you grew and grew
 
nails on your fingers and toes
a heart b
 
stop
 
then a clank under the kitchen table
hit me like a breeze whipping by
taking everything with it
 
I held the little cashew to my lips
he left a faint taste of licorice 
bitter until the end 
 
my body failed 
carve out the rest of me 
 
this body is a snail
take the shell away
 
reveal me bare
and flaccid ​

Hannah Wagner

Hannah Wagner is a resident of Salem, Massachusetts. She graduated from Salem State University. She is also an actor and can be seen in many productions across the North Shore. Her work has been featured in The Broke Bohemian, Mass Poetry's Poem of the Moment, Door is a Jar, Soundings East, Twyckenham Notes, Still Point Quarterly, Incessant Pipe, Sweet A Literary Confection and others.
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​Paul Cezanne’s The Turn in the Road, by Alan Bern

7/26/2020

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Picture
The Turn in the Road, by Paul Cezanne (France) 1881

​Paul Cezanne’s The Turn in the Road
 
I
There are houses
at a close distance.
They are a town,
wedges at angles.
Their fronts and doors
conjure paths and roads.
Roof-
colors question
 
II
the vegetables, many-
fingered touches: dot-leaves
mass into shape around
fully-clothed
branches and towards
dying ones. Trunks curve
and straighten to earth.
Grasses comb the bank of the
 
III
road toward fences & mounds;
the turn
in the road: one step on the straight
and I am drawn
into the town.

Alan Bern

Retired children’s librarian Alan Bern’s three poetry books: No no the saddest and Waterwalking in Berkeley, Fithian Press; greater distance, Lines & Faces, his fine press and publishing company with artist and printer Robert Woods, linesandfaces.com. Alan is a writer and photographer who has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has won awards for both his poems and stories: runner up for The Raw Art Review's The John H. Kim Memorial Short Fiction Prize for his story; won a medal from SouthWest Writers for his story 'The Return of the Very Fierce Wolf of Gubbio to Assisi, 1943 CE [and now, 2013 CE].' Alan was also a finalist in the NCWN’s 2019 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and he won the Littoral Press Poetry Prize in 2015. Alan performs with dancer/choreographer Lucinda Weaver as PACES: dance & poetry fit to the space and with musicians from Composing Together, composingtogether.org.  

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Mother With Two Children, by Erica Goss

7/25/2020

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Picture
Mother With Two Children, by Egon Schiele (Austria) 1917

Mother With Two Children, 1917, by Egon Schiele
 
Once in Tulln, I ran from my father
to live on alchemy, fish bones,
and the sweet blue Danube. 
 
Every morning
two boys rode by on a goat cart
laughing outside my window.
 
At sunset my three models came to me:
a mother and her children 
from over the mountain.
 
I posed them flesh against flesh
the baby’s tiny hands outstretched. 
The mother tucked my money 
 
into her apron
her face warm under my thumbs.
The children fell asleep
 
while I painted in the shadows
my brain a cold planet 
lit with spectral fire.
 
Erica Goss

This poem first appeared in Ekphrasis.

Erica Goss served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA from 2013-2016. In 2019, she won the Zocalo Poetry Prize. She is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2016 Lyrebird Award, Wild Place, and Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets. Recent work appears in Lake Effect, Atticus Review, Contrary, Convergence, Spillway, Cider Press Review, Eclectica, The Tishman Review, Tinderbox, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Main Street Rag, among others. Erica is the editor of Sticks & Stones, a bi-monthly poetry newsletter. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com. 

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