The Fisherman’s View

Our sails chuff, chuff in the slight morning breezes and the wooden planks of my boat creak as they expand in the warming sun.  We wait for the covered gondola to pass our bows.  At least his passengers will not get reddened from the sun, and he can move with his oar while we remain still until the wind decides to be our helper.  He is out quite far and is in our territory.  We need to be away from the city and in the fresher water to cast our nets.  He needs to go back to the canals and pick up some star-crossed lovers for an enchanting morning cruise.  

The lagoon is like textured glass with its reflecting riplets.  I love seeing the vibrant colors of burnt siena, forest green, and yellow ochre reflected back at me.  It was worth buying that new sail.  We are temporarily becalmed here, so I banter with my fishing friend about the prices our fish will fetch, the ongoing repairs on the canal bridges, the new restaurant down on the piazza where I eat several times a week, and the annoying flow of tourists clogging the canals and sidewalks on these perfect summer days.  Oh well, those tourists are eating our fish, I think.  I have to take the bad with the good. 
 
The scene behind us is truly superlative. Blush pink clouds dot the azure sky above the city.  The dome of the church of Santa Maria della Salute is burnished by the newly risen sun, and it glows a silvery white.  This hour of stillness as the city slowly awakens and I float on the water is my favourite.  My home with its pastel colours looks like it is constructed out of jewels.  Indeed, this beloved Italian city is the crown jewel of the Mediterranean.  

Janie Davies Fitzgerald

Janie Davies Fitzgerald is a retired middle school English teacher, a voiceover actor, a tutor, and an educational consultant.  She spends her free time as an avid reader, a writer, a poet, a scrapbooker, a genealogist, a gardener, and an amateur photographer.  She grew up fascinated by art as she watched her grandmother paint, and her husband is an artist as well.  Art has always been an integral part of her life.  She loves spending time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and her local art museum, The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York. ​

Whisper Study I

I drop to my knees next to Nana on command. Fold my hands. Close my eyes. Bow my brown head, small among strangers. We pray for something I can’t understand, for something I should believe in, but don’t. We follow orders from a man in a white dress this week, black next, to sit, stand, sing, sign. We nod to each other, smile. Some shake hands, share wishes by rote for peace we don’t know. Nana, raising me, her daughter's child, in late middle age, may never know. Next to me is my god, not the figure on the cross above the altar, not the man in pictures. Next to me is my saviour. 

I drop to my knees with the news I saw walking up the pier that stood in the Hudson River. News imparted in his bowed head I last touched across the table five months before. News spread across the front page of his rounded shoulders speckled under his shirt with constellations of beauty marks he mistook for freckles until I taught him otherwise. (I taught him.) News broadcast in his awkward gait, both hurried and hesitant to reach me. 

I drop to my knees on the bare beach in front of the Atlantic. Sand softens my landing. The drama of my gesture is mirrored in that of late autumn’s waters, in the sky’s Payne’s Grey palette, in the dunes' shapes, wind-sculpted. No one is around to bear witness save for the sea’s gulls, shells, weed, so I stand up to fall again, to be caught. To be cradled.

​Whisper Study II

I am stopped in shadow on the stairs. Underneath the feet of my pajamas is carpet the colour it’s not supposed to be. It shows the singe marks of embers fallen from the cigarettes that made may grandfather disappear forever to a place I had only heard of, had never seen. My presence there is a secret. Through the baluster bars, I watch my grandmother across the room. Everything is brown—her hair, her skirt, her stockings, her open-toed shoes. Her hands hold her belly. She stands only inches away from a black and white photograph of my grandfather framed on the wall. I have never seen her so close to anything. I have never seen her whisper. 

I am stopped on the threshold of the sculpture studio, covered in clay. The saw’s sounds draw me near. The pink double doors open slightly to a courtyard, to a Greenwich Village mews. Former carriage houses line both sides and protecting those huddled in the corner and the school where I study is a mulberry tree losing her limbs. Aproned, arms akimbo, I shout. Hands in prayer, I whisper.

I am stopped under the new Southern sky motionless in front of the rental’s open hatch. I hear not the river’s beat, but my own heart’s. There is the March midnight chill. The scent of the mountain pines. The taste of the coffee that kept me awake on the twelve hour drive. The touch of my feet on the ground I cannot feel. There is not the woven basket. Not its contents. Not the pink floral tin canister, not the green. Not the remnants. Not you. My God, I whisper.

Janelle Lynch

Janelle Lynch is a writer and an award-winning photographer. Her writing has been published in monographs and in journals including Afterimage, The Photo Review, and Loupe. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in several museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs published by Radius Books: Los Jardines de México (2010); Barcelona (2012), which also includes her writings; and Another Way of Looking at Love (2018). She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery.

​Cat with a red stripe

once-wild thing, once-tiger
stretching in carpeted sun-patches
& gazing through glass at unattainable sparrows,

where is your hunt? 
raised on kibble & neck scratches, 
named in a different language & loved, 

in dreams you’re running – where?
 underneath couches, out of door-cracks, 
up suburban trees? 

have you forgotten 
the antelope, the savannah, evolution’s 
slow fade?        little lion.

if i were to let you go– let you slip
into wildness– how far would you wander
through unfamiliar woods

before turning back
to our doorstep, mewling 
to be let in?

​Sowing seeds in the dark

when you lay dying, you’ll have forgotten this:
piles of unwashed plates, full inbox,
empty fridge, deep hunger. you’ll have forgotten
mirror, scale, self-loathing; in death there is
no self; in death, only body and earth.
what else could matter? 

still you insist: this matters. nothing could stop it from mattering–
not the cat mewling at your feet, not your empty stomach, not the forest 
waiting dark & lovely outside the sliding glass door. 

this matters, I know. tomorrow your computer will restart
and all will be saved. everyone in your inbox will be making breakfast
or tangled in bed with unnamed lovers, unencumbered by your late replies.
the dishes will sit in the sink, no dirtier than today. but today

is sacred: today your body, remembering death, aches for life.
let it tell you what it needs, and listen. stand up; take a walk
in the garden; look at the moon. then come inside
for midnight toast; come warm this body
that was always only yours. 
oh, baby. let yourself eat.

Thursday August 8, 2024
4 to 6 pm est


With a recording and performing career spanning more than four decades, and over 300 million record sales, the trailblazing artist is a world icon. She is of course a singer and dancer and business woman extraordinaire. But aesthetics are an integral aspect of her performance, production and inspiration. She fearlessly explores a range of visual ideas in her sartorial expression, her videography, her choreography, stage sets, books, and films. Her passion for visual art shows up in her personal art collection, her interiors, and all of her art. Join as we look behind the scenes at Madonna and art history and how the two intersect. In this event we will look at and discuss Madonna and the influence of visual art on her life and work. (This is not a generative writing workshop, although we guarantee you will leave with plenty of inspiration for your own creativity!)

In Memoriam: Heather Sarabia 3.1.88- 7.12.24. 
Our deepest condolences to Heather's loved ones.
We are honoured to have published Heather's poems, and to publish this one in her memory.

**

Flow

Very sure things flow
through the mind like water
flows through the strong current 
of a stormy ocean.

I lose a lot 
in the spray of the wave 
and need to wait until it crashes 
before I can get control 
of the flow.

Be aware 
of where everyone flows 
then you can meet them 
in calmer waters.

Heather Sarabia ​

Heather Sarabia is a visual artist and an emerging but long-time writer. She lives in Madison, WI and is on the autism spectrum. Despite being nonverbal, she is a prolific writer and poet, typing out poems and prose with assistance. Her work has recently appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. More of her artwork can be found at https://www.artworking.org/heather-sarabia.  

**

Read Heather's poem, "Emptiness," here (scroll down a bit):
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/gustave-guillaumet-ekphrastic-writing-responses

Read Heather's poem "Memories of a Forgotten Paris," here (scroll down quite a bit):
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/camille-pissarro-ekphrastic-writing-responses

Birds of Perugia
 
Recovering after a year in a prisoner-of-war camp,
he slowly regained strength, but visions persisted. 
 
He abandoned the silk business of his father, switched
from feasts to fasts. Merchants saw him talking to birds
 
and that was it – the gold he inherited was dust 
from country roads and sunshowers in random fields. 
 
Something odd and radiant happened at the woodland edge
outside Bevagna, where multitudes of “sisters-birds” 
 
stretched their necks and extended wings, as they listened to him 
praising the Giver of carefree flight. Not until his last word
 
did birds start rising, as if endowed with the reason. 
Of course, it’s fiction, but what would you know 
 
with a brain that lets you see this golden-leaf-on-wood
of October in a spectrum even narrower than a bird’s?

Elina Petrova

Until 2007 Elina Petrova lived in Ukraine and worked in engineering management. Now she assists in a Houston law firm and enjoys writing in her rose garden. Elina published two poetry books in English (Aching Miracle, 2015, and Desert Candles, 2019) after the first one in her native Russian language. Her poems have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Texas and California Reviews, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. A film presenting her poem at the 2023 Miami Chroma Film Festival won in the category Best Cinematic Poetry.

Our Past is the Emptied Café Terrace
 
Our past is the emptied café terrace:
Mid-September, Arles 1888. 
The North-eastern corner of the Place du Forum. 
Now there is a painting of night, without night.
 
Through constellations captured in time,
On a sky’s trodden contours,
Her gaze scans across the scene
For figures calling last-orders.
 
Glass darkening the internal vibrancy,
Its print overtook our Oregon home,
Bracing floral-fringed lampshades
–assured traces of Art Noveau.
 
Its being in time shading our own:
October tail-end of an Indian-summer
Remembering an unplaced bar
On a Prague street corner,
 
Awaiting the last bus to come
–to deliver us back 
To the familiar hedged shadows 
Of an emptying campsite.
 
Another, smaller, terraced-print hangs
Out of place in the elsewhere of now.
A poorly-framed charity shop relic, 
Past belonging to the unhoused.
 
You watch it float above the roof, 
And vacant rooms of your dollhouse,  
Wherein a world might be revealed 
By the removal of an external wall. 

Peter Kelly 

Peter Kelly teaches and researches poetry in the ancient and modern worlds in Princeton University. He is originally from Galway, Ireland and much of his work considers ideas of place and displacement in shifting environments. He is the editor of a collected volume on Ekphrasis, which brings together creative and academic essays on the connections between the use of ekphrasis in ancient Greece and Rome, and contemporary poetry.  

 
The Fantastic Wheel
 
As I was crossing town today, my feet fused into one big wheel. 
It made my journey easier. True, I rumbled on uneven pavement, 
 
but at least I didn’t stumble and now I zip past boys on bicycles delivering 
Instagrams, though I prefer to move at the pace of, let’s say,
 
a croquet ball wobbling through tall grass, for this fantastic wheel 
allows me to catch glimpses of the past: my mother as she walked to school, 
 
warming her hands with roasted chestnuts in her pockets. One of the few
stories of hers that didn’t feature her bully brother. And now I see
 
my father and his brother. They stand in dueling pose, whacking
each other with sticks. Even at the age of ninety, Dad gazed 
 
into the distance and said, I beat him, didn’t I? Meaning, he’d managed
to live longer. And now I see my brother, changing a flat tire
 
that time his back was bad. What made him persist? The fantastic
wheel helps me to see simple moments in the lives
 
of complicated people. Not to dwell in the past, but to keep 
rolling toward a better understanding. Mind you, the present 
 
holds delights. That secret smile inside my grandson’s eyes. 
Don’t let me move too fast. I want to pay attention.
 

 Learning to Play
 
To make audible the tunes 
that rise inside you, lean 
against a rocky crag. 

Absorb melodies embedded 
in earth’s libraries of sand 
and clay. You will need 

a few molten rocks to spark the air, 
a scrim of fine ash to alter 
the view. Then build, note 

by note, story by story, 
a scaffolding. Climb 
toward sky. Love the clouds, 

but also love the grass. 
 

Practical Magic
 
The floorboards of our boarding school 
grew thin and pocked from the impact of girls
turned stiff and upholstered, ruled, as we were 
by shipwrecked women paid pennies 
to watch over young lives on the cusp 
of making love, not war. Oh there was
 
Miss C who hummed as she prowled the halls,
permed head thrust forward, sniffing
for trouble. Mrs. G, widow of a Russian count, 
or so she said, told stories of spies, and owned
only two brown sweaters. Miss L’s trembling hands 
barely managed a fork. Into my room she came
one night, breathing whiskey, whispering Honey.
 
And what of Miss H, our long-dead founder, 
who took her students to sun-flecked Italy?
Girls should be encouraged to experience
the fullness of life. Come back and haunt us,
Miss H. We need you here.
 
It was late, my radio turned low. And suddenly, 
the doors to my fusty armoire blew open,
delivered me clouds. Cirrus and cumulus
(we had been taught the names of things) 
and I clambered aboard and sailed 
 
out of the school, sailed over meadows, over rows 
of growing things. I didn’t know their names
but I could feel how their stems drank water,
how the tiny hairs on the underside of leaves
protected them. I touched down
 
on a moonlit road and danced with my shadow.
How lovely the world was, and lonely.
I returned to my cell. Vowed 
to become more cello than chair.
 

 
I Wanted to Fly
 
I made a pair of wings
cut from the yellow coat 
I wore to church,
but the wings were too heavy. 
They pinched my shoulders.
I gave them to a boy,
then hunkered down in a courtyard
and turned the crank of a hurdy-gurdy,
the only instrument I knew how to play,
to celebrate his lift-off. 
He flapped those wings 
and soared. I didn’t think
to ask why the boy could fly, 
and I could not.

What I Carry
 
The head of a man I once knew, 
to be dropped into the nearest bin, 
and a basket of grievances no longer
useful—tempting, also, to discard 
the mask I wear like glasses slung 
about my neck, and also the cloak 
I’ve worn for years, wool woven 
from ancestors’ sheep that grazed 
a dirt-poor hillside. The cowl bunches
around my mouth, makes it hard to speak,
but I have spoken enough for one day.
The sun is out. I will turn my back 
on brick and run to the mossed woods, 
free of mask and cloak.
 
Amy Gordon
 
Amy Gordon taught drama to middle school kids for many years.  Her collection of poems, Leaf Town, won the 2023 Slate Roof chapbook prize. She lives in Western Massachusetts overlooking the Connecticut River.

Reflections on Helen Frankenthaler’s 
Mauve District

it is a pale purple
uneven territory
created by 
an abstract dripper 
mapping the 
square canvas 
with permanent 
restrictions 
to legally dominate
the quadratic space
exclusively 
for neglected                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
plum looking pigments
retreating from 
creamy/white domination
that arrogantly refuse 
to variegate 
into a universal 
multicolored municipality 
tinted with 
rainbow brush strokes
& darker hues 
which fuel artistic energy 
while burnished gold  
flowing like rivulets 
guard the whitish border 
preventing 
blues & reds
from merging into mauve 
preferring 
distinct segregation 
rather than 
blended integration

Davidson Garrett

This was first published by Sensations Magazine.

Davidson Garrett is a poet, actor, and former New York City yellow taxi driver who lives in Manhattan. He is the author of two poetry collections, King Lear of the Taci, published by Advent Purple Press, and Arias of a Rhapsodic Spirit, published by Kelsay Books.  www.davidsongarrett.com