Snow and Ice Are the Only Constants

​Hunters trudge back to the village, frigid legs digging ever deeper into snow as dusk falls. A frozen-eyed fox dangles from a shoulder. Haggard dogs huddle to share despair. Down below, bundled skaters slide and glide on frozen ponds, a perpetual winter’s invitation. Shivering children fall on the ice, begging for food as others curl a stone. Couples hold hands.

Nothing stops in the village when held tight in a white blanket. One blackbird takes flight over the frozen mill wheel while the others remain chilled. ​

A moment in time
may air-snap like chimney flames
and freeze forever
​

Remember Hidden Pictures
​
Admit it. You picked up Highlights for Children in the dentist’s office and tried your luck at finding objects hiding in plain sight. But the nurse always called you in before you finished. You could spend all day examining this painting and increase your mental acuity at the same time: For instance, how many people are here? (I gave up at 186.) Can you guess the children’s ages? I’m certain they range from toddler to teen. What games are the children playing: I’m no expert at sixteenth-century Flemish games, but I see leapfrog, stilts, acrobatics, piggyback, marbles, river bathing, blind man’s bluff, mock tournaments, and playing with toys and dolls—at the very least. Can you find all ninety games?

They Build

They build. They build a tower to reach Heaven. They build and understand each other perfectly. They build one level after another easily, because they speak the same language. They build and congratulate themselves on their vision and their progress. They build until their vanity reaches new heights. A punishment comes crashing down. They no longer build. They no longer want to reach Heaven. They no longer understand a word each other says. Their words are babble.

​Barbara Krasner

​Barbara Krasner was first introduced to the work of the Brueghel family in her undergraduate German studies. She owed it to her German professor to experience the Pieter Brueghel the Elder collection at the Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels, fascinated as always by the activities depicted in these paintings. Her first ekphrastic collection, The Night Watch, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Visit her website atwww.barbarakrasner.com.

Best of the Net awards are an annual anthology of outstanding poem  and stories from online literary journals honouring online publishing, hosted by Sundress Publications.

We are proud to nominate fine writers for this fine anthology.

You can learn more at this link:
https://bestofthenetanthology.com/

Congratulations to our amazing writers for their wonderful work!

To Séverine Gallardo Regarding Die Erde & Der Himmel, by Portly Bard
Beggars, by Jean Bourque
Not Looking Out to Sea (No Matter What Winslow Homer Says), by Tara Connor
Self Portrait as an Electron Cloud, by Dagne Forrest
When I Get Back, by Samantha Gorman
Bebe in the Bramble, by Marianne Peel
The Precipice Calls, by Royal Rhodes
Anna, by John L. Stanizzi 

**

To Séverine Gallardo Regarding Die Erde & Der Himmel, by Portly Bard
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/severine-gallardo-ekphrastic-writing-responses-curated-by-kate-copeland
 
(scroll down)

**
 
Beggars, by Jean Bourque
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/pascal-mohlmann-ekphrastic-writing-responses-curated-by-kate-copeland
 
(scroll down)

**
Not Looking Out to Sea (No Matter What Winslow Homer Says), by Tara Connor

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/not-looking-out-to-sea-no-matter-what-winslow-homer-says-by-tara-connor
 
**
 
Self Portrait as an Electron Cloud, by Dagne Forrest
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/self-portrait-as-an-electron-cloud-by-dagne-forrest
**
 
When I Get Back, by Samantha Gorman
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/cookie-wells-ekphrastic-writing-responses-curated-by-sandi-stromberg
 
​(scroll down)

**

Bebe in the Bramble, by Marianne Peel
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/bebe-in-the-bramble-by-marianne-peel
**
 
The Precipice Calls, by Royal Rhodes
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/franka-m-gabler-ekphrastic-writing-responses-curated-by-kate-copeland

(scroll down)
​
**
 
Anna, by John L. Stanizzi 
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/october-18th-2024
 
 (scroll down)
 

 
Boxer at Rest
 
​"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

How tiredness looks. Slumped-over body. Rounded back. Arms dead weights on his thighs. Beaten raw. Bloody mouth and scars and his and the opponents’ blood spattered over his arms, shoulders and back. Facial wounds, called “ants,” still stinging. 
 
Coppery bronze with copper ore’s green patina, and bright flecks of refined copper for the gore. Hellenistic period sculptor Lysippus is credited as the artist by some. The majority of scholars will not commit and tend to agree there is no proof who made the Boxer at Rest. 
 
The sculpture exhibits the posture of one defeated, possibly, or alternately, dispirited. It may represent a victor who, though not once having lifted the index finger of submission in any bout, may be weary of the constant battering it is taking to remain on top. 
 
The bronze may be of Mys of Taranto, Italy, who reportedly lost every bout of his career except his final one and that at the Olympiad. As Mys, the bronze boxer may be showing reluctance to try once more for victory, wanting only to quit, yet urged on by his trainer or by his own nagging quest for glory.
 
One more time to lift myself up by the seat and engage with hope, though tired of hoping, tired of fighting, tired of outrage, tired of dysfunction, tired of misunderstanding, tired of confusing changes in people I love, tired of confusing changes in the political climate I was once certain I understood.
 
The sculpture could be of any one of a number of ancient Greek boxers: Glaukos of Kárystos, who fixed a bent plow blade with his bare fists as a boy and developed a top-of-the-head punch called the Plow Touch. Theagenes of Thassos,who as a boy also was able to lift and carry heavy bronze statues and as an adult purportedly ate an entire bull on a dare. Kleomedes of Astypálaia, who in a rage after being disqualified for killing a man in a fight, knocked down the pillar of a school building, killing sixty children inside. Boxers could be heroes, but at times problematic heroes.
 
With regard to Mys of Taranto, only one person that I can tell asserts he even existed. The reviewer for an archaeological magazine, this person also states the sculpture was found at the Baths of Caracalla. It was unearthed on Quirinale Hill in Rome in 1885, not far from the former site of the Baths of Constantine. 
 
I confess I am exploiting the boxer motif to express what I feel about leaving the fight. No more news, no more social media. No more activism as a result, maybe. Opting out of information and gossip spoon-fed by the algorithms. The need to keep up replaced by the need to drop out of the race. The need to know replaced by the certainty all is lost.  
 
Instead of “It’s time to return to the game,” this maybe merely-generic boxer may be hearing his time has passed, that the previous match was his final one. “No more. Retire.” It could be that. Note the age of the boxer. A veteran, he has been at it a long time. Maybe, by rote, he will stand up anyway and enter the sand pit once more to take and give a beating. Or he may agree it has come to an end.
 
Rather than stand up, I choose to remain unmoved. Movements cause pain, especially if they are the same movements. The always movements. Resulting too often in unresolved re-current outcomes. Fight 1 and then here’s Fight 2; and guess what, here is Fight 1 again. It goes from wrong to repeat, often in less than a generation. Life is heavier and needs witness, but is it my duty to point out always that Everything is spoiled?
 
It could still be Mys.
 
The skeleton of an ancient athlete was found in Taranto, buried with four amphorae depicting Olympic events, one of which was boxing. The unbattered condition of the bones suggests boxing may not have been that athlete’s main event, however – unless it is the skeleton of Melankomas from western Anatolia, who only ever fought defensively and wore out his opponents by sheer endurance, suffering no major injury himself. Ancient rope-a-dope. It could be him if he died in Taranto. 
 
He did not. 
 
In a time of troubles the Boxer at Rest went underground. Sifting the soil to keep it unscathed and whole, the inhabitants of Magna Graecia buried the statue and fled the barbarian hordes in the fifth century CE. 
 
Dug up, the boxer is shown in a photograph sitting on the ground. His head turned, as if questioning, wondering: “What happened to the temples and the Thermae Constantini, and where are the crowds?” A solitary, bewildered, dust-covered figure in a gray landscape, he has been placed to look exactly as he does, by Rudolfo Lanciani, principal archaeologist for the project.
 
How did the country transform so? How did the world? Insults as discourse. Dysfunction as entertainment. Celebrity as wisdom.  Is there anything left to be serious about? War, hunger, poverty, climate? I don’t know where they came from or what they came for. Weird rich powerful people, our collective problem. 
 
Foreskin tied with a knot. Nipples the colour of his broken mouth. Nose smashed entirely shut. Cheek under one eye inlaid with a darker alloy to represent a bruise. And the stitching on his hand wrappings of ox-hide, called himantes by some and caestus by others, bloodied red. Can he take much more? Watched over by the official with his cane. Struggling in the loose dirt of the skamma to maintain. No mercy if he falls. 
 
Anything becomes believable. The irrational, the couldn’t-be, the inconceivable, is. It exists in public life, exists in the minds of frightened (disgusted, angered) people ready to support any kind of retaliation on the enemy who has done nothing to them, who in a sense does not exist, who has been invented for them.
 
Gamblers, art-lovers, toss the divination dice. Rub the bronze boxer’s fingers and toes for luck. Will the Boxer at Rest throw in the towel, knuckle under, bow, buckle, fold? Return from the next fight to rest but then fight again? Will he go down and out and never return? What are the odds? Throw the knuckle bones to bet whether his knuckles hold out. Or his brain. 
 
As the world goes for broke, betting the climate will not crash, dazzled by the artificial and , literally entertained to death, with everyone buried neck-deep in their mind-phones, their senses atrophying, I am keen to spend more time in the here-now instead of the in-there. I aim to immerse myself in memories of our home in vegetable, mineral, and animal, to lift my head from civilized distractions, and reconnect with the mystery of being alive on this green and blue planet. 
 
It is now the moment for the Boxer to turn his head. It is critical he turn his head and look. It will complete an action that needs to happen, that may change everything. Who stands in the absence? The artist created an absence. The Boxer may be isolated now when once he was surrounded, his response somehow explained by the configuration of the figures no longer there.
 
To escape derives from meaning to remove one’s cloak or clothing, to become naked again. Like a boxer who has stopped picking a fight with himself, I aim to divest. To escape the ranks of the insane. That means limiting myself in exchanges with my outraged friends, dismayed and angry at how things are shaping up in the world – kicking (boxing, head-bumping) the junk news addiction.
 
Outrage fatigue. Everyone worthwhile has it. To escape it is rational. 
  
Ivars Balkits
 
A dual-citizen of Latvia and the USA since 2016, Ivars Balkits lives in a small mountain village in Crete, Greece. His poems and prose have been most recently published by Vernacular Journal, Meetinghouse Magazine, and Pnyx (Ozymandias Project) among other online literary magazines. He is a recipient of two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, for poetry in 1999 and creative nonfiction in 2014. 

Mixed Media
 
We’re listening to Shabazz Palaces, my brother drawing from a photo I took earlier with my phone: aimed up, zoomed in, then slid across a high rise right before dark. Lights along the strip that came on too, neon and jagged across the screen.
 
Level with the skyline, ninth floor, sun finally set, I now see that the city’s a whole suite of high rises: cylinders with warm windows wrapped around them the way the towers wrap around us. These lines are like the ones from the piece that you bought, he says, and These are your colours: pink & yellow & blue, some smeared, his hands heavy with pastels.
 
Already done. Which is why he animates for a living, making rigs move. I work best like this late at night now, he says, and This is something I’ve never drawn before, then Let’s call it: “Vancouver Night,” no, yeh: “Vancouver Night with You.”
​

Self Portrait with a TV 
 
1.
 
The figure looking back from inside the screen
holds up his gamepad and pretends to play— 
my younger brother at about fifteen 
before a crusted loveseat tugged up to his room.
The background blends gray with nauseous green 
but still allows enough light for a nude--
bare chest, swim trunks, the legs partly removed,
face blurred as if to mask what he needed to say.
 
2.
 
Before the screen, his foot is tinted peach,
his towel’s stripes curving like still-life fruit--
a twist of lemon peel, blue rug beneath
the console’s purple glow, but despite his suit
he looks like a ghost behind a windowpane,
no one listening to him say: I’m not playing. 
​
B.J. Wilson

B.J. Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, Naming the Trees (The Main Street Rag, 2021) and Tuckasee (Finishing Line Press, 2020). His work has appeared in The Rappahonnock Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He holds a writing fellowship from The Hambidge Center, an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, and a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poetry. Originally a visual artist, B.J. realized his brother was much better, so now he just writes. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, his hometown.

the insistence of a body (after Schiele)
​
she is reclined, yes,
but not in the passive graveyard of comfort  
she leans like a blade, like a hemorrhaging hug
in the windless house of flesh 
an angle sharper than elegy, duller than forgetting.

her fingers, 
gnarled starfish of invocation
reach upwards, or downwards, or nowhere at all,
their prayer is not to god but to gesture itself,
that ancient crackle in the wrist’s thorny theatre.

how violently calm she lies,
how her coat folds like arrested smoke
and her spine blooms into a horizontal icicle 
a spine not of support, but of protest,
of the languor that refuses to end,
but stretches, sentence-shivering, into some unpronounceable mush.

the outline is stitched with hunger
not for food, no
but for the disaster of being perceived.
each line an autopsy of attention,
a scalpel’s dream of precision melting
in the soft apocalypse of skin.

a sliver of jawline dares the page to fold
elbow a hound’s snarl wrapped in linen geometry,
shoulder cinched into a mute theorem of black-crease,
not explaining, never yielding, only bristling
into its own bruised longitude

there: the cheekbone, a jut of mistranslation,
clenched against the fade of mirrors,
tilted like vowels abandoned mid-prayer
no glossary, only the stutter of skin-in-light.

beneath the wrist: a garden of bone-rhythm,
each tendon a child’s forgotten stick
scratching itself into the flesh-ground

her knee, not bent but snarled,
a topography of unfinished ironies, 
invented to confuse furniture and god.

the throat, neither vessel nor passage,
but a stamp of self-absorbed uncertainty,
where breath halts to measure its own weight
against the velocity of not-speaking.

oh, and the colour
a sepia soaked in silence,
bloodless, yet not pale
like the breath of parchment
just before it screams.

no signal gathers in the hush of her elbow
just a long sob of linen folding into angles,
creases like imploded stars trapped in the geometry of gesture.

Her hip juts like a sigh half-erased,
not wrong, just smudged by the grease of breath
and beneath, the fabric
rises not as modesty
but as immobile sharpness:
a slow-lit wick of gesture unfurling sideways,
into lawlessness 

skin flickers in octagonal hushes,
the elbow knotted like smoked wire,
hand halved with verbs uncoiled
revolt of accumulation,
bedsheets of pauses
dragging their dress through the spinal dusk.

she leaks
yes, she leaks
spilling fibrous time from the soft-walled cathedral
of her paused breath
every fold a refusal
every knuckle an unclocked anomaly
​
not once, but relentlessly,
she twists
not forward,
but in
inward like bone folding back into root,
like cloth learning to forget its thread.

Yanis Iqbal

Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-colonial political theory with Iskra Books. His poetry has appeared in Cafe Dissensus, Radical Art Review, Culture Matters, and elsewhere. 

The Knight Errant

1/ Royal Academy Exhibition

The audience is shocked at this affront--
the nude is not a naked success. The nerve of displaying
a woman who’s not even classical not even a goddess
naked! Delicate sensibilities are upset.

She has no story to hide behind, not even a fig leaf,
and she’s watching us watching her, coming
face to face with her flesh. It’s enough to make a man
blush, having to look her in the eyes. 

The point of an exhibition is a sale, and you could
never hang this in your home where your wife might see it,
your daughters getting all sorts of ideas 
about the chivalry of kidnap.

2/ The Artist

Fine. If they don’t want to face her, I’ll repaint her head.

He cuts her face out and sews it into a new canvas.
No point in wasting a martyr. This woman is clothed
and wrapped in another chain.

A modest face now. A maiden in distress ready to succour.
She’ll sell now, he thinks, convinces himself 
this angle of her neck is better really--

a swan, a swoon caught in her tangled hair
and the contrast is still so beautiful the shiny plate
glowing against her skin, luminous peach ripe for biting.

3/ Lady Birch

Can’t he hurry it up now? Get on with cutting the rope?
My clothes grow dirt-speckled 
crumpled among the roots while 

he’s too distracted to wipe the blood from his blade. 
I feel him lingering against my arm.
Can’t he see? that I could admire the waning crescent

moon glinting off his wandering helm
if he would only face me. We could see each other’s teeth.
I could sink mine into skin.

Allison Burris

​Allison Burris grew up in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Oakland, California. Her poems embrace the whimsical and cozy, explore human connection, and affirm the power of stories. She received her MLIS from San Jose State University and her poetry appears or is forthcoming in various journals, including Instant Noodles, Heartline Spec, Muleskinner, After Happy Hour Review, and The Marbled Sigh. Connect with her via https://linktr.ee/allisonburris

Kaaterskill Clove
Joseph Stanton
Shanti Arts, 2025
https://shantiarts.co/uploads/files/stu/STANTON_KAATERSKILL.html

or, on Amazon:
​https://www.amazon.com/-/fr/Joseph-Stanton/dp/1962082768

Thomas Cole’s The Titan’s Goblet, 1833
 
Thomas Cole’s cup runneth over,
as a landscape within a landscape,
a dream within a dream.
In an immense goblet lives a world,
a Roman palace on one side,
a ruined remnant of aqueduct on the other.     
 
The rim of the cup
and the rim of the cup’s base 
are trimmed with forests,
the stem of the goblet
is the trunk  
of a gargantuan tree.
 
This absurdity 
is calmly accepted
by those who sail the ships
and those who live,
within the buildings
perched on the rim
 
of the goblet 
and those 
who occupy 
the tiny city
that lurks below 
the falls of water,
 
the odd, unavoidable
spillages.
All seems natural
within this stilled life
semblance
of a garden ornament
                                                                                                                        
set within 
an exquisitely finished landscape
that features                                                                                                    
the Hudson River flowing
in the background,
enormous and inevitable.

Thomas Cole’s View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, 1838
 
Cole loved this hillside overlooking a creek,
a picnic spot, a short walk from his home. 
He shows us his wife and child at play.
Maria has left her bonnet on the grass
 
and has picked some flowers that she carries
towards the baby, who laughs
and opens his arms to receive them.
In the distance we see the mountains 
 
that edge the Hudson River.
Approach within a few inches
of the canvas and you can spy
the smokestacks of the growing village
 
that crowds the far side of the river.
By the time Cole painted it,
this view could no longer be seen
because a railroad had cut through it;
 
hundreds of trees beloved by Cole
had been chopped down to clear the path.
But in this picture Cole has tucked himself,
happily, into a recently lost world.
 
You can glimpse him stepping through
a broken fence, wearing his familiar garb--
tan hat, red shirt, and blue coat.
He has a rifle on his left arm,
 
but he carries no game. He has, perhaps,
just been out on one of his long walks.
He gazes tenderly towards his wife and child,
his face breaking into the brightest of smiles.  

Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs, 1861
 
In 1859, Frederic Church 
chartered a ship for risky passage up 
“Iceberg Alley,”
from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland 
to Labrador then back to Halifax.
 
He sketched angelic wonders of white light,
boulders profoundly cold, complacent,
moving massives,
deathly, deadly, 
in an absurdly austere North.
 
This other sort of wilderness
offered no green leaves, 
no exotic birds, no mountain trails,
no volcanoes exploding fire and ash.
These spectral mountains of crystal, 
 
rub and crash against each other, 
and against unwise boatmen
who may, of a sudden, find their ships
entrapped and unmoving
or broken and sinking.
 
This is Church’s 
most peculiar masterwork, 
and, despite its frozen grandeur, 
it seemed, to early critics, 
to lack moral force.
 
For us today, we can see
Church’s islands of ice
as memento mori,
understanding them, as we now must, 
as more endangered than endangering.
 

Frederic Edwin Church’s Cotopaxi, 1862
 
Church imagines the volcano 
as a mouth of God, 
speaking His earth,
fiery and neverending,
 
but Church also grasped 
from Humboldt and the rest
that the majestic fires
need also be geologic. 
 
For Church, Cotopaxi was ideal:
Ecuadorian, resplendent,
and plausible to science.
The allegory, too, suited the times,
 
troubled as they were by War.
Despite the perfect form 
of Cotopaxi’s divine cone,
a dire darkness spews forth 
 
and drifts in front of the rising sun,
an eye of God that sees through 
the smokey dark and casts a cross of light 
on the waters of the lake.
 
We must also note that the light, 
lovely blue of the sky to the left 
speaks of reborn day,
and that the waterfall’s 
 
shimmering
red reflection of fire
is overwhelmed
by a vividly transcendent, 
 
surrounding flow 
of blue, blue, blue.

Sanford Gifford’s A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove, 1862
 
Gifford gives us a cluster of birches
on a precipitous ledge at far left.
The birches and the ledge are vivid,
sharp-edged in detail in the gleam
of the late-afternoon light of a sun
that shines center-cut directly at us.
 
Below the ledge a hunter and his dog
struggle upward towards this amazing
view of a vast ravine, bright
and golden, dazzled by delicate
mists rising from lakes and ponds
and creeks and the dimly visible
 
line of white that is, we know,
the tumbling falls of Kaaterskill.
Along the bottom of the ravine
and up the mountainous steeps
on all sides hazed autumnal trees
glow golden and green.
 
We cannot quite make out the disk
that is the sun, it’s a near-white,
a pure, unrelenting intensity.
A clearing in the deep distance
holds a small house, tiny 
from where we stand.
 
Smoke rises from its stack,
speaking of a fireplace,
where a stew is cooking, 
for the belated hunter, 
whose return is,
perhaps patiently, awaited.
 
Joseph Stanton

"Thomas Cole's The Titan's Goblet, 1833", "Thomas Cole's View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, 1837", "Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs, 1861",  "Frederic Edwin Church's Cotopaxi, 1862", "Sanford Gifford's A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove, 1862" appeared in Kaaterskill Clove, copyright © Joseph Stanton 2025, and used with permission of Shanti Arts Publishing [www.shantiarts.com].

Joseph Stanton’s ninth book of poems, Kaaterskill Clove, a sequence of poems inspired by the Hudson River School, has just been published by Shanti Arts. His previous book, Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, was also published by Shanti Arts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, The Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

​Noose or Needle 
 
Two dozen, 2022’s thin harvest’s
not nearly large enough to satiate
the hunger for the harshness we call justice.
The empty nooses anxiously await
 
the go-ahead, the warden’s secret smirk,
reprieves denied, the shattering of hope,
the dead weight dropping till a sudden jerk,
the tautness of an unforgiving rope.
 
Waists chained, the silhouettes all seem the same
except the fabrics’ varied colours – white
black, silver, brown, and red – with each one’s name
and date of death preserved in threads stitched tight.
 
We kill with needles now so there’s no pain
and tell ourselves this makes their deaths humane. 

Carl Kinsky

Carl Kinsky is a sonneteer masquerading as a criminal defense lawyer in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a quirky old town on the west bank of the Mississippi River.  He fancies himself a modern-day Pudd'nhead Wilson.

A Ceremonial Apron Made by My Great-Grandmother Flora Decuir Vallet for a Cousin's Graduation in New Roads, Louisiana, 1958

Now done with the schooling of this town, unto
other roads carry this. Its holes will not protect
from steam or stain, nor its ties fasten steadily.
It serves its purpose without clenching a waist.

Remember those wizened women behind you:
adorned with aprons through domesticity, both
tenderly betrothed and to this ox bow enchained,
as you quit this caustic warren of stifled plans.
​
Its colors bright, clearly stated, neither calico nor
plaid, will call to mind your boldest fervid dreaming.
Out East you won’t hang your auntie’s’ castiron
in the hearth. Let this remind you, on your shelf.

Jeffery U. Darensbourg

Jeffery U. Darensbourg grew up in Itta Homma (of which “Baton Rouge” is a translation) and currently resides in Bulbancha, what others call “New Orleans.” He works with words, crafting essays, poetry, academic articles, and public talks intertwining traditional academic research with autoethnography and memoir. He is a Louisiana Creole and member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation. Louisiana’s deep histories of ethnic mixing between European, African, and Indigenous Peoples are reflected in his ancestry and work. He was a 2024 United States Artists Fellow, He holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science, something reflected in the strong linguistic focus of his work.