Allegory of Sight
The small dogs are terrified, the bird transfixed as Venus and Cupid ponder a picture of Jesus making a blind man see. Some rich collector said “paint my room,” and Brueghel did: an opulent chaos of paintings and busts, globes and calipers, red curtain peeled back like an eyelid, and angled on a pedestal, a telescope. When Galileo studied stars and rearranged the spheres, believers stoked their fires and turned away. But Breughel stared. This is the mind of man, he said, what seeing sees. All there is is here: these images, that red, that gorgeous chandelier. Ruth Hoberman Ruth Hoberman retired a few years go after thirty years as a Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. She lives and writes in Chicago. Her essays and poems have appeared in such journals as [PANK], Natural Bridge, Spoon River Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Adirondack Review, and The Examined Life. She has an essay forthcoming in Consequence Magazine.
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El Palacio, 1946
A watercolour of a rundown, deserted street in Mexico shows a hotel far from palatial. Is this one of the small towns the Hoppers drove through on springtime journeys. Jo driving, Edward sketching, the old Packard’s windows open. He sees stucco buildings with rooftops corroded, second story windows hollowed out. Wrought iron balconies over unlit neon signs for Ford, for theatre and dance halls. Industry, too, has closed down, left this town. The steel building with a chute behind El Palacio rusts while mountains beyond are weighted in Hopper’s grays and blacks. Gaping doors darken this street which once could have been painted pastel pink and sky blue. Now tinted with marquees no one is there to see. Except Edward Hopper with his fondness for icons, his need to inhabit abandoned places. Diana Pinckney Diana Pinckney, Charlotte, NC, has five collections of poetry, including The Beast and The Innocent, 2015, FutureCyclePress. She is the Winner of the 2010 Ekphrasis Prize, Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Prize and Prime Number’s 2018 Award. She admits to being addicted to writing ekphrastic poems and has led a workshop on this form for the Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts. When God Calls To Mary he sent my namesake angel Gabriel, so she would not miss that He was calling. Was it Verrocchio who framed her features or was young, DaVinci in charge of setting forth Mary’s character for us. We know his master, Verocchio Instructed him to “finish the angel.” Mary seems alert, in command, almost cold—one hand on her reading, interrupted by the messenger, other hand raised in greeting or astonishment, or was she stopping Gabriel’s flow of words to fill the space between them with her response? Yet I am drawn to a different picture of her, one framed by her own words, not brushstrokes-- “My soul doth magnify the Lord…” Is the pride the knowledge that “all generations will call me blessed.” My own soul seethes with questions, pines for artistic answers not given here. Perhaps not even DaVinci’s masterful brushstrokes can tell me how to recognize God’s call when He does not send an angel. Joan Leotta Joan Leotta has been playing with words on page and stage since childhood in Pittsburgh. She is a writer and story performer. Her Legacy of Honor series feature strong Italian-American women. Her poetry and essays appear or are forthcoming in Gnarled Oak, the A-3 Review, Hobart Literary Review, Silver Birch, Peacock, and Postcard Poems and Prose among others. Her first poetry chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, was just released by Finishing Line Press. Joan's picture books from Theaqllc, Whoosh!, Summer in a Bowl, Rosa and the Red Apron, and Rosa's Shell celebrate food and family. Her award-winning short stories are collected in Simply a Smile. You can find more about her work on her blog at www.joanleotta.wordpress.com You Are Here Robert L. Dean, Jr.
Robert L. Dean, Jr.'s work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, River City Poetry, Heartland!, and the Wichita Broadsides Project. He read at the 13th Annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in April 2018 at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. His haibun placed first at Poetry Rendezvous 2017. He was a quarter-finalist in the 2018 Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry contest. He has been a professional musician and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas. Call to Action I leaned in to hear and leaned back to absorb. She placed the crinkly bundle on the table when I looked away. Just the two of us in the room; I'm not sure who was interviewing whom. If I hadn't looked closely, I would have thought it was trash and brushed it aside. Like the others had done, she said. One had picked it up in both hands, clapped and crushed it. That was not my nature. I unwrapped it gently. As the paper fell away, I turned it in the air. The feather changed colour in the light. The dried plant was delicate, close to dust. The twig was water worn. The stone was wrapped in thread. Not "what does it mean," she said, but "what do you hear." She pounded her chest and sang a long note. "And what will you do?" Peace Please. Sit on this bench. I protest it is too small; it will not bear my weight. But sitting is not only with the body. She says she once left part of her heart for a test. But, I say, it is only twigs and thread and feathers. Yes, she says, and life and line and lightness. A path to empathy. Please, she says. Just please. Justice Washes Up We walk on the shingle, feeling every pebble under bare feet. I can see the line stretching backward and forward, the sharp edge between wet wave and dry land. We have gritty hands and heavy pockets. She picks up a twig, then a stone. Each one, a story of exile. On the table, she reunites the family, creating a balance in small scale. A smell of spray and algae. On the wall, the shadows add to her poem with triangles and diamonds. Filled out in triplicate, submitted for inspection. But still, the children are missing. The sharp lines temporarily erased, waiting to be redrawn. Joy in Every Little Moment
She removes a thread from my dress and winds it around her finger for later. There is movement everywhere. Lemons, berries, and grapes are loose on the wood table in her kitchen. My appetite sated with colour, I can only admire the fruit even as she bites a grape with sharp teeth. Threads of many colours wave to me in the breeze like hair, flowing from a tree I can't see. These are the notes, she says. She tears a piece of cardboard from a box, winds my thread around it, and passes it back to me. A present. The present. Alisa Golden Alisa Golden works with words, ink, and fibres and is the editor of Star 82 Review. She teaches writing, letterpress printing, and bookmaking around the San Francisco Bay Area. Her stories and poems have been published in Blink-Ink, Split Rock Review, Diagram, and Gone Lawn, among others. She is the author of Making Handmade Books. www.neverbook.com Waylaid
May is playing tricks again. Winter rears like records skip in deep grays that break suggestions of spring. Each year does this but we hold fast our rancor. Each year we are going to leave, have to leave—must, and it's true. (As we watch another year of tulips blooms then, battered by snow, slump into slush.) I cough complaint and scrape ice, infer nothing from the honk of unseen Canada Geese overhead—again, returned too soon. Summer is coming with its snow-melt floods for July then its months of barely-a-drop-of- rain. I clutch my defeat with weak-kneed ardor, you hold my collapse at the door. Nano Taggart Nano Taggart probably likes your dogs better than his neighbours, and is a founding editor of Sugar House Review. By day, he works as a fundraiser for the Utah Shakespeare Festival. By night, he researches new hot sauces for his collection. He's a co-recipient from a grant from the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, and you can see some of his stuff in Terrain.org, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, and on some beautiful broadsides for sale at Art Works Gallery in Cedar City, Utah. Plot to Steal Genitals From Statue Spoiled
(Headline from Weekly World News, April 21, 2003) This intended theft should come as no surprise for Michelangelo’s great David is the perfect mark-- seventeen feet tall on his pediment in the Galeria dell’Academia in Firenze, all Italian marble, smooth as desire and as immobile. He will not run away, will not flinch, will not cry out when the chisel finds its spot and the hammer draws back. One look at his face, at the furrowed, frowning brow and searching eyes, and we can see wariness, suspicion, a stony glare. He has been expecting some such defilement all these years, has been on guard for half a millennium. And why not? He knows about the great Sphinx at Gaza, old no-nose the mouth-breather. What a theft that was! Fifteen nasal tons thumping on the sand then subdivided for getaway. And he knows what happened to the lovely Venus, her long white arms snapped off, taken by marauding soldiers, spoils of victory. He can’t imagine her with arms now or with pale hands’ frozen ineffable gesture. Where would she hold her hands and how? Her torso is the more beautiful, he thinks, its soft curves the more breath-taking for lack of unnecessary accessories and their distraction. Maybe the same will be true for him. Cecil Morris Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English in California, where he wrote numerous memos, lesson plans, and the occasional poem. He has had a few poems published, mostly in English teacher magazines (English Journal and California English) and small literary magazines (Poem and Hiram Review). The Watchers They might be sisters, but they are not out scouting for some picturesque picnic spot on Whitley Sands. The red-scarfed woman isn't clutching a blanket; she hand-knotted that net, and the basket the auburn-haired one pins against her hip is the creel for herring they hope their men will haul up when they return. Those fists planted on the fishwives' windward hips hold this world up. They rose before sunrise to bait lines with sand-worms, then waded into waves to launch flat-bottomed cobles. Now the harder work after the work begins. They stand on the cliff and scan the sea for skiffs. They have worried pre-dawn fog away, weakened the chop to allow boats to beach. Breezes have dried their flannel skirts, while the women wait, watch, wait. David Sloan A graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Poetry Program, David Sloan teaches at Maine Coast Waldorf High School in Freeport. His debut poetry collection—The Irresistible In-Between—was published by Deerbrook Editions in 2013. His poetry has appeared in The Café Review, Chiron Review, Down East, Innisfree, Lascaux Review, Moon City Review, Naugatuck River Review, New Millenium Writings and Passager, among others. He received the 2012 Betsy Sholl Award, Maine Literary awards in 2012 and 2016, The Margaret F. Tripp Poetry Award, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is currently enjoying life's latest delight—grandfatherhood! The Village of the Mermaids 1942, Oil on panel Paul Delvaux Those who cross the sea change the sky, not their souls ~ Horace it’s there: above ankles crossed beneath home-school dresses, her folded hands conceal secrets aligned at right angles. but as her eyes implore the middle distance between a compromise and insignificance, her ears catch the liquid shifting— a past just beyond the stillness she can’t let go. for Rachel MEH MEH is Matthew E. Henry, a Pushcart nominated poet with works appearing in publications including Brick Rhetoric, Kweli Journal, Poetry East, Rhino, Spillway, and Syntax. He’s a high school teacher who spends money he doesn’t have on way too many advanced degrees in various content areas. Portrait of a Womb
Where do we hide the things we cannot un-see? In the cataract of an eye? In the decaying muscle fibers of an infarcted heart? In a papier-mâché womb? Her womb is the portrait of an ocean-coloured sky filled with our dead things. You ask: how does a woman hold a dead man in her womb? She wraps him in paper-thin gold, with chains like metal keloids of ripped flesh fastened to her bosom so that he will not slip-- his body hangs from her tree his head lobbed to one side, bobbing like a brown-petaled flower blooming. She drapes her soul in pearls. The allure of metal on black skin has hypnotized the observer & the observed for centuries. One might say arrogance wears death with aplomb. One might claim the infamy is her own scarred womb turned window, like a eulogy praising death. One might wish she were saying this is so we won’t forget that within that dark pool of the soul a world of dead men hang, fixed pretty in gold. .chisaraokwu. Editor's note: This poem was written about Rest in Peace, a visual artwork/photograph by Fabiola Jean-Louis (USA, b. Haiti). Please click here and scroll down to see the stunning original image of inspiration for this poem. The image shown above is a placeholder as we were unable to contact the artist. .chisaraokwu. is a poet, actor & healthcare futurist. She is grateful to have had her works published in many literary and academic journals. She is passionate about addressing trauma through the arts, is semi-obsessed with the indigenous religious traditions of the Igbo of eastern Nigeria and completely obsessed with the Italian language. Find her on IG: @naijabella. |
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