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Nude in Chair: Four Takes, by Doris Ferleger

8/31/2020

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Picture
Despair, by Daniel Goldberg (USA) contemporary

Nude in Chair
           
Take 1
 
In the left corner of a too big bedroom, she sits, head 
in hand, belly soft, thighs dimpled against worn 
velvet armchair, dusty blue. Bed in foreground, un-
 
mussed patchwork quilt, mismatch to the pearl
buttons of her sweater she keeps in her lap, pearls 
she keeps buttoning, unbuttoning, buttoning. My 
 
demented aunt did the same. But this woman 
appears to be in her forties. Pencil skirt and gold 
lame blouse folded just so on the dresser. 
 
Fingers worrying her brow. Beside the chair,
a too bright bulb as if an interrogation room..
See how the light from the lamp slits her body in two? 

Take 2
 
You drape the sateen sheet halfway over her thigh, 
adjust the folds perhaps to sharpen the shadows 
between the folds. Or shed light on her flesh-curves. 
 
Every color—you will turn—to black and white. 
Magenta sheet, olive skin, dark angle of the bend 
in her knee—I am jealous of the nude who sits
 
head in hand in the velvet chair. Her whole body 
posed by your hands. You snap the pearls—worry 
beads between her fingers—shoot the winter 

blue eyes. The nude—a still life of your grief.
 
Take 3
 
I try on pavé diamond rings at Diane Glynn’s,
though you haven’t proposed. The jeweler ,who has 
only one real breast now, wears a 3-carot-clear-
 
yellow rock, scarlet-red lipstick and bride-white
wig. A bent and muttering man wanders the shop. 
She shakes her head, rolls her eyes. Go sit down.
 
She tells him. He does. Rises, paces. Six years now. 
She tells me. No words except “Son of a bitch”
and “Go to hell!” She laughs when she says these things. 
 
Once over dinner at a noisy restaurant you asked 
if I wanted to be surprised or if I wanted to decide 
together. We are seventy, in quarantine, and uncertain-
 
ty runs rings around us all. Yet even before COVID, 
I’ve been measuring the circumference of my ring 
finger. The distance between marriage and promises 
 
of forever we keep making and remaking. 
 
Take 4
 
You ask me not to laugh at you 
for focusing on the light.
I think of Poppa how he taught me fabric 
 
and beauty—taught me silk boucle for curtains
heavy floral brocade for formal chairs
taught me scallop valance is made by folding 
 
fabric in overlapping curved tiers, 
draping the tiers above curtains 
thereby adding grace and beauty, 
 
but not how the layers block the light 
at the top of the window from coming through.
Taught me grief and love, but not where to look--
 
for light. Forgive my not seeing the light in the folds 
of each day unfolding. Sometimes I cannot recall 
I am living— a lucky life—and you are always 
 
an innocent man. Have I told you  
you look like Poppa? Once again, I think of Poppa
how his lucky life came too late 
 
to save his family from unlucky fates. 
How he was an innocent man 
sentenced to survival’s incessant stabbing 
 
shadows. Forgive my seeing 
his shadow in the folds of my own face 
I thought was yours.

Doris Ferleger

Doris Ferleger, Ph.D., award winning poet and author of Big Silences in a Year of Rain, As the Moon Has Breath, Leavened, and When You Become Snow, has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, L.A. Review,  Poet Lore, Rattle, and South Carolina Review. The 2009 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA., Ferleger holds an MFA in Poetry and a Ph.D. in psychology and maintains a mindfulness based therapy practice in PA.

Daniel Goldberg took this photograph in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, at a workshop with Keith Carter during the annual celebration of the town's patron saint Michael. This photo was shown at the Phillips' Mill show, where he has been twice awarded Best Body of Work. Other photographs have won awards at the Perkins Center for the Arts, Grounds for Sculpture, and the Mercer County Annual Show with a photo accepted into the permanent collection of Mercer County. Goldberg's work was also included in the first and third volumes of Seeing in Sixes (2016 & 2018), a juried publication of LensWork. He is a member of Gallery14  a photography gallery in Hopewell, NJ. He is also licensed psychologist/psychoanalyst/couples therapist with a private practice in Princeton, NJ. 
 

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Soak It and See, by Bert Molsom

8/31/2020

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Picture
Textile Art by Jill Flower (Britain) contemporary

Soak It and See

We choose the materials,                     
collected from our lives,
added, shaped, imagined.

We look to stitch our future
together, making a garden
sewing seeds, nurturing flowers.

We search for harmony
with a mixture of elements
colours, forms, thoughts.

We see each piece as needed
to prevent emptiness
at the heart of the whole.

All are essential, at first,
then overwhelmed
by life which overflows,

to become a torrent washing away
the unneeded, flooding our hopes,
washing away what the water chooses,

not always what we want it to be.
We are swept down many channels,
sometimes pleasure, sometimes disappointment.

But we continue to load the material,
stitch it together with a purpose,
and, again, soak it, and see.

Bert Molsom

Bert Molsom retired early to become an apprentice poet, fully understanding apprenticeships last a long time! He has been long-listed for the Bridport Prize, won Poetry on Loan 2016 and his work has been published by Anthropocene, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acumen and The Ekphrastic Review.

Jill Flower creates designs by stitching strips of paper cut from magazines to a soluble backing which she then soaks for various periods to see what results. Each ‘age’ (childhood, maturity, old age) is interpreted by the use of pages from magazines that depict the influences, developments and interests as we mature.
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To Franz Kline, by Jeanette Willert

8/30/2020

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To Franz Kline
                    (1910-1962, American abstract expressionist)
 
From Pennsylvania coal fields you learned early,
life often belts us with black and white
passions, like lessons, stark and harsh.
 
You thought large, in huge calligraphy,
painting horizontal fists of pigment
like trusses and spiked bump stocks.
 
Your art howls,
wants to brawl, be noticed,
like you…unwanted, orphaned.
 
Your wife posed for you
in a rocking chair, like Whistler’s mother,
before madness laid its claim.
 
This melding of positive and negative -
blank canvas crosshatched with thick black swaths.
Frank O’Hara called that action.
 
There, also, though,
an element, vulnerable, human,
caged/protected, by a firm carapace.

Jeanette Willert

Jeanette Willert, former Associate Professor of English Education at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY and Director of the Western New York Writing Project, served as Vice-President of the Alabama State Poetry Society. She was honoured as their 2018 Poet of the Year. Her chapbook Appalachia, Amour won the Morris Chapbook Award (2017), Her poems appeared recently in Goat’s Milk, WINK and Libretto and, Crosswinds Poetry journals and the 2020 Anthology of Appalachian Writer (Vol. 12). Her first poetry book, it was never Eden, will be published later this year.

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Pearl Earring, by Charles H. Halsted

8/30/2020

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Picture
Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer (Netherlands) 1665

Pearl Earring 
 
On an evening stroll along Amsterdam’s canals, he 
finds himself in de Wallen, the center of the city’s 
prostitution, well known for many centuries before. 
 
He finds her behind a window outlined in red. She 
is about twenty with a demeanor of expectation, an
attractive girl with piercing looks for sizing up the
 
potential wealth of men passing by. She always uses 
the time-worn rule: the better dressed the wandering 
man, the more he will be willing to pay.  
 
On entering an inviting unlocked door, he finds
himself in an oft-used bed chamber, a sheet-
covered bed in a far corner, wash basin with toilet
 
at another. The approaching young woman asks how
many guilders he will be willing to pay. He responds 
up to five, a lot in those days. A deal has been made. 
 
As she retires behind a curtain to remove her clothing, 
he states that he is not lusting for sexual adventure. He
tells her that he is an artist, a skilled portrait painter. 
 
Reaching into the case that he carries, he removes a small
jacket trimmed with gold braid, a blue headband, a white
turban with scarf to hang from the back of her head, red 
ointment for her lips, and last of all, a pearl earring to grace
her left ear. He asks her to turn her head to the left and then
to affect an inviting gaze and faint smile. 

Charles H. Halsted

I am a retired academic physician. My poetry education consists of twelve online courses provided by Stanford Continuing Studies and various poetry workshops in California, Oregon, and New Mexico. Currently, I have published more than eighty poems in thirty three poetry journals, in one chapbook, Breaking Eighty, and in one full book, Extenuating Circumstances. A second full book, On Razor-Thin Tires, is in press for publication in December. Potentially of interest,  I am the grandson of Charles Hopkinson, who was a noted landscape artist and portrait painter of the last century.


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Vamoose Demon, Demon Begone! by Brent Terry

8/29/2020

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Picture
The Red Shoes, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2019

Vamoose Demon, Demon Begone!
 
I can’t spell, so I wore a leotard to the exorcism.
I can’t sing, so I screamed like a cello in love. 
I can’t get over you, so I tattooed 
your heart, brick by throbbing brick, 
on the wall along the ditch into which 
I hurled your next-to-last red shoe. 
Now you jitterbug among rushes and rusting 
shopping carts, spiders’ silken filaments, 
tadpoles writhing their slippery cursive like noodles 
in alphabet gumbo. You goggle frogspawn, 
fondle postdiluvian bric-a-brac and lost 
lottery tickets, hawk unclaimed futures 
while phantasms play hide and seek 
in moldering fedoras and ankle bracelets, 
mood rings and mismatched sneakers, 
shivering an ectoplasmic shimmy and singing
find me somebody to love. They wind 
themselves around your ankles like a kitten 
or a fog, slither up your inseam, run fingers 
along your dendrites like piano keys on fire.
They tickle your clattering ivories, 
diddle what you thought had died. 
Gossamer doodads and glowing motes cavort 
among the sunbeams. The insect orchestra 
tune their instruments while I limber-up 
in the wings. They say it takes two to tangle. 
Are you reeaaaady to rhuumbaaa?!?! 
Because who hasn’t slam-danced with a specter, 
who hasn’t made love to a ghost? 
Who hasn’t hitched themselves to a monster, 
lashed themselves to a pomegranate 
and screamed for juice? Who hasn’t cha-chaed 
off the deep end in one cherry-red Chuck, 
laces undone, tongue tied-up in elaborate knots?
 
​Brent Terry

​This duo is part of a larger collaboration between writer Brent Terry and artist Lorette C. Luzajic. Lorette is creating several collage-paintings to respond to Brent's poems, and Brent is creating poetry to respond to Lorette's artworks. 

Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning artist whose collage paintings have been collected in over 25 countries. She is also the author of Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems, and editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
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Streetlights, by Terrence Sykes

8/29/2020

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Picture
Streetlight, by Giacomo Balla (Italy) 1909

Streetlights
 
stoning burden of fog
               upon lost hours
               laden sea & sky
 
if only languished gods
              above & beyond 
              were lamplighters 
 
descending terra firma 
            ascending babel ladders
            lighting silenced stars

Terrence Sykes

​Terrence Sykes was born and raised in the rural coal mining area of Virginia.  This isolation brings the theme of remembrance to his creations, whether real or imagined.  Other interests include cooking, gardening, heirloom vegetable research & foraging wild edibles.  His poetry - photography - flash fiction has been published in Bangladesh ,Canada, Ireland , India, Mauritius, Pakistan, Scotland, Spain and the USA.
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Upon Seeing Nude in the Box, 1962, by Barbara Simmons

8/28/2020

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Upon Seeing Nude in the Box, 1962

"Light is my inspiration, my paint and brush. It is as vital as the model herself.”
   ~ Ruth Bernhard, photographer  
 
To be certain, there are those days,
the ones too filled with doings,
when I feel laid to rest, boxed
like Bernhard’s nude, reclining, restricted,
not able to stretch myself beyond the edges
obligations draw.   Why move when movement
only finds constraint?  Why try to stand
when horizontal planes arrest
an impulse to arise.
There is the slightest yearning in this nude, her arm
extended  just beyond her head, grasping 
space beyond the box, hoping
for beyond.   For me,
when I can glimpse the corners of my life beyond
my captive self, I’m inclined to toss,
to turn, to rotate to the perpendicular,
to let my arms and legs propel me to beyond,
to unencumbered light that paints
away the darkness of this life, at times 
too busy to see beyond.
 
Barbara Simmons
 
Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston, now resides in San Jose, California  –the two coasts inform her poetry. A graduate of Wellesley, she received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins.  As a secondary school English teacher, she loved working with students who inspired her to think about the many ways we communicate.  Retired, she savors smaller parts of life and language, exploring words as ways to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, always trying to understand more about human-ity. Publications have included, among others, The Quince, Santa Clara Review, Hartskill Review, Boston Accent,  NewVerse News, Soul-Lit, 300 Days of Sun, Writing it Real, Capsule Stories: Isolation Edition, & OASIS.

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Edgar Ende Prompt: Writing Responses

8/28/2020

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Picture
The New Bucephalus, by Edgar Ende (Germany) 1961

Ende's Busephalus Responsa

In the footsteps of Alexander the Great
I too rode my Bucephalus
Two millenia later
Along the Santorini shoreline at Eros Beach
Rearing up like a bronzed statue
To equine antiquity
Astride a well-trained Andalusian steed

The perfect war horse for cavalry mounts
Whose ancestors carried conquering Macedonians
From Thrace to Persia
Heroic exploits exceeding even
Mythic Perseus and Pegasus
As I cantered alongside limestone cliffs
Awash in the timeless spray foam of the Aegean Sea

Bruce Jacobs

Bruce Jacobs is a retired educator and administrator with the Toronto District School Board. He is currently a keyboard player with the motown/funk band One King.

**

It's All About the Horse
 
Do you see him, standing so still
on that narrow balcony?
His moonlit silver coat gleams
contrasting with the dull
red brick of my ordinary house,
both skyborne, both in my dreams.
 
I know that man who tumbles earthward now
He surprised me on the balcony,
tried to steal my steed,
but no, my dream horse threw him off.
 
Only I can ride him
Astride, together, we will  
cross the sky, over trees,
away from the ordinary.
We will leap across the lake of tears
Leaving behind the man, leaving all
who seek to hurt me
with words, with deeds. 
 
I feel no pain when I ride.
Even looking at him lifts me
I see his supple muscles
ripple as he breathes, 
his power, waiting for me.
When we ride, I have power too.
Yes, it’s all about the horse.
 
Joan Leotta

Joan Leotta loves to play with words on page and stage. Her poetry has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Verse Visual, Verse Virtual, among others. Her short stories, articles, and essays are also widely published. On stage she performs tales of food, family, and strong women. When not haunting art galleries for inspiration, she wanders the beach, cooks, and spends hours talking and laughing with family and friends. Her chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon is out from Finishing Line Press.

**

Fall from the Horse of War, 1961
 
Edgar Ende, forced to stop painting 
by Germany in 1936, conscripted as a gunner,                      
has a man, naked, fall from Alexander’s horse 
corralled in a balcony on the Berlin Wall.
 
Surrealist dreams wait through nights
for the first cup of coffee when chairs
are set out at the cafe while your bed 
sweats twenty years of artillery blasts. 
 
A year after the building of the wall,
we worry the Cuban Missile Crisis 
90 miles from the coast of Florida 
and the haunt of Hemingway.  
 
A warrior loses his stage and the dialog 
between two men and a beautiful woman
in For Whom the Bell Tolls centres around 
how many horses needed to get out alive.
 
We hide under desks not far from the coast,
only obtain a white horse if we chase 
it across a field and ride three on its back,  
still young enough we’re not a burden.          
 
A rifle brings down what motors by 
the book depository in a convertible,
wakings now riddled with metal shards 
before we board the bus for school.
 
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.

**


The Beginning of the Ende

held
in illusion--
a bottomless web

The horse has a shadow, but it casts from no apparent light source.  No path appears between staying and going.  Reversed, his vision seems frozen.

What he sees—is it profound or just strange?  No time to brood about meaningless questions when all life has fallen away.

He considers wings, creature wings, human wings, and they open in his mind with a stunned shattering, a magnetic pull of man to horse, a merging of elements rising towards the consuming fire of creation.

form--
a process
replenished by time

Kerfe Roig

A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new.  Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/  (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/, and see more of her work on her website http://kerferoig.com/

**


Shadow

So rare as window, psyche drawn -
they speak of mesmerising frame -
internal shadow laid afore,
from fearful eye, flit cloak withdrawn,
turn sunlight beaming, morning star,
so stallion tamed, but not the mind.

The surreal, Surreal classed,
Spiegel im Spiegel, mirror work,
not art prefabricated, stored;
haunch to wall, blue eyed from foal,
the two, both Great and Head of Ox
association, myth in mix.

Kafka, Baron, Father Brown,
the mare of night, tall story, bike,
this name has long been borrowed, worn
by fiction, mystery, old lore,
then told, one generation more,
by Michael, other Ende on.

This artist told he cannot paint,
express himself, what’s in his brain;
as war destroyed his oeuvre past,
is this the mighty hemmed, cross barred,
or Plato’s cave, where shades are played?

Like funnel flag of shipping line
or white, black field, as terror sign -
identity - so twinkle’s where? 
What exploits, epic tales hear groan,
who brims in head, unstable, door,
unbolted view, dark horse alleged, 
free fall of man - how Kafkaesque -
Bucephalus, rein unrestrained?

Stephen Kingsnorth
​

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had over 160 pieces published by on-line poetry sites, including The Ekphrastic Review, printed journals and anthologies.  https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/

**

To Edgar Ende Regarding The New Bucephalus

The French, their films, reborn untamed
historic place in art had claimed
--  the human tale more coarsely told
as if transmuting base to gold

from veins of raw emotion mined
for pyrite of ironic find
to play upon illusive stage
as mirrored lustre to engage

the mind in wisdom twice retold
becoming lesson taking hold
much like your fabled horse as toy
that represents the pain and joy

untamed becoming lured descent
beyond the roar of discontent.

Portly Bard

Portly Bard: Old man.
Ekphrastic fan. 
 
Prefers to craft with sole intent
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...

ideally also compliment.

**
O Captain 

O Captain’s child
bestride atomic Bucephalus
broken and slouched 
your lance unready
tilting at viral windmills
riding ever downwards
proclaiming “the world is flat”
the fearful storm return’d
and your compass has been lost
so you ride boldly ride
your course is already set
down the ramp of history
to face a false foe
and how we fell far short
of any victory deserved

Mark A. Fisher

Mark A. Fisher is a writer, poet, and playwright living in Tehachapi, CA.  His poetry has appeared in: riverbabble, Spectrum, Silver Blade, Penumbra, Lummox, and many other places. His first chapbook, drifter, is available from Amazon. His second, hour of lead, won the 2017 San Gabriel Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest.

​**

Masterpiece
 
No stars.
 
Tonight, an air-raid sky, streaking Prussian ink.
Somewhere
out of woods, imagined flares light my free-
 
fall into blues.
You could stop me if you whinnied, reared up,
kicked iron,
 
braying some alarm to spirit me back. But you
stand erect,
unmoved by sound or shadow, so calm within 
 
a peacetime cage.
You wait there, bronzed, as I spiral, naked as 
at birth. You let
 
me plunge headfirst, hands out to darkness.
No parachute is
opening to cloak the crash onto rust-flecked
 
wire barbs
below where starved crows or buzzards twist
and pull
 
my artist's guts until there’s just some pecked
carcass.
And I am nothing, except what’s left in you.
 
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 webzines including Words for the Wild, Another North, The Ekphrastic Review and Failed Haiku.

**


A Dream
 
In the dream
he tries to mount an untamable horse,
tumbles again and again,
 
like Sisyphus doomed
to endless, timeless struggle,
through the turning of days, years,
 
empires ascend and wane,
shimmer briefly--like stars--to fall
into a black hole,
 
where upside down becomes right side up.
 
Even so, the dream is immutable,
caught on canvas--
as the world revolves again
 
under the glimmering echoes of light that was,
galloping toward what might be 
a chimera, a challenge, or a vision.
 
Merril D. Smith

Merril D. Smith is a poet and historian. Her poetry and stories have appeared recently in Rhythm & Bones, Vita Brevis, Streetlight Press, Ghost City, Twist in Time, Mojave Heart Review, Wellington Street Review, Blackbough Poetry, and Nightingale and Sparrow.

**


High Horse

Victory secured
By an embellished crown blazing 
And grandiose breastplate
Underlined with tunic blue
Regalia passed down to the eldest
With divine right to rule
He relishes in bardic rhythm
The singing clash of swords
Composing a kingly epic
Riding higher than the common man
All must look up in exaltation
This touch of heaven
Will lift him to legend 
Pride squarely measured 
In blood stained pawns
Corpses evidence his power
Nothing can cage this vision
Until pain blemishes royal blue
Failing equilibrium shifts prophecy
As he reaches out for the earth
Life conquered in coursing red
Still the final thought 
Of his spinning mind proves true
“A king does not die”
Widows will tell stories of the king’s hubris
Remembered for generations
Forever the fallen angel
Naked in his ambition

Amanda Chandler
​
Amanda Chandler’s muse kindles her passion for poetry and education. She believes the most important lessons in life can rarely be found in a textbook. This is why she shares her experience and distinct perspective through poetry (even when it makes her feel vulnerable) hoping others may dare to do the same.

**

Literally 
  
That’s always going to be you, that man falling. For just half a moment, forget that ’94 ever happened, forget that there was no way out of that one.
 
For now, behave as if there were half a hundred ways that whole thing could have played out that would have ended well. Believe they all would have ended well for you and for them.
 
Yes, that’s still you falling, but why is it now? Is it because of the first one, or maybe because of your mother? Is it the latest one, and just because she doesn’t want you?
 
Are you still falling regardless of which of any of these women choose anyone other than you?
 
Are you so far gone that you yourself are gone? The crown has been uncrowned, the seat usurped, and here you are left with nothing but the truth—all of it.
 
This is what you said you were always willing to live in full admission of…yet here you are damning at and hating it, wanting to go back farther and farther until…what?—until that isn’t you falling to your death?
 
Stop re-writing where he’s going! He’s dying, he’s not being delivered from a grim fate, he’s not being reborn, he’s not saved by the horse that’d once been his only friend.
 
It’s questionable whether that “friend” is even looking on anymore, or if he’s got his sights set on another he’d like to befriend.
 
The point is: you’re still falling. You’re going, going, going—gone! And this time you’ve no say in how this plays out. You have all the time in the world to consider and reconsider everything and everyone at every possible moment you were alive and you dreamed and were slain by them.
 
But you are on your way to death and you still see your end as coming from without—from them!—instead of from within: you!
 
You took it too much to heart, all of it. None of them were “the one” and none of them wanted to be. Even those who thought it over, who might’ve even said yes, even they would have changed their minds about you.
 
A curse is not a collection of poor choices—that would be your life. And now, your death is only the admission that these were your choices that never felt like choices in the moment. It’s not ’94, fine…it’s all of them, every one of them. But not any of these women in and of themselves—it’s what you did and what you said in convincing yourself you were nothing without them.
 
The old man said they would be your downfall, and of course, why not take him literally this time. The only other time he was right was when he said you were your own worst enemy. Of course, of course.

Garth Ferrante

Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who writes and makes games out of challenging his own creativity.  He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless.

**

The New Bucephalus

Floating above,
Ghostly white,
Statuesque,
The New Bucephalus stands.

No color in him now,
No life,
Gone is Philoneicus’s wildhorse,
The once shadow-shy and mighty

Favored mount of Alexander,
See how he is thrown,
The king of Macedon is thrown,
Ever-earthward into the canopy,

The New Bucephalus stands 
In a suspended UFO stall,
A balcony-penned alien
Unscared of its shadow.

Ian Evans

Ian Evans is an emerging writer and middle school teacher with his B.A. in English and an Ed.M. in Secondary English Education. He is co-author of "The Mechanic," a graphic poem. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his wife, who is also a writer and teacher.

**

Freedom

A naked man and his naked horse 
run away from his house one midnight.

The horse can sprout invisible wings, 
and fly. They flew high above the ground, 
far away from the man’s house,

away from the man's wife and son, 
and all responsibilities. 
He wanted to be free. 
Free like his naked horse which flies.
The naked horse wanted to be free
of the naked man.

Searching for escape, they find 
a floating palace mid-air, a golden palace. 
The naked man and the naked horse 
walk inside to find the rooms painted 
in blocks of colours. Light blue, indigo, 
blood red, orange. The naked horse 
absorbed its wings back.

They went out the balcony 
to look at the sight outside. 
Dawn was approaching. Hedges 
and trees and shrubs and hills turned 
from black to dark green. 
The green of the earth and the blue of the sky 
were now separating 
from the one whole black they were earlier.

From the balcony, they saw 
a huge mass of smoke rising. 
The sun rose to see 
dense dirty brown smoke coiling like 
thousands of pythons mating in mud,
going up higher, and higher...
Suddenly sparks appeared
within the coil.
The naked animals saw orange, 
deep orange fire-like thing
created inside the fury of the mating dance. 
Then suddenly, a huge boom… !
BOOM. 
The world was white for a moment, 
everything miles around it destroyed,
even the palace 
the naked animals were at.

Only a bit of the palace was left floating. 
The the balcony could fit 
only one animal now. 
The naked horse kicked 
the naked man off. The horse should have flown, 
the man should have been on the balcony.  
But the horse kept standing 
on the piece of concrete afloat. 
The naked man fell head on, 
downwards, (gravity doing its work,)
thinking of his wife and his son, 
and the ultimate freedom which 
all animals find in the end, 
whether they want it, or not.

The naked man’s wife and son died 
in the blast the naked creatures witnessed, 
the wife unaware of her husband’s running away, 
the son not knowing of his father’s abandonment. 
They died loving him. 
The naked man swam to his life 
having landed on water, and not concrete. 

It was Ammonium Nitrate, they said,
- that caused  the ruin.
Not nature’s fury, 
nor an alien attack, 
but faulty storage of
an otherwise harmless chemical,
which used properly
would have fertilized the soil
making it more productive,
benefiting the land.
The opposite happened.
Carelessness caused the fiasco. 
Carelessness, which was felt upto 150 miles.
Carelessness, and 5000 people hurt.
Carelessness, and 135 lives lost.
And more.

What price to pay for carelessness!
So much loss for nothing!

The naked man all clothed now, 
is bound by the human chain again,
searching for another wife, 
wishing for another son. 

The winged horse flew away 
to freedom.

Susma Sharma Gurumayum

Susma Sharma Gurumayum is from India. After receiving a Gold Medal in her Masters in History, she went on to do a PhD in Environmental History. She has won four poetry competitions organised by Kaafiya, a poetry community based in Delhi, India. She loves words.

**

The Release of Wild Things
 
And when Bucephalos was tamed,
he dreamed of the steppes. Of breathless
runs, of sand, stone, mountains and wide, flowing rivers.
When he could still fly, his mane whipping his back in a wind
blown by the gods.
They said he had wings.
 
And after the man had gained his trust, the man
cut those wings. Bucephalos’ sorrow filled the air
he breathed; his cries pierced Andromeda.
The man who’d cheated him of his freedom
swung upon his back and reminded Bucephalos of his loss.
When the man’s heels pressed into his flanks,
Bucephalos bucked against the humiliation.
Then he resigned himself.
There was nothing else.
 
Bucephalos communed with the gods
of horses, after all he had been a prince
in his own right.
Before.
He would have been a king.
And the gods guided him through battles, pain, and indignities.
Never dishonour. Never that. He would serve
his master as though of his own free will
and thus transform his subjugation
into an act of pride and sacrifice.
 
One day the gods were busy elsewhere.
Bucephalus sustained grave injuries.
Dying, Bucephalos relaxed into his homecoming,
and saw himself rising towards the night sky
proud and erect in a small cage made for men,
a cage of contradiction that he knew would set him free. 
 
His last breath was a thrust of powerful thought,
and the man who had been his nemesis
and only friend tumbled into space, naked and powerless
in the knowledge that he would never again
aspire to a kingdom.
​
Rose Mary Boehm

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and Tangents, a full-length poetry collection published in the UK in 2011, she was three times winner of the Goodreads monthly competition. Recent poetry collections: From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939-1949: A Child’s Journey and Peru Blues or Lady Gaga Won’t Be Back. Her latest full-length poetry MS, The Rain Girl, will be published by Chaffinch Press end August 2020.

**

Ox Head

They said he was untameable 
and afraid of his own shadow,
branded skittish with an ox head,
none could soothe his rodeo.

The gentling of Bucephalus 
began with the gentle whispers
and flourished into fraternity
without saddle, reins or spurs. 

They camped under starless skies,
future king and Thessalian steed,
faced the sting of metal
and watched men bleed.

Too many men and horses died in battle
to the song of war cries and weapons’ rattle.

Kim M. Russell

Kim M. Russell has been writing poetry since she was a schoolgirl but only began submitting to competitions and anthologies when she retired from teaching in 2014. Her poems have been published on-line by Visual Verse, among others, and in print: Afflatus Magazine, River Writes (Bure Navigation Conservation Trust), Anthology of Aunts and Second Place Rosette (Emma Press), Peeking Cat Anthologies 2017 and 2018, and Field Work (UEA Publishing Project with Kunsthalle Cromer). She lives in the UK, in East Anglia between the North Sea coast and the Norfolk Broads, with her husband and two cats.

**

Mighty Bucephalus
 
Onstage 
Majestic Bucephalus,
but the rider, fallen.
 
First suspended 
from nothing
but a memory.
 
Below, a range of trees
waits 
to receive.
 
Was it your horse,
Great Discoverer, 
who made you great?
 
Was it because you knew
how to lead? Did you whisper 
in the ear? Did you know

how to turn the head? This horse 
would have no shadows--
by the Jhelum he lay down.
 
How great the love
between horse and rider.
 
Carole Mertz

Carole Mertz, poet and essayist, is published recently at The League of Canadian Poets, The Bangalore Review, and in Poetry Quarterly (print edition.) She enjoys reviewing for various literary journals. Her forthcoming collection Color and Line is with Kelsay Books.

**

The Moon-Shadow Horses


                                             "Where there is much light, the shadow is great."
                                                                                               Goethe

                                                "The uses of shadow are simply modern perversions
                                                  of a symbol people see in themselves which represent
                                                  fear of the world, of political change."

                                                                                                 Phantammeron, Mitchell Stokely

         i.

           Was the blue night deep and starless   over the valleys of Thessalonika
           when the moon-shadow horses emerged from Aegean sea waves?   Near

           Larissa,   they pulled the chariots of the gods for centuries, from Greece
           when Alexander spoke soothingly to an untamed horse,   great in history,

           whispering of their future,   how Bucephalus, his forehead marked
           with a fallen star, meant freedom and desire,   the fulfillment of the boy's

           dreams, traveling east from Macedonia;   and it could be said the horse's
           trust was created by the boy's breath, instinctive --   the fire of friendship

           and determination --    how Alexander trained Bucephalus so he wouldn't see
           his shadow --   a darker horse which seemed to distress the animal.

            ii.

            and there's no way to test the velocity    as wings glued with wax
            begin to melt, liquid flowing through feathers --    owl, eagle, hawk,

            and crow --  birds sacred to Zeus and Apollo,    the gods turning away
            as Icarus flies too high, escaping Crete,   solar power not yet the center

            of scientific cosmology,   the impact of its heat inaccurately measured
            by the unevolved truth of laws defined by terra firma --    the greenhouse effect

            (warm or too warm?) --  as the boy fails to navigate    the heavenly flames
            and falls, his body reversed, upside down   so he can see Poseidon's horses

            rising from the sea,   and the horses of Hades pulling a chariot; and above,
            a white horse with wings, Pegasus   too late to save him from the gates of gravity.

            iii.

            There is no record of a crash in the "Aerial Times,"    if the moon-shadow
             horses pulled a chariot that collided with reality    in a constellation,

             stars in the shape of Pegasus   seen by Ptolemy at Alexander's camp fires;
             or a fire-blast from the sun's chariot, broken in half before dawn.   In his studio
            
             with a sky-light, the artist paints a New Bucephalus,   unable to move
             on the canvas,   caged by a balcony that resembles the front of a chariot --

              the Sun's or Moon's --    his body shining like polished metal, the 13 Talents
              Alexander wagered  to win him.    "The cart has come before the horse,"

              and Bucephalus is looking down,   trying not to see his shadow, pinned to him
              when the moon is blocked by the corner of a wall     broken away in Berlin.

               iv.

              The artist's choices were not his own   after bombs falling on Munich
              destroyed most of his canvasses.    Conscripted by the Luftwaffe,

              he was trained to operate anti-aircraft artillery,   to destroy flying objects.
              What survived in the sky was surreal,   like the eastern corner

              of a broken dream -- a nightmare --   a puzzle piece of the Berlin Wall
              shaped like an airplane wing.    It cannot support a body, falling,

              polished silver like the figure of Bucephalus,   a horse 
              who can't cross the night sky    without Alexander

              as he leads the moon-shadow horses,   shades of their past falling away
              with the artist's, west divided from east
                                                                                      in the earth's uncertain twilight


               Laurie Newendorp

                  Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston.  Her book, When Dreams Were
                  Poems, 2020, ends with an ekphrastic poem, "Orpheus In The 21st Century."
                  Orpheus was the last of the Greek gods, and Alexander, believed to be the son
                  of Zeus, enters history (357 - 323 BC) part myth and part god, conquering lands
                  west to east, with Bucephalus.  Edgar Ende painted The New Bucephalus, 1961
                  in the year the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall was built.  In his painting,
                  the freedom of the horse is restricted, and a young "god," his damaged head
                  oddly mechanistic, his facial identity destroyed, falls into a new and complex
                  world.  The colors in the painting, red and blue, and the figures in silver, make
                   it impossible not to think of economics, age and politics (John Kennedy was
                   inaugurated in America in 1961) in an election year (2020) its outcome unknown. 



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SUBMIT to the UPCOMING EKPHRASTIC ANTHOLOGY!!!

The Ekphrastic Review is compiling an ebook anthology of poetry and prose inspired by international art.

Deadline to submit  is November 1, 2020.

The prompts are in the ebook, The Ekphrastic World: 60 Art Prompts From Around the Globe.

Purchase of this ebook supports The Ekphrastic Review- thank you so much- and qualifies you to submit fifteen poems or five stories. ($20 CAD, about $15 USD).

We are excited about our first anthology! It is a celebration of five years of TER online. 

The diverse, international art prompts curated in this collection will inspire your ekphrastic practice.

Many thanks!


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The Addictive Futility of Hope, by Brent Terry

8/27/2020

2 Comments

 
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The Addictive Futility of Hope, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2020

The Addictive Futility of Hope
 
is what she calls her latest installation,
which is mainly bees on leashes
and fading plastic poppies. The best art 
is collaboration between people and nature, 
she says, like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty 
or a tornado doing a tarantella with a barn. 
She steals the phony flowers from a cemetery 
out by the interstate, leaves pots 
of black-eyed Susans beneath the stones. 
She says that a stalk of wheat driven 
through a fencepost by a twister 
tells us all we need to know about God. 
She says the membrane is permeable, 
but only in one direction. Every morning 
she catches bees in the field of wild-
flowers behind her house. Every evening 
she lets them go. She weeps when they sting 
her goodbye. She says the last song 
on every record is a forlorn, fragile buzzing, 
says just watching the shopping carts drift 
across rain-slick asphalt can make her cry. 
She trembles sometimes when a lover touches 
her face. As if a storm means the drought is over, 
she says, as if touching makes us any less alone. 
As if bees ever did anything but love us.
As if their stings are nearly penance enough.

Brent Terry

​This duo in a larger collaboration between writer Brent Terry and artist Lorette C. Luzajic is a kind of reverse ekphrasis:  Lorette created the collage-painting to respond to the poem. It is from a larger series slowly underway of poems inspired by her mixed media paintings, and paintings inspired by Brent's poems.

Brent Terry’s poems, stories, plays, essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines.  He is the author of the poetry collections yesnomaybe, Wicked, Excellently, and the recently released Troubadour Logic,as well as a novel, The Body Electric.  Among the honours he has garnered are a fellowship from the Connecticut Arts and Tourism Board and the 2017 Connecticut Poetry Prize, as well as nominations for Best of the Net and Bettering American Poetry.  Terry has worked with writers of all ages and abilities, and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Connecticut State University.  He lives in and runs the trails around Willimantic, CT.

Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning artist whose collage paintings have been collected in over 25 countries. She is also the author of Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems, and editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
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Two Poems on Jin Eui Kim, by Colin Pink

8/27/2020

1 Comment

 
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Ceramic by Jin Eui Kim (Britain, b. S. Korea) contemporary. Click image for artist site.
 
Sijo - Opject Lower Form (after Jin Eui Kim ceramics) 

A flying saucer lands on my shelf     it spins before my eyes.
Heft of a discus in my hand      waiting to be thrown again.
All revolves around the still centre        of your black pupil.


Picture
Ceramic by Jin Eui Kim (Britain, b. S. Korea) contemporary

Ceramic Beauty Opject Spherical Form (for Korean potter Jin Eui Kim)
 
The Korean pot is frozen motion, the beauty
of its ribbed body invites visual meditation.
 
Sober colours, white, grey, black and pale
steel blue kiss each other beneath the glaze.
 
A tongue of light licks its smooth skin raising
a slick wet highlight on these perfect curves.

Colin Pink

Colin Pink’s poems have appeared several times in The Ekphrastic Review and in various literary magazines such as Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen, South Bank Poetry, Magma, Under the Radar, Poetry Salzburg Review and Poetry News and online at Ink Sweat & Tears, Blue Nib, and The High Window. He has published two poetry collections: Acrobats of Sound, 2016 from Poetry Salzburg Press and The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament, 2019 from Against the Grain Press.
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