Daniel Clayman's Radiant Landscape (The Blue Panel) It's a net that catches every colour except gorgeous cobalt blue which slips through to become a pool of aqua on the floor shimmering. Bill Waters Bill Waters is a longtime writer of short poetry and compressed prose. He also runs the Poetry in Public Places Project, a Facebook / real-world group interested in creating and promoting poetry in public spaces to increase the richness of everyday life. Bill lives in Pennington, New Jersey, U.S.A., with his wonderful wife and their amazing cat.
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The Ekphrastic Review takes a considerable amount of time, about 60 hours a month. While we keep our expenses very low, any and all expenses come out of my own pocket. I am grateful to everyone who has sent a gift to help make the load lighter. Recently, I had to fork out $315 USD for a web upgrade and maintenance fees, etc. If you feel moved to help with this, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I really want The Ekphrastic Review to be able to stay, grow, and be with us for years to come. I use my own resources because I love this project and I love our writers and I love art. I would be very grateful for anyone who would like to help with this recent fee. You can give a one time gift of $5, $10, or more (in Canadian dollars!) Click here. THANK YOU. You can also buy an ebook. You get a collection of ekphrastic prompts, or some poetry, and help us too. Click here. Norwegian Woe "Then why do I feel alone?" So Long, Marianne, Leonard Cohen Marianne taught Leonard fish is fisk bird means fugl Norwegian mermaids know the cold and futile the wish to fly away to go so long Oslo Leonard taught Marianne he was the Hydra bird she was the song fish swimming in his words Tricia Marcella Cimera Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Her work is found in many diverse places online and in print, ranging from the Buddhist Poetry Review to The Ekphrastic Review. Her micro-chapbook entitled GO SLOW, LEONARD COHEN, was recently released through the Origami Poems Project. One of her poems is pleased to have earned a Pushcart Prize nomination. Tricia lives with her husband and family of cats in Illinois, in a town called St. Charles, by a river named Fox, with a Poetry Box (also named Fox) in her front yard. The Phillips’ Most Popular Painting (after "Sonnet 43" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party) How do I love thee? He looks down her dress. I first love your bosom, then what’s below. No fear, I’ll be gentle; we’ll take it real slow-- if you will allow me, you’ll love my caress. She thinks: I love you. I think. More or less. Though we have just met, we could make it a go. You will ask me I hope--I wouldn’t say no. I love your shoulders—OMG they impress! He sees him lean back: A Bear of a guy! I loved his arms when he pulled on the oar. I think he’s gay, but I can’t catch his eye. I’d love to be with him! I’d make him want more! Renoir’s famous painting where young people try to hit on each other brings bucks through the door. Luncheon of the Museum Assistant They linger yet, luncheon table still set-- disordered linen, crystal, grapes, and wine. Relaxed, aglow, some friends, some newly met, their clothes and hats are casual, yet fine. She stands apart as patrons come and go; her work to answer queries and to guard. Her uniform is drab, her heels worn low; she lives alone in sinking self-regard. Boaters sur la terrasse, patrons in the room, all talking to each other, not to her. She dreams ahead to lunch break, coming soon; admires again the bonnet with red fleurs. In sculpture garden she will eat alone the sandwich au jambon she brought from home. Picnic on the Point The parties in grad school were never like that, I thought, while admiring the Phillip’s Renoir. Our clothes Sixties casual, when friends picnicked at the park with the Point on Lake Michigan’s shore. I was shy, retreated from casual talk, I stayed on the fringes, and didn’t say much. A charmer said yes, when I asked for a walk; I reached for her hand, she withdrew from my touch. She wasn’t mean, but she was very firm: My boy friend’s in service, the Corps, a Marine-- he’s coming to see me at the end of this term. My nascent romance she had broken off clean. That luncheon party over-looking the Seine was lost in translation on Lake Michigan. Gerry Hendershot Gerry Hendershot is a new poet, age 82, who has published poems in The Ekphrastic Review and other journals. He writes in several styles, but has a fondness for forms, new and old. His themes vary too, but often have a spiritual or religious slant. Hendershot lives in University Park Md, where he is co-founder of an active poetry group, and teaches poetry and art in a program for senior continuing education at American University in nearby Washington DC. a star is born in the beginning lived only chaos, tumbling over and through the great void of darkness falling toward divine disorder. a call rang out awakening the light; a call of hope and grace slowly sliding- each into her place. sky beings gathering; dust bunnies, hushed in anticipation, beginning the great dance of joy. i saw the first spark glowing, a tiny ember of ordered cosmos swirling headlong to defeat the chaos. what could i do but join in the dance of the sky gods? boldly i twirled toward chaos, anarchy scattering. i wondered at the great mysterious changing of the universe. i wondered at the divine disorder coursing headlong through night skies. i wondered at the sky ablaze with sparks changing embers to starlight. i wondered at the power of this grace sculpting cosmos from chaos. i wondered at the great mysterious changing of the universe. i wondered at the divine disorder coursing through the night sky and catching on fire. blazing embers of amazing grace forever changing chaos to cosmos. Carla Jeanne Picklo-Jordan Carla Jeanne Picklo-Jordan is a writer living in Michigan who has enjoyed traveling to and teaching in several different countries. Her travels and experiences cross-culturally have impacted and shaped her writing techniques. When she isn't writing poetry or traveling, Carla is teaching children how to be kind and love themselves at a public charter school in Detroit. Annelea Blignaut Annelea Blignaut is a native South African who has lived in six different countries. Annelea's travels obviously influences how she sees and react to the world around her, giving her art a style that is vibrant and bold--characterized by the colours that flow from her brush onto the canvas and not any one particular technique. Her work leans toward portraying an emotion or characteristic rather than rendering a photo. Carla and Annelea met during a brief time when they were both studying in the Czech Republic. They forged a close bond that has lasted many years and across many countries. This collaboration is the first of what they hope with be many. Looking at Winslow Homer’s Paintings of the Tropics Paurotis palms, saw palmettos, a blue sky pure as thought. There is beauty, there is light, and there is death lurking at the margin of the canvas in the guise of an alligator that’s deceptively still, eyeing a roseate spoonbill. In one late masterwork a man lies stretched out on the ravaged deck of a small dismasted fishing boat, sharks all around, their rolled-up eyes ecstatic. And off in the far distance there’s a tall ship faintly sketched suggesting salvation is not to be expected. If this is too dark, take in the next frame: a Bermuda bungalow, a flowerbed in vivid yellows and reds, a cloudless watercolour sky. But even here you'll note the little v-shaped tracks running along the shore. And no bird in sight. Kenneth Sherman Kenneth Sherman is a Canadian writer. He is the author of ten collections of poetry and three books of prose. His most recent publication is the memoir, Wait Time. Instructions for a Modest Project, Granville Redmond’s Carmel Coast, c. 1917, by Mary B. Moore8/16/2020 Instructions for a Modest Project, Granville Redmond’s Carmel Coast, c. 1917. Don’t strut. Muddle and meander the beach’s slight creases, the one shallow gully that side-winds toward the low V where the sea shows. Be mauve like that channel. If purple, be grayer. Yield to wind. The scrubby junipers lie low, and the cypress flattens and contorts, wind battered. One limb crooks nearly 90 degrees; two form an almost X; and all rise and fork, a system of W’s, Y’s, and indecisions. It queries, doesn’t answer, and bows. Let your alphabet mute and mutate. The ice plant scrawls whatever shapes it crawls, blue-gray-green spatters, little stubby fingers, many reaching sideways. Succulent and named for its frost- sheen look, it’s lush not frigid, and unrelenting. In bloom, the magenta flowers dazzle, fifty or more thin petals fringing the yellow centers: Fiesta if you must: Redmond omitted their boast. His dry runnels don’t pout; They channel gray and tan tinged green. Sunset or dawn barely pinks the clouds’ irregular rows or wave forms, and the marine layer chalks the horizon lavender or violet: Avoid crescendos. If the cypress’s bent proves wind’s violence, its angle fits the slight slope that lends it shelter. It’s brown-green, not viridian. Muted isn’t moot. Mary B. Moore Mary B. Moore's recent award-winning books are Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys, 2017), Flicker (Dogfish Head, 2016), and Eating the Light (Sable, 2016), selected respectively by contest judges Dorianne Laux, Carol Frost et al, and Allison Joseph. She also won the inaugural Three Sisters Award from NELLE (2019), and the second-place prize at Nimrodin 2017. Her poems appeared lately in Poetry; 32 Poems; Prairie Schooner; GeorgiaReview; Gettysburg Review; Terrain; The Ekphrastic Review; Fire and Rain, Eco-Poetry of California; The Nasty Women Poet’s Anthology; NELLE; and Birmingham Poetry Review. A native Californian, she taught English at Marshall University, has one daughter, an attorney in Northern California, and lives with her husband, a philosopher, and the cat Seamus Heaney, in Huntington West Virginia. Black Bark After Ana Mendieta’s Tree of Life I decided I wanted to be a black girl. If I couldn’t be a black girl I’d be a white girl but I didn’t want to be a white girl. I find a tree and drag the bark on my skin, some grasses and earth, until I am black by the sweat of my own skin. I’m caught by a pool and captured and shipped someplace else. It’s such a shitty thing they do to me but it’s only the first shitty thing. One shitty thing after another happens. I wonder why the goddess I pray to allows this to happen. I don’t know her anymore, and no one knows me anymore. I will not titillate you with sordid confessions, nor will I dwell upon the horrors inflicted upon me. Instead, I will eat the black beans of my own skin. It was a dangerous decision to become a black girl. I didn’t know my skin would be a red flag, and my people would be lynched. But I feel better not being white, since it’s the whites in charge that lynch black girls like me whether they knot the rope or not. Whether or not you know it or not, the tree where they tie the rope is the tree that bathes my black skin with tree mercy and consolation so my black soul wiggles loose from the noose, junks its losses, and slips past them. Mary Meriam Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, and Subtropics. The War He'd Come to Fight for Alfred Thomas Williams This wasn’t the war he’d come to fight. His bayonet, fatigues and slender rifle were trained on foreign bodies the same as his – explode the bone, gouge the gut’s flesh and man up proud, for home, if your flesh becomes home to blade or bullet. This wasn’t the war he’d come to fight. The needle flight and saw-toothed straw that trepanned him and spat the parasite whose slow bloom made a hot-house of his skin, couldn’t be tracked on a unfurled map and felled like game in-season. They’d warned him on the boat: The invisible enemy split the sodden air like moon- light through an almost drawn curtain, ghostly, needling, lethal. He was, though, only alive to the knife-edge cries of dropping shells and burst of battle’s lights, alive only to the war he’s come to fight. A mocking chill rose and shook the sweat that pooled in his sockets and the rationed soup spewed like lava forced from a fractious core while the rot of the monsoon’s soak on the canvas roof yellowed the sickly brume of twilight – this wasn’t the war he’d come to fight. Mathew Wenham Mathew Wenham is currently the Head of Senior English and Literature at a secondary college in Melbourne, Australia. He has previously worked in multiple Australian universities as a teacher of philosophy and psychology. Mathew is a long-time lover of poetry, and is now in the first stages of his path as a poet. His work was been shortlisted for the 2020 Ada Cambridge award and his poems have appeared online at Nine Muses Poetry, Better Than Starbucks and The Society of Classical Poets
Little Earthquakes collage = reality – Joseph Cornell what if I’m a mermaid – Tori Amos Each frame is both window and cage in Cornell’s boxes. Objects housed are animated by their shallow space, glass pane and attendant gaze. I surveyed these dioramas in a book I snuck to my room. In one, a wide-eyed doll ensnared in branches. In another: butterflies and encyclopedia pages, parrots looking on. Another: sheet music, cork balls, crystal cordial glasses. A pipe whose smoke is seashells. Apothecary bottles filled with liquids, bones, and wings. And a crinolined girl borne aloft, a balloon, by threads of her dress. Each item in these compositions is alert in its small altar. In the hoard of my home, there was no room to move. I’d curl myself in the sill of my window, looking at books and replaying one cd. Piano glinted hints of what our own broken piano could do, in the parlor, if made way to, via threadlike paths through stacks of trash, unearthed from platelets of clutter. Cornell bought trinkets he turned to art from antique and dime stores, second hand shops. A surrealist, he juxtaposed unlikely objects to both contrast and yoke them. My mother, too, furnished our lives this way, assembling antiques and refuse with acute attention, everywhere. On the front of the liner notes, Tori folds her body in a box in endless empty space, arranging that famous orange cloud of hair, her gaze and bent body, over a tiny toy piano. In my favorite song, she’s maybe a mermaid: grieving and mythical, both at once. She asks, “can I be you for a while”, but she already is, herself and myself, a lovelorn siren, a chiming chimera. Surrealists keel the unconscious, shake the foundation of what you think is true. The house was its own grand assemblage, each room a box that housed mother’s junk treasures, each item rife with meanings for her. A girl with no space to take up but my window, I assembled myself there, with my Walkman, and sang along. I gazed and sang from my window frame, extending beyond it now and then by dangling a limb and letting it toll like the tongue of a bell that marks time. Emily Pulfer-Terino Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Collagist, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays The Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts. |
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