Execution at the Temple                                                                   
 
The Police Chief
points his gun at the temple of
his prisoner,
whose body is his temple,
falling in the next
frame of the film.
 
In a photo
we can contemplate the image
like an everblooming rose;
 
Each time we look,
the officer fires.
 
In time we become the officer,
the prisoner; we fire or fall.
We become the gun. 
 
We shoot or are shot,
forgetting love might fall like marigold
petals scattered at the
consecration of a temple,
a cloud of colour
 
Touching our faces, outstretched hands,
bodies not torn by shoes
of running crowds, the lips
of strangers.
 
But if we are the bullet?

Cheney Crow

This poem responds to Police Chief Executing Prisoner Saigon, Viet Nam, by Eddie Adams (USA) 1968. Content warning: this photo captures the moment of execution.
 https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo-contest/1968/eddie-adams/1

​Cheney Crow lives in Austin, TX, where her yard host to raptors and foxes, a mockingbird boasting loud backup beeps, echos of nearby construction. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Terminus, Best of Tupelo Quarterly, International Poetry (translation).  She's been a teacher, a reader for textbook recordings, poll worker, sculptor, musician, photographer, translator, traveler. Thirsty for life.

Pixels
  
Step close to examine all the pieces -- 
small circles, triangles, rectangles -- drift -- 
like Seurat’s pointillist dots -- every 
one a pixelation of memory. 
  
Taken apart -- put back together -- 
a pasture -- a dirt track -- a line of trees -- 
a childhood sense of place -- a treasury 
in the pixelation of memory. 
  
Like squares in Grammy’s quilts -- each reemploys 
remnants of another project -- a dress -- 
curtains -- rematched into a complementary 
scene -- the pixelation of memory. 
  
Across the images -- a word -- a phrase -- 
flowing in cursive -- a few of the thousands 
from mother’s weekly epistolary 
messages -- pixelations of memory -- 
  
don’t always mirror the original. 
Step back -- each pixel falls into its place -- 
a larger picture forms -- mosaic from tesserae 
combined -- the pixelation of memory. 
  
All is framed, as if through that old screen door 
on the back porch -- sequins punched -- turquoise from sky -- 
green leaves -- yellow dust -- a reverie -- 
faded pixelation of memories. 
  
At the seams, fine stitching binds fragments -- 
scarlet threads -- shards sewn back together -- something 
new and beautiful -- Nebraska kintsugi -- 
crafted from pixelations of memory. 
  
 Janet Ruth

​Janet Ruth is a New Mexico ornithologist and poet. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world.  She has poems in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Her sonnet, “A World That Shimmers,” won the inaugural True Concord Poetry Contest, was set to music by the 2023 winner of the Emerging Composer Contest and was performed by True Concord Voices and Orchestra in Tucson, October 2023. Her book, Feathered Dreams: celebrating birds in poems, stories & images (Mercury HeartLink, 2018) was a Finalist for the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards.   https://redstartsandravens.com/janets-poetry/

Archeology
 
When dust covers everything and the excavators finally come
as they did in Pompeii, they will find curiosities, whomever they may be.
There are mysteries and patterns that will need explaining.
 
This is how myths and legends are formed.
The most utilitarian objects will assume the power of magic.
 
In the middle of the line-straight streets, like buttons down a shirt,
they will discover a symbol of ancient municipal pride,
coins of the realm, regular and round and unusually heavy.
These ancient circles, half a meter across, are covered in designs:
Deer and roses, or shooting stars and skylines,
leaves and trees and even temples over the dark below.
Some will appear as hieroglyphs or have pleasing geometic patterns:
Waffles, basket weaves and circles, tactile and familiar, cast in iron and concrete.
 
How will these beautiful creations be deciphered?
Covering the underworld of storm drains, steam tunnels,
bundles of electric and fiber optic cables,
more ornate that can be expected or explained
for mere covers to access points in the pavement?
 
And you likely won’t be able to explain them either,
these decorations that pass underfoot,
a slight disturbance for wheels of cars and bicycles, 
never occuring to us these objects offer clues to who we are,
our compelling desire to decorate even small slabs of metal.
We never spare a thought for the artists of the industrial age, 
wearing blue overalls and sweating, arms covered with burns,
sketching pictures with a stumpy pencil on a small scrap of paper
to be cast into eternity.
 
What if I told you they were made by hand
by a giant deep in the woods, on a blazing forge,
each one as unique as a snowflake.
Bet you would look at them then.
 
Larry Kilman

Larry Kilman is a graduate of Syracuse University with a dual major in art history and magazine writing. He is a journalist and poet who has been lucky enough to live and work on four continents. His poems have been published or will be published in a wide variety of journals, including Epiphany, Mudfish 4, Brief Wilderness and 7th-Circle Pyrite. He lives in South Africa.

House of Mirrors

Join Meg Pokrass and Lorette C. Luzajic for an asynchronous ekphrastic microfiction workshop! 

In House of Mirrors, we will use intriguing visual artworks that incorporate imagery of mirrors to inspire microfiction on themes of reflection, identity, vanity, beauty, time, truth, self-awareness, duplicity, and portals to other realms, all the ways that mirrors have been used for symbolism in art and literature.

Each day you will follow the muse into your stories, writing from a wide selection of prompts, word lists, and paintings. There will be a variety of options so that you can choose what resonates with you. Prompts will be open-ended, and you can connect to the art or the prompts in any way that inspires you.

You will receive feedback on one story a day from Meg and Lorette as well as from your peers. 

We can’t wait to see what this house of mirrors will inspire!
 
September 26, 27, 28, 2025
Asynchronous/online 

Limited spots- sign up today!
​
Register:
https://ekphrasticmicrofictionworkshops.weebly.com/#/

​The Wind Phone is Calling
​
Come,
dejected pilgrims.
Journey to a
humdrum prefecture
quiet seaside village
coiffed garden refuge.
 
A few panes
of cloudy glass
scrap lumber
rusted nails
spare eggshell paint
construct a coffin for grief
linking the departed 
to those left behind
those we lost to 
sweeping waves of disaster
and those we found
among the rubble.
 
Wade through swaying 
hip-height grass
reluctantly crack the door--
a squealing creak greets you.
 
Retreat into this
humble nook
shelter yourself 
from the salty breeze.
 
A
pen
notepad
onyx phone
await you.
 
Retrieve the receiver
twirl the numbered 
rotary randomly.
Don’t worry--
you’re only connected
to the earth you stand on.
 
Speak.
Pour out your loss.
Sob into blessed silence.
Update your dead about 
how your kid bungled a piano recital
how you miss the way your lost one scrunched their nose when they sneezed
how your mattress still sags in the shape of your lost one’s weary bones
 
Take comfort.
Your whispers on the wind
will d i s s o l v e
swallowed whole by the sea.

Lindsey Peacock

Lindsey Peacock is a born-and-bred Southerner who has called Canada home for the last 15 years. She's a recovering newspaper and magazine journalist and has been published in business and tech publications across the country. She's currently a first reader for ROOM Magazine and has had poems appear in Blood and Bourbon, Forget Me Not Press, Deep South Magazine, and the Wilderness House Literary Review.

The Ruckus
 
I’m a bull, fist with horns, heel-stomp claiming 
the floor. Silk folds, fever-whipped 
 
by the goading muscle. A locomotive driven by heat,
I wheel, I fire, I steam. 
 
A palm gropes another palm percussive, clap 
of thunder, bent light, an elbow, sharp, thrust.  
 
I’m drunk off the smell of sweat, orchid, floor varnish, 
damp stucco, tobacco, pechuga mescal, 
 
spirit pulled through a bird carcass. Callused 
fingertips over sound holes seem to escort my flamenco 
 
when really, they hold a portal open. 
I channel what’s coming through. 
 
In El Jaleo, one hatless man, neck thrown back 
like a stork, mouth agape, thought he saw the firebird 
 
descend, obscure Pentecost in a tavern, ripping a seam, 
blowing the doors off. After long silence, I have my tongue. 
 
Brittany Deininger

Brittany Deininger, is a poet and educator. Art and dreams are her dipping cup into the unconscious where the good stuff speaks in images. She received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Her work has appeared in On Being, EcoTheo Review and elsewhere. She lives in New York.

When Only a Crayon Will Do
 
I wrote a missive from the highlands of Northern Thailand:
where my ascension triggered impetuous nosebleeds.
I scribbled a sonnet; I dabbled in differences. 
Between proboscidean mammals from Africa and Asia,
Asian elephants are the more diminutive of the two.
On a narrow, winding mountain path, I fretted the flimsy basket 
in which I perched, atop a skittish, six-ton, grey-brown beast.
With his smaller ears, twin-domed head, and male-gendered tusks, 
I worried for him, fearful he might misstep.
National Geographic reports that elephant depression is real. 
I wrote of blinders, saffron heart bombs, and nested tiny bluebirds, 
and all the purple cloud-tunnels I recalled. 
Sometimes, my incapacity to face down my own mortality 
creates a wordlessness that boils down to love.

Joanne Godley

Joanne Godley is a poet, writer, and art lover who resides in beautiful Mexico City. "Almost daily, my puppy, Jazz, and I walk to Twisted Tree Park (I’ve renamed it) and I think about poetry and how lucky I am to live here, while Jazz watches the squirrels."

Disgust, by Lorette C. Luzajic
Cyberwit Books, 2025
Click here to view or order on Amazon.
​
Rebecca Weigold: Lorette, what can you tell us about your new book of ekphrastic flash fiction, Disgust? What inspired you to write it?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: The stories in this book grapple with the turmoil of the body. Undergoing a devastating trilogy of serious illnesses changed my life dramatically, and for many years the emergency of the body was, against my will, the central reality of my life. 
 
I felt like Job in the throes of this triple whammy. There was a not-understood condition assumed to be fractures, gout, or rheumatoid arthritis, but ultimately none of these. There was a botched knee surgery that has not yet healed after four years. And the cherry on top was breast cancer, which I thought would be the final coup, and yet here I am.

​This ongoing ordeal has been terrifying. The pain consumed me and the fear of losing agency has been intense. Going through the gauntlet of invasive tests, scans, surgeries, poisons, needles, radiation burns, and relentless appointments has been unbelievably violating, and the realization that even the trusted experts know next to nothing about our bodies shook me to the core. I’m naturally squeamish, and was forced to confront the absolute essence of our humanity: blood, pus, vomit, gas, swelling. Everything was disgusting to me. 
 
At the same time I was going through this, there was the Covid pandemic and illness was the theme of the whole world. And my mother was going through a dramatic decline with a rare neurological disease that led to total helplessness. 
 
Mom died a slow and terrible death. I survived, for now. I’m doing quite well now, with manageable pain, but still have a lot of trouble with movement and activity. I am in remission from breast cancer.
 
I sometimes say that I was both humbled and humiliated. This level of illness connected me to every other human being, and to the essence behind the whole “vanitas” and “memento mori” art movements in Dutch still life paintings and beyond. Coming face to face in a real way with “remember, you are going to die” and temporality, the fact that we are compost, is profound.
 
As I do with everything, I began writing stories and poems fueled by the themes of this journey. I began looking at art that touched on these ideas, or seeing art through that lens. I wanted to shake off the shackles of social suppression, where people with valid fear and agony are told that their negativity is causing their illness. I call this toxic positivity. 
 
I am a very positive person, but the litany of dark emotions and anxieties that go with them are valid responses to pain. I wanted to tell the whole story: how people triumph over illness, how they sometimes don’t, how illness leaves people isolated and fractures relationships. How illness brings us closer to God and alienates us, too. I wanted to show how pain connects humans even when they don’t know it. How it is always there, part of the story, rather than its own story. I wanted to show humour, too, because the body can feel absolutely absurd.  And I wanted to give the collection the most honest title I could. So here we are.
​
Rebecca: In what ways has writing about pain and suffering broadened your artistic vision?

Lorette: Suffering is one of the great themes of art and literature through history. My own writing and visual art veers between joy and darkness, embracing the full range of important experiences and the ups and downs of the human story. Artists reflect and process the complexity of life and death, and immersing myself in a spectrum of suffering gave me a deeper connection to and understanding of art, literature, and people.

A key moment in my journey was studying a small painting in my own collection, an unknown Peruvian artist copy of an older unknown Peruvian artist’s work. It was a gift given to me by a dear friend from Lima. I absolutely love Latin American art, colonial era, pre-Columbian, folk art, modern, and contemporary. The aesthetics and creativity of Latin American artists are astonishing to me: they are in contrast to my austere Calvinist-tinged church upbringing, and a throwback to my older German roots, where the macabre was also embraced in folklore and visual arts. This particular painting is gory, depicting with an unflinching  eye the agonies of Christ as he is scourged by a guard with a baton. Christ’s crumpled body bleeds profusely in the picture. 

There were several years in my succession of ailments that I lived in unbearable pain. It was difficult to make sense of. The knee surgery and its subsequent failure was wildly painful, and the trips with the walker to medical appointments and physiotherapy were horrible, and the mystery condition that flared in both ankles was inexplicably even more painful. There was no relief at all from painkillers, salves, ice baths, or deep breathing work. The intensity of those flares was a 15 out of 10, far worse than the actual surgery and follow-up weeks. I seriously considered having both legs amputated in hopes of eventual healing, but the research I did showed that if the problem was in my nervous system and brain rather than in the ankles, the issue might be transferred. 

When I looked at the gory little painting during these painful times, I had an epiphany. I understood that we had everything backwards about the agony of Christ. Many believe that suffering is sacred because it makes us like Christ, and some traditions today and historically included ascetic denial of the body or sadistic torture, as penance for our sins or in imitation of Jesus. This was not a theology I grew up with and couldn’t really grasp, but now I saw something different: that it was the other way around. 

Many times we ask why Christ had to suffer torture and death in order to  save us: surely this meant God was cruel, because He could have found another way. But now I understood the story deeply: the meaning of the incarnation was that Jesus was fully divine and fully human, having taken human form as a bridge. And to be fully human, because we suffer, pain, illness, heartbreak, childbirth, He too had to suffer the pain of the body and death. We do not suffer to be like Christ, rather, He had to suffer to experience what we do.

This revelation turned into the story “Agony” that wraps up the collection. And it was an understanding that helped relieve my isolation and place me, as a person, and as an artist and writer, in complete communion with everyone else.

I have always felt that making art is a religious act, and art history in every culture reflects this belief. I am not traditionally religious, and I struggle with the flaws and fallacies in religions, and my relationship with the Creator is erratic and fragile. My stories are not often religious, yet faith and mystery are still at their heart, and at the heart of all creations that humans make. Art is about communion with others, even when it is created in solitude. It is about delving into the unconscious, about symbols, about initiations and wonder and fear. Making art is a participation in ritual. We are imagining the meaning and puzzling it out. It doesn’t matter what someone believes or if they don’t. I really came to understand through art and through writing about the suffering of the body that all poetry, all painting, is some kind of prayer. It connects us with the oldest traditions in human history and the people who lived then. It connects us with everything we don’t yet know. 

Rebecca: One of your ekphrastic stories in Disgust is called “Strange Fire,” based on renowned artist, Frida Kahlo, who suffered from various afflictions. In the story, you call her “fierce and independent.” Do you find any similarities between you and Frida?

Lorette: Oh, gosh, yes. Frida’s life has enormous appeal to artists, writers, and to women, to the sick, to everyone. It is because we see ourselves in her, or perhaps, at least see what we want to be. We can relate to her pain, even if our own is not quite as epic and mythic. She did not intend to be the patron saint of millions, but her story has become that to so many of us. Frida lived passionately on her own terms, embracing her painful, turmoiled marriage with intensity; she did not let a male dominated world stop her from creating her own version of art, or from loving men deeply. She did not let a wheelchair or body-cast or terrible pain stop her from connecting to the world, to her culture, to her lovers, to justice, to her truth. She was incredibly beautiful and sexy, from within a broken body and her pain. She didn’t wait to be perfect and healed to live. We take inspiration from Frida and see ourselves in her because we want to be like her. She gives us permission to live the full spectrum of our feelings and emotions.

Rebecca: Suffering can be emotionally difficult to write about, especially when drawing on personal experience. Has there ever been a time when it felt particularly painful to write about your own suffering in detail, even if mirrored in a character? If so, can you give an example, or an excerpt from Disgust in which the character’s pain may have been especially challenging to write about?

Lorette: One of the stories in the collection is called “Choked Up,” about Nels developing an irrational fear that his partner Sebastian will choke to death. This reflects an experience I had after my partner had an incident where he swallowed an orange that went down the wrong way. He was coughing for so long and had a sensation of the orange being stuck in his windpipe. He had to seek medical help. At the same time, the other love of my life, my orange tabby Benedict, was having choking fits that turned out be feline asthma. I began to have intrusive fears around the clock that they would die. I was afraid that the orange would come loose while my partner was sleeping and go into his lungs, or that I would be helpless as Benedict gasped for breath and convulsed out of life. I became crazy for awhile, feeling a terrible panic whenever my partner chewed on food, wanting him to eat only soft mushy soups and yogurt. I had a nightmare out of the blue that one of my best friends choked to death. I became afraid of food and anything else that might randomly kill someone I loved. I started to have trouble swallowing myself. 

Although on one level I could understand that this was a pathological response to trauma, a struggle with the reality of the fragility of life, I also understood that I could not just stop everyone from eating, which would also kill us. It was a strange phenomenon and went on for months. I finally told my partner I’d been having bizarre, intrusive thoughts and was losing my mind over it. He encouraged me to write about it, so I wrote the story about Nels having the same fear. The strange thing was that bringing the strange story to life in this way banished the fear. I was better able to understand it and stop it from controlling me.   

Rebecca:  In your story, “Wasabi,” you speak of a character’s “deliberate embrace of life.”  What can your book tell us about making the proactive choice to live with this mindset in the face of chronic illness or pain?

Lorette: One thing I have come to understand through a very difficult life is that happiness is not separate from turmoil and pain. They exist at the same time. Joy and beauty and love are present at the same time as suffering, trauma, and chaos. Life ebbs and flows, and beauty and horror constantly intermingle. Toxic positivity assumes we can control and erase negativity. True joy and love come from understanding that life hurts, and deeply, but that it is thrumming with magic and beauty nonetheless. 

We try to avoid pain, but accepting it holistically is a better way to embrace life. It hurts to lose someone we love, for example, and too often we shut down our hearts to avoid loss. But the experience of going through an illness and demise with someone, while painful, is a very deep and intimate experience. Love and dating are often harrowing, and relationships risk divorce and betrayal, but cutting ourselves off completely guarantees we will have nothing. 

I learned that even in the pain of something as humiliating as radiation burns and losing part of your breast, and losing your hair to chemotherapy, there is still laughter and love inside of those days. My partner wanted a picture of us together when all of my hair had fallen out. I was very irritable at the time and demanded to know what he was thinking. “It’s the only time we’ll ever be twins,” he said, and we laughed and laughed, and I treasure every occasion of laughter.

When my father was dying of cancer, he told me that he still enjoyed each day and all of its small pleasures. The last trip in the car for ice cream on a sunny day. Watching the dog play in the backyard. The gathering of family.

An example of joy and wonder that is constant is cats. The unique relationship we have with pets is an ongoing miracle. Cats are sweet, funny, gorgeous. Every day with a cat is a good day, no matter what else happens. We have wild animals living in our home, the feared kings of the savannah, somehow curled up on our pillows. It’s actually mind boggling. They are unbelievable friends when you are sick or lonely. Pure magic.

I am not saying any of this comes easily. I renew my decision every day to live fully no matter what I face. I pray every day for strength to face what I have to.

A broken heart is a deep initiation into the human story.

In a poem I love, “Lead,” by Mary Oliver, she says, “Here is a story to break your heart. Are you willing?” 

**

Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Other recent collections of flash fiction and prose poetry include Pretty Time Machine, The Rope Artist, Winter in June,and Disgust. Her work has twice been awarded in the Best Small Fictions anthologies, and has been translated into Spanish and Urdu. She teaches art history and creative writing through The Ekphrastic Academy and other organizations. She also teaches mixed media and collage at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto where she was a patient for ten years. Lorette is a recent survivor of breast cancer. She is also an award-winning visual artist, with collectors in 40 countries so far.

Rebecca Weigold studied Theatre and English, specializing in poetry, at Northern Kentucky University. She has held positions including Editorial Assistant at F&W Publications in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Editor at ITP/Southwestern Educational Publishing, also based in Cincinnati. Her poetry has been featured in or is forthcoming in publications such as BlazeVox, The Ekphrastic Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tishman Review, and others. Notably, two of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The Ekphrastic Review. Additionally, she is proud to have participated in the renowned Uptown Poetry Slam on multiple occasions, hosted by Marc Smith at the historic Green Mill in Chicago.