The Soul Aware

On poet's palette daubed and blurred
are sense and colour, thought and word
where time recast and dreams foreseen
collide as moments intervene

disrupting patience being trained
to be the faith of love sustained
that seeks the wisdom to convey
discovered truth in disarray

that dares the brush or pen in hand
to be the will at its command
and leave for all the world to see
the glimmer of a spirit free

in art bestilled to reconvene
the soul aware of what to glean.

Portly Bard

Three years ago today, the ekphrastic collaboration between Portly Bard and Lorette was released, Thinking Inside the Box. ​Click here to get a copy on Amazon. Digital copies are available free to anyone by download, below.

Portly Bard: Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.

Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.

​The House 
 
Stands in its solitude,
an abandoned wound.
 
I touch the scarred walls,
the small doors with peeling paint,
the bathtub full of cracks,
kitchen cabinets with their doors torn off,
a broken faucet in the sink.
 
Mom appears, materializes as a ghost
whose body coalesces from the
blood splatter on the walls.
A young woman in her thirties,
accompanied by her five daughters.
 
She touches everything –
The scattered objects, the pictures hanging on the walls,
the books arranged in the library covered with dust,
the grimy floor tiles.
 
She begins to scrub and scour the floor 
with her hardworking, reddened hands. 
 
Her voice is slender yet domineering,
she fervently explains how much she loves simplicity,
and chooses the colour of the kitchen ceramic tiles
– light green.
 
Noises, Jarring arguments escape through 
the closed door of the parents’ room.
 
I hear the echoes that seeped at nights 
into the sleeping walls, the ticking of 
mom’s typewriter keys, tap, tap.
 
Mom sits beside the black elliptical table in the kitchen,
immersed in a cloud of smoke, lighting cigarette after cigarette.
Her eyes fixed, capturing the page 
peeping out from the typewriter.
Letters piling upon letters, 
lines upon lines, neatly arranged.
 
For years, the house is empty of its dwellers.
For years, the walls drip blood.
 
For years, Dad clings to memories ensnaring 
their prey like spider webs.
 
For years, Dad recedes with the walls.
For years, Dad recedes with the voices.
 
I sit next to him, beside the
black elliptical table in the kitchen.
The pencils are arranged on the table.

Dad draws his self-portrait
as he looks at an old photograph of his.

His back hunched, his hand shriveled, trembling,
holding the pencil.
 
Dad is silent.
 
And I gaze at the green ceramic tiles.
Tile after tile, 
scratched with small black cracks.
 
Before time slips away.
 
Before the house turns
into a sole memory of

nothingness.

Michal Perry

Michal Perry is a poet, painter, and multidisciplinary artist. She was born in Jerusalem and graduated from the Avni Art Institute in Tel Aviv.  She completed her master's studies at Bar-Ilan University in comparative literature. Her poems have appeared in leading journals and she has published three full-length poetry collections in Israel. Between 1990-2004, Michal Perry lived and worked in New York City as manager and curator of the Klarfeld Perry Gallery. In addition, she presented solo exhibitions and participated in international group exhibitions in the US and Europe. Michal lives and works in New York City and Tel Aviv. www.michalperry.com

House by the Railroad
 
I.
 
She was over 100 years old when I lived there
three stories, tan rough brick facade, a dormer
on top where the attic rested like an old dog
 
There had to be a bathroom added and a kitchen
just an ice room at the beginning to keep perishables
Otherwise it was inhabited just like every other
 
on the block. The porch guarded the front door
and gave me a place to play when weather threatened
Gram could watch me from the tall narrow windows,
 
drapes pulled aside. The attic always frightened me--
my room was next to the door into the darkness. 
I was never to go into it alone to root around old boxes
 
with clothing and ornate hats from the 90s.
One was a dark blue mesh with a wide brim,
and sitting on the front was a light blue bird.
 
In spite of my mother telling me it wasn’t real
I somehow knew it was, somebody had killed it 
and put it on the hat. 
 
It was fixed by a wide black ribbon. I never saw
anyone wear it. Its small black eye seemed 
to watch me playing from across the room.
 
II.
 
Next to our porch door was the door where
the neighbours rented a small apartment. 
They were an old couple, quiet and well-known.
 
The man, Mr. Pease, was always trying to touch me 
and pick me up. Mrs. Pease would tell him to stop,
but the minute her back was turned he would 
 
smooth back my hair or get naked in front of
the bedroom door, or try and kiss me 
with his flabby lips when Mrs. was gone.
 
One night when he is asleep, I will take some
money hidden in the Mason Jar and flee
into a new life without him. I will find
 
someone, I think a girl or woman to help me 
find a way to escape his long tongue
boney fingers.
 ​
Jackie Langetieg

Jackie Langetieg has published poems in literary magazines: Verse Wisconsin, The Ekphrastic Review, Bramble Blue Heron Review. She’s won awards, such as WWA’s Jade Ring contest, Bards Chair, and Wisconsin Academy Poem of the Year. She is a regular contributor to the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar. She has written five books of poems,  including Letter to My Daughter and a memoir, Filling the Cracks with Gold.

​[ vertumnus, arcimboldo, 1591 ] 

dad worked for  
a swedish steel company  
setting out each day with 
a brown leather briefcase full of 
gleaming examples of 
stainless steel tubing before  
the boom & the bust — 
each year he flew to 
head office, stockholm 
the annual general meeting — 
he’d return with gifts for me from  
skokloster castle: 
a 5-colour biro &  
a postcard of a painting 
vertumnus by arcimboldo, 1591 
rudolf  
the holy roman emperor 
as a bowl of fruit — 
it didn’t show any of his people 
starving to death 
in the boom & the bust 

Ian D. Smith

Ian D. Smith is UK poet based in Wiltshire, England. "I was lucky enough to see my poems appear in The Ekphrastic Review in 2024." 

​Forever Blooming 

*
Lovers know when a foot smashes a wine glass wrapped in a heavy napkin, fragile relationships begin. Love in pieces resists glue.
 
A mallet cracking a fire alarm cover begs for help. 
 
Baseball finds window. Windshields star-break.  
 
Fire melts the cathedral’s rose window. Sirens race toward breaking windows. 
 
Glassblowers’ learning curves include Kevlar gloves and jagged shards of error. 

*

German father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschke crafted botanically perfect models of 847 plant species for Harvard’s Glass Flowers exhibit. The work spanned from 1886 through 1936. Models range from umbrella liverwort to red maple leaves. The Rotten Apples sequence follows healthy fruit through rot, mildew, rust and scab. To thank Bostonian scientist Mary Ware for financing their work, Leopold gave her a glass bouquet. 
 
A Thai meditation master said of his goblet, For me the glass is already broken. When the wind knocks his glass off a shelf or his elbow knocks it down, he will say, Of course.
 
Mary Ware died of a stroke soon after Glass Flowers opened. Her bouquet remains on display in a new shatterproof glass case.

*
Each sliver of a broken mirror on the slate floor reflects the face of the woman kneeling with a whisk broom and dustpan.

Tricia Knoll

​Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose work appears widely in journals and nine collections, either full-length or chapbook. She is a contributing editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.  triciaknoll.com

Second Thoughts
 
I fold my hands atop my shepherd’s stick
and for a moment from the hallway stare                        
at boys like me whom the professor picked
to educate.  One student spots me there                                                              
while others concentrate on notes they’re scrawling.
I know if I step through the open door
I can’t turn back or stop the new day dawning
but sense a refuge here I’m yearning for.
 
The threshold crossed, I find myself reborn.
No more a peasant’s bastard child, I paint
bucolic scenes, once praised, now held in scorn,
by Bolsheviks, too bourgeois and quaint.
They hate my fawning portrait of the Czar.
From humble birth, perhaps I’ve strayed too far. 
​
Carl Kinsky

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

Shelf-Love  
          
after Jelly Shelf, by Mary Pratt (Canada) 1999
​(at 1.51 in video) 
 
Juice now jeweled
in luscious light 
in jelly jars jam-
med with delicious 
fruits of your labour:
bakeapples, blueberries, 
chokecherries, nectar
illuminated by the sun 
that brought the fruit to
fruition now sparkling the
glass, glinting and 
mirrored in the polished
wood bright with the
vision of children 
spreading your love
over hot, buttered
toast in the wintry
months to come to
start each day, dark 
though it may be.
They will be 
lit from within.

​Susan Whelehan

Susan Whelehan believes that rhythm and words are medicine covered by God’s Socialist Health Care Plan for Humanity. Her collection, The Sky Laughs at Borders, was published by Piquant Press in 2019. A runner-up in CBC’s Canada Writes, she has been published by Novalis, Knopf/Random House, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. A member of the League of Canadian Poets she facilitates writing workshops on-line, at the Haliburton School of the Arts, St. Michael’s College U of T Continuing Ed. and in her home in Toronto.

​Babel

In Borges’s famous library,
each room bounded by six walls,
the books containing every combination
of twenty-six letters and some punctuation,
you can find, somewhere, your life’s story
if only you look hard enough.

Look hard enough
and your life is, in a way, a library,
a repository
for various tales contained between books’ walls,
your birth and death a sort of punctuation,
you some combination

of G, A, T, and C. You are a combination
lock on a restricted section. Therapy and enough
time, and someone will pick it, puncture
the silence of your mind’s library
and its walls
of shelves. The checking in and out is itself a story.

Or consider the way someone looks at the images in a story
about a mill, a hotel, a temple, all these combinations
of rot, and finds the beauty therein, walls
barely bearing the load, but just enough
that someone can sneak safely in, find the heart of a library
beating softly like punctuation.

The magic is that in the chaos we call life, there is still punctuation
in the framing of a picture or a story,
how we can focus on a pair of glasses in a library
or go wide as a whole country. We combine
near and far, yours and mine, excess and not enough,
sometimes in the same breath. We build walls

only to keep up the roof. We build walls
like parentheses, bowed, ourselves an aside. Our punctuation
lets us know when enough is enough,
when it’s time to stop the story,
when it’s time to let someone else find a combination
of words that makes sense of our tattered books. Libraries

are not just stacks of books like towers, enough walls
to keep us in. A library is a collective mind, punctuating
all our stories, all of them, all our possible combinations.

JeFF Stumpo

JeFF Stumpo is a survivor of psychosis and PTSD, husband to a PhD chemist, and father to an amazing trans child. He’s the author of five chapbooks of poetry (most through Seven Kitchens Press) and a spoken word album. He has a (poor) website at www.JeFFStumpo.com.