I Have No Shadow

she says        she has no shadow
but she is a shaman of shadows
she paints two stone cliffs        the rift
you can barely see a couple     in the middle distance
some confined existence

i want to know what substance 
creates a shadow
with hidden stairs 
that leads      to doors
a shallow shell 
a darkness that might          open
to others
    
her paintings will have questions for you

some type of scaffolding      surreal 
& somewhat sinister
what we may find       or not
& read     or not        between the lines
think that
her final act      is
planned
we won’t see it      coming
the future
​
two bullets     shot through the canvas :
Watching the Clock

Sharon Tracey

Sharon Tracey is a writer, editor and author of What I Remember Most Is Everything (ALL CAPS PUBLISHING, 2017), her first full-length collection of poetry. Her poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Silkworm, The Skinny Poetry Journal and are forthcoming in Common Ground Review and Ekphrasis. Art and nature are recurring themes in her work. She has enjoyed a varied career as an environmentalist, policy analyst, editor and communications director. She is currently working on a series of poems featuring women artists of the past five centuries.

The Green Blouse, 1919

In this interior, a girl with a blouse the colour of summer
sits in front of a window.  Behind her, a curtain
falls, a shower of light, and behind that, the tropical
foliage of Le Cannet.  Outside my window in Virginia,
it’s a day still trying to make up its mind—dregs of snow
in the corners, daffodils ringing bravely in the cold wind. 
Spring is late this year, the grass undecided if it should
take a pass, stay sleeping, rolled up in its patchy old coat.
But there are two blue jays at the feeding table, and they 
aren’t fooled by the bare trees, the blossoms reluctant
to unfold. They know the sun by its angle, see that the stars
have gathered in their spring flocks.  They are bluer than the sky, 
and they know it. Every day, there’s another cup of sunlight.
They tilt back their heads, and they drink it all in.

Barbara Crooker

This poem first appeared in Barbara Crooker's book, Les Fauves.

A previous contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, Barbara Crooker's work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Common Wealth:  Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and The Bedford Introduction to Literature.  She is the author of eight books of poetry; Les Fauves is the most recent. She has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.  Her website iswww.barbaracrooker.com

A Child Again                                                              
                       viewing the Dutch film The Vanishing

I lean forward to meet the flame at centre frame engulfed 
in darkness. My eyes adjust. 

A red silken backdrop falls forward. The heroine’s elbows fan out 
against the casket that hems her in. 

My feet press the floor. Her trembling makes the spark waver 
then go out. 

Will she catch a whiff of chloroform beneath her quivering upper lip?
Again she flicks 

her lighter, its flame held close enough to scorch the fabric 
of fear. Her low groan 

makes me shudder. The camera cuts to the fresh-turned ground 
she lies beneath. 

From moving upright to buried alive. I can’t breathe! My own elbows 
measure left, right. 

I’m twelve again, reading burial tales under thick covers
by flickering flashlight. 

Her tremble risks setting silk on fire. Be still. Don’t waste oxygen. 
Wait. 

Margo Davis

Margo’s poems have appeared in Light: A Journal of Photography & Poetry, Wisconsin Review, Midwest Quarterly, Slipstream, Agave Magazine, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Forthcoming poems are to appear in Misfit Magazine, Civilized Beasts, Vine Leaves Literary, Burgers and Barrooms Anthology, and Echoes Off a Canyon Wall, an ekphrastic photo / poetry exhibit. 

Compartment C, Car 193 (1938)
​
            "Rock-poster artists such as Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor
             Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson generated an exciting
             array of distinctive works featuring distorted hand-lettering and
             vibrating colours . . ."
                                            de Young Museum, “The Summer of Love Experience”

A green compartment of varied shades. She reads the script,
takes   little  notice  of  the  space.  Midnight  blue,  her  dress
matches her hat. The  brim swoops over her face concealing
her  eyes, but no one needs to see  her eyes, they are on the
page. She is 

alone,  solitude  the muse for now. Where is  she going? The  
sun  sets   in   the  rectangular   window;  darkened  hills,  an
arched bridge over its  own small  river. White snow  on the
side, white  as  the  page  she  reads. The  play will  never be
produced. Maybe she will choose 

the   script  still on  the  seat  beside  her.  The  script  of  her  
parallel  life. He might have painted her as a dancer doing  a
striptease  across the  stage,  breasts flung  forward, nipples
red as cherries  ready to  be picked. Or a  woman  staring at
her polished fingernails, red 

too, in an all-night diner  where  the  cook and the  man she  
just met  talk  eternal  baseball. They  will never  know  who
wins. On  a  closer  look  they  are  not scripts she  reads but
pamphlets by Swiss chemist Dr  Albert Hofmann. Seeking  a
blood stimulant, he is 

the  first  to  synthesize LSD. She has a rare  disease slowing
her   circulation.  This  made her  parents  overly  protective;
despite  her  stylish air, she is  painfully  shy.  She  will  never
try LSD, dying  before it becomes widely distributed  but her
daughter will. Her daughter will 

be an  artist in  San Francisco who uses psychedelic designs
to promote  rock shows at the  Fillmore. Men will  dominate
the market, but her daughter will possess a strong drive and
a   flare  for   colour   no    one     else   can    match.  Here  in
Compartment C a man is about 

to  enter.  He  will use  a  line  from  a  movie to  engage her.
When  she  looks  at him  she thinks of  Errol  Flynn in Robin
Hood and  is  smitten. The  pamphlet  falls  from  her  hands.
The  shade on  the  window   is  lowered. The  canvas  goes
slack, all 

the muted tones become intense, and intertwine.  

Virginia Barrett

Virginia Barrett’s work has most recently appeared, or is forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, Narrative,  Poetry of Resistance (University of Arizona Press), New Mexico Review, and Forage.  She received a 2017 writer’s residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, NM. Her chapbook, Stars By Any Other Name, was a semi-finalist for the Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull City Press, 2017. She holds an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and a MAT in Art from Rhode Island School of Design. 

Under the Big Top
 
In the bed of the ’46 pickup
The family huddles like penguins
For the short distance
To the Greatest Show on Earth.
My face shows Entertainment a stranger in our world.
Already I smell the popcorn, the sawdust;
I feel the rush,
Imagining lights and music and flawless feats.
 
We enter
The colourful menagerie.
The big top
Revealing first the freak
And then the fat lady,
And clowns cutting capers, shooting confetti,
And exotic blankets adorning elephants,
Whose headdresses and sequined girls dazzle the crowd gone wild.
And the gymnasts with poles displaying
Versatility                              and balance.
 
We inhale and hold -
 
Confined in cages just moments ago, lions now jump through fiery rings
As trainer in ruffled shirt and white, stained gloves lifts his baton.
On the drop,
Horses thunder past, and stunt men, practiced and controlled, somersault
Higher,
Higher,
                            On each other’s shoulders.
 
Hang tight!
Trapeze artists
Soar,
Spin,
Dive,
Defying the odds.
                                  No safety net.
And unicyclists,
Perched three high,
Hands outstretched,
Circle,
One, two, three.
 
The greatest show on earth,
Well-defined and executed,
Tastes of death.
There’s something-
Something primitive about it –
 
I mean, the ring and all.

Jo Taylor

Jo has been an English teacher for over thirty years, and poetry has always been her favorite genre to teach.  In recent years, her students' success with publishing has motivated her to relinquish her writing, and the experience has been rewarding. She is one of nine children born and raised by tenant farmers in Middle Georgia, and much of her poetry reflects that family heritage.

Dream-Sailing
          Inspired by Acts 10

The high noon sun, tabernacled in Orion, blazes across the sky off the coast of Joppa. In his sleep, the offshore breeze feels like a holy wind. It blows through celestial clouds; the visitation of its breath falls upon the vessel dropping from heaven, its white sheet unfurling yard by yard. Sail on. Sail on across the Eridanus, he whispers to himself. 

Salt water sprays with every whoosh of wind. And leaning over gunwhales are giraffes and elephants, lions and baboons, a flock of ostriches all heralding their song, a hymn of praise, as if prayers in a temple. 

He sees himself at the laver, cleaning his hands before awakening.

______________________________________________________________________________
Author’s note: When literary devices used in the Biblical passage are considered (like synecdoche), it is reasonable to imagine that Peter dreamt of a sailing vessel full of animals—a relevant allusion to Noah’s ark, a ship of salvation.

​John C. Mannone

Editor's Note: The imagery in Acts 10 inspired the author to write this poem. In turn, the poem inspired him to create this collage to accompany the writing.

John C. Mannone has work in Blue Fifth Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Peacock Journal, Plough, Windhover, Gyroscope Review, Baltimore Review, Pedestal, Pirene's Fountain, Poetica Magazine and others. He’s the winner of the 2017 Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian literature and the recipient of two Weymouth writing residencies. He has three poetry collections: Apocalypse (Alban Lake Publishing), nominated for the 2017 Elgin Book Award; Disabled Monsters (The Linnet’s Wings Press) featured at the 2016 Southern Festival of Books; and Flux Lines (Celtic Cat Publishing). He’s been awarded two Joy Margrave Awards for Nonfiction and nominated for several Pushcart, Rhysling, and Best of the Net awards. He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other venues. He’s professor of physics near Knoxville, TN. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com

Ears of Wheat, 1890


"I tried to paint the sound of the wind in the ears of wheat."
                                     ~Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to Paul Gauguin

There is nothing here but wheat, no blade
too slight for his attention:  long swaying
brush strokes, pale greens, slithery yellows,
the hopefulness of early spring.  All grass
is flesh, says the prophet.  Here, there are no
gorgeous azures stamped with almond blossoms,
no screaming sky clawed with crows, no sunflowers
roiling gold and orange, impasto thick as Midi sunlight.
His brush herringboned up each stalk, the elemental
concerns of sun, rain, dirt, while his scrim of pain receded
into the underpainting.  He let the wind play
through the stems like a violin, turning the surface
liquid, a sea of green, shifting eddies and currents.  
No sky, no horizon; the world as wheat.

Barbara Crooker

This poem was first published in Barbara Crooker's book, Les Fauves.

A previous contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, Barbara Crooker's work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Common Wealth:  Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and The Bedford Introduction to Literature.  She is the author of eight books of poetry; Les Fauves is the most recent. She has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.  Her website iswww.barbaracrooker.com

Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #79

[The spectator] wants to join the canvas, not in order to consume it aesthically, but in order to produce it in his turn (to “re-produce” it), to try his hand at a making whose nakedness and clumsiness afford him an incredible (and quite misleading) illusion of facility. 
                                                                                                          –Roland Barthes

Lines drawn alongside lines as if under lines, lines drawn straight up and down and
across, lines angular, lines drawn helter-skelter, lines defining fields in shades of blue like
an ocean (but not an ocean), in a band of yellow and gold like a sunset (but not a sunset). 
Lean in here, viewer, where the way out first seems be through windows or doors, before
​they turn into ghostly shapes of ships or just some fog on the glass.

everyone can see
the way it’s been built up
layer upon layer
who knows what to call it?
it is not futility

first sullied canvas
he was hoping to paint out
the lingering stains
as gesture piled on gesture
marks what time does

The eye continually wanders as in a labyrinth, false clues at every turn; first a long time
certain of success, certain you’ve read it, and then right into a wall, the only passage
being under; but the game’s been changed.  We know certainly it is not the picture of
farm plots or a surrealist beach, but we cannot decipher it, unlock whatever hidden
meaning might be there.  It might just mean what non-meaning itself means, the presence
of absence; and it represents the unrepresented.

I first picked out 
that single surface, a canvas
drawn and painted on
flat before my open eyes
no illusions of depth

too many details
to reckon them up in words
no sooner noticed
than forgot, the flood of more
coming on the dancing eye

This is a critic’s nightmare: name the colors and make a catalogue.  Start with that
somewhat greenish column lower left, the one with the rouge, strawberry reddish line
drawn through it, with the pasty clouds, scrawled uncertain images at the top, the green
under the pressure of the brush and from the power of the wash fading in and out
unevenly.

untranslatable
faint markings, red and black lines
suggesting something
not depicting anything 
at all, a Byzantine art

nothing you discern
like any lines composing
a skeletal view
what we know is how cathedrals
wither under erasure

How miraculous if a word appeared, some fishhook to ensnare the thoughts rushing by. 
What if in that yellow band (my favorite of the features, my eye always seeks it out) he’d
written words like El Arroyo de los Baños, and then we’d look for twisting blue canals
banked in sunlit concrete, the sky over the San Joaquin toward the western hills.  But
before we’d gone far down that road, the sky would have broken into shards, like dry
leaves, down into blue and red stripes in thick parallels divided by hard lines, the canals
would crack, turn gray, and evaporate.  Why, then, you’d really wake up.

the only title
that the painter’s given us
what Ocean Park was
south of Santa Monica
a stretch of beach beyond roof tops

in the studio 
some worried lines and angles
made geometry
from the other side, the back
imagined in a mirror

                                                   esquisse

an artist walks up
lays down a long straight edge 
on virgin canvas
then besmirches it with hard lines 
pushing paint and charcoal in

search the scratches
for hints of hidden palimpsest
not really older
but illusions of time passing
between the painted layers

Charles Tarlton

Charles Tarlton: "I am a retired professor who has been writing poetry full time since 2010. I am especially addicted to emphasis and have published ekphrastic tanka prose in KYSO Flash, Haibun Today, Atlas Poetic, Contemporary Haibun Online, Review American, Ekphrastic Review, and Fiction International."

Cradles

1.

You must not cry for night,
a garden of blues and greens, 
the fragrant stars, the little melodies
falling silent. You must not weep
for the selvage of dusk, its frame
settling against the window.

This other kind of cotton’s
made to soothe, to sweep and wrap
against your back. Your child’s
hiding within the forbidden grove,
ever restless with her dreams
of horses, her fear of wind.

2.

When I woke cherry leaves 
swept the sky, stroking
another nursery into being

with its pastels and white crib.
From a hinge in the sky
strains of Bach rose

and fell. Certain shades
came from cuttings left on the curb. 
The same three fates--

Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos--
continued to spin, measure and cut,
sewing shadows to their facings.

3.

Come now to the new place
where the large head waits,
bound and swaddled in flannel.
Come down as the birds plummet

from sky to nest. Circle back,
let the green rest, pace yourself
for the hundred years, the fluted edge,
the filigree tears falling

in a fountain from her breast
as she feels it empty.
Post partum, in the nursery, 
a little muff of dust accumulates 

against a headboard. See to the stain
of milk-spray, the tiny circles
she traces with her finger 
as she nurses this new Victor.

Judith Skillman

Judith Skillman’s recent book is Kafka’s Shadow, Deerbrook Editions. Her work has appeared inLitMag, Shenandoah, Zyzzyva, FIELD, and elsewhere. Awards include an Eric Mathieu King Fund grant from the Academy of American Poets. She is a faculty member at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Washington. Visit  www.judithskillman.com

Turbulence
​
But how can a storm be elegant, the contortion of 
the visible expanse, incoherent elements clamouring 

for release, morning pretending to be a newly birthed 
night, night lit up like a funereal morning, didn’t we also 

do it awkwardly, dumping darkness into the space 
between us, letting the light grind into the ugliness, we 

could sit naked on the parapet to see if the rain understands 
when the earth says no or trace the immorality of the tempest 

to a karmic reduction, a consequence even after it is removed
from its cause, but you stand there, smiling, the universe 

reduced to a point on your finger, telling me why the 
frenzied sky tries to shred itself so it can become 

water, after the penitent water has patiently gathered 
itself, day after day, to become the sky.

Rajani Radhakrishnan

Rajani Radhakrishnan is from Bangalore, India.   Finding time and renewed enthusiasm for poetry after a long career in Financial Applications, she blogs at thotpurge.wordpress.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The Lake, Quiet Letter, Under the Basho and The Cherita.