Five Poems after David Hockney After Wallace Stevens After Picasso Author's note: "In 1937 Poetry Magazine published most of Wallace Steven’s poem, “The Man With The Blue Guitar,” inspired by Picasso’s painting, The Old Guitarist. That same year Picasso painted Guernica, protesting Franco using Hitler’s Luftwaffe to bomb the Basque town. Also in 1937, English artist David Hockney was born. In 1977 Hockney created a series of 19 etchings titled The Blue Guitar after Stevens. He wrote, “Like the poem, they are about transformations within art as well as the relation between reality and the imagination.” When I saw his work at MOMA, I wondered who was going to write a poem responding to Hockney to continue this conversation of discovery. I waited and waited and no one did, so I borrowed the titles of his 19 etchings to use as springboards to reflect on Picasso's guitarist, Steven's poem and Hockney's etchings." ** The Old Guitarist After waking to cheese and chorizo, bread and coffee, I slide my fingers, my bent, blue, arthritic fingers, along your fretted neck. And you moan when I lick you. And you moan when I stop. And my breath upon your breast leaves us breathless as our bodies turn into a body of song. I want to taste the world within your world of rosewood. I want to feel the feel of you, the you of you, the very, very real of you before caesura pries us apart. Before I leave this world the way I slid into it-- sans teeth, sans hair, sans you, crying Not yet. Not yet. ** What is this Picasso? Because Hitler painted landscapes only as they are, his landscapes looked like landscapes and nothing more. So he painted huge machines dropping little machines that Guernicaed the landscapes he could merely render. Listen, we bitch war, but truth is, few of us would be who we are unless there were so much of it. History is an imaginary box with real bombs mewing inside. We know they’re live when we hear them cry, Have some more. And we say, Sure. Let’s blow something up. Things as they are, are-- Don’t get me wrong, change can be good, but so much depends upon who’s playing the blue guitar. ** A Picture of Ourselves O, do not ask what you can do for your country. Ask for it to build for you, something huge. Say, a corporation. Call it Manifest Duh. Say, a religion. Call it Eminent Dumbrain. Say, a wall. Call it American Except. Look, up in the sky, stars turn over their engines in the Guernica dark, and below, Main Streets drape their coffins with flags. Let’s make everything great again. Denigrate Depreciate Self-emigrate Let’s send everyone back. ** Parade What I mean is…is parade is history, celebrated after the war is won, the enemy done and the myth sips a cordial, lights a cigar and polishes its story. It was pageantry all afternoon. And in the evening it was debris. What we need is a song, you and me. Let’s have us a song-- I place a guitar in Tennessee And strike a chord A minor chord that floats Like feathery floss Across the breezy slopes And in the sky Ain’t that the sky A chorus of pundits cries out sharply Things as they aren’t trump what they are What they are ** Etching is the Subject Etching is the subject of etch, as making is the subject of poem. Unlike nature that doesn’t mean to mean or to be beautiful or to kill, the poem is an obsession of imagination over will. When Dora Maar posed for Picasso, he unscrewed her lens from her art. She became his model, his muse, his lover, but no longer a maker. Look how pensive she looks in this engraving, looking without and within. O Dora, mi amor, even though a counterfeit of your countenance hangs in my room, I don’t think I ever knew till now your name. Peter E. Murphy Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York where he managed a nightclub, operated heavy equipment and drove a taxi. Author of eleven books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, his work has appeared in The Common, Diode, Guernica, Hippocampus, The New Welsh Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University.
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Saturn It wasn't so hard to eat the children. He was accustomed to grappling with galactic dilemmas, forcing knife-ish solutions. His wife was against it. Duh. It’s still hard not to like the guy whose goatish rage for order still gambols us onward like any progress, friendly and stupid. Call him the first pissed-off pop to lock his brats in the bedroom. He was buying time, his signal gift, a gift bigger than he. As gifts are. They would dub his the Golden Age which he'd predicted and molded but didn't contemplate. Even gods can’t quite imagine their ends. Yet he was the bringer of ends last planet in the reign of circles conning us all to believe he’d tethered a world built on blood and weather, on women. Surely he sensed in the way we do when the future pricks our goddish fingertips how all things born of fear loop round at last to kick our ass. Alexis Quinlan Alexis Quinlan is a writer, editor, reviewer, and adjunct English teacher in New York. Her poems can be found in The Paris Review and Denver Quarterly, online at Rhino, Tinderbox, and Juked, and via abchaospoesis.blogspot.com. More work coming soon on Diagram and Juked. Her recent review of Stephanie Strickland's How the Universe Is Made is on Heavy Feather Review. She is also a member of XR’s street theater group, Cit Ass Theater. judith slays holofernes by the beauty of her countenance disabled him judith 16:6 bible scholars pronounced my story fiction fiction or not i am more than a story’s heroine i am lady wisdom herself . . . proclaiming in my stride this is how to act, to live as i walk out the city gate . . . i am armored with only perfume, silks and lies when the soldiers let me enter the dreadful camp . . . biding my time i stalk my prey and wait like a circling hawk will wait knowing full well my wisdom can only seduce but with beauty and then with my beauty kill Sister Lou Ella Hickman Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and new verse news as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015. (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at Y92 in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.” Congratulations to Jennifer Leigh Selig, winner of ekphrastic flash fiction summer contest!
Click here or on image above to read her story! Thank you to everyone who entered. We loved your stories, and are eternally grateful for your support and participation! Our currently open contest is Ekphrastic Sex. Click here for details. Our guest judge is the queen of erotica, Alexis Rhone Fancher. Look out for our upcoming Halloween contest. Details will be announced soon. After the Fall The Loue runs underground, birthed from dark cave, shadows large and lurking, boulders mirrored in murky water below. It is the way of things, this dark water, this blackness, this cave which surrenders its bleak reality untainted by lush landscapes. Courbet saw it, this accouchement he knew, saw its truth black as oil beneath the surface. Did he dive into that black hell? Did he ever see sun glinting off water, or Van Gogh’s, Monet’s blues and purples, Gauguin’s bronze bodies, lying abed, spread lushly by blue waters, oranges and yellows, reds awash with sun glow? Or was he forever le desespere?[1]Of late I have seen such a face, a desperate man fraught with demons, his own journey into bowels of soul. His return uncertain. Nancy Owen Nelson [1] Courbet’s self-portrait, “The Desperate Man.” Nancy Owen Nelson is the author of Divine Aphasia: a Woman's Search for her Father, and other books. Woman with a Fan: On Maria Blanchard Diane Kendig Shanti Arts Books, 2021 The Ekphrastic Review: How did your relationship with the painter Maria Blanchard begin? Diane Kendig: I really love the poet Federica Garcia Lorca, and one day in the 1980s, I was re-reading the collection of his prose writing. I was struck by the first, very short essay, which I hadn’t recalled reading before. It was a funeral elegy for Blanchard, whom he really didn’t know. He gave the eulogy at the request of her friend but looked up facts and at least one work by her and gave a very, very personal eulogy. Here it is in Spanish and English: http://mujeresenelarte.blogspot.com/2009/02/elegia-maria-blanchard-federico-garcia.html Tell us, why Maria? Of so many women artists, what was it about Maria that meant a book of poems for you instead of just one? Well, really, it started with just one. After reading Lorca’s elegy, I imagined what her life must have been like, disabled, and how that might have affected her mother’s distanced relationship to her. The poem was biographical, not ekphrastic at all. I was wrong about so much in that poem, which I have since revised. I was trying to find her artwork and couldn’t, but I then found a reference to her relationship with Rivera, and that really set me off and produced the second poem. I never planned a book. It just grew over 30 years. I was encouraged by Michael Northen, the editor of Wordgathering, to write some prose about her, and I just wrote a poem or two about her art each year, and really, there it was. I am not a poet who gets a theme and knocks off a book. And then I found Shanti Arts with Christine Cote, who is so much wiser about art reproduction than I, who has a wonderful publication and books and a gallery and anthologies. When I found her as a publisher, I realized this book could be. What sets Maria's art apart, for you, from other cubists of her time, from other painters in general? I had been writing poems about Frida Kahlo in the years before and found her relationship to Rivera to be so problematic for me, who was raised never to be a man’s handservant. Then, I read how Blanchard loved him first, shared a studio with him, but she would not wait on him the way Kahlo did. When he tested her, whether consciously or not, she just dug in and focused on her art. And that, that, is what set her apart. She worked with men who had women waiting on them hand and foot, and she worked with them as an equal, as an artist. She always worked first on her art. She had to earn a living, and she taught too, and she supported half her family, but art came first, even when it meant penury. I had been there, too. When cubism came along, she studied it and produced a lot of it, and very good, though her previous training, like theirs, was classical: portraits, a mythological subject. Then, then she took this most classical theme, a woman holding a fan (look that up: centuries of it in every culture, painting after painting) and she made it CUBIST and SPANISH, very Spanish. And what is more Spanish than a woman with a fan? Hers is amazing. Two themes that surface in Maria's work and your work about her are her gender and her physical disabilities. What can you share with your readers in advance about Maria's struggles? I’ve mentioned both above. She was born with kyphosis, or as everyone says, “hunchbacked.” Lorca said it was the first thing everyone told him about her, before he saw her art. So me too, the first thing I learned, from his eulogy. And during her time, everyone said it was because her mother fell from a horse during pregnancy. Everyone said that. I wrote it. I am appalled at myself. I was set straight by my friend Maria Bonnett, a nurse practitioner who said, “No way.” And then, in the latest documentary on Blanchard (by film maker Gloria Crespo), a doctor puts the myth totally to rest and says the condition was not caused by a fall from a horse. Puh-lease. And he discusses the condition, what does cause it. He provides x-rays. There was a tradition—Maria said in Spain, but I have found accounts of it here in the U.S.—that you’d win the lottery if you touched your ticket to a hunchback, and she faced being chased down the street by people clutching their tickets. So in addition to the physical difficulty of having the strain on her body, she had the social stigma. She said she fled to France because of it. I don’t know that she experienced less stigma there. As for gender, well you have to look at the work of the Spanish feminist art critic María Jose Salazar, who has worked for decades to gather and catalogue Blanchard’s work because she believes its inordinate range and quality speaks for her itself. And Salazar attributes the relative lack of fame Blanchard received in her lifetime to gender inequity. In her 20s, her work won over Rivera’s in a major competition. And at her death, someone took one or more of her paintings and erased her name from it, overwriting it with the name of the famous painter, Juan Gris, who had also been one of her best friends, knowing it would bring more money that way. Tell us about your quest to see Maria's work, and about seeing it for the first time in Spain. I had been to Spain as a student in the 1970s, but none of her work was public then. Once I found her work, in the mid-1980s, I had just obtained a full-time academic position at a small liberal arts college. The librarian helped me find one book with some of her paintings on interlibrary loan, and I was so excited to send for it. But when it arrived, in photocopy—black and white photocopy—the paintings mostly looked like Rorschach tests. I felt disappointed in my very body. In the mid-1990s, my husband and I made a few trips to Europe and eventually to Spain. On entering the Reina Sofia Museum (which is basically the Prado Modern), I was looking for where Guernica was when Paul spotted Blanchard’s name and the painting, Mujer con abanico. I had no idea she was there. I tore up the steps. She was above Picasso!! She was next to and bigger than Rivera! She was magnificent! Later, I went to the gift shop, where Salazar’s complete, 700-page catalogue of Blanchard’s work was on sale with its huge colour prints and its great biographic info. I bought it, and I carried it on the plane, held it on my lap the whole ride home, and wrote from it ever after, one painting at a time. Tell us how you came to ekphrastic poetry. I’m not sure. I for sure didn’t know the word “ekphrastic” and didn’t know it was a thing. I know I loved Paul Klee’s Pastoral at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and I loved how Klee had said if he couldn’t be a painter, he’d like to be a poet, and I loved his titles. I read his diaries and felt his connection to words--Twittering Machine. The Poets League of Greater Cleveland (now defunct) had several programs presenting poetry relating to art (“Poetry: Mirror for the Arts”), and my Klee painting poem was used for one of those, with an epigraph by Kitaj, an artist who studied in Cleveland: “Some books have paintings, and some paintings have books.” Yes. Then I did the Frida Kahlo series. Even while I was writing Blanchard poems, I wrote a long poem on all the Judith of Bethulia paintings. Another Klee the CMA has bought and hasn’t exhibited yet. A chilling one. When I am stuck—and I am always getting stuck—translating and ekphrasis-drafting sort of suck me out of my stuckness. Tell us about your ekphrastic process. How do you approach a painting, or a poem? How does the inspiration and transformation work for you? Honestly, I am not quite sure. So let me just tell you about what I used for the Blanchard poems. After the first two Blanchard poems, which were biographical only, I wrote my first of the ekphrastic Blanchard poems, “Oriental Caprice,” as a commission piece). “Oriental Caprice” was requested by a former student of my sister, who had just died at age 49 of a long battle with cancer. My sister was her friend, and my very best friend, and Blanchard painted that very uncharacteristic (for her) work out of friendship. I felt that I wanted each poem to have what that poem had: something about the art, something about Blanchard herself, and some connection to me. In a lot of the Blanchard poems, there is a very personal tug at my heart going on that the reader may or may not be aware of. For example, “Portrait of Regina Barahona” is Blanchard’s portrait of her niece. I had a niece that I helped to nurture from her adoption, through the two years of my sister’s cancer, and then, after she died, the guardians cut off most of my visitation. As an aunt there is nothing one can do about that, and I haven’t stated it in the poem, but I know my experience is underlying that poem. And there is something like that in each of the poems. I also tried some forms, a Welsh form and a 17th c. form used by Andrew Marvell that I can’t find anywhere else. (And his was an ekphrastic poem about a child, as mine is, “Child with a Toothache.”) Forms suck me out of my stuckness too, and wow, form plus a painting, there is so much firing in my head and heart, I can’t stay stuck. Read one of the Woman with a Fan poems here. This summer, The Ekphrastic Review started single-session, online writing workshops as an opportunity to gather together, learn more about visual art, build community, write, and have fun.
Each of the four sessions we have had so far has been very special. Lorette shares her passion for the stories behind paintings, and we do several engaging and open-ended writing exercises to fire up your creativity. There is a surprise lineup of artworks each session, curated with the expansion of your ekphrastic practice in mind. There will always be a diverse spectrum of works to accommodate different tastes and challenge you with new ideas. Expect a range of styles and cultures. We are introducing some themed workshops. Moon Gazing will focus on moon-themed artworks, and Ghost Stories, our Halloween session, will focus on ghosts in art history. Boo! We are also introducing Wine and Art Write Nights. This is an opportunity for writers to relax with each other online and get creative. With the popularity of wine and paint nights, it seems fitting during the Covid isolation that writers who can no longer gather at the bar still get together. These will be chatty and relaxing but still full of amazing art anecdotes and inspiring exercises. Join us! The new prompt is up. Click on image above for details!
The Ekphrastic Review features an art prompt every other Friday, and writers from all over the world use the prompt to inspire their poetry and flash fiction. Join us! Click image above for details. Winter in June He is talking about glaciers and the widest skies in the world, about a place called Gondwana that hasn’t existed for two hundred million years. In June, the deep of winter, the moon is eternal and the sun does not rise. You imagine night horses with ice in their manes, galloping across snow-capped mountains. Where would you be if you weren’t here? Maybe there, a little farther north, where Malbec flows from the limestone and men like this one dance the tango. You were too practical to run after him when you had the chance, didn’t try to tame him into staying. You chose to set down roots, in the Northern hemisphere where the cold comes in January, without looking back. Found a man you can depend on, who still makes your heart race to this day, and you are happy. Still, as glasses clink and voices murmur, as guests choose carefully between Viognier and Pinot Noir, or Stilton and Gruyere, as your small audience takes in an arrangement of your pictures, you feel a strange sensation of thaw. It has been a few years since your southbound friend has made it home to one of your exhibitions; it has been nearly twenty since you slept together. Patrons are asking questions about your palette, about the meaning of the signs in your impasto. But you are somewhere else, just for the moment, in the crispy porch frost of a November dusk, melting, Coldplay on repeat, tumbling atop those so small hips, crushing them like winter birds. Lorette C. Luzajic This piece first appeared in Unbroken Journal, then as the title piece for the author's collection, Winter in June, (Mixed Up Media Books, 2021). Urdu Translation جون میں موسم سرما وہ دنیا میں برف کے تودوں اور وسیع ترین آسمانوں کی باتیں کر رہا ہے, ایک جگہ کی جس کا نام گوندوانا ہے جو کے سو الکھ سالوں سے وجود میں ہی نہیں ہے۔ جون میں ,موسم سرما کی شدت ,چاند ابدی ہوتا ہے اور سورج طلوع نہیں ہوتا۔ تم رات کے گھوڑوں کا تصور کرتے ہو جن کے بال برف سے لرہے ہوں, برف سے ڈھکی چٹانوں میں دوڑتے ہوئے۔ تم کہاں ہوتے اگر یہاں نہ ہوتے؟ شاہد وہاں, تھوڑا اور اوپر جنوب میں ,مالبک العم سٹون سے بہتا ہے اور اس طرح کے مرد ٹینگو ناچ ناچتے ہیں۔ تم بہت زیادہ حقیقت پسند تھی کہ اس کے پیچھے بھاگتی جب تمہارے پاس موقع تھا , اسے روکنے کے لئے سدہارا نہیں۔ تم نے اپنی جڑیں شمالی عالقے میں بونا پسند کین جہاں سردی جنوری میں آتی ہے, بغیر پیچھے دیکھے۔ وہ مرد ڈہونڈا جس پہ تم اعتماد کر سکو , وہ جو تمہارے دل کی ,دھڑکن کو تیز کر دیتا ہو, اور تم خوش ہو۔ ابھی بھی ,جب گالسز ٹکرا رہے ہیں اور آوازیں کھسر پھسر کر رہی ہیں جب مہمان بڑی احتیاط سے ویوگنیئر اور پنوٹ نیر یا اسٹیلٹن اور گرئیر کے درمیان چناؤ کر رہے ہیں, جب تمہارے تھوڑے سے سامعین تمہاری تصاویر کی ترتیب سے محزوز ہو رہے ہیں, تمہیں پگھلنے کا عجیب احساس محسوس ہوتا ہے۔ کچھ سال بیت چکے ہیں جب تمہارا جنوب میں بسنے والو دوست تمہا ری کسی ایک نمائش میں گھر آیا ہو؛ بیس سال بیت چکے ہیں جب تم دونوں آخری دفع ھمبستر ہوئے تھے۔ سرپرست تمہارے پیلیٹ کے بارے میں سوال ,کر رہے ہیں, تمہارے امپاستو میں نشانات کے بارے میں۔ مگر تمہارا دیہان کہیں اور ہے, فکت ایک لمحے کے لئے ,نوبر کی شام کی پورچ کی کرکری ٹھنڈ میں, پگھلتے, کولڈ پلے دوبارا-دوبارا, ان انتہائی چھوٹے کولہوں پہ ٹمٹماتے موسم سرما کے پرندوں کی طرح کچلتے ہوئے۔ Transliteration June Mein Mosam-e-Sarma Woh dunya mein barf ke todoon aur wasee tareen asmanoon ki baatain ker raha hai, aik jagha ki jis ka nam Gondawa hai jo ke so-lakh saaloon se wajood mein hi nahein hai. June mein mosam-e-sarma ki shidat, chaand abdi hota hai aur suraj tulu nahein hota. Tum raat ke ghoroon ka Tasawar karte ho jink e baal barf se laday hon, barf se dahle chatanoon mein dhorte howe. Tum kahan hote ager yahan na hote? Shahid wahan, thora aur oper, janoob mein, jahan Malbec limestone se behta hai aur iss tarha ke mard tango naach naachte hain. Tum bohat zaida hakikat pasand thi ke uss ke peeche bhagti jab tumhare paas moqa tha, usse rukne ke liye sudhara nahein. Tum nein apni jarain shumali alakae mein bona pasand kein Jahan sardi January mein aati hai, bagair pechae deekhe. Woh mard dhonda jis pe tum aitimaad ker sako, woh jo tumhare dil ki dharkan ko taez ker deta ho, aur tum khush ho. Abhi bhi, jab glasses takra rahe hain aur awaazain khoser phoser ker rahi hain, jab mehmaan beri ehtiaat se Viognier aur Pinot Noir ya Stilton aur Gruyere ke dermiaan chunaaoo ker rahe hain, jab tumhare thore se saameein tumhari tasaaveer ki terteeb se mehzooz ho rahe hain, tumhain phegalne ka aik ajeeb ehsaas mehsoos hota hai. Kuch saal beet chuke hain jab tumhara janoob mein basnae wala dost tumhari kisi nomaaish mein ghar aya ho, beis saal beet chuke hain jab tum donoon aakhri dafa hum-bister hoay thae. Sirparast tumhare palette ke baare mein sawaal ker rahe hain, tumhare impasto mein nishanaat ke bare mein. Magar tumhara dehaan kahein aur hai, fakt aik lamhe ke liye, November ki sham porch ki kurkuri thand mein, phegalti, Coldplay dobara-dobara, un intehaai choote kolhoon pe tamtamate, mosam-e-sarma ke parindoon ki terha kochalte hoay. translated by Saad Ali Saad Ali (b. 1980 C.E. in Okara, Pakistan) has been educated and brought up in the United Kingdom (UK) and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and an MSc in Management from the University of Leicester, UK. He is an existential philosopher, poet, and translator. Ali has authored five books of poetry. His latest collection of poetry is called Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021). He is a regular contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. By profession, he is a Lecturer, Consultant, and Trainer/Mentor. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Ovid, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, and Tagore. He is fond of the Persian, Chinese, and Greek cuisines. He likes learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities on foot. To learn more about his work, please visit www.facebook.com/owlofpines. Lorette C. Luzajic's ekphrastic prose poems and small stories have been widely published, recently in MacQueen's Quinterly, The Citron Review, Trampset, Ghost Parachute, JMWW, Cleaver Magazine, and more. She teaches ekphrastic writing in online workshops, through The Ekphrastic Review and beyond. Recently, she started teaching five day ekphrastic microfiction workshops with Meg Pokrass. Lorette is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review. She is also an award-winning, internationally collected visual artist, with collectors in thirty countries so far. Aftermath The little French village Took the German shelling hard. Once noisily vibrant With the music of joy and life, It is now deafening silent With death and decay, The putrid smell Of rotting flesh Wafting on the air. It is completely still, Utterly unmoving. Shell holes gape Once fertile fields, With family homes Totally destroyed. A lonesome observation balloon Surveils the widespread damage. Is it friend, Or is it foe? Do its occupants Weep with sorrow, Or are they giddy and jubilant In celebratory victory? It doesn’t matter now, though; Their days are, Likewise, numbered. Brothers: A Tanka Sequence I. Off to war they go These soldiers bonded by fear And by battle scars Living with the great unknown Grim Reaper follows their steps II. Still, they laugh and joke No other way to survive Than smile watchfully And put faith in each other Because warfare knows no gods III. Warily hopeful That they will make it stateside And see tomorrow Knowing only time will mend Broken bones and broken hearts IV, They swallow their bile Constantly moving forward Ignoring their nerves Knowing they have each other Forever brothers in arms Extinction: A Haiku Series I. An empty promise Given without thought or care Avowed recklessly II. Pledged with no remorse With no foresightful vision Immune to regret III. Bereft of wisdom Broken with no backwards glance Unashamedly IV. These are the promises That mankind made to the skies To the fragile beasts V. Promises left unkept Upon the Holy Mountain Debts that we must pay VI. No longer trusted Out of favor and of time Past due notices come VII. Now there is no one Aside from our greedy selves Left for us to hurt VIII. As we look around In miserable anger And we self-pity IX. There are no more beasts To which we can make promises Soon we will perish X. No sustenance left To keep us all alive still In body and soul XI. Thus, we made this bed It is time to lie in it Deathbed that it is For a Dream She Is fast Asleep now. Fatigue has won. After a long day And a meager supper, She drifted off quite quickly. Sharecropping will do that to you. Cotton and tobacco work is hard - So very laborious and tiring. It is a life spent bent over and hunched. It feels as though she is barely out Of the shackles that once bound her, The oppression still heavy In her limbs, on her back. This new slavery Takes a hard toll, On her mind Every Night. If She were Not so tired, So damn weary, She would dream a dream - A dream of true freedom, Like her heart and soul craves. She would not dream of peeling paint. It would be a dream of full bellies, A dream of dancing, a dream of song, But she is incapable of that now. After picking cotton all day long, After chopping out tobacco, After cooking and cleaning, After trying to help The kids with homework, She is much too Exhausted For a Dream. In Harmony: A Haiku Series I. On the street corner Harmonizing vocalists Pass the time in song II. A friendly quartet Bebopping through the standards Perfectly in tune III. Loved by the neighbors They gather after working To blow off some steam IV. Singing of lost love Heartache inconsolable And freedom’s sweet taste V. Even though they know They are still not truly free As black citizens VI. Because everyday They feel a boot on their throats And hurt in their hearts VII. Centuries of pain Not even music can heal That does not stop them VIII. People love their sound, They will do whatever to Unburden their friends IX, To improve their lives To ease the great suffering Of their neighbourhood Man on a Bench: A Tanka Sequence I. He sits silently In his matching coat and cap Every day at noon. From that bench in Central Park, He looks about pensively. II. What is on his mind? Is he just people watching? Thinking of lost love? Pondering the universe? What stories could he tell us? III. We will never know, Never hear his opinions, Never feel his pain, ’Cause for the very first time, Today the bench was empty. Quilting: A Tanka Sequence I. Grandmother watches on, Her needle and thread moving, Quilting up a storm. Dominoes are for the young, But her interest is still there. II. Very well-practiced, She does not need eyes to sew. Her remembered youth And her competitiveness Are memories, sweet and warm. III. She watches silently, Never offering advice, Though they be unwise And their strategies be flawed. They have to learn for themselves. IV. So, she rocks away, Her work spilling to the floor, Lost in revelry, Just trying to stay busy As the night darkens the sky. V. At her advanced age, She feels keenly that these times, Precious as they are, Are no longer guaranteed. She feels it deep in her bones. VI. It makes her enjoy This time they spend together. When she goes at last, She hopes they remember her, So she quilts a legacy - VII. One to give the warmth That she never could show them, Being so distant, Having lived so much trauma, And having felt so much pain. VIII. She hopes that the quilt Will remind them they were loved - Which she rarely felt Until they all came along With their good souls and bright laughs. IX. So, she watches closely, With her heart in every stitch. Family game night Takes on a whole new meaning When you know it will end soon. She Simply Could Not Watch She simply could not watch. While everyone else Clamored excitedly And gossiped in loud whispers, The crowd teeming With frenzied commotion, She turned away, Wrapping her tattered shaw Tightly around herself, The lines of her weathered face Exaggerated As she pursed her dry lips thinly In harsh judgement, Not of the condemned, But of the condemning - Of those weak people, Those arrogant fools Playing god And those feeble-minded masses Wishing that they could. As the horse-drawn wagon Neared the courthouse, The stranger’s life Flashed before her eyes. She saw a screaming birth And an innocent childhood, A first love And all those lost along the way, Sobbing parents, Successes and failures. For a split second, She wondered if he saw it, too. Because while she, indeed, saw it all, She simply could not bring herself To see his end. No, that she simply could not watch. Rose Menyon Heflin Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet and artist from Wisconsin who enjoys nature and travel. Although currently busy cyanotyping and photographing plants and cranes, she enjoys working in a variety of media. Among other venues, her poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in 50 Haikus, Ariel Chart, Asahi Haikuist Network, Bramble, The Closed Eye Open, The Daily Drunk, Deep South Magazine, Dreich Magazine, Eastern Structures, The Ekphrastic Review, Haikuniverse, The Light Ekphrastic, Littoral Magazine, Please See Me, Plum Tree Tavern, THE POET, Poetry and Covid, Red Alder Review, Red Eft Review, Sparked Literary Magazine, The Texas Poetry Calendar, Three Line Poetry, Trouvaille Review, Visual Verse, The Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, and The Writers Club. Her poetry recently won a Merit Award from Arts for All Wisconsin. |
The Ekphrastic Review
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May 2024
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