Missing Elegy For Mary
​
Remember me--
embroidered above a heart
sewn crooked on creased linen. 

With crude silk you stitched a table set
untouched—glasses full 
and chairs pulled out but empty 

as the house you once lived in.
I wonder if your mother 
shook her head at your off-centre 

heart. I wonder if your fingers wavered 
when the needle needed re-threading. 
Mary, why can’t you sew straight— 

she’d scold, clenching all the linen 
you wasted. You’d steady your hands,
shut your mouth tight, and try once more. 

Remember me. 
I wonder if you cried out to Christ 
because you knew you’d be forgotten

like that undrunk wine or the house 
you once lived in—a girl with futile
hands, trembling fingers useless 

to wrinkled linen and a needle
crooked as those lines of verse 
where you dreamt of a grave’s salvation. 

Grace Celi

Grace Celi (she/her) is currently pursuing a B.A. in Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College. She is originally from Brooklyn, New York. Her recent work is forthcoming in Beyond Queer Words and Prairie Margins. ​

We are very pleased to announce our new ekphrastic contest, on the theme of Tarot art. And we are absolutely thrilled to have guest judges Riham Adly and Roula-Maria Dib on board! Riham, our flash fiction judge, reads, writes, and teaches from the framework of the unconscious and has a special interest in Tarot imagery. Roula-Maria, editor of Indelible Journal, is a renowned Jungian scholar and poet. Find out more about these writers, their work, and what they'll be looking for below.

The Tarot's evolution from parlour games to gambling houses to divination claims is as fascinating as the timeless and mysterious archetypal images on the cards. The Tarot is widely used today for cartomancy, but it started out as a popular game and took a mystical turn in the 18th century. A modern approach is to use the archetypal symbols that fascinated Carl Jung for therapeutic purposes, psychological reflection, and creative exercises.

We can't wait to see what these images inspire you to write!

 **

The Art of Tarot Rules

1. $10 CAD (approx. $7 USD) entry fee gets you an ebook with 36 Tarot-themed images, and you can submit three flashes or poems. First place prize for poetry and for flash fiction land $100 CAD prize each.

2. You can enter as many times as you like, using The Art of Tarot purchase button below as many times as you wish.

​3. Poetry and flash fiction, up to 750 words per piece.

4. Use one or more of the artworks in the booklet to inspire your stories and poetry. You can interpret the artwork and the theme in any way you are moved to. Read the judges' overviews in this post (below) to get a feel for what they're looking for.

5. Ten poems and ten flashes will be chosen by the editor of TER and by our guest judges to publish in The Ekphrastic Review. Three poems and three stories will be finalists. One poem and one flash will take first place and each win $100CAD. The judges will read submissions blind.

6. Include a 75 words or less bio.

7. Use TAROT in the subject line.

8. Deadline is November 23, 2022.

9. Winners will be announced in December.

10. Submission email: [email protected]
​
A Word From Our Guest Judges

Sometimes, the only way for us to confront a truth is to summon that never-ending fast track we call life, viewing it in a whirr, before slowing down to examine its components under the microscope. Having discovered that Tarot cards are nothing but archetypical images representing one’s journey—or what mythologist Joseph Campbell describes as “the hero’s journey,” we can use these symbols to create stories that thrust us further into the essence of our characters' journey, their perspectives and core emotions. The journey could be something as subtle as small adjustments that characters realize they need to go through, or revelations that are deep and internal. I would love if you could explore the storylines and the archetypical images in those cards using details, colours, and associations to see into the depth of your own Self. From there, explore new themes in your own writing, perhaps revisiting recurring themes, and understanding where it’s all coming from, as you craft your flash fiction.

Riham Adly

It is a with great honour and pleasure that I partake in this exceptional event, The Art of Tarot, so carefully put together by the inspiring artist, poet, and writer, Lorette C. Luzajic. While I don’t understand much about the Tarot in terms of technique, what I know is that it is a powerful array of symbols and images that move our archetypal energies into action. And the difference between “knowing” and “understanding”, by the way, is also something Tarot cards teach us. They speak to us in the language of poetry, which we grasp without any conventional tools of rational comprehension. Because symbols point toward possible meanings, the images of the Tarot speak possibilities without fixed meanings, pointing to the non-rational aspects of who we are.

​Unlike literalism and just like poetry, the Tarot brings back this symbolic essence of connection to other forms of reality. These cards are their own unique “alphabet” sparking truths through negative capability and synchronicities—a fascinating “alphabet” that the psyche can only fathom archetypally. We would see that each card has its own character, flavour, or personality, which matches one of our many archetypal voices that were activated while looking at it. And it is with great excitement to read your poems inspired by such rich visual language, the language of symbols, open—as ever—to hosting the unconscious. The ekphrastic journeys of your poems are evidence of your transition from the “visual” to the “visionary,” where the different voices of the images come to you to be embodied in such beautiful verse!

Roula-Maria Dib

Riham Adly is an award-winning flash fiction writer from Giza, Egypt. In 2013 her story “The Darker Side of the Moon” won the MAKAN award. In 2022 she won second prize in the Strands International Flash Fiction Competition. She is a Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work is included in the Best Micro-fiction 2020 anthology.  Her fiction has appeared in over 50 online journals   such as Litro Magazine, Lost Balloon, The Flash Flood, Bending Genres, The Citron Review, The Sunlight Press, Flash Fiction Magazine, Menacing Hedge, Flash Frontier, Flash Back, Ellipsis Zine, Okay Donkey, and New Flash Fiction Review among others.  Riham has worked as an assistant editor in 101 Words and as a first reader in Vestal Review. Riham is the founder of the “Let’s Write Short Stories” and “Let’s Write That Novel” in Egypt. She has taught creative writing all over Cairo for years with the goal of mentoring and empowering aspiring writers in her region.  Riham’s flash fiction collection Love is Make-Believe was released and published in November 2021 by Clarendon House in the UK. She is the first African, Arab woman to have a flash fiction collection published in English. Riham shares her craft articles about writing flash fiction through her blog “Riham Writes” and reviews a new flash fiction collection every month on her FB group “Riham Reads Flash.”

Roula-Maria Dib is an award-winning literary scholar, poet, and editor whose research interests include literature, modern poetry and poetics, creative writing, and Jungian psychology. She is endorsed by the British Academy and holds a UK Global Talent Visa. Roula is the winner of the British Council’s Alumni Awards 2021-2022 for the Culture and Creativity category in the UAE and had also won the American University in Dubai’s Provost’s Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement 2020; her book, Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2020) was shortlisted as a finalist for the international IAJS book awards, and some poems from her collection, Simply Being (Chiron Press, 2021) received Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the founding editor of literary and arts journal, Indelible, and creative producer of literary event series, Indelible Evenings, as well as Psychreative, a virtual salon for researchers, artists, and writers with a background in Jungian psychology. Her MOOC, “Why Online Creative Communities Matter” is featured on Academia.edu. Formerly (until June 2022), she was a professor of English at the American University in Dubai.

A Son's Deathbed

also after Damage, directed by Louis Malle (1992)

Holding the flesh that was his boy, Ivan's own pumps about the cradle. Blood peaks in his eyes, the river deathbed not coming soon enough.  
 
A filmmaker wanted a man more broken than he’d ever filmed, his son too innocent to know his Old Man. Once he does, the boy springs back too far, over a banister, to his death. For this, director Louis Malle went to Repin’s father, trapped in a prison-parlor. 

His endless creation.

Matthew Sorrento

Matthew Sorrento is Editor-in-chief of Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon and Co-editor of Film International. A critic and poet with publications in RFO and The Five-Two, he teaches film and media studies at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. His latest book is David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (co-edited with David Ryan, FDU Press, December 2021).

Being Human

after Tehuantepec, Oaxa, photography by Graciela Iturbide (Mexico) 1985 (Click here to view.)

We are the fish of     the world.
We eat and     are eaten.
Cranes pick       our teeth
and leave the strings         of our naked jaws 
to gnaw     the grass 
until they become     the earth.

We pick raspberries from uncut     canes
and share     bare roots for planting.
We eat the sweet flesh        and piths 
of those empty-bellied     bodies.

We are full-bellied roses frost-burnt,         drooping 
and tight blooms coiled     pink and white, 
pulsing       into winter.  
We are rusty        wombs     swimming, 
umbilicus     singing, 

We are sedum,     tight-packed pink in summer,
Nautilus, coriolis-spiral under     first snow, 
thawing     under last, lifting through the         melt.

We are the crane again     plucking fish like flushed berries,
the sky--blue, black,         blushing--
the trees lifting     in mist,
roads crawling     away, dollhouses full 
of furniture but empty     of children,
ozone after rain, company     waiting, 
a fiddler's broken         string,
and all the earth         is a singing companion.

Julene Waffle

Julene Waffle, a graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher in a rural NYS public school, an entrepreneur, a nature lover, a wife, a mother of three boys, two dogs, three cats, and, of course, she is a writer. She finds great pleasure in juggling all these things and managing to seem like she has it all together.. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, NCTE’s English Journal, La Presa, The Non-Conformist, The Ekphrastic Review, and Mslexia, among others. She was also published in the anthologies Civilization in Crisis, American Writers Review 2021, and Seeing Things (2020), and her chapbook So I Will Remember was published in 2020.  Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com.

Camera Obscura

Poised on the headland,                                                                                                                          
a wooden tented circular corridor
its mirrored cubicles bringing the outside                                                             
in with scenes from around the corner;
the yellowed green and brown of cliff tops,                                                                                                               
a busy funnelled harbour,                                                                               
seagulls that clamour and sweep above                                                                           
weathered benches where walkers                                                                        
rest to peer lazily out to sea.  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
Obscured, Edwardian tourists                                                                       
would eagerly spy on bathers                                                                                           
cavorting in the sea pools below,                                                                          
or else searched for couples                                                                                                                                                                   cuddling on summer warmed slopes. 
                                           
Inside, I think of Foucault’s and Bentham’s                                                          
surveying panopticons and as I move                                                                        
from cubical to cubical and from                                                                        
glass imaged screen to screen,                                                                           
the foot stained wooden floor                                                                    
trembles and persistently creaks.
    
There is a sense of an unwelcome presence,                                                                                 
following in the magical and flickering dark.                 

Postcard to Home 
 
Two young Irish maids, one of many                                                                                
required during summer seasons.                                                           
Temporary come-overs working in hotels,                                                                                                      
boarding houses and holiday camps.                                                                                
Some were lucky, considered                                                                                                 
one of the family, others exploited;                                                                                                                    
laying tables, serving meals,
washing up, fetching groceries,                                                                                                      
looking after children, folding sheets
beating carpets, scrubbing floors                                                                                                         
walking the dogs and emptying                                                                                                  
piss pots for a pittance. 
Time off and a postcard home                                                                                         
to friends and family provides                                                                                 
some solace, searching for one to send.                                                                                                
But garish jokes are edgy                                                                                                
with misplaced fun not kind to some.                                                                                  
Wish you were here. No not for them,                                                                                               
Wish we were there. Back home.   
​                                                                                                                                            

A Changing Moment

Fairy lights and hotel windows                                                                                               
cascade along the promenades,                                                                                   
their evening summer glow                                                                                              
edging the sea-side sand.
Couples dance on palace polished                                                         
floors as orchestras replay their youth.                                                        
Others gather on crowded deck chairs,                                                       
sharing their shading shadows                                                                             
to watch a full moon rising.
Dark clouds gather,                                                                                        
the moment already fading.           
    

Holiday Meeting  
                                                                                
Showing off, the tight trunked boys,                                                                                
come in from the sea and face the girls,                                                                           
who have deftly escaped by leaving                                                                          
their parents in smoky pubs                                                                                    
and cake sweet cafés.                                                                                                   
The trio of girls shyly eye the bathers,                                                                
until with more lascivious looks                                                                                
the young Romeos will sit with them                                                                                              
in promenade shelters, breathing in their
heady perfumes to steal an eager kiss.                                                                     
Hiding their teenage fears                                                                                                 
and the holiday tears to come.                                                                                     
                                                         
Doug Sandle

​Doug Sandle is a writer, a psychologist and a former university academic. He has been published intermittently over the years, including once sharing a poetry page with Harold  Pinter. More recently his poetry has appeared in The New European, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry and Covid and the anthology The View from Olympia (poems on Olympic sports). He has also written short stories and plays, including a BBC and Radio New Zealand broadcast. He was born and brought up on the Isle of Man.

Endeavour to Breach the Anxiety

                                             “To love is to be afraid. You are frightened,
                                              deathly terrified, that something will happen to those you love...
                                             And love enslaves us all, for you cannot have love without fear.”
​ 
                                                                                                                                      Marie Lu
​
Lordotic rooftops -
what fear holds you from the door,
spire in the snow sky.

John L. Stanizzi

John L. Stanizzi is author many collections including Ecstasy Among Ghosts and The Tree That Lights The Way Home. His work has been widely published, including in Prairie Schooner, The New York Quarterly,  Rattle, and more. His work has been translated into Italian. John is the Flash Fiction Editor of Abstract Magazine TV. A former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, and New England Poet of the Year (1998), John has just been awarded an Artist Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction – 2021 -  from the Connecticut Office of the Arts and Culture for work on his new memoir. He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, and lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT. https://www.johnlstanizzi.com

Next weekend is a very special workshop on witchy microfiction with the incredible Meg Pokrass and Lorette! 

ekphrasticmicrofictionworkshops.weebly.comClick here or on image above for more information or to nab the last few spots.

We'll be working on some spooky stories, taking inspiration from some fascinating paintings of ghosts and witches.

In these workshops, you work at your own pace and connect with others online in a private Facebook group. You will write from your own timezone and schedule. 


“Where to begin? Lorette and Meg are the perfect team. They both are experienced teachers and create a safe environment. The feedback is positive and constructive. I find that whenever I take these workshops (and I hope to do that as often as they are offered), I feel braver and more willing to take risks. I always feel supported in trying new ideas, and styles. When I first started, I was writing only poetry and was hesitant to try microfiction. Now I feel equally comfortable in both. There is always enough choice in the prompts that I feel comfortable-there is something for every taste. And I have been pleasantly surprised to find that some of the choices I made that I thought would be the hardest gave me some of the most creative pieces. The asynchronous aspect of the workshops makes it possible for people from all over can participate. And that is an added benefit--there are different cultures sharing art in the same space. I've met many people in the workshops and continue to communicate with them. I am always thrilled when I read a writer’s piece that grew out of one of our workshops.” Lynne Kemen