Woman Viewing Las Meninas, 2019

As a person of privilege,
I paid the Prado
for a private hour with Velásquez 
and Las Meninas,
time enough to look 
into the painter’s trick mirror,
join the king and queen,
and take in the scene

of the Infanta with her maids of honour,
mid-breath in sunlight,
encased in silver lace and panniers 
hiding knifepoint slippers,
the subtle armor of women 
holding off the world of politicking men.

Women look out 
from the painting at me, 
another woman costly dressed
today in neoprene surcoat,
iron gray bandolier bag, and designer
running shoes. 
They see I’m still in the frame 
of a world they know well,
one that’s not so much changed 
from the Spanish court of 1656.

Leta Bushyhead
 
Leta Bushyhead wants to be like Sappho whose words survived to let those of the future know our hearts beat the same. 

​Stillborn 1907
 
I met you only once:
in September ’42
at Buffalo’s Genesee Hotel,
where rooms were a dollar.
A dime could buy coffee
in the diner downstairs.
Thirty-five summers brought you there,
through Depression, divorce,
       nine months of war.
 
Your bleached rumpled hair rippled
in the 30-mile wind.
Your right arm, flimsy paperweight,
fought to restrain your blue cotton dress
from slapping your face,
your mask of determined          terror.
Your legs, unstable enablers, shuddered
outside the window of your eighth-floor room.
Your left hand fluttered –
       a quiver
of your despondent intentions.
 
No words could
dissuade the step.
That fall, you fell your eighty feet:
No explanation
       for the erasure of your existence.
 
There’s a photographer in Albany
who still can’t believe he shot that frame,
ten feet above your death.
 
Gary P English
 
Gary P English (they/them/their) lives in Baton Rouge, LA, where they and their partner share a home with a dachshund and two cats. Besides writing, they paint and play the guitar. Their poems have been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Home Planet News, and Stonecoast Review.

​Ecce Homo

Look—you cannot look
away from what you’ve been told
is a man. This piece of work,
 
this lost Caravaggio, sold
into oblivion, now hangs on view
in state, alone, in Spain. The room is cold.
 
This beautiful linkage—Gentile, Gentile, Jew,
bound in the embrace that all men make
before they do what they’ve been told to do--
 
will break when the Roman, who still takes
his stairs in twos, hesitates to drape 
the royal shroud across Christ’s back to make
 
the joke stick, or stop the wounds, agape,
from shining. Be gentle. He is a man, yes, 
but young, and unaccustomed to the shape
 
of these proceedings.

​The Denial
 
Simon, Simon, Satan
demanded to have you
that he might sift you
like wheat
 
I.
The servant girl sees 
as he sits in the light, not for light, 
but for heat, and she says,
When he speaks, he gives himself 
away--
 
II.
The falling saint shifts his gaze 
to the fire beyond the frame.
By this light-dark they caught him,
the soldier and the servant,
and he turned his hands inward, the faint
smell of scales still on them,
as if to do the old work,
the terrible work,
of hauling in a net.
 
III.
The rooster we do not see
accuses the darkness of a dawn
we cannot see
and so, anonymous, we
sit and wait outside
and shun sleep
to see the end,
but mostly to keep warm.

IV.
And it was night, still, when He 
turned and looked at me when I 
was not far off--
about a stone’s throw away, and I 
don’t know if it was the knowing 
or the morning in His eye, 
why I, too, went out, 
and wordless, wept.
 
V.
After the murder,
fleeing for his life to Rome,
Caravaggio painted a man
called Simon called Peter
pointing to himself
smothered in shadows to belie
the new tremor in his eye and in his hand.
 
VI.
Behold, the man.
The weakness is in the hands.
 
VII.
The fallen saint hangs 
in a corner of the Met—sold
from hand to hand,
the caption says,
to pay a debt.
 

Of All Things Seen
 
Light costs two euro.
In the corner, Caravaggio
does the thing he does with light
on the stripped form 
of Peter, a favourite, beginning 
to die. Someone pays, as someone
always does in front of pretty things.
I, being Protestant, protest
by looking away, but not for long--
I have long been transfixed 
by slaughter, or rather, unable 
as I am to look anything I consume
in the eye, by the image of slaughter, 
by its slanting. This is the preferred angle 
of angels, saying, singing, Do not be 
afraid. Money. The light, again. 
It does not occur to me to like it. 
I follow the saint’s line 
of sight, past the new astonishment 
of the stake in his hand, his head inclined
in the beatific tradition of the beaten
toward the one with the hand and hammer, 
raised like your hand
in the final letter where you declined
to write my name, the same
as raising a palm to stroke a face
or strike it.

​**

And Unseen
 
This is not a poem
about crucifixion--
the nails are already in--
but rather, the inveterate art
of doing what must be done. 
Consider the labourer propping up the cross.
One needs help to die
to self. He will go home, the faceless man
on whose back this device depends, and, 
as an afterthought, turn the neck
of the small chicken in the yard, 
set it upside down, and wait. 
 
Lauren Delapenha
 
Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, and a Pushcart nomination. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut.

Hello, TER friends. I imagine most of you agree with me, that our two moderate seasons are your favorites. Maybe not if you’re into winter or summer sports or perhaps you prefer summer because you aren’t in school. 
 
I love autumn for its memories and nostalgia, for the changing of the leaves and the feeling of gratitude that continues to build toward Thanksgiving. Yet it can also make me melancholy. We poets are like that. I hope you drop by TER’s website from time to time to look back at the nine years of expanding treasures. Here are a few poems I especially admire that touch readers with sadness, joy, nostalgia, or a blend. This first poem breaks my heart with its mix of tenderness, guilt, and loss. I’ll try to blend in some more celebratory choices, too. 

Alarie Tennille
 
**

The Deer, by Lynn Pattison

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-deer-by-lynn-pattison

**

These next two selections throw in some extra tips on how to write to art.

How to Remember, by Todd Campbell

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/how-to-remember-by-todd-campbell

**

Autumn Grasses in Moonlight, by John Tessitore

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/autumn-grasses-in-moonlight-by-john-tessitore

**

I loved seeing that George Franklin practices law. It’s an attorney’s gift to piece together what has not been said, to imagine what might change our verdict.

What Brueghel Might Have Painted But Did Not, by George Franklin

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/what-brueghel-might-have-painted-but-did-not-by-george-franklin

**

October blue skies are definitely a wonder. But isn’t it a surprise when the simplest thing, like this colour swatch by Yves Klein, somehow holds us enthralled, just as the painter was?

“He painted blue and it didn’t mean anything which felt like a relief after so much caring and that’s / what he probably liked best about it.”

Of course, Meg Pokrass gets a lot of the credit by adding her own creativity. Remember that art is give and take. The writer could possibly be way off track from what the artist thought he was saying, but the meaning lives with each of us once the art stepped into the world.

The Painter Who Painted Blue, by Meg Pokrass

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-painter-who-painted-blue-by-meg-pokrass

While Pokrass demonstrates that the simplest art can toss our thoughts into the wind, Barbara Lydecker Crane’s poem makes me wonder how many bored models are writing their own secret monologues, trying to tell us things the artist never had in mind, or did he? Are there two authors to this story? Perhaps we ekphrastic writers can imagine companion poems, told separately by the artist and model. 

​**

My throwback to autumn is subtle in most cases. We don’t see many landscapes to tell us the season, but this model is clearly an autumn in the fashion world, and her monologue carries the melancholy of winter coming on.

On My Terms, by Barbara Lydecker Crane

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/on-my-terms-by-barbara-lydecker-crane

**

My Seventh Wonder of this Thursday Throwback celebrates the sure voice of the author as artist, certain that a gray pencil portrait is warm, golden, and carries the smell of apples which are nowhere to be seen.

Ethel Bartlett Sits for the Artist Laura Knight, by Neil Douglas

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ethel-bartlett-sits-for-the-artist-laura-knight-by-neil-douglas

​The Way We Are 
 
Our young love was gently carved
out of soft beige stone,
 
bodies a thin line’s width apart,
contours fitting perfectly.
 
We had a secret language
gifted by the eternal stars
 
when, in the brushed velvet
night the moon was so high
 
she slanted silver fronds across our skin,
lit the hidden places of our hearts.
 
Years became frantic, caught us up
in a thousand whirling eddies
 
that fractured our speech
into the ordinary sounds
 
of the day by day.
The lines are wider now.
 
Holding hands as we sit or walk
we talk of how the apples are,
 
should we buy them again,
what to do today, what tomorrow.
 
When one of us is left alone
to finish our eternity,
 
who then will speak
the language of apples?
 
Sylvia Cohen

Published in Between the Lines (London City Lit anthology, 2019), Sylvia Cohen is a retired psychotherapist living in London with her husband, near (at least in the same country as) her three children and their families, ten grandchildren—who never cease to amaze. She has been writing poetry for about six years.

Monet's Testament

Master conjurer of light,
    you installed
      this elaborate
      and exotic park
    in your last art.
The work -- earthwork --
    weeding beds,
      planting willows,
      adjusting ponds
    with Japanese bridges.
Gardens are moral theatres
    claiming landscapes
      and bright basins
      of Nympheas
    touching the pond's edge.
Volcanic colours of sunset
    burn at the lips
      of tall lilies,
      willows present
    in shadows and flesh like.
You set the light
    escaping from darkness
      in this playhouse,
      not as benign but
    competing for food from soil.
Entanglements, strangulations,
    poisonous plantings,
      the deadly stabbings
      by moist tendrils,
    and, of course, beauty.
This botanical drama
    you wrapped around
      on walls, enfolding
      views like oil spills --
    gold splotches set alight.

Royal Rhodes

Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in central Ohio. His poems have appeared in numerous journals in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., including The Ekphrastic Review, Ekphrastic Challenge, Mad Swirl, Backwards Trajectory, ORBIS, and The Montreal Review, among others.

The Night Window
 
That face. You grope for a name—is that a beard? A hat? A white stick? Could he be blind, staring straight ahead like that? Do you know a blind man? You did once, maybe—Sunday School, Homer, Milton, Beckett, the knife thrower at the carnival when you were ten—but the feet are wrong, all out of whack, they don’t line up with the torso, they don’t face forward, they are coming your direction. You know them, those pointed, shiny black boots. Or should. What are they doing on your street? If this is, indeed, your street. The banister, the ornate iron which the man is passing, it’s not yours, it doesn’t lead to your house—at least, not this house, here, tonight.

You push up on the wood rails. The window doesn’t give. Nothing gives. No egress, no chance of communication. Only disconnection. You will never speak to this man. Never truly see him. And yet, he is always here. Always in passing. You can hear his stick tap. Night after night. Tapping. Cradling that doll.

Your childhood. That’s your childhood in his arms. Now you know where it went. It never left. It’s right outside. You can’t touch it, but it’s there. You’ll never get it back, he’ll never let it go, look at the way he clings to it, that man. He took it the night you abandoned your parents’ roof. The night you first penetrated a lover. The night you realized the dark was real, and you were destined for it. This night you realize he will always be out there, him and the babe in arms, passing by on this street—the street where you are—with pieces of a life dismembered, a life misplaced, a life, sometimes, you hope, well-lived. A life, certainly, well-haunted.
​
And, though tomorrow night it will flame out, an echo—his name, their name, your mother’s voice, calling, like the light on the pole you thought you had lost track of—fires your subconscious.

Cloister
​
Though I have taken vows, though I walk this path black-robed, hands folded, I am not blind. I see the young woman in shorts, the jaunty-jeaned man I might have been, the tent set for whatever feast day this fellowship celebrates. Whatever profane thing in which I must not, can not, participate. You may say it is my own choice, my cynical hermeticism, which seals me off from the laity, the flock, the world. And on certain days I agree. On those days I walk elsewhere than here, a different corridor, a sanctum sanctorum with only one view, and that not outward. But this corridor—this cloister of guilty pleasure—I have built with my own hands, blessed with my own benediction, sacrilegious as it may be to the Brothers who never promenade here. I am tempted—tempted, I say—to pause, to genuflect, as if the Sacrament were exposed, though what I see beyond the glass is surely sin, error, the fall, even if of my own making, of my own self. The panes rattle, a devil’s tongue of voices—Miles Davis, George Strait, Taylor Swift, calling from the tent. I press my hand to the trembling glass. Covet the exit at the distal end. Later, in my cell, I will remove the scapula, apply the lash. God help me.

Escape

What sort of blueprint gave us this redundant stairway to nowhere? And why do we so blindly worship it? Surely such a sky was foreseen, such celestial conjuring forecast long ago. Not even a crossroads marks us, merely a T-bone. Had we intended to reach for the heavens? In a moment, the heavens will reach for us. The stop sign is facing the wrong way. We cannot help that we have given such a grandiose name to such a narrow lane in a no-stoplight town, it is in our nature. We are dreamers, schemers, stargazers. We reach for the impossible, improbable, unattainable, not expecting the dark to come for us one day, out of the blue, that we will need a way to get down as well as up, that we have cut ourselves off at the knees, drawn up no plans for retreat, no shelter from the storm. Perhaps if we take a right turn, follow that supernumerary Broadway into the reflection of our handiwork, we’ll find a loophole in our intentions, a way out of our built-in obsolescence, an escape from the threat of the idols of us.
 
Robert L. Dean, Jr. 
​
Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s poetry collections are Pulp (Finishing Line Press, 2022); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018).  A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he has had work appear in many literary journals. He is a member of The Writers Place. He has been a professional musician and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capital of the World and the Flint Hills.
 
Jason Baldinger is a poet and photographer from Pittsburgh, PA. He’s penned fifteen books of poetry the newest of which include: A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010-2020 (Kung Fu Treachery), and This Still Life (Kung Fu Treachery) with James Benger. His first book of photography, Lazarus, as well as two ekphrastic collaborations (with Rebecca Schumejda and Robert Dean) are forthcoming. His work has appeared across a wide variety of online sites and print journals. You can hear him from various books on Bandcamp and on lps by The Gotobeds and Theremonster. His etsy shop can be found under the tag la belle riviere.

​The Charioteer’s Feet

Phoebe has had a thing about the Charioteer’s feet and the values she feels they represent since she read The Triumph of the Greeks at thirteen. She went to Delphi to see them on her first solo trip abroad and, all these years later, images of the Charioteer still adorn her bedroom: a one-quarter profile with lips that might part in speech at any time, the famous feet from several angles, the right hand holding a fragment of rein that seems to be alive.

The Charioteer stood in the sanctuary of Apollo until an earthquake buried him under a rock fall. Impassive in victory, Severe in style, he has survived the millennia more or less intact, despite – or thanks to – his misadventure. He’s lost his left arm and silver from his headband, but still gazes from fringed, inlaid eyes; his tunic falls in fluted folds to his ankles; his feet, with their veins, metatarsals and flexed toes, are celebrated for their anatomical precision, though never intended to be seen.

*

Phoebe looks at the linen dress she splashed out on two summers ago but has never worn. She’s clearing mistakes and misfits from her wardrobe, but she can’t let this dress go: it’s a gorgeous shade of blue and would be perfect if it were just a fraction shorter, which, were she less hopeless, it would have been two years ago.

Her efforts at sewing were ridiculed at school, held up as models of what not to do. When she bought the dress she told herself she’d shorten it anyway, but lost confidence when she got it home. She admired it hanging on her wardrobe door for several weeks, until it felt like a reproach and she buried it inside. The following spring she asked a friend to pin the hem. It was easy then to thread a large-eyed needle and tack, a struggle afterwards to thread a smaller one. Carefully, she sewed five unsightly hem stiches that puckered the fabric on the right side. Her next attempt produced stitches that were less visible on the right side, but raggedly uneven on the wrong, so she unpicked them and went through it all again and yet again. In the end, she lay the dress over her bedroom chair resolving to have another go next day, but a week later shook it out untouched and returned it to the wardrobe with its tacking.

Now, under the Charioteer’s even gaze, Phoebe admires herself in the mirror. She admires the no-longer-new dress, but is dismayed by its lumpy, black-tacked hem. She takes it off and presses it, sits by the window. Laboriously, she threads a needle, sews several uneven herringbone stitches and unpicks. 

In the garden, a squirrel leaps across the path, tail twitching. A blue tit alights on the abandoned woodpile to gather moss. She pulls at the green tufts for a minute or two before flying off, beak frothing with trailing green.

The Charioteer’s feet were modelled "with scholarly realism," though it’s always said that, hidden as they would be by the chariot in which he stood, they were never intended to be seen. Most accounts also note that those unseen feet were "much admired in antiquity," a contradiction that has always puzzled Phoebe, but she’s been reluctant to think too closely about what it means. Now, as she contemplates the life of the garden, she thinks about the admiration of those allegedly unseen feet and the fact that her hem really will be seen by no one but herself. What matters is not puckering the right side.

She turns back to her sewing box, snips a new length of thread and perseveres until she passes it through the eye. She shifts her chair for better light and sews one herringbone stitch and then another and then two more. She looks at the right side of the dress, turns back to the wrong and takes greater care to pick up just one thread of linen for the single-thickness stitch. It’s pointless to worry that the stitches aren’t uniform in size, so she works on until the thread is finished and lays the dress aside. 

She makes coffee, checks her email, listens to the midday news. Back at the window, she watches the blue tit gather another froth of moss, shifts her chair, recharges her needle and sews on.
 
Patricia Newbery

Patricia Newbery's work (poetry, fiction and CNF) has been published in The Cafe Irreal, The Cincinnati Review miCRos series, The Citron Review and elsewhere. She's a British/Irish translator and editor and has lived in Egypt for twenty-five years.