On the Eve of the Parinirvana Sitting
 
At the relentless city museum, the mountains loomed above us, jagged, snow-covered. How had the curators squeezed that massif through the glass doorway? Why hadn’t the snowmelt flooded the flagstones? Was that Yeti stalking off over the peak, disgusted with us gawkers? We hoped the thin orange line that clasped our ankles would save us from drowning head-first in the deep well, or hurtling in the savage wind into a gulf of granite and fog, like the boy lost from a logging crew on Mount Washington. People spotted him days later, wandering along a road at the foot of the mountain, but no one bothered to bring him home. Only the crows know where his bones lie.
 
When we reached the monastery beneath Balsam Mountain, the shadbush leaves had reddened, and milkweed duff drifted amid the rushes on the lake’s far shore. Beavers lodged against the granite boulder where the Buddha straddled the bronze lotus, fingers pointed downward. 
 
On the temple porch, its floorboards polished foot-smooth, we drank tea with the monks and wrote poems, and the old monk who swept the zendo with a sedge broom played his bamboo flute. At dusk, beavers drifted across the lake, moon-drunk. The twinned falls where Kuncan cut the ridgepole chittered like last summer’s swallows nesting in the eaves, and the breeze, though mild, smelled faintly of snow.
 
Before dawn the next morning, a young monk struck the cast-iron bell with a cedar log, rumbling the mountain’s ribs. Through the fog, we glimpsed the summit, dusted with snow; then we grasped our staffs, gifts from the woodcarver of Kouroo. The wind blew steadily as we crossed the twinned streams, the pine grove, the granite mapped with orange lichen, and with silent footfalls entered the narrow path that wound steadily upward. 
 
We looked back once. The old flute player, tiny beneath us, leaned on his sedge broom, his straw hat brim lifted to the mountain, watching the thin line of our staffs disappear into the fog.

Tess Lloyd

Tess Lloyd, a long-time student of Zen Buddhism, lives on a small farm in East Tennessee. She is currently finishing a novel about unruly nineteenth-century women. At “The Ten-Hour Day,” she discusses social injustice and social reform in nineteenth-century literature (https://tesslloyd.com/). A professor emerita of English, she has done postgraduate work in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

Survivor
 
A long rifle leans against a gold wall-papered wall
in an elegant hallway, muzzle among flowers.
 
             Red-brown blood pools around the buttstock.
 
A Belgian Mauser, circa 1888, veteran of
two world wars, waits in silence.
 
             Blood stains the trigger and barrel.
 
First to come, orphans and women in black, some
in Red Cross aprons gasp at memory, step hurriedly away.
 
             Whose blood is this? Is the blood old or new? Dry or wet?
 
Men and boys felled in battle in blood-stained,
earth-stained uniforms gather round. Some spit on the rifle.
 
             Does the circle of blood grow larger? 
 
Veterans stand longer, mulling the maiming
and killing some so others may live.
 
            The rifle, sorry, sheds bloody tears.
           
Children murdered at Sandy Hook, Parkland High,
Uvalde, crowd the room. Hundreds of victims
stand with them, want to know
 
             How could you let rifles move into movie theatres, 
             music festivals, supermarkets, box stores, dance clubs,
             churches, and synagogues?
 
and
 
             What are you going to do about it?
​
Gerry Moohr
​
Gerry Moohr’s writing blend experience and imagination, not always equally. Her hybrids have appeared in Cagibi, Equinox, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. Moohr lives in Houston and Minneapolis and is online at www.gerrymoohr.com.

​ Door Left Open

What makes us holy?
The paper Sacred Heart, curling?
The Mass on the wooden kitchen table:
linen stiff, silver bright,
tall chalice elevated,
stiff-armed final blessing?

But maybe:
the neighbors coming in,
shawls pulled tight over old heads,
farmers with dusty wool, patched knees.

A tin basin. A tea towel. A churn
pushed out of the way.

Today’s a Feast Day:
pot brimming with mutton stew,
liquor, tea, and fruitcake, 
a jig, like a flame
leaping from the hearth. 

Holiness, perhaps:
not from blessing,
but the door left open.

Later, Land War.
Later, American wakes.
 
Today: hurling on the green,
tug-of-war. A few lovers in the hay,
mouths spitting straw 
and promises.

StevieB.
 
Stephen (“StevieB.”) McDonnell has spent his life in mystical—and later, erotic—adventures, wandering the wilds of the soul and serving as a wounded healer: part priest, part activist, part therapist, part trickster. In his sixties, he began shaping the prose of that journey into lyric poetry. He’s been learning the craft from Rumi and Whitman, O’Hara and Ginsberg—and the great, mysterious in-between. He lives in an anchor-hold with windows in every room, watching the wide-open sky above the farmlands of eastern Long Island, New York. 
 

​The Woman and the Bear
                                                            
Have you ever spied them there in early light
out in that grassy field between the hills?
 
Have you seen the woman, face upturned, body ripe 
in contemplation as she greets the day?
 
Or her familiar? The silent bear who sits 
nearby, the spirit guide who walks with her. 
 
Did you see?  There is no fear between them. He knows her 
full revealed. She breathes in the gifts he brings.
 
Some say he is her lover. Some whisper 
she’s a witch. How else explain a woman’s power?
 
I say, they are simply kindred, each tied 
to earth and air, both sentient, and aware.

Ursula Shepherd

Ursula Shepherd knew before she was nine, she would write all her life, and she has, but life took her away from poetry as she followed her love of nature and became an ecologist and biogeographer. Now she writes to stay sane in this chaotic world. She was drawn to this particular painting for several reasons, not least of which was the fact that, maybe because her name means bear, she has always been fascinated  by them as totems.  Her poetry has appeared in, among others, Big Wing Review, Passionfruit, Unbroken, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Visitation

“When the coating of dew lifted, there on the surface of the desert was a thing delicate, powdery…‘That,’ said Moses to them, ‘is the bread Yahweh gives you to eat…This is Yahweh’s command: Fill an omer with it, and let it be kept for your descendants, to let them see the food that I fed you with in the wilderness…’”
The Jerusalem Bible, Exodus 16:14-16, 32-33

I Loire Valley, Oratory at Germigny-des-Prés

Our choirmaster, Abbé Martin, corralled us
under the dome of the apse.
Eyes followed his gaze, tilting heavenward 
to a firmament of golden mosaics.

We shuffled, restless, tipsy from surfeit of summer holiday.
Two angels welcomed us overhead, feathered wings unfolded.
Gazing into their faces, we joined the Israelites
whom we imagined gathering, amazed by 
the holy messengers reaching down to offer bread
for the journey through the hungry desert.
Bread the tribe would save to remember 
they had never been alone.

Before we sang, Father Martin told us a story.
Goudimel, who wrote the hymn, a Huguenot murdered
by Catholics. He said music sounds perpetual praise, 
inaudible only until any of God’s creatures-- 
a bird, a choir, a cricket trilling—joins the canticle.
Let us laud, Abbé prayed, and sing for reconciling.

II Later, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire monastery

I carried his message as a chalice on to St Benoit
where we chanted with the monks, made merry
over meals of bread, wine, cheese.
I, the only one not French, not Catholic.
At a distance, here, from a glacial marriage that had cracked, 
exposing yearning. With the choir, here enfolded.
 
In the dormitory, the women--
without husbands in a nearby room--
free, telling bawdy stories
as we lay in two tidy rows of beds 
like so many naughty Madelines,
at rest in their happy orphanage.

I fingered my wedding ring, wondering,
vaguely, about the cold diamond,
searching, vaguely, for some part of myself
that was lost to me and wanted reconciling.

Merryn Rutledge

Winner of Orison Books’ 2023 Best Spiritual Literature poem prize and a Naugatuck River Review 2024 Best Narrative Poem finalist, Merryn Rutledge is widely published. Her collection Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed is from Kelsay Books, where a second collection, To Carve a Path through Thickets will be published early in 2026. Merryn lives in eastern MA, where she teaches poetry, reviews new poetry books, sings, dances, and volunteers for social justice. Also a happy grandmother.

Lake George, 1922
    
            I wish you could see this place—here—there is something
            so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees--
            O’Keeffe in a letter to Sherwood Anderson
 
Not stones and bones, not over-sized flowers, not sun-bleached 
skulls, but this: a glacial lake surrounded by mountains, a landscape
reduced to abstraction.  O’Keeffe removed the shoreline, distilled
the scenery to its elements.  Fused the mountain and its mirror image 
on the water’s surface as one design. I keep thinking about the ways
I could simplify my life, keep the essentials, paint everything extraneous 
out of the picture.
 
**
        
This poem was first published at Blue Line.
​

Starlight Night, Lake George, 1922

I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.
O’Keeffe
 
Over my single bed, a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone,
while just to the right, the wooden window frames the exact scene O’Keeffe
painted: midnight blue lake, splotchy stars, globes of the dock lights
shining like tiny beacons. It’s both serene and ominous, a reduction
of shape and colour, the dark shoulders of the Adirondacks rising behind.
I’m not sure what lesson I’ve come here to learn as I shift from my ordinary
routine, only that stillness permeates this wilderness, punctuated
by the round notes of loons, and every breath restores my equilibrium.

​Barbara Crooker

This poem first appeared in Live Encounters.
        ​
Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including  Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.  Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 
www.barbaracrooker.com

Bravo to all the writers! I found myself swirling on imagination's magic carpet as I read these flash pieces. Each one invited me to experience its chosen art in a different, sometimes thrilling way. As it turns out, the winner took me to unexpected depths.

Sandi Stromberg

Congratulations to Yvonne Blumer for her story, "Sea Dragon Flute," winner of the flash fiction entries from the Perfect Ten Ekphrastic Marathon in July.

The flash winner was selected by editor Sandi Stromberg.

All of the finalists in flash and poetry were selected by editors Kate Copeland, Lorette C. Luzajic, and Sandi Stromberg. The entries were read and selected blind.

Approximately 50 marathon participants submitted work to the contest part of the marathon, including one to five works.

The Perfect Ten Ekphrastic Marathon was our fourth annual marathon event. The goal of the marathon was simply to participate, and included a wide selection of art prompts, along with optional ideas to inspire ekphrases. Writers connected in a Facebook group to view the art, chat, share their drafts or ideas and more. They wrote fourteen drafts, with sprints changing every 30 minutes. There was a zoom after party to celebrate their accomplishments. Those who chose to submit to the contest portion had two weeks to revise their drafts and send them in. 

A huge congratulations to everyone who finished the marathon! It is an amazing, intense, fun experience, a day of pure creativity. 

A huge congratulations to everyone who entered their work in the contest portion.

A huge congratulations to all the writers whose work was selected among the finalists! The flash selections are below, and the poetry selections are in a separate post.

And a special congratulations to Yvonne Blumer for her winning story.

We can't wait for the fifth annual marathon next July! Hope to see all of you there again, and many more of you joining the fun.

love, Lorette

​FLASH FICTION WINNER!!!

​Sea Dragon Flute
 
Sea Dragon Flute, (Italy) 17th Century, a wooden flute with dimensions of: height 138.4 cm, width 20.3 cm and depth 8.9 cm)
 
Leila stood at the open window above the canal. The lights of the village swayed on the surface of the water. Voices travelled from cafes and restaurants, people walking the narrow lanes, and from boats on the water. She was on the island of Murano in a small villa. She turned to the large wooden box on the bed and slowly opened it. Inside was the Sea Dragon flute she had stolen from the MET three months ago. She had repatriated it to Italy for no good reason other than to prove she could. Because she’d dreamt of a dragon flute, immense and moaning through her sleep, she looked online and found it and had to have it. She rested her hand on the long hollow back of the wooden dragon, its box as long as her bed was wide. She watched light from the window play on the surface of its gold-painted head. She felt the wood warm and soften under her hand. As her hand rested, the room filled with the scent of candles and incense, voices softened into song. The sun dropped, darkening the window. She ran an index finger from the gold snout, along the body to the tail and felt her skin ripple along her spine. She leaned over and pressed her lips to the reed, releasing a low moan of song. As she did, the surface of her arm itched, as if scales were forming on her dry skin. She stopped and stood, put her hand on her arm, just goose bumps and soft hair. She blew into the dragon again and its shape appeared to soften in the box, an animal stretching after a long rest. She stood and spun around, her loose skirt rising around her. Then she bent and lifted the dragon, held it like a bassoon and blew on the reed again. The Sea Dragon came alive and wrapped around her. She leapt, leapt again, then dove through the villa window into the canal below. A flash of gold and green, the water rose, and Murano’s sunken walls and deep brick foundations strengthened, rebuilt, as the Sea Dragon swam to the watery depths.  
 
Yvonne Blomer
 
Yvonne Blomer has published six books of poetry, most recently Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024). Her work has won awards and appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., the UK, and Japan. She has an MA with Distinction from the University of East Anglia and lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking people. She was the City of Victoria’s poet laureate from 2015-2018.

​Movie Poster
  
The Summer Hit List expectations for Daphne Kato’s first venture in the Director’s chair, Summer Swim, were dashed in Cannes this spring when it was revealed that the movie’s theme song, Hemry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River” (which won the 1961 Oscar for Best Song when sung by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) had been adapted by an unknown derivative grunge garage band from South Cle Elum, Washington. There was also, of course, an egregious error in judgement by the studio heads, who used their final edit clause to force the director to leave in a photobomb mooning of the climactic romantic love scene in which black swans were substituted (“used as metaphors”) for the lead human actors, who were replaced just before the final take because the swans were willing to work for scale. The actors were heard shouting “Swans are scabs!” in unison with the background theme just as the grunge band’s drunken drummer imprudently improvised by bending over and dropping his trousers.

Roy J. Beckemeyer
​
Roy J. Beckemeyer’s latest poetry collections include The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) and Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book was Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2015, 2020, and 2024) and for Best of the Net (2018) and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019. His author’s page is at royjbeckemeyer.com.

Don’t Trust Your Poultry
 
I tried to keep an eye on her. The stories I’ve heard. We’ve all heard. But I had my work to do with the cauldrons, the linens, and the undergarments, boiling water scalding my already scarred and scabbed arms, my apron sopping wet. And she was such a bouncy, happy-go-lucky child putting her nose into everyone’s business. Cook, the scullery maids, even the groom. Her favourite was the serving girl who fed the poultry, collected eggs, butchered the birds for meat, and prepared our prize turkeys for market. 
 
The wash-house had grown too overheated. I could barely breathe, so I stepped outside and spotted him with her. His large, pointed ears, tiny horns, goat hooves. The black turkeys which now I recognized as buzzards, his minions, formed a shield around the two of them. The serving girl, her bodice torn open and cap missing, lay still on the ground. I screamed so to be heard in the village, but as he made off with my daughter under his arm, their images became fainter and fainter. His duck tail was the last image of them that I beheld. 
 
Luanne Castle

Luanne Castle’s stories have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Gooseberry Pie, Bending Genres, Bull, The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cleaver, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, and many other journals and anthologies. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in December 2026.
 

How the Artist Dies
 
When human strives to be Raven the best they can manage is unreliable, though cunning. When Raven metamorphoses into human it’s as the artist who created the mask. The artist’s wings are strong and will carry anyone curious or rapt enough from where they were before to where they are after. Most transformational is the passage along the way. Now look at the eyes inside the mask. They may glow with a fire within as they are the origin of light and all that sustains us. Stay awhile, absorbing life before you catch your ride on the feathers of steel. Later, others will remember you as the wild-haired, wild-eyed rider of the Raven. 
 
Luanne Castle
​
Luanne Castle’s stories have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Gooseberry Pie, Bending Genres, Bull, The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cleaver, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, and many other journals and anthologies. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in December 2026.

Mirror, Mirror

Annelise wishes she could just melt away every time she looks at herself in the mirror, how she yearns to be fit and thin like all the Insta girls who are effortlessly perfect, lip-glossed mouth, trimmed eyebrows, pink-cheeked and dewy skin, and to have such confident attitude when they stare at the camera straight at Annelise, their words ringing in her ears “you need to do this 7-steps-skincare routine, I did it for a week, and see the difference! I swear by this product, click on the link below to get a whooping 10% discount...intermittent fasting is the best...lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks with these kick-ass exercises, click on the link to subscribe” when she’s staring at her reflection in the glass, and then hearing her mother tell her “you don’t need to look like those girls, just be yourself!” but what does she know, her mother is too busy working and helping out grandma, and Annelise continues to spend hours seeing herself as a blob of blandness, a shapeless mass of hair, and legs like Easter ham until the mirror has had enough, and one day, yells back “You want to melt? Then melt!” and Annelise feels her flesh drooping, drooping, and she’s scared, because, after all she doesn’t really want to melt, she still wants to live, eat soymilk lemon ice cream before summer ends, play Pokémon Go with her bestie, watch movies, kiss a boy, but here her head is softening like a piece of chocolate on a Fondue pot, her bones are marshmallowing, and she finds herself on the floor, arms limp and legs that can’t hold her body anymore, and she’s crawling on the floor begging the mirror, “Okay, okay, I don’t want to melt, please help me” and the mirror bounces back “Fine, but only if you stop looking at me, and go visit your grandma, she’ll put some sense into that head of yours” and Annelise promises she won’t even look at her phone except to call grandma to tell her she’s coming and if she would please make her ham and cheese melt in a brioche because she’s just so damn hungry.

Christine H. Chen
​
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared or forthcoming in Cleaver, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and has been anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Fractured Lit Anthology 3, Bath Flash Fiction. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Her stories can be found at www.christinehchen.com

A Tale of Sea Dragons
 
We’ve been such good children that Ah Poh, our grandmother, says we deserve to hear a good story. Long ago Sea Dragons roamed the oceans, she says, and you could see them sliding through the waves, their bodies undulating, their scales shiny and deep onyx like a midnight sea. Sometimes, she says, these giant serpents would show their faces. We oh and ah! And Ah Poh shushes us, let me tell you, she says, they only show their faces when there’s peace and quiet, their faces are the most mighty and stunning, their faces are crowned by gold scales like a crest—we oh! again—their eyes are rubies piercing through the thickest fog, their breath, crimson fire—we ah! again—their teeth sharp like a thousand swords—and we ask Ah Po, where did these fearsome creatures come from, and she thinks for a moment, then says, from all over the world. One of us then says, but aren’t dragons from China? Ah Poh shakes her head no, says Sea Dragons are born from the seas, and the seas belonged to no one until human beings came and carved territories and fought wars to gain more territories, to own more land and rivers and oceans and exploit their riches. We oh! again, and one of us asks, what happened to the Sea Dragons, and Ah Poh whispers, they are still around, and we ah! again, and Ah Po quickly adds, but they are struggling, fearsome as they are, they cannot always survive men’s devastation of Earth, poisoning water and air, and we all ask, what are we to do, and Ah Poh says, if you’ve learned the story, then you will grow into human beings who will care for their survival and the Earth. 

Christine H. Chen
​
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared or forthcoming in Cleaver, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and has been anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Fractured Lit Anthology 3, Bath Flash Fiction. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Her stories can be found at www.christinehchen.com
 

Dust
 
It’s all this dust, dust, dust. Everywhere. It gets into our hair, our nostrils, settles in the folds of our skin. 

And the smoke. It blackens our sheets when we hang them out to dry. We try to wash them on days the bombs are fewer and further between, but those days are getting fewer and further between. 

They think we don’t care about the ‘enemy’, but they, too, are our brothers and sisters. The media blames them for this war, but we know they were not the first to send the senseless bombs. But we are careful with whom we share our thoughts. Neighbours and co-workers have disappeared for less. 

As we hang out our sheets for the third time today, we know better than to complain. To utter a word to the wrong ears could lead to death. 

We school our children in buildings that need dusting every day. They play in the rubble of buildings blasted by drone strikes. Who can blame them, though?

It’s all this dust, dust, dust. And the smoke that cannot cover the dirty truth. 
  
Rosie Copeland 
 
Rosie Copeland is a New Zealand writer and artist. She is currently writing a novel for YA. Rosie belongs to several writing groups. Mayhem, Reading Room, Tarot have published her work, and she has also been a finalist in several poetry and fiction competitions in NZ. She has also had poetry and fiction published in the USA, Canada and several NZ anthologies.
 

Water Baby
 
Lucy checked the forecast first thing after she’d had her morning coffee. Higher than average temperatures expected.

“Don’t forget to pack your sunscreen,” called her mum.

“Got it,” she replied.

After a quick coffee, Lucy drove straight to the river. She wanted to avoid the hottest part of the day when the UV rays were strongest. She sang along to the radio as she made the ten-minute drive to Rihanna’s "Stay." It had always puzzled her that the songstress sang it while naked in the bath in the music video.

There was no one around when she parked up. This was a little-known bend of the river, farther upstream than the section by the village.

She unpacked her towel, sunscreen and began to undress then realized she’d forgotten to put her togs on underneath her clothes.

She looked around. There was no one in sight. Just a few ducks on the riverbank and one in the water feeding.

“What the heck,” she said, and removed all her clothes, laying her shorts and underwear and tee on her towel. She slapped waterproof sunscreen all over her body, including her bare bum, and waded in.

She considered the rushes beside the river’s edge afforded her a screen from prying eyes in the unlikely event anyone turned up.

What a delicious feeling it was to swim in the nuddy. The cool water swirled and swished and caressed her body as she floated, waded, ducked right under. She vowed to do this more often. She’d been checking. There was no one else around.

She was a water baby. Her father had always called her that because even from a very young age she’d loved to swim.

When her skin was as puckered as an orange skin, and she was shivering she made her way carefully over the smooth stones to the river’s edge. Once on the bank, she could see her tee, but her shorts, underwear and towel were gone.

She searched frantically through the long grass, and behind rocks, but it proved fruitless. Her clothes were gone, and so were the ducks.

Suddenly she heard voices approaching. A man’s deep voice and a child. Oh my God, I’m going to get arrested for indecent exposure!

Lucy threw on her tee over her dripping torso and plopped herself down cross-legged amongst the long grasses and pulled it over her front.

But the voices were coming from behind her. Cringing, she turned as a man in his forties holding a small girl’s hand said, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize –”

His eyes looked everywhere but at her as he turned quickly, pulling the little girl, whose eyes were like balloons.

“Daddy,” she said, “That girl’s got no knickers on!”

“That’s–. Um. Let’s go,” he croaked with embarrassment.

Lucy called after him, “Sorry. Ducks must have grabbed them for their nest!” 

And she sat there laughing until her sides ached.
 
Rosie Copeland 
 
Rosie Copeland is a New Zealand writer and artist. She is currently writing a novel for YA. Rosie belongs to several writing groups. Mayhem, Reading Room, Tarot have published her work, and she has also been a finalist in several poetry and fiction competitions in NZ. She has also had poetry and fiction published in the USA, Canada and several NZ anthologies.

​Serial Nightmare

It came again to torture her sleep; came in the black cloak and hollowed out eyes—the ever-menacing, horned, grim reaper-like specter—only this time it brought friends. Were they benevolent or bedeviled? 

The nightmare emerged in pixelated frames and reeled out with flickering momentum. Heralded by the stench of musk and followed by an orange aura, it came, that menacing spectre; wafting its way through each scene where ax-wielding Bishops preyed upon herb-gathering nuns. 

It was the same old nightmare from which she could not wake. Only this time the nuns pulled out open-bolt, blowback-operated mini Uzis from beneath their habits. At last! The longed-for sequel!

The biting sound of guns rapid-firing across the dreamscape bolted her into wakefulness but she refused to open her eyes before witnessing the bullet-riddled spectre flicker into the hell awaiting him—him and his predatory Bishops. 

The nuns went about cultivating the aromatic herb garden that effectively dislodged the stench of musk, and our dreamer went on dreaming.

Karen FitzGerald
​
Karen FitzGerald is a genre-fluid writer from Sonoma County California. When not cycling, hiking, working a day job, and doing Happy Hours with friends and family, she is found with pen to page producing her debut novel in between writing bouts of poetry, essays, short stories and such. 

​Edgar Degas Visits Russia
 
 The famed painter of the ballet stages a new performance with three prima ballerinas. Though it will be difficult for them to even so much as plie in dresses to their ankles, Degas focuses on the flounce of the arm, the subtle movement of the fingers as they hang sheets and shirts on the line. On their hair coiffed in the traditional bun of the corps. The aprons flutter in the breeze, exactly as Degas intends. Each ballerina has her own dance to perform. One holds a basket on her scarved head and lunges stage left. Stage right, another prepares to pirouette. Center stage, one foot in front of the other, sets her the third dancer for a grand jete. Each leaps over the water trough and lands in a split. At the end of the performance, Degas hands his paintbrush to Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova and says, Paint what you see.

Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner looks forward to the marathon all year. Her ekphrastic poetry chapbook, Poems from the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press) debuted this year and will be joined by an ekphrastic collection, The Night Watch (Kelsay Books) soon. Her ekphrastic work has also appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Blaze/VOX, and elsewhere. A historian and multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com.

​Instructions to the Postwar Stylist
 
So many young lives lost in the whirlpool of war. Plunge the postwar knife into what remains. Wipe away the foam, cut into the beer-belly bloat of the Weimar Republic and von Hindenburg. Neither will last. Wear the dirndl like suspenders. Bob the hair and wrap the severed strands into the wheels and gears of industry for fuel. Impale impotent heroes, draw mustaches on clean-shaven faces. Remember Trotsky. Tear away from the past. Snip passe images, reposition them with revision glue into a new world order. See what sticks.
 
Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner looks forward to the marathon all year. Her ekphrastic poetry chapbook, Poems from the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press) debuted this year and will be joined by an ekphrastic collection, The Night Watch (Kelsay Books) soon. Her ekphrastic work has also appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Blaze/VOX, and elsewhere. A historian and multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com.

​We Ride the Train for Home Past the Third Avenue Apartments in Summer
 
 Evening light paints gold over her face, body dress. I see her every night on my way home—her and the man in the seat in front of her. She sits across from me tonight, reading undisturbed by the usual longish stop at Third Avenue where most of the other passengers leave the train. 
 
The ride always seems longer in summer. Even with the windows open, the heavy air, still fetid from the earlier crush of sweating bodies is inescapable. The woman comes prepared—always. She has a book propped on her purse. She has tied back her long auburn hair and pinned it up to get it off of her neck and  has opened the top of her dress as much as modesty allows. The arm not needed for her book dangles at her side. Her feet rest softly, though likely they cannot wait to be freed from those pointy pumps. Her relaxation spills over to me,  not to the man sitting, back to me, also across, but in a side seat, looking out the window.
 
He sits up straight, as always, suit jacket on, no matter how hot the day, white shirt, and yes, usually a tie, with its Windsor knot intact. He is always dressed that way. The golden glow that suffuses our car shines off the back of his bald head as I observe him watching life on display 
in the third floor of the apartment across from our elevated line.
 
We see them every night. A man lives there with his mother—at least I think she is his mother. Tonight their windows are open, and I hear them shouting to each other between the rooms in a foreign language. He, glowing with sweat wears a white undershirt but his gray-haired mother seems pristine still in her flowered house dress like the one my Grandma wears. Maybe they shout because she is deaf? Maybe they shout to be heard above the noise of the trains? He  rushes toward her. I wonder if the man in the jacket understands their language. His concentration on them is intense. For the woman, their words, like the noise of the train when it moves on, are only background for her reading time.
 
The train finally begins to rumble to life and our car rushes down the tracks toward its final  stop where we three will part ways. I do not have to climb the hill like they do, but before I turn to my path, I watch the man take off his jacket and put it over his arm and walk behind the shapely woman. I wonder if he, like I, wonders how she manages, every night, to move so strongly and surely up the hill in those pointed pumps.
 
Joan Leotta
 
Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. A multiple Pushcart and Best of Net nominee, Joan explores museums and beaches with equal fervor for poetic, short story, essay inspiration and the general solace of being wrapped in beauty in both locations. Her chapbook, Feathers on Stone is available from Main Street Rag. Contact Joan about her folklore performances and the show featuring Louisa May Alcott, writer and Civil War nurse.
 

​Standing Out
 
I was starting to lose interest in Jerome, everything about him so beige. Sometimes I could no longer distinguish his facial features, more than once planting a kiss on the tip of his nose when I was aiming for his lips. It was as though he were a drawing I had etched into the damp sand on the beach below our cabin and gentle waves had begun washing it away. I felt guilty that I was almost relieved to think of him as leaving. Then one morning, he returned from a yard sale down the road carrying some sort of sceptre in his right hand. Look what I found. His voice seemed deeper. Only cost me a couple bucks. I didn’t care what he was saying because his tone warmed me where I had not felt warmth for a very long time. I’m heading out for a swim, come join me on the beach later. I couldn’t speak, only wagged my chin and he left, using the sceptre as a walking stick, to make his way down the path to the water. I rushed through my chores, pulled on my swimsuit and almost ran to the beach. There he was, damp from his swim, seated on a rock with the sceptre leaning against his thigh. He was gazing out toward the lake, a patch of ferns highlighted behind him. He turned towards me, and I saw that the ferns weren’t behind him—they had actually sprouted out the top of his head. They quivered, much like my knees, as I moved toward him. 
  
Louella Lester
 
Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (At Bay Press), contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024. Her writing and/or photography appears/is forthcoming in: Cleaver, subTerrain, SoFloPoJo, Neither Fish Nor Foul, Ink Sweat & Tears, Six Sentences, Temple in a City, Switch, Gooseberry Pie, Hoolet’s Nook, Roi Faineant, Mad Swirl, Dog Throat, Paragraph Planet, and a variety of other journals.

The Trolley Song
 
The bell of the trolleybus rings urgently as he hurries to board.

”Wait!” he hears a voice trying to make the 8 a.m. trolley. He's a gentleman so he makes room for her to pass.

His wife is away visiting her mother. It isn’t until he is aboard the trolley that he realizes that the voice belongs to the woman with whom he has just spent the night in compensation for his wife’s absence. She doesn’t seem to notice him, but when he takes a seat, she settles in right behind him.

He hears her catching her breath after her run, a slight sniffle, the shuffling of a skirt, her hands turning the pages of a book. He quietly clears his throat.

As the trolley lurches, pulling itself past buildings in this neighbourhood, he notices the curtainless windows and sees that here life is seen in full view. Her room had been dark. He had found his way by touch. His hands delineated which parts of her were clothed and which parts were not. His face explored the crook of her neck. He felt her hot breath move across his cheek.

He thinks about buying a meat pie for dinner as a present for his wife. After all, she’d been looking after her mother all week. She needn’t cook right away when she gets home.

At the next stop, a large man gets on the trolley. Everyone looks up to take in his size. He thinks the man is smiling at him when he realizes that the man is smiling at her. He can hear her close her book and hum a happy noise.

The big man stands beside him while he talks loudly to her. The man says he’s missed seeing her in the club and asks when was the last time he heard her sing. She laughs and answers with a flirtatious line, full of flattery and reciprocation. 

The man moves back into the aisle and motions that she has a stage right here and now. She gets up and moves to the front of the trolley. She looks a little bit wicked. She’s more than up for the dare. The big man applauds as she begins to sing.

She sings a song about a man and a woman on the day of their wedding. They make their vows and all seems bliss. At the reception the couple are showered with money. The husband scrambles to pick up the bills, but the money runs through his hands like water. The money turns into birds who carry the wife away so she can be reunited with her one true love, away from the man that she’s just married.

The woman turns her head to her audience.

He knows if he turns sideways, he will disappear.
 
Barbara McVeigh
​
Barbara McVeigh is a Canadian writer and teacher-librarian. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Funicular Magazine and Ellipsis Zine, among others. Connect with her on Bluesky @barbaramcveigh.bsky.social. 
**
​

​Collage

She pasted the crown over his head at a jaunty angle, smiling in contrast to the serious expression, the weight of the world on his shoulders. She knew how that felt, trying to shield Maddy and Rob from their parents’ messy divorce without being too much of a “buzzkill,” which she’d recently become, according to her friend Reina.
 
Middle school is supposed to be fun, Reina said, but her favorite part of the day was after the last bell, when the halls emptied out in everyone’s rush to get to a club or practice or to hang out with friends. She had forty-five minutes to wait before getting Maddy and Rob from the elementary school down the street, so she focused on making beauty the only way she knew how—by taking existing things and turning them into something else.
 
The collage in her locker was alive with animals and insects and beating, burning hearts. She couldn’t bear to think of scraping it off on the last day, so she planned to get sealant, to carefully brush over it so some part of her would stay there, just right, forever.
​
Allison Renner
 
Allison Renner’s fiction has appeared in SoFloPoJo, Ink in Thirds, Atlas and Alice, Gooseberry Pie, and others. Her chapbooks include Green Light: The Gatsby Cycle and Won’t Be By Your Side. She can be found at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Bluesky @AllisonWrites.

​Current
 
The sun turned the sky red, orange, and pink, the only way I can be sure that time has passed since he flipped my life upside down. Our perfect beach day, wasted. I had planned every aspect, packed towels, sunscreen, and a picnic. He’d driven us here but hadn’t even let me spread out the blanket before saying, “I’m not in love with you anymore.”
 
I could tell by the tone of his voice and the way he pushed the words out of his mouth and toward me that he’d practiced. He’d thought about this. He meant it, and there was no changing his mind.
 
But I had planned this day, just like I’d planned the wedding I’d now have to unplan, and I wasn’t going to let this go to waste.
 
So I spread out the blanket and plopped down and when he stammered, “Well, I’m going to go,” I waved him off with one finger.
 
I sat on the sand and watched the waves, valuing their consistency. I turned out the people around me—they sounded happy, but I knew no one truly was, not if we hadn’t been.
 
I ate the picnic and drank the bottle of wine and after the sunset cleared the families from the beach, I stood up to pack my things. I thought about how I’d have to find a ride home. I’d have to pack my belongings there, find a place to stay, call my family, our guests…
 
I was sick of planning. Of doing.
 
I left my things where they were. I took off my shorts, my shirt. I stood in my undergarments until I took those off, too. And then I walked into the water, resolving I’d go wherever the current took me. 
 
Allison Renner
 
Allison Renner’s fiction has appeared in SoFloPoJo, Ink in Thirds, Atlas and Alice, Gooseberry Pie, and others. Her chapbooks include Green Light: The Gatsby Cycle and Won’t Be By Your Side. She can be found at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Bluesky @AllisonWrites.
**
 

​Advert
 
Welcome to Holiday, where nowhere is out of reach. Always dreamed of spending time in a misty mountain resort on Chandra 7? We can take you there! Want to see the forming of nations on Earth? We can take you there, too! Revisit your childhood memories or take your children to witness their own births! Nowhere in time or space is off limits. Or maybe you have an important decision to make. Perhaps you’re standing on a crossroad and don’t know which way to turn. We can help you there, too! Just watch the ripples of possibility unfurl before your eyes to catch a glimpse of what could be, and I guarantee you will feel pulled to somewhen important. Glamorous. Maybe even a little dangerous. There is always an adventure to be found with Holiday! Just remember, the future is always changing. But! Though you can revisit the past, you cannot change it.   
 
Kaila Schwartz
 
Kaila Schwartz runs an award-winning high school theatre program in the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her spouse and kitty overlords. She loves ekphrastic writing and can often be seen in museums scribbling away in notebooks. Her work can be seen in Hippocrates Awards Anthology 2020, Ekphrastic Review, Moss Piglet, Waffle Fried, and The Yelling Continues, a Procrastinating Writers United Anthology. In her spare time, she researches her family history.

​The Third Avenue Train
 
Mr. Walters boarded the train, as usual at 8:15. His wife had gone to visit her sister at the seashore. He’d made himself coffee, spilled it on his shirt and had to change. 
 
Miss Albertini, in a red-orange summer dress, her black heels polished, was also on her way to work. She always carried a book and sat facing away from the window so she wouldn’t be distracted. She was determined to better herself. This book was on etiquette, but she’s very fond of mystery novels.
 
Mr. Walters didn’t notice her. He was looking out at an apartment house’s windows, at a man in his wife-beater T-shirt, at the wife he had beaten. Mr. Walters’ mouth formed an O, but what could he do? What did he know? 
 
The next day, Tuesday, Miss Albertini wore a blue dress. Mr. Walters burned his toast. The man in the wife-beater T-shirt yelled at him through his window, through the train window. Mr. Walters turned his head to Miss Albertini. “Did you hear that,” he asked?
 
“Hear what,” she said, barely taking her eyes from her new book, The ABC Murders.
 
On Wednesday, Miss Albertini wore green, which made her eyes sparkle. Mr. Walters broke a jar of jam on the kitchen floor and almost missed the train because he had to clean it up. The man in the window had horns growing from his head. His wife was translucent and seemed to float. Her eyes looked surprised; her throat wore a red smile. Mr. Walters made a noise in his throat, as he swallowed a scream.
 
Miss Albertini asked him if he was okay, then went back to her book. She was halfway through it.
 
On Thursday, Miss Albertini wore one of her two black skirts with a black and white striped blouse. She had nearly finished her book. Mr. Walters had cut himself shaving, then tripped on a rug in the bathroom. There were dark circles under his eyes and small bandage under his chin. He was determined not to look out the window, but he couldn’t help himself. Just a quick glance he thought. The man in the T-shirt, now spotted with red, pointed at him and grinned evilly, displaying pointed teeth.  
 
On Friday, Miss Albertini wore her one blue skirt with a paler blue top. Mr. Walters was not on the train. Miss Albertini has stopped at the library during her lunch break the day before. She settled down to read her new book, And Then There Were None.
 
Merril D. Smith
 
Merril D. Smith is a Pushcart-nominated poet. Her work has been published widely in poetry journals and anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. Her second collection Held Within the Folds of Time is forthcoming (2025). She writes from southern New Jersey. Find her at Bluesky: @merrildsmith.bsky.social;  Instagram: mdsmithnj  Blog: merrildsmith.org   

​Life’s Ups, Downs, and Cats

THE BIGGEST art dealer in Toronto just phoned to offer me a show!  I’m shaking too hard to play it cool. Is this a prank? 

He tells me why my work impresses him, says he’s seen three canvases of mine at a neighboring gallery today. HE EVEN BOUGHT ONE! (This must be a prank.)

Could I possibly get there next Wednesday? He’d overnight my first class, two-way ticket if I could possibly… I have no memory of what either of us said after that, but I did get my ticket and posh hotel reservation the next day.

Time to shop for a few sophisticated outfits. I usually look  like a hippie throwback or someone who just finished a workout at the gym. Maybe Tina can loan me a dress.

Time to call ALL my friends! No, my apartment can only hold eight people standing. At least the party’s a success.

The next morning, I realize it’s not so smart to party before my early flight – too much champagne. I barely make it  onboard.  I tell the cabby I’ll double his tip if he gets me to the airport in time. At least my cats are safely locked in my bedroom with a water fountain and a full cat food dispenser.

I’m still giddy from my trip till neighbour Jack, who picks me up at the airport, says, “Just so you know, someone seems to have died in your apartment.” Already wearing a mask, he’d stopped to pick up scrub brushes, disinfectant, detergent, and long rubber gloves for both of us.

Even before going upstairs, the stench almost kills me. “Yes, Jack. I did wash the dishes.” Dang, I was in such a rush to the airport that I forgot to run the party scraps out to the dumpster, and it’s August! Stinking shrimp! We hear my cats complaining, but I didn’t expect my feline Houdinis to break out of the bedroom. That’s why my best party plates were crashed to the floor. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Jack ran the stinky garbage out to the dumpster, then began sweeping up the broken dishes. “Wait!” I say. “I can use those shards. My gallery boss wants me to bring some new canvases.” 

I start rearranging the broken china around the dead flowers.

“Jack, just look at this still life: broken dishes, sharp edges, dying flowers, a scratched photo, carelessly taped to the wall…this collage surely will make some buyer lament the unfairness of life. How briefly happiness stays with us.”

“Oh, don’t look so sad. I’ll also paint something you’ll like.”

Alarie Tennille

Alarie Tennille was a pioneer coed at the University of Virginia, where she earned her degree in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. She has now lived more than half her life in Kansas City. Alarie received the first Editor’s Choice Fantastic Ekphrastic Award from The Ekphrastic Review, and in 2022, her latest book, Three A.M. at the Museum, was named Director’s Pick for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art gift shop. Her big news this year was being named the 2025 Muse of The Writers Place in April.

​The Potter Has a Business Decision to Make
  
The clay chose him today. Ada’s fingertips brushed against his tense smile before she saw it. The stubborn curls that defied his stifling need for order grew out of the wet block. Pushing her ex-lover back into the mud would feel like murder. It was enough that they had said good-bye, but here he was all over her hands in her messy studio. Although she couldn’t remember the man ever liking houseplants, she finished him into a planter. That was the clay talking again. The studio had one, empty corner where the sun could bounce off his curls. She decided not to sell him until the right buyer showed up.
 
Jane Vogel
 
Jane Vogel is a retired physical therapist. Although she has enjoyed reading poetry since high school, she spent 35 years writing to please insurance companies. Now she writes to please herself. Her poetry has been published in Blue Lake Review, Storm Cellar and The BeZine. She and her husband divide their time between Minneapolis, Scottsdale and anywhere else that the opportunity to travel pops up.
 

​What a wonderful Ekphrastic Marathon this has been, a Perfect 10 indeed! It was just amazing to follow your comments and drafts and freewrites on Facebook during Marathon-day, and it was just ever-so-amazing to read all your entries…some gorgeous classical structures as well as stunning free verse and “dadaisms”.
 
Out of the huge amount of official submissions, Team TER has chosen 50 finalists, of which 30 are poetry finalists. So, without further ado…the winning poem of The Perfect 10 Marathon is:  Where’s the Magic in this World? (to: Raven Transformation Mask, Charles Edenshaw, Canada/Haida, 1880s), written by Michelle Holland. Massive congratulations!
Well done everyone, three hurrahs and bravo! Hope to see your work again soon at the Ekphrastic Challenges and TER's events. 
 
Be well, 
Kate Copeland


Congratulations to Michelle Holland for her poem, "Where’s the Magic in this World?” winner of the poetry entries from the Perfect Ten Ekphrastic Marathon in July.

The poetry winner was selected by editor Kate Copeland.

All of the finalists in flash and poetry were selected by editors Kate Copeland, Lorette C. Luzajic, and Sandi Stromberg. The entries were read and selected blind.

Approximately 50 marathon participants submitted work to the contest part of the marathon, including one to five works.

The Perfect Ten Ekphrastic Marathon was our fourth annual marathon event. The goal of the marathon was simply to participate, and included a wide selection of art prompts, along with optional ideas to inspire ekphrases. Writers connected in a Facebook group to view the art, chat, share their drafts or ideas and more. They wrote fourteen drafts, with sprints changing every 30 minutes. There was a zoom after party to celebrate their accomplishments. Those who chose to submit to the contest portion had two weeks to revise their drafts and send them in. 

A huge congratulations to everyone who finished the marathon! It is an amazing, intense, fun experience, a day of pure creativity. 

A huge congratulations to everyone who entered their work in the contest portion.

A huge congratulations to all the writers whose work was selected among the finalists! The flash selections are below, and the poetry selections are in a separate post.

And a special congratulations to Yvonne Blumer for her winning story.

We can't wait for the fifth annual marathon next July! Hope to see all of you there again, and many more of you joining the fun.

love, Lorette

POETRY WINNER!!!
​
Where’s the Magic in this World?
 
With feathers I would not 
be surprised are mine, even 
if I left the island so many years ago.
 
Not even counted by years, 
some other measurement,
like an ancient edict. I say, 
 
stop making lists. Let go 
the terrible counting I do 
in my head every day: 
 
how many steps, how many 
minutes, this many miles
on automatic. I allow 
 
all of it to pass because
I have convinced myself 
doubt rules and the only way 
 
to compete, to stay delineated, 
to occupy space as matter, 
is to first believe my feet 
 
are on the ground, when 
I really want to fly, 
curve the wings around 
 
my shoulders like a late Renaissance 
fallen angel who burned down
the fourth world I was born 
 
into, with raven eyes adopted 
from a carved mask created
out of a northwest island culture.
 
I live the mundane, sit among 
my chickens in the shade 
of Virginia Creeper that creates 
 
a canopy above us,
know I am not supposed 
to name them, so I find a place 
 
to wait, mimic their contented 
clucking, my days of feathered 
conversation, bringing water to fill, 
 
scratch to scatter. I offer 
a light green grasshopper, 
palmed from the citronella plant, 
 
apologize before tossing 
to the gold-laced wyandottes.
No magic, yet these words 
 
give me a mask, waiting 
for transformation, because 
incantations are beyond me. 
 
What break, maybe the rain  
building, will deliver the wings 
I desire, the feathers of the ravens 
 
who chuckle in the cottonwoods, 
large black weight on ancient branches?
  
Michelle Holland
 
Michelle Holland lives and writes in Chimayó, New Mexico. Her poetry publications include “Event Horizon,” in The Sound a Raven Makes, Tres Chicas Press, and Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press.

​Jazz in the Garden
 
The soothing sounds of jazz--
relaxing yet vibrant.
Mellow music flows through my inner being  
like a warm shower of sunlight.
 
The notes bounce and dance 
like electricity. 
It invigorates my senses--
heals my heartache.
 
The rich timbre of each instrument
transcends mere sound.
It stirs my emotions 
and makes my melancholy disappear.
 
Listening to jazz creates camaraderie.
Strangers become kin.
Children sway to the rhythm.  
Old men tap their feet.
 
The air is thick with love.
 
Barbara Ann Abbott
 
Barbara Ann Abbott expresses her creativity through writing poetry and prose as well as other artistic endeavors. She has been published in several anthologies and continues to expand her portfolio to include her own body of work, which encompasses ekphrastic poetry and other genres. Retired from Corporate HR, she resides in Northern California’s wine country with her husband.

لال مین دریا –
صنوبر جھومتے ہیں گیتوں پر 
سرمئی-سبز کنکریوں کے ​

باؤہاؤس نما باغیچہ –
بھونرا اور جگنو لڑتے ہوئے 
غسل آفتابی کرتے ڈہلیا کے لئے ​

دریا کنارے قصبہ –
میں لطف اندوز ہوتے سینکی ٹراؤٹ سے 
دورانِ سمندری بگلوں کی پُکار ​

موسم بہار کے سرور –
بھورا الو کو کو پکارتے ہوئے 
شنکوں کی جھنکار میں ​

​ 
*
​
Spring delights – 
tawny owl coos coos 
as the strobili chime

Saad Ali

Saad Ali (b. 1980 CE) is a poet-philosopher & literary translator from the UK and Pakistan. His new collection of poems is Owl Of Pines: Sunyata. He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrases into Urdu. His work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, Synchronized Chaos, Lothlorien, Lotus-eater, BRAWL Lit., Pandemonium Journal, ImmaginePoesia, Purple Stallion Review, and various anthologies. He has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and Best Microfiction. FB/IG: @owlofpines.

Apparel
 
We all drape and cloak our bodies,
whether to conceal or reveal, 
fade or emblazon, the close caress
and fall of cloth varying with thread
and weave, fibres of plant or fur 
or refined organic hydrocarbon 
chains spun to threads, threads
crissed and crossed and sheared
and sewn. We thrust our limbs through 
armholes and sleeves and necklines,
cloth snug and close, or open and loose,
the fabrics conforming with folds
and wrinkles and wraps that bulge
coyly or blatantly depending 
on the bone and flesh beneath 
that give it form and substance. 
 
Then we wash and scrub and launder, 
remove all hints of ourselves 
from cotton and satin and wool: 
skin cells and sweat stains, aromas
and smells. All the clothes’ memories
of us gone so they may briefly float 
in air, take on the dancing, transient 
shapes of breezes and wind, 
live for a few hours free of all the pride 
and shame, all the human vanity 
and frailty that they so successfully hide, 
or make, oblivious to us, so 
embarrassingly apparent.
  
Roy J. Beckemeyer
 
Roy J. Beckemeyer’s latest poetry collections include The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) and Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book was Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2015, 2020, and 2024) and for Best of the Net (2018) and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019. His author’s page is at royjbeckemeyer.com.

​Communique
 
What if our only method of communicating
was through images on our skin; images
that would appear as we thought them,
but that would fade after 24 hours.
 
Suppose we had an unlimited palette, but 
a finite canvas: the epidermis of trunk and limbs, 
neck and face, palms and arches. The more
voluble among us would shave our heads,
emblazon our foreheads, carry magnifying
glasses for cramped spidery messages inscribed 
on the whorls of our ears. 
 
Our conversations would become dances, 
nuance and inflections finely choreographed,
complex arguments conveyed by gymnastics.
The more articulate individuals might 
be contortionists, and body language 
would take on a wholly new and richer 
meaning.
  
Roy J. Beckemeyer
 
Roy J. Beckemeyer’s latest poetry collections include The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) and Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book was Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2015, 2020, and 2024) and for Best of the Net (2018) and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019. His author’s page is at royjbeckemeyer.com.

Outlook
 
He said we’ll start with the ladder
and she said no, we should start with the house.
No, he said, if we build the ladder first,
we will be able to reach higher
to build the house. She said you will need the house
first to rest the ladder against and he rolled his eyes
and said no no we need the ladder, what good is a half-
built house and no way to reach the roof.
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing,
then he said he’d already built it.
She threw her arms in the air, why
does she even bother giving her opinion 
and he hooked the ladder on the air,
dug its feet into the ground
climbed up and up to pour
cement for the foundation.
She was so angry, she stood with her hands
on her hips, red cheeked and fuming,
not seeing the miracle
of what he had done.
  
Yvonne Blomer
 
Yvonne Blomer has published six books of poetry, most recently Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024). Her work has won awards and appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., the UK, and Japan. She has an MA with Distinction from the University of East Anglia and lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking people. She was the City of Victoria’s poet laureate from 2015-2018.

Serpent
 
Eels scream through their teeth.
Did you know?
They’re fully outfitted.
Imagine the gnashing and then
The more when they are cooked 
And eaten by the creatures that fear them most.
Now ingested into their very cells. 
 
Do the fearful not imagine how
Those memories now grow into themselves,
How their own eyes stop blinking, 
How their jaws open with a new scream
Out of the belly so full it might 
Split.
  
Kate Bowers
 
Kate Bowers (she/her) is a  Pittsburgh based writer who has been published in Sheila-Na-Gig, Rue Scribe, McQueen’s Quinterly, The Thomas Wolfe Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and So It Goes!  Her work appears also in the anthology Pandemic Evolution: Poets Respond to the Art of Matthew Wolfe, by Hayley Haugen (Editor) and Matthew Wolfe (Contributor) and in the anthology The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain: Pittsburgh Poems, Doralee Brooks (Editor). Kate is an alumna of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project and serves as a volunteer social media team member for The Ekphrastic Review.
​

In Nature He Trusts  

I know him as Pabbi, my heritage, a papa 
from my mother’s line. Folk admire his art –
 
in Reykjavik the gallery is huge and light.
They display his work on white plinths and
 
white walls, open the doors to a ‘Floral Fantasy.’
Wine is poured and visitors lift eyewear 
 
to peruse, follow hushly. There’s the creak of new
leather when feet lean to Pabbi’s world. 
 
Petals whorl in plush purple and grain-gold.
Florets rise like peacock eyes. Poppy seeds
 
explode as dots. Leaves drift in unallotted air,
freely curl and furl. There’s speak of 
 
Pabbi’s mind, how turbulence makes great art. 
As if trauma were a talent, his flee to the fields
 
enough. As if breath were enough. And what 
luck for pretty plants to guide his brush.
 
But when Pabbi walks in, in worn-out boots, zigzags
round the living, it’s them he fears: the civilised folk.
 
To him, the plinths are whipping posts and a white wind
blows and when they lash – again, again – he calls for
his pa who died when he was four. Calls for his ma, 
poor ma, who laboured too hard to raise her child. 
 
For a week he bleeds, lays with his scars on a 
bed of dried grass. Rasps his pain to the open sky. 
 
For balm, he hallucinates flowers. 
 
After, he loads his back with palettes and pots. Re-enters
the forbidden wild. Steals bread, leans to a rock for home.
 
He spreads his parchment and steadies his arm for 
harebell, campion, angelica’s lime
 
and repeats and replicates:
 
harebell, campion, angelica’s lime. 
Green upon green; mauve, then shades of mauve. 
 
Pabbi wets his brush – again, again – frantic purples
fall and float. The landscape is arctic thyme;
 
he gathers sprigs, crushes them to his nose. 
Folk hold open the gallery door, raise their glass 
 
to drink to him. But Pabbi turns, ghosts his back. 
Tilts instead to the skylight, the blue pouring in. 
  
Vanessa Crannis
 
Vanessa has pieces in Writers’ Forum and The Ekphrastic Review and has been shortlisted in two competitions. She runs or swims every day, aiming for a triathlon and a third marathon. Vanessa is happiest out-of-doors in nature, and is currently reviving her interest in UK moths. A late starter, she is also on the lookout for old records, and is discovering whether music might move her as much as words.

Oh Daughter, Mine
 
Within the folds of your silken gown, and the
ruffled edge of your sweeping collar a code 
emerges. Your thoughtful stare, tranquil
 air urges me to decipher that which 
travels from your look-see to a 
hand poised atop a portfolio 
of blank, white, virginal 
pages. I hear the rat-ta
tap-tap of your pencil 
about to un-secret 
what may be the
 message from
the muse 
within. 
 
Karen FitzGerald
 
Karen FitzGerald is a genre-fluid writer from Sonoma County California. When not cycling, hiking, working a day job, and doing Happy Hours with friends and family, she is found with pen to page producing her debut novel in between writing bouts of poetry, essays, short stories and such.

Woman in Bloom
 
You are lovely, in full flower.
In fact, you are hiding behind roses,
of fullest and darkest of crimson--
 
They block your view of a glory 
of pigeons in Trafalgar Square,
the blood long ago dried and forgotten.
 
Surely their thorns scratch your face?  Once,
I bit into thorns, have eaten a few rose petals. 
Strangely, there is nourishment in pain.
 
Lovely one, no need to brace
yourself against the future; they are
not coming for you.  Neither are
 
the pigeons… they only come to feed
from your out slung arms, your perch 
of despair.  Their fluttering will help you
take your first tentative step.
 
Beth Fox
 

​Fear Green—for More Than Envy
 
Oh citizens, workers, you worship a false god.
Do not betray your heritage! Do not turn on
the white ibis, who guides you, for temporary 
wealth. With this Charter, you sign away more 
than your goods, your cotton, gold, and oil— 
you sign away your dignity and your pride. 
 
The green face of greed is a harsh mistress 
whose tenacles and branches will beat you
and your children until there is nothing left 
but the sandstorm that blows in your eyes 
and refuses to leave until you are blind.
  
Robin Gabbert
 
Robin Gabbert is the winner of RW’s 2025 Fran Claggett-Holland Award. In 2024, her poem “Invisible” was a finalist in the San Francisco Writers’ Conference Contest and she was long-listed for Frontier Poetry’s(Not) In Love Tanka Challenge. Her full-length book of poetry Somehow, I Haven’t Drowned will be published this fall.

Late-Stage Body Art
 
even watching the needle-like proboscis
inking deep into dermis 
blood-red / and black / 
                           and black / 
                                   and black /
indigo / tropical green   c o l o u r s
 
tattooing    in the West
an act of creative rebellion 
a middle finger to established decorum
 
even as my question floats into the stratosphere
how many doctors sport tattoos?
                                             
body paintings of calaveras  
in rainbow jewel tones
butterflies   roses   and the names
of so many dead parents
 
tatuaje    not indigenous skin stitching
with whale bone or caribou
and ink-soaked thread cruising cutis
 
nor the months-long coming of age 
Polynesian hand taps    ancestral
stories     engraved into tegument
 
even as the medical examiner in Philly   smug
in his theories tattoos= bad character =drugs
even the Thug Life phrase   poet Nikki Giovanni 
tatted onto her inner left forearm
commiserating Afeni Shakur’s loss of her son
 
even so     I wait   
to hand off my stethoscope 
for this blossoming of my second career    before 
etching with permanence   my middle finger
onto my mid-life Black skin
 
Joanne Godley
 
Joanne Godley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review Crab Orchard Review, Juked, The Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts Review, among others. She is a member of Annie Finch’s Poetry Witch Community. She is an Anaphora Arts Fellow in poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection, How the Black Panthers Fell From the Sky, won the Naomi Long Madgett award for 2025 and will be published in 2026.
 

Sappho’s Last Lyric
 
Dare I do this thing my soul disdains,
while the wings of grief aflutter in my chest,
like a bird too frail to face the darkening sky?
As poet, I hunger for that which lovers crave,
the touch, the taste, of passion’s ripe desire.
But I pine for him who shut his heart to me.
So here I stand upon these Leucadian cliffs, 
awash with rapturous sorrow. Were I to leap 
into the sea, would not the waves engulf
me with their fury? I would not try to swim.
 
Perhaps, the poet’s plight is that we know not
of which we write. Perhaps we’re doomed to gaze 
upon bounty, we cannot hope to feast. O’, Phaon!
My lyre, I leave ashore–as I embrace this vengeful sea!
  
Joanne Godley
 
Joanne Godley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review Crab Orchard Review, Juked, The Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts Review, among others. She is a member of Annie Finch’s Poetry Witch Community. She is an Anaphora Arts Fellow in poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection, How the Black Panthers Fell From the Sky, won the Naomi Long Madgett award for 2025 and will be published in 2026.
 

​Performance in Trafalgar Square, by Sheila Legge In Conversation with Joy Harjo’s I Give You Back.
 
I gave back the fear.
Back to the ones who corralled and killed my ancestors
like they were cattle.
Back to the ones who want the same for me and mine.
The ones who locked their apertures on contempt. 
 
I gave back their gaping maw, ravenous gullet, 
ouroboros.
I stepped aside and let it devour itself.
 
And then I stood still
in the centre of town square.
 
Stood tall leaning into the wind,
arms outspread
becoming the figurehead of my own ship,
vessel for those who come after.
 
birds in my hands
my hair blooming tulips.
 
Maureen Kane
 
Maureen Kane lives in Bellingham, WA with her family. Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals. She is a Sue Boynton Poetry Walk Award winner. Her book of poems are The Phoenix Requires Ashes: Poems for the Journey and Mycelium: Poetry of Connection. Her workbook A Guide Back to You: A workbook for exploring who you are and staying true to yourself is a Chanticleer International Books Awards First Place category winner.

​Welcome to the Circus
 
A sightless, flightless polka-dot bird rides in, balanced
on an unhappy cellophane tape dispenser,
flanked by 
 
a skinny one-handed ringmaster
a ravenous beast, ribs showing, unsatisfied by a single slice of watermelon
a lazy, hammocked sloth
a naked tri-horn snail, chasing its ghost shell
 
Through a window, a peeping Thomasina smirks:
Not my scene, she says, but she bought all the tickets.
Meanwhile, I’m inching up the water tower,
hoping for a baptism, or a dive, either one:
death-defying
 
Skyler Lovelace
 
Skyler Lovelace, a native of Wichita, Kansas, delights in expressing her experience of the world in words and pigments. Her paintings feature landscapes composed of splatters and drips, collaged portraits of quizzical bison, and collaborations with other painters and writers. Skyler writes poetry in open and closed forms, favoring the sonnet or something “sonnet-ish.” Skyler creates her art and facilitates poetry workshops from The Studio School in Wichita, a repurposed 1924 elementary school. 

Ghostly Vision
            
Dim the lights, then tell me,
is this the one, you, too,
resurrect in your mirror,
the one just out of sight 
in your peripheral vision,
who, once bidden, always arrives
whenever you slink past 
the shiny rectangle that once held 
who you are? 
 
This nightmare 
of long hair and horns, 
dog face and blurred cloak
stained by the sepia of shadows:
not me coming to get you,
not you coming to get me,
but a different self, descending  
upon the unsuspecting other,
everything sinister unstoppable.
 
And all those helpless soldiers--
dying or trying to flee?
Maybe you recognize them
from some other life
when you thought 
your sword mattered,
when you thought 
you’d eventually be free. 
  
Marjorie Maddox
 
Professor Emerita of English at Commonwealth University, Presence assistant editor, and WPSU-FM Poetry Moment host, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation; Begin with a Question; In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind; Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For; Small Earthly Space; Seeing Things; Hover Here (forthcoming). In addition, she has published a story collection, four children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and Keystone Poetry. www.marjoriemaddox.com
​

Trousseau
 
Stitch. Purple. Yellow. Green. Stitchstitchstitch. Blood. White. Stitch. Linen. Purple. Yellow. Stitchstitch. Breathe. White. Fingers. Green. Napkins. Stitch. Thread. Purple. Curtains. Yellow. White. Night. Day. Night. Day. Stitchstitchstitchstitch. Heart. Stitch. Green. Tears. Stitch. Purple. Apron. Stitch. Yellow. Secrets. White. Purple. Mother. Green. Stitch. Broken. Stitch. Ring. Stitchstitch. Yellow. Flower. Stitch. Wedding. Stitch. Home. Stitch. Green. Hearth. Stitch. 
 
Stitchstitchstitch.
 
Stitchstitchstitch.
 
 Isabella Mori
 
Isabella Mori writes pretty much everything that's not nailed down: Fiction (a 15th century monk whose best friend is a comfrey plant), nonfiction ("All the Way from the Eocene on Highway 400"), and poetry (lots of haiku!) Their great love is hybrid work, like in their latest book Believe Me, which combines poetry, stories, interviews and research. They run Canada's most unusual poetry prize, Muriel's Journey, which has two first prizes. 

​Damaged
 
Of all the things I’ve broken
Promises, vows, and vases
Of these I’ve never spoken
 
Loss is not a token
Even though there are traces
Of all the things I’ve broken
 
Torn up letters, bills, poems I soak in
They put me through my paces
Of these I’ve never spoken
 
This desert of damage will remain unspoken
Buried in all the right places
For all the things I’ve broken
 
Except if I’m plain spoken
You had one of those faces
Of which I’ve never spoken
 
For that loss I am heartbroken
There’s nothing to replace it
Of this I’ve never spoken
 
 Amy Phimister

Amy Phimister retired in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.  She is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and has been published by WFOP, Yardstick Books, several anthologies and The Ekphrastic Review, and was twice a finalist for the Hal Prize. She published a children’s book in 2021 called ABC the Animals, a scavenger hunt through the alphabet. 
 

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic
 
& then take the Kitchen Knife Dada, using a tea towel or new-fangled paper towels,
wipe it clean of spilled guts and spilled pilsners and spilled blood.
Place it with gusto in the drawer next to the icebox, or next to the sink
& then one hundred years later take the Kitchen Knife Dada from the junk
drawer and lickety-spit flit it back and forth on the whetting stone da da da da
sharpen its arts, perfected through beer bellies of the past, prepare 
the Kitchen Knife Dada for the culinary needs of 21st Century palates.
Cut cut cut from the old cloths new patterns, new trims. Da DA! New fashions
and modes of being in the world. Take the Kitchen Knife Dada, heft the hilt,
its weight should cantilever the wrist back and forth. Let it seesaw.
Dah duh dah duh dah duh. Let the Kitchen Knife Dada
do the work for you. Its sharp should slice and carve automatically.
Trim the fat of the old ways, leaner and less mean, prep for new recipes. Take
the Kitchen Knife Dada, make its long disuse a fact historical, slice off 
the greedy, grabby hands of the takers, slit the throats and tongues of the prevaricators
and rally-cry rubes. Chop bloated capitalists into bite-size bits. Feed the poor, eat
the rich. The Kitchen Knife Dada will fill plates with new delights
you didn’t know you should have. Dinner is served. Bon appétit!
 
David Siller
 
Poet, translator, and film, TV and comic book buff, David Siller studied Francophone literature and knows more about French hip hop than you could imagine. His poems have appeared in 100 Poets Against The War, Newtown Literary, and elsewhere. His first collection, tentatively titled ...& Other Improprieties, is forthcoming from PGNP. Queens, NY is home, where he currently teaches French at St. John’s University; his soul wanders the streets of Paris.

The Ghostly Vision of the Ghostly Vision
 
So long misunderstood
I have stood
in vigil
at the gate of bone and shadow
of the afters and its transitions.
Most times I usher
you to the heaven
or hell you’ve decided--
 
I tell you your path
because I have read your lives--
the choices you’ve made
your receipts, your invoices,
the ins and outs of your ledger.
 
But lately I stand
in confusion—aghast at the gates
open, filing through them
children—limbless husks
children—riddled whole punched with bullets and petty grievances
children—crusted and burned
children—crumpled and crushed
children—tattered, torn, ripped, confettied
children—hollowed carved folded.
 
What have your gods done to you?
  
David Siller
 
Poet, translator, and film, TV and comic book buff, David Siller studied Francophone literature and knows more about French hip hop than you could imagine. His poems have appeared in 100 Poets Against The War, Newtown Literary, and elsewhere. His first collection, tentatively titled ...& Other Improprieties, is forthcoming from PGNP. Queens, NY is home, where he currently teaches French at St. John’s University; his soul wanders the streets of Paris.

Scuttlebutt of Myth
 
talks of spring--
            bloom and flower
                        the body tingle, the body
echo, the body
                        goose;
 
                        wind kiss skin
turbulent flurries draft around
            a form in space, tongue charting
                        thin piqued separation of surface
and blood bone nerve.
  
David Siller
 
Poet, translator, and film, TV and comic book buff, David Siller studied Francophone literature and knows more about French hip hop than you could imagine. His poems have appeared in 100 Poets Against The War, Newtown Literary, and elsewhere. His first collection, tentatively titled ...& Other Improprieties, is forthcoming from PGNP. Queens, NY is home, where he currently teaches French at St. John’s University; his soul wanders the streets of Paris.

​In the Beginning
 
At the confluence of rivers, a bird once sang
and stories rose and flowed with the tides,
 
with the tides, civilizations rose and fell--
always there are demons, sometimes there are men.
 
There are men who sometimes become demons,
they slither like serpents, bring storms of fire,
 
serpents, the ancient bewitchers, beguile
and promise: You will have everything you wished.
 
What do wish for? What were you promised
in this land of sand, statues, and stories?
 
The stories are carried by wind-swept time,
the lush fertile crescent becomes barren and dead
 
but the stories do not die, they rise 
from the confluence of rivers, where a bird once sang.
  
Merril D. Smith
 
Merril D. Smith is a Pushcart-nominated poet. Her work has been published widely in poetry journals and anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. Her second collection Held Within the Folds of Time is forthcoming (2025). She writes from southern New Jersey. Find her at Bluesky: @merrildsmith.bsky.social; Instagram: mdsmithnj Blog: merrildsmith.org

This is Who We Are, but Still, We Dream
 
We are Sisyphus,
there is always laundry
infinite and indeterminate.
 
We are bodies in motion,
constantly shifting,
bound by gravity,
longing for wings to fly--
 
if only we could transform our mass 
into energy,
convert our blues, reds, and greens
into star-white light
 
flowing in and from us--
 
this is our physics,
the curve of a sheet,
an apron glimmering 
with feathered fractals,
a universe washed clean.
 
Merril D. Smith
 
Merril D. Smith is a Pushcart-nominated poet. Her work has been published widely in poetry journals and anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. Her second collection Held Within the Folds of Time is forthcoming (2025). She writes from southern New Jersey. Find her at Bluesky: @merrildsmith.bsky.social; Instagram: mdsmithnj Blog: merrildsmith.org

All Mixed Up in Blue
            
-after Bob Dylan’s "Tangled up in Blue"
 
            So now I’m goin’ back again/I got to get to her somehow…
                                                                        -Bob Dylan, "Tangled up in Blue"
 
(Read to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue.” If you’d like  to grab your acoustic, here are the chords I use. There are many other chord variations. Have fun!)
 
 
C                                 Am
Late one evenin’ the moon was burnin’,
    F                    C       G
I was startled awake
C.                                    Am
thinkin’ about that night she danced,
      F.                        C            G
her beauty made me ache.
      C                                       Am
Her family thought when they looked at me
           F.                   C            G
I wasn’t what she’d need.
         C                           Am
They never could take Ma’s ethnic ways,
            F                                C
Papa’s accent was an “alley breed.”
      Em                        Am      
So I was standin’ down on old King Street
Em                                  Am
snow pilin’ on my boots,
Em                                   Am
lookin’ toward the warm west coast
Em                            Dm                                G
heaven knows I felt abused, but that was no excuse,
                        C         F   C   F
all mixed up in blue.
She was twenty when we first met,
ballet dancer at heart,
but I arrived and messed things up,
I never thought that it would come apart.
We’d meet at dark just the two of us,
when there was no one around.
This went on for a couple a years,
‘til she told me she had found
someone, she said, to take my place,
what could I do but bounce?
I heard her say, and it hit real hard, 
“Now’s the time for this, ya’ gotta admit,”
all mixed up in blue.
 
I got a job in hill-filled town
reading water-meters for a time,
but I hated every step I took,
most days I never did smile.
So I left and I never did work
another job that took me apart.
But there was one thing that I couldn’t shake-
a vision that touched my heart – 
way back when in that gritty town
I seen her in a summer skirt.
She told me years later, I remember you, too,
words that sank like a nasty cut,
all mixed up in blue.
 
She was workin’ in a local dive
and I stopped in for a drink.
I was sure she didn’t know I was there.
What a naïve thing to think.
That’s what I thought so I hung around
right up until closing time.
 “You didn’t think I’d forget?” she said,
her voice was like a string of chimes.
I lowered my head, embarrassed as hell,
but I could feel her smile.
That felt real nice so I looked up,
surprised when she took my hands, held ‘em for a while,
all mixed up in blue.
                                    
We went back to her place then,
and she gave me a glass of wine.
“I’s sure you didn’t know it was me in the bar.
That crushed these feelings of mine.”
Then she asked if she could sing a song
she’d written long ago,
said she played it every night
every night cuz she thought she’d know
she’d never see me again.
I was thinkin’ the same as her-
it was over years ago,
and that we were done, but I was wrong,
all mixed up in blue.
 
I lived with them on Pinney Drive
in a place down under the garage.
The guy next door played his music loud
and quiet became a mirage.
Then I heard that her man was dealing meth
and he paced the place like a ghost.
Nothing she owned was hers anymore.
She felt maybe she’d been dosed.
Then finally their fling blew up
and I became remote.
I reacted the way I usually do,
like a man grabbed ‘round the throat and I took off
all mixed up in blue.
 
Enough time gone by and I’m goin’ back,
gotta find her no matter what.
That whole clan we used to hang with,
I wouldn’t know ‘em if they showed up.
One became a lawyer, another became a cop.
One became a writer, another was a homeless guy.
I don’t remember much, it happened way too fast,
but I gotta get to her, no matter how hard I try.
So I am drivin’ too many miles a day
movin’ from town to town.
The two of us, we agreed on things,
but we’d argue and then calm down every now and then,
all mixed up in blue.
  
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

​Night is a Woman Hauling Her Children
 
across indifferent skies
dropping poppies.
 
Each petal lands a dream, stems
its source in an ancient dirt, motions
the moon to carry it upward.
She gives wide allowances for sleep,
her children, 
who are restless, bruised by daylight,
playing aimlessly and unanchored.
 
She knows where the hurt is, the
deeper shadows under skin and leaves.
She tenderizes what cannot be seen
feeds it dark but promising potions,
puts in motion all the resting poses
stretches and yawns, quiet breaths,
tosses her children into beds of pink poppies
sinking cool as she crosses
the warming sky, facing forward
always forward.
 
Rebecca Surmont
​ 
Rebecca Surmont has a love of corn fields, rivers, trains and funk. Her poems have been in Last Leaves, The Orchards, RockPaperPoem, Amethyst Review, Hare’s Paw, Eunoia Review, Nature of our Times, Steel Jackdaw, Amethyst Review, Crowstep Poetry Journal among others. She lives in MN where she works as a leadership consultant.

Rage
 
Throwing the scissors
Bullseye in the closet door
a gash in measure with her force.
 
She would not say later how it happened
shame hanging heavily
grief hiding behind it
or, the stabbing of a mattress
and how clean it felt after,
the ease of it all
no blood, no foul (she thought).
 
One broken dish
its many faces (her own) as 
shards across the floor.
She remembers only the shattering
and repentance in cleaning up,
tidying an inner house
as if for fresh guests.
 
Yes, she ripped photographs, letters,
tossed mementos, lit them on fire
watched them crisp in an iron pit
anger smoldering like incantation.
Clean sweeping, she called it.
 
It all came back that day years later
except for not remembering
what led up to those moments.
How time can crush
their power, erase history.
The old damage lay like still life in memory
without backdrops, without frames.
 
Rebecca Surmont
 
Rebecca Surmont has a love of corn fields, rivers, trains and funk. Her poems have been in Last Leaves, The Orchards, RockPaperPoem, Amethyst Review, Hare’s Paw, Eunoia Review, Nature of our Times, Steel Jackdaw, Amethyst Review, Crowstep Poetry Journal among others. She lives in MN where she works as a leadership consultant.
 

​Lordy Mercy
 
I heard your story, Robert Johnson, how you could rip 
the harmonica and jaw harp like the night wind in the pines,
 
how sorrow clotted in your soul and the blues burst forth
when you lost your kind-hearted woman and baby yet unborn.
 
How, like the honeybee attracted to ultra-violet blooms,
you longed for unholy manna from the up-and-coming Son.
 
From itinerants mastering their music on street corners, 
in barbershops, in graveyards under the ghostly shadows of moonlight. 
 
How you bowed the knee at the crossroads at midnight and bargained
with the devil to blues up, and like dried beans in warm water, you
 
filled the whole Delta with story, fire, and song until the Stealthy One 
claimed your soul in summer, ensuring your membership in myth’s 
 
Twenty-seven Forever Club. Mr. Johnson, if we had possession 
over tomorrow’s Judgment Day.  If we could have possession 
 
over just that one day. We’d award you peace and love and the soul 
winner’s crown. For life. For the long life you did not have.
 
For the music you were not fated to chart.
 
 Jo Taylor
 
Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. In 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire, and in 2024, she published her second book of poems, Come Before Winter (Kelsay Books). Jo has been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. She enjoys morning walks, playing with her two grandsons, and collecting and reading cookbooks. You can connect with her at https://www.jotaylorwrites.com/ 

​Garden of Music
 
Eden arrived in a saxophone
& double bass & in the naked
bodies playing them & milling
around in shades of nutmeg/
beige/bronze/ivory/umber/
silver/jet/pearl aqua.
 
Soft hills gathered the musers
& the speakers & the players
to their coral & orchid skirts
while the trees with their 
afro’d heads arranged 
themselves at gibbous 
distances, held their own
conversations.
 
Sky withheld sun & moon
so that overhead was nothing--
no storm, no scorch, no wind
infiltrated their various joys/
murmurs/giggles/guffaws/
amens/ain’t it so/bless me/
 
trombone’s creamy slide.
 
Taunja Thomson

Taunja Thomson is co-author of Frame & Mount the Sky (2017), a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, as well the author as Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019).  She is a lover of animals, art, trees, surrealism, black and white movies, walking in autumn rains, feeding wild birds in winter, playing in spring mud, & bat-watching in summer.  Her first full-length collection of poems, Plunge, was published by Uncollected Press in 2023.

​Kalighat
 
We are all spinning skeletons.  
When we are not dizzy, we die.
 
We inherit the bloodshed 
of ancestors, whether we want to
or not.
 
We have all killed—the insect
on our windshield, under our tires,
the patch of land that supported deer
& raccoons & monarchs & coneflowers
now paved over & over.
 
Only when we are over do we cease killing,
only when we end are we innocent
like soil without footprints.
 
We blame the cat for pouncing 
on the sparrow & devouring it,
but there is no karma
for anyone.
 
There is only spinning, quick glances
at our surroundings, ground 
coming at us fast.
 
So caress the cat, feed him blood 
from the wounds under your nipples, 
devour sky, lick ocean’s brine, let wind’s
roar fill your ears, rub spring on your soles,
love your own blue skin.
  
Taunja Thomson
 
Taunja Thomson is co-author of Frame & Mount the Sky (2017), a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, as well the author as Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019).  She is a lover of animals, art, trees, surrealism, black and white movies, walking in autumn rains, feeding wild birds in winter, playing in spring mud, & bat-watching in summer.  Her first full-length collection of poems, Plunge, was published by Uncollected Press in 2023.
 

On Viewing Whistler’s  Nocturne in Blue and Silver

​for John
 
The New York Times “challenge” was to look at a painting for ten minutes, not the three hours that a Harvard art professor expects of her students. I try it.
 
The paintings rotate but today is Nocturne in Blue and Silver by Whistler. Within the first minute, I feel oppressed by the mist that blankets the harbor. Then I am back at the harbor on Gabriola Island with my friend, John. He helps steady me on the slippery granite rocks. The ochre sea stars, in different hues of purple, seem iridescent and fill every crevice between the rocks. We end our day with a `dive into the cool Pacific waters.
 
That's what I want to do now—escape the fog and plunge under the water as the blast of the harbor master’s foghorn pierces the air. 
 
It was on that same camping trip, with John, that I brought Pascal's Pensées with me.
​
A friend, aware of my flagging belief in God, recommended the mathematician-philosopher’s attempt to prove that a God exists.  
 
While John and I walked through a wide-open field, I explained to my atheistic-mathematician friend, about Pascal's thoughts. John was not impressed. “Find me a four-leaf clover,” he said. I reached down without thinking and immediately pulled one from the ground. I held it up, stunned. We looked for other four-leaf clovers but there were none to be found. He interpreted the event as a coincidence. I saw mystery. 
 
A different kind of mystery surrounds the Whistler painting—some critics speculate that Whistler may have painted an original under this newer version, one that mirrored the structures on the shore. It may be that, over the decades, the buildings began to reappear and mimic reflections in the water.  It’s called pentimento. "A change to a piece of art that emerges slowly over time."
 
John's changes have not been slow. In a matter of months, he loses the ability to analyze, to remember the past, to talk easily. Underneath the loss, he is still the same gentle John.  With the same contagious laughter. 
 
I am in Gabriola to see him and I bring my laptop because art has been one of John’s loves. I pull up the paintings from the NYTimes website. I begin with Whistler’s Nocturne. I can see John’s pleasure, as his eyes roam the painting. “Have I ever been there?” he asks. “I’m not sure,” I say, “does it look familiar?” He smiles and nods yes, pointing to the water dappled with streaks of soft pink and yellow. 
 
John moves his hands slowly over the water, and I notice how thin and graceful they have become. Then, it’s as if  he is filling his palms with the mist-filled  air, and turning, offers his open palms to me.
 
Maureen Sauvain O’Connor
 
Maureen Sauvain O’Connor is a poet, flash fiction writer and psychotherapist. Her clients have brought meaning and depth to her life and the work has helped to create a space for her own  self-exploration and writing. She is grateful, too, for the inspiration provided by the magical gardens, outside her writing window, tended by her husband and daughter.

​In the Loge

At the opera, it’s intermission,
and my husband’s gone to stretch his legs.
We both know he has gone to smoke.

He thinks I won’t notice
when he returns with the odor
on his clothing, and his breath.
It hurts me that he lies about
such obvious things.

Meanwhile, I use my opera glasses
to watch the crowd. It’s more amusing
than sitting through the opera.
For a moment, I think I recognize
someone I’ve worked very hard
to forget.

Edward was always trouble.
I smile as I recall his problems with
his family, how his father always had
to clean up the messes. Apologies,
bribes, payment of outstanding
balances, facing down angry husbands.

I look closely. My hands are
trembling. Unreasonable anxiety
surges through me as I continue
to watch.

I’m mistaken.

I haven’t seen Edward in nearly
twenty years. In the opera stand,
it’s a stranger with a similar stature.

They are sounding the bell to summon
the audience to return. My cigar-coated
husband is threading his way back.
When I look again, the man has
disappeared.

Lynne Kemen

Lynne Kemen’s full-length book of poetry, Shoes for Lucy, was published by SCE Press in 2023. Woodland Arts Editions published her chapbook, More Than a Handful  in 2020. Her work is anthologized in The Memory Palace: an ekphrastic anthology (Ekphrastic Editions, 2024), Seeing Things and Seeing Things 2 (Woodland Arts, 2020 and 2024). Lynne is President of the Board of Bright Hill Press and has served on many other not-for-profit boards. She is an editor and interviewer for Blue Mountain Review. She is a nominee for a Pushcart Prize (2024).