Following the Guide
Between the shaded brook and you, outside the frame, longing for everlasting sleep, he waits, holding his oars brightened by death’s supernal gold above the kaleidoscopic forest mirrored in tiny rings spreading on the current that trickles with a softened hum and lures your soul closer toward him, away from a disease that spares no pain, knows no limits of malice. Across his flannel shirt his suspenders’ dark belts dissolve into an enduring brilliance. He turns his bearded face under the broad-brimmed hat and beckons you to follow him. “Why pause?” The prow of his canoe points toward merciful rest, where the river bends into darkness, eternal. Intense, yet tranquilly, he beckons and fixes his eyes on yours while he glides past lilies swaying in the soft breeze that channels your world and his, and that will serve you now your last breath. One step inside the frame -- it’s all you had to take. Once there, the sweep of the current holds you, numbs you with its cold grace while the swirling brown leaves falling from Adirondack trees softens the bank by the bare oak fallen into the stream. Bodiless and pain-free you drift, reach branches outstretched like helping hands, grasp them, and pull yourself with mercy through a dying breath, dreamless. Gregory Lucas Gregory Lucas (Hilton Head Island, South Carolina) writes fiction and poetry. His short stories and poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in many magazines such as The Lyric, Scarlet Leaf, Neologism, Bewildering Stories, The Horror Zine, and Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine.
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Woman Writing a Letter, With Her Maid. Johannes Vermeer. The light from the window shines richly on the contrasting, chequered floor and on two different women. One bends from the light. The other turns to it. In the foreground, with brooch and pearls, head bent to her letter, face partially obscured, the privileged one sits, writes to her lover, face strangely impassive, a blankness beyond the moment. Behind her, unadorned, standing, dressed in plain grey, arms folded in practised resignation, her servant girl stares out of the window into the middle distance, mouth open in a secret smile, lips parted, lost in a private moment of recollected delight. Neil Creighton Neil Creighton is an Australian poet with a passion for social justice and a love of the natural world. Recent publications include "Poetry Quarterly", "Silver Birch Press", "Praxis Online", "South Florida Poetry Journal" and "Verse-Virtual", where he is a contributing editor. His poetry blog iswindofflowers.blogspot.com.au Have you ever wanted
to rise up on the balls of your feet lengthen your arms and dive through silken air backward in time curling at the last minute to land feet first? toes then arches then ankles would sink through sunbaked sand to tickle at the timeless cool lying just below the surface your scratch on the time-space continuum an unimportant glitch in the geologic span of beach sands there you might find your mother barefoot on the beach posing for a picture her face alight hands curled coquettishly at her chin her waist cinched in an emphatic silver buckle you might put your arm around her shoulders and laugh and soak in the sameness of your bodily frames your interchangeable parts you might drink in the scent of her skin salty sandy in the mexican sun you might ask to meet her friend you might laugh some more giddy and weep and wonder at how you can be so close in and so far away and know her so little and so much Elizabeth Burnside Elizabeth Burnside lives in Georgia and works in higher education. Her recent poems have been published in the I-70 Review and Fourth River. She finds herself returning to themes of memory and landscape in her writing. Gas
At the wood’s dark edge, this remote gas station’s heavy with time, like its elderly attendant. He brushes dust from the pumps with the cuff of his overalls, contemplates the empty road. Trade is seldom brisk, but he hasn't seen a car today, let alone customer. When did the world end? Without radio or telephone he wouldn't know. Attuned to the rumour of machinery, he’s alert to every imminent arrival, but nothing’s in the air, save a sense that something’s wrong. He feels loneliness growing from his gut, like a hollowing. All he can do is dust his pumps again, and hope. Paul McDonald Paul McDonald runs the creative writing programme at the University of Wolverhampton, England. He is the author of fifteen books, which cover fiction, poetry, and scholarship. His work has won a number of prizes including the Ottakars/Faber and Faber Poetry Competition, The John Clare Poetry Prize, and the Sentinel Poetry Prize. His academic work includes books on Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, narratology, and the philosophy of humour. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paul-McDonald/e/B001JS7654/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1505512989&sr=8-1 Antoine Vollon's Mound of Butter, 1895
huge mound of finch yellow butter stabbed by a brown spatula wrapped in white cheesecloth two eggs Amy Phimister After a long corporate career, Amy Phimister has returned to writing full time. She graduated from St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, IN with a B.A. in Creative Writing. She also has an MBA and an MA in Education. A member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, she is currently working on a chapbook of her poems. Seeing is an Art
Seeing is an art when you’ve got new bifocals. Position them correctly and see a Cezanne apple on the table, looking tastier than ever before. A block of sidewalk becomes a cube, a neighbourhood a Picasso. The ophthalmologist has given me new glasses, said they’d work just fine but I’m balancing on their dividing line as if I’m trying to climb over a mountain in a Cezanne painting of only lines suggesting a mountain to the imagination. Recently my four eyes saw sunflowers as big and bright as those painted by Van Gogh. My eyes dance from thing to thing and place to place as if they are abstract ballerinas by Dali in dance moves by Degas. Yvonne Vinstra Maria Blanchard's Two Sisters I have a portrait like it, a photo of myself in profile, left arm slung over my little sister’s shoulder. We are ages two and four, and I’m half naked in the summer grass, she wears a sweet dress. In Blanchard’s painting, the sisters are grown, wearing long-sleeved floor-length gowns, one red, one green, both women have the long braids my sister and I were known for in school. She held onto her hair longer than I, and I still have the braid she saved before chemo. “Magnificent in size and colour,” clearly cubistic in the underlying shapes of arms and background, but moving beyond Gris’s cubism to her more human faces, especially the visage of the embraced sister, who looks at us as the other looks down, this painting holds a story at the left on the table with its ball of yarn, crossed through with a needle, and a jar of flowers. Years later, deepest in the penury she knew all her life in Paris, Blanchard scraped up the money to buy it back, because, she said, the purchaser, though a sensitive woman, did not see the sad story that Maria saw “on this table that I love.” A perfect example of what her grandniece means when she says in an interview, “Maria had no business sense whatsoever.” Diane Kendig Diane Kendig’s four poetry chapbooks include Prison Terms (forthcoming), while her editing includes the recent anthology In the Company of Russell Atkins. A recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry and a Fulbright translation award, she has published poetry and prose in journals such as J Journal and Ekphrasis, and she blogs at “Home Again” (http://dianekendig.blogspot.com/). Reason I am content. I raise my foot in jubilation that I am here before you in my contentment. Your arm is not raised in contentment. With my foot raised high I say to you your black sword will not bring you contentment. You hold your treasure in one hand and try to make your treasure part of you and raise the black sword in the other. You linger over your treasure you want your treasure to replace me but it cannot. You blow into your treasure in hope you will make new music that will forbid me from rejoining you. I hope you will have new music and music will encircle you and will not allow me to rejoin you. But you will make no music. You are not inside me and I am not inside you and we are not one and nothing can restore you without me. Without restoration no music will come. You foolishly raise the black sword. Your black sword will never separate us. If your sword comes down on your own throat it will not separate us. You are helpless in your not music and you are helpless in your violence. I who step higher will make you rejoin me. I who am making music as I speak will make you rejoin me. Your black sword will never divide us. I cannot die without your death. You cannot live with my death. You cannot see without my eye. You cannot raise your foot without my foot showing the way. You with the black sword, you the fool with your treasure, you the fool with no music, cannot kill me. Cannot keep us two. Duty We who live must. We must wake and we must eat and we must go into the world. In the world is suffering. The world is suffering. We who were first know that all life is suffering. We must. That is all the answer we can send you. We must wake and walk and stand over the ill and touch them with our wands and hope. Hope is all we can pass through our wands. When I am ill and see death’s allure beyond the wall of the room my must will be clear. When see into the cave I will rest in forever I must die. I must fail the next man who is trying to keep death away. I must fail him and die. Then I no longer must. Fear The ships are approaching and our warriors dance. Our warriors dance by the forest from which they emerged. Our warriors dance by the forest a non-warrior must enter alone with nothing. The forest makes the non-warrior a warrior. If the warrior flees the forest before the forest has made him a warrior the warriors return him who will never be a warrior to the forest and the never-warrior never returns. We have no ships. The new warrior returns to our village built between the forest and the sea and from that time forever he speaks only to warriors. We who are not warriors can offer a warrior food and we can offer a warrior drink but warriors never speak to we who are not warriors and we cannot speak to the warriors. We who are not warriors knew some day ships would come. Our warriors become warriors in the forest. When our warriors return from the forest they scorn the sea. Our warriors laugh at the waves that fall onto the shore and plead for our warriors' attention. The forest is the world to our warriors and the world is all our warriors can see. We who are not warriors saw the ships at dawn. Our warriors do not look at the sea. Our warriors scorn the sea. We who are not warriors have gathered on the shore to watch the ships approach. Behind us at the edge of the forest our warriors are dancing. The ships draw near and we who are not warriors can see the carved heads of the beasts that guide the ships. Our warriors dance on the edge of the forest that made them warriors. The ships are full of warriors born from the sea. Our warriors are dancing beside the forest. The ships are near and behind us our warriors dance. Denial I am awake and you must raise your flag of surrender. Go now and hold your council but your council will be futile. When you return I will speak with one tongue but my words will not be understood for I speak out of my denial and you cannot know my denial. You cannot understand when I speak with one tongue for it is the tongue of denial. I deny myself as I grow. I deny my head. I deny my feet, my hands. I deny my back. My tail is denied. My feet are denied. I exist because I am denial. I grow stronger because I am denial. That you can see me is proof of my denial. My denial is my existence. Without my denial I do not exist. You cannot see my denial and you foolishly think that I am what you see. You foolishly think that I am captive in this too small space. I am bigger than my space. Hold high your flag of surrender when you return. Do not concern yourselves with survival. I grow larger every minute and soon this space will cease to exist. This space will disappear into the new space. You who will no longer exist in the new space. The new space will be the space of denial. You and the space you have sanctified will be consumed. The new space will care nothing for your sanctity. Your sanctity will not be denied because your sanctity cannot exist without denial. You are too wise for denial and the new sanctity will be the sanctity of denial. If you were denial your space would vanish as my space will vanish and your sanctity would be restored and you could strike me dead. You cannot know that only the space of we who are of denial will cease to exist. You know only wisdom and wisdom is merely the light in your futile space. Wisdom is understanding and understanding rejects denial. Hold aloft your flag of surrender. Your wisdom will not bring you surrender. Your surrender will be lost in the new space and you will cease to exist for there is only existence in denial and denial is me. Jubilation
wake up now the stars have broken through. the stars have broken through and you shall wake now. we have come with the two stars and we are entire as two. you who have been made three were once one but the stars have broken through and cleaved the hand that held you as one. you are free now in your three. you are entire in your three. the village awaits you and the village is now covered with the blood fallen from the heavens for the stars have broken through and from the breaking through comes colour. only destruction can bring colour. strength will not bring colour. strength brings strength that brings no blood and only blood is colour. colour is complete and complete colour seizes what it sees and feeds it to its blood. blood is colour. blood is colour. rise now from your whiteness. shun your whiteness. rejoice in the colour. we are not one but two and you are not three but one. i speak with my head lowered for i am the servant of blood and i am the servant of colour. he who does not speak is proud of his silence and he who is wise is wiser in his silence. we who are messengers are not wise. we do not see what others do not see. we see only what the stars have broken open for us to see. you who are now three are not a messenger so rise now and go into the colour. the stars have shattered the white and you are free. the village awaits and will anoint you with the colour and the villagers will gather and you shall then know that you are the reason for the colour. it is your blessing and gift to the village for you are not the messenger. we are here to usher you who are now three into the village where you will be welcomed with the colour and you will be welcomed with the blood and you will be the message the stars have promised. John Riley John Riley lives in North Carolina, where he works in educational publishing. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several print and electronic journals, including SmokeLong Quarterly, Connotation Press, Willows Wept Review, Loch Raven Review, Dead Mule, and Blue Five Notebook. He can be reached at riley27406@gmail.com. I See a Darkness I want you to go down deep into darkness for this writing challenge. Trigger warning: these are not easy works to examine. There's an old cliche that art should comfort the disturb and disturb the comfortable. I do believe we should "keep our minds on the things above." I also believe we must sometimes examine the deep waters that surround us. Grief, pain, and fear make us fully human, and understanding darkness and confronting pain and evil are essential aspects of life, important to our creativity and spirituality. Halloween Poetry Challenge "Rules" 1. There are no "rules." Do as much or as little as you can. Try for more, but accept what is. The goal is to write a poem or prose about each artwork, even if the words are discarded. Then, send your best works in for possible publication. 2. We suggest, but not demand, that you attempt to write about all the prompts, even when words are discarded. That gives you the full experience curated for you, and a deeper voyage to the heart of art and poetry. Because we are inundated, we ask that you only send your best! We can only publish a fraction of the good works that come from this ekphrastic writing experience. Of course it is wonderful to publish and see your name and share your work, but the experience is also about digging deeper, seeing, thinking, examining, feeling, reflecting. 3. You may use the painting as a launching pad that inspires a poem (or prose!), or you may research the piece and delve more deeply into the intentions or life of the artist, as you are inspired. DEADLINE: October 31, 2017 Please send them early if you are finished something great! Please note: Deadlines are suggested, not etched in stone. If you find this post after the fact, or are inspired at a later date, We write, read, and consider poems on all themes and all artworks anytime, including challenge works. submit: theekphrasticreview@gmail.com Editor's note: Some of you wrote asking about the title of this post- it's from this recording, I See a Darkness, by Johnny Cash. |
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