To An Unknown Woman at the Opera I want to hold you with an open hand: a weightless body, like a moth alighting on my palm, then winging off again. I do not wish to speak to you, or close myself around you (though, I must confess, it would be nice to be the arm on which you lean, the ear in which you drop a whispered joke)-- what if you lisp, or smell of garlic, chatter only about shoes? But veiled in shadow, you are made perfect, a powdered pout, a cheekbone angled high, a riddle of a face. Remain that way, as I remain a puzzle to the man who watches me: a creature of the intermission, framed within a fickle lens for just a minute, undeciphered still, and unpossessed. Valerie Ang
Born and raised in Singapore, Valerie Ang is a student of LASALLE College of the Arts' MA in Creative Writing programme. She loves queer lit and mythology, and is the proud owner of a three-foot stuffed whale.
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A Late Elegy For Wang Hui-Ming “I don’t believe in culinary celibacy,” He was telling me, the oil heated to a sizzle In the wok, the shrimp already shelled. His second love, this serious kitchen. I’d watched him peeling broccoli stems With his small exacting knife, slicing them On the bias into a pile. He could have been Working on one of his woodcuts, fluting The radish of a flower out of the grain, Or on a page for one of his block books, Its crowded field of figures and calligraphy. He’d even carved a poem into the bark Of one of Robert Francis’s red maples Where the letters would fatten with time-- FOUR TAO PHILOSOPHERS AS CEDAR WAXWINGS-- The life of the poem the life of the tree. “Steam over rice,” he was saying with a nod, “An image of ch’i,” flattening the shrimp With a thump of the cleaver, tumbling The stems all at once into the oil. This was Amherst, winter, an early dark, His chiseled letters bezeled by the bark. Robert Gibb ROBERT GIBB’s books include After, which won the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and Among Ruins, which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017. Other awards include a National Poetry Series title (The Origins of Evening), two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry and a Pushcart Prize. Self-Portrait as a Young Tahitian
after Paul Gauguin [and Adult Children of Alcoholics] She cradles a bowl of flowers, her nipples the same deep rose as the blooms. Tahiti is hot-- we women may all wish to live this way—our breasts open to the flora, the fecundity they share. [“Take your shirt and sweater and off,” the man with the camera urged in an isolated October meadow. As a child you could not predict the outcome of any given behaviour, so you don’t know how to do it now.] Her gaze does not falter, but looks off to the right--she accepts that he posed her here, as if on her way to a pagan altar deep in the leaves by the thundering waterfall. [It was unnatural to me, a cold-climate girl just beginning to bud. The fact that they may treat you poorly does not matter.] Her friend clasps pink flowers to her chest: a posture of prayer. She leans into the other, profile tilted down, eyes cast to the left, away from the bowl. There is a gravity in her face—near mystical. We talk about an external and an internal focus of control. [Black and white blow-up, the printed image made me cringe: pudgy torso caught in awkward adolescence above jeans. Your judgement of others is not nearly as harsh as your judgement of yourself.] These girls may live in grace and naked ease, but it’s his abstract forms—this brilliant yellow between trees—that makes me ache to create . . . the situation is further complicated by a terrible sense of urgency. Virginia Barrett Virginia Barrett’s books of poetry include Between Looking, Finishing Line Press (forthcoming, 2019) Crossing Haight, and I Just Wear My Wings. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I'm delighted that Woven Tale Press Central has featured The Ekphrastic Review this month as a Literary Bookmark.
Each month, DeWitt Henry profiles a selection of literary bookmarks for the publication's audience interested in literary and art matters. "The quality of writing is uniformly high and includes poetry, memoir, and fiction inspired by or alluding to particular works of art, which are reproduced in color at the head of each entry." Kudos to our contributor Diana Leo whose essay on Chagall's Blue Violin is highlighted. Other writers and our challenges are also mentioned. You can read the blurb here. https://wtpcentral.thewoventalepress.net/2018/10/03/literary-bookmarks-oct-2018/ Bravo and thank you to all of you for reading and writing ekphrastic and making this journal so tremendous. Ekphrastic Writing Challenge
Thank you to everyone who participated in our Anne Ryan writing challenge, which ends today. The prompt this time is The Staircase, by Xavier Mellery. Deadline is October 19, 2018. Everyone can participate! Try something new if you've never written from visual art before and discover why there are so many of us devotees. Ekphrastic writing helps artists and lovers of art to look more carefully, from different angles or mindsets, at visual art. And it helps writers discover new ways of approaching their work, their experiences, and writing itself. The rules are simple. The Rules 1. Use this prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the painting or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. 3. Have fun. 4. Send only your best results to theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. 5. Include XAVIER MELLERY CHALLENGE in the subject line so that your submission doesn't get lost in the sea of emails. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. 7. Deadline is October 19, 2018. 8. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 9. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, following the deadline. 10. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! World Alive
they fly through quarter moons swim past kelp and sing sing the colours of earth and sea vibrate sun’s heat and rise like swifts into clouded trees blown red flowers to settle at midnight with folded wings and watch minutes fade into hills Joanna M. Weston Married; has one cat, multiple spiders, raccoons, a herd of deer, and two derelict hen-houses. Her middle-reader, Frame and The McGuire, published by Tradewind Books 2015; and poetry, A Bedroom of Searchlights, published by Inanna Publications, 2016. Other books listed at her blog: http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com/ http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com Forsaken
after Barnet Newman’s Stations of the Cross a pencil falling on a hospice floor [why have you forsaken me] glass exploding from a spinning car window [why have you forsaken me] fear on the faces of an addict’s companions [why have you forsaken me] shoes being tossed in a refugee camp [why have you forsaken me] a soldier remembers as his eyes are closed [why have you forsaken me] reef burned white in a warming sea [why have you forsaken me] gasoline spilling from a helicoptered yacht [why have you forsaken me] naked brown skin on a city street sleeping [why have you forsaken me] porpoise snagged in a fishing boat net [why have you forsaken me] choking on the dust of a coal miner’s lung [why have you forsaken me] toddler on the floor with an unlocked gun [why have you forsaken me] belt buckle father coming up the stairs [why have you forsaken me] Henry Crawford Henry Crawford is a poet whose work has appeared in several journals and online publications including Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Folio, Borderline Press and The Offbeat. He was a 2016 Pushcart nominee. His first collection of poetry, American Software, was published in 2017 by CW Books. His poem "Blackout" was just selected by the Southern Humanities Review as a finalist in the Jake Adam York Witness Poetry Contest. His website is HenryCrawfordPoetry.com Daedalus Arrives
On the day Daedalus left this world, he made his way to the outer bank of the River Styx, tipped the ferryman and made the crossing to the Land of the Dead. He stepped off the boat when it moored on the far bank and looked around him. He stood alone surrounded by a grey and uncertain mist. He looked for his son but instead found his mother, her arms open wide. She took his hands in hers and held them before his face. When she opened her hands, Daedalus began to draw figures in the mist. To his surprise, the figures he drew remained suspended before him. He drew a bird with a finely curved beak and delicate feathers. When he finished, the bird spread its wings, opened its beak as if to sing and flew away. Daedalus followed it for as long as he could see it. When he looked for his mother, he could not see her. The ferryman, his boat and the riverbank were gone. Daedalus set to work again, drawing lines in the mist that took the form of a boy. He drew each line as though his blood still ran, bringing back every detail of the boy who lived in his memory, even now. When he finished, he stood back and waited for the image of his son to become his son. Then the mist around him changed. The grey, uncertain fog was supplanted by soft mists of red and yellow and a sky as blue and bright as life filled the ether above him. Suspended below the sky was the immense and sunlit figure of his son, who had been where no man had ever been and seen what no man had ever seen, arrested in his fall and eternally in free flight. Daedalus searched the light for the image he had created, but it was lost in the presence of his son. He looked for his own hands, but he could not find them. He put his face where he thought his hands were and wept. Paul Holler Paul Holler's short stories, poems, articles and interviews with noted authors have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Eclectica, Greek Fire, Copperfield Review, Southern Cross Review, Bookslut, Critique Magazine, Conversations with Jay Parini and other journals and anthologies. Make-Believe
When I am 6, I lie on my back outside and look up at the sky. The whole world ahead of me is blue. My father stands on the deck he built with a Budweiser in his hand and asks me what I am doing. I tell him what I always tell him. Just pretending, I say. I imagine I can float all the way to China where I think the Buddha lives, rotund and jolly like my wooden figurine. My father says, I told you to stop pretending. It’ll get you nowhere in life. He crumples the aluminum can in his hand and tosses it aside before pulling another from the ice chest he keeps stocked. I believe the Buddha is a friendly fortune teller, that if I rub his belly hard enough he can change my future. At this age, the Buddha is the only man of whom I am not afraid. When I am 9, I am asked to represent our school in a contest by writing and illustrating a children’s book. I leave my classroom and spend the afternoons in a quiet corridor writing a story about a faraway land with acrobats and unicorns. They live on the other side of the big blue ocean and I believe everyone is safe there. My father takes a swig of beer before he leaves for his job site and says, stop wasting your time. When I am 17, I write terrible poems about unrequited love and suffering. My father falls from scaffolding and shatters the bones in his feet turning them a thousand shades of blue each deeper and more devastating than the one before. He stops drinking and starts dying. I am convinced that I am ok with this. He tries to tell me he’s sorry, but instead tells me to get my head out of the clouds and to get a business degree. When I am 19, I decide I need to see Graceland. I leave California and head East. Afterward, I visit the Art Institute of Chicago where I see you for the first time. And though I know it sacrilegious to do it, I reach my finger up and gently lay it upon the shallow indent of your knee and I believe that we are the same, which both comforts and saddens me. I leave before I am thrown out and later, my father dies. When I am 26, I move to New Orleans to write a novel. An editor reads the first chapter and asks me to send more, but I never do because I know I am not good enough. Instead, I take a job writing someone else’s story until he too dies. I have a medium to large scale mental breakdown and move in with my mother. I try to patch things up between us. I fail and move back to Portland where every morning I make believe I am a writer before waiting tables at night. From the deep, muted blues of my memories, I hear his whispers still. Softer and sadder than before. My father says, stop pretending. But that’s all I know how to do. Lee Ware Lee lives in Portland, OR and is working on a novel. In Love With Mona Lisa
Sssshhhh. Don’t speak. Don’t say a word. Words are not always best. They are suited for fools like me, but they are never true, never hit their mark. They are the things we hide behind, veils, shields, ramparts, envoys we send beyond the castle walls to negotiate terms, and so they are already a kind of surrender. But you must never surrender. Yours is the truth of silence. Your simple, ample presence like that of a cloudless sky. In it I see every love, everything I know is true, every assurance, every satisfaction. In the summer sun I am your shadow. When you drink, I am quenched. When you eat, I am nourished. And when you smile? When you smile I know I am alive. Greg Lobas Greg Lobas is a freelance writer/poet/retired firefighter-paramedic living in the foothills of western North Carolina. He has written for a variety of national outdoor magazines, His poetry has appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal, The Broad River Review, The Petigru Review. He has won the Marjorie E. Peale prize and the Pan Prize from the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and the Carrie McCray Award from the South Carolina Writer's Association. He performs his poetry on stage at the Tryon Fine Arts Center in North Carolina, and teaches a poetry class and workshop at Isothermal Community College. |
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