​To Dissolve
 
I would sit at a blue bar in a blue century
an empty glass and a reflection
a tired tilt of the head - blue
for blue’s sake, I would sit there
in Spanish Celsius, stuck in a shadow
while the woman at my side lets the naked narrow of her back unfold mysteries
leans like an invertebrate into the blue, into this lonely, stoic blue we’d sink
until all we are is a goddamn hue from 1902, dissolved of the duties
of this grayscale reality

Tristan Franz

Tristan is a writer from Brooklyn, NY. His poetry is driven by the power of place and the human need to explore. He is also inspired by full moons, new languages, human kindness and tacos. You can find his work in a variety of online literary magazines. 

​
Slough  

a leg
though he called it a sun
<<sol>>
as though printed Henry Miller
and bathed (see) by Huxley’s title
but the leg splashes
skin off within this
to say what of [flaying]
you can call it a death
or melancholia
             ‘how can it be that I abhor her yet am her,’
             Julia, and is that your shadow,
                         not skin,
                         and it is true, then make me wrong
so the interpretation is consolidated?
             and we disagree, so how to explain
             the shadow as I am shallow
             with depth of the enthusiast 
      <<something about clouds and hands>>
                          tell me of the seeming smear
                          do the dots ray instead of
                          disrupt this water which is
                          sky? and then the question 
                          can’t matter since this answer
                          is different even as extension or
                          circumvention
                                      different from
                                      your answer
                                 and I hardly spoke of the yellow

Thom Young

Thom Young is an artist based in Asheville and Boone, North Carolina. Their work has appeared in a few journals, while their first collection, Bespoke, is forthcoming from Saint Andrews University Press in the Fall of 2019.

Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters: August
 
The eye must enter this blaze of grain
that comes forward out of the frame,
a blond forest of ripened light.
The fastened sheaves march motionless
on their legs of broken gold.
They are becoming the reason
for this day’s work,
its stack and haul,
in the ocher glaze 
of a centuries-old afternoon
the wind rises through
fresh each time we look.
 
In the distance hills slipcase into hazed air,
where always there will be an ocean waiting
at horizon’s edge
paced by tiny pale silhouettes of ships
that come and go in delicate silence.
 
A heedless sleeper with emphatic sprawl
makes himself the hub 
of this wheel of harvest and hungering,
the closed eye of this fecund calm.
His paused desires are the tight nutmeat
in the shell
of this moment,
secure in the clutch
of all that cannot resist
the spiral in 
to sleep.
 
Joseph Stanton

This poem was first published in Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, by Joseph Stanton, Time Being Books, 1999.

Read The Ekphrastic Review's interview with Joseph Stanton, here.

Joseph Stanton is Professor Emeritus of Art History and American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has published six books of poems: Moving Pictures, Things Seen, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban Oahu, Cardinal Points, and What the Kite Thinks: A Linked Poem (co-authored with Makoto Ooka, Wing Tek Lum, and Jean Toyama). Over 500 of his poems have appeared previously in The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, New Letters, Poetry East, Ekphrasis, Image, Antioch Review, Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, and many others. His awards include the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award, the Ekphrasis Prize, the James Vaughan Poetry Award, the Ka Palapala Pookela Award for Excellence in Literature, and the Cades Award for Literature. 

Banquet Forensics
  
This is not like any still life I’ve been shown before. No piles of fruit. No flowers. The beautiful dishes are there, but the food is gnawed, and crumbs, rinds, peels, shells, and crusts lie abandoned on the table. The room is dim. A shaft of light illuminates the wall and glints on the silver and swims in the greenish Roemer glass on the table. I expect to see the light quiver in the pale wine or beer the feaster left behind.

The table is the foundation. Upon it, a heavy, dark cloth with tasseled edges, skewed to reveal the bare wood. A shimmery white tablecloth, embroidered edge and creases apparent, would have made an elegant backdrop for a banquet, but instead of lying smooth over the surface, it’s crumpled and wadded in the middle of the rest of the chaotic refuse as if someone wiped their lips with edge and pushed it away.

A tumulus of oyster shells covers the half-bare, half-crowded table. The eye is drawn from item to item—each exquisite in isolation, in situ, they’re a Baroque trash heap. 

What happened here? Am I witness to the remains of a hedonistic feast, or is it something else? The eye wants to follow the painting, but my mind wants to reconstruct the scene. 
 
This table belongs to a wealthy Dutch merchant, but he’s away on business. This meal is for his wife. It’s a servant who sets the table. There is only one servant, for the lady of the house must keep up the appearance of piety and humility. The maid spreads a dark, heavy cloth over the wood to protect it from the abuse of heavy dishes. With the green runner in place, she reaches for another folded cloth. She pinches the embroidered corners of the linen satin tablecloth, then flings it into the air, guiding it through the beam of light from the window to land on the almost-black brocade. She bustles around the table, straightening the cloths and arranging them just so. She squints when the sunlight from the window gets in her eyes, but she completes the task by touch. The tasseled edging shows around the linen hem when she’s done smoothing the creases as best she can. 

From the sideboard, she retrieves the silver ewer, heavy and half full of water, and crowns the table with it. She uses a corner of her rough linen apron to wipe her handprint off its cold, silver belly. Next is the mustard pot and the salt cellar. She stirs the mustard with its long spoon, then settles the handle back into its slot in the lid. When she removes the cover for the pillar-like salt cellar, she sees that the salt has settled. She glances around to make sure she’s not being watched, then she pinches it into an attractive heap. Another glance and she licks a few clinging crystals from her fingertips. 
​
She sets the table with a polished pewter plate, then begins the task of arranging and filling cups and glasses. She selects a high flute glass for bubbling wine from Bordeaux, a green Roemer for pale gold wine—expensive, from Germany— a tankard for beer, and a squat beaker for blood-dark wine—cheap, from Italy. What a clutter of cups, but the maid knows that the lady of the house will require all of them, even if she doesn’t drink from all. The lady won’t want a fork—the new dining fads irritate her husband, so this household, despite adopting the use of white table linen, relies on tradition. Above the pewter plate, she places the lady’s favorite eating knife—the one with an ironwood handle hiding inside its black lacquer and filigree case, which the maid will use to cut her mistress’s meat and bread. As a companion to the knife, she chooses the Delftware finger bowl over the genuine china, because already, the Roemer has lost a mate and the high flute is the last one in the house. The lady is hard on dishes and a china finger bowl is more dear than an entire set of green glassware. The maid pours a little water from the ewer’s graceful spout and spills a drop on the cloth, turning it transparent and green like the dark brocade underneath. She moves the bowl to cover the spot, then polishes the ewer once more. Her tray on the sideboard is empty, so now she hurries to the kitchen to fetch the food.

When she comes back, laden with a heavy platter of oysters, a hock of cured ham, bread and sundries, the lady is already pacing and has already been drinking. The carefully-arranged cloths are crumpled, and the naked table is exposed. There’s no chair at this table—it stands like an island in the middle of the room, so the lady can pace. The simple place setting is already ruined and the maid freezes. She can’t reorganize the chaotic table unless she sets the trays and platters down, but the sideboard is too small for her load and if she sets everything down on the table, she can’t fix the tablecloth! Her muscles burn and she worries she’ll drop something if she has to hold the trays much longer. The lady makes the decision for her--Put it down and get out! The maid flinches and the oysters nearly tip to the floor, but she saves them with a rattle of tableware and rough half-shells. The master of the house has been gone a long time, so she forgives the lady for her tone and her impious drinking. The ugly feeling of the platter sliding on the wood makes her glad she always uses extra beeswax to polish and protect the table. Relieved of her burdens, her arms feel like jelly.
Where’s the pepper? And lemon—don’t tell me you forgot the lemon! 

She didn’t. She slips the spice out of her pocket, folded and twisted inside the pages of an old almanac, just as the lady’s husband had it delivered. The lady imagines that he measures it out himself, and she likes to unwrap the little cones when he’s gone for too long—the lady told her once when she was very drunk— so the maid never serves it out of silver or stoneware, but leaves it in the little twists of paper as she wouldn’t dare if the master of the house was present. The lemon follows the pepper, and the maid silently opens the knife’s polished case. Delicately and without separating a slice, the maid cuts the end of the lemon, then spirals the blade around the fruit and parts the peel from the flesh. The sharp scent of citrus fills the room and settles over the cold meal. Her hands will smell of citrus for the entire day if she doesn’t do any heavy work for the rest of the afternoon. She slices the ham and bread, laying neat fans of both on the plate for her mistress, but before she’s done, the lady dismisses her from the room. She’ll cut her own meat and tear her own bread if the three slices and the oysters aren’t enough.

The next time the maid sees the table, the slant of light has aged by an afternoon and slid up the wall. The table is a disaster. The ewer, its base surrounded by oyster shells, and thus clearly unmoved from where it was set at the beginning of the meal, stands open. The lady must have felt the need to peer inside, perhaps hoping to find something stronger than water. The mustard pot looks like a gaping frog, its hinged lid propped open by the carelessly-placed spoon. Vinegar and pepper rime the finger bowl, which stands at a jaunty angle atop oyster shells, empty platters, and the sheath of the eating knife. The cap of the knife case hangs by its cord. The curling spiral of lemon peel dangles off the table. The lady only used a single slice. The silver tankard lies on another empty pewter plate, collapsed like a drunk in a ditch. The glassware has survived. The maid sighs and flicks the mustard spoon back into its slot, causing the lid to clash shut.
 
Perhaps that isn’t what this painting is, but it could be.

Marie Skinner

Marie Skinner is a student of writing and Classics. She has been published in the 2019 writing contest issue of Sink Hollow, an undergraduate literary magazine at Utah State University. Art is her cipher for understanding herself and her life.

​Detta Maddalena
 
The breeze of Galilee
closed Mary's eyes,
her Lord's auburn tresses waved as the troubled sea,
cradling with her fingertips the air
in anticipation of His beard curls.
 
Bathing her lips with saliva that healed the blind,
a gospel whispered only to her
with pungent breath that made man;
psalmic pulsations wounding her flesh--
seven demons each possessed by seventy,
 
skin paving the road to Gehenna,
in which He was Satan--
when He burdened her with the knowledge
of redemptive poison He carried in His veins.
 
In all the power He possessed
and all the love she promised,
He couldn’t mute the voice of God
or His will to be spilled,
anointing the cross’s every grain and gnarl--
precious blood condemned before He floated
still in His mother’s womb--
to crucify her desires
for God to come into her.
 
The life that He saved with His words
and changed with His love,
God had tarnished with His quest
making her sacrifice His body
and forcing His disciple to live without a soul,
to love without a heart,
speak without words,
and lie by His side without a body:
like Him, to live to die to live reborn.
 
The Father was testing her too:
she didn’t want to learn about her soul,
but how to wrangle its desires
while He held her hand
and looked into her eyes,
heavy with the sins of the world.
 
They would nail her heart next to His
beating in His frigid cuddle--
between her empty breasts--
tears of wine after He'd resurrected,
ascended to be one flesh with eternity,
and saw as the world courted sin anew.
 
When the crown of thorns
hung over her bed
trickling red rain
for days and weeks after He was gone,
she’d wish to be born
 
in a world void of mercy
in which she didn’t love Him
or wanted all of the things
He couldn't give her:
not salvation,
desire;
not the Gospel of Truth,
the profane.
to die for His pain
and eat the sin hanging on His bones.
 
God chose Him,
but why did He choose her
if all He’d give her was sorrow;
if He knew that He would never be His own
or his mother’s, let alone hers?
If He was not willing to live for her,
then she didn’t want Him to die for her.
 
What good was His blood on dead wood
coated with the rotted flesh of other messiahs
if not to warm her hands in His
on a long night
after the fire died
by the shore of Magdala,
while the one burning in His heart dwindled
as He gazed toward Gethsemane?

Jose Oseguera

Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. Having grown up in a primarily immigrant, urban environment, Jose has always been interested in the people and places around him, and the stories that each of these has to share. His writing has been featured in The Esthetic Apostle, McNeese Review, and The Main Street Rag. His work has also been nominated for the Best of the Net award (2018 and 2019) and the Pushcart Prize. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Milk of Your Blood.