Roman Mosaic Birds Though the mosaic-makers lost exactness of species-- the colours of stone or glass and the colour of birds rarely meeting—they found the essential posture, the attention of each bird in its singing or feeding or flight; their sight residing in the crazed energy of these fragments despite mineral stillness —let me, in midlife, take their art for an emblem of how I see, beneath antiquity’s familiar pallor, brilliant feathers. Nan Cohen Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poems, Rope Bridge (2005) and Unfinished City (2017), and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words, forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Recent work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Cortland Review, The Inflectionist Review, ROOM: A Journal of Analytic Action, The Los Angeles Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, and is forthcoming in DMQ Review, Ruminate, and The Commuter. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship for poetry, and is currently the poetry program director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, a summer writers’ conference in northern California. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Saad Ali
Click here to read an interview with Saad Ali about his book, Owl of Pines. Click here to hear the ekphrastic podcast with Brian A. Salmons, featuring Saad Ali. Saad Ali (b. 1980 C.E. in Okara, Pakistan) has been brought up in the UK and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and an MSc in Management from the University of Leicester, UK. He is an (existential) philosopher, poet, and translator. Ali has authored five collections of poetry. His new collection of poems is titled Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021). He is a regular contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. By profession, he is a Lecturer, Management Consultant, and Trainer/Mentor. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Ovid, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, and Tagore. He is fond of the Persian, Chinese, and Greek cuisines. He likes learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities on foot. To learn more about his work, please visit www.saadalipoetry.com, or his Facebook Author Page at www.facebook.com/owlofpines. German: Sankt Sebastian Wie ein Liegender so steht er; ganz hingehalten von dem großen Willen. Weitentrückt wie Mütter, wenn sie stillen, und in sich gebunden wie ein Kranz. Und die Pfeile kommen: jetzt und jetzt und als sprängen sie aus seinen Lenden, eisern bebend mit den freien Enden. Doch er lächelt dunkel, unverletzt. Einmal nur wird seine Trauer groß, und die Augen liegen schmerzlich bloß, bis sie etwas leugnen, wie Geringes, und als ließen sie verächtlich los die Vernichter eines schönen Dinges. English: Saint Sebastian Though seeming to lie down, yet shall he stand supported by a strength of will to stay. Like mothers giving breast, he’s far away and wrapped up in himself, like wreathed garland. The thwack of arrows, as each finds its mark, sound now, and now, as if sprung from his flesh from steel hard tips to every quivering fletch. Yet still, as though unhurt, his smile is dark. At one instant, a sorrow slowly grows and wells, a grief his pain-filled eyes expose till it’s renounced, as though a trivial thing, as if such lapse, contemptuously, they chose for what, on beauty, would destruction bring. Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Nigel Stuart Nigel Stuart is a retired professor of 20th century history and a translator of epic poetry, with a secondary professional interest in renaissance Europe, in artistic practice and in film; who also writes poetry in English and in Scots. Entries deadline is coming up on October 10, 2021!
Don't forget to send your poetry and flash fiction. If this is news to you, details are here. Het heksenuur, mijn zusters/The Witching Hour, My Sisters, by Kate Copeland (Dutch, English)10/4/2021 Editor's note: This poem was written, in Dutch and then English, to the work Yanjirlpirri or Napaljarri - Warnu Jukurrpa (Star or Seven Sisters Dreaming), by Alma Nungarrayi Granites (Australia) 2012. Please click here to view it, and to learn more about the mythology behind it. The image above is a placeholder as we did not have the rights to publish the painting. ** Het heksenuur, mijn zusters Ze wandelt wat rond, hoofd laag, ogen straf op 't stof. Het zand is rood rondom. Ze is gewoonlijk zo, zo is ze, zelfs eerder - in straten, strand, hemel, haven. Noem haar verlegen, hoog hartig, een regen-heid die ze niet wenst te plaatsen zelf, niet ontkomen kan. Kan ze wel? Noem haar ontdekker, half-waar maar als haar hart, dan zij, regelrecht rond de woestijn, nagels vol aard. Ze wandelt waar glimmers en glimt, straalt, ziet het vuur in sterren spektakelen, ziet een expo van natuur de nacht wegblazen, vandaag, gedurende het heksenuur. Ogen strak op de kluis, haar zusters om veilig te zijn. Zo is ze wel, gewoonlijk. ** The Witching Hour, My Sisters She walks a-round, head down, eyes set to dust. Sand is red around. She is her usual she, she is her, even before - on streets, beach, heaven, haven. Call her timid, call her haughty, a rain-ness she will not place herself, cannot haste from. Can she? Call her explorer, call her half-true, but when her heart, so she, right down the desert, dirt under nails. She walks where the glimmers and gleams, beams, sees the blaze in stellar spectacles, sees nature's expo airing the night away, today, in the witching hour. Eyes set on the vault, her sisters to feel safe. She is her, usually. Kate Copeland Kate Copeland started absorbing stories ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching and translating some sweet languages, her love for art, lyrics and water led her to poetry ...with some publications sealed already! She was born in Rotterdam some 51 ages ago and adores housesitting in the UK, America and Spain. Madonna and Child with Saint John But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. Luke 2:19 Not everything the angel spoke in the narrow dark of Nazareth, nor every word the seraphs sang above that rough stable with its pall of dung and afterbirth was glory. Before her Fiat came the spectre of all that was to come: bitter burst of locust on her nephew’s tongue, grit of sand against his teeth, a searing ache like Eden’s flaming sword sunk deep into her breast as she beheld his head upon a salver. And, yes, the seawater would rise like cobblestone beneath the soles of her son’s calloused feet, but, so too, his naked flesh would be furrowed by whips, his wrists pinned to wood hoisted on a godforsaken hill. No wonder then, the succor she takes in the boys’ fleshly delight, too young for lust, still tender as two ripened dates, mouth to mouth, heads inclined to form a heart above her heart which understands it will be shattered for a god’s unbearable design. How deftly the artist fixed to canvas the sum of brute history—that women pay the awful toll for glories claimed by deities and men. Behold, the storm whose fury gathers in her sable chasuble, the sanguine flood that streams beneath. Frank Paino Frank Paino’s poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including: Crab Orchard Review, Catamaran, North American Review, World Literature Today, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Briar Cliff Review, Lake Effect and a number of anthologies. Frank’s third book, Obscura, was published by Orison Books in 2020. His first two volumes of poetry, The Rapture of Matter and Out of Eden were published by Cleveland State University Press. Frank has received a Pushcart Prize, The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His website is: https://www.frankpaino.net Click here or on the image above to listen to the latest episode of TERcets, our ekphrastic podcast with Brian A. Salmons!
Don't miss readings by Lisa Molina, Meg Pokrass, and Melinda Thomsen!!!! Thank you to Brian for this incredible series. Please help us spread the word and get this podcast out there! We want our writers to be heard everywhere. We are most grateful if you can share this podcast on social media! Put your Trash into Orbit The futuristic orbs beside the TransCanada were called Orbits—she knew that much, but no one would tell her how they worked. Were they direct portals or did the garbage fall down a shaft to Cape Canaveral first? She pressed her nose to the window as another orb flashed by: the opening on the side was wide enough. How many raccoons and stray cats were now unwitting residents of the exosphere? NASA engineers were smarter than her: they would have thought of that. Other kids were lucky. Her dad insisted on saving their trash until the next gas station, so she’d never examined one up close, but she could picture it: when the trash grew heavy enough, it would press on the mylar across portal/tunnel entrance at the bottom and the spacesuit would seal around the trash as it fell through. Such beautiful technology wasted on banana peels and tissue! Up or down, she was fine either way. She looked over at her baby brother. This kind of an adventure was not something to embark on before the age of reason. She tucked her Wrinkle in Time between the receiving blanket and his flannel belly. She watched the signs along the shoulder count down the seconds to the next Orbit…10…9…8...and started gagging. Mom’s head swung around, hands groping the seat under her for anything that could serve as a carsick bag, but they’d tossed out all their burger wrappers and soda cups at Esso. She pressed her nose into her brother’s diaper and coughed harder. As soon as the gravel crackled under the tires, her door flew open, her arms already extended for the forward dive. She was out of here. Angeline Schellenberg Angeline Schellenberg is the author of the triple Manitoba Book Award-winning series of linked poems about autism Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016) and the elegy collection Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). Her fiction has appeared recently in Fewer Than 500, Six Sentences, and The Drabble. Angeline hosts the Speaking Crow reading series in Winnipeg, Canada. The new prompt is up! Click here or on image above for details.
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