​Tree of Life
 
I’m done with my sunset watercolour and the class is loud. I almost get hit with a wet paintbrush, so I ask to go to the book corner. I see one with a guy in glasses and a hoodie on the cover. He’s standing in front of his painting with the vibrating babies with no eyes. He looks friendly and kind. I read how Keith Haring was gay and died of AIDS and made a lot of cool stuff, starting in the New York subways as a graffiti artist. 

The teacher has soft music on, and she puts the lights down to get the class quiet. I almost fall asleep on the bean bag in the book corner where no one will see me.

The bell rings and wakes me up and on my lap is the Keith Haring book opened to a big picture of one of his paintings called Tree of Life.

It’s funny, because the church I go to since I moved in with my aunt is also called Tree of Life. There’s loud singing and clapping, and people are “slain in the Spirit.” They pass out and the elders go over and fan them. This happens every Sunday. When I lived with my mom, we never went to church. When I said certain things, she said I should not say them in church, but I always wondered if we’d go and what it would really be like. Then my mom had to go to rehab, and I moved in with my aunt, who’s nice and makes delicious banana bread. Soon, my mom will finish treatment, then we’ll live together again, so I look forward to that a lot. The Keith Haring painting is also better than the church. I like that Tree of Life.

The next class Ms. Wilson assigns us a biography project, so I choose Keith Haring and check out three books on him and take them home. My aunt asks if I need help. All I want is big white paper and paints to make an example of Keith Haring’s work. The rest will be a report I’m typing on my aunt’s computer. It’s easy to find information about Keith Haring’s childhood and time learning about art in college and how he got the idea to start his own style by filling in the black empty subway ad posters. My aunt hugs me like she’s so happy I’m okay considering my mom isn’t around to see things like this. “You’ll have to read this to her next time she calls,” she says.

I get so many hugs from her. They’re not like my mom’s hugs. My aunt’s hugs have love in them, and she’s soft and smells like almonds, but when she hugs me, I remember my mom’s not there and inside it feels like a black subway ad all blank, waiting for some kind of art or life to be born there, like a tree could sprout or wants to, but it can’t.

I decide I should paint my own Tree of Life, but I don’t know what should go on it.

The next day I show Ms. Wilson the report I wrote already, and she says, “This is gorgeous. Don’t forget the visual!” I tell her I’m waiting to get the materials. She says that’s fine. It’s good because I don’t know yet what my own Tree of Life is. I worry that I’ll have to turn in the project before I find out.

When I get home from school that day, my aunt is on the couch. In front of her on the glass coffee table surface is an acrylic paint set and brushes still in the package and not just one big white paper page but five. I can’t believe it. My mom never had the money for things like this and when I got home from school, if she was there, she was in her room with the lights out and curtains drawn, and she was missing work from the drugs making her sick. 

The art supplies are amazing, but my aunt looks worried. She’s reading one of my Keith Haring books. I sit down next to her. She’s frowning at a picture he painted of a smiley face on a big penis. “This is shameful,” she says. “Sorry. You need to do your project on someone else.”

“Alright,” I say. My ears and face are hot, like I’ve done something terrible. 

“I’ll take these books back and talk to the librarian. They don’t need books like this for children.”

Later, alone in the room where my aunt has me staying, I’m on the floor with the paints and paper. I can remember Keith Haring’s painting, the green branches becoming people with hands waving. The tree connects them to each other and the ground—hands wave and their faces look like seeds. The people under it are yellow with x faces and tiny orange boxes sprinkled around, like they have disease invading and they’re reaching up to the tree for help, like anyone reaches up, like my mom is now. 

At school I tell Ms. Wilson my aunt won’t let me do Keith Haring. Her mouth goes straight. Then her head turns. “I forgot you’re with your aunt right now,” she says. “I can talk to her about it.” During lunch I see her pull the phone cord out into the hall. She comes out looking very serious and says, “There’s sad news about your mom.”

My mom, one of the pretty seeds on the tree waving its hands, getting sucked back into the earth. I reach toward my teacher, eyes in an X.

Joshua Wetjen

Joshua Wetjen is a  high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not grading or chasing my two children, he likes to noodle on his jazz guitar and try new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Newfound and Yalobusha Review among other publications.

Raven Maniac

The Raven Maniac can fly
upside down, low or high,
or somersault across the sky.

Another aeronautic trick
is dropping from aloft a stick,
then grabbing it in mid-air pick.

They’re known for raiding campers’ tents
and cabins. Cornered, in defense,
they turn to avian violence

and lunge at nose and eye and ear
till all who face them flee in fear.
Of such a bird, one might steer clear.

Barbara Lydecker Crane

Barbara Lydecker Crane was a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist in 2017 and  2019.  Her fourth collection, You Will Remember Me, sonnets in the imagined voices of artists through history, with many colour reproductions, will be published in October 2023 by Able Muse Press.​

Don't miss this wonderful introduction to prose poetry through Women on Writing! I can't wait to share my favourite poems with you, and I know you will write some amazing pieces during this program.

Click here or on image to find out more about this course, or to enrol today.

https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_ProsePoetry.html

The Actress Polina Strepetova
 
Twenty-three months ago, 
after being buried in black and white
on page 133 of an obscure book
of Russian paintings, you paused,
stage left, and began your wordless soliloquy --
unimpressed with your audience of one,
buried in olive-drab and khaki
in room 205 of a peeling-paint army barracks
amid the live colours of South Korea;
its cerulean and carmine,
golden yellow and chartreuse
unseen in the grey world your artist chose.
 
When you passed across the pressed-page theater,
your petite drooping shoulders betrayed you:
this portrait was no performance,
and I felt a foreigner.
I didn’t speak the language at the time:
I did not understand 
the tragic angle of your chin,
loose lay of your merging fingers, 
their rough, labored womb poured 
against your peasant dress 
like a January night sky in Rybinsk --
Even these were Russian.
 
When Nikolai Yaroshenko painted you
(with minor conceit a century ago)
did he foresee the glossy pages
that would bring you to my attention.
Could he have known that a war-monger GI,
bred on Budweiser and Playboy,
would spend five hundred American dollars
and two years learning Russian
just to pose these questions
to this shadow of your likeness --
which is as close as I will ever come
to Moscow.
 
Gary P English
 
Gary P English (they/them/their) lives in Baton Rouge, LA, where they and their partner share a home with a dachshund and two cats. Besides writing, they paint and play the guitar. Their poems have been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Home Planet News, and Stonecoast Review.

In this Poem, Writing About Cycladic Art Leads to the Election

These Cycladic figures are so unlike, admit it,
those grotesque Venuses, whose sculptors 

invoked a chthonic gravitas, bloated 
and erupted the stone, to make of it 

a baroque nakedness, turbulently noduled, 
thickly thighed, hot-water-bottle breasted, 

the whole of her furled inward, capped acorn,
locked inside a fisted inscrutable darkness. 

She’s bowed downward, as if fixed by her uterus, 
the body growing inside her belly. And that’s all, folks.

Back then, I’d be scared to be a woman. No wonder 
we were worshipped. But several thousand years 

later, what a difference! Of ever fresh white marble, 
these figures, angular, slim and sleek, except 

for noses sharply denotated, dashes for eyes 
and mouth, white silhouettes, look Deco-like, 

would-be flappers, their v’s lightly incised, bellies 
just slightly rising, nothing tumid, arms folded 

above the waist, perhaps protective of their bodies 
before they became properties, or just sporting,

stream-lining women, like summery linen, 
tennis whites, strong white teeth. Don’t get me 

wrong-- I’m not arguing boyish bodies for women, 
or almost childlessness. Found in cemeteries, 

no one knows their meaning: doll, idol, talisman, 
mascot, underworld docent? I don’t really care.

Because I like their wholesome, confident
mystery. Now they steady me in this vast museum, 

rooms populous with art works and too many spectators. 
Alone in this gallery, off the beaten path, before the display 

cases I can contemplate, rest my eyes, to gaze 
at them as if sipping from a straw my refreshment, 

a lemonade in the heat, the great elemental 
simplicity and serenity of one I could easily clutch 

or carry in my bag, hold as a hand weight, as we use 
in Pilates, a tiny barbell of antiquity, my ideal model 

to build an anonymous lovely body, not some contested, 
identified whomever. To suck on her timeless lozenge,

to soothe my throat sore with too confused, 
querulous growling voices, to use her as a baton 

to conduct the divisive orchestra, and to carve
with an obsidian chisel once more the age-old 

rock of us, the equivalent of an Oscar statuette, 
except female, the award going to a woman to lead our nation. 

Deborah Gorlin

Read Deborah's work after the fascinating Isabella Blow:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/poems-about-isabella-blow-by-deborah-gorlin

Read Deborah's poem after Raymond Isidore:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/cover-story-by-deborah-gorlin

​Deborah Gorlin is the author of two previous books of poems, Bodily Course, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997, and Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.  Her new book of poems, Open Fire, Bauhan, was published in Spring, 2023. Recent poems have been published in Plume; On the Seawall; the Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; Rumors, Secrets & Lies; Swwim; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades” was a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing.  Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. 
 
 

Dancer from the Court of King Jussuf 

We are searching 
for a heated wine
the colour of 
your imagination.
Nothing local of course 
comes close.
And Berlin 
or Vienna 
are not options 
for a thank-offering 
as we well know.
Such a dance 
requires a pyramid 
of kisses, 
and a wine 
coloured by gods, 
but flavoured 
with crystalline 
kisses.

​

​Times of Peace

Here there are dreams 
and low-lying fruit
in the golden dreams. 
We wait for you here.
We bleat happily 
to the grandmother sheep
who wish you well 
as do Mareia and I.
May these days of rest 
and peace
find you here with us. 
Berlin is a cold place
no matter what time of year. Come and gambol.
We await your warming 
presence. Leave now.
There is much 
to be harvested. 
And nothing to be gained 
from the cold hostel 
on Theresienstrasse.

​

Bluish Mythical Creature

My heart breaks 
the green 
wax seal. We wonder 
whether happiness 
can ever be your friend 
again? I know I presume. 
It is the silence 
that talks. The silence 
that demands an answer. 
I know you understand.
The red sun, 
the blue horse 
and crescent rainbow,
your favored stars 
and Sister Mareia 
need to hear 
your silver voice. 
Only your being here 
with us, will suffice.

​Richard Weaver

Author's Note: In the early part of the 2oth century Franz Marc and his wife, Maria, befriended a woman - Else Lasker-Schuler - who was a novelist, playwright, poet, dancer, and artist. She was also a Jew in WW 1 Germany. Marc liked to paint postcards which he sent to his friends. Lasker-Schuler received 28 such painted cards before Marc was killed in the war. I have taken the images and in some few cases portions of the handwritten text as vehicles for each poem. They form the centerpiece section - “The Tower of Blue Horses” for a larger manuscript about Marc- An Old Darkness Deepens.  I am indebted to Philip Wilson Publishers for Franz Marc: The Complete Works Volume 1-3. 
 
The author lives in Baltimore City where he volunteers at the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, the Baltimore Book Festival, and acts as the Archivist-at-large for a Jesuit College. He is the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press). Recent poems from the An Old Darkness Deepens manuscript have appeared in 2River View, Aberration Labyrinth, Clade Song, Conjunctions, Gingerbread House, Twisted Vine Leaves, Repurposed Magazine, Adelaide Magazine, and Underfoot.