The Glow of Frida Kahlo
​
(Palais Galliera, 15 October 2022)

It now seems so obvious how you lived inside yourself
with your polio dipped in smoke, your fallible body,
its chronic pain calling you forth, sometimes sneaking rest
in a wheelchair in your studio full of azul self-portraits.

Firmly your hands were folded standing in front of The Two
Fridas (23 October 1939), identical cartridges in a tray,
with their two hearts—one torn open, the other newly beating,
both outside of your body where an un-stanched artery,
as alive as what was inside your darting mind, put crimson
drops on the lap of your dress. Mexico hurt you into art.

“Detroit is a dump.” It seems everything enters your brown eyes.
Flowers move suspiciously on your pleated hem. Alone
in pain. 

Such pained starings from a shaken world, the three Fridas.
A pistol. A flask. You hold hands with yourself in a room
of stormy clouds on a back wall. Someone else sprinkles
pre-Columbian dust in the entryway and puts votive colours
on the floor. You take a breath as you go out.

And suddenly the room is perfumed,  
apart. Your body makes you laugh.
And that will not last long, either.

William Dow

William Dow is Emeritus Professor of American Literature at the Université Paris-Est (UPEM) and Emeritus Professor of English at The American University of Paris. He has published poems in The Berkeley Poetry Review, Sans Issue, The Adirondack Review, and other literary journals. He lives in Brittany and Paris.

Unraveled
 
                                                                   I decided if I could paint that flower in 
                                                                   a huge scale, you could not ignore its 
                                                                   beauty.
                                                                                                Georgia O’Keeffe
 
Their shapes, inner folds
turned out in twists and turns,
all part of one smooth continuity.
 
Monumental flowers,
luminous bodies, delicate and vast,
panoramic, each petal
 
a harmony of line and curve,
color and shade, 
a sensuous connection radiating 
 
inside the spaciousness of a dream,
feminine, rapturous--
each flower 
 
a distilled essence.
Wordless, shaped by light and memory,
an undulating landscape
 
and luscious contour, cool design,
pure, silent.
Gigantic flowers with their open mouths 
 
and tongues, 
their presence magnified, 
right down to their very centre,
 
opened out to mystery--
their allure, like a fragrance that tells all 
remaining its own secret.
 
Flowers rising,
abstracted flames 
knowing neither time nor wither,
 
filled with 
the languid desire 
of hidden things--
 
clear and moving,
blooming with a river’s 
widening flow.

Brent Short
​
Brent Short lives in Tampa Bay, Florida. His poetry chapbook, The Properties of Light was published in 2015 by Green Rabbit Press. His poetry has appeared in Saint Katherine Review, Tar River Poetry, San Pedro River Review and The Thieving Magpie.

​
A Bowl of Red Fruit 
​ 
She wears a gold bell-shaped hat, a cloche. 
It partially covers her face, but not enough. 
Her right hand is bare, pauses midair, holding cup 
as if forgetting to drink. Her left hand gloved. 
It rests on a marble table top the color of a robin’s egg. 
Eggs. Her stomach grows queasy, only tolerates saltines.
Before her, the empty plate. What to do? What to do? 
Her shame hides under rouged cheeks. 
Beneath the table, her legs are crossed. Stilled. 
She hears her father’s voice: Must you 
practice dance steps beneath the dinner table?
En cloche is a ballet term. The dancer swings her leg
back and forth like the clapper of the bell. 
The dancer’s head and torso the bell’s handle. 
Tondu en cloche Jette en cloche she would swing her leg 
front to back, back to front, upper body perfectly still 
except for lifting food to mouth. A habit becoming a tic. 
Involuntary. Automatic. 
She is cold. Frozen. Will she ever thaw? 
Her table by a drafty door. The radiator useless. 
Once her family visited the Liberty Bell.
Returned home to find their radiator cracked.  
Water freezes, expands, her father explained. 
The same thing is happening inside her body now.
How long will her new coat fit? 
Your eyes are like emeralds, he said. She traced
the pattern onto the emerald velvet, cut the fabric, 
and stitched the pieces together on her mother’s 
treadle sewing machine. She attached the black fur 
collar and cuffs by hand.  When people said 
she looked like Clara Bow, she puffed with pride. 
A beautiful woman, he said, can have anything she desires.
What a lie! How giddy and naïve she was, imagining 
some sparkly future. Overhead, the gold lights 
cast shadows. Behind her, a bowl of red fruit 
resting on a counter below a large window overlooking 
the black void. Taste the forbidden, he whispered.

Robin Michel
​
Robin Michel is the author of the full-length poetry collection Beneath a Strawberry Night Sky (Raven & Wren Press 2023) and is the winner of the  Jessie Bryce Niles Poetry Chapbook Contest for Things Will be Better in Bountiful (Comstock Review 2024). Her poetry appears in many print and online journals, including Unbroken Journal, Gordon Square Review, and Passionfruit Poetry. Robin served as a fine arts program coordinator and / or docent in public schools for over fourteen years.

Flowers on a Train, by Laurel Benjamin
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025
https://sheilanagigblog.com/shop-sheila-na-gig-editions/laurel-benjamin/

ebook from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Flowers-Train-Laurel-Benjamin-ebook/dp/B0F96SS9DN

​The Ekphrastic Review: Tell us about Flowers on a Train. How did this collection come together? 

Laurel Benjamin: Most of the poems came together in the last five years. There is a biographical arc here, with pieces about family, memory, and identity, though the poems are not arranged chronologically. I could see a better path guided by theme, then moving a few pieces around so the sections didn't feel so neat. I couldn't have done this project without brilliant poet-friends like Sandra Fees and a critique from mentor Eileen Cleary, with whom I'd taken workshops. The author and artist Megan Merchant is a guide, as her revision workshop posited the idea of wisdom in the poem and how to connect figurative language. The work of readers and mentors not only made a difference within that set of poems and that manuscript, but also influenced craft going forward. 
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: Many of the poems in this collection are ekphrastic. Tell us something about your ekphrastic journey. Has art always been important to you? In what ways does art inspire you as a poet? 

Laurel Benjamin: My mother led me through San Francisco Bay Area museums and galleries. I grew up taking ballet, playing piano, then oboe, making art patterned or graphic, more than imagistic or landscaped, and considered art school. A relationship with the arts and conversations about the arts played a large role in my development as a person. Yet that relationship with art changed in 2021 when I took my first online workshop with Canadian artist and writer Lorette C. Luzajic, who runs The Ekphrastic Review. In these sessions, people wrote to classical, ancient, and modern art and shared their results. I decided to start an ekphrastic writers group that fall, dedicated to community as much as writing. That group has been going ever since, where I post prompts every week and writers respond then provide supportive suggestions. This is where I develop most of my writing these days. What ekphrastic writing offers is a chance to have an unexpected experience, find a setting or idea outside of one's self or to find a mirror the self, to find an escape into the art, or speak from the point of view of the art or something in the art. Ekphrastic prompts also offer the gift of imagery. Ekphrastic writing has become like food, necessary for survival. 
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: How has your relationship to visual art changed through ekphrasis?

Laurel Benjamin: I devour art now, and much of it not the kind my mother liked, or myself of past times, specifically abstract painting. Recently at the San Francisco MOMA I walked through the Joan Mitchell show, abstracts covering entire walls. I came away with a couple favourites. The through-line of the story here is the willingness to grapple with abstracts in my own way rather than feeling left out. In one of Lorette's workshops, where we studied a collage that had so much going on, she instructed us to just take a section of the painting and focus on that exclusively instead of being overwhelmed. That approach has released expectations provided a key into the secret garden of images. 
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: What is your ekphrastic process like? How do you choose artworks to write about, or do they choose you?

Laurel Benjamin: I go down rabbit holes searching online for art. I try to buck my personal taste to a certain extent, but listen to it at the same time. Sometimes an art exhibition will present something unexpected. For instance, Mary Cassatt at Work, shown at the San Francisco Legion of Honor in 2024, dedicated one room to her pastels. A different technique than oils, yet the resulting details felt similar. Other techniques of hers were groundbreaking. Then online, I look for upcoming artists with various backgrounds in a variety of countries, who are promoted not only in art magazines, but also on museum and exhibition sites. I find depth in a combination of painting, photography, sculpture, and installations. 
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: You have several poems after Leonora Carrington and also Johannes Vermeer in this book. What draws you to these artists? Are there other painters that you return to over and over?

Laurel Benjamin: Carrington and Vermeer are among the few I give credit to in the book, but most poems in the collection are ekphrastic. The aim is for the work to be stand-alone, meaning not reliant on the art. As for Carrington's surrealist paintings, my poem "The Bird Men," after The Bird Men of Burnley (1970), uses a magical realism response, where men in the painting threaten the birds and the speaker. They represent all the ills of society. Her images gift a kind of freedom in writing, and allow disparate images to arise; whether they coalesce in the poem is the challenge. 

Some works in the famous Vermeer exhibition (Rjiksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2023), had never been shown to the public, 28 of 37 total works. A film of the exhibition at my local theatre included an art expert's narration. Vermeer's piece, The Art of Painting (Allegorie op de Schilderkunst) (1666-68), is typical of the artist, depicting a woman inside a canal house, and in this case an artist's model. Yet we're not sure if she is a professional model, a worker, or his daughter. In my poem, "Lower Your Eyes," I bring in doubt, try to capture the time and place from the point of view of a young woman with few options. 

​The Ekphrastic Review: Not all of the poems in the collection are ekphrastic, although I would say they carry the spirit of art with them in the imagery and sensibility and references to other kinds of art such as music and literature. How do you decide which poems will be ekphrastic? Where else do you derive inspiration from?

Laurel Benjamin: Once an ekphrastic writer, always one. Poems that don't directly arise from images provide their own. Food, women's bodies, heritage, nature, music, are themes that dominate my work. Inspiration comes from a grocery store trip where bits of conversation are interspersed with the memory of my mother and I at Woolworth's eating liver and onions, or a tremor (I live in earthquake country, between two faults). A yearly trip to the Monterey Bay elicits a scene where along the shore a dead seal is having it's insides ripped out by the "knitting needle beaks of vultures." When my new neighbours cut down the two backyard trees at their move in party, I think of the Japanese who dominated this area, and who were rounded up and taken to internment camps. My morning walk presents a whole tree of bluebirds, where I "wait for the wavering kew in succession." Visiting cousins back east, in retrospect, I consider the bagel woman and everything she lost leaving the old country, where my Jewish family escaped. I started to think about the work of women, and the work I did when very young, like "shit jobs like ABC legal and the flower shop," taking an hour by streetcar to arrive at minimum wage A&W, as well as a law firm file room where "photos learned to drag themselves from their sleeves," showing horrific photos of women who'd sued for IUD malfunction. I attend classical music concerts regularly, and in one poem I complain directly to Beethoven. I'm also an early jazz fan, and in another poem I'm listening to Woody Allen at a New York jazz club, when my mind leaves the scene for 1920s Paris.
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: Was there a poem you found especially challenging to write? If so, why?

Laurel Benjamin: "Gingko" was a response to a Pep Ventosa piece (New York, Three, 2019.) He snaps hundreds of photos from different angles around a subject, merges them, capturing more than one moment in time. I wrote about a memory of high school chemistry, yet the poem ended up completely different. The subject was a specific tree on my neighbourhood walk, yet I didn't know why that "meeting" had such significance. Eileen Cleary asked "What's the poem about?" Spelling it out in plain language to her gave me a way in, desperation of having a mass removed from the abdomen. I threw out the first third of the poem. The leaves of the tree shimmer side by side, saying "You will heal." 
​
The Ekphrastic Review: What’s next for Laurel Benjamin? What are you working on right now? 

Laurel Benjamin: My next collection, Written Into the Curve of the Sea's Open Throat, will be published in 2026 by Shanti Arts. In Flowers on a Train, we journey to different places and times, while Curve stays with themes of women, Jewish women, Jewish heritage, reproductive issues. The concept of compromise connects up the themes. A different twist, yet ekphrastic images again propel much of the work. I am currently working on a third collection focused on California. I've lived here my whole life, recently started writing poems about the rugged coast, mountains, trails, along with the San Francisco Bay and life around it, the foghorns and trains. So it's very atmospheric. 
 
**

Read Laurel Benjamin in The Ekphrastic Review:

Watermelon of Forgiveness (nominated for the Pushcart Prize)
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/watermelon-of-forgiveness-by-laurel-benjamin

Missing Artist Found in the Railyard ​
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/missing-artist-found-in-the-railyard-by-laurel-benjamin

Kim's Vietnamese Cafe
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/kims-vietnamese-cafe-by-laurel-benjamin

My Mother Read Szymborska 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/my-mother-read-szymborska-by-laurel-benjamin

​Dutch Elm & Live Pine
 
Bicentennial Great Quilt Contest, State of Minnesota Winning Entry
 
The materials: denim, variegated green corduroy (olive, sage, celadon,
             viridian, moss), gray twill, cotton batting. The tools: Mémé’s converted 
 
treadle (black with Singer’s gold lettering), needles, thread, 
             straight pins, tape measure, scissors. The terms: selvage, grain,
 
betweens, block, mitering, staystitching, piecing, setting,
             sashing, binding, template. The subject: Boundary waters
 
coniferous forests once white pine white pine white pine white pine.
             The subject: Dutch Elms that lined Northfield streets
 
tree tunnels I walked under to my job at the college 
             where I kissed a man not my husband, all the while 
 
the trees diseased, dying. The appliqué: crude, unrefined, edges 
             barely caught. I know every stitch I took, every fraying edge 
 
I tried to hide. The patchwork: to set off each single tree, each row of trees.
             To keep each thought separate, isolated. The quilting: nights 
 
after I crossed the line, I could not sleep. This quilt too large, 
             too thick to fit a frame so I lap quilted. 
 
My stitches weren’t fine, not showy. Not a delicate story.
             They had to cut the elms out of the sky. Those trees 
 
the only thing to love about that town. We quit it then, 
             drove west and west. The finishing: I was unsure of myself 
 
when it came to mitering corners, I pulled the lining over the top, 
             blind stitched the edges. After forty years they’re worn down. 
 
I can see the batting where it has lain. What if anything of that time remains 
             except this quilt where the partial narrative of a life is stitched?

Regret
 
I wished to turn and look back... I did indeed have a sort of regret.
Grace Marks (Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood)
 
I should have bought that Crazy Quilt
from the gallery in Minneapolis
but that was decades ago now
 
and now I might not even love it
as I once loved Of Human Bondage
and reread thinking I should still love it
 
but I’m a stranger to that girl now
my heart evolved, hardened
as the hard-edged decades passed.
 
I still think of that quilt—ruby, sapphire,
emerald velvets, embroidered vines and
roses—I should have listened to my heart
 
my then heart my heart of then
and bought that quilt and carried
it with me through the decades.
 
That was before I took up the needle 
before I knew how to secret stitch.
I should have bought that Crazy Quilt
but that was decades ago now.
 

​American Love Story
 
When I made my first log cabin quilt 
I believed in this pattern’s origin story
 
as I believed in my first marriage--
brave pioneer families, log homes on the prairie, 
 
red center square for the hearth, log like strips 
torn by hand, light values for the sunny side
 
dark for the shady side. Years later, when I learned 
that mummified cats found in Egyptian sarcophaguses 
 
were this pattern’s likely origin I had to ask myself 
if two histories could be true. Each cat swathed 
 
in linen strips that made perfect log cabin patterns: 
Sunshine and Shadow, Courthouse Steps, Housetops. 
 
Paws wrapped so tight each cat resembled a cylinder 
not unlike the cylindrical pots my first husband 
 
created from clay—tall, nonfunctional, grooved lines 
where his middle knuckle formed the stoneware walls. 
 
It was 1975. We were going to start a pottery, live 
off the land. At least that was the story I told myself
 
but any story could be a fabrication. And yet how we love 
a love story. And yet how we fail to excavate for truth. 
 
At the World Museum you can still see cat mummies. 
Signs say thousands were exported to Britain to America 
 
and crushed for farm fertilizer. I keep one of the pots he made. 
When I look at it up on the mantel, I see a cat mummy not my past.
 

The Drunkard’s Path
 
After the newlyweds unwrapped my gift
the elders came over to examine, to praise my piecing, 
my hand quilting—ten stitches to the inch.
             Blue for water, white for purity—curved shapes
pieced to create the drunkard’s staggering path, perhaps
a woman’s vote for prohibition, perhaps another quilt myth.
             To break my curse, they chanted its other names:
Wonder of the World, Wanderer’s Path in the Wilderness, 
Double Wrench, Solomon’s Puzzle.

Lone Star
 
One central star 
six or eight points 
 
pieced from tiny fabric diamonds
star points working outward 
 
from the centre 
in colours selected and positioned
 
to create radiating rings. 
It takes great skill 
 
to piece this pattern 
named after a state 
 
that wants to build a wall, 
control bodies, rewrite history. 
 
All the diamonds must be cut
and stitched precisely, squares
 
and triangles framing the star
joined with Y seams.
 
If rushed, if shortcuts, 
the top will not lay flat
 
the centre will pucker
corners and borders
 
crooked, askew, 
an untenable state.

Cindy Veach
 
Cindy Veach is the author of three poetry collections: Monster Galaxy (MoonPath Press) a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award; Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal; and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book “Must Read.” Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI and Poet Lore among others.

​Oh Honey, You Came to the Right Place 

after Twentysix Gasoline Stations, by Ed Ruscha (USA) 1969

Don't think she caught my smile.
She, in her own soft world
of sprigged cotton and lace,
creamy, high-collared security. 

"Gas, ma'am?" I asked and 
her head dipped, not quite in time
with her wig, and the wide, gloved hands 
fluttered lavender thanks and clasped 
a worn purse to flat chest.

Brave to stop here, a wind-blown nowhere,
so I checked the oil, the plugs, the whole caboodle,
and her bony shoulders lowered,
knowing home would be reached safe
and she could remove her great feet
from those straining Mary Janes.

For a speck of a moment, she frowned
at my throat and then we looked 
straight at each other. 
She mouthed, "Good job,"
and her finger tips
brushed a benediction on my buzz cut
and off she drove
in a cloud of hope and Coty.

Marka Rifat 
​
Marka Rifat writes poems, stories, essays and reviews, as well as producing illustrations and photography. She has several awards and commendations including from Oxford Poetry Library, the international Saki short story Prize, and Federation of Writers (Scotland). Her written and visual work is in more than 60 anthologies. Marka was born in Scotland and via a few countries, now lives there. She has performed her work in a fish market and on a hill overlooking the North Sea.

The Runaway 
​
A tumbling hillside holds her hidden steps, 
which echo through uncertain drifting dawn,  
while shadowed streetlamps sleep with old regrets,  
wrapped in riled dreams of roaming honeyed fawns, 
who caught in backlit sudden spilling sun,  
with rounded eyes fall-down in fading noon,  
waking veiled midnight, then to come undone - 
moonbeams lying shattered in a gnarled rune. 
But tumbling hillsides hold forgotten paths,  
which hedged in quiet starlight mark a way, 
to lead her homeward through a looking glass, 
listening to her unnamed young soul say: 
I know with every burning breath I can, 
be more than what I am ~ walk on again.

​Donna Carnes

Donna Carnes is an imagist, en plein air poet. She writes in diverse poetic forms, including freestyle, villanelle, pantoum, sonnet, haiku and haibun. Her poetry is shaped by the geography and culture of her childhood and adult life. Carnes was born in Chicago, Ill., spent her toddler years in the Pacific Northwest, and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. She studied and worked in England for several years, and lived for decades in San Francisco, CA. She particularly enjoys plein air writing in winter light and during the end-of-day blue hour. Over the past 18 years, Carnes’ poems have been in numerous exhibits with artists, in articles, and in radio interviews and poetry readings. Her most recent book is All About the Light, Poems & Paintings (Donna Carnes poet and Jan Norsetter painter; Two Goddesses Press, November, 2024). 
 
​

Creativity is a powerful way to consider our experiences of the turmoil of the body, and manage our journey through illness in ourselves and those we love. Exploring visual art, music, and literature on these themes brings us into community with others and an understanding of their experiences, while liberating us to express our own experiences in writing. Illness impacts our family, work, friendship, sexuality, mental health, spirituality, and more. Writing about our own struggles can strengthen our craft, allow us honest communication about our experiences, connect us to others, and enrich and empower us to live a full life despite the limits of our physical selves.
Participants can write poetry, non-fiction, short fiction, or any form that works for them. There will be room in each class for discussion about our experiences and our work. Content warning: this class will involve writing, art, and frank discussion on illness, grief, and the body.

This workshop is with Lorette at Women on Writing. The class includes three zooms and feedback on your work. 

​This class starts on November 6.

Info and registration at Women on Writing:
https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_WritingThroughIllness.html