Friday Night at the Candlelight Lounge ​

She was better than I expected, hunched over the mic, arms and legs entwined with the silver stand like she was fucking it. My ex-lover, Pete said she sang jazz ballads mostly, throaty and low. Almost like Billie, he said, how she lagged behind the beat, her voice catching on the blue notes. Pete said I should catch her act, if I was in town. Look, it was June in L.A. — the gloom fogged my vision. Pete warned me. Careful! She’s bad news. Lonely. Clingy. But those days I was needy, too. I could care less that her nose was crooked, that her speaking voice was little more than a whisper. I overlooked her slouch and her wandering eye, and those clothes she wore, wrinkled Dockers and a food-stained shirt. After her set, she stood in the doorway. Her untamed black hair, a frizzy halo. Her hands were in her pockets. Her eyes were on me. She made my fingers ache. I got up from my ringside table, left my jacket on the chair. You want a drink? I asked her. When I returned from the bar with two tequila shooters, she was sitting in my chair. Wearing my jacket. A noticeable improvement to her outfit. We clinked glasses. Salud!  Pete said she was a cheap drunk. Two rounds after each set, he laughed, she turns into a slut on wheels. Already her head sagged against my shoulder. She had a tiny snore I found endearing.  Whatever you do, don’t take her home, Pete warned. Of course, he’d say that. He had what they call "graveyard love" that "I don’t want you anymore but I don’t want anyone else to have you" kind of love. The kind of love that makes me want to do the exact opposite of whatever he asks. So after the club closed, I took her home. Invited her into my bed. She was ravenous. It wasn’t just sex or tequila, she consumed my thoughts, my marijuana stash, my peace of mind. She raided my closet. Stole my favourite thigh-high boots. When she forged my name on cheques, I forgave her. When she rearranged my furniture, re-hung all the art, I looked the other way. And when Pete snuck into the bedroom one midnight, begged for forgiveness, wanted a threesome, I welcomed him. Look, I know it’s crazy, but none of this mattered. What mattered was how she sang love songs in the shower. What mattered was that first night, at the Candlelight Lounge, how she stood in the doorway after her set, backlit and dangerously beautiful. 
 
Alexis Rhone Fancher

This poem first appeared in Book of Matches.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, Slipstream, and elsewhere. Her eleven poetry collections include Erotic: New & Selected, and Brazen (NYQ Books); Duets (Small Harbor Press), an ekphrastic chapbook with Cynthia Atkins, and Triggered, a “pillow book” (MacQueen’s). Coming soon:  CockSure, a full-length erotic book, from Moon Tide Press, SinkHole, from MacQueen’s Press, and a book of portraits of over 100 Southern California Poets at Moon Tide Press A multiple Best of the Net and  Pushcart nominee, Alexis recently won BestMicroFiction 2025. Find her at www.alexisrhonefancher.com

My Atheist Weeps for Adam and Eve
​
(upon seeing Rodin’s The Hand of God at the Met)
 
Born full grown in the curve
of each other and the great hand
that shelters, thrusts them into life,
cradled mid earth and heaven
before the conjuring breath of God
quickens and the green world calls,
 
a sweep of innocence, 
a spark from the hand,
boy and girl, they are flung into life
pure and naked in the joy of Eden.
 
(Were these your thoughts, 
my atheist lover, as you stood and wept, 
stood in awe and firm in heresy,
mourning the lost catechism of youth? 
 
The artist fashions beauty as a way to God.
Did God, too, make us, to carve truth,
beauty, love? Is heaven merely
a simple place where one can see
the other—naked, undefended, true?
Is that god enough for you?)
 
In that first pulse of time,
out of the void, a single light exploded,
infusing sparks of dust with potency.
And all was good, as God breathed life
into the quivering clay that claws its way
from earth to heaven.
 
In Eden then, the two lived quite alone
to walk the blissful garden
delighting in their solitary curve of love;
unshod, unclothed, and unashamed, calling
to each other from the hushed gold shade.
 
And God thought,
“It is good that I have carved them
in the palm of my hand,
charging them to make a garden
down the long millennia, carving out
the mysteries of stars and atoms,
life’s core, until the end of time.
 
But cutting through the pure white days,
there came the fall from grace, not sin
but doubt, clothed in fear, like past lovers
cowering in their separateness.
“Who told you you were naked!” thundered
God. Before the fall they had been one,
their legacy to us a sense of loss unending.
 
And you, my tearful lover, whose face
I carry all the day behind my eyes;
in the curve of whose hands I am complete;
for whom beauty is the only god;
let us create an Eden of truth and trust.
Let us not be clothed in fear or doubt.
I hold you in the curve of my heart.
The future calls.

Suzanne Yuskiw
​
Suzanne Yuskiw has taught English and Creative Writing in Virginia and Maryland, and has dabbled in confessional poetry for decades. Her other passion is writing and producing short plays in her current location of Aiken, South Carolina. She is often impressed by the profound psychological relevance of ancient texts and archetypes, finding them worthy subjects for modern poetry. 

The Pushcart Prize is an annual anthology since 1976 honouring the best literary works of the small press.

Learn more about this honour here:
http://www.pushcartprize.com/index.html

Please join us in congratulating the following six writers nominated by The Ekphrastic Review for their amazing poems.

Moving Pictures, by Antonia Clark
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/moving-pictures-by-antonia-clark
 
(over) extended, by Janice Colman
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/over-extended-by-janice-colman
 
The Ruckus, by Brittany Deininger
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-ruckus-by-brittany-deininger
 
The Woman on the Island and the Woman at the Diner, by Jean L. Kreiling
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-woman-on-the-island-and-the-woman-at-the-diner-by-jean-l-kreiling
 
House by the Railroad, by Jackie Langetieg
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/three-after-edward-hopper-by-jackie-langetieg
 
sappho meets the beats at the beach, by Mike Sluchinski
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/miguel-carbonell-selva-ekphrastic-writing-responses
​

Join The Ekphrastic Review for a generative writing weekend, asynchronously online.


Halloween is traditionally a time to contemplate the shadows lurking in the human heart and the spiritual realm.


Art history repeatedly addresses disturbing and dark themes such as ghosts, witches, demons, monsters and murder. These can provide amazing fuel for dark stories and poems.


This workshop includes a live zoom where we will look at the history of horror in art. Trigger warning! The session will take an unflinching look at macabre paintings on a variety of subjects, and talk about ways we can use them to inspire our own horror poems and flash fiction. We will also look at some ideas on what it means to write horror.


Writers will receive the slides from the zoom along with a handout of horrifying art images to choose from, with questions to prompt their imagination. You will write three horror flashes or poems. You will receive feedback on one story or poem per day through Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Writers will work independently from wherever you are and connect and share their stories in a private Facebook group.

​

Pronkstilleven Harbinger 

A brooding peacock, God-like, austere, 
presides over a mutilated menagerie 
while a milieu of mutts prowl at the side 
and a mendicant monkey scratches the scraps, 
its awkward presence offset 
by an anachronistically plated lobster 
and a parrot’s living brightness, 
its judgemental beak 
beckons a verdict, 
but is it vengeance or revenge 
for the execution it perches above? 

A violent cornucopia 
of corpses piled high. 
Caracasses collapse into each other. 
seasons mingle in the autumnal, rooted up vegetables, 
voluptuous summer fruits 
lasciviously spilling from their gaudy bowls, 
cascading toward 
the boar’s severed, leaking head 
staining the deer’s rump, 
a tangle of birds in a hare’s hide, 
their feathers, flightless and down-soft, 
splay out – a plumage parade. 
​
And all the while these beings died for living 
while their living counterparts live for dying 
because the nude woman sulking in the background 
below the crumbling balustrade 
and the dreary drape are ghostly harbingers 
of who will return to retrieve the lute 
left behind in this catastrophic chaos, 
a calamitous celebration of human 
ostentatious waste and ruin.

Rachel Bates

​Rachel Bates is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Curry College. She resides in Boston, MA, but she considers herself an Appalachian first and foremost. Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Review, Broad River Review, and among other journals. 

The Marauders                                                           
  
One faces us, 
the front of his bee-mask flat
as a sawed-off stump.
And look at the way he slues his body 
when he turns, 
 
as if listening for footsteps, a guilty rustle 
in the leaves.
The middle one waits empty-handed,
a witness now. 
his arms slack against his sides,
 
while the one on our right tears off
the top of the skep,
its careful basketry thrust
against his groin.
This could almost be anywhere.
 
Any time, any round up, 
any rape or pillage.
Marauders always terror-masked
and well-suited
to enter an alien world.
 
Almost out of sight, 
the bird-nester wraps his legs 
around a limb 
to stop himself falling
from the private gravity of the tree.
 
Bruegel knows he’ll return safely 
to the comfort of his table, 
with its ale, 
its plate of birds’ eggs.
His honeyed bread still warm.

Jeanne Wagner

Jeanne is the author of four previous full-length collections, most recently, One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, Californian.

Putting on the Ritz
 
We are looking at a painting of Adam and Eve. She has an apple in her hand.
Holding it towards him, or taking it back? Can we tell?
Well, there are the tangled garlands they've strung
Around their loins, dark leaves the same as those
On the forbidden tree the artist has painted in
Just behind them and to their left.  They must be then
About to step out together, through days of sweat
And labor, into the long night of things that will, like stars, turn
And turn.  So she is offering the apple
For the second time at least.  And he is, once again, about to break its
Crisp skin, to taste again its sharp, sweet flesh.
They are lost now.  They have fallen, the man and the woman.
The garden’s indifferent bliss gone.  They will live now
Making promises to each other, and will keep some.
The voice in the sky will invent new rules.  They will die.
Meanwhile, every now and then, they dress for the evening
In green rags of paradise.

Blake Leland
​
Blake Leland is a teacher at Georgia Tech, a Pushcart nominee who has published in Epoch, The New Yorker, Poetry International online and a few more places. He thought once he might be a painter but now expresses that impulse in poems in which he tries to bring together vision, music, thought and feeling.