Conversation with an Eye Seen through the Keyhole
 
Rubber ducks bob in censoring suds.
Do you think I can fit inside the shower
caddy? All this ginger, citrus, & oatmeal
scrub tastes like soap. How does it smell
on your side of the door? burning leaves?
the body? You are alive, I agree, though
only after days inside the whale’s infected
belly button ring. I’ve pierced more holes than
 
the boy
                  I once was
                                     imagined
 
You should have seen my caterpillar,
my pupa, my fat, sad self, reflected
in a ponderous ravine. Black flies
on pads of butter. I pray my best
days are future. I know you don’t sleep,
but do you blink? Isn’t it a sad thing,
not knowing? No, I can’t fit my toes
in the faucet. Are there others
on your side of the door? If so, slip one under.
 
                   I’m lonely like a drain.

Jim Davis

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

JIM DAVIS is a student of Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University and has previously studied at Northwestern University and Knox College. He reads for TriQuarterly and his work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Harvard Crimson, Portland Review, Midwest Quarterly, and California Journal of Poetics, among others. In addition to writing and painting, Jim is an international semi-professional American football player. @JimDavisArt

You Gotta Have Heart
 
Tag words: advertising, bebop, bird, bottle, Charlie
Parker, Coca-Cola, Cole Porter, Dizzy Gillespie,
door, flag, heart, jazz, light bulb, Louis Armstrong,
Miles Davis, palette, Pepsi Cola, pluralism – found
object, retablo painting, sculpture
 
Arbitrary or subconscious, he picked six.
Man created on the sixth day from darkness;
we came into the light, of knowing, of naming.
Satan, sin all held within, black of skin Oh
Africa chopped up bleeding, a third world’s
doors, Saunder’s shows black, nailed shut.
 
With the skin of drums, the heel of hand, he
pounds the nails on the trail of the carpenter.
 
Kept in place, Lot’s of salt white line the globe.
White powder, white power, sugars the impalpable,
addicting first with coca leafs and caffeine, doping
the public poor for dimes. Reinforcing the lure
of the bottle; the cola bottle that fell unbroken
earth from the sky in The God’s Must Be Crazy,
 
some have always used their addictions to create
like a found object we too fall calling to Mother Mary.

Deborah Guzzi

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

Deborah Guzzi's poetry appears in Magazines: Existere - Journal of Arts and Literature in Canada, Tincture in Australia, Cha: Asian Literary Review, Hong Kong, China, Eunoia in Singapore, Latchkey Tales in New Zealand, Vine Leaves Literary Journal in Greece, mgv2>publishing in France, RedLeaf Poetry, India and Travel by the Book, Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, Sounding Review, Kyso Flash, The Aurorean, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Liquid Imagination, Poetry Quarterly, Page & Spine, Ekphrastic: Writing & Art on Writing and others in the USA. Her new book The Hurricane is available now through Prolific Press.

Morning on the Seine Near Giverny

Branches & white orchids bent…
Out of inequity, the faux congruous
& out of that, the sheen: layers shine
along the Seine, a scene impressed
upon a man who as a boy rode a pink
rocking horse through the west. Years pass.
She was interesting & tall, though not at all
interested in standing by the river with me.
This morning, her biscotti dipped briefly
in a mellow espresso, I expressed how
pretentious it all seemed. She scoffed
& bought a snow globe from the Met –
something wicked this way went. I pray
for reasons to believe the fallacy of colour.

Jim Davis

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

JIM DAVIS is a student of Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University and has previously studied at Northwestern University and Knox College. He reads for TriQuarterly and his work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Harvard Crimson, Portland Review, Midwest Quarterly, and California Journal of Poetics, among others. In addition to writing and painting, Jim is an international semi-professional American football player. @JimDavisArt

Readers and friends, one of our poets is looking for some assistance at book layout and design and turning it into an APP. If you can help her, please let her know.

Help! If you're a book designer or know a book designer who can help polish a collection of ekphrastic collaborations with contemporary artists, please contact me! I have such a collection, which is about 75 pages and has 35 or so color plates integrated into the text. Many of the poems were written in response to this artwork or were paired after the fact. In one case, the artworks were inspired by a poem. There is also traditional ekphrastic work about famous photographs, pieces of music/dance, and in one case, a poem inspired by another poem written by one of the artists.
I need to know how much it might cost to design this book and use a free app from the Apple store to turn it into an app. I think that to do this would not be difficult once it was turned into a PDF.
Contact me on Facebook or at [email protected].

These are links to two examples of the art and poetry.

http://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/october-13th-20151
http://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/evolving-sirenian-by-robbi-nester
Robbi Nester

Vincent's Ear

"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures." – Van Gogh
 
I found Vincent’s ear
lying quietly in Midday Rest,
Sunflowers guest,
listening,
silent to autumn’s sky.
Surrounded by Olive Trees
afternoon’s brush, mustard, melon, sienna and gold.
 
I bent to ask, did he desire,
needing return
away from this Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees,
smelling sweet and warm.
 
I strained to hear whispers
as dusk fell violet grapes
watching him listen
listening to the glorious music of Starry Night.

Heather Browne

This poem was previously published by the Poetry Quarterly


Heather M. Browne is a faith-based psychotherapist, recently nominated for the Pushcart Award, published in the Orange Room, Boston Literary Review, Page & Spine, Eunoia Review, Poetry Quarterly, Red Fez, Electric Windmill, Apeiron, The Lake, Knot, mad swirl.  Red Dashboard  released her first collection, Directions of Folding.

Follow her: www.thehealedheart.net

Deborah Répéter Depuis le Début
 
Perception fuses like melted rose quartz,
fuses puzzling Matisse’s blood gorged eyes
like the naiveté of childhood returned to age.
Melted images rose in two dimensions,
rose in repetition, mothering the pieces. 
Quartz, genteel rosé, shown in transcendence,
 
fuses puzzling Matisse’s blood gorged eyes.
Puzzling naysayers & followers alike,
Matisse’s left brain obliterated; right reinforced; the
blood, silent, returned to the madness of pattern,
gorged on stimulus, burns in golden sunlight
eyes dry as bone from sleepless nights sigh.
 
Like the naiveté of childhood returned to age,
the Madonna appears, or the muse Aphrodite reborn,
naiveté sexless tasted clean, pure, purged in white.
Of the patterns outside, he’d reproduce those within
childhood wide-eyed he approached & there he
returned again & again paying homage to the core,
to reiterate images in pieces of two dimensions
age left the left brain obliterated – reinforced the right.
 
Melted images rose in two dimensions.
Images, giving meaning to negative space,
rose ground beneath the pestle of repetition
in loops, sockets, knobs, holes, tabs, slots & keys
two halves male-female, left-right, up-down
dimensions all an idiocrasy depicted his fright,
 
rose in repetition, mothering the pieces,
in loops, sockets, knobs, holes, tabs, slots & keys
repetition reiterated, quartz ground beneath the pestle
mothering the pieces of two dimensions
the left brain obliterated – reinforced the right
pieces of puzzle, conjoining parts, triangularly staged.
 
Quartz, genteel rosé, shown in transcendence.
Genteel, childlike, Matisse adored illumination, art
rose with repetition, a mothering the of pieces,
shown in the dance, in stance, in transfigured delight,
in loops, sockets, knobs, holes, tabs, slots & keys,
transcendence an illusion, of optics, of light.

Deborah Guzzi

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

Deborah Guzzi's poetry appears in Magazines: Existere - Journal of Arts and Literature in Canada, Tincture in Australia, Cha: Asian Literary Review, Hong Kong, China, Eunoia in Singapore, Latchkey Tales in New Zealand, Vine Leaves Literary Journal in Greece, mgv2>publishing in France, RedLeaf Poetry, India and Travel by the Book, Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, Sounding Review, Kyso Flash, The Aurorean, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Liquid Imagination, Poetry Quarterly, Page & Spine, Ekphrastic: Writing & Art on Writing and others in the USA. Her new book The Hurricane is available now through Prolific Press.

A Note to Henri from His Wife
                                      “It’s me or her.”  Madame Matisse, 1930
 
Flatten the idiosyncrasy from days
until all that remains are flowery shades;
Filter out depth, tightly knotted grays --
nights when our torment ruled. Prettify  
the complex stage; iron-out dimension,
then divorce shadow.  Display your works
for scholarly fools; let estranged critics
engage in creased tête-à-têtes. Go on, Matisse,
level your latest pet, the ever-quaint Cerise,
lay that blushing cameo.  Droll paint will dry,
frame infamy and the lustiness of ego.

Cyndi MacMIllan

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

Cyndi MacMillan poetry has recently appeared in Grain Magazine and the Fieldstone Review.  Her verse, short fiction and novel-in-progress resentfully compete for her attention.  She lives in New Hamburg, Ontario, home to North America’s largest working water wheel. Coffee and family allow ideas to percolate.

Perfect Assertion

The long night of questions
also handed the morning
with a scatchcard of promise.

Colours did intrude though
in an otherwise open-ended
discourse that followed.

Scouring of solid pneumonics
of colours with linear algorithms
yielded a fair surprise

leaving the domain porous
for ingress of dimensions
in a dumb co-ordinate system

gifting counter-contours
of a sing-song progress
with a singular assertion.

S. Jagathsimhan Nair

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

S. Jagathsimhan Nair is the author of three poetry collections, and has also been published in various anthologies.

The Gift of Presence
   
To engage in the absurd is a privilege

of reason. I was born into a feudal world

is a universal claim. Jazz into birth, you:

Miles rides a train made of birds or

Dizzy named his sassy Ella “cat” since

there has to be machines to move machines.

The final fifty pages of a novel exceeding

800 pages make you consider your life

[        ]. It takes a crane to move a crane.

Men’s brains are semi-permeable. I’m not

ready: oar, knots in the rigging, hole

in the bottom of a boat not sinking:

two hollow suns walk into a bar, one says

Jim Davis


This was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

JIM DAVIS is a student of Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University and has previously studied at Northwestern University and Knox College. He reads for TriQuarterly and his work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Harvard Crimson, Portland Review, Midwest Quarterly, and California Journal of Poetics, among others. In addition to writing and painting, Jim is an international semi-professional American football player. @JimDavisArt

The Bourgeois Troubadour
 
The western sun lends what warmth is left
in the winter day to my parchments and plaster
walls. Layers upon layers of clothes garb me,
as does the snow outside the vaulted leaded
glass. All held in place by light and shadow.
 
ink splotches
coat my fingertips:
the painting’s eyes follow
 
The arch, the line, the staff, the cleft all
borrowed scrolled or hidden in the folds, my
consciousness rests. Restrained, retrained, prodded
on by familial needs, only the flight of music
bring me release.
 
beneath your
eye and hand, I sigh:
a thrush sings unseen

transcendence an illusion, of optics, of light.

Deborah Guzzi

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

Deborah Guzzi's poetry appears in Magazines: Existere - Journal of Arts and Literature in Canada, Tincture in Australia, Cha: Asian Literary Review, Hong Kong, China, Eunoia in Singapore, Latchkey Tales in New Zealand, Vine Leaves Literary Journal in Greece, mgv2>publishing in France, RedLeaf Poetry, India and Travel by the Book, Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, Sounding Review, Kyso Flash, The Aurorean, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Liquid Imagination, Poetry Quarterly, Page & Spine, Ekphrastic: Writing and Art on Art and Writing and others in the USA. Her new book The Hurricane is available now through Prolific Press.