Field Work

In the winter of '89, Vincent paints 
         from black and white photos of Millet's series--
peasants farming. He writes brother Theo he is
         ...not so much copying as translating them. 
Finger working impasto like the yarns 
         he braids nights, twisting complimentary 
shades together for the effects. 
         Mornings he calls out like some exotic bird, 
“Blu! Orange!” while banging harmonies 
         on the pianola until his music teacher refuses
lessons to the man who hears colours.

Van Gogh keys Millet's sepias to bright hues. 
         Bends the woman in blue, her neck, breasts 
pointing toward earth as she gathers grain.
         When the pot-bellied stove goes cold,
he imagines himself warm in fields 
         with workers--the core of his art. 
Dabs the brim of a squash-coloured hat, 
         chambray shirt of the man who is both sower 
and reaper, digging for something in the sun.

At noon a cup of weak tea for the artist,
         and the couple rests gathered into another canvas.
Shadowed by the hayrick, their mounded bodies
         give off heat like cattle. His face eclipsed
by his hat, her kerchiefed head nested in her arms.
         They spoon into each other like the steel blades
of the sickles beside them. Man and woman
         saints like him, workers in the heartland.

Vincent surveys the canvases, knows 
         he will not marry. He thinks of Theo and 
his sister-in-law, of their baby due any day. 
         Thinks of his other brother, the first Vincent, 
who died a year to the day before his own birth.
         Their shared name carved into his boyhood
sharp as the reminder awaiting each time 
         he swung out the kitchen past the stone marker

of the first Vincent planted in the family plot. 
         He was a replacement child.
Day's last light and Vincent finishes the face
         of the woman with a pat of mauve while she 
steadies her toddler. He sets the man 
        on one knee to celebrate their child's first steps--
shovel dropped, arms flung wide in welcome.
         Tethered as gate to fence, beans to post,
dug in like his easel planted in the Provence soil,
          together they work the cabbages.

Rhett Watts
​
Rhett Watts was born in Beirut, Lebanon and has lived in New York, San Francisco, Connecticut and currently lives in Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, The Worcester Review, Connecticut River Review, Yankee Magazine, Ekphrasis, and other journals. Recent work is online in poetrymagazine.com and Sojourners Magazine. Her award winning chapbook is No Innocent Eye (Seven Kitchens Press) and her book of poems is Willing Suspension (Antrim House Books). One of her poems was included in book The Best Spiritual Writing 2000. Rhett currently facilitates writing workshops in CT and MA.

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Pieta of the Mayans

The solstice, as predicted: chill wind; bitter sun;
the temperature falling like a glove
belies all the talk of the world dying of the heat.
Most will make it to the far side of winter,
no matter what the Mayans might claim:
the world soon coming to an end.
Compared to their workaday miracles:
toileting my mother,  changing her, putting on lipstick,
it hardly matters the brutality that went on
atop Chichen Itza so long ago.
Joy to the World and all is forgiven,
we hear from the desperate, the sick-at-heart,
but what’s all such idle saying worth?
A song pitched too high, even for the cherubim?
A so-called virgin birth--the agony without
the earlier pleasure that might serve to redeem?
It’ll be cold enough in the grave with or without,
but how about we try a winter coat?
 
I know my mother is tired of all this incessant being.
When she taps her tongue to her palate just so,
gets the neurons to fire in proper sequence,
and those stubborn synapses to bridge,
she tells me, No good! No good!
Maybe the Mayans are keeping it
too hot in here, too much like the Yucatan:
I start to think a little cooling in the ground
could be just what the doctor ordered.
Es la vida, one of the señoras tells me
when I cry from this cold, cold thought I now regret thinking.
Que lastima, niño!--she pities me
my weakness, my child-like honesty,
but offers no substitute, no shoulder to cry upon,
no lap to cradle me my wounds.

Alan Walowitz

This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic Halloween challenge.
​
Alan Walowitz’s poems can be found on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College and St. John’s University.  His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing.  Go to alanwalowitz.com for more poems and more information.

White Doors
​
​no, no, this was around the time he'd told me that certain places disturbed him even if they weren't really haunted, and then launched into story where he was in a forest and it was the way the trees refused to move in the wind, the way the hill sloped downward as though it were trying to give him a nudge toward the way back where he came that had made him feel like there was a presence watching him, taking note of his movements...this all synced perfectly with the story i'd already shared with him, the one when i must've been like four because my parents were sleeping in the room next door when, on returning to bed after going to the bathroom, the window flew open on its own in the dead of night and the curtains, just like those trees, had refused to move...one or two people said it must've been the alley between the two houses that funneled the wind which opened my window, but then why did the curtains remain still?...the only answers are the ones that are rejected because they don't make sense, because it is popular to say in broad daylight that one has rubbed elbows with the supernatural, but just you wait for the sunset, then you'll see a different kind of logic, the logic of fear...and it won't be like him telling you his story and you saying "hmm..." to something so interesting, nor will it be like mine where physics and what is possible don't seem to mix very well...no, it will be more like you lying there waiting for a visit from some fiend who might be a creep from the apartment downstairs, a moaning of the wind against your house, the rattling of your mind going all the way back in time to show you that here, right here, is the reptilian brain, here is why you jump and shake and scream your little scream of death that is too confused with everything you let play in the soup of all you know and heard and cannot now un-hear and un-know in the small hours when you are the plaything...
​
Garth Ferrante

This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge.
​
Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity.  He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless.

On the Border
​
I stand astride the line between two worlds,
a bride in pink losing patience, my last
cigarette burning forgotten between the fingers
of my right hand. The sick sun, the sad moon, 
the pink lightning cast a feeble light over 
a Mexico turning gray, old temple
half gone and its stones gathered for 
an unknown future. Even death is dead,
while the god and goddess stand as I do, defiant,
alone, forgotten as the lush flowers with deep roots 
crowded into the corner. 

Estados Unidos, your skyscrapers are rising higher
than your flag.
Estados Unidos, the smoke from Ford’s factory is beginning
to obscure your flag.
Estados Unidos, your welded pipelines are marching
across the land like the undead.
Estados Unidos, your electronics are putting deep roots
into your soil and connecting to our flowers.
Estados Unidos, I am waiting. Underground
the secret marriage has begun.

Gregory Luce

Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications), and Tile (Finishing Line). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, and in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing), and Unrequited and Candlesticks and Daggers (ed. Kelly Ann Jacobson). In 2014 he was awarded the Larry Neal Award for adult poetry by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Retired from the National Geographic Society, he lives in Arlington, VA. and works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC. He blogs at https://dctexpoet.wordpress.com.

The Rain of Empty Choices

My once rosy pink flesh has been drained
of life. I am left with nothing but this pale
wrinkled whiteness, revolting as writhing

maggots. We are all awash in blinding white
that appears to us as an endless gray rain.
The voice of God washes over us.

Drowns us within our own irrelevance.
We have been left here to stare
into the open pit of empty choices

no rain could ever wash away.

Andrew Vinstra

This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic Halloween challenge.

Andrew Vinstra is a huge devotee and fan of 60's British invasion classic rock, 50's rockabilly, American blues and soul music and the classic standards of American popular music from the 30's, 40's and 50's as well as old country and jazz. Andrew also loves old classic Hollywood films, the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, the poetry of William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Pablo Neruda and the rantings of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. When not writing poetry or singing classic rock and Sinatra standards at karaoke bars Andrew wishes he had the guts to pursue becoming a stand up comic like his heroes Robin Williams and George Carlin or that greatest of American writers who was also perhaps the first great stand up comic, Mark Twain.

Values

I don't even have to be in the 
centre of the picture for anyone
recognize what I'm about
witness the power of my spare Zorn palette

cadmium red yellow ochre
titanium white and Payne's grey
bachelor buttons bleed into tulip
scapes with a dominant beckoning blade

a thin wash of wan atmosphere
steps away from my optically blended petals
my impasto stamen
elegant dishevelment

haphazard confidence
nothing else on the table matters
not even the table itself
only the brown shadow of an afterthought

Amy Baskin
​
Amy Baskin’s work is featured in What Rough Beast, Fire Poetry Journal, The Ghazal Page, Postcards, Poetry & Prose, Dirty Chai, Panoply, Riddled With Arrows, and more.  She is a 2016 Willamette Writers Kay Snow Poetry award recipient for her poem “About Face.”

Frida and Diego, 1931

she, looking like
a finely dressed
miniature
beside him or
he, a giant
above her
 
as though she
would fit
inside him
 
as though she
could
open the front
of his body
like a door
and step
inside

M.J. Arcangelini

M.J. Arcangelini was born 1952 in western Pennsylvania.  He has resided in northern California since 1979. He began writing poetry at age 11, stories in his teens and memoirs in his late 40′s. His work has been published in a lot of little magazines, small newspapers and 9 anthologies.  He is the author of two poetry collections: “With Fingers at the Tips of My Words” 2002 and “Room Enough” 2016. Arcangelini maintains an occasional blog of poetry and prose at https://joearky.wordpress.com/

The Healing

Dressed in pink and wheeled forth to the healing 
in a pillowed cart by her husband's hired man, 
this woman is not dead yet, but her sidelong glance
at the ground beside her, covered in figured cloth 
anchored in place with pots of flowers, tells us
her thoughts are earthward.  She will not be healed.

Her husband and daughter are there, the child wearing
a dress cut from the same pink bolt of cloth
and painted with the same pink brush, but ruddier,
for she is twelve or twenty years away
from love, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, death.
It is spring, everything is wet and ripe and fresh,

and from a rose on one of the potted plants
the dying woman sees an infant worm
hang by a gleaming thread, then drop suddenly, 
and she knows that when they lay her on the cloth
the pots will fail, the cloth give way, and she
will fall into the chute of endless night.

​Michele Stepto

This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic Halloween challenge.
​
Michele Stepto lives in Connecticut, where she has taught literature and writing at Yale University for many years.  In the summers, she teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.  Her work has appeared in One Sentence Poem,NatureWriting, Mirror Dance Fantasy, Lacuna Journal, and Italian Americana.  She is the translator, along with her son Gabriel, of Lieutenant Nun:  Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World.   ​