Thank you all dear readers for keeping the home fires burning at The Ekphrastic Review. I am near the end of my two week hiatus, having an exhibition in Mexico. If you haven't heard from me about your Halloween writing submissions or if postings are slow, please be patient and know I'll catch up soon. It's been a terrific opportunity and learning experience to show my work here in Mexico and I'm so blessed.

​-Lorette

Mimicry
 
“More like the sitter than the sitter herself,”
Raphael declared of a Lippi Madonna.
The living may seek their own perfection
but never find, the painter implied,
the way a mother cannot hold a child 
close enough to keep it from all harm
though that be a woman’s deepest desire.
The sun would never glare in her child’s eye,
for she? She would never turn away.
 
But Maria, Madonna’s model, is hungry
and imagining pears, with none like
herself seeing herself in any way
than what she is, at least in her own eyes.  
Where else would art find its light
to launch itself above our shade
than in a beauty bound to be nevermore,
with nothing else like it when it lived?
 
Lines etch themselves beneath our eyes.
Art though in lines finds no such doom
once freed from the tomb of the artist’s hands.
It photoshops a shadow in the blank march
of days that flicker by us on our way,
a flock of birds frozen in the sky, 
a sun blinding us by other means.
 
Sometimes we see the fatty hand of art
loom over the hand, or a portrait   
not with the gait of any man that lived, 
a limp counterfeit of humanity,
as Hamlet says. Sometimes we awake
to find we’ve been actors in our own skin.
That’s when death or love throws out art,
 
and we find ourselves sitting in a park
on a cold slab crying hot tears,
a sad clown, our mascara dripping,
or frozen like a stone, freed by death
from having to act another’s part.
Will we care then if nobody comes by
to offer a word, remark on how we look,
place a flower just so turned to the light?
It could be a common one, not even bought,
a violet plucked from a garden where a crow
seemed to mock our hand for its secret theft.

Anthony DiMatteo

This poem previously published by Levure Littéraire.

Anthony DiMatteo's recent poems and reviews have sprouted in the Cortland Review, Hunger Mountain, Los Angeles Review, Verse Daily, and Waccamaw. His current book of poems In Defense of Puppets has been hailed as, "a rare collection, establishing a stunningly new poetic and challenging the traditions that DiMatteo (as Renaissance scholar) claims give the poet 'the last word."(Cider Press Review).

Egon Schiele, Seated Male Nude
 
In the studio, shadows stretch
and sprawl
across the easels;
a pale array of colours
mottles the torn and hanging
canvases. The air eats
the morsels of food
that remain, while coffee
colors the palette itself.
And after darkness engulfs the room,
light bulbs bulge into
brightness, and the shadows
cleave to their corresponding
objects, caressing the extensions
of themselves. Hands
and feet, once numb, dull
into nubs at his concentration,
vermilion, over the days, spiders
the whites of his eyes. He draws quick,
ascetic breaths, not drawing—but flaying
the paper, carving figures into
existence. He climbs from his seat,
palming his protrusions. I am
fierce and angular.

Andrew Hanson

Andrew Hanson is an English Literature student at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.  His work has appeared three times in his college literary magazine. He was born and raised in Miami, Florida and grew up careening around the Caribbean—catching fish and spearfishing. As of late, he has turned his attention to Medieval Literature and Philosophy, studying as a visiting student at Oxford University. 

Procession in Fog

Squeezed out by the heavy feet
of mourners, an unearthly fog
rises from hell.  Day after day, the dead
pass my door, followed like a shadow
by those who can still pray or dig.

I think I see Mother,
and she’s been gone ten years.

Death, like a new pastor, busily
makes the rounds to every household
before winter.

I have nothing more to say to God
for myself, but ask mercy for parents
who plead, Please, Lord, please.
Take me instead.

Alarie Tennille
​
This poem was written for the surprise Halloween ekphrastic challenge.

Alarie’s latest poetry book, Waking on the Moon, contains many poems first published by The Ekphrastic Review. Please visit her at alariepoet.com.

Student of Philosophy 1926

Once you are known as
the kind of man who asks
questions and who expresses his
opinions freely, you are the kind
of man who is followed wherever
he goes.

There are no definitive answers
to the problems a perpetual student
poses. In a world where everything
is brown or yellow, this is a dangerous
path to follow.

When they shoot him, they will
do it twice to make sure he is dead.

Alan Catlin

​Alan Catlin has been publishing for five decades in all kinds of styles, voices and subjects. He has published several collections of ekphrastic poems including Effects of Sunlight on the Fog from Bright Hill Press and American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.  Future Cycle Press will publish his book, Wild Beauty.

Alfred Schnittke, Symphony no.5, Concerto Grosso no.4, 1988

                      We have a different sense of time ... as a “simultaneous chord.” 
                                                                                                       – Alfred Schnittke

Spectres of Mahler 
and no doubt Marx
are stalking the corridors
of a grand hotel in disrepair
round which Alfred is pedalling
never at rest 
never at home.

Mahler’s murmuring to himself 
a ghostly piano quartet 
he forgot to complete
(his memory’s not what it was).

Marx props up the bar toasting his failures 
or beckons seductively from the bath 
his beard spread out
like a net. 

Both Ms are decomposing.

Sometimes Alfred turns a corner
to be confronted by the pair
their voices a sudden shining:

Come and play with us, Alfred.
Come and play with us
forever and ever and ever and ever.


Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, critic and lecturer. His books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His poetry collection is Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in the UK. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.

Anonymous

I am the stout tree's
branch, the one holding the weight
of three-too-many
blue-winged birds.  Perched, preening,
bee balm & forget-me-nots.

Kersten Christianson

Kersten Christianson is a raven-watching, moon-gazing, Alaskan. When not exploring the summer lands and dark winter of the Yukon, she lives in Sitka, Alaska. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (University of Alaska Anchorage) and recently published her first collection of poetry Something Yet to Be Named (Aldrich Press, 2017).  Her blog: www.kerstenchristianson.com
​

​Crooked shack on a snowy plain near mountains
 
More of the same fields rise
when driving past. I skim
the ancient junk piles,
measures of time and waste from
the rural professor,
the ubiquitous poverty
of ideas about how to clean this
abandonment and romance.
Romance is not actually
here or anywhere.
A repose inside the lack of touch,
the lack of poet body
like a house slowly eroding into the ground,
presently unknowable.
Put two hands on the steering wheel
at whatever time seems to offer
the most control. Get to work
on time.

Anne Garwig

Anne Garwig’s poetry has appeared in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Broad!, and the Jenny, among other journals and anthologies. Anne completed the 2017 Poetry Foundation Summer Poetry Teachers Institute in Chicago and teaches in the English department at Kent State University in Salem, Ohio. She lives in Youngstown, Ohio.