Virgin and Child on the Crescent Moon I too have wished to pluck the inverted pear, out from the pouch of my belly tuck away its trembling pips deal them into the slack of anonymous passing pockets with the guile of a thief the insouciant nope of your adolescent slouch Too late Already one course has bloomed from the other, husky and cross-eyed a boy baby confounded by the magic trick The miracle draws wonder from a million invisible hands still, dancing shoes toe our hems, begging to reel—back into the night the stars we smuggled in starched blue robes Kathryn Moll Kathryn Moll is an architect and California native. Her text-based drawings—collaborative works created under the name modem—have been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Cooper Union in New York City. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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The subject of collage is close to my heart, so I hope you will sign up for this workshop next Tuesday! We will look at a variety of collages from art history. We will also look at some of the ways we can use collage to inspire our poetry and stories, through a few creative writing exercises and ideas for finding inspiration in eclectic, surreal and non-narrative cut and paste artworks.
Our single session workshops are about connection, creativity, and conversation. We aim to foster discussion and generate writing sparks to move your ekphrastic practice forward. We strive to make our workshops personal and inclusive, as if we are gathered together talking and working in my living room. Join us! Click here to sign up today. Also ahead: Frida Kahlo wine and art write night, a discovery workshop on American surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, and holiday gift certificates to invite your loved ones to a workshop of their choice next year. Joining our workshops will jump start your creativity and intensify your passion for art and art history. It is also a tremendous support for the journal. Thank you! Lorette “These workshops, with inspiring art prompts and educational descriptions by the brilliant artist and writer Lorette C. Luzajic, can be used like a secret remedy for letting the creative genie out of her bottle.” Meg Pokrass The Topography of Hope Tresses fly in sharp salty wind Mary breathes in the vast ocean shimmer beneath remote regal Palos Verdes cliffs the low hoarse call of the pelican announces the artists’ arrival an easel standing at ready attention brushes, paints, tools of the trade and stars align from her canvas springs a moment in a brushstroke a day, a year an era an every-changing world captured the swaying ocean the eroding shores shifting, quaking yet an enduring, reaching peninsula our Mary by the Sea Jennifer Shneiderman Jennifer Shneiderman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in many publications, including: Yale University’s The Perch, UCLA’s Windward, The Rubbertop Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Flash Fiction Magazine and Minnow Literary Magazine. She received an Honorable Mention in the Laura Riding Jackson 2020 Poetry Competition. Reflections on My Legacy after Visiting the Ramses Exhibit at the Natural Museum of the Arts in Houston to my husband, recently diagnosed with a rare and debilitating disease Today I’m thinking about my legacy, what I can hope for, what I might achieve. I will never be a Beethoven, a Mozart, a Picasso or a Keats, will never be crowned with an olive wreath nor Tiktok my way to fame. I won’t be in the annals of history, in the research journals of science, in the exhibits of the great Pharoahs whose cartouche carvings and jewelry collections blazoned the family tombs of their mighty empires like a jillion coral polyps underneath the surface of the sea. What I long for is a good name, one chiseled in a single stone, a name suggesting a rock or a gracious giver or one who has withstood great heat. A name like Shadrack, a name like yours. Jo Taylor Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. Her favourite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it. In 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire. She enjoys morning walks, playing with her two grandsons, ages four and seven, and collecting and reading cookbooks. Isis, or The Lover Learns by Losing We who are left behind pray to stones. We beseech walls and bricks for answers. Driving south on CA-380, my husband pulls off suddenly, sends the car shuddering—he’s been summoned by a ghost. I chase him across the undulating green of Golden Gate National Cemetery; the thick-bladed grass slices my bare ankles bloody. We get lost in labyrinthine rows of white headstones tumbling downhill like teeth; at the end of one, he stumbles on his surname, Burdick. There, he falls to his father’s breast: the famed warrior-poet genius, dead at forty-seven. He sets his head on the marker, sun-glittering with minerals, and sobs. Asks the Father-Stone for solace. Asks me to take a photo of them, though there is only man and stone and green, his godlike father, nowhere to be seen. Don’t you dare cry, his mother hissed before the cameras flashed. He was nine. It happened to me at sixteen, except it was my mother. I couldn’t cry either, though no one forbade it. My heart simply stopped beating. My mother’s friends commended my strength: she’s like Phyllis, a solid building with good bones. My mother was a lover to her marrow—she did have good bones—and broad birthing hips and bountiful breasts. That’s where trouble brewed—breasts and lymph nodes, both removed—a jagged gash across her chest. A swarm of wonky cells slunk from the cut and hid in the folds of her brain. When she turned forty-five her hive-mind exploded: a thousand bits of buzzing black stung her senseless. She’s buried in a veteran’s cemetery, too, next to her father-in-law because we couldn’t bear for her to be dead alone. An inane fate only the living fear. This is my husband’s first journey to his father’s grave in fifty-six years. First time he cried over his father’s death by widow-maker. On his knees, my husband shudders like our car, jerked from the highway by his father’s ghost. “I want more of this,” he says. Red-faced and wet, he suckles the pleasure of release, trembling with longing the way he long ago trembled for me. He asks if I’ve felt this, if I’ve been to my mother’s grave. I shrug. No. And yes. As a child I prayed to her consecrated bones each week. They lay in Sun City, Arizona, across the road from a golf course, the emerald lawn identically lush on both sides. My Mother-Stone yielded no answers though I knocked for years. I wish we had buried her naked rather than in the navy blue skirt-suit my teenage self picked out. No clothes, no lacquered casket, no more chemicals pumped through her chemo-logged body. I’m surprised there was room in her veins. Laid in a box, she held together the form we found so pleasing, but she didn’t owe us a final viewing, a private peep show. The mortician sewed her lips into a permanent smile so that, even in death, she could assure us everything was alright. I wish we had let the lady rest. Let her loose. Let her frown. Let her fall apart. Let go of her goodness, her fortitude. Set her free. Let her disintegrate into the earth. I don’t know if I’m speaking of my mother or me. My husband wants to know if I’ve cried. Sure. Inside. Every day. On the knife-edge of fifty, my friends are just beginning to lose their parents. They fall into my arms and sob like children. In the darkest chamber of my necrotic heart, I shrug. Of course—it’s awful. How did you not know? The hole was hollowed out of me so long ago the vacancy feels normal. Still, I marvel: why are they surprised? Death is holding our hand all the time. It’s inside us, if we look. At sixteen, I was promised the crushing sadness would wane. (Lies.) All my life, I’ve run from love because I know: loveis what hurts, not death. Yet here I am at this late hour, loving one more person, his grayed head laid on his dad’s gravestone, grieving. Last March, it was nearly his turn to make me a widow. Five surprise bypasses; one aortic valve donated from a pig who didn’t sign a consent form. The child we’ll never have tugs at my sleeve. Asks how I dare love this man in a world where nothing lasts and everything dies. I don’t know. It’s not normal. It’s exceptional. The day lockdown began, a masked man stopped my husband’s heart for seven hours, massaged it like clay, wove his breast closed with wire—twice. My husband—god of my underworld, of night, of beginnings and endings, of shuddersand sobs, his breastbone cracked in twain—the surgeon saved him, but I put the rest of him back together, save the missing part. Why I whisper on my knees in the grass, my head pressed to his chest. Why bother. This insignificantsandbag set against an inevitable tide. My husband chuckles. Laps the golden amber leaching from my scars, and outlines the means and end like it’s simple: It’s in the nature of suffering. I love, and I hate, that he’s the only one who tells the truth. Gabriela Denise Frank Gabriela Denise Frank is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and educator. Her work has been published in Poetry Northwest, True Story, DIAGRAM, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, Baltimore Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She serves as the creative nonfiction editor and managing editor of Crab Creek Review. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com 10th Street Women "Content is a glimpse of something. An encounter like a flash." Willem de Kooning Lepidopterous she noiselessly unfolds from the swaddling moth-light beneath these crazed impastos an insolent wing the feral moisture of a mocking smile each stockinged thigh implied implicit in these silken tremors of her savage after- image rising as if through flocks of startled pigeons as if glimpsed ascending into twilight’s grime- stained airshaft past the streaming shimmer of empty window panes into evening’s horn- tormented streets. Observe how all around that brutal absent gaze each zig-zag crowding contour seems to carom backward past the reckless aberrations of the wrist effacing every swift abruption of his searching hand to softly leave behind what only flutters indistinct to leave behind itself the crumpled evidence of last week’s news a sillioned contour map of what it is or was that’s so precisely absent here or maybe wasn’t really even ever there but left such slashing concentrated absolute- ness in its wake that our hapless abstract speech might only barely trace the furtive flap of time’s erasure encounter in this stark loquacity her imperious escape only the vivid vicinities of her departure. DB Jonas DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. After several Wanderjahre in Spain, France and Italy, he studied philosophy and literature at the Universities of California and Padova, and earned postgraduate degrees at Princeton and Yale. Following his retirement from a long career in business and the sciences, he returned to the practice of poetry. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Jerry Jazz Journal, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Willows Wept, Sequoia Speaks; Revue {R}évolution and others. Venus Aphroditi tis Milou, Goddess of Louvre and beauty. Marble eyes. Marble thighs. Gifts loudly coveted and quietly despised. Are you happy up there? This perpetual show. Blink once for yes, blink twice for no. Curve V, Swerve V. Are you there? Can you hear? Or, did Antioch carve blocks of wax in your ear? The guard isn’t watching. Dispense with contrition. Do you sense you’re not worth the price of admission? Heaven sakes, Heavy de. Why the snub? The cold shoulder. Might it be you expected someone centuries older? The man with the hands to release you, unblocked. The same one who guessed you, undressed you, then walked. Bare breasted. Bare chested. Hard body. Smooth frame. You limbless. Me himless. Two pieces. Same game. Between us and the walls, one can see why you’re armless. You were shorn by a lover you thought to be harmless. So, you twisted your spine and refracted your gaze. Quarried for shelter in this great, granite maze. Still, to take on this burden yourself? A nonstarter. Anguish calloused your flesh yet it suffers no martyr. You’ve no singular sorrow, I’ve suffered man’s pains, and felt my blood harden; run quartz in my veins. But, this show’s run too long. Straighten up. Can’t you see ‘em? A thousand new suitors walk this drafty museum. Though, perhaps it’s indifference, your ultimate crime. For it is not love that unmade you, but time. Joseph Lezza
Joseph Lezza is a writer in New York, NY. Holding an MFA in creative writing from The University of Texas at El Paso, his work has been featured in, among others, Variant Literature, The Hopper, Stoneboat Literary Journal, West Trade Review, and Santa Fe Writers Project. His debut memoir in essays, I'm Never Fine, is due out February 2023 from Vine Leaves Press. When he’s not writing, he spends his time worrying about why he’s not writing. His website is www.josephlezza.com and you can find him on the socials @lezzdoothis. The Art of Tarot deadline is in a few weeks- November 23!
Don't forget to send your poetry and flash fiction entries in. Lots of time to enter if you haven't already. Click here or on image above for details. Our guest judges, Riham Adly for flash fiction, and Roula-Maria Dib for poetry, can't wait to see what you come up with! She’s Gone Perhaps she will just eat them out of hand. It’s spring, after all, or some blurred line into another summer. Perhaps, as she rubs her finger over the nipple of the stem and recalls, from childhood, or a place like it, the tastelessness of the skin, she will peel and discard the exterior, as she often considers doing with herself, will sink her teeth directly into the sweet juicy flesh, let it dribble down from the corner of her mouth into the Han blue folds of her dress, let the sex of it return to the Chinese mother, though her first dalliance with such things remains secreted in the winged black lashes of her eye, the nape of her neck cautiously exposed beneath bound up volcanic rivers of obsidian hair, the surety of her jawline, the slight inquisitive parting of her lips, the turquoise pendant hiding the lobe of her ear, shielding the canal from whatever sounds try to voyage this reverie of some prior life, some place, some pool of time in which we have never swum. The ovules, the stones, is she aware of the bitterness, the toxin, possible death? The way she holds them, these double-edged fruit of the sword of dreams, her posture, the slight curve of her back, the smooth inquisitive knowledge in her face, says Yes, and I will chance the world upon them, and we wonder what world is chanced, if it’s ours, and, if not, how do we get there? Robert L. Dean, Jr Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s poetry collections are Pulp (Finishing Line Press 2022); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018). A multiple Best of the Net nominee and a Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in many literary journals. Dean is a member of the Kansas Authors Club and The Writers Place. He has been a professional musician, and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capital of the World and the Flint Hills. Ants Discover a Pink World City streets and high-rises are hidden in the colour of peonies just poking their heads from their green jackets. Jumping from bud to bloom takes less time than the husky black ants who are checking them out for future travels. The blossoms open their petals to accept their visitor, exuding a sweet elixir and he sends to the rest of the colony through pheromones. Pheromones appear to others as black bubbles of scent leading them to the food they desire. Myths lead one to believe that ants open the buds. Give them a good upside down shake before bringing them in the house, the ants will soon find another fragrant peony bud to satisfy them. Jackie Langetieg Jackie Langetieg has published poems in literary magazines: Verse Wisconsin, Ekphrastic Review, Bramble Blue Heron Review. She’s won awards, such as WWA’s Jade Ring contest, Bards Chair, and Wisconsin Academy Poem of the Year. She is a regular contributor to the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar. She has written five books of poems, most recently, Letter to My Daughter and a memoir, Filling the Cracks with Gold. |
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Tickled Pink Contest
May 2024
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