**

Alexander McQueen. Dress, spring/summer 2001

hospital gown stammers strandline along Norfolk beach
bivalve disposables shellfish encasements bleached
razor-sharp sequence everything clings like long hard petals
her silhouette vibrates with the structure of shatter a
two-way mirror prolongation of quiver fricative movements
of cream-white flexure brine reverberation the razor-height
of ventral margins breakage indefinite hard hitting the
glister of wallings clusters torsion prizes fallen breakage
indefinite divine ipseity the scroop of external skeleton’s
clatter leftover skin rasping expanse a new language no
limit to audacity no limit to volume meanwhile sea-weary
brittle model wrestles with dress a two-way mirror
prolongation of quiver fricative movements loosen from
worry her body goes dark with rage she becomes the dress
crashing with her own lyric chatter a splitting garment of
seafoam gasps and gashes endlessly 

Paul Cunningham

**

To view the specific fashions:

after Loewe. Jonathan Anderson. Coat, spring/summer 2023 menswear

https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/image/2024/4/15/4627cbe0-ec4c-4e96-93f9-5b9681e82b35-loewe_ss23_mens_show_runway_look_54_front_rgb_cropped_2250x3000_54.jpeg?w=1200&h=1200&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fm=jpg&fp-x=0.5034&fp-y=0.2135

after Phoebe English. “Sunray” dress, spring/summer 2024

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6378bf29d5271b72c95fe0c5/1715094188221-PS42UVQVKOXK2QMV2BCM/015_PhoebeEnglish_%C2%A9AsiaWerbel.jpg

​Herbert Levine Inc. Herbert Levine and Beth Levine. Shoes, 1966

https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/170307/preview
​
​after Bea Szenfeld. “Ammonite”, spring/summer 2014

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Ammonite_by_Bea_Szenfeld_%2851613%29.jpg/1496px-Ammonite_by_Bea_Szenfeld_%2851613%29.jpg

Alexander McQueen. Dress, spring/summer 2001

https://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/images/McQ.1103a%E2%80%93d.EL.JPG

​**
These poems are from the author's unpublished manuscript, Awake in the Garden of Worn.
​
​Paul Cunningham co-manages Action Books. He is the author of two poetry collections from Schism Press: Fall Garment (2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (2020). His next chapbook Sociocide at the 24/7 is forthcoming from New Michigan Press in 2025. His translation of Sara Tuss Efrik's play Danse Macabre Piggies was anthologized in Experimental Writing: A Guidebook and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Cunningham currently manages the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame.

Won't you join us Sunday for an ekphrastic breakfast with editor Kate Copeland? She'll be guiding some generative writing ideas on the theme of pets in art. We will look at pets in art history with Lorette, too. Bring your coffee and cupcakes and enjoy connection, conversation, and creativity on Sunday morning.

Click here to enroll for this zoom breakfast!

​https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrasticwritingworkshops.html

​The Small Shopkeeper (Le petit propriétaire)

Le petit propriétaire is tiny enough to hang his hammock in the folds of your brain.
The radical youth flock to his shop of lumber, leather, and limbs.
In a cavalcade, they muddle, bushy-eyed, outside the tinted windows.
Shaking now, they chomp at the hem of his wrangler jeans.
“Will you let us in?” they ask, “We are thin and vivid.”
“Everything is! Everything is! Yet, strangely, I am compact.”

Le petit propriétaire fastens his monocle and prepares for our arrival.
He embroiders kaftans by the light of a twenty-watt lightbulb.
He stuffs shotgun shells with Mesoamerican chia seeds. 
He writes a treatise on papyrus with a Pilot G-2 Premium gel roller pen.
It reads, “Let us see ourselves as polymers colour-printed in amber.
The neolithic monster who bought me my crib
Has updated their LinkedIn Profile.
In the ‘skills’ section, it is decreed:
Reliable, Congruent, Good at Burrowing and Time management.”

Le petit propriétaire lets us in one at a time.
Handing us a stenographer’s keyboard he asks that we caption our question.
“Will it slow down? I cannot breathe under such duress.
Is there something you have that packs a real punch?
That could send me ripping through the muslin of space-time
Into a quiet place with no mechanical hum. 
Into a place where I can feel the sun pool up in my pores
Where the wind will lift my back hair to waggle
And where there are no precipices or revolving things?”

“If I could sell what you describe I would be a very rich man
But, perhaps, one poor of character.
Honey does not spoil but you should not liquify your assets and dye them gold.
Like the others, you may come clamoring again tomorrow if you wish.
But know, tomorrow must come, clamoring.”

Josh Nkhata

Josh is a student at the University of Chicago studying Creative Writing and Media Arts and Design. At the university, he is the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Blacklight Magazine the university’s only Queer/BIPOC literary magazine. Currently, supported by a grant from the Stamps Scholars foundation, he is working to design a series of musical synthesizers that "play" and present soundscapes of black communities

​Potato Clouds             
           
When Ma picks up this hitchhiker,
I mumble, not this one.
His horns must pop out at night. 
 
The government had paid Pa to put
our oxen down. Pa muttered,  
one less mouth to feed. I miss Ivan.
 
Paprika coats the stranger’s beefy
neck. The front seat sinks,
a fallen cake, he grunting then 
 
expectant, like Ma’s about to serve 
roast and potatoes. Then he spots
me slumped in the back like a flour
 
sack. He frowns, shifting a bit.
His mushroom cap glides
over his beet red face. He tells Ma
 
where to turn. Ain’t picking up
supplies. Would the government
pay to put this one down? 

​Day Night Day                                                                       
 
Ma whispers, drive, Sissy. 
She thinks we have gas.
Sunlight makes me so thirsty
my tongue dangles.
But every drop is dusty so
instead I nibble a bruised heel
of bread. Is that maize? 
Ma coughs day, night,
into dawn. Today hangs,
a dirty bed sheet flapping
on a makeshift line.
If only I could tie
a wet kerchief over my nose.
Mid-afternoon skies darken,
churn. I gaze in space.
Not night sky, exactly,
slick like a blackboard. No,
chalky like clapped erasers.
Do stars swoon? Fine
particles land on my shoulders.
I brace my legs over Ma’s
so she can’t sleepwalk.
Do I smell fry dough? Can’t
see my palms, not even if
cupped like the Big Dipper.

​Nothing Now, Nothing Later
     
No wheat to tussle in the wind tossing dust
             then dying down.
No wind competing with our oxen’s bellow 
             now that Ivan’s
 
been put down. No birds singing. There
             are no birds.
 
No stealthy jackrabbit slipping through
             the grasslands.
 
Both rabbit and grass, gone. Not a raindrop
             to defy stinging
 
light. No baby’s breath. Nothing but dust.
            The car? Sold it.

​Hollowing                                                                                           
                                                                                               
Hunger makes me
chew string of all things
 
but not for taste
or texture. This hunger,
born of nervousness,
 
as squalls hunger for upset,
stirring chaos dread near-madness--
 
its hunger stripping maize
from the fields. I hunger for
a full dinner plate. For
 
hunger-free. So weak I can’t
scoop up a dead jack. Instead I wrest
 
the baby’s teething bone.
Hunger drowns out each rumbling
squall. Angry skies roil.
 
Hungry vagrants expect
handouts. Here’s nothing
 
halved. My face covered
with a wet sheet, I suck its hem,
wheeze. Hunger
 
overpowers us, needles the bony
children. Hunger, ease up

​Black Sunday                           
             
Imagine fifteen long minutes of darkness, dust
scrubbing skin, eyes, nostrils. Such fine red dust
 
inside a flour sack dress coated with more dust.
And that churning wind! carrying soft dust
 
that half-buried the stalled car. Buried us! More dust
coated the ships three hundred miles out. Dust
 
choked the fields. Pea pickers migrated West when dust
pneumonia spread through the squatters’ camps. Dust
 
settled on tumbleweeds and Ma’s face and then dust
took our little brother too. Gritty dust
 
rolled in, maybe eight foot high. Why? A choking dust.
Still no water anywhere. No crops. Dust
 
hunted us down. Our skin, cracked as the earth. This dust
wiped out the Davis clan. Indifferent dust.

Margo Davis

Margo Davis was born with traveling shoes. She's been awarded ten writing residencies, mostly overseas, including recent ones in southern Portugal and Budapest, as well as Italy and two outside Barcelona. A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems have or will appear in The Ekphrastic Review, Equinox Biannual Journal, three Lamar Press anthologies and Verse Daily. Her chapbook Quicksilver is available on Amazon. Originally from Louisiana, Margo lives in Houston.

​An Offering in Blue

On tiptoe, bare-breasted and bent-kneed, I laid my heart down on the table, over coated paper, under rays, and breathed, while it raced. My heart.

Arced over my limbs were those of a Russian olive, heavy with age. Naked, like me, after a long winter. But with promise.

Ten minutes, twenty. I watched the treated surface below me change in response to time and light, like you, after a long winter apart from me. A distant image, emerging: chartreuse, cerulean. Silver.

I was shielded on the patio, behind the humble house on the private lane they named for whalers. Still, the April wind reached me cold on what was for others a table for summer meals, but for now was one to hold an offering of another kind. A spring together.

Like farming and fishing, whaling was an industry here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whalers’ blubber was boiled for oil to light lamps. For lubricants. Even margarine. I recoil at the thought of the mammoth creatures I see swimming freely today hunted for their flesh, but understand the drive to do what is needed to survive.

On his own table, across centuries and the ocean at my door, a man searches for survival of a different nature. Sir John Herschel, a scientist knighted for his contributions to the stars, sought a method to capture and preserve an image. When something matters, we want to keep it forever. We can’t let it fade.

Janelle Lynch

Janelle Lynch is a writer and an award-winning photographer. Her writing has been published in monographs and in journals including Afterimage, The Photo Review, and Loupe. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in several museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs published by Radius Books: Los Jardines de México (2010); Barcelona (2012), which also includes her writings; and Another Way of Looking at Love (2018). She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery.

​After Remedios Varo [Rheumatic Pain, 1948]
 
They wrap me in the pained body of linen strips 
striping flesh compressed and pressured sealing 
what’s physical from view so that none can see 
agonies as my face portrays them, refuse to admit
the failure of their purported cures and pin me 
with excuses pressed into my Self: she suffers from 
ego neurasthenia hypo-gyno-other-chondrias 
female problems meno-glosses a glossary of terms 
that imply head has no truck with the body, with its 
boundaries, bounties, bowels. Red means swelling, 
signifies pain—say to my beloved untether me
I prefer undoing to unknowing, to the forces that tell me
“press on” toward an unwelcoming citadel that never 
has been my goal. There’s no remedy from men 
in medical smocks who’d swaddle me in certainty 
or terminology. Unpin me from these message boards. 
Let me float in my own corpus lightly above a world 
of hurt. I’ve earned my right to cry Let go.
 
Ann E. Michael

Ann E. Michael's latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Retired from academia, she keeps busy as a hospice volunteer, gardener, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at http://www.annemichael.blog