 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, by Pablo Picasso (France) 1907 Les Mesdames du Sfat It's the third week of August. Four pregnant women stand on the pathway crammed between wall and stairs in a slum building complex in Sfat. Itchy and sweating in the skull-numbing afternoon Sfat heat, we have run out of words and so, we say nothing, only slowly stretch our heavy arms to the sky to try to catch a bit of breeze and then put them down again to tug at our belly-flapping smocks. The silence is broken by the shrieks of our toddlers fighting over toys. It's the third week of August and there is no daycare and thus, no work and all the fun money has run out and the toddlers are antsy and wild, and want ice cream until it streaks and stickies down their chests, and then they cry, and all offers of drinks and fruit are slapped away. It's the third week in August, and we have stepped through a hole into a space where nothing is measured in clicks of a clock or the sweep of an arrow around a dial. There is nothing but the path of the sun across the sky, dinner at dusk, showers, stories, bed. Ann Bar-Dov Born in Brooklyn NY, Ann Bar-Dov has been living in Israel since 1976. After many years spent teaching everything from kindergarten to yoga to Public Health, she has finally retired and is devoting herself to writing.
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 Hotel Room by Edward Hopper (United States) 1931 Hotel Room I wanted to write you a letter and now and here I am in a hotel room where suddenly the freedom to do Have escaped again you know my score You keep my route forever tired again so I have written you to state that after all and still and here I love you, my one to say sorry we were so madly incompatible, unable to stop the better version of me got a hold for stronger or worse yet feel all this time do leave, your anger - my calls allow the sun - our laughs rather than to forgive I wanted to write you to never forget the sounds we shared the travels that need Love always, your one Kate Copeland Kate Copeland started reading libraries at the age of five. Her love for words led her to teaching and translating her three favourite languages, while singing along to her favourite lyrics. Her writing teacher advised her to skip stories and start poetry. The subsequent writing waves have already resulted in some publications...leaving a crave for more! She was born in Rotterdam some 51 years ago and adores housesitting in The United Kingdom and Spain.  Photo by Lee Woodman. We Come in Peace, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, by Huma Bhabha (USA, b. Pakistan) 2018 They, Alien They come in peace, standing stone still outside a White House. Tall, one might guess forged of clay, cork and bronze, perhaps papier maché-- One pink head, four faces in each direction, black nostrils flaring, torso of turquoise, massive chest with yellow nipple studs, abdomen and legs that turn black below the belly with forearms pressed against trousers down to space boy boots. You terrified them, you militia of horseback and guards of gun men. They’ve bared themself to you with love, red and yellow vagina bearing witness, bulbous black penis and scrotum to the left side. The upturned eye lashes on their voluminous breasts say they are open, raise no arm to fight, no weapon to harm. They are the Goddess of Everywhere, Urdu tattoos in royal blue and orange cover both arms, Jewish stars on one forehead, Native American braids down the back, an arrow toward two fleshy buttocks marked with orange dots. You see them as prehistoric or apocalyptic. They’ve fallen on one knee. They came in peace-- Now, you are the Other. Lee Woodman Lee Woodman is the winner of the 2020 William Meredith Prize for Poetry. Her essays and poems have been published in Tiferet Journal, Zócalo Public Square, Grey Sparrow Press, The Ekphrastic Review, vox poetica, The New Guard Review, The Concord Monitor, The Hill Rag, and Naugatuck River Review. A Pushcart nominee, she received an Individual Poetry Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities FY 2019 and FY 2020. Her poetry collection, Mindscapes, was published by Poets’ Choice Publishing on January 9, 2020, and Homescapes was published on May 22, 2020 by Finishing Line Press.  Portrait de Marie-Melanie Quesnel, Canadian School (Canada) c. 1810 Peach permanent shrug collarbone tilt skin the tint of peach fabric hair coiled into question mark her pressed lips about to speak Catherine Graham Catherine Graham is an award-winning poet, novelist and creative-writing teacher. Her sixth poetry collection, The Celery Forest, was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Michael Longley praised it as “a work of great fortitude and invention, full of jewel-like moments and dark gnomic utterance.” Her work has been translated into Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Bangla, Chinese and Spanish and she has appeared on CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto SCS where she won an Excellence in Teaching Award. Publications include Arc Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Glasgow Review of Books, Event Magazine, Joyland, The Malahat Review and she was recently shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Æther: an out-of-body lyric and her second novel, The Most Cunning Heart, are forthcoming. www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet  Paths, by Miki Lovett (USA) contemporary Beyond The fog is dense I cannot see beyond the fence beyond the tree the gate I climb beyond the pond the little rhyme beyond beyond  Mountain Trail, by Miki Lovett (USA) contemporary Life-Line That mountain trail looks like my life-line. It comes out of shadow and undertakes a climb. Beginnings are often so: technique seems mastered, prodigy-style (which time lavishly disproves). Then the little plateau. Nothing really amiss here. And now another steady climb. Applause applause. And then oh that loop back on myself. What retro-spirit possessed me? that valley? that gorge? that drop-lake? No technique here but herculean climb up a perpendicular gut-rock, no technique except survival instinct surviving half dead. But, the line lives. A flatter walk now headed west. And so, which deadly sin was next? complacency? fear? Lot’s wife? The line plummets, down that shadowed place I thought I’d left. It felt something like being starkers in a blizzard. But now, cut the drama, but now, rise again, and climb and climb and climb, steady now and steady, stay this course damn it, finally horizon, sea and sunrise meet my life-line and it seems to be a long arm, reaching over that sea, ending with a hand lifted slightly, blessing from the bottom up, and look at that loop – it is a head, inclined like a woman swept in a waltz. But that is the ending and I am not there yet.  Words From a Dark Place, by Miki Lovett (USA) contemporary The Portrait I like me. I like my mix of the square and the curvy, the safe and the surprising. I like the way my square points upward, reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s John the Baptist. I like the way my arms gather east and west in a sea-toned swirl. I like it that I’m earth- toned on top – earthed, where I need to be, where my head is, my thoughts. I am a celebration of opposites: of discipline and freedom, stillness and movement. And look: the Word is behind me: the Word from a dark place, not fully formed, but becoming – oh, and my name is Grace. And under- neath, a heart-beat: the wash of luminous flesh.  Find the Way Out, by Miki Lovett (USA) contemporary Thinking About the Prodigal Son He found the way out, alright. Now he needs to get back in, back in to the centre rich with russet, warm enfolding. Ok that looks like a sword blade but there’s no real door. He can crawl in there squeeze through and curl up, and those golden rounds at the centre, if he can ever get there, if that tangle could stop stopping my mind blocking itself by actor’s lines, lies, webbed, imbedded, making my eyes seep more binding threads, if only i could just keep going then that still centre, rich and russet? that’ll be arms; those tangles outside? they’ll be the air-born warm swirls of incense perfume from Father’s breast. those golden rounds inside the little room those golden rounds, that rood? the fatted calf – everything food, everything pulsing laughter all waiting for this hopeless roaming’s homing.  Untitled, by Miki Lovett (USA) contemporary A Short Story A sunbathed village in France or Spain on a midsummer day? If you like. Stuccoed walls, straight and resistant, the church’s square bell-tower, the narrow alleys, and that blue sky, seductive as a siren that wails in the distance, to warn: a cold wind comes obliquely and whips your hair, the harsh slap of wind, angry as a tyrannical parent, just as brutal; tender hopes are aborted here before they’re anywhere near the birth canal. Brown skinny tree trunks are things to hold on to. Stumble down bright empty streets, amid sunny walls supported against every intrusion. You belong in the bell-tower, ringing the mystery. Johanna Caton, O.S.B. Johanna Caton, O.S.B. is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey in Kent, England. She was born in Virginia and lived in the U.S. until adulthood, when her vocation took her to the U.K. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, The Windhover Literary Journal, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, on The Catholic Poetry Room, www.integratedcatholiclife.org, and in other venues, both online and print. Miki Lovett works in etching, monoprint and marbling. She lives in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and her website link is www.mikilovett.com. Miki exhibits and sells her work from online venues as well as from several art centres in Massachusetts.  Attributed to Lysippos, 340-100 BC. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Victorious Youth a Sonnet in the Fibonacci Sequence+ Shipwrecked. Underwater. Barnacle encrusted. A bronze statue. Waiting lifetimes at the bottom of the sea. Till Italian fishermen pulled you up in international waters between Italy and Croatia. How alarmed they must have been that summer’s day, catching you in their gnarled nets, like pulling up a dead body. Word soon crept out, of a shipwrecked treasure-- a bronze statue that could be the work of Lysippos-- sculptor to Alexander the Great and known throughout the ancient world for his statues of athletes. You have been here in the museum for as long as I can remember, and no matter how many times I come to stand before you, I always find something new in which to delight, as I circle around and around you—as I am circumambulating you—I know a lifetime would never be enough. Oh, how your career took off, first hauled out of the sea and cleaned up, then hidden away in a cabbage patch till an art collector from Gubbio, who had bought you for $40,000, just one step ahead of the Carabinieri, who were hot on the trail, chased you all the way to Brazil, where you were concealed in a monastery for several years, under the murkiest of circumstances, before dealers felt it safe enough to approach Mr. J. Paul Getty to see if he would buy their boy. Well, Getty said, no but then changed his mind and asked for an inquiry into your provenance—are you stolen? and whose patrimony are you anyway? by then the Italian police were banging on doors, demanding you back, even after Getty was dead and the museum purchased you, the Italians still have not given up. Carbon-dated back to ancient Athens, when a wealthy merchant wishing to commemorate his son’s triumphs in the Olympic games—Victorious Youth-- has you cast in bronze, your right hand pointing to your victory wreath. Such a beautiful start, but then the Romans ripped your feet off dragging you back to Rome as more war booty. When fate would find you shipwrecked, cast to the bottom of the Adriatic. Where grown heavy with barnacles, you sleep underwater. I couldn’t stop imagining you. Laughing at us. Our temerity. Foolish. Humans. ++ 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 Leanne Ogasawara Leanne Ogasawara has worked as a translator from the Japanese for over twenty years. Her translation work has included academic translation, poetry, philosophy, and documentary film. Her creative writing has appeared in Kyoto Journal, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, Hedgehog Review, the Dublin Review of Books, the Pasadena Star newspaper, Sky Island Journal, etc. She also has a monthly column at the science and arts blog 3 Quarks Daily. Also forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine. La Casa Azul after photographs of Frida Kahlo in her garden Born from prickly pear, I am. My seeds were cobalt — cacti mixed with yucca, agave, canna-lily, the bougainvillea crown of deep thorny pink from which pain sprouted. Selfies grew from blackbird brows, rouged skin bled into terracotta, mustard, leaf-green dappled basalt walls and slabs of raw volcanic rock that make up a central courtyard surrounded by the rooms of me — my eyes weeping shells. Mosaics that spell my name in a kitchen of turgid fruits; the glass ceiling makes sense of my brokenness. My bathroom a cell of fashionista loot: red leather boot with leg, bows, bells, lace resplandors, embroidered Chinese silks, cool Tehuana huipils, enagua underskirts peeking polka dots. My gallery of ex-votos, the re-runs of tragedy on trolley–buses that crawl like tin creepers over textured walls while those painted corsets of misery sit propped in folk art corners. My library of botany, tiny bouquets pressed in chartreuse leaves. A domestic oasis of portraits, plants, people, parrots — spider monkeys scaling the pyramid or my shoulder, my deer, my pack of dogs cavorting among pomegranate boughs and succulents, my meandering pathways of paint — the comfort and pain of home and his betrayal mixed plein air. The white crocheted bed where I assign the colours — soaring Aztec pink green sadness, yellow madness, cut red melon death flesh, that sweet electricity of my deep blue tender fire Jane Frank Jane Frank’s latest chapbook is Wide River (Calanthe Press, 2020). Her work has most recently appeared in The Blue Nib, StylusLit, Grieve (Hunter Writers Centre, 2020), The Poets’ Republic and Cicerone Journal. Poems are also forthcoming in Meridian and Other Terrain Journal. In 2020 she was shortlisted for both the Thomas Shapcott and Wigtown Poetry Prizes, and in 2019, was joint winner of the Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Award. Editor's note: These are some of the selected entries for the Christmas Isn't Cancelled contest. There will be another showcase of entries next week, and the winner will be announced and awarded in the early new year.  Return From the Woods, by Giovanni Segantini (Austrian Empire) 1890 Otherwise Before you write a poem about my life in some frigid, unnamed place – how I leave my house at sunrise in my shabby unlined coat to chop wood, heft it onto a crude, splintery sled, tow it through the snow, build a small fire in my small house to cook a small pot of soup – write about your own. Write how you bully yourself out of bed at sunrise, put on leggings and a fleece, and run around the reservoir, listening for birdsong but hearing only cars. Write how the soles of your feet blister, how the wind whips your lungs and singes your eyes. Write your small house, where you sit in a hard-backed chair and stare at a black and white box for three hours. Write how you stay in one position, your face immobile but your fingers twitching and clicking, desperate to tease out meaning. Write how you neither speak nor smile, how at five o’clock, you collapse the box and go into the kitchen, take out the cutting board and vent your anger on the cucumbers like a woodcutter wielding an axe. The only difference between you and me is that you could have chosen otherwise. Shira Atik Shira Atik is an award-winning poet and a Hebrew-English literary translator. In 2018, she and sculptor Alice Kiderman co-published Stone Word, a book featuring nine of Shira’s poems alongside the sculptures that inspired them. Her poems have been published in Poetica Magazine and The Ekphrastic Review, and were displayed at the Beachwood Jewish Community Center and the Nature Center in Shaker Heights, both in Ohio. ** Return From the Woods Although she's not tired, Gretel stops, drops the reins. The toboggan she has pulled for miles glides over the crust of snow, bumps her calves, knocks loose a dusting of green needles from her shoulders, a cone of gray hair from her cap. She stares at the village, its low slung roofs, the yellow lights that shimmer from this window, that. No smoke billows from any chimney. They haven't changed, still cold, still hungry, still living by dim candlelight. She wonders who might notice her return. The father, the mother could only be dead. But surely someone remembered – Hansel, Gretel, the girl, the boy, their journey into the ravenous wild? Something black flaps in the church belfry. Crows? A new priest drunk on wine and winter fumbling up the spiral stairs to ring the vespers bell? Did the people pray anymore? A weight of bread bulges in Gretel's coat pocket, presses against her thigh. She pulls it out, bites into its brown sweetness. It tastes of smoke and ginger, witches and brothers, sin and cinnamon. It sucks at her teeth like sour fruit and jelly. Oh, the village. They would only understand salt and fat, never sugar or skin, incest and lust, witch and boy, boy and girl, girl and woman. It was how they lived, safe and warm in a magic cottage, all appetite and answer, touch and pleasure. These people in those dirty dwellings only knew pain. They bore so many children for the oven. “Why are the children the ones we always sacrifice?” Hans had asked once. “Because they are so delicious and fat?” The witch had answered. Who grew tired of the dirty kisses first, the squall of birth, the cloying odour of mother's milk? Meat made them all angry. Hans said he was tired of picking out the bones. The witch's spices grew bitter and exotic. Gretel found herself wandering away, never bringing back the mushrooms or the wild strawberries she found. Hans would not chop the wood anymore. The witch refused to bring in the water, choosing to fill their cups with supernatural wine instead. They all grew gaunt, moral, quick to argue about what was wrong, what was right. Hans succumbed first, his eyes, his mouth wide open as if screaming. The witch died in her bed, a smile on her lips, her sweet wine staining her sheets, her wand tangled in her tresses. Gretel grieved for awhile, but then she turned a rock into licorice, the river into marzipan. She transformed a bear into a tree trunk, snakes into branches. She stoked the witch's ovens again, but made only nut pies and raisin bread. Gretel looks at the village again, thinks of turning back. The people will probably throw her in a pit, hang her from a tree, stone her, burn her. Still she wanted to tell them of the house, its impossible arches, its sugar windows, its bitter flavour. She wanted to tell them of its promise and its lie. Yes, God walks its passageways, but the devil walks right beside Him. Gretel puts the bread back in her pocket. It's no lighter than when she took the first bite. She picks up the reins, wraps them around her shoulders, and trudges on. The wood piled high in the toboggan behind her writhes, kicks like a child waiting to be born. Nan Wigington Nan Wigington lives and works in Colorado's capital city. Her flash fiction has appeared in Pithead Chapel, The Ekphrastic Review, Gordon Square Review, and in After the Pause.  Gray Tree, by Piet Mondrian (Netherlands) 1911 Weathering Tree is life is of life. The cluster of branches, once taut and new, now deconstruct, vault, and radiate in complicated patterns from the graceful bending of the central chord. A spirit of presence protects and secures the trunk and its spiral ballet from sailing unrooted into winter’s dark storm. Instead it grows wings, sweeps through the glimmering grey, a radiant snowdance holding the world’s naked grief in its arms. We silently offer a benediction, conferred with gratitude for what continues to nourish the days. All the earth and its creatures flowing through seas of fury. Beseiged by the crosswinds of collapse, but still singing and sparkling amid the sheltering choreography of boughing trees. the questions become listening surrender Kerfe Roig A frequent contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new from her residence in New York City. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Right Hand Pointing, Silver Birch Press, Yellow Chair Review, The song is..., Pure Haiku, Visual Verse, The Light Ekphrastic, Scribe Base, and The Wild Word, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, Pea River Journal, Fiction International: Fool, Noctua Review, The Raw Art Review, and several Nature Inspired anthologies. Follow her on https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/(with her friend Nina), https://kblog.blog/, and http://kerferoig.com/ ** Prelude No.4 in E minor Frédéric Chopin - Prelude in E-Minor (op.28 no. 4) - YouTube If I could arrange your organic form to music it would be the powdered chalk of Chopin rippling in ivory skies, arpeggio spine curled like an umbilical cord, life-giving, the rounded belly of seed, a gift to ground, roots teeming with the furrow of ancient scales. I hear your voice, primal tones a warning as December fog settles on bough and bark. It is lighter than lark song composed at dawn, lighter than tip of brushed wing tracing grain. I feel its pull, the hang of its damp like discarded wrapping left to rot in wood. There is an odd stillness to the air. It is that moment before stone hits lake, this planet poised on semi-breve of imbalance. The very shape of you sketchy, twisted, trapped in the grizzled topple of time, your silvered lustre reduced to ash. Kate Young Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood. Over the last few years she has returned to writing and has had success with poems published in webzines in Britain and internationally. She is a regular reader of The Ekphrastic Review and her work has appeared in response to some of the challenges. Kate is now busy editing her work and setting up her website. Find her on Twitter at @kateyoung12poet.  A Christmas Carol, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (England) 1867 To Art As Carol We Are Drawn From richly simple instrument a melody is heard as lullabye to Mary's child, acknowledged as the Word... We sing in peace the Child to sleep as message we proclaim of alleluia to our Hope now given flesh and name. The message etched beneath in frame makes clearer the intent. The voice unheard is beauty seen in patience brush has spent to clarify the sapphire eyes in upward thoughtful gaze and lips that also seem as gem of hymn's unending praise... that sings in peace the Child to sleep as message we proclaim of alleluia to our Hope now given flesh and name. And love adorning floral wall as art within the art enables eye to peer within the soul of sacred heart... ...and sing in peace the Child to sleep as message we proclaim of alleluia to our Hope now given flesh and name. Portly Bard Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent of verse becoming complement... ...and by such homage being lent... ideally also compliment.  Dreamer of Dreams, by Edmund Dulac (France) 1915 Stealer of Darkness I Stand on the edge of beauty. To the East, Uluru clothed in night-shadow a whisper of Outback breath fresh on skin. I cut artificial light from screen. My stealer of darkness lies, naked in shame diminished by the spectacular. I tilt, neck at 45 to gaze at upturned cave. It descends, sprinkles its cosmic dust, starburst blaze from tip of wand and I am drawn toward dome, lost in its spirals, its violet freckles random patterns of pinwheel-spin. Sirius conjures Ursa Major, the hunt, her constellation pinned in time her bears weightless in a veiled sky. Orion is wearing her indigo smile, it is splattered across the sheer expanse of space, leaving the shape of me floating Kate Young Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood. Over the last few years she has returned to writing and has had success with poems published in webzines in Britain and internationally. She is a regular reader of The Ekphrastic Review and her work has appeared in response to some of the challenges. Kate is now busy editing her work and setting up her website. Find her on Twitter at @kateyoung12poet. ** Sorrow’s Creation With chilled hands she learned how to shape bears, make art in spite of pain. A set of three she made for me, and every day since her death I see them, sitting next to my poetry and a set of Shakespeare’s plays the mother protecting her cubs. Some days I remember her swollen wrists gnarled fingers kneading dough into life forming clay the way a white dove might flap her wings on window panes. “Art from tragedy,” she would say, and I see her still, a maiden fair in white flowing dress, daisies braided in her hair. She breathes her vows in a puff of cloud amidst a pink orchard’s promising spring. The young prince’s love glistens cold and sharp, concealing winter’s frost, icicles hide in the trees. But as all heroes do, she shapes her sorrow into art. Sandra Frye Sandra Frye is the author of two memoirs, African Dreams, about serving with the Peace Corps in Africa from 1969 to 1971, and Fatherless, the story of her unique childhood in the 1950s and her yearning for a traditional family. Recently she published her first book of poetry titled Leaving Lessons. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she loves to write in coffeehouses. She’s a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, a retired high school English teacher, and mother to four sons. ** Abandoned She’s been lost Long enough to forget There was ever anything else Standing there like her own ghost Like a pillar of snow against snow White on white, a trick of vision The shadow left after the flash Of too bright light Impossible and true as any fairy tale The shadow of some old memory The shape of some forgotten miracle Fragile and defenseless And yet safe enough Flanked by great white bears As though they were her dogs Outside barefoot In nothing but a dress and veil Gauzy as falling snow Everything bleached the pale Blue and white of ice But her red mouth And the blood red heart She holds out so tenderly Like an offering Cradled in her hands Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired RN, who has always loved writing and the visual arts. This has made Ekphrastic a particular favorite for her own work, which has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Earth's Daughters, Praxis, Third Wednesday and The Ekphrastic Review.  A Christmas Carol, by John Leech (Britain) 1843 How Heavy is Regret? How heavy is regret? Can it be weighed post death like a liver slathered on slab, drowned in the paddle of its own blood? In the hover between now and next I pray for that flash of life, that fast-forward spin of "best bits" promised by soothsayers and priests. Instead, I toss and turn, fold into the pages of my soil, coiled like a worm in earth hoping to pinken in reincarnation. The scales wait, sure as sunrise, colours balanced in cause and effect. I feel its mass, the press of it, regret, heavy as this leaden lid. Kate Young Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood. Over the last few years she has returned to writing and has had success with poems published in webzines in Britain and internationally. She is a regular reader of The Ekphrastic Review and her work has appeared in response to some of the challenges. Kate is now busy editing her work and setting up her website. Find her on Twitter at @kateyoung12poet.  January Moon, by George Ault (USA) 1914 January Winter’s dark heart When all the lights of celebration Have gone out And we face a long fast Before the next resurrection. The world is silenced, sealed over, Reduced to black and white, Nothing growing But the ice on the water, The snow piling up against our doors, While we persist, thin and hungry For the first sharp greens of spring, For the ice to groan and break And let the waters rise Furious And wild with joy. Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired RN, who has always loved writing and the visual arts. This has made Ekphrastic a particular favorite for her own work, which has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Earth's Daughters, Praxis, Third Wednesday and The Ekphrastic Review. ** Bob Ross Territory if only Bob Ross was here he would be towering above the easel appraising this canvas determining what needs to be done with soft words of encouragement to a reaching out audience perched on their sofas ingesting his every word his utensils in the right hand limited palette in his left perspective from perception happy little trees from his imagination blending very few colors prime, secondary, tones at every single stroke with the subtly of a sorcerer opening doors wide to the eager into barns of the boondocks feet deep in pristine snow awaiting to be overpainted alla prima rediscovered all within thirty minutes or less smiling wide to the camera as if Bob Ross was here Alun Robert Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical free verse. He has achieved success in poetry competitions across the British Isles and North America. His work has been published by many literary magazines, anthologies and webzines in the UK, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Kenya, USA and Canada. Since 2018, he has been a member of The Ekphrastic Review community particularly enjoying the fortnightly challenges. He is a member of the Federation of Writers Scotland for whom he was a Featured Writer in 2019.  Two Oxen in Winter, by Maud Lewis (Canada) by 1970 Maud At The Door Maud resides in a farmhouse as we’re chained up outside. She’s warm. She’s secure. We’re Nova Scotia cold, minus 30 or lower. We can’t stand motionless for a single minute more. I’m frozen. I’m bored. Been here for an hour, possibly two at her door. Maud walks round her canvas after opening up the door. She turns her head this way and that. Loads up her camel hair brushes then takes the oils off. It’s not as though we’re being paid, twin sister. Another bale of hay wouldn’t hurt. Wouldn’t break the bank account. But now she’s tutt-tutting, tells me not to move. Maud says she’ll be done soon now Everett is back. He still stinks of gutted fish through clothes, hands and head. He does chores round their house. Expect he’ll clean all her brush. Alun Robert Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical free verse. He has achieved success in poetry competitions across the British Isles and North America. His work has been published by many literary magazines, anthologies and webzines in the UK, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Kenya, USA and Canada. Since 2018, he has been a member of The Ekphrastic Review community particularly enjoying the fortnightly challenges. He is a member of the Federation of Writers Scotland for whom he was a Featured Writer in 2019. ** Tea With Tennyson I like to tell people that when we first met, I was unmoored. At the mercy of the wind and waves, the push and pull of the moon’s tides. But, that’s not really how it happened. There was no open water. No raft. Just ripples in my tea as I blew against its fevered surface. At the coffee shop, curled up in my favourite orange chair by the window, I tried to catch the warmth of the afternoon sun on my nose. My toes tucked under my legs, I perched my cup on the coffee ring collages left by those before me. I saw you before you walked in with your hands in your pockets. You were whistling, but I couldn’t hear the tune. The wind picked up and the leaves on the sidewalk gave chase around you. A young girl wrapped in a brilliant red scarf peeked up from her hot cocoa and waved hello. You smiled and waved back. Her chilled cheeks sprouted into a smile. A half moon filled with happiness and promise. I smiled too. When you wandered in, the bells on the door broke into song. A winter ballad of your arrival. One I had never heard before. Ringing in hope and truth. Ringing out sadness and doubt. A sweet serenade that unexpectedly gathered me in its arms and held me tight. Ringing, clanging, chiming, and wild. You looked at me. You smiled. And, I was adrift no more. Sarah Wolsey  Madonna on a Crescent Moon in Hortus Conclusus, by unknown artist referred to as Master of 1456 (Italy) 1456 Our Lady of Toil and Trouble Whose breath? She hides her divinity in fragments of spirit. The garden wall encloses both inside and out, expanding into the unseen, the realms of retreat. The rose and the lily. Doves weep golden ghosts into the distances between stars. The crescent conceals the ephemeral, the misbegotten regalia of repose. Hands raised, hands resting. Whose volition? The turmoil of why and the needs of limitations. Her compassion flows like water, like light, reflecting the purity of the fallen. Our capacity for sorrow exceeds all hurt. the passion of doubt-- who are the seekers? lodestars are always shifting Kerfe Roig A frequent contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new from her residence in New York City. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Right Hand Pointing, Silver Birch Press, Yellow Chair Review, The song is..., Pure Haiku, Visual Verse, The Light Ekphrastic, Scribe Base, and The Wild Word, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, Pea River Journal, Fiction International: Fool, Noctua Review, The Raw Art Review, and several Nature Inspired anthologies. Follow her on https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/(with her friend Nina), https://kblog.blog/, and http://kerferoig.com/  Mari Lwyd Custom, Welsh Post Card, by 1918 Welcoming By Welsh tradition, hobby horse of man beneath and more on course from house to house in Christmas tide for food, and drink, and warmth inside as acting troupe and minstrel choir auditioning for modest hire well knowing they will be denied until thee times at least they've tried beseeching strangers some have said to mimic night of Mary's dread -- her faith so often turned away in search of place to humbly lay and change the course of heaven's earth where those unknowing gave her berth. Portly Bard Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent of verse becoming complement... ...and by such homage being lent... ideally also compliment. ** Mari Lwyd Is not the spectre of death always waiting, a bedazzling skeleton disguised with ribbons and glittering lights? So tempting. So close to the journey that has no map, no clear end. Can you reason yourself out of following it to the Otherworld? The young men sing their challenge. The ghostmare waits to hear what reply is given. Will it save the souls of the house and its inhabitants? The lamp throws shadows into the night, blending with the dusky dark. Who can resist the pull of the starlit sky? When does the song move beyond play, beyond a simple exhange of melody and rhyme? Who can say how thickly the spell becomes woven and which words will break the enchantment, returning both sides to a simple exchange of seasonal festivity—a drink, a treat, goodwill? We meet in the cast of the hidden moon-- the silences challenge us to complete. Who carries the ghost that shadows the tune? The silences challenge us to complete. Ashes to ashes they say. But the bones-- the silences challenge us to complete. Questions ring out reft by darkness, undone-- Answers brew bitters—unswallowed, unsung. Kerfe Roig A frequent contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new from her residence in New York City. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Right Hand Pointing, Silver Birch Press, Yellow Chair Review, The song is..., Pure Haiku, Visual Verse, The Light Ekphrastic, Scribe Base, and The Wild Word, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, Pea River Journal, Fiction International: Fool, Noctua Review, The Raw Art Review, and several Nature Inspired anthologies. Follow her on https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/(with her friend Nina), https://kblog.blog/, and http://kerferoig.com/  The Dream, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940 Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is The Dream, by Frida Kahlo. Deadline is January 8, 2021. You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, or short fiction. 1000 words max please. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. Have fun. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include KAHLO WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your poem. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight, January 8, 2021. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, only those selected for publication will receive a response. You will receive an acceptance notice within a week of the deadline. We can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 12. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 13. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!  North Shore, Lake Superior, by Lawren Harris (Canada) 1926 A Group of Seven Norway Spruce A painting I may not have seen has gone missing from all of the places I almost remember it being. For years I’ve been trying to find it, since something reminded me of it by summoning forms I was certain were only familiar to me from that landscape the scene recollected: I saw how the twigs on a spruce tree swung pendulous down from its branches as if they were hanging on hinges the same way they looked in that painting. I thought it was one of those things in the world I would never have noticed except that some picture I’d taken for flight of the artist’s own fancy showed up in its colours and figures that waited unlighted for someone to frame them just so, like the twists of the naked grey stumps I’ve seen spiralling up from the shoreline, which Harris’s painting had primed me to find. But I may have invented that picture: it turns out those spruces aren’t from here. They didn’t grow wild in the woods where MacDonald and Johnson and Lismer Carmichael and Varley and Jackson would draw secret truths from the trees. They’re an introduced species from Europe, more pleasing of form than the natives, which never get taken for Christmas. They’re grown to throw shade in the city, and though they might pick up the habit of sprawling from lawns in the suburbs they’ve only invaded the landscape in my mind Matthew King Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, and is the author of Heidegger and Happiness. He now lives in “the country north of Belleville,” where he walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. |
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January 2025
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