Editor's note: The Ekphrastic Review is most grateful to our special guest editor John Di Leonardo, for sharing his art and choosing these pieces of writing. Many thanks to you, John! You Are you are the pulse and throb of spoke-spin, thistledown caught in the jowls of air, a wheatfield of rippled muscle on spine, the skitter of arpeggios in F♯ major, a finger-tip brush on ebony bone, a crush of honeyed-oil on skin, the shifting wings in a drift of bees, the promise of seeds eating the sun, a crocus opening, simply knowing you are Kate Young Kate Young lives in Kent and has been passionate about poetry since childhood. Over the last few years, she has had success with poems published in webzines in Britain and internationally. Her poems have appeared in the Places of Poetry anthology, Write Out Loud anthology and Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite published by Hedgehog Press. She is a regular reader of The Ekphrastic Review and her work has appeared in response to some of the challenges. Kate is now designing her website and collating a pamphlet. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet. ** The Line, The Curve Stilled and moving—is it exhaustion or despair you felt then in that second? Did I ask? A moment caught, a pose extending into the infinite. The line of your foot, the curve of your breast—forever fixed, frozen in movement to the unknown, immortalized in tessellated form. The tenderness of skin, the tenacity of will—your youth-- I remember. Merril Smith Merril D. Smith is a historian and poet. She writes from southern New Jersey. Her poetry and short fiction have been published recently in Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale and Sparrow, Twist in Time, and Anti-Heroin Chic. ** Recharging the Resistance A series of fractured selves, (body doubles, echoes in parallel realms), lean against each other— unclad bone- weary women. Whelmed by the neon- yellow glare, they hug themselves in half, repel, repair from the assault of all they’re allotted to do, be, bear, contain. Already, the thick pitch tar inches up their legs, intent to clamp them in place. Karen L. George Karen George is author of five chapbooks, and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014) and A Map and One Year (2018). Her work has appeared in Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Salamander, South Dakota Review, Naugatuck River Review, and SWWIM. She reviews poetry at Poetry Matters: http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/. Visit her website at: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/. ** The Stationary Bicycle Ride I’m not sure if I’m doing this for me ...or for him never considered myself a feminist ...yet am I? Loss is gain, is it because he hints svelte equals sensuous ...or am I taking charge? Will these screaming muscles succumb - become toned, defined on my terms, my effort ...or is subservience in play? I read a book years ago, The Subservient Wife, it touted, choose your battles before confrontation written by a woman non-feminist, it appeared Ergo: I ride this stationary bike to nowhere ...my choice! Jane Lang Jane Lang has had her work published in several on-line and print publications. In 2017, she sent her chap book, Eclectic Edge, to family and friends in lieu of Christmas cards. Jane was nominated and received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. ** Thought We Dare Not Disavow The shadow struck by what we know will somehow always seem too low where eyes we bury leave exposed the burden, by our birth imposed, of conscience turned to face the light in which we are, to others, sight disrobed by failure to conceal the shame that we've been made to feel by fear becoming blinding glare of what is never really there, yet colored as the searing heat of moment from which we retreat to haven dark of head we bow and thought we dare not disavow. Portly Bard 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. ** The Sleek, Supple Contour of the Breast Riding to glory on the hounds of hell, hell-bent on travelling light and pell-mell, light as a light year would have you believe but only the blink of an eye in time’s weave. In a mellow yellow moment of bliss the ballet shoes crash to the floor with a kiss opening a door to the other side where stale tears are the price of the ride. The sleek, supple contour of the breast holds high court while the body’s at rest. The flesh and the tone of the upper thigh cause even a cold heart to heave a sigh. The clickity-clack of a rickety train gathering speed at sixteenth and main wakes me out of my sweet revery and shakes my mind back to cruel reality. Now the hounds of hell are falling asleep in the dungeon of a dark castle keep. The light years have flickered, finally burnt out and the ballet shoes have stopped dancing about. And all the while … the sleek supple contour of the breast holds high court while the body’s at rest. Candice James Candice James, is a professional writer, poet, visual artist, musician, singer/songwriter and book reviewer for a variety of Publishing Houses. She completed her 2nd three year term as Poet Laureate of The City of New Westminster, BC CANADA in June 2016 and was appointed Poet Laureate Emerita in November 2016. She has authored sixteen print books of poetry with five different publishers: A Split In The Water, (Fiddlehead 1979) was the first and her 16th book is The Path of Loneliness (Inanna Publications 2020). Her poetry has been translated into Arabic, Italian, German, Bengali and Farsi. Her artwork has appeared in Duende Magazine and “Spotlight” Goddard College of Fine Arts, Vermont, USA and her poetry has appeared in and artwork (“Unmasked”) on the cover of Survision Magazine, Dublin, Ireland and her poetry and artwork have appeared in Wax Poetry Art Magazine Canada. ** Another Night of Selling My Soul Backstage I faltered. He’d wanted me. Begged to get into my dressing room. Pounded at the door. Keen on his pound of flesh. What part of my flesh, I wondered? He’d paid for the strip, but so had others. Don’t do lap dance. It’s enough to take your clothes off in front of drunken imbeciles who can think of nothing but fucking. My little girl back home... Is she asleep? Will the strange babysitter treat her well? Heather couldn’t come. I think she has a new lover. Have learned to survive. It’s this or waiting at tables. This pays better. My baby girl needs new shoes and a school uniform. I’ll be home before she wakes. So very tired. Rose Mary Boehm Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). Her fourth poetry collection, THE RAIN GIRL, was published by Chaffinch Press at the end August 2020. ** Dark / Light | Stillness / Dance After assemblés and arabesques, the woman welcomes rest, the solitude of stillness, the warmth of yellow. She has danced the fairy tales-- Sleeping Beauty, Odette and Odile, Cinderella. At home in her body, she lives only to be at the barre or to sweep in from the wings. Though the days she danced with Balanchine are gone, Coppélia and the Sugar Plum Fairy pirouette in her veins. Her arms—laid lightly before her-- will soon swan as she gracefully gathers her still lissome body. Long legs, shapely and muscled, left foot poised to leave the drawing’s growing darkness for one more jeté into the limelight. Sandi Stromberg Sandi Stromberg’s poem, “Joy’s Seven Degrees and Pocket Full of Stones,” appeared in the October issue of Visual Verse, and another ekphrastic poem appeared in November's Words & Art, a collaboration between artist-poet Mary Wemple and the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston (CAMH). Two other poems have been accepted for the winter issue of The Ocotillo Review. She is proud to have had one of her poems in The Ekphrastic Review nominated for 2020 Best of the Net. ** The Art of Drowning I have folded into my own aura which is sour, which has assumed the shade of gone days, the celluloid-yellow of storm, drifts of torn leaves, the jaundiced lick of them on pavements, clogging gutters and doorways. Lines have blurred, my outline uncertain. Days pass in celluloid dream, images remembered by their own shadows, backlit and shifting. I turn over and over, like coloured glass to the sun, the thrill of that unexpected meeting, the night air brilliant with tail lights, reflections across wet pavements, and your fingertips so cold, so cold, as they rested for an instant on my lips. Now the dark creeps nearer, black oil on the surface of a great sea, and no one is here, no one is here to watch me drown. Jane Lovell Jane Lovell is an award-winning poet whose work focuses on our relationship with the planet and its wildlife. She is Writer-in-Residence at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve. Her latest collection is the prize-winning God of Lost Ways (Indigo Dreams Press). Jane also writes for Dark Mountain, Photographers Against Wildlife Crime and Elementum Journal. ** If I’m Being Honest Naked is purest, before yellow and black find their way to canvas, each wispy stroke perfection telling its tale of muscle and sinew, while ripples surrounding her form mimic the flow of limb a touch of grace and movement in the still, locks escape her ballet bun, a heartwarming detail of shared shortcoming. Elaine Sorrentino Elaine Sorrentino is Communications Director at South Shore Conservatory in Hingham, MA. Her work has been published in Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, The Writers' Magazine, Haiku Universe, Failed Haiku, and has won the monthly poetry challenge at wildamorris.blogspot.com.
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Taxidermy Girls after Joel Peter Witkin 1. The pale one, gaunt and green. Just walked out of an Otto Dix painting, but her girlfriend is even uglier. Her Mad Hatter headgear and bruised pupils have their own currency, but her waddle is Humpty Dumpty, or Twiddle Dum Dee. She is doughy and dumpy, rolly and lumpy, with hirsute arms and stubby paws. I like her immediately. 2. Although she looks fifty, I know she is only half my age. When I was her, I tried, too, to be as odious as possible, shaved the sides of my head, and then all of it. Wore a flowing turquoise peasant mumu and combat boots. 3. They are selling fox paw pendants, rings with teeth, and itty bitty exoskeletons of rare insects. I hold up a brooch of claws and copper wire, try it on my lapel, lay it back in its bed of ribbons and stones. An open jaw relic glimmers with skinny silver chains. I picture the pair of them out treasure hunting in the moors, excavating dead things from under roots and boulders, cold graves. 4. The Jack Sprat one has kohl-sunk eyes. Turns them on a new customer. The wife who could eat no lean scoops up a bleached bone, tells me to hold it to my throat. I feel that wild thing ignite behind my thyroid butterfly, that sense of immensity and power that only death can stir. 5. I ask her how she came to be interested in dead things. She wasn’t, she says, until she met her girlfriend. The tall one has a PhD in insect taxidermy. She herself is finishing her masters degree in human neuroscience. I’m impressed. I buy the lynx necklace. It feels like a wishbone in my palm. 6. Most moments you forget, but some you remember. The first kiss with M. The last line of cocaine. Seeing Bobby Martin saunter up the drive the day he died a thousand miles away. And this one: the moment I took a man’s brain out of a Tupperware and held it in my hands. There were thirteen corpses in the medical morgue that afternoon. I was a visitor, a witness to the students’ human dissection. But all the oozing juice and lipid drips could not distract me from the epic hush of that hunk of dense plasticine. All of the dendrites and synapses were silent, the whole of a life was reduced to a putty mass pumped full of Fermaldehyde. Even so, you could tell: this was rare physical contact with someone’s actual engine. My hands were cupping the seat of the soul. 7. My fixation with death started early. I had to make my peace with the mechanics of murder and the reality of temporality. I was a highly sensitive child, noticed it everywhere, in between the electric sparks of living. I couldn’t let it fell me, so I became fascinated instead. A girl I loved was gang raped and strangled at seventeen. A girl I knew had to get away from her father. Tied a tender knot around her neck, slipped from a backyard cherry tree alongside its blossoms. That was just the beginning. 8. It was what Mother was always threatening to do, but never did. 9. I would stand like a shadow in the doorway and try to reach her, listen to her howl and keen like the ducks she felled on our farm, in the seconds before their silence. 7. The flesh grows weary. Barely middle aged, and I’m already old. I repent of all I did, on purpose by mistake, to poison myself, to stop living. God forgave me, but my body won’t. 8. Still, after giving up everything else, I can’t give up the wine. It’s the only thing that feels like blood. 9. In an ancient Maya cemetery, the week of my art exhibition in the Yucatan, Manuel and I took pictures of the rusty tin boxes giving up their ghosts. There were bones everywhere, skulls propped under vines, leaves blooming in their sunken sockets. It was so hot and humid, and so strange, it was as if I was under water. 10. Witkin used the same things as we did at the graveyard, for his photographs, the same things as the taxidermy girls, as the doctors in the laboratory morgue. Dead things, and the living dead, arranged, sutured, assembled. He had to work in Mexico, where the things he needed for his images were not illegal. Heads, limbs, eyeballs. His black and white medleys of scars and sadomasochism, lard and lust, blood and dust are harrowing, and beautiful. I usually detest shock value art, dismiss it for being too easy. But there is something compelling and compulsive in his grim tableaus. Authenticity? Maybe. Something essentially Catholic. Something pure. They are gelatin-filmed, and macabre, but feel close to the truth. 11. The artist says his works are closer to the Beatitudes than to snuff. 12. When he was five, he witnessed a car crash. In the noise and excitement and terror, he found perfect stillness as a rolling stone tumbled through the chrome and steel shards and landed beside his innocence: the eyes of a pretty little girl stared back at him, unblinking. Just her head, shredded asunder from the rest of her. It was one of those defining moments you don’t choose but never forget. Her absolute loneliness. Lorette C. Luzajic There is no accompanying image to this piece because all of the photographer's images are incredibly disturbing. It is up to the reader whether they want to look up the works. They are gruesome and shocking and show decay, death, deformity, illness, sex, and pornography. This poem was first published at South Florida Poetry Review, and in Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems (Mixed Up Media Editions, 2020). Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning, internationally collected visual artist with works in more than 25 countries. She studied journalism in university but prefers creative writing, often about art. Her most recent of five poetry collections is Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems. She recently won first place in a flash fiction contest at MacQueen's Quinterly, and has been nominated several times each for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems and very short stories have been widely published, including recent or forthcoming appearances in Bright Flash, Club Plum, Halfway Down the Stairs, Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Communicators League, and more. She is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review. We Are Sorry for Your Loss A head writhing with snakes conveys discord. An Old Woman Cooking Eggs in the dark cottage, hollow-eyed in the white shawl staring past the broad-faced boy with cropped bangs, tender hands cradling the cruet, the orb and cross – glowing in candlelight, the promise of salvation. Bat wings appeared when the Tartars came. My father warned of carnal enticements strawberries and cherries a stranger in the park offering treats. We believed in the devil without horns – hairy body, hidden hooves. I wasn’t frightened by damnation, preferred Merry Company in a Pergola, Jan Steen’s tavern maid with the cider pot, red hair adorning her neck and bare flesh of shoulder blades curving down the flow of her rounding copper-brown skirt, turned in grace from the drunken crowd to read the heedless fat man’s crumpled scroll; the cherub girl in the red velvet cloak smiling at us over her fiddle heralding this annunciation; a pensive boy crouched down sneaking, tilting the spout of her pot to his lips. Who can resist Botticelli’s Madonnas? But Satan with his pitchfork is hilarious to us now. We tire of Jesus hanging from the cross. As a kid I didn’t realize it was human sacrifice, in the moonscaped backyard of Sudbury I rode my tricycle into delirium as a soldier of Christ. My religion chimerical – the giant Christopher fording the river; the first beast a lion, the second a winged cow; the pale horsemen, the blackened sun, the red moon. I often dream of bears, the first animal to be worshiped. My mother sprinkled holy water chanting Satan be gone. But I passed out in a dirty hotel searching for a single face I knew; a red-eyed Rottweiler guarded the door; I turned but couldn’t escape the foul air, the everyman sins of the father. My parents were gone, I returned to weeks of unanswered mail – we are sorry for your loss – bowed to my meal of barley and mead, the rough planks bleeding in the late summer sun. Ken Massicotte Ken Massicotte lives in Hamilton (The Hammer), Ontario. He has published in several journals, including: Wilderness House Literary Review, Gray Sparrow, Poetry Quarterly, Ginosko, Crack the Spine, Matador, Sleet, Easy Street and Grain. Living Room, 1948 This too is Andy Warhol.* Among the Brillo boxes and Campbell cans, dance-step diptych, Marilyn and Jackie, overcrowded and overlooked, a weighing of some sort of ragged truth, a Pittsburgh living room. Overstuffed sofa, tilted shades, rocker, brick fireplace with cross, maroon armchair and threadbare carpet- Oriental, by assimilation Czech, a picture of a certain immigrant America. In this room his father was laid out, dead from drinking coal-mine water. Here he played with paper dolls on the floor while his mother cradled her colostomy bag like a child. There’s no outdoors pictured through the windows. This was a boy whose skin flamed with chorea, whose limbs shook with St. Vitus’s dance, who prayed for beauty by osmosis. This was a man who dyed his shoes and painted each nail a different colour, who found in fame what he lacked for in love. Death lurked on the margins of this cluttered dusk. A shot glass shatters a mirror. Pared down and stripped, emptied of himself, this is how he prepared to enter the world, ready for his debut. Eliza Browning *Italicized quotations taken from "Andy Warhol in Eight Works" by Jerry Saltz. https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/andy-warhol-whitney-retrospective.html ) Eliza Browning is a student at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she studies English and art history. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in L'Ephemere Review, Doghouse Press and Vagabond City Lit, among others. She is a poetry editor for EX/POST Magazine and reads poetry for the COUNTERCLOCK Journal. General Curse Against One Who Has Tried to Harm You Fish will eat you and your yellow coyote eyes bubble to oyster jelly, your rank vermicelli hair will bolt straight up in terror on your death, death, deathbed (sinner don't wait until it's too late) and still I will not forgive you. You may have as many eyes as hairs on your head and fail to track the spell: what went around will come around, its foot will make no sound. No use to hide in seams where even a mole could not go. Darkness doesn't fall, it rises, milk you put to your lips boils red in your belly overnight. Back and front you'll suffer in an ape suit of hives, you're a silver skeleton walking, your marrow and bone shine. Margaret Benbow This poem first appeared in Star*Line. Margaret Benbow's work has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Triquarterly, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, and elsewhere. A first collection, Stalking Joy, won the Walt McDonald First Book award and was published by TTUP press. Need Not Greed The bike laid down by gingham, cod, a casual cloth, cool baby milk, the menu depends appetite or toddle by, just curious. So spot the dress, doze, headscarf, face, discarded ball, newspaper waste, quick drag, a cuddle, baby hug, slow swig from bottle, dummies, clasp. The stove for meths, pump paraffin - why not a thermos, all this fuss - our kettle, tea cups, where is brewed a mixed community at large. Fish from the Lakeside chippy, wrapt as heard the word declared on sward, started as food-share little lad, scraps from wee scrap who offered catch. Miracle hunger, battered, but it took one son to break the fast; he risked his all, his mother’s ire, a simple kindness multiplied. Is that a nappy on the grass, diaper maybe, foreign grass, or maybe, if today, a mask, what is uncovered in the son? This hear, is not magician’s trick, nor a white bunny from top hat; small portions from the global store, need not greed the steer achieved. Companions, eating chips on hill, food, friendship, altered, open air, for be, belong, believe if will - that’s what this picnic brings to us. Stephen Kingsnorth Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had over 170 pieces published by on-line poetry sites, including The Ekphrastic Review, printed journals and anthologies. https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/ Artemisia Note: an Italian Baroque painter, Artemisia is considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists. I have taken the morning to read about myself by reading about Artemisia Gentileschi, and the graveyards of airplanes in deserts, airplanes that still try to take off with any semblance of wind, and could Artemisia have sold herself on talent alone? yes absolutely yes but then talent is constrained in order to be whatever it is that turns the pages of history, of commerce, a woman is banished in her own way, it is unique to each of us, and I think of her paintings in museum stillness separated as they have been from her touch, four hundred years to think themselves over in the eyes of strangers remarking about the boldness of colour, the weight of shadow, and Artemisia never saw an airplane, at least not in the air, and since I have seen both: her paintings, the airplanes, does that make me someone who could explain anything? No; you see, when I take something in for the first time, I am an ancient single-celled thing, lust of senses, something of colour or form, lapis lazuli or second wing, as Artemisia said, never has anyone found in my paintings a repetition of invention, not even a single hand and in finding nothing else to relate this to, I turn to memory, which isn’t a thing at all but like a painting witnesses me where I stand and I lift a little from my shoes on that air, on that body. Hannah Larrabee Hannah Larrabee’s collection, Wonder Tissue, won the 2018 Airlie Press Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award. She has a new chapbook of epistolary poems to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin out from Nixes Mate Press. Hannah's written poetry for the James Webb Space Telescope program at NASA Goddard, and she'll be sailing around Svalbard in the Arctic Circle with artists and scientists in the fall of 2021. She reads for Bomb Cyclone, a journal of ecopoetics. hannahlarrabee.com |
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