No Clean Slate with Blood Let us start on a clean slate. A clean slate it will be. Will it? For whom? Victors? Losers? Departers? Anglers? Jigsaw puzzle of history’s spoils remains incomplete. Truth, and dare, and brinkmanship all consummating. A horrific orgy of breaths and breathing. Life. Death. Exhumed. Everyone is scattering us. Our emotions and beliefs, roots and futures, bones, and blood, longings and wants, family and friends. Petitions gone in hiding. Or lost. Or bon-fired. Pushing. Stampeding. Wedging. Transporting. Not knowing where we are going. Knowing only, we are grabbing for something that smells of freedom and preventing being grabbed by something that stenches of death. What will I write when the slate has been washed, blood has been mopped, tear streaks have dried, when screams and pleas have been chock-held, and drowned? Will I feel like writing then? When all I will remember is my innocent child’s life muffled. My parents left standing on a frenzied tarmac as the plane doors padlocked. I was the last allowed to board, huddled mask less next to strangers. My heart served on a privileged platter I did not bake, still pulsating like fish just out the water. Realize now why I don’t like eating meat and penance a few months every year. Why I don’t eat sea food at all. Crabs and lobsters thrown alive in boiling water. Stalks watching intently, petrified, yet proud with claw thumbs straight up in “I give a damn, karma doesn’t take too long”, as the last to be submerged. Scalded. My identity, your identity, your world, my world, were all moving in different speeds. Different directions. Different fissures. The Matrix was on replay, and dystopia-he was dragging utopia-she by her hair. Primitive societies were returning, hatched in laboratories of the gluttonous and bored in many Jurassic parks. And then, there was a union, a marriage of the senseless squabbles of mice and men. We became a speck on the messy roll of the film for the nightly news. Anita Nahal *The Matrix: A 1999 science fiction action film directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski *Jurassic: Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science fiction action film directed by Steven Spielberg This poem is from Anita's upcoming collection, Espresso Bar. Anita Nahal is an Indian American poet, flash fictionist, children’s writer and columnist. Anita has two books of poetry, one of flash fictions, four for children and three edited anthologies to her credit. Her third book of poetry is What’s wrong with us Kali women, by Kelsay Books, August 2021. Two of her books are prescribed in a course on multiculturalism and immigration at the University of the Utrecht, The Netherlands. Anita teaches at the University of the District of Columbia, Washington DC. Anita is the daughter of Sahitya Akademi award winning Indian novelist, Chaman Nahal and educationist, Sudarshna Nahal. Anita resides in the US with her son, daughter in law and golden doodle. More on her at: https://anitanahal.wixsite.com/anitanahal
0 Comments
Emiliano Zapata’s Eyes One hundred and two years after his death, Emiliano Zapata’s eyes stare out at me from a mural on a wall in Oaxaca de Juarez. Paint flakes away from paint, plaster separates from adobe, but Zapata’s eyes do not waver. Zapata himself did not waver in his lifelong struggle to bring land and liberty to Mexico’s peasants. For his forty years of devotion to justice, Zapata was jailed, conscripted, betrayed and, finally, one hundred and two years ago, assassinated. What have I done? I’ve lived five years longer than Zapata. I’ve signed petitions, I’ve worn t-shirts, I’ve made a few token donations. I’ve walked down a cobblestone street in Oaxaca de Juarez and snapped a picture. Many times since that day I’ve looked at the small screen of my iPhone, at the picture I took of the mural of Emiliano Zapata on a wall in Oaxaca de Juarez. Paint flakes away from paint, plaster separates from adobe, and time after time I have been unable to meet Emiliano Zapata’s eyes. Jim Latham Jim Latham lives and writes in Oaxaca. His stories have appeared in The Drabble, 50-Word Stories, Rue Scribe, Spillwords, and elsewhere. His flash fiction collection, Noon in Florida, is available on Amazon. Twitter: @jimlatham15 Dear Ekphrastic Family, Just a heads up that I am behind in quite a few things, such as the ekphrastic sex finalist announcements, coming soon, as well as submission responses, emails, and more. Although I am working, I am working much slower than usual. I had knee surgery recently and it has taken much more out of me than I was expecting. The pain and fatigue are challenging, and so are the appointments and tasks that will supposedly support the healing process! I have severe arthritis and another pain condition of unknown origin that have severely impacted my work and mobility in recent years. The hope is that this surgery will help restore me but at the moment it is a bit of an ordeal! So please be patient if things at Ekphrastic are behind, and know why. I am still working as possible on the journal, on writing and art, and on educating, but it is a snail's pace for now, sticking to essentials first. This is to be expected of course in this early stage. However, poetry, art and this community are restorative and meaningful to me and important parts of my life and day, every day, including this day. So here I am, just much slower for now! I had booked the Sunday Session with a two week berth of the surgery so that I would have something to look forward to. Our workshops are a great way to get creative for an afternoon and generative new story or poetry ideas, talk about art, share our work, and support each other. I may be a little worse for the wear but I'll be there! We will be checking out an assortment of images and delving into them, and I can't wait to share them with you. Join us! If you've never attended, our workshops are kind of like getting together in my living room and writing with old friends, looking at paintings. We have done some incredible creative work! love, Lorette Portrait of Harriet Since he asks, she’ll turn to him-- brother, painter-- though she longs to look away, to scan her book in hand. Her cheeks flush with what it takes. She feels her lips pressed close, latched gate to the interior. How strange to find oneself fifteen! This volume may yet tell her that thing she’ll recognize, then know what it is to occupy a self-- its darkness sleek and fitted, hers alone. It wracks her, to be only beloved, a daughter, in a rich house. And he-- he can tell her nothing. She won’t even ask. She won’t speak of the draft that tickles the snow slope of her shoulders as she quivers, imagining the passing of a hand that’s not yet there. Anne Myles Anne Myles is Professor Emerita at the University of Northern Iowa, where she specialized in early American literature. She recently received her MFA in poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in the North American Review, Split Rock Review, Whale Road Review, Lavender Review, and other journals. She lives in Waterloo, Iowa. To Step Inside His Mind “Immersive Van Gogh” is a 16,000 square foot installation on Pier 36, NYC. A 40-minute loop of 400 animated Van Gogh images plays in three adjoining spaces-- a moving mashup reflected on broad walls, floors, and dazzling mirror sculptures. Light bounces everywhere, including from visitors’ bodies and faces Dark entry corridor, black shiny floors, I’m handed a pillow, covered with a Van Gogh image, I kneel in the first gallery. A winged insect flies in, quivering alone on the tall wall, followed by innumerable swarms fluttering high and low, glittering on the mirror sculptures, buzzing on the black floor. Van Gogh appears on top of them with candles in his hat and swats; a shock of sunflowers takes over. All surfaces disappear into sheer colour: yellows, golds, tournesols, tournesols—the pure joy of sunflowers growing and shrinking, assembling and disassembling. Children run to catch the huge blooms, stamp them on the floor. Gone! And the music changes: orchestral plant-climbing music switches to Edith Piaf, her plaintiff vocals-- “Rien de rien, rien de rien. Non, je regrette rien.” Am I dizzy? Now we’re in sugar cane fields, triplets of rising harp notes, Japanese figures on bridges, kimonos. Nodding buds, bursting poppies. Two yellow butterflies alight on fields of red against a swath of pale blue sky. Van Gogh mutters, there is no blue without red and yellow, I move to the second gallery. The same loop of images plays again, yet I enter at a moment of nuns singing dirges, and in the third gallery, different moment in the loop, peasants chat in patois. Van Gogh’s self-portraits drop down the walls at intervals, sometimes upside down, his knowing eyes, his changing beard transforming everywhere. A train chugs through the village, people in the gallery echo clusters of folk in nearby wheat fields. Visitors take photos, selfies, we’re all part of the scene. Same scale, standing on the floor or toiling in the fields, A curtain of black spinning Rorschach blotches pull all colour to the floor. Now, moments of madness, light patches of lucidity. Blue clouds go crimson, Vincent howls behind barred windows while he paints version after version of Nuit Etoilée, His final commentary, ultimate vision—a starry night roils with melting aerolites, comets adrift. His purple is heaven and hell. Velvet violet-blue flowers snake the walls, the floors, the mirrors—tongues languishing-- I drown in Irises. Lee Woodman Immersive Van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch, 1880-1890 (A 360-degree art installation, by Director Massimiliano Siccardi, Set Designer David Korins, Composer Luca Longobardi. Exhibition appearing in many cities nationwide 2021) 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, Naugatuck River Review, and The Broadkill 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, Homescapes was published on May 22, 2020 by Finishing Line Press, and Lifescapes was just published by Kelsay Books on June 1, 2021. Artscapes will come out from Shanti Arts in late 2021. Purity: With an Asterisk Rubens and his writhing ganglion of drunken revelers. “The crowd is untruth,” wrote Kierkegaard. As for you: Remember that small, unfenced field and the cold stars above; everyone gathered around the keg, the stubby, silver barrel of veneration? Plastic cups of watery beer. High-school, hyena laughter. What were you doing there? Zola tells us of a farmer plowing in a dell in September 1870 while the Battle of Sedan raged close by. A consequential battle: the fall of Napoleon III, Prussian defeat of France, the Paris Commune. And the toxic seeds planted for future use. But the farmer plowed on, a Zen master who’d never heard of Zen. The man I still would be. So, I put my finger to the wind, and go the other way. Though, sometimes, I confess, I glance back over my shoulder. I, too, am not immune to the fear of missing out. Mike Dillon Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His most recent book is a chapbook, The Return, from Finishing Line Press (Spring 2021), and is editor of the recently released (Oct. 2021) Notes from the Garden: The Making of a Pacific Northwest Sanctuary, from Chatwin Books. He is a previous contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. Acrobats of History There is a new relativity, a condensed space in thickened air; sockets to balls, lines to curves, curves taking on new weight, anchoring where we use to swing and fly Taut, trained bodies find and climb with sideways faces looking for landing pads between broken lines Shows have closed but we know about limitation the bars are set both low and high. We try to wrap the tent in lights that won’t burn out, keep the lines secure to they can support again but the drums and horns commence a funerary rite so we play the angle needed to support a fall and watch the rigging melt the clown is on the wire; the fools have left the tent There are no nets; just hope in the shadows, we tumble sideways out of order -- how will they frame us, the acrobats of history? Rebecca Surmont Rebecca Surmont has Masters degrees in English and Leadership Consulting. She spent 15 years performing and teaching throughout the Midwest and makes her home in Minneapolis where she consults, coaches, and writes. Her work has been found in New Verse News, Silver Birch Press, The Southwest Journal and an anthology, Seasons, by Trolly Car Press. “An unfit representation of the man” It really was the hands, wasn’t it? After all the dissatisfied snorts from the esteemed committee of the Grand Army of the Republic, the grumbling about the flag dragging on the ground, the casual way Grant was laying aside his sword, the fact that Franklin Simmons managed to make a marble uniform look rumpled, and the lack of – what? – a dash of heroic stature; in the end, I suspect the hands sealed this statue’s fate. The gesture so human, so enigmatic. Not even a gesture - more a pre-gesture, someone trying to free a captured thought as if releasing a bird into the air. For me, the hands are a pathway into the mind of a man envisioning war’s end while beginning to grasp the cost. In fairness, the Grand Army leaders were no doubt fed up with way the South’s losing generals were praised for their strategic brilliance and military bearing, made romantic heroes in a lost cause, while their own blunt, whiskey-drinking generals were continually discounted - their tactics unsophisticated, their actions brutal, their bearing unchivalrous. It’s true, Grant showed little interest in the elegant maneuvering of troops on the battlefield - he knew Union victory would only come, could only come, from relentlessly battering the enemy with superior force until surrender. It’s not hard to imagine the Grand Army wanted to commission a reminder of who won and who surrendered. Simmons returned to his studio in Rome and sent back a new version – marble uniform pressed, knee-high cavalry boots that looked like something from The Three Musketeers, that enigmatic left hand now gripping a sword with determination and the now-empty right hand held innocuously at his side revealing nothing about the subject’s inner mental state. In other words, no longer brilliant, no longer human, no longer Grant. The new statue was installed in the U.S. Capitol while the rejected statue was remaindered to Maine – with those hands so hard to look away from and that bird still waiting to be freed. Robert Miner Robert Miner is a former political consultant who now works in government affairs in the energy industry. His poetry has appeared or soon will appear in The Ekphrastic Review, The Earth Journal, The Dewdrop and The Tanka Journal. Fall On Your Knees We met at the public library across a scratched wooden table. He asked “What are you reading?” At thirteen, I was thrilled to be noticed, particularly by a boy who looked old enough to be in college. When I told him Gentlemen’s Agreement he said: “I loved that book.” He held up his own volume, which was called, innocently enough, The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham. We discussed Maugham briefly, discovering that – not surprisingly – we were equally bookish. I had finished Of Human Bondage months before. “I liked the part about the Oriental rug,” I said that first time we spoke. The boy nodded. I realized (not then, later) he had no idea what I was talking about. I remembered that encounter – from 30 years ago -- when I read the indictment this morning. “She’s yours,” Mo said handing it to me. “Cassie Crane. A misdemeanor but sexy.” He meant “sexy” the way we use that term in the prosecutor’s office, signifying a good meaty case. That’s all we mean by it. I read on, wondering if I should say I didn’t want this one. Mo could give it to Rudy, with his beefy tattooed arms, who’s next in line. But I say nothing. “What are the two worlds of Mr. Maugham?” I asked that first day in the library, across the table from the boy in the reading room. The boy blushed deep red. “Britain and Tahiti.” He looked down. “And Samoa.” “That’s three worlds,” I said, trying to be clever. I was smart, but a fool. Either the librarian or someone else told us to shush, which ended the conversation. When I returned to the library three days later, I was relieved the boy wasn’t there. “It’s surprisingly popular,” the librarian said crisply, handing me the book after a short wait. I sat at the table, hoping to learn what secrets were in the book, what made the boy blush. It was the back cover, surely: a Gauguin painting that, the blurb explained, Maugham found and rescued from destruction in 1917. A golden-skinned bare-breasted girl, with pale puckered nipples, held a large green fruit. The painting was called Tahitian Eve in the Garden of Eden and the girl was Tahura, Gauguin’s “child mistress.” Three weeks after our first meeting, the boy and I were alone on the second floor, in the stacks. It was the fifth time I’d seen him at the library since we met. Always before, there’d been others around, always – until now – we were in the reading room. This was different, but not completely unexpected. “On your knees,” the boy commanded. I looked into his gray eyes, which I’d noticed the first time we spoke: the grayest eyes I’ve ever seen (even now, 30 years later), with thick dark lashes. “On your knees,” he said again, more softly than before. I was half-hoping he was kidding, half-not. In the three weeks since I met him I’d turned fourteen. He was three years older. I still remember the smell, of wet paper and metal; the day outside, which was rainy, the streets black and slick, the trees shrouded in moisture; and the floor I knelt on, which was not carpeted, but harsh, unyielding concrete. Most of all I remember his book and the painting on the book jacket that brought me to that moment – a moment that would be repeated throughout my adolescence, not just with him. After meeting with Mo, I go back to my office. The police report in United States v. Crane reads something like this: Crane entered the East Building, National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. She walked into Room 7 and stood before an oil painting by Paul Gauguin entitled “Two Tahitian Women” valued at an estimated 80 million dollars. Crane struck the painting with her right fist. Eighty million dollars. Imagine. Fact (discovered in the library when examining the boy’s book): Tahura not only looked my age, but looked rather like me, with scraggly black hair hanging past her shoulders, a soft chin, overlarge lower lip, and ears that were too small. Fact: Tahura was thirteen, same as me – although I would turn fourteen the next week. The author of The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham shared details about her. Gauguin “found” Tahura while riding horseback near Taravao. Her mother made her go with him and she ran away. He came for her again. When she misbehaved, he spanked her. When she fidgeted while he painted her, he slapped her. Gauguin described her as “a large child, slender, strong, of wonderful proportions...she gave herself to me ever more loving and docile . . .”. I hated that book, even then. Hated the author, hated Maugham and Gauguin, hated the grey-eyed boy for reading it, and for showing it to me. Hated the librarian for finding it on the shelf. Hated myself for how it made me feel, desire unfolding within me, an exotic, swollen bloom. Thirty years later, I am bound to uphold the Constitution, to pursue and bring offenders to justice. I read on in the indictment: “Subsequently, Crane was read her Miranda warning. Asked why she had tried to take the painting off the wall, Crane stated: ‘Gauguin is evil. He has nudity. He is bad for children.’ Crane vents her homophobia. She is obsessed with the two women in Gauguin’s painting. The Washington Post references her in “A Short History of Crazy Art Attacks.” But I have to wonder just how crazy she was. The painting she attacked wasn’t my portrait of Tahura. It was that picture that changed my life, not the same painting that roused Cassie Crane to fury. But still I understand her. I wanted to slash a Gauguin once, too. Nancy Ludmerer This story first appeared in Fiction Southeast, where it was a finalist in their 2016 Hell's Belles contest. Author's note: "The Gauguin painting that inspired the flash fiction was discovered on the glass door of a house in Tahiti and reproduced on the book jacket (back cover) of the first edition (1965) of Wilmon Menard's biography of Somerset Maugham, The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham. The door painting itself was discovered in 1917; the actual date it was painted seems to be unknown. (Photographed by Leonard Ross, Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Berma, Allentown, Pa.)" Nancy Ludmerer's fiction and flash fiction appear in Kenyon Review, New Orleans Review, Electric Literature, Mid-American Review, Grain, and Best Small Fictions 2016 (a River Styx prizewinner). In 2020, her stories won prizes from Carve, Masters Review, Pulp Literature, and Streetlight. She lives in NYC with her husband Malcolm and their recently-adopted 13-year-old cat, Joseph. Twitter: @nludmerer |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you. Join us on Facebook:
Tickled Pink Contest
May 2024
|