All That’s Left I wondered where the hell God was during the horror of my brother’s untimely death and why He allowed the Devil to rule the day dropping him from the blue sky by devils with horns and tails claws and giant bat wings one among the many hapless helpless mortals anguishing white moaning howling begging respite from their punishers. Sometimes I picture him as he was in hospice gaunt and pale except for the bruises he got from falling out of bed prefiguring his ultimate plunge down being caught in cold rocky crags there to be gnawed upon clawed mangled furtherharassed for all eternity perhaps. Whenever it rained we’d get water in the basement and dozens of shiny black water beetles appeared out of nowhere like Kerry’s cancer sent from Satan and we couldn’t stop them either. Michael Estabrook Michael Estabrook has been publishing his poetry in the small press since the 1980s. He has published over 30 collections, a recent one being Controlling Chaos: A Hybrid Poem (Atmosphere Press, 2022). Retired now writing more poems and working more outside, he just noticed two Cooper’s hawks staked out in the yard or rather above it which explains the nerve-wracked chipmunks. He lives in Acton, Massachusetts. https://michaelestabrook.org/
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After I get an MRI the plumber installs a new thermocouple He crouches on the cement in front of our water heater, twisting his head, flashlight clipped to his cap, with the afternoon settling into him. Who knows how many jobs he’s covered already, work truck plunging the streets of El Cerrito. He runs through the details like he’s training me to become a genius about metal-to-metal connection and I feel like I’m still in the machine. Earlier, in a medical room, they locked a cage on my head to steady, instructed shallow breaths and my body, pushed into the narrow vestibule where clicks made are not from a small wrench and the metallic chink chink clunk clunk reminded me of a rock concert where earplugs did nothing. And I gulped between tones, saw cubes of blue and green and a circular shape like Steven’s Mississippi, how his watercolored rounds combined with squares, each object unto itself but also part of something larger, and then, a hint of salmon and always flax, always rust. A way of seeing not possible for the ordinary. The results have come into the health portal but I’ll wait for the doctor, an expert just like the plumber who explains they make the unit this way so not just anyone can get in here, as he inserts the screws by hand, closing the access panel to the heater, then pushes the line aside navigating the industry that is his own, where close by, turrets safeguard a citadel and a light ignited will gift us. Is the heater popping, tapping, rumbling, he asks. No. Then he unwinds the new thermocouple, threads its copper coil through the opening. This magnetic beauty. And I wonder about the results of my test and whether I have a brain tumor and how long I have to live, or whether it’s nerves behind the ear like the doctor said. Laurel Benjamin Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work in Lily Poetry Review, Burningword, Eunoia, Glassworks, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fourth River. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon. At the Origin of the Source Propelled by fins and wings, my egg-shaped boat glides upstream along the A Place to Paddle River until we reach the flooded forest. Birds peek out of knot holes, watching. They’re looking for a savior. I stop at the hollow trunk, examine the pattern on its bark. My eyes travel up two steps, through a curved doorway, and into a small room. Though dim within, I see a modest goblet spilling water, water spouting and pouring in rivulets down the sides, onto the floor, across the distance to the door, and down the steps to be the river. The glass continues to fill and overflow. I reach to remove it from the three-legged table, the kind my grandmother had in her parlor, hewn from some dark wood as though that was wood’s purpose. Even lifted, the chalice contents continue to rise and overflow. The origin of its source, itself. I want to swim in it. Karen Neuberg Karen Neuberg writes poetry while drinking strong coffee in a room with windows overlooking trees. She has poems in numerous publications including Black Moon, Constellate Literary Journal, Nixes Mate Review, and Verse Daily and is he author of PURSUIT (Kelsay Books,) and the chapbook “the elephants are asking” (Glass Lyre Press). She is associate editor of First Literary Review-East and lives in Brooklyn, NY. In the Boat We were all happily surprised when our neighbor from the adjoining farm, Vladimir Ivanovich Beloglazov, knocked on our door one day, and said that his son Sergei wished to call on our eldest sister Elisabeth. Papa was against it because Elisabeth was, to be honest, a little homely, and mousy and reserved, and he thought she couldn’t handle another romantic disappointment, but Mama overruled him as usual, thinking that this might have been Elisabeth’s last chance to get a husband. Mama’s decision encouraged all of us. Until Elisabeth was married, none of the rest of us could be married. I never understood that convention, but that’s the way things were. Even though the potential beau was Sergei, a very quiet, awkward, and, we thought, a stupid, boring, and probably illiterate man, all of us agreed it was a good idea as Elisabeth deserved some kind of future outside the family. We knew she wanted to have children although she wasn’t even very good at dealing with us, her younger siblings. But she was twenty-two years old; she was running out of time. The following Saturday, Vladimir Ivanovich Beloglazov, his wife Elena Nikolaevna Beloglazova, and Sergei came to our house for dinner. Sergei didn’t talk very much. I don’t think Vladimir Ivanovich said anything except to compliment Mama on the dinner, and Elena Nikolaevna talked too much. I think she must have been nervous about this initial courting situation of her son and Elisabeth. My sisters giggled a lot, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. But it did end well. Sergei asked Mama and Papa if he could call on Elisabeth again. The next Friday, after Sergei had finished his farm work, and Elisabeth had finished knitting another jersey for the orphans in the village, Sergei came by the house for tea. Mama served them in the parlor. She stayed a few moments, whispered something to Elisabeth, then left the two of them alone. Mama shut the door and shooed us away from it, but we returned once Mama had gone. Over the next several minutes, we could hear only a few words and some indistinct sounds so we became bored and went away. Who knows what two non-conversationalists like Elisabeth and Sergei talked about for the next hour until Sergei went home. Late Tuesday night, after we were all in bed, I heard Elisabeth get up. I looked out the window and saw her walking down the road by the light of the moon toward the Beloglazov farm. She disappeared among the fir trees that lined the road. On Saturday afternoon, long before Sergei could have finished all his farm chores, he knocked on our front door. Elisabeth answered it and immediately they set off over our back fields toward the river. I could see that they didn’t exchange a single word. I didn’t understand this at all. I roused my sisters and we went outside to follow Elisabeth and Sergei. We crossed the fields and went through the woods that bordered the river. From there, we spied on them. They were sitting in our boat in the shade on the shore just down the river, anchored by our old milk urns. Elisabeth sat in the bow of the boast, looking at Sergei. Sergei was sitting in the middle of the boat, sideways to Elisabeth. He had a book in his hands. He was reading! He wasn’t even talking to Elisabeth, even though her attention on him was rapt. This was no path to romance. Oh, what a fool he was! What could he have been thinking? We made our way through the trees and shrubs and brambles down to the river’s edge. It was a mostly still day, and we could hear murmuring, but couldn’t make out what was being said. Gradually, the wind changed direction, and we could hear more clearly. The murmuring turned into words, and they were coming from Sergei. Elisabeth saw us, and nodded with the faintest of smiles. She looked back to Sergei and again seemed serious. Sergei turned to Elisabeth. He appeared apprehensive, but she smiled at him, and he seemed to relax. I think Elisabeth said, “Beautiful.” Sergei went back to his book, and we could hear him sound out the words, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Elisabeth looked at us again, winked, then lay back in the bow of the boat with the biggest smile I had ever seen. William Kitcher William Kitcher lives in Toronto and write in many genres – literary, humour, SF, noir, non-fiction, drama. "My stories have been published on all continents except South America and Antarctica but I have some good penguin connections, so I should be able to knock Antarctica off my list very soon." Jessie’s Egg (1895) Jessie’s blind grandmother taught her to crack an egg one-handed. Such a clumsy girl, she would chide, when Jessie’s eggs took two smacks against the side of the bowl, or three, and bits of brown shell floated amid the slippery white. How Grandmother knew they were there, Jessie couldn’t guess, but her long, burled fingers would search through the bowl, picking them out. Jessie’s grandmother was known for her angel food cake, high and light as air. Lately Jessie’s young arms provided some of that air, beating egg whites for what felt like hours. Jessie’s friend Susannah said eggs told fortunes, that you could see your future husband in the yolk, but she hadn’t said how. Would a firm round yolk mean a handsome man, or a dark yellow one a rich man? Would a thin, runny yolk mean a shiftless sort of fellow? Jessie had asked Susannah’s mother, and she said that was just an old wives’ tale, pure superstition, and what would the Reverend Mr. Phillips think? I don’t want to marry Mr. Phillips, Jessie said, and Susannah’s mother said she was a wicked girl, but she said it with a merry look on her pink-cheeked face. If wicked things didn’t bring a whipping, they were worth doing or saying. Sometimes, Jessie thought, if the wicked thing was fun enough, it was worth a whipping. An old wives’ tale, Jessie thought. Jessie’s father had fought for the Union in the war, marched with the other old soldiers in the Fourth of July parade. If he was old, Grandmother must be even older. Jessie had never dared ask her age, afraid she’d get a wooden spoon across her knuckles for impertinence. Impertinence was one of Jessie’s faults, and laziness and wastefulness and muzzle-headedness. There were so many. Jessie pictured her faults piling up in a coffee can, like the egg money Grandmother saved. Maybe Grandmother would know. Jessie’s grandmother was nothing if not old, and must have been a wife once, and so Jessie asked her, readying herself for a spoon-smack, but her grandmother’s laugh, high and strangely girlish, shocked her. Jessie heard the sound of splintering eggshell and saw Grandmother’s dripping fingers. “Child, look what you’ve made me do with your fool talk! Did you get that from the Scotch witch?” The “Scotch witch” was Jessie’s mother. “I’m not an egg, or a whisky,” Jessie’s mother would grumble, whenever Grandmother called her Scotch. She never corrected her on witch, and Jessie watched her mother carefully whenever she took up a broom to sweep, but Mother never flew away. If Jessie were a witch she would fly off in nothing flat. “Fetch me a towel,” Grandmother said now, “and don’t be so quick to look for a husband. You’ll have your whole long life to be a wife, but only a few years to run and play.” The egg Jessie had gathered warm that morning floated in pieces in the bowl, the yolk hopelessly broken, bits of shell mixed in with everything, and Jessie thought of that song her mother sang, about the lover who came back broken from a war: You’re a spineless, boneless, chickenless egg And you’ll have to be put with a bowl to beg O Johnny I hardly knew ye Some of the men her father marched with in the July parade had patched eyes or wooden legs. Would Jessie’s husband, too, march off to war? Would he come back—Jessie counted the blobs of broken yolk—in two, three, maybe even four pieces? She tried to nudge the yellow bits back together with her spoon but they wouldn’t stay. They chased themselves across the bowl, hiding like broody hens, until Grandmother’s swift fork whisked away all the husbands Jessie would have. Kathryn Kulpa Kathryn Kulpa is the author of Who's the Skirt? (Origami Poems Project), a micro-chapbook; Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus), a flash chapbook, and Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, forthcoming from New Rivers Press. Her stories have appeared in Five South, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. Kathryn is a librarian and a flash editor for Cleaver magazine. The character Jessie is based on her much-married great-grandmother, Jessie Sharp Drake Walker Willis Ethier, who also inspired the story "Jessie's Life in Three Surnames," published in New Flash Fiction Review. Kathryn has not yet found a photo of Jessie, but strongly suspects her of being a ginger. When I Saw the Mona Lisa Like ants at dusk processing in line, we finally enter the glass pyramid filled with treasures of paint and marble. The train to Paris delayed, I have only sixty minutes to rush through these hallways on this backpack-pilgrimage of my young adulthood to find her. Frantically scouring the guide to her home within these catacombs, a blur of people, paintings, and sculptures become peripheral color and light in my panicked tunnel-vision quest. I turn a corner, almost colliding with the security official. I see the crowd of craning necks and hear a mystical collective whisper of various languages as if in prayer. Without so much as brushing against anyone’s clothes, I weave my way through the throng of onlookers, like a cat perfectly navigating the rooftops of France. I find a perfect line of vision between narrow shoulders in order to gaze upon the woman I have traveled thousands of miles to meet. I hold my breath. Squint. She is so small, plain, thin-lipped. I exhale. Ashamed, I look down to the shoes that have traveled so far, but I feel her eyes on me as I am racked with guilt of disappointment and judgment. All the fame, theories, conspiracies, thefts, legends, lore, and expectations of this woman—who partially bears my name—come flooding through my being in a confusing cacophony of inner voices. Is she famous just for being famous? Just another reality-show socialite? Have I been caught in the celebrity hype that has been so carefully constructed to sell tickets to tourists? Have I, once again, committed the sin of worshipping a god that can never live up to my expectations? I shuffle sideways to see from a different angle and dare to look her in the eyes. They pierce through mine as arrows of light, burning into my retinas. All becomes sublime, suspended silence between us, as I have the sacred realization that I too, am small, plain, and thin-lipped. It is she who has always gazed upon us: without judgment, without disappointment. In her eyes, we are the masterpieces. Lisa Molina This work was first published in Sky Island Journal. Lisa Molina is an educator/writer in Austin, Texas. She has taught high school theater and English, and now works with high school students with special needs. She loves to share her passion for reading and writing with her students, and they especially enjoy ekphrastic writing. She is a “Best of the Net” nominee for her poem “Who You See,” published in Fahmidan Journal, and her digital chapbook “Don’t Fall in Love With Sisyphus,” published by Fahmidan Publishing, launched in February 2022. Her words can be found in numerous journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Beyond Words Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Neologism Poetry Journal. The art and poems of this week’s Throwback Thursday give readers a chance to slow down and reflect on all that is good in our hearts, dreams and memories. May your month be full of joy, warmth and solace! … Haiku, by Kitty Jospe A haiku for the season—full of depth and feeling. https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/haiku-by-kitty-jospe ** Laura Ann and Her Papaw Brumleve Eat Bean Soup, by Brian A. Salmons Like a childhood memory: “A meal square as quilts.” https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/laura-ann-and-her-papaw-brumleve-eat-bean-soup-by-brian-a-salmons ** The Old Towns, by Mark Danowsky A snowy landscape by John Folinsbee inspired this poem: “A tiered expanse to reflect on birth.” https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-old-towns-by-mark-danowsky ** Outside the Walls, by Ed Gold A poem like something out of a dream inspired by a beautiful painting by Linda Fantuzzo. https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/outside-the-walls-by-ed-gold ** why I didn’t marry the drummer, by Marjorie Maddox From the painting Jazz Elegy by Lorette C. Luzajic and from the first line to the last, this poem held me tight and lifted me up. https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/why-i-didnt-marry-the-drummer-by-marjorie-maddox ** Picasso’s Blue Guitarist, by Tricia Knoll I love this poem, especially this line: “She kept a bottle of Glenlivet under the skirts of her bed and wore cowboy boots.” https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/picassos-blue-guitarist-by-tricia-knoll ** Following the Light, by Julie L. Moore Like a summertime wish, this poem made me feel free and wide open. https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/following-the-light-by-julie-l-moore ** The Tie That Binds, by Charlie Rossiter Inspired by The Horizon by Rene Magritte: “I’m getting lost in the vastness” https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-tie-that-binds-by-charlie-rossiter There are almost eight years worth of writing at The Ekphrastic Review. With daily or more posts of poetry, fiction, and prose for most of that history, we have a wealth of talent to show off. We encourage readers to explore our archives by month and year in the sidebar. Click on a random selection and read through our history.
Our occasional Throwback Thursday feature highlights writing from our past, chosen on purpose or chosen randomly. We are grateful that Marjorie Robertson shares some favourites with us on a monthly basis. With her help, you'll get the chance to discover past contributors, work you missed, or responses to older ekphrastic challenges. Would you like to be a guest editor for a Throwback Thursday? Pick 10 or so favourite or random posts from the archives of The Ekphrastic Review. Use the format you see above: title, name of author, a sentence or two about your choice, or a pull quote line from the poem and story, and the link. Include a bio and if you wish, a note to readers about the Review, your relationship to the journal, ekphrastic writing in general, or any other relevant subject. Put THROWBACK THURSDAYS in the subject line and send to theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. Let's have some fun with this- along with your picks, send a vintage photo of yourself too! Modigliani's Women They're having no truck with obesity, no penchant for butties and buns, shunning burger bars, chocolate, and sugary drinks; they wear their good habits like nuns. They pound through the pool before breakfast, completing their customary lengths, spend hours at the gym, emerging so trim that they turn all their weakness to strength. Admiring each other's sleek outlines, in leggings and leotards dressed, they smooth down their minimal bulges and cover the rest with their vests. In the long afternoons they spend sitting with admirable calm and repose they nibble at fruit and at lettuce whilst the artist remodels their toes. Chosen for litheness and vigour, they take up their arduous pose and the artist himself, Amadeo, paints the girl that is wearing a rose. The hours they put in in the mornings once the pains in their muscles abate are worth all the strain and the struggle to the caryatid bearing the weight. As he sculpts and he smooths and he brushes his women are coming to light imbued with the artist's own vision of what makes a good woman look right. Julia Duke
This poem was first published at London Grip New Poetry. Julia Duke is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, inspired by the landscape and people of England, Wales and the Netherlands where she has made her home(s). She is a lover of nature and of artworks, of quirky ideas and connections of all kinds. Ekphrasis gives her the opportunity she needs to express her love of both art and storytelling. Her first poetry pamphlet Conversations was published in September 2021 by Dempsey & Windle. It takes a look at our successes and failures in the search for intimacy, including a number of ekphrastic poems to explore the theme. Crash My neighbour is mowing his lawn near a row of white and yellow-streaked tulips. He’s trying to avoid me. Which is weird. Normally he’s quite friendly. Maybe he senses I’ve been dreaming about his house. Some people are just intuitive like that. And now he fears I know about his lewd South Sea photos suspended in bubbles of cellophane on the second-floor’s northwest passage. That passage he’s been trying for years to find a way through as a short-cut to his bathroom. His special hush-hush project. Or maybe he feels just bad about never having me over, not once in twenty years, and now he’s put out knowing I’ve seen anyway his prized Mississippi Company’s commission of The Raft of the Medusa. Or the pieces of glittering Klondike Bar foil he sprinkles periodically on the basement floor, so he doesn’t fall down a two-mile shaft to a coal seam that stretches all the way to Scotland and peters out in Andalusia. Or how, sometimes, he goes up to the attic to tap morse into the void to contact aliens or to put on dresses and makeup. Or that tucked behind the gas chamber in the boiler room sits a shoe box made of butterfly wings sown in tears and magpie quills. Because, dear neighbour, remember how that magpie’s heart thumped like a jackhammer when you picked it up off the street? How it jerked a few times and then went still? Remember how you cried? How you hid it? Nothing to be ashamed about. Everyone has a bird in their life that never made it. And now, now that I’ve caught up and on to you, because you can’t escape me, I want to tell you, It doesn’t matter, the house, the bird, everything I know, because you’re there, at the vanishing point of oblivion, and it will all crash soon, maybe tomorrow. Because you’re like a train driver who can’t see the broken rail beyond the curve you’re turning into and I’m the hapless hiker on the mountain looking down on it all, pointing and screaming into the wind, too far away to be heard and seen. There’s a brief moment, where I think he looks up and sees me waving, where he could stop the train and things could be different. But then I see it’s all hopeless, because his feral eyes burn like a starving mountain lion’s begging me please, please tell me, tell me your house has all these secrets too, and I don’t know who says it first, but the words echo in the air, “Have a nice day,” and I walk past him. David Luntz Work is forthcoming or appeared in Pithead Chapel, Vestal Review, Reflex Press, Scrawl Place, Best Small Fictions (2021), trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit, Janus Lit, Fiction International, Orca Lit, and other print and online journals. https://twitter.com/luntz_david In Grandma Hale’s Painting, Which She Gave Me Nothing can keep the white farmhouse from floating in moonlit smoke from a black locomotive. The molten orange field in an invisible sun whose gold haystacks can't stop glowing. The sun, the moon, a brother and sister, two black-and-white cows-- near one's nose, a bee almost big as the incredulous bonnet our Grandma’s cousin Millie wore in the asylum on Long Island. I never wanted children, our Mom told me. Oh white triangle of fruit trees, oh red barn roof. Say what you want about the Jews-- they make good family men, said Grandma. The place inside the barn. Oh frozen cherry trees. Oh two white silos. Richard Widerkehr This poem first appeared at Open: A Journal of Arts & Letters. Richard Widerkehr’s fourth book of poems is Night Journey (Shanti Arts Press, 2022). At The Grace Cafe (Main Street Rag) came out in 2021. His work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Writer’s Almanac, Atlanta Review, and over 50 others He won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review and enjoys singing and playing guitar. |
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