Ekphrastic Writing Responses: Andy Warhol

Tomato Soup, by Andy Warhol (USA) 1962

​Canned Soup on Sundays

In the crumb-swept corner of the top drawer, a tin opener. Mum digs it out, placing it over the first can’s shining rim; then her strong stabs pierce metal. As she jabs and heaves, she takes care not to catch her fingertips on jagged cut edges; she works her way around slowly until the lid is pushed back to reveal today’s offering. One shake and a mass of cold soup belches into an aluminium pan. She repeats this process with the second can. Now, Mum’s moment; into each emptied tin, she pours a stream of creamy top-of-the-milk to give that dash of luxury. With a skilled swirl, she turns the milk pale pink, adds water from the cold tap, then tips it all into the saucepan. Straightaway, each can, with its lethal lid tucked inside, is swilled under the tap. The can labels soften, shred, hang loose before the containers are thrown in the dustbin.  Mum now switches on the electric plate, picks up a metal spoon, stirs. Her fingertips hardened to burns and splashes, she whirls her spoon until she spots bubbling. Time for the turning off, the slow dishing out. Steam rises across our blue Formica tabletop as we take our places; Mum at one end, Grandpa at the other; Dad sits facing me, my big sister by my side. We pause and stare at this Sunday’s blood-red potion, not thinking to add any croutons, not dreaming to throw in a leaf of basil: this is Britain in 1962. Instead, we bow heads, say grace. Only afterwards do we reach for sliced brown bread, buttered up to the four corners with hard margarine from a fridge in need of defrosting. Bread folded, we dip, dunk, sip, swallow, each taking comfort in the cloying sweetness of sugared tomatoes. This is a family ritual, silent except for the odd splutter or nose-wipe or Grandpa’s steady cough. Though all around us, there’s canned music: from the transistor radio, Russ Conway plays jolly tunes like "Side Saddle" and afterwards Elvis will belt out "Jailhouse Rock." In between tracks, the lady with the sing-song voice on Two-Way Family Favourites will send notes of love and longing out into the world. Somewhere in New York, an artist I have not yet heard of is turning a tin of condensed soup into Art. Outside our window, Ayrshire cows, in a field across the yard, stand by a stone trough and gaze in at this exhibition of Sunday dinner while we clear away our scraped bowls, ready to tuck into today’s joint of freshly roasted beef.     

Dorothy Burrows

Dorothy Burrows enjoys writing poetry, flash fiction and short plays. This year her poetry has appeared on various websites including The Ekphrastic Review. She tweets @rambling_dot

**

In the Soup
 
Hey – shopworn image! Just say what you mean, 
your fame aside, regarding our consumption 
of life as if right out of a tin can; 
I pause only to spoon some water in. 
 
You don't prep Campbell’s Soup that way, I’m told. 
(“Read the instructions, dude.”) Life isn’t offered 
free of complications. It is best served stirred 
with love and a hunk or two of honest bread. 
 
You’re now worth so much more to us than this. 
And a wall of Warhols might as well be priceless, 
the hand-stamped flavours of their canvases 
fed only to those tasteless heirs of Croesus. 
 
The kitchen sighs: “Regarding mass production . . .” 
But even that provides no satisfaction. 

Michael Caines

Michael Caines was longlisted for this year's National Poetry Competition. 

**

Tomato Soup
 
Jersey tomatoes brewed in Camden where Whitman died 
not far from the wharf across the Delaware from Philadelphia.
We all ended up across the river, left the smog and factories 
for shorelines by way of the Black Horse Pike. I was raised
where tomatoes grew in towns with names like Vineland.                                       
 
First winter on my own, I worked in the back room keeping
books for Atlantic Tobacco Company, carried a thermos
for lunch filled with what I called Whitman’s soup heated 
by a stove along with the rest of the cold water flat, drove 
across bridges between inlets to get to the place to watch 
 
waves slam against jetties and wrote, enamored by my daily 
life as Whitman must have been by the part of Camden 
where he lived no one thought a good idea. It was cheap 
and it was his own and still stands in defiance of fire codes. 
I did not know then that rough was good for poetry, but he did. 
 
Kyle Laws
 
Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence coauthored with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Net, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

**
​
Condensed:
the Man and his Can
 
portable potable heatable 
eatable lickable lovable 
paintable notable
 
iconic sardonic platonic 
erotic demotic hypnotic 
exotic neurotic
 
ambitious capricious 
nutritious delicious 
judicious auspicious
 
blood red inside
something to hide
 
Claudia Court
 
Claudia Court has had work published in several magazines and anthologies, and has won a number of competitions. Her debut collection, How to Punctuate a Silence, was published in July by Dempsey and Windle.

​**

Surreal Ideas on Tomato Soup

Images:
broken mirrors
falling into her mouth;
like decayed soup,
like filtered coffee,    Turkish? Caffeine grits 
like tools beaten into the sod.

Tablets:
a theatre of soul
dependent on each other;
like children soft of love,
like balanced seagulls,
like fools playing in the sand.

Poison:
condensed and dripping
gathered for a spring hunt;
like thoughts tattoo’d to eyes,
like campbell’s books on fire,
like a queen starving her mind. 

All this and more serve 
to remind us of the fragility
that comes with opening;

all this and more serve
the breakfast to a hungry
belly of confusion;

all this and more serve
us with soul and tomato, 
partied with champagne and tears.
​
Zac Thraves

Zac Thraves lives in Kent, UK and writes for pleasure as much as for a living. He has created an online course using the arts to overcome anxiety and depression and has written a book about his own struggles. All his books are available on Amazon. Poetry is a passion, and most of his poems are safely kept hidden away; this wonderful website offers an opportunity to share his work with others. Zac appreciates the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, H.R. Hays, Steven Spielberg and Vic Reeves. He plays guitar, badly.

**

A Splurge of Soup
 
Shoulder to shoulder with MoMA elite,
my reward a glimpse of iconic-red-can,
60s typeset printed on brain like
tangerine trees and marmalade skies,
four thousand holes in Blackburn,
Lancashire, I never quite got to the bottom of.
 
I ease my way through foreground-throng,
eyes clamped tight on jaws of steel,
the oh-so-slow-prise-and-peel of lid
and the happy release of memory,
that taste of comfort slick on spoon.
 
November-flu, the ache of limbs,
the swallow, trickle of slip-slide soup
skidding on tongue, the rasp of throat,
tomato-tang absorbed in quilt
lovingly tucked around sofa-edge.
 
Through Warhol’s soul I see much more.
A container of change, challenge,
the churn and thrum of metal drum
packed with explosive 60s beat,
a metronome set to alarming pulse.
 
I listen to Dylan, the throaty blues
of pocket-harmonica blowing in the wind,
to Marilyn’s gift to JFK sewn into skin
of sequin-cream dripping with scandal,
to the rising breath of the Berlin Wall.
 
Lyrics mad as yellow-matter-custard,
tangle with Twister in ribbons of laughter,
TV screens crazed in a flicker of Flintstones
and Marvel comic-men scramble skyscrapers
high as the girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
 
I wore it well, my private revolution
all psychedelic flares, symbols of peace
strung from neck on beads of hope,
Mandela resolve like space-age steel,
exhibited now in a splurge of soup.
 
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 @Kateyoung12poet.

**

Labels for Education - 1996

I sit cross-legged on the living room carpet
armed with a pair of scissors
trimming the edges of Campbell
soup labels. Tomato. Chicken Noodle.
Chicken & Stars. Minestrone. 
The odd Pepper Pot or Cream of Shrimp.
Stack and tie in lots of 100.

Move on to the Chunky soups.
The Spaghetti-Os. The V-8 juice.
Bag the Vlasic pickle lids.
The UPC codes cut from Goldfish
crackers, the snack of choice
in the back seat while on the way
to soccer or ballet or Scouts.

A boxful sent to Camden
can get our elementary school a new 
overhead projector, a bonus
in these days of tight budgets.
For me, a quiet gift of time
to our community, away from noisy
meetings and misunderstandings.

Joanne Corey

Joanne Corey wrote poetry as a child in rural New England and re-discovered her love of writing poetry in her fifties. She currently lives in Vestal, New York, where she participates with the Binghamton Poetry Project, Broome County Arts Council, and Grapevine Group. With the Boiler House Poets Collective, she has completed an (almost) annual residency week at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams since 2015. She blogs at topofjcsmind.wordpress.com.

**

To Andy Warhol Regarding Tomato Soup

You brought to canvas, brush, and oil
the masterworks of graphic toil
iconic as the mass appeal
of soup so long your daily meal

not drawn but from projection traced
as if on shelf so squarely faced
and filled from brilliant palette mixed
that kept beholder's mind affixed

to shades of metal seeming real,
and paper texture eye could feel,
and tiny flaws a master's hand
would put in place and understand

as fifteen minutes he became
in annals of artistic fame.

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."

**

Grilled Cheese
 
And tomato soup, such comfort foods
for a certain sort of suburban youth –
one in which I grew up absorbing
the grease, the acid, the Vitamin C,
cutting my finger on the jagged edge
of a tin can, the label winking
its two-tone logo, imprinting
Campbell’s! on my limbic system. 
On a fevered day, a lunch tray
in bed, served warmed up soup,
and toasted bread, felt like
love to my congested head.

Betsy Mars

Betsy Mars is a poet, photographer, and occasional small publisher. She founded Kingly Street Press and released her first anthology, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife, in October 2019. Her work has recently appeared in Verse Virtual, Sky Island, Muddy River Review, San Pedro River Review, Live Encounters, and Better Than Starbucks. Her chapbook, Alinea, was published by Picture Show Press in January 2019. In the Muddle of the Night, with Alan Walowitz, is coming soon from Arroyo Seco Press.

**

Labeled
 
Is this art, this iconic label?
Warhol-ian tradition, soup
daily for twenty years,
celebrated soup cans, displayed
with Marilyn and Brillo,
a cleaner brighter world,
Coca Cola, flowers and donuts, 
Elvis and Prince, label
of the famed tomato-red,
pile of peeled labels 
fiery -- incandescently,
lit a path from pantry
to school, from mother’s hand,
stirred with milk and butter 
at home and lunchrooms,
grilled cheese sandwich dunked 
in creamy tomato soup, warmed 
bellies, labeled as familiar,
Warhol-ian way to showcase,
branded among the famed dead,
ironically iconic, this art.
 
Julie A. Dickson

Julie A. Dickson is a poet and writer who loves tomato soup and grilled cheese on a chilly day, while writing poetry, curled up with her cat, watching autumn leaves fall. Her poetry appears in Poetry Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, The Avocet, The Harvard Press, and others. Dickson was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018 for her poem, The Sky Must Remember. Her books can be found on Amazon.

**

Comfort in Time of Covid
 
That red label: the visceral pull of it, 
knee-jerk (if that were possible)
in my solar plexus, remembering…
 
blankets pulled to my ears,
a wrap thrown round my shoulders 
under Granny’s eiderdown,
 
although I remember shivering,
not warmth, and my mother 
with creased brows bearing a tray
 
of lemon-barley water,
thermometer, and soup spoon,
a steaming bowl of tomato soup
 
so she could haul my fever down,
stem the infection, hydrate me 
with the only drinks
 
I wouldn’t run dizzy, dry-heave
into the bowl, weeping, 
shaking, teeth chattering.
 
Now that I’m the granny under the duvet,
Warhol’s soup speaks cans of warmth: 
red comfort in this time of Covid.
 
Lizzie Ballagher

Lizzie Ballagher has just finished her first full collection of poetry. Her work has been featured in a variety of magazines and webzines, including Words for the Wild, The Alchemy Spoon, Poetry on the Lake, and The Ekphrastic Review.  She blogs at  https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/

**

21 Thoughts on Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans
 
1. In my mind’s eye, it is always Tomato – a wall of Tomato soup. And I’m not the only one. As she read this piece, my partner exclaimed, “Wait - they aren’t all the same can of soup?” 
 
2. Although Warhol painted all 32 varieties of Campbell’s soup available in 1962, Tomato and Chicken Noodle have come to be the two associated with him. According to Vanity Fair, these are the two flavors most often left on his grave. 
 
3. In his original work of the 32 varieties, Tomato has moved around in placement, but for almost 15 years at MOMA, it occupied the most coveted memory place for those of us whose native languages read from left to right – the uppermost left corner. 
 
4. The reason given: it was the first variety introduced by Campbell in 1897.  
 
5. The reason not given: Warhol didn’t give any specific instructions for how the soups should be ordered. 
 
6. This is surprising: I had assumed an artist with the level of fame that Warhol had would care very much about how they were arranged. It’s not like he didn’t have time to issue the instructions – he lived long past the vaulting of “Soup Cans” to the highest heights of art fame.
 
7.  Is his blasé attitude towards the order of the soups yet another of Warhol’s critiques of mass production? 
 
8. What if this is Warhol’s gift to us – the freedom to make the order mean something for us, for our time? 
 
9. If anything, Pop Art is more relevant today. Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” was a predecessor of social media: he would have enthusiastically embraced such a democratizing of fame had he lived to see it. 
 
10. He would have been on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest before you were. 
 
11.  Should Campbell’s Soup Cans be static while our social media feeds grind out endless content? Who should be the gatekeeper of such an ongoing cultural memory? 
 
12. Tomato has had its day. 
 
13. I propose we diversify. 
 
14. Idea 1: What if we let Campbell’s Soup decide? This is the reality of America – where corporations are people, with the accompanying rights, but few of the responsibilities – corporations make decisions about our lives all the time, big and small. 
 
15. Remember: Campbell’s initial opposition to Warhol’s work dissolved quickly when they realized the marketing potential. They became his collaborator on a number of projects. Why not this one posthumously? 
 
16. Idea 2: What if they were alphabetical? Nothing says bureaucracy like an alphabetical list. Organized mass production!
 
17. Whether a person’s name is at the beginning of the alphabet or the end or somewhere in the middle, everyone has a story to tell about an alphabetical trauma - those liminal slippages of nomenclature: the misspellings, the cut-off given name, your picture placed last in the yearbook.
 
18. Idea 3: There’s always an Internet vote. Is the order of the panels of the most important piece of American Pop Art something too important for the Internet to decide? Warhol wouldn’t have thought so.
 
19. Yes, allowing people to vote on the internet gave us Boaty McBoatface as the name of a research submarine in the U.K. but hear me out: Warhol said that art should be for everyone, not just the wealthy or the elite or well educated. 
 
20. Campbell’s soup is something so ordinary as art that it became extraordinary. It was Warhol’s own lunch for 20 years. 
 
21. It was as close to “painting nothing” as he could fathom. On second thought, that we only see 1 soup when there are 32 would have pleased him.  

Marcy Erb
​
Marcy Erb is an artist and writer based in San Diego, California. When it's not desert camping season, she can be found posting art and poetry at marcyerb.com.

**

Talking to Andy
 
We have assembled our brand behind a wall of illusion.
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Marketing speaks in shapes and colors that disguise motivation.
Art is what you can get away with.
What remains to be bought or sold?
Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
What is perceived mutates until nothing exists.
Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me and there I am.  There’s nothing behind it.
The images have been transformed into a message without any substance.
I’m afraid if you look at a thing long enough it loses all its meaning.
The questions have been ignored until they can no longer be heard.
If you’re not trying to be real you don’t have to get it right.
The false truth follows you everywhere.
I used to think that everything was being funny but now I don’t know.  I mean, how can you tell?
 
Kerfe Roig

Author's note: Italics in poem are quotes from Andy Warhol.
 
Kerfe Roig is waiting out the pandemic in NYC.  You can see what she's up to at https://kblog.blog/ and the blog she does with her friend Nina https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/.

**
​
​Waiting For The Ghost of Andy Warhol    At The Whole Foods Store In Houston
                                                                                      
I can feel a portentious breeze today,    the air uneasy beneath the oaks,
sounds of cars and construction    carried from across the street

to this outdoor table where I'm drinking coffee    and wondering
about Warhol's platinum hair:    will it be disheveled when he gets here,

trying to find soup --  Campbell's Soup --   "Always a tomato in every can!"
To Warhol & Me, soup is lunch and poetry --    Pop culture, the arts,

and a history of soup    that begins when Napoleon sits down beside me.
He's in uniform --  green and white --    a leader of the Chausseurs a Cheval

de la Garde Imperiale.    He speaks in French --  Es-tu courant que j'ai offert
12,000 francs pour l'invention  --   nouveau, bien sur  --  conserver la soupe?

(So Soup once a day makes a Su-per You in 1795?    How time flies
when I'm eating soup!)    Suddenly Houston disappears, and I'm in Austin,

at my grandmother's house    where a ghostly vision of Napoleon,
who's followed me here,    leans down from his cheval  and accepts a recipient

(a jar) and a fat, ripe tomato from the hands of my grandmother   who looks tiny
beside him in an outdoor image featuring home grown tomato plants --    healthy,

red & green as a holiday in history....    & then he's gone, his Imperial Uniform
vanishing with his horse    and with her soup, colorful in a clear glass jar.

I'm left behind, disoriented by the pace of time --    225 years of soup
before Napoleon's unexpected appearance in the 21st Century --    a famous

revolutionary leader   sharing his love of soup with Andy Warhol....
who sits down across the table from me   and asks for Campbell's, his favorite.

It's getting close to lunch   and Andy wants his soup with a grilled cheese sandwich.
Looking at his ghostly transparency    (maybe it takes time for his viscera to fill in,

like the outline of his body in a kid's Pop Art coloring book)    his choice for lunch
makes me curious:    Will I be able to see him swallowing?   Esophageal

animation beneath his black and green checks    (tiny checks) of his synthetic shirt,
thin as the transparency of plastic wrapping    for a 21st Century gift package?

"Do you wear the same thing every day in the afterlife    & are there facilities
for laundry?"  (I picture commercial washing machines    in white, in an open-air

room filled with clouds, vibrating on Spin   and the rain-water rinse cycle --.)
Andy looks like a kid (didn't he always?)    and smiles, making little wrinkles

by his eyes and mouth, but he won't answer because he's changing;   is now wearing
a tie-dyed T-shirt exploding with colors --    red, hot pink, purple, ghostly green --

so I decide  I'll have to use yes and no questions    as a way to avoid telling him
that not all stores carry name brands   even those as good as Campbell's --

and how am I supposed to know which cheese he wants --    Cheddar?  American?
Velveeta?    Regal after Napoleon, I continue in italics, the first Campbell soup can

looked like The Knight of Comfort Food in shining silver   with contents named in gold...
Almost unable to take my eyes off his blinding Pop Aura   (plus the Peace Symbol

in the center of his T-shirt's rainbow-burst of color)   I question the truth of fiction --
or the fiction of truth -- as follows   (historically valid or invalid):   "Centuries after

Napoleon led his cherished Imperial Guard   his enfants ceris ('treasured children')
into a camp kitchen (location unknown)   at lunch time --  l'heure du dejeuner --

the Campbell Soup label embraced reality   by using a picture of 2 men in kitchen aprons
& tall, white French Chef's hats    hurrying into the label carrying produce  -- The Tomatoes! --

fresh from field  to kitchen..."   Andy nods, thinking of his iconic soup can label --
pure Americana, a giant among labels --   springing -- artistically -- from a personal

conglomeration of memories    20 years of opening a can of soup for lunch --
the soup can growing in size --    dejeuner growing --  until the 20 years of soup

unite in one huge symbol for Campbell's on canvas   soup transformed
in his "New Factory" in New York   the product of industry with a silver lining,

his fame in art.    So Andy, I say, to draw attention away from real food in case ghosts
lose their cool when they're ravenous   would you like to hear a soup story?

He nods.    But which one should I choose?   The Tale of the Vanishing Soup,
a family story contered around an empty soup can,    the can standing bravely

in front of condiments and outdated spices    above my mother's stove,
sometimes holding coins, sometimes messages   and once, a tooth gathered

from under my pillow by the Tooth Fairy?    Or a soup story from high school days
when I found out tomato was slang for a "hot" woman   (like Warhol's Marilyn Monroe)

and a friend  (considered "hot"; I never was)   wore a can of Campbell's Soup
she's constructed  with poster board and red paint   by shaping it around her body --

And didn't she look authentic, dressed for Halloween   attracting hungry spirits
when she came into the kitchen   wearing a picture of a tomato, the winning

ingredient for a Frenchman's famous recipe?   I tried to explain to my mother --
"winging it" with soup history --    why it was we needed the family car 

to go to a party:   Andy &  I were born before the Great Depression, days
when Americans stood in long lines at the doors of soup kitchens   praying

they'd survive the terms of wealthy politicians --    hours of waiting, with slim hope
and gnawing hunger   hands empty in their 'hobo' gloves --    And did artists,

I wanted to ask (restricted by the use of yes and no)   think to fill another
kind of emptiness, a blank canvas waiting for a future?    An antithesis

to tradition with radical change visually interpreted   by psychedelic explosions
of color in the turbulent 60's    and a Pop interpretation of Campbell's,

honoring soup, daily and good & ordinary    standing alone, a giant-size label
(art on Warhol's canvas) now transformed to my story    with Andy Warhol listening

as a new personality enters --  red lips and a platinum wig --    wearing a picture
of Campbell's Soup, "canning" herself    a tomato in a Frenchman's famous recipe.


I hear the clink of coins    in my mother's kitchen "savings account" --
would there be enough coins --    coins = gas, gas=miles, to get to the party?

                                                                                                   Napoleon re-enters

nearing the end of my 'ghost' story   featuring tomatoes as it winds down --
part of a wacky historic climax    (all ingredients of the story coming into the kitchen

for a curtain call)    with two teenagers about to be out of gas on their way
to a denouement    as Napoleon Bonaparte  lifts a silver soup ladle, sharing soup

with Andy Warhol in my mother's 1960's kitchen;  & at the very same time,
I'm at a win-win lunch at The Whole Foods Store in Houston   a happy ending

for me & the ghost of Andy Warhol    sharing Pop Art & Campbell's Soup

                                                                  on Zoom --  in my uncensored vision,

                                                                                         The Tomato Girl Blooms

Laurie Newendorp

Laurie Newendorp enjoys hot tomato soup with crackers, and believes that the"pop top" can is the greatest invention in the evolution of canning, glass to metal, the art of savoring "safe soup," its comforting taste prepared without  a handheld can opener, the can jimmied open with a threatening, weapon-like arm, or blade, a kitchen tool fighting to win in The Battle of The Lid.

**

Story of Us

Childhood was the big, white carpet in your parents’ living room; 
Adolescence the tomato soup on the couch. 
Young adulthood was spilled everywhere; 
Middle age the paper towels and cold water––
Nervous scrubbing, we got the stain out. 
 
A red carpet now sits in our living room: 
a testament to where we began. 
Old age is a flipbook; 
You, my dear, are the centre of every slide. 

Love tastes just like Campbell’s. ​

Niko Malouf

Niko Malouf: "As a teenager living in Los Angeles, I enjoy writing about the things that surround me, stimulate me, the events of my adolescence as well as the happenings of the world. I hope to share my experiences and perspective with others and inspire them to do the same."

**

Home for Lunch… 
 
Sliced Italian salami  
Delicately placed between two pale leaves of iceberg lettuce. 
A tranche of juicy red tomato, 
Lovingly arranged 
On soft, fresh challah bread  
Lathered with Miracle Whip dressing and a hint of French’s mustard. 
Campbell’s condensed tomato soup 
Hot, thickened with whole milk  
Served in a small porcelain white bowl. 
Salted soda crackers crushed,                                          
Mottling the soup. 
Devoured in minutes. 
Savoured for years. 

Ellie Klaus

Ellie Klaus was born and raised in Montreal. She has lived different selves over several decades: daughter, wildlife biology graduate, vision quest traveler, family life educator, president (of her son's school committee), friend, confidante, lover, wife, mother, caregiver and now caregivee, if there is such a word. Each has contributed to a different perspective of living, of life. The pieces of the puzzle are evident and coming together, although the final image is yet to be revealed.  So, writing has reemerged as a creative endeavor to release some of the angst that arises from living a confined life, or any life for that matter. She has a poem entitled "Bones" that appears on NationalPoetryMonth.ca April 9, 2020 and poems published in The Ekphrastic Review.

**
​
​Dandy Warhol
 
1. I watch you watch him sleeping. Not for the full film- I am fading to flicker long before your patience gave out on the camera. Possibly the slowest cinema in history. You thought it would be ridiculous to have long movies about nothing, six hours of footage of your friend fast asleep. He might turn or stir but mostly he’s just breathing. I hesitate to read too much into it, but can’t help wondering if there’s something more there after all. As if you wanted to witness the unseen, see what we usually sleep through. 
 
2. We have come a long way to find you, Andy. Drove all the way down to Pittsburgh, winding past manicured American churchyards, tidy and quaint gardens with old graves and corny little plaques or statues of the stars and stripes, or big bums. 
 
3.We stop at the outskirts in the kind of grimy little diner of our dreams, order grilled Cheez Whiz on Wonder Bread, and a bowl of steaming tomato soup. 
 
4. Some said you were celibate. That you never had love. That no one ever wanted you that way. 
 
5. No one, that is, except God. You went to meet him, clandestine, most days, kneeling in a stone cathedral and basking in the beauty. Mass wasn’t everything- you wore a scapular, served soup to the homeless with a mission. I picture you small and naked without your white wig, feigning slumber when I peek in, surrounded by a thousand glow in the dark plastic virgins.
 
6. Others say you started the whole virgin rumour yourself to make sure people never stopped guessing, or talking. 
 
5. I wander through the warehouse, through the mad-dashed factory of mass manufactured originals, soup tins, daisies, dollar signs, Marilyn, Mickey Mouse, bananas. 
 
7. The greatest paintings on all seven floors of the Andy Warhol museum are the guns. Red and black, black and white, pink and red and white and black. The revolving revolvers. You made them after you took a bullet for all men. It shattered your spleen and you had to keep your innards from spilling out from that day forward. The woman who popped that bullet was a terrorist: she wanted to kill the patriarchy, believed we must eradicate all men. Fey and fizzy, awkward, and eternally bewildered, you were an unlikely target for her scorn. You turned to the second amendment to defend yourself from the accusations at the heart of her almost murder, brought in your metaphorical big guns, endless wall wide screen-silks outlining her death wish. Grim, but even so, triumphant, in peaceful protest, how you rose from the dead to defy her. Each barrel your giant middle finger. 
 
7. But I love the cats most. Tabby after tabby. Green, red, freckled. Blue and orange. Orange and blue.
 
7. Your tomb is among a small sprinkle of stones on a sunny hillside at the side of the highway. You have been covered in dahlias, clam chowder, a teddy, and a plastic bottle of holy water.
 
8. No one knows where to find you. Before we finally get there, we asked a man watering his lawn a block away from where you were at rest. Who? he asked. Andrew Warhol? How do you spell that?
 
9. Your city is a thousand bridges, and old gargoyle churches transplanted from Transylvania. Where your kin was knit. Landed before American steel was thrown into the soup. The city of steel, of concrete, cranes, and stained-glass windows
 
10. The museum is grand and austere, missing the frantic speedy frenzy of the freaks you found were friends. It all feels like some sort of epic parody, except for the kicker at the core. That you were the real deal, the coolest one among them.
 
11.  How did you do it? How did you command the bold and the beautiful and all their millions? You and your tooth-shorn stubby fingers, your pasty pallor and Einstein wig. You and your golly-whiz gees. You polish your specs on the loose pockets of your gabardine slacks, slide them back up to your pale beady blues along a greasy cushion of nose. Golly, oh, really? Oh, Gosh, I don’t know, you admit, lisping a little. Sip your Coke and shrug.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic
 
Lorette C. Luzajic is an internationally collected collage artist and a widely published writer. Her latest book, Pretty Time Machine, is a collection of ekphrastic prose poems. She recently won first place in a flash fiction contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly. Works are forthcoming in Bright Flash Literary Review, Club Plum Journal,and Voice and Verse (Hong Kong). She has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, twice for Best of the Net, and has had poetry translated into Urdu. Lorette is the editor of The Ekphrastic Review, one of the few journals in the world devoted entirely to writing inspired by visual art.