Ekphrastic Writing Responses: Joaquin Torres Garcia

Pintura, by Joaquin Torres Garcia (Uruguay) 1928

To Joaquin Torres Garcia Regarding Pintura As Your Call To Constructivism Was Nearing...

Your fleeting dream  --   art undefined
by label someone else designed  --
I daresay you had here achieved
in Paris real and yet perceived

as absent depth in flattened view
with somber, planar beings who
appear collaged to stagnant scene,
each by the others never seen,

of flesh and clothing indistinct
unclearly to your purpose linked
unless, perhaps, to have us see
that urban anonymity

is, rather than the blessing, curse
of being polar and diverse.

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 Longings of a Separate Self
 
Leaving the tabac 
from an innocuous errand
taken up at perhaps an odd hour.
Who can predict when ordinary needs
for a stamp,
a smoke, a lotto ticket,
a magazine, or even
a small candy, will strike. 
Walking back home I see her,
at her usual night time sentry post,
woman in red, whore of the night,
temptation.
One side of me sees her
as an expense my soul cannot afford,
yet, a part of me wants to stop
to discover the exotic
revel in her flame, bring
flash of colour into my drab life.
Only part of me wants this—I think--
at least for now.

Joan Leotta

Joan Leotta is a frequent contributer to The Ekphrastic Review. She loves writing ekphrastic poetry and other forms. She also writes essays, newspaper and magazine articles, short fiction, books, and even a play. Her blog, joanleottarecipes.com, offers recipes for dishes mentioned in the Inspector Montalbano mystery series. In addition, she performs tales of food, fmaily, and strong women. In the fall, she will debut her one woman show, Louisa May Alcott, Civil War Nurse.

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Abstract Man
 
Ten years before Tradition of the Abstract Man
he paints two men in contrast, one light, one dark,
a tobacco sign above, and a woman beside 
the image of a pool parlor. 
 
He’s in Paris, was in New York, and city life influences
a mind full of signs and symbols, arrows and buildings,
letters in Spanish with the simple title Painting
reserving complexity for handmade books, 
 
taking commerce into art the way a banner of a bare 
Coppertone behind is pulled by a twin-engine plane 
along beaches over and over in poems 
about my youth. 
 
This painting is in motion, different than Nighthawks, 
that scene of Edward Hopper that came later, 
the tension of men and women created in a garden 
brought to the city by a revolution industrial. 
 
There is darkness under the streetlights.        
 
Kyle Laws

Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community 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 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, 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.
  
**

Waiting
 
She is not quite refined
She is not quite a trollop
Unchaperoned she finds herself in a place she ought 
       not to be
 
              The café has closed,
              where will she go?

Carole Mertz

Carole Mertz has reviewed poetry collections at Main Street Rag, Eclectica, Copperfield Review, The Compulsive Reader, and elsewhere. She finds ekphrastics among the most enjoyable approaches. Carole plays piano, paints, and rides a bike in Parma, Ohio, where she resides with her husband.

**

Three Stanzas Standing on the Sidewalk

Contrasts begin this monochrome world.
A canvas: paint.
black man red woman white man
addicted to preconception
like the first man who counted his money
in hieroglyphics from beyond the grave
or the hand reaching in its pocket
for cigarettes.

A canvas: paint.
The woman waits.
The streetlamp is concrete, not giving
anything to the progression beneath
which is as natural as 6 following 5
in any nameless café or the insatiable need 
to define with words and colours.

Emerging from the threshold
the white man’s eyes receive the street, his gaze
my gaze, a canvas painted,
his feet elevated, his coat armoured
against the wind in a way
the blankness cannot defend.

Wilson Taylor

Wilson Taylor is a poet living in New York City. Most recently his work landed in The Merrimack Review; all of his writing can be found online at wilsontaylorwrites.wordpress.com.

**

So Close But So Far Away
 
Five before seven
most every Monday thru Friday
come wet or dry
cold or warm
in the dark or in light,
the lady in red
and the man in black
stand next me in line
awaiting to breakfast
at Café de Pintura.

We don’t say a word
avoiding eye to eye contact
observe passing traffic
growling autos
silent cycles
and early morning joggers
as fluorescents glow white
while glancing at our watches
to listen for the door unlock
promptly on seven.

I don’t know the duo’s names
wouldn’t recognise them on the Metro
have no idea of their back stories
or the apartments they call home
though often wonder
or imagine
who they are
where they work
whether they are in love
or if they have been hurt.

But for now we social distance
keeping so far apart
he wears a white face mask
she wraps round a silk scarf, red
as we order our breakfast
at Café de Pintura
with doors bolted shut for
“Only Window Service”
displayed in three tongues.

Alun Robert

Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical verse. Of late, he has achieved success in poetry competitions and featured in international literary magazines, anthologies and on the web. He particularly enjoys ekphrastic challenges. In 2019, he was a Featured Writer of the Federation of Writers Scotland.

**

Our City

The sirens,
melodic, jarring, 
broke through our dreams,
warned of early rising waters, 
brown, shadowed, sent
damp- raw tobacco scents 
to steam up the yellowing papered walls
in our rooms. The cafe’s windows, low, grey,
later framed us as we shelled cranberry and runner beans,
their pearly pigments pouring rich 
over beige ceramic platters at our meagre,
common meals. There was the aromatic blend 
of pecans, cinnamon, of car fumes and loud voices
drifting through each time the cafe’s front doors shifted.
Sometimes, a round of silences surrounding
the negative spaces and solitary streetlamp along our stretch 
of the rue Saint-Honoré floated in. We snuck cupfuls 
of blended orange aperitif, were warmed enough 
to enlighten our shaded shadowed 
sorrowful souls with the hope that we might again meet one day 
momentarily under 
another crested awning
in our beloved city. May that moment be
a promise of healing,
redemption, and not 
just merely
a shifting perspective
from another dream.

J. Adams Lagana

J. Adams Lagana’s poetry has previously appeared in Atlanta Review, Naugatuck River Review, the Paterson Literary Review, and others. She is the co-editor of River Heron Review and resides with her family in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.   jlagana.com

**

Meeting at Night
                     after Eavan Boland


A packet of cigarettes to sit snug in the pocket.

(This on a monochrome stroll towards that café.
In the Marais.)

She’s there, they see, under the awning. Burnt up.
A flare of paint.

Their talk turns to where they’re going. This trio. What 
route they should take.

Her question is which of these two to trust, given
their black-or-whiteness. All’s even.

So go nowhere. Stay right here. Watch the night disappear
and speak rarely:

all buy drinks. An impasse. Laughter in the bars. And
in the past.

Michael Caines

Michael Caines was longlisted for this year's National Poetry Competition and highly commended in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly competition for winter 2019
​
**

Invitation Returned 
 
I.  Dear Joaquin 
 
Your building blocks of another world
Reflect my someone-else-ness
Would that I knew your Montevideo, Catalan,
shared visits through Barcelona,
that I could see what you have seen, 
paint with words what colours speak.
 
II. Thank you 
 
Simplified bare but not barren
I  long for green, the verdant you left out.
Insistent hues wrap the world 
like brown paper packages 
tied up with pedestrian stares. 
I feel your challenge to wander
the streets I once enjoyed.
 
III. Saludos, Goodbye
 
You tell me to move but let the eyes linger.
Stop among the billiards, 
step out of the rain.
Dance the city but don’t let it show 
We know you know,
you know we see
the places we would rather be.

K. M. Huber

 K. M. Huber’s work is coloured by growing up in the USA’s Pacific Northwest, a decade in NYC, and many years living in South America. Her stories and poems have appeared in Earth Island Journal, Diner, McGuffin, Post Road, Pydras Review and ViceVersa among others. She has recently moved to Tennessee with her Peruvian husband and her novel of sixth-century Nazca is looking for a home.  

**


Picture Problem
 
In math terms
It is easy
1+1+1
Or 2+1
Or 1+2
Think of it
As a word problem
In this word problem
There is a 1926 DeSoto Sedan
The seating could happily seat
Three across the front
One of the three or
Each one of the three
Could take turns driving
Or, if it is a long journey,
One driving, one passenger front, one seated behind
Or at a passionate rest stop
Three across the back
If the journey
Is as long and as difficult
As love often is
There is room for
One or two
In the trunk
Remember some one
must drive the getaway

John Stickney

John Stickney is a poet and writer originally from Cleveland, Ohio, now living in the Wilmington NC area.​

**

Three Cherita and Cherita Terbalik Poems in response to Joaquin Torres Garcia

1. Remember when we were
all coffee grounds
on a Saturday night

made more bitter
clumped together

scatter spent by dawn?

2. She knew a door
for what it was–

not portal but promise.

In the street sign spotlight
her winning smile
(never mind fingers crossed).

3. Midnight puddles shine

solid gold cufflinks, 
princess cuts–

How I miss the simple
business of buttons
doing their duty!

Emily Reid Green

Emily Reid Green's poetry has appeared in various publications, including: Gravel, Khroma Magazine, 1932 Quarterly, Moon Magazine, and The Ekphrastic Review. Her first chapbook Still Speak was published earlier this year by Writing Knights Press. She has also been a sponsored poet with Tiferet Journal and their annual poem-a-thon. Emily lives in Toledo, Ohio with her family.

**

56 Café Lima, Peru

Lima, Peru, 
antipodean to
Bangkok, Thailand.
Lima. Gentle girls.
Invisible.
They find you.
Mi amor. Mi rey.
Want to be happy?
 
A tunnel would be leading
from Lima’s Plaza de Armas
down, down, baja,

straight to Bangkok,
 
to Pat Phong and the girl
who can blow
smoke rings down under.
Dollars, dollars. 
Want to be happy?
 
In America everything
so big, no? 
Oh my! H̄ıỵ̀ !

Rose Mary Boehm

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and Tangents, a full-length poetry collection published in the UK in 2011, She’s three times winner of the Goodreads monthly competition. Recent poetry collections: From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939-1949: A Child’s Journey, and Peru Blues or Lady Gaga Won’t Be Back. Her latest full-length poetry MS, The Rain Girl, will be published by Chaffinch Press in 2020.

**


Obituaries

The language of death
is forbidden.
The language of dying
is swallowed
like a sword,
the inside bleeding,
the inside covered 
with prayers--all 
the silence entombed
in itself.
The language of deceased
is like shrouded bones--
hollow, clinging
to the remains--
the before of never.
The language of gone
is a call without
a response, so loud
it can’t
be heard.
The language of absence
is on the other side--
no matter which 
way you 
turn it.

Kerfe Roig

Kerfe Roig plays with words and images in her apartment in NYC.  You can see the results on her blog https://kblog.blog/.

**

Memory of the Fleeing
​

I stroll past cafes and remember your 
wide smile across a small table, 
fit my feet between the stones of a 
foreign street we once conquered together, 
glimpse the palaces and plazas whose difficult 
pronunciations I’ve replaced with your name 

I feel the beach breeze of Montevideo, 
I watch the moon rise behind Punta Ballena, 
I remember the sight of your plane, shrinking 
as it distanced –– enough for me to hide it 
behind my thumb 

I soak in the hot air of Uruguay nights, 
I learn what it means to have come and gone, 
I thank the South American wind for bringing us together; 
I curse the promise of America for carrying you away.

Niko Malouf

Niko Malouf is 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."

**

La java des petits diables
 
Ils font la java devant le bar tabac
et tabassent les gars à qui la gueule leur déplaît,
et les filles faciles leur emboitent le pas.
Tu montes, chérie ? 
Elle monte, ils montent, ils montent tous les trois
et n’amènent aucune nouvelle ni a Gand ni a Aix,
car la bête a deux dos, depuis la nuit des temps,
beugle toujours, connaît tout, blasée.
Tu montes, chérie ? 
Et la rue remplie d’ombres du phare sur la mer,
appelle les marins et les marins d’eaux douce
de faire la java dans les chambres d’hôtels,
louées à l’heure, avec filles faciles,
qui guettent les clients depuis la porte,
étoiles fatiguées, du Bar du Port.
 
Un chat passe, 
la nuit chante un hymne à l’amour, 
sur un brin d’air marin et un parfum fade
et l’odeur rance de vieux mégots.
 
Lost Boys and Girls
 
They ruckus in front of the Bar du Port
beat up the kids whose faces don’t fit
and the painted girls sidle up close,
Tu montes, chérie?
So they gallop, she gallops, they gallop all three,
and they bring no good news not to Ghent nor Aix,
for the beast with two backs, since the dawn of time
knows it all, seen everything, yawns as it moans,
Tu montes, chérie?
And the lights of the port fill with shadows the streets, 
a beacon draws sailors and landsmen the same, 
to kick up a ruckus in hotel rooms, 
let by the hour, with painted girls 
who watch for trade from the bar tabac door,
red star-glitter of the Bar du Port.
 
A cat slopes past, 
night sings a hymn
to love on the sea air of cheap perfume 
and the stale reek of old dog ends.

Jane Dougherty

Jane Dougherty lives and works in southwest France. Her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, Hedgerow Journal, Visual Verse, ink sweat and tears, Eye to the Telescope, Nightingale & Sparrow, the Drabble, Lucent Dreaming and The Ekphrastic Review. She has a well-stocked blog at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/

**

Joaquín Torres-García’s Un Caballito
 
Childhood, terrain of nightmares, 
old folktales about witches and demons
 
monochrome geometric 
shapes and figures in the dark
 
behind the Iron Curtain 
the land of your people
 
swoop across colours in grey
an old hag sitting on your cot while you sleep
 
a mare peeks from behind a door.
It slides down. Flies under the table. A big lump
 
play taking the Thanatos out of the Eros 
white rocking horse, 
 
wood put together with dowel and peg, 
painted over rough texture, carved 
 
and incised. Simple shape, 
a red saddle, black pigments.
 
Caricature-like surrealism 
your father receives censored letters
 
aunts, uncles, and cousins
you’ve never met.
 
Muted amaranth pink
the sky in Earth’s shadow.

Ilona Martonfi

Ilona Martonfi is an editor, poet, curator, advocate and activist. Author of four poetry books, the most recent collection is Salt Bride (Inanna, 2019). Forthcoming, The Tempest (Inanna, 2021). Writes in journals, anthologies, and six chapbooks. Her poem “Dachau on a Rainy Day” was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. Artistic director of Visual Arts Centre Reading Series and Argo Bookshop Reading Series. QWF 2010 Community Award.

**

Whodunit

Through the dark door
of the hidden underworld
a man and his shadow
slip beside the spoon-street-lamp
sneaking snuff into their pockets
outside a tobacco shop.

A lady of the night
curves a blood-orange dress
she hustles in the light
of a cafe window
where pool players shoot billiards.

I spied three cut-outs in a painted collage
looking out at me observing them
knowing that I knew what they did.

I caught them in the act,
their button eyes startled
on a murky night in Uruguay
in black brown grey.

Tanya Adèle Koehnke

Tanya Adèle Koehnke is a member of the Scarborough Poetry Club.  Tanya’s ekphrastic poems appear in The Canvas and Big Arts Book.  Tanya taught critical writing about the visual arts at the Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU).  Tanya also has a background in arts journalism.

**

In Paris, 1928

It was the year for roaring in Paris.    
           Smoky cafés for flapping, emancipating,    
                        cabarets for toe-tapping. It was the year
of androgyny, rebellion, extravagance,
            a stock-market bubble.

Iconoclastic artists—their brushes beastly
            with colour—cubed the human body, lingered
                         over absinthe, late-night tête-à-têtes.
Contentious debates, like mental tugs-of-war,
             pitted classical against avant-garde.

It was the year of Duesenbergs, Bugattis,
             Peugeot Landaulets, hot cars swerving around
                         horses and carriages, madmen with new toys.
Flâneurs idly strolled the grands boulevards,
              the chestnut shade of the Tuileries.

It was the year for high fashion, Coco Chanel,
              pearl necklaces, wide lapels and cricket jackets,
                         white or black, the homburg, bowler,
cloche.  Artists caught between reason and
              feeling, figuration and abstraction.

It was the year for thoughts of the circle
              and the square. For the grid. For the voice
                         of Joaquin Torres Garcia, artist,
theoretician, unifier.
              For the mystical and the material.

Sandi Stromberg

Sandi Stromberg lived more than 20 years in Europe, but, alas, never in Paris. She would like to have experienced the City of Lights in 1928, but probably not in 1929!

**
The Beholder

She had always been able to see the corona around the head and had made her living that way for awhile, traveling from fair to fair reading auras and fortunes, telling people where there were breaks in the envelope around them and how to fix them, who to ask for help and where they could be found.

And while those days were long gone and she had a proper job and a mortgage again now, the ability to see still stood close by her throughout her days, like the patience of underlings waiting for attention so they might have a word. 

She appreciated this of course. An underling herself, she knew something about waiting steadfast at the gate. So this sort of peace between them, her ability and her, this sort of agreement around energetic chalk marks where one began and the other ended, had become part of the measure of her days. 

And if she noticed an aura, she took note of it for her own guidance but rarely remarked on it to its owner, knowing the low tolerance for this type of thing in the community she lived in now.

When the virus started to spread and the lockdowns began, she began to see things differently. At first, she noticed light glaring around the heads of those she encountered on the street and a few holes near the heart where their auras had been pierced and attacked. These encounters were few and at a recommended distance, so she couldn’t be completely sure of what she was seeing. She didn’t think too much about them really, having concerns of her own now over survival.

But soon this shifted along with the government’s warnings on the new iterations the virus was taking and further precautions that would be needed. 

She had begun to volunteer at the food pantry and animal shelter preparing boxes of foods to fill the hundreds of cars on line for hours to receive them. There was no work now. Only need.  

She and her coworkers were gloved and masked and mostly silent, though furiously busy. And while this made them a little harder to get to know, she could still read them.

The light around their heads began to recede and spill down the body as the weeks went on, forming shapes—the outline of a trumpet, a chandelier, a bell—instead of their typical egg shape. She herself could no longer tell where her own chalk lines began and ended. All she could do was see, and she knew patience was at its end and her ability had come forward to stay.

And so she watched as the bodies stretched out to fill their new light shapes. Faces elongated vertically looking like cornices at the top of buildings while the body below flared into the shape of a chalet or narrowed into a bassoon or kayak or any shape at all that revealed the present condition of the heart of its owner. 

All these people shapes tumbled together as each day unfolded— like a kaleidoscope congregating then into patterns. Within each pattern she saw the sickled moon face of the virus and the domino path it planned to follow. And then she had to say it. Had to tell them what she saw. The geography of it—where plates rubbed and bucked against one another; where silt slowly dropped off the water’s edge floating down through to the bottom of the water; what was happening or going to happen inside them soon.

Eventually they would build her right into the town’s wall—an anchoress as their own personal gyroscope for the days ahead—and would feed her through her window, plaiting her white hair that reached her feet and bringing her sweet smelling cream to rub into her skin.

But first it was only wonder, blinking questions “Tell me my fortune.” “Will I?” “Is there?” “What can you see?” The mind being the box that it is and need, so much need, being insatiable and therefore, like an onion, without a core.

Some people did survive. She did. And while their aura was never truly rounded again, it was no longer as angular, the sickle shape of the virus having gone back to the moon after all while the sun, the glorious sun, radiated again round and ready shouting with life.

But for those who didn’t, who kept their odd geometry as they climbed back up to the moon, she raised her face at night in the window of her cell under the stars and recited their names and remembered for hours until moonlight spilled down and the earth was briefly quiet.
​
Kate Bowers

Kate is a Pittsburgh based writer who works for a large, urban school system by day and practices yoga, pottery, and improv comedy at night. She has been published previously in The Ekphrastic Review.

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