Heaven Eleven Marathon Finalists and Winner: Poetry

At last, we have the finalists for the Heaven Eleven Annual Ekphrastic Marathon in July. And the results are a wild surprise: the winner of both the poetry and the flash categories this year is the same person!

What an amazing experience it was to connect virtually and create with writers all over the world. It is an incredibly intense experience every year, to write fourteen drafts of poetry, flash fiction, or other forms, in a single day!

The goal of the marathon is to complete the marathon and be part of the experience.

Writers had the option of polishing or revising their drafts after the fact, and submitting five to the contest portion of the event. 

The editorial team has been busy ever since the deadline, reviewing an incredible array of stories, poems, CNF, and more, responding to an exciting variety of artworks. We read all entries blind, and discussed our favourites together. It was a challenge to come to a consensus for some of the works, and others were voted in by all of us. Many works were difficult to leave out as well. Ultimately, we had to decide, and created a finalist file that was only a fraction of the wonderful works created in this experience.

For the flash fiction category, Sandi Stromberg chose one piece from the finalists. Kate Copeland chose the winner in the poetry category from the poem finalists. Sandi and Kate chose their respective winner independently of each other and independently of my input, from the finalists we all chose together. They were still choosing from documents without author names.

The Ekphrastic Review reads blind for some events like the marathon, and leaves names in tact for other situations, such as the bimonthly challenges and general submissions. Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. In this case, the finalists were a huge surprise, as many authors had several works chosen as finalists, some placing in both categories. 

Another big surprise was that our double winner is a first-time marathon participant, and new to ekphrasis! We are thrilled to welcome this amazing new talent to our pages.

A huge congratulations to everyone who was part of the marathon. Well done! I know many of you have placed stories and poems from the experience and love seeing them out in the world of journals. 

And a huge thank you to Kate and Sandi for your hard work and dedication to our wonderful world of writers.

love, Lorette

And  the poetry winner of the Heaven Eleven Marathon is Chantal Emmery, for "Deep Surrender."

Chantal's poem is first up, below, and then the finalists follow in alphabetical order by author.

​The flash fiction finalists are announced in a separate post.
​
**

Dear Ekphrastic-ers,

Thank you all very much for joining the Heaven Eleven Marathon and for submitting your stunning pieces!

It was an enormous pleasure and honour to read your writings…whether in traditional form or in a more unconventional way.

I use these words deliberately...this year’s Marathon winner chose a classical artwork to wrote an original, layered and intelligent poem to. I noticed myself returning to this poem many times, reading and reading it again, and I kept enjoying the rhythm and imagery, the arrangement on the page as well. 

With no further ado, the winner of Heaven Eleven's poetry category is Chantal Emery. Congratulations, you have written a remarkable poem!

And congrats to every single one of you for being such fantastic wordsmiths. Hope you will marathon with us again next year;  hope you will join in at our Ekphrastic Challenge and Ekphrastic Events too.

Be well, Kate Copeland 
Curator-editor, The Ekphrastic Review 

​
POETRY WINNER!!!!

Deep Surrender
  
1.
You, God of that other-world
Guarding the gate called sleep
 
Thought-hounds barking their incessant un-necessities 
Your turntable echoing a single tune with maddening frequency
 
Such ludicrous severity you carry yourself with, guarding ridiculous fictitious fantasies 
 
Your coveted prize is an overflowing waste-bin of half told stories with no beginning middle or end, absurd unfinished drafts of astounding anti-clarity
 
And within those nonsense peaks and valleys
Renewal
Healing
 
What do you gain by refusing me to rifle through that incendiary pile before it takes flame? I have no offering to please you, waiting in half-waking. Why withhold my blessing?
 
Stand up and finish me if you insist I shall not pass
Sitting Impervious
Make the manner match the mask
 
But there is no death, hovering above that deep surrender
Instead, a parasitic draw on life
Rendering incomplete both wake and sleep
 
Why do some meet slumber with such certainty, like old friends at ease
And I, a stranger  
 
2.
The beast bellowed, voices cracking like a whip.
 
I have three minds about you girl
 
You reek of rotten privilege
By comfort you have turned your birthright sour
The industrious do not utter pithy complaints such as these
Sins of sloth have disturbed nature’s effortless order
 
Yet we have seen you exhausted in mind and body, and still unable to enter here
Does my master refuse you for another iniquity? Doubt, or gluttony? Pride? Envy
You covet your neighbours bedrest and forfeit your own
 
I want what I am owed
 
You dare interrupt me and humiliate yourself imagining the master in your debt?
 
I want to hear what he says
 
It is worse than we thought. Not sin but stupidity. Naivety. You think you will find the key
to that gate? It is yourself you cannot escape.
 
 
3. 
Enough, he said, and the hounds resigned
 
You think me a villain 
Withholding that precious nectar, keeping you from dreams, frivolous as they may be
 
You have forgotten the midnight wake
Despised the one who hears branches break in darkness
Smells smoke on the air
Senses the shifting of atmospheres
 
You have forgotten the genius found in the fulcrum
It is not blessing nor curse, not certainty
Careful now, not to dismiss a stranger, who notices what the belong-ed cannot
​see
 
Then tell me, how do I guard against madness?
 
Now child, you have dreamed of the key worth seeking
Search for the place full of strangers, where genius and madness are found coexisting
Where the sun tells time, and the moon gives enough light for the wakeful to write by

​Chantal Emmery

​Chantal is a life-long journaler and word-lover attempting to live off-grid. Ekphrasis is a wonderful new medium to her, and she's excited to dive in.

Saad Ali

Saad Ali (b. 1980) is a poet-philosopher, literary translator and author from the UK and Pakistan. His work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, The Haiku Shack Magazine, Jackdaw Haiku, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into Arabic. His poems/fictions have been nominated for the Best of the Net, Best Microfiction & Best Small Fictions; and showcased at art exhibitions in Australia, Canada, and USA. Visit Saad: https://linktr.ee/owlofpines.

Saad Ali

Saad Ali (b. 1980) is a poet-philosopher, literary translator and author from the UK and Pakistan. His work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, The Haiku Shack Magazine, Jackdaw Haiku, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into Arabic. His poems/fictions have been nominated for the Best of the Net, Best Microfiction & Best Small Fictions; and showcased at art exhibitions in Australia, Canada, and USA. Visit Saad: https://linktr.ee/owlofpines.

Hiraeth
  
I miss those slow autumns when trees soften
to umber and gold after a late-August
cooling. Where one can walk through leaf-scented air,
the softness of decay and loam. Scarves billow,
shoes dampen and a light smokey fragrance wafts
from a woodfire in the house ahead. The sense
that someone is home, but who can know the lives within?
Perhaps a pipe, slippers, a thread-worn chair, 
a dog at feet or cat on a windowsill. A book of poems 
open, the clatter of a dropped pot in the kitchen, clomp 
of footsteps coming from upstairs, and the dog suddenly barks. 
Softness, the slow softening of autumn, late afternoon light. 
Where I am, summer fires and drought, cedar trees thirst
and pines are decimated by beetles, new limbs green
fire-burnt trunks. Imagery to poetry is the slow cooked soup
warming on a wood stove. English country house,
hiraeth for what never was. 
 
Yvonne Blomer

Yvonne Blomer has published a cycling memoir and six books of poetry, most recently Death of Persephone: A Murder. She lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən speaking people and has edited three water-based, eco-poetry anthologies, Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice is the latest. She is a huge fan of ekphrastic poetry and teaches this form and many others in immersive and inspiring poetry classes on zoom to poets across North America.

Trafalgar Square
  
Paint a scene
in butter cream
pinks and blues,
a white circle-smudge of sun
on a lemon-yellow sky.
 
We travel to London’s
Trafalgar Square
where heat has me shoeless. 
Sandals hang from my right hand, 
as I step into the frosted blue fountain,
feed the soft birds, slow dance
under Nelson’s melting column.
 
The day’s sticky with summer’s swelter
as pedestrians drip like lit candles.
There is no place to go
no flowers unwilted in this tourist town.
This whipped scene a reverie
of human warming’s
long burning celebration.
Oh sweet, torched meringue; oh scarcity.

Yvonne Blomer

Yvonne Blomer has published a cycling memoir and six books of poetry, most recently Death of Persephone: A Murder. She lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən speaking people and has edited three water-based, eco-poetry anthologies, Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice is the latest. She is a huge fan of ekphrastic poetry and teaches this form and many others in immersive and inspiring poetry classes on zoom to poets across North America.

 
The Silence of the Wild
 
Sometimes the silver threads of a giant moon
would weave through the branches of the trees.
After winter had denuded the beech trees
and the sweet chestnuts, together with the swifts
the first green hues would appear, make promises
of a rich summer and fat green leaves covering
the world, and silence the clearing,
and only the woosh of the swifts, the sweet
voices of the goldfinches, and the hoarse calls
of the woodpigeon would interrupt
lazy thoughts of waves lapping, boats bopping,
and tanned young skins glistening with sweat,
boisterous under a southern sun.
 
But it was autumn, the glory of fall,
that entranced us with its glorious generosity.
Gold, russet, ochre, the gentler sun 
of another dying year, the threat of another
winter clad in the finest crinkly coats with wings,
dancing to their death on the soft floor
of a moist bed made from the first heavy rains.
 
And we knew then that soon the long sleep
would prepare us for another new beginning
but this time would come without us. 
Like the swifts, we had to leave, yet,
unlike the swifts, we would not come back.
 
Rose Mary Boehm

​Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, short stories, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her poetry has been published widely, mostly in US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a several times Pushcart and a Best of Net nominee. All her books are available on Amazon. A new full-length collection, My Father’s Sky has been published in July of this year. Her earlier collection, Life Stuff, has just received a five-star rating from Reader’s Choice Book Awards and is a bronze winner. See more on her website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

​Puppets in a Cosmic Game
 
Each star holds a string connecting us to eternity,
just like the Nazca lines, earth’s patterns
are maps for the stars to know their paths,
for mankind not to lose the way.
The divine alchemist mixes sacred elements
of life and transformation:
 
women, wombs, woods, water, whirling mists,
the sacraments of men and beast,
of cloud and land,
holy geometry, life-giving mystery.
 
Rose Mary Boehm

​Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, short stories, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her poetry has been published widely, mostly in US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a several times Pushcart and a Best of Net nominee. All her books are available on Amazon. A new full-length collection, My Father’s Sky has been published in July of this year. Her earlier collection, Life Stuff, has just received a five-star rating from Reader’s Choice Book Awards and is a bronze winner. See more on her website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

Caesura
 
Streaked with shame, lines are drawn
in her skin. Rouged images blush her cheeks
in the same way grass looks greener
from one side or another. But as she broods
something else comes to light: the road ahead
is like the path behind, paved with renewal
and second chances. Maybe she is not who she once was,
or thought she was. Maybe her thoughts wander.
Even the bench on which she sits, stands,
is evidence of her new perspective.
Don’t shit where you eat interrupts
the tranquil blue and orange hues of this scene
constructed by the other. A decision will be made
but not now. It doesn’t need to. Only when the sun begins to set
will she go home, and even then, she may not
have her answer. But she has thought, and in the thinking
is trying, is not alone, is on the cusp of
something.
 
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 

Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum is a writer, teacher, filmmaker, and publisher from Wasilla, Alaska. She also plays music, paints, and podcasts. Learn more at caitbuxbaum.com.

Shreds of Purple
 
A scorching sour lemon summer day in Guangzhou. Holding Ah Ma’s sweaty hand. Ube ice cream dripping lilac pearls on Ah Ma’s dress. The taste of cubed purple yam swimming with tapioca beads in coconut milk on my tongue. A sea of jacaranda periwinkle blossoms around Lake Anosy. Ah Ma’s shopping cart filled with plum-coloured yarn on sale at Target. Silver knitting needles clinking like ice cubes cracking in boiling water in her humid Pittsburgh apartment. Ah Ma’s fingers braiding fringes of the scarf I wore in college. Yellowed photos of her and Ah Ba standing in front of cherry blossoms. The smell of blueberry soap she left in the middle of a folded blanket. African violets on her windowsill, wilting to brown. A topped-over glass on the table, spilled prune juice spreading like bruised veins. Burnt crusts of eggplants at the bottom of a pan with a broken handle. Her mattress stained sepia-brown.
 
As if resting peacefully 
not a care for
my shredded heart

Christine H. Chen

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, Fractured Lit., and anthologized in Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions among others. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Read her stories at www.christinehchen.com or @CSquareH.bsky.social

Late Blooming Feminist (or Phone Sex)
  
1.
If I were beautiful
I would cry a current 
(Knowing how quickly it is lost)
 
2.
The muscle of palms’ thumb on inner thigh
No longer strangers, shameless
Bright eyed, rejecting sour seeds that yield no life
We decide what’s beautiful
We decide what grows in our garden
We decide what a weed looks like
 
The work of life is weeding
Ideas, strangling, choking better fruit
Stealing resources meant for joy to bloom
Watch me dance beneath the moon
Watch me say yes to pleasure, endure pain, thank rain, and at end-of-day remember the breath is my most reliable rhythm.
Watch me live in season, balance rhyme and reason
And decide what’s fruitful
 
Do not tell me what pleases your gaze
With my one short and precious life I will love all of me 
 
Do not mistake beauty for consent
Write this word on your eyelids
 
Do not assume my body is a tragedy or deviation in need of correcting to your ideal
We are not poor unfortunates - the body’s greatest advocacy for diversity is that it is
 
My existence is accomplished
I have conquered nothingness
The hard part is over - I am here
Against all odds I have made time and space my shelter 
I am home
We are arrived and we will weed out messages that say it’s not enough. 
 
Go softly now, not quietly in that pursuit of fruitfulness 
Listen carefully
Grieve when you hear poison
Purge those words and shrink for no one

Chantal Emmery

​Chantal is a life-long journaler and word-lover attempting to live off-grid. Ekphrasis is a wonderful new medium to her, and she's excited to dive in.

Miscarriage
  
I drowned in the blood that
was not at all like water, more 
like thick paint, waiting for
the artist's brush to lift it to linen
canvas, spread it thick, thin it
at the edges with turpentine
which is all I could smell when
I rose to see my daughter spread
across my thighs and my sheets
and puddled in a pool beneath
me. How was she ever going to 
crawl to cry to sing to climb to die
an old woman in a house in the
mountains surrounded by her own
children. How could I keep myself
above water, when I couldn't kick
my legs, when I could only spit
this red water, this vermillion
paste touched with black 
back into the air? So there would be 
no baby, no small body to come through
me to hold swaddled in soft cotton,
only this relief and bigger than that
a painter’s pot filled with guilt and no
canvas on which to write. 
 
Joyce Hayden

oyce Hayden is a teacher, writer, and visual artist. She has led ekphrastic writing classes in both university and private settings since 2006. Her essays can be found at Al Jazeera English online. Her poems have been published in many journals and in her chapbook, The Lost Handprint. Find her at joycehayden.com

Dream-Naked
 
Our language is weather. 
Overcast 
now translated into 
slant of sunlight, wisp 
of high cloud above 
the earth
where storms shelter 
their own. I’m not
ambivalence or 
subtlety. You no heavy 
lifter as in move 
the feather from over 
there. But, boy, can 
you do rain—like 
flip a switch from 
blinding buckets to 
not one drop. I want 
to talk about 
this kind of truth 
and all the unsung 
songs in our river. In 
the end it’s clear I’ve 
been swimming dream-
naked all my life 
to get to you. 

Annaliese Jakimides

Shaped by her first-generation-American family in inner-city Boston, followed by decades raising her own in a small northern Maine town, Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Cited in state and national competitions, more than 1,000 short works—prose and poetry—have appeared in magazines, journals, anthologies, and audiobooks, on radio and stage. Recent or upcoming publications address liminal space, transformation, and obsession. She lives in Bangor, Maine. annaliesejakimides.com.
​

So Grateful You Thought of Her on the Other Side         
                        
1. Thank you for looking out for my mom in the weft and warp of the nexts. More fragile than I remember. Maple and cinnamon her country, now so unnecessary except to her, feeder of the folds, these years later still looking for fire.
 
2. She comes from an altar boy, sand nuns, tea cozies of control and slap, obedient love, sorrowful mysteries.
 
3. First an angel. 
 
4. Aren’t we all?
 
5. She grew white peonies and a vine of scant red roses in a rectangle of blood, fluffy clouds afloat in a dirty sky, small yard and blue curtains.
 
6. What does looking out for look like there in the afterbreath and what do you say to each other? 
 
7. I am your common denominator, here still with ocean swells, pots and pans, the chipped bone and blackened river stones, now bead-stitching a whisper of moonshine into your hair, a painting on canvas with white silk, sorting begun. 
 
8. Pouring myself into, day breaks.
 
9. Not long. Or longer. Time relative. Could be soon.
 
10. Fugue rising.
 
Annaliese Jakimides

​Shaped by her first-generation-American family in inner-city Boston, followed by decades raising her own in a small northern Maine town, Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Cited in state and national competitions, more than 1,000 short works—prose and poetry—have appeared in magazines, journals, anthologies, and audiobooks, on radio and stage. Recent or upcoming publications address liminal space, transformation, and obsession. She lives in Bangor, Maine. annaliesejakimides.com.

The Colours of My Bruises Poke Through Skin
  
The colours of my bruises poke through skin, 
your first five-fingered smack across my face. 
Yellow remnants, pain’s diary within. 
 
That first one stunned me, gesture from my kin, 
landed me on the floor, your smile so base.
The colours of my bruises poke through skin.
 
Don’t anger me, or your fist will begin. 
I don’t know your triggers, what moods to trace. 
Yellow remnants, pain’s diary within. 
 
My son remembers cupboard’s darkness, pinned, 
crack of spine ‘gainst fridge’s metal surface. 
The colours of our bruises poke through skin
 
Raw egg cracks with ease, my gloves are kidskin. 
Your yolk spills, wielding butcher knife in chase. 
Yellow remnants, pain’s diary within. 
 
And you, my husband, divorce shows your sin, 
Your ego now bruised, you slink in disgrace. 
The colours of your bruises poke through skin
Yellow remnants, pain’s diary within.
 
Barbara Krasner

​Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet whose recent ekphrastic collections include Poems from the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press), The Night Watch (Kelsay Books), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (dancing girl press), The Wanderers (Shanti Arts), and the forthcoming The Appropriation of Brueghel (Shanti Arts). Her ekphrastic work has also appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Metphrastics, The Light Ekphrastic, and elsewhere. She serves as host of The Ekphrastic Review's Book Club.
​

Life’s Passage
​ 
Even now it speaks to me –
the rough assemblage
of taffeta torn ocean,
black pupil stare of space.
The blue of a bruise,
windswept, white atmosphere 
of forgotten days.
 
The moon, a tinselled silver
heart
beating through it all.
 
The indigo hue of dreams, seas,
irises drowned by desire.
The precision of longing – 
stars an array of merry dots.
The Divine just a jumble
of random, criss-crossed thoughts. 
 
And the kintsugi gold line
of travel – 
speed of light, of love.
The way of wounds, of words,
of wondering,
path lines of imagination. 
 
Call it alchemy, epiphany.  A cosmic aptitude. 
But we can make believe our own worlds  
true. 
 
Siobhán Mc Laughlin

​Siobhán Mc Laughlin is a poet and creative writing facilitator from Co. Donegal in Ireland. Her poems have featured several times in The Ekphrastic Review and in other publications including Drawn to the Light Press, Reverie, Hive, The Poetry Village, The Waxed Lemon and The Honest Ulsterman. She is a fan of ekphrastic poetry, haiku, and reading and writing poetry whenever the opportunity arises!

​Self Portrait with Striped Blouse
 
 Shadow becomes me. 
In the subterfuge of night
I dream, defy day’s brazen light
with inhalation of liquorice dark. 
 
A raven’s wingspan blots out the moon.
A tree’s gnarled branches
reach upwards in a silent scream.
The day’s embers
smoulder at my feet.
 
I slice a pomegranate, ruminate.
Its juice runs like blood,
scarlet as a gaping wound,
forbidden as light. 
 
Siobhán Mc Laughlin

​Siobhán Mc Laughlin is a poet and creative writing facilitator from Co. Donegal in Ireland. Her poems have featured several times in The Ekphrastic Review and in other publications including Drawn to the Light Press, Reverie, Hive, The Poetry Village, The Waxed Lemon and The Honest Ulsterman. She is a fan of ekphrastic poetry, haiku, and reading and writing poetry whenever the opportunity arises!

Summer Palace (Haiku Series)
​  
Marshmallow moonglow
Summer demands a softness
The sweetness of love
 
Incandescent moon
Even buildings are blushing
In sunset’s fierce pink
 
Flamingo pink heart
How can I hide love from you
When the moon giggles
 
A love beginning
And my world fills with petals
The moon conspiring
 
As the world softens
Everything is rose pink now
From my heart to yours
 
Siobhán Mc Laughlin

Siobhán Mc Laughlin is a poet and creative writing facilitator from Co. Donegal in Ireland. Her poems have featured several times in The Ekphrastic Review and in other publications including Drawn to the Light Press, Reverie, Hive, The Poetry Village, The Waxed Lemon and The Honest Ulsterman. She is a fan of ekphrastic poetry, haiku, and reading and writing poetry whenever the opportunity arises!

Hope
 
The leaves are singed off all the olive trees
and the grove is a field of ash.  
 
The children no longer startle awake to the air sirens. 
They curl into each other like a litter of fresh kittens.
 
My breasts are shriveled and I have nothing 
to offer but the hum of my hands on their backs.  
 
I carry a crust of pumpernickel bread
and three clementines in my jacket pocket.
 
I have learned that I can make a feast
out of the most meager of provisions. 
 
Beneath my striped blouse, I keep a vial 
of dirt from our garden.
 
I tuck a packet of marigold seeds 
in the pouch of my brassiere. 
 
There will come a time when the sky is not 
replete with fireworks that crater every breathing thing.                        
 
There will come a time when the earth
will, once again, nudge marigolds to seek the sun.  

Marianne Peel

After having taught English for 32 years, Marianne now nurtures her own creative spirit.  She’s spent three summers in China, teaching best practices to teachers.  She has three full-length collections of poetry from Shadelandhouse Modern Press: No Distance Between Us (2021) and Singing is Praying Twice (2024).  She has a third collection from Act of Power Press:  Untamed Arabesque (2025).   Marianne’s forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Orchestra of Belonging, will be published by Accents Publishing in 2027. ​

Disintegration
 
head floats… head bursts… red tendrils pour out… rope-like hair brings thoughts and memories…  billowing and flowing blood dress covers my white porcelain body… sinks beneath the dark waters head bursts… rose petals bloom and flower… merge with wild thoughts under the surface… wild thoughts escape from my head… cloud bursts in the dark… press your body to mine… find me… find my mouth… press your lips to mine here in the dark water… my body is heavy in its dead red lead dress… I let it sink… the halo moon overhead adorns my expanding red cloud head… white shoulders… bare breasts gently bobbing… hands out-stretched to welcome the dark thoughts of heaven or hell… I get to choose where I go… dark water velvety smooth like my red dress enfolds me in its dark caress
 
take my hands
take me dark 
water lover
 
Laura Peña

Laura Peña is an award-winning poet born and raised in Houston, Tx. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Education. She is a primary bilingual teacher as well as a translator of poetry into Spanish. Laura has been a featured poet at Valley International Poetry Festival, Inprint First Fridays, and Public Poetry. She has been published both in print and on-line journals. She has been a workshop presenter at VIPF in the Rio Grande Valley, Tx. and People's Literary Festival in Corpus Christi, Tx.. One of Laura's annual traditions is to write a poem a day for August Postcard Poetry Festival and has participated in the fest for the last 13 years. Laura has performed poetry for Invisible Lines at such venues as Notsuoh, Interchange, Avante Garden, and The Match. ​

Play Time
 
As a young girl, Dressy Bessy and Dapper Dan 
taught me how to lace and tie, zip, button, buckle,
and snap. Whenever my pre-school fingers nearly 
tore their yellow or purple vinyl shoes in my
vain attempts to take them off, their
embroidered smiles and rosy cheeks 
remained, forever placid. 
 
My first baby doll with clothes of her own
Had no buttons or bows, or laces or zippers, 
But she was undressed more often than not.
 
I think about them now, seeing photos of you,
posed and positioned to support the male gaze.
We are taught, after all, to dress and undress.

Kaila Schwartz

Kaila Schwartz runs an award-winning high school theatre program in the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her spouse and kitty overlords. She loves ekphrastic writing and can often be seen in museums scribbling away in notebooks. Her work can be seen in Superpresent, Ekphrastic Review Challenges, Boudin, Metphrastics, and Still Point Arts Quarterly, among others. 

Between Heartbeats
 
the outside world flickers
in gilded reflection, 
 
inside the shop,
she commands 
with siren voice,
 
her gown of the finest Flemish wool,
her brows deftly plucked,
 
she points with one elegant hand,
he nods
 
his desire as sharp
as the goldsmith’s file,
 
he aches to remove her gown,
to free flesh held by fortress fabric--
 
he wills her fingers to pick up the ring.
 
A handsome couple
the goldsmith thinks, as he weighs and measures
 
wondering which is heavier—gold or a lifetime? 
 
Merril D. Smith

Merril D. Smith is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet from New Jersey. Her first full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. Her second collection is Held Inside the Folds of Time (Jane’s Studio Press, 2025). Find her at Bluesky: @merrildsmith.bsky.social;  Instagram: mdsmithnj Blog: merrildsmith.org  

Re-souled
  
The city of angels called to them
 
their Oklahoma soil 
wind-scattered, lives shattered,
death-dusted--
 
even their old car
with moans and sighs,
succumbed somewhere
in the mournful mountains.
 
The brothers walked then
in patched boots, blistered bodies,
splintered souls near broken,
 
mocked by billboards
and indifference
 
they kicked-up illusions
in California dirt
continued
 
dreaming of an oasis,
resurrection.

Merril D. Smith

Merril D. Smith is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet from New Jersey. Her first full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. Her second collection is Held Inside the Folds of Time (Jane’s Studio Press, 2025). Find her at Bluesky: @merrildsmith.bsky.social;  Instagram: mdsmithnj Blog: merrildsmith.org  ​

Celebration

it was the time when wisdom
surged in from the west
vanishing everything in its path

I had left a blue boat in the bushes 
I would return years later to retrieve it
beneath a coral sky and a pasty white moon
 
I was a youth when I hid the boat
so that now going back many years later
it would be nearly impossible to find
 
there were hundreds of blue boats
all the same
no one could know if the boat I hid
 
was the boat I had now chosen
or just some random boat
lying there entirely weathered
 
gunnel deep
in the murmuration 
of surf

​John L. Stanizzi

John’s books are Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Chants, High Tide-Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Hallelujah Time,  POND, Tree That Lights the Way Home, Sundowning, Feathers and Bones, and SEE. His new collection, Entra La Notte, will be out next month. Johnnie is a former New England Poet of the Year, a Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, and he received a Fellowship in CNF in 2021 from the CT. Office of Arts, Culture, & Diversity. He took first place in The Ekphrastic Review’s Ekphrastic Marathon in 2024. He is currently among the poets nominated for the honour of Connecticut Poet Laureate.​

​ 
The Lifespan of a Monarch
 
The fall of Saigon--everyone remembers the ‘copters of the roof.
People like ants, like roaches, scaling the sides of embassy walls
scratching, clinging, willing themselves straight up the verticals, 
bedrolls and blankets, babies in baskets tied to their backs.
Marines wielding machine guns, swatting mosquitos, 
swatting people back, back 
from the blades that swung through the air, 
cutting the thickness, cutting off their escape.  
 
I remember instead our last night together, a hillside hotel with a view of the jungle.
It rained all night and the windows were open. The floor, the bed, your hair 
were drenched. We were both crying.
 
We curled together in the wet bed and watched butterflies 
light briefly on the ceiling, then fly away.  
 
Cynthia Storrs

Cynthia Storrs writes near Nashville.  Educated in the US and UK, she has served on the boards of Poetry Society of TN, Poetry West (CO), Pikes Peak Poet Laureate Committee, and Pikes Peak Arts Council, which awarded her a grant for promoting poetry in the region. She has been published in anthologies, magazines, and on-line. She has also published academic articles on bilingualism, biculturalism, and acculturation. Cynthia loves art history, theatre, landscape painting, and chocolate. 

The Story of Charlotte
 
Charlotte was a harlot, born the month of May.
In certain circles, she was stardom
in others, deep dismay.
In her left hand, a suitor, or patron, if you will
in her right, a lily, to remind them she still
held the cards of their temptation
but with money in her purse --
enough to pay the baby
enough to pay the nurse.
Upon her head, a too-big hat
that always entered first.
 
Her ruby lips spoke little, in front and behind
the scenes. She let their secrets bury themselves
as they justified their means.
A tender-hearted broach 
clipped to the velvet near her breasts
so she might not forget
how a certain lover 
loved her best.
 
Her later years grew cloudy
as the tint had left her cheeks.
The years had turned to months
and the months morphed into weeks.
She told the younger ladies
don’t give your heart away
until you find the only one
who decides he wants to stay.
 
Charlotte was a harlot
they piled lilies on her grave--
raised theirs hats and glasses
to all the love she gave.
 
Rebecca Surmont

Rebecca Surmont can’t get enough of the short summers, living in MN with her husband and dog. She writes mostly when it’s not summer. Her written work has been in publications such as the new anthology ICE Out Minnesota Writers Rise Up, The Mackinaw, RockPaperPoem, Last Leaves, The Orchards, Amethyst Review, Hare’s Paw, Steel Jackdaw, Eunoia Review, and Crowstep Poetry Journal. She works as a leadership consultant.

​Still life before an open window--
 
blue trees, newspaper cuttings, 
mediocrity, pipe, pink
& green beveled glass shard 
(triangular like a sail), 
frayed ribbon (from Christmas, most 
likely), broken easel, sadness
(left over from Christmas, most 
likely), photo of a man 
with a dog, philodendron
(drooping), poetry slivers,
lipstick napkin, detail of 
a Dutch painting (an eye), thoughts
of an evening walk under 
anonymous skies, kind moon.
 
Taunja Thomson

​Taunja Thomson is co-author of Frame & Mount the Sky (2017), a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, as well the author as Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019).  She is a lover of animals, art, trees, surrealism, black and white movies, walking in autumn rains, feeding wild birds in winter, playing in spring mud, & bat-watching in summer.  Her first full-length collection of poems, Plunge, was published by Uncollected Press in 2023.