 Ishtar, triptych by Jean-Michel Basquiat (USA) 1983. Basquiat: a Triptych Basquiat: I saw you at the Barbican in London, learned your energies in school, your legacy on a Newsnight special. But Basquiat, they say you are gone, and I wonder now if your face is as innumerable as those shuffling past your displays, a new face in each panel, and a voice in their ear. Your face and your skulls constructed ever-anew by curators, asking but never on first name terms, “where art thou, Basquiat?” Tom Pryce Tom Pryce was born in 1993 and read Theology and Religious Studies at The University of Cambridge. He holds an MPhil in Philosophy of Religion, focusing on Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. His poems have appeared in Notes, the Ars Et Mundus Magazine, and at exhibitions in Cambridge. When not used for poetry, his mouth is usually found shouting at football and/or drinking ale. He can be contacted using @tomprycepoetry or via tomprycepoetry.com ** It’s all in front of my eyes Ishtar, you goddess of war and love Damn life that stole you too soon. Ishtar, Ishtar Your side view, jaw and teeth Shaped like a temple. My left eye tracks your every move. Ishtar, Ishtar Stare into my eyes that witness life Adorned in only half rose coloured glasses. Feel strength like lightening Explode from my hand. Ishtar, I tried With lines and shapes to chisel Through your armour. Oh, but your alter ego Your addiction was craving love elsewhere And there was no way to break that fucking love How I failed to keep you safe Not even Warhol could save you now. Robyn Greenhouse Robyn Greenhouse: A little lost, but looking for direction through writing. ** basquiat blue, 1983 and we were never being boring Pet Shop Boys the club is crowded when I see you across the room basquiat! I shout you come towards me pushing through the people dancing wildly and take my hand you have five more years to live I have twenty yesterday you showed me the painting with all that blue your colour basquiat I whispered that painting will not die even when the club is empty Tricia Marcella Cimera Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Her work appears in many diverse places — from the Buddhist Poetry Review to the Origami Poems Project. Her poem ‘The Stag’ won first place honours in College of DuPage’s 2017 Writers Read: Emerging Voices contest. Tricia lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois / in a town called St. Charles / by a river named Fox / with a Poetry Box in her front yard. ** Tripping the Triptych Intimidating slash of shadows and cross-outs, layer upon layer we want to penetrate, symbols we want to grasp. From TEMPLE, to KHNUM-- protector of water, fertility, creator, forming children from earth’s clay—to SIDE VIEW OF AN OXEN’S JAW TEETH, echoes of Samson and the Philistines. Massacre with a jawbone. Where was their protectress, the goddess of fertility, war, justice, beauty, love? The LEFT EYE searches. Centuries too late, Khnum abandoned, Basquiat cries out to her, ISHTAR, ISHTAR, ISHTAR. Does she answer him in the heroin trance? And is it his black face we see in the middle? A ladder giving access to his thoughts, allowing their descent into a frightful mouth of skeletal teeth? One eye green, one eye red, electric shock of a fist, flash of lightening. We rush on to a pale, frightened face behind black bars, silent mouth, eyes, side-by-side with the goddess, ISHTAR, ISHTAR. Then in bold red, SEBEK—god of crocodile power, fertility, war-- invoked to fight the Nile’s inundations, to annihilate man’s wickedness. Our unending search for more powerful forces to assuage our needs, fears, when no sign comes from a host of gods, goddesses, drugs, to answer our lonely cries in the wilderness—or Basquiat’s. Sandi Stromberg Sandi Stromberg is enjoying the ekphrastic challenges presented by The Ekphrastic Review, with one poem appearing in the Joseph Cornell Challenge. She also loves gathering poets’ work into anthologies. She co-edited Echoes of the Cordillera (ekphrastic poems, Museum of the Big Bend, 2018) and Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press, 2015). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, read on PBS during the April 2017 “Voices and Verses,” and published in multiple small journals and anthologies. She has been a juried poet ten times in the Houston Poetry Fest. Her translations of Dutch poetry were published in the United States and Luxembourg. ** Jean-Michel Scribbles, symbols, and capital letters explode, where the bold strokes of neo-expressionism electrify the canvas. Three panels of collage shout ISHTAR, the contradictory deity of love, sex, and war. Colour radiates, as repeating words and images emblazon, provoke thought, hip-hop with surface rhythm. Brooklyn-born Basquiat delivered street art to poetic heights, altered perceptions with his painterly activism and biblical references-- SIDE VIEW OF AN OXEN’S JAW-- like Samson, with the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass I have slain a thousand men. Jeannie E. Roberts Jeannie E. Roberts has authored four poetry collections, including The Wingspan of Things, a poetry chapbook (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), Romp and Ceremony, a full-length poetry collection (Finishing Line Press, 2017), Beyond Bulrush, a full-length poetry collection (Lit Fest Press, 2015), and Nature of it All, a poetry chapbook (Finishing Line Press, 2013). In January of 2019, her second children's book, Rhyme the Roost! A Collection of Poems and Paintings for Children, was released by Daffydowndilly Press, an imprint of Kelsay Books, Inc. She is also the author and illustrator of Let's Make Faces! (author-published, 2009). She is Poetry Editor of the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. ** Crown of Basquiat: A Triptych Beneath words of Welsh, Dutch, Icelandic, could be Akrikaans, and Cornish is a drawing of a pig. No matter the language for sacred sow, it matters in the land of Basquiat’s father’s birth, matters to the captain of the military envoy ordered to destroy every native boar after an outbreak and replace them with pigs from the heartland of America not used to heat and hurricanes and hills of Hispaniola. He knocks on the door of a convent with rifle in hand and tells the nuns he has to kill the hardy natives in their pen. And of all he’s done, it’s the one thing he regrets in his military career. Banksy, anonymous London street artist, puts a crown on every car of a Ferris wheel he paints outside the Barbican Centre for a major retrospective of Basquiat’s work, a place keen to clean any graffiti from its walls. As many sourcebooks as paintings in show, as many photographs as jazz references that become the crown that become the image on the wheel together with the artist welcomed by the police. Basquiat came up in a New York with bigger problems than graffiti and bloomed on buildings abandoned with no money to raze, sold color photocopied postcards of his work on the street, one to Andy Warhol. One of his postcards got in the hands of Ishtar, Egyptian goddess of fertility and war, then DYNASTIES of violence appeared on canvas. The Book of Judges jawbone of an ass that slayed a thousand men became on one panel SIDE VIEW OF AN OXEN’S JAW and on another NO OTHER F---ING SKULL BONES centered by LINE, SHAPE, TEXTURE, the fertility of war that began with Boer in Africa, continued to First, to Second, to Korea, to Vietnam, to Persian Gulf, to another century, back to a figure in black on a dominant blue background, artist as Griot, wandering poet, musician, historian, storyteller, street performer, and social commentator in one. a place keen to clean any graffiti from its walls: an excerpt from the caption under the Banksy painting on the wall outside the Barbican. 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 Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press), and Wildwood (Lummox Press). Ride the Pink Horse is forthcoming from Spartan Press in 2019. With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. ** Ishtar Ishtar is on the subway. Her face is repeated Through layers of torn posters. Her talking heads are chanting Sex and war through sacred boom-boxes. She reigns in New York City, From uptown lofts, to the Downtown candy store. Ishtar’s smiling faces sometimes Float through the turquoise Haze. Her teeth are chattering ticket stubs. They spell out a new code. You see it in layers of dead flyers, Pez wrappers and graffiti covered trains. A manual from the underground To slay the Philistines. Ishtar gifts you the city in A paintbox. You draw black lines That define the barriers between Uptown commerce and downtown Creativity. And then, so effortlessly, You reveal the anatomy of the city, With a brush-stroke and a cloud Of weed smoke. Ishtar shows you colours Through New York city rain. Taxis queue in yellow exodus, Carrying you from gallery to gallery. In your paint splattered Armani. You shift from the downbeat of mutant Discos to loft apartment parties. On the boom for real. Ishtar is on the A train. She reigns in New York City. She’s an art dealer, She’s a bag lady, She’s a stripper on Times Square. Her repeating heads are Layered on tiled walls. She is chanting sex and war. Ishtar is drawing you a map, An escape route from the underground. You can see her eyes everywhere Through the layers of torn posters. She is tracing the veins of the city, From uptown lofts, to the Downtown candy store. On a mainline to your skull. Colin Gardiner Colin Gardiner lives and works in Coventry, United Kingdom. He writes short stories and poetry. He is currently studying an MA at the University of Leicester. ** Ishtar Versus Captain America Love is a Babylonian battlefield dominated by a blindingly beautiful goddess. Impotent and sterile, industrial capitalists don their righteous masks, enter the arena. Uninterested in a game tethered to emotion, they will take your wealth. If not your wealth, your power. If you have neither—your life. Only a eunuch, or stock-market-sexual, has the balls to turn Ishtar down. Basquiat being neither, grabs her fiery hips, begins to paint the toothy faces and punk phrases exploding like firework orgasms behind his closed, ecstatic eyes. As is the pattern, Ishtar grows weary with the show of self-important confidence contracted from her intense touch. The Caribbean creator’s gaze wanders. His palate embraces a ménage of new muses. Slighted in sepia tones, Ishtar fumes. Her revenge—an open, unprotected door for the wolves on Wall Street to enter with IPO opiates and cult-status positioning. Jordan Trethewey Jordan Trethewey is a writer and editor living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. His work has been featured in many online and print publications, and has been translated in Vietnamese and Farsi. To see more of his work go to: https://jordantretheweywriter.wordpress.com ** not SAMO change and stay the same that’s just how it is, those who lead and those who follow but it doesn’t have to be, not for me, I don’t need that same old shit so shake a pillar and perhaps another, alter the tone with the flavour of youthful nectar replenish the energy with urban philosophy, use chaos to get to order because you never know and time is short. Henry Bladon Henry is a writer and art lover based in Somerset in the UK who writes fiction and poetry. He has a PhD in creative writing and runs a writing support group for people with mental health issues. His work can be seen in Writers’ Forum, Potato Soup Journal, FridayFlashFiction, thedrabble, Entropy, and Spillwords Press, amongst other places. ** Layer Upon Layer Motherfucking skullbone! (My head before Basquiat) Ishtar / Inanna thieving culture from Enkidu, [the apple in the garden?] or slinking to harass Ereshkigal deep in the underworld [Demeter, Persephone?] & Sobek, the great impregnator, crocodile-god of copulation, lord of semen, who takes women from their husbands according to his heart's fancy, Khanum after Khanum, to mother dynasties, & the artist, glaring through terror & speed’s wide eye, spittle-teeth & oxen-jawed, nostrils like moon- craters, the great egomaniac, shape-shifter & super-hero, clutching fistfuls of lightning bolts [line, shape, texture—all bleeding] heir to a lineage passed down the millennia, snake & ladder, layer upon layer, yet still sui-generis, self-replicating-- Columbia, Columbia, Columbia! Devon Balwit Devon Balwit resonates at Basquiat's frequency. ** Ishtar Raised in downtown Brooklyn mother Puerto Rican coupled with Haitian a dichotomy of confusion as Ishtar beats her drum her mesmerising undertones addictive urban metronome and Art begins her dance weak at first a tribal curse graffiti set to melody rhythm free from slavery coded hip-hop melody scrawling print and litany symbols from anatomy stencilled on the walls pillars strong as oxen jaw a mural in a metaphor Samson breaking temple doors paint conflicting peace and war chalk defining syllables paint eroding numerals spattered skulls in aerosol problems insurmountable. Kate Young Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood. After retiring, she has returned to writing and has had success with poems published in Great Britain and internationally. She is presently editing her work for an anthology and enjoying responding to ekphrastic challenges. Alongside poetry, Kate enjoys art, dance and playing her growing collection of guitars and ukuleles! ** Blasphemer, Prophet Yours is an altarpiece for the church of broken things- fragments of forgotten gods, their bodies dismembered, that no one knows how to reassemble and breathe back into a still familiar world, full of violence without elegance or grace. These walls are lined with crude hieroglyphs- disordered, clumsy, jumbled and confused, written and overwritten like the layers of a crazy palimpsest no one wants to read. Here the faces of saints glare and gnash their teeth ready to grind our bones and spit them back to us, useless and used up like the world they will devour down to the broken and bloody end. Hell’s landscape waiting to receive its true believers. Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy has always been a writer but spent most of her working life as a Registered Nurse. She has had work appearing in many print and online journals, and has an electronic chapbook, ”Things I Was Told Not to Think About” available as a free download from Praxis Magazine online. **
Jenene Ravesloot
Jenene Ravesloot has written five books of poetry. She has published in The Ekphrastic Review, The Ekphrastic Challenge, After Hours Press, Sad Girl Review, DuPage Valley Review, the Caravel Literary Arts Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Packingtown Review, The Miscreant, Exact Change Only, THIS Literary Magazine, and other online journals, print journals, chapbooks, and anthologies. Jenene is a member of The Poets' Club of Chicago, the Illinois State Poetry Society, and Poets & Patrons. She has received two Pushcart Prize nominations in 2018.
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January 2023
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