Le Cineaste, Rene Magritte, 1953 As my friend reads a story about his childhood on the farm, Magritte gets to his feet and paints one of his pictures, bright dusk over a row of unlit houses, and Jesuses are floating down through the air, each one identical, each with that same sappy smile. My friend is a good man. How little I value that. In the picture no one else is on the street, no one on a doorstep. Only the Jesuses. Oh, this is that parable about the wheat being thrown, and how it grows depends on where it lands. I remember now—rocks, weeds, good soil; crazy parents, loving parents, parents absorbed in their own shit, if you had a dog, who you sat next to in school, were there drugs, were there Cossacks, leprosy, AIDS, ice age, global warming. It makes a difference. My friend is a Jesus who landed in the midcentury Midwest and he is how that Jesus grew, not anyone who’s going to spring us all from prison but still of good stock. In the stories he tells, a single green pea rolls heedless and uncaught between all the claws and jaws and hammers. When it turns down my street, I take a break from the cellars where I work for my living, and for the sake of smiling at the green pea’s antics I come up from the dark and out into the morning. I remember now: I’m not always a nameless employee. I come from a good family. Like you, I landed in a handful of circumstances and grew as I did and flourished or not. Like you, I sometimes look up and see that the sun has gotten between all the houses and trees and big parked cars, passed unscathed through the glass and sits at the breakfast table, ready to talk. Like you, sometimes I free someone from the narrow stone room, sometimes am freed. Peter Cashorali Editor's note: This poem is an ekphrasis after an imagined Magritte painting. Peter Cashorali is a neurodiverse queer writer living at the intersection of rivers, farmland and civil war. He practices a contemplative life
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The Ekphrastic Review
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July 2025
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