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Things You Should Know About Me, by Lorette C. Luzajic, Translated Into Urdu, by Saad Ali and Nashwa Yaqoob Butt

6/4/2025

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Picture
Moonlight Masquerade, by Konstantin Somov (Russia) before 1939
URDU TRANSLATION

باتیں، جو تمہیں میرے متعلق پتہ ہونی چاہییں
قسطنطین ساموو (روس) کی مصوری "چاندنی کا بہروپ " (1939ء) کی طرز پر
میں بہروپوں کا ایک جلوس  ہوں۔ پہلے پہل میں کردار نبھاتی ہوں تمہاری عاشق کا، پھر دوست کا۔جب مجھے تم سے کچھ چاہیے ہوگا تو میں تمہیں یقین دہانی کرا سکتی ہوں کہ میں تمہاری بات سن رہی ہوں۔ لیکن میں اچھی دروغ گو نہیں ہوں جب میں ڈری ہوئی ہوتی ہوں، جو کہ میں اکثر اوقات ہوتی ہوں۔ میں مضبوط نظر آتی ہوں۔  لیکن میں صرف گارے کی قلیل مقدار کی طرح غیر یقینی ہوں جس سے دراڑیں بند کی جاتی ہیں۔ میں ہمیشہ نیلا اور سفید رنگ پہنتی ہوں اور جرابوں اور برتن صاف کرنے والے تولیوں سے لے کر ہر چیز کو استری کرتی ہوں۔ میں وہ انوکھا انسان ہوں جسے ہیلوین کی بچی ہوئی گڑ سے بنی مٹھائی بہت پسند ہے اور اس کے بدلے خوشی خوشی اپنی ایرو بار اور سمارٹیز دے دوں گی۔ لیکن میں ہر وہ چیز جو تم نے ایک دفعہ چھوئی ہوگی وہ چرا لوں گی جب تم متوجہ نہیں ہوگے۔

**

Things You Should Know About Me

I am a parade of disguises – first I play your lover, then the friend. I can convince you that I’m listening when I need something from you. But I’m not a good liar when I’m afraid, which is most of the time. I look solid but I’m just a precarious arrangement of found pottery and caulking. I always wear blue and white and iron everything, from socks to dishtowels. I’m the odd one out who loves the molasses taffy leftovers from Halloween – I will gladly trade my Aero bars and Smarties. But I will steal when you’re not looking, anything you’ve touched that I can keep.

**
​
TRANSLITERATION

Batain, Jo Tumhein Mere Mutaliq Pata Honi Chahiyein

Konstantin Somov (Roos) ki musawri Chandni ka Behroop (1939) ki tarz par

Main behropoon ka aik jaloos hon. Pehle pehl main kirdar nibhati hon tumhari aashiq ka, phir dost ka. Mujhe tum se kuch chahiye ho ga toh main tumhein yaqeen dehani kera sakti hon ke main tumhari baat sunn rehi hon. Lekin main achi daroog goh nahein hon jab main deri hui hoti hon, jo ke main aksar aukat hoti hon. Lekin main sirf gare ki qalil miqdar ki terha gair yaqini hon jis se dararein band ki jati hain. Main hameshah nila aur sufaid rang pehnti hon aur joraboon aur bertan saf kerne waale toliyoon se le ker her cheez ko istari kerti hon. Main who anookha insaan hon jise Halloween ki bachi hui gur se beni mithayi bohat pasand hai aur uss ke badle khushi khushi apni Aero bars aur Smarties de don gi. Lekin main her who cheez jo tum ne aik dafa chui ho gi woh chura lon gi jab tum mutwajeh nahein ho ge.

Lorette C. Luzajic, translated by Saad Ali and Nashwa Yaqoob Butt

The English version of this poem first appeared in The Neon Rosary, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Cyberwit Books.)

​Saad Ali is a  poet-philosopher & literary translator from the UK and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and MSc in Management from the University of Leicester, UK. His new collection of poems, Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse), is an homage to vers libre, prose poetry, and ekphrasis. He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrases into Urdu. His work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, Synchronized Chaos, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Lotus-eater, BRAWL Lit., and several anthologies, including Poetry in English from Pakistan, by Ilona Yusuf & Shafiq Naz (eds.). He has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and Best Microfiction. Influences include Vyasa, Homer, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Jung, Kafka, Tagore, Lispector and more. www.saadalipoet.com 

Nashwa Yaqoob Butt is from the Gujrat District, Pakistan. She is a teacher, social worker, and poetess. She holds an MA in Mass Communication from The Allama Iqbal Open University, Pakistan. She has authored two collections of poetry: Luminous Butterfly (2021), and Solitude: Silence and Self Identity (2023). Currently, she teaches Urdu and Social Studies at the Jinnah Public School & College. She has also been a part of a local Social Welfare Organisation for the empowerment of women in the region as a Crochet Instructor. Her influences include Rumi, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Amrita Pritam, and Rabindranath Tagore. In her spare time, she pursues gardening, sketching/painting, writing, and crocheting. You can learn more on Facebook @NashwaYaqoobButt.

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Under Each Rock, by Janice Colman

6/3/2025

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Under Each Rock 

an Excavation 
 
I am on a search for a word. Something like sea eagle or goose, 
perhaps French Angelfish, Bald Eagle or Emperor Penguin. 
 
How a winged word circles back, meaning enfolds meaning embraces. I am on a
search for a word, a winter wrap-around, like cashmere or horsehair. I remember
our horse-driven sleigh ride through Central Park. We roomed at the Plaza. There
were chandeliers in the bathrooms. Can you think of a word? 

 
It doesn’t have to be fancy or have many syllables. It need not be a rare gem: Pinite,
Tanzanite, Red Beryl, Black Opal (creamy white with exploding inner hues) or
even Alexandrite. It could be as simple as a tablecloth or birthday hat
or handkerchief (linen, embroidered with initials). It could be as convoluted as a
slinky. 

 
Particulars: Am I seeking a Hollywood noun-star? Can I lasso a modifier or verb & 
what tense? I have a fondness for past-perfect because my past is so im(perfect). On
pre-arranged rocks I perch & watch the Etobicoke Creek swerving deep brown,
having to do with mud and sediment dredged— 

 
Having to do with mud and sentiment. Why does a river rush when it has company
for dinner including one chatty forest and four dogs meandering? Is the word
meander? Or are there words, not just one, random stars strung together like a
necklace or bracelet or balanced like a stacked stone sculpture. Or not a word,
instead, an image? The way, when I remove my glasses, stars show themselves in
the stream umbra brown (not the stars
— fluorescent white with wingtips depending
on how light rays strike). Do hues strike and wound? 

 
Is there a word for when my heart is about to pounce, that moment before so tightly
wound, before the hunt before the prey, before I came to sit here at Etobicoke Creek
with four dogs of different hues & head shapes, according to whim, according to
fancy. Whimsy is also a word. 

 
Whimsy is the way I sit on this rock-stack randomly arranged, while canines bark
across the creek. We thought we were alone. Beneath these rocks shaped like a
whale’s fin or imprinted with the Blue Heron’s toe stalks or mollusc. Under each
rock is a word. I am going to excavate words. Maybe an expression, something you
share with stars or creeks or canines, a string of words that warms and elicits
laughter. That warms like a Mylar thermal blanket for first aid kits & natural
disasters to retain body heat and maintain warmth (pack of 10) meaning
hypothermia (physical or psychological) which can be symptomatic of word-
deficiency or prolonged hunger for the right word
⎯

The heart freezes over or so it seems. I used to watch the minnows pooling. In this
creek where the water is clear & swirls around my ankles, circles swim around my
shins. Now, the creek’s mud-guts (scraped from an epithelial once smooth) in
swarms racing over the creek’s surface swell, a mob that loots young saplings,
flattens bedrock. Once I hailed forest footprints by name:
 Northern Otter, Redhead
Duck, Snowshoe Hare. 

 
What are the three types of haemorrhage? arterial bleeding / venous /
bleeding capillary in spurts or flows steadily or trickles / from the body
bleeding from arteries & veins
. My mind thick as mud, wilful, woebegone
& raging, arterial also venous. Farewell, my umwelt as I lean into the
ambiance of rock, river, tree, Maple or Sycamore beside-me-now almost
bent, broken nearly. In my garden lives a community where stems pop
when there is hurt when there is hunger. Today the giant Hosta in my
garden is dying. 

 
My son-in-law is a philosopher. My younger daughter, a poet. My eldest sings, full
voice, crescendo. I am Sea Eagle, sometimes Goose or French Angelfish, 

Bald Eagle, Emperor Penguin. I am the forest loquacious, whale’s fin, mollusc,
meandering canine. I am the swell, footprints fading or forgotten, Blue Heron with
long legs and thin searching toes. Umgebungen is another word. 

 
The outer world, so fragile. The bear resides in a wood & an amoeba lives in a
pond. The bear lacks the ability to see the amoeba; the amoeba, the ability to see the
bear. Neither can see the Umgebung. 
My grandmother wore a cotton corset. 
Channeling is the fabric that encases the boning in a corset. When I unfasten
the cinchier of my own umwelt, I waver. Then I enter yours. 
​

Janice Colman

Born in Montreal in 1948, Janice Colman is an emerging Toronto poet, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Martha Award recipient, and a two-time Toronto Arts Council grant recipient. Her work has been published in the temz Review, filling Station, Arc, long con Magazine, The New Quarterly, Freefall Magazine, and Over/Exposed Lit. Janice is the mother of two powerful daughters and the human guide of an 8-dog trail-hiking pack. 
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Still Life, Reviving, by Stephanie Pressman

6/2/2025

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Picture
Still Life, Reviving, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1963

Still Life, Reviving 
​
Fruit whirl, speeding planets 
        around a flame  -- peach,
mango, tangerine, strawberries,
        kumquat, apples, pomegranate.
Some burst in the outer orbit,
        spew their seed. Below, 
eight pewter plates fly 
        off a swirl of cloth. This supper 
not complete. No utensils, no place 
        to put the peels. We eat them,
eat even the seeds and the pith,
        suck sweet juice in this place -- its old
clerestory walls, the one grimed
        window dark, unglazed, 
letting mosquitos in, letting
        the damp nourish stringy vines
that bear tiny red blossoms: 
        promises. 
​
Stephanie Pressman

A graphic artist and lifelong poet, Stephanie Pressman earned an MA in English from San Jose State University, taught writing at community college, and is the editor of the small press, Frog on the Moon. She served as co-editor of Cæsura and americas review. Her work has appeared in both print and online journals. Her poem “Self” was a finalist in The Ekphrastic Review’s 2021 Women Artists Contest. Her long poem Lovebirdman appears in an illustrated volume available on Amazon. Currently, she is working on a volume of ekphrastic poetry featuring women artists, many of whom she was unfamiliar with before beginning the project.
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Paleo Truleo, by Daniel Lusk

6/1/2025

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Picture
New Guinea Clay Man, for National Geographic, by Malcolm Kirk (USA) July 1969. Photograph copyright of Malcolm Kirk, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 
Paleo Truleo
 
Clay man waits for ancestor to come.
Blue clay on his skin, flaking.
Waits a long time.
 
Clay jar a crude hive on his head.
Holes for breathing.
Whisk of magic leaves in his hand.
 
He is Quiet, awaiting the whisper
when old one comes.
To tell.  To command. To sing.
 
Inside his mask 
is the center of the world.
Where Silence is the heart’s thunder.
 
He is practicing an uncertain word.
To still the hammer of his pulse
in the jar.  To mend his stammer.
 
He awaits the invention of ink.
Singing to himself.  No self.
Cry like a rainy day.
 
Daniel Lusk

This poem first appeared in Every Slow Thing, by Daniel Lusk, from Kelsay Books.

Daniel Lusk is author of eight poetry collections and other books. His work is published widely in literary journals, and his genre-bending essay “Bomb” (New Letters), was awarded a 2016 Pushcart Prize. Native of the prairie Midwest and former commentator on small press books for NPR, he lives in Vermont with his wife, Irish poet Angela Patten.
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Bebe in the Bramble, by Marianne Peel

5/31/2025

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Picture
Untitled (Bebe Marie), by Joseph Cornell (USA) early 1940s

Bebe in the Bramble
  
A slip of the foot and you are lost in sticks.  A maze of kindling.  You steady the brim of your hat.  Your hat a cornucopia of leaves that have lost all colour.  Drained of summer’s rouge and ready for the campfire. The pumpkins have begun to shrivel in on themselves.  Before the deer have gutted them.  Papaw always left them out behind the tobacco drying shed.  Smashed them with the dull end of his ax.  Made it easy for the deer to devour the innards of the pumpkin.  Told me they always left some of the seeds behind. He’d roast them and salt them good.  Have them with his morning joe while Meemaw flattened out the biscuit dough.  And I see your hands submerged in a muff.  Warm. Sweating now, I think.  And you continue to look straight on, as if you have not been waylaid by a clot of sticks. As if one step will unbalance you.  I want to rescue you.  Strip this kindling away.  Like peeling the bark of a birch.  One paper mâché layer at a time.  Slowly. Never knowing what you’d find beneath the pincurls of birch bark.  The apples in your basket are shriveled, too.  Like the pumpkins.  Your apples would make a dry, dry compote.  Something to grind with your incisors. Like a day-old raisin scone at Miss Jezebel’s Bakery at the Four Corners.   I am wishing the branches were sticks of cinnamon.  A saucepan of water is simmering on the way-back burner.   Starting to boil with bubbles.  Slowly.  I place the cinnamon sticks into the water.  Careful not to scald my fingertips.  I sprinkle in some cloves.  Pour you a cup of spiced tea.  Blow on it to cool it for your tongue.  Here, give me your hand.  I am afraid your feet will trip on the stubborn roots of the old pin oak.  Give me your hand.  I will guide you out of the woods.  Can you smell the spiced tea, heavy with cinnamon and cloves, waiting for your tongue? 
​
Marianne Peel

Marianne Peel loves poetry that literally makes her stop breathing.  She worked for thirty-two years as an English teacher, learning life lessons from her students as well as from Albee's Zoo Story, Williams' Streetcar Named Desire, and Shaffer's Equus. She loves to play Native American Flute and ukulele in the woods. She’s taught teachers in China for three summers, studied in Nepal and Turkey on Fulbright Scholarships, and has danced in the rain forests of Bali, Indonesia. Her debut book of poetry is No Distance Between Us through Shadelandhouse Modern Press.  She has a second full-length collection, Singing is Praying Twice, published in 2024, from the same publisher. 
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A Ramble on the Painting Who’s Afraid of Vanessa Bell? by Pennie Brantley (1985), by Mike Goodwin

5/30/2025

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Picture
Who's Afraid of Vanessa Bell? by Pennie Brantley (USA) 1985

A Ramble on the Painting Who’s Afraid of Vanessa Bell? by Pennie Brantley (1985)
 
The empty chair in the empty room is like my mind lately. Emptiness upon emptiness. It’s not enough to not be in the empty room – I must not be sitting in the empty chair. Maybe the robe signifies my having been there and gone. Maybe it wasn’t even me. Maybe it was what I wanted it to be. A mind devoid of any substance or pain, empty of emotion or confusion. A world ready to be filled with laughter and understanding. So much promise but not until the room is cleaned out. Maybe the robe signifies my shell trying to hang on. Trying to maintain my presence in the room – in the world – in my mind. I want to furnish the room with bright objects, interesting artifacts, happy people, my younger self. But when I look into my catalog all I find is broken furniture, rusty fixtures, torn drapes. A life well lived but now in need of serious repair. I don’t know if I’ll make it back to that chair but I know it will wait for me. Always sitting in the empty room that is my mind, my life. We all have our chairs and our rooms. We try to use them as they were meant to be used. We don’t always succeed and we always get older but the chair is always there in the room, not wanting to be empty.

Mike Goodwin

Mike Goodwin is a retired high school mathematics teacher who  recently became interested in writing poetry as a result of attending workshops on ekphrastic writing at the local art museum. 
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Venus  - After the Bath, by Cynthia Storrs

5/29/2025

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Picture
Venus Rising from the Sea-a Deception, formerly known as After the Bath, by Raphaelle Peale (USA) 1822

Venus  - After the Bath
 
Why hide, Venus?
Behind that curtain
or tablecloth.
Edged in gold
giving off a sheen
glistening, like an oiled body
shimmers.
 
You balance
on one slender foot
around which sweet flowers push
coaxed into existence
by your breath.
 
You tease, twisting
up your long golden locks
voluptuously
over a plump
golden arm.
 
Is your beauty too strong
for our unshielded eyes?
Or is that whiteness
a disguise for an aging, unbalanced goddess                                   
with shadows and folds
now as grey and deep
as that concealing sheet?
​
​Cynthia Storrs

​Cynthia Storrs teaches, writes, and paints in Nashville, TN.  Educated in the US and UK, she has served on the board of Poetry West (CO), Pikes Peak Poet Laureate Committee, the Pikes Peak Arts Council, and now on the Board of the Poetry Society of Tennessee. Her poetry has been published in three anthologies, Critique, Tennessee, and on-line. She has also published scholarly articles on bilingualism, biculturalism, and acculturation. Cynthia loves art history, theatre, landscape painting, and chocolate.  ​
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David Hockney, Yorkshire  Paintings, by A. Robert Lee

5/28/2025

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David Hockney, Yorkshire  Paintings

God knows, you’ve travelled landscapes.
Or riverscapes, hillscapes, flowerscapes. 

Across canvas, paper. By oil or wash.
Each the invitation to gaze, to prospect. 

Claude coast.
​

Constable pond.

Van Gogh field.

Cézanne mountain.
​

Now it’s dale, moor, riding.
English north. Plein Air Yorkshire.

You’ve been to California for the splash
You’ve seen the Ipad plants and vases.  

Now it’s the boy from Bradford.
Home again from Sixties to Postmodern.   

Just look at the Sledmere multi-colour.
Curvilinear brushstroke, pigment brilliance.  

Contemplate the Kilham watercolour.  
Parked street at rest in discreet white, pink.  

Level your eye at Huggate summer.
Fringe grass, sloped hill breasts.  

These, the others, speak memory.
Paths, wheatfield, bower, hill.

These, the others, speak colour.
Meadow, treetop, sunlight, snow.

These, the others, speak brush, palette.   
Hyper pastel, Hockney’s inside landscape. 

​A. Robert Lee

A. Robert Lee’s creative writings include Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), Tokyo Commute (2011), Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012), Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013),Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013), Americas (2015), Off Course: Roundabouts & Deviations (2016), Password: A Book of Locks and Keys (2016), Written Eye: Visuals/Verse (2017), Alunizaje/Lunar Landings, with Blas Miras,  Writer Directory: A Book of Encounters (2019), Daylong, Nightlong: 24 Hour Poetry (2020), Suspicious Circumstances (2020), Time Travels (2022), Outside In: Hinges and Swivels (2022), Almost Patagonia (2023), and Everywhere You Look (2024).

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Snapshots of Girlhood via Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, by  Colleen Fox Breen

5/27/2025

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Snapshots of Girlhood via Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures 

Welcome Home 
Two girls walk up the pebblestone steps bordered by a well-groomed, pristine green grass lawn. The front door of the two-story, red brick house is framed by two fake shrubs in antiquated pot-vases. There is a door-knocker on the stained-brown door. You cannot see what the girls are wearing because their clothes are pasted to their stick bodies with mud. Their hair is also caked in mud, and there are droplets of dried mud behind them. 

Feminine Hygiene 
Two girls washing their hair in a river. Purple and white sports bras, black and blue sports shorts. One has her head turned upside-down and dipped into the river. The other is working the suds into a mohawk. 

Parking Lot Dance Parties 
Two girls-- one with short hair whipped out like helicopter blades, covering her turned head, arms stretched to the sky, feet together and off the ground; the other with hair cut close to her head, legs apart, knees bent, hips jutted out to one side, mouth wide, singing a song. They are in the parking lot of a series of storefronts. 

Get Out The Way 
Two girls leaning out from either side of a tan-gold Jeep Patriot, screaming at an Elk lying in the middle of the dirt road. 

Congratulations 
Girls dancing in a circle at a graduation party, all wearing black. 

Land of Plenty 
Three girls are laughing hysterically as one passes a bag of freeze-dried chili to another. Behind them is a silver tarp held to the ground by three rocks, tied to a nearby pole. Beneath the tarp are three sleeping bags. They’re in a desert canyon that reveals no sky. 

Buried Alive 
A girl is wrestling out from a hole she’s buried in. Her knees and wrists and head are above the ground- rope visibly wrapped around her wrists. Two girls stand nearby, watching her indifferently in combat boots, one Parquet Courts t-shirt, one black wife-beater, holding two dirt-caked shovels. 

Heights
One girl climbs up a ledge to the top of the canyon. Another girl photographs her climb from above. A third girl on another ledge nearby. None wear shoes. 

Shields 
A girl walks in the woods with a turtle shell and a bag strapped to her backpack, the translucent bag filled with other bones. She wears pink-brown corduroy pants and a peach t-shirt tied in a knot above her belly button. 

Faces 
Two girls without shirts lean over to make their bellies bulge, each holding her rolls between both hands to make belly-mouths. They’ve drawn eye shapes around their nipples. 

Kiddie Crossings 
Five girls walk through a park surrounded by brightly colored signs and tables and children running around in brightly colored clothes. One pulls a cigarette out of a pack of American Spirit light blues, another two are pulling drags, one is laughing with smoke spilling out of her teeth, and the final looks at the laughing girl with a smirk, her light blue hanging with her arms by her waist. 

Branded 
A girl tattoos the name “JESSI” onto another girl’s ass. The girl tattooing has an ass that reads “COLLEEN.” The three girls watching nearby also have hands covered in indigo ink. The tattoo gun is made of a needle and thread taped to a topless electric toothbrush. 

Wild Things 
Two girls hang upside-down from respective tree limbs with tiger masks painted on their faces. 

PSA 
One girl on the sill of a porch, naked in the public apartment complex. She holds a bottle of Jameson. Another girl wears a white t-shirt and a soft pink pair of briefs, and the other wears a navy blue sports bra and black jeans. The two girls are kissing, and the naked girl on the sill is giving an animated speech. 

Of Montreal 
Girls dancing in a circle outside a small concert venue. All the other people outside are talking or smoking. 

Post Eruption 
Two girls sprinting down a steep trail of a volcano in the middle of a violent storm. 

Girls Don’t Drink Whiskey 
Two girls with their heads tipped back, shooting shots of a nearby bottle of Jameson. The third dumps the Jameson down her throat from the bottle, staring down a pan-faced young boy. 

Sisterhood of of the Traveling Pants 
Two girls wear a massive, poppy-red, floor-length dress at the same time. Their middle ankles are tied together, middle arms invisible. 

Accomplished Feats 
Two girls lay in each other’s arms, one leaning back into the lap of the other, in a full bathtub. The third is climbing up the bathroom doorway, pressing on the inside of the doorframe with her bare feet and hands. The other two girls watch her climb. 

Side of the Highway 
A girl is squatted down and peeing as another is kneeling down to take a photograph of her pee-puddle, and the third is doubled over in laughter by a crack in the earth, teeny blades of grass pushing through. All that is visible around them is sky and sand. 

Feminine Hygiene 2 
Four girls shoved into a bathroom where the bathtub contains a grey-brown film around the bottom third, one cockroach near the drain, and a face-down baby doll. One girl in the midst of violently brushing out her hair with a thin comb. Another leaning over the counter to put brown lipstick on in only her underwear and a pair of three-inch platform boots. Another sits on the toilet, reaching down to wipe between her black-yellow-and-white floral dress, a toothbrush hanging from her mouth. The final throws a black, lacy dress over her head-- one foot dyed royal purple. 

Howler 
A girl at the top of a wooden windmill without a shirt, the O of her lips upturned to the sky. A group of boys below, all looking confused. A girl below, head thrown back to the sky in laughter. 

Celebration 
One girl kisses another girl’s nose as the other kisses her chin at a New Year’s party, surrounded by bustling other bodies. Each wears a glittery dress. 

Sensible 
One girl points at a patch of moss, her mouth in mid-sentence, the other presses her hands into the patch- water dripping through her fingers. 

Slippery Slope 
Two girls on all fours climb up a steep trail, one behind the other, each wearing boots and gloves, the trail completely covered in ice. 

Beneath The Train Tracks 
Girls dancing in a circle around a bonfire, a burning couch at the centre. 

High Stakes 
Two girls involved in a vicious game of cards, eyes wild, marker drawings all over their faces, in the cafe of an art museum. 

Throw Em’ Back 
A girl in a pale, flowery dress and no shoes bends over to pick up a dead silver-dollar fish off a dock. She has two others in her opposite palm. 

Feminine Hygiene 3 
Two girls in a mirror that reads Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work. The faucet is running. One girl slathers foamy soap onto her stubbly armpit. The other is brushing her teeth with her finger. There is a makeup bag on the counter, a tube of mascara peeking out. 

Structure 
Four girls in mid-topple over a game of Twister, three shouting or gasping, the fourth with her teeth bared in laughter. 

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 
Three girls wearing one oversized cable-knit sweater. All girls wear the same shade of red-brown lipstick. 

Burn the Witch 
Girls dancing and jumping around a burning shirt on the ground, all screaming at the fire. 

Crash 
One girl floating in a natural pool, arms and legs spread wide. A ten-foot waterfall crashing ten-ish feet above her head. Chest bare at the surface. Weightless. 

Dreamless 
Four girls in a pile of blankets, piled on top of one another, limbs wrapped and stacked and intertwined. Waffle-style hand-holding. Wearing jeans and skirts and dresses and lipstick and mascara with bangs and buzzes and lengthy locks and socks. All with their eyes closed. 

Colleen Fox Breen

Colleen Fox Breen (she/her) is a writer, editor, art historian, and film photographer. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, a BA in literary journalism from Hampshire College, and is a candidate for her MA in art history at Lindenwood University. Her creative and academic work focuses on the relationships between humans and the nonhuman world, with particular interests in magical realism, climate fiction, American landscape painting, and regenerative Earth art. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her dog, Fable.
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Ekphrastic Flash Fiction Course with Lorette at Women on Writing

5/26/2025

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Very excited about the upcoming Ekphrastic Flash Fiction course with Women on Writing.  You won't want to miss this deep dive into ekphrasis and the small story. In this five week course, you will discover how to mine visual art for themes, characters, setting, and narrative, and bring unexpected stories to life. Zoom classes with discussion on ekphrasis, art, and story examples, and responses on your stories.

Find more info or register here:
https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_EkphrasticFlashFiction.html


Testimonials from other Women on Writing courses with Lorette:

"Lorette's enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge about art combine to make her one of the most exciting and empowering workshop leaders I have ever had the joy of writing with. And the Hyperbole police would not arrest me for saying that!  I was exposed to art I would never have looked twice at, and have learned how to linger and engage with the work and the artist. Her preparation, presentations and written feedback were thoughtful, generous and encouraging. an absolute delight!"
Susie Whelehan

Lorette is one of the most vibrant, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable workshop leaders I’ve encountered, and I’ve worked with about a dozen of the top poets in the U.S., including Naomi Shihab Nye, Ted Kooser, and Jane Hirshfield.
Alarie T.

“Lorette’s course provides a multitude of opportunities to practice the craft of writing in a supportive, non-judgmental setting.  In four weeks, my confidence grew and my creativity blossomed.”
Allison C.

“This definitely fulfilled the wow factor- already in the first class.”
Elissa G.

There are two other courses with WOW! later this fall. You can view more information or register for them at the following links:

Ekphrastic Poetry: Exploring Visual Art by Women
https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_EkphrasticPoetry.html

Writing Through Illness and Chronic Pain:
https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_WritingThroughIllness.html
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