Pouring One Out I take her hand and hold it like a gold-encrusted vessel, precious lifeblood coursing through its mottled veins, fragile, shriveled joints wrinkled, long and knotted, the slender claws of an airy wren. The shrouded evening wears thin; I close the buttons on her satin nightshirt, tuck the collar soundly around her graceful neck shutting out the cold. ‘Tell me stories, Mama,’ I coax. And the songbird lifts its trusting voice, rising lark-like from the meadow depths, scaling mountainous crags, soaring, breaking through the clouds filling the cup of my memories before nodding, landing safely back to rest. E.C. Traganas Author of the debut novel Twelfth House and Shaded Pergola, a collection of short poetry with original illustrations, E.C. Traganas has published in a myriad of literary reviews. She enjoys a professional career as a Juilliard-trained concert pianist & composer, and is the founder/director of Woodside Writers, a literary forum based in New York.
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On Zoom. Thursday July 25 2024 from 6 to 8 pm est a wine and art write night Bring your favourite Shiraz or a pot of tea as we relax together and take a look at the theme of night in art history. The night has inspired art, poetry, prayer, awe, and fear in humans since the beginning. It is a symbol of beauty, mystery, eternity, and the unknown. The night can be a profound source of wonder, and it can also be terrifying. "I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day," said Vincent Van Gogh, who painted the most famous artwork in history, aptly named, Starry Night. We will take a look at a variety of paintings of the night, and use them in some generative and brainstorming exercises to inspire our own poetry or fiction. A Sonnet to a Sappho
She was leaning over the edge of the sea cliff her fearful eyes peering down to the rocky depths below darkly stroking her wavy hair the twilight throes of some ill-fated despair seeking to hide herself–two tides pull within I could tell by the swell of her breast beating breath she desired death to throw her willowy body over the sheer faced ledge to embrace the blood veiled pillow of the billowy sea– for I’ve seen that distraught look painted before. She was unknotting and knotting tear-drop knots– a crazy heartache she was caught in a shake her eyes choppy white breakers about to break . . . Éamon Ó Caoineachán Éamon Ó Caoineachán is a poet and freelance writer. He is originally from Co. Donegal in Ireland, but lives in Houston, Texas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crannóg, Irish Times, History Ireland, IrishCentral, Impartial Reporter and various poetry journals and magazines in the U.S. and Ireland. He is currently in the PhD in Arts research programme at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, Ireland. Upward Mobility
—after an untitled photograph by Vivian Maier (U.S.A.), dated September 29, 1959. https://www.vivianmaier.com/gallery/street-4/#slide-44 Old clothes, old clothes—the two-note medieval-sounding cry of the “rag and bone man” rose from the alley behind the six-floor Bronx apartment house our small family lived in: threadbare jackets, spatulas with burned handles, beef and lamb bones were thrown down to him from above, packed into the bag he shouldered. I didn’t consider, as a child, that he must have walked long distances through more than one borough, and many, many alleyways. I didn’t know that he sold what he collected to makers of paper, fabric, glue or soap. Before supermarkets were the go-to places, the “vegetable man” parked his horse and pushcart laden with fresh produce near a shopping center a few blocks from our building. Better dressed than the “rag and bone man” or the “vegetable man,” the “Fuller Brush man” rang our doorbell, and if my mother deigned to look, would open his case of cleaning implements. But she usually politely declined to buy, and he’d sigh almost inaudibly as he repacked. In my immigrant city, commerce was everywhere—however humble. On cold-weather trips to Manhattan my mother and I would have to stop for a paper bag of hot roasted chestnuts from a street vendor; the scored skins of the chestnuts peeled open as they roasted, sending up an enticing starchy-sweet aroma. In any season, we could share a mid-afternoon pretzel like the six or seven dozen visible in the seller’s basket in Maier’s photo: soft pretzels— briefly boiled, like bagels, before they were baked—zesty with nuggets of coarse salt, crunchy on the shiny outside, soft within. Mom and I, wearing our “street dresses” and low heels, as required for shopping trips to Manhattan in the 50s (and much of the 60s), might have passed this very corner, since just across the street from the pretzel seller sitting in the sun is a Barton’s Bonbonniere chocolates shop, that successful business started by a family of brothers who fled Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss—the city my mother had emigrated from with her family in 1927. My mother loved Barton’s; even their Easter chocolates were “kosher for Passover.” I didn’t think about profit and loss in my teens, and so wouldn’t have wondered whether this corner was a desirable one, whether those pretzels in the basket were getting stale in the sun while the crowd strode by, showing no interest. I probably wouldn’t have noticed that the pretzel-seller looks tiredly away, a pen quiet in her left hand, her brow slightly creased—like my father’s might be on a slow mid-afternoon, no customers inside drinking egg creams, when he stood outside his new, tiny, lower Broadway luncheonette in his smock jacket, arms folded across his aproned belly. It was normal for me, home on college vacation from Massachusetts, to wait for mom to scrub the luncheonette’s floor of miniscule black and white tiles with a mop and bucket reeking with ammonia on a “half-day” Saturday—the store already closed—normal to wait for her to wipe the sweat off her face and change from her smock and deep-pocketed apron into her street dress, before we set off on a clothes-shopping trip for me. I wish the man in the fedora and sport jacket would suggest a pretzel would be just the thing to the woman he was with, and turn around and retrace his steps to buy a couple. It was normal for me to sleep in on those winter and spring vacations from school while my parents got up before 5 A.M. to drive to Manhattan and open up shop. It was normal for my father (who had also come from Eastern Europe—from Germany in 1934, the year after Hitler came to power) to provide a fifth of their modest yearly earnings to match the half-scholarship I received from the New York Club of my Ivy League college, starting in the fall of 1960. The position of the lady with the soft little dark hat—head turned to her left, tipped down—seems to echo the position of the-there-but-for-the- grace- of-God pretzel seller in her unglamorous babushka, smock and apron. I wish that lady with her velvety hair adornment would open her purse and buy some pretzels. I wish the man glancing in the pretzel-seller’s direction, who looks like a boat captain in his whites, would discover a yen for half a dozen to take home. Dad had graduated from being a factory foreman to being a small proprietor, though it meant standing behind a wide-open window taking in coins for candy bars, gum, and cigarettes in all weathers, his legs aching. He attended the fountain as well, dispensing those carbonated chocolate milk egg creams, and Cokes made from syrup and seltzer, but had already begun to yearn for the dry and warm gift shop with a closeable door that would finally come, years later, as opposed to this “wet” luncheonette. I quit a summer job six weeks before I started college, even though it was obtained for me by an uncle. Miserably hot work in the office of a bias-binding factory. I couldn’t deal with the surreal boss who refused to direct the fans into the office because he had no functional filing system and didn’t want the orders and bills to fly about. I delivered a parcel he gave me to an address near Wall Street, and never returned. My parents—particularly my mother—were very upset with me, yet didn’t make me beg the boss to take me back. My Eternal Gratitude, Mom and Dad. And My Apology. Judy Kronenfeld Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was recently released by Bamboo Dart Press. Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems will be published by Inlandia Books in early 2025. Currently, Judy is obsessed with Vivian Maier’s street photos; she has published poems on these in MacQueen’s Quinterly and in The Memory Palace. Christy Sheffield Sanford Christy Sheffield Sanford has won an NEA in poetry. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and Interarts from Antioch University. Sanford recently won Arts & Letters Unclassifiable Contest, and she was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Chain, Inverted Syntax, Drunken Boat, and Action / Spectacle. Sanford is the author of The Cowrie Shell Piece (Baroque and Rococo Strains) and Great Lakes (Map-Induced Trance States). I Run into Camille Claudel at the Rodin Museum Don’t let these prim, shining halls fool you— the work was born of plaster dust & wet loam, sour sweat & tang of metal in our mouths like blood. Skin bits floated in slants of light like god particles. To be a woman then was to be a laundress, cleaning up after greatness. I couldn’t do it. My hands needed to wrest feeling out of cold minerality. At 12, I sank my fingers into red clay from banks of the Seine, my starched petticoats earth-smeared, fingernail crescent moons caked thick with creation— from this, figures wormed to life, a night jungle menagerie sprang from me. I never should have left, become pupil, protégé, a kind of prey. There was no place in the atelier for my children of mud & stone, they were too alive for this world, their faces ached, they didn’t behave as statues do, sitting still with their hands in their laps, obedient, empty. They moved & breathed. Finally, a great wave came for me— my family locked me away, they tried to snuff out the flame in my eyes, but it was too late, I had already unleashed my marble beasts upon the land. Time undrowned me, washed me to shore. My huge Gorgon wings dried in the sun. They gave me a room here, have you seen it? My heart beats through rock there, it is unstoppable. Through rock, I tell you. Wendy Kagan Wendy Kagan (she/her) lives in New York’s Catskill Mountain foothills. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, miniskirt magazine, The Poetry Distillery, Eunoia Review, The Hyacinth Review, and elsewhere. Wendy holds an MA in English from Columbia University. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition. Join us for the epic event of the year. You won't be sorry. It is wild, exhilarating, exhausting and wonderful. A day of pure creation. Play. Brainstorming. Join us on Sunday, or do it on your own time over the next couple of weeks. Details are below. Nine Lives: an Ekphrastic Marathon Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating nine years of The Ekphrastic Review. Join us on Sunday, July 14, 2024 for our third annual ekphrastic marathon. This is an all -day creative writing event that we do independently, together. Take the plunge and see what happens! Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone. We will gather in a specially created Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, before the deadline for submission. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2024). Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site. One poem and one flash will win $100 CAD each. Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year! Marathon: Sunday July 14, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks) (For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 14, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.) Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2024 Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 15 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors. If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll sign you up. Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September. Sign up below! Nine Lives: the Third Annual Ekphrastic Marathon
CA$20.00
An all day ekphrastic marathon on Sunday July 14, 2024, celebrating nine years of The Ekphrastic Review. Eight hours, fourteen drafts. Polish drafts later and submit your five favourites! Poetry, flash fiction, micro fiction, CNF, anything goes. Marathon will be held in a private Facebook group with multiple prompts to choose from. Your objective is to create a rough draft in thirty minutes and then move on to the next. You can take time out for breaks and lunch, of course. If date or time zone don't work for you, we will have alternative participation options! More information will be made public closer to the event. The first two marathons were epic experiences. Try it! The goal is to complete the marathon, nothing else. Any awesome drafts and story ideas will be a bonus. And you WILL have several! Thank you for supporting The Ekphrastic Review. Untitled Essay, Untitled Painting author's note: "The part in italics is the 'untitled essay' I'm writing within the essay... as if we are breaking the 4th wall. I wanted to show the thought process and work that a writer goes through while writing something. The parts in regular font are the present time as me the writer researching and thinking about the untitled essay in italics. Whenever I go back into italics, that is me writing the 'untitled essay' again. The writing style is inspired by Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where we see the playwright's thought process as the main story." My dad had made the cut in the first round of his bowling tournament. The bowling alley was near Ravenna, Ohio, about a 45-minute drive from Cleveland. My mom’s father, my Grandpa Thomas, lived in Ravenna, and she wanted to visit him before the second round of the tournament started. I know this because they’ve both confirmed it. I can imagine my parents bickering on the way there, my mom pleading for him to just slowdown in their… What was their car again? I text my dad, “What was the cool blue car you had before I was born?” I can just hear them. “Steve! Slow down!” my mother said as she pushed her foot into the car floor, stomping on invisible brakes. “Vic – Come on! You can’t expect me to drive slow in this thing!” He revved the engine and gave her a goofy scrunchy-up pout, his Mario mustache making him that much cuter. She laughed and looked out the window, the trees one green blur. No speed could have gotten them there soon enough though. The speedometer reached 95mph, and my mom… My dad texts me, “1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme!! It had a 35 rocket with a 4 barrel engine!! It was the fastest car I ever had!! I once went 115mph on a Sunday going to a bowling tournament!!” Oh geez. Okay. The speedometer reached 115mph, and my mom yelled, “Steve! Slow down!” just like they did my entire childhood. They arrived at my grandpa’s mobile home, laughing, my mom punching my dad’s arm playfully, telling him to “not drive like a speed devil ever again.” My mom knocked on the door. “Dad?” They were on a covered patio. I know because I’ve seen pictures. The mobile home was very fragile, shifting under your feet as you walked from the front to the back. You could hear everything in that echo chamber. So, Grandpa Thomas should have heard my mother calling him. “Dad!” I can hear her voice going up, concern now peppering it. She turned to my dad and said, “Maybe he’s asleep? I think I can see him on the couch.” She knocked again. No movement. She knocked again. Just voices coming from the TV. Perhaps now she wished that they had come before the first round of the bowling tournament. Panic zapped her like an exposed wire. “Steve, we need to call 911.” But how did they call? This was 1988. There weren’t cell phones. I ask my dad in another text, “Do you remember how you guys called the police when you got to the mobile home? You wouldn’t have had cell phones.” My parents stand at the door, immobile, stuck, waiting for direction. He texts me back, “My god that’s right! I really don’t remember.” “Maybe went to a neighbour?” My mom told my dad to run over to the neighbour… “I don’t recall doing that!!” my dad says. I have my mom bring my dad back over. “Hmm bizarre. Because the cops or firefighters are the ones that broke down the door, right?” I ask my dad. “It was the paramedics!! Ask your mom. I guess we got a neighbour??” My dad’s extra punctuation marks sound just like his exaggerated voice he always speaks in. It occurs to me that maybe my mom had a key to the mobile home, but she forgot it. Maybe she never had one? I text her, asking for her side of the story. I continue. “Steve, we need to call 911!” She must have forgotten her key… “I never had a key. Went to the neighbour,” my mom responds. Okay, no key. Neighbour. Paramedics. “Steve, run over to the neighbour and call an ambulance!” my mother’s voice shook, her tongue tripping over the word ambulance, the syllables too much. She stood there looking at the outline of her father on the couch, unable to reach him, unable to help. My dad ran back over from the neighbour’s, something he doesn’t remember doing. Probably adrenaline, probably his brain erasing this traumatic event. Death had never really knocked on his door before. They waited. I envision the moments waiting to hear those sirens of help. Those long agonizing minutes. Did they stand there in stunned silence? Did my mom pound on the door, her fist taking out every transgression her father had ever done to her? Like throwing her First Communion cake against a wall in pure alcoholic rage in front of all of the guests? Like bending his clarinet over his knee in a terrifying fit of anger? Like letting her leave home at 16 without so much as a phone call for over a year? Did she scream, spittle coming off her lips as she cursed her father for causing such panic now when really she needed someone to rescue her all those years ago? I don’t know, because I don’t ask. I have a picture of my Grandpa Thomas lying on that very couch. It’s either Christmas or his birthday because my mom has stuck two green gift bows to his brown knit sweater. He looks happy and sober. The couch is a late 70s plaid of orange, brown, and beige. I wonder who picked it out? “Probably my mother. She wasn’t a very good judge of things,” my mom tells me on the phone once we decide to just call each other – my essay could wait. “She probably sat in it at the store and liked it but changed her mind when she got home.” “What happened to the couch?” “Oh, we had to throw it away. We didn’t know how long he had been there. He had wet himself. It smelled terrible. Ugh, it was awful.” I have inherited some of my grandfather’s things throughout the years – his perpetual motion clock that GM gave him when he retired, his travel Olympia typewriter, his wedding ring, and most of his acrylic paintings. My mom has given them to me because she says they are too painful to look at. They remind her of blue and green bruises, of sleepless nights. They remind her of the sweet man he became once he was sober. One of the paintings, signed D L Thomas, July 1974, hangs on a wall in my living room. Untitled, it depicts a storm on the ocean, waves crashing into each other, a mist obscuring dark sky. My grandfather suffered an aneurysm long before my parents got into their car. The paramedics took him away because he wasn’t dead. Not yet. He was still in the mist. “Something I don’t think I’ve ever told you was after we took him to the hospital,” my mom says on the phone. “Your dad had gone back to the bowling tournament since he was doing so well. So, I was alone with my dad in his room. He still hadn’t woken up or said anything.” I can’t imagine standing next to my father after finding him like that. “So, I’m standing there, and I’m pissed. I’m pissed that he didn’t call. I’m thinking about what’s to come. Because, I know. I know he’s not coming home. Now, I’m going to have to get the door fixed that the paramedics broke. I’m going to have to get rid of that couch that now has piss on it. I’m going to have to get rid of everything in the mobile home. But then my dad opens his eyes.” I haven’t heard this before. “He opens his eyes, looks right at me. I say, ‘Dad! Why didn’t you call?’ but he doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me, and I have this angry look on my face. I’m upset about everything that’s happened, and here I am standing there with this bitchy face. Steph, I can’t tell you how much this bothers me.” I swallow. “Then he closes his eyes, and he never opens them again. He never says anything, and I’m the last thing he saw, with my bitchy face.” “Oh, Mom, he knows now why you looked like that.” “I know. And he knew I wasn’t a bitchy person, but I still can’t get over that.” Then I think about how my Grandpa Thomas traumatized my mother’s childhood with his alcoholism and abuse, and yet she’s still upset that she somehow let him down in his final moments. He let one final blow hit her heart. “I don’t even think you dad knows about that,” she says. Very typical of their relationship. I look back at the photo I have of my grandpa, the man I never knew, wondering. Wondering what an aneurysm feels like, wondering what he was watching on TV, wondering if he felt remorse for letting his daughter down one last time. My mom stayed by his side until he let out his final breath. Sitting on the second bed in the room, she had been fiddling with a medical glove whenever he sat up, grimacing. He grunted in pain then fell back on his hospital pillow. The air seeped out of his mouth as my mom looked at her motionless father. She sobbed and dabbed her eyes with the medical glove, a fill-in for a tissue, just like he had been a fill-in for a father all those years. After I hang up with my mom, I look at his ocean painting one more time. My mom once said that there had been a ship on the waves, but that he ‘sunk’ it because he wasn’t pleased with the results. Instead, the brushstrokes crosshatch, bringing your eyes toward the swell of water where souls have been lost to sea. Greens and blues texture the waves, just like a healing bruise. I hope he found peace beyond the mist, but more importantly, I hope my mother does too. Stephanie Provenzale-Furino Stephanie Provenzale-Furino is a librarian in Northeast Ohio. She holds an MFA from Ashland University, where she finished her book-length memoir. When she isn't reading or writing, she's busy jamming out on guitar. You can view her other work at stephanieprovenzalefurino.com. This poem was inspired by a photo of Matisse by Henri Cartier Bresson, although it mentions the work shown above as well. To see the photo, click below: https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/art/studio-matisse-henri-cartier-bresson/ Palomas Matisse examines the captive dove while others look on from atop their cages. They're like uncertain spectators bound to serve the game of art. The painter's palm wraps around the fragile form of their companion-- it's the hand that also feeds them. Once, when the church he didn't believe in offered a job for the Chapel of Venice, the same hand sent them off to young Picasso. The elder wished his studio free for invention. A bird with wings outflung and beak holding colourful flowers flew into Pablo's famous poster for Advocates of Peace, that Stalinist bunch he quit when Soviet tanks rolled in to quell the Hungarian rebellion. "We will no longer remain slaves," they'd protested, explaining why Matisse had never joined the communists in the first place: ideology another cage. Still. Did the doves feel unchained when they got to Picasso's studio? Did he, embracing his elder's winged Muses? Did Matisse, leaving his bedbound form to fly into the dark unguarded space he'd sought through art he wished as "a soothing, calming influence on the mind," find anything like that liberty when he flew the coop? Picasso was désolé: "When one of us dies, there are things the other will not be able to say." His tribute painting in the style of Matisse placed doves in cubes on the periphery while two birds perched on the sill, reluctant to rise and fly, as if they were still conversing. Lisa Norris Lisa Norris is a professor emeritus of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA. She grew up in Virginia Beach, VA, and taught for 15 years at Virginia Tech. Her prize-winning story collections are Toy Guns (Helicon Nine Press, 2000) and Women Who Sleep With Animals (Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, 2010). Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in Willow Springs, Shenandoah, Ascent, Fourth Genre, Terrain.Org., Bullets Into Bells, Gulf Stream, and others. Leading Lady Frame her, instead, as ancient Egypt, A magic-irrational, colour cult object In profile; scan the inverted pyramid Of her lowered eye, apex embedded At the bloom of carmine cheekbone, Eyelid surfaced in lucent limestone Washed over underpainted hues Of shadow mauve and tinted blues, The oval blue-black socket Pool an oasis source or First Cataract Where the deep keyed register enacts Painter’s proofs against the dry plane Of her face; she’s made up again, Head pinned back against a column Of rigid hair. Above, in cadmium Yellow, the little hat’s jammed down Like the sphinx’s paw, drawn As neuralgic hieroglyph or sorcerer’s Trepanning tool. Is the pain her’s, Or fashioned as sardonic painterly barbs? Anyway, it’s her mouth where the sable’s Lingered most, in red and madder lakes, In alizarin crimson, in gestural strokes To emulate the deft control of lipstick Practice (he saw that many times) As the brush creates and follows form, So her lips open and join and firm Through space and light, a spinning rim, A raised relief and a canopic jar To capture and keep some sense of her. Gareth Robinson Gareth Robinson's writing life has spanned print and broadcast journalism, mainly in the public sector in Australia, and work as an analyst for a public sector watchdog agency. He's published poems in Australian Book Review, Meanjin, and Cordite. He lives with his family on a narrow coastal strip, on Dharawal land, under the Illawarra escarpment, south of Sydney. Honeyeaters visit the backyard, cormorants hang around out front. |
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July 2024
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