Under the Waterfall
                        
It all began on a Summer solstice dawn: the sun disappeared in a
fiery sky of molten marigolds and blood flowers tainting misty
waterfalls all the way to the swan cove. And the startled swans
wandered around mounds of featherless flesh lying pell-mell,
sleeping forms with sparse down crowning their heads, a burnt
umber field of sepia limbs sprouting from broken shells, their
strange, acrid smell terrified them: flapping their immaculate wings,
they kept bathing in the purifying waters, came back to the inert
bodies in maddened circles biting their own tails amidst the dormant
newborns: had they heard of Andersen’s tales they’d wonder why
they were all cursed at once with ugly little ducklings, unaware they
were witnessing the origin of the human race.

Hedy Habra

This poem was first published by Diode. It appeared in Hedy Habra's collection, Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015).

Hedy Habra's latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? won the 2024 International Poetry Book Award and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award; The Taste of the Earth, won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Poetry Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Poetry Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa, She is a twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. https://www.hedyhabra.com/
 
​

​Stone Carving
 
In fifteen years of teaching study abroad classes in Italy, I had never seen the David. I had been to the Uffizi several times for day trips, always at the mercy of the same guide who went into painful detail about each work, not caring that I had a baby or a toddler on my hip, who I would pass to Dan, who after a time would pass him back to me, and so on…as if we were in a game where we passed a really heavy fish back and forth trying not to let it get away, and trying to keep anyone from noticing the fish. 
 
Last year, I stayed in our home base of Viterbo with Covid while everyone else saw the David.  Even this year, just outside the entrance to the Galleria dell'Accademia and feeling the weight of this anticipated moment, a group of female students mustered up courage to tell me they were chased the day before into a café in Rome by a man who had unzipped his pants when he saw them.  Life carries shadows that make experiencing art, searching for it, seem futile, ridiculous even, secondary to the business of “real” life.  I talked with Dan about the necessary things we needed to do, how we could best help our students and report it to Title IX, as we made our way into the front room filled with bright paintings (reds, blues, greens), and then moved into a hallway with Michelangelo statues—each unfinished, but seen together, offering a lesson in sculpture processes.  There were so many, and they were huge, larger than life, and each in various stages of completion. 
 
As I grew to realize, the interesting thing to see was how each part of each statue was in a different stage of completion from every other part.  And even unfinished, how beautiful each statue was. 
 
The pieta statue with three figures, for instance, showed faces that to a novice might be from three different styles or artists.  In this statue, Mary is upright and looking toward Christ’s face, who has fallen backwards on her, his head leaning on her shoulder. By Mary’s side, a girl strains to help support him.  She does not look at Christ, but instead focuses somewhere ahead toward where she thinks they need to take him.  Christ’s face is smooth, but made of shapes that are still sharp—the nose a smooth straight line from the forehead, but with edges along the sides, like a sandcastle brick that hasn’t been rounded or smoothed away.  Mary’s face behind him is also made of shapes, but with additional tiny rice grains of brush strokes all around, like wind current patterns, or like Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  These tiny marks are even more pronounced on the sidelined girl, whose face looks the way a face under a cloth might look—ill-formed, smothered—but with so many tiny strategic ruts.
 
It is interesting to think about whatever Michelangelo’s process must have been, not just how a face is made from stone, but also what things Michelangelo chooses must wait while he works on other things.  Christ’s face waiting unfinished while the women take shape.
 
Of course, the other thought in this room is how many works and faces Michelangelo started and did not complete, each one made to such great effect and on such a grand scale and still left unfinished.  None look ruined or worth abandoning.  In the museum, the crowd moves you, you move with the crowd, catching glimpses of these giant sculptures, until you see at the end the one with the name you know, the David, larger than even these prefatory statues, and perfected.  It waits at the end of these other attempts, centered and standing in light that is yellow and that exists around it alone, and all the people circle and hover and move around it like dust particles in a shaft of sun.
 
It is an experience of the mind, not just the eye.  A chance to think about a person who had a genius for seeing space where there was rock, for seeing exact shapes and measurements, who could fix these shapes in front of him, who could do this party trick again and again without mistake, who nevertheless worked in time like the rest of us, who lived in many moments of incompleteness, who left a trail of projects for any finished one—and that finished one even more a miracle for all the ones not completed.  You see the David, and in the same moment of seeing, you are thinking about Michelangelo, whose name on the plaques by each drafted sculpture is spelled Micheliangilio—the “i” a reminder of a story more personal and human than you have been able to pair with the idea of genius you have been given leading up to this day.  You stand facing a pedestal made not for the man above men, but made for the achievement of the man who lived on the ground with the rest of us—his genius and talent something to be dealt with like stone, a constant cutting away of time.
 
At the end of the tour, students collected in groups by the gift shop. We waited for everyone to finish their wanderings, to make what purchases they would make, and we began the walk in the sun back to the hotel, through streets that were narrow and that caused us to walk in small groups.  We carried our so-many conversations with us through Florence, but I don’t remember what they were.
 
Ginger Hanchey

Ginger Hanchey is the Director of Literature and Creative Writing at Baylor University and the Director of Core Curriculum in the College of Arts & Sciences. She has poems published in such journals as Nashville Review, Foundry, and Tar River Poetry.  Her chapbook, Letters of a Long Name, was published through Finishing Line Press.

San Francisco Skirts
  
In San Francisco circa 1930
where Frida lived before New York and Detroit
there was no shortage of illegal spirits for sale
but Frida spent her precious coins on silks. 
She loved Chinatown, the joyful clamor 
of the shops. Toys, trinkets, silks of infinite 
weights and patterns, hand-sewn birds, flowers, 
tiny figures in peaked hats.
She loved the Chinese style of dress, how the Chinese stayed Chinese
in America, the way she stayed vividly Mexican
wherever she went—precisely, Tehuana--
of the Isthmus from whence her mother came, where women wear and keep the gold
and hold their bosslady heads high.
A few of Frida’s San Francisco skirts survived the comings and goings
between Mexico and the States.
I, the bright yellow one, the colour Frida said the ghosts wear,
was her favorite, but we all could take her back rápido
to the heady days of firsts when she was twenty-three,
not twenty like she’d have you believe.
First year of marriage to Diego.
First trip outside her homeland.
First glimpse of the ocean, first
sea-swell leap into her yet-to-be-landed life. 

**
 
Underskirt of Matilde Calderón de Kahlo 
 
You’ll find no picture of Frida wearing me,
an ankle-length underskirt of organdy cotton and Valencia lace.
Frida wrote to her mamacita nearly every day
but never let me grace the hemline of her radiant rabonas,
not even after her mama passed.
She couldn’t bear to wear me
or to give me away, belonging
as I did to her mother’s firm Catholic body,
Matilde Calderón de Kahlo
whose love was
solid as the table you’ve laid me on so carefully
to assess the damage and the beauty,
the beauty and the damage.
When Frida brought the trunk of Matilde’s things 
to Detroit, she left me behind in Mexico.
How can such a daughter come from such a mother, you ask?
One was all prayer and discipline, the eldest 
child of a Spanish general and a Tehuana.
The other was all pleasure and impertinence.
It’s a mystery as intricate and delicate as my lace:
a daughter’s love for the woman she is distinctly not,
but without whom she doesn’t exist.
 
**

Skirt Trio
 
You see me in the well-known Kodachrome 
image shot by Frida’s lover Nickolas Muray 
on a New York City rooftop, circa 1946. 
A blue so infused with light it doesn’t look real.
The colour, Frida said, of electricity
and purity love.
Of sky and sky and sky.
But I’m really that blue.
That blue exists, and I am it.
Or I was, once,
before Diego locked me up,
part jealousy, part protection,
but not in equal proportion.
 
*
 
Of all Frida’s skirts, we’re the most depicted,
if not the most beloved—military green,
the drab olive Frida called
the color of leaves, sadness, science, the whole of Germany.
You see us in My Dress Hangs Here, finished in 1933, 
and also in Memory, from 1937,
and The Two Fridas, 1939, with slight alterations:
twin bands of red ribbon, an increase of lace.
We’re the hue of desolation, of far from home.
Of pain, dislocation, 
putrescence,
a country drunk on the black milk of hatred, 
dragging the world back to war.
 
*
 
I’m made of printed Manchester cotton 
of the kind adored by Tehuanas and thus in good supply 
in Mexico. An immigrant fabric
with a deep lace-trimmed flounce.
But Frida loved me.
Someone who knew this arranged me on her bed 
after her death, in a semblance of fullness.
Gisele Freund photographed Frida in me in 1953.
She said, don’t look at the camera, 
just lie in your bed like that, 
with your world all around you. The books, fresh flowers, a few 
small paintings, but not the medicines and syringes 
Frida kept in the bathroom, the Leche de Magnesia,
the hand-labeled bottle of chloroformo.
Frida’s fully dressed in her narrow bed, fingers bejeweled, 
staring into space with a ferocious, calm focus.
She isn’t well. Her legs ache. Her spine. 
She is tired. Of injury, the marathon of healing, even loving.
In her last years, she often needed
to lie down like this and stare out the window,
especially after working, as she did that morning
on a portrait of her beloved late father. 
She knew it would be her turn to go soon
but not that she’d lose a leg first.
I kept her secrets for so long and would 
have gone on keeping them. 
A limp, the touch of lovers, 
the blood and wind and briny woman smells,
the half-leg stub after the amputation. 
After that it didn’t matter what Frida wore--
the devastation couldn’t be contained.
She wrote in her diary: I hope the leaving is joyful--
and I hope never to return.

**

United Skirts of the Casa Azul

Incarceration in Frida’s rooms for fifty years
is no way to treat us
who so faithfully served our mistress.
Diego was crazed with grief when he made that decree.
Is it 1965? 1982? 2030? We can’t say,
only that it’s been too long
since we’ve seen the sun and the moths 
never relent. We’re not alone here.
There’s lipstick, perfume, sketches, paintings, 
diaries, medicines, boots, 
corsets, prosthetics,
huipil and rebozo.
But we don’t speak for such things.
We only speak for skirts.
Specifically, Frida’s.
What would our mistress have been without us?
The eyebrows were only part of the overall effect.
We were as precious to Frida as her paints and brushes.
Because skirts have powers.
Not the least of which: freedom of movement.
A skirt can conceal or reveal. A skirt swishes and sways
or hangs straight, can change hearts
and steal minds. Skirts know
things only skirts can know.
We grant that sometimes Frida wore pants. 
But let’s be clear: a skirt isn’t just a woman’s 
garment - imagine how history would be 
different if more men
wore skirts.

Colleen Morton Busch

Colleen Morton Busch is the author of the nonfiction book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, published by Penguin Press and named a best book by Publisher’s Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble. Her poetry collection, Smolder, won Ex Ophidia Press’s Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest, judged by Felicia Zamora, and will be published in summer 2026.

By popular demand, we begin 2026 with a new monthly series of generative writing sessions on zoom! 

Welcome to Ekphrasis Anonymous!

Each session will include a curated selection of diverse artworks and prompt ideas for brainstorming and generating poetry or fiction. We will look at and discuss each artwork briefly, then spend time writing. We will have a few minutes to talk about our process and the option for a couple of people to share their drafts after each exercise. The curated artworks will be a grab-bag each time, from different artists, eras, styles, and cultures, chosen to inspire your writing and challenge you to new directions.

​The first session starts this Thursday. Join us!

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cephalopod Mollusk

after Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value, by Enrique Chagoya (USA, b. Mexico) contemporary
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/illegal-aliens-guide-concept-relative-surplus-value-78309
​ 
I am not this gorilla businessman, briefcase/club high in my hand; grey and shaggy-haired, he walks on storm waves. I am not these oil tankers, super ships, or tiny boats for no more than four folks, or these ducks in a row. I am not a robot airborne on a flying fish, my cold metal legs grasping its cold metal scales, listening to the deep bass quote Marx. I am not Olive Oil or Popeye, but I’d like to be. I am not surrounded by a golden gilded frame as interesting as I am. I am this red octopus, a tentacled child of October, my speech a tangled graph.
  
Stephen D. Gibson

Stephen D. Gibson studied writing at Purdue University and the University of Houston. His short fiction has appeared in The Citron Review, 100WordStory, and Wigleaf. It has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for Best Microfiction. When not reading, writing, or playing board games, he is with his family. They have a no-pet policy.

Graffiti in Rome
 
just remember that certain things will always be true: / half of us are used like mules /
 to carry the other half into oblivion; / […] somewhere the same men in the same uniform /
​come alive next morning / and fight again until cold night falls. 
SC Flynn, “Last Words”, Abridged 0-92 The Violet Hour. 
 
A man, crucified, with a donkey head – or maybe a mule:
Mocking the faith that worships a god dying like a slave.
A private visit to a famous graffiti, against a dark blue dawn,
Only a bakery is open, the bread hot, white like marble.
From the ground floors of the palaces upward, 
Only grates, princes having ruled in fear, with fear.
The Renaissance of clashing mobsters, 
All forgotten or, rather, just the half who toiled,
Beauty – beauty absolves the world;
Give us a masterpiece, and you will resuscitate a virgin,
Come alive and useful, a cosmos that transforms violence,
New but different, like the alleyways misleading the tourists, 
The soldiers, the ideals, the deities, the arcs of triumph, and
The bell towers presiding the ghetto. 
You passed a horse drinking at a fountain, 
The whip nowhere to be seen – yet.
 
Massimiliano Nastri

Massimiliano Nastri: "An ever-receding biography. I spent my childhood in a German-speaking village on the Italian Alps, something redolent of Heidi, the cartoon. Three PhDs: is it an achievement? I only have few and minor publications, two unpublished novels, and some poems I am very proud of on Ink Sweat and Tears, Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, and The Ekphrastic Review – eternally grateful in this life.  I work as a teaching assistant at Queen’s University Belfast, where I am revising a book about the interwar collapse of Centre-right parties and the rise of fascism. Ominous and irrelevant together is a rare feature, indeed. Fifty years old, still swimming – slower and slower."

Moonstone Diner: 54th & 7th, 1:00 A.M.
 
after Waitress, Diner, New York City, photography by Elliot Erwitt (USA) 1955 
https://www.jacksonfineart.com/artists/elliott-erwitt/new-york-city-usa-1955/
​
I’m the star of a play. Like Groundhog Day we repeat.
The house is always packed. Our patrons repeat.
I’m still Off-Off Broadway, I’m paying my dues.
I cross downstage and up.  My cues I repeat.
I do tread the boards but not as I’d expect.
Linoleum diner floors. Disinfect, wash, repeat.
An apron my costume, an order pad, my prop.
What’ll it be? I fill up your cup; repeat.
I loop through the restaurant. I command my stage.
New patrons come in. My script I repeat.
How I long to speak words of Inge and Albee.
Instead I speak greetings and order repeats.
I want to embody Ophelia, her madness insane.
Not live my own madness, go home and repeat.
Why did I move here, perhaps for a dream?
It’s turned to a nightmare, a loop I repeat.
It’s curtain call now, the end of my day.
Linoleum diner floors. Disinfect, wash, repeat.
I linger a moment with my nicotine bouquet;
inhaling her deep, I exhale I repeat.
As I kill the lights I look back at my stage,
Good night you old diner, I’ll see you tomorrow: Exit Sara: REPEAT.

​Sara Castaneda

Sara Castaneda is a poet/writer.  Her poetry collection, Underdog Bet, was published in March, 2025 by Pegasus/Vanguard Press. Her poems have been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Morsus Vitae and Zebra Ink. She has a collaborative speculative short story in Space & Time Magazine. She is the Editor of the Collaborative Lab Space at Authortunities. She is also VP on the board of 11th House Publishing. Sara lives in Dallas, TX with her husband, Scott, and they are proudly owned by their three cats and dog.

​Taking the Dare

Niagara seemed to dare me: make your mark
with a giant panorama of the Falls.
And so I tackled that terrifying arc,
sketching just behind the viewing wall
its crashing rush, its plumes of towering spray.
That day, as water thundered, the day grew late;
the sky, cloud-streaked in puce and smoky gray,
added drama. Studio weeks would wait.

I added a rainbow so realistically
that critics thought it was reflected from
the window of the New York gallery
where for two weeks my finished artwork hung;
one hundred thousand people paid to see it.
I had succeeded. Niagara guaranteed it.

Amid this Rising Strife
​
I’ve heard that Mr. Church
now has a picture twice as wide
with a beguiling, come-and-go rainbow.
But mine, they say, has a stronger glow.
And though I have no wish to chide,
nor any wish to besmirch

that rich New York White man
(my racial heritage is mixed),
my rainbow here is representing hope
for peace. Isn’t that of greater scope
than an artful trick of light betwixt
that artist’s sky and land?

War is always brutal.
The rainbow is my last-ditch prayer
that civil strife will somehow be averted.
I compose a scene where land’s converted
to peaceful pastures; all is fair.
It’s only art. It’s futile.

. . . except it’s only art
that builds a bit of self-respect, 
feeds my children and my very soul. 
It’s the one part of my life I can control.
Right now I count on one effect:
art calms my anxious heart. 

Barbara Lydecker Crane

Barbara Lydecker Crane's most recent book is Art and Soul, Kelsay Books.Amid this Rising Strife

​What is Loss?

I was a kid. I curved space before I knew of Einstein. We now see billions of galaxies, and billions more we can’t yet see. And then some.

How can anyone imagine eternity?

And then there is the first law of thermodynamics. And then there was the famous physicist who sighed and said: Perhaps, at the beginning, there was just an idea. And then there is John 1:1—In the beginning was the Word… And then there is quantum mechanics.
 
How can anyone imagine eternity?
 
Can anything come from absolute nothing? What has always been and will always be, is that its own eternity? Serious cosmologists, philosophers, and physicist are beginning to suggest that ALL IS CONSCIOUSNESS, that there is nothing but consciousness, that we and all creation are three-dimensional expressions of consciousness.
 
We come and we go, like the waves of the oceans, like the waters of the rivers, like the highest mountains and the deepest caves, like the Pleiades and the supernovas, like the atoms, the quarks, the electrons, Like thoughts, like prayer, like song…
 
And we can never be lost.

Rose Mary Boehm
 
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, once for the Best of Net. Her latest: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), and Saudade (December 2022) are available on Amazon. A new collection, Life Stuff, has been scheduled by Kelsay Books for February 2024. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/