Dance of Atoms
Mary K. Lindberg
Oakledge Press, 2025
View or purchase on Amazon:
​https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Atoms-Mary-K-Lindberg/dp/1939030129
​ 
The Ekphrastic Review: Mary, talk to us about Dance of Atoms.

Mary Lindberg: In this poetry collection, I take liberties. I bring back to life the victims of the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius to show us their last moments in Pompeii, Herculaneum, nearby villas. Figures in art come to life to socialize; some to challenge, confront spectators. Newly-roused composers Mozart and Beethoven critique today’s performances of their music. 

Let’s not forget Franz Liszt, the probable very first “rock star” of the musical world. His mesmerizing virtuosity drove women to snip his clothes for souvenirs. Other poems explore nature’s healing power, examine the role of truth in memoir, inquire if an MRI can be a poem. 

Such liberties confirm my sense that the world is in constant motion, atoms are always dancing, if people can free themselves and use imagination. The specific phrase “dance of atoms” comes from Mrs. Natica Aguilly, a California artist, dancer, and poet who has spent decades internationally promoting poetry and dance as a unified art, exemplified in the annual Dancing Poetry Festivals she created. I take from her the idea that atoms of life can dance and create, by participating in imaginative forms of art.

This collection is divided into “Vesuvius at Your Back,” “Locked in Oil,” and “Life’s Tumultuous Surprises.”

The Ekphrastic Review: The first part of your book is a series of poems inspired by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. Tell us about your fascination with this part of history. How did this interest turn into poetry?  

Mary Lindberg: I have always been fascinated by the tragedies of Pompeii and Herculaneum that occurred when Mount Vesuvius erupted unexpectedly. This interest grew when I saw the Pompeii casts of victims and Herculaneum skeletal remains on trips to Italy, and read the letters of contemporary Pliny the Younger describing escape with his mother at Misenum, and his uncle Pliny the Elder’s death on the Bay of Naples shore.

To glimpse unguarded moments just before death made me curious about life. When shaking began, what were people doing? Working? Relaxing? Eating? Stealing? Making love? Writing? Those silenced first-century Romans and their slaves invited me to create fictional identities to show them alive, along with their aspirations and relationships, the very moments the eruption began.

Remnants of life 2,000 years ago continue to fascinate. In May 2025 The New York Times reported on a newly discovered Pompeiian house where a bed was used to barricade against the first geologic onslaught. That inspired my poem “How To End a Poem.” 

Further, scholars have found that there were survivors, those who managed to leave before debris and pumice locked people into pillars and pyroclastic flows boiled human brains. Using Pompeiian family names, researchers have found that some survivors left early enough, and were able to thrive. Because Pompeii has only been one-third excavated, much more will be revealed in the coming years, especially with new technologies in archaeology.

The news suggested a way to begin the book. A 22-year-old American man from Maryland climbed a forbidden path to the summit of Vesuvius in July 2022, tried to take a selfie, dropped his phone, and tumbled down toward the crater’s bottom. He was rescued by Italian guards who had followed him on the restricted path. His back was bloody from scraping the crater, but he is alive. His photographic disaster turned into the first poem, “Shooting Vesuvius.”

The Ekphrastic Review: Your book has sections on poems inspired by visual art, as well as being inspired by performing arts and music. What common thread do you see that connects these diverse arts? 

Mary Lindberg: First, the personal. I have a deep interest in music, having studied piano for many years, even performing as a teenager on TV, and I attended the Eastman School of Music. But, as the saying goes, "I cannot draw a straight line." Later, when selecting an English doctoral thesis, subject, I studied British artist and social satirist William Hogarth (1697-1764), and found striking interconnections between his art and the London theater in form and content. At the time, an evening at the theater, at a minimum, consisted of a musical number, a prologue, the play with entr’actes of dance and music, and an epilogue. My focus was on the visual, his art, and what it meant at that time.

To your question, the common thread is a striving toward expression of the inexpressible, such as love, life, grief, death  — what can be called universals. In music it is more difficult to describe, but I believe the urge is the same. Music is usually part of dance, but choreography offers another dimension, attempting to demonstrate in gesture the inexpressible. All are part of atoms dancing.

The Ekphrastic Review: Tell us about your relationship with visual art. Were there any specific experiences that invited you in? What does art mean to you?

Mary Lindberg: Just as I see the victims of Vesuvius alive seconds before death, surrounded by beautiful, fanciful frescoes, I see works of art as living objects, despite being made of marble, alabaster, or centuries-old paint and fresco. Thus a painted basket of ripe figs on the damaged wall of the Villa Oplontis became a symbol of the flirtation between Flavia and a Roman soldier, so I placed a basket of figs on the table between them in my poem “Garden Room, Villa Oplontis.”

In short, to me, art isn’t fixed in time or intention, it’s a jumping off point for the imagination.

I also picture works of art communicating after hours in museums, as when a Matisse odalisque slides down the stairs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit a marble hunter in my poem “After Dark After Restoration.”  In another vein, it is human to be full of mystery and ambiguity. I find that the enigmatic nature of many portraits suggests this is true. That makes me think about what sitters may be thinking. Could I be gazing at represented fantasies, unimaginable dalliances, power clashes? I’m inclined to think so. 

In “Hushed Hint of a Sneer,” I speculate from the sitter’s facial expression and dress what emotions might be behind or in it, and to whom they might be directed. Thus my psychological response becomes the basis of the ekphrasis.

In reviewing a recent Kerry James Marshall exhibition in London, Emily LaBarge says that, when looking at Marshall’s paintings, “it often seems the figures we behold …  stare out watching us watching them and together we are all part of the project of art, which is a project of looking.” (New York Times, 10/2/25, C5). I agree.

The reviewer adds, in some Marshall paintings the spectator becomes the subject, and “the great question becomes not what are you looking at, but who you, the viewer, are. And what you want to see.”  That is the essential idea of my poem, “What We Exhibit.” The “we” is the viewers, you and me walking in a gallery, peering at subjects, paint, even frames; while, at the same time, we “exhibit” revealing personal data about ourselves.

The Ekphrastic Review:  Tell us about your ekphrastic process. How do you choose the artworks you write about? Were there any surprises in your writing or selection process, or in the paintings themselves? What does art mean to you?

Mary Lindberg: Such good questions. I always look for surprises in works of art, or one could say, contrasts. In a large 16th century painting of Diana and Actaeon, by Titian, I see a curious, timid, pretty girl observing the actions of the gods, as if she is an in-painting spectator.  In Francesco Goya’s Portait of Ferrer, I examine the thoughtful expression on the sitter’s face. On closer examination of his pose and the way he holds his book, the portrait opens up questions about his emotional life that I perceive him asking himself.

The Ekphrastic Review: You mention in the collection’s notes that writing these poems was an act of resilience in the aftermath of cancer and the side effects of treatment. Tell us about this. How did ekphrasis and other writing help?

Ekphrastic writing helps me understand what I’m looking at.

For example, I saw a New York Times photograph and article about the Italian restorer who cleans Michelangelo’s seventeen-foot statue of David periodically. The woman stands on tall scaffolding, leaning over to brush the thigh of the giant statue, a tiny figure next to David. She must have unique moments of perception, I thought, being that physically close to David, one of the most perfect works of art. She can more easily see what we cannot. For instance, the pupils of his eyes are sculpted in the shape of hearts, which I discovered on a post card. The poem “Preserving Perfection” is the result of all this.

To your question about cancer. After receiving my final biopsy report, I had completed the first section of Dance of Atoms. I thought of this as a standalone short book. Successive bouts of chemotherapy, radiation until finally, eliminating the lymphoma by CAR T-Cell immunological treatment, ended less than a year later. During that time all I wanted to do was extend and finish a longer book about literature, music, nature and art.

It was at first difficult to write about the medical procedures I experienced.  The awareness that I would have to work very hard simply to walk again, and that my numb right foot is the piano’s pedal foot, threatened depressive thoughts. But as rehabilitation progressed, it was easier to write about how nature’s autumn colour change stirs new emotions, even joy at the possibility of walking again. Driving toward that goal made completing Dance of Atoms significant.

The Ekphrastic Review: What’s next for Mary?
​
Mary Lindberg: I have finally begun to write about many of the experiences I had during cancer: questions, fears, hopes, the wait for a biopsy result, and other hospital out-of-body experiences. Considering that I am completely free of lymphoma, it is easier to write. Atoms dancing enables me to imagine totally new approaches to medical procedures and healing, and to the myriad possibilities poetry itself offers.
 ​

Preserving Perfection
(Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy, 2022)
 
Home from a day of careful brushing Michelangelo’s David,
Signora Silvia Pollinari prepares dinner. She lifts a pasta strand
like strumming a harp string, chiffonades basil for her sauce.
 
Every month, the expert restorer sweeps away foreign particles
from the young giant-killer, fresh from slaying Goliath. She
marvels at the detailed perfection of his sculptured muscles, veins.
 
Grating parmesan, she recalls the surprise discovery of cobwebs
on David’s head, dust ensnared in his curly locks, where spiders
dare to live. What a challenge, she muses, first to imagine, then chisel,
 
such beauty from one stone into a seventeen-foot titan. She sees how,
at first sight, David halts visitors in their tracks, a young god sprung up
before them. His magnetism beams, spreads gasps, respectful silence.
 
She wants him to speak. Does he relish attention from millions, who
gawk speechless at his body, wave cameras for selfies? Or, is it tiring?
Would he say: “Some of them eat, or worse, chew bubble gum”?
Involuntarily, Silvia smoothes his cheeks with the back of her hand.
 
Tonight the restorer sculpts her recipe expertly. She puts finishing
touches on artichoke salad, samples mascarpone for dessert, opens
the Chianti. Guests should arrive soon.
 
They burst in, exchange kisses, offer gifts. “Are you still trying to be
perfect, Silvia?” Lucia asks. “My daughter Marina’s class saw you 
dust David’s ears.‘What a view Silvia has!’ she remarked.”
 
Inhaling the bouquet, Silvia recalls hidden master strokes, 
like the heart-shaped pupils of his eyes. Only she can see them. 
“Flawless art can take your breath away — yes, and tonight
I want to dazzle you with culinary purity.”
 
Brava! Friends clap, smile, take a goblet, excitedly anticipate
an impeccable dinner.
 
Mary K. Lindberg
 ​

​Themes w/ Variations

after paintings by Philip Guston
 
White sheet: conehead w/ Frankenstein’s monster stitching. Vertical eye-slits. A head under this mutated Klan shroud. Painting red-handed: that is, big red hand w/ paintbrush at canvas. Picture inside the picture: incomplete self-portrait of conical sheet, differently stitched, vertical slits. Three red dabs at bottom. Stout smoking stogie in the non-painting hand, in The Studio.
 
Variation 1. Three stitched headcones are Riding Around in a stubby black car. Three red hands, two w/ stogies twixt middle and index fingers. The third red index finger points right, out of frame, to where the car’s headed / at whom it’s aimed.
 
Variation 2. Two coneheads, hands w/ stogies, four slits, sit in a car like a black teacup carnival ride w/ steering wheel. Three boards stand up in the seats. One is spiked w/ nails, here at Edge of Town.
 
3rd. Two other headcones. Each faces the other. Torsos included, body sheets w/ random sutures. Red splashes stained in sheets for heads and bodies. One w/ arm bent back over the shoulder, dark flail in fist, aimed at the companion. Large empty bottles, window curtain drawn, naked ceiling bulb. Title: Bad Habits.
 
4. Flatlands, a cram of severed items.  Wood chunk spiked w/ nails.  Flexed ankle w/ foot and leg bone hole.  Two clocks (white w/ numbers, meat-colored w/out).  Two pant legs w/ shoe soles (nail holes).  Red hand (boxing glove?) pointing right.  Hovering white blocks. Half-sun rising (or setting) (or orange mound w/ black lines sticking out).  Red brick chimney top, woolly smoke.  Pink, red, orange splotches.  Other detached objects.  Two cone/Klan/clone heads mounted on mounds, w/ or w/out eyes behind slits.
 
Discussion Questions
 
Uses for stogies, cars, nails.
Distinguish body part from thing (ex. cone from head).
Holes vs. protuberances: why?
Compare and contrast: splotch, dab, slit, stain.
Identify represented habits.
Extremities: dressed or flayed? Options?

David P. Miller

David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations, and have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, Reed Magazine, About Place Journal, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, SurVision, Vincent Brothers Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among other journals. His poems “Interview” and “And You” were included in an issue of Magma (UK) focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He is a member of Boston’s Jamaica Pond Poets.

Canopic Jars
 
A Complete Set of Canopic Jars, Egypt, c. 900-800 B.C.,
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.
 
Lifted carefully from the chamber by some unseen hand,
The four prosopopoeia of organic being line up, curatorial,
Under cool white light that feels like pure plane of history.
In these therianthropic jars are the remains of functional viscera:
 
North, Hapi, the baboon, who guards the lungs;
East, Duamutef, the jackal, who guards the stomach;
South, Imseti, the human, who guards the liver;
West, Qebehsenuef, the falcon, who guards the intestines.
 
White earthenware, clay. Their expressions are of mortality,
Are of sorrow, determination, hope, and anger.
The human tissue has been mummified in natron.
Energies, bodily fluids, and microbial cultures
 
Pulsed these organs, squishy and vulnerable;
They contributed to somatic psyche, the mana of organic being.
Now they are dead tissue. They look out at you, meet your gaze.
What I contain is untouchable, a mystery that you yourself contain.
​
Brendon McLeod
​
Brendon McLeod is studying a PhD in English and Writing at The University of Sydney for which he was recently awarded the Arthur Macquarie Travelling Scholarship. He was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and was awarded a fellowship to Varuna the National Writers’ House. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rabbit Poetry, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal, and other venues. He is a jazz musician and works as a music teacher. His work often explores lived experience of mental illness. He lives on Wiradjuri Country in Australia.

Natura Morta (Still Life)
 
Why do we want to see objects displayed on tables, 
            flowers arranged to look random?
Van Gogh’s large vase with fifteen (count them) sunflowers, 
            the face of obsession. 
Braque’s monochromatic violin and candlestick 
            stuttering before us, 
Cezanne’s fruit bowl’s double perspective--our urge 
            to catch the apple before it falls.
Chardin’s ray of light upon a dark tableau
            shocking in 1728 to see a live cat lurking, 
as shocking as the spoiled fruits of Caravaggio in 1599 
            or the Dutch painter Claesz’s violin with glass ball 
where he’s reflected painting--self-portrait amid still life.
            Pop art versions of the 1960s:
portrait of Abraham Lincoln, television, a pair 
            of beer bottles, pears, red chairs.
Artists convince us, with symbols deep in meaning or beauty,
            we can stop life, knowing it’s not true.

Marc Frazier

Marc Frazier: "I have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two “Best of the Nets.” My four books are available online. I am a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry. My latest poetry book If It Comes To That recently won Silver in the Florida Writers Association Royal Palm Literary Awards contest. I have published in well over a hundred journals. I am an LGBTQ author living near the ocean in Fort Lauderdale and I love taking photographs with my Canon. I love architecture and nature photos."

The Transit of Selina
 
Here’s what Hans Hofmann told Selina
about art: Whatever the secret is
 
it’s my secret. 
You have to find your own.
 
So Selina drew and drew for years
till she was drawing the back
 
of her soul, a hummingbird lit
with gold leaf and fire.
 
No matter what the figures --
court jester, chicken, robed monk, 
 
a goat – they shared the same
arched brows and opaque eyes. 
 
It feels like they’re trying to tell us
about the life underneath this life.
 
We’re always surrounded by death
is what Selina said.  
 
Look at that pink bird perched
on the dancer’s shoulder --
 
as if she has a secret to share.

Kathy Shorr

Kathy Shorr grew up on the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, but she has spent virtually all of her adult life near the tip of Cape Cod.  She is a devotee of all things poetry and poodles. She and her late husband spent many summers in a 100-year old house without running water in Squid Tickle, Newfoundland. She  is the 2024 winner of the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, and recent work has appeared most recently in the Atlanta Review, and Lily Poetry Review.

The Magician (I)

Fairy Tale

They fed me fairy tales with my first milk 
long before my mouth formed words. 
Failed enchanters trapped inside a crumbling 
Camelot, they armed me with the power of 
magic thinking. It was their gift, a shield 
against old demons—some they conjured up 
like zombies—and ordinary monsters, in the
castle, down the street. They knew that
children catch magic easier than the chicken 
pox just like they knew I’d heal. But did 
they know that shingles, itchy button  
roses, return when walls made of denial
and make believe weaken. So much easier to
wish away all wrongs, especially ones 
committed quietly in Camelot, assured that 
happy endings prevailed like Galahad and 
Lancelot. What my failed enchanters never 
counted on was a child that fell into the world 
then cracked, mirror to their brokenness. I fled 
them, their Camelot but not all of their illusions.
Beautiful remnants of their disease, they live 
deep as viruses, strong as fortress walls.

The High Priestess (II)

Fruiting Bodies

                A pear-shaped place that bleeds and stains like 
pomegranate juice makes you a girl. 
 
                You like those fruits and others, too, but aren’t
a flower made for pollination. 
 
               You’d rather feast on trees of knowledge and
be a friend to snakes and snowy owls,

               not ripen on a branch waiting for a hand to
pick you and a mouth to eat your flesh: 
 
               trees turned to books to feed your hungry 
mind don’t bruise or rot like fruit.  
 
               Neat and sweet as nectarines, the other girls you
know care only about who touched who
 
               and how. But you forgo the trifles between
girls and boys to muse on fuzzy-legged
 
                bees. With tiny, yellowed feet, they stroke the 
flowers into the joy that bears the fruit that
 
                spills the seeds into a waiting wanton earth 
that gestates secrets in the dark. Like the ebb and
 
                flow of tides and bodies, it’s cyclic. Cosmic.
And at times orgasmic. What you know
 
                you rarely tell, just like the watchful moon
that hangs like silver fruit above you in the sky.

The Best Small Fictions anthologies are an annual publication since 2015 celebrating the best flash fictions and hybrid prose forms under 1000 words.

https://altcurrentpress.com/best-small-fictions/

The Ekphrastic Review nominates five small fictions annually.

Please join me in congratulating these amazing writers for their stories.

** 

A Short Tale of a Tall Alienated Polis, by Saad Ali
​May 15, 2025
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/a-short-tale-of-a-tall-alienated-polis-by-saad-ali

 
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An Offering, by Allison Connolly
July 7, 2025
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/arch-hades-ekphrastic-writing-responses-curated-by-kate-copeland
 
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Going Nowhere, by Roy Geiger
Feb 27, 2025
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/going-nowhere-by-roy-geiger
 
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The Heron’s Game, by Sarah Nielsen
October 6, 2025
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-herons-game-by-sarah-nielsen
 
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Cancer Cells as Pop Art, by Gordon Taylor
Feb 21, 2025
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/cancer-cells-as-pop-art-by-gordon-taylor