Old Wood Shop (Impspired Books, 2021), by Charlie Brice and Jim Hutt In Charlie Brice’s words and in Jim Hutt’s images there grows a palpable nostalgia from under the bones of vehicles and barns and ships sleeping in fields. Each photograph and word is deliberate in its reflection both inward and outward, both backward and forward in time, to end in a path which regenerates in each friendship, each young laugh. This collection masterfully conveys a feeling that our places, our bodies, will be abandoned one day but will still be perpetually vibrant in the threads of memory, in the words of our children, in the pictures we have kept under our lost skins. From the first poem, “Woman at Window,” we see Brices’s ability to take an image of an immediate moment and stretch it out through time and space: “The same nothingness…has placed her reflection / against what grows and flows, / against what lights her way / through the dark.” And following in the next poem, this opening into eternity continues with: “panes that open, / through tears, to what grows green, / and frames what flows, to what births / flowers and floods.” Hutt’s photographs lend themselves to reflection from the minute details of an abandoned “Lund” family farmhouse captured in black and white, the image looking textured and weathered as the “rotten / floorboards and sloping eaves,” to the symmetric wooden frames of “Phelps Mill Grain Chutes” where “Deep inside one structure is another / structure and still another.” But even in the historical tableaus Brice and Hutt capture such as a club filled with wealthy white men who “cemented exclusions: blacks, browns, / yellows and women—those who had / to be Other in order to keep those men / comfortable,” Brice does not shy away from showing the injustices of the past in clarity. He also shows the invincibility of a familial bond in “Brothers:” “That brother has no / righteous blather: religion, politics, even / beloved sports teams can’t destroy the bond.” In the poem “Duet” Brice chronicles the musical relationships between another set of siblings: That final evening, they played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, Joseph on piano, Ben on violin. Such hardy music, full of strength, hope and strife. At the core of this collection we can see each speck of sawdust and each stain of sweat from the past so clearly, owing to the work each person has put forth to sustain a life: This is where hands counted and all that was done was done with muscle, sweat, heart, and heft. Yet even within the same poem, Brice springs us from the labors of the individual to the respiration of the trees, and, in fact the world: Everything in this room once respired, housed birds, squirrels, and forest voles, soaked up sun and conjured shade. Again, Brice takes each frozen piece of timber, each glorious picture, and makes it sing with mystery. In “Sunset on Pelican Lake,” Brice reflects on the tangerine and blood hues of the sky and the water: “but here / there is no god, not even the dream / of a god—only the silence of twilight / and the secrets of the depths.” The strength of Brice’s poetry and Hutt’s images is the emotional depth and resilient humanity they convey. The last poem / photograph pairing “The Laughing Boy,” the collection is concluded with a bright grin of hope as a child grips his shirt and opens his mouth wide in a laugh. And Brice masterfully writes: “The laughing boy inside us calendars / our best days, punctuates our dark / gestures, rescues us from despair.” We all need this type of transcendent spirit, especially in these times when our survival depends on it. Both Brice and Hutt deliver it here. Scott Ferry Scott Ferry is a poet, and author of These Hands of Myrrh (Kelsay Books). Old Wood Shop, pictured above, is a collaboration between our regular contributor, poet Charlie Brice, and his friend, photographer Jim Hutt. We talked to both of them about the project. Talking with Charlie Brice, Poet, About Old Wood Shop The Ekphrastic Review: You frequently write ekphrastic poetry about paintings. How does writing from photography contrast with that experience? Charlie Brice: That’s such a fascinating question. I have to say that there isn’t any contrast for me. To me, it’s all art. I’ve written poems to music and sculpture as well as paintings and photographs. I let the artwork inhabit me, take me places I couldn’t have gone on my own. I look at the piece and let my mind go. In ekphrastic work, I’m interested in the associative process, the flow of consciousness and unconsciousness that the piece provokes in me. I don’t care for ekphrastic work that simply describes. In my view, a poem that merely describes the work in words is redundant. Who needs a poem that literally describes a photograph or painting? Why not just look at the painting or photograph? What was it like writing poetry in response to the artwork of a friend rather than a stranger? Jim Hutt and I have known each other for fifty-five years! He is the closest thing I’ll ever have to a brother. No, he is my brother. We can often finish each other’s sentences and have, on many occasions, wound up texting each other at the exact same time, and they were crazy times, like 2PM on a Saturday afternoon (11 PM his time). We also love to razz each other and have sometimes startled others as they listen to us hurl good natured insults at one another. So writing poems to Jim’s photographs seemed as natural to me as having a conversation with him. The nature of our relationship, the love we share, made me feel like I was completing in words what Jim had begun in a visual medium. I don’t think I could have had anything like that with a stranger. What’s your favourite photograph in this collection? Tell us a bit about why it speaks to you. It’s very difficult for me to pick one photo. They are all so vital, so well crafted, but if forced, I’d say my two favourite photos are Old Wood Shop and The Laughing Boy. The artistry of the photo, Old Wood Shop, is stunning. The texture is remarkable. It’s as if you can feel every object in that room—the wooden bench, the tools, the splinters. And the light! Look at how the light blankets the table in that photo. I want to walk into that shop, into that photo and stay there. As for The Laughing Boy, if anyone can look at that photo and not feel better about themselves and life in general, then they’re dead and don’t know it. I felt that boy inside of me, that joy, that exuberance. I think we’ve all got that kind of happiness inside of us. Unfortunately, the stuff of life can sheath that ekstasis, but Jim’s photo helps to bring it out of us, if only momentarily. Was there a poem in this collection that you struggled with? Can you share the specifics, if so? What was your process like for writing these? I have never experienced a writing process like the one I engaged in on this book. There was no pressure, no time limit, but these poems just poured out of me. I wrote the twenty-two poems in the book in less than a month! And each poem went through at least three and up to ten revisions. Each one of these photos spoke to me in such a vital way. I’m sure that is because of the love Jim and I share for each other through our long friendship. Our mutual friend, Monica Beglau, suggested that I write poems to some of Jim’s photos and I/we took up her suggestion. Monica was the editor of our high school newspaper back in the antediluvian period. She was the first to publish either one of us. We agreed to do the book, but only if she would write the introduction, which she did. From Monica’s suggestion to Steve Cawte, our publisher at Impspired Books, the entire process only took three months! Steve did a tremendous job putting this book together for us. I’d written for his marvelous UK journal, Impspired Magazine, and when I asked him if he’d be interested in our book, he said definitely. I thought it would takes months to publication, but I think Steve put the book together in about three weeks! Your poetry here contemplates the sacred and mundane, and everything in between- the nuts and bolts of our very existence. Engines, gears, cigars, sunsets, peeling paint, the old wood shop. What can you share about the act of noticing, and documenting in poetry? Why do writers have this compulsion to witness, to look deeper, to contemplate? In his moving elegiac poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden wrote that, “Mad Ireland hurt [Yeats] into poetry.” I think many poets write from a great place of hurt, of existential injury. I have written elsewhere that the nuns I had in grade school and high school hurt me into poetry. That’s another aspect of life that Jim and I share. We both feel that the nuns we encountered, with few but notable exceptions, were angry, sadistic, and mostly stupid tormentors who tried their best to kill our spirits. For me, having alcoholic parents, also hurt me into poetry. The point is, these existential injuries produce a hyper-awareness not only of one’s inner states, but an acute, if often weary, compulsion to observe the inner lives of others if, for no other reason, to anticipate possible attacks. Poets connect to others through their pain, but also through those bright spots in their lives. For me, humor became a way to both cope with pain and get access to it. I think Jim and I share that part of our lives as well. I don’t know anyone who is funnier than Jim Hutt. There are times we get together and make absolutely no sense, but laugh a lot. Both of you are psychologists, so I will ask both of you this question: how does your professional experience and perspective on human behavior inform your creative work? How does your life practice in psychotherapy/psychoanalysis affect the way you express yourself artistically? This is a fascinating question. I’ll be interested to see how Jim answers it. For me, as a poet, my training as a psychologist and psychoanalyst gets in the way of doing my craft. For years I actually had to practice a kind of professional forgetting in order to write good poetry. Let me explain: my former field is extremely reductionistic. A patient comes into the office with complicated symptoms, a complicated and complex life, and it’s the analyst’s job to find the themes that are running through the patient’s life and help him or her see those themes. That’s why it’s called “analysis.” It’s extremely beneficial to help a patient see that, in her relationships, she’s duplicating relationships from her past over and over again and that’s why her relationships aren’t working out. For example, the patient always seems to find partners who mistreat her because, unconsciously, she has being mistreated confused with being loved, etc... . So there’s a reduction of her relationships to a theme: being treated badly is akin to being loved. See what I mean? Once a patient becomes aware of that theme in her life, she’s in a position to change that. Doing that to a poem, reducing the subject matter to a few themes, would be akin to T.S. Elliot writing, “It’s bleak,” instead of all the five stanzas of “The Wasteland.” When I sit down to write a poem the very last thing I want to do is reduce the material to a few themes or threads. Instead, I want to describe its complexity, confusion, complications, ambiguities and paradoxes. I want to celebrate these phenomena, not reduce them. Let the analysts look at my poems and reduce them to my neurotic issues, I don’t want to do that. I recently wrote a poem in which I changed my mind as to the subject matter of the poem in the middle of the poem. Can you imagine an analyst telling a patient, “You choose partners who mimic the destructive relationship you had with your parents,” and five minutes later saying, “I don’t think you do that, maybe you just like being mistreated? Why don’t we describe, even celebrate, your mistreatment?” Anyway, I certainly love celebrating the complexity and mystery of artwork through the medium of ekphrastic poetry and I absolutely love being a part of The Ekphrastic Review, one of my very favourite online poetry venues. Thanks for taking the time to explore our contributions to Old Wood Shop. ** Talking with Jim Hutt, Photographer The Ekphrastic Review: You describe yourself as an amateur photographer. Tell us about your interest in capturing images. When and how did you start taking photos? Jim Hutt: I think of myself as a serious amateur. My study of photography showed me the stark differences between amateur and a pro status, which isn’t necessarily obvious to the ubiquitous smart phone amateur photographers. My interest in photography emerged in my adolescence. I stumbled across an old Yashica split-image focus camera (probably my father’s) at home in Cheyenne, Wyoming when I was 16. I figured out how to load it with Ektachrome slide film, took some shots, and to my delight, they turned out relatively well for a rookie. There was always a certain angst waiting for the film to return from the developer. But it was also part of the thrill. I spent time at the library reading more about photography than anything else. That probably explains why I flunked out of college my first try. Charlie will probably tell you he’s surprised I even knew where the library was! Overseas in the military in 1971 I purchased from a duty-free shop what at the time was the state-of- the-art Nikon camera. After I returned from my successful four-year military stint (successful means I came back alive), I immediately went on a photoshoot in the Snowy Range in southern Wyoming with my younger brother, Dave, who by then was a professional photographer. That shoot cemented my love affair with photography, and Dave as my mentor, teacher, and companion on several photoshoots. Truth is, Dave has probably forgotten more about photography than I will ever know. What is your process? How do you choose your subjects? What kind of digital alterations or experiments do you use? How do you know when a photo is ready to your liking? My process has morphed over the years. I alternate between digital full-frame Canon cameras and the iPhone. Because I no longer shoot with film, I don’t have or need a darkroom, although at times I wish I did. Back in the day, post processing took place in the darkroom—a wonderful place of solitude, quiet and non-sequitor thought process. Processing now occurs in the digital realm, on the computer. Both methods can be terribly time consuming, it just depends on how obsessive I want to be in my quest for a particular image outcome. I’ve been all over the map with subject choice, which is to say, I really don’t have a “voice.” I’ve noticed that professional photographers have a “voice”—when you see their work, you know it’s theirs: It’s unmistakably Adams, Westin, Avedon, Bresson, etc. When I first started taking photos, I shot anything I thought was cool. Didn’t matter what it was: landscape, a plane in the sky, a car, a weird street scene, cat or dog, you name it. Over time I realized the camera can be a powerful communication tool, used as a platform for a message. But, life intervened—Vietnam, college, grad school, marriage, kids, career, and everything else, and I never got back to acting on that realization. My current interest is working in greyscale, although you wouldn’t know that from the book. You can blame that on Charlie. I’m particularly interested in greyscale candid street photography, urban and rural. My focus going forward is on the senseless white-supremacy-fueled racial divide we continue to live with in America. I would like to produce images in a manner that document this destructive historical horror in a way hasn’t been done before. That is not to say previous brilliant documenters don’t exist—they do, Pittsburgh’s phenomenal Teenie Harris, for one. But I have some ideas of my own I want experiment with to add to that documentation. More will be revealed. As for experimenting with images--In a sense, each image is an experiment, with the exception of family photos I take for documentation purposes. Even those I will tweak to some extent—just depends on who wants to look thinner and/or younger! LOL! The images I capture with my Canon gear I process in Lightroom, then Photoshop. If I’m working in greyscale, I also might run an image through a set of digital filters in OnOne. I post-process images taken with the iPhone employing any number of seventeen different photo apps. Each app allows for several different outcomes. That’s where it gets fun. The permutations are almost endless! Canon or iPhone, the image I want usually has less to do with what the camera “sees” than the image I want seen. And that depends on what moves me, or what I think may move others. I proclaim an image is ready for my liking/posting/printing the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” Tell us what it was like seeing your photographs through the eyes of a poet, after reading the poems Charlie wrote. Well, you have to understand that without Charlie, this project would never have happened. Dead stop! This project was a completely new experience for me. I didn’t know what to expect. I was shocked that my images evoked the depth of emotion that Charlie’s work brought forth! I did not anticipate that. It deeply touched me in a couple of ways. For one thing, understand that Charlie has been one of the most important and influential men in my life, beginning in high school. He was the bridge to my feeling included as the new kid, the outsider. So, co-authoring a book with him was a powerful practical and metaphorical inclusion in, and deepening of, our regard, connection and love of each other. In my experience, very few men have that. I have that with Dave and Charlie, and I’m grateful beyond words. Another thing is that the book project got me to see my own images from a deeper interior place, I guess you could say multi-dimensionally, a place beyond the aesthetics of design, composition and color. Without Charlie’s poetry that simply would not have happened. That has made photography and poetry more rewarding for me. When I consider shooting an image, I now include meaning in my decision matrix before I release the shutter. What’s your favourite poem in this collection? Tell us a bit about why it speaks to you. That’s an interesting question. I vacillate between three of them: "Railroad Car," "Brothers," and "The Laughing Boy." For me, "Railroad Car" and "Brothers" connect Charlie and me in several ways. Those two poems also reflect the strong connections I have to my three brothers, particularly Dave. In fact, my brother, Dave, the professional photographer is in the Brothers photograph. "The Laughing Boy" is my son, thirty-three, now a man. I see the strong connections he has to his male friends, and that makes me happy, gives me hope. At the end of the day, those three poems give me hope that one day men will be socialized to be in touch with their feelings or emotions; that it will be acceptable for boys and men express emotions, and that the patriarchy will no longer dictate the dysfunction we all experience between men and women because of the distortion the patriarchy promotes. But, if I have to pick one poem—"Brothers." Yeah, that’s the one. Tell us what you hope to explore or achieve with your photography. What are your plans now? Photography will always be an important part of my life—fortunately, for obvious reasons it never had to be my day job! However, there is more than a little science involved in photography, a nourishing interest of mine that feeds my intellect. Going back to what I mentioned earlier—about not having a photographic voice—I would like to achieve, or discover my voice. I imagine that it would be gratifying to know that when someone sees one of my images somewhere they would know it is mine, even if it wasn’t signed. I know as an amateur that’s not likely, but hey, dreaming is good, right? Both of you are psychologists, so I will ask both of you this question: how does your professional experience and perspective on human behaviour inform your creative work? How does your life practice in psychotherapy/psychoanalysis affect the way you express yourself artistically? Actually, I think it’s the other way around. In my experience, creativity is as much at the core of my therapeutic work as empathy, compassion and pragmatism. That said, the work of therapy is a bit like working with a photographic image. Each image is its own distinct entity, just as each therapy client is a sperate, distinct person, an “n” of one, if you will. Creativity is involved with both, albeit in different ways. The worst approach for a therapist is being formulaic with a client, although that’s what we’re taught to do. It doesn’t work. The application of a formula in a subjective milieu is antithetical to creativity. Fact is, I can be simultaneously thoughtful, experimental and creative in my responses to a client, just as I can with an image. Of course, there are significant differences: I can undue a change I made to a photograph, but obviously cannot unsay what I have said to a client. I think 43 years in private practice has indirectly affected the way I express myself artistically. It certainly has taught me to reflect on my artistry, to think about it, not take it for granted. What I can tell you is that sitting with people day-in and day-out for four decades has imprinted in me that I can’t be sure of anything, and that I know very little. To wit: I revisit “old” images and change them. So much for being sure I’m “done” with them! I know my brand of artistry won’t appeal to everyone, and that’s ok. In my opinion, my artistry and creativity are precursors to mastery, and mastery is directly connected to self-concept, and how I see myself has everything to do with my emotional availability and the extent to which I wander the planet with some sense of peace and purpose. Ultimately, I like to think creativity has been at the core of my career as a therapist, and as an amateur photographer. Brothers There’s whiskey and there’s barbecue. There’s the world’s woes and worries, its weary and worn, which these brothers save and solve in the way the Weber’s smoke curls toward heaven. Anyone can pop out of the same uterus, out of the next car in the birth train, but becoming a brother is a lifetime vocation. Despite the fights, attempts to dodge, battles to outdo one another, brothers keep each other. A brother traverses the River Styx up and back again, but never forgets. He’ll dig through the rubble until he finds you. He’ll bring you home broken or whole and listen to your drunken whine at 3AM. A brother may be from a foreign womb, may reach with a black or brown hand that pulls and pushes, tells you to keep going when all you want to do is die. That brother has no righteous blather: religion, politics, even beloved sports teams can’t destroy the bond. He understands your failures and shame and celebrates your triumphs. His “we” will never reduce his brother to a “them.” His I will find his Thou in him. Charlie Brice The Laughing Boy He’s there, somewhere inside of us. Can we find him? Twist our shirts, shiver with laughter, with delight, shake with the joy of existence? He is the beginning and the end. Nothing stands between his belly-laugh and his exuberance. If we find him, we will relish absurdity, even celebrate it. That laughing boy inside us calendars our best days, punctuates our dark gestures, rescues us from despair. Framed in white and black, he is our dream of happiness, the exultation of breath! Charlie Brice Read more ekphrastic Charlie: The Lacemaker (on Vermeer) Death and the Miser (on Bosch) The Shepherdess (on Pissarro)
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Pilgrim in the Cornfield Overlooked and silent, camouflaged by the ordinary, the old pilgrim watches the road. The young speed by in their expensive, technical gear. Their hungry ambitions seek the illusive tranquility promised by success. The old pilgrim had dropped his grudges along the road of time, struggle, and pain. He breathes in the scent of life in the soil, the perfume of the red poppies that rise from the dying stalks. The old pilgrim hears the grasshoppers drone, considers the crows finding treasures in the field, feels the comfort of the evening breeze. The old pilgrim smiles. Composure has found a home in his face. His song is easy, his breath slow. His pilgrimage has taught him that age is a reward. Years build the rich autumn colours, the reds and ochres that smolder, the warmth that is deeper than all the harsh neon lights of youth. Cathy Hollister Cathy Hollister was a Finalist in the Ageless Authors 2020 Coping with Crisis writing contest. Her work has been in Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Corona Global Lockdown and It’s Not Easy published by Poet’s Choice, and others. She lives in middle Tennessee. Our workshop on Sunday February 20 will focus on works of art by African American artists. Join us!
Our creative writing sessions include art history, prompts, writing exercises, discussion and time to write. They are single session events with affordability and flexibility of scheduling in mind. “If you love learning about art and artists and if you love writing, Lorette's workshops are the perfect place to twine those loves together! Comfortable, educational and inspiring, these two enjoyable hours fly by. And like me, you may linger breathing in the riches of The Ekphrastic Review for your heart and soul.” Fran Turner We have another workshop on Ekphrastic Flash Fiction coming up next Wednesday. Check out these or sign up, here. Field You’re standing out in the field for no particular reason, the long grass reaching up as if it wants to be the trees. The warm air fragrant with approaching rain, the chirps and croaks of smaller things still singing to each other. This is where you breathe. Take in the fullness of everything that’s not you. The green oats slowly wave like a sloshing sea as the wind gently drapes a humid blanket across your bare skin. The oats, still waiting for the harvest, mimic the coming rain. You’re content to listen forever as the trees answer the oats with the deeper applause of their dark green leaves. The sweet smell of the soil invites you to stay. A square shape, reddish brown, just barely peeks over the trees. Is it the brick chimney of a house? Your home? You’d rather not know. Dane Hamann Dane Hamann works as an editor for a textbook publisher in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University and later served as the poetry editor of TriQuarterly for over five years. His chapbook Q&A was published by Sutra Press and his micro-chapbooks have been included in multiple Ghost City Press Summer Series. His poetry collection, A Thistle Stuck in the Throat of the Sun, was recently published by Kelsay Books. The Final Knot I spend my days sitting on our balcony overlooking the city, sewing my daughter’s wedding dress. She’s getting married next year and wants a modern white dress instead of the traditional black. My husband is so looking forward to the wedding. On the balcony, the breeze caresses my face and I can smell the pine trees from the nearby forest. As time goes on, my stitches get smaller. I only leave the balcony to make meals for my husband. His appetite is huge and seems to be growing. I make him hearty pork stews that he devours. I drain off some of the thin broth for myself. It’s all I can manage. I have a nut trapped in my throat. At first it was a peanut. Now it’s a walnut and getting bigger. As it grows, my throat slowly constricts so it becomes harder to swallow. I survive on soup and glasses of milk. My husband worries about me not eating. He tells me I don't need to lose any more weight. He doesn’t know the real reason. I'll have to tell him eventually, but I can't bring myself to say anything yet. He's so excited about our daughter’s wedding and I don't want to spoil his happiness. I haven't been to see Dr Navarro yet. I know it's already too late, that there's nothing he can do. If I visit him, it will start a process that will involve scalpels, blood and pain and in the end not achieve anything. I know it doesn’t make sense, but as long as I stay on the balcony I can enjoy the scent of the pine trees. And keep sewing the wedding dress. Daniel Addercouth Daniel Addercouth is a Scottish writer based in Berlin, Germany. Find him on Twitter at @ruralunease. Our flash fiction and poetry finalists for the Fifty Shades of Blue contest have been announced. Click here. Cloud Study I Hello, Honey! I’m home! Where are you? I begin looking for my cloud climatologist-my husband. His head jaunts around Jupiter, so I look there first. Three layers: ammonia, hydrogen sulfide- water on the bottom. My eyes weighted by water, constantly drizzling but not there. Next, I check Venus. Filled with sulfuric acid. A day in Los Angeles, a perpetual haze. Squinting, I don’t see him. Finally falling, back to Earth, I find him. He’s here, cloud gazing, creating elephants out of the heavens, faces from fog. Uncommon cloud thoughts. My NASA guy with missions on Jupiter (Voyager Galileo) Venus (Pioneer Venus) Earth with CloudSat, and Calypso. Calypso was almost Picasso, but Picasso’s posse refused. My husband shakes his head in disbelief, as an artist refused immortality. -How long will you be wrangling clouds? -Not long. I’ll be back, then we’ll talk about your day. Cloud Study II Pregnant clouds loom, portending rain. Greys, browns, smudged. My NASA scientist, sees it. The resident cloud specialist. He prizes this piece, prays to the artist. -Lighting is wrong. Brown shades look like dust storm. England isn’t eaten by dust storms. I don’t like where this is going. Instead, I imagine historical settings. Dust be damned. Beethoven lives, thunderous himself. And Poe’s still depressed. Hans Christian Anderson’s tykes still terrified. Mary Shelly miscarried her monsters. Navier-Stokes fundamental equations of fluid dynamics, Turbulence, again. Constable knows it’s provocative to postulate. My NASA guy glows, as I study the floor. Steamboats shear the English Channel, Its sulfurous steam browns the sky. I understand the nature of light, Faraday’s electromagnetic waves wave. Fresnel finds waves transverse, side-to-side Constable senses the theatrics of light and waves. Lynne Kemen Lynne Kemen lives in the Great Western Catskills of Upstate New York. Her chapbook, More Than A Handful (Woodland Arts Editions) was published in October 2020. Five of her poems appeared in Seeing Things Anthology, Robert Bensen, Ed. She has been published or has forthcoming poems in La Presa, Silver Birch Press, The Ravens Perch, Blue Mountain Review, Fresh Words Magazine, What We See In our Journeys Anthology. She was Runner Up for The Ekphrastic Review’s competition of Women Artists. She is on the Board of Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, NY. The First Last Dance In their dance, a dance to the music of time treading a rhyme of rhythmic splendour without control of their spectacle four Seasons rollick with each other. Attired in their shimmering silks hair coiffured by all Hours Seasons sing of solstice while prancing hand-in-hand in ever-decreasing circles as Aurora proffers a new dawn through a pareidolia of Apollo, the chariot golden and horse-hitched to melodic strains of Time’s lyre reverberating through the ether in sight of the herma of Bacchus both youth and yesteryear. Seasons cavort, laughter echoes in the dance of outward facing veils over a testament of eternal trauma through yearnings for mortality against the deity of Time’s nudity with winged feathers sullen from his flight of introspection, the greybeard measured and transfixed without beginning or end twixt Seasons’ craving for continuity yet ignored by a couplet of cherub sheltering from the ides of Zodiac. The four Seasons frolic forever without control of their spectacle treading a rhyme of rhythmic splendour in their dance, a dance to the music of time. Alun Robert Alun Robert is a prolific creator of lyrical free verse. He has achieved success in poetry competitions across the British Isles, Europe and North America. His work has been published by numerous literary magazines, anthologies and webzines in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, India, South Africa, Kenya, USA and Canada. Since 2018, he has been part of The Ekphrastic Review community. He is a member of the Mid-Kent Stanza, Rye Harbour Poetry Group and Federation of Writers Scotland for whom he was a Featured Writer in 2019. The Traveler You reconstruct me so cheerfully. To you it is an act of love: to find me as I once was, to return me to it. There, see? A woman on a train. See, of course, her pearl necklace! There she is, reading a newspaper. She clutches her umbrella. Look, see, she is not so broken! But when someone comes by and sees not a woman but a ruined city smoldering or a spring lake in thaw or a curtain rising or a ransacked ship keeping to its course or Mt. Sinai with its holy thunder, do not correct them. Only listen. Christy Lee Barnes Christy Lee Barnes has published writing in Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Cagibi, McSweeneys, Spillway, Tin House online, and elsewhere. She's an educator originally from Los Angeles who now lives in Seattle with her husband and one-year-old son. The Physics of Flight Without a hitch, you lift and drift from the thrust and drag of your bones, arrive refreshed. There’s a spring to your step. The taste of metal is gone from your mouth, your weeds and mortgage a shimmering whisper, your past a distant side show. But for the twenty-five grams of your soul, you are slimmed down, almost weightless. A breeze tickles the space between what was the soles of your feet and the grass below. You bid goodbye to the dog, soar past the estuary’s green-gilled sorceress, circle the grilled mouth of a cow-skulled god. You float and coast, survey all there is. What Was becomes a fleeting question. There is a quiet to this time. It’s a gentler place to be, what your grandmother, dusty with baby powder and self-rising flour, waiting her turn on the porch, would call a blessing. And you have always expected the best. Mikki Aronoff The image above is a substitute for the painting that inspired this story. It cannot be shown here, so please click here to see Rise, by Gregory Amenoff (USA) 2006. Mikki Aronoff’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, Virga, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, London Reader, SurVision, Rogue Agent Journal, Popshot Quarterly, South Shore Review, The Fortnightly Review, Gentian Journal, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and elsewhere. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she is also involved in animal advocacy. |
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