January 31 -- Cherise Wyneken

Sculpture Park  

A crisp and cloud-specked day

we walked the city through

to Oslo’s Frogner Park.

A pastime.

Instead we lit on life:

love of living,

faith in family.

One hundred fifty statuaries

by Gustav Vigeland.

 

Across the bridge

posed on a parapet,

bronze statue people move

and shout – celebrating joy.

Life cycles in bas relief

surround the central fountain.

Wrought iron children

climb wrought iron trees

frosted from the fountain’s spray.

They smile and climb in happy play.

 

A rise of stairs

through iron entrance gates

to granite people,

speaking pain and pleasure.

Speaking love.

Speaking children.

Speaking mother’s comfort

to a son who’s grieving.

 

Carved eyes

with pity, laughter, love.

Caressing hands, reaching out,

flecks of granite –

freckles on their flesh.

 

I could sail forever

on Norway’s fair fjords

and never find the wonder

Vigeland’s work affords.

 

*  TOUCHSTONES, Winston-Derek Publishers, Inc. (No longer publishing) 

 

 

http://www.authorsden.comcherisewyneken ;

http://www.examiner.com/poetry-in-oakland/cherise-wyneken

January 30 -- Anne Harding Woodworth

Gestation in Jade

 

The elephant’s sides, rounded

with circular latticework,

are windows into her belly,

where the infant looks out,

as if eager to leave the mother-ribs.

 

We lose serenity at times,

when the fill of an inner hollow

seems out of reach and uncarvable.

 

Diminutive tools play awkward

in the task of sculpting a uterine image.

 

But the unborn ask us to be patient,

prenatal duty being only slightly instinctive.

We eventually learn delicacy, knowing

a mother and her fetus are all of one piece.

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks, with a fourth, The Last Gun, coming out in 2016. Her work is in published in journals at home (TriQuarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly) and abroad (Antigonish Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Crannog), print and on line (Innisfree Poetry Journal, Punchnel's). She lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

January 29 -- Anne Harding Woodworth

The Miniaturist, 1828

Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853)

 

When she heard his wife had died,

she painted a miniature self-breast,

(with which he was surely familiar),

he whose name had burst out huge

into the public consciousness.

 

He did not ask her to join him in the forum.

She was a mere painter of large things

made small, not so much insignificant

as causing the naked eye to squint.

 

She continued to live off the minuscule,

the pocketable, in her unimportant way,

but no customer gave her workspace the shiver

he had brought about among the paints.

 

Life without ecstasy left her woeful.

She feared he would destroy the miniature,

the two baby birds, craning, eager in their nest.

But history revealed he’d locked it in a drawer,

as if the quick click of a key could keep a secret.

 

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2006.235.74

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks, with a fourth, The Last Gun, coming out in 2016. Her work is in published in journals at home (TriQuarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly) and abroad (Antigonish Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Crannog), print and on line (Innisfree Poetry Journal, Punchnel's). She lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

January 28 --Alexis Fancher

WHITE FLAG

On Edward Hopper's painting, "Morning Sun, 1952” http://www.edwardhopper.net/morning-sun.jsp

No one paints loneliness like he does. Those half-clad women by the bed, on

the floor, hunched over, staring out the window, in profile or from behind, 

always clean lines, such worshipful light. The gas station in the middle of 

nowhere, estranged couples on the bright-lit porch after dark. Even the boats 

sail alone. And the diners. The hatted strangers, coming on to a redhead, a 

moody blonde, all of them losers, all of them desperate for a second chance. 

This morning the sunlight pried open my eyes, flooded our bedroom walls. I

sat alone, in profile on our bed in a pink chemise, knees drawn up, arms 

crossed over my calves, staring out the window. Desperate for you. No one 

paints loneliness like Edward Hopper paints me, missing you, apologies on 

my lips. Come back. Stand below my window. Watch me beg for a second 

chance. Downturned mouth, teary eyes, parted knees, open thighs, that famous 

shaft of Hopper light a white flag, if only you could see.

January 27 -- Alexis Fancher

STAYING PUT by Alexis Rhone Fancher

after Edward Hopper’s painting, A Woman In The Sun, 1961  http://collection.whitney.org/object/1337

He paints me naked in an empty room. 

Like I need nothing. Like he needs me. 

I’m his type.

High tits. Lean shadow,

blond hair falling 

past my shoulders.

A long drink of water.

There is no escape.

But the window to my left is a promise.

Wide open. Green hills.

"Hold still!" he says.

So I stare at the painting on the wall. 

Another landscape, this one contained 

by a white mat, black frame;

it, too, allows for dreaming. But it only

goes so far, then hits the wall. Like him. 

Only so far before he drops off-grid and 

disappears into the canvas. No 

wonder I can’t stay still.

The room holds little. A bed, my shoes

abandoned underneath. A pack of

cigarettes. My restless heart. A rectangular shaft

of light pours in from an open, second window and

the breeze plays with my hair. 

"Fix it!" he says.

I tuck the wisp of hair behind my right ear, 

just the way he likes it, then put my hand 

back where it belongs.

He says his favorite thing is painting sunlight 

on the side of a house.

"So why paint me?" I ask.

"So you’ll stay put.”

January 26 -- Jeanne Wagner

Summer Interior                                          

            by Edward Hopper

 

 

Why didn’t he paint a scene sun-kindled

and warm as the title, not this room

 

where I sit, posed like a conundrum, my

body forced into incongruent angles

 

of shame and desire: the awkward cant

of my back as it stretches from the floor

 

to the bed, my face forced downward,

hidden by a cap of pelt-black hair I tie

 

each day in a tight-fisted knot on top of

my head? My blouse a palette of icy

 

milk and mauve shadow, shown against

a pulled-off sheet that’s somehow

 

glaciated down to the floor, where I pose

as if divided into hemispheres: one

 

where the neck of my blouse casts a shady

vee inside the cleft of my breasts; the

 

other where a dark delta meets the bare

landscape of my thighs. Though I ache

 

in all the places where this posturing pulls

my body awry, I know it’s a gesture of love.

 

My skin glowing with the same ghostly light,

as all his inconsolable houses.

Winner of the 2013 Sow’s Ear Prize and the 2015 Arts & Letters Award judged by Stephen Dunn, her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and American Life in Poetry. She is the author of three chapbooks and two full-length collections, The Zen Piano Mover, winner of the Steven’s Manuscript Prize and In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press. She is on the editorial board of California Quarterly.

 

Poems appeared in the following publication:

 

"Summer Interior” first published in In the Body of Our Lives, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011.

 

January 25 -- Laura Madeline Wiseman

The Fairy Tree

The fairies have cried wolf, stood as the town crier to give the general cry, the far cry, within cry of him once standing there watching where he’d thought I’d gone. They’ve drank from the whiskey crier, cried over spilt milk, cried out their eyes, cried on my shoulder, cried all the way to the bank where they gave the cry of pleasure, crying forth in the moonlight, crying at last. In Iceland, they have The Screaming Tree, a place a man can holler, can scream down the sun, scream off the stars, scream back to who he was before hunger, economy, boss, or whatever had set him off. We don’t live in Iceland. We don’t live among fairies on this adventure, but the fairies live near The Crying Tree, a red leafless creature with swirling bark, growing deep among palms, yuccas, and thorns. In full cry of the blood moon, they give the great cry, the good cry. They are crying out for us.

After the painting “The Crying Tree” by Patssi Valdez.
First appeared in Abyss & Apex, 2016
From An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX Books, 2016)

January 24 -- Laura Madeline Wiseman

Returning to this American Gothic

I’m on the wrong side. You’ve forgotten your pitchfork. I’m not scowling at you, wearing a dress, or posing as your wife when really I’m your sister. You’re not wearing the bibs you don’t own. You still have all your hair. The trees behind us are not the shape of orbs and the house is one in which we never lived. We buy a magnet. We consider donning costumes. The gardener who is also the photographer who is also the cashier doesn’t mind the humidity, the cicadas’ song, the drone of tractors, or maybe semis, maybe the highway we took to get this picture. I’m looking for Rosanne Barr’s ex-husband who bought a house here once, rode a bicycle on RAGBRAI, any proof of mists that divide, impossible deaths, a possible life. You’re looking at the map in your head, the one you point to in the air showing me where we’re going next. I'm listening, practicing that magic. You’re telling me you’re the hero of this Midwestern American tale. I nod because today you are. Here we stand, side by side in Iowa, fecund and green, no pitchfork between us, just our hands.

January 23 -- Toti O'Brien

LESSON
(for Susan Hertel)

They say that you lived in the moment. 
That’s how you could get so much done.
All day gluing tassels of stone on town’s walls. 
Tough job 
but you didn’t complain. 
That fed kids and animals. 
When night came you painted for hours. 
A calming device. 
You chanted until dawn. Morning found you
awake and refreshed. 
You lived in the moment and that was your secret
Susan. 

You fought cancer once. You won, it bounced back.
You thought you’d let nature decide. And nature you knew. 
You knew. Seasons colors light matter
stones clay fire and water. 
You knew rhythm and hours. 
To make food for many. 
To manage fatigue 
keep quiet and let time be your friend. 
You knew time. 

You said ‘must be time to let go’. 
One more task you’d bravely embrace. 
You truly lived simply, Susan
then you stepped aside with same lightness. 
Is art all you’ve left? Is there more? 
Did you weave yourself in the tapestry 
with tiny meticulous stitches 
like nuns did in convents?
Are you a golden freeze in a corner? 
A bird flight 
embossing the sky.

January 22 -- Joan Day

                                      U

                           B                         R

                 M                                             G

         A                         ?                                      E

H                                                                                 R

                                             ?                         

                          ?                                               Y    ~    Y 

O                                                                H       ~          A

        N                                             T           ~            W

   H         ~            A                   A         ~            S               

        A         ~                 P              ~           Y’                                   

             V            ~       ~     ~     ~      D                                   

                 E       ~        ~     ~    N                                                          

                          I  T        A  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejr9KBQzQPM

January 21 -- Sarah Thursday

Dead Song

 

I wait no more for your polite

I run no longer to your cordial

I let no wind carry

let no night star

I fight not for your uncertain

for your wander, for your lost

not for your stroke, not your soothe

No more gray ink

photograph gaze

No collar bone

valley of skin

I set fire to your words

I drown your colors

all swirl of rainbow

I lie in your grave of kindness

I cough out your breath

I spit you out

wipe the taste of you

from my mouth

Inspired by a piece by Alex Diffin

https://www.facebook.com/AlexandraDiffin/photos/pb.680134035384117.-2207520000.1446614706./754603774603809/?type=3&theater

 

January 20 -- Sarah Thursday

Unnamed Color

 

If I were a painter, I'd find the darkest

blue paint—thick as gravy—

push it slow across a powder-white

canvas, diagonal edge to edge,

let the ridges and valleys of the stroke

seep into a settled mass. I'd drag

the brush saturated in blue past

the easel, over my window pane

across my pale green wall

and onto my bed frame. I'd shape

the prints of my hands where I held

myself above you. Where I saw

you under me like a child, like one

who never married, never had children,

never worked twenty years in the same

company, never had to harden his heart

like police armor. I'd paint

the color of your eyes—

if they could ever be captured

in a shade made by man.

 

 

Inspired by Melinda Hagman

https://www.facebook.com/artbymelindahagman/photos/pb.161753087209482.-2207520000.1446613920./951489944902455/?type=3&theater

January 19 -- Sarah Thursday

Colors for Bruising

 

1. Swell: fluids rush in panic, raise the skin

like a flag, damage still unassessed

 

2. Purple: t-shirt logo wearing of pain, most

celebrity, most sympathy for self

 

3. Blue: first layer under, uglier, sign of longer

lasting mark

 

4. Green: usually on the edges only, ghost

sleeping under your skin

 

5. Brown: dead blood vessels dissolving,

novelty gone, even you don't want to look

 

6. Orange: almost gone enough to be rubbed

off with spit and thumb, will it away

 

7. Yellow: untraceable outlines only faith

remembers, sing it a lullaby, let it go undreamt 

Published originally in On the Grid Zine

 

Inspired by Lynn Azali

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2199469341658&set=a.1234522338586.2037423.1095002219&type=3&theater

 

January 18 -- Sarah Thursday

 When I've said all the words I can say

 

I can only sound.

I dissonance.

I shutter volume.

 

I scrape metal to metal

–skyscraper groans

–car alarm until it backgrounds.

 

I tree crack from roots

–siren ambulance, fire truck.

I bone crush

–violin in a cold, dark alley.

 

I canyon scream

behind double pane windows.

You, inside, sit soundless.

 

Inspired by:

detail, "Study of the Fourth Estate"
by Michele Vavonese

https://www.facebook.com/133577886680421/photos/a.672598129445058.1073741827.133577886680421/715931951778342/?type=3&theater

January 17 -- Michaelsun Knapp

Native American Gothic

                Wood, Grant. American Gothic. 1930.

                Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Last Show. 1930.

We knew how to walk with our chins

as straight as colts,

but windows were not our way.

Pitchforks, overalls, train cars,

circuses and collared dresses 

were not us. But we were educated

to look through glass, and to cover it

with fabric when we wanted to be alone

in our painted white houses. We learned

to put war bonnets on,

and fight ourselves. We learned

to haunt a gaze like a home.

Our fingers came to know a pitchfork’s handle,

like a rifle,

like a coup stick,

like the feel of our forearms

like the feel of powdered cheeks,

and how to wear it until it’s smooth.

We learned how to pull splinters out with our teeth.

We learned

how to fit a collar

around our necks

and jump.

They taught us

to wear the war paint of their mind.

They taught us

to come when our names were called.

Originally published in The Chaffey Review

January 16 -- Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

His Eyes Keep Following

From The Blue Boy, (1770) by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) oil on canvas

Even from the distance, first

noticing the lapis colors, draped

across capturing this eternal figure,

still young, as you see the dirty whites

of his knee cap britches and slashed

doublet slightly opening at the bottom

with his lace collar covering his neck

and looking past his blushing cheeks

and then you are caught hypnotized by

those eyes keep tracing you, while moving

around the creaking wood flooring you

while staying in his Blue Boy pose, his

focus trails your vision, while hanging still,

even as the bow ties on his shoes have him

frozen inside this painting—you swear sneaking

away his eyes shadow, transcending charcoal

brushstrokes, you swear beyond his silence

now immortalized, with every blink you are

hooked—mystified by this boy’s haunted look

will stay with you, as your retention exposes,

his pupils reveal—his piercing blue disguise.

2015

link: http://bit.ly/1PIYMDA

January 15 -- Kevin James Salveson

St. Francis Dam, 1928

The churchbells

peal out their 

plaintive wail.

The organ murmurs 

its condolences.

Survivors shuffle

and shake

in the cloudless day

under the heedless sky.

A squall you might 

glimpse from a distance; 

I heard soaking wet notes 

pouring forth.

It told of towns and people 

washed clean away 

from the badlands 

when the dam burst.  

 

Some get a wooden cross 

in the dirt 

to remember their grave 

on the floodplain, 

most don't even get that.

Many people are never found;

many bodies are never recovered.

January 14 -- Alex Simand

The Willow’s Roots

Just a shattered face, trauma unknown,

bits of skull like scattered glass

fall tumbling from the heavens,

grapefruit chunks of brain color the sky.

Bits of skull like scattered glass

a wayward ear falls neck over nose

while grapefruit chunks of brain color the sky,

a misplaced smear of color.

A wayward ear falls neck over nose

over femur over eyelash over pencil stroke,

a misplaced smear of color

washes the world in crimson fury.

Over femur, over eyelash, over pencil stroke

grows a willow tree like rosemary,

awash, like the world, in crimson fury

the child who clings to its roots, dangling,

Grows a willow tree, like rosemary,

stretching down from swan’s beak,

to the child, who clings to its roots, dangling

his feet upward, his head lolling to the ground.

Stretching down from swan’s beak,

the willow tree cries to the child,

his feet upward, his head lolling to the ground,

just a shattered face, trauma unknown.

http://jamesjeanart.tumblr.com/post/41943778663/the-willow-tree-2-color-pencil-digital-22-x

January 13 -- Marie Lecrivain

Ingres' ​

Grande Odalisque

Here you are, your cheeks freshened by the breeze.

I was not aware you were so petite.

The virtual world never mentioned these

facts. Why would they, as it’s their job to cheat

people like me into thinking you’re

larger than life, and that your lovely curves

are as famous as the snow on the pure

peak of Mount Everest. You’ve got my nerves

attenuated. I try to make sense

of the shock and embrace the irony,

but your sweet smile disarms my defense.

You know it. I’m won over. Quietly,

I salute you in your naked glory,

and then move aside for your next quarry.

previously published in Ekphrastria Gone Wild