Red the blood, blue the blood, on entry, on exit, like a color song.
Pools of red turning maroon, turning carmine.
The room is piss yellow, the nurses green as shoots,
vertical, a moving jungle. They want what they can’t have:
my death. I want what I can’t have: my life. We are all swimming
in this lavender water, this gray air. I ask for oxygen and get sulfur.
I ask for silence and get tinnitus. My cells explode into calligraphy
that’s dripping. It’s a language my paginated body cannot hold.
::
I see your body unraveling in the hall. I almost said
unravening, unleavening, unleveling. All true. I know
because I’m you. Pretty flower. Pretty nude. Who taught you
to petal? To move toward any open door? They’re already
calling you a whore. Broken stem. Busted seed. Gown down
around your waist. That everywhere hair. There’s
nothing beyond the frame. Those stairs lead nowhere.
Leaves like hands. Carpet like a tongue.
You are so young, Child. You are already flung.
::
She and her maid were transformed,
all brutality and body, brought as close to God
as any man. Not a drop of blood on their dresses,
not an inch of space between their intentions.
Knife like a cross but him like something else.
He begged them to stop. As if. Gentileschi put them
in the good light, oiled Holofernes’s blood
until it shone. Painted the knife more than halfway
through the neck, Judith’s hand knuckling
his head in place as she cut clean through skin,
then muscle, then vein, then nerve, then cartilage
and back in the opposite order. After she split
the Adam’s apple, she sliced the carotid
in two like a worm. Gentileschi showed
Judith’s cleavage, flush cheeks, rippled
sleeves, dark ribbons, well-muscled arms,
her fingers, her wanting. Gentileschi showed it all:
how it was, how it had to be. How it will be forever.
—
These are sections from a long poem titled “The Body.” Each of these sections is ekphrastic. The first is after Joan Mitchell’s Faded Air 1, the second after Dorothea Tanning’s Sunflower in the Hall, and the third after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes. Allison Blevins provided the artwork as inspiration for these poems in her workshop titled “Writing with Pain: A Generative Workshop on Illness and Disability.”
*
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX, Cider Press Review, Laurel Review, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Trampoline, and other journals. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books).
It’s almost Giacomettish of you, your rather persistent disinclination
toward the up-close photo of us that I often ask for as we travel.
As though it held less truth than untruth as we lean against a sycamore,
or sit across a white linen table where the great invisible
distance that is alive and well between any two people, no matter how much love,
has once again slipped past undetected by the dull instrument of the camera.
That great invisible distance that Giacometti wanted to show
when he positioned his models standing a few feet from him as he worked
but strove to make viewers perceive them as from a point farther away.
And that these dual perspectives hold each other in perfect balance
like two children on a seesaw, neither pair of feet
touching the dusty ground. It’s almost Giacomettish of you,
when I ask a friendly tourist to snap a picture of us,
a once in a lifetime shot to remember the two of us overlooking
the giant maw of Vesuvius that erupted those
many millennia ago, and you once again, refuse.
*
On The Swimmer by Pablo Picasso
Orange figure in blue water, arms flung out like wings,
female, in freefall, letting the water hold you any way it wants.
The paint brushed thinly as if it too were floating. And after
swimming, when you lie on sun-warmed shale,
I imagine each drying water bead as the remains of that second skin
that had held you, everywhere, as only the water can,
loved even your miserable parts. Stuck its wet tongue all over
into the very smallest spaces, those most difficult
to open that you had allowed yourself to forget.
*
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
after a painting by Rose Wylie
Before they razed the hedge, I did not see it. What I saw—just the warm brown of wood-slatted fence and reaching green
from the other side. I’m a painter. I was held by those colors, did not even imagine a domicile with other humans.
Each morning, the wrens, round as notes in the dry brush from last autumn. The house is yellow. It does not cheer me
with its single black window like an eye gone dark. But oh, how I love the brown
tall tree that leans towards the house next door. And that I can paint away from the truth: that this tree is rooted firmly
on my side of the fence and could not crush that house were it to fall.
*
Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at the 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor-at Large for Plume Poetry journal. Her poems have appeared the New York Times, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Plume, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/MadHat Press in March of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award, a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award and Runner Up for the Poetry By the Sea Best Book Award.
Francesca Is Complicit After Amy Sherlock, “Multiple Expeausures: Identity and Alterity in the ‘Self-Portraits of Francesca Woodman,” 2013, an erasure
The nude hovers
between flesh and ideal.
Always an external gaze
complicit. The tactile
apprehension –
sensation of intimacy
thwarted. A mourning.
The withdrawal caught:
every gesture suspended.
The nude crumbling blurs
the doorframe. The threshold
never there.
*
Francesca Is, Francesca Does After John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, an erasure
A woman is different. Her attitude defines what can be done to her. Her gestures, voice, a kind of aura. To be born a woman into the keeping of men. A self split must watch herself: her image of herself walking, weeping. Walking or weeping. Everything she is, she does. Men survey women. Women must contain, interiorize. Demonstrate what is and is not permissible. Women watch themselves being looked at: She turns herself into an object. The nude aware of nakedness is not as naked. The mirror in her hand –
*
Lisa Beech Hartz directs Seven Cities Writers Project which brings writing workshops to underserved communities. She guides poetry workshops for men and women in two city jails. Erasure and ekphrastic poems are among her writers’ favorite ways to create new work. She is the author of The Goldfish Window (Grayson Books, 2018) and These Kismets (CutBank Books, 2025).
Note: Participants capped at 15 for this workshop.
Workshop Description:
Ekphrastic poetry is a written response to a work of art— a painting, drawing, photograph, sculpture or other type of rendering. Since the age of Homer, poets have devised various ways to interact with art, including analyzing the work, exploring symbolic meanings, inventing stories, or even creating dialog and dramatic scenes. The artwork often leads the poet to new insights and surprising discoveries.
In the first half of this two-hour workshop, we’ll go over the history of Ekphrastic poetry, discuss different approaches to and examples of ekphrastic works. Then, we’ll use our dedicated writing time to create a draft poem inspired by one of three different images provided.
Attendees are invited and encouraged to engage, discuss and share their poems with the group, although this is not mandatory. This workshop is limited to 15 participants so that everyone has a chance to share their work in a safe and intimate space.
Limited to 15 participants
About The Workshop Leader:
Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small, generative poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of two collections of haiku, Light, Come Gather Me and Blue Seasons, as well as the book Everything I Thought I Knew, essays on living, learning and parenting outside the status quo. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and in several anthologies, most recently The Wonder of Small Things, edited by James Crews and Facing Goodbye by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.Her debut collection of full-length poems, No Small Thing, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. Her poem within, “When the World Was Whole,” was nominated for Best of Net by Braided Way Magazine. She lives off the grid with her family on an island in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook
As a teacher and a part-time art dealer, I am an avid patron of art museums who typically visits museums throughout the Midwest and Appalachia several times a year. Due to the stay-at-home mandates in Ohio during 2020, however, I was limited to either conducting my museum visits virtually or thumbing through my own collection of art books to satisfy my cravings. I found myself returning again and again to The Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth. The story of Wyeth’s and Helga Testorf’s self-imposed isolation from the prying eyes of the public for nearly 15 years so that he could produce more than 240 portraits of her really struck a chord with me. The poems that make up the Andrew and Helga sequence were all written during that stay-at-home period and reflect the sense of isolation that many people felt at the height of the pandemic. In a very real sense, these poems could not have been written in the same way under “normal” writing conditions.
When Mark Danowsky accepted the sequence “Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found” for ONE ART, he challenged me to write a series of poems based on the paintings of Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son. I accepted the challenge and immediately began an in-depth exploration of Jamie’s paintings. I found myself particularly drawn to his many excellent portraits of people and animals, portraits that did more than merely replicate the appearance of his subjects. Just as his father’s portraits of Helga reveal a startling intimacy between the artist and his subject, Jamie’s portraits convey a similar intimacy that pulls the viewer into the worlds and emotions of his subjects, be they pigs or people. In just two months, I had written three poetry sequences based on eight of Jamie’s paintings. When read together, the poems based on Andrew’s paintings and the poems based on Jamie’s paintings coalesce into conversation between a father and his son about intimacy, love, family, and—above all else—art.
*
Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found
I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting. It would be like somebody watching you have sex—painting is that personal to me.
— Andrew Wyeth
I’m supposed to be the mystery woman, something lost and found.
— Helga Testorf
I. Black Velvet, 1972
I have completed God’s work, creating you as a constellation with the empty spaces between stars
filled in and fully realized. I have made you whole yet weightless, luminous in the perfect darkness
of the universe, God-like in your own right. Or, more truthfully, a Goddess reclining
on the backs of prayers that slip silently from the lips of supplicants. Every night, believers look up
to you for guidance before being pulled down into sleep, the only world where we exist
alone with nothing, or no one, to hold onto.
II. Sheepskin, 1973
There is something you’re not telling me, something I try to conjure out of you with a tempera potion
born out of rabbit-skin glue, distilled water, crushed marble, honey, egg yolks, and beeswax.
You don’t keep the secret in your eyes, as a layman would believe. Nor can it be found like the remnants
of a whispered prayer in the creases surrounding your enigmatic mouth.
A mouth that refuses to betray a smile or a frown. A mouth that once formed the word yes
when I asked if I could capture them—and you—in ink and paint. You keep your secret in your hands,
not as one might protect the delicate papier-mâché of a robin’s egg found abandoned beneath a hedgerow,
but as one cups a firefly, its tiny, otherworldly light just barely illuminating the narrow gaps
that never fully seal between closed fingers.
III. Easter Sunday, 1975
Runnels of stubborn snow shroud the muddy ground surrounding you and, by extension, me.
When I found you four Easters ago, I knew I had found the hollow place where the desire that I feared
had died was actually hiding, very much alive, thrumming like a hive: the desire to be divorced from all
expectations and preconceptions of the artist, the father, and the husband I had to be.
You gave me permission to paint for myself, to personify in you every secret I keep,
to finally release my soul from gray barnboard and brown barley grass and live in the world again
as flesh, blood, and bone. Now, on this Easter Sunday, in an otherwise barren landscape,
you are my one promise of green.
IV. Drawn Shade, 1977
I am a witness to your aging in a light of my own making, and I will I carefully catalogue
every new silver strand that appears like a shiny trinket pilfered by a magpie and woven into
the tasseled cornsilk of your hair. Already your downy temples have begun their transformation.
Soon, your mossy brows will glint like cattails gone to seed. Even the gosling fuzz softly covering
your cheeks will pale from amber to the white of milkweed silk. And eventually, naturally,
the perfect nest resting between your thighs will glitter and shine as if gilded by winter
with jewels of snowflakes and hoarfrost.
V. Braids, 1979
There are moments when you won’t even tell me what you see when you look away
as I pull your gaze out of the darkness surrounding you. I want you to reveal everything to me
freely so that I may capture in the contours of your face the shadows of your thoughts,
the full truth of you. When you look into the distance, look for me. Stand behind me
as I paint you. I want you to see your face as I do, a wolf moon rising
out of a January wheat field not yet blanketed by snow, gradually eclipsed
by the penumbra of your auburn hair.
VI. Night Shadow, 1979
Beneath my hand, you exist in both darkness and light. I hover above
you, the form of my shadow diaphanous and dissipating, a storm cloud releasing
everything it holds: water, ice, lightning, thunder. I rain down upon your body
and baptize you.
VII. In the Doorway, 1981
This is our house, a place for our prying eyes and ours alone: yours trying to see in me
the way that I see you; my own studying every particle of your being as an astronomer studies
the depths of the universe hoping to find the beginning of all creation. You stand naked,
filling the entrance both with the white light of stars and the dark matter that fills
the emptiness between them all. You and the doorway have become one and the same.
To enter our house means entering you.
VIII. Helga’s Words
quotes by Helga taken from the short documentary film Helga (Running Stag Productions, 2018)
He said I was his silent sounding board. He said there must be silence to realize what is behind the world.
He said I was starved. He said he gave me what I wanted and got what he wanted from me.
He said our time together was a dream. He said he was afraid of the dream disappearing if we talked about it.
I dreamed that I had fallen in love, and when I woke, I knelt
at the end of my bed and said, “Let it be true. Please
let it be true.” But how do you explain a dream? I knew
he was always painting himself in me. I knew I was a figment of his imagination.
Like a leaf blowing in the wind, I was there, but not there.
*
Three Portraits of a Sow
. . . if you get to know pigs, they’re very moody. They’re not sweet little animals at all. That’s what I like about them. They get depressed . . . — Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Pig, 1970
Her teats dangle, flaccid and empty.
Her corkscrew tail has come unwound.
The eye we see remains screwed shut tight
as bristly fur and hay needle her skin.
Withered cobs at her feet bear
no sign of a mother’s appetite or desire
now that her suckling litter is off to slaughter.
II. Night Pigs, 1979
The cockerel will wait until sunrise to crow its condolences.
There’s nothing more for the boar to do tonight but sleep.
They leave the sow to sit litterless in golden lamplight
(continued, new stanza) beneath her own growing shadow blackening the wall above them all.
III. Winter Pig, 1975
She knows what can be found at the heart
of a whiteout because she stares into one kind of abyss
or another with every sunrise. She knows the cold, too,
the way its emptiness stings like frostbite
in the wind that blows across her empty teats.
And she knows just four hoof-steps
over the splintered threshold will deliver her into
a world of her own making at a time of her own choosing.
*
Surrounded by the Sea
Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. —Jamie Wyeth
I. Orca, 1990
I have painted your hands as pointed and sharp
as any harpoon that pierced a leviathan’s heart.
Now you must choose for yourself: Ishmael or Ahab?
Will you live to tell your own story? Or will you doom yourself
to a slow death floating among the flotsam of a ship
shattered by the mortal sin some god demands we fight?
There is nothing more I can do. I have given you all the knives
you need to flay this life to the bone.
II. Screen Door to the Sea, 1994
You clearly want to leave. The door stands ajar.
What is keeping you from disappearing into the sea-spray
and salt air? What is keeping you from slipping out
before the clock strikes twelve? What is keeping your eyes
locked on mine, your hands fidgeting like gulls near the surf line?
Why do I make you stay? What is keeping me
from painting the doorway empty like an open mouth crying out for you
after you have walked away?
III. Other Voices, 1995
Your fingertips caress the locked door, feel the pulse
of a muffled conversation like some version of Braille
you have not learned how to decipher. The voices on the other side
could be inviting you to enter, to walk on through without turning back
and lock the door behind you. Or they could be telling you to stay patient
with the world in which you live, to just turn around and go back home.
And then again, there might not be any voices at all; it might just be the sea.
All I know is that there is still time enough for you to live your life
on this side of the threshold. Whenever you feel the need to leave,
I swear to you I will paint the key.
*
Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait
“I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.” — Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Andrew Wyeth, 1969
All fathers are oak trees to their sons, massive and domineering, casting a broad shadow across whatever field they claim. Though their roots run shallow, they run wide, rippling out and out from their thick trunk in search of water to feed their leaves and drink the world dry. It only takes a tiny injury—a broken branch, a redheaded woodpecker’s jackhammer bill, a passing bear claw scratch—to seed a burl that will keep expanding until the tree dies. What wound did you inflict to make the burl of your father’s face grow?
II. Pumpkin Head (Self-Portrait), 1972
Pumpkins grow best atop the ground rather than below, unburdened by the weight of earth and the tangle of roots. Every autumn we cut them and gut them and stuff them with candles until they smile brightly in spite of their own defilement. The Jack-O-Lantern that hides your own face stares at the world with empty eyes and a jagged, maniacal smile. You are the sole sign of life rising out of this fallow winter field. Unable to overcome the cold, your pumpkin head hangs in a blank canvas sky like a wan and sallow sun.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
Here, purple coneflowers and stark red lilies
lift their seed and pollen to the air
like open hands, palms to the sky.
A way of thanking, David thinks,
of giving back for their brief life above the earth,
up from the dark world. Now
his wet, painted garden waits in bright light, and
David stands at the edge, looking in,
his artist brush still poised—
somewhere, in time, he imagines,
a singing goldfinch thirsts for seeds of a coneflower,
a hummingbird for a red lily.
~ After David’s Garden II, watercolor by Wendy Kleros ~
Sally Nacker received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her poems continue to appear in journals, most recently Hawk and Whippoorwill, The Orchards Poetry Journal, HOOT, One Art, Your Daily Poem, Blue Unicorn, and The Sunlight Press. Sally has three collections: Vireo (2015), Night Snow (2017), and Kindness in Winter (just released); all published by Kelsay Books. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two cats. “David’s Garden” was exhibited on the walls of Fairfield University’s Downtown Bookstore in Fairfield, CT, as part of the BRAG Ekphrasis V Show in April.
