Monthly Archives: April 2022

Books from the Pantry: The Mask by Elisabeth Horan reviewed by Claire Faulkner

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I think I was in an art lesson at school the first time I saw the work of Frida Kahlo. I’m not quite sure how old I was, but I remember the impact it had on me. I was intrigued and completely spell bound. I remember how the colours stood out, but also how they seemed to weave together to tell a story.

The Two Frida’s is an artwork which has stayed in my memory bank for years. That was until I read The Mask by Elisabeth Horan, and the image came flooding back to me. The Mask is the second collection of ekphrastic poetry by Horan in response to the artwork of Frida Kahlo.

What interests me the most about ekphrastic poetry is connection. How the reader connects with poetry through art, and how poetry can provide the reader with a different interpretation of the original work. Ekphrastic poetry also raises questions about the relationship between the reader and writer, and I was interested in whether my reactions or interpretations would be the same as Horan.

The Mask provides a mix of emotions, and Horan’s work has a touch of raw honesty and openness to it. Sometimes difficult to read, but worth the effort. The words, much like Kahlo’s colours, are intense, sometimes fierce, but each one adds value and strength to the story of both women.

There were a number of poems in this collection which stood out for me. Of course, The Two Frida’s, an inner struggle about duality with themes of desire and attraction, of who you are underneath, and who you want to be on the surface.

In Con Mi Cama (Ella y Yo), Horan describes the inter dependence and relationship between a cripple and her bed, with a dream like quality.

‘I know you are only a bed, amora / And I, but a cripple…/That’s what we have together~~~/

To touch and to love each other / Not to turn away / As the other burns.’

Nectar of the Gods and a Woman’s Throat is based on the self portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. A painting full of symbols and meaning. For me Horan’s words emphasise not just the pain Kahlo is presenting, but also strength and resilience of a woman searching for love and security.

The Mask, Vol 2 was perhaps the most impactful poem in this collection for me, and I feel this highlights Horan’s skill as a writer. Shocking the reader with the opening ‘I want the voices / to cease / shushing me’. The words reflect the darkness and uneasiness of the painting which inspired it.

Female strength and resilience feature heavily in this collection, but if you’re a fan of Kahlo, and are familiar with her work, I think you’ll enjoy reading this. Horan says the poems are a celebration and tribute to Kahlo, and I think this collection is a remarkable group of poems influenced by Kahlo’s art. The Mask by Elisabeth Horan is published by The Broken Spine.

With special thanks to Isabelle Kenyon from Fly on the Wall Press.

Poetry Drawer: Contemporary Irish Poetry by S.F. Wright

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One morning,
Banging issued from down the hall.
Our professor opened the door, said,
“Could you please do that another time?”
A voice, some worker’s, said,
“When the hell am I supposed to do it, then?”
Our professor’s face blanched, then reddened.

But the banging ceased.

The lecture resumed,
The excitement over.

S.F. Wright lives and teaches in New Jersey. His work has appeared in Hobart, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Elm Leaves Journal, among other places. His short story collection, The English Teacher, is forthcoming from Cerasus Poetry.

Poetry Drawer: Extinction Rebellion by Raymond Miller

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This marching, these banners, remind me of Tot,
gently spoken, dreadlocked, who once offered
to construct a house for our kids in the tree
at the end of our garden. He’d protested at
the Newbury bypass, built and inhabited
his own tree-house, so we figured he’d take
just a few days or so. He laboured all summer,
hampered somewhat by a refusal to hammer
nails into wood because of the pain that caused
the tree, and a penchant for stopping and staring
at the world from his heightened aspect.
He dropped dead last year, only 57,
a heart attack busking outside the train station.
His partner crowd-funded to pay for the wake
and that would have met his approval.
It was unlike him to exit so quickly, she said,
but he’d never have stood for a bypass.

Ray Miller is a Socialist, Aston Villa supporter, and faithful husband. Life’s been a disappointment.

You can find more of Ray’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Inky Hiaga by Jerome Berglund

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Jerome Berglund is an author and fine artist who cowrote a television pilot which at a festival for them received numerous accolades including best in show. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program, with emphases in screenwriting and philosophy. Berglund is author to the novel Havenauts and the story collection Dick Jokes. His short fiction has been exhibited by the Watershed Review, Paragon Press, and the Stardust Review. His poetry appears in Abstract Magazine, Bangalore Review, Barstow & Grand, and most recently O:JA&L. A drama he penned was published in Iris Literary Journal. Berglund is furthermore an established, award-winning fine art photographer, whose black and white pictures have been exhibited in galleries across New York, Minneapolis, and Santa Monica. Berglund has some indigenous ancestry, identifies as lgbtiqa+, and is neurodivergent.

Pantry Prose: A Man is the Highest Created Being in the Universe! Earth is the Jewel, Masterpiece of All the Worlds by AE Reiff

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You can say of Yeshua Messiah that he was made a little lower than the angels, however he was also in the beginning and without him was not anything made that was made. A man is the highest created being in the universe. What is man that thou art mindful of him? You can say Lucifer was the highest created being, but the covering cherub surrendered his position for the sake of himself, went after his own thoughts whose end is among the shells of the qliphoth, the end of death, from which there is no rescue as there is for the highest created being. You cannot even say angels are the highest created beings, even though they are more powerful in apparent dimensions, for of which of the angels did he say, thou art my son, meaning that where ever men turn, Yeshua Messiah precedes them. Those men made in the image of Yahweh take on the nature of the son, which is not to despise angels but not to worship them.

You cannot say the highest created being in the universe is the universe. Well you can say it, but you become an idolator. You cannot say that the highest created being in the universe should be amended to the highest created being in the earth, for remember, creating heaven with a touch, his fingers, he gave to man dominion of his hands. Everywhere you turn Yeshua Messiah makes Man the highest created being in the universe, and dignifies earth as much as Yeshua taking the form of a man dignifies a man. Sarah called him lord. Earth is his home, to be remade to suit him in his true state, this both at the end of Isaiah and Revelation, and everywhere between. The man remade inhabits the earth remade. The superficial evolved states of the biome are going to be redone.

Man is the highest created being in the universe.

Earth is the jewel, the masterpiece of all the worlds.*

There is a negative proof mentioned in all the attempts to neuter a man by science. Astronomy, mythology, every agency of civilization seeks to enthrone the demonic skulls. These forces have had their day. Approaching full flow they are to be dry as the Red Sea before they are engulfed. It is important to them to prevent the man from realizing he is the highest created being in the universe. A man’s enemies reveal a lot about him. Natively, it sounds wrong to say man is created highest because that title should be reserved for Jesus. But Jesus, blessed, is not created. Jesus, blessed, was the same in the beginning with Yahweh.  Putting him in the place of man promotes the man. According to his enemy, not the man but the universe is the highest creation and is creation itself.  More negation from the demonic skulls and their surrogates.

Man is a sculpture event. He is being fashioned as a man as we live. And what does that say about woman? How do you think he gets here! These sayings require a hearer. The first was said to Aeyrie after his two week tour of mid country, yesterday. When I heard it I was shocked. The corollary was said to Eden this morning in bed.

AE, Andrew Edwin Reiff works at Forms of the Formless Ceramic. He ran a Pharmacy garden for the U of Texas, taught at Fayetteville State University and again at Bishop College-Dallas, studied acoustic phonetics and took a doctorate in literature of the renaissance.

You can find more of AE’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: Fashion: Recognitions by Robert Demaree

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Fashion

Our grandson, starting high school,
Wants to be sure he has the right book bag.
I think back to the salt & pepper sports coat
In which I went off to college,
Random flecks of this and that
Against a background I recall
As a vaguely purplish blue.
Mortifying.
I paid to have the pleats
Removed from gray flannel slacks,
That useless belt and buckle
Appended to the back.
(This was 1955,
As you perhaps have guessed.)
When I finally got myself
A proper muted brown
Herringbone jacket,
It was from the wrong store.

Recognitions

At his college
The reunion was commencement day,
Steps in different directions:
The newly degreed and their kin
Exchange congratulations,
With old alums,
A pleasantness instinctive, spontaneous,
Someone’s plan.

At his fraternity,
Rife with the debris of
Last exams, last parties,
They found his class picture,
An off-hand, unsought kindness.
Rows of young men
With dark, severe hair, dated,
Is this you?

At the banquet
He recognized people
Who did not recognize him,
Which had also been the case
In nineteen fifty-nine.

Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.

You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: From the Pound Cantos: CENTO XXIV: A line from Margaret Atwood: geographies: Chorley: Cursive script by Mark Young

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From the Pound Cantos: CENTO XXIV

This is Mitteleuropa. Guns are a
merchandise. Have special privi-
lege. No retail tax or any of the
other taxes, no broken contracts.
Everything in its place, & nothing
left over. Let things remain as they
are. A perennial extension of fran-
chise to continue one’s labours. The

words rattle. Surely we have heard
this before. The bodies so flamed
in the air, took flame. Flames
flowed into sea. For three days
now as if snow cloud over the sea.
& for three days, & none after.

A line from Margaret Atwood

This talk of films made in the early
21st century, as if it was so very
long ago, is making me thirsty. But
then I’m more concerned with some

different points of view, working on
something done a century earlier,
1913, de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of
the Poet, with its strange foreground,

a bunch of bananas, poised against the
shadowy background porticos. So much
was going on in it: but now, with a 90°
rotation & the use of much erasure I’ve

reduced it to unlinked islands of activity.
Have kept its focus — though with the
certainty of a poet have retitled my piece
A Last Banana for Giorgio de Chirico.

geographies: Chorley

Sometimes the Bolton &
Preston Line of the Lanca-
shire & Yorkshire Railway
Company goes swimming

in the Chor. Sometimes,
when the rain is heavy, the
reverse can occur. Neither
bears the other any ill will.

Cursive script

I sit
in a chair
in a room lit
only by the
lost light
of late
evening

eating
dried fruit
from a mini-
pack made
of a dull
paper that
stamps its own
taste upon the
contents

& think about
moving
to a house in
the country
where the words
don’t have to
be summoned

but come
of their own
accord when
they’re ready
to be
milked.

Mark Young’s first published poetry appeared over sixty-two years ago. Much more recent work has appeared, or is to appear, in The Sparrow’s Trombone, Scud, Ygdrasil, Mobius, SurVision, NAUSEATED DRIVE, Unlikely Stories, & Word For/Word.

You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Flash in the Pantry: The Lakehouse : Change of Plan: Connecting Stars Like Dots by Keith Hoerner

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The Lakehouse

Deep below the lake’s murky surface, there sits—in tact—a house. A two-story structure of Carpenter Gothic details like elaborate wooden trim bloated to bursting. Its front yard: purple loosestrife. Its inhabitants: alligator gar, bull trout, and pupfish. All glide past languidly: out of window sashes and back inside door frames. It is serene, and it is foreboding. Curtains of algae float gossamer to and fro. Pictures rest clustered atop credenzas. A chandelier is lit, intermittently, by freshwater electric eels. And near a Victrola, white to the bone, a man and a woman waltz in a floating embrace.

Change of Plan

Every time he checks the blueprints, something’s different. When he questions the architect, he sneers, as if to demand “What are ya talkin’ about bub; you were on board with the designs – just yesterday.” But upon today’s examination, the roofline has taken on a monstrous fortress-like appearance. Worse yet, each day, it continues to grow in strangeness. Now, as the house is complete, he does not question its organic shapeshifting. He lies in bed aware—as walls fold and floors slide around him. The house lives, takes on new forms, and against his will, locks its doors and windows.

Connecting Stars Like Dots

When I was a kid, I would sleepwalk. I remember having a recurring dream. Today, it seems to be such a mature dream, intuitive and analogous, for a boy of about eight years old. I dreamt I would slice an orange. And nature would whisper to me that when one slices an orange it displays 13 sections. Always 13. Only 13. But the orange I sliced had one section more—or less.

I would begin to sleepwalk, the gauze masking Lazarus’ eyes bound tight around my own: making me maneuver the furniture in our house as if by radar, blindly gliding past hard corners and pointy objects.

My siblings, Mom, Dad, were use to my meanderings. I would find a presence, sense a group of my brothers and sisters as they sat watching Johnny Carson, hee hawing at his stand-up comedy routine. I stood there, too, mumbling, asking them for help in a language only the desperate can understand. “Why,” I’d ask simply, pleadingly. “Why is my orange different? Why am I different?”

I would feel an arm drag me to the side or a kick in the butt almost take me to my knees.

“Go to bed, Keith!”

“Stop blocking the TV.” “Mom, Keith’s at it again…”

A hand, assuredly my surrogate mother, Kathleen, gently guided me on my precarious walk back to the orange grove and the knowledge even then, on some subconscious level, that all was not right with me; something was wrong, because my surroundings told me so. I was witness to Mom’s beatings on Kathleen. Just a kid, I was already sensing the dread to be caught up in Mom’s manic moods. I had begun wetting the bed and being punished sarcastically by Mom on each occurrence. And the dream came slice after slice after slice.

One night, it took me to the place of the big “orange ball” we kids played with… when around two in the morning, my twin Kenny awoke and went looking for me, finding me standing at the free- throw line staring blankly at the basketball hoop in our backyard.

I would surely shoot and miss.

I relate still to this image, me standing outside in the dead of night, head cocked slightly upward, blind eyes unlit by a phantom moon, while my mind connected stars like dots, hoping to map out the answer to my riddle through some astrological means. I could sense the half-horse, half-man archer, Sagittarius, lull me in my trance with the moral principles and laws of the universe… pointing his bow and arrow in the direction I was to follow, however far, however near.

Keith Hoerner (BS, MFA) lives, teaches, and pushes words around in Southern Illinois, USA. He is frequently featured in lit journals (75+ to date, including decomP, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, and Litro—to name just a few). He is founding editor of the Webby Award recognized Dribble Drabble Review, and his memoir, The Day the Sky Broke Open, is a recent Best Book and American Writing Award Finalist. A collection of short fiction and poetry, entitled Balancing on the Sharp Edges of Crescent Moons, publishes later this year.  

Poetry Drawer: Gustav Holst Considers a Pebble While Composing ‘The Planets’: Rivers in the Dorian Mode: Coln St. Aldwyns by Neil Leadbeater

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Gustav Holst Considers a Pebble While Composing ‘The Planets’

He cradles its convexities
in the palm of his hand,
feels its significance,
weighs its bulk.

Striated it could be Saturn,
whose drawn lines
are deeply scarred
from hard-earned experience.

Pockmarked with craters,
it could have been Mars.

Cold, it could be Neptune.

Its sudden jollity
is the playfulness of Jupiter.

Broken open
he hears music

How did it get inside?

Rivers in the Dorian Mode

In that see-saw Margery Daw
ocean of a morning,
red poll bullocks near a barbed wire fence
steer clear of the flood –
all that collective improvisation
driven by the height of tides –
not the happy-go-lucky flow
you sometimes see in summer –
but one that shifts into
a faster pace –
an orchestral outburst
of tidal manoeuvres
surging up from the Channel –
so we listen to fenders
shielding blows
that, and the willows weeping.

Coln St. Aldwyns

In 1953, ‘Gardener’s Question Time’
with Franklin Engelmann
came here. The programme was recorded
in the Village Hall (now defunct)
by the BBC.

I was two years old.

I have a shrub that doesn’t want to flower.
(but not all shrubs do!)
How do I identify my soil type?
(clay, silt, peat or chalk?)
How can I get rid of slugs?
(you never will).
Is it safe to move my peony?
(yes, but it won’t like it).
Can you suggest some plants
that will grow in the shade?
(snowdrops, dog tooth violets,
hydrangeas, hostas
and the hart’s tongue fern).
How can I attract bees?
(foxgloves)….

Between the Norman church
and the cottage gardens
these same questions are asked
and answered
year after year.

Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His publications include Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, Scotland, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus Press, England, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, England, 2014), Sleeve Notes (Editura Pim, Iaşi, Romania, 2016) Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017), Penn Fields (Littoral Press, 2019), and ‘Reading Between the Lines’ (Littoral Press, 2020). His work has been translated into several languages including Dutch, French, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.

You can find more of Neils’ work here on Ink Pantry.