Kumar and Mansoori's Landscapes of Love

New Jersey poet Lavinia Kumar’s chapbook Rivers of Saris is available from Main Street Rag.  Her poetry has appeared in US and UK publications such as Ascent Aspirations, Atlanta Review, Caduceus, Colere, Edison Literary Review, Exit 13, Flaneur, Kelsey Review, Lablit, Mobius, New Verse News, Orbis, Pedestal, Pemmican, Stone Highway, Symmetry Pebbles, Touch, US1 Worksheets, and Waterways. She is an editor of children’s poetry at PoetryWITS. Check out her website at laviniakumar.org. 

"Landscape of Love" by Nabibakhsh Mansoori, oil on canvas, 2005

It’s morning as I lie on my back in cool water.

I see your smooth skin over my cheek bones grow

as a bright green hill onshore, a blue eye at a ridge,

and at the foot soft sand chains of twists and coils.

My nose sinks deeper in still water.  I close one eye

till a small tree grows above it.  Branches inside

spread crimson red, blood red, color of the river

and your arrows. I enclose it in a glass bubble

and watch it rise, till it sails farther than words.

Now my nose slips under.  Habit holds my breath.

But should it?  Is there a time when green love

is more than life?  No new color should be beyond? 




painters and poets
ekphrastic

Henry Moore's "Reclining Figure" by Poet Donald Hall

Poet Donald Hall

Sculptor Henry Moore, 1898-1986 

Donald Hall, born in 1928, is an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. A graduate of Phillips Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, he has written over 50 books across many genres.

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1951

Reclining Figure

Then the knee of the wave
turned to stone.

By the cliff of her flank
I anchored,

in the darkness of harbors
laid-by.

painters and poets
ekphrastic

Breasts and More Breasts: Poem by Camille Guthrie

Born in Seattle and raised in Pittsburgh, poet Camille Guthrie earned a BA at Vassar College and an MFA at Brown University. She is the author of the poetry collections The Master Thief (2000) and In Captivity (2006, and has taught at New York University and Bennington College. 

 Mamelles by Louise Bourgeois, 1991

Mamelles (From Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois)

A stretched frieze

poured hill to hill

Louise Bourgeois in Her Paris Studio, 1946

to a milked horizon

The fetish rubs close

is graspable, laps 

at the taffy-pulling rack

She acquiesces to divine rights

This poultice will heave

many handled

rose-sucking waves

for a garish thirst

Erosion in evidence

Post-partum depression

Dismembering nestler

to a precipice

painters and poets
ekphrastic