Issue 1: Beginning

Welcome to Metphrastics! We’re delighted with the enthusiastic responses to the submission call. We settled on ten favorite poems, starting with John Greiner, responding to Max Beckmann’s triptych “The Beginning.” Greiner is a poet and visual artist who has worked in the security department of the Metropolitan Museum for more than a decade, so we thought it fitting for him to be our first featured poet. In a short interview, he gives us some insight into how his days at the Met inform his ekphrastic process. We also have poems from Sharon Dolin, Hunter Hodkinson, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Gregory Crosby, Marcella Durand, Cathy Wittmeyer, Leemore Malka, Kate Copeland, and Charlotte Cusumano Maiorana, responding to works by Edgar Degas, Polykleitos, Giorgio de Chirico, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Badi' al-Zaman ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, Alberto Giacometti, Jackson Pollock, Alma Thomas, and Harold Ancart. We hope you enjoy this first issue. If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to support our work, please visit Donate.

Note: to comply with copyright law, some artworks are not pictured on this site. Please click the link below the author’s name to view the work.

Beginning
John Greiner

after Max Beckmann

 Most men are not Tiresias
but many are blind organ grinders
this is better for the history
of song
prophecy strains the vocal cords
the captured king looks on
and envies the musician's wheelchair
if not his war and battle wounds

I am a hobby horse hero
a holy emperor
charging cavalry commander
I kill the cat and hang him by his boots
St. Peter style

his spurs scrape the ceiling
this is heaven
a place to look down from
and fall in love with
the reclining redhead
and lust after the bubbles
that she blows wishing
to never burst
I look up to God
so God gives me
Jacob's ladder
which is far too short for the job
that needs to be done
there is no reason to try
to climb
down here
I've got my empire ambitions
and the love of my courtiers
my clown is in the closet
I've promised him that he can
stay there forever
with a mirror of amusement
the Iron Chancellor adores
my pony

when we were terrors
wild and unredeemed
we'd pass forward and back
drawings of naked ladies
as the headmaster mined fantasies
in the front row
we were born to admire the busts
                     of better men
the earth is so green
what a pretty planet

John Greiner is a writer and visual artist living in New York City. He was educated at the New School for Social Research. Greiner's work has appeared in Antiphon, Sand Journal, Otoliths, Survision, Sein und Werden, Empty Mirror, Sensitive Skin, Unarmed, Street Value and numerous other magazines. His books of poetry include In An Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky (Arteidolia Press), Circuit (Whiskey City Press), Turnstile Burlesque (Crisis Chronicles Press) and Bodega Roses (Good Cop/Bad Cop Press). He is a recent 2nd place recipient of the James Tate Award and his upcoming chapbook, Clouded Saints and Kinky Shadows will be published by SurVision Press in the coming months. He has worked in the security department of the Met Museum for the past 11 years.

Suzanne Manet
Sharon Dolin

after Edgar Degas

No one asked me when you cut off
my hands my piano my face
in the double portrait Edgar  

made for us. You're still reclining
on our white couch, listening to me
play Brahms. One hand by your face,

the other rests loosely in your pants
pocket, you're slouching in a contemplative
pose, one of your shoes hidden

 by the folds in my taffeta skirt. My
back to you. Who knew except me
and Edgar of your temper? Music  

the one thing to placate you. He
gifted us this painting but unlike
other gifts, it will outlast us, more  

stewards than owners. It will preserve,
like skin, the damage you inflicted.
You said it wasn't a good likeness

of me; was the portrait you did
of me any better? In yours I'm wearing
black with see-through sleeves. You

got my nose all wrong—but did I
take a knife to it?

Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet
Edgar Degas, 1868-69

Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present; a prose memoir entitled Hitchcock Blonde; and two books of translation, most recently, the award-winning Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga. Her book of poems, Burn and Dodge, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. A recent NEA Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize Winner, and recipient of a Fellowship from the Library of Congress, Dolin is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press. She lives and teaches in New York City.

Eye of the Beholder
Hunter Hodkinson

after Polykleitos

Amputated by tide or
a careless colonizer,
Diadumenos’ small manhood sits
at the bottom of the Mediterranean &
is often mistaken as a nice place for bottom
feeders to hide beneath, or, even more tragic,
just another stone passed on by a group of
divers blissfully unaware they are potentially
staring at the most famous foreskin in the world.

Hunter Hodkinson is a non-binary, Ohio born poet teacher and editor, building community in Brooklyn & beyond. They have worked with The Adroit Journal, Brooklyn Poets, & are the founder of Dead End Zine, a quarterly publication showcasing art, poetry, & interviews. Their work appears in, Diode, december, Anti-Heroin Chic, Dream Boy Book Club, SplashLand Magazine, Poetry is a Team Sport, Abobo Zine and elsewhere. Their debut chapbook, "Mean Gays" is forthcoming (Tiny Cutlery, 2024.)

Fragments of a marble statue of the Diadoumenos (youth tying a fillet around his head)

Copy of work attributed to Polykleitos, ca. 69–96 CE

Corky St. Clair, do not rope me into your mysterious affairs
Rosebud Ben-Oni

after Christopher Guest &
Giorgio de Chirico's "The Jewish Angel"

 

Somewhere, in the long shot, lurks portraits of our fathers. Eyes,
mostly. We geist ourselves, trying to measure by catching them
when they aren't looking. Best luck with that. Better I'm fresher
off the destroyer & stoking fire at noses. I do so much work & it serves
you well, but oh? Chris, meet Giorgio (extreme close-up), who had Jewish pre
-dilictions. Choice punctuation keeps things friendly. Makes the magician
& not the fire trick the main mechanism.
Like pulling hats & hi, rabbi & juxta
-positions & uh oh, here Giorgio

            goes again: Jewish hour, Jewish wife. Diaspora as Off-off-off-off Broadway.

                                                             What a feat of eerie, exact engineering,
with literal math just thrown in & ensemble misfit
continuity &— perhaps the reason some feel our absurdities
are conversations in mono

            -logue. Especially the unspeakable ones. Sacrificial mockulore. Like Queens
of the Dairy, same scary affair. Go off book for Pomeranian Power Ballads
on Purim. Party time. Egg

                                     -celibate. Aren't we the ultimate

                        Geiger in our homes. Best Guess in show. Better royalties: it's Lord
Hayden-Guest & Giorgio's mother was a baroness. So I'll bind, boys;
you blindfold. I pit the despair of counts & I’m not cooking

                                                either of you

breakfast. No, not even coffee. Not even when you're mostly dead. Not to fifty! I like the moxie
speed of montage, in which crude curves lurk the secret to whom. Such sticky six fingers! Plethora,
peeling. Dénouement, de-knowing. Credenza, credentials. Ingredients for a real bridal princess.
Analogy as spice on a death rack. Wack. I’ve had a spinal tap. Mm-hmm, true story, & it was not
a mysterious affair, but for only lumbar consideration. I'm still here. Because of what we do,
& what we do is best described as you just have to be there. Tingle the surreal levies,

                         & Stevie & Rosebud

            Motel & white lotus luxury. How could they imagine Tanya-esque extravaganza,
after all, without us? This is making me weepy. Heel, predilections. An elicit
prediction: tomorrow, same as yesterday, turning our face to a mighty wind.
All my life I did not sit and wait for gruff men. All my life,

                                                I never stopped foretelling.
Still out there. Isn't it. Open arms, heart
-guard & I'm making a run up into another's arms.
Let’s live or not live forever & still find things to disqualify
for. Never end on a pre-proposition. Or a portrait of another
who wanted you to be something new. Let's not search for who
killed whose father. Award no season a king's ransom. Keep it simple:

                                    you bring the lunchpail & you the remains of the days

                                                & I'll tally the hours of bathwater we did not throw away.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award. Paramount, the National September 11th Memorial, and The Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust have commissioned her work. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, Tin House, among others. 

The Ribbon's Song
Gregory Crosby

after Frederick Carl Frieseke

It’s the ribbon before anything else.
Nothing ever really happens
except
in the eye; yet another story in the male
gazette, helplessly subscribed.
It isn’t her nakedness but

the green ribbon around her throat
that beckons. She sleeps
in sunlight for which the word
dappled was invented, while her friend, fully-clothed,
brings the spinning parasol of time to rest (O demure,
O mindful), eyes down upon her, 

whose skin is the absolute cliché of alabaster.
If she asked, Never remove the ribbon from my neck,
I would tell her, Never, never, never, never,
never, Lear into leer, a fetish
forever. I stood,
in eros & agape, agape. What was this 

doing here? One room away
from Madame X’s frozen, decorous shoulder, this dream
just hanging there, out in the open, as if waiting
for my imagination? Did no one see
how hot this was? Summer, it read. That ribbon
filled the gallery, a brushstroke

unending. I’d never even heard
of this guy. This all happened a long time ago;
strange, because
it’s still happening. That ribbon—
binding & unbinding (body), bound
& unbound (time). A dappling, even now.

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). 

Summer
Frederick Carl Frieseke, American, 1914

smile nicely
Marcella Durand

after Badi' al-Zaman ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari

water and candle clocks
fountains change their shapes
automata pour drinks
water pours out of peacocks’ mouths

automata with semiautomatics
ten face off against the other ten
ten move fingers up and down with a stick
automata smile nicely and pour drinks

bees carry ropes on their backs
ropes covered in pollen
sacks suspiciously yellow
thieves who stole my flowers!

ten loves every other number divisible by ten
ten wonders how to fit three or four
ten desires to be a hundred, a thousand, or a million
ten contains all numbers and reaches for more

garden filled with automata
uncanny valleys under the moon
move and moving strangely
water pours from the uncanny moon’s mouth

Marcella Durand is a poet, editor and translator. She is the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry, published by MIT Press in Fall 2024, and the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Other books include To husband is to tender, The Prospect, The Garden of M., and Western Capital Rhapsodies. She lives and works in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 

"Design for the Water Clock of the Peacocks", from the Kitab fi ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya (Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) by Badi' al-Zaman b. al Razzaz al-Jazari

Author Badi' al-Zaman ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, dated 715 AH/1315 CE

The Forest, Alberto Giacometti, 1950
Cathy Wittmeyer

Cathy Wittmeyer hosts the Word to Action retreat in the Alps where discovery inspires hope in response to fear. Editor of the anthology: Eden is a Backyard: Climate poems from Word to Action from EditionEupolinos, her work appeared in Quarter After Eight, Ekphrastic Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and others.

Jackson
Leemore Malka

after Jackson Pollock

I was daring,
walked right up,
confronting your silver,
pink and cool blue.

I felt like how I feel on the ocean,
legs longer than long,
chest cleaved
broad open.

I want
this marble, I want
splattering, to be an action,
“refusing to accept
the artificiality of an ending.”

Quote attributed to Allan Kaprow

Leemore Malka is a poet and an actress, equal parts fifth generation native New Yorker and Moroccan Israeli kibbutznikit. She is a graduate of NYU, an alumna of the Bats at the Flea Theater and a regular at Easy Paradise at KGB. Her collection of twenty poems, Hard and Sweet as Cold Cake, is forthcoming in its second edition. IG :: @blueblackgolden

Confetti petals
Kate Copeland

after Alma Thomas

The steel of brier, a yearly blooming.
Such kind of beautiful. Soft spheres, 

like deciduous cherry. Close to skin. 
More, and more, she hungers to court 

the fiction side of flowers, overtones
of leaves reaching — out, to different

mornings dripping down colourwater. 
Trails cross streams, curve keys, and

rocks shine carmine and teal in October 
sun. Everyone deserves a furtherance.

Kate Copeland’s love for languages led her to teaching, her love for art & water to poetry. She is curator-editor for The Ekphrastic Review & runs linguistic-poetry workshops for TER and the IWWG. Find her poems at The Ekphrastic Review, WildfireWords, Gleam, Spirit Fire, Hedgehog Press [a.o.] & Instagram.

Guiding Light, 2021
Charlotte Cusumano Maiorana

after Harold Ancart

Suppose heavy
and light stars will soon
disappear to the naked eye.
We need telescopes to identify
the Big Dipper, the North Star,
the color red. In backyards,
we beg the moon to stay.
We offer the moon its own moon.
We go back,
but of course, there is a line.
We perforate the sky
in search of the stars.
To our surprise,
there is now less sky.
We take out telescopes for the mineral bursts.
Everyone agrees it is brighter now.
There is no point in arguing—
we lost long-term memory.
It is not that I want more time,
just the ability to sit in silence.
At what point do we start
to resemble each other?
This landscape
is dark, nothing permanent
but orbs,
yellow and pink.

Charlotte Maiorana is an American-Italian writer and mother. She is a current MFA student at Randolph College and lives in her hometown of Staten Island, New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal, One Art, The Rumen, and elsewhere. You can find her at @charlotteccm on Instagram.