During most of his dreams Pisanello is wide awake, painting his Madonna of the Quail. His concentration is broken only by the arguments of the Child and the quail.
Because of your earth-born body roses scatter – the quail begins.
Zero divided by zero is zero – the Child ripostes.
No gold leaf will erase your pain – the quail insists.
Yet, angels pay homage to my earthly mother – the Child retorts.
When the Child and quail argue the Madonna is never present. Most often she has stepped from the painting for a rest. I often wonder what she dreams of when she sleeps.

a boy
his mother’s face
retouched

Ekphrastic haibun based on ‘The Madonna of the Quail’, Pisanello. (c.1420)

Réka Nyitrai & Alan Peat

…I close my eyes and see my mother bearing darkness in her crop. As if hypnotized, I raise my head, open my beak and sup from the regurgitated endlessness of night. From bill to bill the murk of it all flows like treacle. Dear, I am writing to you now to tell you this: that I could never have imagined it; that feeding on death could feel so intimate! Dear, there is nothing at all between her beak and my heart — she has taken me bareback. Dear, if you wish to save me, come quickly! Come now!

arranged on a table
the thin, pitted bones
of a Winchester goose

*In medieval London the brothels of Southwark were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester. The prostitutes who worked in them were known as Winchester Geese.
Ekphrastic haibun based on ‘Guatemala No.7 (Dying Vulture)’ William Congdon (1957)

Reka Nyitrai & Alan Peat

Post-high school, a ghost appears while you’re drowning your Jesus freak image in banana schnapps, still wearing that dipshit frycook uniform, mustard drunk, onion skunked. His old soft chains sloughing fecund for mesquite roots at the edge of a pasture. Here haunts he over the warped and beaten steel of an ancient cattleguard of braces, faces, and scurfy blooms. Eventual ruins when some ugly future looms a roll cloud over this place & the last to the ship are too late.

cowtown vowels
the word lacked
pronounced liked

Seth Copeland

“The child doesn’t know you, nor does the afternoon,
because you have died forever.”
— Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Federico García Lorca

Not his real name but all I knew.

He never locked his door. He left his cult in India. Where a child died.

He sang. The voice of a choir boy. Eyes. Of one possessed.

Principles blind. A knife slashes the eye of night. Starlight in the distance. The waves white fingers slipping through the sand.

The matador turns. Blood and sand. ¡Que no quiero verla! A song in a silent film.

dawn song
the last maple leaf
covered in snow

Note:
¡Que no quiero verla! – I don’t want to see it! (from Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías by Federico García Lorca)

Robert Witmer

The failed poet left an epistle for the Mailboxes. Their name was there on the rusty receptacle just inside the crumbling tenement.

To whom it may concern:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Mailbox,
Yours truly is looking for a post.
I have letters – of reference – a stamp of approval.
I promise to deliver.
RSVP
Yours sincerely,
A Poet Postponed

a ghost
in the machine
writing a wild horse

Days passed. The letters began: To Rearrange Themselves. The Mailboxes came. Down with their building. So the rubble rabbled.

swollen eyes
in the damp moonlight
a potato dreams

Once the dust settled and the guilty were booked and the sentences executed, a quiet period followed. He now pursued another line of work – without success.

In the end, nothing happened.

an old song
winks in the waves
madness in the eye of night

Question 1: Identify the literary devices in the prosimetric narrative above.

Question 2: Write a reply to the Poet in iambic pentameter, from the judge’s point of view.

Robert Witmer

It actually crosses my mind to shift lanes so I can avoid making eye contact with the homeless man standing at the stoplight. Green it says, so my path continues, frictionless.

just in time
a water strider
skims the surface

Lorraine A Padden

*title taken from a Shakespeare sonnet