GA Gardner | Captive

CAPTIVE
 Mixed media collage painting on paper
Artist: GA Gardner
Created: 2019 
Courtesy: www.Gartsy.com

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GA Gardner is the founding artist of Gartsy.com. His mixed media collage paintings have been exhibited at various museums and galleries in the USA, Asia and the Caribbean, including the James E. Lewis Museum of Art; Paterson Museum, New Jersey; Nanjing College of Art, China; Corridor Gallery, New York; Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St Croix, USVI, Bergen Museum, New Jersey. He has been the subject of numerous articles and catalog essays. He has been awarded artist residencies in the Caribbean and Asia. He is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington DC, USA.

Nancy Kirolos | Fairku/600nm

Fairku/600nm

Difficult to rhyme
Mix of yellow and red shades
Grapefruit soda yum

Carrot tangerine
Bitter British marmalade
Sweet ginger ice tea

Half circle at dawn
Indian mango lassi
Autumn pumpkin pie

Bright shade on dark skin
Orange color or sweet fruit
And Buddhism too

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Nancy Kirolos is an artist and an award-winning scientist living in the Netherlands. Her preferred media to create art are words, music, watercolors, and photography. She likes to write stories and poems in English and Dutch. Nancy’s goal is to stimulate people emotionally and intellectually through her written work which has been published in several publications in Europe and the US. In 2020, Nancy was longlisted for the Dutch El Hizjra literature prize

Howard Pflanzer | Orange Sky

ORANGE SKY

 

In the west the sky glows orange

Light scattered by the pollution

Right before the sun goes down beyond the shore

Is this a harbinger of a happier time ahead

Or just a precursor of another black night

 

Let’s wait for tomorrow

And see how the day progresses

Will the sky at dusk glow a brighter orange

Streaked with crimson

Or will the disappearing light plunge us directly into the darkness

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Howard Pflanzer is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer. Dead Birds or Avian Blues was published by Fly By Night Press in 2011. Recent publications include FIVE Poetry, And Then, Downtown Brooklyn, Home Planet News, Pratik, Poems:LES Festival of the Arts Dedicated to the Lower East Side (TNC 2016, 2017), Of Burgers and Barrooms (Main Street Rag 2017), and WORD:An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes (2017). His hybrid performance piece, Walt Whitman Opera, adapted from Whitman’s poetry with music by Constance Cooper, was presented at the undergroundzero festival in New York in July 2014.

Akshaya Pawaskar | Indian Summer

Indian Summer

These days
we wait for the moon
to descend upon
us, to fill us up
with its white coolness.
As our heads spin,
as our kurtas drench
with sweat,
cling to our flesh
and muscles,
and even the bones
of civilization creak
under the weight
of a wish to bare
our papery
parched skins.
We move thirstily to
the solace of noise
from our ceiling fans.
The blades slicing
the Indian summer,
cutting the air
into a salve on
our salty bodies
dressed in austere
cotton whites.
As Tropic of Cancer
simmers to a boil
and the mosquitoes
whine into our ears,
sounding like languorous
sullen lovers,
we recline on
the earthen floors
of this peninsula.
As hysteria of
the orange sun
meets with
our torpor,
an old paramour
afraid of touch,
it welts us red
with love that
needs no touching.


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Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India, and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling, among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020, placed third in the Poetry Matters Project contest that same year, and placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018.