Welcome to the Summer 2026 Issue of Metphrastics. We have poems by Olaitan Akano, Ivory Alexander, Marc Chamberlain, Gina Ferrara, Barbara Krasner, Michelle Penn, and G. Sabbatini responding to works by Emanuel Leutze, Johan Christian Dahl, an unknown 19th century American painter, Edouard Manet, and pieces from Ancient Egypt and Ancient West Asian Art. We also have a poem about the experience of going to the Met for one reason, but being pulled in different directions by other artists. Our featured poet is Leemore Malka, who is interviewed at the end of this issue.
Call for Submissions: For Fall 2026, we’re looking for poems about Wounds. This can be a literal or abstract wound depicted in a painting, a “wounded” or damaged work of art itself, kintsugi and other artistic repairs of “wounds,” weapons that have caused wounds, having your heart broken in the Egyptian Wing, or any other way you’d like to interpret this prompt. Please submit by September 15th!
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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.
I begged you not to attend
Ivory Alexander
the orgies on Mount Vesuvius.
Spit trails dangling from the glossy edges of history.
Letters of post-mortem lovers and post-coital sacrifices
segregated in casts, poses considered facts.
Sinners bedded In Herculaneum, numberless speeches recorded
for museum tours.
Molten dragonflies jet through the air,
boiling the throat of God.
In the gutters of my dreams I saw
a princess skinny dipping into Pompeii
with ash rubbed on her vulva.
The marble-breasted soldier stood in the furrowed afterbirth.
In the present-day, it is thought that the detached face on my neck
may belong to the body discovered next to me, the dust of my crushed
fingers making the background art of our headboard.
The moment we meant to part will never come.
I hope it is known that when the heat gored our villa,
I seized your weak arms, desperate to mummify
our last shared breath.
Ivory Alexander is a writer from Georgia, and is currently studying Creative writing and Linguistics at Columbus State University. She has nurtured a love of writing poetry and prose, and her work has been featured in the literary magazine at her university, where she is now editor-in-chief, and in the Carson McCullers Literary Awards.
An Eruption of Vesuvius
Johan Christian Dahl, Norwegian, 1824
Between Past and Future
Gina Ferrara
Equidistant,
one of the banks is behind us,
the other ahead.
The breeze can barely lift a veil.
You quit rowing and have not dropped
an anchor yet to claim the moment,
though you should,
your white shirt fetid,
damp with sweat I suspect.
The boat has taken on a wave of blue.
My dress fills the bottom,
grazes your feet and ankles
until they are awash,
submerged in a flood of silk.
Gina Ferrara lives in New Orleans. She has five poetry collections, and her sixth, The Rooted and Recurrent is forthcoming for publication with ULL Press. In 2025, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Louisiana.
Boating
Edouard Manet, French, 1874
The Fall of Nineveh
G. Sabbatini
here lies Ashurnasirpal’s sentinels:
human-headed gypsum beasts,
colossal remains of a forgotten god’s grandeur
conscripted at last into American service
heralds of our own undoing, their testimony—
the felling of an empire,
one link in a great chain,
a promise for those who know to listen
G. Sabbatini writes poetry, fiction, and essays that investigate creative mythologies and cultural memory. Her work explores the stories we tell about art, artists, and their afterlives. Learn more at gsabbatini.com.
Human-headed winged lion (lamassu)
Assyrian, ca. 883–859 BCE
Snap the Whip
Barbara Krasner
I came to see the Raphael exhibition.
But Winslow Homer wrapped a rope
around my waist and tugged me
into the sunlight to snap the whip.
I came to see the Raphael exhibition.
But Theodore Robinson beckoned me
into his bird’s eye brushstrokes of Giverny
until I had no choice but to stand on the hill and linger.
I told myself I came to see the Raphael exhibition.
But instead I pushed aside Mrs. Hugh Hammersly
on that velvet sofa, ready to sit
for John Singer Sargent and my own portrait.
I wanted to repose on John White Alexander’s divan,
my voluminous white dress spilling, fur trim
curving along the sumptuous lines of my body
and dare Alexander to paint me.
The guards mumbled how the Raphael exhibition
was a sea of people. I should hold off.
William Merritt Chase offered me a chair
and a basket of sewing while I waited.
In the back of my mind I knew
I came to see the Raphael exhibition.
But I wanted to join James Jebusa Shannon’s girls
as they listened to their mother reading Kipling’s jungle tales.
I had thirty minutes left before my car service came
to take me back to Jersey. I came to see the Raphael exhibition.
I couldn’t get past the labyrinth of wall text readers.
I could always buy the catalog.
Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet with ekphrastic collections The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026), and the forthcoming The Appropriation of Brueghel (Shanti Arts, 2027).
Snap the Whip
Winslow Homer, American, 1872
pomegranates
Michelle Penn
she counts the seeds in her palm
1. rage
2. rage
3. rage
each seed a plague, a storm, a war
her special messengers, full & red & ready to burst
she the blazing eye of her father, his revenge
lioness face twitching with it
seeds she could crush, turn to blood
she would she will
demagogues & traitors, the arrogant & the cruel
blood until no blood remains
then drop the seeds, breathe long &
heal the wounded world, flip her rage
inside-out like a sleeve
Michelle Penn is a dual US/UK national living in London. Her latest collection, Retablo for a door (Shearsman, 2026), was featured in The Guardian and on BBC Radio 4. Her previous books are Paper Crusade (Arachne Press, 2022) and Self-portrait as a diviner, failing (Paper Swans Press, 2018). michellepennwriter.com
Statue of the Goddess Sakhmet
New Kingdom, ca. 1390–1352 B.C.
Complicity
Marc Chamberlain
The ethical ‘Non-Identity
Problem’ asks us to confront
the impossibility of harming
people who will never exist.
Here, the artist’s brush is
delivered into empty space
by a forearm as proud as
the neck of a swan and
fingers that pinch like a beak.
The swan is primed to strike
the figure the artist paints,
like Zeus biding his time
before lunging at Leda.
How can we possibly know
ourselves and the potential
we have to cause pain, to stop
the unknown before the next
brushstroke or before the pen
hits the page? The wall behind
the artist is bare. The light,
very precisely, divides it.
Marc Chamberlain is a poet and critic based in London. His work has appeared in publications including The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021, The Hudson Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. For more information: www.marcchamberlain.net.
Self Portrait
Unknown Artist, American, ca. 1800–1805
The Weight She Carries
Olaitan Akano
Not the ice, not the wind-whipped flag,
but the way the boat lists slightly
as though one more man would sink them all.
He stands at the prow like someone
who has practiced this pose in mirrors,
yet his eyes are tired, the kind of tired
that comes from asking others to die
for an idea still forming in your mouth.
Behind him the oarsmen hunch, faces
half-hidden, anonymous as the river itself.
One wears red, a splash of color
that feels almost accidental, like blood
that hasn’t yet decided to matter.
I keep returning to the man in the stern,
steering with both hands on the rudder,
his back to the future we now call history.
What does he see when he looks back
at the Jersey shore disappearing?
A kitchen table left uncleared,
a child who won’t remember this night,
or just more water, black and patient,
waiting to swallow whatever comes next.
Olaitan Akano is a content writer and storyteller who enjoys crafting engaging articles and creative pieces across various topics. Passionate about meaningful writing, Olaitan aims to inform, inspire, and connect with readers through every story.
Washington Crossing the Delaware
Emanuel Leutze, German American, 1851
AN INTERVIEW WITH LEEMORE MALKA
Leemore Malka is a poet, actress and singer from the Bronx, equal parts fifth generation native New Yorker and Moroccan Israeli kibbutznikit. She was featured in the inaugural edition of Metphrastics with a piece inspired by Jackson Pollock. Leemore is a regular at Easy Paradise at KGB, the Den at Dead Letter No. 9 and McNally Jackson at Elizabeth Street Garden. She has also had the pleasure of performing at New York landmarks such as Jefferson Market Library and Governor’s Island for the New York Poetry Festival. Her first collection of poems Hard and Sweet as Cold Cake is available in select bookstores and from her directly, and a second collection, Gold Chain Glint, is forthcoming. IG : @leemore
Describe your ekphrastic process. Do you have a favorite prompt or way in?
After college, I moved to Paris and I used to frenetically pace the Musée d'Orsay, head down, mumbling poems to myself and scribbling in my notebook. I was an Impressionism autodidact, that was a real channel of inspiration and sensibility for me. Today, my process is a lot more about being still and breathing and really trying to see. Van Gogh wrote about being obsessed with “painting something true”. I want to feel what and where and why that is, and I want to linger there. I love to ask questions in my poetry, I aspire to declare my self rather than fixating on others, I want to find how to talk about colors, bodies, moments I want to keep.
What attracts you to a work for ekphrasis? How do you know you’ve got a good subject?
What I love about visual art is the sense of a whole vision in one moment. My eye witnesses the piece in one breath. Initially, I react. I'm halted in my path, magnetized closer, sometimes urgently, sometimes more cautiously. Then, I have a choice of how long I want to stay, and look, and see. The choice is entirely mine, and entirely spontaneous to me. If it's hard for me to turn away, like I physically feel a sensation of a rope between my chest and the piece that pulls at me if I attempt to leave, I know I need to take my time and take out my notebook.
What’s your favorite piece (or room) at the Met?
Favorite piece : PixCellDeer-#24 by Kohei Nawa. There's a poem forthcoming about this ... !
Favorite room : When there's only a few minutes before closing time, you might find me in Gallery 822 sitting in front of Monet's Path through the Irises. It presides over the room, gently reflective and unapologetically monumental at the same time. That's inspiring to me.
Do you have a favorite ekphrastic poem?
Rather than one poem, I'll pick a poet I find to be ekphrastic as a matter of course, and that's Frank O'Hara. I love the way he freely cites painters, singers, even the Threepenny Opera as points of reference and dear friends to the heart, companions and fixations. The art he identifies with ripples from his eye or ear out to the rest of his life, in his flair for the quotidian, the delight and the drama of it. I relate to that very much. His streams of consciousness always lead to places both unexpected and familiar.
What advice would you give a writer who would like to try ekphrastic poetry?
Don't feel obligated to follow the prescriptions of some grand tradition. Art is for you. Your eye and your taste is for you, to enjoy and explore. Not just to show off to other people.
What excites you about the Metphrastics project?
When this project was announced a few years ago, it stopped me in my tracks straight away (like a great painting at the Met!) and I said to myself "Oh wow, that's for me". I was born and raised in New York City, the museum is a great place to write and I hold the art that I love very dear. In our era of overconsumption, I try hard to choose where I put my attention and how I use it. Metphrastics is a valuable offer to practice that habit.