Welcome to the Summer 2025 issue of Metphrastics! Several poems this month are about “the hunt"—a quest, search or voyage—both physical and psychic. We have poems by Aileen Bassis, Alexandra Burack, Brittany Deininger, Greg Haber, Camille LeFevre, Pattie McCarthy, Ben Nardolilli, Kendra Ralston, and Kristine Esser Slentz responding to works by Hans Memling, Andrew Wyeth, Edouard Manet, and Camille Claudel, and we also have our first poems on Ancient Near Eastern Art, Musical Instruments, the Cloisters, Costume, and Ancient Egypt. Our featured poet interview is with poet and educator Sharon Dolin, whom we published in our first issue.
Our next issue, coming out in October, will be devoted to poems about the Met’s Arms & Armor collection. Please see our Submissions page for more info, and submit by September 15.
We hope you enjoy this 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.
The Hunt
Greg Haber
“Come,” the docent cries, “take up arms!”
I wrench the longsword from Jean d’Alluye
and storm the stairs. Other patrons join,
having found weapons among the dead
corners of dusty rooms, broomsticks sharpened
to spearpoints. Without speaking, we see
we seek the same wonder.
Discarded audio tour headphones
hum underfoot like bees eager to sting.
We find our quarry two rooms down
bathing in the trickle of a drinking fountain,
its pearlescent fur curving the light to taut bowstring.
Hunting horns blare from unknown lungs;
the docent looses a whistling black arrow
and soon the ceiling is thatched with spearshaft.
Surprising myself, I heft the longsword and strike
at air as my target evaporates into the battlefield.
A cheer goes up and the horns call again,
dogs alerting the pack that prey has been caught.
Standing beside the gift shop with a lupine grin,
the docent proudly points to defanged spears,
newly retired as fenceposts, encircling
a unicorn muted, shackled, and alone.
Greg Haber is a poet and an arborist with the New York City Parks Department. He lives in The Bronx, New York and originally hails from Croton-on-Hudson, New York. His work has been featured in Sprout and New Croton Review.
The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries)
French (cartoon), South Netherlandish (woven)
1495–1505
Memento Mori
Camille LeFevre
Remember
his pale gown of
razor shells bearing
subtle rings of buffed and forlorn
color clinging with finger-
like lingering designed
to funnel desire down
the throat of waiting flesh,
shells stitched to straight edges,
layered to splay gray tails of
savage beauty; enrobed,
in this artful armor
of performance, the
model embodies
a Venus thinly clad
in shell-halves, her
slender arms threading
through anticipation, her
tender palms raking
a carapace of knife
blades, bloody fingers
gathering the unhinged
unto frenzy - even.
Remember
his discovery of
empty razor shells
void of muscled flesh for
divining sustenance beneath
the sea’s push-
pull existence until sea-
sickened or shell-
shocked, then storm-
heaved onto shore, sheaths
mounded in dour glimmer; he
marveled at the heaped husks,
their clack at
wave shush, snap beneath
boot step; he gathered
the savage shards
envisioning anticipating
a shroud sewn of
feral beauty,
a dress of distress designed
for dying, rebirth,
for madness,
unto memory - even.
Camille LeFevre’s poetry has been published in Hydration (poet feature), The Ekphrastic Review, Unleash Lit, The Winged Moon, and Thin Air. Her essay, “Body Topography,” published in The Dodge, was nominated for selection in Best American Nature Writing and Best American Essays. She received the 2023 Scuglik Memorial Residency in ekphrastic writing from Write On, Door County. She lives in Northern Arizona.
The Tonal Values
Ben Nardolilli
In the centerpiece, a savage harvest,
And it is not just the brown wicker of the container
That whips up a crown of thorns all along the bottom
It is what the basket holds as well,
A pile of fruits that look more like brambles plucked
With anger from a field somewhere outside of Paris
These are not plump, fuzzy berries
Waiting for human hands and mouths to come along,
They sit in a fearsome confederation on the table
Even the seeds seem sinister,
The white brushstrokes rising like spines and quills,
It calls all domestication into question as a fantasy
I wonder if I am looking at it wrong,
My eyes too close and the rest of me feeling sick
In front of what should seem sweet and appetizing
It is probably the artist’s intent,
I need to take a step back, then another, and another,
Until my hair brushes up against a late Pissarro
Ben Nardolilli is a theoretical MFA candidate at Long Island University. He writes poetry, prose, and the occasional political flotsam and jetsam. In his spare time, he likes to go to a law firm and edit documents related to asbestos litigation. Occasionally they pay him for this. Follow his publishing journey at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.
Strawberries
Edouard Manet, French
ca. 1882
First Voice
Alexandra Burack
Enheduanna (2286 – 2251 BCE), Sumerian High Priestess, unifier of the Mesopotamian empire, is human history’s first named author.
Usurped from temple service to the Queen of Heaven, I berth
in diaspora under a sheepskin roof. Pastures dilate mountain-north
from the river, where shad incant to their roe the kind of serous ardor
I seethe in copper censers for Inanna, exalted lady omnipresent
as my blood, she who animates the muscle of my devotion.
In my sexagesimal measurements of stars, I trace Inanna’s hands
as they limn the tablets of dusk with violet and dawn with rose-
melon. I crave her hands to douse the clay of my body with almond
oil until it kindles, exquisite solder of woman to woman. In this land
of recreants and chary folk, I am a fractured bone flute without a drum.
This banished night impedes compulsion to chant. I am poet yet my throat
is wilderness-tattered, my songs scraped by hyenas’ teeth while a dagger
sleeps, declined. Exile doubled. A feral loneliness crouches outside my tent;
like resistant shrieks of deer pursued, I refuse expulsion, hear down two
thousand years to this moment the alluvial voice that feeds the valley,
that female grand anonymous of abundant hymns. I reanimate my praise.
How my goddess outshines the heliacal rising of Venus, out-furies lightning,
out-transmutes the finest alchemy of love. For her I birth this verse, this zeal
to weave one ceaseless lapis ocean to bind the star of now to might, to shape
from mud the dried firmament where we read our shared contingency, our vow
on which I inscribe the first voice who owns a name.
Alexandra Burack's work appeared previously in Metphrastics, and in Ucity Review, The Sewanee Review, Bulb Culture Collective, and The Missing Slate. She works as a freelance editor, writing coach, and tutor, and serves as a Poetry Editor for Iron Oak Editions.
Standing female worshiper
Sumerian
ca. 2600–2500 BCE
Breaking Up Over Text Message While at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Kristine Esser Slentz
i see her death
between texts
encased papyrus
spread across
a display
i read spells
i view rites
first her mother’s
scratched out
and now hers
this book tells her
move onto afterlife
vibration in hand
a charm repeated
creates my eternity
I love you a curse
I’m sorry a cliché
another book sent
another passing
another circle
remove my mother’s
heart replace mine
parent
partner
– again
i see ritual
i close messenger
Kristine Esser Slentz is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and forthcoming collection face-to-faces (ThirtyWest Publishing House, 2026). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, TEDx, and elsewhere. Kristine is the co-founder of Adverse Abstraction and Verse & Vision.
Book of the Dead for the Chantress of Amun Nauny
Third Intermediate Period
ca. 1050 B.C.
The Painter and His Model
Aileen Bassis
Back-stairs and halls, the cellar and the keep.
I wake in dark, I dress
in shadows.
Master calls: Girl: Fresh Water,
Clean Rags, Three Egg-whites.
Beat them well.
He slants light opening
to an unnamed shape rolling
like a waterfall of red.
He calls, Girl. Pulls
out a bench. Says
Sit. Tells me, Turn.
He moves my hair.
He pulls my arm.
Air pricks inside me.
He mutters, Be
Still. I feel eyes rough
as fingers travel over
my every crease.
He paints an oval face
with shellfish eyes
with hands boneless
as starfish and hair falling
in a seaweed ripple.
She’s like me
and yet she’s not.
A painted girl in a light-swept
room, light-washed walls.
Glassy-skinned, she glows.
Aileen Bassis is a poet and visual artist in Long Island City, Queens. She’s the author of two chapbooks, “The Other Side of the Mirror” and “Advice for Travelers.” Her collection “Among Sinners and Sants” will be published in 2026.
The Annunciation
Hans Memling, Netherlandish
1480–89
below your uprooting
Kendra Ralston
it’s not how i imagined—
my need for you thick as yolk in morning simmer
desperate as tulip bulbs that force through
the cold stitched earth
i hate it
your lips near my ear whisper silver-full
of everything and nothing
but the river mouths yes to me
me below your uprooting or perhaps the cause
of my unraveling to let it milk divine light
yes here perhaps
my arm may branch no longer broken by wind
my hair soft coiled down my back
as a serpent belly-up to sky
Kendra Ralston is a poet based in Washington, DC, and holds degrees from Smith College and Fairfield University. Her poems are forthcoming in Anthropocene.
Rattle
Brittany Deininger
Lady of the milk-damp hours,
you talisman of hair, you’re
a fountain becoming a river.
Fingered and toed, baby arrives
in your terracotta clipper, splitting
time into before and after.
Music mimics the instrument
of your body open-mouthed,
blown through like a House
Sparrow, Jalisco rattle. Shake you
and all bells and bird flutes
and whistling jars bow. Tell me.
If I never mother, could my body
give like you give? First, hollowed out,
then, thumping from the inside?
Brittany Deininger is a poet and educator. She uses art and dreams as dipping cups into the unconscious where the good stuff lives. She received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. She lives in New York.
Rattle
Jalisco
100 BCE–200 CE
from Wyeth -
Pattie McCarthy
Wyeth not on view
stanza & camera solar winter
began yesterday Philadelphia
gone forty days without measurable
rain a whole lent a whole
quarantine a whole mourning
Wyeth weather the longest spell
the shell disproportionate
bleached blank the house empty
through as view I’m in
my archeological era winterhair
every side is the weatherside
& what is through bleached blank
windward & shorn low-fi scatter
not on view this image cannot
be enlarged or viewed at full
screen or downloaded I disagree
there’s nothing poignant or ordinary
there is nothing to read nothing to learn
I’m not going on any more journeys
Pattie McCarthy is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Wifthing (Apogee Press, 2021), and a dozen chapbooks, most recently extraordinary tides (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023). A former Pew Fellow in the Arts, she is a non-tenure track professor at Temple University in Philadelphia where she is currently the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program.
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.
Describe your ekphrastic process. Do you have a favorite prompt or way in?
It's always changing. I prefer writing in a sequence or series, so I am making a commitment of time and effort in order to work on a project. Sometimes I try to fashion a nonce form for the series, as in my decision to "frame" my ekphrastic series about Howard Hodgkin (based on a retrospective I saw at the Met in 1995). Hodgkin often painted onto his frames as well as developing a vocabulary of swishes, squiggles, and large swaths of color. So I decided to limit most of my poems to 15 lines, varying the stanzaic structure and the look on the page with each one. With my most recent series of ekprastic poems in dialogue with Meret Oppenheim, I chose to give voice to the works of art themselves as dramatic monologues. My choice is deliberate yet also intuitive.
What attracts you to a work for ekphrasis? How do you know you have a good subject?
What draws me to the work is, first of all, seeing it in person and then love and curiosity. I have to feel there is an opening in the artwork for me to engage with it. Mostly I just follow what intrigues me, such as the one that Metphrastics published based on Degas's Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Edouard Manet, which enraged Degas (was it rivalry? jealousy?) so much that he destroyed the part of the painting with his wife's face and hands while playing the piano. The painting had been gifted to them by Degas. What a disturbing and fascinating thing to do since it is forever preserved that way. It was the most intriguing work of art for me in the entire show that I saw a few years ago at the Met.
For more than 25 years, I am most drawn to an artist's series of paintings, beginning with Joan Mitchell's Black Paintings, as well as Richard Diebenkorn's and Howard Hodgin's art (in Serious Pink) to Francisco Goya's Black Paintings (in Manual for Living) to Lita Cabellut's Trilogy of Doubt series in my last book Imperfect Present. Most recently it has been Meret Oppenheim's work (both conceptual pieces and paintings) that I saw in a retrospective at MOMA several years ago. It is rarer for me to write a single poem about one piece of art, though I have done it. I also have to admit I have a special attraction to abstract work because it gives me the freedom to play and create my own poetic canvas.
What’s your favorite piece at the Met?
I'm going to go with my sentimental favorite: The Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage in one of the main halls (Gallery 827) because I grew up going to the Met and this painting always made me stop in awe: that possessed look on her face and the awkward gesture of her arm, then the insubstantial, mysterious figures of the saints floating mid-air in the background. As a child (and even now), I was also struck by its sheer beauty.
Do you have a favorite ekphrastic poem?
No favorite, but I do love Jorie Graham's San Sepolcro, based on Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Pardo because it brings in the contemporary moment and invites the reader to share in the visionary experience.
You have extensive experience teaching ekphrastic writing. What do beginners sometimes get wrong when approaching ekphrasis? What advice do you have for a poet who would like to try it?
While ekphrasis begins as an art of description, usually you have to go beyond describing the artwork into enacting something about it in words. So I would say beginners (and perhaps all of us) need to remember that poetry (and by extension ekphrastic poetry) is not about transcription but transformation, as Carl Phillips so aptly put it.
What excites you about the Metphrastics project?
Metphrastics reinvigorates our experience as poets, readers, and viewers so that we remember a work of art requires a viewer to interact with it in a personal, even idiosyncratic, way. It opens us up and refreshes whatever artwork is before us.