1. In Mexico City, my first face to face encounter with Tàpies.
   A massive wall of burnt sienna, paint dark as loam.
   
   
2. A void full of dreams. Sigils and signs. Sticks and stones.
   
   
3. His work is everywhere before you know his name:
   
   
   • Fresh cement, poured, scarred soon after by passing teens.
     
     
   • A crumbling wall under a bridge.
     
     
   • The bumpy terrain of dried gum wads on the underside of an old snooker table.
     
     
   • Spilled blood on kitchen linoleum after the slip of a knife.
     
     
   • The writing on the wall.
     
     

Publisher’s Note:

To learn more about Catalan abstract painter and sculptor Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), see Artnet’s biography of the artist and their gallery with hundreds of his artworks.

Lorette C. Luzajic

is from Toronto, Canada and writes prose poetry, flash, and other forms of little stories. Her work has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Bright Flash, Club Plum, Red Eft, and Indelible, among others. Her story The Neon Raven won first place in a writing challenge at MacQueen’s Quinterly, and her work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her most recent of six collections of prose poems are Pretty Time Machine (2020) and Winter in June (2021). Some of her works have been translated into Urdu.

Lorette is founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review (established 2015), a journal devoted to writing inspired by art. She is also an award-winning visual artist, with collectors in 30 countries from Estonia to Qatar. Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary in MacQ-9 (August 2021) by Clare MacQueen, with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize