Jonathan Ottke
Response

Unlearn Me
By Lisa Kilhefner
Inspiration piece

Unlearn me,
please un-know me,
unsee this world
through my swollen eyes.
Unlearn the way you have to detach,
Un-run with me.
I’m un-knowable as her,
as drought-stricken soil,
as wandering feet.
I run.
I’d stay but I can’t see past my brow.
Watercolor flowers fill my memory
and fade in an instant;
promise unfulfilled,
promise of a static mind.

Unlearn my eyes, my ghost, my smolder.
Un-know this hurting hand
and skin and hair that falls
across my frown.

Unleash a seed to grow
and shine a light.
The promise is renewed.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jennifer Fendya
“Offering”
Response

Madona Tyler LeBlanc
Inspiration piece (movement video)

Jenny Forrester
Inspiration piece (writing)

Reflecting
By MM Panas
Acrylic on paper 3′ x 8′
Inspiration piece

Reflections of the Season
By JoAnn Moore
Response

Riotous spring colors erupt
through the landscape,

after weeks of mid-winter warmth,
safe in their evolutionary guideposts

that Mother Nature won’t
fail them.

Grandchildren run and climb
careful not to injure

the delicate daffodils, wayward
crocuses, insurgent magnolias.

Hues clash under the golden
warm blue sky. Meanwhile

the firmament rains
bombs the color of war

half a world away
as winter deepens.

With kindergartens crumbled and
streets on fire

subway tunnels become refuge
as teenagers, teachers and grandfathers

enlist.
Beacons

of pride
learning how to fire a gun—

disquietly knowing it all
can be rebuilt

except souls,
childhoods and truth.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Nature’s Cycles
By MM Panas
24″ x 18″ Acrylic on paper
Response

The Memory of Scent
By JoAnn Moore
Inspiration piece

The lilacs finally bloomed the day before,
spilling sweetness through the window to your bed

and your low labored rattles. Ironic
that you, so angry and unforgiving,

favored the briefest of flowers— even
in dying.

Twenty months of treatment,
coma day eighteen, you began

to harden: pain lines furrowed deep, creased eyelids,
tightened fists, clenched jaw, curled toes. No amount

of morphine for release. Out in the yard
your first granddaughter picked every lilac;

filled each vase in the house, plus two
mixing bowls for the extras— immersing you

in the candied purple scent. Then into
the backyard corner she went where your darkest

purple tree awaited its own blossoming.
She scaled the ladder and cut the biggest

of the unopened flowers, fed that cutting
warm water and flooded it with lamp

light. By morning, only two panicles
opened. Your rattle roared—

drowning out the scent
the lilacs sang until she walked in your room,

brushed your face with that spray of deepest purple,
and laid the lone realized flower at your chin.

With the lifetime that fills three minutes—
in the dense, lilac-laden air— suddenly

you were quiet, and in the lines relaxed
upon your face, the earliness of a smile.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jennifer Fendya
Inspiration piece

Jenny Forrester
Response

We’re going to lose, shredding each other instead of the other side.
You know????

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Madona Tyler LeBlanc
Screenshot from “Reciprocity” video
Inspiration piece

Jenny Forrester
Response

We braid, reach out, reach up, bend, we believe…in art as…I walk up rainbow-painted steps, a giant heart lit up with the word ‘love,’ sit in a movie theater in Boulder, Colorado, watching Beijing Spring, watching artists making art, some for arts sake, revolutionary because Mao’s red book states that art isn’t for its own sake. Can’t be. Must tow the communist ideological line. In the film, the artists interact with Democracy Wall, make pamphlets, magazines. They ride bikes two at a time even though it’s illegal, carry their art on a cart, hang art on the iron fence outside the official art museum. At the end of the film, there’s a talk-back time and a woman born in China says she’d never learned of this piece of art history until that night. And a super smart professor says, and I paraphrase, “All the artists were creating something to do with the human body…each of the artists was a refugee due to their artistic creations even though only one of the artists was explicitly political…”

So it’s political to be a human.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Tora Estep
Oil on canvas
Inspiration piece

Earthen-Colored Vibes and Futurescapes
By Darice Jones
Response

Bing! Ring! Ding! Hummmmm!
Bing! Ring! Ding! Hummmmm!

Bop, on pop, on bop, bop, bop. Tap, tip, tap. Boom to the boom.

Tremor, tremble, shake, shake, shake. Bop, on pop, on bop, bop, bop.

For 20 years this rhythm-heavy, wordless, Soul song played just outside the galaxy that once housed the livable blue planet called Earth.

It was coming from 40,000 paintings that protected the soul’s of Earth’s remaining lives. They were people from a place called Nigeria, a place called Congo, islands called Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Zanzibar, and four cities called New Orleans, Oakland, Detroit and Brooklyn.

Beings from the neighboring galaxies had silently and invisibly visited the lively planet throughout its evolution, fascinated first by the atmospheric developments, the coming into being of the passionate elixir called water, the birth of creatures, and so many varied and electric forms of life. Eventually, one of those creatures – who called themselves People – began to take over the place.

They seemed the only beings for galaxies around that had mixed feelings about life itself. Their actions were those of the perpetually unaware and the willfully immature. They killed and tortured living things without reason. They failed to share resources. They held other living beings back, from whom they should have been learning, and incredibly, they failed to learn all other creature’s languages and cultures. Because of this, the whole planet could not fully actualize. They swore their oath to a system of valuing some living things above others, rather than the oath sworn in the rest of the multiverse – to life itself.

Because of these observations, beings across the galaxy chose to visit and watch, but never to connect with the Earthlings. And beings across the galaxy mourned as the view of the planet from space went from bright blue, to a painful purple, to a deathly gray.

The Ornet Galaxy’s Cicou folk, who were iridescent 6+ feet tall and double-wide mahogany-colored beings with thick, billowy; black cotton-like hair, were the only galactic group to take pity on the Earthlings before their world turned into that ugly ashen ball. They’d gone in waves, disguising themselves as the humans with most authority – sometimes military, sometimes politicians – to offer escape and evolution to some of Earth’s inhabitants. Because the Cicou have always been beings of sound and vibration, they went to places that combined the most sounds in order to create their music.

Adding complex music to the multiverse is considered one of the most mature forms of expressing life. In fact, there’s a direct correlation between the sound expression, the growth of galaxies, and the expansion of life.

The Cicou found 5,000 people in each city who were eager to fulfill their calling as the seeds of humanity that would remain after the earth had gone. The Cicou were deeply proud of these beings, most of whom had a deliciously regal earthen-colored skin and whose hair resembled that of the Cicou. These beings were much smaller in stature though, and would likely be deeply frightened if they knew how tall and wide the Cicou really were. Interestingly, they were willing to risk their own lives in pursuit of preserving humanity precisely because they had been treated so poorly by their Earthling peers.

Their oppressions and tortures had kept their minds open to the possibility of other, better worlds.

They survived by imagining the fantastic and often by imagining their children and grandchildren thriving in other worlds. So when the Cicou shared the process, these particular Earthlings were startled – but their desire for better futures for their descendants outweighed their fears.

The Cicou hid the earthen beings inside colorful galactic energy paintings. They asked the Earthlings to choose imagery and all over the world, they had chosen the same images. Deep Black roots and flourishing Black branches with water and sky flowing behind. They all, in their own languages and in their own connected but distinct cultures, expressed that the paintings should show the connection between past, present, and future. The paintings should represent life.

And the Cicou knew they had made the right decision in helping these tiny beings, because their choice of painting was so evolved. One by one, all 40,000 left their homes, families, and everything they’d known behind to be merged with their own individual painting. They were amazed as their souls meshed perfectly with the painted roots, branches, waters, and skies. The paintings would be displayed in the Ornet Galaxy, just outside the Milky Way. For a generation, the people that lived in the paintings would be observed while, at the same time, they looked out upon their new home in space . The stillness of having their souls embedded in the paintings would allow them to learn and develop in ways that just weren’t possible on their home planet of Earth. And all throughout the galaxies one could hear their souls, alive and adding to the sound vibes of the multiverse.

Bing! Ring! Ding! Hummmmm! Bing! Ring! Ding! Hummmmm!

Bop, on pop, on bop, bop, bop. Tap, tip, tap. Boom to the boom.

Tremor, tremble, shake, shake, shake. Bop, on pop, on bop, bop, bop.

It was almost time. Soon these soulful earthlings would step out of their paintings and into their new lives.

Written by Darice M. Jones
In the year of Wangari Mathaai ©2022

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Darice Jones
“Heat Before Spring”
Inspiration piece

Forgotten Hope for Tomorrow
By Jennifer Fendya
Response

We had a blast
though

how is it

………we’d forgotten to
put money
where our mouths caught fire

We kissed
this park deserted
tongues like flames licking
sweat from sand

…..Mountain’s arched spine
………..paid out nothing more.
……………Trees’ bare spines
……………….paid out no more.
…………………….La creatura rose from the depths
…………………………….showed her spine and
…………………………………….owed us nothing at all.

We sank money-boats by the pier
sinking
………hope for a tomorrow

Sun kissed
sand licking flamethrower’s
side-eye

this controlled burn
where our mouths caught fire

parched tongues
forgotten too

We had a blast
though

no sweat

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Darice Jones
“Return to You”
Response

Pantoum for My Pandemic Partner
By Jennifer Fendya
Inspiration piece

I really saw you for the first time when I had no other place to be but here.
I went looking for you out there in the world, but the perspective changed and I couldn’t find you.
I gave up searching and returned to the mystery of you out there in here.
I looked forward to seeing you every day.

I went looking for you out there in the world, but the perspective changed and I couldn’t find you.
I cherished our time together and your secret.
I looked forward to seeing you every day.
We all went back out there and you disappeared again, because I stopped looking for you.

I cherished our time together and your secret.
I had enough of out there and settled back in here.
We all went back out there and you disappeared again, because I stopped looking for you.
I have a feeling you never stopped seeing me.

I had enough of out there and settled back in here.
I gave up searching and returned to the mystery of you out there in here.
I have a feeling you never stopped seeing me.
I really saw you for the first time when I had no other place to be but here.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jonathan Ottke
Inspiration piece

Don’t Trap Me
By Lisa Kilhefner
Response

You want to lure me in?
I’ll need directions.
You want to chain me up?
Well, I’ve got questions.
You’ll pull me in and force me out.
I’ll fall asleep, I’ll toss about.
This trap will only hold me ’til I’m weak
enough to lose my will.
This tension is the fragile kind. You speak,
but, quiet now, be still.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.