Still Life with Mug, Pipe and Book,1899 by John Frederick Peto (1854-1907)
Category: Art
Mockingbird — Aron Wiesenfeld
Mockingbird, 2023 by Aron Wiesenfeld (b. 1972)
Skin Graft — Otto Dix
Lord Candlestick’s Horses — Leonora Carrington
Une après-midi — Xiao Guo Hui
Penelope — Glyn Philpot
The War Crime — Ben Quilty
The War Crime, 2022 by Ben Quilty (b. 1973)
“The Dreadful Has Already Happened” — Mark Strand
“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”
by
Mark Strand
The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.
They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel
them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.
Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.
A small band is playing old fashioned marches.
My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.
My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving
to somebody else. There are palm trees.
The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall
billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,”
I hear somebody say, “Go on.”
I keep wondering if it will rain.
The sky darkens. There is thunder.
“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,
“Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told.
The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.
The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh
when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them
out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.
It was about that time I gave up.
Now, when I answer the phone, his lips
are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered
around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search
I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.
Thanatopsis — Ed Emshwiller
Morning — Norman Stevens
Nightmare — Salman Toor
Nightmare, 2020 by Salman Toor (b. 1983)
Girl Reading — George Clausen
The Hall of Spiders (An Illustration for Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast) — Charles W. Stewart
On the Way to the Doctor, 1974 by Charles W. Stewart (1915 – 2001).
Part of a series of unpublished illustrations that were to illustrate Mervyn Peake’s 1950 novel, Gormenghast. (More here.)
King Cheetah — Angela Gram
King Cheetah, 2022 by Angela Gram (b. 1985)
Playground No.6 — Peter Colville Horridge Gardner
Playground No.6, 1968 by Peter Colville Horridge Gardner (b. 1921)