Note: Special gratitude to Talent Gallery artist Jolene Monheim for filming my reading as a last-minute request. I had asked her to get a couple photos for this post, and she graciously offered to film it.
Ekphrastic Poetry Reading
The Talent Gallery
September 27, 2026
Yesterday, I had the honor of participating in The Talent Gallery’s ekphrastic poetry reading. This popular every-other-month event features a rotating lineup of regional poets curated by poet Andy Anderson to coincide with the hanging of the new exhibit. Each participant selects an artwork from the exhibition, writes a poem about it, and then performs it beside the artwork to a packed audience the following Sunday.
This is my second time participating, the first being in December 2025.
Poetry in Real Time
The poets only have a few days between the hanging and the reading, so this produces a Parkinson’s Law espressolike efficiency in the creative process that feels almost like writing poetry at the speed of thought.
I had even less time because I wasn’t able to get to the gallery to select my piece until the night of Friday, September 25, when I spent an hour carefully studying each piece to see which one called to me the strongest. I photographed a half-dozen or so and then narrowed it down to three—including a hauntingly poignant painting by Jolene Monheim titled Ophelia’s Mother II, the first piece that caught my eye.
But it was Bruce Bayard’s Curtains that spoke to my soul the most deeply. It is visually delicious with a melancholy, vintage nostalgia juxtaposed with rusty urban textures. But that’s not why I chose it.
I chose it because it immediately evoked poetic possibilities that align with my life’s work, path, and purpose, taking me on an epistemological journey spanning intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. I’d say more, but I’ll let the poem speak for itself.
I’ll share a little bit about the process for the curious.
Friday night, I picked the piece. Then I slept on it, waking every hour or two to email myself notes for the poem.
Saturday afternoon, I set up outside with a blank yellow notepad and Sharpie S•Gel pen.
I hand-wrote the notes I had emailed myself, filling a couple pages. I wrote another page of notes documenting the additional ideas that had been percolating and swirling and coalescing in my mind.
Then I wrote the first draft of the poem in a little under an hour.
I usually write my poems at the computer, but lately, I’ve been trying to get a few minutes of sunshine a day while resetting my circadian clock, so I decided to write my poem outside.
Handwriting the first draft enabled me to document its raw, nascent form. (I’ll let you sneak a peek1, but I suggest reading the final poem first so you don’t encounter spoilers.)
That evening, I typed the poem, revising, rewriting, and adding new lines as the poem carved itself out more clearly with each pass.
Every poem-writing experience is different, but I find ekphrastic poems particularly ecstatic because it becomes a dialogue with something, someone outside myself, and I am always delightfully surprised by what surfaces.
It was special to write this poem because Bruce has been a wonderful friend for around twenty-five years, give or take a year. He is one of my favorite artists, and I’ve always relished his aesthetic. Indeed, this ekphrastic poem may mark the beginning of a collaborative series.
Bruce is also just a dear human being, as is his lovely and talented partner Ann DiSalvo. Bruce attended Michael’s funeral, and both have buoyed me up during my journey through grief.
I hope you will enjoy reading the poem as well as getting to know Bruce and his exquisite work.
Curtains
Artwork by Bruce Bayard
Poem by Margaret Anna Alice
When your eyes fall on the curtains,
do you see the linen,
the intertwining threads,
the chintz roses of Sharon—
or do they find the gap,
the smudged windowpane,
the breath of betweenness?
Maybe they catch the light whispering
through the parted panels,
the both-and wave-particle
dappling the unseen beneath,
which could be the rusted iron grate
flattened to besideness.
Or do your eyes peer behind the curtains—
at the isness they cloak,
lasering through the labyrinthine layers
laced to lull and lead your look
until you’re so lost in its Byzantine beauty,
you forget there is anything behind it—
even, perhaps, living roses of Sharon
growing in a garden the window
and its blossomed curtains overlook?
Whatever is beyond the bend in the curtains,
the waves of warp and weft wafting in the wind,
is hidden within the folds of time,
just out of sight.
Even if you crane your neck,
you will never apprehend
the naked everything of All.
It will always be mediated through your senses,
your experiences, your knowledge, your memories—
the monocle of your consciousness
suspended in your physicality.
You may tip your timid toe
into the beam of light
and feel its weakened warmth,
but you cannot see the Sun
from your angle.
Those who squint past and through the gauzy curtains
enter a liminal space of possibilities—
of maybes and perhapses and other potentialities
our minds paint on the Mystery beyond,
the ineffable, intangible, ineluctable, inexplicable.
Yet these imaginings are merely curtains
of our own weaving, wistful wonderings
of our individual, indivisible I’s.
I cast off these cognitive curtains,
comforting as they may be.
I want to see what is,
not what I wish to see.
So tell me what you see through your window,
and I will tell you what I see through mine,
and together, let us assemble
a mosaic of what is outside
from our interior witnessings.
Some of the tesserae
will be cracked, broken,
discolored, misshapen,
fetching but false.
They are placeholders for future pieces
whose edges fit more naturally,
like the map wiggles as movement
through time and space reveal place.
We shift from hypnagogic to hypnopompic
by replacing the discordant tiles with resonant ones,
forging an andamento of ever-crescendoing,
forever-imperfect harmony with reality.
Are you brave enough, honest enough, and loving enough
to inhabit this perpetual state of wobbling uncertainties,
recognizing you may never know anything absolutely—
until, perhaps, your curtain falls?
📣 Dispatches from the Multi-Verse: Autumn Edition
Wednesday, September 30, 8 pm CST
Register here
It’s time for the next Dispatches from the Multi-Verse hosted by Victory Palace Poetry, and I am honored to participate for the third time in a row!
Here are the first two if you missed them:
I hope to see you on Wednesday at 8 pm CST! I will be reading Curtains as well as two previously unpublished poems.
Don’t forget to register!
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First draft, scribbled on September 26, 2026, from 4:04 to 4:52 pm:
