Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This remarkable ekphrastic poem doesn’t need much of an introduction because of its stark title and indebtedness to the Malevich painting. I admire its unfolding syntax and its unflinching voice as it explores the figurative ocean of the painting’s blackness.
Listen to Strohschein read the poem:
Fascism
inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting, Black Square
The flat black attack lands on hover-pad of white while not devouring it completely, not crushing it to oblivion because its wholeness (we think) can never completely capture the infinite white, & in such times, the thin blank beach is survival, & so we run around the edges playing, building sandcastles, erasing thoughts of what could destroy us, playing in a world where what we fear flows to flood: memories of split plastic toys—the putrid pail, the shellacked shovel—washing us away in a new terrible tide, oil-spilt ocean, ocean of cowardice, ocean of willing submission, ocean of I could never imagine, ocean of a million regrets, ocean of the charred body, ocean of foundered laws & civil liberties, ocean of the minority, ocean of disappearances, ocean of tribunals, ocean of inconceivable loss, ocean of inexcusable historical blindness, ocean of Jesus?, ocean of Again?, ocean turned black.
Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Mark Strohschein resides in Washington state. His poems have appeared in Cirque Journal, Flint Hills Review, Bryant Literary Review, Broad River Review, Barren Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. His chapbook, Cries Across Borders (Main Street Rag, 2025), was a semifinalist for Button Poetry’s 2023 chapbook contest.
