Vanessa Zimmer-Powell: Top Honors: FPL Ekphrastic Poetry Reading and Contest

Voice of the Bedouin

    after viewing John Singer Sargent’s painting, The Bedouin

How you captured my eyes, John.

You will follow their gaze

through Ottoman lands,

traveling like a nomad

with your white-skinned goum,

knowing only what you see:

skin, dark against

cream of fabric,

lips parted in question,

in command.

You do not take what I give you.

These rules between our eyes are fixed.

Here we own each other,

painter and painted.

Vanessa Zimmer- Powell, Top Honors, Friendswood Library

Vanessa Zimmer-Powell was the winner of the 2016 Houston Poetry Fest ekphrastic competition. In 2013 she won a Rick Steve's Haiku Award and received honors at the Austin International Poetry Fest. Her poetry has aired on the radio and has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies including: Austin Poetry Fest anthologies; Avocet; Blue Hole; Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems;  Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review; Chaffey Review; Copperfield Review; Ekphrasis; Houston Poetry Fest Anthologies; San Pedro River Review; the Texas Poetry Calendar; and Untamable City. Her chapbook, Woman Looks into an Eye, is published by Dancing Girl Press.