Issue 48

Blue Mesa Review Issue 48

Blue Mesa Review Albuquerque, NM Founded in 1989 Issue 48 Fall 2023

Blue Mesa Review is the literary magazine of the University of New Mexico MFA Program in Creative Writing. We seek to publish outstanding and innovative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, along with compelling interviews.

Cover design by Gwyneth Henke

BLUE MESA REVIEW Fall 2023 • Issue 48

Editor-in-Chief

Anthony Yarbrough

Managing Editor

Gwyneth Henke

Associate Editor

Kyndall Benning

Poetry Editor Nonfiction Editor Fiction Editor Faculty Advisor Graduate Readers

Undergraduate Readers

Amy Dotson Kani Aniegboka Joe Byrne Marisa P. Clark Jeanette DeDios Julie Peterman Rebecca “RJ” Smith Mia Casas Shona Casey Evan D. Chilton-Garcia Bruce Chrisp Alexandra Dark Robert “Wes” Dyer Carter Gage Katrina Gilbert Jordan Lenz Emilia Madrid Sophia Puglia-Henry Savina Romero

Table of Contents Letter From the Editor

7

Fiction How to Heal a Mestiza Heart Ciara Alfaro

11

The Red Dot Terri Lewis

20

Endlings Craig Foster

36

Bella’s Last Soiree Katharine Beebe

52

Poetry The Pigeons Katey Linskey

9

Mermaids of Albuquerque Elizabeth Cohen

17

Nothing Grows in Fontana Michael Vargas

33

Tone Poem Bob Hicok

51

Nonfiction Doom Kristi D. Osorio

15

Latrina’s Little Sister Guarina Lopez

31

A Forbidden Thing Tolu Daniel Roots of Racism Allen Price

44 63

Art Human Nature Hiokit Lao

6

Diablo Canyon Wash Kathleen Frank

8

Boulder Highway 2 Jeff Corwin

21

Un Día Con Juanito Claudia Santos

30

Mother’s Grace Amuri Morris

35

Soliloquy Ana Prundaru Elle ne se retournerait pas (She would not turn around) JC Alfier

52

Author Profiles

65

Artist Profiles

69

50

Issue 48 5 | Issue 48

Human Nature Hiokit Lao

Blue Mesa Review | 6

Dear Reader,

Letter from the Editor

It’s a bit surreal, a bit joyful, a bit nerve-wracking, to be writing to you as the current Editor-in-Chief of Blue Mesa Review. This is my third year with the magazine, and with each year of service I’ve come to admire the magazine and the people who make it possible more and more.

Two years ago, I began my tenure with the magazine as a graduate reader. For two semesters I led a small team of passionate readers to discuss submissions and recommend our favorites to the editorial team.

Last year, I sharpened my editorial instincts as the magazine’s Fiction Editor. Beyond the immediate pleasures of reading so much great work, I became increasingly occupied by questions of how my selections might do work beyond the pages of the magazine. What stories do I want to see out in the world? Which voices do I want to highlight?

Since stepping into my current role as Editor-in-Chief, I’ve left those decisions to the new genre editors: Amy, Joe, and Kani. Without their tireless work, this issue would not exist, and the voices in these pages would still be searching for an audience. I’ve been reading and re-reading this issue with delight. With each reading I’ve become increasingly proud of how our magazine promotes voices that deserve to be heard by as wide an audience as possible.

The editorial work on the magazine doesn’t end there. I’m deeply grateful for the work of our Associate Editor, Kyndall, whose promotion of the magazine and website have kept Blue Mesa Review’s presence alive in our chaotic and attention-sapping cyberspace. I also want to express my sincere gratitude for the Managing Editor, Gwyne, whose keen strategic eye and aesthetic sensibility have been essential not only for curating the issue before you, but to help steer the magazine’s future into even more exciting and fruitful territories. With the help of Gwyne and our genre editors, we have also picked out some truly wonderful pieces of art that grace the pages of this issue. I would be remiss not to thank our faculty advisor, Marisa, for her wisdom and publishing experience. Her knowledge has been instrumental in keeping this magazine running smoothly throughout a hectic and resource-intensive academic year.

Lastly, I express my gratitude for you, the readers of this magazine. Without your interest in this magazine and your commitment to the world of contemporary literature, Blue Mesa Review would not exist. There is a lot to admire in the pages of this magazine, and I hope the poetry and prose we’ve worked hard to present to you will bring you some measure of joy, relief, catharsis, and beauty. Read on to make an urgent trip across the US-Mexican border, sink into a languorous, romantic summer in the Mediterranean, and revisit the memories of a childhood loss, among other adventures and meditations.

With love and gratitude, Anthony Yarbrough

7 | Issue 48

Diablo Canyon Wash Kathleen Frank

Blue Mesa Review | 8

The Pigeons

Katey Linskey To Picasso’s Les Pigeons, Cannes 1957

You, rare as rain in Barcelona.

Painted pigeons on the patio.

Mediterranean spring, citrus and salt. Oil and smog on the Diagonal. Heat fissures the sky. We rush to pull the wash from the line, rush to unmake the taut bed, rush of blood, hard against my mouth. You, ordinary as waking to sweat-soaked sheets on the shoulder of summer.

The rented attic in Poble Nou. Cheap & hot. And yes— I want you to do what you think I want you to do.

At the museum, we each find a favorite painting and ask the other to guess. For me it’s not the painting but the promise of a balcony view to look out at the sea together.

You, rare as the last blooming lily of the bunch. A reason to save the flowers for a few more days.

A second climax. You, ordinary

9 | Issue 48

as gravity. Turkish coffee grounds settling to the bottom of a lilac glass. You, rare as daytime honesty.

A beer sweats onto a maroon tablecloth between us. The air hums with the indecipherable chatter of other couples.

Blue Mesa Review | 10

How to Heal a Mestiza Heart Ciara Alfaro

The morning after you end up stranded outside the red pulsing club by yourself, maceless and drunk in a new city, sleep in as best you can until eleven. At least eleven. When you wake, watch the sky from your too-hot bed, through the vinyl blackout shades your new apartment provided. They’ll make it impossible to get out of bed, ha! the property manager told you, sequin-smiled, last month, when it was still the bright bloom of Midwestern June.

It was funny back then; everything was. A move will make you think that way. Soulmates everywhere every time you walk out into your new neighborhood. In fact, during that same tour, you looked at this property manager, hands in his salesman pockets, and thought: that looks like a man that would take care of me. You’d already begged half your credit-shot family to co-sign your lease and handed over the deposit check so big your butt clenched writing it by the time Instagram told you he was already engaged.

So now you lie there, alone in your apartment, buried in your sheets, until your bones start to feel stale inside your skin and you think you cannot possibly get up, come back alive, face this day. You know it’s better to just front load this hopelessness, feel it all now so you’ll feel less of it later. Like venom, a bad night can coagulate the blood.

Pull your vodka-fingerprinted phone out from beneath your pillow and don’t be surprised that the Tinder guy who ghosted you last night hasn’t sent his apology yet. It’s only eleven and he stopped answering your calls at midnight. There’s a thirteen-hour rule for dipshits, or something. That type of thinking. When you start to feel your hangover in your stomach, drag yourself the four steps to your city girl bathroom.

Your hair will still be damp from earlier this morning, when you stumbled in crying at five, just before daybreak. You decided you needed to shower before anything else. Now, you’ll wish there was more time between that girl and you, but if you think like that, you’ll wish your whole life away. And it will be so fucking half-curl tangled, your hair, because you ran out of energy to lift your arms for conditioner after you’d already wet it, that dark drunk hair. Lucky for you, deciding not to condition was your last mistake before bed.

Grab all three combs—the fine tooth, the paddle brush, and the detangler—from the top drawer. Get to work, baby. Tip to roots, tearing the comb through, careful not to break the drugstore plastic like all those times before. Once you’re done, or once you’ve given up, swish it all back into a tight bun at the nape of your neck, like J.Lo in that maid movie. You don’t look like J. Lo, in case you were wondering.

You look too white to claim anything and too mixed to fit anywhere else. Pinch all the broken, leftover hair from your white clean countertop and sink—it might be more lost hair than you were expecting—and throw that clump of dead in the trash. Don’t even think twice about it being gone.

11 | Issue 48

Keep going like this: brush teeth, wash face, sunscreen and CeraVe eye cream because of that skin.

Dress yourself: golden halo hoops, sneakers, and sports bra because you are nothing if not someone who likes to hold your chest close.

The Devil himself invented underwire, underwire, you sometimes tell the wide-eyed, arms-crossed preteens at work, shopping for their first big-girl bras. You keep telling your leads to keep you out of Intimates, which means they stick you there even more. After dressing, open that engaged man’s blackout curtains.

Tell gray St. Paul that you love her, even today, because you believe in karma.

Really, you can’t even be mad you ended up out here, in the north end of the city, facing the trees, train, and sky. Everyone in your building is nice enough, with a soft-coated dog or a gym complex. You all work jobs where you use fake voices all day, so you know what it is to be kind. It’s always a new face in the elevator, always pushing their own floor number before asking for yours, always a you new around here? oh, yeah, it’s reeeal nice—for sure, see you around, thanks, without ever exchanging names. The rhythm of the neighborhood works the same.

Most of the time, you like this kind of private informality, how it makes you feel left alone. But today, you wish you knew anyone’s name here.

There’s a tradition in your family, passed to you from your grandma. It’s called cooking and cutting the pain away.

Concave out your single girl fridge, working with what you have: five baby avocados, wilting cilantro, cheap fat limes, jaffa oranges, thirty-eight-cent roma tomatoes. Peel your avocado, slice your tomatoes, bunch and cut the cilantro several times over, squeeze in the citrus. Add extra orange juice for the men on the train who tell you they like it spicy, you sweet Latin baby. Bring out the molcajete and Pete Rodriquez to feel more Latin, but be embarrassed about it. There is no shame in trying to feel alive, no matter what the world outside tells you. It’s okay that you don’t have jalapeños on hand because they make you suck your teeth and wince. Go ahead—act like your grandma to feel tough.

Spice the guac and feel like you made something that really matters, just for a second. You will not be able to eat all of this guacamole on your own, but slide up on your counter and start in on it with some chips for breakfast.

If the boy’s apology text comes in over your noon breakfast, don’t panic. Don’t think it’s better that he didn’t wait the whole thirteen hours. If he respects you, he’ll tell you the truth. But because he doesn’t, he’ll say, it was out of my hands and sorry for that situation and so I guess you made it home okay after all? For anything short of him getting held up at gunpoint like your friend Megan’s onceghosted date, do not reply. Not right away, but also not ever.

Fold the bag of chips, lime juice and saran the guac, clean up your mess. Set the avocado hearts aside for later.

Blue Mesa Review | 12

At work, act like nothing happened. It’s a new job. Even in retail time, you’re too new to talk about the bad night, the being sent to voicemail outside the cold club alone. It’s not funny yet, and the girls here hardly even know you anyway. A couple weeks ago, the other Latina girls came up to you one at a time, stone-faced, asking you if you’re Latina, and what kind, and do you speak Spanish, and you’re half-white huh? You were relieved when you found out that none of them know any Spanish either. Now you’re kind of sisters.

Smile in the faces of the mall tourists, count and carry their dressing room leftovers. Tell them the coral jumpsuit looks best against their skin because it looks best against everyone’s skin. Say, no, thank YOU! Fold ribbed cotton tees, laying and folding and flipping the standard shirt board, hearing your lead’s girlboss voice ring, Standards, standards, standards!

Pick up gossip with the only coworker who’s even newer than you. She and her wonderful thick cellulite thighs will tell you about the video of her boyfriend cheating she was sent on her lunch break.

You’ll feel bad that none of the other girls have taken to talking to her. She’ll keep going. Don’t ask too many questions, just nod, fold, call him some names, and carry her deep heavy ache in your own chest until you both go home, sweaty, exhausted, and just the tiniest bit richer.

Hear the police sirens calling outside your apartment, all across your neighborhood, probably headed toward Rice to stand watch at the Mobil down the street. In just a month, you’ve found that cops are like ants around here; tucked around every brick corner, neighborhood tree, lip of the street. You’re new to this city, but not new to the pulse of this country. You come from cowboys and tumbleweeds, from men with snakeskin boots, guns in their pockets, ready to fight back.

Now, here, the policemen pull over to watch you walk your mile around the Capitol in the mornings, not in the way that makes you feel unsafe but rather in the way that makes you feel too visible, too thickhipped and brown-haired and doe-eyed to be circling this white-white building.

Once home, text your best Aries—your first retail best friend—that you wish she was here, in this new echoing city, with you. And remember that you’re no longer together because you’re off somewhere far away, far enough that home actually feels like a place to be missed.

She’ll send you a voice text, just after midnight, in the middle of her bar shift, saying: Ciara, what you need to do is beat the fuck out of your face, go to any coffee shop that isn’t Starbucks, be an aesthetic, and when the barista calls up a cute guy, grab his coffee and say, “Oh! Your name’s Paul, too?”

Listen to her laugh into the phone, the way she cracks herself up, the way it’s so self-assured like your favorite 2000s R&B. Text her that she’s stupid. Text her you love her. Text her if it weren’t for her, you’d already be dead. You would.

That night, open the fridge and pull your avocado pits from the old Country Crock tub you threw them in for safekeeping earlier. Hold them in your palms, those cold wooden orbs, and let them cool the lifelines your great-grandmother could’ve read for you if she weren’t dead. Pull open your balcony door and step out into the night. Throw the avocado pits off your sixth-floor balcony when no one is looking. Do it as 13 | Issue 48

the clouds cover the moon and stars, as the Milky Way smears itself like slept-in eyeshadow, just to hear the way the pits thud against the neighboring apartment building’s grassless parking lot mud. Like a heart, they’ll thud.

And don’t be surprised when, after two sweaty summer weeks, after you’ve already forgotten about the boy, the guacamole, the pits, and the thud of it all, six avocado trees spring up right there in your neighbor’s backyard parking lot. Five from the pits, one from the miracle of it.

Short little trees, green as parakeets, flowering elliptic leaves and endless avocados down below; so many avocados that the apartment complex next door will not be able to keep up. Thirty, forty, fifty new avocados a day. Avocados that will warm and brown in the late summer heat, fall off their trees, roll beneath the tires of the cars parked back there, and smush all over your neighbors’ Lincolns and Camrys.

The sweet-smelling trees and the summer sky turning quinceañera pink every night will pull all your neighbors out of their sad little apartments and onto their balconies. Your neighbors down below, with their loud chisme and Hot 100’s music, will probably paint their metal patio chairs aqua. The man with cinnamon cigars next door may sit on a single stool. The small girls on the other side of you will most likely lay butt- and belly-down on bright, circle-shaped beach towels. Look at all this sky, they may say to you, waving their fruit-stained hands at it.

It will be a mess, those melting summer evenings. Without knowing why, you will start crying on your balcony at twilight and, before you know it, everyone else out there will start crying too, drunk on the sweet smell of the avocado trees. You’ll all hold it together in the elevators, in the hallways, when you’re hauling out your trash. But, as the sun falls into the bird-ornamented trees and turns the sky to fire, you will hear singing and humming and breathing from your neighbors, wiping their oily cheeks with the palms of their hands. Your trees will make the whole street love-drunk, weepy, afraid to look in the mirror and enthralled by it, the mapping of their own faces. For the rest of the summer, those trees will grow and drop heavy avocados, beating toward the earth, a part of it.

You’ll tell your Aries about it. You’ll take your time brushing out your tangles. You’ll stop looking at men like they might do something for you, because you will know you did this, that you might be a witch like your great-great-grandparents, but you won’t feel scared because that’s how you do it—by holding the magic that’s always been yours.

Blue Mesa Review | 14

Doom

Kristi D. Osorio

Check out the lockdown button, he says with a grin. I don’t even know his name yet.

Only a few other students have arrived, quietly unzipping their backpacks, scrolling on their phones.

He keeps looking at it, the button. Red, shiny, intimidating. I’m shuffling syllabi, setting up the monitor.

In previous years, none of my classrooms ever had a lockdown button. I try to force a half-smile, laugh it off.

He brings it up again. Even before the icebreaker is over, even before the first-day nerves fade.

Before we’ve heard where all twenty-two students grew up, what their majors are, what they hope to become. For the next six months—because after this semester ends, he will be allowed to enroll in another course I teach—I will become consumed by my fear for their safety. I will report him, and then I will report him again, and each day, I will hope they get to live long enough. I will hope they make it out of this room without ever having to see me press the button.

Every class, he questions everything I do.

I never learn anything from you, he says. This class is pointless. He’s aggressive toward other students, makes fun of their speeches, hounds them with impossible questions when they speak in class. I intervene, ask him to stop. I tell him it’s not appropriate.

Sometimes, students stay behind after he leaves.

You’re a really good teacher, they say.

This is my favorite class, they say.

He just has it out for you, they say. Nobody knows why.

By now, I assume he googled me before the semester even began, read about the murder. Students have done this in the past. Fresh out of grad school, at my first teaching job, a student came up to me and said, Did your mom really kill someone? I’d heard the question so many times: when my college roommate googled me, whenever an almost-boyfriend googled me.

But you were just a teen then, they’d say when they felt bad. Most of the time, they didn’t use it against me. Even if they saw me as a victim, someone they should feel sorry for, they mostly didn’t show it.

Maybe he sees you as an easy target, a friend offers when I tell her about him, because of, you know.

I start to question myself: has my own trauma, my, you know, made me overreact?

A student presents a speech about gun violence, tells us she was accidentally shot as a child when she and a family member found a gun. Students wipe their eyes. He asks to see her scar, wants her to prove it in front of everyone. Later, he gives a speech about the recent Alec Baldwin shooting, shares his knowledge about guns: loading them, cocking them, shooting them. He would never make a mistake like Alec did.

It’s an evening class. The courtyard outside is always empty.

Who will come to save us? I wonder some nights when I walk to class, the sun setting earlier each night, and eventually before class even begins. He always arrives first, watches cartoons, or listens to loud 15 | Issue 48

music before the others come in. I live in faculty housing on campus, one mile from our classroom. I’m only sleeping two hours a night, wondering if he followed me, if he brought a gun to class today, or if he will next week. My doctor puts me on anxiety medication, tells me to relax.

Kids these days, she says, opening the door to show me out.

He starts coming to class in a black mask, the kind doctors wore during the plague. After I report him, nothing changes. I send more emails, ask for help, state the details clearly. Do everything they tell you to do in those training videos.

He’s technically not breaking any rules, the administrator says. His other professors say he’s never done or said anything disruptive.

When I ask the students to submit songs for our class playlist for writing sessions, he sends a song from the video game Doom. When it comes on abruptly in class, between instrumental jazz and lo-fi beats, students cover their ears, put on their headphones, ask me privately to turn it off.

It scares me, a student tells me. It gives me anxiety.

Me too, I think. But I tell her that the playlist represents our community, that we should respect and celebrate our differences. He bangs his head in the corner.

After months of workers’ comp therapy sessions, when I finally decide to resign from teaching, the thing that once brought me joy and hope, I think of his face behind the plague mask. I think, too, of the night, the year after the murder, when a new friend at my new high school invited me to a haunted house for Halloween. I thought I could do it, thought I wouldn’t be scared. The therapy had been helping. I’d finally been able to sleep with the light off. It was what teens were supposed to do on Halloween.

But I didn’t even make it to the house, just the line to get in. A masked monster ran out with a chainsaw, clothes torn and soaked with fake blood. Screams and menacing laughter echoed from inside the house. I ran back to the parking lot alone, hid behind some car, hyperventilating.

Will it always be like this? Will it? I said over and over to no one, trying to catch my breath.

Willitwillitwillit?

For months, even after I’ve moved to another state, started a new job at another university that requires no contact with students, I will see him everywhere. Shopping at Target. Bagging groceries at the local market. Walking a dog in my neighborhood. Logically, I know I’m safe. I tell myself he’s not here, that he’ll never find me. Maybe he never wanted to hurt me, maybe it was just inside my head.

Will it always be like this? I ask again, even now, trying to catch my breath.

Blue Mesa Review | 16

Mermaids of Albuquerque Elizabeth Cohen

Imagine them sunbathing on Sandia Peak, long locks rustling like Mexican feather grass.

And later, down in the bosque, flipping iridescent tails skyward, diving into the acequia.

Once a month, they go to Tingley Beach to feed the geese, bathe in moonlight, listen to the opera of animals at the zoological park, serenading their abducted children they know they’ll never see again.

The mermaids of Albuquerque understand.

Once they had a great sea, waves and particles that rose and fell, tided and king tided, exhaling weeds and shell onto ancient beaches, luring ancestors of birds.

Once they had currents, grottos, spin-cycling whirlpools.

They fanned themselves with lacy bryozoans.

Collected coin-size brachiopods like souvenirs.

Swam through whole apartment complexes of fish.

The mermaids of Albuquerque visit Bone Spring cemetery, a limestone catalog of the last mass extinction.

Bivalve clams and brachiopods stamp the headstones.

Sea urchin and nautiloid spirit the cliffs.

The mermaids of Albuquerque sing to their departed sea dried now into a circuitry of salted slot canyons, long-limbed black mesas, peppered with ash.

To an alkaline ledger of species, keeping track.

Now, truck stops inlet the basin. Diesel-hunting schools of long haulers congregate, freighted with vegetables, electronics, and human cargo, too. Beating hearts, tied to one another, like baled hay.

17 | Issue 48

The mermaids of Albuquerque sing to their captivity.

They’ve witnessed every genre of vanishing.

They swim the asphalt interstate, passing miles of pumpjacks, greedily milking the blood past.

The mermaids of Albuquerque sing to the ghosts of buffalo, to hidden caverns of copper and bats. They know this has nothing to do with them. Not the microchipped desert, the fire-scorched hills, the anemic Rio Grande, Pecos, Gila and Las Animas, waterways veined with unstable isotopes and plastic shopping bags, discarded tires, beer cars, and rock cliffs imprinted with skeletons of extinct, cartilaginous fish.

The mermaids of Albuquerque swim toward endzones, singing to dreamers who survived borderlands; singing to the river, rigged to catch refugees. They recognize it: the world changes without sentiment, leaving pieces behind.

Look at what has survived the defection of those waters.

The dried seabed scuttles with scorpion, slithering snakes.

It’s not hard to imagine lobster and seasnake ancestors, great underwater creatures, silently paddling the expanse.

Blue Mesa Review | 18

Boulder Highway 2 Jeff Corwin

19 | Issue 48

The Red Dot

Terri Lewis

Denver sun bled along the horizon outside Gemma’s window, the front range slate-blue, the back rimmed in scarlet; overhead, contrails frayed like her nerves. On the bed, her dance bag, leotards and pointe shoes out, cans of diet soda and apples in, prepared for tonight’s long drive out of the country.

She snapped off the evening news with its endless Vietnam War and cooled her forehead on the apartment window, forcing her shoulders to relax. Also in the bag, a Spanish dictionary in case the doctor didn’t speak English. Let him speak English. Let him be kind and know what he’s doing.

If he failed, she’d lose her job. Also her first solo, a years-long dream earned by endless classes, rehearsals, blisters, tears. For a moment she imagined herself inside Nutcracker, flying hand-in-hand with the music in the shimmering green tutu. Humming Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” she massaged her muscled calves, rolled her head, arched her long feet. A dancer’s body. And despite what the law said, hers.

Her pelvis clenched around what she called the red dot.

As she waited for her ride, despairing women she’d read about ghosted past, creeping along back alleys, throwing themselves down stairs. Drinking dangerous concoctions. She at least had a clinic. Ten plus hours, Denver to Ciudad Juarez. In a moment Stefan would bound up the stairs, singing opera like he had many times, but no, today he pulled into the street below and blasted the horn. What about the neighbors? What she needed was illegal and the possibility of exposure spread heat through her body, shocked her face. She smoothed her ponytail, slung her bag over her shoulder, and rushed down, coming onto the sidewalk where he waited by his Chevy, trunk open. The windows of the surrounding apartments remained firmly curtained and her spirits lifted slightly.

Tonight, the eve of a four-day break in rehearsals, they were to drive south to Mexico, arriving on Thanksgiving Day. She’d have the procedure and they’d head back as soon as possible. Stefan worked on Saturday; Gemma’s rehearsals resumed Monday and she had to be whole by then. No bleeding. No weakness. Please.

Not until Stefan reached for her pack did Gemma notice the couple in the back seat. “What the hell?”

The woman’s pale face pressed against the window.

Stefan pulled her behind the lifted trunk lid.

“Who are those people?” She clutched her bag, heart a block of wood.

“They are going with us. She needs.” He lifted a shoulder against the word. “She’s in the same position you are.”

Her heart splintered, she gasped, “We,” and threw the bag at him. “We’re in this together.” She pushed his chest so hard he staggered.

Stefan closed his eyes against the sinking sun. “I should have said we.” He picked up her kit and put it in the trunk.

Earlier in the month, when her frantic search for an escape failed – the laws so bewildering, so certain

Blue Mesa Review | 20

of their rightness – she’d revealed her secret and her decision to Stefan. His ambition to sing was like hers to dance, so she believed he’d understand her need, but his reaction shocked her: rage, pacing, crying, begging her to change her mind, saying he’d take responsibility, marry her. He loved her. She pleaded in return: she loved him too but couldn’t have a baby before she danced the solo, before she had the career on which she’d based her whole life. He countered: some women want children their whole lives. She backed away, arms crossed. She’d never been a girl begging to hold a baby or picking out names for future children. I’ll do this myself if I have to. I’m only me when I dance.

Faced with her fierceness, her need, he’d acquiesced and found the clinic, a miracle after her own fraught quest. She was nineteen but her failure diminished her back into helpless childhood. Please don’t let him hold it against me.

Now light drenched everything – old snow, leafless branches, the front of the apartment building – but as Gemma raised her face to the warmth, a cloud slid across. Teeth chattering, she said, “I can’t go.

Not with people I don’t know.” Mittened hands in her pockets, she hunched against the cold. “Take them home.”

“Christ, Gemma.” Stefan flung out his arms and turned sharply away. “I can’t.” With a deep breath, he faced her. “Because...” His face opened. “Would you rather have the baby?”

“Don’t even ask.” She shivered violently. “It’s not a baby. Not yet.” She was whispering so the couple wouldn’t hear. “Send them away.”

“Gemma, please.” Stefan rubbed his hair. “They’re going to pay half the gas. 1200 miles. I can barely afford...” Again the word stopped him. “The procedure.”

“Abortion. Say it. And we will – oh shit.” She hadn’t thought about the cost, the distance. “Stefan, I barely make rent.” She’d failed as a we. His face was flat, uninflected; she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe her determination had forced his acquiescence.

“It’s all right.” His breath puffed white in the cold. “But I’m spending everything I saved to go to New York.” He touched her shoulder. “With you. I wanted to go with you like we planned.”

The sun dipped onto the mountains’ edge and the swirl of clouds over the city burst into gold. Her cheeks warmed. Her heart. Tentatively, she leaned against him and he put his arms around her, taking her weight. His strength loosened her words. “We will go, I promise. You’ll sing; I’ll dance. We can make another baby. Just later, when I’m too old to dance.”

“Promise?” When she nodded, he kissed her neck, held her tight for a moment, then took her hand.

“Come meet Nancy and Greg.” * Six hundred miles south through Colorado, New Mexico, and a bit of Texas into Ciudad Juarez. As they began the long drive, the Rocky Mountains reared like cardboard cutouts against the sunset, then waned into nothingness. Little cities pooled in their own light – Colorado Springs, Pueblo – followed by little towns – Walsenburg, Trinidad – their light a mere spatter of stars along the freeway. Often the car slipped through total darkness as if along a ridge, both sides of the road dropping away into black canyons. When they entered New Mexico, traffic dwindled, towns fell into sleep, and the radio left off the Beatles and Stones hits and slid into static. They crawled alone across the country, dream-like time unmarked except for the illuminated clock set in the dashboard. 11:39. Nancy and Greg were asleep, her

21 | Issue 48

head on a pillow in the lap of her lover, phantoms at Gemma’s back.

12:07. She rattled with worries she couldn’t speak. What if someone found out and told her parents?

Or Madame, her director, who lectured dancers about technique, but also about the imperative of representing the company with excellent behavior, no drunkenness, no carousing on the street. Sex before marriage unmentioned, but understood to be taboo. Abortions? God no, Madame was Catholic.

Besides, they were against the law. Madame could punish her by taking away her solo, even her job. If that happened, she might as well have married Stefan when he asked and had a normal life. The word normal constricted Gemma’s breathing, crumpling diapers and book clubs and shopping into her chest.

She pushed away little boys with their bats and frogs, little girls playing hopscotch. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby…No, not for her. Again she hummed Tchaikovsky, imagined joyous leaps in the spotlight.

No one she knew had done what she was doing. In the way she was doing it. She’d seen girls drop out of school or return after five months “at a cousin’s”; a couple in her high school married hours after graduation; the girl had given up a scholarship. What were their lives like now? She imagined housewives and mothers, secretaries and teachers, night school and exhaustion. Dreams pushed away or forgotten.

Dancers had a too-short career, no time for babies, and Gemma was on her way to becoming a true ballerina, something rare, like a perfect crystal (she ignored the sweat, pain, stage fright).

Ballet jobs were also rare: her mental list of professional companies stalled at eleven. At the audition for the newly professional Rocky Mountain Ballet, she’d danced among forty-two girls who pushed her aside with their fast turns and beautiful adagios. She hovered unnoticed at the back until, with a spurt of bravado, she forced herself front where she bloomed along the music to become the one Madame wanted.

The moon had long gone down. Wind rose, slapping the car; her stomach lurched and spun. Maybe her body had gotten the message, she’d have a miscarriage, and they could turn around. But no, she was simply carsick. She ate a cracker. 12:44. She nudged Stefan. “You okay? Awake?”

“I’m fine.”

“You could ask Greg to drive.”

“My car, my responsibility.”

To hear him say it was like holding hands, like running her cheek along his. “Both of us.”

He smiled in the clock’s faint light. “Don’t worry. That thought is engraved here.” He tapped his head. “Go to sleep.”

“Do you want music?”

“Look out the window.” He gestured at the black. “Only silence.”

She stroked his arm, sagged against the door, and plunged into dreams. The rushing air turned into applause. Even in her sleep, she knew the dance itself was more important than bows, but she was pushed in front of the curtain wearing the green tutu with the glittering bodice and the audience cheered. * At 4:30 Stefan pulled into an oversized gas station, startling in its light. Rows of parked semis crowded the lot, a herd of giant beasts. Greg went to the all-night café for coffee; Nancy and Gemma waited outside the single, occupied restroom.

“Gotta go, gotta go. Hurry up in there.” Nancy gripped her jacket and paced. “Emergency,

Blue Mesa Review | 22

emergency.” Her feet scraped the gravel. “Ya think the baby makes me need to pee so hard? I heard something about that.”

“Maybe.” Gemma wondered how far along Nancy was, but decided not to ask. “You and your boyfriend slept pretty good.”

“Boyfriend?” Nancy stopped with a soft whistle. “Wow. My brother. The goddamn boyfriend, if you wanna call him that, wouldn’t come. Even when Greg broke his nose.”

Across the lot, Greg handed a cup of coffee to Stefan who set it on top of the car and arched his back, stretching, face bleached in the light. Behind them, the great trucks slumbered.

“Once. Just once we do it. Me holding out for months ‘cause everyone says it’s wrong, so when I give in, of course this happens. Boyfriend wants to marry. It’s not love, he says, but he wants to avoid mortal sin. How about mortal poverty?” Nancy stood with her legs crossed, jiggling. “Okay, okay, I get it.

Church says it’s murder. So have it and give it away. Perfect. When all’s done you start fresh.” She began pacing again. “But meanwhile, goodbye job. Pregnant waitress, balancing plates on her stomach. I don’t think so.” She stopped in front of Gemma, almost yelling in her face. “I’m twenty-fucking-two. Kids?

Marriage? Later, when I’m rich.” She laughed loudly and Gemma flinched. “Anyway, I’d have had it, but how’d I feed it?”

“Maybe your family could help?” Gemma pressed her lips together. Not her business, really, but they were women with the same problem.

Nancy snorted. “You tell yours?” She pounded on the door. “Come on, hurry up in there before I pee my pants.”

No way Gemma told her family. Those straight-laced insurance agents, sales reps, stay-at-home mothers, not a single divorce thought she was a virgin and didn’t like her career. A flaunting they said.

Godless. You’re a young girl, too soon to decide your life. She imagined lectures and tears, heavy blame.

In college none of this would have happened. Only fools thought that. College girls were tempted right and left, virginity lost in back seats, couples faking marriage to get birth control prescriptions. She hugged herself. We all give in to love.

“Why those bigwigs hafta make this so damn hard?” Nancy punctuated her words by whacking the door. “They don’t give a shit about me.” Whack. “Or my kid.” Whack.

Whoever was in the Ladies’ yelled, “Give me a break. I got my period.”

Nancy stopped pounding. “We’re all sluts to them. But if some rich guy’s daughter spreads her legs and oops? They’ve got dough. They fly to Sweden and fix everything up all legal-like and safe.”

The door to the bathroom opened and a uniformed waitress exited. Nancy pushed in and just before she slammed the door, called to the woman’s back, “Hope ya washed your hands.” * The clock read 5:17. Along the horizon a dusting of pink. Ahead lay El Paso’s great spread of lights. “The clinic doesn’t open until eight. Let’s eat breakfast here.” Practical Greg who’d bought coffee for Stefan and packed a pillow for Nancy. “That way we won’t have to exchange dollars for pesos.”

“Bet they take dollars, Greggy,” said Nancy.

Stefan, who could hardly keep his eyes open, managed to say, “I don’t think the girls should eat before an operation.”

23 | Issue 48

Operation sent a waking shot through Gemma – this wasn’t the simple scrape she’d pictured, like clearing eggs from a frying pan. It implied anesthesia, a potential for pain. For loss. Ignoring Stefan’s advice, Gemma ate a cup of oatmeal, dousing it with sugar and milk, cradling the warmth in her hands, letting the sweetness melt the rock in her chest. Nancy drank hot tea; the men ate eggs and salsa. Revived but wary, they drove into Mexico.

The crossing over the Rio Grande reminded Gemma of waiting in the wings. Everything still to happen, stomach tumbling in knots, heart urging her forward.

On what seemed to be Juarez’ main avenue, crowded buildings and a jumble of signs, the street shouting in Spanish. Only Coca-Cola comprehensible. As if in a slow-motion Technicolor movie, they drove past slashing red awnings, a spatter of people in jeans with hoodies pulled up against the morning chill, and women arranging sidewalk displays of bright piles of fruits and vegetables. From the back seat, Greg gave directions using a crackling paper map. They turned into a quiet street where the white adobe clinic vibrated in the early sun.

Vibrating herself, Gemma longed to leap from the car, her first time in a foreign country, and smell the oranges and peppers or buy a mango, a persimmon. To skip. To hide. But no, this had to be done.

Her shoulders clenched, her knees shook, but she kept her face smooth. She’d insisted; Stefan mustn’t know how scared she was.

Inside the clinic was clean and smelled of bleach. A good sign. The waiting room, which resembled a cheap hotel lobby with its low plastic table and thin modern couch, was empty. A bad sign. Maybe no one came here because it was dangerous. Because the doctors… “¿En qué puedo ayudarle?”

Gemma clutched Stefan. “I left the dictionary in the car.”

“They spoke English when I called.”

They did. Greg was already at the desk with the receptionist.

A young nurse took Gemma and Nancy by the elbow and before they could say goodbye to the men, pulled them down a hall. When Gemma called out, Stefan began to sing an aria they both loved: Nessun dorma, no one sleeps. Le stelle che tremano d’amore e di speranza. The stars tremble with love and hope.

A river of comfort flowed from him, lapping at her ankles, then doors closed, the aria was interrupted, and the nurse lightly pushed them into a room with two small beds. A window set high in the wall. The morning light barely dusted the space, creating a calm like in the dance studio but without the drift of past movement or music. Women in this space sat and waited and prayed. Cried. Dry-eyed, Gemma changed into the hospital gown, then, because lying down was out of the question – Nessun dorma – sat on the thin mattress across from Nancy, who seemed to be meditating. Other, earlier women shadowed the room. They’d come here because they had too many kids or had been young and unlucky; because of laws back home and because love was too insistent to wait. She closed her eyes, remembering the heat that made waiting impossible. Stefan’s body sliding into hers. Even at this moment, she knew she’d do it again: clothes thrown on the floor, naked on the bed, cradling his weight between her open legs. She swore today wouldn’t erase that joy.

A nurse wearing a stiff white hat entered. “Eating?”

Gemma opened her hands. She’d left the apples in the car with the dictionary.

Blue Mesa Review | 24

“Por favor.” The nurse pointed at Gemma. “Eating?”

“No eating,” Nancy raised her hand and the nurse nodded toward the hall where a gurney stood. A real hospital, Gemma thought. The nurse turned to her and held up three fingers. “Usted. Tres horas.”

Three hours to wait. Her nerves shot like fireworks in all directions, thumping her heart, sending fire along her ribs. To soothe herself, Gemma stood to stretch her muscles and tendons which ached from the long drive. The familiar exercises, done on days without class or rehearsal or if she was just plain stiff, took an hour and fifteen minutes and when she finished, she went to the wall and rose slowly on demipointe to look out the window at a lot filled with dried weeds. Under the thin gown, her body cooled. Any minute Nancy would be back with news about what to expect.

But Nancy didn’t appear. The building was mute. Gemma rubbed her stomach and imagined the red dot gone. The thought threw her into movement. She began sketching out her solo, no space to leap, but arms to be perfected, the tilt of her head, the epaulement of her shoulders. She hummed and played with timing, no need to match the girls on the left and the right as if she were still in the corps de ballet. As she worked through the piece, she was no longer alone in Mexico, but alone in the spotlight bursting her elan over the audience.

Stage crashed back into cell when the door crashed open and the nurse said, “Ahora.”

In the hall Gemma climbed onto the gurney and counted ceiling tiles as she was rolled down the hall.

Eight. Let it be all right. Nine, ten. Please. When she reached 53, the gurney whacked through a swinging door. Startled, Gemma blinked under the bright lights.

“Ah, the young lady who ate.”

Gemma almost laughed out loud. The doctor spoke English.

“We are going to sedate you.”

She tried to sit up, but he pressed her gently back. Her tension flowed around his hand, rising like water. “Are you sure it will work?” His warmth and surgical gloves encouraged her to trust him. “I have a dancer’s body. It reacts strangely.”

The man smiled. “When the nurse puts in the needle, count backwards from ten. I guarantee before you reach one, all will be black.”

She wanted to tell him that her body was important, not just for living, but for her work, her whole life, but the nurse put the needle in her wrist. She held her breath and started counting. At seven, the doctor was right. * Gemma’s cat sat on her face, pinning her to the bed, furring her eyes shut. C’mon Petrushka, move. She tried to push him away but couldn’t find her arms. His weight sent her back into darkness.

Awake again. Shivering. No blanket, only a white sheet piled with red roses. The scent of iron. She curled tighter into herself and slept.

A dazzle of light traced veins in her eyelids. She covered her face and the warmth on her fingers stirred her awake. Sun flared through the clean window and although shadows lurked under the narrow beds, the room glowed, the floor radiant. Slowly her blood began to move. She remembered the clinic, her fought-for decision.

On the bed opposite, Nancy slept, or…Gemma squinted at the broad back, the plaid shirt, then slid

25 | Issue 48

closer to the wall, cowering under the sheet as danger shifted in the shadows. “Who are you?” The sleeper stirred and rolled over. She almost screamed. Then, “Oh! Stefan.”

“I was exhausted after driving all night. The nurse let me in.” He rubbed his eyes, his hair. “How do you feel?”

She took inventory. Stomach, flat; tender when pressed, but no pain. Between her legs nothing.

“Okay.” The sheet was splotched with blood, rusty and dried. She crumpled it away. Too intimate for Stefan to see, despite their naked nights, shared bodies, words, ambition. His lost baby in the stains.

Hers. The thought made her dizzy and she lay back down. “Where’s Nancy?”

“She and Greg went to explore the town.”

Gemma, eyes closed, spoke through the desert that was her mouth. “Why didn’t you go too?”

“To be here when you woke up.”

Feeling very young, very cared for, she managed, “I’m glad,” and slept again. * The nurse sent them out onto the street at 5:00 and they waited by the car until Nancy and Greg arrived, giddy and narrating their afternoon: the walking, the bars, the tequila, lime, and salt. “We had a blast.”

“The doctor said you could drink?” Barely upright, Gemma leaned on Stefan.

“I have no idea.” Nancy shrugged. “I don’t understand Spanish.”

“Mine spoke English.”

“Lucky you, but so what? Buenos días and under you go.” Nancy tossed her purse in the back seat.

“You shoulda been there. Some crazy guitarist on the street, his fingers fast as crickets. Best I ever heard.”

“Tequila ears,” Greg said. “He was awful. Sweetie, you called the bartender a prince. Two drinks and you’re totally whacked.”

“One drink and a sleeping drug.” She laughed and shook her hair.

Nancy’s fairy tale of the town, the bar, the guitar player contradicted the hard beds and the red that bloomed from Gemma’s body. She clung to the image of Stefan asleep in the shaft of light.

When they crossed back into El Paso, safe, she tried to enter the world of the solo but her inner stage remained empty, her life suspended. She hoped it would awaken later when she was fully alert, when the uneasy shadows were gone, when she stopped thinking about those women who were still searching as she had searched. They might not have her luck and their lives would shatter.

Texas quickly behind them, into New Mexico. The mountains reared and fell along the horizon, barely visible. In the back seat, Greg and Nancy giggled about tequila worms but Gemma and Stefan didn’t speak. Once she put her hand on his thigh; once he turned and raised his eyebrows. She nodded.

He’d forgive her and they’d love each other as before. That left only Madame, the tiny cross, the sharp eyes. Please, don’t let her guess.

On into the night. An occasional tumbleweed rolled across the road, fleet as an animal. The halfscoop of moon spilled pale light, smoothing and softening the prairie on their left. On the right, the mountains wore a rim of stars.

Gemma whispered to Stefan, “I’m going to sleep now but when I wake, I’ll drive.” Against his protest she said, “You have to work tomorrow.”

Blue Mesa Review | 26

She dreamed of a coyote bounding alongside the car. She joined it to leap in perfect grands jetés until the moon forced them to separate, leaving the coyote to howl on the road. Dream Gemma watched from the back window as the animal shrank away, howl morphing into half-yips.

Her mouth dropped open. She jerked awake. The moon rested on the edge of the mountains and Stefan was driving steadily, eyes gleaming in the light from the clock, 12:34. “Where are we?”

“Just passed Raton. Can you wake Nancy? Her whimpering creeps me out.”

The siblings were asleep, Greg sprawled upright with Nancy’s head on his lap as before. Gemma reached back and shook the girl. “Nancy. Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

Nancy stirred but instead of ceasing, her cries thickened. “Greg.” She thrashed a little. “Greggy, I hurt.”

Greg woke. “What’s up?”

“Nancy needs help. Do you have aspirin?”

“Sure.” He unzipped a bag and uncapped a thermos; Nancy continued to cry. The movement in the back seat, as well as the constant moaning, roused the darkness, the shadow women. Gemma rolled her neck to loosen the knots.

“Settle down back there.” Stefan’s knuckles were white in the thin light. “I’ve got to concentrate.”

“Nancy, does it help if you turn over?” More movement, then Greg bucked, crashing into Gemma’s seat. “Oh God.” The force of his voice twisted Gemma toward where he hunched over his sister.

“She’s bleeding.” Greg’s voice was a croak. “I can feel it on the seat.”

No, no, no. With shaking hands, Gemma touched herself. The absorbent pad and her underwear were dry. Surely he was wrong.

“Turn on the light,” Greg gasped. “I need to see.”

Nancy’s bleating became a solid wail, an animal let loose in the car.

“Shut up!” Stefan was threading a convoy of semis. “Do you want to get us killed?”

“Nancy, please.” Greg flailed in the back seat. “Turn on the fucking light.”

In the sudden light, Nancy’s face, eyes like dried plums, mouth open as she clutched the pillow between her legs. “Aaaaaaaah.” Greg lifted her skirt. The pillow was streaked with blood. Smears on his hands, his shirt.

“Oh God.” He gagged. “Stop the car.” He slapped Stefan’s shoulders.

Gemma threw herself across the seatback, seized Greg’s arm. “Do you want to crash?” She scratched his arms, his neck until he fell into the corner, moaning, “Oh fuck, fuck.”

“Stopping won’t help.” Stefan pushed the old car up to 80. “We need a hospital.”

The moon had gone down. The void was lit only by the uncaring stars. The car shimmied and their headlights probed the white stitched road. A sign flew past, a shiny punch in the dark: fifteen miles to Trinidad. Nancy’s howls sirened them forward.

The Trinidad hospital was aghast with light. Nurses lifted Nancy and wheeled her away, Greg running alongside.

“What do we do now?” Gemma’s knees trembled.

“Wait,” said Stefan. “Pray.”

27 | Issue 48

They sat in the waiting area. A baby on a lap crackled with a cough, a college kid exclaimed over a broken ankle, an old man held his wife’s age-spotted hand. Battered by the smell of antiseptic, blood, bodies, Gemma hummed softly. Stefan prayed, head down, hands braced on either side of the orange plastic chair. She knew he’d been raised in a church – she’d forgotten the denomination – and that he prayed before he sang. She’d thought his prayer similar to her own rituals before performance, but now the concentration on his face and the deep bend in his neck revealed a strong faith. Had he prayed the night she insisted on the abortion? She didn’t know. She stopped humming: we had been wrong. This had been all her. She wanted to grab Stefan, to say she was sorry, but in so many ways it was too late. She needed to sort out her choice but her mind held a labyrinth of paths, known and unknown. She couldn’t travel down those of the future. A career, maybe stardom. Or failure through injury. Years in the corps – not enough stage presence to become a soloist. But when she stopped dancing for whatever reason?

Grief, marriage, a regular job. A baby. She pretended the little one coughing across the way was hers, that she smoothed its forehead and whispered to the soft cheek. Her heart stayed cool. Only when she looked at Stefan did it warm.

Greg came out to say Nancy was in surgery. He fidgeted, covered his face and moaned through his fingers.

“Come on, buddy.” Stefan put a hand on his shoulder and steered him down a long hall.

Gemma sat very straight, offering posture against final disaster – she had nothing else. As they walked up and down, she breathed good wishes. Occasionally a siren flared and a gurney rushed past.

They, all of them, doctors, patients, Nancy, Greg, and Stefan should be home, sleeping off Thanksgiving dinner, innocent, sated.

A doctor came into the hall and Greg grabbed Stefan’s forearm. Gemma could see the indents his fingers made as he listened. Slowly his grip loosened, then he dropped his hand. Gemma was on the edge of a sob when Stefan turned with a nod and made an okay sign. Her posture collapsed in a whoosh of relief.

Stefan spoke to Greg, handed him a crumple of dollars, pushed him to follow the doctor, then came to Gemma, exhausted, the edges of his body unraveling. “She’s going to live.” He rubbed his eyes. “They were so damn stupid, partying afterwards. Makes me furious.”

Gemma held him together with a hug. “Why’d she bleed?”

“A perforated something. I only half-listened. It hurt too much.”

“How long do we wait?” Internally, she gave up the Monday rehearsal, the solo even. Nancy had almost died.

“No need. Greg has a cousin here. I gave him some cash. They’re worse off than we are.” He leaned on Gemma as they walked to the car.

In the vast lot under the buzzing lights, she said, “What were you talking about as you went up and down the hall?”

“Fishing.” Stefan staggered slightly. “Stupid, fucking stupid.”

“You don’t fish.”

“He does.”

She’d always remember his kindness.

Blue Mesa Review | 28

* It was after 4:00 when they left the hospital. Gemma drove and Stefan slept beside her, the back being too stained, too sticky with near tragedy. The highway stretched sleekly toward home; the old car responded to her touch and she passed a semi in a blur, changing lanes smoothly at a nudge on the wheel.

At first the clock and the arms of the headlights were the only light, but at Pueblo the sky took on a luster, the underside of the clouds downy red as the sun spread pink on the face of the mountains.

Gemma worked through her body, tensing, releasing each muscle, flexing each joint. Slowly her feelings woke: relief and a slight pride. She’d bet everything, broken the law, kept her dream, her very self intact. There’d be no going back. On Monday in rehearsal, she’d own the difficult pirouette, she’d gamble and risk and power through. Madame would notice. She sat straighter, drove faster while Stefan slept against the window, his eyelashes a fringe of shadow on his cheek. Past the Air Force Academy, past Castle Rock. Her mind rested. There was only the road and the clarity of the risen sun.

They reached her apartment in full glorious day. A sky fit for cherubs, air fresh and clean. Stefan stirred when the car stopped and she waited for him in a cocoon of silence and after a bit he wakened, stretched, touched her knee. When she took his hand, he began to sing. His voice was fuzzy but Gemma recognized the aria from his senior performance, the night she’d sat in the audience, heart exploding at his beauty, thrilled to think he loved her. Un dì, felice, eterea: one happy ethereal day. Now, his song filled the car with flowers. Lilacs and iris. Misterioso, misterioso. A puff of tender peony. When he sang the end – Croce e delizia, delizia al cor, torture and delight to the heart – from deep inside the aria, her life emerged.

29 | Issue 48

Un Día con Juanito Claudia Santos

Blue Mesa Review | 30

Latrina’s Little Sister Guarina Lopez

Our neighborhood was populated by Black families, Mexican families, Salvadorian families, a few Native families, and maybe one or two white families. We all went to school together down the street at Drachman Elementary, where every morning we’d arrive like a tumbleweed of small Black and Brown bodies and loud, boisterous voices. On the way to school, the kids would exit their homes and join one by one. The last two kids to join were Latrina and her little sister. They lived in the middle apartment of a three-apartment home; I remember the front door was often left open, and the screen door, which was painted green, never quite closed either. The screen on the top part of the door hung down and flapped in the breeze each time someone ran out of the house. It looked real dark inside, and we all knew never to ask to go in or visit or spend the night, nothing. We should only see Latrina and her sister at school or while playing in the street. So that’s what we all did.

Latrina and I became partners in P.E. and decided to perform together for the talent show. Latrina did all the dancing while I shuffled about on the school stage, too shy to remember all of the moves we had choreographed together. She wasn’t mad after the talent show since she had basically forced me to sign up with her. She knew I had performance anxiety, but she also knew I was a damn good dancer. I loved to dance with my friends when no one was looking but froze up when on display. Sometime after the talent show, Latrina invited me over to her house. I knew I wasn’t supposed to go, but I did anyway. I made sure not to tell my brother or anyone else.

Latrina and her sister lived in a crack house, that’s what they called it then. Crack was ruining the lives of many poor families in our neighborhood, and though I’d heard about it, I was too naïve to really know what crack was. Their mother was a crack addict, and Latrina and her sister were left to fend for themselves on just about everything: food, school, laundry, everything. Some of the kids made fun of the girls because of the way they smelled or because their hair wasn’t done up properly, but no one in the neighborhood cared enough to help. It was easier to tend to your own troubles than to get caught up with a crackhead. So, I said yes, I’d go to her house since no one else did, and we were friends. Plus, I had let her down at the talent show.

There wasn’t much to her place; there was an unpleasant smell, and it was very dark. We didn’t stay too long because her mom was there, passed out on the couch. She was very thin, and her hair was messy; that’s all I remember. The girls must have been used to their mother in this state because they made no apologies or gave no explanations about the state of their family life. It was what it was, just like everyone knew that Arco and I didn’t have a mom, and that was what it was, too. Or that Johnny and Susanna’s mom had a hole in her face, and the dog on the corner, whose real name was Evil, was the fucking devil. It all was what it was.

Latrina and I were basic friends, nothing special, nothing unusual, and because we didn’t have sleepovers or go to each other’s homes regularly, we weren’t close, but we were friends. Latrina was a big girl for her age, and I remember she was already growing breasts in third grade. Her little sister, whose

31 | Issue 48

name I cannot remember for the life of me, but there’s a reason for that, was little and thin. She was kind of like Latrina’s shadow. She was quiet but very sweet.

Just a tiny little Black girl.

Back then, we could buy cigarettes for our parents, and it was always a field trip for the entire neighborhood when someone’s parents ran out. You never went to 7-11 alone. You just didn’t. There were too many homeless men, drug addicts, rabid dogs, and creeps around, so you always went with at least three other friends. That way, if you got jumped, then you’d also have lots of backup. Barrio Viejo was no joke, it was rich in culture but rough, and you never took any chances. Plus, this was the era of the creeper van, the ones you were warned against in school that were driven by perverts who lured you in with candy, and you ended up on the back of a milk carton.

The girls’ mom was out of cigarettes and sent Latrina and her sister to 7-11 to get her a pack. It was an innocent request, nothing out of the ordinary. The girls went into 7-11, and when they came out, a car drove right into them, instantly killing Latrina’s little sister. It may have been a drunk driver or a car chase, but all we heard was that the car came crashing through the gas station and onto the sidewalk, right into the girls, just like that.

Horrible, awful things had happened to a lot of us in the neighborhood, but this was probably the most painful for us kids because of Latrina. On the mornings that she’d walk with us to school we could hear her mother wailing in their dark, sad house. She cried and cried and cried, and no one helped her.

Latrina went to school, was very sad, and then went home. It went on like this until it didn’t anymore. I can’t remember what happened to Latrina and her mom because childhood is distracting, and you are told not to stare too long or ask too many questions.

I remember thinking that even though their mother was on drugs, she was in mourning.

In school, we’d been told that drug addicts were losers and were bad people not to be trusted.

But Latrina’s mom did nothing wrong; she did drugs, but she wasn’t a bad person, and she loved her babies like any mother should, and now she was crying because one of them got killed by a car. I remember thinking how unfair it was to be a single Black mom with two young girls and no help. I felt for Latrina and, for a long time, kept that memory of her sliding across the stage doing the Cabbage Patch while I woefully attempted to keep up. I also remember her little sister, who never had a fucking chance to dance in the talent show. She just didn’t, and just like that, another poor Black girl died for nothing.

Just like that, and it was what it was.

Blue Mesa Review | 32

Nothing Grows in Fontana Michael Vargas

My grandpa laid chains between the arms of his trees dressed the legs in white latex paint amended the soil with a disarming placement of shoveled chicken shit just to enrich the soil I can’t remember his voice but a sour distinction of Camel smoke and World War II asbestos a reference point my mom still keeps magnetized to a wheel of tape from what the Sun and I recall though hardly defining it may be I remember the enchanting rhythm of gnawing flesh from sugar cane, eclipsing my face behind a swollen mouth, drunk with fibrous love, drooling platitudes my tongue would embrace like secondhand communion I imagine my grandma knew from the window of her basin how earth had prepared my second grave she could read it on my skin full blistered and painted with onion tears a remedy to soothe the scratches under every evening moon reverberated by her tar-filled lungs lined with holy scriptures though I bare the name of a sword-wielding archangel my celestial body was unmatched by Pluto’s gravity so my grandpa accepted the vestigial shell that my mother had given to me and laid to rest a conceptual death binding me to dirt What alchemy resides in the rocky soil of Fontana?

33 | Issue 48

the place of my birth just follow my grandpa’s familial absence into the Central Valley like every other bracero I listen to my grandma’s sober voice lipstick drawn in demi-matte tarot

the home was never her dominion she bled her hands over cotton and returned at the end of the season only to work on her knees injecting hens with medication this is why she advised my grandpa to construct a sieve a landslide captured before the rooster’s song transmuting amber clay, smoke, and cast-iron soot into immaculate plumes of dew highlighting our ground flesh into breathable soil What magic I create now?

after the settling of Santa Ana’s erosive waves of wind revealed my dispatched roots

I present each burgeoning sprout like my grandparents taught denying every casted stone with a bloom admonishing envious patrons with my downcast eyes bewildered by my proximity to death because I adorn my second grave the same way my grandpa did with the silhouette of a rose’s pentacle, hidden from you

Blue Mesa Review | 34

Mother’s Grace

Amuri Morris

35 | Issue 48

Endlings

Craig Foster

“They make you buy a separate ticket for that thing?” The old man nodded across the aisle at the tiny wooden casket in the seat next to Brother Philip. His voice creaked through the bus like footsteps in a dark hallway. The other passengers were asleep, lulled by the engine and smell of dew on the windows.

Brother Philip leaned forward, bald head pressed against the seatback in front of him, pretending not to hear the question. He wondered how his twin sister, Tessa, would answer the old man. She would say that, yes, they made her buy a ticket for the casket but that she only had to pay the special casket rate.

The old man persisted. “It’s so small.” Clicked his tongue lightly. “Still takes up a whole seat, though. Why don’t you just put it underneath with the luggage?”

Brother Philip grimaced at the thought of the casket in the hull below like any other box, sliding against suitcases full of underwear and cocaine. He felt the irony: soon enough it would hold a tiny body and be covered in dirt.

Turning his face across the aisle, he shrugged his shoulders. They made eye contact then and the old man understood. * In a valley surrounded by pine trees, where the grass is burnt and brown for half the year, a small order of monks wakes before the sun. Kneeling in an empty chapel, they pick up the liturgy left hanging the night before; swirling chants plucked from the air like ancient dust. Hooded in black, they appear as shadows whispering at shadows, pleading with their maker, knowing that this hidden work suspends the universe.

And they pray an unending prayer, interrupted only by sleep, where even in their dreams the world is only black or white.

Amidst the prayers the brothers build caskets. Modest boxes made of pine or oak, each inlaid with an ivory cross. Every spring a forester traipses through their woods, talking endlessly about compassionate harvesting; pointing out poison ivy and deer trails. He has a funny way of sniffing shed pine needles as they lay on the ground. He puts his nose right on them, right in the dirt, and closes his eyes. “This one’s not ready just yet,” he’ll say. Or, for the unlucky few ready to be felled, he shakes his head and marks them with an orange X. With black robes traded for denim overalls, the monks slice their chainsaws through the orange Xs, unleashing a whirring dirge through the forest. They pray even as the hardy towers drop like hands on a clock; time speeding and speeding.

Then it stops with a thud at their feet.

And then chains and tractors drag the wooden skyscrapers through the jaws of a mill, which shaves them into planks—flat and unrecognizable. They are then stacked to dry and forgotten in a lonely corner of the monastery, water seeping so slowly from their pores that you’d swear it was magic. And after months of struggling to breathe they succumb and stiffen just in time for the monks to return and deliver the final cull. Their bark is removed; edges straightened; defects blotted so that their flesh is soft and white.

Blue Mesa Review | 36

In the rough hands of the monks, the lumber is cut and bent into caskets, mostly for old bodies worn to the husk. Mostly for those who had a warning; who filled out the order form and selected the fabric that would line the casket lid and embrace them for eternity. These caskets were of normal size—big, hulking boxes with handles for the pallbearers.

But there were tiny caskets, too. The monastery provided them for free to anyone who asked. Cut from pine, the mini-caskets were the simplest, with tiny pillows for tiny heads; bald heads before their first haircuts; bald heads like the monks’ who wept and prayed for the families forced to use them.

And one weekend in July, sweat soaking through his black robes, Brother Philip carried one of them by hand across five states to his sister so she could pack it full of grief. * The previous night, the bus had crawled through a series of small towns as the pine forests of the monastery gave way to the rolling plains he knew from childhood. It was early morning now, and he stood alone at the bus station in his hometown. A bare lightbulb buzzed overhead as he hugged the casket to his chest. It had been three years since he had been home. Jesus. Three years since he had entered the monastery.

The lights flickered on at a diner across the street. He looked at his watch—it would be an hour before his mother picked him up. No one greeted him as he navigated through an array of empty tables where he banged the bottom of the casket on a chair. It landed with a loud, hollow clunk and his face flushed as he scrambled to keep the lid from falling to the floor. He stumbled to a booth against a plate-glass window and gently rested the casket on the bench opposite him.

He knew this place. It used to be a music store where he and his sister would walk after school for piano lessons. He remembered Tessa’s toes tapping, tapping on the tile floors as she glided through “Für Elise.” The chilly keys on his fingertips. She always laughed at his playing but it didn’t bother him. They might as well have been in bed, under the sheets with a flashlight and she was crooking her finger making fun of Mom’s hammertoe while he giggled so hard that he got a stomachache.

A boy shuffled from the kitchen with a backpack hanging over his shoulder. The back of his hair pointed in all directions like peacock feathers. He sat down at a booth in the corner of the room, his short legs swinging. He flicked a small origami frog across the table and onto the floor. Picking it up, he noticed the monk. Head still, the boy’s eyes slid from the bald head, to the black robe, to the casket.

A waitress placed a cup of juice at the boy’s table, took Brother Philip’s order, and disappeared again behind the swinging kitchen doors.

The boy was on the floor now, flicking the frog toward the monk.

“Did you fold that yourself?” he asked the boy.

No answer as the frog jumped onto the table. The boy followed, perching himself on the booth near the casket. “Is that a coffin?”

“A casket, yes.”

The boy raised a confused eyebrow. “Is there someone in there?”

This poor kid thinks I’m dining with a corpse. “Oh no, no.” He nodded reassuringly, trying not to smile. The frog sat motionless on the table between them and he poked it toward the boy. “Is that your mother? The waitress?”

37 | Issue 48

“Yeah. She’s got work every first and third Saturday. And sometimes there’s a fifth one.” He hesitated. “Did someone die?”

The question was innocent but landed like a punch. “Yes. My nephew. He was sick for a long time.”

The boy picked absentmindedly at the frayed seams of his jacket; his eyes glossed in thought. “Was he a baby?”

“Not quite a baby anymore, but he was younger than you.” Brother Philip had become exasperated with his mother when she called two months ago, insisting on a Catholic service and a casket from the monastery. His sister hadn’t been to church since John Paul II. Are you sure that’s what Tessa wants? he asked his mother. Yes, of course, Phil. But, Phil . . . he’s shrunk. What do you mean, shrunk, Mother?

I mean I think he’ll fit in a baby casket now. He didn’t believe her so she snuck a tape measure into the hospital room that night and measured her grandson from head to toe. She was never right about anything, but she had been right about that.

“Are you a preacher?” the boy asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“I saw a movie and there was a preacher who had a dress and hair like that.”

“I’m not exactly a preacher. I’m a monk. Basically my job is to pray every day with other monks.”

“You have to cut your hair like that for your job?”

“We don’t have to. But I choose to do it for God.” “It’s kind of weird.”

He smiled. “I agree.”

“Did you pray for the baby to get better?”

“I did. We all did.”

“Maybe God was mad or something.”

“I don’t know. I hope God isn’t so cruel.”

The boy thought for a moment, then slid off the bench and returned to his table. He rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a small pair of blunt scissors. Using the side of a napkin holder as a mirror, he clumsily cut a sprig of hair from the top of his head. He then placed the sprig into a napkin, folded it into a neat package, and returned to Brother Philip’s booth.

He thrust the package toward the monk and said, “So I don’t get sick, too.” * He was waiting outside the diner when his mother pulled up in her station wagon. Her face startled him, like a clown’s with painted eyebrows and bright pink cheeks. As he slid the casket into the back seat, the stench of her perfume made him anxious. He climbed into the passenger seat next to her.

“Is that the casket?” she asked.

No, Mother, it’s a ham on rye.

“That’s it, Mom.” “It’s beautiful, Phil,” she said, too solemnly. “It really is beautiful. Please tell Father Abbott how thankful we are.” Eyes closed, she breathed in deep and crossed herself. “Here . . . come here.” With one hand she waved him toward her; with the other she pulled her eyeglasses down from atop her head. “Let me see you.”

Blue Mesa Review | 38

She looked fully into his face and her hot breath made him turn away. “You told the funeral home I’m bringing it over this morning?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s the same place that did your grandfather’s hair so beautifully. I know you remember.”

He remembered. She had stroked that dead-man hair for an hour until Aunt Verna told her she was acting like a crazy person and then the potluck had to be called off because they were screaming so loudly.

He asked about Tessa. She said she wants the casket? The burial and everything? I just wouldn’t have guessed it, that’s all. No, you know we don’t talk much these days. Yes, because of the monastery. You know that. Yes, you do. You do, Mom. * The funeral home was falling apart like the rest of town. Four rotten pillars guarded the front door.

Somewhere hidden inside, a man forced air through a tube used for draining arteries until coagulated blood shot out the other end.

Brother Philip tapped a bell on the front desk. A young woman met him with a warm smile. He explained that he was dropping off his nephew’s casket and gestured toward the box on the ground.

“And you said the deceased’s name is Myles . . .”

“Yes, Myles Carey.”

She clacked away on a computer. Her head tilted; she scratched her cheek. “Hmm. Let me go check on that.” A quick turn. No eye contact.

Ma’am, have you misplaced the deceased? He was glad his mother had waited in the car. The morbid intrigue would have sustained her for months.

A prim, middle-aged man in a tweed suit emerged, carrying a cardboard box. The type of person who blinks uncontrollably when he’s nervous. [blink] “Hello, sir. Is it Father Carey? [blink blink] I’m Methodist, you’ll have to forgive me.”

“Just Philip. Is something wrong?”

“Well, Philip, [blink] there does seem to be somewhat [blink] of a misunderstanding.” His mother would be drooling now. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just that we were instructed to, well, [blink blink blink] the deceased has been cremated. I talked to the boy’s mother personally about her wishes. She was quite clear about it.” In unison they looked at the cardboard box on the reception desk. A label on top read “M. Carey, c/o Tessa Carey.”

Honestly, it was hilarious. Tessa would love this. John Cleese would play the mortician. The studio audience would laugh nervously as the camera panned from the monk’s confused face to a single bead of sweat on Cleese’s forehead and then back to the monk. They would completely lose it when the camera cut to the grandmother fanning herself wildly, boiling in the hot station wagon like Humpty Dumpty right before he crashed.

“Please, Father. [blink] Let me help you get this back to your car.” John Cleese placed the cremains on top of the casket and lifted up one side, waiting for Brother Philip to lift the other. The two men then waddled awkwardly down the front steps, two giants moving dollhouse furniture; a Methodist and a Catholic with a delusion between them.

“What in the hell, Mother? You knew about this?”

39 | Issue 48

She shushed him with her eyes and smiled at John Cleese who blinked and waived and slinked back up the stairs.

“Of course you knew. I cannot believe you let me go in there with this thing.” He placed the cardboard box on the armrest between them.

“Is that him?” she asked, leaning violently away from the box.

On a bus. A thousand miles across the country. Every damn person gawking at the insane bald man in the black robe hugging a casket that would be for nobody.

“Is that Myles?” she yelled, practically hanging out of the car window. Yelling that she told Tessa that she could not–could not–cremate that precious angel because how could a pile of ashes go to heaven, how could a pile of ashes be resurrected, where would he go now, they would never see him again, just a pile of ashes in a box forever. * Tessa did, in fact, love it. They found her alone in the living room, lights off. She took a moment to adjust to the sunlight streaming in from the front door, to calculate the scene in the entryway: the casket, the box of ashes, the hysterical mother, the irritated brother.

“Oh, no . . . Oh, Phil . . . Mom, you didn’t?” Her face was wide open, grinning with delight. “Please tell me you took that casket to the funeral home.” When he answered by looking at his feet, she lost it like the studio audience and he couldn’t tell later if her eyes were damp and puffy from the laughing or the crying. * He hid in his old bedroom like it was the monastery. His sister out there somewhere, holding the deceased’s ashes. Having to explain it to their mother again. Sobbing and left to wonder where her brother had gone. But he was in his closet on the carpet with the door closed, rummaging through yearbooks and old love letters and Mossimo t-shirts with blurry lettering.

The back door slammed. Through the window he watched Tessa descend toward the creek that ran jagged across the back of the property. The cardboard box under one arm. Her silhouette was so familiar to him. It used to be his silhouette; to catch her in his peripheral was to catch his own shadow.

Motherhood had changed it, of course. Made it softer on the edges. But some substance had fallen all over her; something that didn’t wash off with a shower and drove down until her shadow became hers only.

Three years ago she had gone to the creek with Myles, when worries about his health turned from unease to panic. His legs quivering like toothpicks trying to raise a house. His head bobbing like a metronome. She took her ragdoll to the creek and dipped its toes into the water like they were at Bethesda–not believing it but hoping it–and the ragdoll felt the coolness and it smiled and wrapped its arms around her and took on her fear.

She sat there next to the box now, talking to it, her toes digging into the sludge below the stream. * Have you heard the one about the monk, the mother, and the twin sister at the wake? No punchline, just a procession of condensed-soup casseroles and funeral cousins who exist only when someone dies.

Diversions from the great enemy of the grieving: empty time. That petri dish where sadness blooms in the

Blue Mesa Review | 40

dark.

The space was too intimate. Their mother’s living room, where he used to watch Scooby-Doo in his underwear. Where Myles had died five days ago. Standing in the corner, he watched his sister intently.

She had always been the magnet that spun the room. The energy but not the axis, and it had been exhilarating to be, not just in her orbit, but elementally the same stuff as her. He was never jealous and she had never asked him to be.

The magnet was on the move.

She eased in next to him, a crumpled tissue in her hand. She was obviously miserable, but the thoroughness of it consumed him. Their twin-sense was still intact even after sitting on mothballs for three years. She touched his hand and indicated subtly toward their mother. The old bat had sunk her fangs into an actual priest, an aging vicar newly assigned to the parish. A blob of ranch dip sat absurdly on her left shoulder.

“How in the hell?” she whispered. “It looks like a bird shat on her.”

He squeezed the blood from his arm to keep from cackling. “I dare you to go dip a Frito in there and eat it. Play it totally straight.”

It felt good to make her laugh. * They buried the ashes in their father’s grave, literally on top of him. The cemetery let them do it for free, but Tessa loved the thought of the two of them there together. Stacked like two bricks left over from an old ruin; weathering it alone for god knows how long. Later, with the funeral cousins gone and the casseroles rotting at the dump, she lay in bed, her hair wet from tears, her wet hair smeared on her neck, and listened to the rain and imagined her child weeping slowly down through the mud and joining their father there and it comforted her.

Just a little hole in the earth. Drop him in. That was that.

The twins sat in the grass by the grave. Tessa sighed and told him that he looked like that William Blake poem. How’d it go? I saw the tombstones where flowers were supposed to be. And the priests in black gowns, making their rounds. Something, something with briars binding our joys and our desires?

You’ve never understood it, Tess, he said. Besides, I’m not even a priest. People keep saying that. Oh, no? she said. You leave me here alone with her, in that house with Myles like that, and you don’t even become a priest? He said, that’s not fair. It’s fair, she said. I think it’s very fair. I’m so sorry, Tess. I’m so sorry but he was so sick and I didn’t know what to do. I was trying to do something. And she whispered that it was nothing, that all his praying was just screaming underwater and nobody could hear it except you and it was only for you. * She threw all of her ragdoll’s books and toys and clothes into a pile in the backyard. She put the Poohbear; the little blanket with the red and blue stripes from the hospital; the painfully-small Nikes that had never been worn. She lay face down in them and smelled them. She put the bile-stained sheets on the pile and the welfare paperwork and the medications with meaningless expiration dates. She looked at the pile and sobbed. She shifted her weight. She took a breath. She kneeled down and cupped her hand around the lighter. She lit the sleeve of its favorite shirt.

41 | Issue 48

And the flame painted a clumsy sunset across the pile.

“Wait,” he said. The back door slammed. He had the casket. Chucked it on the fire. The tiny lid and tiny pillow tumbled down. The sunset was growing and building. Something in his pocket scratched against his hand. He pulled the folded napkin out. I hope God’s not so cruel, he had said.

On top of the pile, the napkin burned quickly. Smoke carried the boy’s hair up and up toward the sky and then he lost sight of it.

Blue Mesa Review | 42

Blue Mesa Review 2024 Spring Contest December 1, 2023 - February 29, 2024 $500 prize per genre FICTION JUDGE

Jennifer Givhan Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices, she is the author of five full-length poetry collections and three novels, most recently River Woman, River Demon. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.

POETRY JUDGE

Shayla Lawson Poet, performance artist, and public intellectual, Shayla Lawson is the author of books, scripts, and all sorts of media. Their work has been recognized by the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, the LAMBDA Literary Awards, MacDowell Artists Colony, and Yaddo.

NONFICTION JUDGE

Sarah Gerard Sarah Gerard is the author of the novels Binary Star and True Love, and the essay collection Sunshine State. She’s the winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary James Duggins Mid-Career novelist prize. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, and in several anthologies. She’s a private investigator in Denver.

For full judge biographies and information on how to submit, check out our website: bmr.unm.edu/contest 43 | Issue 48

A Forbidden Thing Tolu Daniel

I. At a small house in downtown Manhattan, Kansas sometime in 2021 I told a room of conservative Christians that I wanted to become American. It happened on a cruel winter evening at a prayer and Bible study event hosted by a Christian organization that helped international students settle in Kansas.

The silence that followed was confounding, like what I just said was a forbidden thing. And though the evening had been chiefly uneventful, my declaration would become the most notable happening of the night. Well, until the weird phone call that I ended the night with, from a man who told me he would report my intentions to ICE and dropped the call before I could give him any response.

In the room, I had been speaking with my companion, a Nigerian too, someone with whom I had spent most of the evening making fun of everyone and everything. He had convinced me to attend the prayer meeting, echoing a piece of advice my uber-religious parents had shared since my arrival in the States; something about finding a religious covering. In the conversation that evening, my companion had whispered something about how much he admired the spirit of compassion in Americans regardless of their political leanings.

In the days after I arrived in the US, the Christian organization that hosted the event we were in organized a furniture drive that helped populate my barren apartment with free stuff. But I thought, in my usual way, how possibly these acts of kindness were not really kindnesses at all but could be penance for any crime on a very long list. I wondered if they acted this same way towards their fellow Americans who were less privileged. I thought about the woman I saw on my way to the event that evening sitting in front of an abandoned building close to the Kansas State University Manhattan campus on Claflin Road, barely covered in the cold. Beside her was a trolley that contained what seemed like everything she owned. I wondered in that little moment why these people – who in the short time since I met them, had given me so much – were not in the service of the woman as well. It was an odd moment of intense thought, such that by the moment I blurted out my desire to be American, it was proceeded by an awkward pause, and subsequent banishment from events that were organized by that organization.

The banishment, if one may call it that, was subtle, never communicated to me in person. But it became so obvious that when, on another day, I reached out to my friend to ask when next he would be going for their events, he looked me in the eyes and said, “They think you are too dramatic and not interested in their bible education. So, they basically don’t want you there,” and we laughed.

II. “When I left Nigeria, I left with the intention of never looking back, to begin anew,” Ope, an old friend, said to me on a windy autumn afternoon. “I thought I could get lost in the sea of other immigrants.

Work hard till I could actualize for myself the promise of the immigrant dream because this is our reality now.” We were sitting at a table in a tiny Italian restaurant at Canary Wharf, London. It was my third day in the country, and I was visiting my younger sister who had just graduated from the University of

Blue Mesa Review | 44

Hertfordshire. I had not seen her for about the two years since I moved to the US and so I decided that I would also use the opportunity to see any of my friends who now called the United Kingdom home. Ope was the last person I imagined seeing in a foreign country because, since I had known him, he had had this love for Nigeria that both confounded and amused me. I had once apportioned it to his middleclass upbringing until he told me about his brothers, both of whom left Nigeria for Canada the moment they completed their undergraduate degrees.

His family was one of those few who could afford to send their children to school abroad, and when we completed our bachelor’s education in 2009, I encouraged him to leave as well. He never listened until he did. When he informed me that he had moved to Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom towards the end of 2021, I knew that he hadn’t made the decision lightly. Yet, when I saw him, it was important for me to ask why, because if believers in Nigeria like Ope could decide to leave, what hope was there for cynics like me who had always aspired to be everywhere else but Nigeria?

“That country is gone bro,” Ope said. As soon as he said this, I couldn’t help but think about the preface to the late Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s 1983 book, The Trouble with Nigeria. In the preface, Achebe explained that he had been moved to write about the issues that held the country hostage because of his children and their mates in whose future the argument was about. The first time I read this portion of the book, I had taken Achebe’s words in the literal. My thoughts had been overshadowed by a sense of an imagination of a youngish Achebe, sitting bent over a small table, wearing a plain shortsleeved shirt and small khaki shorts in a room I imagine to be his writing den, imagining a different Nigeria for his children. I imagined him thinking about what the present, at the time he was writing the book, meant to him – news items upon news items from radio, newspaper and television, filled with more of the same kind of debauchery by the government, motivating him as he bangs his slim fingers on the typewriter with an intensity that mirrors the power of his words. But as I read on, I realized what he was doing was positioning himself as an elder, someone who had seen the future and was critiquing what he perceived as a failure of leadership, while consequently offering suggestions on how to solve the issues in a move towards the future.

Yet, the future that Achebe was gesturing towards, the future which includes the generation that were at their infancy at the time he wrote the book, were now the individuals who were overseeing the carnage that the country was in. If Achebe was still alive, he would be slightly over the age of ninety, an older, retired ancestor. I wondered what he would have thought about the current state of things. How little had changed since his own years of worry. But to query Achebe this way was also to infer a likely falsehood because the ruling class in Nigeria is still scattered around the Achebe generation, with only a few of those who would have been children back then in a few positions. But somehow, perhaps by proximity, these people have continued to perpetuate the same draconian ideas as their elders.

At the time of the publication of Achebe’s book, Nigeria had recently emerged from a civil war and sworn into power its second republic in a democratic transition from military dictatorship. That democracy, which would later be interrupted by a coup, would eventually become a blueprint for subsequent democratic administrations in Nigeria several decades later. And though Achebe witnessed Nigeria morph into its longest period of a pretend democracy in his lifetime, I wonder still what he would think of us if he could see the mess we are in now. How several young people have chosen exile over

45 | Issue 48

home. How the naira is in competition with garri in water. How Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists have made exploiting the Nigerian government’s weaknesses a daily affair. How instead of facing the problems head on, the Nigerian president – Muhammadu Buhari in his second incarnation as a reformed democrat – is instead blaming the youths for daring to demand better and calling us lazy.

Would Achebe, as might be his right as an elder statesman, leave us to our troubles? Or would he, like one of his colleagues of the time, the Nobel Laurette Wole Soyinka, aged eighty-eight, leave the future of Nigeria to the strength and expectations of young Nigerians when he said in a 2021 interview with Associated Press that “It was up to the new generation to decide whether they want to keep going along the same chugging one-track train, or chart a new course.”

In a way, it was this clarion call by Soyinka, that young people like me answered when we decided to commit ourselves to the delusions of change as we joined the ENDSARS protests in 2020. The protests began as a movement against police brutality but quickly morphed into a demand for good governance in a way that had never been experienced before. The Nigerian government’s response was decisive and clear. They sent murderous soldiers to the protest grounds, killed innocent young Nigerians, and lied about it.

Achebe’s generation, which included Soyinka, fought with the systems of oppression and corruption that Nigeria inherited from the British colonial masters. For their troubles, many of them were sent to jail, while some chose exile. Soyinka’s famous memoir, The Man Died, was a product of his incarceration in the 60s during the civil war because of his vocal criticism of the Nigerian government’s attempts to suppress the Biafran independence movement. There is another story about a time Soyinka forced his way to a radio station to substitute a tape of his own to disrupt the recorded message by a fraudulent victor of an election in 1964 that earned him two months in jail. The Nigeria then and the Nigeria now feel like a timeless loop: those events mirror the government’s response to the ENDSARS movement, except in this generation, both Achebe and Soyinka would have been killed or disappeared for all their troubles, with no choices of exile.

At the time of Achebe’s death, the conundrum of the failed state weighed heavy on his mind at the release of his final book, There Was a Country. The book provided his personal perspective on the history of Nigeria and detailed his role in the formation of the separatist Biafran country while making a case for reconciliation and understanding. Yet, the fact of how those who lived through all the political upheavals of the time could sit back and oversee the destruction of the future that these people fought for, would never not be concerning.

It made me wonder about my generation as well, especially those of us who, like Ope once was, were brave enough to seek political offices. Perhaps this was what power does to people. That perhaps, if the government had not clamped down on us and our demands during the protest. Perhaps if we had had our own opportunity at the bedrock of power. Perhaps we may fare even worse. But this is the thing with speculations: the future is never exact, and now we may never know what our own roles will be like since many of us have chosen to run.

Ope’s voice brought me back to the moment.

“After the massacre in Lekki, I knew I couldn’t remain in that country again. There was nothing to believe in anymore. The country is gone. Totally gone, my brother. I called my wife, and we made plans to

Blue Mesa Review | 46

leave,” Ope said as he took a sip of the old-fashioned cocktail in front of him.

Ope wasn’t the only one who left. Many of us did too. We left Nigeria for Ghana. We left Nigeria for Kenya. We left Nigeria for Germany. We left Nigeria for the United Kingdom. We left Nigeria for the United States. We left Nigeria for Canada. We left Nigeria for anywhere that would have us. We left for jobs. We left for our safety. And years later, we are still leaving. Exile has become for us a constant conundrum to negotiate and as a gift, we have become the reluctant Nigerians, people for whom our nationality is only by the fact of our international passport.

III. In a recent after-brunch conversation with a friend on a fine fall afternoon in front of my apartment in St. Louis, Missouri, I told her of my worries that my allegiance and nationality had shifted from its stoic and solid position. We had been talking about privilege and the American identity and what it means to be a Nigerian navigating the diaspora. Our conversations were always something of this nature. We tried to understand what it meant to be in the positions we both occupied, her as an African American woman who was interested in unearthing her African identity, me as the Nigerian man who was still confused about my place in the American society and the larger world.

That afternoon, I explained that my identity had become something of a negotiation, a position in which I was no longer an active participant, but a spectator. My companion looked at me for what seemed to me like a very long time and burst out laughing.

“That is stupid,” she said after the laughter.

“I know,” I said. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain to her that this was what exile does to you. That even she, who was proudly Black and American, with all the privileges and oppressions of the position, was in the same boat as I. That her friendship with me, rooted in our shared affinity for a community that was chiefly made up of people with the same kind of melanin color as ours, was rooted in the same kind of negotiation. That the days when I felt proudly Nigerian were the days when the country of my birth, the place where I spent the last three decades of my life, wasn’t in the news for some shit our government did again. That my Nigerianness, which appears shaky at best, could never be compared to the half humanity – according to her – that her own African Americanness sometimes connotes. That on some days, I felt like James Baldwin in his wistful musings about the villagers at Leukarbad, Switzerland in his essay A Stranger in the Village. How he imagined the villagers as people who, from the point of view of power, could never imagine themselves as strangers in the world.

“Why is it that Nigerians are always so competitive? Like their whole thing is just to succeed. All the ones I have met, including you, not one of you know how to live in the moment. I feel it is inhumane,” she asked, almost suddenly.

I paused, because the question was so irrelevant to the conversation we were having and yet, in a way, it proved the point of my anxiety about my identity as well. Since my arrival in the US, I had been flinging the idea of my presence in America as exile, when in truth, it probably wasn’t. I didn’t leave home because of the protests like Ope. I didn’t leave home because I had become a political commentator who the government was chasing down. I left because I needed to, and the history of my leaving began the moment I graduated from my first degree in Economics, back in 2009. I left because my time as a university

47 | Issue 48

undergrad had been riddled with series of industrial actions by the Academic Staff Union of lecturers which ensured that on graduating, I didn’t feel ready to face the world. I left because those I had to compete with for the very few available jobs were people who either graduated from foreign universities or attended private universities. So, for me it became a no-brainer to seek that sense of completion elsewhere.

Yet, the circumstances that brought me to the point of claiming the word exile is resident in the aftermath of my decision to leave. When I left, I uprooted my life, resigned a job I had done for over ten years with all its attendant securities, and arrived in a very complicated America where everything feels jaded and many encounters with people sometimes inferred or connoted the feeling of being unwanted.

So, almost immediately, I began to negotiate another kind of way to exist in this place – an existence that would allow me to look back always. To hold my Nigerianness as a badge of honor instead of the disdain it might sometimes connote. To always wish there was a place to return to, a home to return to, even if that home may not recognize itself as such.

“Your feelings about us are valid,” I said. “However, it is also difficult to quantify why we do the things we do. We can call it the immigrant’s curse, and it is only more noticeable with Nigerians because African Americans expect some form of solidarity from us by the sheer virtue of our shared history. But instead, what we tend to do is what James Baldwin in his conversation with Audre Lorde calls ‘trying to be white.’ We aspire to whiteness in ways African Americans will never understand. It is why we are always so quick to shed our Nigerian nationality the first chance we get, because our standard for everything is set and determined by our colonial history.”

“But it is the same with us, except we chose to walk away from it,” she said.

“That’s why it is difficult; unlike slavery, the position of the colonized is not an inconvenient one. It is convenient. Most Nigerians are not even aware that there are other types of white people. Some of us are not even aware that sometimes power is not equal to whiteness. We see a white person or a white person adjacent, someone like you for instance, with your fancy accents and all, and we start quaking in our boots. In our most revered spaces, we open doors for them, doors we will never open to people who look like us. So like Lorde in response to Baldwin in that same conversation, our struggles are not the same.

We still have more work to do in terms of being able to decolonize our minds.”

“I have never thought about it that way.”

“Yet, even I don’t know if I am right or just making excuses.”

IV. In the same visit to London last September when I met Ope, I sat on the plane with this American woman who, like me, was visiting the Queen’s country for the first time. Over the course of the eighthour flight from Chicago to London, we bonded over our shared experiences of rural spaces in the United States. I had lived in Manhattan, Kansas before moving to St. Louis, Missouri and she lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. She would tell me later that London was going to be her first stop in a stretch of travels visiting all the major capitals of Europe and then Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing. I listened to her gush about what she would do in each place, and how she was fulfilling a lifelong desire to see the world.

Listening to her talk reminded me of similar dreams I had and shared with my little sister as

Blue Mesa Review | 48

youngsters, backpacking through Europe and the Americas. As we grew into adults capable of making these travels, the passport of the country we swore our allegiance to had become so infamous that smaller countries in Africa like Tanzania and Madagascar would treat a traveling Nigerian like a stain.

Stuart Wakeling, a business consultant with Henley & Partners, a global company on citizenship and resident investment, in an interview with Pulse Nigeria about the issue, explained that because “visa-free travel and passport ranking is contingent on a positive international perception of domestic affairs and proactive engagement between sovereign states,” it was a no-brainer that countries around the world would treat the Nigerian passport like a disease, since the country was in a whirlwind that didn’t seem to be calming. Hence, people like me and my sister quickly learned to abandon any ambition that we harbored in our quest to see the world.

While my American companion from the plane was able to sashay her way through the customs and border patrol at Heathrow, I would spend three hours waiting in line for my turn. Not because I did anything wrong or because something hazardous was found in my bag, but simply because of the origins of my passport. I felt in those moments, standing in the long queue watching different people from different countries, some eastern Europeans, some Nigerians and many folks from other African countries, this feeling of being an inferior other. I wanted to aspire towards what gave my American companion ease. I wished my declaration in that room in Kansas had been true and that I had the power to put the mechanism that could make it happen in motion.

V. Yet, to be American is to be constantly reminded of the evil that has been done to ensure your freedom. Perhaps this is a stretch, because I know of some types of Americans who are happy to wallow in their ignorance. When you live in a society where basic things like electricity, pipe-born water, decent roads, are a given, ignorance might become a currency worth wasting. Yet, to be American as well, whether the average American is aware of it or not, is also to be part of a colonial project, one that is perpetuating acts of violence against Indigenous Americans, its own Black citizens, and the rest of the world it considers inferior. It wasn’t surprising to encounter a sentence that mirrors this sentiment in the American writer Eula Biss’s essay “Pain Scale.” “People suffer, I know, so that I may eat bananas in February,” she writes. Why then would someone like me be attracted to such a project? Well, this answer might be obvious, but in case it isn’t, it is so that I can hoard my ignorance as well. It is so that I can think about other ways I can exist. To be able to travel un-harassed. To be able to sleep knowing that there is no chance that my electricity can disappear at any moment. If I was like Ope, I could make the claim that I came to America to become the model Black man, the type who knew how to receive the crumbs from the table of white people, cap in hand, expressing gratitude in a loud voice. To be able to say that I came for the American dream – whatever it means. To be able to aspire without doubting if my time here might be interrupted by some random man’s phone call to ICE. But I am not. I am instead a person who wishes power wasn’t such a solid, rigid thing. I am also an African who will always have to negotiate his blackness in this place. And more importantly I am a person whose aspirations are at loggerheads with his status.

49 | Issue 48

Soliloquy

Ana Prundaru

Blue Mesa Review | 50

Tone Poem

Bob Hicok

Before I can see the mountain, I see the mountain.

Black trees. The shape of a woman’s hip on her side, her hand brushing over a lake with an open palm, the water cool, calm.

So much of what I remember hasn’t happened yet.

A quiet house clears its throat. A god comes in, takes off his armor, removes his heart and feeds it to a dog. He needs a story in which he dies.

I need to catch the mouse chewing on my wires and read a book with her until the sun goes down.

I do not want to kill the dark by turning on the light, and to speak means I am interrupting the moon.

You were saying. The person who taught me to drive showed me how to do it with my eyes closed. Step one: never get in a car. Step two: keep a life in each pocket.

Step three: consider taping your head to another’s, and those two to a third, and so on. The tape was figurative, the connection literal, and the extent infinite. I am currently seven billion elsewheres to some degree. Being here, though, in this chair, this breath, has always been tricky. Do you ever wonder if seven or eight of the bones or one or two of the nodes of emotion were left out and thrown away when the workbench was cleared of the memory of you?

A stone is a stone wherever you go but a person can be a stone in a very soft shirt and not know where this shirt came from or who they should thank for this life, if at all.

51 | Issue 48

Elle ne se retournerait pas (She would not turn around) JC Alfier Blue Mesa Review | 52

Bella’s Last Soiree

Katharine Beebe

I. Monday, September 26, 1927—First, she saw the feet. Soles, heels up. Bare to morning sun, sticking out from a thicket of red willow by the stream. Cecil held back—fifteen, twenty feet by the truck—covered her nose and mouth with her hand. But then, despite breakfast climbing up her throat, she crept closer as if death, facedown in a thicket, might lurch to his feet. Heels dirty, calluses. Tops of arches pressed into gravel, ankles exposed. Calves extended out from the willow that shrouded most of the corpse. One leg bent at the knee. Little of the white linen pant leg, bunched midcalf, visible through the foliage.

Thus, a fresh, new ache on Cecil’s soul, cancer-like, divided, multiplied.

Cecilia went by ‘Cecil’ because her parents, if they had to bear fruit thirty-five years before, had wanted a son. On this particular morning she left her crumbling adobe house in the faintest dawn light. The day that wrecked her life began handsomely enough. Across the dirt street, with sunrise, cottonwoods banking the rio would flaunt fiery gold leaves. Normally, Cecil bicycled unless she skipped town on a back-country, plant-sampling, horse-packing trip or as her paint-splattered boyfriend called them: highlonesome death-treks. But today a rusty Model T truck sat parked in the yard.

Beside her four-by-five view camera, Cecil loaded a wooden box of photographic glass plates onto the truck’s worn seat. In her studio last week, she treated the plates with colloidal solution, a pill of a process but cheaper than ready-made and faster than waiting for Boston to ship by rail to New Mexico.

She shoved the box to the center of the seat and, when she tapped it twice, Woofie, her dog, jumped in.

Stepping onto the running board, she placed a wood and brass tripod on the floor, wound down Woofie’s window, and slammed the passenger door shut. Walking to the driver’s side, Cecil swung into the seat.

Through the windshield, the sun’s curve rose fiery behind mountains and filtered through the bosque— dawn through trees. Plush velvet, she thought. Mother of God! Woofie leaned out the window and barked dog joy.

Bella had named the dog. Bella rescued all things lost, everything hungry, anything forlorn: dogs, cats, chickens, donkeys, artists. Starving one winter, Woofie found Bella’s ranch. Inside by the fire, Bella sat curled under a Hudson Bay blanket in an overstuffed chair while reading about the lost Franklin expedition. The dog struggled through snow to Bella’s window. And he said, “Woof!”

Sometimes Cecil wondered if she herself was one of Bella’s strays.

Several miles out of earshot from town, Bella’s hacienda afforded New Mexico an art salon and her transplanted artists a patron. Bella had just toughed out the annual soiree, and the locals—descendants of Rio de Espiritu’s 18th century settlers—must have sighed in relief. Most of the smart set had just left the Southwest to overrun Chicago, Boston, New York, and European capitals. Bella, too, must have sighed.

Yesterday, when she handed Cecil the keys, Bella said her foreman would need sleep in the morning more than he’d need the truck.

53 | Issue 48

Just out of town, two headwaters met among willowed banks to form the river whose name the village took. Though idyllic, Espiritu could make a person nervous. A rattler might slither into town by mistake and shelter under the boardwalk till night when it slithered out to safety. There was wind, maddening in spring, but in any season a rogue blast might rush down the side of Mount Blanco at night. Strange lights in the night sky, cries in the forest. And the river invited wading but for quicksands.

Cecil and Woofie drove along the tree-lined plaza with its mercantile, saddle shop, chemist, blacksmith-livery, sheriff and doctor offices. Adobe with wooden balconies shading boardwalks below.

Church, northside. Cemetery. On hard springs the Model T bounced down dirt streets. In one house window, a dim light from an early riser’s lantern.

Just past the plaza Cecil motored to a fork in the road and stopped, brakes whistling. Often from here, she’d search for Unnamed Plants of New Mexico, for the book she was writing. She envied nameless green things. They held their link to deep time. The right fork led to an unidentified vegetal she’d seen in a ponderosa grove. But if she sought that green gem, why did she leave home in the dark? In truth, lately when she photographed flora, she shot it not as artefact, but art. Although Bella much encouraged Cecil to exercise her creative eye, Cecil knew exactly what she was: a jobless botanist for whom the camera was a scientific instrument. She’d only just begun to fancy herself an artist.

Book: right fork. Art: left to a canyon wall waking into young light, weathered fractures and ridges screaming out the violence of time. Inside the idling truck, Cecil flashed on a look a man gave her at Bella’s soiree; a split-second look that held a Bible’s worth of pain, and on this morning that look felt like fate. Steering wheel in hand, she turned toward art. Cecil sought rock. Today she’d seek what she’d taken too long to find, what she’d spent childhood swearing never to pursue: Art. As the road became two-track, they climbed through sage—the gods’ perfume—through foothills, where the road traveled by meadow and stony outcrops. Cecil stopped, yanked on the handbrake, climbed out while the truck idled rough. Eyes down, she couldn’t help but study the ground for anonymous plants. She even squatted, worked fingers through vegetation; a few botanical misgivings, perhaps? But then her fingers formed a picture frame she raised to her eyes and turned to scan the landscape. Back in the Model T, she drove among cliffs, where, to one side of the track, a gurgly stream with cattails drained the upper reaches, and chickadees on boulders drank from half-cup pools.

Woofie leaned out his window.

“Is this the place, Woof? What do you think?”

As Cecil parked Woofie jumped out the window.

She loaded a few glass plates in a canvas bag, grabbed her four-by-five and tripod. Wading through grass, carpeting the canyon bottom and soggy from last night’s rain, she found her spot. A cliff wall with mineral veins glistening at dawn.

Cecil judged the shot, then mounted her camera on the tripod. She put the black cloth attached to the camera over her head. Through the viewfinder, eyeballed the glittering surface, upside-down and backward. She opened the shutter, focused. Set swings and tilts. Adjusted F-stop. Closed the shutter, inserted a plate, pulled out the slide.

Her heart raced a little as, at the end of a cable, she pressed the shutter button. She replaced the slide, removed the plate, and got out from under the cloth. The plate frame had a number on it: 1. In a notebook

Blue Mesa Review | 54

she wrote date, time, place.

Joy: That’s what Cecil felt, felt in her cells, when the image lit up her mind. Deeds so prehistoric only the rock remembered. Precambrian formation—volcanic heat, seismic pressure, geologic time. Melted, crushed, fractured, rock-sculpted pain.

And Cecil, instead of recording something (say, an anonymous plant, an innocent she’d regret outing with a name in a book, another species filched by an artificial world), she had created an image, a look that wasn’t there before, by which stone might speak. But joy, undeserved. Still, a theft, that briefly banished the lesion metastasizing on her soul.

Art. It’s what her parents did. But they weren’t photographers.

While Cecil re-shot the wall, Woofie bounded upstream, startled chickadees, and trotted farther up the rudimentary track. In the canyon bottom, night’s damp chill hung in the air. Sun would cook the land dry and bright soon. Shots 1and 2 captured, Cecil stood in a clearing of scarlet penstemon and closed her eyes. Then, tripod shouldered, she carried her kit to the truck. Nowhere in sight, Woofie barked. At first once, then twice, then his voice high, crying, coyote-like.

Cecil walked up the track, around a bend. Something in the willows streamside not far from the foot of a cliff. Woofie yipped and scratched at the ground. Something in a thicket by the stream.

“Woofie! Come here! Right now!”

But Woofie was intent.

And then a wind shift carried the smell.

II. Nine days prior—On a Saturday around 9 p.m., the soiree commenced. It would wear on until hangovers colluded with altitude sickness to send guests back where they came from. The dead man, while still among the quick, had counted as a partier.

This year Bella had shipped contraband from Chicago by rail to Albuquerque. There, a man in a panel truck left the city pre-dawn to travel dirt tracks northeast to Espiritu. By afternoon, he turned his truck around to climb La Bajada Hill in reverse gear. Extra horsepower inched his load up an ancient lava flow.

Around midnight he delivered Bella’s order of bootleg rum, gin, scotch, champagne, bourbon, vermouth, wine, and vodka—all in crates marked ‘shampoo.’

With Bella’s soiree, Espiritu’s population ballooned. The international set boarded steamers from Europe to New York where they bought tickets to travel west by rail. Half of Greenwich Village boarded the train while some intrepid souls suited up and piled into motorcars for fifteen-hundred miles of road dirt. All migrated west.

New Mexico’s ticket to modern art, Bella had an east coast clipping service. Monthly, the Espiritu post office delivered a fat envelope stuffed with clips from every New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Paris, Venice, Florence paper with news of her painters, talent she’d summoned to her altitudinous retreat, with rumors of high desert scandals, and, always, Bella’s soiree. She pasted them all—the flattering and the vicious—into scrapbooks stacked in her library for the parade of bohemes to peruse and

55 | Issue 48

find themselves tattled upon. Or worse, not.

The soiree could run a week or more before hangers-on left. Bella’s hacienda was out of town and, to spare villagers, she tried, not always successfully, to keep guests entertained and sedated on the ranch.

Bella’s sprawling front room filled with noise and tobacco smoke under a viga-latilla ceiling. She had two pianos. At the north end, a baby grand she’d brought west. Sixty feet to the south, Cecil’s upright. They dueled, those pianos, played boozy jazz, ragtime, whatever the loudest sot yelled for.

Except for the pianists and Bella, only Cecil was not three sheets to the wind. With her tipsy boyfriend, Alexander—or as Cecil called him, Sandy—she leaned against the side of the upright surveying the room. Soon, she spotted the man she’d dub ‘Gatsby’ for his white linen suit. Brown hair parted down the middle and pomaded back. And barefoot. Months later Bella would say, “But, dearest, Gatsby wore a pink suit.” Yet, the name stuck.

When this Gatsby announced himself an artist, his claim, like a leg-hold trap, clamped onto Cecil’s soul. Although Bella much encouraged Cecil to exercise her creative eye, Cecil knew exactly what she was: an unemployed botanist for whom a camera was a scientific instrument. She’d only just begun to fancy herself an artist. But it takes one to know one and something about him wasn’t right. She bet if she looked at Gatsby’s hands, they’d be clean. Painters’ nails weren’t. Her parents’, for example. Especially with oils. Squeaky clean? Never; for an artist’s work is messy, baring the particulars. Art finds short-ofenough insight, maybe dash of grandeur, to almost counter the doubt. Art disrobes life.

Among the guests was an aviatrix. Not a crasher, this pilot was invited, a friend, and she flew a biplane to New Mexico. Around her neck a white silk scarf. From Tibet. The aviatrix had one change of clothes. The rest of her cargo was gas for return to the nearest fuel depot.

“Wasn’t it risky,” Sandy asked, “landing with all that fuel.”

The pilot produced a flask. “That’s what this’s for.”

“Why not ship it out by train?” asked Sandy. “The fuel, in barrels?”

She offered him the flask and said, “I’m berries on fear!”

He took a swig, grimaced, gasped. “Christ, this is the fuel!” He passed it back.

Nearby were an art dealer and a cool, elegant woman in a long black, bias-cut dress, no jewelry. They critiqued a badly dressed bottle blonde, across the room, in a tight frock with cleavage at a time when androgyny was fem. The blonde sauntered up to a lost-looking guest. A young man in a cord suit, clearly appalled by his surroundings, stood by a table of hors d’oeuvre, eating perhaps for something to do. He appeared grateful that someone joined him, even the blonde.

“Now watch this,” the dealer said. “She’s quite skilled.” The dealer picked the olive out of his drink, popped it in his mouth. “Watch her sniff out an easy mark.”

“You know so much about her,” the black dress said.

“Before that poor bastard, she was sniffing me out.” The dealer recounted how earlier he was talking with an artist, angling for a studio tour, maybe pick up a painting or two. “She went for us both till she sorted out who had the dough.”

Barely able to suppress a laugh, the black dress said, “Won’t somebody tell her the bosom is passé?”

“She’s slathered,” the dealer added, “in five ‘n’ dime perfume.”

Overhearing the commentary on the bottle blonde, the pilot joined in. “Such a little face on that

Blue Mesa Review | 56

chippy,” she said, “in danger of being swallowed into cleavage lurking below.”

“She’s not a chippy,” the dealer said.

“Well, if she can read,” said the pilot, “I’m Babe Ruth.” She raised her flask. “To the Yankees!”

“Oh, she can read,” the dealer said. “Gossip columns. She can tell you who Mary Pickford had breakfast with last Tuesday.”

The night wore on. When Cecil couldn’t shake Gatsby’s claim to artistry, she dragged Sandy to her target. They stationed themselves on either side of Gatsby’s chair. Cecil began interrogating him.

“Oils?” she asked. “Pastels!” Finally, she was having fun. “You look like a pastels man.”

“Uh huh.” Gatsby drank from his gin and tonic. He leaned back in his overstuffed chair, rested his head against the back. Clumsily, crossed his legs; tried to push back an errant strand of pomaded hair that fell over an eye, but it took two passes, the first colliding with his nose.

Something about Gatsby, not a mean drunk. And, at the soiree, there was something polite in that.

Or verging on thoughtful, yeah, even tanked to the gills; thoughtful like people weren’t anymore. And he had nice feet, uncorrupted by shoes. Still, he’d be easy to play, drunk to the point of defenselessness.

Thus, Cecil, herself ill at ease, couldn’t resist. So, she pounced.

Cecil repositioned in front of Gatsby’s chair. She took Sandy’s hand. “You see this hand?” She bent over and held the hand in front of Gatsby’s face. Already schnockered, Sandy played along, amused.

“You see here an artist’s hand, a fine hand.” She ran her fingers over it. “Now, this artist is a clean man, but you’ll notice, although he scrubs with soap, paint tattoos him anyway. Especially round the nails.” She held Sandy’s hand nearer to Gatsby’s face. “Granted,” she said, “one must look closely, but on this handsome thumb, you see this tiny line of spruce green?”

Gatsby, trapped in his chair, turned his head away.

“And here, burnt umber on the knuckle.”

A man in a striped French sailor shirt, red sash about his neck, had claimed to be researching an Apache dancer role for a silent film. He walked up and bumped his glass into Cecil’s center of gravity, sloshing champagne. “Hey, jodhpurs,” he said to her back.

She straightened up and turned.

“How’s tricks?” the sailor-shirt said.

Cecil gave him a flat look, but Sandy reclaimed his hand and stepped up for war. “Are you,” he said, “speaking to my woman?”

“Your woman!” Cecil laughed, brushing champagne off her pants.

At which the shirt said to Sandy, “If she’s the one in jodhpurs.”

The shirt and Sandy moved away.

Cecil left her dueling suitors to it. Bent on crushing Gatsby, Cecil persevered. “Landscapes?” she asked. “Boudoirs?”

The sailor-shirt pulled the sash off his neck to grip one end in his teeth and handed Sandy the other end. Lips drawn back, canines exposed, each man eyeballed the other from his end of the sash. With one hand, each held a drink. With the other, shoved his stumbling opponent. They slopped booze on the floor.

57 | Issue 48

“Y’ave two men fightin’ over you.” Gatsby spoke quietly, slurred his words. “Don’t you wanna’ be with them?”

“Not especially.”

The black dress and aviatrix dropped in.

“Why…not?” Gatsby asked.

“They have nothing to do with me,” said Cecil. “Just look at them.”

Gatsby obeyed.

The black dress leaned toward the pilot and murmured, “The artist and the critic.”

To hear Gatsby’s mumbling over the racket, Cecil stepped around to the front of his chair and straddled one of his legs, leaned forward face-to-face, bracing her hands on the arms of his chair.

Sandy and his sparring partner shouted through their teeth.

“Boys!” Cecil called over her shoulder. “Keep it down, would you? Or go outside to play.” It wasn’t a question. “They don’t bother me at all,” Cecil said to Gatsby. “I’m so taken with your hands.”

Gatsby looked at the hand not holding a drink. Slowly turned it over.

“They’re so clean,” she said.

In a gentle way he looked confused, and Cecil wondered that she could be such a goddamn bully.

Was she like the rest, only sober? Was everyone uncomfortable? To the point of criminality? Maybe she needed to drink more. “Watercolors?” she went on. “No, I s’pose not.”

“Lemme’ look at that hand!” the pilot said, barging in, bending over Gatsby and grabbing his free hand. She caressed it, ran it over her lips, then, looking Gatsby in the eye, sucked a finger into her mouth.

At last releasing it, the pilot stood up straight, turned to the massing audience, and declared, “Insurance salesman, I’d say.”

“Bravo,” said the black-dress, clapping. “Virtuoso!”

Which triggered a hearty applause. They’d drawn a crowd. Egged on, drunk on encouragement, Cecil pushed the pilot away and leaned over Gats. But he met her eyes, he gave her a look that lasted a second in time—and the rest of her life, too. The look asked, Why? And something in Cecil changed.

Gatsby held his glass up to Cecil’s face and, in a sing-song voice, said, “Re-fill.” He gently pushed at her arms. “Ge’ off me,” he muttered, adding a “please,” that shamed her. She stepped out of his way. He leaned forward, tried twice but failed, falling back into the voluptuous chair. Cecil took Gatsby’s drink, put it on the floor with her own, took each of his hands in hers, leaned back as far as she could, and pulled him out of the chair to stand. When he wobbled, Cecil put an arm round him. “There we go,” she said.

“Tha-ank you.” He staggered off to the bar where he spilled a gin and tonic on his wrinkled linen suit and babbled about a lost treasure someone had discovered. A heap of gold bars, an 1880s strong box with deeds, gold, silver coins.

Around 2 a.m., the pianists conspired to play together. At the far end of the room, Bella, who didn’t relax at her own events, sat on the bench beside the player at the baby grand. Like Bella, Cecil did not enjoy Bella’s soirees. For Sandy: that’s why Cecil said she went, and for Bella, too. Pianos playing in concert, the reluctant partiers lost themselves in Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun. But, for a roomful of inebriates, musical sobriety felt morose. Guests hollered obscenities; one threw a celery stick from his drink, hitting

Blue Mesa Review | 58

the back of Cecil’s head. An ingénue from Hollywood burst into tears and ran out into the night tearing off her clothes.

Cecil circulated. More into observation than revelry, she could nurse a highball all night. Surrounded by screaming people dancing, mean drunks yelling, punching faces, breaking teeth. Romanizing noses.

Laughing people posing. Arrivistes. Parvenus. Semi-conscious sots in chairs. A flapper snorted cocaine.

A man stood unseeing, staring blind, unconscious on his feet. A corpulent bloke peed in a potted plant, closed his eyes, and sighed.

Later Sandy found Cecil by the baby grand pianist, together pounding out “I Wanna Be Bad.” Sandy took Cecil’s hand, led her to a chintz loveseat, and flopped into it pulling her down with him.

“All acted out?” she asked.

Sandy glared at her from the corner of his eye. “ ’atta boy.” She slapped his thigh. “Sandy’s all better now.”

The pair slouched on the loveseat. Gatsby had somehow found his way back from the bar and climbed, miraculously, onto the coffee table by Sandy’s propped feet. Gatsby teetered as he blathered and gesticulated about Black Jack Ketchum’s hoard. Black Jack Ketchum, famous outlaw.

A career alcoholic, this Gatsby, if ever there was one. So how, Cecil wondered, could she see something childlike, even sweet, in his need to share his Wild West tale? Yet there Cecil sat, germinating pity on a soul whom minutes before she’d disgraced. Any fool knows sobriety at a party extorts a price.

Instead, one must drink into amnesia. The blessed can forget.

And there tottered Gatsby, barefoot on the table: Black Jack Ketchum this, Black Jack Ketchum that.

“You know, da’ one robs trains?” Gats was the show now. Spectators convened. Of course, the black dress. Aviatrix. Bottle blonde. The dealer.

When Gatsby said, “Gold in zum cave zum where,” the flyer pooh poohed, “That’s the wrong story, sweet pea. Black Jack’s a different tale!”

The crowd whooped. Hurled invectives, laughed until the bottle blonde stepped up on the coffee table. She took Gatsby’s arm, stabilized him, got him off the table, walked him away.

“Wish we’d let him finish,” said the dealer. “I liked his story.”

Cecil looked at Sandy. He took a long draw on a cigarette mounted in a holder, tipped back his head, exhaled.

III. Nine days later, 4 a.m.—Cecil sat up in her bed, propped against pillows in the dim light of a bedside lamp. “I don’t see why Bella does it,” Cecil said in a sleepy voice. “I don’t think she likes those people.”

The smell of coffee wafted to the bedroom, just off the kitchen.

Already up, Sandy making breakfast. In painter’s pants, no shirt, he brought in two bed trays and set one over Cecil’s legs. On the trays, a carafe, coffee cups, saucers, a little pitcher of cream, linen napkins, silverware. A lean six-footer, sandy hair, he put the second tray at the foot of the bed. In bare feet, he crossed the shiny floor, dirt tamped centuries before, hardened and sealed with ox-blood.

An overgrown marmalade tabby sat on the deep adobe window sill. Lester was a cat and a half with a

59 | Issue 48

head the size of a grapefruit and polydactyl feet.

“Social obligations,” Sandy said, rubbing his chin, then stepping into the kitchen. “That’s why Bella does it.”

Cecil poured two cups of coffee. Added cream, lots of cream, to one and stirred. Sandy returned from the kitchen with two plates, huevos rancheros, carried one plate plus a basket on his arm, another plate in that hand; in the other, a bottle of Kahlua. He poured a shot into the cup without cream.

He grabbed his own tray from the foot of the bed, and climbed back in.

Cecil put a hand on the back of her neck and rotated her head. Since a child, stress lived there. She picked up her fork, took a bite of eggs. Closed her eyes. Savored.

The cat jumped off the window sill, onto a cherry bureau with a mirror-rattling thud, then leapt onto the blanket chest at the foot of the bed.

“Oops, almost forgot.” Sandy moved his bed tray aside and got up to retrieve from the kitchen a tiny plate of scrambled eggs cut in tiny bites and a tiny bowl for cream. The cat waited at the foot of the bed, observing while Sandy flattened a place on the quilt, grabbed a book—The Jungle—from Cecil’s shelves, and set the cat’s plate on Upton Sinclair. He poured cream in Lester’s bowl. The cat breakfasted.

“You behaved like Bella’s guests,” Cecil said.

“Did I?” Sandy sipped his spiked coffee. “Don’t recall.”

At the foot of the bed, the cat licked the last cream from the bowl and looked sphinx-like first at Sandy, then at Cecil.

“I don’t remember much.” Sandy laughed a little. “But I do remember you behaved like Bella’s guests.” He served her a biscuit. “My ferret.”

“Me!” “Poor Gatz. You minced the man. He’ll never be the same.”

“Why pick on me! I was zozzled.”

“But you weren’t.” He laughed. Sipped Kahlua coffee. Said “Christ, that’s tasty,” And “I confess, sunshine, I was proud.”

After breakfast, Cecil got up and dressed to load the Model T parked in the yard.

IV .

Noon sun beat down. The coroner, already blotto. They all stood in the canyon bottom along the twotrack road and stared at the pungent body Cecil and Woofie found earlier that morning. The sheriff tied a bandana over his nose and mouth and took a pair of gloves from a back pocket. Protruding from the willow thicket by the creek, soles of shoeless feet, dirty white linen pantlegs rumpled up around the calves. The sheriff pushed branches out of the way, stepped into the thicket, examined the body. “Gimme a hand,” he said to the coroner. Who tripped over a rock and fell on his face. Which he bloodied.

Sandy had ridden back to the scene with Cecil in Bella’s truck when they led the sheriff and coroner to the deceased.

“Christ almighty,” Sandy said of the coroner. He jogged back to grab a pair of gloves Bella’s foreman left in the truck. The smell of death gagging him, Sandy waded into the brush and helped the sheriff drag the body onto the grass. While the coroner stumbled holding his head, Sandy and the sheriff turned the

Blue Mesa Review | 60

body over. Buzzing flies had laid eggs in the meat of what had been a face but was now an open wound the size of a football.

Cecil turned away, suddenly, to vomit. And not for the putrefaction. But for the look. The look Gatsby gave her at the soiree. The look that asked, Why? The look that barfed her breakfast.

The sheriff wiped his gloves on the grass, took one off. He stood, then shaded his eyes as he glanced up at the cliff-top a hundred and fifty feet above. “Well, I’d have to say, the clumsy sucker fell. Tripped and fell. Cut and dry.” He spit tobacco juice. “These gall-darn East Coasters…”

Ten years on and Cecil still wasn’t used to local slurs. She walked to a break in the willows, knelt by the stream, and rinsed her face. She cupped her hands, filled them with cold water, sloshed it in her mouth, and spit in the grass.

“It’s Gatsby,” Sandy said, grimacing, turning his head from the stench. “I recognize the suit.”

“Gatsby?” asked the sheriff.

Sandy stepped back. “Guy from Bella’s party. Said he was an artist.”

“And that’s his name?” His voice incredulous.

Had the sheriff read the book?

“We called him that.”

Cecil walked over, but not too close. Not close enough to see the maggot infestation. She stood by Sandy, who held his arm over his nose and mouth. He backed away a few steps.

“Gatsby,” Cecil said in a hoarse voice. How wicked she’d been. All he did was pretend. Why couldn’t she leave him to his fantasy? But, no, she made it clear she knew he was a phony. She broadcast it to the smart set. She leaned forward, braced herself with hands on knees.

Sandy shed his gloves, threw them in the willows. He grabbed Cecil’s arm, led her toward the trucks.

She ran her eyes up the side of the cliff and wondered: What sort picks on a drunk? Well, she knew what sort. The sort that knows she’s the fraud, after all. “Judas,” she muttered. Maybe he was an artist. Of a different sort. Yes, she thought he was.

Sandy pulled her close, put his arms around her, and held her head to his chest so she couldn’t turn and see. Cecil wiggled free. He smelled of death now.

Meanwhile, the sheriff and wobbly coroner managed to load the body, dropping it once when the coroner tripped over an arm dragging on the ground, into the bed of the county truck.

Cecil drove home. Driving settled her stomach. Her throat knotting up, she navigated the curvy twotrack in second gear, downshifting at times to first. Massive boulders narrowed the track. Cecil and Sandy bounced over ruts on the hard springs of Bella’s old Model T, swerved around curves. The rain last night had turned low spots to bogs, through which Cecil floored it lest they mire in, mud flying off wheels, clods thumping on the fenders. A long-eared squirrel darted across the track to scramble up a ponderosa tree. Gatsby. He deserved better.

“Why couldn’t I leave him alone?”

“Don’t go there Ceece.”

“I tormented him.”

Sandy watched Cecil for a long moment before he said, “Stop the truck.”

61 | Issue 48

Cecil slowed down, shifted to neutral. She nearly stood on the brake to halt the forward roll.

Sandy slapped the seat. “Sit by me.”

Cecil slid to the middle and Sandy turned to face her.

“Cecil, he fell. The sheriff nailed it. Gatsby fell. He didn’t jump.” He took her hand in his. “Are you so egotistical to think that just because a sober woman at a drunken party in the wilds of New Mexico didn’t buy his act—? How crazy are you, buttercup?”

Cecil didn’t answer.

“What we just saw—” He nodded a wavy strand of hair off his forehead. “I’m in shock, too. I just”—he shook his head—“react differently.” Then he said, “Let’s walk.”

“No!” she said. “I want out of this canyon.”

V Cecil slid back to the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition, released the handbrake, depressed the clutch, and wrestled the shifter into first. When she failed to humor the clutch, the old truck lurched forward a few times, then a few times more, and took off fast, rattling toward town. They each raised an arm now and then to shield faces from branches that whipped through windows. Driver and passenger bounced on the hard springs till Sandy hit his head on the cab roof. And Cecil slowed down.

When they reached Espiritu plaza, Sandy said to stop at the mercantile. “Need to buy the foreman gloves.”

Cecil watched him walk away. A man was dead. A not-so-bad man. And with all due respect for the wonder of life and how there ought to be a law against squandering one, Gatsby was gone. Entirely.

Was it so fragile? Strangely, since the soiree Cecil caught herself doing something weird: Praying.

And the same futile prayer: Forgiveness. Asking. Baloney! Pleading! Yet, as she watched Sandy enter the mercantile, she thought, what’s there to grant it? You got to scrounge inside the brain, worm around in slimy convolutions. Forgiveness? Hooey! Make it up, invent it.

Because the last act complete, we each crumble into trillions—a malodorous condition, rotting bodies feeding maggots—to survive as elements to be recycled for whatever. Hence, the fundamental: Deeds and words, done and spoken by us, to us—they get afterlife.

Blue Mesa Review | 62

Roots of Racism Allen Price

What they don’t tell you about experiencing racism as a six-year-old Black boy is that when one of your white elementary school classmates calls you a racial slur, they’re telling you that you belong at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And when you wake up the next day you expect to feel better, but you don’t. You open your eyes and feel the way you did the day before, only it’s today. Everything’s just like yesterday. And it is—underneath the brown skin that gives you your Blackness.

Some days you look in the mirror and see someone not like who they described, but someone who doesn’t see you as they do, and that reflection is the you who is you. Other days you look in the mirror and say something about yourself that’s in agreement with the racist insult your white classmate said, and that’s the you that’s not you. And maybe one day when you’re an adult that memory will be triggered, and that’s okay. That’s when you’ll cry and free your mind—tears from the fear that’s held you in that moment will release like the present, and make you realize how beautiful and amazing your Blackness is, and you’ll take back power of your feelings.

You’ll learn that the way you age is like the layers of a glacier: the lower layers are of continental origin while the upper are of snow accumulating, thickening similar to the way racism hardens the mind and body. And sometimes the layers splinter like the roots of a tree when lightning is loosened. You don’t always feel the trauma, not right away. It takes weeks, months, years, sometimes before the effects are felt. And when you do notice them, you try to move past, but they drop on you like a limb from a tree, fracturing your core being, exposing your suffering.

I wish I didn’t have a racist moment from my childhood. And I wish my brain knew how to un-brand it, because if my brain had known how, I wouldn’t have just stood there looking in a dazed, bewildered kind of way, struck solemn by the echo of my own hail as it rang unfamiliar through my interior when that white first-grade classmate called me the n word.

“Everyone,” our teacher, Mrs. Hickey said, sitting at her desk, “we’ve fifteen minutes before lunch.

You can take the time to do what you want. Just please stay in your seats.”

I sat at my desk not having something to do, having no friends as school had started the previous week. I looked to the right of me at a blond, blue-eyed boy playing with Matchbox cars. He had the yellow Tonka truck I wanted but my then-divorced mother couldn’t afford to buy me, so I smiled and said, “Can I play?”

He stopped moving the cars and stared. A thousand-year-long minute passed before he said, “You look dirty.” Then he poked my cheek with his finger and wiped it on the desk. “You take a bath?”

Is my skin dirty? I recall thinking. I don’t wanna have soiled skin. I wanna look like him. I wasn’t born thinking why do I look dirty, or why does he look white? I didn’t think anything about white skin or brown skin. I wasn’t even aware of colorism, or racism. Unfortunately, I was alone in that.

“It’s my…I’m not…I was born…” I said in a small voice that I continue to use whenever I’m around white folk.

“My parents told me I’m not allowed to play with—”

63 | Issue 48

“—Richard H. Clark!” Mrs. Hickey voiced angrily.

“Oooo,” the classroom said in a kind of chorus to a word I’d not heard before.

All of a sudden I felt sick. It wasn’t his words so much as the hostile, superior tone he used that made me feel awkwardly uncomfortable under the fear of such an imputation. I blushed from embarrassment; it was impossible that such a thought should not have sometimes entered my boy mind; but I had not selfinterested views; and now I remained silent with too much good taste to disclaim.

“You apologize to Allen right now, young man.”

“But my parents—” “—This instant!”

“My parents told me—” “—I don’t care!”

Why me, why me, why me, but Mrs. Hickey was insistent. My embarrassment growing, I can’t remember if he atoned. I still can’t explain; the vision appears like unwoven time in a tapestry. The words must’ve not carried their proper significance. Or maybe the words were said in such strange tumult that they wouldn’t bear recording. All I know for certain is that in my eyes his face remains. And in my head I was screaming how long until the bell rings, how long until I can take off my brown skin and throw it in the trash like a torn breviary. Nevertheless, the boy’s apologetic remarks must not have answered their purpose because when the bell rang, Mrs. Hickey said, “Richard, follow me to the principal’s office.”

That was the last encounter Richard and I ever had. When I went home that day, I told my mother.

She, Mrs. Hickey and the principal all had a meeting with Richard’s parents who said that that was how they were raising their children, so for the rest of the year, the school kept us away from each other.

I wanted to run away, so far away like an autumn leaf blowing in the far away sky, so little you have to close your eyes to see it. Instead, I internalized the echelons of white supremacy, learned not to be presumptuous as to expect equal citizenship, and self-erased my Blackness. Whiteness was what America viewed as normal, born to relate rather than be related with. And so as I aged, I grew like an evergreen, my branches wandering forth in every direction, planting my roots deep, gripping the ground tight, enjoying the nourishment, but always wondering, waiting, fearing a white man would cut me down.

Blue Mesa Review | 64

Authors Ciara Alfaro Ciara Alfaro is a Chicana writer, romantic, and descendant of magicians from Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, Swamp Pink, Best American Essays, and more. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and a BA in English from Colgate University. She lives in Minneapolis.

Katharine Beebe In the past, Katharine Beebe’s outdoor column appeared in the Albuquerque Journal, along with articles in Mirage, New Mexico Wildlife, New Mexico Business Journal, and other magazines and newspapers; her fiction has appeared in The Pinon Review and Permafrost. Past awards include the D. H. Lawrence Award in Short Fiction (winner) and the Lena Todd Award in Short Fiction (finalist). More recently, her fiction appeared in the 2016 Santa Fe Literary Review. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in the central mountains of New Mexico.

Elizabeth Cohen Elizabeth Cohen is a mama, dog mama , memoir coach, and writer who lives in Albuquerque, NM. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, is the author of the poetry books Bird Light and The Patron Saint of Cauliflower, and the chapbooks Wonder Electric and Martini Tattoo, among other works.

65 | Issue 48

Authors Tolu Daniel Tolu Daniel is a writer and editor. His essays and short stories have appeared on Catapult, Olongo Africa, Lolwe and a few other places.

Craig Foster Craig M. Foster’s writing has appeared in Jabberwock Review, J Journal, and The MacGuffin. He was the recipient of the 2021 Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize for Fiction and his work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Bob Hicok Bob Hicok is the author of Water Look Away (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). He has received a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, nine Pushcart Prizes, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in nine volumes of the Best American Poetry.

Blue Mesa Review | 66

Authors Terri Lewis

Terri Lewis has been accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and into juried workshops with Rebecca Makkai, Laura Van Den Berg, and Jill McCorkle. She was a finalist for The Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize (Nonfiction) and shortlisted for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. She has been published in Embark, Hippocampus, Denver Quarterly, and Chicago Quarterly Review among others. Her reviews for The Washington Independent Review of Books have been excerpted in LitHub.

Katey Linskey Katey Linskey is a writer with poetry out and forthcoming in The West Review, Emerson Review, The McNeese Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Cobra Milk and elsewhere. She spent eight years working in public health which continues to inform her work as a writer.

Guarina Lopez Guarina Lopez is from the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and grew up the Southwest and San Francisco. She currently resides on Piscataway territory in Washington, D.C. Guarina is a visual artist, storyteller, athlete, mother, and founder of Native Women Ride & The Indigenous Cycling Collective. Guarina’s work explores the intersections of Indigeneity, Environment, Politics and Culture. She is the co-director of Running is Prayer and the recently released Carlisle 200, a short documentary that shares the history of Indian Boarding Schools. Guarina’s writing has been published in magazines, poetry reviews, museum journals and zines. She is currently working on a book of short stories based on her life as an Indigenous woman living in the “white man’s world”.

67 | Issue 48

Authors Kristi D. Osorio Kristi D. Osorio is a writer and editor living in Arizona. She is the winner of the 2023 Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and the 2023 Sonora Review Mercy Contest in Nonfiction.

She is at work on a memoir that blends cultural criticism around violence in popular culture and her personal story as the survivor of a violent crime. She enjoys running, watching baseball, and spending time in nature.

Allen Price Allen M. Price won Solstice Literary Magazine’s 2023 Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize (chosen by Grace Talusan), and a finalist in Black Warrior Review’s 2023 Nonfiction Contest. He won Blue Earth Review’s 2022 Dog Daze Flash Creative Nonfiction Contest and Columbia Journal’s 2021 Nonfiction Winter Contest (chosen by Pamela Sneed). A 2024, 2023 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, his work appears or forthcoming in Five Points, december, Cutthroat, Forge Literary Magazine, African Voices, Zone 3, Post Road, Sweet, North American Review, The Masters Review, Terrain.org, Shenandoah, Hobart, Transition, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, River Teeth, The Coachella Review, Pangyrus, and others. He has an MA from Emerson College.

Michael Vargas Michael Vargas is a queer chicano from Southern California. He comes from a family of field laborers, mechanics, and other blue collar workers. He is a first generation college student, holding a BA degree in English and anthropology. He currently works as a Letter Carrier for the US Postal Service. His work has been published in The Fairy Tale Review and Ink & Voices.

Blue Mesa Review | 68

Artists JC Alfier JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.

Jeff Corwin Over 40+ years as a successful award-winning commercial photographer, Jeff Corwin has taken photos out of a helicopter, in jungles, on oil rigs and an aircraft carrier. Assignments included portraits of famous faces and photos for well-known corporate clients. Corwin has turned his discerning eye to fine art photography. He still creates photographs grounded in design. Humble shapes, evocative lines. Eliminate clutter. Light when necessary. Repeat. His fine art photography has garnered awards, national and international museum exhibitions, gallery shows, work in permanent collections, features in numerous fine art publications, radio and newspaper interviews and representation by several contemporary galleries.

Kathleen Frank Santa Fe artist Kathleen Frank travels throughout the Southwest/West, seeking landscape paintings vistas. Using vibrant hues, she captures light, pattern and a glint of logic in complex terrains. Exhibitions include Northwest Montana History Museum; UNM Valencia; International Art Museum of America; MonDak Heritage Center| Art & History Museum; St. George Museum of Art; WaterWorks Museum; Sahara West Gallery; La Posada de Santa Fe; Roux & Cyr Fine Art Gallery; and Jane Hamilton Fine Art. Press includes LandEscape Art Review, MVIBE, Art Reveal, Magazine 43 and Southwest Art. Art in Embassies/U.S. State Department selected her work for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Hiokit Lao Hiokit Lao is a 29-year-old self-taught artist from NYC. Through surreal, abstract, and vibrant pieces, she aims to create meaningful art that instills hope and positivity.Her art is a kaleidoscope of surrealism and abstract expression, a vibrant fusion echoing the various cultures that have shaped her worldview.

Inspired by her diverse upbringing and a deep fascination with the world, her work resonates with the colors, traditions, and social causes around the globe. Each piece is a homage to cultural diversity, intertwining social narratives and her own artistic vision. Employing different techniques, she creates pieces that offer dual perspectives, presenting dichotomous yet harmonious narratives based on the viewer’s orientation. When the canvas is inverted, a different narrative surfaces — a testament to the multifaceted nature of culture and perception.

69 | Issue 48

Artists Amuri Morris My name is Amuri Morris and I’m an artist based in Richmond, Va. I recently graduated from painting/ printmaking and business at Virginia Commonwealth University. Throughout the years I have acquired several artistic accolades such as a VMFA Fellowship. I aim to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience.

Ana Prundaru Ana Prundaru was born in Romania and presently lives in Switzerland. Alongside her legal career, she writes and illustrates for publications like Fugue, the Pinch, Third Coast, New Letters and North Dakota Quarterly.

Claudia Santos Claudia Santos (@claudiaexcaret) is a Mexican English Major, poet, photographer, and cultural gestor.

Her photographs have been published in Azahares Literary Magazine and L’Esprit Literary Review.

Blue Mesa Review | 70