If I Were Sam Shepard

every day I would take note of myself in my bathroom mirror with amazement. How craggy I am, I would surmise, just look at that steely glint in my eyes. My leathery hand fondles a coyote pup a jigger of whisky chills by my laptop. There might be a stranger bound-up in my closet, gagged with a sock and panty hose.

After my breakfast of oats and grain, out front of my doublewide, dust devils swirl on the featureless plain. I wonder if I’ll ever act again. I tug on my Stetson and rev up my Harley. There’s miles to travel before I unravel. I roar past the crossing with inches to spare—I conjure a western beauty— wild roses twined in her hair.

High desert music rises around me, against background rumble of motor and train, mourning doves hoot a sorrowful refrain. In the borrow ditch a diamondback shakes his maraca. Close-by a bullet ricochets with a whine. Whisk-broom sagebrush sweeps the asphalt, high above a redtail screams his warning, a crack! lighting smacks the hard pack.

A semi pulls up beside me, snorts like a bull, and bellows its horn. “Fuck off,”

I give the long-hauler the finger. If I had my six-shooter I’d blow out his tires. But I left my revolver back in the Rover, so I reflect on my mountain-cat nine lives. Time to head home, time for my lunch, I’ll finish that play, beat death to the punch.

Susan Chase-Foster

Mijas Above and Below

In a few flaps and flutters on that sultry Costa del Sol evening two azure-winged magpies might have krrr-krrred their way to the crest of the hill where locals promised cooling wind and a view worth blisters, bites, broken ankles.

But wingless and unable to intuit a trail we zigzagged a bottle of tempranillo and two pink plastic cups through a stone pine forest of vesper-thrumming cicadas, stumbled and scrambled past talus towers atwitch with scorpions, a squadron of ants transporting a millipede, and one six-inch rhinoceros beetle wobbling atop scree on his back.

Up and up we scrabbled over rock shards and rubble, cobble and clay to an abandoned ermita, an ancient chapel in the clouds. We sat in her shade on steps painted the color of our wine sipping above cascades of white casas plummeting down the Sierra like cubist waterfalls into a valley of violet marguerite ranging toward the great shark fin of Gibraltar glowing in the same mauve Mediterranean sunset as across water the parched mountains of Morocco.

Michael Christenson

Landscape Ablaze, with Nude

It’s 85 degrees in Juneau and I’m out on Zerelda’s porch, drinking hot coffee and somebody just lit a candle at my little cast-iron table. I understand the underlying reasoningit’s citronella and it’s s’ppose ta keep the bugs off but really this isn’t helping.

The coffee has a pinch of chili powder in itapparently they don’t use cayenne at this establishmentwhy not double down?

as the heat rises off the street in a shimmering mirage of waves.

Inside the restaurant is a painting of a woman, a model, and an artist, and I start to wonder if the line between art and artist isn’t wholly imaginary… Isn’t art just circling back to the same few obsessions we’ve always had, a process of expressing our preoccupations, recording the strange activities of the brain and depositing the results in the laps of strangers?

Looked at the right way, everything is a hallucination — I mean, it’s all just 3 lbs. of braided dough in a black box making it’s best guess as to what’s going on out here.

We’re all our own inventions, stories we make up trying to fashion the random shit the universe throws at us into outfits, until our clothes, already soaked in sweat, coated in the lamina of experience, like the layers of a painting, built up, stage by stage, begin to take on the resemblance of intention.

Look up in the sky and see three small lights flickering in the void, avoiding colliding, every man and every woman a star, and we can’t help but try to tie them together in some Grand Unified Narrative, it’s a miracle there’s only 88 constellations, Apophänia, pareidolia, synaesthesia, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response rubbing up against Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, mysterious innuendos and maroon roses enthusiastically stomp the chic chronicles. I love the noises that come out of her face.

Art, roughly, has three parts, anagrammatically, the Activity, the Realization, & the Testimony and an artist can love one phase and hate the rest, or make things alone in their room, at a desk or even at the table of an outdoor cafe, beads of sweat dripping onto notebook pages, partially blotting out sleazy emotions that will never be shared with anyone other than the ghost of Emily Dickinson.

I don’t go into the bistro to gaze upon the painting, to cool myself in soothing blues that breeze across an imaginary landscape, that’s not how this works. I’ve got my own imaginary landscapes to create, out here in this oppressive heat, where the words are threatening to burst into flames…

We all do.

Nancy Christopherson