Santa Fe Literary Review: Issue 2022 by Santa Fe Community College

SANTA FE

LITERARY R

Volume 17

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2022

Santa Fe Literary Review

SANTA FE

LITERARY R

Volume 17

●

2022

Faculty Advisor: Kate McCahill Creative Non-Fiction Editor: Tintawi Kaigziabiher Fiction Editor: Austin Eichelberger Poetry Editor: Jade McLellan Art Editor: Brittney Beauregard Editors at Large: Isaac Burwell, Patricia Dempsey, and Leslie Elena Nava With special thanks to Holly Beck, Deborah Boldt, Emily Drabanski, Tracey Gallegos, Andrew Gifford, Julia Goldberg, Sarah Hood, Shalimar Krebs, Shuli Lamden, Todd Lovato, Diane Ortiz, Laura Mulry, Rob Newlin, Val Nye, Amy Pell, Margaret Peters, Adam Reilly, Serena Rodriguez, Becky Rowley, Miriam Sagan, Kelly Smith, Laura Smith, Emily Stern, Roxanne Tapia, Nick Telles, and Jim Wysong. We’re also grateful to the folks at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the Santa Fe Public Libraries, Pasatiempo and the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Santa Fe Writers Project. Santa Fe Community College acknowledges that the grounds upon which the college is built are the unceded sovereign lands of the Pueblo Nations of Tesuque, Nambé, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Ohkay Owingeh, Cochiti, Kewa, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Zia, and Jemez. SFCC recognizes and respects Indigenous Peoples as the original and current stewards of the land upon which we create and publish. The Santa Fe Literary Review is published by the School of Liberal Arts at the Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Volume 17 • 2022

For the third consecutive year, we draft this letter to you, our reader, as the world waits

FROM THE EDITORS

for the COVID-19 pandemic to end. Our editorial meetings take place on Zoom now, and we reminisce about the layout meetings of “before,” when we’d lay our book’s pages onto the floor of Liberal Arts and spend hours drinking coffee and talking over each other, deciding where each poem and story and piece of artwork should live. These days, a hug from a friend still has the capacity to transform a week, and for the most part, books remain our most intimate companions, our comrades and our guides.

In an uncertain present, despair sometimes seems to surround us: Illness, violence, corruption, war. But spring is on its way, and the apricots here in the Santa Fe floodplains are blooming now. We’re reviewing the first thrilling proofs of the issue and examining options for a vibrant cover. In the early morning, the air smells of rain, and at night, the coyotes sing to a waxing moon. We are alive. This book is filled with the radiance of another year turned over, another set of lessons, another four seasons come and gone. Linked by this issue’s theme, “Resilience: Adaptation, Empathy, and Hope,” the stories, poems, essays, and artworks within these pages examine the pursuit of finding meaning in the mundane, the jubilant, the silent, and the sad. “Take your broken heart and make it art,” said Meryl Streep. Here in your hands, reader, you have it: A tattered year turned rich.

Santa Fe Literary Review

Volume 17 • 2022

Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise. Maya Angelou

Volume 17 • 2022

CREATIVE NON-FICTION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LAURA JIN MAZZARO Go Back Inside

INTERVIEW 7

SFLR Speaks with Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

KATHERINE GRAINGER Hiking With Willy and Grace

POETRY

EM BROUSSEAU Someone not Someone’s

MICHAEL MARK If You Step on This Word Barefoot

ARACELIS GONZÁLEZ ASENDORF At Fifty-Nine

SENECA BASOALTO catch all the fires

SUZANNE SAMPLES Passing Through

100

1 14

RENÉE M. SCHELL DUPLEX: WHEN I DON’T KNOW, I DREAM 23

FICTION

ADAM TAVEL Fox Wake

LAURIE ANN DOYLE Roses and Formaldehyde

TRIANA REID Lull

BRANDON KILBOURNE Creation Myth

JEN McCONNELL The Jumping-Off Point

WAYNE LEE Splinter

ANGELINA GEORGACOPOULOS Origami

LESLIE ELENA NAVA Can I Hold Your Hand?

FRANZ JØRGEN NEUMANN Sailing Lessons

ANANGSHA HALDAR A brown girl’s guide to skin

ELDER GIDEON #1

KATELYN ELWESS Impressions

LAURA PRITCHETT Bluestem

112

Santa Fe Literary Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON Poetry Dedicated to Strangers, Lives 60 and Others in Starry Disbelief

SHERRE VERNON Raise Me Up JAMES GIFFORD Quibble Commons

68 72

COREY MILLER No one talks about overpopulation 73 NANCY BEAUREGARD we don’t speak of the dying MIA NELSON Social Isolation CAMILLE FERGUSON Sonnet for Feel Good TAPAN SHARMA Old School CAROL CASEY Unravelling RON RIEKKI 3 People Died E.H. JACOBS Reading in Bed

76 80 85 86 90 92 96

SHAGUFTA MULLA Reverberations

107

MAIRA RODRIGUEZ 7 ways to hold on

120

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VISUAL ART GRACE HERMAN An Artist’s Statement

GRACE HERMAN Water Bearers

GERARD J. MARTÍNEZ Y VALENCIA An Artist’s Statement

GERARD J. MARTÍNEZ Y VALENCIA Stark

MADGE EVERS An Artist’s Statement

MADGE EVERS Luminous Herbarium

EVONNE ELLIS An Artist’s Statement

EVONNE ELLIS Lookout Mountain

LAUREN DANA SMITH An Artist’s Statement

LAUREN DANA SMITH Gather

HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT An Artist’s Statement

HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT Abstract Portrait: The Deed Room Diva

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LAUREN DANA SMITH Box Breath

EMEL KARAKOZAK Chaosmos 1

106

DAVID McCAHILL An Artist’s Statement

SHEENA CHAKERES An Artist’s Statement

110

DAVID McCAHILL Svínafellsjökull Glacier

SHEENA CHAKERES The Light Above

111

STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR An Artist’s Statement

DAVID McCAHILL Svartivoss

118

STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR Henry Box Brown

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

124

HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT Abstract Portrait: Fall Break

EVONNE ELLIS Under the Bridge

DESMOND TETTEH ATITIANTI An Artist’s Statement

DESMOND TETTEH ATITIANTI 1960s

EMEL KARAKOZAK An Artist’s Statemnet

EMEL KARAKOZAK Chaosmos 6

JOCELYN ULEVICUS An Artist’s Statement

JOCELYN ULEVICUS Loving

Santa Fe Literary Review

MICHAEL MARK

IF YOU STEP ON THIS WORD BAREFOOT If a bird crashes into your face while you’re reading this and you miss a word, will your mind put it in? What if you look up and that word is on a tattoo or bus so the poem moves, stopping every other block to pick up passengers still panting? Would you wait for it to return before reading on? Is here better here? If a body is buried beneath this word, would you turn the page afraid or cut into the paper with a scissor? Here, I’ll give you a new word with a light to crawl into.

Santa Fe Literary Review

GRACE HERMAN

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT Every ten seconds, waterborne illness takes another human life. Although access to clean drinking water is a basic human right, 785 million people lack access to it. Women and girls bear most of the burden to collect water where it is scarce. The average African woman walks four miles to haul 40 pounds of water each day. Globally, an estimated 200 million hours are spent each day collecting water. If these had been your circumstances, what would your life have been? Or, rather: if these women and girls had access to water, what could their lives become?

Volume 17 • 2022

GRACE HERMAN | WATER BEARERS Santa Fe Literary Review 3

LAURIE ANN DOYLE

ROSES AND FORMALDEHYDE

Late at night I heard my mother cleaning: the roar of the Hoover, her quick footsteps, then chairs scraping across the floor. The smells of Lemon Pledge and sudsy ammonia wafted into our bedroom. “Zach, do you hear something?” “Not really,” my boyfriend grunted. “Maybe.” “What’s happening?” “Beats me.” He rolled over and fell back asleep. My mother died six months ago. She’d had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, doctor’s appointments all the time. Last January, she beat back double pneumonia and was her old self again. Calling me two, three times a day, wanting me to come over and fix the TV, check the checkbook, dust. The last time she phoned she asked me where the aspirin was. I told her in a not-very-patient voice. Then, feeling guilty, I offered to bring over chicken soup. She was my mother, after all. And I, her only daughter, my father long gone. She pulled in a raspy breath. “It’s nothing,” she said, not sounding very happy either. “I’m fine. Really.” That night my mother died in her sleep. Quickly, the doctor said. Now here she was furiously cleaning my apartment. I heard her rustling on the other side of the wall, humming “Stormy Weather” and talking to the furniture the way she always used to when she rearranged it. “Not bad,” she said. Then, “Old friend.” I didn’t want to go see. Maybe her face was decayed and half-crumpled in, maybe she was just a bodiless voice, a vacuum running through air. Or maybe she looked the way I remembered her as a child, just five foot three, but huge to me, with a long pale neck and eyes that turned from brown to green in bright sun. In life, cleaning had not been her thing. Rearranging furniture, yes, but never cleaning. She’d sponge the kitchen counter in big fast circles, leaving behind a thick trail of crumbs. Before Zach and I moved her into the senior facility, I had to scrub congealed blood out of the refrigerator meat compartment. Now I heard my mother washing dishes with a vengeance at three in the morning. Something crashed. Then something else.

Volume 17 • 2022

I was out of bed in my pajamas and bare feet, heading into the kitchen. She had pulled out my garbage can and was standing next to it holding up a Blue Onion plate to the light. Soapy water dripped down her purple Playtexgloved thumb. “That’s my plate,” I said. She smelled like roses—her favorite scent—and formaldehyde. “Well, I was the one who gave it to you.” My mother flung it in the trash. “What are you’re doing?” “It’s cracked. And I can’t have you eating off cracked plates. For one thing, they might cut you. Another, they’re unsightly.” She looked at me long and hard. Her hair was back to its original dark red. Two spots of mauve stood out on her blue-white cheeks. She wasn’t wearing the practical blue pantsuit we had buried her in, but turquoise slacks and a bright gold sweater still covered with Esmeralda’s cat hairs. My mother dragged on her Pall Mall until it glowed. Apparently, she had decided in death she could start smoking again. The long ash tipped but didn’t fall. “It was just chipped,” I said. “Chipped is bad enough.” Her voice had that stubborn Fresno twang it could get. She dunked a juice glass in the foamy water with the same intense energy I remembered. Growing up, when my mother turned all her attention on me, life seemed magical. She’d take me to her office on Van Ness and introduce me around like I was the smartest kid in the world, then over to Golden Gate Park where we’d float silver balloons up into the eucalyptus until the treetops glittered. But long gray months also went by when she ignored me, babysitters picking me up right after school and staying way past dark. Even my mother’s toothbrush was missing, away at the office. As adults, we fought and made up on a regular basis. Did I tip the waiter at Lori’s Diner enough? Had she taken all her pills? Was this truly the best parking spot? But we shared a closeness, too, from hours spent in City Lights bookstore where she’d head off to history, and me, to art, and holidays ice skating in endless circles around the rink in Union Square.

Santa Fe Literary Review

“Why are you here?” I asked. After my mother died, memories kept coming out of nowhere: her fingers setting a warped picnic table in Yosemite, the salty smell of Rice-A-Roni, her red-lipsticked lips opening to the green olive in a martini. Sometimes I’d forget she was dead and pick up the phone. But lately, I don’t know, whole days went by when I hardly thought of my mother at all. I’ve finished grieving, I told myself. Her purple fingers held up another heirloom plate to the light. “Stop!” I reached out and touched her arm. My hand didn’t go through. Her skin felt cool and firm, something between damp clay and moist cement. Smoke drifted around her face. She put down the plate and stubbed out the cigarette in an old rosebud ashtray she must have dug out of a box somewhere. My mother reached into the cupboard and pulled out a mug with Emmie! and two green hearts that she’d painted for my eighth birthday. “Pretty good,” she said, “don’t you think?” Suddenly I was crying, tears spilling down my pajamas and staining my cheeks. “Oh, honey,” my mother said. She placed her cool hand in mine and pulled me out into the dark night.

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LAURA JIN MAZZARO

GO BACK INSIDE

When I was five years old, I got a pink bicycle, a hand-me-down from one of my sisters. I wanted to become a professional cyclist. One day, I took my bike out to our building’s parking lot. It was early, but the tropical air was already thick and salty. I hopped on my bike and began riding. I zigzagged along every row of parked cars, launched down a small ramp that ended with a sharp right turn, zigzagged some more, and rode up the ramp to start all over again. I tried to lean my bike to the side as cyclists did on TV. The temperature was rising. In the afternoon, my mom yelled from the fifth-floor apartment window, calling at me to eat something. After two bites of a sandwich and a sip of water, I ran back to work. The next thing I knew, my hand was laying on something wet. I opened my eyes and saw my speed ramp, sideways. I was laying on a puddle of car oil in an empty parking spot. My bike was on the ground. My knee was covered in blood and oil. I screamed. My older sister brought me upstairs. “I fell asleep on the ramp,” I said. “I told you to eat more,” my mom reprimanded me as she scrubbed the car oil from my scratches. I always wanted to explore nature. As a child, I’d spend recess alone, in the bushes, pretending that my metal ruler was a machete. A child therapist asked, “If you could do anything, what would it be?” I answered, “I’d ride my bike in nature.” That was called bicicleta de montaña, she explained. Later on, as a teen, I’d explore small pieces of forest between buildings in my hometown, imagining that I wasn’t in the middle of a city. After work, I change into my biking clothes and shimmy my bike out of the trunk of my Honda Civic. Several men walk by, each one asking if I need help. “No, thanks,” “No, thanks,” “No, thanks.” I ride to the narrow dirt trail behind a café. My front tire wiggles back and forth as small rocks try to throw me off balance. I start softly singing one of the made-up songs that have been stuck in my head for a few years now: “At first I was afraid, I was petrified. I kept thinking I could never ride without you by my side.” I try to ride up a rocky step, but my cheap suspension bounces me back and I fall

Santa Fe Literary Review

onto a sharp cushion of locust shrubs. I grunt, shake the twigs off, and give myself a pep talk while getting back up: “It’s OK. It was soft. We can do it! At first I was afraid, I was petrified…” I am breathing hard and pushing myself. Sometimes I fall harder and cry; I get back on the bike, or I walk next to it, tears streaming down: “Pobrecita. That hurt! We can walk, it’s OK. That was scary.” In the end, I go back to the car, which is too hot to enter. My entire body tingles. Tomorrow I’ll make it up that step. My partner walks into a movie theater and looks around the crowded lobby. He lingers on a face, losing interest in the rest of his surroundings. He’s watching a confident man in his late twenties, light skin and eyes, wearing expensive adventure clothes. “Do you know him?” I ask. “No,” he responds, still watching the man. I go order some snacks as my partner finds his way to the mystery man. Coincidentally, an acquaintance knows him and introduces them. His name is Peter. My partner asks where he’s from. The response is usually a well-known outdoorsy town: Anchorage, Bend, Burlington, Aspen, Seattle. Then they start naming people that they know in each other’s towns. “Do you know Kelsey? She’s a ski patroller in Aspen,” or “Have you met Phil? He is an environmental scientist in Anchorage.” They don’t stop until they find that person that they both know. They always do. In this case, Peter from Seattle once dated my partner’s old housemate’s sister. I walk over. “Where are you from?” Peter asks me. “I’m from Venezuela.” I ask what brought him to Santa Fe. He is quick and disinterested. Our friend, Jess, walks over. “Where are you from?” again. “Maine.” Peter smiles and asks, “Have you been to the Common Ground County Fair?” To which Jess exclaims: “Yes! I volunteer there all the time!” They bounce around names of people they know in Maine. I go find a place to sit while waiting for the movie to start. At 6 a.m., I start getting dressed: a thin Costco thermal top and bottom, ski socks, leggings, a long-sleeve cotton shirt, a thin merino wool

Volume 17 • 2022

sweater that I also wear for important meetings at work, two itchy wool sweaters, an old rain jacket, and thick ski pants that were almost free but are three sizes too large. By the time the two-hour drive is done, I am sweaty beneath all the layers. My ski boots, which I left in the car from the previous ski day, are frozen. My left foot won’t go in the boot. I push hard, holding my breath to numb the pain, and finally my foot slides in. On the chairlift I begin to shiver. I try to focus on the playlist that I keep on repeat, mostly reggaeton, which feels warm and happy. All day I go up and down, learning how to stop, turn, and slow down. Every time I’m back on the lift, I take a bite of a sandwich that I keep in my pocket. If I stop to eat I will get cold, and then I can’t warm up again. At four, the ski area is closing, and I catch the last chair up. Once at the top, I am alone. Most people are back in their cars or at the resort bar, having twenty-dollar nachos and twelve-dollar beers. I calculated it: if I do this three times a week, which I can with my student schedule, I will spend less money this winter than if I went out for food or drinks with friends twice a week. I remind myself that I can afford it. Until ten years ago, mountains like these were like dragons and unicorns for me. Now, I am alone on a peak in the middle of the Rockies. I look around at snowy peaks as far as the eye can see. I remember that I get to bring myself here as often as I want, and I get goosebumps. I take my time skiing down. A ski patroller skis down past me and waves. As I walk by the bar on my way back to the car, I see the groups of people drinking and eating. Clearly, I found a loophole and snuck in somewhere I shouldn’t be. A classmate says he is going skiing and asks if we want to carpool. He wants to save the planet. During the drive, he tells me, “Women always want me to teach them how to become better skiers. I don’t have time for that.” I struggle to get into my boots and he informs me, “You can’t leave your boots in the car overnight. They are softer when warm.” At the top of the mountain, he turns to me and says: “This is the only thing

Santa Fe Literary Review

I’ll teach you.” He puts his hand through his ski-pole strap and grabs the handle, reciting: “The bunny goes through the hole and grabs the carrot.” Then he skis off. He wears only three thin layers of clothing. I watch him add and remove layers all day. I can’t figure out why he does this, but I know that I cannot ask. It takes another three years for a romantic partner to share that the key to staying warm is to avoid getting sweaty. I ask my partner why outdoorsy people never seem to want to talk to me or learn about me in the way that they try to learn about others. He responds: “They like you! They are just afraid that they may say something offensive if they ask you questions.” After skiing, we drive to a house where around fifteen people are spending the night, mainly employees from a prestigious outdoor company. A coworker introduces me to someone that I have met at least three times before. “Nice to meet you,” she says. “Good to see you again,” I respond. She is already walking away, but I see her confused frown. I sit on the couch and try to get to know the person next to me. I keep getting one-word answers. In the middle of our chat, she turns her back to me and sits quietly. One person is loudly talking about how bad they are at skiing, and how unworthy they feel because of this. Others pitifully agree. I ask how long he’s been skiing, and he admits, “Ever since I can remember.” After a bit, I discreetly tell my coworker that I’m going to head home. Everyone turns to me. “No! Don’t leave! Please! Stay!” I am confused, but I sit back down. I try to talk to someone again, and they walk away while I am asking them a question. I attempt to leave again, and again they want me to stay. After a few more times, I finally leave. “Let her leave if she wants to,” one person says to another, bitterly. I was going to ski tomorrow, but I decide that I don’t want to.

Volume 17 • 2022

Three of us visit a glacier in Denali National Park. We find a massive crack in the glacier and walk into a room with shiny ice walls. Up close, I can see tiny bubbles and small blobs of mud that, I imagine, have been trapped for thousands of years. Behind the bubbles, the ice goes on until it fades into darkness. The light shining from the outside gives everything a bright blue glow. Immediately, I think of movies like Ice Age, which depict similar caves in what I had assumed was an exaggerated style, meant to capture children’s attention. Now I realize that the style isn’t exaggerated at all. “Wow! It’s just like TV,” I blurt out. Immediately, both other people respond in an upset tone. “What? Absolutely not!” one of them argues. “Are you kidding? It’s exactly the opposite,” the other one disdainfully agrees. I hear their message loud and clear: This magic belongs only to those that can see it in person. For the rest of the hike, I walk in silence. We pass a tub of Talenti back and forth while watching an episode of Jane the Virgin. My cat rolls on the ground, trying to get our attention. My partner tells me that a group of his friends are going on a bike ride that weekend, to a place where I’ve been meaning to ride for a while. “Should we join them?” he asks. I want to say yes, but the excitement that I felt about going to this new place has been replaced by a wave of anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. His question triggers the urge to spend the weekend at home, curtains closed. I remind myself that being outside is what I wanted before knowing how to do it right. These adventures began in my head. They weren’t what people around me were doing, so I did it alone, on my little pink bike, or with my ruler machete. I realize that I still don’t match those people around me, so my options are alone, or not at all. For now, and until it gets too lonely, I will keep going alone. I tell him that I will go for a solo ride to a different place. “But have fun!” I reply.

Santa Fe Literary Review

GERARD J. MARTÍNEZ Y VALENCIA

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Art invokes our senses and reactions, whether they be expressed through emotions, sound or contemplation. I look at the everyday surroundings and capture the portrait presented before me and explore the message and how the experience can be articulated either through lens, pen, note, or movement. As a lyrical photographer, I capture images that invite the viewer to share their unique idiom to describe emotion, reflection, introspection, and musing.

Volume 17 • 2022

Santa Fe Literary Review

GERARD J. MARTÍNEZ Y VALENCIA

STARK

SENECA BASOALTO

CATCH ALL THE FIRES

It is not for you to catch all the fires that find their flight to Guernica, the cinder settling on the palette after being coughed from the lung // this was your home, that which was swelling on the pasture of each breath you struggled to unearth how many hours were lost with the gazania now sharing the afterlife with the woven blanket laced by the crooked fingers of your sleeping grandmother who did not wake for the bombs when perched in a nest between your heart’s mouth and the yellow azulejo hatred will always find its way to steal what pieces are loose and falling from your flesh, but you must close your eyes when the flesh of those you love find fire, now you learn agur // or else your memory will stay behind to roam the roads where you once fell in love with boiled clay beneath the sun here, smell how the spelt becomes the bomb, but do not fix yourself before you flee // only the soul cannot be replaced, zure bihotza erre egingo da zer esanik ez

Basque: “zure bihotza erre egingo da zer esanik ez” your heart will be burned no matter what

Volume 17 • 2022

KATELYN ELWESS

IMPRESSIONS

In the morning it had rained, but by afternoon the weather had become unusually warm, leaving the air thick and damp. At dusk, Bill and Claudette returned from their walk with the twins. Bill parked the wagon on the lawn before lifting the children out of it, then joined his wife on the back porch. He pulled his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and offered her one. She shook her head and slipped off her sandals. He lit his own, drew it to his lips, and inhaled. “Quitting again?” he asked, smiling. Matilda grabbed a box of jumbo chalk behind him while Arnold stumbled over to the pile of leaves Bill had raked the day before and sat down. Matilda called for him to color with her, but he didn’t answer. Claudette wrapped her arms around her knees. “So what if I am?” “God help us all,” Bill said with a chuckle. He flicked his cigarette. His hands were weathered and stained with motor oil from the day’s work. He ran a small repair shop in town. He worked six days a week, but his hands perpetually looked like he’d just been under an engine. Claudette stared at them, frowning. She had quit smoking twice before. The first time was when three of the other nurses at work quit, about six months after Bill and Claudette began dating. She’d also started a juice fast the same day. She’d tried her best, but after three days, Bill found her with a menthol in one hand and a half-eaten Hershey’s bar in the other. The second time was when she found out she was pregnant with Arnold and Matilda. Claudette had a perfect pregnancy. She took prenatal vitamins and slept at least nine hours each night. She cut out sugar and ate more whole foods. She practiced yoga each morning, read every parenting book she could find and attended Lamaze classes. Even the delivery was seamless. After thirteen hours of labor and forty-six minutes of pushing, Claudette was cradling her new baby boy and girl. Pregnancy was bliss, she decided. The most difficult part was telling her husband. “Mommy,” Matilda called from the sidewalk, “I drew a cow!” “Chicken!” Claudette called back. To Bill, she said, “She gets them mixed up.” Bill snorted and lit another cigarette. “How?” “She’s six,” Claudette said, her voice sharp. “It’s not that big of a deal.” Still, she

Santa Fe Literary Review

made a mental note to find Matilda a worksheet on identifying animals the next day after their piano lesson. She turned to watch her children. Arnold made mud brownies by stirring dirt and water with a stick. When he brought the stick to his mouth, she jumped from her seat and said, “No, sweetie! Don’t eat that!” “Maybe he’ll be a chef,” Bill said and laughed a slow, wheezing laugh that sounded like air being let out of a tire. Claudette gave him a look. He said, “What? It runs in the family.” Claudette covered her mouth. The air was still heavy and moist, and it made her feel sick. Matilda ran from across the lawn and sat close to her mother. “Mommy, my chalk broke.” “We’ll try to get more tomorrow,” Claudette said. “No! Now!” Matilda yelled. She stood up and stamped her foot. She wore a pair of purple slip-on sneakers that lit up when she jumped. Claudette rubbed her temples. “It’s almost bedtime.” Matilda jumped to the ground and faced her mother with crossed arms. “No bedtime! No bedtime!” Claudette watched the pinks and blues and yellows of Matilda’s shoes light up the lawn around her. She looked down at her own bare feet and rubbed her eyes. She put her hand back over her mouth, trying to will away the bile crawling up her throat. She regretted eating the tuna steak Bill had made for dinner. She regretted many things. “It smells like barbecue, don’t it?” Bill asked. He squashed the butt of his cigarette under his Birkenstock. “Do you smell that?” Claudette pressed her knees together. “Don’t mention food, please.” Bill sat back down and put his arm around her. “You okay? You’re not getting sick, are you?” Claudette shrugged him off. She stood up and walked to the back door. “I need a drink.” She poured herself a glass of water, then returned the pitcher to the top shelf in the fridge. She took small sips, staring at the photo pinned under a magnet on the fridge door. It had been taken at a park. Claudette had intended to use it for the family’s Christmas card that year, but it didn’t turn out quite right. In

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the picture, she and Bill stood behind a two-year-old Arnold and Matilda with strained smiles. The twins were dressed in matching baby blue sweaters and khaki pants. Claudette wore a blouse in the same shade of blue. Behind them was a large pond. Arnie was looking at something out of frame and Matilda was waving her hands, making them look blurred. It was the only decent shot they’d managed to get that day. When Bill and Claudette had married eight years earlier, she never expected to be in this position, let alone twice. She’d been told she couldn’t have children of her own. Initially, she was heartbroken. Every time she passed the children’s aisles at the store or saw the baby pictures her friends posted of their children online, she felt an awful hopelessness that she thought would never pass. She took a leave of absence from the hospital. For a while, she stopped getting out of bed. “I’m worried about you,” her mother would say while she smoothed out the comforter or folded a shirt that had been discarded on the floor. “Maybe you should see someone. A therapist. “Before this gets worse. Just consider it, Claudette.” Bill had tried to console her, too. He’d cook her favorite meals and bring her roses he’d bought from the convenience store. He’d whisper how much he loved her as they fell asleep and joked about how much they would save on diapers and college funds. But he had never really wanted kids, and the news of Claudette’s suspected infertility wasn’t his loss. Once she finished her drink, she set the glass in the sink and surveyed the kitchen. It was a disaster. Bill’s family owned a steakhouse in the city. To their dismay, he opted to become a mechanic instead of taking over the business. Still, he’d managed to inherit both his father’s talent and his knack of turning a kitchen upside down. The kids’ plastic Disney plates sat piled on the table, still covered in half-eaten fish sticks. On the counter were bottles of olive oil and catsup, seasonings, spatulas, and butter. Claudette carried the skillet to the trash can and tossed the rest of the tuna. Then, she went to the sink, turned on the faucet, and began scrubbing the pan. When it was clean, Claudette placed it on the drying rack and put the condiments in the fridge. When Bill and Claudette were first married, she loved to bake. On her days

Santa Fe Literary Review

off, she would make cakes and pies and custard while Bill made their dinner. If the couple had a weekend off, sometimes Claudette would make desserts for the restaurant. Afterward, the two would spend the rest of the day shopping or watching a matinee. After the twins were born, she gave up baking. She gave up a lot. She no longer had time for her book club or weekly brunches with the girls from work. Her mother’s calls went unreturned for days and she stopped her spinning classes. She cut her hours to one shift a week, and by the time they had their first birthday, she quit the hospital altogether. Bill started working extra shifts at the shop to make up for the loss. Outside, someone screamed. She looked out the kitchen window. Bill roared like a bear and chased the twins around the yard. Matilda giggled, but didn’t try to run. Bill picked her up and spun her around. Arnie hid behind a tree. Claudette returned to the porch. When Bill saw her, he stopped mid-spin. “Are you feeling better?” he asked. Claudette’s stomach jerked. “I’m fine.” Matilda hugged her father’s leg. Arnold wandered across the yard. His shoes had come untied. He sat on the grass and began tearing a leaf into tiny pieces. Bill yawned. “I’m not. I think I pulled something. I need a beer.” He peeled Matilda off him and went inside. Matilda sat next to Claudette and grabbed her hand. “Mommy, les’ play Hide and Seek.” “Not tonight,” Claudette said, pulling away. “It’s getting late.” Matilda stood up. “I’m hungry.” “You already had dinner,” Claudette said. Her stomach churned. She closed her eyes and sat still. Matilda jumped up and down, rattling the porch. “I want strawbabies!” “Strawberries,” Claudette said, but her daughter didn’t hear. Bill returned with a bottle. “You ate all the strawbabies this morning, Monkey.” “Berries,” Claudette said through gritted teeth. “I think it’s funny,” Bill said. He took a drink. Claudette stood and crossed her arms. “You need to correct her.” “Why?” “So she knows what’s right.” “She’s six,” Bill said, shrugging. “It ain’t that big of a deal.”

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Matilda crawled on to her father’s lap. Bill took another sip. Across the yard, Arnold pulled out grass by the handfuls. Claudette called him over, but he didn’t answer. “I’m going to shower and lie down,” she said. “All right,” Bill said, frowning. He had a look that Claudette hadn’t seen since she told him she was pregnant with the twins. “You don’t look so good.”

As she worked the shampoo through her tangled locks, Claudette felt her stomach churn again. She placed her hand on the tile and took a breath. Once the nausea subsided, she finished rinsing her hair, then applied conditioner. It had been over a week since she took the test, and she felt no more prepared to tell Bill than the day she found out. She imagined his jaw going tight, the way it did when Matilda had accidentally knocked over his T.V. during a one-sided game of Tag with Arnie. She imagined him getting up from his seat and storming out, slamming the door behind him. She imagined him never coming back, leaving her alone with more children. Before she could stop it, Claudette doubled over and vomited, holding the faucet for balance. She wasn’t sure what she wanted him to do, exactly. She hadn’t decided how she felt about the news herself. Motherhood was hardly what she expected. Her twins were beautiful: two darkhaired, brown-eyed children with Bill’s dimples and her cheekbones. But, they were peculiar. Arnold almost always kept to himself and he still couldn’t write his name. Claudette worked with him for weeks, but it took four days to even get him to hold the pencil correctly. When he finally did write, the letters came out as harsh, disconnected lines. His inability kept Claudette hunched over her laptop late into the night researching specialists, but Bill seemed unbothered. Matilda was a different story. She needed. She needed Claudette all the time—her attention, her help, her affection. She asked questions and demanded to hold her mother’s hand and wanted to show Claudette the new trick she’d learned or the picture she’d colored. She threw loud, frantic tantrums nearly every day when Claudette dropped her and her brother off at school. She often ended up in Bill and Claudette’s bed after a nightmare.

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Part of Claudette worried she was selfish, but she feared what troubles the next baby would bring her. What if it, too, was as distant as Arnold, or as needy as Matilda? What if it was developmentally delayed or disfigured? Could she love it as completely as she should? She didn’t know. After Bill seemed to calm down about the news of her pregnancy, Claudette asked him what they should name the twins. “Oops and Whoops,” he answered. She didn’t ask him about anything else regarding them after that. In fact, she made virtually all the decisions about the children since they’d been born. She chose what they ate, how they dressed, what school they attended and which pediatrician they saw. She enforced their nightly routine, took them to music lessons and gymnastics, and helped them with their homework. Once her hair was rinsed clean, she listened for her husband and children. The house was silent. They were still outside. She began shaving her legs. She decided when she was finished, she would dry off, get dressed, and tell Bill the news, no matter how ill the idea made her. She nicked her leg with the razor and held her finger over the cut. A few minutes later, Claudette finished and returned to her bedroom. As she lathered her skin with lotion, she pictured his reaction for the millionth time. Maybe he would shout at her right there in the backyard, in front of the twins and any neighbors who might be in earshot. Maybe he would tell her no. No, they couldn’t have another child. They weren’t ready for it. They didn’t have the money. He was done. They had two—two more than he ever wanted—and he was done. Claudette reached for her pajamas, her UCLA t-shirt and a pair of shorts, then paused. What if Bill went so far as to tell her to end the pregnancy? She hadn’t considered the option. They would have to go to the clinic in the city. It would be best to leave the children with Bill’s parents. Perhaps they could spend the rest of the day alone. They could go sight-seeing and have a quiet dinner. On the ride home, they could stop for ice cream with the twins. She dressed quickly, then dried her hair with her towel. She headed back to the porch, combing out the tangles with her fingers.

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Bill stood against the railing, watching Arnold and Matilda spin in circles in the yard. His bottle was on the porch next to his feet. Claudette put her hand on his back. “I need to tell you something.” He jumped in his spot. “What’s wrong? Are you feeling better?” “No.” “No?” “Just listen,” Claudette said. She grabbed his hand. “I need to tell you something.” “Okay,” Bill said. Claudette looked at the twins. Arnold had stopped spinning and now sat on the grass, blowing on a dandelion. Matilda pulled at his arm, trying to get him to chase her. “I’m pregnant.” There was a long pause. “You’re kidding.” Claudette shook her head. “I’m sorry.” Bill said nothing. His face was blank, but his hand gripped hers tighter. She put her other hand on his shoulder. After a beat, he asked, “Sorry?” “I know it’s unexpected,” she said. “But we’ll figure something out, won’t we?” “Of course.” He pulled her close to him. “Of course, we will. This is great, Claud.” Claudette’s head shot up. “It is?” “Sure, it is,” Bill said, hugging her. He smelled of sweat and rain and the cologne she’d given him for his birthday. She thought she might collapse. “But you hate kids.” Bill’s laugh rumbled in her ear. “Well, yeah. Other kids. Not our own.” When Claudette didn’t answer, Bill pulled back from her. “Jesus. You don’t think I hate our own kids, do you?” Claudette’s cheeks reddened. “Of course not.” Bill chuckled and pulled her back to him. He kissed the top of her head, then called for the children to come inside the house. Grabbing her hand, he said, “It’s great news, Honey. Really. We’ll have to celebrate. Claudette? Are you okay?” “It’s just my stomach.”

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“Are you sure?” Bill asked. In the yard, Matilda skipped away from her brother. Her hair fell in her face. She looked like her mother when Claudette was around her age. Claudette remembered being in the fourth grade. Her hair was a little longer and lighter than Matilda’s, but she had the same wide brown eyes and rosy cheeks. She stood on a stage at a spelling bee. She wore black Mary Janes and an itchy turtleneck. Claudette couldn’t recall what words she was asked to spell, or how far she placed. She did remember the way her voice wavered into the microphone, and the cold temperature of the auditorium. She remembered the thrill of the competition before it eventually became serious and bleak. She remembered the chocolate bar her mother bought for her afterwards. She remembered Saturday barbecues, games of Hide-N-Seek with the neighbors’ kids, and baking with her grandmother after school. Matilda picked up the stick Arnold had been playing with earlier. She drew it to her mouth and sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Claudette’s stomach turned again, but she ignored it. She focused on the little version of herself dancing around the yard. Matilda’s shoes flashed rapidly in the growing darkness, her step so light she hardly touched the ground.

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RENÉE M. SCHELL

DUPLEX: WHEN I DON’T KNOW, I DREAM My daughter painted her childhood room pink. Millennial pink, she said. I thought it sweet. But, twenty-something, she wasn’t about sweet and I couldn’t hear what her body called out. I played the blame game. I called out those who’d given her an unsafe place to sleep. So thin, her body an unsafe place to sleep. Sharp, all angles, her hips and elbows scared me. The skeletal knobs of her knees scared me. I heard a voice crooning: You could lose her. It wasn’t weight she wanted to lose But something else neither of us could name. She’s out of that room now, changed her name. I dream the lost colors of love: Childhood. Pink.

Santa Fe Literary Review

MADGE EVERS

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work originates in the soil with materials I grow or forage. Using various media, including the cyanotype and pastels, but primarily mushroom spores, the powdery substance that resides in the gills and pores of mushrooms, I make imagery that is informed by mycology and influenced by the inherent transformation of growing cycles. When released in nature, mushroom spores land on nearby soil, leaves, or rocks, always with the intention of survival. In my process, these tiny reproductive particles fly or float, then alight—my medium for works on paper. Thus, the spore print, a mushroom identification tool, is adopted in form and medium to create works on paper that explore mycorrhiza and photosynthesis. Spore images contain organic abstractions and patterns that conjure a natural world both strange and deeply familiar. “Luminous Herbarium” is made with the bioluminescent spores of Jack O’ Lantern mushrooms (Omphalotus olearius), and depicts chervil, echinacea, and yarrow. It’s part of the New Herbarium, my series that interprets the practice of pressing and preserving flora, initially inspired by the Herbarium Emily Dickinson created when she was a child.

Volume 17 • 2022

Santa Fe Literary Review

MADGE EVERS

LUMINOUS HERBARIUM

ADAM TAVEL | FOX WAKE for Madara Mason still wronged I think this vixen’s bark on nights of frost I cannot sleep her throat here in our dying year quavering acres newly ours I doze and trace her phantom roam from woods to fallow pasture weeds I’ll never till to plant but mowed in raw July when my sneakers squished with sweat as sunburnt I climbed down to touch the bushy eyebrow of her fur intact no blood the mouth agape the razor pearls of teeth her legs outstretched and sprinting in the dirt what unseen wound she kept through shovelfuls I cursed to make her disappear and now such yowls their desperate searching vacancies have come starlit to beg back bones to pant one final hunt and claim the only body she could dare consumed beyond a gown of flame

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KATHERINE GRAINGER

HIKING WITH WILLIE AND GRACE

COVID-19 was everywhere. Civil unrest was on TV; the upcoming election was contentious. For the past six months, my son had been under incredible strain because I am constantly exposed to COVID at my job. Then, just when our vacation started, our water main broke. Despite his autism, Willie was trying to cope, but this was too much. He had to get his mind off the strife around us. Denny Creek Trail seemed a perfect hike. We began with our usual squabble over water. Willie wanted six bottles in each backpack. I wanted two. He rolled his eyes in frustration. “We will get dehydrated! Why don’t you get that?” I tried to reason with him. Willie was unable to negotiate. Finally, I instructed, “Put the excess water bottles in the cooler.” This would be a cranky and challenging day, but I kept our plans because I don’t want my thirty-four-year-old son to give into his fears and use autism as a crutch. I wanted to teach him to keep our commitments. As I drove, Willie’s head was bent. He huffed and puffed as he flipped through pages of CDs. He couldn’t find what he wanted. His flushed face meant he was ready to give up. “Go slower, Son. It’s in there,” I said softly. “It’s not there. I know it.” “Take your time. Look at one page at a time.” I knew the importance of keeping everything the same, including what music was played first in the car. Willie quickly found the CD. He let out a loud sigh of relief as Ricky Martin sang with the rhythm of rapid drums. Willie’s head bobbed faster than the beat. I bit my lower lip. He’s out of sync. It’s going to be a hard day. We’ll both need a bit of grace. Once parked at the trailhead, I decided to be proactive since I’m prone to asthma attacks and inhaled the medicine deep into my lungs. “Okay, I’m ready.” Willie was already walking up the steep incline. I followed. Boulders and tall trees surrounded the path. “Hey Willie,” I began. “I don’t want to talk, Mom.” He continued without glancing back. Willie usually has a lot to say, but not this morning. I didn’t respond to his rude tone. “Ok, no problem.” Although the medicine was helping, I paused to catch my breath. Not too bad for an out-of-shape sixty-one-year-old woman. “Using the inhaler

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before the hike seems to be working. What do you think?” “Yeah.” I have dealt with my son’s autism for over thirty-four years. I know him and his behaviors. I knew the day was going to be hard, but I had no idea how hard until we had to cross a river on two skinny, unstable logs. Willie tested the first log with his hiking stick. It sank a few inches under his weight and rolled. “Son, I think we should try another way.” Ignoring me, he stepped on it. My breath caught as I watched. Light-footed, he ran down its length. With a quick hop onto the next log, he made it to the other side. Well if he can do it, so can I. I took two steps. “This thing is moving!” I took another wobbly step. The log rolled and I almost fell into the river. The older I get, the more I don’t like gravity. “Will, come help your mom.” My son sat, staring at the ground. “I don’t want to fall in the drink!” “Nope, you do it yourself.” “Watch how you speak to me, young man.” The log bobbed. I got off. “Wait till I get across,” I muttered. The grace I’d hoped for went screaming down the mountainside. As I searched for a way to cross, I saw a mother and a young girl. “My daughter can help you,” she offered. I smiled sheepishly and nodded. A long-legged girl in a black tee shirt came splashing towards me. “I feel so idiotic,” I said, placing my hand on her shoulder. “At your age I would have slogged through and hiked in wet jeans.” As I adjusted my straw hat, I thanked her, and then waved to her mother. “Don’t forget to use hand sanitizer,” I said. COVID. It’s always there. Even on a hike. My son sat on a rock, pouting. “Why couldn’t you help me? I raised you better than this.” “You have to do it yourself and you have to do it my way.” This isn’t like Willie. The last time he was this combative was back in middle school, when he didn’t understand what I was saying. Then Willie got up and walked away. I stomped behind him. “Oh really!”

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I felt like thunking him on the head with my hiking stick. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Since when did you become Mr. Control Freak?” My empathy for my son was gone. Willie kept walking. I slammed my curvy stick down. “Ignore me, ha! Wait till you need help.” “You always help me,” he said in his deadpan voice. I stopped in my tracks. Because of his autism, I do have to be there for him every day and night. We continued up the mountain in silence. The green branches rustled in the gentle breeze. I stopped to listen. The soothing sound and fresh air calmed me. I followed Willie out into a massive meadow. Willie kept walking. I stopped and took in the scene before me. Dragonflies with blue and orange wings landed on purple stalks that reached up into a blue sky. Surrounded by the sweet scent, I took a deep breath. Birds flew, and butterflies danced around us. I was enchanted, but my son didn’t even glance up. He moved quickly towards the forest. The mountain teemed with life. I watched a dragonfly sitting on a flower, looking content. “Willie, stop! You’re missing nature’s show.” “No.” He marched off. Exasperated, I hung my head. Where is grace when I need her? The dragonfly turned towards me. “Do you have children?” I whispered. “You could whack them good with a tail like that.” The dragonfly flicked its wings as if to say, Get going, woman. He needs you. I sighed and trudged after my moody son, leaving behind the magic I’d hoped would help him. Willie was still in a foul mood when we arrived at Keekwulee Falls. When I started snapping photos of the falls, a man offered to take our picture. Willie moaned. I leaned over and whispered, “If you don’t stop the attitude, I will make your little life miserable for eternity. You know I can do it, so you might as well knock it off.” Apparently, that did the trick. Willie stood next to me as the man took our photo. We both thanked him. While we ate our lunch, I said, “You know, Willie, you need to tell me what’s going on. You’re missing a lot. This is a beautiful hike. Nature shows

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how it lives in the moment. You didn’t look once as we walked on the mountainside. You are choosing to stay in a bad mood.” Willie’s shoulders sagged, then his face crumbled. In a tumble of words, he said, “Nothing has gone right, Mom. There are too many changes this year. I can’t keep up. It makes my head hurt. Plus, the day is starting to warm up and we won’t have time to see the second falls.” He watched people playing in the Keekwulee Falls swimming hole. “I hate this stupid sinko-pee syndrome.” The year’s challenges seemed endless. Willie had been diagnosed with vasovagal syncope. If it’s too hot, his heart slows, and he faints. “That’s understandable,” I began. “But that doesn’t excuse you from being rude. Your meanness is uncalled for. Did it make your day happy?” “No.” He looked down at his hiking boots. “Only you can change the day,” I spoke gently. Although Willie was somewhat tempered, I was already contemplating our next possible crises. Would Willie pass out from the vasovagal syncope? Would his autism cause him to shut down completely? I envisioned lifting my son’s limp body by his wide shoulders. Or grabbing an ankle and dragging him down the mountainside. Stop! I wiped the images from my mind. Willie looked at me, “The sun is rising, Mom. We have to get back to the car before it really warms up.” He sounded unhappy. “We’re both learning to adapt. We’ll come back on a cooler day so you can see the second set of falls and perhaps enjoy the meadows.” I smiled. “What do you say?” He laughed and looked relieved. “Okay, I think I would like that.” “Let’s go.” I got up and he followed. Willie talked nonstop on our way down. He pointed to flowers in the meadow. He was enjoying his surroundings. When we arrived at the dreaded river crossing, my son ran across the slippery logs. I found a place where the water was lower and hopped from rock to boulder until I made it to the other side. “Waaaahooo, I made it! Take a picture!” “No, you were supposed to go across the logs like I did. You didn’t do it right.” “Hey, I never tell you how to figure out a challenge. I resent you’re doing that to me.” I walked over to the river, smiled broadly, and took a selfie. Willie started to turn away.

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“Look at me,” I said sternly. “Don’t ever speak to me that way again. You will not be mean and try to control me. I don’t do that to you: I encourage you. Which you did not with me. Am I clear?” One hand was on my hip while the other held a death grip on my hiking stick. Grace was nowhere in sight. Willie looked at my face for a good minute. I knew he needed time to process. After a few minutes, he responded, “Okay, Mom.” We began our walk again. For the next hour, Willie spoke about his favorite video games nonstop. It wasn’t that he ignored what happened; he just didn’t want to get overwhelmed again. We finished the hike on a good note. Would we discuss it later? No. Hard days like this are best dealt with in the moment. On the way home, Willie slept peacefully. Just as I started to chastise myself for not extending grace when Willie was so challenging, a gentler voice within spoke: You are the mother of an autistic adult and that’s no easy road. It requires patience, figuring out a positive outcome on the fly, and the ability to try to achieve goals you set. When I thought about it, Grace was with us throughout our day! She was there when I inhaled medicine so I could breathe. She was there when a young girl helped me across the river and blessed me with peace in those life-filled meadows. She kept me from my worst impulses. Grace helped me find a way to break through Willie’s wall. He was calm enough to enjoy the meadow on our way back. She helped me celebrate my small victory after the final river crossing. Then, just as I was about to lose my temper in the final hour of our hike, Grace helped me contain my anger and showed me how to respond to my son’s insolent behavior. Whether we’re facing a difficult life challenge or struggling on a hike, our bond grows stronger. Though we may not always realize it, the struggle is real for us both: he trying to navigate his day and me guiding him. I had to remember that I have been through enough of these days to know Willie grows from experience and by extension, so do I. This was Grace’s final blessing of the day.

Santa Fe Literary Review

EVONNE ELLIS

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT Evonne Ellis seeks to share light and the story of place in her photos “Under the Bridge” and “Lookout Mountain.” She works as a fire lookout in Oregon. The last two fire seasons have burned millions of acres of forests across the state. Ellis has encountered days when she can’t see more than five miles out from the lookout’s location; meanwhile, her viewshed was filled with smoke. This has helped her appreciate what she can see. There is no light without darkness. The duality of light and darkness generates radiance and reflection. This is what Ellis looks for behind the lens of her camera as well as beyond it. Her work is driven by depictions of hope in the landscape.

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EVONNE ELLIS | LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN Santa Fe Literary Review 33

TRIANA REID | LULL I went up the mountain, on wheels, to look at the first snow. Round in patches. If there were more words then cold & wet & white surely, I would use them now. Brittle, perhaps? Heart-quickening. Soon enough the weather will be so full there will be no need for descriptors and as always, the snow will blanket all there ever was.

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BRANDON KILBOURNE

CREATION MYTH Spiraling headlong in each other’s gravity, we plucked loose strands of creation for the fuse to wind around our binary orbit— From among a trove of fish prototyped fin upon spine in barren niches, anatomies radiating in light-starved depths. From clods of pure iridium and iron crater-smelted from meteorites, atoms smithed in sidereal meltdowns. From stone feathers splayed around bones of birds’ newfound wings, petals gathered for a gorgon’s pressed rose. From the Mesozoic’s monsters rescued from chthonic strata, vertebrae stacked to breach the empyrean. From among a red panda’s hairs, a flint to strike against your eye’s umber, spark kindling fulgurous constellations. Curating the debris of spent epochs, we ignited our inaudible bang, genesis with the thunder of butterfly wing beats— Pair nebulous in the primordial bliss, we firm our bodies with a deifying flame, two wreathing coronae, overbright and dissebling.

Santa Fe Literary Review

JEN MCCONNELL

THE JUMPING-OFF POINT His cannabis delivery was late. Again. It was Virginia knocking at the apartment door, bringing Thai food for lunch. “How are you feeling?” She gave him a deep kiss on the lips. “Better now.” He pressed her against the door, squashing the bag of food. “I can take a later flight,” he whispered. She nudged him toward the couch. He opened a box of noodles, sniffed, then set it on the scuffed coffee table. “No appetite?” she asked. “You can have mine.” He texted another question mark. This dispensary was always late, but they were the only place that carried his strain in edible form. She lifted a potsticker with chopsticks. “I could come with you. Meet your mom.” “There’s better ways to spend a weekend than Arizona in the summer. It’s hot. Like hell’s asshole.” “You don’t want me to go?” She put her hand on his knee and moved closer. They’d only been dating a couple months. Too early for parental interaction but time had suddenly accelerated. The news—cancer, aggressive—had steered their relationship onto the fast track. “It’s just, would you want to meet her if I hadn’t…if I wasn’t…” He sighed. “Maybe next time, okay?” There was a knock on the door. Tyler made the quick exchange, feeling better already. He chewed an edible during the ride to the airport. The rest were packed into a one-a-day gummy vitamin bottle. His medical marijuana card was in his wallet. While cannabis was now legal in California, the laws in Arizona were murkier, so it was just easier to be prepared. By the time he took his seat on the plane, Tyler was relaxed but alert enough to watch the safety demonstration. Dying in a plane crash, rather than of cancer, seemed like a joke God would play. The idea of death, to Tyler, was like moving to Nebraska. He wouldn’t see his mom or friends

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anymore. He wouldn’t be in San Francisco—or anywhere—anymore. That idea he could handle. It was the slow-motion images he had to push out of his mind. His body in a coffin. His clothes hanging on a rack at Goodwill. His mom, alone. Tyler rubbed his sunken stomach, finally sensing a rumble of hunger. He was down twenty pounds since he was last home. Once he started chemo, his hair would fall out, the doctor told him. Tyler would shave it before it got that far. Maybe Virginia would shave off her long golden hair, too. The blast of the late afternoon heat hit him like a backhand. People moved slowly, fanning themselves with hats and newspapers, anything to move the air. “Hell would be a vacation from this,” Tyler said to no one in particular as he stood in the rideshare line. He’d talked his mom out of meeting him at the airport, hoping their reunion would be less intense on her own turf. That idea evaporated when she opened the front door. “You’re so skinny,” she gasped. “Oh my God. You didn’t tell me…” Any other day, he would tease her for being so dramatic but he just hugged her, letting her tears stain his damp T-shirt. Finally, he ushered her into the house, the air conditioning giving him instant gooseflesh. She quieted down, but the panic in her eyes remained. “It’s all that tofu you eat,” his mom scolded later as she set out the taco bar trimmings: black beans for him, ground beef for her. “Tofu didn’t give me cancer, Mom.” He pictured a dead, roasted chicken come to life to fight off traitorous tofu tacos. For years he’d done everything right: avoided sugar, didn’t smoke, and ran three miles every other day. He didn’t have to open the fridge to know his mom had cooked far more than the two of them could eat. Pot roast with mushroom gravy. Lasagna. Linzer jam cookies and German chocolate cake. Forget cancer. He’d have a heart attack by the end of the weekend. After dinner, Tyler took a cold shower. As he toweled off, his calf began to spasm. “Ow, ow, ow.” “What’s wrong?” His mom pushed open the door.

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“Mom! Jeez.” Tyler clutched the towel around his waist. “It’s just a charley horse.” He sat on the tub edge and massaged his leg. “Are you sure? Did the doctor tell you that would happen?” “It’s just a cramp. Anyone can get them, you know.” The look on her face stopped him. “Mom, I’m sorry.” He stood up and kissed her cheek. “Everything’s going to be okay. It’s just…Do you mind if I get out of here for a little while? I’ll see if Motor’s around.” She nodded and they both pretended she wasn’t about to cry. By the time Tyler walked from the house to Motor’s truck, any relief from the shower had evaporated. “You look like shit,” Motor said as Tyler closed the rattling door. “Well, you know. Cancer.” “You’re pale as fuck. What, you inside jerking off all day?” “You still driving this piece of shit?” Tyler pulled a beer from the cooler at his feet. Along the highway, subdivisions gave way to strip malls and then arid open space. “Nothing’s changed here.” “Isn’t that why you left?” “Don’t start.” Tyler gulped the icy beer, though the smell turned his stomach. “Fixed your mom’s garage door the other day. Made me take home a whole goddamn icebox cake. How’d she take seeing your skinny ass?” “About as well as you think. How’s your sister?” This got a glance from Motor. “When I told her the news, she said she forgave you.” “So cancer—that’s all it took?” “Fuck off.” Motor pulled onto a dirt road and drove the familiar route up to the Gorge. After parking, Tyler carried the cooler while Motor lifted a set of golf clubs from the truck bed. They walked up the well-worn path among the shrubs and cacti toward the clearing. In the distance, voices of climbers carried through the hot evening air. Halfway there, Tyler had to set down the

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cooler and wipe the sweat from his face. He didn’t exactly miss the desert but the oppressive heat and kicked-up dust did feel like home. Tyler was eight the first time he camped with Motor and his cousins at the Gorge. At some unspoken signal during lunch on the first day, the older boys jumped up and dragged Tyler and Motor to the jumping-off point and tossed them over. Before he could scream, Tyler was in the water. When they surfaced, Motor was laughing but Tyler got out and ran off down the path. He refused to go camping again until high school. When they reached the clearing, Motor put down the golf bag and knocked a tee into the dirt. Tyler kicked a few rocks off the cliff. Across the expanse of water, a few boats were nosing back to the dock. “Looked a lot farther when we were kids.” “You were such a chicken-shit.” Motor put a ball on the tee. “Fore.” “Still am.” Tyler stepped back as the ball flew by. “So. How are you?” “Other than vomiting and insomnia?” Tyler selected a club and placed a ball. “Could be six months, could be six years. They just don’t know. Mine’s an unusual case, the doctor said. He also said I was exceptionally healthy.” “Except for the whole cancer thing.” Tyler swung as hard as he could, feeling the satisfied smack of the club face against the ball. “Except for that.” “You’re killing your mom, you know.” “Is that right? You fix one garage door and you’re an expert on my mom?” “I see her a lot more than you do.” Throwing the club down, Tyler stomped into the scrub brush to take a leak. When he came back, Motor was finishing a beer. He opened a fresh one and handed it to Tyler. “Don’t be so pissy,” Motor said. “Get over yourself and move back. What’s so goddamn special about California anyway?” Tyler picked at the beer label. He thought about Virginia. The coding job he could do from anywhere. The rent he could barely afford. “Not just my mom…” He turned to look at the pink sunset over the faraway canyons. They’d been friends since grade school but Tyler could count on one hand

Santa Fe Literary Review

the times they talked about death or love or fear. After Motor’s dad died, they hit balls silently at this exact spot every night for a week. “I need to…I need to live more. Longer,” he said. “You know? I just don’t want to be dead.” Motor clinked his bottle against Tyler’s. “I don’t want you to be dead either, Ty. And if you want to talk about that, I’ll do my best. But it’d be a lot easier if we were in the same state.” They hit balls off the cliff long after dark. It was past one a.m. when they pulled up to the house. “Maybe I’ll text Amy,” Tyler said before getting out of the truck. “Did she really forgive me?” “Just don’t be an asshole.” Opening the front door, Tyler was surprised to see the kitchen light on. “Mom?” “Out back.” “Be right there.” In the bathroom, Tyler splashed water on his face and grabbed the vitamin bottle. If anyone needed to mellow out, it was his mother. She was on the patio, stretched out in a lounge chair, an empty wine glass on the table. He pulled over the other lounger and sat sideways on it. “Mom, I think you should have one of these.” He took two gummies from the bottle. “It’s edible pot. Don’t shake your head. It’ll help calm you down.” She waved him away. “I’ve already had some wine.” “Did that help?” She paused, then held out her hand. “What’ll it do to me?” “You’ll just feel relaxed. I’ll have one, too.” They watched the stars in silence. “Did you know they move the holes on golf courses?” Tyler asked. “So players don’t get bored.” His mom didn’t answer so he raised his head to see if she was asleep. She turned to look at him. “You know what we haven’t done in a long time, Ty?” Her voice sounded far away. “Mini golf. Remember that place with the windmill?”

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“They have this thing called a divot plugger,” Tyler said. “Or maybe it’s a pivot digger. Anyway, this thing digs a new hole and they use that sod to plug up the old hole.” “We called it goofy golf when you were a kid.” “It’s just absurd. They don’t change a tennis court or ball field because people get bored. Change is fine, but some things should stay the same.” “Is that why you never played with Motor? He won all those awards.” He turned on his side to see her better. “How do you feel?” “Good. Maybe? I can feel my heartbeat. Is that normal?” “Motor was always a natural at golf. I liked books better.” “You were always a bookworm.” Tyler looked at his mom’s face in the soft light from the kitchen. The furrows on her forehead were gone and her eyes were shining. He wondered if she’d worry more or less with him in the next room. She began to snore. If he got up to grab a blanket, she’d wake up, so Tyler just lay back and let the cool night air settle around him.

Santa Fe Literary Review

LAUREN DANA SMITH

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Lauren Dana Smith’s body of work explores the climate of internal place, magnified through the layering of unexpected yet familiar corporeal forms, the emotional saturation of color, and the stillness of memory. Smith’s feminist approach tests the personal body boundaries we choose and those we don’t. Interested in honoring the depth and narrative of the American Southwest and its parallels to personal and ancestral memory through a contemporary lens, Smith’s work analyzes color, texture, climate, and existential presence in a departure from the familiar iconography of traditional Southwestern art. Smith’s process-oriented approach is sensitive to the psychology and politics of land and body. A viewer may feel that they are simultaneously hovering above the work and suspended inside of it. At play is a tension between our inner landscapes and outer environments: a constant rupture and repair. A visual artist and art psychotherapist shaped by many years of prior clinical experiences in hospitals and intensive care units, she brings arts-based perspectives into the dialogue around living, dying, healing, and wellness in the United States. Her paintings forge inquiries into the impact of personal and collective trauma and transformative experience on the psyche. Smith’s work ultimately invites a path through our intimate interior spaces and along the exterior boundaries of physical form, the natural world, and human consciousness. Each work considers the bodily experience of the land and the mirror it provides to us in times of calm and times of chaos.

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LAUREN DANA SMITH | GATHER Santa Fe Literary Review 43

WAYNE LEE

SPLINTER The splinter went in deep, couldn’t be tweezered or needled out completely. A sliver of it stuck in a crease of her middle finger, reddened, swelled, a yellow crush of pus trying to push it out, her pain mounting by the day. Her husband was her foundation, her frame of reference, until one day he fractured and fell, bits of him scattered on the ground, others driven like shrapnel into the flesh of her skin, her heart— no, farther—to the bone. Sometimes all we can do is trust in the body, in the ways the body heals, how we heal, though never all the way. There’s always some remnant left inside, some jagged shred of loss and, on the outside, some scar to remind us our wounds are signs of what we’ve survived, of how we’ve been broken and reassembled, the cracks now part of the design.

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EM BROUSSEAU

SOMEONE NOT SOMEONE’S

The first time he calls me his girl, we’re in the laundromat, and I’m watching as he folds a black t-shirt, talking with his phone tucked between neck and shoulder to an unknown caller. I’d love to, man, but I’m with my girl. Cool if she comes? He looks at me like I know who he’s talking to—an expectation too big for the short time I’ve known him. He wants a sense of familiarity before it’s earned. He wants me to be his girl before I know him. Alright. See you then, brother. The phone falls from shoulder to laundromat table, clattering. He keeps folding, relaying no details about the plans. I finally break the faux familiarity and ask what I’ve been roped into. I don’t ask why he called me his girl, and I don’t ask why he asked if I could come, but not if I wanted to go. There are a lot of things I don’t ask. We’re going fishing. The caller is his friend Nate, who’s bringing along his girl Caitlin. It’s a grey fall day, and just the swing of the laundromat door sends the cold seeping into my bones. I imagine how cold it will be by the water. I don’t like fishing. Or new people. Or being cold. I don’t say any of these things. There are a lot of things I don’t say. Caitlin is very nice. Very sweet. She comes with a blanket and two cans of hard seltzer, ready to sit and watch. The girls don’t fish; they observe. This is the routine: the men fish and the girls sit, watching without interrupting, existing without making an impression. To be someone’s girl is to accept that you are not there to be yourself. So we sit and watch, and occasionally the men toss us a line. Nate comes over to offer Caitlin the rest of his cigarette. Myles flashes an ignorant smile, too excited to bring me into this world to consider if I want to be here. Fishing is fruitless. It’s too late in the season to catch anything, and the cold is getting under everyone’s skin. Myles packs the tackle box; Caitlin shakes out the blanket. I stand awkwardly with Nate, who reminds me of my high school principal– tall, authoritative, old. So how old are you, again? he asks, inspecting me as if I were a lure, shiny and bright. Twenty-two, I say. Quiet. Embarrassed. He nods. Nice. There’s nothing left to say. I begin to realize he asked my age as if he already

Santa Fe Literary Review

knew it. I begin to realize why the bad weather wasn’t important—that it wasn’t the fish being shown off. I begin to realize a lot of things. My most vivid memories of being eight years old are Sunday mornings. My mother would putter around the house, cleaning up Cheerios, putting mix CDs my brother and I burned into cases, folding already-folded throw blankets. Finding anything to do that wasn’t taking me to watch my father play softball. My brother always left with my dad. He loved watching the men crack open eight a.m. beers and practice their swings, seeing his future through the bright optimism of a child’s eye. I didn’t like the men, the cold, the pressure to play with the other kids. Instead, I brought books and hid behind my mom. My mom kept score for the team even though the league paid a tired high schooler to be the official scorekeeper. She didn’t like socializing with the men’s girls–not because she didn’t like them, but because their lives were so immensely different. While much of the team was around my parents’ age, the other men and their attendees differed wildly from my own family. By 28, my mother had been married for a decade with an eleven-year-old and an eight-year-old. That, plus some social anxiety, made for a lot of difficulty talking to the players and their partners. She went right from child to mother and wife—this was all she had ever known. It felt disingenuous to sit with small-town girlfriends and talk about things she had never experienced—break-ups and bars, spontaneity and shopping. Everything she had, she gave to us. So it wasn’t a dislike of the girlfriends that made her stay in her camping chair with her scorebook. It was an inability to relate, to talk about boyfriends and if they’d propose, if they’d have kids. They came enthusiastically, because being included in their emotionally unavailable boyfriends’ softball league meant they wanted their girlfriends to watch them. And to them, that meant something. My mother resented this, or perhaps she didn’t understand it. She never had a choice, so she didn’t come enthusiastically. She waited until the last minute, dreading the expectation to be someone she was not. But she did show up, because it was easier than saying no, than fighting. They did fight about it, sometimes, and I would lay awake and listen.

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So you don’t care about me? That’s not it, you know that. Oh, so you don’t want to support me and hate my friends? Everyone else comes. You think you’re better than them? What could you be fucking doing that’s more important than this? Then came the silence. And after the silence, Sunday morning, my mother and I toting camp chairs and a book and something quiet, something heavier, to the field. In December, Myles quits his job and goes to visit a friend in Texas. It’s been two months since the fishing outing: two months of being a tagalong toy, biting my tongue. Amidst the outings, fights that reminded me vividly of lying awake in my childhood bedroom. His trip coincides nicely with finals. I had mountains of unfinished papers; he never wanted me to leave his apartment. Not to see my friends, not for class, not for homework. I did try, sometimes. I’m going out to dinner with Cristina and Abbey. Oh, you are? Are you bringing me? No, it’s just going to be the three of us. Then you aren’t going. I never go out with my friends without you. You don’t need to go out with your friends if I’m not there. So I would cancel. Sorry, I would text. Headache. Lying. I spent a lot of time that fall hiding things. I was ashamed of how much of myself I was losing, betraying, by staying. Myles’ trip is a chance for his insecurities to bloom into full-fledged accusations. He spends two hours texting me insult after insult; I spend two hours looking at my friends, wondering where I could even begin, wondering if they would ever forgive me. Myles, uh…. I start, then stop. They stop ragging on their D-list movie and turn. All eyes on me. And it all comes out, months of yelling, accusations, the real reason I could never go out. This is the most I have shared with anyone–I drown them in a tidal wave of anxiety and shame.

Santa Fe Literary Review

Their eyes grow wide. They say what I’ve always known, but it’s different coming from someone else. There’s a common refrain when you struggle with selfcompassion: What would you say to a friend going through this? And as I hear my friends–I don’t deserve to lose myself, I am more than this, I am more than him–I think this is what I would say to a friend going through this. To anyone. How this is exactly what I’ve said to my mother. I fell in love when I was nineteen; it made me simultaneously stupid and enlightened. I spent a lot of time thinking I knew more than anyone about love and life, and sometimes I was right. One afternoon, at the tail end of August, my mother and I take a day trip to the malls. I grew up in a small town, and the nearest shopping plazas are thirty minutes away. We spend the afternoon at the Target Dollar Spot, enjoying a bad chain restaurant, and returning ill-fitting clothes at Kohl’s. In the Kohl’s parking lot, my mother gets a text from my father. She doesn’t answer it, and she doesn’t tell me what it says. We sit, the engine idling, the A/C overwhelmingly loud. I wait. He wants me to come watch the game at Bobby’s. All the wives are there. I nod. I understand her reservations without needing to be told. I’m modeled after her, a wallflower—when I took the Myer Briggs assessment for a sociology course, the professor told me she had never seen someone so introverted. I wouldn’t want to spend my Sunday like that, the men watching the game and the women watching the men. My father doesn’t get this, even after two decades of marriage. I think about my partner, the nights we spend driving around and listening to soft music, not watching sports. Wouldn’t it be easier, I ask, to be with someone who spends their Sundays like you do? I don’t like sports or going out, and Sam doesn’t like sports or going out. It works. My mom looks at me, then out at the parking lot, the muscles in her face softening as though they, too, are giving up. Sometimes, she says, when you’re young, you don’t know you’re incompatible until it’s too late.

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Even though I have known for much of my life that my parents were unhappy, it was never said out loud. It was a fact to me like any other. Their first date was at the mall; they were married in June; they were unhappy. It was the implicit undercurrent in our household, sometimes stronger, sometimes at bay, but never gone completely. This was the first time she had admitted that the unhappiness was not lost on her. It had been part of her so long that she couldn’t imagine herself without it. The incompatibility was to my mother the same as it was to me: a simple and objective fact. She had two children; she loved sunflowers; her and my father were fundamentally dissimilar. All of these things true. All of these things unchangeable. All of these things too late to reconsider. It is too late for my mother’s second thoughts, but it is not too late for mine. I think back on Sunday mornings spent reading and hiding. I think about being nineteen, stupid in love, smart enough to know when it felt right—because I had spent my whole life watching when it was wrong. When I was younger, I wondered how my mother could stay when staying meant sacrificing herself. What I did not know yet was that there is a world of difference between knowing when it’s wrong and knowing what to do when it’s wrong. A number of things can trap you. Your empathy. Never seeing healthy relationships growing up. The rush of being loved; the fear of never being loved again. Growing up in a family where you stay, even if that means losing yourself. It is indescribably hard to leave when you have no blueprint. But a number of things can free you. A support system with people who keep you anchored. A reminder of a conversation five years ago, a Sunday morning fifteen years ago. Remembering who you are, or who you were. Who you want to be. Because above all, I had only ever wanted to be my own person. I spent so long watching my mother exist as an extension of my father—and then I found myself in the same place. So I decided to act on what my mother never could. I am many things—my strength, my kindness, my love for sleeping late on Sundays. But most importantly, I am not someone’s girl—I am just someone, enough just as I am.

Santa Fe Literary Review

HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am a folk artist who likes to create abstract artwork that shows a broad range of human emotions in an abstract manner. Typically using ink on paper, I start by drawing multiple eyes (usually more than two). Using intuition, the rest of the portrait comes to life with webs of interconnecting bold lines. I then use multiple colors of ink to align with the expression evoked by each abstract portrait.

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HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT

ABSTRACT PORTRAIT: THE DEED ROOM DIVA

LESLIE ELENA NAVA

CAN I HOLD YOUR HAND? Just for a few seconds? Just to know what our skin feels like together. I won’t flinch when our hands are intertwined. To see if the scars on your hands and the ones on mine, a puzzle, fit. Will you pretend? That you want what I want, that our hands tell our secrets, reveal their stories. Just for a second pretend, our hands are still burning with warmth. I know I don’t like to be touched but I promise I won’t flinch.

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ANANGSHA HALDAR

A BROWN GIRL’S GUIDE TO SKIN

for all my brown sisters who were made to feel less because of the color of their skin

“Don’t drink too much coffee, it will make your skin dark.” “Don’t stay out in the sun for too long, it will make your skin dark.” “Put some haldi, beta, it will brighten your skin, give you that glow.” Brown skin, an archaic papyrus heirloom that has borne the history of silent strength, naked pluralism, often, is dragged out—made to be a subject of shame, for simply being the way it is: brown. Creams, lotions, prospects for a suitable groom—all hollowed aspirations, sold at half prices, if you are represented by the lighter shades on the color wheel.

Discounts and dignity withdrawn if you are dark. A few unsolicited remarks by snarky relatives served at lunch; dinner shall have more appetizing starters. Bland, run of the mill hors d'oeuvre for us brown girls—much like the overplayed remixes on the Sunday radio.

Magazines—Vogue and the Bazaar—talk of inclusivity. But the world of glamour cannot report on ground zero reality. One that discriminates, berates you for the things you cannot change—your skin colour. One that perpetuates, often through mothers, aunts, well-meaning neighbours, a sardonic mishmash of feigned open-mindedness and hypocrisy.

Santa Fe Literary Review

Melanin, a thing of beauty, is the arch nemesis of a brown girl. You go on a shopping spree to buy the best sunscreens, scarfs to cover your face against the morning sun, wear the ugliest sunglasses as a badge of protection—to save your skin not from pollution or the cancerous ultraviolet rays, but to prevent the epidermis from turning into the rich alluvium that covers your garden.

I am guilty of this too. Brainwashed, subliminally.

That fair is rare; fair is beautiful. Brown is average; brown is common.

Now it’s up to us to change the narrative. With intrepid hopes, to make ourselves and others believe that brown is worthy. Worthy of being more than a flimsy tool of exotic aestheticism. Worthy of being worn with pride, in every possible variation. Brown is a revolution, enduring and calm-provenience of the deep roots of centuries of culture. Brown is the color of earth—the giver of life.

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ANGELINA GEORGACOPOULOS

ORIGAMI

I. Fortune Teller Pick a color. My soft, nail-bitten finger pointed to blue. Which number? Seven, my favorite. My classmates crowded in as Lisa moved the paper seven times then unfolded a flap. You will have….eleven children. Everyone squealed; our oracle had spoken. Maddie would have five, Rachel would have three, and Sadie would have none. In those days, we thought of children not as people, but as names. Buttercup, that’s what I would name the first of the eleven, Cinnamon the second. After the bell rang, we went back to math class, trailing in the smell of chalk and wet grass. I watched as Lisa played over and over again under her desk, cupping it around her hands as she looked at the results. She wouldn’t show anybody what she had gotten, and after playing so many times, she must have had varied results. Mother to many and to none; later I would learn about Schrodinger’s cat and think of her. To have no direction, like a ghost ship adrift at sea, would have been unthinkable. Go to college and get a job, then get married. I was following a red string into the future, moving paper and picking numbers. Everything was within my grasp, given to needy hands by privilege and circumstance, until it wasn’t.

II. Rabbits He couldn’t have known about my aversion to rabbits, yet the gesture seemed infinitely malicious. Even with synthetic fur and a fabric tag sticking out of its rear, the stuffed rabbit held an ominous presence that reminded me of the one from my childhood. I had been visiting a friend at her house when she took her male rabbit out of its cage and let it roam as we sat cross-legged on the carpet. I picked it up and put it in my lap and that’s when it began humping my leg. For a moment I was frozen, trying to figure out what was happening, then I screamed. Rabbits disgusted me the more I learned about them. They bred endlessly, in a way that reminded me of holding up a mirror to another mirror and watching the display of infinity. Rabbits could outbreed wolves and rifles. They could probably outbreed humans, too.

Santa Fe Literary Review

I’d always thought of birth like this: a little piece of the soul gets snipped away to make another soul, like a starfish whose lost arm grows into another starfish. What would be left of the rabbit mother after so many litters and so much has been snipped away? The only explanation is that they are machines, like the male rabbit who hopped robotically towards me even after I shook it off my leg. They have no names, only a genetic combination to identify them as different creatures. When my friend’s rabbit died, her parents bought her a new one that looked identical. She was none the wiser until they jokingly told her the truth years later. Something about the species was offensive. In a week I would stuff the rabbit down the garbage chute and watch as its colorful pink form disappeared into the abyss.

III. Paper Cranes Taped to the rabbit was a card that said, “Get Well Soon,” with a picture of Winnie the Pooh holding a thermometer in his mouth. I ripped it in half and threw it in the trash. Unless I became a starfish, the hope for that was none. I began to have dreams of rabbits, ones where they would crowd around me and rub their paws across my legs. I had one dream where a mother rabbit gave birth and I was forced to watch as she unhinged her jaw and her bunnies crawled out, one by one, like spiders out of a sack. Waking up in a cold sweat, I clutched for a body, only to find nobody there. His departure had made me hyperaware of the emptiness in my stomach. I prodded the flesh with my finger. It was a desert; no flowers would ever grow there. Upon realizing I was a lost cause, he’d picked up his scythe and rake and abandoned his land. All I had been left with after the appointments and tests and treatments was a gas-station gift and Sorry, I can’t do this. I was seconds away from a supernova and that’s when I started folding the cranes. It came easily. Fold, unfold, fold again, and flatten out the crease. I worked like that for hours, as sunlight sat heavy on my brow and the moon gazed down, a sliver into another world. My hands became robotic, worked by springs interwoven between vein and muscle. I made hundreds of them, hanging them from the ceiling, stuffing them in drawers, under the bed, and into boxes. They were birds of agony, folded from anger and pain.

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Paper cranes are the opposite of rabbits. They don’t break off into fragments and new arms. One paper folds into a single paper crane, a metamorphosis in place of production. I was a creator, not to eleven but to hundreds. I took pictures of them to post to Instagram, where my origami account had thousands of followers. From cranes, I went to elephants and dragons and tulips that I placed in vases. These flowers would never die. I think about the rabbit sometimes. Right now, it’s probably sitting in a landfill somewhere, pink fur turned brown with dirt. Maybe one day it will break down into microscopic bits, float down a river and into the ocean to be eaten by a fish. Maybe one day I’ll be sitting in a restaurant poking my fork into a piece of rabbit. For a moment the thought stings, like a too-hot iron, but it soon drifts away with the rest. It’s three o’clock and school’s out. I hear children outside in the nearby playground, their shrill screams passing concrete walls and resonating deep within my chest. I feel a tingling in my stomach where the hole used to be, but a long period of healing has sewn it shut. One crane hangs by the window, catching the light, its bent face emotionless. I’ve decided not to be afraid of rabbits anymore. All that’s left of me to take has been carefully folded away and kept safe within the creases of origami paper.

Santa Fe Literary Review

LAUREN DANA | 58 VolumeSMITH 17 • 2022

BOX BREATH

ELDER GIDEON

#1 how mom’d rant at the evening news more menacing than Gorbachev’s mark of the beast or looming mushroom skull fire were the hordes of bare-chested men breaching TV screens demanding rights to be perverse! she’d spit wasn’t judgment clear? Queers! she never meant to target shoot my opaque silhouette blocking TV features of fallen stars Rock Hudson inhaling his own ashes

I bystood dazed in the early eighties a boy disembodied by his own desires a basement swollen shut its only window vented bullet holes

Santa Fe Literary Review

DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON

| POETRY DEDICATED TO STRANGERS, LIVES AND

OTHERS IN STARRY DISBELIEF A new self at rebirthing inarticulate and stupid is a gangly doll half plastic, half human. The universe slopes such an undeclamatory evening like a tilted glass the stars gone milky the stars gone whitish milky near shadowless absence the grass the color of porous-hearted nostalgia the color of a still life reminiscence the still life the color of Goldenlight crackers, milk, and honey. **** The grief is implicit inside the sharing of stories Do you mean the sharing of stones? Regardless of whether I ask slowly, methodically, like a toy simulacrum, too much like a metronome, the chess pieces measuring an end game, the small pawns marching toward an upheaval the upheaval weightier than a cathedral Do you mean weightier than a culmination? so that I speak beneath a cathedral tomb and I ask whether I myself am duplicitous a toy inside an echolalic simulacrum Do I mean the grief is implicit?

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while others speak spastically, helplessly, babbling several voices, while others break into tears while others withhold so much judgment insensibly to themselves/ against the world/ and from the world against themselves their hard luck cases plunk like stones pelting the cathedral moat waters. Do I mean to share the stones with the dreary waters?

Santa Fe Literary Review

DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON

SFLR Speaks with Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the 2021-23 Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. An uprooted Southerner who is now a New Mexican, he has been a professional journalist for over 20 years, with articles, fiction, and poetry appearing in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Boston Review, and many other places. He is also a playwright and performance artist. His essays on poverty, economic justice, race relations, African American history, civil rights history, and post-Katrina New Orleans have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, Dissent, Crisis (The NAACP magazine), The Guardian, and others. He has appeared as a guest on the Tavis Smiley Radio Show and is presently a Writing Fellow at the Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C. In the arts (and sometimes in life) he loves playing with fire. His recent full-length collection, Psalms at the Present Time (Flowstone Press), was released in November, 2021. SFLR: Sometimes, it seems like folks are afraid of—or intimidated by—poetry. Others dismiss it as an unimportant or irrelevant genre. Many leave high school or college and never look at a poem again. As a poet yourself, what’s your response to this phenomenon? DLW: We all have our interests, strengths and weaknesses. That isn’t the point. The point is that primary school is where you receive foundational knowledge, like basic knowledge of math, science, and history—all of which is supposed to make you an able citizen: able to do income taxes, understand Newtonian physics, and appreciate the democratic process. I conduct workshops with an appreciation that teaching poetry and the arts to high school students activates a different set of receptors, having to do with becoming what I like to call “a responsive human being.” A responsive human being has cultivated another kind of training. This person is responsive to aesthetics—and accordingly responsive to feelings like concern, empathy, understated humor— capabilities fostered by having an imaginative curiosity.

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Knowledge, skill, and taste are culminative—and memories build upon memories—so the student who interacts with poetry in high school retains a starting point. And if they enjoy something artistic, they have a little bit more insight into why they enjoyed it. Furthermore, if they re-engage with poetry in later life, they have a background memory to draw on. I want to note here that, contrary to the implication that interest in poetry is in jeopardy, by many people’s measurement poetry is more popular than ever in American history. Let’s assume this is true. It may be that more young people latch on poetry via social media. Through no fault of theirs, this comes with its own set of problems. Poetry is disseminated in a way that begins to resemble celebrity culture, with the kind of faddishness that makes hype an integral part of a reputation. And in a culture of hype, social connections and/or being connected to powerful institutions becomes more important. It feels to me that something like Emily Dickenson being rediscovered, or Walt Whitman being reappraised as the most important poets of their times, has become much harder to imagine. I don’t think interest in poetry is dying out; actually, it’s cresting. Nevertheless, this complicates matters. You’ve lived in Santa Fe for ten years. How has this city influenced your writing? I wrote a story set in Santa Fe for the short-story collection Santa Fe Noir. And I write a column that addresses local issues. My creative axis is not New Mexico, however. I hope this isn’t a disappointing answer. Because without being disingenuous, or roundabout, I really do believe the New Mexican influence on my writing has been both profound and inconspicuous. You’re not going to find references to New Mexico in the poetry collection, Psalms at the Present Time. No poem directly relates to Santa Fe, the culture, or landscape. I’m not that kind of a creative writer. Yet. I was born in the South, raised in the South. I experienced being a Black American in the South. I still return to Charleston, South Carolina, occasionally, and I live there imaginatively in my head.

Santa Fe Literary Review

This dichotomy is not so unique. It’s the genesis of the expression, “Silence, exile, and cunning” by James Joyce—famously describing his physical exile from Ireland. Joyce left Ireland when he was 20, never returned, but always wrote stories set in Dublin. I am a person ‘in exile’ who keeps one foot in the South. This will always be the case. I am a New Mexican, too, given my past decade. I am still sorting through what that means. I suspect that sorting through its meanings is the most integral part of being a New Mexican! New Mexicans adopt rooted perspectives, yet this is a place of cultural divergences. I am a newbie. I am a stranger. I am culturally estranged. Yet isn’t every New Mexican simultaneously rooted, yet insecure; located, yet displaced? And how do the pieces make up a whole? And who are you within these cultural divergences? And how do you define your contours? It may be that managing feelings of displacement is the real new Mexican experience. I have discovered a number of new writers, new voices, “new” (meaning new to me) literary histories since coming to New Mexico. The writers include Western story spinners, like Max Evans; culturally-rooted Hispanic writers, like Rudolph Anaya, author of Bless Me Ultima; and my favorites: highly abstruse, experimental Native American authors, including Layli Long Soldier, James Thomas Stevens, and Jake Skeets— wordsmiths who struggle with the hegemony of writing in the English language at all. Forgive me. I had never even heard of Bless Me Ultima before coming to New Mexico. In the South, institutions steer you toward books written by regional authors. The South is obviously a site of historical conflict, shadowed by the legacy of slavery. But when I imagine books by the major Southern writers, reflect on the shelved titles, I can conveniently divide them into two categories: those that confront racism and those that try to avoid dealing with it. When I imagine New Mexican titles lined on a shelf, I see a cultural divide more extreme—definitions worlds apart—containing whole diverse universes and cosmologies of culture, language, religion, and visions of revolution. And I picture large spaces in between the shelves that must be the gaps where the individual wanders, investigating New Mexico.

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In America, literacy rates have declined over the past decade, particularly in New Mexico, where, this year, the Annie E. Casey Foundation ranked our state 49th for child welfare. As our city’s Poet Laureate, what ideas do you have for cultivating literacy amongst children and adults alike? I am confused by these statistics. Since becoming the Poet Laureate, I’ve traveled to Santa Fe schools—charter schools and public schools—and I am amazed by the students’ language skills. This week, I taught poetry to a handful of ten-year-olds. I can’t say enough to praise their level of concentration and comprehension. New Mexico schoolchildren have remarkable potential, but extreme poverty and cross-cultural issues must be widening achievement gaps and pulling our students down. I posted this question on Facebook to get feedback. Friends responded that New Mexico would achieve better results in literacy education if there was higher pay for pre-K and elementary school teachers. Others emphasized the importance of introducing children to culturally relevant reading material. It makes sense to me that you have to entice children who can’t read, or only marginally read, just like you have to entice adults to pick up a paperback. I also emphasize the pernicious effects of poverty. It destabilizes families and induces anger and frustration at school. Among your many activities, you teach a workshop for adult poets. What’s your favorite part about teaching? What common struggles do you observe among your poet-students? Youths and adults alike have different ways of reading texts. I have shared poems with students that I have never read in the same way afterwards. A good workshop, like a good short story, benefits from surprises. A good discussion goes beyond the obvious. And something unique, odd, or enlightening happens. I adore the unusual. This story is exemplary although the class of adult learners studied Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, rather than poetry. One student had a particularly special way of reading texts because he was a trial lawyer. He ignored symbolism and intangibles. He read like he was gathering moral evidence. He focused on tangible evidence,

Santa Fe Literary Review

specific statements that justified the narrator’s behavior. It was like a legal defense of Existentialism. The whole class benefited from the way he had been trained to read. Experiences that enhance the group’s versatility in reading and writing belong among my favorites. Creative struggles are irreducible. Yet to address the question with an appreciation that creativity is your own Sphinx’s riddle—poets whose work isn’t successful sometimes haven’t sufficiently relied on a process. They think they’re exploring language that develops mysteriously. They think they’re then exploring the unknown. They haven’t let go control, using a process. Or maybe they don’t understand how subtle that is. They think the language on the page is the key. They don’t appreciate that history, biography, sociology, physical motion, stray thoughts, biography, time, philosophy, and zeitgeist are all aesthetic processes. Poetry is a reflection of consciousness. Each passing second is a potential new aesthetic process. If they’re not engaging with the multiplicity and duplicity of patterns and processes, maybe the writing isn’t layered. As a poet, playwright, performance artist, essayist, and journalist, how do you get into the creative “head space” for each? Do you work with a muse? Ultimately, what inspires you to create in so many different forms? People say they have a hard time describing my writing; in fact, I have a hard time describing my writing. The kinds of questions that writers usually get asked—“What is your most urgent theme?” “Is you writing autobiographical?” “What has been your major influence?”—I can’t, or don’t answer. I am too busy discovering these answers through new pieces of work. I am a bit hooked on a process that is moment-tomoment, critically conscious, literary, yet performative. There are precedents for writers who can’t be easily labeled. I admire versatile talents, Cocteau and Pasolini, namely, although I doubt I will match their stellular careers. Joy Harjo is a poet and a musician. Versatility can be called a contrivance. Think again. Labeling writers is actually a terrible contrivance. There have been so many authors that have

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been publicized for one brand of writing, then scholarship has proven this label is superficial. I don’t have to stop to puzzle which idea will fit which medium. A story sometimes becomes a poem, or vice versa. A play monologue from yesterday becomes a poem today. A poem becomes a brief discursive essay. An idea that began inside a poem is incorporated in a performance piece. This is not a problem. I barely notice. Possibilities tend to swirl around me amorphously. My muse is Energy. You once remarked to the Santa Fe Reporter, “So what the hell is poetry? It is to make. I believe this is the most useful definition.” What advice would you give to someone struggling with finding creative inspiration to make poetry—or any form of art? Grasping that the etymology of “poetry” is the Greek word poiesis, which means “to make,” is in itself a source of energy, liberating you from self-conscious baggage. And it liberates you to perceive that every activity in your daily life may be poetry. I fielded this question recently. Someone asked, “I sit down to write. And nothing happens. What do I do?” I responded, “You’re sitting down to write? Why not stand up!” This is a comical answer—if you leave it at that—yet I often stand while I’m writing. I stand up because it reinvigorates me. See? I’ve taken writing out of a purely literary context. My literary work sometimes intersects with body, space, and place. Wallace Stevens, in his poem “Life is Motion,” called this “the marriage of flesh and air.” Find a way to find energy. Stand up.

Santa Fe Literary Review

SHERRE VERNON

RAISE ME UP

1 Hot water and gravel detergent in the upstairs tub. The hamper tumbles the edge over and I roll the legs of the yellow jumper above my calves and stomp. We will dry the clothes hanging on towel racks and hooks, on shower rods and stair-rails. We will dry them with hairdryers and the heat of summer skin. 2 The antibiotics are always pink like sidewalk chalk and a rhyme about fruit-cock-tail that I don’t know is dirty until you tell me. They taste like licking ashtrays from cheap cigarette gum in waxy wrappers. I empty the whole bottle, one shot at a time, chase it with red fruit punch sugar. 3 Fresh bread is just sugar, flour & water— like a body: salt and yeast. We can get those things from the food pick up, the long line for the block of not-cheddar. It’s enough to keep us coming back. We eat bread hot and I learn to make it so I can share this with the girl I love in the lockerroom. She wears her hair up, shows her neck.

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4 Hip thrusts to Maneater in the center of the trailer. When we drive through the park to get to the pool, Madonna says she’s gonna marry him and you scream along. I sleep in the small closet you’ve made for me, one side with a shelf for stacking books you’ll leave me—the other, a window. 5 Gifts included: high-waisted jeans from Panama City; a beat-up car I wanted but wasn’t allowed; slouch booties when I needed a pair of Docs; your name (which I never use); a mustard yellow jumper I wore sick and threadbare because I loved the buttons; the wind like music, screaming against the plywood & concrete; your face in every photograph of me.

Santa Fe Literary Review

DAVID McCAHILL

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT “Svínafellsjökull Glacier” (pictured opposite)

The Svínafellsjökull Glacier, located in southeast Iceland, is one of many outlet glaciers stemming from the substantial Vatnajökull ice cap. A short hike from Iceland’s “ring road” brings visitors face to face with the Svínafellsjökull’s glacial lagoon, filled with gently bobbing, locomotive-sized blocks of ice. While the scale of the glacier is hard to fathom, with its deep crevasses and tall seracs, so is the speed of its retreat. Nearby farmers have been diligently measuring the decline of the glacier’s tongue since the mid 19th century using rope and iron stakes, some of which are still in place. Soon, the lagoon in the photo will be a lush meadow as the Svínafellsjökull’s tongue continues its steady march up the mountain. “Svartifoss” (pictured on page 118) This September, I was lucky enough to visit Iceland while scouting backpacking itineraries for an American student-travel company. The Svartifoss waterfall, located in Iceland’s Skaftafell National Park, is one of the country’s many geological jewels. The name Svartifoss, which means “the black falls” in Icelandic, refers to the hexagonal columns of basalt which shape the waterfall’s backdrop. The water flowing over the falls comes from the mighty Vatnajökull ice cap, and the imposing basalt columns remind viewers of Iceland’s rapidly changing geologic landscape.

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DAVID McCAHILL

| SVÍNAFELLSJÖKULL GLACIER Santa Fe Literary Review 71

JAMES GIFFORD

QUIBBLE COMMONS Black beams tarred down in brown water stare hard into the trembling of stream-sides at quarreling waterways. Houses stare down, fence off pedestrians tumbling awkwardly through these thin pathways of Quibble Creek in suburbs. Keep out. Private. Water lolls quietly, arguing placidly. When will the streambed painfully dug here finally overflow breaking through property, washing off boundaries stinking of coal-tar, creosote, naphtha. Scrubbed-out concrete quarrels here, failingly. Water-browned Quibble Creek Commons undermines foundations, erosion cutting in, pouring out earth under ownership, patiently washing out boundaries—

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COREY MILLER

NO ONE TALKS ABOUT OVERPOPULATION

Maybe it’s not a concern to them being harvested for humanity first hand

but I observe the land

Farmlands needing every square inch to feed the latest newborn that will grow up

to buy

Consuming red peppers out of season because they eat with their eyes Guatemala sounds exotic

a townhome in the city

and

When we can’t cultivate

anymore

drench the crops with chemicals until the yields are greater and greater and Don’t consider the taste in your mouth the good and the bad like having to weight out having to tell someone no

sour

you NEED to control yourself

Set out a predator that’s as tiny as a mosquito that is a mosquito Sucking the blood from one patient and depositing it into another Free blood transfusions extending our life expectancy greater and greater and that traveled the country Let’s all grab avocados to northern Ohio The plastic bags grocery stores so willingly provide us take them home discard the recyclable carriers make guacamole eat 1/2 thenhaveourmid-lifequarterlifecrisis overtheNOWgreymushbowlthatwasSOripeonthewayheretous WhyOhWhycan’teveryseasonbeINseason Santa Fe Literary Review

STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

A short-term memory loss ushered in Stephen Abban Junior’s illustrations on the walls of his mother’s bedroom during his early childhood. Those illustrations were his means of keeping his memories alive and helping recall the thoughts, morals, and values passed on by his parents. Episodic memories are some of the subjects Abban captures and portrays in his oeuvre, wherein he synchronizes the process of aging and history. As humans advance, there exists the possibility of being metaphorically blindfolded from our history, and going through our lives without a sense of who we are, historically speaking. But human progress should always taste of nature and its history. Abban’s work makes it possible to bridge the gap between nature and its history by linking nature’s elements: soil, the human figure, fibers (here, burlap fabric), and water, all blended with an inorganic element—here, acrylic—to create a visual and psychological sensation of antiqueness in the viewer’s mind. The formalism of Stephen Abban Junior’s oeuvre is comprised largely of figurative representations which the feminine figure dominates, thereby allotting Fluidity, unclenching and amnesty in his journey through his executions. Abban uses the human body (depicted in varied postures and spaces) metaphorically, as a way to address the pertinent historical narratives that are reticent in contemporary history.

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HENRY BOX BROWN Santa Fe Literary Review 75

STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR

NANCY BEAUREGARD

WE DON’T SPEAK OF THE DYING

who sits between us, cross-legged on the floor, munches buttered popcorn, drinks gallons of syrupy soda, watches soap operas—don’t look at him, don’t mention the smell that permeates from his hair, clothes. i stay silent, sit on the edge, a half empty wicker chair where canvas totes, books are piled—observe this dying killing you, cringe as skin sinks against jawline, hollows knees, shin bones, worse than it did a week ago. can i cook you something? spaghetti, eggs and bacon, sweet potato soup? even as i ask, i know you can only eat broth, mushed bananas. i glance at prescription bottles, listen to frustrations: hospice, morphine, diapers, no energy to walk, play with your dog. i hear pain, sense hands that grab, squeeze—from the alien that grows inside you. we don’t speak of the dying who sits between us, not interested in our conversation, opens freezer drawers, reaches for ice cream, grabs a spoon off your end table on the way back to the tv. we talk about books you’re reading, reruns of star trek: the next generation, the saga of ann of green gables that you watch on dvds over and over again, the screenplay you hope to finish before you go. when there are no words, books, movies to discuss, the light outside fades, you fade—back into a garden of basil and rosemary patterns, the cushions on the couch tuck you in for the night. i stand, trip over the dog’s water bowl, place my hand on the wall to break my fall, touch a portrait, one of two horses you had to give away, hear the gallop of a broken heart as i run my hand across an empty saddle. for Ann Clemons 1957-2020

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ARACELIS GONZÁLEZ ASENDORF

AT FIFTY-NINE

I light a candle to guide your way as you used to do for others. Come, I call you. Come sit in my kitchen the way I sat in yours. Look, I’ve made cafecito the way you taught me; dark, sweet, and foamy. I fill two small cups—thick, blue rimmed, white tasitas I bought at the bodega. I place María cookies on a plate: your favorite sweets. Ay, boba. I hear you suck air through your teeth making a chirping sound. There you are, I say. The you I want today. You at fifty-nine. Granddaughter, what do you want from this me? To know how you felt leaving your island behind and crossing the Florida Straits? Sad. Frightened. So frightened. We huddled in a boat as rain beat down, and my sons fought waves that tried to swallow us. Your mami held your small brother. I pressed your eightyear-old body tightly to my breasts, never letting go until we were safe. Don’t you remember? I remember an old woman. But, you were fifty-nine. No home, no money, salt water-ruined clothes. How did you cope starting over in a land whose language you couldn’t speak? Ay, niña, I did what I had to do. I followed my children. I cared for their children so they could work. I cooked for everybody so they could eat. In the evenings, when the house slept, I hemmed pants and dresses, and got paid by the piece. When you have nothing, every penny helps. That’s all. “Quiero más.” Tell me more. Chamomile soothes upset stomachs, sleeplessness, and broken hearts. Was your heart broken? Part of my heart was broken. Which part? The part that left behind my sisters, and my parents’ graves, and the house where I birthed my children. Mi casa, where I taught my babies who lived to talk, and bathed the ones who died for burial. What were your dreams? Desires? Ay, niña, don’t be foolish. What energy did I have for my dreams? With what time? I desired survival and rest. My heart dreamt for you. What did you do with those dreams? Look, I say, this year I’m fifty-nine. Now, I have your cushiony breasts. I, too, pressed my girl child to them as a storm tried to claim her. She fought blue pills and white powders that tried to drown her like waves. I held on fiercely, the way you taught me, through the tempest until she was safe. Santa Fe Literary Review

Look, I say, I keep chamomile in my cupboard. I’m thrifty because I know pennies count. I got the education you never had. And with that education, I learned to sew. I stitch one letter to another, forming words, so that when my daughter is fifty-nine she can read them. She won’t have to conjure you to know you. You’ll be right there on the page—the you that left one life behind so that ours could be better. She’ll know her story. It comes from yours and mine.

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HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT

ABSTRACT PORTRAIT: FALL BREAK

MIA NELSON

SOCIAL ISOLATION

Alone, I practice the strangeness of goodbye. I walk past the mirror and interrupt myself, stuttering. I see my reflection in a limp green teacup and ask about a daughter who died. I mis-congratulate myself on the pregnancy, I stumble over an inappropriate joke to the boss who is also just me, but mirrored in the garden pond. You can say all the wrong things even if you’re talking to yourself. I offend, I blubber, I cry in the bathroom. I am off-putting and too eager. I talk about myself behind my back. I do not invite the her that is me to sit at the table with our brown bag lunches. I do not share the biology notes. I don’t ask if the she who is I is feeling okay. I smell the vomit on her fingers and I ignore it. What a freak, I think about my disjointed, stupid selves. I would never invite myself to the party, I would never offer to share my lip balm, I would never run my stockinged foot over my shins under the dinner table. I would never choose me to dissect the sheep’s heart. I say hello and goodbye to myself each time I leave a room in my empty house. I turn the lights off and my own voice comes back to me, angry at the sudden dark. I bang on the bathroom door and tell myself to hurry up in the shower. I wake up exasperated that I haven’t planted the tomatoes yet, angry that I dog-eared the book, that no one cleaned up the cat pee in the living room. Of course, there are moments of tenderness. I sometimes read to myself fables about two-headed birds, one who eats only spoiled fruit. Sometimes the she that is me sets out a nice table of chicken buttered the way I once told her I like best. Occasionally, we slow dance to the rhythmic sound of another me peeling tangerines in the kitchen. This is the abating of misery: my selves spoon feeding each other honey in the refrigerator light. This is the miracle of body:

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a gentle, insane chatter that smells like survival & unwashed hair. In the skin of my brain I am the worst roommate imaginable. I leave cups half-filled with misery over every empty space, I let the food rot until it smells like saggy beauty queens, I leave all the doors flung open so the animals can flee, & I mislabel the living and the dead. Even worse, I often name myself both: my two souls, the one alive and the one dead, how each moment they wake to the horror of the other.

Santa Fe Literary Review

FRANZ JØRGEN NEUMANN

SAILING LESSONS

Like dozens of girls who came of age in the early 1980s, Sasha was smitten by Christopher Cross. His voice on songs like “Sailing”—sincere and gold as early autumn—was a call she imagined her adult life would answer. Sasha is thinking of Christopher Cross now because he is seated beside her on her flight to Austin, his seat reclined as far as it’ll go. His eyes caught her attention first, squinting at the glare from the silver wing and the Sonoran Desert far below. Now, with his mask lowered to finish a snack, she’s sure it’s him. “You’re Christopher Cross,” she says. Christopher Cross, headphones on over his flat cap, mask pulled back up, pretends he’s watching the business report on the seat-back screen. Sasha’s certain he heard her, but she doesn’t feel slighted. How could Christopher Cross know she spent cumulative months of her childhood listening to his albums? That whenever “Sailing” comes on the car radio (rarely, these days), she’s whisked back to her childhood bedroom, listening to songs that felt like the pinnacle of maturity. Adult. Contemporary. Christopher Cross looks tired. Perhaps he’s returning home from a tour of second-rate venues, or has indigestion from hotel food, or is still suffering from long-haulers’ syndrome. Maybe he wants to be left alone. Sasha understands. She closes her eyes and plays “Sailing” in her head. She’s listened to the hit so exhaustively that she can recreate every note: the opening strings, the glittering percussion, the rise and fall of the three-note accompaniment that rides as though on gentle swells. Even the drums and baseline come to her in the same comforting fidelity as Christopher Cross’s soft, high register. If his voice were a fabric, it would be corduroy. One lesson “Sailing” taught her is that nondescript overweight men can be overdeliverers, full of surprising melody. She imagines there are scores of men unaware of the service Christopher Cross has done for them—although life and an ex-husband have taught Sasha that heavy plain men can also be full of discord. As she takes sidelong glances at the musician, an uncomfortable realization comes over her: this man is too young to be Christopher Cross. He’s perhaps only in his late fifties. But don’t celebrities have the funds to keep themselves looking perpetually middle-aged, she thinks, even when they enter their final decades? The man stands and heads to the plane’s lavatory. While he’s gone, Sasha checks his seat and seat pocket, but finds nothing but a bottle of water and an empty bag of chips. Nothing with his name on it. Isn’t this the

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way celebrities travel: light, with a single platinum card in their pocket? Sasha, flying to Texas for long-deferred family memorials, knows she’s trying to convince herself so she can arrive with a nice anecdote. You’ll never guess who sat next to me on the plane. A few minutes later, the man comes back up the aisle. He sneezes. Then sneezes again, again, and again. The passengers give each other looks and pull their masks up over their exposed nostrils. The man sits beside Sasha and sighs. “There’s a cat up there,” he says, annoyed, a voice too deep to ever reach Christopher Cross’s pure non-falsetto register. He goes back to watching the business channel, ticker prices slipping past on the chyron from oblivion to oblivion. She can’t help but associate the stock graphs with case counts. The man stifles a few sneezes. Each time, Sasha feels this stranger might explode. The lurch happens almost an hour later, at the end of their descent, accompanied by a loud grinding noise, like a wood chipper meeting its match. The pilot comes on the PA and says: we might have had a bird strike, folks. We’ll be on the ground in another minute. Sasha places all hope in the pilot’s nonchalant informality, even as the plane rudely drops altitude. All the video screens in the cabin glitch, then lock to a logo of the airline. People straighten their seats and buckle up. Sasha hears the cat mewing. A man several rows ahead claws overhead at the air nozzle, his hand bleached with light. The man beside her lays his hands on his knees, palms up, as though meditating. Sasha slips a hand into his and his fingers tighten around her fingers, and her fingers tighten around his. She imagines the plane landing. She and Christopher Cross applaud in gratitude, along with all the other passengers. The pilot comes on and, on behalf of the entire flight crew, wishes them good health and safe journeys as the plane taxis to an open gate. Everyone is patient and kind as they disembark, and their bags are waiting for them when they reach the luggage carousel. Their rides have all pulled up to the curb, their rental cars have all been upgraded at no extra cost, their destinations are all reunions, and sailing over everything, invisibly, the airwaves make promises that, this time, they keep.

Santa Fe Literary Review

EVONNE ELLIS

UNDER THE BRIDGE

CAMILLE FERGUSON

SONNET FOR FEEL GOOD

The oil-slicked seagulls have moved to my head, & they’re flocked behind my eyes—if you look close you can see them, inverted, behind my pupils. As you do this, know the ringing in my ears is a siren. I’ve kicked all my addictions save you, but do I have to? Come here, let’s lie under the bed, let’s leave the past in a box & stay busy in each other’s eyes. I don’t want to be what’s happened to me, but the birds are sticky, getting stuck & twisted to my veins. Please, tell one person my name. Don’t attach addict to the end of it. Let’s fuck away our ghosts. If you scream loud enough they can’t haunt us.

Santa Fe Literary Review

TAPAN SHARMA

OLD SCHOOL

Another day, another dollar in debt My parents started with nothing. How’d I end up with less? Used to be the head of the class before the whole scheme collapsed. Top of the pyramid, no peers amidst me Now I peer into the mist, appears opportunity must have missed me. Can’t seem to dig myself out of a dead-end career path Turns out it’s pretty crowded on the so-called right track Go-getters, goal-setters, thousand-dollar books in my knapsack, Every generation wants the next one to break its back Keep it moving, single file to the diploma mill, now Do the graduation dance in that dunce cap and gown I should’ve been the crass clown instead of wearing the class crown Google “what was my 4.0 for?” Page not found Trade in your participation certification for a 401K, but in the interim it’s hard to carpe diem with a car payment due in the AM, So far in debt, lenders can’t seem to leave me a loan Feel it in my bones I paid too much in tuition Now a 9 to 5 is the new 25 to life, death waiting in the wings, coroner in a corner office Postmortem: a deadly cocktail of being broke and boredom Put us in cubicles and tell us to think outside the box Incestuous nepotists banking on daddy’s direct deposit While the rest of us have to make a name for ourselves Tokens in their broken jukebox playing the same old song Head down, chin up, do everything you’re supposed to Put your hands up if you’re down with the old school.

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DESMOND TETTEH ATITIANTI

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work seeks to interrogate the negatives and positives of the human journey through life. Focusing on both our successes and failures fully depicts who we really are, while just focusing on one aspect of these two components doesn’t portray who we really are. The work presented here, which is a portrait of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, portrays the two in inverse color. The use of the matchsticks as a medium for the creation of the work is based on the idea that human beings and matchsticks share the trait of ephemerality. Human beings, just like matchsticks, are ephemeral, yet have the potential to impact their environment and society, leaving an impression that can outlive their mortal and temporal existence.

Santa Fe Literary Review

DESMOND TETTEH ATITIANTI

1960S

CAROL CASEY

UNRAVELLING

If I were to unravel the twisted tapestry of what became of Us that hangs, haunting in some dusty attic of my brain, or lodges, rotting, in some mouldy crevice of my colon (it moves around). If I were to take it out into sunlight, pick at the threads, pull one out, let it bleed, let its black caustic blood, eat holes in sensibility until the howl is out, whizzing headless, banging on trees, till its pulverized pulp turns compost, feeds butterflies. Then another thread, and another until the fabric is so threadbare that the remnants are a movie

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I can watch while eating popcorn, a book I can read, put down and walk away, walk away, walk away.

Santa Fe Literary Review

RON RIEKKI

3 PEOPLE DIED

in the plane crash when I was in the Navy and I used to stay up all night like I’m doing tonight because I’d think it was my fault when the counselor talked me through it and showed me how it made absolutely no sense for me to think that way and I remember when I got my PTSD paperwork back how they surprised the hell out of me by including a sheet so strange that talked about the history of the crash where they also mentioned that three other people lived from that crash and it was like all of a sudden

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I was on one end of a seesaw and then instantly it balanced out where the number three shifted all of these times where just the number three was a trigger for me but now I could see life in the number and I did and I do.

Santa Fe Literary Review

EMEL KARAKOZAK

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Emel Karakozak adds an emotional aspect by maintaining a sharp sensitivity against human disorder, and forms pure images reflecting her inner voice. The body is a shelter and the first example of an inner world is a language. Karakozak perceives the uncanny as the alienation of human from the self. In this sense, she upholds both the familiar and the unease arising from the revelation of the hidden. Karakozak approaches her works as existing somewhere between reality and unreality. In other words, her work occupies the purgatory of painting and photography, an obscure world where the boundaries of reality and unreality are blurred. Karakozak desires to create a disappointment with the whiteness by highlighting the concepts of emptiness and absence in fictional human bodies. The figure exists at a passage between the inner and outer worlds. The effect of silence formed by the white and gray tones and the lonely figures in the emptiness are strangely both peaceful and disturbing. Karakozak, through the inner patterns inside the whiteness, creates a ghost of what they mean to us and draws the unheard voices to the mind’s patterns. The bodies are consumed and reshaped in the same place, bringing out a desperation by alienating the self from the trauma created by the congestion. Existence of an unease at the center of the artwork crystallizes into a power that can reshape everything. The work allows viewers to create their own connections and associations, and to gain a new perspective from within the images. Karakozak names her work as “a change in her language” and wants to speak with the viewers’ language, leaving the bodies to the experience of them.

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EMEL KARAKOZAK

CHAOSMOS 6

E.H. JACOBS

READING IN BED

I’ve gotten used to reading in bed. My doctor says it’s bad sleep hygiene. She says I will be tired and being tired is bad at my age. My doctor says bed should be only for sleep or, and here she pauses. She does not want to say “sex.” We shouldn’t talk of sex at my age. So, she says, “intimacy” and I nod. “So, I get two things,” and she looks puzzled. “Two things,” I repeat. “Sleep…intimacy.” And she nods. “With my husband gone, I’m down to one.” She nods again. “So, I get to substitute.” She does not know how to answer. My doctor does not say I will stop dreaming about you. My doctor does not say I will stop imagining I hear you snoring softly as your sinuses congest. My doctor does not say I won’t turn and think I see the mound you make under the blankets. We slept as one. We rose as one. The other day I read the letter you’d sent me on our tenth anniversary. It slipped through my fingers as I fell asleep. On its way to the floor, I dreamed that I

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rescued you from heaven. You said heaven was sweet, but never as sweet as sipping tea and discussing the kids, never as sweet as caulking the window while I read the paper, never as sweet as correcting crossword mistakes. That I had written in pen. I’ve gotten used to reading in bed. Sometimes, I read aloud so you’ll hear over your snoring, beneath the blankets on a winter’s night. Wherever you are.

Santa Fe Literary Review

JOCELYN ULEVICUS

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

As an intuitive artist, Jocelyn Ulevicus (1979) creates out of a female speculative perspective. Inspired by nature and the unseen, themes of exit and entry, of change and transmutation, are dominantly present in her work. Whether painting flowers or more abstract works, her paintings are a direct response to her emotional life as she explores what it means to be a woman today. Using everyday experiences as a starting point, she unpacks the normative conditioning that dominated her childhood. Her arrangements are schematic, often playful, exploratory, and urgent, inviting the viewer to move into a space of critical speculation. Most of all, Ulevicus wants you to feel. Her recent flower-themed work is motivated by the return to joy and free expression prompted by her exploration of alcohol-free living. Juxtaposing hard and geometric shapes with soft marks and bold colors, she exposes herself as vulnerable and wild, as unexpected and unpredictable. In her own words, “My art changes as I change. I change, I change, I change with the seasons.”

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JOCELYN ULEVICUS

LOVING

SUZANNE SAMPLES

PASSING THROUGH

The hungry darkness of Tunnel Number 12 swallows me like the anesthesia before my craniotomy three years ago. I don’t remember anything from the medically induced blackness, but similarly to how I feel now, I could not escape. For eight hours, I was trapped in the nothingness of circuit oscillations and obscure memory loss. I woke up terminal. The surgeon told me generally 11-13 months, but here I am, years later, hiking through a deserted, ink-drenched corridor four miles from my hometown. I did not want to move back, but I had no choice. Diagnosed in my mid-30s, I could explore hospice options or move in with my aging parents and pretend I was caring for them instead of the other way around. Hood up to protect my head, I am halfway through Tunnel Number 12 when I realize I cannot move my bad foot. But still. I believe the supernatural can occur in these passages. I believe I can enter disconnected, disturbed and emerge on the other side, bare limbed and brave. I believe the ghosts of passengers long gone can whisper well wishes and encouragements. You have more time. Now just breathe. We aren’t ready for you yet. I had no symptoms before the devastating discovery of my tumor. Instead, I sat inputting final grades at a café as a seizure rolled up my leg like the trains that once passed through these gaping, open-mouthed channels. In the mid-1900s, caravans brought supplies to this foggy, middle-of-nowhere town. Without this method of transportation, those who came before me would have frozen or lost the fat from their bones and resembled the native white-tailed deer in a starving season, their ribs prodding through sickly taupe skin with mangled fur shed on snow long ago. But presently, I stand centered in Tunnel Number 12, unable to move. My right leg, paralyzed for three months after the seizure, seemed to petrify when, seconds ago, I stepped into a puddle and became part of the stony structure.

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I feel like a ghost train might barrel through the opening, the whistling apparition knocking over the crumbling statue of my suddenly frail body. Recently, I have been moving my leg with ease, but right now, fear has driven me back to that day on the table when the last words I heard were a nurse saying, My name is Teddy. The surgeon is ready for you. In through your nose and out through your mouth. I’m going to take care of you. I didn’t want to step onto the streets when I first moved back here; I didn’t want people who once knew me as a skilled, competitive dancer to witness me dragging my leg behind me like an unlaced ballet slipper as I practiced walking and tried to become myself again. But in these tunnels, I could develop my stride, and no one could study me. No one could watch. No one could criticize or markdown my scores whenever I fell. I crashed all the time. I tore my rotator cuff because I collapsed in the hospital while the nurses assisted other patients with their pissing and shitting. I injured my arm when I fell in my old apartment after trying to catch some keys I dropped. I tripped and bloodied my knee on the sidewalk as I carelessly stumbled over a slightly raised lip no one else noticed. Now I needed a vicissitude of fortune, a perfect plié in the darkness. I needed proof of healing and forgiving power instead of ultimate weakness. I needed cryptic symbols that surely, I was leaping back to life. These tunnels gave me those signs. I trudged through these human-made shunts four times a week. The challenge exhilarated me. My doctors never expected me to leave a wheelchair? I proved them wrong by walking unassisted to their offices for my follow-up appointments. Oh, I should be homebound and only leave my bed for emergencies? I defied expectations and traipsed through these ghastly, lightless fat pockets that filled with fog on autumn nights. Was I scared? No. I had been through far worse. The dead could not frighten me. I had been there and back. And then, I am stuck.

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And then, I am terrified. And then, I am silent. A nurse hissed through her teeth at me: Wake up, Susan. You need to answer me. I don’t answer her because my name is not Susan. My name is Suzanne. I refuse to say anything, and I feel like everyone hates me. Susan Susan Susan. I am awake. I am alive. I am annoyed. Gone was the friendly nurse who told me to breathe and promised to take care of me. I am not allowed to move, even if I could. I have never liked people telling me what to do. When I fell in the hospital bathroom, I was alone. I memorized the buttons the nurse pushed when she and the assistant dropped me into my adjustable shell for the next month. As a kid, those flashing memory button games were never my style—and after the surgeon removed a chunk of my left frontal lobe to ensure he got all of the tumor, my short-term memory was fucked—but this was a matter of survival. I needed to explore. I needed to look around. I needed to test my leg. Button on the left, switch on the top, below the bed twice, and one on the right I could barely reach because of the paralysis. Unlike those childhood flashing memory games, there was silence when my left foot hit the floor. Silence meant I won. I did not have any mobility aids yet because I was not permitted to move from the bed; my yellow FALL RISK bracelet and purple socks signified this. However, the hospital staff trusted me. Before I got up, I had done nothing to dissuade them from my allegiance to their stringent rules and regulations. Somehow, although my entire right side remained stiffly paralyzed, I made it to my destination: the stingy Copen blue bathroom. I did not tumble because of the paralysis; darkness got me in the end.

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Falling is the only option. The best choice. The only way to escape this quagmire. I don’t want to ruin my sweatpants, but it’s just mud and possibly animal dung. I cannot survive forever in Tunnel Number 12. I feel like a spirit. My cellphone flashlight is nothing more than a pinprick. Is this how my brain looked to my surgeon? How much could he see? I tried to watch craniotomies on YouTube, but I couldn’t get past the initial incision; I did not have the stomach. After a single semester off work, I returned to teaching. Sure, I still had to complete chemo and had physical, occupational, and speech therapy, but I needed money. As a single woman, I couldn’t sit in my apartment until I died. So, I moved home, began teaching online, and exploring tunnels in my spare time. When I fall in Tunnel Number 12 on purpose, I forget to protect my hands. I had collapsed before on these trails, and the results were heinous. I picked pebbles out of my palms for weeks and nursed an infected knee. A truck nearly ran me over. Did they see me and not care? I’m not sure. I rolled into a ditch and didn’t move until the vehicle drove away. And when I could no longer hear the motor, I told myself in through your nose and out through your mouth. You just have to breathe. I did not want to become another casualty of these trails, of these tunnels. I had improved my strength and mobility, and now I could slump to the ground in this cavernous darkness and still make my way out of here on my own. I am not sure if my palms land in equine shit or mud. Many people ride horses through the tunnels, but they are told to dismount before entering. Too often, the horses get spooked and toss the riders. Once my knees hit the earth, I finally exhale. I roll to my ass and listen to the lonely drips of water splash into puddles. I remove my hood so I might feel less dizzy, but nothing helps. I am engulfed by these endless shadows and have no idea which direction is out. I no longer care about the mess on my sweatpants; I just want to sit here and feel less lightheaded. I speak.

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Visit me, ghosts, I taunt. Come and find me. I’ve always believed in the paranormal. There’s far too much out there we just don’t know. At this point, I would welcome an apparition. Perhaps a vision would shepherd me out of here. If you don’t want to leave, at least guide me toward some light. My voice eerily echoes. As if I am a cavewoman looking to the walls for a story, I suddenly hallucinate petroglyphs forming before me. A woman smiles with her friends, all of them at the ballet barre in first position. In the next iteration, a woman stands in front of people seated at writing desks. Finally, the same woman sits at a table with two cats and a dog at her feet. The right foot is twisted and limp, like a disinterested lover. As I stare at the story in stone, the drawing of the woman elevates from the tunnel wall and shifts into a pale silhouette. Her friends remain engraved, but she lifts from the markings and resembles a shape made from fancy cigarette smoke. She morphs into a fully fleshed human and stares back at me with passionate intensity. I recognize this bright smile she gives me before everything happened. I recognize the way she shakes, the way her eyes refuse to blink when the surgeon says unfortunately. I recognize the look of horror when she pulls hair from its roots and holds balls of brunette strands in her small hands. And then, as if I am waking from a nightmare, the woman disappears like thin whisps of smoke from a locomotion long gone. Alone in Tunnel Number 12, I convince myself to stand: palms on the ground and butt toward the drizzling ceiling, my bare head exposed and wet. I inch my hands closer to my feet until I can prop myself up. I still can’t see, but I have shaken the feeling of stiffness away. I am muddy but alive, as far as I can tell. When I am upright, I shuffle toward nothing with my hands in front of me until I hit stone. I do not have gloves, but as long as I am moving, I will not freeze and remain unthawed until spring. Pressed against the structure, I move my feet just as I did in physical therapy, just as I did as a child in dance classes.

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One, two, step-ball-change, one, two, step-ball-change. I no longer leap or tour jeté. I am exhausted. My breath sounds like a faraway train whistle through my teeth. This sound echoes back to me: Wake up, Suzanne. You have to wake up. The journey out takes longer than I planned, but finally, I see the sun.

I wonder: When I die, will I return to Tunnel Number 12? Will I come back to that which has healed me? Will this eventually be my last stop? I don’t plan on staying here; I am merely a specter. Will you walk right through me on a haunted hike? Will you hear my lonesome whistle when you see the light stretching toward the end? Will you know about me at all? The dripping water will remind you: I was once here, too. I once belonged in this tunnel. I was once shrouded in this darkness, afraid to move. I will say to you: You have more time. Now just breathe. We aren’t ready for you yet. I was once passing through.

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EMEL KARAKOZAK | Volume 17 • 2022

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CHAOSMOS 1

SHAGUFTA MULLA

REVERBATIONS

I. A hand the size of her left cheek knocks her out of farm animal songs the first time, knocks her out of sacred self the second, knocks her into wild diving squawks and crushing waves the third. II. The suddenness of my car clipping the curb knocks my nervous system into five years old, my mother stuck in the basement, my knowing face flushing for the both of us as I stand just out of view by the stairs, both arms clinging the pink rabbit she gave me, hoping he doesn’t come up first. III. Soft trills float by on bobbing Pacific foam, pull me into rushing peace I long to drown in, not knowing if I desire life or death, but tiny endangered plovers ache in my chest at the absence of me, darting around my drying driftwood, looking for a safe place to rest. IV. The first time his hand settles on my left cheek I flinch and I can’t stop the tumble of salt and burn.

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He softly says I’m sorry for something he didn’t do, slips his hand away into blurry pockets where he patiently waits. I look down at the blurry concrete parking block where I stand to be closer to his face, drowning with a cinched smile.

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SHEENA CHAKERES

AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“The Light Above” (pictured opposite) On this dry trail in the middle of the desert, I am following the path of water. Every curve is the meandering of a river long gone. These walls, shaped by time, have a story, and I’m drawn to look up to the light and imagine when and how it started. “The Little Castle” (this issue’s cover image) It’s a trail I’ve walked a hundred times in every season, often with just a day pack and sometimes with a sleeping bag. The Winsor always seems to have some breath of fairy magic, especially in the morning: Tendrils of verdant moss. Dew sparkling in the early light. Whispering trees that watch over this precious place. On this day, a beautiful fog had settled in the mountains. On our way to Lake Katherine, this Castilleja, Spanish for “little castle,” stretched upward as if awakening from a beauty sleep. She was extraordinarily vibrant against the muted greens. Courageous. Hopeful.

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SHEENA CHAKERES

THE LIGHT ABOVE

LAURA PRITCHETT

BLUESTEM

We’ve passed John Wayne’s birthplace, the Russell Stover Candy Factory, home of Astronaut Gus Grissom, the House of Corn. Various billboards announce this to us, plus also that Jesus Loves, Abortion Stops a Beating Heart, and Seatbelts Save Lives. “Our lives are tenuous.” Nova nods at a series of small billboards that warn of the dangers of drinking and driving. “This planet is fucked. We just like to mark it in various ways. Or amuse ourselves in the meantime.” Then we pass a small white cross that verifies the flimsy world she speaks of, and I know she’s lonely and therefore angry, and so I say, “Yeah, think about that lost life, what dreams went unrealized.” “Exactly,” she says. “That’s true even for us who go on living.” Then, as she intended, I register the fact she’s referring to herself. I nod to let her know she’s been heard and turn to put my arm out the window and wave my hand up and down against the rushing air. The car is loud with windroar, a noise created not just by the current wind but the air that’s been rushing in for hundreds of miles, some combo of heat and wind and land and salience of our own demise and fundamental unimportance and it all makes me feel dazed and I wonder what this trip would be like in a new, air-conditioned car. I can’t imagine it, can’t imagine us not being sticky and smelly and burnt with the heat and noise, can’t imagine not having tangles in my long raspy hair, her not having tangles in her long black hair, can’t imagine being sleek and elegant or looking cared for. I equally can’t imagine being fully happy, fully content, and I hate that about me and so I reach out to touch her thigh and say, “There is no wealth but time,” but I don’t actually want to hear her answer, which will be, “No, Ruthie, there is no wealth but love,” or some other bitterness, so I turn up the music to fill the air even more. The prairie stretches out of sight and the dimming rays of the sun light up the fields in a soft glow. The wheat has started to turn. The green fields are streaked with gold, and there’s a few places where the stalks are a little of both, caught up in the space between living and dying, which is what the song is about, which is what the billboards are about, and I think to say something about this when I see a flash, a brown blur. It happens at once: Nova slams on the brakes, a deep thud sounds through the car, my body is thrown forward, air escapes my mouth in a cry, the car jolts to a stop. A quiet follows, a buzzing silence that presses at my ears. Nova and

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I look at each other, and then I struggle to unclasp my seat belt, and Nova turns on the hazards, backs the car up and pulls it to the side of the road. Now I see the bloody deer in front of us. She lies on her side, front legs flailing in the air. A soft, beautiful brown on black pavement. When we run to her, I see she is shaking in a weird way, deep quivers running through her body. Her nostrils move slightly with breath and blood trickles out her black nose. A dark, soft eye stares straight up at us, then blinks. She tries to move, strains her neck up and kicks her front legs, then lies flat again. I cover my mouth with my hand and back up, stumbling on the grass alongside the road. Nova looks white and sick, but still crouches next to the doe. Holding her head down with one hand, she runs her other along the deer’s spine. Her fingers stop halfway down her back and I think it is broken, I think I see the lump under the skin where bone has snapped. The doe strains her neck again, and looks at her hind legs, as if to ask them why they’re not moving. This simple movement, her gazing at her legs in wonder, makes me gag. Then I must pee—or I’ll pee my pants—so I jog off to the barrow. I’m so embarrassed somehow but it’s not a choice. While I’m crouching, I see Nova run for the car, come back with the backpack, and shake the contents out across the road. She can’t find whatever it is she’s looking for. She kicks at the water bottle, paws through the granola bars, throws my art supplies into the road. Then she stands, holding my big utility knife, flicks it open, and walks to the deer. She looks to me for help and then shakes her head in disgust and then looks up and down the road. There are no headlights, no nothing, so she looks at me again, buttoning my pants now, then pushes the doe’s head down. I see her pause. By the time I am near her, I can see that she is palpating the throat just under the jaw and feeling for the esophagus and that detail makes my heart gag and I push my eardrums until I hear only windroar again. She stabs into the neck and pulls the blade toward her, then turns her head away from the deer, and I too am turning my head, but we know blood is gurgling out. The deer thrashes wildly for a moment, spraying blood as her head breaks free from Nova’s hands. It is horrible, to watch this waste of life, her potential time left unrealized. Finally, the doe stills. “I didn’t want her to suffer,” Nova says, and I assume she is also referring to

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herself. Then she turns and vomits, right onto the pavement, holding her black tangled curls back with one hand. When she’s done, she passes her wrist across her mouth and raises her eyes to the sky. I want to tell her I love her, out of admiration that she knows such things, for her tenderness and presence of mind. That she can do what should be done, that her history as a ranch kid makes such things possible, and also that she’s honoring her future by giving her bigger dreams a try. That I’m sorry for my silence, for my violence against her in that way. But already she is picking up the hind leg to drag the deer to the side of the road, although the deer doesn’t budge and so I grab the other leg to help, but again the deer doesn’t budge, and I realize the deer is heavier than we are strong. Nova does a sad one-two-three-heave!—and in this way, we lurch her forward until the doe is just past the white line. Then we stand, heaving, and she bends to wipe the blood off her hands in the grass. I find a water jug and an old towel in the car, pour the water over her hands and hand her the towel. She holds it in her hands and then sighs and says, “We should go home.” Back by the House of Corn, birthplace of John Wayne, back past the stupid monuments, the worthy monuments, back past the sacred and mundane, back across all those miles in a hot car, wind blowing, our bodies jolting as we’re carried for hundreds of miles, without effort, without much awareness, despite our efforts. “No, no,” she says, seeing my face. “Here. This home.” The West, she means. She says, “We’re falling into the middle.” “Bell-curve and all,” I say, trying to make a sad joke. But she doesn’t smile. “We said we wouldn’t do this mediocre-middle thing.” We were supposed to work to change the world, she means. Or the opposite alternative: Escaping to a quiet place to live simply. Not where we are. Not in a city, not in a small house crowded amongst others, not with me wondering about how to best fold the towels, not with her worrying about laundry detergent brands. I look at the sun hovering behind a bruised cloud and the sky has deepened into a deep shade of blue, an enormous arc of a blue that’s quiet and still. “It doesn’t matter where we live, Nova. It’s us.”

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“But our dreams can’t live in that city. Where are they, our dreams?” “You can still be a person of consequence and be in the mainstream,” I say, though she’s heard this before, and she knows that I’m right, but also, she is right, and it’s true, we are not heading in the direction we intended. “I was thinking about our gas mileage before we hit the deer. Thirty-two gallons per mile? Who cares?” Her voice is hard now. “What about the people who die without ever having tasted an orange? Plastic never disintegrates, do you hear me?” She turns to me and speaks softly. “I’m so sorry. I can’t live with you anymore.” I open my mouth to speak, but before I can say anything, she sweeps her hand across the land in front of us. It’s nearly dark, and now there are different bands of blue—a dark blue earth, lighter blue sky. “No sidewalks, less concrete, fewer lines, more space.” On the horizon, where she has just waved, headlights appear. We watch as they grow closer and a pickup truck becomes visible. The driver slows when he sees us. “You okay?” A man in a ballcap leans out of the window and squints at us. “Yes,” Nova says. “Thanks.” “No town for miles.” “Deer,” Nova says, nodding in the direction of the dark form. “She’s off the road. No car problems.” The man eyes the car’s front bumper, which is hanging crooked. If it was lighter out, he could see what I know is there: blood pooled on the road, blood sprayed across Nova’s clothes. But he doesn’t, or if he does, he understands, and he is in a hurry, and he drives on. When his red taillights disappear, I walk forward to the grass on the edge of the road, where it’s been mowed short, and I walk further to where the stalks suddenly spring up to the height they were meant to be. I stand there for a while, then pull out a blade of bluestem that is nearly as tall as a deer, rub the blade between my fingers. When I look back up, it’s dark, but I can make out the shape of Nova holding her hands to her head, which is jerking with crying, and as I approach, she backs up. “The deer and all,” she says in a crumpled voice. “I know,” I say. And I think I do: not only that we have killed it, but that it happened without our knowledge, our consent, our awareness. What if she’d seen it sooner? What if we’d passed by that spot one minute later? So much depends

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on nothing, or nearly nothing, so I walk up and hand her the stalk of Bluestem. “Isn’t it beautiful?” She holds it to her, then holds me to her. I pull away, suddenly, and I sense the sorrow that comes from her when I do. But it is not what she thinks. I walk over to the dead deer and stand above her silk-brown form before getting down on my knees. I put my hand against her neck, strong and firm, and push my fingers inside the wound. What I feel is warmth—not hair or blood but warmth—and then I feel slick and strength, tendons and dead-weight muscles, all of it so heavy. I press further. I want to feel what we have done. I clutch my fingers so as to feel the deer’s throat, and with my other hand, I touch my own.

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DAVID McCAHILL

SVARTIVOSS

MAIRA RODRIGUEZ

7 WAYS TO HOLD ON

I. It’s the spring of your 18th birthday and morning cloaked in black grieves. You gather a fistful of dirt, drop some in your pocket, look to opened metal gate at green paint you applied last summer, now a shedding skin. NO TRESPASSING sign stomped into ash in the driveway, silent lights of cop cars block entrance, stand by as bumblebee men with yellow helmets unravel a limp python, watch it spew its inner river II. Linger at the door now seeped in black soot, hanging on a hinge as if drying, the one with the drawings you scribbled in first grade with your big brother’s green Sharpie. Determine the last time you closed the door behind you and felt safe, the fire too strong, and this is where it all started, faulty wires surged, a deadly sparkle traveled, and the door tried like you now try to find traces of your ink

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III. Memorize the room with the half-melted 1st place trophy you won freshman year, remember where it sat on the now invisible bookshelf, rescue what you can of the bed you shared with your older sister until you were 12, until mom and dad could put forth 5 years of savings to make more room for growing. Pick up a shiny key that survived unscathed from under a water-soaked pillow, wonder what memories it’ll unlock IV. Thank the alarm clock for waking dad an hour early on his day off, the dogs for barking at your little sister’s door and leading her out the back, the roof for holding on until mom woke up, thank her lungs for forcing her awake, and the highway that lead you away after an insomniac night, the rosy dawn for summoning you from your bed, away from sure death and being your escape

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V. Reconstruct a copy in your memory where trees don’t resemble burned matches, rains give in unashamed to cleanse the air, where stars beam brighter than flame. Say goodbye to the structure but hold on to the key, look around at the land, it remains scarred but will recover with time, and let the coyotes in the llano let loose their song of bark and whine VI. Wave to a shadow of a girl twirling in a dress. Her scattered books are now ghosts, and she will hold on to what this house used to be, but you will look ahead, create something new. Peer through windows that didn’t explode, fog up remaining glass with heavy breathing, draw a heart with the tip of your finger, let the house settle and try not to implode VII. Stand at the base of the kitchen where mom cooked brown sugar love into empanaditas, walk an endless circle around a reincarnated dinner table, run your hand over air, dust flour off your jeans, pull open a charred oven lid and gaze into the depths, don’t let it swallow you, close your eyes and taste bitter metal, sour ash, sweet, sweet cherry pie

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES Stephen Abban Junior (b.1992) is a Ghanaian contemporary artist currently working and living in Sekondi-Takoradi. A native of Mankessim, located in the Central Region of Ghana, Abban studied visual arts in high school and holds a Higher National Diploma (HND) in commercial arts (painting) from the Takoradi Technical University. Abban participated in a fine art international exchange program at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University in Eger, Hungary, and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Technology in painting (studio practice) at his mother institution. Aracelis González Asendorf was born in Cuba. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Kweli Journal, The Adirondack Review, Puerto del Sol, The Acentos Review, Litro, The South Atlantic Review, Saw Palm, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Hong Kong Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, 100% Pure Florida Fiction, and Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness. Desmond Tetteh Atitianti (b.1995) grew up in Odorkor, an energetic town in the suburbs of Accra, Ghana. His love for Indigenous Ghanaian culture grew tremendously based on his association with different ethnic groups in the compound house where he lived. Atitianti has always been fascinated by the concepts of recycling, tradition, and how people from different ethnic groups relate to each other. He developed his skills when he applied to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree in Commercial Art, specializing in Material Technology, at Takoradi Technical University. Seneca Basoalto is an Iberian Sicilian poet and lifelong lover of the arts who has been writing and practicing poetry for nearly three decades. Taking great pride in the evolution of her craft, Basoalto has adapted the breadth of her experiences into candid poetic portraits full of enigmatic devotion and temperamental narratives within her diverse range of literary work. Nancy Beauregard lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her daughter and two feisty Maine Coon cats. She holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and will receive her MFA in Poetry at Western Colorado University in 2022. Her work has appeared in Duck Head Journal, The Normal School, Sky Island Journal, and Contemporary Haibun Online, among others, and in her poetry chapbook, I Heard a Train. She has also recently won first place in the Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest. Follow her on Instagram @murderedinanovel. 124

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Em Brousseau is an essayist from a small seaside town on the east coast. A graduate of Emmanuel College’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program, her work can be found in the anthology When Home is Not Safe: Writings on Domestic, Verbal, and Physical Abuse and the mental health cookbook A Unifying Blend: A Compilation of Recipes and Stories to Celebrate All That Makes Us Human. Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Prairie Journal, The Anti-Langourous Project, Please See Me, Front Porch Review, Cypress, Vita Brevis, Blue Unicorn, InScribe Journal, and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently Rearing in the Rearview (Quillkeepers) and Byline Legacies (Cardigan Press). Follow her on Facebook @ccaseypoetry, and on Twitter @ccasey_carol. Laurie Ann Doyle is the author of World Gone Missing, which bestselling author Edan Lepucki praised as “a gorgeous debut.” Recipient of the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award and a Pushcart Prize nomination, her stories and essays appear in McSweeney’s, Alta Journal, Under the Sun, Jabberwock Review, The Los Angeles Review, and many other publications. She teaches writing at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco and at UC Berkeley Extension. Learn more at laurieanndoyle.com. Evonne Ellis is a fire lookout in Oregon and a nature writer in Western Colorado University’s Creative Writing MFA program. She spends her free time exploring the natural world and enjoys capturing her adventures in photos. Her essay, “Resiliency in a Changing World: Reflections from Nature” was awarded second place in the Resilience Studies Consortium’s 2020 Student Resilience Reflection Contest. Ellis’s poetry has been published in Duck Head Journal. Katelyn Elwess is an emerging writer from California. In 2019, she earned her MA in English (Creative Writing) from Sacramento State. Her stories are forthcoming or have appeared in Remington Review, Call Me [Brackets], and Pigeon Review, among others. When she’s not writing, Katelyn enjoys drinking too much coffee, spending time with her partner, and taking pictures of her cat, Shakespeare. She can be found on Instagram and Twitter @readinthegardn. Madge Evers is an educator, gardener, and visual artist whose work explores transformation. Referencing the ancient collaboration in mycorrhiza, her practice involves foraging for mushrooms and plants and sometimes includes the cyanotype process. Her artwork Santa Fe Literary Review

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has been shown in New England and New York; in 2021 she was a Mass Cultural Council photography fellowship finalist. After teaching for 25 years in Rhode Island and Massachusetts public schools, Evers now works as a full-time artist. She facilitates artmaking workshops for people of all ages. Follow her on Instagram @_sporeplay. Camille Ferguson is a queer poet from Ohio. Their work has been published in Flypaper Lit, Zone 3, Passages North, and Door Is A Jar, among others. Ferguson has been nominated for a 2021 Best of the Net award and for a 2022 Pushcart Prize. You can follow Ferguson on Twitter @camferg1. Angelina Georgacopoulos is a high school senior from the Boston area. Follow her on Twitter @angie_george7. Elder Gideon is the author of two poetry collections, Gnostic Triptych and Aegis of Waves (Atmosphere Press), and co-author, with Tau Malachi, of Gnosis of Guadalupe (EPS Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in dozens of journals. He’s an alumnus of the 2021 Community of Writers. A veteran English teacher-activist and leader of a gnostic tradition, Gideon lives to connect. Reach out to him @elder.gideon, or email eldergideon@gmail.com. James Gifford is an active editor and teacher, as well as Director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. He is author of the Mythopoeic Award-winning book, A Modernist Fantasy, and has taught in six countries on two continents. His recent writing is in SAD Mag, The Nashwaak Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. Follow him on Twitter @GiffordJames. Katherine Grainger’s writing is informed by her multicultural upbringing and her experience in advocating for those who need support. She has worked for Seattle’s public transit for twenty-two years and has been gathering stories from the city’s frontline. Raising her son who has autism has been the cornerstone of her writing. She has completed a children’s book on the subject. “Hiking with Willie and Grace” is her first publication. Anangsha Haldar is a 20-year-old student from India. She is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in psychology. Poetry, for her, is a way of life—a tool to unravel the mysteries that lie even in the most ordinary things. As an introvert, she loves the company of her books and would one day love to own a pet cat. Follow her on Instagram @anangsha_haldar.

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Grace Herman is a visual artist and humanitarian from the Pacific Northwest. She has a degree in fine art with a focus in metal sculpting. She has worked extensively against human trafficking, and with marginalized communities to find creative solutions and foster strong local voices. Her latest work is ink on paper and explores the purpose and experience of being human. E.H. Jacobs is a psychologist and writer in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. His work has been accepted by or appeared in Permafrost Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Storgy Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Aji Magazine, and Smoky Quartz. He has published two books on parenting as well as psychological papers and articles, and served as a contributing book review editor for the American Journal of Psychotherapy. He also served on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. Emel Karakozak was born in Mut, Turkey in 1975. Her adventures in photography started in high school and now include participation in many group exhibitions. The recipient of awards in various national and international competitions, Karakozak has served as a jury member in many photography competitions. Karakozak’s works have appeared at Hacettepe Art Museum, Baksı Art Museum, London’s Saatchi Gallery, the Romantik Bad Rehburg Museum, the Belarus Center for Contemporary Art, and the Museum des Kreises Plön, among others. Originally from Louisiana, Brandon Kilbourne is a biologist and poet living in Berlin, Germany. Working at the Berlin Museum of Natural History, he pursues a parallel career as a poet. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Ecotone, Tahoma Literary Review, West Trade Review, Artemis, and elsewhere. Additionally, his work has appeared translated into Estonian in Sirp, and in 2021, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Wayne Lee lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lee’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Press, The New Guard, Slipstream, and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three Best of the Net Awards. His collection, The Underside of Light, was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/ Arizona Book Award. Learn more at wayneleepoet.com. Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Sun, Waxwing, and Poetry Foundation’s American Life in Poetry. He’s the author of two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). Visit michaeljmark.com. Santa Fe Literary Review

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Gerard J. Martínez y Valencia is an opsimath, writer, playwright, composer and musician, and lyrical photographer. He is currently writing a collection of magical realism stories based in and around North Central New Mexico. Martínez has worked over 25 years in university, state, and local government sectors as an organization development, special events, administrative, media, community, and public relations specialist. He has served on several local, regional, and national boards and committees, and currently works at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Laura Jin Mazzaro is an atmospheric scientist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was born from Korean and Italian immigrant parents in Caracas, Venezuela, and in 2007, she did her own migration to the United States. Mazarro is passionate about inclusivity in the outdoors, and has recently been exploring more creative pursuits outside of her scientific career. Some of her photography work can be seen at laurajin.com. David McCahill enjoys landscape photography, and his camera is a trusty companion on all adventures that involve snow, ice, and rock. Originally from Lake Placid, New York, he now lives and works in Leogang, Austria. Jen McConnell is a fiction writer and poet with recent work appearing in October Hill, The Disappointed Housewife, Sledgehammer, Poetry Super Highway, Hindsight Magazine, The Louisville Review, and more. Currently, she serves as Fiction Editor for The Bookends Review. She earned her MFA from Goddard College in Vermont. Her debut collection of stories, Welcome, Anybody, was published by Press 53. Read more at jenmcconnell.com. Corey Miller was a finalist for the F(r)iction Flash Fiction Contest (’20) and shortlisted for The Forge Flash Competition (’20). His writing has appeared in Booth, Pithead Chapel, Third Point Press, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He reads for TriQuarterly, Longleaf Review, and Barren Magazine. When Corey isn’t brewing beer for a living in Cleveland, he likes to take his dogs for adventures. Follow him on Twitter @IronBrewer or at coreymillerwrites.com. Shagufta Mulla is a poet and artist. Her poetry has appeared in ARC Journal, Orangepeel, Blood Moon Journal, Blood Orange Review, and the anthology Nombono by Sundress Publications. Mulla is the 2021 Blood Orange Review literary contest winner in poetry. She holds a DVM from Colorado State University and a BS from the University of Arizona. Mulla lives in Oregon and she can be found on Instagram @s.mulla.dvm.

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Leslie Elena Nava lives in New Mexico and is currently in college, majoring in creative writing. If she isn’t staying up late doing homework, she is writing or reading. Mia Nelson is a ’22 at Dartmouth College. Her work has been recognized by Princeton University, The Poetry Society London, and can be found in The American Poetry Review. She was born in Denver, Colorado. Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have appeared in Colorado Review, The Southern Review, Crab Creek Review, Passages North, Fugue, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere, and can be read at storiesandnovels.com. Follow at @storiesnovels. Laura Pritchett is the author of five novels, two nonfiction books, and editor of three environmental anthologies. Her work has been the recipient of the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the High Plains Book Award, and others. She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. She can sometimes be found sauntering around the West, especially her home state of Colorado; she particularly likes looking at clouds. Learn more at laurapritchett.com. Triana Reid is a graduate from the Institute of American Indian Arts where she received her BFA in Poetry. Her inspiration comes from a tender connection with the natural world and the simple act of slowing down. Her poems have previously been published in the IAIA student anthology and in WORD, a publication by the New Mexico School for the Arts. Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Right now, Riekki is listening to Tony Robbins’ “Setting a Standard” from his Love & Passion: Your Journey to Lasting Connection and Fulfillment CD. Maira Rodriguez lives in Alamosa, Colorado, and holds a BA in Creative Writing from Adams State University. She’s an avid reader and enjoys teaching Spanish to middle school students in her free time. She is currently completing her MFA in poetry at Western Colorado University. Her work has appeared in Colorado’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, A Circle Book: A Conejos County Anthology, and she’s done freelance writing for Storycentral.

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In a past life, Suzanne Samples was a calico cat. In this life, Samples is an Appalachian native who now searches for Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. She’s the author of two memoirs, Frontal Matter: Glue Gone Wild and Stargazing in Solitude (Running Wild Press). With her cousin, Emily, she’s the co-founder of Dead Skunk Mag, the only literary magazine to openly brag about not stinking. Renée M. Schell’s debut collection, Overtones, is forthcoming from Tourane Poetry Press. Her poetry appears in New Verse News, Catamaran Literary Reader, Literary Mama, Naugatuck River Review, and other journals. In 2015 she was lead editor for the anthology (AFTER)life: Poems and Stories of the Dead. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and teaches second grade in a diverse classroom in San Jose, California. Tapan “like Japan with a T” Sharma is a writer from Minnesota who dropped out of medical school to be a disappointment to his Indian parents. With degrees in psychology, neuroscience, ohysiology, and biomedical engineering, he fancies himself able to clock what makes people tick and what makes them talk. He has a third-degree black belt in camaraderie. Lauren Dana Smith is a painter, writer, and art therapist living in Taos, New Mexico. Smith’s work is held in private collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. In 2021 she received a SURFACE: Emerging Artist of New Mexico award from the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque. She is a professor of Art Therapy at Pratt Institute in New York and Southwestern College in New Mexico. Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including two forthcoming collections: Green Regalia (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022). His most recent book, Catafalque, won the Richard Wilbur Award (University of Evansville Press, 2018). You can find him online at adamtavel.com. Jocelyn Ulevicus is an American writer and artist with work forthcoming or published in Free State Review, Beehouse Journal, Dewdrop, Blue Bottle Journal, The Petrigru Review, Hole in the Head Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Humana Obscura, Entropy Magazine, No Contact, Mindful Matter, and The Santa Ana River Review. Ulevicus’s essay, “I Remember The Violets,” originally published in the Santa Fe Literary Review, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Learn more at jocelynulevicus.com.

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Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the author of two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings (fiction) and The Name is Perilous (poetry). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and anthologized in several collections, including Bending Genres, Fat & Queer, and Best Small Fictions. Readers describe her writing as heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical, and intelligent. To read more of her work visit sherrevernon.com/publications and tag her into conversation @sherrevernon. Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the 2021-23 Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Wellington’s articles, fiction, and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Progressive, The Christian Science Monitor, Dissent, Crisis (The NAACP magazine), The Guardian, and elsewhere. Wellington’s recent full-length collection, Psalms at the Present Time (Flowstone Press), was released in November 2021. Hanna Marie Dean Wright is a self-taught folk artist residing in Keavy, Kentucky. She uses her experiences from growing up in rural South-Eastern Kentucky, teaching special education classes, and living with obsessive compulsive disorder to inspire her unique works of art. Wright uses bold lines and bright colors to create abstract figures with relatable and at times deeply emotional expressions.

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SUBMIT TO THE SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW The Santa Fe Literary Review (SFLR) is published annually by the Santa Fe Community College (SFCC). An in-print literary journal, SFLR features work by local, national, and international writers and artists. From June 1 to November 1 each year, we invite no-fee submissions of poetry, fiction, dramatic writing, and creative non-fiction, as well as reproducible visual art. We use Submittable, an online submissions platform, for all submissions. Our 2023 suggested theme is “Myth: Invention, Legend, and Lore.” Our submissions period opens June 1, 2022 and closes November 1, 2022. Contributors receive two copies of the magazine and are invited to share their work at the annual SFLR reception, hosted each fall. At SFLR, we aim to publish a diverse range of writers and artists, and to present a wide variety of stories, styles, and perspectives. We’re especially committed to promoting voices that aren’t always empowered in the publishing world, so if you’re a writer of color, an Indigenous person, a non-native English speaker, a female, a member of the LGBTQIAPK+ community, a person with a disability, a trauma survivor, or anyone else frequently silenced or ignored by the modern media, please submit. Visit our website, https://www.sfcc.edu/santa-fe-literary-review/, to submit your work. If you are unable to submit electronically, please write to us at SFLR, 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87507, or call (505) 428-1903. Poetry, Prose, and Dramatic Writing Submission Guidelines Word limit per prose submission to SFLR is 2000 words per submission period; poets may submit up to five poems per submission period. Dramatic writing (for example, screenplays), should not exceed ten double-spaced pages; SFLR encourages submissions of full-length works or standalone scenes. Please format your submission for twelve-point font or similar, to ensure legibility. SFLR accepts simultaneous submissions, but please email sflr@sfcc.edu if your work is selected elsewhere, or go ahead and withdraw it from Submittable. We do not accept writing that’s been published elsewhere.

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Visual Art Submission Guidelines SFLR invites submissions of visual art, including but not limited to graphic novel excerpts, photography, digital media, and reproductions of produced art in any media. Aside from our cover, we’re only able to print in black and white. As such, we suggest that artists submit works that will reproduce well in black and white. Submit visual art submissions in .jpg or .tif formats, at 300 dpi. Please visit our website to submit electronically. Learn More Pick up a free copy of the SFLR at the SFCC Library or any of the three Santa Fe Public Library branches, or write to SFLR, 6401 Richards Ave, Santa Fe, NM 87508. Follow Us: Facebook@SFLRSF Twitter@SFLR_ Instagram @santafereview

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SUPPORT THE SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW To support the Santa Fe Literary Review, consider making a donation. Your gift will help students and faculty members to continue creating, printing, and distributing this publication, and will empower writers and artists from Santa Fe and around the world to showcase important work. To donate by check: Checks should be made payable to “The SFCC Foundation—SFLR/ENGL Fund,” then mailed to: SFCC Foundation, 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87508. Kindly write “SFLR/ENGL Fund” in the memo. To donate by credit card: Call (505) 428-1855 or visit https://www.sfcc.edu/foundation/ give-now/. Be sure to indicate, over the phone or in the “Comments” section online, that you’d like your gift to be designated for the SFLR/ENGL fund. For other ideas about how to support the Santa Fe Literary Review, email sflr@sfcc.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!

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Santa Fe Literary Review: Issue 2022

Articles inside

MAIRA RODRIGUEZ 7 Ways to Hold On

RON RIEKKI 3 People Died

CAROL CASEY Unravelling

TAPAN SHARMA Old School

CAMILLE FERGUSON Sonnet for Feel Good

COREY MILLER No One Talks About Overpopulation

SHERRE VERNON Raise Me Up

ELDER GIDEON #1

ADAM TAVEL Fox Wake

SHEENA CHAKERES: Original Work and An Artist's Statement

DAVID McCAHILL: Original Work and an Artist's Statement

RENEE M. SCHELL Duplex: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream

E.H. JACOBS Reading in Bed

EMEL KARAKOZAK Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

SUZANNE SAMPLES Passing Through

LAURA PRITCHETT Bluestem

JOCELYN ULEVICUS Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

SHAGUFTA MULLA Reverberations

CAROL CASEY Unravelling

DESMOND TETTEH ATITIANTI Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

TAPAN SHARMA Old School

CAMILLE FERGUSON Sonnet for Feel Good

MIA NELSON Social Isolation

FRANZ JØRGEN NEUMANN Sailing Lessons

NANCY BEAUREGARD we don’t speak of the dying

ARACELIS GONZÁLEZ ASENDORF At Fifty-Nine

STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

JAMES GIFFORD Quibble Commons

ANGELINA GEORGACOPOULOS Origami

ANANGSHA HALDAR A brown girl’s guide to skin

DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON Poetry Dedicated to Strangers, Lives and Others in Starry Disbelief

Interview: SFLR Speaks with Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

LESLIE ELENA NAVA Can I Hold Your Hand?

EM BROUSSEAU Someone not Someone’s

HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

WAYNE LEE Splinter

LAUREN DANA SMITH Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

BRANDON KILBOURNE Creation Myth

JEN McCONNELL The Jumping-Off Point

TRIANA REID Lull

EVONNE ELLIS Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

KATHERINE GRAINGER Hiking With Willy and Grace

MADGE EVERS Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

LAURIE ANN DOYLE Roses and Formaldehyde

KATELYN ELWESS Impressions

LAURA JIN MAZZARO Go Back Inside

SENECA BASOALTO catch all the fires

GRACE HERMAN Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

GERARD J. MARTÍNEZ Y VALENCIA Original Work and An Artist’s Statement

MICHAEL MARK If You Step on This Word Barefoot