2023 Santa Fe Literary Review

SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

Volume 18 ● 2023

Faculty Advisor: Kate McCahill

Creative Non-Fiction Editor: Tintawi Kaigziabiher

Fiction Editor: Austin Eichelberger

Poetry Editors: Jade McLellan and Maira Rodriguez

Art Editor: Brittney Beauregard

Editors at Large: Isaac Burdwell, Lily Powers-Gold, and AJ Wood

With special thanks to Nancy Beauregard, Jennifer Breneiser, Linda Cassel, Emily Drabanski, Tracey Gallegos, George Gamble, Andrew Gifford, Julia Goldberg, Julie Ann Grimm, Jackie Gutierrez, Jonathan Harrell, Sarah Hood, Shalimar Krebs, Todd Lovato, Holly Lovejoy, Kelly Marquez, Laura Mulry, Rob Newlin, Trish Newman, Val Nye, Diane Ortiz, Margaret Peters, Adam Reilly, Serena Rodriguez, Becky Rowley, Miriam Sagan, Brian Sandford, Laura Smith, Roxanne Tapia, Briget Trujillo, and Jim Wysong. We’re also grateful to the folks at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the SFCC Foundation, 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 Cochiti, Jemez, Kewa, Nambé, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Tesuque, and Zia. The Santa Fe Literary Review 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.

Copyright © 2023 by the Santa Fe Community College

FROM THE EDITORS

“There’s no hiding something that wants to be found,” writes Melissa Darcey Hall in her story, “Leave the Bone Buried,” which begins on page twenty. Creation is like that: that which was hidden rises to the surface, manifesting in ways the artist might never have intended—or imagined. Once fashioned, a good myth takes on a life of its own, evolving over time through countless retellings. And for the writers and artists—the makers of myths—it’s so often the case that our message, our voice, finds us, and not the other way around.

For this year’s issue, our editorial team called for art and writing that explored our magazine’s 2023 theme: “Myth: Invention, Legend, and Lore.” Thousands of submissions streamed in, all shaped around the mythic—retellings of ancient myths we recognized alongside modern myths we’d never heard before. Through the lens of the fabulous, submissions touched on the nature of memory, the sting of loss, and what it means to come of age. Myths took on every shape imaginable, and our editorial team pored over each one, searching for the interpretations of legend and lore to fill the pages that you, reader, now hold in your hands.

Myths shape who we are, how we identify, and what we value. They tell us where we came from, and they instruct us how to move forward. They pass on lessons and preserve history, defining societies around the world. A myth—just a story, really—has the power to shape a culture. Myths keep traditions alive, ensuring that a memory lives forever. Through dozens of manifestations, the myth lies at this issue’s core, and with it, a celebration of every story wishing to be found.

Make

Roshani Chokshi

yourself a myth and live within it, so that you belong to no one but yourself.

ANOOSHA G. REDD | BRAIDED TOGETHER

I sat, cross-legged, on the leather bench seat of the train, facing the window. Through the peeling metal bars, the expanses of dry orange earth and the contrasting dark green dusty groves of trees bobbed up and down in front of me. We were in a sleeper train, bustling with people and tea. Kids crying, kids laughing, the man yelling on the platform with his undulating voice for you to buy some cold, fresh cucumber with squeezed lime and salt and chili. I was sitting amongst these smells, the exhaust of the train, the spice of the food, the rhythmic noise of the tracks—sitting still, my mother’s hands massaging melted coconut oil into my hair.

She parted it down the middle, measuring from my nose. I remember the feeling of the tip of the comb running down my scalp from the top of my forehead to my neck. She parted my hair, combing each side and yanking firmly to begin each shiny braid from the points behind each ear. I loved the feeling of comfort, the smell of the coconut, the touch of her hands brushing my neck as she reached the ends of the braids. I always wished my hair were longer, as long as the train, so that she would never reach the end. So that we would be frozen in that moment forever—braided together, mother and daughter.

When it was over, I leaned back into her belly, so soft and warm, and closed my eyes. It was not every day that she braided my hair, and I would keep the braids in for as many days as possible, until they were mussed, stray hairs escaping at my ears and the nape of my neck. Amma would say, fix your hair like a good girl, and I would reluctantly undo the braids, strand by strand, feeling like I was about to cry but not being able to explain why.

It’s the same feeling we look for our whole lives, the feeling of connection we want to hold and never let go of. The grief and emptiness when the feeling is gone, when she was gone—the summers I spent without her, and now the years. My mother in India, halfway across the earth, that feeling of her braiding so far away from me now. But I try to remember, even though my hair is now too short to braid, that we are still braided together. To remember that we are all braided together in this beautiful world, even though the braids are often messy and tangled.

RICHARD PARISIO | HOUSE OF WONDERS

A young couple brings their baby home to a mountain cabin where a perennial spring flows out of an iron pipe driven into the bedrock.

An aquarium near their woodstove lulls with water music, holds an axolotl, a kind of salamander that retains some larval traits for life. One week

and the baby widens his blue-grey eyes, locks gazes with his mother as she sings and nurses him. For this is a house of wonders. Pink gills

feather the axolotl’s thick dark neck and flutter in clear water. His species is named for an Aztec god who guided the sun through the underworld,

brought back the bones of the dead from which new life in our world was created. The axolotl’s job now: to represent his species, almost gone

from the wild. And the baby, just arrived from where his ancestors lie? Mother and baby swim in each other’s eyes. They are drawing the sun from its well

again. As the moon’s milky disc descends the sun shows its face on the mountain. The father takes his son from his sleeping mother’s arms and the axolotl dances

on delicate feet across his glass floor and the quiet brims and burbles. Wordless the water sings a new world into being.

ASH HAGLUND | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I approach collage as a meditative practice exploring reconciliation and healing. Much of my work is a reflection of woman’s existence and a reimagination of that reality in a post-patriarchal world. I aim to connect personal relationships and activated stories at the center of my subject matter through visualization of lived experience. My former career in commercial fashion lends me a unique perspective on how women and femininity have been portrayed in media. The female centerpieces applied to my work are sourced from both vintage and contemporary fashion magazines and Playboy. I often reform the image’s narrative from its original intent in order to redirect the oppression and objectification of women in mass media to confront patriarchal attitudes and structures of today’s society.

RADHA ZUTSHI OPUBOR | IROKO-TREE

My brother and I used to spend our summers at our grandmother’s home in Kwara state. Before we were born, she had been called Tanimola, one who knows the future. She lived in an old wooden farmhouse on the edge of Saare village and was known to have once been a juju priestess. She kept chickens and a big black dog to watch them. And if sometimes she still cast fertility charms on young brides, well, that was between her and the spirits. So, to answer your question: yes. We knew what dwelled in the iroko-tree. What happened to me was not the fault of my grandmother.

The morning of the sixth of August, my grandmother fried akara in a heavy pot snapping with palm oil. I made her sit down and served the small fat cakes myself.

“Am I so old?” my grandmother grumbled. But she ate with relish. Taiwo came out of our room and grabbed the two fattest pieces. Grandmother sucked her teeth when he passed. He had hardly spoken a word to us all summer. Taiwo blinked, and for a second he looked more than annoyed—almost angry. Then he grinned, and he was Taiwo again. My older twin brother, who’d always been my best friend.

“Good morning, Grandmother,” he said. She gave him a withering look and waved him out the door. Then she turned to me. I saw the creases of effort around her eyes as she smiled.

“Would you like to hear a story?” she asked.

It was a story I knew by heart. I let my mind wander as I listened. The iroko-man lived in the iroko-tree. He came out when the moon was full and drove men wild with rage and murder. Girls died at his roots, and boys hung from his branches. Then they became iroko-men themselves. But one day there would be three signs, and the iroko tree would grow silent and still.

“Why?” I had asked my grandmother, once.

“When you love yourself and love to live, you could stand rooted in one place forever. I could have done it, when I was a girl. But the signs never came.”

In the evening, the air grew thick and heavy. It settled in my hair and coated my tongue. The thunderclouds were practically begging to rain.

“Kehinde,” my grandmother called. I rose from the mattress I shared with my brother and went to her. She was in the big room—the one that wasn’t so large in the daylight, but seemed to go on for miles at night.

“Come here, Kehinde,” said my grandmother. She was in her rocking chair in the corner, blanketed completely in shadows. I knelt at her feet and kissed her hand.

“

Ẹ kú alẹ,” I said. It was a good evening. Quiet and still, like me. Restless and wild, like Taiwo, part of me whispered.

“Kehinde,” my grandmother said for the third time. I looked into her eyes and recoiled. She stared through me, unseeing. Her mouth trembled, and her hand shook where I clutched it in mine.

“The iroko-tree is watching. He knows it’s time. Stay away!” she cried. Then she moaned and shivered. As I watched, she shrunk. Her head nodded down to her chest.

“I’ll stay away. I will.” I held her hand until she fell asleep, then padded back to my bedroom as quietly as I could. Taiwo returned just before dawn. He was quiet, but his panting breath was loud. He sat at the edge of the bed for a long, long time. Did he know I was awake?

“Taiwo,” I whispered, “are you alright?” He jolted.

“Go back to sleep, stupid girl,” he said, his voice rough. I made a small noise of surprise, then quieted. It did not occur to me that he had said it in Yoruba, that Taiwo did not even speak Yoruba.

You might think me foolish for missing the first sign. The second was harder to miss. That morning, as I went out to feed the chickens, I found my grandmother’s dog in the yard with its head missing. There were iroko leaves in its fur. I observed this as if from far away.

Time went by.

My grandmother found me kneeling by the body, screaming without making a sound.

She held me and took me away. One look had told her what I had already guessed: the iroko-man had found a host. Grandmother spent the day in the kitchen, cooking up a counter-curse. But we both knew even her juju was no match for the iroko-man. I buried the dog. There was a buzzing in my ears, under my skin. The air was almost shimmery with anticipation of rain. I imagined the gathering storm clouds felt the same way I did. Eventually, I gave in. I crept deep into the forest that surrounded my grandmother’s house to find the iroko-tree.

The tree was the tallest thing for miles, gnarled and dark, planted in the coldest corner of the forest. I crawled through stinging clumps of bushes towards it. As my eyes adjusted, I saw my brother. He was nailing the head of my grandmother’s dog to the tree. Small sharp leaves fell from its branches and settled in his hair. He paused and wiped his brow, then scanned the forest. For a moment, his eyes met mine. They were not my brother’s eyes. The eyes of the iroko-man were clear and utterly empty.

That was the third sign. I stumbled away, then vomited in a clump of bushes.

This is the part I regret most. If I had been stronger, I could have admitted what I already knew: there was only going to be one ending to this story. I couldn’t change that. But I could have said goodbye. Instead, I went straight to bed and fainted.

I woke late in the night. Heat lightning flashed in the distance, and the air was heavy and cold. I was alone in the house. Had my cowardice cost me my grandmother, as well as my brother? I ran as fast as I could, deep into the bush, to the resting place of the iroko-tree.

They were both there. Iroko-man clutched a paring knife in my brother’s hand. Our grandmother was bound at his feet, struggling wildly.

“Iroko-man,” I shouted. My brother’s body turned toward me. My grandmother screamed at me to run, and I suddenly knew why. I’d known why all summer. I knew the words of this story by heart. My eyes welled up, and it began to rain.

“You are so old and so angry,” I said in Yoruba. The words poured over my tongue like water. “I’m silent. I’m still. I don’t love to live, not yet, but I’ll try. Let Taiwo go. I’ll take your place.”

I went to my brother, and took his hand for the last time. He blinked like a man waking from a dream as the iroko-man appeared before us, a vast dark shadow. He smiled, then disappeared. My arms stretched towards the rain clouds, and my feet plummeted deep into the earth. As my brother carried my weeping grandmother away, millions of sparkling raindrops settled in my branches.

I wanted to go to them, but I am rooted here, forever safe and forever stable. I live forever and I love to live. I am the iroko-tree.

AJIKÉ KENDRICK ASEGUN | ANCESTRAL

Somehow she grew stronger each time she heard of another someone’s passing A master of invisible things she knew how to fold herself into disappearance and come out on the other side as solid flesh But she couldn’t yet figure out how to keep all her people alive in one place at the same time without them popping in and out of realities Slipping between realms reincarnating more frequently than ever before Was it some celestial restlessness going on All she wanted was one full lifetime A whole conversation with all her loved ones seated being still not having to split her mealtimes between those eating in the groves at the base of trees and those sitting around the table laughing

JON DAVIS | INTENTION

Intention is a stuck gear, a starter that requires a hammer. Intention is a bottle of cheap Cava that won’t open until it does, spewing the window and a shelf full of your favorite cookbooks. Intention is shaky on heels, too loud in cowboy boots. Intention snoozes under a sleep mask, keeps its ears plugged tight. Intention gets everything wrong— the pitch of the roof, the depth of the channel, the distance down the left field line. Intention is an ark for one of each species. It’s a tunnel that turns out to be a cave. Intention meant to marry you but widowed you instead. Intention swings at the low outside slider every time. Intention won’t wear its helmet, its elbow and knee pads. Intention tries to hit that impossible high note and squeals instead. Intention is writing its dissertation on The Concept of Economic Fatalism in the Lesser Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Intention knows nothing, is cocksure about everything. Intention is a watering can meeting a Galapagos tortoise on the floor of an automobile showroom. Intention won’t ever sit still. It bursts into meetings with a list of demands. Intention is a poisonous snake that you recognize too late. It’s a long slow ride to the wrong hospital.

GARY OAKLEY | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I have the word “awe” tattooed on my wrist where I can easily see it. Actually, my entire family—two daughters and my wife—also have the same tattoo. I believe that the awe found on a mountaintop vista can be felt every day by surrounding ourselves with inspiring art. This feeling of awe is good for our mental, spiritual, and physical health. I continuously remind myself that it is not what I paint, but how it makes people feel. I hope my abstract representational landscapes not only inspire awe, but also motivate all of us to realize that we are all part of nature and we need to protect her, to keep New Mexico paintable! Consequently, ten percent of my sales go to environmental causes.

This painting, “Getting in Tune II,” is part of a series done in 2022 in which I experimented with reducing my palette while applying the paint with square brushes. My goal was to not even try to make it look realistic because New Mexico often looks so unreal! A cloud really can be square! By reducing my palette to the essential colors, the piece becomes more aesthetically pleasing without the distraction of too many colors and details. In this case, for instance, the reds/greens and yellow/blues compliment each other beautifully.

I paint in oil over colored gesso, leaving some underpainting exposed, fattening up my paints with mediums to add texture. Final touches like the thin streaks across the surface give it energy, and the turquoise dash is a conversation piece and perhaps the “human” element. I paint standing to literally add kinetic energy to the landscape. I try to keep that energy loose and free by listening to music. Some of my titles come from songs I heard while painting—in this case, “Getting In Tune,” by The Who.

GARY OAKLEY | GETTING IN TUNE II

MATTHEW J. SPIRENG | WINTER MORNING WALK

Outside the vet’s office a greyhound bundled up like an old lady in a heavy coat, wool bunched on its neck up to

its ears, is being taken for a walk as I drive by 20 minutes past sunrise, temperature just below freezing. It’s only a glimpse,

but the image sets me thinking of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, how this innocent greyhound could be a version of the wolf in grandmother’s clothing. Only, given that it’s a greyhound, not a wolf, this fairytale would have to be

different, no use of the big teeth to eat the grandmother or Little Red Riding Hood, as some versions have it. Let’s say

early one winter morning Little Red Riding Hood, who had been neglectful about visiting her grandmother for quite some time, set out through the woods to bring her grandmother, who was very, very old and had been feeling ill

of late, cake for her 95th birthday and some chicken soup so she might regain her strength, but, unknown to

Little Red Riding Hood and her family, her grandmother had died since her last visit, and her grandmother’s faithful greyhound had dug a grave and buried her. In fact, the greyhound had just finished covering grandmother over with dirt and bowing

its head in mourning when it caught a scent in the air: Little Red Riding Hood at a distance, with cake and chicken soup. The greyhound was beside itself. It knew Little Red Riding Hood was a very sensitive child and would be overwrought with grief and guilt if she arrived at her grandmother’s house only to learn her grandmother had died during the months and months since her last visit. What to do?

What to do? The greyhound dashed through the woods as only greyhounds can to catch a glimpse of the child and

reassure itself its nose had not lied and then ran as fast as it could, which was very fast indeed, back to grandmother’s house, where it pushed open the door, bounded up the stairs and into the bedroom and dragged items of grandmother’s clothing

from the closet, which it somehow pulled on over its long legs and taut body, and jumped into bed and pulled up the covers

so when Little Red Riding Hood arrived and went in the house and up to her grandmother’s bedroom, she found

the greyhound, bundled up in her grandmother’s clothing, lying in her grandmother’s bed. Where’s grandmother?

Little Red Riding Hood asked, not for one second fooled by the costumed greyhound, but figuring the greyhound was bundled

as it was because greyhounds are very sensitive to the cold and it was only keeping warm. The greyhound had to confess that grandmother

had died. But it felt compelled to try to make Little Red Riding Hood feel better, if it could. It surely didn’t want her to think her grandmother

had died because of her neglect, so it made up a story about a wolf that had snuck into the house while it was off

hunting rabbits for the grandmother’s larder, and how after the wolf had fatally injured her grandmother, it arrived back home

with the rabbits only to find what had happened, and drove the wolf off into the big river to the east, which the wolf tried to swim across, but was swept away and drowned. The greyhound told Little Red Riding Hood how her grandmother had suffered very little and had died quickly

before it even returned home from chasing the wolf, and how it had given her grandmother a proper burial. Tears rolled down Little Red

Riding Hood’s cheeks as she listened to the story, and when it was done, she asked to visit the grave, and, after, she and the greyhound

ate some cake, and then she led the greyhound back to her home, where she embellished the story a little and they lived ever after, happily or not.

JOHN BRADLEY | LABYRINTHINE SLEEP (From The Recovered Book of Ariadne)

I am X, as X

= Bits of red thread stuck to your lower lip.

= That scar on Ariadne’s palm bending in the curve of a bull’s horn.

= That black leather drinking cup made with the hide, the reckless hide of a bull.

= Reciting from The Book of Labyrinthine Sleep: I am asleep-awake, and yet awake-asleep.

= The mirror in the labyrinth saying, Who moves your mouth when you are not moving? When you are not moving, and your tongue begins to move?

= Telling the mirror, I know nothing, more than nothing about the so-called daughter of the Minotaur.

= The mirror saying, And how is it Ariadne’s hair smells of Minotaur musk? And why does the labyrinth lead to a door below Ariadne’s bed?

= Telling the mirror, I know nothing, less than nothing above (or below) the groin, nor the glacial distance between brain and farthest star.

= The mirror saying, And those bits of red thread? On your lower lip?

MELISSA DARCEY HALL | LEAVE THE BONE BURIED

Katja, Maeve, and Zosia first heard about the bone in biology class, which was normally where interesting conversation went to die. While Mr. Brickshaw consulted a lab group about their frog dissection, Cora—a quiet redhead who, at the start of eighth grade, disappeared for seven months and came back three weeks ago with a nose ring and a lot of knowledge about horses—finally gave in to Maeve’s nagging and told her what started it all.

The bone affects everyone differently, Cora warned. Some girls become nymphomaniacs, buy a bass guitar, or wake up every morning naked in the park, while others get pregnant and drop out of school, grow a whole bra size in one month, or stay up every night writing poetry about body hair and cherry lip balm. Cora told them they weren’t ready for the bone, which settled it: Katja, Maeve, and Zosia had to find the bone.

“The bone!” Katja’s mother laughs when she hears their plan. “We had the same myth in Michigan when I was a girl.”

She leaves out the part about finding the bone at the start of eighth grade, curious and scared and energetic all at once when she first held it. She had her first kiss two weeks later, the boy’s lips warm and damp.

“Let them find it. They all do eventually,” Maeve’s mother tells Zosia’s mother, who squints and pulls her mouth tight. “If something’s buried, it’s for a good reason.”

They, too, found the bone when they were girls. Touched it, smelled it, excited themselves with the morbidity of it. In their day, they didn’t talk so openly about the bone. If you found it, you kept it to yourself. Besides, it was easy enough to tell apart those who’d found the bone, and those who hadn’t.

No matter how much they beg or offer favors, Cora won’t tell them where to find the bone. Luckily, Katja’s cousin, Violet, is in college and has a boyfriend and a girlfriend, which means she knows everything. When Katja calls her, Violet tells her the bone is in the canyon behind their neighborhood.

“If you reach the trail at the bottom of the canyon, you’ve gone too far,” Violet says. In the background, Katja hears the rasp of a deep voice clearing, the thrum of a guitar, the low vibration of movement that warms a room.

“What happened when you found it?” Katja asks.

“Stop that,” Violet laughs, her voice quiet.

“What?” Katja asks before realizing Violet isn’t talking to her, has forgotten all about her on the other end of the phone line, hundreds of miles away.

Katja hangs up and tells Maeve and Zosia she knows where they can find the bone.

“Of course,” Zosia says, Maeve and Katja nodding.

They’re not supposed to go into the canyon, not since some creep killed that high school girl there last year. Their mothers warn them it’s dangerous, that bad men hide in the bushes and do bad things to good girls. But the three of them have been climbing Maeve’s backyard fence and hiking through the walls of the canyon for months ever since their classmate, Joseph, said he found a twenty-dollar bill and a sticky deflated balloon in the brush. They’ve yet to find any treasure, but they like the lawlessness of the canyon. It looks like the old California from hundreds of years ago that they learned about in social studies class, not the serpentine drives and courts of tract housing in which they inhabit now.

Their familiarity with the canyon makes it easy for them to find the bone, sunbathing beside one of the larger boulders on the lip of the canyon. At nearly a foot long, the bone is sizable enough to be from a human, maybe a child, though more likely from one of the dozens of coyotes that litter the terrain. Their science teacher would give them an A for identifying it correctly as a tibia. It’s caked with dirt and sticky with sinew on one side, but beneath the layer of nature they dig with their fingernails, they uncover the sunbaked white of their treasure.

“That was almost too easy,” Maeve says.

“That’s the point. The bone knows if you’re ready or not,” Zosia says. She’s not sure if that’s true, seeing how she made it up two seconds ago, but it sounds like a universal truth, like saying the sky is blue or that watermelon is the best HiChew flavor.

They take the bone to Maeve’s bedroom and sit in a circle, passing the bone around like show-and-tell. Their feet tap the ground and their palms pool with sweat as they each wait their turn. Katja presses her thumb into a groove in the bone and feels warm all over with its perfect fit. Like Cinderella, it’s a sign the bone was

meant for her. Zosia sniffs the bone and comments on its dead garden scent before rubbing the bone with two fingers and licking them. She likes the salty tingle on her tongue and the bitter aftertaste that lingers in her throat. Maeve strokes the crest of the tibia, her insides jiggling like Jell-O. Her mind flips through future versions of herself, wonders what the bone will give her.

It takes three rounds of rock paper scissors for the girls to agree to keep the bone at Maeve’s house that night.

“We’ll establish custody arrangements tomorrow,” Maeve says. As the child of two divorce lawyers, Zosia and Katja trust her expertise. “But for tonight, my mom says you can sleep over.”

They make a bed for the bone between two stuffed bears sitting on Maeve’s nightstand. With the lights out and only a sliver of moon peeking through the window shades, the toothy white of the bone emits a faint glow in the dark. The three girls stare at the bone, chanting whispered wishes and willing something to happen, before falling asleep.

In the morning, Katja cradles her breasts, swears they feel tender, fuller, rounder. Zosia cries, says the bone made her touch herself last night, but Maeve rolls her eyes.

“You did that all by yourself. You’re just scared your mom will find out and send you back to that Jesus camp,” Maeve says. The bone revealed nothing to her last night, only made her have an unsettling dream about her older brother’s girlfriend.

Before Zosia can answer, Maeve’s mother walks in with a plate of toasted waffles dusted in powdered sugar. Her eyes fall on the bone, and she sighs. She knows from her own experience that the more forbidden a thing, the more a teenager wants it.

“That thing,” she says. “At least wash your hands before eating.”

Maeve’s mother calls the other mothers and tells them their daughters found the bone. Only when she says it out loud does she feel the rattle in the pit of her stomach and a heaviness in her chest.

“I didn’t think they’d find it so soon,” she sighs.

“I was a year younger than they were when I found the bone and look how I turned out,” Katja’s mother says, which only makes Maeve’s mother or Zosia’s feel worse.

“Just let them see what happens if I find them with it,” Zosia’s mother says before hanging up.

Maeve’s custody rule dictates that each of them gets three nights with the bone, which means Maeve gets two more nights. Not until the third night does Maeve feel something like a heartbeat at the base of her lower back. She stays awake that night listening to the low vibration that taps at her spine while sniffing her arms. She’s always wondered how to describe the scent of a body. Her skin doesn’t smell like honey or roses or vanilla. At two in the morning, she resolves to save her chore money for that Victoria’s Secret body spray her brother’s girlfriend wears, the bottle a cloudy purple and capped in gold.

“It’s working,” Maeve confirms when she passes the bone to Katja, but refuses to reveal more. “You’ll see.”

That evening, Katja tucks the bone into a doll bed, kisses the bone goodnight. In the morning, she undresses and stands before the bone naked, imagining it’s Peter, a blonde tenth grader who lives across the street. She turns to inspect herself in the mirror, runs her fingers along the dimples and grooves and hills of her body. She’s never really assessed her body, not all the different parts as a puzzle put together, and she wavers between intrigue and embarrassment. When she Googles “naked woman,” a deluge of images engulfs her computer screen, but none of the bodies look anything like hers.

When the bone finally makes its way to Zosia, she sleeps with it tight against her body as if it were a part of her. She likes how the rounded edges soften its stiff frame, the way it feels strong against her but never threatening, not like the cane her grandpa carries, swatting at ankles and bare toes of anyone who crowds him. The next night at dinner, she notices how little her parents touch each other, the way her father looks in the direction of her mother without really looking at her at all.

The transformation doesn’t happen overnight, not the way they thought it would, but they feel a creeping and nebulous change that’s hard to assign a

name or shape. When Maeve starts her period, she sobs into her bed sheets not from pain but from the confusion of her emotions—a sense of pride and loss all at once. Katja invests in three bras and tweezes a hair from her left nipple. Before bed, she massages her breasts with coconut oil, confident the stimulation will promote growth. Zosia shows no externally obvious metamorphosis other than a sudden interest in trying out for the track and field team next year. Each morning before dawn, she laces her Keds and gallops through the labyrinth of suburbia and into the canyon, a mare freed from her stable. She likes the wind against her cheeks, the pounding of her heart in a steady staccato, and the warm tingle that builds from her core and, if she runs fast and long enough, spills out of her in mutinous convulsions, her head dizzy but mind a flat plane.

On the one-month anniversary of finding the bone, the girls celebrate in Maeve’s backyard. They circle the bone with a candlelit vigil, each kissing the bone in thanks for their gift before sipping from the bottle of wine Maeve found uncorked in the kitchen.

“May the bone guide us all our lives,” Katja toasts.

A week later, Zosia’s mother finds the bone tucked under Zosia’s pillow. When Zosia returns from her morning run, her mother lectures her on womanhood and responsibility and the immorality of MTV.

“Good luck finding this again,” her mother waves the bone in Zosia’s face and grounds her for a week.

But when Zosia tells Katja and Maeve, they just laugh. There’s no hiding something that wants to be found. Assembled at Maeve’s house, Katja and Maeve pull on their sandals while Zosia slips on her Keds, now dirt-caked from weeks of running, the white of the canvas barely visible. The three of them slip over Maeve’s backyard fence and into the brush, wandering in an uneven line, waiting for the bone to call to them.

PI LUNA | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

From a distance, Pi Luna’s artwork looks like a painting, but get up close, and you’ll start to see the shapes and textures. She cuts up tiny pieces of paper from recycled magazines. Initially, the process looks like a chaotic mess, much like the number Pi—an endless, irrational number going on forever. At first glance, the chaos seems hopeless and overwhelming. But look a little closer, and you’ll find that this irrational number also makes perfect circles that are balanced and whole. Each piece has a place, and each piece belongs.

Pi transforms the mess into cohesive visions of hope, healing, and renewal.

BRYCE SWAIM | CRAWFISH COOKS QUESTION GOD WITH A BUCKET OF BUDS END OF NIGHT

Jimmy boiled beside a sage who wore an apron stained in death and spice

Graced a metal paddle along the bottom of a metal pot an Alchemist

He cooked well manifest in the potbelly snug under that untied apron never trust a skinny cook

Atheists, they fumbled fifty-pound baskets of pinching crawfish cursing

in two-hundred-twelve-degree judgment gray shells turned dead, before a seasoned red that makes drool drip the chin of any honest southern man

I found Jimmy’s sage after the barkeep called Last Call

A few regulars sank into barstools. We filled buckets of ice and booze, the fish linger still ripe on his apron. On the deck, we sat

to eat the last batch of extra-spicy. The sage busted the first tail from head

orange flavor splattered the table He peeled away the first two rings tongued down the white meat just a taste at a time

Imagine what the big dude upstairs would do to us after we do crawdads like this

he washed the thought down with beer carried on

Jimmy—Reed knew Jimmy, didn’t ya Reed— Jimmy had issues Took too many drugs hung around the likes of us too often. Aye, Reed and I warmed a cell over-night with ole Jimmy— didn’t we Reed— Well, one day

Jimmy took a visit down this way took some bad acid top floor of a Houston hotel threw himself from the window

No more Jimmy What type of God makes bad acid, kid? You know what I think?

I think

there’s two gods in this world Man and Nature and they’re at war.

MADARI PENDAS | BLESSÉ

According to family lore, my great-grandmother, Elisa Rodríguez, never went to the gynecologist. When I prodded my mother for more information, she swiveled from her chair (she was eating a pear and taking a break from mothering teenagers) and quoted Elisa with exaggerated gesticulation, flailing her arms like a dictator or frustrated street mime.

“It’s all working fine down there.”

I had more questions, like how did my great-grandma know everything was functioning down there (a vibe?), and why was my mother so quick to end this conversation? Were vaginal convos off limits? Were vaginal conversations about the elderly off limits? Or was this one of those topics (like religion and politics) that isn’t polite and proper? In some ways, the conversation could be both religious and political.

My abuela, Elisa’s youngest daughter, taught me how to be a lady. She had gotten off the phone with my mother, who explained the condition. Once the phone was back in the cradle, my abuela stormed into the living room and took the game controller from my hands. She sauntered with me to the bathroom. Her hand cupped mine, firmly, then closed the door. I was twelve years old and wanted to keep playing Nintendo 64 with my cousins, but my abuela insisted.

“You can’t let anyone find out when you’re on it. ¿Me entiendes?”

“Yeah, okay, okay.”

She didn’t say the word. Not period or menstruation. There were always euphemisms or codewords (that time or lady problems or the visit), as if we were talking about something illicit or an act that needed obfuscation. Why? Why all the secrecy? It’s not like the men in the house, my uncle and abuelo, didn’t know.

Abuela took the toilet paper roll and unfurled a long sheet, almost six inches. She held it out like a scroll, taut between her thumbs.

Look, I could see her saying with her gestures. Look, this long.

“You wrap it up tight, so no one can see the Kotex.”

“Why?”

“Because. Stop talking back.”

I was only allowed to use pads. Tampons, my abuela explained, were not used by virgins (señoritas). I was warned tampons would un-lady me. Break my hymen. I wanted to make a joke about if that meant I’d fall in love with a tampon, but this didn’t seem like the time to try out new material. I nodded and took mental notes. She made a tight wad, demonstrating what I was to do with the used product for the rest of my menstruating life (the next thirty years?).

Her chubby fingers moved with a speed and acumen I rarely saw, the movements of an expert.

She lifted the trash lid and shoved the wad deep into the bowels of the garbage. We couldn’t flush toilet paper down due to the septic tank. Her hand pressed passed used toilet paper and wet wipes and old floss to complete the act. I was disgusted.

I wondered why this needed to be hidden. I had walked into the bathroom several times to find my uncle’s unflushed shits floating in the water’s surface like lily pads. In response he would offer a puerile “whoopsies” or tell me to stop acting like a princess and flush it myself. Where was his shame?

“Then you lift the toilet and wipe the seat,” my abuela said, showing me how.

I was to leave no evidence. I had not been there.

My family had a disdain and mistrust for doctors. They were certain doctors were trying to sell us something we didn’t need; or scare us into spending more money; or giving them access to our bodies for their experiments.

“It’s all a business,” my mom said. “Una estafa.” She was convinced her doctor forced her to have a C-section. She was certain she could deliver her second child vaginally, but the doctor insisted on the surgery, and ignored her.

“That son of a bitch just wanted to go home,” Mami says every time the story comes up.

“I know I could have done it.”

Perhaps she was made to feel like she didn’t have the pedigree to argue with a doctor. A poor, immigrant woman, who didn’t speak English. She tried, but the doctor insisted a C-section was the only way. Her C-section recovery time was difficult: she was unable to walk or change her child’s diapers. “I felt useless,” she said. “Qué podría hacer?”

In the 1950s, the U.S. government conducted human trials of birth control medication in Puerto Rico—before the drug itself had been approved in the mainland. Many women were not made aware of the possible side effects. Many of the women were left feeling like guinea pigs for the benefit of upperclass white women, who could enjoy a safer version of the pill.

Doctors’ assistants went through slums knocking on doors to recruit poor and vulnerable women, promising them they wouldn’t have to have more children.

Three deaths were reported but could not be directly linked to the trials because autopsies were not performed. A lot of women experienced unintentional sterilization. In an interview, participant Delia Mestre said,“Why didn’t anyone let us make some decisions for ourselves?”

For many, the experiments reinforced the inferiority of minority women. And those who supported eugenic policies used the advancement of contraceptives to support sterilization. One such advocate, Margaret Sanger, said that “morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals and prostitutes” should be forcibly sterilized or given contraception to limit their reproductive capabilities.

I went to the gyno behind my mom’s back during undergrad. There was a free health clinic on campus. I made an appointment for a day I had class. No extra miles on the Nissan. Nothing suspicious about going to campus.

I didn’t dare mention the clinic’s existence to my mother. She was like a shark sensing a drop of blood miles away. I knew what her response would

have been had I even suggested thinking—just the thought was enough for persecution— about a gyno visit:

Why do you need to go?

Are you having chocha problems?

Do you think you have an STD?

Why all this interest in the clinic?

Are you having sex?

Who said you could have sex?

I learned that when a mother says you can tell her anything (cue Maury Povich soundtrack), that’s a lie. It’s a trap! It’s a bait and switch. The CIA should consider borrowing these techniques for information gathering. You’re lured into a false sense of safety, reveal secrets, then get hit with the heatseeking chancleta.

The last secret I revealed to my mother was that I had a boyfriend in high school, Andy. For the next three months of that teeny-bopper limerence, my mother told me every morning: to not get pregnant; to not let him touch my chochita; to not let him touch my boobs (as if I had any to offer); and to wait till marriage to see his pe-pe.

I kept my first gyno appointment a secret. I did research on what to expect—the Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers kind of research. I learned all about speculums. Good lord, no wonder my great-grandmother didn’t want doctors foraging about up in there.

The modern “duckbill” speculum was invented between 1845 and1849 by J. Marion Sims, a plantation doctor in South Carolina. He performed dozens of surgeries, without anesthesia, on slave women. The speculum’s use was contested by doctors who privileged the “educated touch,” which meant palpating the stomach.

When I finally went to my appointment at the end of the semester, I changed into the hospital gown, and wondered if I should have shaved down there. Did the doctor have a preference? Did hair make their work harder? Would it

reflect poorly on my character? I was running through the litany of questions as if this were a first date. I should have waxed or something, I thought.

A young nurse took my blood pressure and I asked her about my pubic hair. Her lips curled, suppressing a laugh. You could fit a dime in her cheek dimples. Was I stupid? Or vain? Both? She shook her head. “Hair is normal,” she said. “It’s actually there for a reason.” Afterwards, the doctor came in and talked me through everything that she was doing—from putting lubricant on her finger to the breast exam. She was a calm and reassuring woman, whose bedside manner seemed developed for her first-timers.

The doctor pulled the gloves off. “Good job.” It was a small thing, going to the gyno, but it made me feel grown and capable.

After university, my menstrual cramps became more painful. I remembered the middle school video Your Body and You. The video, which we all giggled through, didn’t mention that the pain could get more severe over time. Now in my thirties, even my PMS has become more intense. I must map my cycle on the calendar because the intrusive thoughts and emotions reach nearcritical levels. During one particularly insufferable week, I picked a fight with my partner over the way he poured rice into Tupperware. “You have to make balls with the spoon!” I bellowed.

I asked my doctor, a man, about this issue. He scribbled something down on his pad. Maybe he wrote himself a note: this woman’s annoying as shit or asks too many questions or looks like we have a whiner

Then he looked up, almost surprised I was still talking. I was trying to put my pain into words. I wasn’t sure how best to describe the sensations.

“That’s normal,” he said. “It changes sometimes.”

I wanted to ask more questions, but the appointment ended. I was ushered to the front desk, where a woman was already asking me, “Cash or credit?”

After a year, I switched doctors. This new OB/GYN was a woman. I thought women were always allies to other women. How couldn’t they be? They’d

understand the physical pain, symptoms, and the frustrations. I thought support was the default.

The doctor was a young woman in her late thirties, sprightly and animated in her movements around the room. My cousin had told me to always make medical appointments in the morning when doctors have more energy and mental bandwidth. “By the end,” my cousin said, “they probably just hope you die so they can go the fuck home.” Didn’t I tell you my family hated doctors?

The pain was so agitating and disruptive that I couldn’t sleep at night. I felt crazy. At the vagaries (pun intended) of my mood, my boyfriend at the time made comments like:

You’re bipolar, you know that?

Stop being so extra.

Why are you being so sensitive?

I wanted to ask her if this was normal. This hadn’t been the case between the ages of eleven to twenty-six.

“I need to get cells from your cervix.”

“Sure, all aboard.”

She didn’t laugh at the joke, and I thought I saw a mild eye roll.

The speculum was not entering easily. It was painful and I could feel the curved edge of the upper clamp digging into me in an uncomfortable way. My abs and legs tensed. It was beginning to hurt even more.

“Just relax,” the doctor said.

How was I supposed to just relax? What was I supposed to do about that? How was this just my problem? Maybe if she had laughed at my joke, we wouldn’t be here.

When the doctor still met physical resistance, she breathed an annoyed sigh and looked at me as if to come on, really?

“Relax. Breathe.”

I was breathing. I was breathing this whole damn time. I wasn’t the vagina whisperer. I couldn’t say open sesame and automatically have the

needed lubrication—much to her chagrin. “Relax,” she continued. “This doesn’t need to be that hard.”

Now I was getting frustrated.

The speculum was uncomfortably prying and burrowing into my flesh. I could feel my muscles tightening in response to the pressure she was applying with her forearm.

The doctor stopped and dropped the tool on to the medical tray. “You’re doing this on purpose.”

“No, I’m not.” I looked away, embarrassed. I was a scolded child. I couldn’t help it. It hurt. The nurse, required to be in the room, looked through me, as if she knew to not argue with the doctor.

“It’s not that bad,” the doctor glared at me until I looked away at a poster of a happy baby in a field of sunflowers. I thought I was the problem. I was doing something wrong. I was making her job more difficult.

“Relax,” she said and picked up the speculum. “Okay?”

Does telling someone to relax ever have the desired effect? I endured the penetration with the tool. It still hurt and pinched when it was fully inserted. I didn’t say anything. I wanted to go home. I thought with a woman it would be better.

A year later, a different doctor told me birth control would help with the PMS and some of the other physical symptoms, like fatigue and depression.

The doctor wrote the prescription hurriedly and I wished we would have talked more. I assumed he was educated enough to give quick recommendations. You see enough similar cases, you see the pattern, right? When I worked at Burger King, I could sometimes anticipate which clients were going to be difficult by how (and if) they greeted the cashier. Patterns, right?

I looked at the degrees and certificates on the wall for further reassurance. Dude has to be smart-smart.

“Any questions?” He asked, more out of habit than anything else. Perfunctory, like when you say bless you when someone sneezes.

“Nope. No questions.”

Physically, little changed in terms of pain management. My cramps still left me hunched over or made it challenging to stay asleep through the night. A boyfriend insisted they couldn’t possibly be that bad. He was also convinced PMS and postpartum depression were psychosomatic experiences. Made up. A type of wandering womb hysteria of sorts. His intellectual pathologizing included statements such as:

It’s a collective delirium.

Men don’t have an excuse to act like bitches.

You just want attention.

I stopped taking birth control when I experienced severe headaches and diarrhea. I had read about more of the possible side effects online and got nervous about blood clots and seizures.

Plus, even the generic brand version of the pill was expensive. At some point I thought of sending my partners an invoice for reimbursement.

When I informed the it’s-an-attention-thing boyfriend that I needed to stop taking the birth control pills, he threw one of the greatest mantrums I’d ever witnessed. He thrust his fists in the air, screamed, paced back and forth, and Googled reasons why I was wrong.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

“I’m doing this for me.”

He paced some more, muttering, hands in his hair. He looked like what I imagined a military general looks like before making a tactical decision on the front lines: serious, wrinkled brow, darting gaze. The Miami Rommel.

When he stopped, he turned and looked at me. His eyes were wild and distressed. He ran his hand over his face. “So what? I’m just supposed to go back to condoms?”

At a visit to the OB/GYN in 2017, the doctor said he saw something abnor mal in my tests. Abnormal cells. He explained something about the clustering, my age, and coming back for additional testing.

I phased out thinking about what abnormal cells could mean. Cancer, right? That’s what all this was about—the prodding, poking, speculums, cervix scrapings.

When he paused his monologue for my reply, I looked up. He had one of those youthful old faces. I could easily imagine what he must have looked like as a child—freckles, bucked teeth, swiping at the fringe in his eyes. And I could see what he’d look like in a few decades.

“Do you have any questions?”

He must have been a happy child, I thought. The type that asked for more time outside when the streetlights came on. Difficult, but happy. I snapped out of my thoughts. “Yeah, yeah. Will my insurance cover it?”

Afterwards, I cried in the parking lot of my job with my coworker, Lucía. We used to go on long walks through the maze of the parking garage. We played hooky while Lucía chain-smoked Marlboro Reds, and I ate greasy pork croquettes. I slumped against the edge, near her car, while she rubbed my back.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. She blew the smoke out the side of her mouth. Everything would be okay—it was a false reading of the results.

Lucia had wanted children. But life, immigration, and a journalist’s work schedule prevented that. She had mentioned it in passing when a coworker’s child scampered through the cube farms during Take Your Child to Work Day. “What a blessing,” I thought I heard her say over her keyboard.

Did I really hear the word “blessing”?

Her voice was low and there was a panel between us. Did I hear her correctly? In French, blessé means wounded or to injure. Blessé shares its etymological origins with the modern English “blessing.” Perhaps I simply misheard Lucía. But it did seem possible that something could be both a blessing and an injury. Perhaps.

ROCÍO RODRÍGUEZ | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am a migrant; I grew up in Mexico and I moved to the U.S.A. about seven years ago. My life is full of contrasts that I struggle to balance. I grew up being very shy, insecure, and uncomfortable with myself and my body, but every now and then I can be the opposite: bold, loud, and very confident with who I am. I studied architecture, but I want to do sculptures and photography. Mexico is my home, yet I never fit in while I was there; the U.S.A. is where I live now, and where I feel accepted, yet it’s not my culture.

Through my art, I try to capture the struggle I feel to fit in and to find a place that I can call home. My sculptures don’t fit their context and are made out of paper used to protect deliveries and twigs; they are fragile, they are not meant to last, and they seem lonely because they don’t have a world where they belong. They are constantly misunderstood; some people find them threatening, but I never create one with the intention of making something scary. On the contrary, their body language is quite shy and insecure. They are not trying to scare anyone. If anything, my creatures would like for someone to approach and connect with them. As a portrait photographer, I take photos of my sculptures as if they were people, not objects; I think that helps to capture the essence of each piece.

ROCÍO RODRÍGUEZ | WHERE TO GO NOW?

KATE KRAUTKRAMER | I DREAMED OF DIAMONDS

Back against the bricks, three stories up, I never looked down while trying to befriend a murder of crows. They roosted in upper branches of an elm that must have been tall even when the asylum I stood on was a functioning business, before the advent of Social Security, some fifty years before I was born. Atop a two-acre plot, with three floors plus a basement, forty rooms, and ghosts of unsound mind promenading the wide hallways—kids, adults, everyone I knew called it the the crazy house. The abandoned building towered near the shore of a quiet lake at the edge of our placid town, the whole arrangement a kind of washed-up Neverland. I’d been sneaking past CONDEMNED signs to get inside for months before I shuffled out on the eaves.

Daily I risked my life on the ledge, luring the one bird that noticed me. I tendered a quarter I’d shined, a rhinestone earring stolen from my mother, the top of a tin can I’d hammered and chiseled and bent and made into what looked like a man jumping off of something, or into something, arms up like a big cactus. The crow stood beside me and manipulated my offerings in his bird feet before he took them. After a few weeks, he came into the crazy house on my arm. If I lay down in the dust to nap, he hopped up and down my torso. He nuzzled at my ears and pockets searching out bright objects. I hoped he would grip the front of my overalls and fly me away. I pictured myself relaxing, flopping backward while he winged high, the two of us forming some weird kind of Icarus who would be okay if he fell into the lake. The crow could ride to shore on the boy, who was a good swimmer, if it came to that.

When we were pals, I visited the crazy house as often as I could. At first, if I had nothing glittering to offer, the crow still stayed with me, kneading my belly with his claws. We huddled in a corner room on winter days. If I rested my head back on the windowsill, he perched on my forehead or my nose. He stood on my knees and listened

to me. He tilted his head when I said important things. Instead of doing school work at home in the evenings, I polished screws, nails and washers from my dad’s workbench. I dreamed of diamonds and sketched diagrams showing how I would pull down stars.

But my crow wasn’t interested in plans. By spring he started giving me judgmental looks. I knew he thought I was withholding treasures when I put my hands in my pockets searching out warmth. On my end it was getting embarrassing, spending all my time with a friend who wouldn’t come over to my house and who couldn’t even ride a bike. I gave him the benefit of the doubt once when he shat in my eye, but I noticed he was pecking me harder when we were together. Finally, one day I coaxed the bird onto my head, then shinnied myself out on the eaves and swatted him toward the elm where he landed and conferred with his crow pals while I slunk back into the crazy house and mourned our breakup.

It was only a minute before the crow flew back in, dive bombing me. He caught my hair in his claws and held on, squawking like I’d never heard him squawk. I ran down the corridors, down the stairs, all three floors while he clung to my head like a turncoat bowsprit. He rounded himself over my crown as if all he cared about was giving me one last deprecating stare. Since we weren’t friends anymore, I think he wanted to peck my eyes out. My eyes were so blue when I was a kid, so bright. I think that crow believed I would stop running and open them wide, just give away for nothing the shiny things that were mine.

REBECCA LEE KUNZ | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work is greatly inspired by mythic and archetypical symbolism and draws upon Cherokee iconography where I reimagine ancient folk tales from a generative and emergent perspective. Each composition usually begins with an idea or an impulse and at some point, it begins to take on its own life, and I take on a new role as a story translator. In the end, they become like found objects in a game of lost and found in the eternal creative collective. I dedicate my life to this, which is not only my artistic discipline but the place I go to connect with Spirit. In preparation for my work, I invite visions and the creative muse. Through this discipline, I can become a creative vessel where I receive imagery and messages. Here I am not separate from creativity and nature, but part of it. And I believe that in this well of creativity, all humans can meet. It is life-giving and vital and is one of the true frontiers where we can take part in a great mystery.

“Untethered :: At the Gate” (pictured on cover)

From the Cherokee creation myth, we know that animals, plants, and people lived in the Galun‘lati, the Sky Vault, long before they lived on Earth. Sometime later the Earth came to be, and living things came to live upon it. The Earth was tied to the Sky Vault by cords and this land became our new home. But, as prophecy tells us, one day the Earth will grow tired and fall back into the sea.

As a mother of three children, living through a pandemic and under national leadership where hatred and division were celebrated, I began to feel that everything I once knew was crumbling below our feet. When the supposed first “three weeks at home” turned into months and the mere act of breathing without a mask on became dangerous, desperation and panic started to sink in. My oldest daughter began struggling with isolation, and everything we knew and loved seemed to turn to dust. I had no solutions, no assurance

I could pass on to my children, just a long ceaseless road ahead. I

know I wasn’t alone. I had been studying this creation story and it began to live inside of me. And this artwork is my interpretation, or more accurately, my modern reaction, to this myth. Images of falling animals, most often coyotes, started flooding my imagination, with the Sky Vault looming overhead. One after another...dropping, floating, flying, and sometimes willingly jumping back up through the clouds. Why were they falling, and to where? What were these images trying to teach me?

“Sky Vault Descent” (pictured on the following pages)

According to Cherokee mythology, when animals, plants and humans were equal, when animals still spoke, they lived on the Sky Vault, high above a vast body of water. There was no light and no dark.

The animals and people looked at each other and felt crowded. Something had to be done. As they looked down to the water’s surface, they wondered what was beneath it. Could there be a new safe place to live? Water Beetle and Great Buzzard went down from the Sky Vault, and though a series of events, made land from water. This land became Mama Earth and it was now floating on a vast ocean, attached to the Sky Vault by cords, one on each corner of the four directions. This Earth provided all that they needed.

But alas, this was not made to last forever. According to prophecy, when the Earth one day becomes old and worn, the cords will begin to fray and eventually break. The Earth will sink back into the sea. This painting, “Sky Vault Descent,” is my contemporary reaction to this myth. Here the deer are jumping off the edge of the Earth. To where are they jumping? Will the cords from the Sky Vault hold?

COLLEEN MICHAELS

| ORIGIN STORY: ATHENA AFTER BEING TOLD SHE’S HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER

He never admits I got my brains from my mother, says he now hears her only as the high-pitched hiss of a fridge on the fritz, but I feel her at my shoulder.

In my dreams, she sews an owl into my collar, blocks the view of his gun display case on prom night. She knows we are all going together as a group anyway. She gets me.

My father was a voracious eater. Sent my mother out of the room before he told his stories to his students, all spinning plates and passed cigars, the students he forced to come to Sunday dinner.

The school spelling bee, crescent moons under my arms and armor, the heat of the auditorium lights, I hear Anima but maybe Animus. I want a definition of Us. I ask for clarification. I want her. Counsel.

During my debate society’s winning rebuttal, my father strained from his balcony seat, yelling, she gets it from me! Sometimes pride is a boa constrictor at the neck.

What I remember is not stopping at the Dairy Queen on the way home, seeing the runners up on the benches with their mothers, the consolations in their mouths.

SARAH WOLBACH | DAPHNE

“A heavy numbness seized her limbs, thin bark closed over her breast, her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches. . .”—Ovid, Metamorphoses

The hotel clerk in Guadalajara asked me over and over if I really was twelve as he touched my thighs, tracing waning moon into sickle in a second-floor alcove of the hotel. Tendrils of laurel hid the cornering of that hour. I had been left in a windowless room for the evening, thus my need for a book and the asking that brought him after me and the yellow dress that left my arms bare. I cried for my father, but he never came. After forfeit I fled raped and wreathed, and in the morning, I lied.

BRAD SMITH | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I became an artist without knowing it. I just loved to paint and draw. In preschool, I remember winning the drawing contest for Thanksgiving; a big turkey was my subject—with bright, colorful tail feathers. I don’t think my style has changed much since, so I was always an artist from my earliest memory. I paint because I love to: It’s just that simple. I love it when I can share a painting with someone and bring positive energy to his or her home or environment. I have a gallery in Santa Fe, because it is my destiny. Just like the acorn is destined to be a tree, that is where my life has brought me. I embrace that and am happy, feeling I am on purpose for the first time in my life. I have arrived where I am supposed to be.

I have a wide range of inspirations and appreciate that each demands a different approach. This excites me as I feel my way through each painting, realistic or abstract. Many collectors ask me where my inspiration comes from. When the monarch butterfly goes to South America, he is driven by some unseen force that cannot be explained. That is what being inspired feels like to me. It cannot be explained; it takes me to places I have never been before and will never understand. I have found that making a great painting is not so much about my education or technique but about not being afraid to bare my soul for all to see. Of course, there are some who would disagree, but so much of what we think is really just our own personal perception or illusion.

ERICA REID | THE TEMPLE OF YOUR CHOOSING: PART I

Before moving forward to The Temple of Your Choosing, please gather the required ingredients. Write them here.

1 animal

1 name

1 mythical being

4 adjectives

1 insect

2 places

1 noun

3 body parts

1 plant

1 emotion

(this poem continues on the next page)

ERICA REID | THE TEMPLE OF YOUR CHOOSING: PART II

For Camelia Finley

Welcome to the temple of (any name) the (mythical being).

Only the most (adjective) of supplicants journey through (place) and (place) to reach this holy site.

As you know, our god/dess takes special interest in souls like yours, souls (adjective) with (emotion), souls (adjective) with (noun).

But rest now, you who have come so far!

Our handmaidens have collected all you will need for the ritual: (body part) of (animal), (body part) of (insect), (body part) of (plant).

You need only be patient and (adjective).

Everything changes at daybreak.

Use the guide above to fill out the poem below. Your temple will be unique to you, and to each visit you make.

Welcome to the temple of ( ) the ( ).

Only the most ( ) of supplicants journey through ( ) and ( ) to reach this holy site.

As you know, our god/dess takes special interest in souls like yours, souls ( ) with ( ), souls ( ) with ( ).

But rest now, you who have come so far!

Our handmaidens have collected all you will need for the ritual: ( ) of ( ), ( ) of ( ), ( ) of ( ).

You need only be patient and (adjective).

Everything changes at daybreak.

AMBER McCRARY | Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks with Amber McCrary

Amber McCrary is a Diné poet, zinester, feminist, artist, and the founder of Abalone Mountain Press, which publishes work for Native people, by Native people. McCrary’s chapbook, Electric Deserts!, was released by Tolsun Books in 2020. Her poetry, interviews, and artwork have appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Room Magazine, Poets & Writers, Turning Points Magazine, POETRY magazine, Navajo Times, and elsewhere. Originally from Shonto, Arizona, McCrary is Red House born for Mexican people. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Arizona State University, and her Master’s in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College. Santa Fe Literary Review editors and interns were honored to interview McCrary on September 7, 2022, via Zoom.

Santa Fe Literary Review: To begin, we’d love to hear a bit about what you’ve been working on recently, and where your interests lie. What projects loom for you—and for Abalone Mountain Press? What are you passionate about now, and what are you drawn to in terms of poetry, publishing, and (or!) creative ventures at large?

Amber McCrary: Right now, projects I’m working on are getting Boderra Joe’s book, Desert Teeth, out; it should be coming hopefully today or tomorrow. Very excited about that! Boderra’s book is amazing! I’ll be coming out with a chapbook next year with Rachel Johnson, a disabled Diné poet. Rachel has a chapbook that we’re going to be releasing; it’s mainly about the body, and what it means to be disabled as a Diné woman. It’s good! [Laughs.] And then, I’m also going to be finishing up a project I did with In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets. I was a fellow this April in Washington, D.C., so my part with In-Na-Po was to work on putting together a zine entitled The Future Lives in Our Bodies: Indigeneity and Disability Justice. For that project, it was a few poets that submitted, and basically we made an anthology of Indigeneity and disability justice, and we will be printing about 260 copies of that zine, and will also have it available digitally at flipsnack.com/indigibay/indigeneityanddisabilityzine.html. The design and cover were put together by Johnnie Jae, also a disabled Native artist who runs a podcast called A Tribe Called Geek. The way she designs the zine is so beautiful; I can’t wait to share it. I want to try and get another chapbook out next year, and then we’re also still working on an anthology called The Languages of Our

Love, a love and sex anthology by Indigenous writers. Originally, the release date was scheduled for November, but we may push it back to February—in time for Valentine’s Day!

SFLR: Talk to us about what it means to be an artist. What did being an artist mean to you when you began your literary career—and how do you think that definition has evolved over time and with experience?

AM: That’s a good question. Sometimes I don’t really know what it means to be an artist! The only thing I can really think of when I think of being an artist is being a truth seeker, someone trying to find meaning and truth in what they’re being. For me, I am more of an interdisciplinary artist, so I like to write, I like to do collage, I like to make zines, I like to make books. Bookmaking is another form of art that I like to do. I’m not saying I’m necessarily good at all those, but those are things I really love and gravitate towards. Mainly through poetry, I find the ability to seek truth or tell my truth as a poet or writer. Growing up, I didn’t think my voice was anything special, or that my experiences were special. I think that had a lot to do with courage and self-esteem. As I’ve gotten older, I’m realizing I do have a voice, and through my voice, I can seek truth and write about my experience of the Native person.

My chapbook, Electric Deserts!, came out right in the middle of COVID, so I didn’t get a chance to tour it or promote it. I just thought it was something that came out and that’s that. But the more readings I’m starting to do again, the more I realize, I didn’t read or promote this chapbook much, and I’m enjoying it, I’m enjoying the book now. I used to think, oh, the chapbook’s there, and maybe I’ll just read more of my new stuff, and I didn’t think I’d read from it much—but reading from it is nice. It was released by a press called Tolsun Books, originally based in Tolleson, Arizona, but now located up in Flagstaff. Dave [David Pischke, Tolsun Books publisher and editor] is my mentor; he helped me in starting this press, and gave me a checklist, a document suggesting what I need to do where starting my own press is concerned; he’s been really great through this whole process.

SFLR: As a publisher, Abalone creates books for Native people, by Native people. Your press, according to its mission statement, supports Native artistry in all forms. In addition to books, Abalone publishes media in a range of formats, from original prints to coloring books to zines—in addition to traditional books. You’ve released an Abalone Mountain Press podcast, too. What compels you to publish in such a range of mediums—and how does your multigenre approach to publishing empower those who choose Abalone as the “home” for their work?

AM: A lot of it comes from my background doing zines. Coming from the zine community, I think I’ve become more accustomed to radical publishing and creating zines or creating prints. A lot of people make prints in the zine community. I was introduced to Pachanga Press, right next to my office, and they do a lot of risograph printing, which is done on a Japanese printer. Everything that comes out of that printer is made from Japanese soy ink. I have been learning the process of riso printing, and it’s amazing, and I fell in love with that. Of course, because there are so many bright colors you can use with riso prints, and I love anything bright— any colors that are super bright. We started collaborating on an initiative where any books that people preorder come with a free riso print. That’s where I got into riso, and then I see how Denise [Dominguez] from Pachanga Press, who is also in the zine community, makes zines through their printer, and it’s really cool.

When I went to Mills College and got my M.F.A. there, I harnessed their book arts program. It’s a good thing I took book arts classes during my last semester, because otherwise, I would have probably switched my focus to book arts altogether. I really fell in love with my book art class. We did make zines, and I was already accustomed to that, but we also made prints off letterhead, like the traditional printer. Learning different ways of making books was the most exciting thing for me. I feel like I want to try to highlight that more when I have more of a budget, more resources. Celebrating the art of bookmaking is another passion of mine. I’m still a beginner at that process and am still wanting to learn more about it. Instead of coming out with traditional books, which we could do too, the Abalone Mountain Press journey ended up gravitating towards all kinds of art, not just books.

SFLR: We’d love to hear about the process of conceptualizing Abalone Mountain Press as a project—and what motivated and inspired you to bring it to fruition. Please tell us, too, about your cheerleaders—those who saw potential in the idea of Abalone Mountain Press, and then helped you bring it to life.

AM: The press first started, the idea of it, came about during the first or second year I did Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute through Navajo Technical University with Manny Loley. I taught some classes including the poetry course the second year. I just realized that so many of the poets and writers in those summer programs were just so talented, and I didn’t want them to just say to themselves, “I took the summer course, and that’s it.” I thought to myself that I would love for them to continue writing, or encourage them to continue writing, and that’s kind of where I realized I wanted to open a press. I saw there were so many talented writers out there that either weren’t being encouraged to continue writing, or didn’t think they could ever see themselves published. That was something that was really important to me, because I understand firsthand how hard it can be to not get published, or not recognized, or overlooked, or feeling like you have to write a different way in order to get published. By seeing what they were writing, I realize that wasn’t actually true, because what they were writing was groundbreaking, amazing, and inspirational—and they were telling their truth. That’s where the idea started.

I started talking to people about how I was thinking of doing it. Most specifically, I remember texting David [Pischke] and saying, “You have a small press. Do you think this is something I could do?” He said, “Absolutely. You have the network that you need, and you know the writers you want to work with.” He was one of the biggest cheerleaders, and that really helped me to say to myself, “Okay, I can actually do this.” Because he actually had a press already. I would have been fine if he had been truthful and said, “No, I don’t think so,” and I would have just said, “Okay,” because I respect his opinion. I had other great cheerleaders, like Manny [Loley]. My partner is not an artist or a writer, but he’s just like, “Okay!” He’s not the type to be like, “Yeah! Do it!” And that’s what I like;

we keep our personal lives a bit more separate. Ultimately, David and Manny were my biggest cheerleaders.

SFLR: So many artists, especially those newer to the craft, wonder about the value of the M.F.A. degree—the Master’s in Fine Arts. Tell us about your experience earning the degree—and about making use of it as you move farther from your graduation date.

AM: I feel like I got really lucky with my M.F.A. My cohort—we were pretty close. I am so happy I went to Mills for my M.F.A.; it was basically like being at a residency for two years. I lived in graduate housing, and I got to go and walk down to campus and just write for two years with all these wonderful professors. I had so many great professors that did teach me about BIPOC poets I never heard of. One professor in particular introduced me to concrete poetry and environmental poetry, and at first I was very stubborn, convinced that I didn’t understand it. But the more he introduced me to a lot of these types of poetry, the more I really loved it and gravitated towards it.

In terms of my cohort, about ninety percent were BIPOC, and about eighty percent were queer, so I really love that I got to see this BIPOC/queer community, and all these writers coming together. A lot of the poets and writers in my cohort weren’t just writers; they also did other things. One roommate did rapping and hip hop on the side, and she made her own music. Another was really into book art as well. A lot of them were very interdisciplinary, and I related to that a lot, too. It’s so cheesy to say, but it was a magical time, working with all these other writers coming from all these other backgrounds, and everyone was very supportive of each other’s writing. I don’t have the same experience as they did, but I still loved what they were writing in workshop, and whatever books we were reading. I loved my M.F.A. program.

My program, Mills, is located in Oakland, California. Mills is also an all-women’s college, so there was nothing but women, trans, and queer people. I didn’t want

to be around a bunch of guys mansplaining that I don’t know poetry. I didn’t have a poetry background or even an English background, but it was good.

Since graduating, I have used my M.F.A. a lot. I have looked up to how a lot of the professors worked with students and with the students in their class. I looked up to one of the professors, Stephanie Young, and how they conducted poetry workshops, and the style was so unique. I love how she gave every student the attention they deserved for their poem. She was so great with workshop, and I try to be the same way. I have also had professors that were not the greatest at workshop, so I got to see both, and I knew I wanted to be more like Stephanie. I had another professor, Truong Tran, who just came out with a book called Book of the Other (Kaya Press), which is winning some awards right now. He is amazing, always supporting his students, and has a great relationship with all of them, guiding them towards how they really want to craft their poetry. Even if they aren’t a student anymore, he is always willing to help them out or talk with them. He is an awesome person. I look up to him when it comes to how to be a professor.

SFLR: What, in your mind, makes independent presses like yours so valuable? What do Abalone Mountain Press, and other indie publishers, offer their authors and readers that large corporate presses cannot?

AM: I know that with small presses, it’s a lot easier when it comes to communication between the editor and the writer. Most times, it can be a lot more intimate. I think this is a harder question for me to answer, because I’m barely in my second year, still seeing the trial and error that takes place within my press compared to a larger one. But I know it’s a lot more community-oriented when it comes to small presses. For me, it’s more community-grounded because the people that I work with, I use as much as possible and collaborate, for example, with Pachanga Press, or Palabras Bookstore, which is right next door to the Abalone Mountain Press office. We all try to help each other, leaning on each other’s areas of expertise. I love that we can always do readings together, or

have collaborative events at conferences like AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs).

We get along really well in terms of our mission and who we serve, which is frequently the BIPOC community. That’s who we want to work with, and that is kind of always our mission. In terms of making the books or anything we publish accessible, that’s another thing that is really important for us. It’s kind of hard right now because of the economy, but we always try to make whatever we can accessible. If someone from the community sees an issue, or if they’re interested in collaborating, we want to listen, and we want to see if they are interested in ever working with us. Wasted Ink Zine Distro is also in our space. They mainly sell zines, and they also run the PHX Zine Fest. I met Charissa [Lucille], Wasted Ink founder, back in the day, and we know each other pretty well; Charissa is very similar to me in terms of wanting to work with the community, but also be involved in radical publishing.

In the end, I can take more risks as a small press. There’s more freedom to do what I want to do, compared to, for example, the context of a non-profit, where I would have to go through board members to approve my project or my idea. That was something I thought about before creating Abalone Mountain Press; it would be nice to be a non-profit and I would have lots of funding, but I wouldn’t have that freedom. That’s the biggest thing for me, as an artist, is that freedom.

AMBER M c CRARY | SWEET, SWEET HUÑ (NY)

In a sea of bitter calloused kernels swimming in their own douses of germination

You are the softest, sweetest, and genial despite the error of excrement, you were given wayward weeds abundant & infestations undeserved

Quite contrary, you did not run elbows with concrete or viscous winds

You took your seed, soil, and soul and made midnight sky silk My eyes beat seashells for your 60-day kin you gift me season after season thousands of years of yourself how do I live up to the return, I wonder?

I look at you sober as a corn silk corn hairs tied back frays sticking out whole & unhulled Gliding along Pima canals from Westend to East end

I look at you sober as a maze man of a maize

DAVID RADAVICH | PERSEPHONE

A story that always seemed reassuring— a fixed time in the underworld then traveling with seeds to the universe of light and growth, claimers at either extreme prepared to fight grieve. Our first shared custody between shade and sun, desire and shame, sin and florid redemption.

The self never felt so wild, so torn.

NINA GLASER | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work has always explored relationships in some way, while not focusing on any particular era or event. I am more concerned with our timeless conflicts and longings. I’ve always been interested in the fine line between opposites—life and death, passion and violence, peace and conflict—and I use allegories about human nature, at times inspired by myths, to tell stories. As a child, I spent thirteen years in Israel, watching and absorbing the extremes of human nature both in conflict and in occasional peacetime. The experience of growing up in such a historical, rich, and at times tragic political climate has informed my artwork and inspired me to create and tell stories.

“Eyes Wide Open” is pictured opposite.

REBECCA VINCENT | PADDLE WITH A TURTLE

A baby turtle crawled from the sand one sultry summer day and peered into my eyes. The sun burned through the cloudless hot sky while the air, drenched in humidity, hung heavy and still. I anticipated my immersion in the river: the icy water shocking my baked skin; the instantaneous release from heat. Back in Northwest Wisconsin for our annual trip to visit family and reconnect with our homeland, I was paddling from the lodge to the town of Brule, eight or so miles downriver. Somehow, I had the river to myself on what would typically be a crowded July day. Black and green damselflies flitted above the water, frogs thrummed, and the Common Yellowthroat’s witchetywitchety resounded from the trees along the shore.

After paddling three or so miles, I rounded a wide lazy turn where a narrow sluggish inlet crowned with tall reeds and tangles of water plants entered the river from the right. I pulled my boat up onto a small sandy beach just in front of the inlet and rested on the bow of my canoe. A slight movement in the sand nearby caught my eye. The sand continued to move, and then a small head with two tiny eyes peeked out. Sand-shrouded, it crawled silently up to the surface, spilling sand as it moved. He was so well camouflaged he looked like a moving leaf of sand with eyes. Next, he raised himself up on his hind legs and looked right at me, species to species. A baby snapping turtle, he was no more than the size of a silver dollar from the tip of his head to the tip of his tail. Still as a statue so as not to scare him, I considered I may be the first human he had ever seen.

Watching each other in silence, we slipped into a different fold of time. Water time. Turtle time. Time that’s big, slow, and long. Time that swallows up all thoughts and concerns. Old tales of turtles drift into my mind. Turtle shamans shepherding people below the water’s surface to sparkling lands below. A Japanese story: a man named Urashima protects a turtle from abuse by a group of boys. The turtle thanks him by taking him deep beneath the churning folds of sea to the Ocean

King’s castle. The king’s sea nymph daughter marries Urashima and they live in happiness with good fortune the rest of their days.

I dunk into the icy stream. We sink into chill folds of water, cold instantly startling my hot, parched skin as tiny bubbles rise to the surface. We enter an ancient castle of sand lit with liquid amber. I’m in dream waters with turtle. Lines bend and refract. We’ve exited the world of land. Turtle. Ancient tribe of slow movers; keepers of the portal of the lost and forgotten; ancient dreamers of life. We’re far away in a hidden dimension, tucked inside the halls of story. Words drown. I’ve disappeared into the ancient deep and the forgotten. The water silence is silky and living. Turtle talks to me in a forgotten language, the language of water. But I understand. I had gills once in another age, another fold of time. Caverns dimly lit of amber. Crystals shimmer in ancient underwater grottos. Water Mother, Turtle Shaman. Bringer of Dreams. She swims between eras and hides in water’s green shadows. Turtle takes me into somewhere dark-lit and coppery and tells me a story. She places a small glistening amulet in my hand. It sparkles in the coppery light. I hold it close, and swim upward in spirals of light to the water’s surface.

Turtles lived through the eras of dinosaurs and ice ages. Sea turtles have been swimming the oceans for over 200 million years. After surviving these past millions of years, today six of the seven sea turtle species are either endangered or on the brink of extinction. They get trapped in abandoned fishing gear and shrimp trawls; boats and jet skis crash into them; and the scourge of plastic is an everpresent threat—they become tangled in plastic six-pack drink holders, and they ingest plastic and toxic debris, which they can’t digest or eliminate. The plastic accumulates, eventually filling the whole belly until there is no longer any room for any real food, and the turtles die of starvation.

Turtles are hunted, sold, and poached for use in supposed health tonics, while their shells are cut up and made into adornments and jewelry. Sea turtles must contend with everwarming oceans and an unrelenting tide of pollutants from the human world. And undeveloped, undisturbed shoreline, which they need for laying their eggs, becomes harder and harder to find.

The Maya say that when something bad is going to happen, turtle hides far beneath the water until the bad thing passes. The Maya decorated their temples with carvings of turtles, adorning the doors and corniches with turtle sculptures. The writer Antonio Médiz Bolio describes turtle as “like a word from the gods that men once knew how to understand.” Legends from the British Isles recount that the fairy race, at the advent of the Industrial Era, retreated from the human realm into a hidden dimension and waits until the human world returns to a more welcoming place for them. Perhaps turtles, like the fairies, wait on the outskirts of space and consciousness until the hostility of the current era on earth has passed. Or perhaps their kind, like so many others, is silently sinking into oblivion, casualties of our violent era.

Turtles figure prominently in myths and stories around the world. Hawaiian stories tell how a green sea turtle guided the first Pacific Island People to the Hawaiian Islands. And in Hawaiian myth sea turtles can shapeshift into people. In creation myths from the Indigenous Peoples of North America, India, China, and Oceania, turtle plays a key role in supporting newly created earth.

The North American Haudenosaunee (whom the Europeans derisively called Iroquois) recount that long ago when all the earth was covered in a vast stretch of water, the only animal capable of swimming far enough down to the very bottom of the water to bring back earth was muskrat. Muskrat swam far, far down into the deep, black water, farther than any other animal could go, and eventually

found solid earth. After a long while he emerged to the surface with his tiny paws filled with dark, wet mud. The animals conferred about what to do with this earth and decided turtle was the only one strong enough to bear its weight, so muskrat placed the handfuls of mud on turtle’s back. The handfuls of mud grew and spread rapidly on turtle’s back and became the land we know as North America.

Native Americans commonly refer to North America as Turtle Island, and many different tribes have turtle clans. The Huron tribe at one time had four different turtle clans—mud turtle, water turtle, striped and great turtle. In Hindu myth, every four billion years the earth is dissolved in a catastrophic flood and then recreated and held up by an elephant who is in turn held up by a turtle.

After a while of sitting with each other in the hot sun, the baby snapper approached me. I bent over the edge of my canoe to better see him, causing my water bottle to clank as it tumbled across the boat. Alarmed, the baby snapper instantly darted away from me and vanished into the great river. Well acquainted with this stretch of water, he swam to a green-shadowed oasis of safety amongst a clump of long dark billowy water plants thick with curls, swaying in the river’s current. He swam confidently from clump to clump of plants— his hiding places where he became invisible, like Frodo when he put on the magic ring. Then he launched out into his liquid-amber home streaming with golden beams of light from above. Susurrus and gentle ripples of water echoed through his sun-filled water castle. I watched this little turtle explore his vast gorgeous copper-colored world until he disappeared into the river.

The veils were lifted between species that day, and I saw someone else, and that someone saw me. I recalled the writer Terry Tempest Williams’s vow to each day make eye contact with another species. When I first heard this vow, I adopted it, but soon found how challenging it is. Aside from gazing into the eyes of my dogs, which

happens daily, making eye contact with another species requires a substantial amount of time outdoors—lovely yet not always feasible. Here was my moment—species to species. Finally, a joyous group of loud young campers approached our curve in the river and broke my reverie. I sprawled out on the warm sand along the riverbank and watched the temple of green water float by. Sun-filled leaves of maples shone with summer light. No crimson wands of autumn heralded death, disintegration, the ceaseless passage of form to other form—the grand parade of shapes and beings in the bittersweet passage of time. The abundance of green leaves everywhere proclaimed summer, ripeness, endless possibility. It was a cathedral of green as if a giant vial of precious, green sunlit potion had spilled from the sky and covered the river valley.

I continued paddling downriver, splashing through cool water in the rapids and around wide bends of sluggish brown water, thick with mud. I saw other animals—deer, eagles, osprey, trout, songbirds—but the enchantment of my encounter with the baby snapper stayed with me along my way and sparkles still in my memory while I plod along in my city life far away.

Notes

Mediz Bolio, Antonio. “Maya Turtle.” A World of Turtles, edited by Gregory McNamee and Luis Alberto Urrea, Johnson Books, 1997.

JESUS FRANCISCO SIERRA | THE STAIN OF INEQUITY

You get to your new country and when you arrive at your new city, you feel like you’re in a movie, one that’s been running in your head as far back as you can remember. You’re awed by the hills and the bay and the tall bridges and the sounds and the movement, and even the fog, which is never still, coming and going all the time. You think that this is where you’ve always wanted to be. You hope to one day become a citizen of this new land, so that you can help everyone left behind, maybe bring them to see this wonderful place someday.

You set out to get a job because the opportunities are everywhere. It’s what you’ve always been told and what you’ve come to believe. So, you set out to look for work and you stop by places to ask but your English is not so good, and you wear the best you got but somehow people make you feel as though it’s not good enough. You smile a lot but few smile back. Finally, you walk into a small bar in a neighborhood where there are some people that speak your language. Your job is to help the bartender and you’re told that you’ll get paid by the hour and that you’ll get part of the tip. The work is hard, wiping down the bar, restocking the shelves with new bottles, washing the glasses and cups. You take on all the overtime that you can. When you break a few glasses, you get mean looks and are called names that you don’t understand but you can tell. You go home that night, to the room you’re sharing with four other guys, and you talk about home, and you talk about your dreams. You sleep on the floor. It feels comfortable because it’s better than where you were, where you felt fear everyday and the sounds you heard there were gunshots in the middle of the night. It’s why you left, those sounds. And what they meant.

The first day that you’re supposed to be paid they hand you some cash and tell you to count it. When you count it, you realize it’s much less than what you were told. They tell you it’s because they took out the money to pay for the glasses you broke. But you wonder just how many glasses you broke because they took out a lot. You ask about the tip share, and they tell you it’s in there already. But you don’t believe it because you’d seen

the jar and it had a lot of money in it every day. You were sure you’d get a lot more. When you call them out on it, they tell you that’s all they got, and that if you don’t like it, that you should call the cops. They know you can’t do that. You’re beginning to sense the beauty of the city is sometimes stained by its inhabitants. You have little choice. You just must get another job on top of that one to make it and live out your dream.

And you find another job at another place, a restaurant this time, doing pretty much the same thing in the kitchen, washing dishes and glasses but this time you do it slower to make sure not to break anything. When payday comes you tell them that they’re not paying you the amount they promised. But they tell you that you’re slower than they expected so they had to adjust the amount. You argue that no one has complained about your work and that you don’t like being cheated like that. They tell you to call the cops if you don’t like it. They know you can’t do that. The stain of inequity seems to be permanent in this city and you wonder if it’s like that everywhere. You wonder if beauty in this new city, in this new country, is only skin deep. And when you think that in your head you wonder about skin. It’s like the clothes you wear; it defines you, especially in this place. Now sitting here in this holding pen, which is really a prison, you, and hundreds of others, sit on the cold concrete floor, crowded against each other. The space between you is fraught with fear because they’re sending you back home, all because they said the taillight in the car you were driving was broken. You look out through the chain link fence, the border patrol guards stalking you from the other side. You wonder if they get a bonus for each one of you they send back or if they get less if one of you breaks down and dies. Still you sit and wait, and you recall the beauty of where you came from, the violence notwithstanding. Then again, this other place is violent too and you wonder which is worse, violence in plain sight or that other type of violence that lies under the surface, under the mask of hope, under the skin of a different color.

JOHN BLAIR | APHORISM 43: THE STORY BEGINS WHEN THE BOOK CLOSES

Sometimes a story is just another way to ask for mercy that isn’t anyone’s to give the red-vine spirals of alleles pushing you to save yourself any damned way you can your days sweet with self-love so irresistible that none of it is really your fault not the sins not the raw contingencies of breathing not even the ordinary taedium vitae that in the beginning moved the world to make you and then you to make another iteration just like you and so maybe one day you just stop just walk away from your bit part in the latest Greatest Story Ever Told the one about prayer and shouting in which ecstasies roll telluric just below the surface of meaning to give you the good news that the end isn’t the end at all like in that famous parable that begins with a mustard seed and ends with jackdaws weighing down the limbs of a tree each bird made of black feathers and augury calling over and over the words of a story that is the one true story because it is no story at all.

KATHIE COLLINS | A TALE DARK AND GRIMM

We whisper late into the night about how to do this thing. How I will be the one to tell him the lie about where we are going. You don’t want to do it. I don’t know what else to do. The schools have run out of patience. The doctors have run out of schools. Last week he snapped in half my mother’s candlesticks. Last night he held my arm like a stick inside his fisted hands. I have flipped the child locks on the car’s back doors. In the morning we will buy biscuits at a drive-through window, drive two hundred miles to the edge of a national forest. We will leave our son on the side of a mountain with strangers who instruct us on the art of fast goodbyes, drive two hundred miles back home to a pitch-black house. We will not turn on the lights. We will not forgive each other.

RENEE WILLIAMS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

While so much time is spent trying to capture the best straight photo, what intrigues me are the fifty or so images discarded because of perceived imperfections. Upon closer examination, magic can be found there—and the picture enhanced to reach a stronger presentation. Details which may not be immediately noticed emerge with added attention. Image manipulation can take a photo that may not be eye-catching and transform it into something mystical. Polar bears are fascinating creatures. I could spend hours watching them. But photographing them through scratched glass as they swam underwater created a bit of a challenge. Converting the image to black and white complemented the visual scene and compensated for some of the issues that I encountered in post-processing. The raw image itself is less than impressive, but with some careful editing, I was able to revisit an image that I had ignored and create art.

RENEE WILLIAMS | MAGIC BENEATH THE WATER

SHANNON TRUAX | THE MASON JAR

As I tap on the brakes, I hear something in the floor of the car’s backseat. I don’t recall leaving anything there and glance back while at a stoplight, but see nothing. A water bottle, I think. I drive on, and the rolling around in the backseat continues. I arrive at home, pull into the garage, and walk around to the other side of the car. Opening the back door, I place my hand a little under the passenger seat and find something that feels smooth and glassy. I pull my hand out and there it is: a mason jar with a lid screwed on.

These are the jars we use as drinking glasses in the house but without the lids. Why is this particular jar in the car—with the lid screwed on? As my mind contemplates that question, before I can finish the thought, my mind provides the answer. It’s been there for a few months now and must have been dislodged from its nestled spot under the passenger seat. Holding the jar, I think back to that Sunday a few months ago. It was May and I looked upon the tree-lined river’s edge where the cottonwoods and aspens grew tall, and their leaves were green. As I stood there below that beautiful clear sky that afternoon, I thought about how the same spot would look in chillier days of October—the wind with more of a bite to it, and the trees holding onto the last of their leaves before they also joined the soft yellow carpet below. Constant is the river, though, always running the same direction and skipping over the same rocks lodged close to the shore.

I remember walking to the water’s edge and unscrewing the lid from the jar. I bent down a little and, reaching my arm out, carefully emptied the contents of the jar into the river. The ashes drifted on a little pocket of air to the water, and they made contact with it sooner than expected, sooner than I was ready for, I think. The river accepted the ashes and softly carried them on around the bend as I tried to follow along, but the brush got too thick, and the bends of the river too many.

It’s a long river, the Rio Chama, and it’s a major tributary of the Rio Grande. It begins in the San Juan Mountains in south central Colorado

and flows generally south into New Mexico and through the town of Chama, then through many other beautiful southwestern landscapes while other rivers join in it, and it ends near the town of Española, New Mexico.

Here in Chama, the river is fresh out of Colorado and the remains of spring snows have melted from the San Juans. This river is just as my mom described it in her journal when she and my dad camped here in October, eighteen years prior. I can picture them waking up in their camper, my dad pulling on his jeans and a thick flannel shirt jacket, going outside to feel the crisp morning autumn air. Mom pulling on layers of warm clothes with nothing coming close to matching. Her hair not washed or fixed for about four days now, pushed back and hidden under a bandana.

Joining my dad outside, she would mention a specific tree and ask what kind it was and if it would grow at home and where could they pick one up and where would they plant it upon return. She would point out wildflowers and clouds and the way the river was rushing right by. My dad, though, had already seen all of this before she came outside, recording it as a mental poem in his head. She brought him coffee and a sausage and egg sandwich and then asked him to look at a map they picked up yesterday while buying groceries and gas. He ate and agreed to look over the map and all at once his mental poem was lost.

I stood there on the quiet riverbank at the Little Creel Lodge in May. No campers in site as it was Mother’s Day and not quite summer. The scene I imagined of them that morning eighteen years ago felt very real, and as I prepared to twist open the mason jar, the scene swirled in front of me, and siphoned into my jar of ashes. I removed the lid, and the memories poured into that same bend of the Chama River. I watched the ashes move, and as they did, I understood that love could float.

ROBYN TSINNAJINNIE | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Among the many obstacles as an artist and individual, painting and women seemed to make the most sense to me. Painting has become a therapeutic way for me to process the anger I feel when it comes to the unfair obstacles of being a small, Navajo woman. It’s a familiar upsetting feeling I believe women everywhere also feel but never get to express. By creating a variety of colors, I enjoy creating scenes with women in dominant positions while situated in a stereotypical environment. Then, I surround them with items that give them a sense of power. I believe people misrepresent women in more than one way and a lot of important things women accomplish continue to go unnoticed.

Each of my paintings address situations that women everywhere may live through, and I like to satirically point out the stereotypes that tag along with them. Although I am not a mother myself, I believe we’ve all seen an incident where someone who is breastfeeding is being mistreated or told to cover themselves because they’ll reveal their chest. With “Cover Up!” I wanted to create a dinner scene that shows a mother feeding her child while the others who surround her have their heads covered with cloths, successfully covering up. It humored me to create a scene that shows how ridiculous these imaginary rules implicated on women can be. My goal as a painter is to use all the assumptions made toward my gender to my advantage with humor instead of anger to help me grow individually and artistically.

JANNA LOPEZ | BALEEN

i’m inside a whale’s mouth; it’s ripe and porous a fog, leathery thick cascading the tongue, a balmy savannah texturized by barnacle colonies and sea foam upon the sponge horizon echoes of Pinocchio slosh and gurgle that puppet was once a guardian, now a ghost— so alone I float, drift, swim, and marvel at sorrow a womb a tomb a quarry where bones become dust with a gnaw

i roam the baleen if not for danger, baleen might be a delicate word

it’s loudly silent in a whale’s mouth pleats are shapeless in space as am i

will I drown, suffocate, or grow gills to emerge? do I click or squeak in unison to tell other whales I love them

or that I’m food? or, welcome deafening sonar cries to pulsate then pulverize my salted breath to death?

it’s lonely inside a whale’s mouth— in case you didn’t know

one time I imagined snarling teeth—

towers of fixed trunks sharply brittle like toast but it’s dark.

i see cuspids in my mind which got devoured by foolish whimsy to think it spiffy to kiss a whale

DEBORAH NEWBERG | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Painting and dance are my forms of expression, and they influence each other. In both my painting and my dance, the movement creates the form. Observing the movements of nature translates into movement within the painting. Shells, clouds, mountains—they all have their characteristic gestures, a body language that expresses their nature, their way of being in the world. The movements within the painting, like a choreography, activate the space in a dancerly way.

M.E. SILVERMAN | LOOKING FOR LAIKA DECADES AFTER SHE FELL

On November 3, 1957, Laika became the first animal launched into Earth’s orbit but the true cause and time of her death were not made public until 2002. —Alice George, Smithsonian

A forgotten dog floats in dense dust clouds drifting between stars. Like a toy, she sits in a small capsule, circling far from patches of grass and pools of blue. My father says this is progress, points at clusters that shape into patterns he knows. Catfish Constellation, Standing Crawfish, Wagging Walrus, Frying Pan, Whiskey Flask. He calls them by name like greeting neighbors at the store. I wave at a white light trailing past. This is the last Sunday in May, where we sit on the back of his pickup with beer and Coke. He shows me all the stars he can name. When it is my turn to peer into the dark, the telescope brushes the deep well of my eye. Is there life out there? Can we see aliens? He says someday, which means when I am older. Someday is not now. And the dog? Where is Laika? My father scratches his right ear and scrunches his nose, trying to find a way to say back to where stars are born, to where stars return. Like Pop-Pop? He raises his eyebrow and meets my eyes, trying to determine my seriousness. Son, he begins, this is what I know about space: stars form when a cold cloud of gas and dust and all sorts of dead star materials come together. That stardust is part dead, part something greater than us, but that same stardust will also become living stars. Then he pauses as if done, scratches his chin with his left hand, and slightly tilts his head. We are all part of the same space, but for now, keep that stardust in your heart.

LUCAS JORGENSEN | THE BOOK OF LUKE II

I’m laying on the floor doing chest-flies when I realize the position of my body is not unlike Jesus on the cross: foot folded over foot, arms spread open, ribs exposed.

How uncomfortable he must have been— even before dehydration, nails, the crown of thorns, the spears. I believe this happened, but I struggle with the return. It’s so much

easier if Jesus was in the right place at the right time, triumphant atop a white donkey, then the wrong place at the wrong time—so many of us are.

& it cannot go unsaid: what happens to Judas is a crime. A pawn with its head chopped off, a bull butchered after beating the matador. God set the first fire & guides

with a can of gasoline, blames whoever’s burned for its spreading. He could’ve put it out, He could’ve spared us from the start, it just doesn’t make

for a good plot. Other things, too, are worth half-believing: my body is a temple but I’ve long let it fall. My body is a stone wall cracking under its weight. I’m unsagging

the foundation, now. Then I’ll coat myself in paint: cicadas crawling out of the ground, sharks ascending from the deep. If there is anything to worship, it is fun & beauty. I’ll pierce my nose. I’ll drink to drink. When it comes down to it, I could be Jesus—my long hair flows like a lion’s, my father & I are divided by a veil of understanding. Even real Jesus must have doubted— in the Garden, betrayed not by Judas, but by his own father. The moment

I most believe. When Jesus is so human, so willing to be swallowed to keep the song going. It’s all I want to be: a lamb in a world of teeth.

L. ACADIA | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

九份 (Jiufen) has a fraught place in recent Taiwanese history as the site in 1947 of the 二二八事件 (228 Incident) sparking the 白色恐 怖 (White Terror) era leading to martial law in Taiwan (1949–1987). I shot this photograph while visiting Jiufen for the first time a few days before the seventieth anniversary of the 228 Incident. While my nieces played and posed comically along the window seat looking over the hillside buildings and out to the Pacific Ocean beyond, I considered how the violent history still looms over the town. I’d been reading Shawna Yang Ryan’s novel Green Island, which begins with a retelling of how a Tobacco Monopoly Bureau agent beating an unlicensed cigarette-seller who objected to them confiscating her wares, which prompted mass protests from Taiwanese citizens upset with the new 國民黨 (Chinese Nationalist Party or KMT) government; the governor general’s guards opened fire on the protestors, leading to violent riots during which tens of thousands of people were killed or disappeared. I wanted the photograph to express how the 墳墓 (tombs) on the hill spill down into the homes of the living, their colors and shapes echoing one another, blurring boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead.

SARA SOLBERG | SEVEN SPECULATIONS ON WHY THE FRENCH OF 1518 DANCED UNTIL THEY DIED

After Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

I.

Regal is the blackbird shadow swooping the cobbled streets. Its wind-spun pirouettes

entrance. One woman, so inspired, lifts her skirt to dance.

II. A small child sits beside a plough, tickling rye bristles against his cheek. Laughter sweet as nectar burbles. His mother

watches. Love and fear pool into her belly like ale until her drunken feet cannot stay still. How many children can someone lose before the blackbirds cease to sing?

III.

Who can hear the silence of such deafening death and be unmoved?

The thud a body makes when it hits a swept dirt floor is faint enough to be mistaken for the rat flung against the wattle wall.

IV. Frost creeps. Barren fields weep pebbles to be picked in distant spring.

Once a person becomes cold enough, you can take a stone and chip at their flint flesh until all that’s left is bone.

V. Before your curse echoed down the snowy Alps, St. Vitus, did you bathe in a slow Sicilian river and whistle a pied piper tune? When the feather floated past, did you cradle it in cupped hands and smile?

Did you drown your rats? Did they dance before they sank?

VI.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of maypoles.

Like blackbirds, they flock, a manic swirl of wings. Like blackbirds, they fall, one by one, bellies up.

VII.

Dust suspends in sunbeams streaming through a torn thatched roof. Breathe deep the smoke, dung, the bronze-crusted bread. Soft, still, radiant is chilled morning. What else to do but dance?

JOHN GREY | MY EXPLANATION AS TO HOW WE ARRIVED AT THIS PLACE

I was the one who slipped stealthily through palace walls, who clung to the shadows of the flaming torches in the hall, who gripped the columns, grasped the stones.

I was not the guy in the bar talking up the wreckage of one marriage, making it sound like a course in how to put together the next one.

I was in Camelot, or Fotheringay, in dark time mist, where golden inlays sparkled, silk curtains swished, and skins of dead animals clothed footsteps.

That wasn’t me on bar-stool throne, one hand corralling a beer glass, the other hanging off the side like an airplane wing after a crash.

I was the one you glimpsed by the fountain’s amber gloss, in the enfolding red-green flesh of garden. I made a lady-in-waiting catch her breath, a peacock scream, upset a suit of armor.

Think bar-room pickup, think other men, with their slicked-back hair and florid faces, jewelry jangling, chest hair crawling out of shirts.

I was threshold moonlight, Paris and Young Lochinvar. I was brash as any ever seized a maiden but I burst with stars and myth and romance. I swept you off your feet and out the door and over cloud-tongued mountaintops.

I didn’t grope. Nor did I lie. I wasn’t drunk and settling for you but high-spirited and taking what I had to have. Afterward, we ate breakfast in a small restaurant at dawn. Street-cleaners came by, swept up one story. Sun dazzling through glass told the other.

MAISHA UZURI JAMES | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“Madama” (pictured on page 116) was born from a vision of merged global representations of veiled women. Dyed cloth is used as head coverings by women all over the world for adornment, membership, and spiritual as well as practical protection. This is a moment when the royal power of a veiled woman is held to express her divinity, beauty, vitality, and grace. The image denotes high esteem and station. I took particular inspiration from images of women from Kerala, India; Dakar, Senegal; and Catholic iconography of the Virgin Mary. I chose vibrant acrylics washed and overlaid to create transparency and solidness of form. Bright color is used to convey the richness of the subject’s cloth as the most important adornment. Sheer cloth layered for cool power.

“Imma” (pictured opposite) is my image of a giantess born from the wreckages and bones of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It is a rebirth image of a calm being who was formed from all manner of materials into a serene universal woman. With watercolor and tempera, her skin is more solid than the waters that birthed her. She has an inner light of spirit represented by her corona to show there is the possibility of divinity born from atrocities. Wooden icons float in the waters surrounding her as remembrances of her source. This is a moment to express that everything is brought up from the bottom of the sea. We too can be reborn from buried devastation. This piece is made from watercolor paint, pencil, and tempera paints on canvas.

MICHAEL GARCIA BERTRAND | CATFISH OF CATFISHES

Percy Shelley laid down his quill. The sonnet was finished.

“I have drunken deep of joy,” he said aloud, smugly.

Mary was in the same room reading Coleridge. “I hope it has pretty imagery, Percy. I do enjoy it so.” She cringed, suddenly tiring of her London accent. Almost four months of this.

“Of course, my dear,” he said, sliding his chair from the escritoire and turning in her direction. He crossed his legs at the knee. “It’s in iambic pentameter. About a king that’s all but forgotten.” He ran a pudgy hand through his thinning hair. His phone dinged, and he scowled.

“Who is it, dear?” Mary asked.

“Scam, likely” he said, breaking character. He pushed it away in disgust and closed his eyes. Mary could tell he was trying to recompose himself. Maybe the time had come to talk over things. She braced herself.

“Don’t you think, Percy,” she asked, dropping the accent deliberately, “it’s time to get to know each other? Time to drop the masks?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. Of course, he was going to continue to play the part.

“I’m weary of our game,” she said. “Of this.” She waved her hand in a circle.

“This?” he pantomimed with an ashen hand.

“Yes, this.” Why was he so pasty? she wondered. They lived in Miami, for goodness’ sake! Near the beach! She glanced again at the room’s décor and recoiled. Everything was so fake. He’d fixed his apartment to look Victorian: candelabras, wooden chairs, porcelain figurines, morose portraits, old rugs, old books, a mantelpiece, an artificial fireplace.

“I don’t think I understand, Mary. How can we not be who we are? I’m a poet following the romantic tradition, and you’re the creator of Frankenstein.”

She stared at him. Could he be serious? How much longer?

They’d met on a site for fans of classic literature, and he’d charmed her with his intellect. She’d grown so impatient with men who used would of instead of would’ve, who didn’t read books, who used acronyms and emojis, who only wanted pretty faces and perfect bodies.

She’d heard the term ‘catfishing,” but this wasn’t that. She’d known they were playacting from the very beginning, and she did so, willingly! For long months prior to meeting in the flesh, in fact, they’d sent each other emails as Percy and Mary, peppered with phrases culled from their writings. Finally, when he suggested they meet in character at a discreet restaurant he knew well, she thought it’d be fun to dress up. He showed up in doublet, waistcoat, and ruffled muslin, and she adorned herself in velvet and lace and wore beribboned ankle boots. She already bore a likeness to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the same long face, thin lips, dark hair.

“Sweetheart, you know you’re not him, right?” she said, gently, “and I’m not really Mary Godwin.” It’d crossed her mind he might be mentally unstable though she quickly reminded herself he worked in the “real world,” a professor of English poetry at the college, and she knew he owned phone, laptop, television, and other modern conveniences. In other words, he readily accepted the twenty-first century. It was only with each other he wanted to play at being the Shelleys as if he were trying to turn the make-believe world of the internet into real life.

“When I’m with you, I am,” he said. “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.”

“Sweetheart, your name is Oswald,” she said, “and I’m tired of pretending.”

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,” he said. “That’s from my new poem, Mary.”

“Which was written over two hundred years ago! You’re not him! We’re not them!”

“But, Mary, darling,” he said, reasonably. “We are who we say we are.” Her eyes widened in a kind of panic. This was supposed to be a ruse only, a silly, stupid game. All she wanted was to be loved.

“Percy Shelley drowned when he was twenty-nine,” she said, frantically.

“In 1822!”

“That’s impossible, my dear,” he said, waving his pale hand.

“I know we’re different, Ozzy,” she said, trying a different tack. “We don’t think like others. But things have gone too far. I want to know you, and we never go anywhere but here!”

“But, sweetness,” he began, “it’s a brave new world. No one has to be who they don’t want to be anymore.” He had a penchant for sentimentality.

“Ozzy…?” she asked. “What’s my name?”

“You’re so clever, love,” he said. “Calling me Ozy as in Ozymandias.”

“As in Ozzz-wald,” she corrected, harshly. “What’s my real name?”

“We were destined to be, my love,” he said, reaching for her hand. “Mary?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she blurted, and her heart sank at the realization. How was that possible when she didn’t know him?

“I have a marvelous idea, Mary,” he said, excitedly. “We should try and recreate the summer of 1816 by revisiting Lake Geneva! I’ll invite Byron and Polidori! How fun! Maybe you’ll write the sequel to Frankenstein there!”

Was it possible? She was starting to feel the familiar sting of loss.

“What do you think, my love?”

“Why don’t we ask Harriet?” She knew she was hitting below the belt. Harriet was Shelley’s wife when he and Mary first embarked upon their affair. Harriet later killed herself.

He blanched. “Mary! How could you?”

“We can’t, can we, Percy?” she said, suddenly cruel. “Because she’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Mary!”

“Let’s invite my stepsister, Claire.” Stop it, she scolded herself.

“Mary!”

“No, we shouldn’t, should we? Because you slept with her!”

“Mary!”

“What’s my name?” Why was she insisting? Where was the harm?

“Mary,” he said, stonily.

It was a new world. She’d never been pretty or loved, but he loved her. Did it really matter that he didn’t know her? Did it really matter?

“Yes, Percy,” she said, mechanically, her London accent restored. She couldn’t believe her own ears. Had she perfectly catfished herself? “My name is Mary. Mary Godwin.”

CARMEN PEER | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

There is a tradition that dates as far back as Mesoamerica called Día De Los Muertos, celebrated on November first and second each year. It’s a ritual of making elaborate costumes of skeletons, also called Catrinas. The tradition consists of bringing offerings to our ancestors of food, flowers, and joy as an intention of honoring the loved ones that came before us. It is a celebration of life. Marigolds are bright, cheerful flowers native to Mexico, and they are said to attract the souls of the dead. Monarch butterflies are also believed to be the carriers of our ancestors’ souls returning to our world of the living for only one night.

In the spirit of love and memory through the generations, I, along with my daughter and grandchildren, dress up to celebrate and honor their ancestors. We like to pick different locations to take photographs, holding a space for our ancestors to visit us and pass their knowledge and gifts to those who walk the Earth after we too pass. It is through this ritual, wherein the Land of the Living connects with the Land of the Dead, that we share this season’s photograph alongside the belief that we honor the depths and layers of this magazine’s theme—Myth: Invention, Legend, and Lore.

CHRISTINA BAGNI | ARTEMIS AND CALLISTO

Artemis pressed calloused fingers to Callisto’s jawline

“you must never leave me,” she whispered with powder-soft lips her voice soft, crystalline, untouched by the sun.

“i want always for my quiver to be within your grasp for you to anytime reach down to my hip and fill your bow with what you find there.”

Callisto sighed into the goddess’s beauty eyes grayer than the moon reflected on a still pond and just as responsive to movement.

“my lady,” she whispered.

“my lady,” Artemis insisted.

hours later

Artemis curled calloused fingers pulled strong bowstring to anchor at the corner of her lip the same lip Callisto had sucked dry of kisses the night before and released the tension freeing from her fingers from the bowstring from her tensed shoulder blades to send the arrow coursing through the forest.

“Callisto,” she whispered, godlike speed, childlike joy, her word forming before the arrow made its mark. “the bear. take it down with me.”

“Callisto?”

Callisto. months later

Artemis reaches up at the night sky tears long run dry

quiver long lain empty and traced callous-free fingers across the arch of her lover’s back.

RICHARD HEDDERMAN | SHELL

After the photograph “Truck Stop Shell” by Greg Clary

They walked away from the last fuel depot of the Anthropocene the moment the restroom trash cans were full, tossing

the keys into gravity’s undertow, cheering as they fell, leaving the bright plastic porticos under rain the color of steel

shavings. They called it a lunar landscape, but it couldn’t be further from the moon, even the dark side of a moon that hasn’t

been found yet. We get the gas stations we deserve. Semi-rigs stayed ahead of the Great Flood, air-brakes warping

the panes with planetary static straight through as they barreled to Kingdom Come. They were searching for a theory of how space acquires energy, and the answer came back wrong, wrong by a lot. Do you see that cloud, trudging on empty and charged with spent

nebulae bearing gallons of solar atoms? Do you see all that dark matter just waiting for a lit match?

GORDON KIPPOLA | NOT FAR FROM FALLEN POULSBO

The cemetery, and the steep road to get there were both named Mountain View back when

the old soldier, before becoming the ghost, paid his parents respect in a sculpted forest.

In this place the man remained, ashes poured down a knee-deep hole dug into dad’s grave

and then covered, decades later, by cement, and a layer of water-proof polymer grass.

Prior to Revolution, eighty-foot giants hid the Olympics behind evergreen curtains.

But a clear-cut of second-growth Douglas fir, spruce and cedar gave the nine upper floors

of Mountain View Estates a panorama west to Mounts Deception, Ellinor, Storm King.

Bored, and annoyed about its stolen trees, the ghost haunts the discount apartments.

To its great surprise, the specter finds a friend or as much of a friend as the dead are allowed.

Eleven-year-old Jose will warn the new kids We stand on cursed white-man burial grounds.

Scandinavian Spirits drink blood from the holes they bite through your face. Jose knows the shadow is harmless and sad, but gore-embroidered stories are way more fun. And the ghost doesn’t mind.

VICTORIA ROSE LANE | THE PHOOKA’S FRACTAL

His tail curls and twists high in the willow tree the wind drops autumn leaves on silky black fur. A riddle kisses the phooka’s tongue. We are coming to the end of blackberry season.

The tail curls and twists high in the tree wind blows in a lone traveler ready to share the riddle.

Blackberries offered to the traveler.

The tail curls and twists high in the tree the wind reminds the traveler she was unprepared. Riddle of risk. Traveler’s name, another of many collected the blackberries were accepted.

The tail curls and twists high in the tree, wind pushes the traveler to the willow. The riddle was answered.

Blackberries squished between teeth.

The tail curls and twists high in the tree wind shakes the leaves the traveler realizes her mistake the phooka smiles blackberries wash down her mistake.

The phooka climbs out of the tree wind blows the silky fur. The traveler reaches out her hand, the phooka hands another blackberry in return for another name.

TERRI BRUCE | MAKING GHOSTS

I was fifteen when I made my first ghost. No one told me it was so easy and that you have to be careful. I didn’t know what I was doing—honestly, I didn’t even intend to do it, it just sort of happened—and the thing came out all wrong. It followed me around, sad and listless, made from the grief I didn’t know what to do with. It was full of regrets and would-have-beens and lived in the corners like a shadow. Most of the time, I could ignore it, but sometimes I would catch sight of it out of the corner of my eye and be reminded—and annoyed.

Later, as time dulled my memories, I made a new ghost; this one was all bright, glittering edges, and prismatic rainbows, as unlike my mother as the first one.

“Daughter,” it would say—for how could I call it ‘she’?—“remember that time we went to the store and I bought you that doll you loved so much?” But, of course, that’s not how it had happened at all. I hadn’t loved the doll. I’d hated it, the way I’d hated all her “I’m sorrys.”

“Daughter, do you remember when I took you for that pony ride and we had a picnic afterward? Do you remember when I took you to the beach and we picked up seashells? Do you remember…” Her glittering, rainbow-colored view of the past was full of sharp edges and cut like broken glass.

Grief drifted in the corners, silent as always, a heaviness that made my irritation with Rainbows all the keener. The pair of them—stupid and immature.

By the time my grandmother’s ghost came along, I was out of patience with the other two and had locked them away. Grief I put in a box and stuffed it under the bed. Rainbows I trapped in the pocket of a dress I’d bought out of sentimentality but never wore. Grandma wasn’t happy—this ghost I had made a little more clear-eyed, a littler realer, than the rest—and she would shake her head and sigh at me. She kept her counsel, but I could see the disappointment in her eyes. That part made me wonder, because my grandmother had never had disappointment in her eyes when she was alive. Eventually, I decided I’d made this ghost wrong, too, and stuffed her in a pocketbook I left behind when we moved to a new house.

It took a few years, but Grandma found me somehow. And she brought Grief and Rainbows with her. By then, I’d added several more ghosts to my collection because I was so terrible at not making them. A third mother, another grandmother, and a dear friend who was still alive but with whom I’d fallen out of touch and missed. With the arrival of these three, we were now quite crowded. I could hardly move about the house without bumping into one of the ghosts.

If they’d provided any solace, any wisdom, it would have been one thing, but all my ghosts were wrong in one way or another—the originals, but not. In Grief, I could see all the best parts and in Rainbows, the worst. Dear Friend was full of loneliness, and it made her clingy. She was always underfoot. Second Mother and Second Grandmother ignored me in favor of arguing with each other all the time. They made it hard to sleep because they were particularly loud at night.

“Why can’t I make a right ghost?” I asked First Grandmother one day. She was the only one I could stand to talk to even with all her dissatisfaction. “Why can’t I gather up the right combination of ingredients to make one properly? Where do I keep going wrong?”

But she was no help—she was made wrong, too. She just shook her head and sighed—disappointed once again.

Finally, I’d had enough. I collected up all the places I’d put my memories— stray rocks and loose buttons, snippets of songs and lines of poetry, and that corner I kept banging my shin on. I put them in a bowl on my grandmother’s desk and kneaded them into my mother’s bread recipe, baked the loaf until it was done, and then sat and ate it slowly as I gazed out a window on a summer morning. When I was finished, I turned from the window and a new Mother stood before me. She smiled, and I knew I had made a proper ghost at last.

With quiet efficiency, she got a box, piled in Grief and Rainbows and all the rest. She folded up the flaps, and, without looking back, took them away with her when she left.

MARISA P. CLARK | ALTAR

Smooth the cloth upon the table. Arrange the frames enclosing photos of smiling faces, better days. Center the six-legged Shino bowl sculpted by a friend long near death’s door—this bowl holds the names. Strike the match, light the candle: scent of sulfur, paraffin. Set out offerings: glass of water, shot of rum, a white chrysanthemum, red beans and rice gumming on a saucer, a hunk of French bread, a chunk of smoky quartz your lost love left you in a recent dream. Pull up a chair and draw the names one by one, each on a white strip of paper small as a fortune. Greet the dead aloud, regale them with fond memories, and sad. Take care not to rush, although the list keeps growing, the latest additions two friends, a friend’s grandmother, a dog. Place the papers in neat rows—they crowd the tabletop. The flame flickers, a flag of salute waving over all these graves. Written down the candleholder, family surnames, the ancestral line traced back as far as you can go— from France and the British Isles, across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia,

the Carolinas, Haiti, Gulf of Mexico, southern Louisiana, Mississippi coast:

DeGrano LeBlanc Broussard

Rodrigues Borel Prevost

Langlinais Stover Mobley

Bruce Clark

The Line ends with you, terminus by choice. Wonder who, if anybody, will count you among their beloved dead.

NINA GLASER | BEAUTY WITH EELS

CLARISSA GRUNWALD | LABYRINTH

You follow whatever you have: breadcrumbs, some thread, a man with a harp. The thing that I followed had teeth—so it goes. We cannot choose what saves us. You walk, and emerge as whatever is left.

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University, a dog pillow at home, and otherwise searching Taipei for ghosts and vegan treats. L. has a Ph.D. from Berkeley and photography published or forthcoming in Autostraddle, Feral Journal of Poetry and Art, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and Sycamore Review (Summer/Fall 2023 featured artist). Connect on Twitter and Instagram @acadialogue.

Ajiké Kendrick Asegun is a life coach specializing in leadership development through spirituality. Through her coaching practice, Spiritry, Ajiké helps spiritually-minded leaders provide effective guidance to the people they are called to serve. She earned a Master’s degree from NYU with a concentration in Leadership Development and Women’s Studies. Ajike’s debut collection of poetry, Dwelling Place, offers readers a personal glimpse into a place between worlds where anything is possible.

Christina Bagni’s creative work has been published in Brigids Gate Press, Writers Resist, and Flora Fiction, among others. She’s a professional book editor with a love of mythology and buying too many books to ever actually read. Her first novel was published this spring: My Only Real Friend is the Easter Bunny at the Mall (Deep Hearts YA). Find more about her at linktr.ee/christinabagni.

Michael Garcia Bertrand is a Cuban-American educator, living and working in South Florida. His short fiction has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Epiphany, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Coachella Review, Wisconsin Review, Jelly Bucket, The MacGuffin, Kestrel, Concho River Review, and Your Impossible Voice.

John Blair has published six books, most recently Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016) as well as more than 200 poems and stories in magazines and journals such as The Colorado Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Antioch Review, and New Letters. His new collection, The Shape of Things to Come, is due out from Gival Press in late 2023.

John Bradley’s most recent book is Hotel Montparnasse: Letters to Cesar Vallejo (Dos Madres Press), a verse novel. Dear Morpheus, The Glue That Is You (Dos Madres Press), poems on sleep and dreams, is forthcoming. A frequent reviewer for Rain Taxi, he is currently a poetry editor for Cider Press Review.

Terri Bruce writes hard-to-classify fantasy and science fiction stories that explore the supernatural side of everyday things. She is the author of the contemporary fantasy Afterlife series, the speculative fiction short story collection Souls, and numerous short stories in various anthologies and magazines. Like Anne Shirley, she prefers to make people cry rather than laugh but is happy if she can do either. Visit her on the web at terribruce.net.

Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer with publications in Shenandoah, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Free State Review, Prairie Fire, Rust + Moth, Sundog Lit, Texas Review, and elsewhere. Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. A senior fiction reader for New England Review, she lives in New Mexico with three parrots, two dogs, and whatever wildlife and strays stop to visit.

Kathie Collins, co-founder and creative director of Charlotte Lit, is a poet, mythologist, and lifelong student of Jungian psychology—which, consciously and unconsciously, makes its way into her work. She earned her graduate degrees in mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she also served as adjunct faculty. Kathie is author of Jubilee (Main Street Rag). Her poems have appeared in Immanence, Kakalak, Pedestal Magazine, Flying South, and elsewhere.

Jon Davis is the author of six chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, including, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021) and Choose Your Own America (FLP, 2022). Poems from his new manuscript, Anathematica, are forthcoming in The Tampa Review, Porcupine Literary, and Pine Hills Review. Other poems are forthcoming in In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa (MadHat Press, 2023).

After a long and rewarding career as a photographer, both as a fine-art and commercial artist, Nina Glaser became a teacher at the San Francisco Academy of Arts University. Her next career as a hypnotherapist was a continuation of her interest in, and use of, metaphors to tell stories. She then returned to the art world, incorporating her photographic images into a mixed-media format, giving her photographic subjects new stories and meanings. The black and white images are now recreated in color and pieced together with glass and other materials. Glaser has two monograms of her photographic work, “Outside of Time” and “Recomposed,” and has been widely published and exhibited both nationally and internationally.

John Grey is an Australian poet and U.S. resident whose work has recently been published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Grey’s latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself, are available through Amazon. Work is forthcoming in The McNeese Review, White Wall Review, and Open Ceilings.

Clarissa Grunwald is a librarian at a small college in central Pennsylvania. She has previously been published in Deep Overstock, Drunk Monkeys, and Jet Fuel Review. In her free time, she plays viola and enjoys pen-and-paper RPGs.

Ash Haglund is an analog collagist living in Seattle, Washington, whose work displays personal resonance with counter-culture narratives, feminism, and U.S. politics, with an emphasis on challenging patriarchal structures. Much of her work explores lived experiences of women and memories of her own former career in the fashion industry.

Melissa Darcey Hall is a writer and high school English teacher in San Diego, California. Her work has appeared in Red Rock Review, Fugue, The Coachella Review, Five South, The Florida Review, and others. View more of her work at melissadarceyhall.com.

Richard Hedderman is a multi-Pushcart Prize nominee and author of two poetry collections including, most recently, Choosing a Stone (Finishing Line Press). His work has been published in dozens of journals both in the U.S. and abroad. He has served as a guest poet at the Library of Congress, and performed his writing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He is Writer-inResidence at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Maisha Uzuri James is a mixed-media visual artist and owner of Amounah Works through which she creates images of women on canvas, tiles, and textiles. She is a self-taught artist and painter with a preference for watercolor and acrylics since childhood. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maisha now lives and works in New Jersey where she uses her creative and graphic design skills to help entrepreneurs consistently express their brands.

Lucas Jorgensen is a poet and educator from Cleveland, Ohio. He holds an M.F.A. from New York University where he was a Goldwater Fellow. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Texas. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and others.

Following a career as a U.S. Army musician, Gordon Kippola earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa, and calls Bremerton, Washington, home. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Post Road Magazine, District Lit, The Main Street Rag, Southeast Missouri State University Press, and other splendid publications.

Kate Krautkramer’s work has appeared in such publications as North American Review, Colorado Review, Fiction, National Geographic Magazine, Washington Square, Mississippi Review, Orca, The Normal School, and the New York Times (Modern Love). She’s been included in The Beacon Best, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best of the West anthologies, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kate lives in rural Colorado with her husband and children.

Victoria Rose Lane is a poet from Pueblo, Colorado. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry and is earning another emphasizing Publishing from Western Colorado University. She founded a local writing group called Steel City Writers. Victoria is a director of a preschool program in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She spends her time with her cats, Ostara and McCloud. She loves poetry, teaching, and nature.

Rebecca Lee Kunz is a multi-media artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, her work draws upon Cherokee iconography and is greatly inspired by mythic and archetypical symbolism. Her mission is to create art that is accessible while bringing more healing beauty to the world. Rebecca earned a B.F.A. in Painting from the College of Santa Fe in 1998. As the business owner and artist behind the Tree of Life Studio, she sells her work both online and in retail locations, galleries, and museum shops, including the Museum of Contemporary Native Art shop and the Gilcrease Museum shop. Rebecca, her husband, and their three daughters reside in the foothills of Santa Fe, where they live an intentionally slow and quiet life. Learn more at treeoflifestudio.net.

Janna Lopez is an intuitive book coach, creative writing teacher with an M.F.A., and published author of Me, My Selfie & Eye. She uses intuition to guide individuals in transforming their lives through discovery of fearless writing, reimagining the power of poetry, and unlearning false beliefs about writing’s purpose. Her clients have profound breakthroughs. Her new book is The Art & Invitation of Self-Conversation—Writing That Moves You Beyond Fear to Freedom (2023), and is based on her work with hundreds of clients. She leads creative writing retreats in Santa Fe through her company, Land of Enchantment Writing.

Pi Luna has an M.F.A. from Goddard College in Interdisciplinary Art where she studied the connection between math, art, and Jungian Psychology. She has shown her work at the Bat and the Buffalo Gallery on Canyon Road and Tortuga Gallery in Albuquerque. She was a winner in the Your Art Our Table Contest hosted by ArtWalk Santa Fe and Cafecito and has given a presentation about her artwork at SITE Santa Fe as part of their PechKucha Night run by Creative Santa Fe. Her prints, notecards, and journals are carried in stores across the country.

Amber McCrary is a Diné poet, zinester, feminist, artist, and the founder of Abalone Mountain Press, which publishes work for Native people, by Native people. McCrary’s chapbook, Electric Deserts!, was released by Tolsun Books in 2020. Her poetry, interviews, and artwork have appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Room Magazine, Poets & Writers, Turning Points Magazine, POETRY magazine, Navajo Times, and elsewhere. Originally from Shonto, Arizona, McCrary is Red House born for Mexican people. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Arizona State University, and her Master’s in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College.

Colleen Michaels’ poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Passages North, The Paterson Review, Cider Press Review, and Barrelhouse, and have been commissioned as installations for The Massachusetts Poetry Festival. She hosts the Improbable Places Poetry Tour, bringing poetry to unlikely places like tattoo parlors and swimming pools. Yes, in the swimming pool. Prize Wheel, her debut collection, will be published by Small Bites Press early in 2023.

Deborah Newberg was born in New York City and has lived in Santa Fe since 1985, engaged in both art-making and dance, living on the land. She has taught on the dance faculty at Santa Fe Community College since 2008, and is the director and choreographer of the Saltanah Dancers dance company. Her art has been shown at various venues, including a solo exhibit at the Museum of the Southwest, and was featured in New American Paintings magazine.

A professional photographer in Boulder, Colorado, for many years, Gary Oakley moved to Santa Fe in 2008 specifically to paint. He is thrilled to live in the land of extraordinary light and gets exhausted every day trying to soak in the beauty of New Mexico. It seems like every day he sees something that is supernatural! His modern interpretations of landscapes are in galleries in Colorado, Texas, Spain, and Santa Fe.

Radha Zutshi Opubor is a 19-year-old Indian-Nigerian author. Her work has previously appeared in Omenana, The Kalahari Review, and the Afrofuturism Issue of Chicago Literati. In 2021, her short story “The Beginning” (Omenana 8/20) was selected for the 2020 Locus Recommended Reading List. Radha won the 2021 Griot African Storytellers’ Competition with her short story “The Travelling Man.” In 2022, she was longlisted for the Toyin Falola Prize.

Richard Parisio has worked as a naturalist and educator in the Everglades, in the Pocono and Catskill mountains, and in New York’s Hudson Valley where he currently lives and writes. Parisio is a graduate of Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European M.F.A. program in creative writing. His collection exploring the intersections between human and non-human lives, The Owl Invites Your Silence, won the 2014 Slapering Hol Press Poetry Chapbook Award.

Carmen Peer was born in El Paso, Texas. One of six children raised on the border speaking Spanish before English, she spent much of her time with her Abuelos and was completely immersed in Mexican culture throughout her childhood. Later, she moved all over California and the Southwest, even as far as Mexico. Carmen has always been fascinated with creation and the process of ‘making’ in different ways that help express her inner landscape. Her Abuelo had a dicho: “En cada cabeza hay un mundo,” which translates as “in every head, there is a world.” Thought is where the process of creation begins. We all have our own unique perceptions, which lead us forward in manifesting. Carmen likes painting large scale and traveling: visiting different areas, she feels the land as an abstract expression of her senses.

Madari Pendas is a Cuban-American writer, translator, and painter. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (Tolsun 2022). Her work has appeared in CRAFT, PANK, The Master’s Review, and elsewhere. Pendás has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Florida International University, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Among David Radavich’s poetry collections are two epics, America Bound and America Abroad, as well as Middle-East Mezze and The Countries We Live In. His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. His latest book is Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun: German and English Poems (2022).

Erica Reid lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. She earned her M.F.A. at Western Colorado University (‘22) and serves as Assistant Editor at THINK Journal. In 2022, she was nominated for Best New Poets; in 2021 her poetry won the Yellowwood Poetry Prize and the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest (Modern Sonnets category), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was commissioned by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.

Anoosha G. Redd was born in Tucson, raised in Kansas, and has roots in India. Anoosha is now a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts where she studies Studio Arts and Creative Writing. She hopes you enjoy this piece, her first publication, which is a sweet memory about her mother braiding her hair on the train in India during summertime.

Freelance artist, photographer, and trained in architecture, Rocío Rodríguez is currently studying a sculpture and a painting certificate at SFCC. She uses simple materials that would have ended up in the trash, such as paper from delivery packages, twigs cut from gardening, and even leftover construction materials, to create self-portrait-inspired sculptures that she calls “creatures,” while reusing and recycling the trash in a beautiful and delicate way.

Jesus Francisco Sierra is a Cuban writer working out of The Writers Grotto in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Stream Literary Journal, The Bare Life Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, The Acentos Review, and Lunch Ticket among others. He holds an M.F.A. from Antioch University Los Angeles. He is currently at work on his first novel.

M.E. Silverman had two books of poems published and co-edited Bloomsbury’s Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium. Learn more @4ME2Silver.

From his earliest memories of childhood forward, Brad Smith has needed no persuasion to acquaint himself intimately with art. Brad developed a referral clientele and gallery following in Dallas in the 1980s, doing portraits and murals, and moved to Santa Fe in 2000. Whether depicting a bouquet of flowers, a wild butterfly garden, a grove of aspens, or a colorful sailboat in the South Pacific, each of Brad’s paintings is a piece of his heart and soul.

Sara Solberg is a writer from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She graduated with her M.F.A. from Northern Michigan University this past spring and has since been busy writing fanfiction and building up her freelance editing business. She has strong opinions about octopuses and Marvel movies. Sara’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the minnesota review, X-R-A-Y, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. A full list of her publications can be found at sarasolbergwriter. wordpress.com.

Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize-winning book, Good Work, was published by Evening Street Press. An eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of two other full-length poetry books, What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks, Clear Cut; Young Farmer; Encounters; Inspiration Point, winner of the 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition; and Just This. Learn more at matthewjspireng.com.

Bryce Swaim is a poet and writer who lives in southeast Texas where he teaches high school English and coaches football. His work aims to contemplate humanity’s role on this living and changing planet. He received his M.F.A. in nature writing from Western Colorado University in 2022. He believes in the power of beauty and attention paid to all that can be called beautiful.

Shannon Truax resides in Oklahoma after spending her earlier years in Texas. After a number of years away, she’s recently reconnected with her passion for writing and art. Rooted in the southwest, she especially enjoys experimenting with all forms of media that reflect the scenes and colors of the region.

Robyn Tsinnajinnie is from a small reservation surrounded by the endless color of the New Mexican desert. Her passion for painting grew from the ability to create color and being able to process the stereotypes placed on women. After receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Robyn realized that being Native and a woman is looked at as a disadvantage, but has learned that it’s actually the best advantage she can have.

Rebecca Vincent is a writer, editor, and environmental educator with a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies. She writes mainly about water, nature, myth, and the intersection between myth and the environment. Her writing has appeared in various publications, anthologies, literary reviews, and blogs. Learn more at rebecca-vincent.com.

Renee Williams is a poet/photographer from Ohio. Her images can be found on the 2023 cover of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund calendar, as well as in the Moss Piglet journal and online at the New Feathers Anthology, among others.

After receiving her M.F.A. from the Michener Center at UT-Austin, Sarah Wolbach moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she led poetry workshops for expatriates and taught English to the employees of a mushroom factory. After leaving Mexico, she lived in New York City for many years. Her work has been widely published, and she is the author of two chapbooks. She now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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 July 15 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 2024 suggested theme is “Lovely, Dark, and Deep: Journeys Real and Imagined.” Our submissions period opens July 15, 2023, and closes November 1, 2023. 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 promote 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, New Mexico 87508, 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.

Visual Art Submission Guidelines

SFLR invites submissions of visual art submissions, 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, New Mexico 87508.

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