2024 Santa Fe Literary Review

SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

Volume 19 ● 2024

COVER IMAGE

“Sine of the Moon” © by

Pi Luna

LAYOUT BY Tracey Gallegos

SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

Volume 19 ● 2024

SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

Faculty Advisor: Kate McCahill

Creative Non-Fiction Editor: Tintawi Kaigziabiher

Fiction Editor: Austin Eichelberger

Poetry Editor: Maira Rodriguez

Art Editor: AJ Wood

Copyeditor: Brittney Beauregard

Editors at Large: Isaac Burdwell, Adam Ferguson, Susan Griego, Joanna Johnson, Sabranna Malin, and Christine Schwatken

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, Mason Kovac, Todd Lovato, Jade McLellan, Laura Mulry, Rob

Newlin, Trish Newman, Val Nye, Diane Ortiz, Margaret Peters, Adam Reilly, Serena Rodriguez, Becky Rowley, Miriam Sagan, Brian Sanford, Kelly Marquez, 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 © 2024 by Santa Fe Community College Volume 19 ● 2024

FROM THE EDITORS

Each year, we release our newest issue when summer in Santa Fe is at its height: outdoor markets, wild sunflowers blooming at the roadside, and endless, sun-soaked days. Shade is sweet and hard to come by, and the ice cubes in our glasses melt instantly.

But our Santa Fe nights are a different story. When the sun sets here, the air begins to cool, and we leave our fans and air-conditioning and step outside. At night, certain types of cactus bloom, and in the arroyos, coyotes howl and play. These high desert nights wash the day’s heat from our skin, and in the morning, the City Different wakes refreshed.

The work in this year’s issue is like that: revelations welcome after a long day beneath the world’s glare. Writers and artists from all around the world submitted their creative interpretations of this issue’s theme, “Lovely, Dark, and Deep: Journeys Real and Imagined.” Inspired by one of the final lines in Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the theme and its origins aligned with our process; we selected the work featured here during December’s darkest, coldest days.

“The mind is its own place,” writes John Milton in his epic poem Paradise Lost. The work presented here is a testament to this idea: that within the mind, we may shape-shift and time travel, journeying from memory to memory, season to season, allowing the imagination to run loose. In everything we do, there are two journeys, after all: the external and the internal, the outside world and within. The mind is its own place. Let us take you there, reader—like a desert night in summer: lovely, dark, and deep.

What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.

Rumi

DAVE MORRISON | OLD FRIENDS

We were feeling blue, work-tired and done with the rain, so we went to that store with the good coffee and cookies the size of a Viking shield, and we drove down the quiet straight roads, through the tunnel of ancient trees and we talked of familiar things and we were lifted, just enough that the rain and fog and fatigue were not only acceptable, but old friends, really, and we were filled with that sense that familiar things and simple pleasures would continue to save us.

ADAM FERGUSON | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Photography was always a way for me to remove myself from reality, and to exist only as an outside observer. When I’m not traveling the world, being in nature is a place where I don’t feel the pressures or judgements of reality. There is more of a natural tendency to connect openly with my surroundings and let worries and fears dissolve. “Layers of Intimacy” and the other photos captured in those moments with the Yucca Plant were an embrace of intimacy and a yearning for a deeper connection with nature and the universe. As humans in a fast-paced modern world, we often forget how important it is to communicate and connect with nature on a more intimate level. Photography helps me remember this. From these experiences, we can learn to connect with one another without judgements and with only love, acceptance, and peace.

ADAM FERGUSON | LAYERS OF INTIMACY

JEFFREY UTZINGER | DISASSEMBLY REQUIRED

The downside of mail order honeybees is that some arrive dead. A grim fact you discover while cajoling live bees from their plastic carrying container into a new hive, and you realize not all the bodies are writhing, tumbling, and coalescing around the queen or floating about, scouting the immediate area. Amongst this furious life, you’ll find immobile insects, their legs and wings tangled together, forming strands, some of which fall into the hive where they hang like macabre garland over frames until, one by one, the bee husks detach, blanketing the hive’s floor. A reminder that, despite their astonishing replication rate, rapid wing velocity, dogged pursuit of enemies, coupled with an ability to sting, bees are fragile. If not handled with care, they damage as easily as glass beads.

Honeybees remove their dead as quickly as possible to prevent the spread of disease. This I knew from my experience with outdoor hives. What I have never witnessed until installing an indoor observation hive, however, is the work of undertaker bees. In the midst of bees masticating wax to build comb, giving directions to nectar sources, or tending to pollen others have carried in, I catch a glimpse of a solitary bee hauling away a dead one. The hive’s exit is located near the bottom of the hive where most of the dead settled after a few days, and so the route these undertaker bees choose is confounding. Each dead bee is carried first to the hive’s top, a harrowing feat given that a bee corpse, even counting for loss of moisture, is roughly the same size and weight as a live bee. The bees travel with their dead weight up the acrylic sheets which form the see-through walls of the hive, presumably to avoid the impediments of other bees going about their work on the frames. A wise choice, except the sheets are smooth and hive traffic is chaotic—as often as not, an undertaker bee midway up the hive collides with another worker and finds herself sliding down the smooth plastic, forced to restart her journey like a miniature Sisyphus hauling corpses instead of rocks.

Undertaker bees do, ultimately, make it to the top of the hive but each one I happen to see complete her upward journey disappears with her cargo behind a frame. I know the dead bees’ final destination is indeed the ground

outside the window because I see them there, hanging in the lilyturf grass and weeds or curled among the diatomaceous earth (scattered to deter hive beetles) like forgotten victims of some aircraft disaster. The route the living and the dead take, however, as they descend through the interior frames is shrouded in mystery. As is the reason bees opt not to take the direct route across the hive bottom. The inefficiency of the whole operation is baffling, especially when so much of bees’ work is geared towards expediency and driven, perhaps, by a sense that they have but a few weeks before their own internal engines fail, and they transition from bearing the dead to being the one borne. Time is running out the moment the clock starts.

The mystery might lie with the queen who is in residence, hidden between frames at the top of the hive. Is it possible that each dead bee must pass the queen’s final inspection before being removed from the hive? There might be practical reasons for this—the queen assessing the overall health of the hive based on mortality rates, or perhaps she serves as the hive’s coroner, confirming the presence—rather than the mere appearance—of death. These suppositions are anthropomorphizing at best, but better guesses than what I like to imagine is the reason for this journey: a funeral procession passing by a mourning community before the corpse is presented to the queen who pays her final respects.

“I think they’re tearing the dead bees apart,” my son says.

“Well,” I say, “probably not?”

“You should come look.”

“The dead ones are just breaking down somehow?”

“It’s sad,” he says.

My son, nearly sixteen, uninterested and unimpressed by most anything in my realm, has studied the honeybees, transfixed, every day since I installed the hive a few weeks ago. His childhood, spent mainly indoors, has been very different than mine, absent a bevy of male cousins and a neighborhood of lost boys; he’s been spared the viscera of hunting and fishing, summer vacations on farms, unforgivable insect experimentation. If indeed the

undertaker bees are dismantling the dead, I don’t want it to drive him away from the joy of observing honeybees, especially when observing him has brought me such joy.

But there it is: a bee fumbling upwards clutching a thorax, and not far behind, a second bee transporting an abdomen. Impossible to determine if their parcels were once part of the same intact body. And really, would it matter?

Honeybees have an hourglass design—a waist so thin, one wonders how they remain intact during flight, and how they don’t break apart upon landing. A waist easy enough to saw through with mandibles. One might also wonder if this is a flaw in their design. Not so. The hourglass shape allows bees to bend without breaking as they puncture your skin, driving the stinger home.

The voyeuristic nature of observing honeybees this closely gives me pause: what gives me the right to this access? To witness the queen bee lay eggs that, a few days later, bloom into larvae curled at the bottom of yet-to-becapped cells. And later still, to watch an antenna poke out, then eyes, head, and legs until a new bee emerges. To watch bees with heads pressed against the acrylic sides, their eyes narrowed to slits, sleeping perhaps, certainly in a rare static state, dreaming perchance that when they awake, the looming faces of father and son, so like a planet and its moon—one weary and aging, the other shiny and new—casting their shadows, have disappeared from sight, perhaps for good, to let the honeybees live—no matter how brief it may be— in peace.

MELISSA CANNON | THE INQUISITOR’S WIFE

stands in the kitchen adding spice to daydreams— wakes just before she chars the light meat dark; lays out her silver—the studded knife—and turns the scalloped spoon, fondles the ornate fork— polishing each prong until it gleams. (Careful, she whispers, hell to pay if she burns this dinner.) Centered, the crimson candle burns unlit, somehow recalls those dangerous dreams devoured by a wolf whose red eye gleams when he rode above her and her mind went dark (Where have his hands been?). She may drop her fork on the snow-white linen as the whole party turns to stare. Perhaps she’ll ask if they take turns, turning the rack. Or if his split tongue burns, tasting the sweet flesh heavy on his fork. And here, is this the lover of his dreams he meets while she lies, burning, in the dark? The taper seeps and one ruby droplet gleams, glints like the string of bloody gems that gleams over a shadowed cleavage: the woman turns to him and, laughing, calls him “Lord of the Dark.”

He says, “Oh, it’s my work. The trashman burns dead leaves and limbs the way I burn bad dreams.”

Her head rings—a pitched anvil, a tuning fork he strikes and strikes. She watches water fork around her folded hands, all slippery gleams, all streams, and can’t tell waking now from dreams or how the simplest fairy story turns— wed to her torturer—and her flushed skin burns

with the images she conjures out of dark. Outside, it’s raining and the sky’s so dark— she’s running down a road, then branches fork, leading to tower and black forest. Something burns (she sees it!—something silvery still gleams after he turns the last light out and turns away) against her lids, sifting through dreams of the dark like melting metalwork she gleams covers the fork between her thighs and turns tosses tosses with night-sweats burns in her dreams

AARON

LELITO

| AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

In my photography and digital art, I am primarily drawn to the patterns and imagery of nature. This subject matter has become a way for me to reflect on the larger themes of environment, climate, and ecology. Along with this macro view, however, there is the micro—my personal, subjective relationship with the world around me. There are restorative, therapeutic, and transcendent aspects of interacting with the waves, rocks, leaves, and branches. These patterns have a deep resonance with the transformations that are a part of the human condition.

For the theme of “Lovely, Dark, and Deep: Journeys Real and Imagined,” I was drawn to images that are spacious and layered. Within the darkness of the night sky, however, there is also a luminous quality, and for me there is something disarming and vulnerable about these photographs. A moment of pause to notice a simple image—the moon through branches or the fading glow of twilight sky—can be a moment of connection and presence, a moment of taking a breath and noticing it move in and out. It can be a moment of wonder and awe.

Sometimes we need a wake-up call, a reminder to look up. To see, to feel. “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” This is Mary Oliver’s instruction for “living a life.” Each journey into nature is a little different—some lovely, some dark, some deep.

CHRISTINE E. HAMM | SELF-PORTRAIT AS AMBIEN

It was you who buttoned, unbuttoned, my tonguecolored blouse. You who showed me how to fall in the most dramatic way, how to fake my own death. You whose bare feet brushed the tops of telephone poles. Afterwards, on the twin mattress in your mother’s sewing room, you made me close my eyes and guess what your hands were doing. Now, the medics appear, and phlebotomists paw through our pockets, our pink plastic purses. Tentative, mucky, very wet, very red, their fingers clutch our braids as they whisper numbers, strap us in. That word you love to slip inside yourself, how it shapes your mouth. Their needles cannot pierce our skin. On the ceiling of the ambulance, a red clock. We ask for water; they ask us why we are thirsty.

D.T. COLLINS | THERE’S NO FOG IN ALBUQUERQUE

Somewhere along the shoreline of the northern coast, where cold and gray waves crash on rounded boulders the size of small children, the fog rolled in from the cliffs. We were playing, my sister and I, on a small sandy beach shaped like an elongated circle, with shallow waves lapping one side and a short hill of poppy clusters and manzanitas on the other. Our dad, a tall man to us, was wearing denim jeans and a button-up denim jacket. He stood still with a foot in the poppies and his hands shoved into his pockets. And there was a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

I don’t remember where the road and car were, though I’m sure we drove there. I don’t remember the name of the beach, or if it even had one, though I’ve scrolled up and down the 101 on Google maps trying to find it. My hands and feet were cold, but my chest was warm as I chased my sister around, ignoring the fog engulfing the pines. We liked to play variations of the same game: cops and robbers, knights and ninjas, He-Man and the Shredder. We had strong imaginations. Or maybe it was because we only had each other. We were never in a place long enough to make friends, and it wasn’t like our folks were going to join us. That’s why we were driving up north, to spend time with Grandpa and Grandma Barnes so Mom and Dad could work things out again. We had pulled over so we could stretch our legs and Dad could have a smoke without worrying about giving us cancer. One of those things Mom was always nagging him about.

It was while he was smoking that, in between glances, the fog took him. It didn’t register at first. I sometimes wonder how long we kept playing, oblivious to what had just happened. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had looked up a moment sooner. But mostly I wonder if any of this would have really made a difference. As it was, it didn’t. And as it was, he was gone.

It was after he was gone that I screamed.

The rest is a blur, made up more by what adults have shared over the years than any real memories of our own. The yelling and screaming got the attention of some teenagers road-tripping a gap year. Some stayed with us

while one in a brown corduroy jacket ran off to use a freeway box. The cops came and asked questions. Somehow Grandpa and Grandma Barnes heard and made it down to us faster than Mom could from Albuquerque where she was interviewing for a job she would eventually hate but stay at for the benefits. The News showed up. I specifically remember a woman with frizzy hair asking questions. But after a while the story died down. They never did find him. They never did find any of them that the fog had taken.

The fog along the coast had been taking men for years. No one knew why. And no one knew when. Nobel-nominated biologists, psychologists Rhodes scholars, multi-site evangelical pastors, all and more had examined the fog along the shore, and none had an answer. No video could seem to record it. No one could claim to have seen the moment it happened. And everyone always seemed so surprised by who it took. So, people kept living along the northern coast, tempting fate and putting up with poor weather. When enough people had been taken, it became nothing more than a statistic, like unemployment or ski accidents.

Shortly after the fog had consumed my dad, Mom had us move in with her in Albuquerque. There wasn’t any fog there. We moved around a bit, from rental to rental, until Mom could finally afford to buy a single-story house with three bedrooms. She never remarried, though she did date a guy or two. Apparently, she either didn’t have any desires or just didn’t want to deal with the hassle. In high school I met a girl, we kissed, I freaked out, and ended up waiting three years till I dated again.

At first, my sister and I would share that the fog had taken our dad, slipping it in when it was time to introduce ourselves. Those types of stories were a relatively foreign thing in New Mexico, like fresh fish. But after a while, they became more and more common. And I just didn’t want to deal with any of it. When I got into high school I would just tell people my dad was a truck driver always out of state. By the time I got into college, I just wouldn’t even mention my parents. In fact, I wouldn’t even really think about it except for when it came up on the News. Usually when some guru had a new theory about the fog disproven.

The girl I married while in college was book-smart but life-dumb. When she should have ran the other way, she chose to try and fix me up. It was fun the first two years, mediocre the next five, and the last seven, well. Having two kids just poured gasoline on it. My Mom was sad. I thought it was because I had failed in the same way she and dad had, but she was just worried that she wouldn’t be able to see the grandkids. For a while, my ex-wife and I both lived in Albuquerque. It made it easier for visitation during the holidays and weekends, and the kids liked being in the same schools with their friends. But after child support and taxes, there wasn’t much left, and I hated living in a studio next to the railroad.

It makes me sound like a jerk, but it wasn’t that hard of a decision when the job offer in Washington State came up. It paid double, it was actually in my field, and I preferred the wet rain over the dry heat any day. We talked it over, my ex and I. The kids would stay there, and with the bump in pay and lower expenses, I could afford to fly them out during breaks. As far as lovers go, she was far better as my past than as my forever. And Mom was happy with the arrangement, which didn’t really make me feel that much better. What did make me feel better was how quickly I was able to find my own place. Get a dog. Buy a real sofa. I was able to kiss a girl and not feel shame when she woke up the next morning and saw my house in the harsh sunlight. But she was both book-smart and life-smart and she left before the kids came up for summer.

Kayak rides. Bear cub sightings. VHS rentals of Pokémon and burnt French toast. And right when I was getting used to it all, they were gone. And the house seemed to creak a little more than it had before, and the rain and clouds that I had preferred seemed a little more cold than they had before. Frost crept up my windows and my fingers pinched putting on the snow chains. And a phone call right before Thanksgiving break told me a stranger was to become a stepdad to my kids.

Their mom asked if they could come up after Christmas, as her soon-to-be in-laws had traditions involving church and adoptive fathers and Jesus Christ. I had stopped listening, but as I watched the droplets chase each other down the windowpane, I said yes.

Of course, due to severe weather, their flight got redirected to Northern California. I drove down a day early so I could pick them up fresh. Then their flight was delayed three more hours. Disheveled hair and dark circles under eyes met me at the luggage claim way past the time of the movie tickets I had bought. I took us back to the motel I had set up base at. They were out as I leaned in to kiss them goodnight.

I let them sleep in. Treated them to a greasy diner breakfast where the table is always a little sticky and the food not good but warm. And the conversation was all about the new guy. I didn’t mind that they were getting a new parent figure, I just wished that he didn’t seem all that involved. The road weaved along the coast. Marine, Boy Scout Leader, Assistant Coach to my daughter’s soccer team. The waves, cold and gray, crashed against boulders the size of my children as a fog slipped through the thick forest pines. I’d never disliked a decent guy more. The pain in my knees told me we needed a stretch. I pulled over to a bit of sandy beach in the shape of an ellipse, with gentle waves lapping the shore and clusters of poppies and bushes covering a tiny cliff. The children, invigorated by the salty air that bit our faces, jumped and ran around, playing some made-up game of tag and superheroes. I looked down and saw the fog begin to tangle around my feet.

I lift my right foot. The fog retreats.

I put it down. The fog begins to encircle my legs.

I look at the kids as I leave my legs planted on the ground. They continue to play. No glances my way. They are having so much fun. A chill, as if I’ve plunged into the Pacific, rolls up my back and arms to my neck. They laugh and scream. I know what happens next. There will be no trace. No footsteps. No finding. It will be easy. The boy tags the girl and turns his heel into the sand to sprint away. They have a mother. And they will soon have a stepfather. The fog is getting thicker. Its finger’s clasping my cheek. The last I see is these two children, running around and around and around, as I leave my foot firmly on the ground, and then, nothing.

Until I hear my childhood scream.

ROGER CAMP | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

This particular photograph, “Feet in Pond, Ohio” (pictured opposite), was taken while I was teaching an advanced photography class at the Coumbus College of Art & Design in Ohio using nude models in order to demonstrate to students how to light form and the effect that would have on shape, texture, etc. One of my colleagues offered to let my class use his farm, which had a large forested area including a pond to photograph the models outdoors. Since it was a field trip, I took along my own camera.

If one were to examine the history of nude photography, it would become apparent that most work idealizes or objectifies the subject matter. The work of Brett Weston or Lucien Clergue comes to mind, as both produced large bodies of work of the female form in water. This image reveals something about both the environment and the model. This is a rural pond with mud on its banks and weeds in the water. A close examination of the feet shows the mud as well as damaged skin on one of the feet, which personalizes the subject. This image was taken under sunlight, which accounts for the intense highlights in the water. I’ve deliberately exposed the water so darkly that it focuses the viewer’s attention on the feet and legs.

As with my documentary photography, I am more interested in the little thing, some object or scene that might give some insight into the place I am photographing, perhaps offering an epiphany.

ROGER CAMP | FEET IN POND, OHIO

KATHARYN HOWD MACHAN | SHOW YOUR SON WHERE THE MILKWEED GREW

Take him walking on the land that was. Point out where you climbed the pine with branches far enough apart for you to wend your way through needles and never mind the sticky sap. Talk of birds, how you had learned their different songs and how they helped to make you feel you were alive and might grow wings, might fly. Explain how earthworms turned back dirt to even better soil for gardens. Gardens? Yes, where people grew good food and gathered it in woven baskets to cook in their homes with love. Murmur about what used to be a mountain. Describe how sky shone clearest blue above a lake, above a forest. And when you reach the place you ran through grass and flowers, your feet bare, try not to weep when he cannot believe there once were butterflies.

SUSAN GRIEGO | APPLE OF DISCORD

Lo siento mucho. It’s a condolence used in my culture, resonant of any type of suffering. “I feel it very much” is a way to convey a heartfelt synergy with loved ones and to provide comfort and hope. By using these words, Hispanics immerse themselves in the needs of their culture and escape from tragedy not of their own making—tragedy formed from prejudice played out in selfhate and turned into an obsession with alcohol, borne of an attempt to rid the memories of generational suffering.

Hispanics also hold a place of discord in their collective soul. There is discord made up of passion and pride. Our passion for life spills over even in times of grief. Our pride engulfs the physical world and is emblazoned in the food we prepare and enjoy during times of celebration and mourning; however, a putrid discord is held in the depths of the Hispanic tragedy shown in the passion we hold for universal grief. We crave suffering, first and foremost as a response to generational trauma, and secondarily as a responsibility to humanity. We suffer because our ancestors did. We suffer because we are human.

Our passion engulfs the spirit world, too. Some of us quell the spirits with booze, and some of us embrace the spirits as our own. Either way, the suffering is the same.

As a young girl, suffering came in many forms. Raised by a single mother who made the choice to go it alone after one too many beatings at the hand of my alcoholic father, I learned to take it all in without making a sound. When you suffer from seeing your mother beaten, everything else is trivial—at least that is what I was conditioned to believe. As a result, I formed a response to pain void of emotion and retreated to the safe world of the spirits where brujas are storytellers, too. The stories brujas tell are filled with muck and mire, pulling and coaxing to the bottle until the habit is firm. Listening to the cacophony late at night, I made amends with lost souls and offered my warning to those with less of a view.

Don’t let yourself get sucked in, I would whisper. Somehow most of my family got consumed by the grief.

Hard to believe La Familia could take such a turn. The descendants of New Mexico royalty with a history beyond statehood, our sight could have been set on the lessons instead of the sin. My forefathers gained an appreciation and respect for the land, as we merged with the original Natives to ensure heart in our clan. My Abuelita, the anchor and grandmother, commanded respect because of her strength, vision, and hope. Abuelita’s strength was evident in having raised eight children and burying a ninth with evidence of a tenth. The firstborn drowned in the acequia when the brujas claimed their stake. Later down the line, another child claimed the same fate. Abuelita’s Native clan taught the Spanish how to live without fear of the spirits. They taught how to comingle with pride. We then learned to survive by keeping love for family as the priority in line.

The death of Abuelita, the matriarch, was inevitable but still a big shock. Having died in her sleep, the brujas lay in wait to witness the pain. Abuelita lay in the cuarto with no fogón, the coldest room of the house. When I glanced at the coffin during her vigil, I didn’t recognize the face. Quickly looking away, I focused on the coffin to keep from attracting the brujas’ attention as they lingered in the high corners of the room.

The kitchen was Abuelita’s pride. Abuelita made tortillas by squishing the dough over and over again with her tiny warm hands. She would pull and tug, and then slowly massage and coax the dough into soft squishy balls. Then she would line up the squishy balls of dough in straight rows and count them slowly, touching each with her gentle fingers, tender with resolve. Now, lying in the coffin, her hands felt cold, dry, and hard. I recoiled in disgust. Ashamed of my instinct, I pulled at my mantilla and knotted it firmly under my chin.

The death of the matriarch, with a life lived as fully as Abuelita’s, was surely a sign La Familia would endure. Our people surviving meant coming together at Abuelita’s house. All the brothers and sisters in one room, smoking and drinking after the funeral. The uncles and aunts sat at the kitchen table where the adobe walls had cracked after decades in the dry New Mexico air, their voices growing uncomfortably loud with each drink. If the bottle

held a promise, it would be the offering of warmth. The memories too vivid and somehow too strong to ignore. So, the brothers and sisters each told their stories to show how their mother had forged a path full of promise drenched in love and compassion. They remembered things differently and fought over the details, but none could change the reality of the night.

My cousins and I were outside in the orchard, telling our stories as well. Six girls together one last time. Unaware of our fate, we held flashlights under blankets and told scary stories until the youngest cried. I held my breath so no one would know just how scared I was. Mostly, I held my breath so the brujas couldn’t hear me as they flew overhead. Then, with the strength that only a clan can muster, we huddled together and lay our last plan. We all made a pact. Whoever died first, we’d come back in sequence and pull the leg of the ones left behind.

Having made the pact, we all went indoors the kitchen counter was overflowing with platters and bowls full of posole, beans, tortillas, and empanadas. The community had come together to make sure we were fed and offered hushed remarks. Lo siento mucho. The loving task of cooking left to less capable hands. The empanadas at the end of the counter were smashed and had half-burned edges. They looked rushed and uncared for. The apple filling oozed from the sides and made them seem tired and worn out.

I remember myself as a child in Abuelita’s orchard, climbing up the apple trees with the ease of a monkey. I held a firm resolve that came from never looking back. I’ve always preferred bitter apples, the crisp green ones that hold on until the end. As sure as I’d gone up the tree, I’d find my way back down, holding the tiny green apples in my shirt, pulled up high on my belly. Once down from the tree, I’d empty the apples in the wooden bushels piled next to the barn. To get to those bushels, I’d have to cross the acequia by balancing on a wood beam laid across the water. The beam was swollen and half rotten. I hesitated and wondered if it was the same beam that had rolled at the hands of the brujas, throwing my unknown aunts into the acequia to drown. My hesitation was quelled by the call of Abuelita. I made my way towards the house with the

brujas at my side. Running faster, I felt the squishing of the fermented familiar apples, too sweet and sour to ignore.

No matter how early the picking would start, the yellow apples always fell from the trees and turned mushy and brown. Beneath dozens of feet of children and grandchildren, our weight was enough for the orchard to rot over. To keep from smelling the stench, we learned to tie our bandanas across our noses and later let them fall to our neck, when the smell finally turned less rancid and somehow pleasant in the cool autumn wind.

Just as we became accustomed to the smell of rotting apples in the orchard, our family became accustomed to the trauma inherent to our culture— generational trauma infused with torrential alcoholic binges, and as a result, abhorrent cruelty at the hands of our own. Beatings and unrelenting hatred aimed at the weakest of the clan, until the discord borne from our passion was no longer a source of pride.

As the vigil dismantled, each member of the family more anchored to our passion and pride, I felt the presence of a resonant discord deep in my belly. Even at my young age, I knew the divide between the sin and me would be a harsh statement to make. I resolved then and there to keep Abuelita by my side. In that moment, I felt Abuelita take a place inside of me. I became the apple that didn’t get spoiled by the sin. I was the one that would hold on until the end. By trading the lure of the brujas for the spirit of someone bathed in calm, I became the outcast, too good for my own. Most of the others found their solace in the bottom of the bottle, with the brujas lingering in plain sight. The familiar discord that arose from suffering would take its toll and leave a mark for posterity to bear.

One by one, the aunts and uncles exited Abuelita’s house, and with the autumn wind blowing hard, they habitually held their breath, anticipating the stench.

NANCY REYNER | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I like to refer to my paintings as exotic landscapes—otherworldly places that are beautiful and meditative. Nature is my muse for inspiring luminous interpretations of air, water, earth, and light. Merging the literal and metaphorical, I work on each painting until the image hovers somewhere between pure abstraction and realistic landscape.

The ability to dream and create new worlds by taking a flat surface and transforming it into the illusion of 3D is the gift that painters can bring to the world. With this concept of manipulating dimensions, a painter may point out something that already exists but in such a skillful manner that the viewer sees it in a brand new way.

This is my mission as an artist—to bring our invisible inner world into tangible physical form. Art is a rewarding pursuit that adds quality of life, and I share this passion in my art and with my students.

NANCY REYNER | NIGHT LIGHTS OF SANTA FE

NATALIE SCHRIEFER | BREAKING UP WITH AN ASTROPHYSICIST

I. Always we are hurtling towards a breakup, a loss, our atoms careening towards an inevitable shattering. A final fragmentation. Time does not solve anything.

II. The Big Freeze

The predominant theory is heat death, not death by heat but the death of heat. The universe expands forever and the cosmos cool. We’ll frost over like bits of comet. I’ll finger the grain of the nightstand, trace the wood in the dark, while you sleep on the couch.

III. The Big Rip

Everything will be shredded by dark matter: galaxies, stars, planets, even spacetime. We’ll be torn to slivers too small to repair— and I’ll spend hours cutting photos, shearing out your body, your hands, your face.

IV. The Big Bounce

If the universe started with a bang, why can’t it end with one, too? Expand expand expand and then shatter, contract, collapse— and then explode again, an eternal mood swing vacillating between our most recent blowout and the walks we take, hand in hand, guessing the phase of the moon.

V. Vacuum Decay

We would be destroyed instantaneously, ghosted by the laws of physics— the apartment empty, echoing, the contents of the closet spilled out onto the floor. Stained into the table is the ring from your coffee cup— the only thing left behind.

VI. Cosmic Uncertainty

Of course, what’s to say our end can be predicted? Theorizing and experiencing are vastly different nebulae. No matter what, eventually, we end. Tonight I’ll lay in the middle of the bed, my head between our pillows. This is a reset. An end. A beginning. Maybe now I’ll finally sleep.

ARTIE ANN BATES | WIDOW’S BREATH

You’re not the first person to die on this farm. I expect you won’t be the last. I regret that I didn’t talk you out of cutting that damn tree in the first place. I wasn’t here when you cut it down or when you sawed up the trunk and branches.

It’s my own fault, ‘cause it’s my job to take care of people, keep them alive, but I foolishly misunderstood the Universe’s signals. Let my guard down, got distracted, and snap—you were gone. What’s weird, I would have sworn we were on the brink of something great. I saw adventure in our future, travel, new things, but now I squat on a rafter over the kitchen inhaling dust, sharing space with dead wasp husks, my breath as dry as your hands were in the coffin. Is this supposed to be our grand adventure? Or am I still missing something?

I never understood people like you. How can someone be happy all the time? I understand depression, especially now, but what about of all those others who died ahead of you and me on this farm? They died before we were born, before we married. Long before we moved up here to this old house in the head of nowhere to hear knocking on the walls, having the same thought at the same time, saying words together. My parents gave it to us because no one else in the family wanted it. Why would you want to live in the head of Elk Creek? Nothing up there. It’s creepy. But you and I liked creepy. This place released us to be curious.

I hunch on this rafter, sweet memories of us, our last Skype session that Sunday evening before fateful Monday, you shirtless at your desk, running fingers through tousled hair, planning your visit to the military hospital base where I worked in Germany. I saw tragedy all day with returning soldiers, but a trauma surgeon ought to know when her own man is in danger. Two weeks to our 30th anniversary and instead came this news with cracked words that set different tracks in motion. We got switched like wrecked trains; our metal wrenched jagged.

When I got your call in Europe, six time zones, four thousand miles away from home, I felt the shiver from a freeze where the sun and stars go dark, and the Earth stopped. I’d get that feeling hearing the choppers come from the field, but this was miles deeper. The solar system turned off kilter in our bodies. My hands shook but had to get home, get to you, book a flight but my fingers kept missing laptop keys, had to type over, erase, type again. Get a ride to the train station. The airport. Why was I so far away? Why had I volunteered to fix others’ brokenness when I couldn’t fix this? But, if I’d been home when it happened, would I have wished I were in Europe, or at the grocery? Is it okay to be anywhere hearing of death?

I refused to believe it. You, bigger than life, defied death a million times before. More lives than a hundred cats. Worked on steep, third-story roofs, walked high scaffolding on painting jobs, drove fast and wild like fighting fires, caught snakes with your bare hands and rehomed them away from busy roads. Played smash-mouth soccer and paid for it when some burly dude took revenge, fractured your cheekbone. Played hide and seek with the kids and climbed out on this rafter, slipped, and broke your arm. “Darn, can’t even say it was from work,” you laughed, holding your cast. You chased cows and calves, running them down for vaccinations in the corral. Rode motorcycles and scaled trees. Teased me over my accent, like a perpetual kid in adult skin. A gift from God.

The coffin. Funeral. Then I had to walk away from your body. Cremation. You in a box, powdered atoms, calcium, and iron when you should have had a pulse, held my hand, kissed my hair. Your spirit out there somewhere, mine dragging back here. Had to let go of each other’s hand, shake off our branch into the rushing water. I get that we can’t return to where we’ve been all these years, but my breath won’t go below my throat, lungs cramp for air but none comes because my breath went with you.

Truth? I scooted out from the upstairs bedroom window, tied the rope around this rafter above the kitchen. It’s wide enough I can perch like a cardinal, balance with one hand still on the windowsill, my toes hooked claw-

like over the edges. The square knot you taught me: the more it’s pulled, the tighter it gets. Looped it over my head like Jesus’ crown of thorns, down over my chin, scratchy on my neck. If I do this, will it deliver me to you? I’ve heard people say that the rope is painless, compared to other means. That it gives peace, but what if it blocks us apart? Will self-death work like any other death, bringing us together in the afterlife? Or the opposite, keep us apart, eternal punishment? I don’t want that river, that vicious wash from the dark that humans barely navigate, but we did, somehow, from even before birth.

I mean, if there’s an afterlife, wasn’t there a forelife, where we whizzed past Earth in other star-filled journeys? I see that in you, because of your spirit. Nothing stopped you. In fact, I don’t even like to say you “died” because it undercuts your strength, so I say, “He was killed.” The unstoppable doesn’t die. When people told you no, you did it anyway. Back in the 90s, you saved an American Indian rock shelter from strip mining. The coal company had the permit, landowner wanted a cattle watering hole, but you leaned into it, worked with the lawyer, and saved it. The odds were a zillion to one. Wonder if any of those first people died here, too, long ago? They lived here for thousands of years, and you found an arrowhead behind our cabin. Their spirits didn’t just go poof, either.

Grandpa Dave died in 1925, but I don’t know which room he was in or if he was outside working. It was January 21, might have had flu or pneumonia, or tripped over a rock out gathering firewood. Had a heart attack? That was back when a wake was in the house. He was in a coffin made by his sons Joe, Willie, Jesse, and Floyd. They set the coffin across two chairs in the bedroom. Grandchildren had to sit up, let the adults sleep. Disrespectful to leave a corpse.

Around midnight, the coffin’s upper end raised up. Grandpa was stiff by then, so his head stuck out like a turkey. The youngins shrieked, thinking he rose from the dead, then saw the old cat had jumped on the lower end. On the day they took Grandpa to be buried, Granny didn’t go. As the wagon creaked heavy with his coffin, easing downcreek to the graveyard, Granny

swept the front porch. Her nerves might have been bad, and grief twists things. Maybe felt like he should have tried harder to stay alive. Might have found herself in a second childhood, so why not sweep? Maybe relieved his suffering was over.

She kept all the dead babies’ clothes upstairs in the spare room. A table with baby gowns, hand-crocheted lace around the bottom, for newborns, others for toddlers, dingy muslin, dark wool, coarse and scratchy. Smelled musty but the youngins played there, put them on shuck dolls, held funerals. Then Granny died in June somewhere in this house, eighty-six years old. Might have been her Dixon temper.

There was a murder here, in the 1950s. Men on the front porch playing cards, guzzling liquor, leaning against the porch posts in straight-back chairs, slurred speech, throwing down bets till somebody got wind of cheating. Jumped up in each other’s face, staggering, then a fist cracked Jim Butcher’s chin. Backwards he fell, six-foot-four frame reeling on the porch edge like it was a high wire. As he fell, tried to grab a post; they reached for him but grabbed slow-motion air. On the way down, Jim hit his head on a metal pole. The sheriff didn’t come. Nobody went to prison. What did Jim’s ghost think? Does he come back, hold a grudge, get revenge? Is he one of the ones rattling around the upstairs room with the dead baby clothes? He died outside; does he stay out there, make me think it’s the night wind down the holler? Or a possum scratching?

People visited this old house, nostalgic, back for a family reunion or their school gathering, and they’d drive up the holler for old time’s sake. They’d amble around outside, tell us their memories of a tire swing there, a corn patch on that mountain, a square dance inside, but somebody always said, “Did you know a man was murdered in this house? Jim Butcher.” Yeah, yeah, heard it enough times. But they never said did we know that Grandpa and Granny Back died here, or the youngsters with diphtheria. Does a murdered soul stay a ghost, whereas elderly folks of natural causes go to rest? What about self-inflicted death? No one ever said there was a suicide up here, so

would I be the first to die that way? You weren’t murdered or elderly, and you sure didn’t give up voluntarily.

Isn’t that why God invented religion, so we get answers? If good: heaven; if bad: hell, but without you, life is hell. So, I hang on too tight, keep us in limbo. They say you’re in a better place, but what if you’re suffering like I am? Who’s come back to tell?

I’ve waited by the phone these three months, in case you call, but how silly is that? You aren’t going to contact me by phone. That was when we were both alive; now, it will be a different way: a breeze on my cheek, a flutter at the corner of the house, a coincidence that only you and I know, our secret code. No one will believe it, so why tell?

Truth is, when that trapped sapling bashed you, released at the speed of sound, its velocity into your chest, its force transferred and overpowering your heart rhythm, it delivered you to a place I can’t go. Are you in the woods behind our house, or under the floor, or in the attic with these other spirits? As an angel, do you float in the wind, clear a path for what’s left of my halfalive-half-dead-half-human shell? In my dreams, you’re elusive, can’t touch. You’re the high-pitched sounds the dogs hear, sharp eye of the hawk, the mystics’ sixth sense. My head can’t perceive you, but my heart does. It’s the depression I have that you never did, like the room with the dead baby clothes: alone, clueless, and sad. A sign from you, can you spare one? Come and meet, because I don’t know if I can stay, not knowing where you are. Don’t know how to do this dangerous kind of suffering. Release: the rope is so tempting. Do I suffer in the hope of sharing tiny moments with you, or go now and risk never seeing you again?

We orbit Earth’s icy dust, pass through at the speed of love. You gave me breath, and now you must teach me to wait. I’d wait forever and leave these wasp husks behind.

Maybe I’ll sweep. Push snow off the porch, no matter what the spirits think. I breathe, unsure of what’s next, but willing.

SETH PETERSON | IT’S ALWAYS THE WRONG TIME TO GO HOME

My lungs filled with practically rotten air. People shaped their feet into roots. Even the skies were littered with thousand-year-old stars. I was green then, & everything else was grey, & that’s no way to live. So, I got on I-44 & headed West. I must have driven for years through reams of cornfields & shit-caked feed yards, until the pitched roofs flattened like sundial shadows. I saw palms & volcano pies & people pumping gas. I saw distance collected in peaks & ridges & stretched in watery sheets. But none was so vast as the thickness of a window. Shadow moved again & roofs seemed to elbow & flex. An exit sign caught the light, which waved me into a main drag. It was like a puzzle I’d already solved. The fresh blacktop streamed through crispy silhouettes. Streetlamps preened as though they’d captured starlight. My car stopped outside a house that looked familiar, snugged warm beside a lake. I walked up to the window, which the hearth had yellowed like the wrinkles on my face. For a moment, I imagined it was home. I was not sure if I could speak, & hesitated, though my mouth was hung ajar. I knew that glass could bend things passing through its pane. Sometimes unpredictably, & sometimes with mercy, back from where they came.

JULYAN DAVIS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

In my current series, “American Ghosts,” I am trying something unusual in narrative art; with no prior text, it is a novel of awakening written only in images. The unplotted story crosses the breadth of America and a century of history (1850-1950). It brings together much of my prior art: hundreds of paintings that documented the natural landscape and vanishing architecture of my adopted home. It also ties into past narrative work that explored folklore, legends, and lost histories.

“American Ghosts” follows the interweaving paths of three fictional women, personifying three key moments of American history: the Gold Rush, the Civil War and the Dust Bowl. In an allegory of both the Gilded Age and Westward Expansion, the ghosts of Betsy, Belle, and Nancy gather a caravan of outliers on their journey across history and the land herself.

Some years ago, I read that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was in fact a mournful allegory about the collapse of the Populist movement. His subterfuge may have made an impression on me. In my fiction writing I have since used a light touch to convey weightier messages, and in this new narrative I am doing the same–following a string of characters that might people a children’s story to tell America’s complicated history. My ghosts and I are on a path of discovery. I’m eager to see what history will teach us next.

JULYAN DAVIS | THE MAN WHO BUILT THE RAILROAD

STARR PAUL | SHE EVEN LOOKED LIKE A SHEEP

A stiff woman, oldest living Basque in Wyoming, Amatxi’s spine shaped in prayer, her hair tufted like

sheep she used to herd wooly, water resistant. Still she insisted on a plastic bonnet with every rain

her fingers trudged tired at their joints from beading rosaries between

reciting the prayer, three times daily, her voice splitting and filling with wooden beads from calling Christ

when she could no longer kneel before hardened pews the priest beamed to her bedside, Mary never missed communion

anyway, when she died the organ sounded as an alarm to let the church know I had been misplaced.

You can’t escape serving God even in death so here I am, reciting the rosary on carpet-burnt knees:

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for our sinners now, and at the hour of our death, Amatxi,

I was tied to a woman’s tongue, only moments before you died, is this prayer about me?

STEPHEN KAHN | ONLY AFTER YOU’RE GONE

I never got to tell my mother goodbye, or that I loved her, that I was sorry. If I could share a drink with her today, I’d make it a strong old-fashioned, or just straight bourbon from a paper cup, the way she used to take it. We would sit in her surreal living room and watch the picture cards of hope hang on the mantel, conceiving which one is me. Then we’d drink our words and let the booze bring us back together, let it burn away all the time we’ve missed: twenty-two years, over half my life. I might ask her permission to steal a few lines of poetry; she was a writer, too. She too would have known that it’s safer to employ a third-person narrator to create more distance from dark material, so as not to lose the narrative in a heap of tears. But I think I can take this head on, I’m not afraid of getting in a wreck. Besides, the art is not in the tears we cry, but in the tears we hold back.

Long has she passed, my mother, so long that “Mom” hardly seems appropriate. I’ll call her by her first name, even though it was one she hated: Louisa.

Long has she passed, Louisa, so long that the story hardly seems real, as if I never knew her. And yet, just the other day, I thought I heard her voice in the other room…

It was the day she taught me how to drive. Or how not to. I had a lacrosse game that afternoon, a home game at the bottom of St. Paul’s School for Boys’ sprawling campus, a private Episcopalian school on acres of land, a rich kid school. We were rich: rich and miserable. That morning in chapel, I prayed Louisa wouldn’t show up to the game. Well, actually, that’s a lie, because I never prayed, but if I had, that would’ve been my only prayer.

“Goddamnit,” I said when I saw her red PT Cruiser pull up that afternoon, the game having already started. I took out my mouthguard and spat. “Shit.” Quite a mouth for a fourteen-year-old. Quite a temper too. I was an angry kid.“What’s your problem?” the boy defending me said. “You guys are winning.”

A sunny afternoon in Baltimore County, all the flourishing colors of spring, and a dark cloud around Louisa. I could tell she was drunk by how slowly she rose from the car, and by the way she stood, slumped backward like someone

carrying a stack of books (or a case of liquor), her head cocked to one side, a tipping effect in her posture. She had on a white t-shirt tucked into khaki shorts, open-toed shoes, dark sunglasses, what she always wore. There was about half the length of the field between us, but she was noticeable from afar. She had great hair, wavy and blonde; she went through bottles of hairspray, but it made her hair sparkle in the sun. A very beautiful woman. Always the most beautiful, I remember Dad saying, and always an alcoholic.

She didn’t wave to me; I didn’t wave to her. None of the other parents spoke to her or even stood near her. Throughout the game I’d look up and suddenly she’d be gone, disappeared back into the car, and then she’d reappear, standing there like a drunk scarecrow.

Strange, to think I knew this woman: I saw her every day of my life, ate with her, lay in her bed, touched the mole on her neck and played with the clasp of her gold necklace; I helped her up off the floor of her bathroom, changed her dirty sheets and emptied the handles of liquor I found in her closet. I knew this woman: but in a removed way, as a reader knows a certain narrator, but not the author.

“Stephen, get your head out of your ass,” Coach said during a timeout. The score was now tied heading into the fourth quarter.

“Come on, we need this.”

“Right, Coach,” I said, looking over at the parking lot, Louisa nowhere in sight. “I got it.

On the next play I lost the ball. The boy defending me scooped it up, but before he could heave it downfield, I checked him hard enough that he lost control and dropped his stick. I scooped the loose ball, made a quick pass, and we scored. It was a legal check, I hit him in the upper arm, but so viciously that it stunned him; his arm had probably gone dead. After the play, he took a knee and cradled that arm. The game was paused. I bit down hard on my mouthguard, standing over him with a callous composure, almost able to taste the tears streaming down his face. It’s a rough game, I thought, scrape his ass off the field and let’s go.

As I watched him walk off with his head down, I suddenly felt a deep remorse. It couldn’t have been me who sent that kid weeping to the sideline, but rather an unintentional, exaggerated version of myself, my reflection in a funhouse mirror. But it was me, my furious and scared self. And that dark figure getting out of the car, slouching toward the ground, ready to tumble down drunk: that was me too.

We won the game, not that I cared. Now I had to get home. I signaled to Louisa that I would walk up the campus hill to get changed and meet her outside the gym. She reciprocated with a slight wave. I wondered if she even knew where she was. All the other kids rode with their parents up the hill in fancy SUVs. I walked. For reasons left to a whole other story, I couldn’t call Dad, and never in a million years would I have asked a friend for help; I was beyond embarrassed.

I hurried up the hill and got changed. Having mastered the art of hiding my emotions, I feigned a good mood for my teammates, the whole time worrying about Louisa behind the wheel, drunk navigating the winding campus roads. Upon exiting the gym, I was relieved that she had found her way. Funny how comforting normalcy is, even when normal is totally fucked up. She botched the park job, her tires well over the line, the front bumper riding the block, badly scratched from all the drunk driving. To my knowledge, she never got caught, but to have called her a functioning alcoholic would have been a stretch.

I got in the car without hesitation. There was the sweet, sickly, almost medicinal smell I’d come to associate with Louisa and with failing motherhood, and there was her little paper cup, in plain sight, half emptied of bourbon. I laughed. Her behavior had become so brazen, so absurdly reckless, it was like some trashy sitcom, and I laughed right on cue. It was anyone’s guess how much she’d had to drink; she was always under the influence (always sad and beautiful). But then there were the horrible, heartsinking moments when I realized she was gone, gone from the world and from herself, eclipsed by her own shadow, by this person she hated: Louisa. This was one of those moments. Maybe that’s why I laughed, to fend off the fear.

Her delicate hands clenched the wheel, one of the knuckles black and broken from a fall she took in the kitchen a few nights before. The bridge of her nose was also busted, I saw it in profile as she lolled in the seat. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open behind her dark shades, but she was very quiet, which was always a bad sign. She was going down.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom. Mom. Shit. Goddamnit.”

“You,” she said, under a heavy, desperate breath.

“What?”

“You…hurt that kid.”

“What kid? You probably don’t even know who we played.”

“You hurt that kid.”

“Who cares. You’re drunk, so who fucking cares. Let’s go.”

It was hard to understand her sickness, why she wouldn’t stop. I used to think it was because she loved alcohol more than me, or because she didn’t love me at all, and so I was very short with her in those days. If I had known just how few of them she had left, I would have been more patient. I would have said, Louisa—

Or Mom. Mom, I say—

Or Stephen says—

I’m sorry, Stephen says. I was mad at you and I took it out on him. I don’t have the temperament for sports, this isn’t me. I’m better suited for the writing world, where it’s really dangerous. I’m a writer, Mom, like you.

No one can save you now, Stephen says, but maybe the writing can. Find a narrator, create the distance, forget about being a mother. I’ll say goodbye and be one of the picture cards of hope hanging on the mantel, just the way you wrote it. And then I’ll write about you someday, all the dark and lovely material you’ve given me, that will be the way I love you. But only after you’re gone, of course, to spare you the pain.

Stephen doesn’t know where the pain comes from, but he hears it in the absence of his mother’s words, echoing from somewhere in the past, if there ever was a time before she was sick. He watches as other boys get into cars

with their mothers and wonders what they talk about, but he’s not envious. What good would a life in writing be without a little conflict?

You know, Mom, Stephen says, if you get in a wreck, they’ll take you back to the hospital, and you’ll have more hallucinations. Remember last time when you thought the nurse was our golden retriever? But if I get in a wreck, I’ll just say you were teaching me how to drive. Or how not to.

So Stephen drives them home. He’s anxious at first, but after a few sips of bourbon, it’s easy, just like driving a go-kart. It kills going down. How could anyone want to drink this, he wonders, but soon the effect is wonderful, almost unbearably so; he’s never felt this good. His mother takes a few sips, then removes her sunglasses. The green in her eyes has dulled. There is very little left, merely a reflection of her son.

Getting dark, she says, and lays her head on Stephen’s shoulder—

Getting dark, Mom says. I hear her in the living room.

Always dark in here, I say. I light the candle, change her typewriter ribbon and turn on the machine. A whir and a clacking, and the brown liquid glows.

Wait, Mom says. There are the pictures hanging on the mantel.

Oh? I thought they were Christmas cards.

Come closer. They’re just little babies. See their faces, black and white. The indistinguishable little shapes, the almost-hearts, hanging there together. Which one is me?

Hard to tell, they’re all so blurry. I’m probably just drunk.

Doesn’t matter. The years have already decided. Now tell me, what are you working on?

It’s different, Mom says, almost untraceable from my other work. I love being able to start over like this, to write about things only as familiar as a distant memory can offer, things I can’t say are true, and yet are of the deepest instinct; to gaze into that forward time, to look back and laugh at what you thought you knew. It’s almost better than booze. Want to read some?

Absolutely, I say, but if it’s good, I might steal a few lines.

Fine, Mom says. After I’m gone, no one will ever know.

SHEREE

LA PUMA | IF YOU SKIPPED ONE COFFEE A DAY

Or wine, red that slips wantonly between your lips like nectar on a flower petal...

If you ignore the stems, the edges of leaves, toxins that act as a defense mechanism...

If you dug up earth to excavate soil, unearthed roots, disloyal in their slow

creep towards death. If you gave up men, complicit in those acts of yearning...

Would you plant the seeds God gave to you?

I think of the kid that jumped, rooftop, Santa Monica Place Mall.

I’d tell him how a mirror shatters. How we bleed & bleed until there is nothing left.

Help me to understand why a body poisons itself. You crave the delicate secret blessings, slavering over sex. Here is the cake I made for you. The key to life is in the box in the corner.

Infinite & lonely, like a second life.

BILL WOLAK | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Everywhere we look, there are faces staring back at us. Out of the corner of the eye, we spy a wink from a passing shadow or a smile in a gleam of water. We project ourselves outward into the field we experience. These four collages record what I have discovered in flowers, hair, and other objects.

I make collages out of all kinds of materials. Most are made out of paper engravings. Many collages are digitally generated or enhanced. To begin a piece, I select some sources—either color or black and white. If I’m using magazines or prints or old books, I cut out some images or parts of images that interest me. Then I start working on a background or some other sort of chance construction. Much is left to fleeting insights. These are tiny miracles of inspiration. Depending on whether I’m using scissors and glue or digital images, each collage could take several hours. Sometimes it takes several days or even weeks to know if a collage is finished. Much depends on the kind of collage and the size. My photographs are usually photo collages or, if not, they in some way attempt to represent the figure, usually naked, using an unusual or unexpected approach.

LIZ LYDIC | SOBRIETY

When I first saw that it was Ange at the Starbucks, I was flooded with three memories. Number one was the email she sent me the initial time I reached out to her, the first person I ever admitted to with real truth about my drinking problem. Her website, a community and resource for young women struggling with alcohol abuse, was referenced in an article I read that set me in motion for a world that would have previously embarrassed me but which I later would embrace, religion-like: recovery. Hooked by Ange’s online personality, I worshipped her confidence, generosity and how she had all of that without alcohol.

My second memory was the time we met in person after discovering we both lived in the city. We spent almost an entire night talking about our childhoods, parents, upbringings, romance, careers, and sex. We had so many similar experiences, I felt I was meeting my present self and future self. By then, because of her blog, I had been sober for about six months. Still, my sobriety had begun to feel more of a forced habit, rather than a natural way of life that I could fully embody. On that night with Ange, and the moment before we parted, when we stood outside a post office on Geary Street, close to where I lived in the Richmond District, she took me by my shoulders and looked at me. Her eyes, green, hazel, black, whatever they were, were glistening. Her hair was pinned in a low bun, and she looked geeky but beautiful with about ten clunky barrettes holding her wisps back. Her eyeliner and mauve lipstick countered the harsh hairdo, making her entire look commanding and breathtaking. If I could reach up and touch her face, I would feel a softness and a firmness that would allow the stroke but only for a moment.

It was always uncomfortable when people over-used my name, but when Ange did it, it was like I was being called into full human presence. She used it to start a thought, mid-way through a thought, and to change subjects. In retrospect, I think it was a part of her control issues. I think she said names pointedly as a way to ensure she spoke the most important words and to clarify that she was the giver of information, never the receiver. That night on Geary, she gently pushed my right elbow with her left arm to place me where she wanted me. Even through my red peacoat, I swear I could feel her skin on mine. She was a few inches taller than me,

and more so in her silver Doc Martens. She seized my shoulders, and her grip was enough to ground me for a lifetime. I never wanted to be anywhere but there.

“Amanda,” she said. “I know you can conquer this. I know you are scared. Amanda, I want to hold you like a baby. I want to remind you of the little girl inside you that didn’t have a first chance. I want to give to you whatever you need to allow that child to emerge, and to shine. I don’t want you to ever think it’s too late to be the woman you are meant to be. If you need permission, I grant it to you now. Amanda, if you need love, I give you all that I have. If you need faith, I present to you my belief. If you need somewhere to fall, I’ll be here.” By the end of her vow, I was sobbing, and her eyes had pooled up but nothing had fallen from them. We hugged for an eternity and I felt safer than I had with anyone, anywhere, ever.

The last memory was the night I pressed ‘post’ on a comment on her blog, when I told the world that Angela Annelli was a fraud. That she had sold herself as a sobriety and alcohol-free lifestyle coach and mentor, stating and sharing her own struggles and recovery as points for her legitimacy and expertise, not to mention, relatability. To the public or anyone and everyone who read her blog, I made it clear that Ange was not sober. I had recently seen her not only drink, but get drunk, and I explained that this person who claimed to have authority on the sobriety process did not actually understand it at all. I announced that Ange herself admitted to me that she had only been sober for four months in the past 20 years, and that she told me this when she was drunk and that she did not expect me to ever see her that way. This conversation happened at a music festival in Golden Gate Park, on a kind of day that plays its own games with inhabitants: offering a sudden and unanticipated respite from fog and gray, gracing the city with color and heat. In these bizarre moments during the year, it seems like everyone in San Francisco actually wants to live there.

That we ran into each other at a crowded festival was a feat in and of itself, but complemented much of what I had been studying in recovery about vibrations, manifestations, and purpose. Ange had a clear plastic cup in her left hand, wore dangling silver and feather earrings, and perfectly played the role of an unflappable hippie overtaken by music. She still had a type of orb around her, and now it glowed

as she danced with her booze prop. I’d wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, that she might just be holding it, trying to keep up with the Jones’ of this event, and even though that falsity was maddening in its own way, it was better than what actually happened: she slammed the entire beer, and then stumbled into someone she seemed to know, marking the fact that it was not her first drink of the day.

Ten minutes later, after my initial approach and accusations, she and I were headed up a path away from the concert and toward a wooded area. I was keeping my calm in addressing her, but I knew I’d have to start yelling soon, because she was both totally denying what I was accusing her of and also, because she was drunk. “‘Manders,” she started, and leaned her head far back as if both searching for the sun and also as if a boneless puppet, completely done with everything. She straightened up and then slouched but managed to look at me. “Come on. Come on, girl. It’s me, Ange.”

“Yeah, so?” I said.

“Look, ok, whatever. I’m not perfect, none of us are–”

“This isn’t about perfect, it’s about being real, Ange, which is all you’ve ever talked about!”

“Dude. Don’t you get it? This is real. This is really me, girlfriend. This is who I am. I’m a fucking alcoholic, and I don’t even care not to be.”

“Don’t say that, that’s not even true. Of course you care. You care enough to help, like, hundreds of girls get out of the shit they’re in. Bullshit you don’t care!” I was starting to tear up.

Then, she pulled the move: hands on shoulders. Her touch was ice cold. She started to knead my skin a little and then in my peripheral vision, I also saw that she was fidgeting with her own fingers, maybe gouging her nails together.

“Amanda, look….Does it even fucking matter? Does it matter if I am drunk, an addict, sober, recovered, a psycho, or anything? Does any of that matter, if I actually did help you? Who cares how you got help, honey. You got it! You got it and you’re better now, and for fuck’s sake, you are not going back! So, what difference does it make what I do?” Her eyes were glazed but pleading. They sparkled bright. They hadn’t been altered by the booze, or pot, which I smelled on her breath, too.

“Amanda, you are an incredible angel in this world. Nothing about me has to do with that. That’s inside you.” She pointed her right finger and made a move as if she was going to jab my heart, but instead ran her finger gently down my collarbone to my sternum and rested it there. I realized I was holding my breath. Ange was looking down at her finger and it dawned on me that she might be sick or about to black out. I tipped her chin up with a crooked finger. Her eyes were half-closed.

“Ange? Angela, wake up.” I gently cupped and then tapped at her left cheek with my right hand. I steadied her slight body, and then wrapped my arm around her, guiding her to a bench. Purpose filled me right now: the need to take care of her, and it didn’t dawn on me to be mad again until about an hour later when Ange’s friend found us and took her away, after Ange had come around a bit. She didn’t even look back at me. Had I, at any point, actually thought that I would impact her life? The answer didn’t crystalize, but it was obvious. I wanted her to need me the way I needed her, and I wanted to believe I had a part in her maintaining sobriety; that my progress, my strength, was keeping her going in her own recovery.

Of course, a desire would come, and I knew not to try to avoid it or wish the impulse away, but to instead, live in it. I could have taken a different way to the entrance to the park, walking longer, but steering clear of the beer garden. That would have been easier. But I didn’t. I intentionally walked toward it, close to it, and passed it. The instinct was there, the voice in my head guiding me to the booze, to just have one drink, fully justifying it particularly because of what had just happened. The thoughts rushed over me, and the images of the taste and smell and warmth just one sip would have on me; the way the substance would fill me up so quickly with ease and slack and joy when I was feeling anything but those things. In my mind, I went up and got a beer and no one noticed or cared; I easily slipped in with this crowd of fellow youngish people doing what looked like fully experiencing life. I let my mind consider that if Ange was drinking, of course I could, too. But I kept moving. Soon, I was past the stage and the booths and tents

and sea of people with hats and sunglasses and windbreakers around hips, and I was at the entrance to the park nearest to my street.

It was then that I knew I’d out her online. I thought of something I had forgotten all about until that moment. Ange had once promised we would go rollerblading in Golden Gate Park, that she would get a whole group of us recovery girls together for skating, kite flying, or even just a random dance party where we could act goofy together and prove that we didn’t need alcohol to let loose. It was going to be epic, and a marking point for many of our lives. It would be a claim to our community, and to the world about each of us with our very own choices and self-love that people on the outside could never understand. It would be all ours. That event never happened, and back then, I just assumed it was because Ange got busy with something bigger or more important; maybe someone’s life needed saving. Now, I see that the utopian moment she dreamt up and shared with me was just that: a made-up vision of a world she wanted to create but never did.

CHRISTINE SCHWATKEN | HIGHWAY SCRIBBLES

CHRISTINE SCHWATKEN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

In the moments I am able to slow down enough to let my surroundings whisper in my ear—notice me—the ordinary world around me comes alive, and I get quiet so I can listen. This happens when I am out on walks or hikes in the paths and trails of New Mexico or anywhere I decide to give in to the moment, letting go of all the “shoulds” and “didn’t-do’s” that often wrestle with my mind. I delight in admiring the things that mostly get overlooked in our world, when we pretend we are too busy to see them. I believe that all things are unique and special if we choose to see and appreciate them just as they are. Isn’t that what we all want, anyway? To be admired just as we are?

For “Highway Scribbles” (previous page), on a drive back home from Utah, I was the drawn to the mystical artwork from the late-morning sun scribbled on the highway, revealing what once was the patchwork of past wounds made by the road-warriors before me, now turned into glowing calligraphic lines, rewriting themselves in golden-glory across the highway before me.

“Untouchable Moon” was the happy experiment of transforming an ordinary object from my backyard into the moon and layering it into a photo I took of the Sandia foothills, creating an exciting Gestalt effect. I played with texture and contrast until something otherworldly came through, telling me a new story and revealing my own.

FADAIRO TESLEEM | SELF-PORTRAIT WITH A FISTFIGHT ON MEMORY LANE

Every day, we pray for peace and protection.

— Boussam Abdullahi, Nigerian refugee

At Azraq Refugee Camp in Syria, the sight of guards with their guns, a gallery of lost things: pictures of our dilapidated huts, the race my father ran before the bullet outstripped him of life. Memory unbraids the sutures we fight so hard to heal.

My father, a mountain of endurance; yet the gun's mouth is a storm of destruction that leaves nothing in its wake. Tonight, I feel the silence of my dead village. There is a tiny space between what has happened and what is going to happen, I mean: the only time my father could hasten his pace was before he got robbed of his breath. I do not have records of survivors, but I witnessed we all ran: myself, my siblings and the girl I gifted my soul. We are from Allah & unto him is our return was my father's watchword, meaning: everything God gave us has its method of returning to him.

To be a refugee is to seek shelter from hands that stand on triggers, from bullets that ripped our skins, and from the flooding of our land with our blood.

AIMEE LOWE | THE CREVASSE

It began with 23-year-old me having been dumped by Scott, my high school sweetheart of six years. As I recall, I deserved it in a variety of ways but didn’t actually know how to live without him.

Nights, I drive past his apartment to see the light on in his window. By day, I take routes on campus that might throw us together. I guess you could call it stalking, but that’s too energetic for a hungry ghost with half her substance gone.

I ask around and am told he’s seeing another woman who, like him, is in medical school. I myself never seem to get my shit together and have changed majors more than once before chipping away at a BA in English. Also like Scott, the new girlfriend is from a backpacking family and their breaks from school are filled with fun campouts.

I love nature, sure. Summer swims in Lake Washington. Botanical gardens. But the wilderness felt vaguely dangerous to a child of parents more comfortable with books and cooking shows than pitching tents. Scott had encouraged me by planning our trips and organizing supplies. He had smiled when I called him the “pack animal,” sweating under the weight of our food, sleeping bags, and cook stove while my own small bag carried the sunscreen and a paperback. He batted away bugs for me, coaxed the fire and gave me the thicker of our two sleeping pads. He introduced me to mindstopping moments of beauty, yet me and the wilderness never went beyond a cool distrust.

But after the break-up, it comes to me: To win him back, I need to pull off the greatest makeover of my life. I will become an outdoors woman. The Navy Seal of outdoors women, in fact: a Seattle Mountaineer.

The nine-month training course begins with an introductory class. The woodclad walls of the old Mountaineer clubhouse are lined with photographic portraits of prior classes dating back to 1912. Those first women Mountaineers wear brimmed hats with netting tied under their chins and long wool skirts atop lace-up ankle boots. Couldn’t be too hard if they scaled mountains in

skirts. As the portraits move from left to right, woolens give way to modern sunglasses and polypropylene jackets, but all graduates share the zesty gleam of adventure, a proud lineage to which I am now a part. I like myself better already.

We take our seats in the lecture hall. There’s one woman for every five men, and none besides me wearing make-up or carrying a purse.

The instructor has handsomely-weathered skin and a strong profile, itself a small mountain range. He wears a close-fitting Capilene top that reveals a fit torso and pants with multiple pockets and loops with bits of dangly gear. He hikes up his pants before sitting on the edge of a table and looks out across the group with eyes that have seen a thousand trails, have been humbled by majesty.

He skips the introductions and gets right to it. “Given time, every one of you will come to know someone who has died in the mountains. Hypothermia. Sliding off a sheer face. Hidden crevasses swallowing a body whole.”

Loving his humor, I turn to the woman next to me and chuckle.

Her eyes stay fixed dead ahead on the instructor, who swings his focus onto me. There’s no rebuke in his gaze, only a solemn, laugh-at-your-ownperil look.

“We’re going to learn safety in this course, people,” he says. “Safety.”

In the next three months, I learn new words, muscular words. Crampon. Piton. Carabiner. I spend two years’ savings on equipment, buying the latest and sleekest of everything. I get a gym membership and labor like a penitent on the elliptical with sandbags in my backpack. I tie knots, learn self-arrest with an ice axe and study elaborate diagrams of ropes and pulleys for crevasse rescue.

Glacier Day arrives and the group meets in the parking lot at the base of Mt. Rainier. We don our crampons and glacier glasses, the ones with side shields that protect against the blinding white. I’ve waited months for this. Not for the glacier, but to finally wear my badass glasses and look like a Mountaineer. We crunch through the icy snow about an hour up and join

the lead team who has located a suitable crevasse for practice. Here, we will take turns controlling ropes and being lowered into the ice cave.

From a safe distance, the crevasse reminds me of a wide, pale blue ribbon thrown playfully across the ice. Not so bad while I’m tucked between instructors in the sunlight, watching others go first.

Then it’s my turn. My legs are threaded through a figure eight of rope that cups my buttocks from below. A carabiner clasps the rope to a harness at chest level. I crunch ahead to within a few feet of the crevasse and suddenly see it’s wider than a man and three times as long, its shape defined by yawning jigs and jags. The snow crust gives way to a sickening sheer drop with no bottom in sight, dark as twilight.

I laugh, my eyes wild behind the sunglasses.

I feel dizzy and have to sit down in the snow.

“You’re doing great,” the instructor says with gusto. “Nearly there.”

I turn onto my knees to crawl away. “I don’t think I can—"

“Over you go,” he says and blocks me with his legs. For the first time I wonder if he has a military background.

The scene attracts some attention; the excited chatting quiets and a couple of classmates murmur. I turn back to sitting and scoot one hip forward at a time, feeling the rasp of frozen snow under my butt until I’m close and ease my legs over the edge.

“Good. Good. We’ve got you.”

I lower my glasses, letting them hang from my neck, and glance back at the classmates training on belay. If they don’t “got me,” there’s no coming back. I grab the rope with both hands at heart-level. My heels give one tiny push and I slide over the lip, falling weightless, a pinched-off whimper in my throat. Then the rope tightens and pulls me up short.

I dangle in mid-air, lowered jerk after jerk as my team strains against the heft. The rope that had once seemed indestructible now feels like a wisp of spider silk and the only thing between me and certain death. On all sides, I’m dwarfed by giant glossy wedges of ice rising up around me. They drip and creak and all fissures point down into the cold deep.

The glacier absorbs every color of the spectrum but blue and blue is refracted by an infinity of crystals, creating its otherworldly hue. It absorbs my body heat, too, drawing it out bit by bit until my teeth chatter and my skin is colorless. No life can exist here. The glacier sleeps eternally in the pale blue dream of her own melting and creaking and shifting and refreezing, in what I now feel is a truer form of hell: indifference. She doesn’t care about my warm animal body or that I’m alone or if my rope snapped, I’d fall too far to retrieve. The dream is all.

I look up at the golden slice of sunlight, remote as heaven, remote as being happy and Scott loving me again, and start to cry. The tears roll out warm but freeze halfway down my face.

Unable to let go of the rope, I let my nose run and cry in little shudders, a shaken snow globe of sadness, loneliness, and fear.

The rope begins to move again and hoists me back up over the lip. I slide the glacier glasses on before crawling onto the snow.

“Nothing like it, right?” The instructor beams.

I come to standing and flash my brightest smile. “Wow,” I say.

One month later, I climb to the summit of Mt. Rainier, a shallow basin framed by a sloping spine of andesite and basalt rock. In the end, I did not win Scott back or even score points for trying. But this time, the mountain is not indifferent.

From basecamp at 10,000 feet, we awaken at 2:00am for the final ascent. Big talk of “bagging the peak” has died away, as each now knows only the mountain can grant safe passage.

That night, Rainier is crowned with a ring of stars and a full, perfect moon that pours light over us as we cling to her side, roped together in single file. Below, thousands of feet of sheer drop are washed in sparkling ghost blue. Above, she is all massive folds and swirling geometries. We stop to take it in.

When our breathing eases, the air is as hushed as the suspended moment before a kiss, and I fall deeply in love with her.

She loves me back. And for one shimmering night, that’s all that matters.

MICHAEL MARK | WALKING THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO WITH MY DAUGHTER - A SACRIFICIAL

Each night in the refuge, after rubbing her feet with leaf-salve until she sleeps, I walk the next day’s path, clearing every pebble, twig, prying boulders the Romans set centuries ago, and break each raised root – threatening as serpents. I bend

treetops in accordance with the sun’s trajectory so they will shade her all afternoon – then just before she wakes, I return

with stolen grains and grapes from dog-guarded farms for her meal. So she may walk her Camino. When it rains, I leap branch-to-branch, above,

to catch even the smallest drops – not one will touch her shoulder. (should) When needed, I am her river. And should the church bells not ring

as she passes, I will beg her forgiveness - Sorry! Sorry! - crawling on my knees. I know this ruins her for this life. And the next day I do it all again.

ROBIN WHALAN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My subject matter tends to dissect a complex spectrum of human emotion and present it in an honest and often humorous and whimsical narrative. Relief printing is my true passion. There is something magical about watching one piece become another, instantly. Inspired by turn-of-the-century children’s books handed down to me from my mother’s childhood, I love presenting what I see as a clear story and watching that story take the viewer on their own emotional rollercoaster. We are all on different versions of the same ride. I feel the more we understand that, the more we will understand each other.

TJIZEMBUA TJIKUZU | CITY ON A MOUNTAIN, PLEASE LET ME GO

The Pueblo city sits on a mountain. The road up labors slowly along the steep sides of the mountain. I can see the snow-crested peaks of Sangre de Cristo from the city. It is February; a biting wind commands the airways.

The cold adobe church we enter feels familiar, like my grandfather built it.

I read the dust particles of sorrow floating about the church like a preacher preparing a sermon. It is as if God is pressing hard with his index finger a wound I didn’t know I had.

The drowsy sun beams its fragile light through the windows of the church.

Children come out of the adobe houses to feast the rising sun, as we once did when we were children.

The children of the city have eyes like a forgotten cup of black coffee; history and its granular residue brews slow and calculated in their eyes. Death billows red in their eyes like a regalia on fire.

SLATER GARCIA | VIA DE LA VALLE

Tessa ground her teeth, her cheeks still stove-top hot from her argument with the boy sulking in the passenger’s seat beside her.

I’m not adventurous enough.

She repeated his words to herself.

I’m not spontaneous.

Hadn’t they just spent a weekend hiking around Southern California’s cliffs? All this steam from him just because she wanted to get back the day before work rather than spend another day and have to rush back the night before. All because she needed a perfectly necessary cool-down day.

Interstate 5 flattened out in front of Tessa as she accelerated. Nothing illuminated the freeway but dim running lights and a deep indigo tucked away behind the mountains flanking San Diego.

She glanced down at her Highlander’s built-in GPS system and studied the map ahead of her. Off to the west, a blank, black space tore a straight line through the digital map, cutting off little side roads, cutting through the names of closed stores and sleepy neighborhoods. Just a glitch.

She recalled that there was a military fort just off the coast; it had been a decade since she last visited. It would have been consumed by the glitch if she had correctly deduced their location.

The black space gnawed at her. Just another annoyance on top of everything else. Her fingers tapped all over her steering wheel in an involuntary flurry and her leg bounced up against the center console between them.

I am me, I’m okay. Tessa grounded herself.

Finally, he turned to her.

“Can you stop with all the noise?” he groaned.

She snarled at him. “You know I don’t like being cramped in these tight little spaces, especially when you’re being such a big baby about everything!”

He scoffed and turned away.

Maybe that was the last straw. Tessa twisted the wheel and pulled across the road, tearing through lanes.

“What are you doing?” the boy cried.

“Oh, you suddenly don’t like adventures?” she snapped back.

“Yeah, I wanted to go on another hike, not die in a crash.”

“Come on, dear; your boring girlfriend is taking you on an adventure!”

She ripped down the curve off a ramp exit named “Via De La Valle” and peeled onto the main street, heading towards the glitch in her map. The void looked nice this time of year.

“Tessa, you’re taking my words out of context!” he roared. “I hate when you get pissy like this! The fact is. . .”

She tuned him out.

Greenish-white streetlights dimly illuminated the little town. Not a car on the road other than the few parked here and there against the sidewalk. A few closed businesses appeared around and about, interspersed with small beach houses. No one was home, not in the whole town, apparently.

She furrowed her brow at the road ahead. No lights after a point, just darkness. Right about where the glitch appeared on her GPS.

The boy pontificated relentlessly. Who knew what he was saying now; Tessa had found a more curious fixation and as her eyes darted in the blackness, his voice became a low and distant drone, like tire noise on a faraway freeway.

A hand shoved Tessa. She whipped her head around and snarled at the boy.

“Were you even listening to me?” he barked.

“No!” she yelled back. “Why should I have to listen to the same stupid spiel over and over again? To stroke your ego?”

Blackness overwhelmed them.

She gasped and slammed on the brakes. They lurched forward in tandem.

“What? What happened?” the boy demanded.

Tessa peered around her through the windows. Her headlights revealed nothing but a small crown of light that peeked out over the hood.

She spun around to look back and her heart dropped.

The little sleepy beach town was gone.

Tessa cursed as sweat beaded out of the pores in her hands. She pushed the shifter into reverse and plowed her foot down on the gas pedal, though no matter how far she seemed to travel, nothing appeared through her rear window but that all-consuming, ubiquitous night.

She slammed on the brake pedal again.

Tessa gasped for air, her flesh tingling, icy cold and stiff. “Baby! Look!” the boy pointed just ahead of them. Tessa turned to see, in the distance, a flickering dot of light just off to their left.

“Let’s get out of here. This place is creepy.” The boy shook her shoulder and she swatted him away. “Come on, we just got turned around. We can talk more about us once we get out of here.”

The dot of light burned in her periphery.

“I don’t want to talk more about us,” she trembled in outrage. “I want to go home. And to be honest, I don’t ever want to see you again.”

To punctuate her statement, she wiped her freshly leaking eyes, put the car in drive, and stomped the pedal. They sat in silence for a moment. For once in the last seven years, she felt she could breathe without gasping, like she could wiggle her fingers and stretch her limbs with weightless ease. Even in the crushing darkness.

Tessa spun the wheel towards the dot of light.

In mere moments, it enveloped them, swallowed the darkness, extinguished it. It burned Tessa’s eyes.

What now filled her field of view made even less sense than the darkness.

An endless room of spiraling crystal mirrors, like a kaleidoscope, but with no pattern, no order to the reflections. She smashed the pedal. The images twirled, incoherent and inconceivable, blurring.

Over the hum of her engine, something else roared, an ocean wave crashing against the shore, but there was something uncanny about the sound: it filled their cabin, which split away into reiterations like shattering

glass. The sound fissured into harmonies, not one sound, but thousands all at once. It roared again, forming a word.

Help.

The throng of voices bellowed, sonic ebbs and flows crashed against her ear drums. She glanced out, unable to discern where was out and where she was in relation to it. The thousands of faces broke into millions of doppelgangers, billions, trillions of visions of herself.

Help. The mob cried again.

“Let me out of here!” Tessa cried, but to her horror, the other voices entwined with her own, calling out her exact demand in chorus.

She impulsively reached for the boy, but he was everywhere, broken into shards. He surrounded her, beside her own image, which blinked frantically back at her, dumbstruck with shock and terror. She glanced down at her hands. Her hands were everywhere.

Before she could release another cry of desperation, her mind split. Every thought and memory burst apart all around her, only to rush back into its singularity again. Consciousness heaved like a lung, like a heartbeat.

Herself.

Not herself.

Herself.

Someone else.

Herself.

Everyone else.

Herself and everyone else.

Everyone.

With each expansion she collected memories, thoughts, points of view, perspectives, until there was no distinction between someone else’s mind and her own. Until there was no longer an other. There was no one.

There was everyone.

A memory swirled in vacant darkness, a dust devil of synaptic pulses whipping up and taking shape.

A hall in a military fort, a secret meeting of scientists. A withered corpse faced them from the front, half-naked, eyes half-closed, crisscrossed legs. The man’s leathery skin, yellow with death, was inexplicably preserved. In the center of his forehead, a third eye blinked and darted around the room. Wherever it looked it sent ripples through the crowd, displacing matter for a moment with a gaze. Not a human eye, not an eye like anyone had ever seen before. The size of a palm, white with glowing purple bioluminescent veins. The pupil morphed amoebically, shifting with all it perceived.

An accident. A catastrophe of wizardry and science, animated in the preserved corpse of an ancient monk, found in the Himalayas, stolen and studied, but not for long.

The eye blinked in another direction and the gaze ripped through the other half of the room.

As far as the eye could see, it tore into creation, until creation reshaped itself into mirrors. Mirrors on mirrors on mirrors. Endless repetitions, ceaseless regurgitation. Every memory, every thought intertwined.

One entity.

No entity.

This never happened to me.

Tessa gasped, finding herself, her fading corporeality, clinging by a thread. Within the rippling reflections she felt what it meant to be her own mind, her own body.

Breath burned in her lungs and her eyes throbbed.

Her eyes. No one else’s.

“Get me out of here!” she cried. Alone.

She reached out, feeling with all her nerves her flesh, her bones, her muscles, each heartbeat through her veins, reformed through shards of broken glass. She saw herself in her reflection. Her real self appeared and she stretched out towards it, soaring through glass.

Her fingertips grazed the mirror. Fingertips against fingertips.

She burst through the darkness with a violent gust that blew her onto the asphalt. She crashed into the ground, the impact left her wheezing and writhing on the ground. The tang of blood soured her tongue.

“What the fuck. . .” she hissed.

She pulled herself to her feet and trembled with adrenaline. First, she grabbed her head, making certain it was still there, then her belly, each arm, each leg. Cold beach spray danced on her skin like delicate little needles. She was really there, staring into a wall of blackness.

“I’m here. I’m me. This is me. I’m here,” she repeated to herself, and smacked her temples as if this would nail the concept into her brain.

She remembered the boy, stretched out a hand to the wall of black, wondering if she had the capacity to return, to retrieve him. And what if she didn’t?

Tears streamed down her cheeks.

Another memory pummeled her like a freight train. The first time he met her. . .

The boy shuffled his portafilters in and out of their sockets. Second semester in college, first job ever. Not an expert barista by any means, but not the worst among his coworkers.

8 p.m. Just about to close, but there was always the rush of students before the end.

The door opened.

A new face. Young, pretty. A freshman, no doubt. Short. She couldn’t have been older than 17. The boy, 19, chuckled at the thought. . .

His memory tingled in Tessa’s mind.

Tessa had taken something with her from the kaleidoscope. Herself.

Everyone else.

The boy smiled. Tessa smiled. A fond memory, shared. A memory that made them miss the old times, when they were younger and excited, when they were thrilled at the prospect of falling in love.

They wiped their tears with Tessa’s. The road ahead left them without a vehicle, and while they didn’t feel as if they were bleeding or broken, the fatigue nearly left them immobilized. They gasped for air, nearly crumbling under their own weight.

Whatever it was they had experienced wouldn’t matter if they just sat there and starved under the cold sky. They needed to escape, to find a place where they could alert the police, the CIA, the military, whoever.

They broke into a run. Streetlamps blurred in their periphery. Something caught their shoe, sending them hurling into the ground. Their chin burst, burning in agony. They reached up, cupping their face as blood trickled through their fingers.

Tessa’s mind tingled.

Something contaminated her thoughts. An intruder. Memories that belonged to someone else leaked into her own.

“I am me, I’m okay,” Tessa and the boy recited together, in one throat, in one body.

“I am me.”

CYNTHIA HARTLING | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Using handmade sharpened twigs, India Ink, wash and brushes, my figure drawings on paper began as an exercise to sharpen my hand-eye coordination for my non-representational work, and harken back to my days in art school, where drawing from a live model was a prerequisite course to train in observation from real life. To my surprise, I found refuge in the weekly classes, in the quiet of a communal drawing space, to slow down and regroup from a previous busy work week. The concentrated, focused attention that came from utilizing quick gestures taught me not only to get the figure down on paper, but to challenge myself to try to reveal each model’s psychological state of mind and the mystery of the human form. Drawing from a live model offered me a direct way to approach compositions, and gave me the freedom to approach my abstract painting with more clarity and spontaneity.

CARELLA KEIL | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“Queen of Hearts” is the visual companion for a series of intertwining short stories that explore realms of heartache and magic. The reflecting faces and staircase in this piece form the shape of ventricles, cupping the mysteries of the heart. The piece has a sacred chamberlike quality, as though it is a surrealist X-ray of the heart.

INTERVIEW | Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks with Monica Prince

Monica Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation. Prince is the author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem; How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem; and Letters from the Other Woman, as well as the co-author of the suffrage play Pageant of Agitating Women with Anna Andes. Prince’s work has appeared in Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee obsessed with yoga and maxi skirts with pockets, Prince teaches activist and performance writing and serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. Members of the Santa Fe Literary Review editorial team were honored to interview Prince over Zoom on Wednesday, September 6, 2023.

Santa Fe Literary Review: To begin, let's talk about taking risks. What does it mean to you to take a creative risk? And why does risk-taking matter when we make art?

Monica Prince: I love this question. I love the idea of discussing risk. I think I learned about risk as a writer actually, in the fall or in the summer of 2018 with [poet] Tina Chang. I was at a fellowship in Aspen, Colorado, for a week, and I worked with Tina Chang that week, and on the second day she asked us all what the difference was between risk and courage. She asked us to think about a moment in which we took a risk, and what it taught us about courage. And so, when I think about risk, I mostly think about having the ability to do something in spite of fear. It shows up in my writing a lot. The first thing, of course, is that writing choreopoems feels like a risk because it's a very niche genre. It's very specific, and a lot of people don't know what it is unless they've read Ntozake Shange, or if they've seen “For Colored Girls.”

And there's just this sort of risk-taking in terms of writing the show, producing the show, getting the show published, trying to help theater companies understand what it is, trying to help publishers understand what it is. So, as someone working in the genre, it’s difficult—it’s a risky genre indeed. I think that as writers and as creative people, it's our responsibility to take those risks, because if no one has ever done it before, or if it's been done but no one is still doing it, then it's our responsibility to keep it alive, and to pave spaces for other people to create.

I remember [poet, painter, filmmaker, and editor] Richard Siken telling me during a reading he hosted that if you're writing something, and it feels like it's going really well, and it's easy, and it's just coming out of you, then you’re probably going in the wrong direction. But if what you're writing is difficult, and scary, and is just surprising you at every turn, then you're on the right track. I think about that when I consider the risk of creating choreopoems, especially because the genre itself is meant to encapsulate as many performative elements as possible, and that can be difficult to demonstrate on the page.

What I appreciate about the genre in and of itself is that you don't necessarily have to imagine who specifically will play these parts, who's going to perform them, what it's going to look like. You can imagine your creative space, but you don't have to hope that someone, somewhere, will be able to do it. You just have to trust your directors. You trust your choreographers to find the people who can do this work.

SFLR: Please tell us about your writing routine. Are you an early-morning type of writer? Late-at-night? At a coffee shop? What does a day in the writing life of Monica Prince look like?

MP: When I have time to sit down and write, I'm one of those midday writers. In the morning, writing is not a thing for me. I do not enjoy mornings. I think they're reserved for lying in bed, drinking water and tea, and playing video games on my phone, but around eleven, I feel motivated to get up and get dressed, make more tea, and then wander to some part of my house, or just stay in bed, actually, and just write. And then when I get into the groove of writing, I will do it for hours until I finish whatever individual project I'm working on. That can be confusing, whatever that project might be. Sometimes that project is a choreopoem that I'm working on. Sometimes it's an essay, but the last time I sat and really powered through a bunch of work was when I was writing another choreopoem called Hysteria. It's all about trying to navigate what it means to decide to have a child. It just flowed out of me, based on all these other poems I've been writing for years, and so I think my process, or my writing life, is frenetic and varied, and it's really dependent upon what my schedule looks like and what my day looks like.

When I'm teaching full time, my writing happens randomly, essentially whenever I have a moment. But when I'm not teaching, like in the summer or winter, I'm able to choose that space a little bit more intentionally. I can write pretty much everywhere. When I'm writing poems, I need silence. But when I'm revising, I could do that anywhere. I don't like coffee shops for writing because it feels too stereotypical. [Laughs.] And in my little town we only have, like, one really good coffee shop. The rest are just like bars, and then that's also a stereotype, being the drunk writer in the bar. They’re all complicated! There's no win in the spaces like that in my town right now. But overall, I can pretty much write anywhere. And that, I think, is a good thing.

SFLR: It is a good thing! And it also speaks to your talent, probably, that you can do that. Monica, we admire your harnessing of a range of artistic forms, including the lipogram and the concept of erasure. What are the benefits and limitations to using forms like these?

MP: I love form poetry. I love formal poetry. It's almost a shortcut to inspiration, because you just have to follow the rules. So in Roadmap, my choreopoem, there's a lipogram in there that is called “Black Boys are Missing,” and it's a lipogram for the word “suicide.” I recently fell into the form of lipogram because it's one of the Oulipian constraints. I got really into writing lipograms because somehow, it's the hardest thing. It takes you like six hours to write one poem, but it's really rewarding because you did this complicated thing.

When I utilize erasure in the form of the lipogram specifically, it allows me to think through how to say something without saying something, and it asks: How do you allow your readers to truly understand what's going on? And the lipogram has a trick in it, right, where you utilize every other letter in the alphabet, but you can't spell out the word that you're talking about, and then you have no choice. You can't think about anything else, because you can't say it. I remember trying to write a lipogram that was not about whatever thing was missing and just failing miserably because it's, like, the only thing you can think about. What I really appreciate is the ability to combine forms in the quarry poems and on the page, because it allows me to not just do a lipogram. I can also do an etymology poem, or I can write the lipogram in the form of a hustle

or a sonnet, and I haven't done that yet. That feels like a lot. It feels very exciting. But adding the etymology to it has actually shifted a lot of how I understand the words I'm erasing.

Plus, because the premise of Roadmap is that there's a young Black man trying to subvert his most likely cause of death, which will be homicide, it's interesting to have a word in the show that is not what we think the whole show is about. The whole show is about him avoiding getting murdered, but then he performs this poem about avoiding taking himself out of the world. I wanted to demonstrate that sort of balance in the show, and to talk about the underlying erasure within the show, which is that we're losing Black bodies: they are just not available anymore. They're not present anymore. And because it's this epidemic in young people that we don't pay attention to as an epidemic, I think it's really important to include those sort of erasures within performances and within full-length collections, because they allow us to think, “What's the thing that's actually missing in our show? Or what's the thing that this show is trying to call attention to that's missing?”

SFLR: We're interested in learning more about the collaborative aspect of choreopoems. How does performing your pieces allow you to explore new elements of activism and expression that may exist beyond the written word. While you’re at it, please define the choreopoem for our readers!

MP: Of course! I always forget to do that. A choreopoem is a choreographed series of poems that includes performance, poetry, dance, music, art, yoga, Parkour, Zumba, burlesque, voiceovers, short video clips—any kind of performance media you can think of, all rolled in together and thrown onstage like a play. It’s a super accessible form in the sense that you don't have to know how to do any of those things to ask your actors to do those things. I know how to do Zumba, but I would never know how to put that in a show. What I like about the choreopoem genre is that it is inherently collaborative because it does require other bodies in order to come alive. I think when we write plays, there is an inherent idea of the performance. In a play, we don't emphasize, “How do we move from left to right?” There is not really blocking involved in writing the

play. The blocking might be specific in terms of, like, someone needs to be stabbed, or someone needs to leave the room, but it's not as specific as entrances, exits, and what type of dances are happening.

And this is actually really fun when you're writing a musical or a play: You get to see your stuff come to life. But in a choreopoem, there has to be a little bit more intentionality behind the choices of media you're including because if, for example, you have a voiceover in the show, it needs to be intentional in terms of why it's there. In Roadmap I have a sort of omniscient character named The Novelist, and in earlier drafts, she was just a voice that would descend from the sky. This made sense in terms of the fact that no one can really see her, and we don't know where she's where she's coming from or who she's speaking to.

But then I realized, there needed to be a physical form of The Novelist because if you have that sort of “voiceover voice,” most audiences immediately think it's God, or some sort of deity in the sky, which is not my intention. So I made her a physical character on stage to avoid that confusion. And I think when you're making choreopoems, you have to be really intentional about the kinds of works you're including. In Roadmap there aren't explicit dances performed except for L’Apache. The French L’Apache is a dance that involves a man and a woman more generally, but more specifically involves a pimp and a prostitute. It’s a dance meant to show a man trying to destroy a woman onstage, and it's a very violent dance, a street dance, invented in Paris at the start of the twentieth century. And though I don't know how to do that dance, I do know that it's an effective form, and it's probably the most effective form to demonstrate a shift in body language onstage because it is such a violent dance. [The choreopoem] allows a director to take that direction and either learn it for the choreographer or have the choreographer know what it is, and then put it on the actors, or else, if you don't have actors who can do that, the director can still try to keep the momentum of what is asked for in the text.

So the choreopoem is really wonderful because you can write it by yourself, but the whole time you have to be thinking about the physicality of the words, physicality of the choices you're making onstage. If there's going to be a burlesque performance, why? What kind? Do you want it to actually be satirical, or do you want it to be sensual? I think that the intentionality behind the choices of collaboration is very important.

When it comes to the collaborative nature of writing the show: When I edit my shows, I lure all my friends into my house and ply them with liquor and pizza, and I ask them to read their parts cold. A lot of them have never performed before. A lot of them don't know what I'm looking for them to do, and it just helps me hear it. It helps me hear it from other people's bodies, which allows me to revise the show. Even that small collaboration dramatically shifts the show. For example, the poem “Unfinished List of All the Ways Black Parents Say I Love You” is what came out of two of my friends who played Raven and Neil when we were just revising the show. They both said, “We don't have enough lines,” and I was like, “It’s ‘cause you all are selfish, you want more lines.” And they said, “No, no, no, no, we really don't have enough lines, we only have these three poems and we don't think that that's long enough.” And I was like, “Okay, okay,” but then I didn't know where to put it. I was like, “How am I supposed to give you more lines? Where are you going to even show up again? We’ve moved past your limb in the family tree.” And that's when I ended up writing the poem, which came in response to the way that Dorian is trying to change onstage. The change is thinking about the the ways that his parents love each other, and the way his parents have loved him, is a way that he needs to actually consider how he's going to love Aisha. Even though it was a sort of flippant feedback because they just wanted to talk more, it actually made more sense in the show to add more lines for them because they really did need to speak more. They needed to be more present. Because you are always considering your director, you're considering your choreographer, there is no way to get away from who those people will be as you're crafting the show. I think that's the best part of the collaborative aspect: you trust whoever it's going to be, but you also have the opportunity to be present in terms of what you want it to look like. And that's really lovely.

SFLR: So your poems are often rooted in a physical experience. How does physicality empower your writing? And does the physical experience take precedence during the writing process? In other words, what comes first—movement or language?

MP: Yeah, language comes first. Well. [Laughs.] I want to say language first, but that might not be true. In most cases the language comes first, because I have the idea first, but frequently when I'm struggling to write at all, I will just kind of be thinking about what I want to see, if that makes sense. I want to know, what kind of image am I trying to put on a stage? And that helps me write the poem. The poem that Ty reads in Roadmap, “Do Not Pray,” came from an image I had in my head of a tall Black man wearing a hoodie, sitting down onstage, and speaking very low and very slowly, and I didn't really know where that was going. I wanted, whatever happened within that moment, for him to eventually stand up and kick the chair away from him and then yell at the audience, and I did not know who was going to do that or what that was going to sound like. Originally, I thought it would be Dorian because he's talking about the hypocrisy of “thoughts and prayers.” But then I realized, Dorian couldn't say that, because he's onstage for about ninety minutes, and he says all the things for so long. But also, the whole show is just about trying on different versions of his future. So he doesn't have to physically do that. We can have someone else come forward and be an imagined possibility. And so that changed the poem, “Do Not Pray” a lot because at first I just wrote it in response to watching way too much CSI Miami, because the first five lines are all about all the horrible ways that people die, and you find their bodies. And then it shifted almost immediately to referencing all the ways in which unarmed Black children had been killed in the last several years: one child walking out, taking out the garbage, another child just walking home, or just being in their own home, and being shot at. I felt the need to reference all of those horrible instances. The thing that was really in the back of my head was this fear of doing mundane activities and being killed for it. And so I emphasize that in the poem. And then, as soon as I was revising it, I realized that the moment where he stands and shouts at the audience had to be a climactic moment in the show.

So the physicality and the language sometimes come at the same time. I try to be intentional about that because I want it to be obvious to the audience that I can also do some of these poems. It's literally like this joke in my department because I perform “Do Not Pray” at admissions events, and at the end, you're supposed to scream, and it always terrifies these very well-meaning sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. And then,

of course, three or four years later, they're, like, “I remember you did this poem, and now I am here, and I think it's really cool” and it's very sweet, but I do it all the time because it’s a really physical and emotional poem that allows me to kind of, like, drop a mic and walk offstage, but it also allows the characters within the show to realize that the stereotype of having only two options as a Black man in the world—to go to jail or die— needed to be stark and obvious. That’s why it starts with this negro spiritual song, and then it ends with this—this rage.

And I like that the physicality of those emotions can come through in different forms throughout the show. There's a song that they sing, the “Ring Around the Rosie” song. There's “On the Outside” that they also sing, which I heard someone else do for the first time ever this past summer, and it was amazing and wild and so cool, because it was a whole different tempo than I'd written in in my head. And I was like, “Excellent. This is actually what I wanted.” I wanted the directors and the actors to take this song as it's written and take it elsewhere. So that was really incredible to see. I think the physicality is really important because it is a performance piece, and understanding what that looks like is interesting for poets who are afraid to perform their work in public. I think it's important for us to think about how work sounds outside of our brains. It kind of comes at the same time, the language and the physicality. And I'm really interested in it because, in a different lifetime, I would be a dance major with a French minor, but I'm not that person, so, to make up for it, I am just putting dance in my shows forever.

SFLR: Your work is often very intimate. What sacrifices must you make when you share personal revelations with your readership? And how do you navigate privacy—your own, your loved ones—while at the same time giving of yourself on the page?

MP: That's a really good question. I had a student ask me that this morning—how do you write about personal things and allow other people to perform them? A lot of Roadmap and How to Exterminate the Black Woman, which is the show where Dorian actually first appears, is built around the sort of lack of privacy we have as individuals now. Like, we're constantly being surveilled. We're being tracked all the time, whether it's our own doing by leaving our locations on our phone, or the doing of the criminal justice

system. There's just sort of this acceptance that we will be watched all the time, and it's upsetting to think about in depth, but it's a reality that we have all kind of passively accepted. And so in that sense, a lot of things that were once private, are just not. I like the idea of bringing those things to the stage because I want people to talk about the things that we don't normally talk about, or that we're not supposed to talk about.

In Roadmap there are three poems in a row when we meet Belle, who's the grandmother. And she's talking about sex work. I remember I wrote that because I work with a non-profit called Beautiful Feet Wellness, and they focus on supporting survivors of human trafficking through fitness and wellness. I wrote that poem as a kind of response to the work that I'd started doing with this non-profit, and to create a character who had made the choice to enter sex work—while recognizing that it's actually not really a choice because it comes from poverty, it comes from lack of access, it comes from lack of education, it comes from the ways that we build our cities and our communities, and it comes a lot from lack of resources in terms of what is available to certain types of people when they're trying to make their lives better. By working with sex work survivors, I learned a lot about how to better understand that even if you're not forced into the trade, something did force you into the trade. I was understanding the difference between coercion and a willingness to put yourself in the space, recognizing that you wouldn't even have thought about it if you didn't have any of these other issues that were structured to keep you from success. And so you have “Sex Work is Real Work” first, and then that tumbles into “Cut,” which is all about self-harm. And it was important to put that onstage as well because I think it's a huge thing that we really don't talk about, and we don't talk about what self-harm looks like in these different venues.

So, with “Sex Work is Real Work,” we're looking at an active choice to harm oneself because there's so much, like, emotional and physical damage that occurs when women enter the sex trade. We have this inadvertent self-harming. And then we have this intentional self-harm of a character cutting themselves, and then that rolls into the sort of self-harm of omission between lovers. Right? We have Raven talking about how she has definitely been assaulted, but she doesn't tell her partner, not explicitly. Neither of them actually tells one another the explicit nature of their own destruction. That's harmful in relationships, and is also harmful, period.

By quickly bringing up these intimate issues onstage—they're some of the earliest poems in the show—I wanted to demonstrate that we have a lot of things that we keep from other people or from ourselves. But we actually have to talk about them so that maybe we don't repeat them. It's a cycle right? There’s a moment within the show where they say, “You have to break the cycle, because you can't just keep experiencing this harmful experience over and over and over again until someone finally learns their lesson.” Why should we sacrifice multiple generations to make something stop? I think a lot about how intimacy needs to be portrayed onstage for that reason. But additionally, I want to make sure that my audience is aware that there are real examples of emotional, sexual, and romantic intimacy with people of color and with Black people. I want to make sure that I'm demonstrating what Black love looks like, or can look like. That's why the line from Nikki Giovanni comes in, “Black love is black wealth.”

There are just not a lot of moments where we get to see Black characters loving one another outside of this sort of “Well, of course they're together. They're both Black” kind of energy. I see the way that it happens on television. I'm re-watching House now, which did not stand up to the test of time, but it's quite interesting. Anytime there is an intimacy between characters, it's always racialized. The only character who can have an issue with a Black patient is the Black doctor, right? The only character who can have an issue with the white patient has to be one of the white doctors. I don’t know that they notice it or if it's on purpose, but it's so clear to me, it's so obvious. I wanted to emphasize that they're not just together because they're both Black. They're together because they want to be together, and they have the choice to be together, and they're choosing it every single day.

In terms of privacy, I've kind of accepted that there's nothing private about anything. I write essays about my sex life; this is just where I've decided to live in the world. But when it comes to choreopoems, I want to focus on providing titillating language that gets us close to the thing without demonstrating the thing onstage because that should be private, if that makes sense. In terms of protecting my loved ones’ privacy—when I did a bunch of interviews for previous choreopoems, I had to be really careful to make sure I wasn't utilizing identifying features or qualities. But when it comes to my shows now, because a lot of my shows focus on Black people in their

emotions, in their struggles, there is less concern on my part, at least, that my family or my loved ones will feel some type of way about it simply because I'm talking about the things that we have always talked about in secret.

I want those secrets to stop being secrets because they hurt everyone. I think about how we find things out after the fact, when our grandparents die, our greatgrandparents die. My grandfather died in 2009 and that's when I found out he had a whole separate family. And everyone knew, and everyone was fine with it the whole time. And I'm just like, “That feels like something we should talk about!” I don't believe that keeping secrets like that saves anyone. It prevents gossip, I guess, but shouldn't we have those conversations to prevent harm in the future?

SFLR: To conclude our interview, let's touch on writer's block. How do you navigate your own experiences with writer's block? And how do you encourage your students to break past their own blocks, from procrastination to a fear of examining trauma, to find deeper expression in their creative work?

MP: I don't do writer’s block very well because I don't really think it's a block. I think it's mostly that I am hesitant to write something. I think we all fall into these cycles where we're afraid to write something because it's going be hard [laughs], or it's going to be emotional. Or maybe we don't think we have the talent to do it? One of the main ways I get through writer’s block is through writing prompts and forms because you have to follow the rules. You don't feel that bad if it's not good at the end because your whole point is not to focus on the content. You're just focusing on hitting the rules, right? So lipograms are really helpful for writer’s block because you don't have a choice but to keep working on it until it's done, and then you go back and see if you screwed it up, and if it makes any sense.

I'm teaching a class right now called Poetry and Magic and my students are using different forms to accomplish different spells, if you will. We talk about how an elegy could potentially raise the dead. We talk about how sestinas can offer possible futures. We discussed how the sonnet could be a way to bring a lover home, or to bring a lover to oneself. It's been a really fruitful conversation with these students, because

they talk a lot about how they don't really know what they want to write. Following a form kind of helps them get out of that moment.

I think we see writer’s block as sitting in front of your computer and nothing comes out for like three hours. And that sometimes happens to me. But I think my writer’s block is more that I justify not writing because I know that everything I'm doing goes into the writing. I learned this in grad school, but I really learned it when I read Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and he has this moment in an early letter where he says, “Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I must,’ then build your life in accordance with this necessity.”

Because I know that I have to write, I can't not write. I need to, then I accept that everything around me is feeding into the writing, whether I’m giving readings or interviews, or I’m teaching, giving feedback on work, drinking coffee, going for walks—I just accept that everything I'm doing feeds into the writing. We as writers, I think, give ourselves permission to not get everything done all the time. Ada Limón talks about how she has a gathering time, where she spends time doing anything but writing for months or years, and then she spends six months just pouring out the book, and then she's famous. I don't think we as writers give ourselves permission to do stuff like that, right? You don't have to write every day. Just make sure you write. There’s still @CountsAsWriting, a Twitter account—I don’t care what he calls it, I’m going to call it Twitter [laughs]—that posts things like, “Today, writing counts as staring at your unfolded laundry.” Or, “Today, writing counts as taking a walk around the block.” Things like that. It's about giving ourselves permission not to do the work.

Procrastination is a big thing with my students and with me. But I also know that ultimately, my writing practice is more about content than it is about frequency, and if I'm doing multiple projects, I tend to get sidetracked. For the last three years, everything's been about Roadmap, and I haven't written anything else. But well, actually, I guess that's a lie, because I still have publications coming out, but most of my work has been around Roadmap. When it finally came out, I kind of just like sat around and thought, “I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with myself now.” So I try to allow that to be. I try to make that acceptable for myself and also for other

writers. Sometimes we don't know what we want to write about. And that's okay? And it's okay to just not be writing.

One of the best ways to write is a deadline. Deadlines are very helpful. You have a workshop deadline, or you have a deadline for a place you want to submit to, or a contest looming. That is the best way to get writing done, but other than that outside pressure, I think I'm more interested in making sure that my writing is impacting me the way I would want it to impact my audience. Sometimes that means not writing at all. Sometimes that means writing the same poem over and over and over again. I have this lipogram that I've been working on for probably a year. It is just the same stupid poem five different times, and I think that's helpful because it allows us to really sync into what our intentions are with our work instead have just cranking stuff out for the sake of it.

I had my students do a semester of poems in the fall of 2020 because everything was falling apart. “We're all gonna die.” And so I was like, how about we put a little art into the world? And so we wrote a poem for every day of the semester. That was about 103 poems by the end—it was a depressing thing to realize that we are in school 206-ish days a year. By doing that, I suddenly had a lot of terrible poems, but a lot of good poems, and some poems that I could revise, and some of actually made it into Roadmap before it went to print because those were pieces that I knew it needed in order for the performance to be sound.

ERIK

H. GELLERT

| AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

As I begin a new series of work, I ask myself the question: “How do I best represent an experience beyond time and materiality?” My process can then be executed one of two ways:

1. Pull from a place beyond time and space, artifacts of the infinite, which have now, paradoxically, become memory.

2. Create a space in which the infinite itself is given permission to manifest.

Utilizing either methodology, objects emerge with their own inherent sense of materiality, or lack thereof; of time or lack thereof; of maker or lack thereof. There is a space that resides in between.

This is where I work.

In my “Square” series, I fuse together individually hand-rolled coils of clay, each roughly the size of a pencil’s width, into an object of roughly square dimensions. The process is vigorous—moist clay only adheres to moist clay. Thus, designs that emerge are created in the moment. Pattern becomes structure that supports as it grows.

Squares are efficient, and they pack together neatly. People, more like the coils, are going to do what they will. What, then, emerges as the two are melded into one?

H. GELLERT | DETAIL LARGE

ERIK

ROGER CAMP | STRANGER UNDER A TRAIN

The words in my lap swayed in sync with the train’s cadence, a band of metallic strains stuttering to a halt.

The conductor’s words, a homeless man asleep on the rail, ricocheted off the silent passengers.

My window framed a bleached summer California landscape more suited to a scavenger’s death.

I wondered what kind of dream was vibrating through his brain as tons of steel rocked down the rails.

Something symphonic under a full head of steam, banged out with drums and cymbals, perhaps a cannon or two, the only celebration his life received.

A man, lacking a bed, placing his head on a rail instead, finding at long last sweet melodies whispered in his ear. After a muted, forty minute intermission the train departed a drifter, dead.

TAMMY GREENWOOD | MYSTICS

AND MISFITS

How can you love the desert? they ask, coming down from redwood mountains, the green of tender-shaded skin, low-lying branches reaching down like mother’s arms.

It’s hard to decide between protection and redemption, to see beyond safety, know the feeling of being set free.

You don’t choose the desert, it pulls you like the moon.

Boulders of spooning bodies blanketed by painted skies— origami sky of colored paper cranes, compass of Joshua crowns.

Landscapes offering only forgiveness. Baptisms of sandstorms, promises of salvation, where remembering withers then blossoms from dried ocean floors.

Its daytime vastness equal to star-filled nights, where heaven and earth converge, where the end looks like the beginning, the beginning, the end.

The humidity of a southern summer, monsoonal clouds mushroom with rain. Midnights full of mystics and misfits, where blooms are reborn of stony desolation.

A place of resurrections, only survivors live here. Their sorrows collected like seashells— vessels of echoes calling the rest of us home.

HARPER O’CONNOR | E IS FOR ENCHILADA

The night Peg arrived, she went to bed at whenever-the-hell-I-want o’clock. She did not set her alarm for 5 AM and did not leave for the bus at 5:20.

She stretched and grinned upon waking at 8:30, and took her sweet time making a cup of tea and peanut butter toast. She went to lunch with her best friend Mark, the one who drove the moving van with her and the cats for three and a half days across four states. She gorged on messy soft tacos cooked by Ramón (she heard the waitress yelling at the cooks) and drank a Mexican CocaCola straight from the bottle. There was nothing left of the two sopapillas on her plate afterwards.

Mark took Peg shopping. She bought bathroom rugs at Walmart, a big blue vase at Thrift City, and a dried chile ristra to hang on the porch. Technically, Mark paid for the big blue vase as a housewarming present. He didn’t care if she patted the scratchy blue and gray wool blankets at the talaveras shop or ran her fingers over terra cotta suns on the walls. She touched everything at the stores and only washed her hands once when she got home. She relished sweating in August and still being able to breathe. “But it’s a dry heat,” Peg said to Mark right before giggling. Her phone came out to snap pics of the real roadrunner on the sidewalk.

Mark took her to the grocery store and smiled when she caressed rough birch bark-like skin, saying, “I really missed jicama.” Fresh tortillas jumped into her cart along with mac and cheese, honey vanilla Greek yogurt, 12-grain bread, and not one damn frozen corn dog at all. Fig jam, avocados, and Brie snuck in as well. Mark actually asked her where she wanted to go for dinner. He offered several options when she froze while trying to decide. A local chain won the coin toss. “Do they also have sopapillas?” Mark just laughed.

The swamp cooler rumbled from the dining room window. She sat on the merlotcolored couch and sighed, full of enchiladas, sunlight, and lightness. Peg drew deep breaths of alpine desert air that wafted in through the barred screen door and cleared the dregs of humidity from her lungs. Six desperate voicemails blinked in blue light on her phone on the end table.

Mark was sprawled in the red leather recliner. “Are you going to listen to those?”

Peg petted the tabby cat on the couch beside her and shook her head. “Nah. I know what he’ll be saying, and I’m free now. I’ll delete them later so the blinking doesn’t keep me up.”

Mark grinned. Peg and her BFF shared a brain, after all. “When you going to kick me out and go to bed?”

“Whenever I damn well want to.”

SHERRY SHAHAN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am a white settler artist, writer, and poet. I live and work on unceded Chumash and Salinan land on the Central Coast of California. I’ve spent years wandering the globe as a journalist, quietly watching the world and its people from behind, whether in the jungles of Columbia, a backstreet in Havana, or alone from a window in a squat hotel room in Paris—and whether with a 35 mm camera or an iPhone. My sensibilities spill into two categories: those that pick at the scabs of inhumanity and those that reflect promise and possibility. Both styles express my purpose, passion, and personal truths. Now a proud septuagenarian, I’ve begun looking inward, living more fully inside my own skin. I’m no longer too old or too slow. I move at my own pace, eschewing imperfections and embracing my authentic female self.

SHERRY SHAHAN

JOANNE M. CLARKSON | CUSTODY

The worst parts of the divorce were Friday and Sunday evenings, the drive back and forth. Anger like tires spinning on gravel. The little sentences of guilt trying to pry out testimonies of neglect and betrayal while I sat in silence clutching the newest cheap toy that I always said was exactly what I wanted. About that time,

in my fifth grade reader, I encountered the myth of Persephone. The teacher told us it was about the seasons, but I knew it told the story of a car ride where I was forced to make my way among boulders and roots, feeling torn between the house and an apartment. Someone always saying goodbye in that voice. Journey I could not escape that I had no say in, as if I had choked on some seed and had no idea of the consequences.

TERRY SANVILLE | LEAVING CUMBOLA

Connor aimed his Boy Scout flashlight at the path ahead, its fading yellow beam blurred by the storm. Raindrops the size of half dollars smacked against the broadleafed maples and oaks, their branches whipped by the wind. The fleece-lined Indian moccasins that he’d sent away for from an ad on the back of a comic book were squishy wet, his Rawhide Kid pajamas soaked.

But he cinched his knapsack tight and pressed forward along the trail he’d climbed much of his eleven years, moving steadily uphill toward the plateau and the coal mine where his father once worked. He could have hiked the mine road that wound gently up the slopes. But the mountain trail seemed shorter and he hurried to get away, from what and toward what he wasn’t sure.

The leaf-covered ground proved slick as pond ice and he slipped and fell, landing hard on his side, the breath forced from his lungs but, surprisingly, with no pain. Connor scrambled up. A dim light outside the mine watchmen’s shed shone through the trees and he stumbled toward it, his arms protecting his face from the thrashing branches. The mine had closed down just before Easter, but the company still kept old man Hawkins on to watch over things until they could remove the equipment and seal things shut.

“The end of an era,” his mother had muttered when they got the news. “Why?” Connor asked.

“Just is. Good riddance.”

“But we’ve always . . . ”

“Yeah, and look where it got us.”

Reaching the edge of the woods he stepped into the clearing. The strippins pond lay before him, its black water textured by the rain and wind. It would take years, but Connor knew that some day he could fish that pond, like all the other mining pits that had filled. Fishing them was great sport, unless you fell in and couldn’t climb out. It happened to his friend and first crush Lily, the year before at another pond. The company put up a fence, but it didn’t last. Everything about coal seemed dangerous.

In the blackness, he steered clear of the pond’s edge and moved silently across the yard. Puffs of smoke floated up from the shed’s stovepipe. He heard

laugher from a TV comedy, probably Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners, the noise filtering through the shed’s tin walls. The aroma of Hawkins’ greasy supper still fouled the air.

He crept toward the entry to Shaft A, his body shuddering from the cold. Once inside and out of the rain and wind, he crouched and sat on a rail that already sported rust. The stench of coal dust, creosote, and human sweat still filled the tunnel, as if the day shift had just ended with the night crew on its way.

After a few minutes Connor stopped shivering. He played his flashlight’s beam against the opposite wall. It caught the glint of small bits of anthracite that peppered the tunnel. As he watched, the pieces of coal seemed to turn into marbles—puries, cat’s eyes, swirlies, red devils, all his favorites that he played with at school, all there for the taking. He slipped off his knapsack and untied one of its pockets. But when he looked, the marbles had become coal once again. He shook his head and wondered if he’d wished them into existence, wondered if some left-over gas in the mine shaft had caused him to dream, to get a bit crazy like his Pop sometimes got.

He looked toward the entrance. The wind had died and the rain had turned into spring snow. Everything got quiet as the soft fluff covered the ground. He stood and pushed deeper into the mine, trying not to stumble over the cross ties. Ahead, a soft light glowed in the passage. Connor sucked in a deep breath, felt dizzy and slumped against the wall. But slowly his mind cleared, and he continued to move toward the glow that seemed to come from a side gallery.

He turned toward the light and into a large, softly-lit cavern with a low ceiling, his mouth open, breathing hard. In the middle of the room stood the miners, gray-faced, dust covered, unmoving, frozen in place and time, as if Connor had interrupted a conversation in mid-sentence. He recognized Angus, his Pop’s shift-boss; Jones, the guy that came to the house one time, got drunk on the front porch and puked all over his mother’s potted geraniums; Leroy, who always messed up Connor’s hair when Con brought his father’s lunch; the constantlygrinning Smiley who had no front teeth; and Rich, who had only worked one summer before getting trapped in a cave-in that closed down Shaft B.

As Connor watched, the figures slowly unfroze and the gallery filled with boisterous conversations—about the God-damned prices at the company store; about the girl Rich just met in the village and had already made it to second base; about others that Connor didn’t know who had died of the black lung or simply never showed up for work and passed out of their lives; about the pending strike and what they would do to anyone trying to cross union picket lines. Color had returned to their faces, all except Rich’s. Their hands grasped mason jars filled with boilo, their belts loosened, lunch pails and helmets stacked against the wall.

“Hey, everybody, Connor’s here,” Jones hollered, and the crowd lifted their jars.

“To Connor, may he never again set foot in a God-damned mine.” Their voices rang out in a seemingly practiced chorus.

Leroy stepped forward and tousled Connor’s hair. “About time you got here, kid. We were just about to start.”

The crowd of jostling men parted. Two caskets with their top lids open rested on sawhorses against a far wall. The men gathered around. One of the coffins looked small. Edging forward Connor stared down at his first sweetheart, Lily, dressed in her Sunday best, her lips painted a pale pink, eyes closed as if asleep.

“Yeah, she woulda been a real dreamboat,” someone murmured. “But at least you got one good kiss. That’s better’n some.”

Connor’s eyes leaked tears. “We was just fishin’, just havin’ fun. She fell in when I wasn’t lookin’. Turned around and she’d gone . . . couldn’t save her . . . lost her in the black water.”

“Should be a crime to leave them mine pits open like that,” Angus muttered. Connor reached forward and touched Lily’s lips, willing her to speak but knowing she never would. The pain in his chest grew when he glanced sideways and into the other casket. His father lay stern-faced, wearing his dark suit and flashy red tie, his face showing the damage from every scrape and rock fall, every cave-in that he’d experienced, even the scar on his forehead where a long-gone miner had hit him with a shovel.

“We’re sorry about your Pop,” Angus said, followed by a murmur of assent from the crowd. “None of us should die from black lung. But some of us will.” He raised

his jar of boilo. “To Joseph and Lily. May they rise above this darkness and forever breathe heaven’s fresh air.”

Connor bowed his head and studied his feet, tears dripping onto the gallery’s rocky floor.

Rich approached. “It’s okay, Con. You’ll beat us all. You’re smart, you’ll get the hell out, fall in love, do something with your mind and keep your body safe.”

He gave Connor a good shake and turned to rejoin the other miners who made headway in downing the remains of their homemade brew. Connor turned and moved toward the main passage. But the noise of their conversation died. He glanced back. The miners had frozen again in place, grayfaced, coated in dust.

Someone grabbed him by the shoulders and shook. “Wake up, Con. It’s time to go.”

He opened his eyes to darkness, in his room, lying in bed under heavy woolen blankets. His mother bent over him and ran a hand along his cheek. “Come eat your breakfast before it gets cold.”

He pushed himself up and stumbled into the kitchen. A row of suitcases lined one wall near the door. A bowl of oatmeal and a glass of milk awaited him. His mother sat at the table and sipped her coffee.

“We’ve got an hour until Uncle Frank shows. You be nice to them. Ya know, they didn’t have ta take us in. You’ll like Philly.”

“But Mama, I got friends at school here and ya can’t fish and hike around and do stuff in Philadelphia.”

“Yeah, it’ll be a big change for both of us.”

“I don’ wanna change.”

“Sometimes we don’ get a choice. Jus’ don’ let nobody call you a coal cracker. Besides, those fools would freeze in winter if it wasn’t for King Coal. Now go put on your slippers—you’ll catch your death in bare feet.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Connor returned to his room and pulled on his Indian moccasins, still squishy wet from the storm.

MARGARET B.

WALLENBERG

| WAR, MY MOTHER’S LOVER

i.

The prisoner of war doctor whispered stay still

I’ll prove you’re dead

Gestapo: Burn her.

ii. War her lover— watched over nothing.

III. Audition for armless poplars kneel on gravel between railroad ties.

One cold night I climbed under my mother’s blanket she told me: I rode a frozen German soldier— he was my sled.

v.

I packed my mother’s red shoes— Spin, I said turn your bullets into gold Margaret, some lives aren’t worth living.

PATTI

SULLIVAN

| AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am a self-taught lifelong artist, somewhat late to the game of getting my work into the public arena of publications and exhibiting. They tell us time marches on, but for the lucky ones engrossed in their creative processes, time can be ignored. We get to live in a world that may have been opened to us long ago by a kind teacher—one who told us it was okay to keep on painting Angelfish every day.

Taking inspiration from nature, my art has evolved over the years into being completely abstract, which brings me the most joy—though I don’t mind hearing, I like the one of the lady in the moon or lovely calla lilies, even though there are no ladies or lilies pictured. I had just finished a series of mixed media pieces all in gray, black, and white when I read of the Santa Fe Literary Review’s theme, “Lovely, Dark, and Deep: Journeys Real and Imagined.” I was happy to have this one chosen as it seems to have the most movement. I’ve titled it “Delving Into Ancestry” after discovering a connection to Indigenous people. Curiosity ignited the flame of learning more, as the world keeps opening still after all these years.

CALLIE STOKES | METAMORPHOSIS.

You closed the lid. Everything was dark. I begged for breathing holes.

Clawing the days and years into the wall.

I watched the mice scurry across the floor. The mice became kin. Together we built a tribe.

Taking turns collecting crackers. Hiding them under blankets.

Inside gashes and cigarette burns. Each agony of the mind, a maze. Sedated

I crawled with the spiders along the halls of your plastic cup.

I told myself it’s better not to feel anything, and lived inside a skin graft cocoon. You entered. Without permission. You’d have killed me that night.

If I hadn't have left my body.

DAVID e. MORENO | ESPAÑOLA

Bury me in a turquoise motel with its vacant, white-washed swimming pool and broken diving board. Make me a cross of faded plastic roses.

Print my epitaph across a sun-bleached billboard with 1950s graphics and peeling edges. Let it look out over a lonely New Mexican highway that I may watch the Sunday parade of low riders, hear their hydraulic squeaks, and the rumbling backfire of sand-blasted pickups.

Face me East toward the snowcapped peaks of Truchas mountains. Let my soul go out to them through the gray veins of winter trees. Let me sail over parched Thanksgiving cornfields and the scattered shards of the Ancients.

In summers to come I will settle among giant gnarled cottonwoods, rustling and shimmering light back to the sun.

And, in autumn when the cooler winds twist and jerk the rusted chain-link sign at Vallecitos Ranch, I will shake gold leaves from cottonwoods like coins to the pockets of the earth and dream a l o n g s i l e n t winter.

ALISON MARIE DALE | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

For most of my life, the practice of making art has been both my greatest therapy and path of meaningmaking. While I'm immersed in tracing woodgrain, experimenting with brush patterns, or cutting up old Life magazines, I find myself in a trancelike state, connected not only to the sensuality of space around me but also the flow of time and history. Making collage work, for me, is like a divination practice, where I am able to make profound internal discoveries about how humans make sense of their place within the natural world around us through printed historical narratives of our collective subconscious. I love to begin my process by slowly and deliberately painting the grain of my wood panels. Doing this allows me to touch in with the beautiful growth patterns of mother nature through my hands, tapping into what I feel is the most beautiful art form possible. Next, I intuitively piece together collage elements and paint strokes that call to me, and oftentimes I'm surprised by the meaning I find in the resulting image.

I created this particular piece, “Billionaire Apes in Space,” in the summer of 2021, when billionaires Bezos, Branson, and Musk were all taking part in a personal space-race-for-the-one-percent. We were still in the height of a global pandemic where people were suffering and tests and treatment were unattainable, and meanwhile these ridiculous humans were blatantly spending millions on their joyrides to the edge of the atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, many Earth-ridden human apes were in full support of this, as we were sold the great aspiration of space holidays for all, one fine day in the future. The dollar bills collaged onto the ape's heart, hand, and eyes shows the pervasiveness and perverseness of the pursuit of money in our capitalistic society among the inequalities that surround us. This work, and many of my other paintings and collages, seek to spark curiosity about our perception of humanity's place within nature and help us recognize our deep interconnection with the world around us.

NICHOLAS TRANDAHL | MENELAUS

I open another can of beer as she checks her tomatoes, plants heavy with green earthy fruit.

Half a moon smolders beyond the poplar limbs in the bronze patina of summer dusk, Arcturus just above it, so ready to glow in the coming night.

A bluebird sings in the rowan tree.

I turn another page of The Iliad. Antlers softened with velvet, a slender buck grazes the yellow clover.

A thunderstorm passes to the north, lumbers into the Black Hills on legs of jagged radiance.

I turn another page.

Cedar and shale.

In heavy pine shadows, my youngest grove of aspen saplings learn to rattle green leaves in a fine waverly breeze.

Another page …

Menelaus,

I think I understand you now.

O, to wring his perfumed leopard skin in knotted fists, hot blood speckling the sun-cracked body of God.

A.C. KOCH | AN

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

It always amazes me how powerful it can be to flip the perspective on something. Turning a photograph upside-down can open up a viewpoint that feels like a glimpse into another world. Sand and rocks scattered underfoot become stars suspended above. Rain puddles on city streets become looking glasses into hidden dimensions. For this photo, my girlfriend Denise and I visited Stinson Beach in Northern California where the tide on wet sand offered a perfect chance to capture a mirrored view of the sky. The black-and-white film heightens the contrast, turning the textures of the beach into the suggestion of weather. As a fiction writer, my interest in such photo manipulations is in the storytelling possibilities that emerge from altered images. Change your point of view, and the story comes to you.

BRIAN DUNCAN | IN A FLASH

for Bill

Every now and then I pull up your Facebook post with that photo of you, standing in the rubble of 9/11, in your Ladder 59 helmet, yours the only truck sent that day from your firehouse way up in the Bronx. You arrived just before the first tower fell. This is going to be a long day, one of your buddies said.

Your face is lit by the flash of your disposable camera. Behind are the dark holes of blown-out windows in the buildings that still stand. Ahead are all the funerals you’d attend, day after day after day, until you just couldn’t anymore.

The look in your eyes no longer the one I remember from when we were boys, sitting at dusk on the field after track practice, figuring out infinity and the universe, and what’s beyond it, and what’s beyond that. In those eyes now I see the bodies of the jumpers,

and those stories you told before. The red-hot ember down the back of your neck that left a scar. The time you were lost crawling in a smoke-choked apartment, tangled up in a Christmas tree, thinking you’d never get out.

Where you wiped the sweat off your face, left behind are black smudges on your cheek and brow. Ashes. Maybe a family photo from the desk of a worker at Cantor Fitzgerald, a stack of memos from Aon, a napkin from Windows on the World, a bit of a hijacker from Flight 11, or a trace of one of your 343 brothers.

You burned all your photos, your memories, one day, but couldn’t forget. Your posts these days are always about accepting death, being ready when it comes. You quote Jed McKenna, Eckhart Tolle, and Rumi.

You cling to the risk of a vertical climb in the Shawangunks, live near the airport where you skydive, finding that thrill you always sought, that release, that feeling of free fall.

SHIRLEY EDMONDSON | TRASH

Dumbfounded and confused, two teenage boys, a jogger, and I stared down the bottom of a garbage can on a sunny Saturday morning: June 14th, 1997. I recognized the incongruity of this moment, the banality of my mental errand list against the insistence of the sound we heard spiraling up and out of the waste receptacle:

1. Call Ava to wish her Happy Birthday

2. Return books to the library

3. Food shop for the week

4. Call Mom

I had started the day preparing for a lumpectomy to be performed on Monday. I did my meditations and relaxation visualizations but was still a bundle of nerves. I didn't know what the doctors might find in my lymph nodes which might indicate the spread of breast cancer. So, that morning, I focused on taking one step at a time. With this attitude, I believed I had a chance at long-term survival.

What I was about to encounter became a reminder of how plans can change in an instant. Already at 8:55 a.m., a humid 80 degrees made the Edison, New Jersey, morning feel ten degrees hotter. The emerging of seventeen-year cicadas clicking their wings, traffic, and lawnmowers muted under a sky-blue backdrop. A mewling cry caught my attention. It stood in the foreground of my perception, not quite clear, but present enough to warrant further investigation.

Curious, I turned my attention to the direction of the trash can. I became aware of the boys walking towards me from my left. Across the parking lot on my right side, a jogger approached. In slow-motion detail, I realized he had on ridiculously tight-fitting navy-blue rayon shorts so small they showed his tiny package. He noticed the ruckus and came over.

Simultaneously, the four of us reached the trash can. Peering in, the jogger's knees buckled as he sank to the ground, the wind suddenly knocked

out of him. I expected to find a baby raccoon, kitten, or squirrel that had become trapped in search of food. What I saw instead made my heart drop in fear, so that for a nanosecond I couldn’t move. My vision didn’t match with perception and reality, like a funhouse mirror.

A whimpering cry emanated from a balled-up bloody shirt. There, at the bottom of the trash can, was an infant, tossed amongst the debris, with the umbilical cord still attached. Seconds passed as we all registered what we were seeing. I froze, rooted to the spot. The jogger regained his balance and stood up while I urged my brain to refocus and act. Then, together, we tried lifting the top of the waste receptacle. But we would need help from a rescue squad, because the top wouldn’t budge.

I turned to the boys with a controlled urgency and told them, "Get help from the librarians! Pound on the door until they open up! NOW!"

While the boys ran to the library door, I looked at the trash can, trying to figure a way to take the top off. Like airport recycling bins, it would prove difficult to extract something thrown in. The vents pushed inward so the design prevented vandalism. The jogger and I each took turns trying to get into the can. We positioned ourselves to reach in blindly towards the front, then our hips on the side, neither times with success. Our arms were too short to reach her. It seemed the seconds passing were hours. I felt the helplessness of time ticking by and the danger of possibly losing the soul amongst the garbage. Someone had thrown a baby away on this beautiful summer morning.

I felt an energetic connection to this child. I wanted to comfort her but couldn’t physically reach her. She needed tenderness after entering the world with cruelty, having not been properly fed, clothed, or held. I started a silent prayer as we waited for help to arrive, and that the Creator would also have mercy on me. I was tied to this child, our souls intertwined in our fight for life. Somehow the universe placed us both here at this moment in time for us to meet, bond, and live.

My heart dipped and sank, then seized with disbelief. I held my breath for an indeterminate amount of time. It seemed that I had ceased breathing to breathe life into her.

The baby's cries diminished into a whimper, then to a low moan. Was she dying?

I could see the afterbirth dried about her torso and her head full of dark straight hair. Her skin was a creamy sunflower color that showed through the blood and white caked placenta on her face.

The seconds ticked by without the sound of sirens. I glanced over and realized that the librarians either hadn’t heard the boys or were ignoring them.

With a whoosh, I started to breathe again. My feet moved, my voice came back, and I ran towards the library door that remained closed to the boys. Together, we shouted and pounded on the glass of the door. We finally got the librarians’ attention, told them what we had found out front of the library, and someone finally called for help. Some of us paced around the can: “Do you hear her?” we asked each other. “Can you tell if she’s moving?”

Some of us went silent with eyes wide and shallow breathing, praying for help.

Finally, the sound of the siren grew near. The rescue squad truck pulled into the lot. Our small crowd backed away from the can as the firemen used a tool that created the leverage needed to lift the top. We watched as the baby, now limp but alive, was attended to by the paramedics. They started an IV for liquids, wrapped her in a warming blanket, and gave oxygen. By now the crowd drew surrounding neighbors, and someone called the press. The paramedics reported that the baby was physically okay, even though she suffered from oxygen deprivation and exposure. Her lungs were clear, and her heart was strong.

Later, I named her Angelita. I wanted to humanize her so that she was not labeled “infant found in trash can” by the press. She exemplified the qualities I hoped to transfer to myself at that moment: enduring through pain, calling out for help, and holding on. It was her light that shone bright that day, and

she became my beacon of hope. Though I faced poor odds against a rapidly spreading Stage IV breast cancer, I felt in my heart that I would survive. That both of us would survive together.

After the paramedics left, somehow the jogger continued his run. The librarians, the two boys, and I went inside the library. We stood around full of adrenaline, not sure what to do with the leftover energy from the trauma. My body started a low tremble, trying to release what I had just witnessed. The librarians went to the circulation desk, busying themselves with opening, and the boys remained silent, milling about the lobby without direction. I knew the media would arrive soon to ask questions. I didn’t want to take part in the questioning because I was in a state of distress. Eventually, my flight response kicked in, so I drove home thinking of the person who could listen and understand my trauma. My Grandmom.

I felt a sense of drowning, just under the surface, trying to break free of the constant replay of events. When I got home, I felt like a stranger in my house. I had just left an hour before, but home offered no comfort. My dog was present and loving, but I couldn’t greet her. My focus was getting to the black phone on the wall, dialing the numbers I knew by rote, and finding relief from the mountain of pain in my spirit. I carried all that I had witnessed like a trunk full of clothes newly strapped to my back.

Suddenly, I transferred all of the rage I felt about my cancer diagnosis onto the mother who abandoned this beautiful child. The rage rose within me, creating a trail of searing anger that pooled into a charcoal burn in the pit of my stomach. I cursed her; in my mind I formulated who she was and why she did it.

I wanted to vent, to hurt the person who did this, and judge her as unworthy. As trash.

"Grandmom!" I yelled into the phone. “I just saw a baby in, the trash in front of the North Edison Library.” I panted, out of breath. “I couldn't figure out the sound coming from the trash can. When I looked in there she was. I couldn’t make sense of it!”

My shoulder and neck muscles constricted as I paced from the kitchen to the living room. My feet continued to move across the floor as the buildup of energy forced its way through my body.

By now I was out of breath and mind, and back into pure trauma.

I couldn’t wait for Grandmom to reply, so I continued.

"I just saw a baby thrown away in the trash at the library! Why would someone do this to a newborn baby?"

My grandmother was trying to interject. “Hold on, slow down.”

I spoke over her, unable to stop the words wailing from my mouth.

"Who would have a baby, carry for nine months, and then put her in the trash?”

I shouted questions there were no answers for, questions I wanted to release from the tightness from the muscles in my lower back, forcing me to sit at the kitchen table. My dog sat quietly at my feet, her eyes meeting mine with a matching sadness and confusion.

“How can this mother live with herself?"

"What if I had returned those books an hour later? She may have died—”

I couldn't finish my sentence. I kept flashing back to the baby, alone, dehydrated and hot, laying among the Dixie Cups, Mountain Dew cans, and rotting pizza scraps crawling with ants.

Grandmom listened quietly and patiently until I was done. I could feel her presence, hear her breathing between the breaks in my voice, which eventually turned into hitched gasps for air.

"Shirley," she said, "Listen to what I tell you, and listen to what you can do now."

My head hurt, my stomach churned, the muscles across my chest tightly knotted, and I felt frozen. Frozen in time, back at the library.

"Put your energy into a prayer for the baby. She needs your prayers for her life right now.”

“But Grandmom.”

I was trapped in that moment of discovery, suddenly understanding the value of mercy.

Grandmom cut off my protests by forcing me to focus on the present and let go of the near past.

"What has happened, has happened. It cannot be changed or undone. But you can pray for her health and life,” Grandmom responded calmly. "Don't damn the mother. We don't know who she is or what she is dealing with. If you can’t forgive right now, don't damn her."

Grandmom wisdom.

I felt my heart quiet.

Saying a prayer for the baby and focusing on a positive future was something I could do. Angelita whispered for attention on that Saturday morning in June. She cried for her life; she was a survivor, I the witness. I was put there when she needed me to be a part of the miracle to save her. Saving her was also the beginning of my own miracle, a set of lessons I’d learn about cancer, a cycle of powerlessness, surrender, and love. Now, I was ready to begin the journey.

PI LUNA | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

To me, recycling is more than repurposing our stuff. It is about radical transformation on all levels, including the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual realms.

When I get an idea for a piece, I often choose something in my life or our society that I want to heal or transform. Then I grab magazines and start chopping. With each clip of the scissors, I imagine cutting up the problem. I break apart the ideas, emotions, and belief systems that hold me back. The magazines, often loaded with cultural conditioning, get so destroyed by my process that the messages are no longer coherent. Fragmented, they lose their power.

What is left is simply a pile of scraps. From there, I create something new—something lifeaffirming. Piece by piece, I assemble an image that feels alive and full of possibilities. I often choose nature as my subject matter because it symbolizes our most natural and harmonious state. It represents how I want to be: interconnected and whole.

“Sine of the Moon”—About This Issue’s Cover

Is time linear? Or does it follow a different pattern? As an entrepreneur, I wear many hats— from making art to marketing, bookkeeping, fulfilling orders, shipping. It’s a lot to manage and trying to make it fit nicely into a consistent linear calendar never seemed to work. I seemed to find myself pushing when things were slow and overwhelmed when things were busy.

Seeking a new way of approaching time, I looked to nature for inspiration. The moon showed me another way. Time is a wave—half light and half dark.

Ever since, I’ve been experimenting with time by mapping my to-do lists with the moon. When it's full, I focus on more outward tasks, like networking, events, marketing, and sales. When the moon is dark, I focus on the internal tasks, like cleaning, making art, bookkeeping, and planning. My stress levels have gone down, my productivity has gone up, it's easier to focus, and I feel more in sync with the natural rhythms of the Earth. The moon’s energy is a gift to all of us and we can use it to help us in our daily lives.

RICK KEMPA | WHATEVER IT WAS OUT THERE ON THE PATH

Mexican Hat, Utah

Whatever it was out there on the path above the cliffs under the moon within its white ring throwing white light upon the river’s back two hundred feet below—the only light in that naked world—throwing solid blocks of blackness from higher cliffs across the path, casting its sheen upon the narrow shelf and the talus slope that veered down and away...

whatever it was out there in that empty world shattered the moon-dream within which I moved by bursting into motion—a clumsy, two-footed, gravel-crushing explosion beyond the fringe of sight. My pulse spiked. Blood gorged my brain. My eyes, dilated, saw a shadow up ahead, indistinct. I listened hard to hear if he or she or it was moving closer or away.

I thought of calling out, It’s just me, thought twice about that, turned and walked (not ran) back the way I came, peering Ame and again over my shoulder or up at the rocks from which the shadow might leap and squat before me, grinning, on that narrow shelf above the river’s back.

I stopped once to pluck from the ghostly ground a rock like an anvil that I clutched in my leL hand—an object

to focus my forces around all the long way down to the blacktop, the bridge beneath which the white-backed river moved, to my four-walled motel room where, if not for that red rock still in hand in the morning, I might have shook my head, said, oh, it was just some old burro, or that was a hell of a dream—and suppressed once again truths known only to those who walk the world at night.

LINDA SCHELLER |

THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES

To preserve us for his purposes, our father the king locked us in our room at night, yet every dawn our slippers lay in tatters. What witchcraft is this? He challenged men to answer, offering one of us as trophy and the axe as failure’s price.

With little to lose, an old soldier bet his neck. He pretended to drink the wine I’d drugged and snored in a corner, feigning sleep as my sisters and I donned silk and new slippers. Through slits he watched me open a magic door and lead my sisters down the secret staircase. Privileged by invisibility’s cloak, he followed us through winding caverns and jeweled forests. My youngest sister felt his boot on her hem and cried out in warning, but I paid no heed. He boarded her boat unseen, and she rowed his weight across the dark lake, complaining. He shadowed us to the castle and saw my lover kiss my hair as we danced. As always, my sisters and I left before dawn and rowed across the bottomless lake. We returned through the door to our chamber and shed the slippers we’d danced to shreds.

That morning, the soldier told all to our father, and men walled shut the door to our joy. My sisters wept as the soldier claimed me, the eldest, as his promised reward.

Now dressed in rags and housed in a hut, I stir and curse in the language of spiders. Sparks snap, singeing my feet and legs, and my hands are red from the steam.

SABRANNA MALIN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I have enjoyed photography since picking up my first Canon AE-1 in 1976 while studying journalism. I love the idea of telling stories with photos—a good photograph is worth a thousand words. My first love is writing poetry; as a student at Santa Fe Community College, I am re-discovering my creative roots. On a recent road trip from California to my adopted home in New Mexico, I stayed at a restored Route 66 motel in Holbrook, Arizona. The vintage cars in the parking lot spoke to me of travels and adventure. I remembered family road trips as a child. Inspired by the synchronicity of being 66 years old while traveling on Route 66, I photographed these relics of a bygone era to remind me that our life journeys are worth documenting. I feel blessed to share my journeys (real and imagined) through words and images.

CAROL DESPEAUX FAWCETT | DOLPHIN WHISPERER

Pawai Bay, Hawaii

She tells us, “If you make a connection with a dolphin you will have this bond always and forever.”

Her long gray hair sways with the boat, wisdom etched on her face, a craggy shoreline. We lean in—

she instructs us to send love and Frequency 16 into the water. “Stay close to the boat, swim in pairs.” Of course

I float off like Mom did—at 66, picking blackberries in her nightgown, wandering away from home in the middle of the night, mind freed by early dementia. She forgets who I am, who she is, forgets her mean, drunk, dead husband. Better off for it, too. Except now she can’t find her way home. Four counties of Search and Rescue, bloodhounds, picture in the paper, on TV, everyone searching floating face down, a pod streams beneath me—highway of sleek torpedo bodies, then a mama and her baby. I send Frequency 16, think—

Your baby is beautiful. I have a son, too. They loop back, circle beneath me. She touches him with her flipper, he spins

I pray

for the first time in years. Pray they find Mom, pray she’s alive. I fall to my knees, gravity pulling me down.

They find her in blackberry stickers, unable to speak or stand. In the ambulance, I hold her hand but she pulls away

unsure how quiet the ocean is, how empty the funeral home. Night after night, she protected me, sacrificed herself bracing

myself on the pew in front, I feel mother and baby spin, remember the words of the dolphin whisperer— always and forever.

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Artie Ann Bates is a writer and physician, and has published a children’s picture book, Ragsale, as well as essays in the anthologies Blood Root: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. She is a socially-conscious nature-lover, currently working to limit mass incarceration in east Kentucky.

Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002) and Heat (Charta, Milano, 2008). His work has been awarded the prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence for European photography, and his images have appeared in numerous journals including The New England Review, Paris Review, and the New York Quarterly. His writing has appeared in Pank, Tampa Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Nimrod. He lives in Seal Beach, California, where he muses over his orchids, walks the pier, plays blues piano, and spends afternoons reading under an Angel's Trumpet with a charm of hummingbirds. When he's not at home, he's photographing in the Old World. More of his work can be found at Luminous-Lint.com.

Melissa Cannon lives and writes in Nashville. Her first career was in academia, her second in the fast-food industry. Her poems have appeared in over one hundred small-press journals and anthologies, including HomeWorks and HomeWords, two volumes of Tennessee writers from the University of Tennessee Press. She has published one chapbook, Sister Fly Goes to Market, and she was the inaugural winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry.

Joanne M. Clarkson's sixth poetry collection, Hospice House, was published by MoonPath Press in 2023. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Clarkson worked for many years as a professional librarian, then re-careered to serve as a Hospice R.N. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington, by the Salish Sea. Her favorite place to travel is the American Southwest. Learn more at joanneclarkson.com.

D. T. Collins is an amateur writer, college professor, Baptist believer, and full-time husband and father who occasionally writes something worth reading. Born and raised in SoCal, he spends far too much time watching (read: judging) Hallmark movies with his wife, is struggling to learn Spanish to keep up with his bilingual toddler, and has learned through much practice how to make delicious scrambled eggs while leaving a clean pan.

Alison Marie Dale is a mixed-media artist, astrologer, and somatic guide. Born and raised under the big starry skies of Tesuque, New Mexico, her work draws upon humanity's deep innate connection to the cycles of the cosmos. After graduating from Santa Fe High, Alison studied anthropology at Tulane University, lived and taught in Brazil and China, and then settled in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade. While there, she joined the startup wave and founded Artlarking, a multimedia production company, and Flipcause, a fundraising and supporter engagement platform for nonprofits. She returned home to New Mexico in 2020 to raise her daughter, make art, and get back in touch with the vast land and sky.

Julyan Davis is a British-American painter and novelist living in Asheville, North Carolina. For more than thirty years, he has painted the vanishing landscape, lost histories, and folklore of the United States. Davis has collaborated with poets, musicians, historians, and, most recently, actors in bringing these stories to life. His novel, A History of Saints, was a semifinalist for the 2022 Thurber Prize.

Carol Despeaux Fawcett lives in the Pacific Northwest. She earned her M.F.A. from Goddard College. Her poetry is published in 34 Orchard, Isele Magazine, Birdhouse Magazine, Jeopardy, Dreich Magazine, Out There Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Her poetry and memoir won first place in the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Contest. Her interests include paddle boarding, camping, the mystical, and orange cats. Learn more at cdfawcett.com.

Brian Duncan lives in Kendall Park, New Jersey, with his wife, Margie, and two cats. He worked in a virology laboratory at Princeton University for many years and is now happily retired. He enjoys devoting his time to poetry, gardening, and hiking. Recently, his poetry has appeared in ONE ART, Thimble, Passengers Journal, Whale Road Review, Elysium Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig.

Shirley Edmondson is a memoirist and spoken-word poet performing in New York City and Santa Fe. Originally from New Jersey, she has been a featured writer in Zora’s Journal: Breast Cancer Memoirs by Lesbians of Color. She is also published in One Albuquerque: One Hundred Poets, winner of the 2023 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. A writer whose observations are humorous and reflective, Edmondson facilitates workshops on a variety of topics.

Adam Ferguson has been a photographer for more than half of his life. Creativity has always been an integral part of his journey in self-discovery and experiences. Currently pursuing a degree in creative writing, he’s on the path of combining his passions of traveling the world, writing, and photography.

Slater Garcia has a short horror-comedy story published with Samfiftyfour and a ghost thriller novel published with Mischievous Muse Press. He takes great delight in his peculiar life with his wife, his dog, and his small armada of weird vehicles that he hopes to get running properly someday.

Poet and printmaker Tammy Greenwood is a Louisiana native residing in California. Since graduating from California State University, San Bernardino, she continues her studies while working on her upcoming book of poetry. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Rattle, Door is a Jar, ONE ART, Hyacinth Review, Rust & Moth, Orange Blossom Review, San Pedro River Review, Poetry South, Emerge Literary Journal, FERAL, and elsewhere.

Susan Griego is a Latina/Indigenous writer who uses her culture and generational trauma as inspiration. As a descendent of the first Hispanic Governor of New Mexico and of Genízaros, she aligns with the fervid spirit of the land. Her most recent award-winning publication focuses on her youth and the unique soil of her home state. Susan lives off-grid in the mountains of New Mexico with her partner and four dogs.

Christine E. Hamm, queer and disabled English professor, social worker, and student of ecopoetics, has a Ph.D. in English and lives in New Jersey. She recently won the Tenth Gate Prize from Word Works for her manuscript, Gorilla. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has published six chapbooks and several books— hybrid texts as well as poetry.

Cynthia Hartling’s visual language lies in the tactile and hidden, utilizing color and form as her subject matter while capturing both static and fleeting moments in order to question and inhabit felt/perceived experience in an almost diarist confession. She received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union and also studied at the Istituto Statale d'Arte, Urbino, Italy, and at SUNY New Paltz. She now lives in New Mexico, inspired by its light, high desert, and Indigenous cultures. Learn more at cynthiahartling.com.

Katharyn Howd Machan writes poetry and memoir on her Dragon Patio when weather allows and elsewhere when it doesn’t. As a professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College, she mentors students in fairy-tale-based creative writing courses. Her most recent publications are A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020) and Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press, 2022). For spirit and body, she belly dances.

Stephen Kahn is originally from Baltimore, Maryland. He began learning the art of narration at The Writers Studio in New York City and has been taking writing workshops ever since. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he works with his brother in concrete construction and volunteers with the Central Virginia Food Bank. This is his second publication.

A.C. Koch is a teacher, writer, musician, and photographer whose fiction has been published in Analog, December, Meridian, Split/Lip, Five South, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. His photography has appeared in Mud Season Review, Burning Word, and Invisible City. After years living and working overseas (France, South Korea, Mexico), Koch resides in Denver, Colorado, working with language learners while studying at the Mile High M.F.A. program at Regis University.

Carella Keil is a writer and digital artist who creates surreal, dreamy images that explore nature, fantasy realms, melancholia, and inner dimensions. She has been published in numerous literary journals including Columbia Journal, Chestnut Review, and Crannóg. Her writing was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her art has appeared on the covers of Glassworks Magazine, Nightingale and Sparrow, Colors: The Magazine, Frost Meadow Review. and Straylight Magazine. Find her on Instagram @catalogue.of.dreams and on X @catalogofdream.

Poet and essayist Rick Kempa lives in Grand Junction, Colorado. His latest poetry collection is Too Vast for Sleep (Littoral Press, 2020). Truths of the Trail, a collection of short prose pieces about the backpacking life, is newly published by Deep Wild Press. Rick is the founding editor of the literary journal Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry, now in its sixth year. Learn more at rickkempa.com.

Sheree La Puma is a recent cancer survivor who lives in Los Angeles and Popotla, Mexico. Her work has appeared in The Penn Review, Redivider, Sugar House Review, The Maine Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Lascaux Review, Salt Hill Literary Journal, Stand Magazine, Rust + Moth, Mantis, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She earned her M.F.A. in writing from CalArts. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of The Net and three Pushcarts. A reader for the Orange Blossom Review, her latest chapbook, Broken: Do Not Use, is currently available at Main Street Rag. Learn more at shereelapuma.com.

Aaron Lelito is a visual artist and writer from Buffalo, New York. His images have been published as cover art in Red Rock Review, Peatsmoke Journal, and The Scriblerus. His poetry chapbook, The Half Turn, was published in 2023, and his work has also appeared in Barzakh Magazine, Novus Literary Arts Journal, SPECTRA Poets, About Place Journal, and EcoTheo Review. He is Editor-inChief of the Wild Roof Journal. Find him on Instagram @aaronlelito.

At first glance, Pi Luna’s art looks like paintings. But come up close, and you’ll start to see the textures and shapes. She cuts up tiny pieces of paper from the pages of recycled magazines and arranges them into works of art. She first developed her process when working on her M.F.A. at Goddard College. Originally a realistic oil painter, Pi wanted to explore metaphor and storytelling in her artwork. She started branching out to explore new media, working in acrylic and mixed media. Eventually, she discovered paper and fell in love. Learn more at pilunaart.com.

“When an injury ended a promising career as an under-employed actor, Aimee Lowe embarked on journeys to the summit of Mount Rainier, the feet of an Indian guru, teaching English in Japan, and becoming a hospice nurse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she resides. Her writing draws from a deep well of embarrassing life choices that—through the magic of writing— become stories to share with new friends.”

Liz Lydic is a mom, writer, and local government employee in the Los Angeles area. She also does theater stuff. Learn more at lizlydic.com.

Sabranna Malin began writing early; her first poem was published when she was ten. Several of her poems have appeared in Trickster, the literary journal of Northern New Mexico College. She

co-hosted a poetry event in her hometown of Espanola, New Mexico, with a number of local poets and writers, including a Poet Laureate of Santa Fe. She recently served as an intern for this volume of the Santa Fe Literary Review.

Michael Mark’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Sun, and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry and 32 Poems. He’s the author of two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). Learn more at michaeljmark.com.

Former New Mexican David e. Moreno is a world-class yoga instructor, performing arts journalist, and dance critic whose varied careers have landed him in the New York Times, Esquire Magazine, and The Advocate. He has written for Yoga Journal, Yoga International, and LA Yoga Magazine. David also pens monthly reviews and commentaries for CultureVulture. His book, Lamps Without Shades: A Memoir of Mystical & Irreverent Incidents, will be published in 2024.

Hailed as 'a hearty weed in the garden of American poetry,' Dave Morrison's work has been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and featured on Writer’s Almanac, Take Heart, and Poems from Here. Morrison has published seventeen books of poetry including Clubland (poems about rock & roll bars in verse and meter, Fighting Cock Press 2011) and Cancer Poems (JukeBooks 2015). Another Good Day Begins (Soul Finger Press 2022) is his most recent collection. After years of playing in rock bands in Boston and New York City, Morrison now lives on the coast of Maine.

Harper O'Connor is a nonbinary disabled quirky Albuquerque-based writer owned by one or more cats. Their inspirations range from Stephen King to Audre Lorde. Drawing on a complex and occasionally traumatic multinational past, Harper creates stories which speak to heart and mind. Off the page, they are also a passionate crafter in the arts of ink, watercolors, and textiles.

Starr Paul is a poet and graphic designer from the Black Hills of South Dakota. She is currently an M.F.A. student at Western Colorado University. Starr is drawn to creating poems that explore romanticism, death, and connection.

Seth Peterson is an emerging writer and physical therapist in Tucson, Arizona. His writing is published or forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Santa Fe Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry and teaches with The Movement Brainery.

Monica Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation. Prince is the author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem, and Letters from the Other Woman, as well as the co-author of the suffrage play Pageant of Agitating Women with Anna Andes. Prince’s work has appeared in Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee obsessed with yoga and maxi skirts with pockets, Prince teaches activist and performance writing and serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.

Nancy Reyner is a contemporary painter known for inventing unusual acrylic techniques. Her images allude to heavenly landscape, with illuminated subject matter using reflective materials like gold leaf. She has appeared on HGTV’s “That’s Clever” and authored four bestselling art books with Penguin. She received her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Nancy lives in Santa Fe and enjoys teaching from her studio. Learn more at NancyReyner.com.

Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California, with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full-time, producing stories, essays, and novels. His work has been accepted more than 500 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The American Writers Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. Terry is also a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist.

Linda Scheller is the author of two poetry books, Fierce Light (FutureCycle Press) and Wind & Children (Main Street Rag Publishing Company). Recent honors include Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, and her manuscript, Laurels, was shortlisted for the Aryamati

Poetry Prize. Scheller is Vice President of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and volunteers as a programmer for KCBP Community Radio. Learn more at lindascheller.com.

A Best of the Net nominee, Natalie Schriefer, M.F.A., is a bi/demi writer often grappling with sexuality, identity, and shame. She loves asking people about their fictional crushes (her most recent are Riza Hawkeye and Gamora). She works as a freelance journalist. Find her on X @schriefern1 or visit her website: natalieschriefer.com.

Christine Schwatken is an up-and-coming writer and visual artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has spent most of her life in the desert and is ever-inspired by its beauty and resilience. Christine has been published in the Santa Fe Community College Accolades for Fiction (2022) and Poetry (2023), and was awarded the 2022 Richard Bradford Creative Writing Scholarship for her fiction submission.

Sherry Shahan is a teal-haired septuagenarian who lives in a laid-back beach town in California. Her art has appeared in Progenitor, Antithesis, Zoetic Press, The Hunger, Josephine Quarterly, december, Harbor Review, and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for The Pushcart Prize in Poetry (2024), holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and taught a creative writing course for UCLA for ten years.

Callie Stokes is a poet and writer from northern Utah. She seeks to find beauty in what is deemed ugly or untouchable. “Metamorphosis” is her first published work.

Patti Sullivan is a native Californian artist and poet. Her art appears in Black Fox Literary Journal, Evening Street Review, Café Solo, Lummox, The Healing Muse, Sow’s Ear, ArtLife, and elsewhere. She has participated in group and solo exhibits. Her poetry books are For The Day, Not Fade Away, and At The Booth Memorial Home For Unwed Mothers 1966.

Fadairo Tesleem is a Nigerian poet who writes from Ilorin, Kwara State. Tesleem is an alumnus of the Olongo Africa Poetry workshop and a member of the Hilltop Arts Foundation in Kwara. His poems are published or forthcoming in Fiery Scribe Review, Arts Lounge Magazine, Blue Minaret,

Down in the Dirt, Ninshãr Arts, Blue paper, Upwrite Magazine, Inverse Journal, Second Chance Lit, Tilted House, and elsewhere.

Tjizembua Tjikuzu is an essayist and poet from Aminuis, Namibia. He graduated from the RutgersCamden M.F.A. in Creative Writing program in 2021. His poetry and essays are published or forthcoming in Doek! Literary Magazine, Obsidian Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, Rigorous Magazine, Empyrean Literary Magazine, Columbia: Journal of Literature and Art, Consequence Forum, Tint Journal, The Elevation Review, Barely South Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review.

Nicholas Trandahl is an award-winning poet, journalist, outdoorsman, and veteran residing in northern Wyoming where he currently also serves as mayor of his community. He is the author of six poetry collections and has also been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Trandahl has been awarded the Wyoming Writers Milestone Award and has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize.

Jeffrey Utzinger has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in American Literature. He is Associate Professor of English in Austin, Texas, and lives in Lockhart, Texas, where he keeps chickens, a duck, and a few thousand bees. His collection of creative nonfiction essays, The Risk Involved, is forthcoming with April Gloaming Publishing (2024).

Margaret B. Wallenberg received her B.A. from Grinnell College and studied for her M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence College where she worked with the poets Thomas Lux and Brooks Haxton. Her recent poetry appears in New Orleans Review, Salt Hill, Confrontation Magazine, The Awakenings Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Budapest Stories, an artist book, was exhibited in twenty nonprofit galleries. She lives in Gallup, New Mexico, with her husband.

Robin Whalan is a printmaker, illustrator, and author from Texas. She spent the better part of the past twenty years in the service industry, ten of those owning and operating a small brick and mortar. During the challenges of 2020, she found a new voice and a new passion with ink and

paper—a passion which soon steered her to leave her service career and begin writing her next chapter. Robin now devotes her energy to telling stories through printmaking and children’s books and participating in art fairs near and far.

Bill Wolak is a poet, collage artist, and photographer who has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages and photographs have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Harbinger Asylum, Baldhip Magazine, and Barfly Poetry Magazine.

SUBMIT TO THE SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

The Santa Fe Literary Review is published annually by the Santa Fe Community College. An in-print literary journal, we feature work by local, national, and international writers and artists. We invite no-fee submissions of poetry, fiction, dramatic writing/screenwriting, creative non-fiction, and reproducible visual art. We use Submittable, an online submissions platform, for all submissions.

Our 2025 suggested theme is “Bloodlines: Lineage, Inheritance, and Legacy.” Our submissions period opens July 15 and closes November 1. Contributors receive two copies of the magazine and are invited to share their work at our on-campus/virtual celebratory reading and reception, held each year on the third Thursday of October.

As editors, we aim to present a wide variety of stories, styles, and ways of seeing. We’re especially committed to supporting writers and artists who aren’t always empowered by the modern mainstream, 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 in the realm of publishing, please submit.

Visit our website to submit your work: https://www.sfcc.edu/santa-fe-literary-review

If you are unable to submit electronically, please write to us at SFLR, 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87508, or call (505) 428-1903.

Poetry, Prose, and Dramatic Writing Submission Guidelines

Word limit per prose submission 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; we encourage submissions of full-length works or standalone scenes. Please format your submission for twelve-point font or similar, to ensure legibility.

We accept simultaneous submissions, but please withdraw your work from Submittable if it’s selected for publication at another journal. We do not accept writing that’s been published elsewhere.

Visual Art Submission Guidelines

We invite submissions of reproducible visual art including, but not limited to, graphic novel excerpts, photography, digital media, and reproductions of produced art in any media. Aside from our cover, we’re only able to print in black and white. Submit visual art submissions in .jpg or .tif formats at 300 dpi.

Support the Review

To support the Santa Fe Literary Review, consider making a donation. Your gift will help students and faculty members to continue creating, printing, and distributing this publication, and will empower writers and artists from Santa Fe and around the world to showcase important work.

To donate by check: Checks should be made payable to “The SFCC Foundation—SFLR/ ENGL Fund,” then mailed to: SFCC Foundation, 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87508. Kindly write “SFLR/ENGL Fund” in the memo.

To donate by credit card: Visit https://www.sfcc.edu/support-the-santa-fe-literary-review

Learn More

Pick up a free copy of the SFLR at the SFCC Library or any of the three Santa Fe Public Library branches, or write to SFLR, 6401 Richards Ave, Santa Fe, NM 87508.

We are on social media, and we would love to hear from you:

Facebook @santafereview

X @santafeliterary

Instagram @santafereview

TikTok @santafereview

Graphic Services and Printed by

Artie Ann Bates

Roger Camp

Melissa Cannon

Joanne M. Clarkson

D.T. Collins

Alison Marie Dale

Julyan Davis

Tracey Despeaux Fawcett

Brian Duncan

Shirley Edmondson

Adam Ferguson

Slater Garcia

Erik H. Gellert

Tammy Greenwood

Susan Griego

Christine E. Hamm

Cynthia Hartling

Katharyn Howd Machan

Stephen Kahn

A.C.Koch

Carella Keil

Rick Kempa

Sheree La Puma

Aaron Lelito

Pi Luna

Aimee Lowe

Liz Lydic

Sabranna Malin

Michael Mark

David e. Moreno

Dave Morrison

Harper O’Connor

Starr Paul

Seth Peterson

Monica Prince

Nancy Reyner

Terry Sanville

Linda Scheller

Natalie Schriefer

Christine Schwatken

Sherry Shahan

Callie Stokes

Patti Sullivan

Fadairo Tesleem

Tjizembua Tjikuzu

Nicholas Trandahl

Jeffrey Utzinger

Margaret B. Wallenberg

Robin Whalan

Bill Wolak