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.

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.

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 deter mine 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