2025 Santa Fe Literary Review by Santa Fe Community College

FROM THE EDITORS

Here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at just the right time of day, the mountain range overlooking our city glows a salmon pink. Sangre de Christo, these peaks are called— “the blood of Christ.” Here beneath those mountains in the storied City Different, families bleed into each other and diverge again. Travelers come and go. Writers and artists still flock to this scrappy town, a place that, newcomers are told, either embraces you instantly or spits you out. We all leave a bit of our stories, our bloodlines, beneath the shadow of the Sangre de Christo range.

In the poems, stories, essays, and pieces of art that punctuate this issue, voices and images created far beyond the reaches of the Sangre de Christo examine that which we’re born with—and the pieces of ourselves that we’ll leave behind. In these pages, storytelling becomes at once our inheritance and our destiny, each narrative straddled by a reclaimed present. Making art, after all, is to recreate ourselves, to define our own existence in spite of—or in thanks to—our bloodlines.

In the end, we’ll all become stories.

Margaret Atwood

MARCY RAE HENRY

ERNEST WILLIAMSON III

ERNEST WILLIAMSON III

ZEKE SHOMLER | HYDROLOGY

When my father’s daughter washed my dark hair in the war m midwestern gutter-rain, pink bubbles traveled down the hill in little rivers as if racing toward some other, safer life. We didn’t know, then, how phthalates and parabens could disrupt the cells of animals, slipping into muscle and marrow as a hand slips behind a closing door to stop the latch. I only saw the greenness of the yard, warm with light and swarming with mosquitoes, where we found four rabbit kits clustered like closed white flowers and tense with the fear of feral cats. There were no fences there, between the houses, only open space to watch the storm-clouds rolling in and reaching their green fingers toward the earth. My sister smells like nicotine and hair oil. She washed me in the foment of the summer rain, the first time I was baptized, the only one I still believe in. Faith in something larger than myself comes easily; to find its name requires a complex mathematics I have yet to learn. I am not my father, but I’ve sown seeds of this world’s unmaking, rinsed my scalp and poured the water-waste into a living mouth. I strain my neck to see the next downpour, anticipating lightning like each new year of my inevitable and damage-stricken life. When my hair was clean, my sister held me to her chest to hear my breathing.

C. BELLETTINI | CROSSING THE RIVER

This morning, I woke up to the sound of Grandmother’s prayer beads flowing through her fingers, clicking her simple gold wedding band. The only piece of jewelry we didn’t sell because she put it on when she was 16, and we couldn’t remove it even after the soup became water.

There is no space in this tiny apartment that I share with her, my mother, and my brother. He tries his best to forget by spending the night with the cheap lipsticks he meets at the Club Zhavago. Nobody says anything about the cloud of perfume he leaves behind after one of his expeditions. We ignore the whole squalid spectacle like some beggar on the street we cannot afford to see.

My grandmother has put the eye on me. I walk up the stairs from the subway, I wait at the bus stop in the night, and I am safe. After the soldiers crossed the river, the gulf between childhood and the person I am now is so wide there is no bridge. But here in America, my grandmother’s eye is a powerful thing, stronger than death.

I pack cardboard boxes with plastic objects in a warehouse without windows. I work every day except Monday. At night, I learn how to be a phlebotomist. My lips move around the word: fill-bottom-must. I am not afraid of blood. I put in the best IV. The instructor even told me so: “Jelena, you are a natural. I didn’t even feel it. Nice job.” I smile. My fingers find the ping-pop of a good vein, where the needle can slide in and not blow a site when the skin is tough or the patient is dehydrated. These are the things I can do. But in the timelessness of artificial light, one more box until I am huffing and puffing running late into the classroom that will be my escape, one day

But escape is a question, like the hastily packed suitcase I left behind; I don’t really know if it exists. A white car parked by our building becomes a smoking shell, the wind whistling its tinny music through the charred interior. There are still echoes of feet running on the pavement, slamming of doors, whispers of men coming to town, tomorrow, next week, next month. When I tell my mother these things, she and my grandmother sing to me; sometimes we all cry at the lost slow sound of our voices remembering.

In the library where I go to study, on the long wooden tables carved with initials and insults, I trace over the human values of hemoglobin and hematocrit, neutrophils and monocytes with a pencil that needs sharpening. I weave into the stacks; I pull out a thin book that smells like nutmeg when I fan its pages. Sit on the floor and mouth the short lines into understanding.

In the poem, a captain on a sinking boat touches his lips with salted fingertips and imagines the softness of fresh bread, his lover’s breast. Against the spines of books, I am adrift at sea with the man in the boat. A librarian shakes me awake. She slips the book from my hands. Then she gives me a look like the ones I reserve for my brother, who is only trying to survive. We are in the same boat, trying to moor ourselves before we fill with sea.

SANDY WINKELMAN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Through the fusion of pyrography and watercolor, I celebrate the spirit of the desert animals and landscapes of the American Southwest. Each piece begins with the wood itself, where the natural grain becomes a unique foundation, reflecting the organic beauty and individuality of the land. No two canvases are ever the same, mirroring the diversity and character of the desert itself.

Inspired by the camouflage patterns of wildlife, I burn intricate designs into the wood. These patterns honor the animals’ ability to blend into their rugged environments—an essential harmony between survival and beauty. My work seeks to capture that delicate balance, where life and landscape coexist in quiet resilience.

Watercolor enhances the warmth and texture of the wood-burned images, echoing the golden sands, twilight skies, and sunlit mesas of the Southwest. This blending of fire and color brings the animals to life, inviting viewers to connect with their timeless presence and the landscapes they inhabit.

I aim to honor the region’s beauty and spirit, encouraging viewers to see the world through the lens of nature’s patterns and resilience. My art is a tribute to the desert’s power, harmony, and the creatures that call it home—an ever-present reminder of the connection between land, life, and art.

MEGAN E. M c DONALD | BLOODLINES

“Maybe she would find me more charming on account of what’s befallen me—the unexpected horror I’ve seen, the inevitable pain I’ve endured. It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colors, a richer resonance to our words.”

—The Vampire Lestat in The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice

She and her disease spotted my blood and, excited by the prospect of continuing the night’s frenzied activity, crept toward where I huddled on the floor.

From an early age up until I had acquired the wisdom of a nine-year-old, I perceived my mother as this plurality—woman and incurable condition. She appeared to me as two distinct entities: she acted as my nurturer, clothing me, feeding me, and caring for my pains. However, with the tilt of an inauspicious glass, she became the demon responsible for stripping me naked of my strength, tearing at my young flesh and systematically draining my lifeblood away. Like the vampire responsible for speaking the words I opened with, my mother was intoxicated, not by the possibilities of life coursing through intimate veins, but rather by the power offered her in a bottle of sharp, chilled, cheap vodka.

On this particular night, her existence had become especially unbearable, so her psyche demanded a larger transfusion of liquid fire than usual. But the flames spilled over from her soul into her actions and she resorted to violence to keep herself from being burned. I can see myself, the innocent child, descending the staircase into the hell of a parental battleground.

Unfortunately, I had already been exposed to my mother’s illness: more than once I cleaned the physical residue of her drunkenness from the toilet and from her body, then laid her to rest for the night.

I should have stayed safe in bed despite the explosions of glass shattering my slumber, but my father’s distorted tones roused me. I padded my way barefoot to the living room and, in my groggy state, woke fully to the source of my father’s pain. More than the steak knife she held to his throat, it was her taunting that hurt him. She, despite threatening his life, scraping his skin with a serrated edge and causing a rash of tiny scarlet dots to stain the pale of his neck, was daring him to seize the knife from her like a man and slit her throat.

My whimper distracted them from this peculiar suicide attempt. I expected my father to rise and remedy the situation quickly. But he remained seated, forcing me to decide abruptly that if he wasn’t going to prevent his own death, thus deserting me and my younger brother, I was going to sacrifice myself, too.

The glittering shards of glass littering the floor rescued me—they tripped me and drew me close to the carpet, lodging in my tender toes. At the sight of blood flowing, my mother let the knife fall and brought her maternal instincts to bear upon my prone form. Although I recoiled from her touch, she persisted in trying to alleviate the pain she’d caused. She grasped my foot, tore the glass from my wounds, then laid her lips to my skin and sucked with all her might. The alcohol on her breath stung mightily, and I fell into a welcome state of unconsciousness.

I came to tucked into my twin bed with the antique white and gold leaf headboard, swaddled in pink gingham sheets, just as the first rosy fingers of dawn reached into the room. The night was over.

My mother eventually received professional help, but this was at a time when counseling for collateral victims—the family of the alcoholic—wasn’t indicated. I might have become a very different person due to this lack of support had I let my recollections consume me. In fact, I often wonder if they occurred exactly as I remember them, or if my impressionable young mind misinterpreted or exaggerated the scenarios. If I attempt to confirm or confront the circumstances, I am hushed and shushed, told, “We don’t talk about those things…” But all doubt is banished by my mother’s occasional threat that she will return to drinking. Though these warnings are infrequent and subtle, they are enough to trigger a deep, choking fear.

I cannot help but sometimes reflect on this “gift” I have been given: I may speak with a resonance the Vampire Lestat claims exists only in those who have endured glorious amounts of suffering. Despite my apparent acceptance of the memories, though, I could never recommend my experience to any other human being. For when interacting closely with an alcoholic, as when flirting with a vampire, one perpetually risks becoming what one is struggling against.

j.h. gho | how do scars form?

the 박수무당 said it was very likely my mother had family separated at the 38th parallel i thought of a sepia-tinged photo you once showed me, a gaggle of tan children –you pointed yourself out to me, bowl cut heavy on your head the 박수무당 said when i felt grief depressing on me it was a visit from my 외할머니, who was already gone when my mother was younger than i am today the 박수무당 said my mother bears a lineage of lives cut short, so that is my lineage too the 박수무당 said my work now is to return to my body

depressed tongue saying “ahhhhh” in the doctor’s office depressed cushion, sticky thighs crinkling medical paper “do you have a history of depression?” indigo-inked marker depressing dotted and solid lines into my chest “this is where we’ll separate tissue from muscle this is where we’ll remove your nipples this is where we’ll reattach flesh to flesh this is where the incisions will end” when i put a hand on my chest, i feel a cavity depressed where it once hung heavy i know the scars will end with my body

translations:

박수무당 / bahksu mudang / a male mudang (korean shaman) / the one i mention is trans 외할머니 / weh halmuhnee / grandmother on mother’s side / my mother’s mother

JENNIFER SAUNDERS | SETTLING THE ESTATE

after Gabrielle Calvocoressi

At first there were vestiges of her: tuna-tins in the trash can and coffee cups in the sink. Newspapers stacked unread.

The air stale and close. Then cleaners moved through the house, professional and efficient,

they scrubbed the bathroom tiles with Lysol and threw open the windows to June’s late breezes.

They emptied the refrigerator of olives and cheeses, of store-brand sliced turkey. That useless box of Arm & Hammer.

We bagged clothes for Goodwill or consignment, threw away her blown-out winter gloves.

Afterwards, after the estate sale and the strangers sliding through the house picking up stemware on the cheap, then—

then she was nowhere: that house empty as a pocket, its windows uncurtained to the street, to the neighbors,

to the mailman who kept on delivering her mail. That stuttering delay. Weeks after we’d divided and scattered

her ashes came the electricity bill, the water. She must have watched some TV, maybe she’d run a cool bath.

Her small debts lingering in the system until my brother cut a check.

BEN BRUGES | THE EXHIBIT

I'd seen newborns suck in the world and howl for the amphibian dark they've lost in birth's son et lumière

and can imagine the terror of transition: the murmuring voices suddenly shock-clear, the feeble, tenuous, shifting, partial hold in the new rhythms of this breathing medium and the feel of skin, wind on skin, the cold dry touch of skin. And yet, new parent, I wasn't prepared.

After the endless dim-lighted calm a sudden rush of green-robed medics sweep our nurse aside, intent in their silent urgency,

bristling with equipment, working as one. Given no explanation, those last moments push at eternity. Her efforts are given up on.

Left out, she becomes the site of their heroism. A last glorious rush, he's delivered, but whisked away. We're left alone, a moment that might be forever.

I pour empty reassurances into her haze. But I have to know and fear to know what's so urgent in that other lit room

and force a glimpse through the doorway at the huddle, like some dramatic tableau, surrounding, held up, gaze-fixed, there:

the exhibit, blue-hued, soundless but struggling, limbs working, face closed tight, straining, and then the first yell. He's alive, weighed, saved.

Why so resistant to birth? What held him back? After-shocks judder his tiny frame: stomach-tight moments lit equally by delight and dread.

DANIEL JOSEPH COMBS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

In April 2024, my partner, Shelli Rottschafer, and I attended the annual Gathering of Nations Powwow in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was my first time attending the Powwow. I was hoping to capture some images of the incredible regalia and the movement of the dancers. We watched from the stands as the Grand Entry took place, and around 2,000 dancers entered the arena to the rhythm of the accompanying drummers. Every inch of the arena floor was filled with dancers from tribes from around the nation and the globe. It was without a doubt one of the most moving experiences of my life.

After the Grand Entry, we made our way down to the floor level, where we found ourselves sitting next to the entrance the dancers were using to enter the arena. I sat on the floor next to other photographers and began to shoot away as the youth dancers entered to begin their portion of the Powwow. This photo captured a moment when two young girls shared a word before entering the arena. Whether they were sisters, cousins, or friends, they were certainly “Relatives” in that moment. I feel honored to have witnessed and captured this shared exchange.

DANIEL JOSEPH COMBS

JENNIFER MARKELL | WHAT A GHOST CAN DO

In the parking lot of an abandoned theater, weed-choked and starved for light, my mother’s ghost hides. I see her face in wilted leaves and acorn caps, hear her voice in a branch as it snaps, and in the silence after.

My mother’s ghost eavesdrops on my intimate conversations, waits at the crossroads of my major decisions, says I know you better than you know yourself. She looks through me, translucent as moon jelly. I turn myself inside out so my soul can escape.

She carries a photo of the two of us: mother and young daughter sitting on the hood of a Chevy in matching T-shirts, holding hands. This is love, she pronounces. When I point to the daughter’s fingernails chewed raw, she floats away.

The daughters of ghost mothers like me walk quietly. Our feet above the ground, never touching. Our lifeblood an ancient oath, do no harm. We offer the purity of our silence. Anger seizes us like a bad engine.

The week before my mother dies, she reveals the epitaph for her stone— Beloved Wife and Mother I poke at grief with a stick, drop it in a well to see how deep.

DEBORAH FLEMING | ANGEL TRAIL

Anne Grafton galloped to the edge of the grass in the park where she and her older sister Leah and friend Marcia were reenacting the latest episode from The Adventures of Spin and Marty. Marcia insisted on playing Spin, Leah played the role of Marty, and Anne was a wild horse they were trying to catch. From an opening in the brush, barely visible, the path called Angel Trail descended the steep hillside until it disappeared among the trees. All the kids knew how to make their voices echo by shouting into that valley. Marcia had once claimed that the echo was someone trapped in the woods calling back for help, but when Anne repeated the story, her mother told her it was a fable.

“Don’t go down that trail,” Marcia cautioned, peering through glasses that were thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle and made her eyes look bigger than they really were. “Hobos live in the woods.”

Anne was seven, her sister eight, and Marcia nine, so naturally Marcia was the one who decided where they went and what game they played. Her age as well as the fact that she rode a bus to the Catholic school while Anne and Leah walked to their school gave her added status. Her fair hair was a mass of curls created in a styling salon, while their mother cut Leah’s and Anne’s hair. Marcia also had every toy as soon as it was advertised on television, and she always made a special trip to their house to show them. Her playroom was filled with toys, more than twice what Anne and Leah had together. Whenever they asked to go to Marcia’s to play, their mother always told them to come back together, but they seldom did.

“What’ll the hobos do?” Anne asked.

“They’ll kidnap you,” Leah explained. She was usually less assertive when Marcia was around. “They’ll take you to the railroad yard where they camp out until the trains come. Then they jump onto the cars and make their getaway.” Anne wasn’t sure whether to believe Leah because her sister sometimes told fibs, which weren’t as bad as lies. Anne was not sure of the difference between the two, or between a fib and a fable, especially since they were all stories.

Anne and Leah knew what it was to ride the train because their father, who worked for the railroad, got two free tickets every year. Anne had been fascinated by the enormous size of the locomotive engine, the way the platform trembled when it pulled into the station, and the shiny steel tracks on the bed of black cinders. Once, when the teacher told everyone to explain what their fathers did for a living, Anne had been embarrassed because everyone else’s

father worked in one of the steel mills across the river from Lafayette, Ohio; they were rollers, machinists, or foremen, and when Anne had to say that her father was a block operator for the railroad, the kids turned their heads and wrinkled their noses at her. Marcia’s father didn’t work in the mill, either, but he traveled to many places selling things and brought her presents from every city he visited. Neither Anne nor Leah had ever seen him.

“You can go down there when you’re older,” Marcia corrected Leah. She always contradicted anyone who volunteered information before she did or seemed to know something she did not. “A girl from our school walked all the way down, but she was in high school. She said the path goes to the river. Hobos don’t bother kids that old. They’ll only take younger ones. That’s why it’s called Angel Trail—because a little girl named Angel went down there once and they never found her again.”

Anne and Leah had often seen the river with its twin bridges, the black one the trains used and the silver-gray one for cars crossing over to the West Virginia side. The tires always sounded different when they drove on the bridge made of steel girders with wide gaps between them, so you could see the river beneath. The mills looked like little cities all lit up, with high, round towers the kids named “cloud makers” because they spewed out white smoke. There was something mysterious about the wide gray river winding among the wooded hills and flat barges pushed by tugboats. People warned children not to walk on the steep banks because every so often, someone fell in and drowned in the fast current. Even from as far away as the road, Anne had seen waves curling on the surface. Nobody wanted to live down there because the poorest people lived closest to the river while richer ones lived on the hilltops.

Anne cautiously peered into the dark woods as far as she could.

“Mommy’ll be mad if you get your shoes muddy,” her sister admonished. Yes, their mother would be mad if she ruined her shoes, but Anne and Leah were used to their mother’s temper.

“I’ll go and take a look,” Marcia said with the pride of the eldest.

“Aren’t you afraid?” Anne asked.

“Hobos probably wouldn’t want kids as old as Leah and me,” Marcia answered. “But they’d take you, so you better be careful and stick with us.” She started toward the head of the path.

Then she tur ned. “Look there,” she said, pointing toward the ground. “A red cloth.”

Anne stared where the older girl pointed. The trail bent around a large rock halfcovered by underbrush where a dirty red rag lay among pine needles, rotting leaves, and fallen twigs.

“A hobo bundle!” Marcia yelled as she took off across the grass toward the street. Leah followed, shouting and running as fast as she could.

The combination of two girls screaming overcame Anne’s curiosity. She started after them calling “Wait! Wait!” as the thrill of fear rose from her heart along the back of her throat to the top of her head. She could barely control her own legs.

“Wait! Wait!” Marcia turned and mimicked her; Leah followed suit.

“When we get home, I’ll tell Mommy on you,” Anne shouted when she reached them. “I’ll tell her you ran away from me.” Her lungs ached as she tried to catch her breath.

“Go ahead and tell,” Leah taunted, hands on her hips, wagging her head back and forth and sticking her tongue out.

“Let’s play without her,” Marcia said, and she and Leah strode away from the field toward the street.

“You wait!” Anne cried, angrily pursuing them, but they started running away from her. Tears filled Anne’s eyes and closed her throat as she tripped over a jagged edge of broken concrete and fell onto the gritty pavement. Sitting on the ground, she examined her scraped and bloody knees below the plaid shorts she had worn that day—a birthday present. Although the skin stung, she brushed the dirt off and looked up to see Marcia and Leah far in the distance. They had stopped running and were talking to each other as they walked, not bothering to glance back to see if she was all right.

Full of rage, Anne tur ned and headed back toward the park. She had followed Leah and Marcia here enough times that she could find her way home without them. At first determined to tell on her sister, Anne realized as she paced off the distance that her mother would probably scold her instead and tell her she couldn’t play in the park anymore. She would just have to say she had tripped when she was running. Leah wouldn’t be able to make fun of her without confessing that she and Marcia had run away from Anne.

When she reached the park, Anne crossed the grass, stepped warily toward the hillside, and peered down the slope into the woods. Early in the morning, dense fog shrouded

the hills until only the first row of ghostly trees was visible, reminding her of a story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” that her teacher had read to the class last year at Halloween. Anne wondered whether Marcia had told the truth about older kids being able to explore without being kidnapped by hobos, and whether she really knew a girl who had walked all the way down to the river. Marcia often changed her tales about people and places in the neighborhood, and yet somehow she was never called a liar as Anne was whenever she added details to make a story more interesting.

Caught in thor ny vines at the edge of the slope, the wet rag lay sodden and dirty. It looked less like a hobo bundle than the kind of large handkerchief that cowboys wore around their necks in movies or TV shows. Someone must have lost it when he walked down into the woods.

Anne strode back up from the trail. Furious with Marcia for telling a lie, at the same time Anne felt disappointed that the red cloth had not been a hobo bundle; she liked the idea that hobos lived in the woods and rode trains wherever they wanted to go. She would ask her father whether hobos really lived in the railroad yards. One day, she’d follow that trail all the way down to the river without her sister or anyone else. In the meantime, she galloped up and down the grass, tossing her head, a wild horse nobody could catch.

LUKE JOHNSON | CHIMERA

Tonight, rain drapes the blue acacia

& the streetlights shimmer, shroud the cars in shadows. My sick, who calls herself daughter, points at how the blossoms curl to cocoons then commit themselves to air. She wants to know where the scavengers take them, & why at night when her name emerges, they come so close

she could reach a hand, stroke their knotted pelt.

Pretend she says, this is all a dream,

& when we wake we are bodiless voices, vapors

framed in mist. We watch I Love Lucy.

Take turns singing Frank Sinatra, then sit by the window waiting for fawns, the little ones lost from their mothers.

As a boy, my father wiped dust from a rifle then slowly framed a five point & blew until the birds burst & the beast lay

still in the reeds. In the reeds, a womb revealed a doe unborn, & my father, lost, spared me the sight, before slipping

Long before this, when my mom was small & her father had not died from cancer, she was wrestled from dream by invisible force & found, when waking,

it into the stream. I confess, when the beast fell & baby sank, I could hear a hum erupt from water then sweep across the fields. It fell like snow

over flowerless trees & loomed, large,

like an angelic chill, stalking the news of the living.

a wounded robin, flapping against the floor.

She bathed the bird & fed it.

Gave it drops of water, a bed, & set it near a lamp to warm its wing.

In the morning, yes, the bird was gone,

but for a single feather, & my mom

began to weep for hours, afraid

of what she’d done. That Fall her father died & the birds no longer shared the news nor squabbled the streets for seed. It was as if everything stopped, she tells me. No more music son, no mystery.

Tonight, rain drapes the blue acacia & sores surface my daughter’s skin, radiate into her stomach. I sprinkle lavender, water, stutter over a prayer. Place my palm upon her body & beg the beast to transfer pain & seed its gales inside me.

CLARISSA CERVANTES | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work explores the significance of the word lineage as defined by Merriam-Webster: “a group of individuals tracing decent from a common ancestor […] especially such a group of persons whose common ancestor is regarded as its founder.” The origin of the Flamenco Art can be traced to Andalusia and other parts of Spain as early as the 15th Century. Traditional Flamenco performances involve music, poetry, singing, and dancing. Flamenco female dancers typically wear elaborate ruffle dresses, some with polka dots, while others might choose stripes with bright and vibrant colors as well as the typical flamenco shoes, where nails are embedded front and back to enhance the sound. My black and white photography composition was taken during a Flamenco performance as an invitation to add your own colors and sounds into the picture while dancers gather before the last song.

CLARISSA CERVANTES | LINEAGE

CHERYL MARITA | BECOMING HUMAN

I’d never told anyone. It was a secret, even though everyone could see it. I was part lizard. That day in second grade, in the Epiphany Grade School girls’ play yard, the secret was revealed. Terror rose up my back, crawled under my skin.

The schoolyard didn’t have any place to sit. Recess meant jump rope for coordinated kids, not someone like me. There was a huge oak tree growing in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by concrete. Judy and I sat with our backs to the tree, pulling our skirts under our legs for protection from the prickly twigs on the cold ground. We wore pants at home, but the nuns said pants were “evil.” I thought the Dominican nuns were evil. I snuck my new Silly Putty into school in my sweater pocket. We pulled it, popped it, made imprints of sticks and rocks. Judy told me secrets about her family, like the time her mother squished her between the rollers on their washing machine and then had to blow her up like a balloon. Gullible, I asked, “Did your bones crunch?” That day, I thought she would tell me more secrets. Instead, she asked, “If you’re adopted, where did you come from?”

I’d known I was adopted long before grade school. My mother was a proud rescuer of unwanted children and bragged about saving me and my brother. We had to go to St. Vincent’s Orphanage every year to be exhibited before Sister Mary Alice. Mom wanted to show off how well we were being cared for. If only Sister Mary Alice knew. As for Judy’s question that fateful day, the answer slithered out of my mouth, “I was hatched from an egg. I’m part lizard.”

And so it began. Soon, the whole second grade knew I was an alien, like the one in Twilight Zone. He was a grown-up, hidden in the back room of his mother’s house. He had lizard arms, legs, and scaly skin but a human-sized body. I had the signs—my skin was cracked, crusty, bloody. My parents wrapped me in gauze and took me to special doctors to get help, but nothing worked. I was defective, a lizard girl. Twilight Zone was as real to me as the news. Curiosity and questions were not tolerated in my household, so my birth mythology festered.

Waiting at the stoplight on the way home from school in sixth grade, I tried to become invisible, but the boy next to me saw the latest changes in my skin. “Yuck, your neck is black! You’re dirty! Get away from me!” He ran off while I dragged myself home. I assumed that

the lizard in me was taking over, but I was too scared to say anything to my parents. Mom threatened that if I didn’t behave, she would take me back to the orphanage. Being part lizard would certainly qualify for a reason to return me. But my mother decided to help, and started bleaching my neck every week. We let my hair grow longer to hide the nasty change, but we never talked about what was happening.

As I grew up, my scaly skin got worse. My wrists would leak yellow sticky fluid and blood onto my school worksheets. The creases in my elbows were thick with old blood and scales. The calves of my legs dripped blood onto the cuffs of my white socks. I was a mess before I even arrived at school. The nuns marked my work down because it was messy. After school, I ran eight blocks home to hide.

Somehow, my parents learned about a doctor on Chicago’s south side, a dermatologist who worked with children. We lived in Little Village, the Bohemian settlement on the west side of Chicago. Our stores sold Bohemian food. We spoke Bohemian. We were not allowed to even look at public school kids. We were white, Catholic, Bohemian, and proud— so proud we hated everyone else, or so I was taught. How my parents ended up driving me across the city every week to a Black doctor for Vitamin A shots is still a mystery. Mom didn’t call him Black. She only used the “N” word. She truly hated everyone who didn’t look like her.

The shots hurt a lot. I cried a lot. I wondered if she was punishing me for being defective, for being part lizard. Did she hate me as much as she hated everyone else? Finally, after a year of weekly shots, the torture ended. It never worked, never changed the bleeding, the oozing, or the scales.

High schoolers didn’t care about how I looked since they didn’t see me. I blended into the newspaper office, the Militaires Marching Rifle Squad, the Future Nurses’ Club. Long sleeves and coats covered my skin. My weekly newspaper column, Beatlemania, got rave reviews, although no one knew the quiet, cloaked girl was the author. I wore a beige trench coat yearround. Sometimes I pictured my black lizard tongue around the necks of football jocks when they heckled girls with insults, but most of the time I just hid inside the beige tent of a coat.

Nursing school was harder, as some patients refused to let me care for them if my arms were cracked and draining. Our uniforms were short sleeved, the nuns refusing any exceptions

for my skin condition. My classmates accepted my disease and my brain. I was smart, secretary for the class of ’67, but clumsy. I managed to trip, dousing my very prim Southern belle teacher with a liter of patient urine. Between that incident, my inept bed-making of poorly mitered corners, and the times I refused to give up my seat to a doctor, Sister Superior called me into her office to tell me I had to leave school a month before graduation. My lizard self rose up, clawing the air. I graduated, top of the class, carrying red roses. A poem I wrote was part of the graduation program.

Years later, I would learn the truth. I had a rare skin condition. I was human, and my skin healed itself when I turned forty, which was typical for the disease. All those years of feeling defective, yet almost enjoying the lizard in me. I wanted something to connect to, some bloodline to my past. I wasn’t hatched, but who, or what, was I?

I learned biology and genetics in nursing school, and later, with the births of two healthy human children, I knew my lizard fantasy was only a coping tool for the layers of rejection that adopted children normally feel.

Ancestry.com offered magic to someone like me, someone who would rub an Aladdin’s lamp believing a genie would appear. I told my kids, “Finally, with Ancestry, I’ll find my birth parents. I’m signing up today!” It was 2012. I was one of the first people to submit a DNA sample. Not much happened. The DNA did confirm information St. Vincent’s hospital had sent me back in 1996 in a “non-identifying information” letter, information about my sweet birth mother and my unknown Greek birth father. A few years later, I dropped my membership after some futile attempts to contact eighth and ninth twice-removed cousins. I told my friends, “It’s not worth it. I’ll never find anyone.”

But I never stopped wondering. Years later, I resumed my quest to find out something, anything, about my birth parents. I decided to protest the Illinois closed adoption rules. In 2018, I planned to fly to Chicago, pound on the desk at the Bureau of Vital Statistics Office, and demand a copy of my original birth certificate. My son calmly said over the phone, “Why don’t you call instead?”

I wonder if he’d looked up the Illinois adoption laws while we’d talked. (He’s such a kind, wise man.) If he had, he would have seen that Illinois changed closed adoption laws in

2011, and with a completed one-page form and $15, I could have a copy of my original birth certificate.

Two weeks later, I tore open an envelope stamped “Illinois Adoption Registry.” I plopped down into the chair my grandfather had died in decades earlier. I need your support. What if there aren’t any names on my birth certificate? What if no one wanted to admit that I had a human birth? What if…

I couldn’t unfold the paper. I couldn’t look. I’d been a lizard my whole childhood, then a bastard baby throughout my teens. When I became a nurse, I felt connected to women before me, even Florence Nightingale. When I refused to give my seat to a doctor, I asked Florence to stand by me. She was a rebel who changed the world. I wouldn’t change the world, but she changed me.

As I sat there with the folded birth certificate, I looked at my wrists. At 72, I was older, wiser. Even my tissue-paper skin was more supple than in second grade. When I became a mother, I truly didn’t know how to be one. I just knew to do everything opposite to what Evelyn, my adopted mother, had done. I loved being a mother. I taught my children to take risks. I need to do the same.

I opened my birth certificate. I had a birth mother: Freda Greb. I had a name: Marita Clara Greb. I didn’t have a father: unknown. Someone witnessed my birth, was with Freda when I was born. Someone put one percent silver nitrate in my eyes and recorded it on paper.

Human eyes, a human body.

ELIZABETH GALOOZIS | they made us

they taught us how to swim. bright, squeaky wings buoying us until we could push the wall away. nothing elegant. no strokes that would win us medals or even save our lives. but we could cannonball into the complex pool and make it to the other side.

we’d pull each other’s hair sometimes, then. shove each other just to get our own space. acting our ages.

and them. only twenty years on us, acting their ages, slamming doors and calling names we hadn’t learned yet.

// sometimes they dressed us in the same dresses, one red, one blue. sat us shoulder to shoulder in the portrait studio,

already facing divergent directions. when we moved on from shoving to words, they made us write nice things about each other. we’d ask each other for ideas. you’re nice, you’re pretty, what else. they seemed to do the opposite themselves.

// here we are now. an archipelago instead of a tree. whether it’s swimming distance, I can’t say. the gaps shrink and grow with the tides. they made us without knowing how to make us know. our knowing is what we made ourselves. a system of signals. a rope bridge crafted in the dark. you are the only one who swims the way I do.

NOLAN WINKLER | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“A bird does not sing because it has something to say. It sings because it has a song.”

—Chinese Proverb

I paint with emotions moving the brush and my favored music playing loudly in my studio. I paint not to give advice, but to garner questions while giving no answers. It is for you, the viewer, to react in a manner that suits your senses.

I paint because it is what I do. I paint because I love the act of not knowing what I am going to paint but letting the paint and the music move me. An accident will happen sooner or later, and since I have been painting for so long, I recognize that and go with whatever that accident has to offer. My work is inspired by the paint, the music, and often by poetry and lyrics.

NOLAN WINKLER | ALLOW ME ONE MORE CHANCE

MARY ROBLES | DRESSING FROM MEMORY

My father taught me how to drink Tecate and how to drink myself to death. As a little girl, I knew the comingled scent of lime & salt & beer on his laugh, his laughing breath. Once, he told me that Tecate meant to put it on, like a shimmering of feathers, like the black eagle in the hero stance, bearing its wide chest across the label. Early on, I learned the taste, and the way to suck the foam and in my spinning mind I felt him close, death / my father / bitter, salt-with-soured-lime. The eagle emblem in his hand flowing tender ness & dread, and the name Tecate,

meant my father’s tongue gone sharp with salt & tang as he flew upward without memory. Then as if we had dreamt him up, as if descended from the golden hazes, Death found my father sitting alone in his bed. Death tore a piece of red ribbon from his shirt and gave it to my father to wear as a tie. So my father put it on (like he was told, Tecate.) Ever since that day, my father wore the ribbon as a lock of woman’s hair, wrapped long around his neck. He couldn’t live in the world anymore, he tur ned his back away and sucked the last faint taste of alcohol

from the tangled scrap of the agave’s skirt. Then he fell bur ning into the earth, then he learned to drink the dirt. Pobrecito, I drank to him. T inge of lime saliva, you could call this kind of love a tor ment.

Death stayed with me a long time and went among my family like a dream, bringing a little song of smoke. Bringing an angry woman’s tender ness he wended numbly into rooms. He went into the house, he went writhing in the bed sheets. He undid all the clothing, stripped the fingers ring-by-ring. He pulled feathers from the riverbed and my grandmother tore within his hand.

She would have bur ned but Death was soft with her, and simply tore away her sleep in bed like petals, in the canyon, where my grandfather erupted in his tears. All of this was just a song, Death said and it was up to me to numb my head, and taste the salt, push the limes into the beers, forget. Death offered a gown of so many ribbons to me, held it in his fingers. He said I’d only hurt so long, and he said Tecate, put it on, put it on.

I still dream in drunken rivers where my father sucks the stones, my sleep is black with eagle feathers, I still dream in drunken rivers.

ERIN AVERILL | HOWL

Adjusting the scope on his rifle, he located the outline of the decomposing angus carcass a couple hundred yards away. The moon waxed bright over the open stretch of grama grasses encircled by a dense conglomerate of scrub oak and piñon. Third time he had to re-pitch his tent this week. Wind patterns kept shifting. Needed to be downwind of the original kill site.

He was just doing his job. It was an order from headquarters. But after a string of 16hour shifts, alone in the remote pockets of the Gila Wilderness, questions were starting to surface.

This was Mike’s dream job since he could remember. Grew up on a ranch in southeast Arizona, an hour past the New Mexico state line, just southwest of the Gila and Apache National Forests. As soon as he was old enough to (legally) drive, every weekend was spent under the looming gaze of the evergreens. He was always more interested in looking out for the raptors, reptiles, and pronghorns than running cattle with his dad and brother.

When he was younger, he often wondered what things were like when there were still wolves in the forest. Extirpated before he was born. Ranchers and feds teamed up to eradicate all the Mexican wolves north of the U.S.-Mexico border in the seventies. He understood why the ranchers didn’t like them. It was simple—they killed cattle. In the earlier days, when his grandfather’s grandfathers were running things, food was more scarce and children more numerous. A dead cow could mean empty plates which could mean a dead kid. And now, margins on ranching were thin. It was why some fudged their herd numbers and sent them off to feedlots young. Commercial beef makes more money if you fatten up steers and heifers on corn and undisclosed hormones instead of grass alone.

In the game of man versus wild, man won fair and square. They had spent decades, a couple centuries even, toiling to master this dominion. Never mind the Natives who cohabitated this terrain with other apex predators for thousands of years prior. Removing the wolves was a sign of success. Civilized behavior. Peak human evolution. Less wolves also meant more deer and elk to hunt. A win-win. But then environmentalists started making noise, and the battle to reintroduce them grew fierce.

Captive-breeding campaigns were underway when Mike entered high school. He thought about studying wildlife biology, but college was expensive, so he went straight to working a long string of seasonal jobs at different agencies throughout the Southwest. Even

spent a couple seasons doing trail maintenance in the Grand Canyon. But his heart never stopped pining for the Gila.

Those roles were almost as rare as the Mexican wolves. He bided his time, building up his resume, bouncing through a few state park ranger positions in Utah and Arizona. Then one day, that dream job finally opened up, after nearly two decades of patience and determination. He packed the few belongings he had and made his way to New Mexico.

Cracks in the sheen of his fantasy soon emerged. Too-loud whispers of backdoor deals with ranchers to thwart proposed conservation easements. Protocol was to look the other way when the terms of existing ones weren’t adhered to, with landowners still pocketing the extra cash, making sure to kickback a little to the feds who didn’t give a damn if all the creatures in the forest lived or died. Intimidation of environmentalists was common. Entertainment. A few warning shots fired here and there never hurt anyone. Any related reports or complaints swept under the rug.

Mike developed a reputation for being a rule follower, for not wanting to get involved in these kinds of negotiations. His more jaded coworkers could smell his green as soon as his truck approached the parking lot.

One day, he was called into a meeting with his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss at the USDA. A wolfpack killed some cows on a high-priority grazing allotment. Needed to be taken care of.

“Consider this an initiation,” boss man said.

So here he was, camping out in the Gila, just like he had done hundreds of times as a teenager. Except this time, the scope on his hunting rifle wasn’t searching for deer, but for wolves. He had heard some howls over the past week. After each initial chorus, they only seemed to move further away. Always was tempted to follow, but he knew it was better to exercise patience and stay put.

The night sky was shifting from indigo to azure. Dawn was approaching. In a few hours, the sun would peek out over the trees. If he didn’t find them before ten, he would give himself a day to recharge before coming back out. At least he was getting overtime for this. How does one hunt the forest’s greatest predator? As this question floated his consciousness, a doe darted through the clearing in front of him.

When he heard it, a chill like none before sprinted up his spine. First a shrill bark, then a prolonged, aching howl. Couldn’t be more than a mile away. The exhaustion Mike accumulated over the past week evaporated. He was alert. Heart punching into his ribcage.

Quietly, he pointed the barrel of the rifle towards the meadow. Within a few minutes, he heard distant footsteps fast approaching. The lurking crunch of dried pine needles carpeting the earth was hardly perceptible to the human ear. He cocked the firing pin into place. Peering through the scope, he put his finger on the trigger and took a deep breath.

NOLAN WINKLER | THE BLOOD

Good Luck

Xie xie! （谢谢）

Good Luck

EMILY ZHANG | GOOD LUCK

Good Luck

Xie xie! （谢谢）

Xie xie!

Xie xie! （谢谢）

we say as children when we receive hong bao (红包 ) during the New Year, money in red envelopes adorned with Chinese characters glimmering gold in the light each time we change the angle.

we say as children when we receive hong bao during the New Year, money in red envelopes adorned with Chinese characters glimmering gold in the light each time we change the angle.

we say as children when we receive hong bao (红包 ) during the New Year, money in red envelopes adorned with Chinese characters glimmering gold in the light each time we change the angle.

wear red on important days; good luck will prevail. Red is lucky, you tell me.

The color of fortune, luck, and prosperity, glimmering against the Eiffel Tower, lighting up dozens of casinos sprinkled across Macau.

wear red on important days; good luck will prevail. Red is lucky, you tell me. The color of fortune, luck, and prosperity, glimmering against the Eiffel Tower, lighting up dozens of casinos sprinkled across Macau. In preparation for Chinese New Year, mandarin oranges beckon in their dining table nest: Don’t eat these! They’ll bring you good luck! every time I reach unknowingly for one. Instead you offer da bai tu (大白兔 ), milk candy, smooth to the touch. It’s a special day! Melting slowly in my mouth, the hard candy’s rice paper flakes off, bit by bit, until milk fills my mouth.

The color of fortune, luck, and prosperity, glimmering against the Eiffel Tower, lighting up dozens of casinos sprinkled across Macau. In preparation for Chinese New Year, mandarin

In preparation for Chinese New Year, mandarin

oranges beckon in their dining table nest: Don’t eat these! They’ll bring you good luck! every time I reach unknowingly for one. Instead you offer da bai tu (大白兔 ), milk candy, smooth to the touch. It’s a special day! Melting slowly in my mouth, the hard candy’s rice paper

Once guests leave, you take my hong bao and keep it safe, saved for the future, soon to be used for classes, clothes, trinkets, toys— you bought me a red hoodie imprinted with bok choy, jiao zi (饺子 ), with mandarin oranges, to wear on special occasions. Always wear red on important days; good luck will prevail. Red is lucky, you tell me. The color of fortune, luck, and prosperity, glimmering against the Eiffel Tower, lighting up dozens of casinos sprinkled across Macau. In preparation for Chinese New Year, mandarin

oranges beckon in their dining table nest: Don’t eat these! They’ll bring you good luck! every time I reach unknowingly for one. Instead you offer da bai tu , milk candy, smooth to the touch. It’s a special day! Melting slowly in my mouth, the hard candy’s rice paper flakes off, bit by bit, until milk fills my mouth.

flakes off, bit by bit, until milk fills my mouth.

DÉSIRÉE JUNG | ON THE RIGHTS OF

BEING MAD

If this is an unspoken residue of something unarticulated during my birth, time will tell. From this moment on, the only thing I can do is speculate from the intuited inscriptions etched by the words that write me: an I who unknows herself as mad for an entire life until making it into her cure, and an irreparable love, suddenly creating an unthinkable destiny, once crazy. By recognizing myself as mad, I open the doors to the resignification and reappropriation of my own body. On the rights of being mad is a gesture of renovation to redirect an ancestral order: obey and fulfill an outside judge (not by chance, the name of my city of birth, also called Juiz de Fora in Portuguese).

The rigour of this jurisprudence over my small being is at its maximum efficiency in most of my lifetime, or even before it, I should say. A desire of submission and rebelliousness incarnated in one single knot tying all my law books together while, intimately, urging me to reinvent ways of survival, never of living, for such was not an option, it being improper, dirty.

Ever since I was a little girl, I had the habit of calling this outside judge my foreman, cruel father, extreme law, superego, enforcer of excessive enjoyment, at last, an interiorized exacerbated control forbidding me to desire outside its law (once I had no clue of my own).

But what does it mean to desire outside the law? Is it to be madly passionate, or to be unconscious of one’s own enjoyment? Which madness are we talking about? Incest? Or the transgression and reestablishment of a limit whereby excessive enjoyment opens space for pleasure and love in their purest and unthinkable expressions? This arc, this art of being sexuated and inhabiting a body, appears easy but is impossible in its complete articulation. Sexuality, if acted upon, is an occurrence that brings with it the measure of its own improvisation, which often rhymes with the unmanageable.

Before this conundrum, there is always the risk of facing an unconsciousness deriving from ancestral times, the malign retour of an unceasing repetition demanding more and more in an excessive cruel reset, desirous of an insane sameness. Why is it important to talk about this? There is coherence in my incoherence. I want to state that by understanding my rights of being mad as a choice and not as repetition or destiny, such sentence is set free. And what is madness for me? Irrationality is unknowing how to articulate every single thing by the laws of the mind which judges the body by its reasonable circumstances only, coding without negotiation and excessively enabling its negations.

It goes like this: if you do this, you will win a moment’s respite. How? By placing and replacing one same object in the same position a thousand times over, by thinking excessively about death, by cultivating an altar for the deadly destructive drives, ad infinitum. In this madness, time is jerked off, and I remain unable to feel bliss or delight. My life is sentenced into a body whose locus of enjoyment is obedience and submission before an oppressor who acts as if it knows how to do it right—and yet, closed to the possibilities of love, the opened doors (and legs) of the heart’s reasons.

While fulfilling this judgement imposed by myself, I also struggled to elaborate such martyrdom. The psychoanalytical work I chose to bet was uncertain (like any other bet) and desirous to articulate my letting go of the judge’s hand (the same one that held me, and also my damn origin), hoping to rebirth (or remember) an internal law, which, suddenly and to my unexpected surprise, resurfaces when my life is at risk. Before a cancer diagnosis on the base of my tongue (yes, my tongue), I undergo two surgeries, one urgent, to remove a tumour there-lodged. Such intervention is done by a robot maneuvered by the hands of a surgeon who operates the machine. It is this strange metal being that penetrates my mouth and slits my tongue, cutting the organ in its real materiality, separating its deadly becoming from what announces life.

It is only months later, when receiving the pathology results, that I will hear: the reports indicate that the tongue showed a negative, or, in medical terms, more flesh was extracted than it was needed. Or, said in my own terms, the extricated rest of this tongue represented the unspoken words the once upon a time baby couldn’t vocalize or reach. But I am moving too fast here. I first need to explain that the second intervention I underwent was caused by an unexpected bleeding during the night while I was still hospitalized, and that filled my mouth, and my body, with an excess of blood, an absurd quantity of origin.

It was at that instant, I can assert, that I understood for the first time the primary sense of the law: a deter mination that requests the separation of bodies so that they can live conscious and aware of life and death’s limits and cycles despite the illusion of filiation and eternal repetition, many times unconscious in parents, but often manifested in their descendants, successively. Then and there, I also understood it was time to let go of the judge outside my body and listen to the interior voice inhabiting me, which so much desired but exceeded in blood, in lineage, and yet, still, in a magistral manner (as one of the doctors on

call would later say), was capable of swallowing (unconsciously, under the effect of a general anesthesia) the clot over my vocal cords, and, like so, sacrifice the blood, the origin, and liberate the breathing, easing the tessiture of the cut.

I also have lear ned that only a small percentage of the cases (20%) in this kind of operation can cause unexpected bleedings, especially due to the quantity of nerves located in the region where the tumour was removed—not to mention the placement of several major arteries, one connecting our breathing directly to the beating of our hearts. For me, the interesting aspect of all this is that, despite science having the reputation of universal and endless in search of definitive answers, the doctors, in this situation, and to my luck, the majority who attended me, gave the final authority of knowing to my body, the expert in the success of this traversal.

To the point of me listening, almost like a whisper, while waking up in convalescence in the emergency area after the second surgery extremely fragile, tired (as though I had given birth to my own being and void) after losing so much blood, the doctor’s insistence and reassurance that I had pulled out of this because my body knew exactly what it was doing at the moment of the crisis, prosperously allowing the effective action of the team.

Before death, life, which edges but in a second. And the atemporal consciousness of a knowing (not knowing) anterior to words and which govern the law and the pulsation of life, but also of death. And still, why say something before all this? In order to understand how the trust in what one doesn’t know it knows determines the law of those who choose to live, continuously acting over our bodies with limits and answers, many times impossible to be articulated but still valid with the same science.

It was up to me, and my desire, to unveil this disruptive and destructive plot, recreating a new way out for this mad infant (this infant on fire). But I didn’t do this alone. I worked for several years and still remain, to elaborate the frontiers of the unsayable through the labour of psychanalysis. Without another person occupying the position of a listener, this task would have been impossible, for any link can only be established between one and another. Whilst the dialect of the judge, inverse to the one which connects us in love, is perversely mortal and judgmental: a dictatorship that kills the “I” in the name of another enjoyment, and whose suffering can reach unimaginable levels in its best and worst versions of the law and its limits.

By appropriating the demarcation between life and death, and in a certain way, opting to rebirth in this castrated body, cut from the ideal of original fusion, I validated the unheard emotions of a baby which, in former times, came to the world madly.

These memories, I know, are full of failures, and yet important to be said, so they can fully act on my skin. It is in this tessiture, also, where holes are found, the mad desires without sense in their sudden disappearances. On my rights of being mad: so that, from the return to the mythical maternal origin of Juiz de Fora (Outside Judge), the same mortifications may be possible to create a new dance, a novelty, where I, gone in the erotica of passionate, interlaced loving bodies, can be lost in the other, but refound in myself, depositary of traces melted in the flesh; a heritage of eternal self-rewriting, affectated by the silver gloss of the moon over our transitory, dazzled beings gulped by the pulsations, unrestricted and contingent, and recipient of frequencies and meanings, to be rediscovered, the unhindered pleasures out of the temporary residences of words.

Considering that facts are nothing but versions, nothing but nothings reordered, it is like so that I retell my small little story. The summary of a rebirth, of a traumatic repetition, of life and death intermingled. The tale of a young girl who was born and became gravely sick after labor. Who experienced recurring transit accidents that almost took her life; a sequence of psychotic breaks, an exacerbated dread of the law and a crazy desire to be body and transience. From a normal delivery goes the legend, I was put in incubation for a few days with a very high fever, until, as soon as arriving home, I developed an intestinal infection due to a hospital contamination. What does this baby want? I can still hear the echoes around me. Why doesn’t she get better? Eventually, with an excess of food, affection, and prayer, the child decides to submit to the condition of living outside of her mother’s body (be it for her desire or mine, I don’t know).

It took me a long time to completely understand this. I was also late to comprehend how my so-called independence, which made me capable of creating a life in another country, foreign, and living alone without anyone else (or the fact I never married or had children) are part of the contingencies, but also of an unconscious desire for separation and alienation present in me. Whether this may be a traumatic repetition of what my parents desired and couldn’t realize or a residue of so many other similar principles, life was realized as it could. Certainly plenty has changed today, greatly due to the psychoanalytical work,

moreover, evidently, due to my own spirit, triggered by the mysteries of everything that is most occult and taboo in my soul—for even if I resisted, my life experiences would have inevitably forced me to face each one of my shadows. For this reason, and something more, I no longer feel alienated, much less separated, from the collective or society—the result of an exhaustive and determined work, arduously conquered, obviously with its contingent limitations.

The demand of an idealized return home, a purity of origins, exerted a devastating power over me, and for a long time acted as a destructive ghost, eliminating any possibility of restoration, thus reflecting its incomprehensive invisibility and narrative veracity. In other words: I believed more in the ghost than in my capacity to recreate a new story. That is, until now. Today I can understand how this unconscious desire for lineage, and the demand for sameness, traversed a series of unconscious generations prior to mine. A collective of men and women inattentive to the savoir of a heart which pumps much more than blood. Without mentioning that, despite it all, I still don’t carry definitive answers (auspiciously), only the courage to ask the questions. For they are the ones which, somehow, indicate the path to my truth and singularity, partial and imperfect, an effect of that which is most unknown in me, but also in my ancestors, that if once desired my life, also condemned me to death. In the beginning, in my view, only love and desire (ours and of those who surround us) should remain, so that this trivial cell may expand and win over death, exhausting the thread towards the inorganic (travestied in origin)—while it may be possible.

An intervention, a second time, which, in the case of the medical act, occurs exactly at the moment when the official daylight savings in Canada (from summer to fall) fell back, and the clocks were changed, in an in-between characteristic of the atemporality intermittent in the unconscious, which repeats without any reference to the chronological time, reinscribing itself in difference. A cut beyond the umbilical, in the living real flesh of my body, on the base of my tongue, the one I received from the other, and that, until then, I couldn’t say for sure it was really mine, officialising a new time, an uncertainty, another logic, over my body (an operation without a definitive time, according to the medical reports).

This, and many other stories, are part of my kaleidoscope of experiences: my effort to articulate my rights on being mad, which I attempt to sketch here. For everything that derives from memory and writes me seems to walk in circles, speaking about one thing and saying

something else, so to speak. Like the recurrent dreams of being lost and unable to find my way back home. Like a baby, mad when being taken apart from her mother, the source of her unconditional love. Like the experience of a meditation, which delivers me a vision, and a dream (because I fall asleep): when, searching for my mother, I, still a child, find her lying down in a leaked bathroom, unconscious, maybe dead, the faucet running water. Such is the fright that I panic without knowing what to think or do. Instead, I act by intuition and impulse in a knowledge that doesn’t know (but knows) what it is doing. The child I once was carries the body of her mother to the hallway (who knows how) and lies her ear against her mother’s chest: she (I) wants to hear her heart, to make sure the mother is still alive.

It is at that moment that I hear a sudden expansion coming from my mother’s core, while, at the same time, feel her heart inflate—full, unmeasured, and uncontrollable—in my direction. What I see and sense is her heart amplified with such intensity until funding and entering into mine, expanding myself to such a lengthening that I wake up. Open my eyes. My emotion is so intense that I am slow to understand what has just happened. Little by little, still disoriented with what has passed, I breathe deeply and feel my heart again, the same as my mother’s, now fully alive in mine.

Lying in bed, it starts to dawn on me the memory, the remembrance, of deciding to meditate after arriving home tired after a session of radiotherapy. I remember also that my mother has passed away more than seven years ago, that the bathroom featured in the dream existed once in the past, and that this recollection is partially true in the content of its images, but fully unreal in the veracity of the ensued facts. I also recognize that there are many things I misrecognize when outside the temporality of conscious feeling. During the measure of an instant, or a bit more, I remain in state of pause, slowly to reinhabit my body. Until, suddenly, and from a distant, yet close place, I hear in the background (and strangely outside of me), the uninterrupted crying of a baby who thinks she has killed her mother by being born separated from her. It is then, also, when I understand, a bit unreasonably but fully lucid, that this crying, this desperate baby, is myself lost in some place in the past locked inside of me and that, until now, hadn’t been heard. Thus, with the patience and loving care of a mother, I listen her lament, her sorrow, and explain carefully (also to myself) that she has not killed anyone, and that her mother will live forever, now in peace inside her heart.

It is from this love where all things are born, I say, and I listen.

And it is like so, from a simple, almost accidental, guided meditation, with the intuit of changing my astral frequency, that I reencounter the second moment of the law founded in the love of this mother, now internalized and reawakened inside of me, sometime later. With open eyes, and still alarmed by the truthfulness of the experience outside the linear memory timeline, I regain what I had forgotten: the identification I have with my mother is with her heart. In this riddle of resignification, I also realize the impossibility of separating myself from a quality of enjoyment and pleasure that characterize me despite my fear and even horror. My fusional comings and goings with bodies, images, and perceptions: my way of perceiving others’ traverses and sources infinite possibilities and knowings, not often rational or well regarded with the laws of the mind.

In my body, one is not just one but plenty of others, what complicates my lear ning in a world where (historically) each thing must be one and same, and woe betide anyone who questions why the sea is not shell, moon, or whisper, or all together, for it always comes the time of reason, of coming back to oneself, aware of science and the limit of each word and thing. If what partially characterizes my desire is to love intrinsically, madly passionately and with expansive fusion, it is precisely there where I best live, especially when this way of being no longer condemns me to the death row. Knowing how to fuse is also knowing how to separate and sustain the lack in its most profound and constitutive expression, essential to the creation of life (or death), depending on what you desire. From the impossible of being articulated, the castration of the tongue, the reappearance of a mother’s love is reborn inside of me, the origins of my affection, of my way of loving and desiring, and from where grows the laws of life. The error in calculus occurs in the equivoque of thinking that the heart lies inside one’s tongue and what can be explained with words, while what pulses on the skin is exogenous in speech, times over madly and desirous, whether for being unspoken, unconscious or impossible to be said.

Indirectly I can risk saying that it was through the process, and the symptoms, of radiotherapy I underwent later—six weeks of daily applications of lethal strong rays over the region affected

by the tumour (the right side of my neck)—when I learned something about the process of elaborating anterior marks not previously recognized and which, in a certain manner, were repeated and re-actualized: the intense burns left on my skin. The heated fever kept inside me. The lack of taste in my tongue, the distasteful taste of savours and savoirs. From the base of my tongue, now castrated and conscious of its rational limitations, and everything that is impossible to be said. From the body that once feared lacking words and now lives in the irrational love unraveling the supremacy of reason, defying death like a temporary breeze, a spiral disorientation of knowledges and altering consciousness, trustful in the greatest worth I inherited: life, while it endures, with its mixtures of oceans, colours and airs, far and close from home, present beyond the mad repetitions of a crazy infant, transgressed with the intersection of a motherly love, the law of a desire to re-signify the gift, returning to the same place but differently, madly passionate and familiar in the alterity of the time of arrival, in the other which comes a posteriori. So that the desire to love may be lived in its plenitude, now free from the need of a time or exact place.

PATRICK McEVOY and ANDREA MONTANO | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Acted out onstage. Illustrated onto a page. Words becoming sentences becoming paragraphs becoming stories. Visuals taking shape within a certain frame. No matter the context, there is an idea there, a thought, possibly a story to be brought up from within. Put out into reality to make someone think, feel. And whether short or long, story or picture, hopefully it resonates in some way with the viewer. With a strong affinity for genre fiction and surreal art, there is possible truth in all forms.

EVOY

PATRICK

INTERVIEW | Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks with Deborah Jackson Taffa

Deborah Jackson Taffa, a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo, is the celebrated author of Whiskey Tender: A Memoir, which earned critical acclaim as a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was named one of The Atlantic's Top 10 Books of the Year. Recognized by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, and NPR, Whiskey Tender also made notable lists in Elle, Esquire, and Publisher's Weekly. Whiskey Tender was also longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Taffa has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, and Tin House, among others.

With an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, Deborah Taffa has taught writing at Webster University and Washington University in Saint Louis and now directs the Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Boston Review, Salon, and Prairie Schooner, and has been anthologized in The Best of Brevity and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her play, Parents Weekend, was performed at the Autry Theater in Los Angeles.

Santa Fe Literary Review: To begin, we’d love to hear about your creative process. What does your practice look like, and how do you feel it has evolved over time? And more specifically: how would you describe the process and experience of writing your memoir, Whiskey Tender?

Deborah Jackson Taffa: My practice has become a lifestyle over the past 25 years. Despite publishing my memoir later in life, I resolved to write in my early twenties, but I felt that travel and healing would be important to my development. My family’s place in American history meant that I’d inherited a great deal of pain and confusion. It took many years of hard work—building a marriage, family, and business—to gain critical distance from my upbringing. I followed my intuition and opted to do it backwards, delaying my degree until I had some real-life success under my belt. I surmised at an early age that the callowness of youth might not allow me to write with sensitivity, and that writing could become a desperate act if it was linked too early with survival needs. In other words, I opted to give my voice a chance to develop and turned down at least one offer to publish the book before finally selling it to HarperCollins.

SFLR: Whiskey Tender recounts memories from your deep past—and uncovers difficult truths about your culture and your own family. What does it mean as a writer to expose these parts of yourself?

DJT: I initially resisted writing exclusively about my youth, but this led me to ask myself why I was ashamed of my childhood when it served as an indictment of governmental greed. I remembered the words of Zora Neale Hurston: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” I decided to give my childhood stories a try.

SFLR: How do you navigate the vulnerability of sharing your story—and of writing about others in your life?

DJT: Self-telling is difficult. It is hard to see ourselves clearly. We must learn to laugh at our oddities and to be generous with our foibles and errors. It’s important to have a sense of humor. No one wants to read a cautionary tale. It helped me to remember that no one reads literature through a moral lens. We want to hear about all the spilled tea: the mistakes, the lies, the stupid decisions, and the lapses in judgment. It makes the reader feel less alone. The best advice I have for other writers is to take your time. There is no rush. Stay in your lane with your blinders on and don’t compare yourself to other writers. The personal story is a sacred story about your moral education. We all have cognitive dissonance. But if you give yourself time, your mask will eventually slip, and you’ll learn things about yourself that you didn’t know before.

And as for others: my father is 83 and he loved the book. My siblings are divided: some have read it, and others are afraid to read it. But I come from a very loving family, and they have all been incredibly supportive as I knew they would be. Two things were important to navigate: I had to be honest and get the facts as straight as possible, in particular where I was dealing with family lore that occurred before I was born. I was careful to cue my reader in when I was using supposition as a craft tool. Mainly, you want to expose more about yourself than you do anyone else. Otherwise, it feels uneven and unfair.

SFLR: Tell us about your experience as an Indigenous woman navigating the literary mainstream. What has surprised you the most about how your work has been received, and what aspects of this journey have been disappointing or challenging for you?

DJT: I moved to Iowa City where I would earn my M.F.A. when I was 39. There, my professors urged us to create a contradictory persona on the page. Rather than perform a stereotypical identity, I was to subvert expectations. I sought to draw from my tribal histories as well as the myriad of cultures I was influenced by as a modern woman, an American citizen, a dual-national married to a man from Milan, Italy, whom I’d met in Bali when I was twenty, a woman with a gang of biracial children who switched between English and Italian and felt as comfortable at the Uffizi Galleries as they did at Pueblo Feast Days.

For a first-semester workshop, I wrote a piece about our family picking olives on my in-laws’ farm in Italy several years before. The essay involved a neighbor who couldn’t believe I was Native. From there, the story flashed back, referencing the alcoholism I saw growing up. “You seem like a well-spoken woman,” my professor said. “Are you sure you aren’t playing the race card?” He suspected I was using a story that wasn’t my own because I thought it would be popular. I was insulted, though it was fair to assume that some Natives have happy childhoods. I learned an important lesson about the politics of representation that day.

Before accepting my Native identity, some readers would ask for my street cred. Sadly, for intersectional writers like me, it’s necessary to introduce a multitudinous identity slowly on the page. This is rather disappointing, but I consoled myself by remembering that I could always write a second book.

SFLR: Like so many creatives, you wear many hats—as an educator, a scholar, an administrator, and a public figure. How do these roles inform each other? How do you make space—and set boundaries—within each of your roles?

DJT: I divide my days by time. When I’m heavily involved in an essay or project, I get up at five a.m. and write before I go to work. I tend to do administrative duties during the day, exercise right when I get home, and return to writing in the evening. My students inspire

me. There are those teachers who are sapped by teaching writing. For me, it clarifies my understanding of craft. Talking about it allows me to listen to my own advice about crappy first drafts.

SFLR: What challenges you most about being a writer? We’re curious about the hurdles you face within the craft, but we also want to know about the challenges you’re navigating now in the context of Whiskey Tender’s rise to mainstream renown.

DJT: I’ve highlighted some of the hurdles I faced with the craft. Writing a persona that is multitudinous but also coheres, and finding a way to articulate and perform the consciousness of a single individual (myself!) on the page is an incredible challenge. Poetry and fiction came easier to me when I was publishing poems and short stories. Art is all about arranging and cutting. When you delete sentences that contain vital information about who you are, it can feel like you aren’t telling all that you should. You keep asking: who am I in this particular story? You ask it so many times in an attempt to be honest. It’s truly a spiritual, meditative task. In terms of challenges due to the success of the book: the travel is brutal. You get tired of hearing yourself speak. It feels like a miracle that anyone cares about what you are saying. But in terms of the material, there is no struggle. By the time you’ve published it, you have sat with it so long you have accepted yourself. It’s the kind of self-acceptance that can’t be faked. You’ve done the work, and you are no longer afraid of the face you see in the mirror.

K.A. M c GOWAN | LAST RITES

Be honest about your graveyard. —from a child’s game

All has been said, and you can almost hear the sound light makes moving through the trees.

It’s okay to think of the first time you made love.

That you never learned piano is useless now.

Orange doesn’t need to rhyme with anything.

Good idea not burning bridges just in case.

The call of your fathers and mothers who went ahead gets stronger each moment.

Yes, travel light.

Your money’s no good there.

CAMERON MacKENZIE | GOGGLES

When I was a kid, I used to wear goggles when I swam. By about third grade I’d worked myself up into a tizzy about it, would cry if I couldn’t find them, wouldn’t dip a toe into the water if they weren’t suctioned to my face. They became an extra appendage without which I was helpless, marooned to a deck chair next to my mother where she smoked cigarettes and read her Sue Grafton. And then one day, a boy stole them.

I told this to my four-year-old son because he had just seen another boy at the hotel pool with goggles. He thought they were the coolest thing, and I knew, without a doubt, that I’d be in Walmart within a week, spending more money we didn't have on more shit we didn’t need.

He's a little small for his age, my son. He's a little thin and a little fragile, and he's sweet. And I want him to stay sweet for as long as possible. Kids change, sure, but right now he's inquisitive and thoughtful and generous and, if I'm a touch overprotective, it's simply because I don't want the world as it is to happen within a quarter mile of him.

So, when we got back in the car from the pool, I told him I used to have goggles until a boy stole them. I had to get used to swimming without them, I told my son, and after a while I was happy they were gone.

Long silence from the backseat. A silence in which I suddenly remembered the boy, fat and tan and slick as he paddled away from me in the sunlight, dangling the goggles just out of my reach, singing about what a pussy I was, snapping the strap on the back of his head. I remembered swimming out to the deep end and back, chasing him and chasing him and finally catching him, my fingernails digging white lines across his back. And I also remembered how intent I was at that point not on getting my goggles back, but on killing the boy, on drowning him right there in the middle of the pool in front of everyone’s parents. I fixed that fat kid's chin deep in the crook of my elbow and cranked down hard while he, mouth full of chlorinated water, called out to the lifeguard, to his mother, to anyone nearby for help as I put my feet on his hips and pulled for everything I thought I deserved.

“A boy stole your goggles?” my son said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said, glancing up into the rearview. The car seat was snapped primly across his chest. His eyes were wide and incredulous—horrified, and fascinated.

“What did you do?” he asked.

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 enhance my hand-eye coordination for my nonrepresentational work, offering me a direct spontaneous approach to my compositions. Rather than portray the model as an object, I wanted to reveal each model’s state of mind and the mystery of that that individual in the concentrated, focused attention, utilizing quick gestures to capture the figure.

CYNTHIA HARTLING | UNTITLED

JENNIFER SAUNDERS | WHEN I’M 25 MY MOTHER DIES

after Sharon Olds

When she tipped forward, arms out to break her fall, when she landed on the bathroom floor maybe with a small cry or maybe not, her eyes open to the last and seeing per haps the tile or the gap beneath the closed door, or maybe nothing or a tunnel of light or her hand with its trim finger nails, I didn’t feel a thing. Not that day and not the next. Not for a moment of those hours she lay alone did I feel her presence or her absence. They were days like all the days before. The sky remained trapped behind the window. The heat shimmered on the asphalt.

In D.C. my office air conditioner hummed while outside Chicago her face plummed with stilled blood. Any regret trapped forever behind her rigor-mortised tongue. I used to think that if she had lived, she might have softened. Or I. I know better now. Apology was not in her nature; unearned forgiveness not in mine. Sometimes the story doesn’t ascend. Sometimes there’s no redemptive arc. Sometimes there’s just a body in a bathroom, the onset of livor mortis, a faucet and its incessant drip.

NATASHA CUIFFO | MY MOTHER AS NAPOLEON

When the nurses try to assess my mom’s mental competence by asking her name, she responds, “Napoleon Bonaparte.” She lashes out against the unfairness of her late cancer diagnosis, the unfairness of her sudden loss of mobility, the unfairness of the brusque tone some nurses take towards her as they tell her to “listen to their instructions exactly or die.”

She takes off her oxygen mask so frequently that they install in the small room a dystopian—looking screen on wheels. The screen is black except for the words, “Videorecording in progress.” When Mami pulls off her mask, the disengaged voice chides: “You need to wear it.”

A psychologist comes in to check on her behavior. My mother crosses her legs from atop her hospital bed, sits up straight, and says, “I’m a psychologist too, you know,” even though she only ever worked in software.

They let my dad sign off for a bone biopsy.

When they wheel her back, the act is done. She understands that she cannot have her way with these procedures, at least until they figure out what is going on with her lymphoma.

As the nurses help her around the room, she is nicer, actually compliant, but she winks at me when the nurse’s back is turned. She smooths herself back into her soft-spoken persona, but she wants me to be aware that she is willing herself polite again. She rattles off the new “truths” she has discovered. We’re all going to pretend. Things will get better. Okay. We’ll pretend it’ll make a difference.

I watch, knowing how I myself mask in any social situation. I had sat her down merely months before and dramatically sucked in air before speaking the words I had been reciting in my mind: “I am Autistic. I’ve been like this my whole life, but only recently figured this part of myself out.” My Mami’s response at the time was more of an eye roll than anything else.

Now, she seems to be showing me how she can split open, too.

Just do it for your country. Do the right thing. Be a marine. In a bout of echolalia, she quotes this commercial to show how she was putting on a brave face, fulfilling her duty for something greater than herself, her family, while not believing that any of it will make a difference.

My mom receives her T-cell lymphoma diagnosis and is discharged to await treatment—she can nurse her pain and lack of identity from the comfort of home. Walking into my old living room to

hear the unfamiliar medical breathing of an oxygen tank is heart-breaking. My mom sits quietly on the couch while my dad receives instructions on how to use it from a delivery man.

The monitor that I used on my child since she was a baby sits on the family room table. Its sole use before was to assure me that my baby was peacefully asleep. I caught her first rolling on to her belly on that monitor—a feat she accomplished by testing her limits when she thought nobody was watching.

Now it displays my mom, fully adult, but not fully, lying on a mattress on the floor. She had hit her head getting out of bed when it was up, so on the floor she now stays. She turns and writhes in discomfort.

At about 2:00 a.m. my mom gets such intense hot flashes that she tears off all her clothing, yet is still rolling in discomfort. She cries a little and even sucks her hand.

One day I think the monitor is set up. I hold the button down to tur n it on and see myself reflected back at me, confused in the middle of the room in which I stand. Apparently, the video monitor has been moved into the room, but seeing myself where I was expecting my disabled mother to be is jarring. My dark hair in the black and white screen looks the same as hers would look if she were standing up, my skinny arms the same birthmark-speckled limbs I have come to know well each time I help her get up.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. My response was pathetic—the tiny prick of the lancet sent me to tears. It burned where it broke the skin and yet did not cut precisely enough to even get enough blood on the testing strip. My voice broke up on the phone as I told my mom about it. She arrived that day, all dressed up in her work clothes and with an air of matter-of-factness about the situation. “No, this is going to be OK. You will get used to it. Sit down.” I was surprised by the apparent lack of sympathy in her voice, how she just wanted me to stop feeling sorry for myself. Now, though, I realize how freshly diagnosed with diabetes she was herself, just a couple of years back, and how she knew this was something passed down in families—my temporary diabetes a sign that I could likely develop her type—Type II—in just a few years. She was teaching me to grimace hard and raise one’s sword against the inevitable.

A female fetus has ovaries with millions of eggs—all the eggs she will ever need in her lifetime. That means if a woman is pregnant with her daughter, her granddaughter is in there too.

When my daughter Celeste was bor n, a completely new Mami had emerged— attentive, softened, melting like snow over every squirm from the wrapped baby. This Mami was not the strict defender I had known all my life.

Sometimes I bring Celeste to my parents’ house for caring sessions for my mom. Signs of OCD have grown in me during this whole experience—I feel like I am being pulled under as I stand in my mom’s bathroom imagining how much of the tiny room is covered in germs that could potentially carry traces of Epstein-Barr disease—the illness commonly experienced as mono that my mom first contracted months ago and the symptoms of which covered up the signs of cancer. To be more truthful, though, it appears that the Epstein-Barr is what evolved into lymphoma in my mother’s blood.

I brush my daughter’s teeth in Mami’s bathroom and later end up replaying in my head countless times exactly where I placed the fresh gargling cup—I needed to reassure myself that I did not use one of my mother’s. With all of us having the same genetic propensities, the three steps—mono, cancer, die—pound away in my head as a drumbeat.

Mami starts chemotherapy and is hopeful as the port they affixed to her chest a couple weeks back is finally used to save her some stabs of the needle. She reacts rather well for the first few days: no nausea, no new bouts of weakness that did not already exist.

It is when she starts immunotherapy for the cancer in her bones that her body starts to go awry, although it is impossible to tell what is triggering what in her mass of cellular interactions.

When she goes to her follow-up appointment, Mami’s hemoglobin level is too low and she needs to go in for a blood transfusion.

What is in the blood? During bloodwork for pregnancy appointments, it was revealed that I have sickle cell trait—not sickle cell disease, but the carrier version of it. They needed to make sure that my husband does not have the trait as well. This trait comes from the same geographical area that its double-gened cousin does, in areas where malaria can

be counteracted with a different type of blood. Of course, western medicine would not acknowledge the blood difference in this way; it is only a stumble away from a horrible disease.

This is another hereditary aspect of blood—blood type, blood disease, blood sugar, blood cancer. What activates cancer in these predisposed veins?

How far does a changed gene stray?

After the blood transfusion, problems arise. Mami is shitting like crazy, all over the bed, the floor, everything. She cannot be changed fast enough and one nurse calmly explains that most patients in this condition just prefer to go right on the pad and have those changed instead of putting diapers on.

It is beginning to become clear to me that they are testing symptoms that arise with end-of-life. If you Google-search “lymphoma end-of-life,” you get results that match what she is going through.

Despite the matches, the medical complex just goes through testing and testing each organ, one at a time.

My husband calmly explains to Celeste that her “Mimi” is not getting better and may be dying. He does this during one of the times I stay with my mom in the hospital, and when I return, Celeste is able to carefully recite to me what happens when people die. She does not twitch, tear up, or question as she gives the sentences she has been taught.

At three and a half, though, tears are not the way in which toddlers express grief. She is fully potty-trained, but starts refusing to have bowel movements unless she absolutely cannot hold them in anymore. She holds her fists tightly and screams that she does not want to or hums to herself until I give up.

Mami expresses her wish for hospice to get involved. They come rather quickly in the morning and explain what will happen: If she was well enough, they would discharge her home so her family could administer what they can to keep comfortable. Since she is unable to be away from the morphine drip as of now, she will stay at the hospital under hospice care. They will stop all other treatments and just keep her comfortable until she stops breathing.

Her breathing is labored, so it creates the rhythm in the room for the next two days. It slows at times and has more force to it at others. The hospice nurse said that hearing is the last sense to go, so my brother and I talk to her when we overcome the awkwardness of doing so. She is a captive audience, quite literally, so I hope she forgives my sentimental expressions of hope that I have made her proud. I play a video of Celeste for her, and when the toddler voice echoes in the room, my mother’s breath catches, like she is worried that her granddaughter is in the horrid space with her. I assure her that it is a video only. She was always so protective of her, not wanting Celeste to witness too much of her pain.

About a day later, Mami is pronounced dead. My dad was in the room with the nurse. He was commenting on her slowing breathing and she stopped right there with both of them looking at her.

Mami’s body looks beautiful in her wedding gown that she dictated she be shown in. I placed a crown in the stiffness of her hair. The only feature that looks off is her mouth—the lips are held too tight in a way she never held them, even when she was her most Napoleon.

The wedding gown was set aside for her funeral years ago when I rejected it as my own dress. I wanted my own, something besides the lacey sleeves of the eighties that bloomed on the bed when she presented it to me.

I had to help my dad find the wedding dress in the heat of the attic. It was thrown into a dusty box after being lovingly kept under her bed until the year of my own wedding. We were worried that the delicate embroidery would be browned, so we took it out with bated breath. We found perfectly intact white—and a note that tumbled out. “To my daughter, with love,” it proclaimed.

STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The passage of time and the potential for societal amnesia motivates Stephen Abban Junior’s works to bridge the gap between aging and history, reminding us of the importance of cultural preservation. Cultural assimilation and appropriation are significant agents that can affect cultures both positively and negatively. Through mythological narratives from African folklores, palm wine music, and proverbs, Abban sparks a dialogue between tradition and modernity by introducing techniques from various visual art forms to redefine Ghanaian oral traditions into visual expressions. Using mixed media, he blends natural elements such as burlap, soil, and water with ink and acrylic to visually represent his oral culture.

Abban’s artistic jour ney began with a childhood memory challenge that ushered his preservation of stories and lessons told by his parents. He found solace in drawing on the walls of his mother’s bedroom, turning them into a canvas of recollection. He creates visual and psychological sensations that transport viewers to the depths of cultural collective memory. He believes that by delving into our cultural foundations, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

Abban’s image, “Mythology of the Asante Bonwire Kente Fabric,” appears as this year’s cover of the Santa Fe Literary Review.

JODI L. HOTTEL | PHOTO: MAY 24, 1942

I no longer recall how I acquired this glossy 8 x 10, only my shock when I noticed the date. The photo was taken just the day before the Japanese Americans of Wapato, Washington would board a train for the long ride to the Portland Assembly Center. In their Sunday finery, they’re arranged on the steep steps of the Methodist church. I scan the faces, searching for family members. Although they know they are about to leave their homes, most smile as if embarking on a sightseeing trip. A few children scowl at having to pose. My sixteen-year-old mother beams and wears pearls.

Breeze carries scent of tumbling apple blossoms screen door slams

Today, I stand where they boarded, on the now-abandoned train station platform, trying to sense the presence of the families who stood here decades ago, cradling infants, clinging to suitcases. Silent and stoic, they face the tracks as the train screeches to a stop.

Dusty, dry wind whispers secrets stirred from the soil

SHYMALA DASON | NAMASTE

The father of an Indian daughter

Who is doing well in America is excited to receive a plane ticket, from a daughter who says, ‘Appa, please come and visit me.’

But then, once out of the airplane in America, he sees his suitcase. It looks different. Less.

Back home, visiting his parents, in their village (it’s poor there), taxi-drivers carrying that same suitcase from the bus-stop call him, ‘Sir.’

Now, in this American airport, he sees his daughter’s eyes hold embarrassment.

Sees her thinking: Appa is not doing so well as his daughter. What is he to do? He’s done: holding a baby. Saving. Praying. Wishing a better life someday, for her. Now he worries: because he never bowed his head before strangers.

The daughter thinks, as she makes the call

I have served flowers at holiday feasts carrying a silver tray, jasmine strands touching my fingers. Sometimes my elders gave me saffron to hold Or rosewater, to bless the head of the arriving guests.

Now, in this austere land: isolate, how will I offer welcome? I cannot find the balm of incense here, nor holy saffron thread. There is no salt, no ritual water. Only me. I am a vessel without ornament.

Namaste

ZOË ROMANS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“Stucco in Self-Observation” (12 x 5 in., 35mm film) grapples with the realities of self-expression that heavily depend upon the additions we make to ourselves by posing my dad, Russ, draped in my mom’s and my inherited jewelry. His shadow looms blankly and unadorned, asking its reflection, “How much of yourself belongs to me?” Considering the many burial sites brimming with valuables in the forms of beads, gems, and jewelry, I ponder how one’s legacy is upheld through their possessions. This work asks viewers to explore the possibilities of successfully communicating one’s identity without feeding into accessorized madness.

ZOË ROMANS | STUCCO IN SELF-OBSERVATION

KATHY WHITHAM | FAMILY ALBUM—FALL RIVER, MA

Snapshot: (1981) Me in the backyard of my grandparents’ house in Fall River with my infant daughter in my arms. Beside me stands my mom, Clara. Beside her my grandmother, Igina, pressed down by time. Our line of women.

Snapshot: (1968) Mom and I poised to step into the entryway of my grandparents’ house. Across from us stands a tall cupboard crammed with Green Stamp dishes safely parceled in brown bags from the A&P tied up with white string. I am fourteen. It’s Sunday.

Snapshot: (1982) My grandfather, sitting next to the treadle sewing machine. Tendrils of smoke twist up from the ashtray near him while he circles a tobacco-tinged finger in my baby daughter’s expectant palm, chanting in Italian, grinning like sunrise.

Snapshot: (1970) Mom and I standing with my grandma in the warm smell of pizza dough rising from the kitchen radiator. My grandfather, seated on the far side of the chrome-edged, red Formica table, that takes up the center of the room, dipping toasted and torn Wonder Bread into a small Revere Ware pan of reheated black coffee.

Snapshot: (1972) My grandmother, in the entryway, her back a curved turtle shell, secreting a folded envelope from the pocket of her navy-blue cardigan into my mom’s hand, like life depends on it. It would be $100, maybe $200.

Snapshot: (1934) My grandfather holding a dinner plate in the air. Shattered shards of my grandmother’s china littering the kitchen floor. Invisible shrapnel flying at three young daughters. Mom was the third.

TONY TRACY | HOW LUCKY LAZEROV GOT HIS NAME

Hunched under the hood he shakes his head, winces with obvious disdain at what he sees

though he already knew what he was getting into before he wiped his hands on a grease-spotted rag before reaching behind himself for the precise metrics of a socket wrench. Lucky works on imports strictly,

Mercedes exclusively as the licensure from the German Automakers Union attests with its printed proof

hanging above a jubilant teenage version of himself standing upon graffitied chunks of the Berlin Wall across from where he lived on Bernauer Strasse. He told me point blank if I wasn’t

a friend of the family he’d never considered doing this, working on

my 12-year-old warhorse, closest he ever came to giving the ole Beemer a compliment the engine, as it were,

and all its major components encased in plastic beneath the dignity of any real mechanic, but mostly, he’d later laugh off, a pain-in-the-ass to work on We swapped life stories under the hood,

his renegade history vs. my utterly benign life of proletarianism. He called himself a “Black Sea” boy, this GDR descendant who spent summers dreaming beneath the granite cliffs

of Crimea while girls in the distance spun pirouettes on the sand unaware of their captive audience hiding back in the cove. When I asked Lucky how he landed on his name he said

your guess is as good as mine.

JULIE SPROTT | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I call this compilation “The Sky is Falling.” It’s an emotional response to the climate catastrophe legacy we’ve inherited from greed, consumerism, and materialism promulgated in technoadvanced Western cultures over the past 150 years. Our bloodline includes an extractive mentality that has resulted in the ongoing devastation of mother earth.

Recall the fable of Chicken Little, who thought earth would soon end when a branch broke off and landed on him during a nap. Shouting “the sky is falling” to his barnyard friends and setting them in a panic, they took up the invitation by the fox to seek shelter in his den— definitely a bad idea. For me, this metaphor switches from a false alarm to indicating real danger stemming from the rise of greenhouse gases, blanketing the earth and resulting in hotter temperatures; this may well take us into the fox’s den. We see the effects through severe weather events like floods, drought, and fires across the globe. Sadly, data from the World Wildlife Fund’s 2024 Living Planet Report indicate a 73 percent decline in bird and other species since 1970.

In the summer of 2023, peering through the sliding glass door to the backyard, I spent hours photographing birds at the feeders, especially lesser goldfinches as they hung onto the seed sock and fought off other comers. That fall, in order to meet an assignment for a Photoshop class at the Santa Fe Community College, I drew on the summer’s bird images, adding in the dramatic annular solar eclipse taken at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden in October, increasing contrast with a black disk over the sun, and placing two free-trial stock images of bare trees (front branch, Pexels: Malam A Mushitu / back tree, Adobe Stock: Olsio).

ANDREW ALEXANDER MOBBS | THE DONATION

i. (Registration)

I glimpse the veins of the octogenarian volunteer asking if Andrew’s my name veins lipping the flesh of his sun-spotted wrists & I think this man in his mesh war vet cap must have bled plenty of times in his life because life’s a war & we’ve always shared the same blood as a species pumping in and out of one another since God & what is a body but an aqueduct with the capacity to fall in love deeper than the liquid it carries but he’s done with me now so he channels his voice of wind-shaken reeds they’re ready for you out there

ii. (Assessment)

My phlebotomist, Mark, might moonlight as a standup comedian; he jokes and laughs at every step of the age-old Red Cross ritual:

• verifying my state identification

• asking my name and date of birth

• facilitating my medical history survey

• measuring the iron in my hemoglobin

• asking me which arm today (left)

• showing me where to lie down

• prepping my vein with alcohol

• telling me to squeeze the foam ball

• saying look away if you dislike blood

• sliding the needle into my vein

• waiting for my reply I love it that’s why I’m here

iii. (Withdrawal)

& so my lifeblood flows

for five minutes whole

like the nearby Willamette

rushing down new detours

outside my body

supine & still

into a polyvinyl chloride bag & one day soon

inside your body

two tributaries

supine & still

iv. (Containment)

Caution: refer to instructions before usage.

Human blood: avoid extreme temperature.

Perishable product: must not contaminate. Product could transmit infectious agents.

Store at 1°C to 6°C for maximum 42 days.

pH may be adjusted via sodium hydroxide. See info for indications/contraindications.

Federal law prohibits dispensing sans Rx.

Effectively identify the intended recipient. The need is constant; gratification instant.

v. (Convalescence)

By my own woozy calculations, ten percent of my lifeblood disembodied. I am no stranger

to deficits, so I fill this one with trail mix, H2O, lightheaded wonder. I wonder about my

pint-bagged neighbors in storage, how many of us will transfuse into the same host. How

easy it is to exist side-by-side externally with no inkling that we are all siblings of iron.

This is precisely how we exist: weight less. By my own dizzy math, eight thousandths

of my mass sieved through needle and tube. Call me Ishmael; call me punctured balloon.

Call me three months later to do this again. I’ll manage to be full by then, but for now,

burn, baby, burning under my skin. Bruises blued into a Neptune pool—shall I dive in?

RIKKI SANTER | MY PERIPATETIC FATHER

I cling to riddled clouds and try to keep up, his unlit El Producto a baton measuring the brisk beat of his gait. On my weekend visit he’s asked me to join him in his three-mile routine through the neighborhood. It’s the easy alphabet of his jokes and his naming of front yard flowers, the Kravitz’s snapdragons his favorite. On the stove, back in their apartment kitchen, his tangy compote steeps and the shopping list on the fridge in his award-winning penmanship curls its tail. The sidewalks are his daily colonnade as he walks off his angst as caregiver for a wife whose legs no longer wanderlust. Today it’s the rainy mist that saturates our joy of being together, his weathered wallet from the war in my back pocket. We stop so he can tell the mail carrier that last night he watched the original The Postman Always Rings Twice on Turner Classics and we all laugh because there’s not a single mail carrier in the story. On the next block an owl duets with its partner across the ravine. My father takes my hand, winks, then we both jump into a puddle in the elementary school parking lot. O, that daddy of mine who likes frisking when I’m around. We round the last leg of our journey as he offers boss and boyfriend advice. With his arm around my shoulder, we’re so far away from the Monday morning phone call about him.

Hospital waiting room

Code Blue over intercom

slow summer rain

ROBERT JESTEN UPTON | ABUELO

This isn’t about UFOs. It’s about my grandfather. Yes, there’s a connection and this story is composed to explore it.

My name is Justine Ortiz. My name is the legacy of my grandfather, my Abuelo. That’s where I’ll start. The village where my Abuelo was born is a tiny New Mexico town that has existed since the days of Spanish rule, out on the edge of Comancheria.

Comancheria was the empire of the Comanches, the Lords of the High Plains. The Spanish settlements ran right up against them. With the Spanish came the tough, desert-bred horses that had been introduced into Spain by the Moors from North Africa and from there into the American Southwest. The Comanches took to the breed as quickly as escaped and stolen horses arrived on the plains, and they lived on their backs, giving them dominance to a huge territory from Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas. They made their fortunes by raiding their neighbors: other tribes, the Hispanic settlements of the province of Nuevo Mexico, and deep into Mexico itself. The Spanish and then Mexican governments crashed into this Comanche wall in a desperate conflict. To create a buffer against the Comanche raiders, the Spanish deployed the blood and bodies of their colonists, the offspring of the conquistadors who had found wives among the native tribes they met as they pushed north into the province of New Mexico—a people just as tough as the mustang horses.

The stubbor n resistance to the Comanche raiders went on until the Spanish government, instead of losing skirmishes with the Comanches, made a truce based on mutual trade. The settlers traded goods such as beads, knives, tobacco, pots and pans, cloth, metal spikes (for making arrow points), coffee, and flour for the hides, cattle, and captives that the Comanches took on raids into Mexico. The settlers took what they got back to the Spanish merchants in the provincial capital of Santa Fe. The men who made these hard and dangerous trading trips into Comancheria were a hard-bitten breed that came to be known as Comancheros.

These were my grandfather’s ancestors. Although his village no longer traded with the Comanches—they had vanished from the Plains with the extermination of the buffalo and the advent of the repeating rifle—the communities pushed out onto the edge of the High Plains continued to scrape out a living, little altered from the days of their establishment. Abeulo’s village, Anton Chico, was slowly shrinking away as he grew up. He managed to go to high

school, and, like many of his classmates, when he graduated, he left home to enter the outside world by joining the military.

World War II had just ended, but a new conflict for him to be part of had just begun: the Atomic Age. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, mutual annihilation, and strategic nuclear forces inspired the creation of the Strategic Air Command, known as SAC. He joined the Army Air Corps (soon to become the United States Air Force, a branch independent of the Army), and in 1947 was stationed not so very far from his home on the SAC base at Roswell, New Mexico. I have an old photograph of him in uniform, a skinny young kid with a couple of Air Force buddies, taken in front of the newspaper office in Roswell and holding up a copy of the paper.

You can almost read the headline.

Why did he have a photo of himself holding a newspaper? The first time I saw it, the question didn’t occur to me.

Abuelo had always been my anchor, the most important person in my life. He was stationed in Guam when he met my grandmother, a local girl from Yigo. She brought with her a large, extended family—my family. When he retired with twenty years of service in the Air Force, Guam was the natural place for them to settle. They had a little store that sold groceries and the various commodities that a small community wants. I was twenty years old when he died in 2008. Like my grandfather before me, I had left my little town in Guam when I graduated from high school to enter the greater world by moving back to New Mexico where he had begun his life, to study journalism at UNM.

Even if I had lots of family, it was my Abuelo who was always there for me—for me, no matter where my life-path took me. He always called me “Nieta”—Granddaughter—a pet name that stuck as a nickname. He was “Abuelo”—grandfather. To others he was Polonio Ortiz. His name was his last tie with Anton Chico.

Even though I still had my mom and her large family, it was too far away—all the way across the Pacific Ocean where I was born. Instead of going to his funeral, I decided to remember him by returning to his hometown, a place I’d never been. I asked a friend who had

a car to take me, heading out into back country I’d never seen. We took the Interstate and headed across miles and miles of the empty, broiling high desert until we got to the Highway 84 exit and turned south into the piñon and juniper-clad hills of the Pecos River valley. Anton Chico was spread out from its old town plaza: a dozen houses at the town center, most of them shuttered, crumbling adobes, with the rest of the community spread along State Road 386.

This is ranching country where cowboys—real ones who live on horseback—continue to make their livings. Pickups and baseball caps are more common than they’d been in Abuelo’s time, but they still know what a lariat is and how to throw it. Rodeo is a pastime, not a sport, and open country is what they live in, not just sing about.

I liked Anton Chico, a relaxed village along the Pecos River under the cottonwood trees of the bosque. Sure, the living is hard, the wages are slim, but the days are peaceful and the skies are blue. I could almost feel Abuelo at my side.

My mom told me that Abuelo had left me something—something of his, but she didn’t know what it was. She said it looked like an old foot locker and she hadn’t tried to open it. Even if it wasn’t very big, shipping it back to the States wouldn’t be easy—or cheap. I told her to hold onto it; I’d get it whenever I managed to come back to Guam.

That took a while. I graduated and got my first job writing copy for a real estate company. It was another two years before I could get on a plane to cross the Pacific Ocean. During that time I made a visit to Roswell out of curiosity. I went to the local newspaper office first (job opportunities to explore) to see if they were hiring—they weren’t—and I learned about the event that put Roswell on the map as a weird focal point for conspiracy theorists and UFO chasers. The Roswell Incident. The tale went—and Roswell has a museum for this—that on July 3, 1947, something unexplained crashed during a thunderstorm out on a local ranch. There were all sorts of rumors and speculation about it, some claiming that it was a flying saucer. The military, which immediately did an investigation (one of many odd details about the event: why would the military get involved?) wrote it off as an ordinary crash of a weather balloon. That seemed, even at the time, to be a pretty lame story, and it certainly didn’t convince the UFO enthusiasts. The story just continued to grow.

What did I think? Not much, really; I couldn’t say I believed the flying saucer story any more than I was interested in a weather balloon. I just thought that the whole Roswell affair was an opportunity for a small, remote, and dull city to have something to promote. It really didn’t occur to me to link my Abuelo into any of this. I hadn’t seen the photo yet.

The whole trip slipped from my mind pretty quickly. My visit to Anton Chico held more significance for me than Roswell had, maybe because it held a personal tie for me that made it a real place. Roswell was just another place along the road to be passed through.

When at last I was able to go home to Guam—another five years—I returned as a very different person. I was working my first real professional job with a public radio station in Colorado, and I had matured as a woman of the world. Guam seemed to me to be what it is: a tiny speck in a very wide ocean, awash in its own limited perspectives and its rather bizarre history. And I’d learned to love it for what it was: my home.

The airport was the usual chaos of Japanese tourists coming for a vacation on a south sea island where they could take thousands of pictures of themselves having fun to show back home. My cousin was there when I got off the plane to pick me up. After an eight-hour flight with a rough layover in Hawaii, getting out of the airport and seeing a familiar face jolted me into a throwback world. I was a melted mess in the island’s heat and humidity, so unlike the dry heat of New Mexico. When I stepped out of the car at my mom’s house, it was straight into a family event, an authentic Guamese gathering. I’m talking here of at least fifty relatives with their various personal associations, all of this bathed in the aroma of barbeque grills lifting clouds of smoke into heavy, humid air, plus an inflatable water slide for the kids.

My mom greeted me with intense hugs, tears, and pure joy before turning me over to my aunts who replayed the welcome. It took a good while before I could retreat into the strangely familiar stillness of my old room. The footlocker was there, waiting for me. Curiosity banished the jet lag, the sticky cling of sweat-sodden clothing, and an urgent need to shower. The locker had a lock, but the key was conveniently fitted into the lock. I fiddled with it a little before it gave up and allowed me to turn it. The smell inside was island—musty, but there didn’t seem to be damage to the contents: old stuff, accumulated from his long life, his old uniform from when he had first entered the service, his discharge papers from the Air Force when he retired, the marriage license from when he had married my grandmother right there in Yigo in 1953, various service decorations received over the years, and best of all, his old

baseball cap embroidered with an image of a B-29 and the name of the base, Anderson AFB. Inside an envelope I found the photograph. My skinny Abuelo with a couple of friends with a storefront, the sign announcing the Roswell Daily Record behind them. As noted before, my Abuelo was holding up a copy of a newspaper, the way kidnap victims hold a paper over their chest to prove the date when the photo was taken.

That was the first time I’d seen it. Abuelo, as a young man, away from home for the first time and engulfed in a foreign—that is, a dominant English-speaking—environment. Abuelo’s English was good, but heavily imprinted by his native Spanish. It must have come as a relief when he got to Guam where, once more, he could hear Spanish being spoken.

I put down the curious photo to look at another unusual item in the footlocker: his old, much wor n, military lace-up boots. Why would these old boots have keepsake value? I looked them over, shook my head in mystification, and returned them to their place in the box before closing the lid and re-locking it to go take my longed-for shower.

Eventually, the old locker joined me in the States. I threw nothing out, not even the old boots, because they had been my Abuelo’s. And here comes the turning point in this tale.

Through entirely unrelated events, the Roswell Incident came up again. It captured my attention because I was interested now about how government cover-ups and conspiracy theories intersect to expand and feed off each other. The Roswell Incident, the granddaddy of conspiracy theories, combined with my own visit to Roswell and because my Abuelo had been there right when the Air Force kicked off the cover-up. Speculation, the midwife of conspiratorial interest, bloomed in my own mind. Putting one and one and one together, set me to wondering: did they add up to three?

As in “duh.” But hold on for a minute. Just because you can stick them together with the connective “and,” doesn’t mean they add up. I’m a jour nalist, not a conspiracy hunter. I seek evidence, not random chance.

I went back to the photograph; that and Abuelo’s service record, which showed that he had been stationed at Walker Air Force Base in 1947. That could have placed him in front of the newspaper office at the same time when the debris of the “weather balloon” was being collected out on a local ranch. None of that was news to me. But why the photo? Why was he posing the way he was with a newspaper held up in front of him? Was he somehow associated

with the event? Was this just a one plus one plus one situation? And finally, even if it did add up to three, what difference would it make?

If only I could make out the headline or the date on the paper! But the quality of the photo and its condition defied my ability to decipher it.

I read books and articles until they made my head swim. Sometimes I was convinced that something really fishy had happened out there on July 3, 1947; other times the more rational part of my intellect wrote it off. But fascination morphed into obsession. Oh, Abuelo! If only you could tell me yourself! (Spoiler alert: Reader! You can go to the record if you want. It’s out there. But I warn you, it’s a convoluted mess with a few clues buried in a morass of speculation, mistrust, and wishful thinking.)

I had never learned to speak Spanish. My generation grew up speaking English and listening to rock & roll. I was looking beyond the ocean to the States for my future, not satisfied with a job as store clerk or snagging a coveted position on the island with the military. UFOs seemed more real than the legends of the old Chamoro people who, in their agile outrigger canoes, fished well out of sight of land and “owned” tracts of open ocean as their birthrights.

In 1565 the Spanish came to colonize Guam as a stop-over for the treasure ships returning from the Philippines loaded with Chinese silks and porcelain. They seeded Spanish and Catholicism the same way they did in the Comancheria settlements and worked their Chamoros to death, giving them only the salvation of the Church. Epidemics unknown to the islanders took the rest, and the Spanish replaced them with slaves from the Philippines who already spoke Spanish and knew Christ. Like the Comancheros of New Mexico, they married the local women and became Guamese.

UFOs and rock & roll. Time and customs march on, one overtaking the other. Did Abuelo see the shift in our world that the rest of us didn’t know yet? If he did, what sign could he leave for me?

I rummaged through his footlocker, looking for something; a clue, something that could be a message for me. And I did find something I’d overlooked before. His old uniform had an “MP” armband. Military Police. I never knew he had been an MP. He was a quartermaster, a Master Sergeant. So, MP was something that he must have done early in his career, like when he was stationed in Roswell as a low-level enlisted man, a nobody. An

unimportant tool to be pulled into something he understood nothing about, such as being part of a grunt squad to clean up the wreckage of a weather balloon.

The rancher who first reported the crash to the Air Force claimed that the crash site was scattered across 200 yards. The official Air Force report of a downed weather balloon claimed that the debris field covered 20 square feet and was gathered up to be taken back to base in the investigator’s jeep. The rancher claimed that he had often seen scrap from downed weather balloons, and the shiny metal tatters he’d seen were unlike anything he’d ever laid eyes on. But after being held for three days in Air Force custody, he never spoke of it again. Dead end.

That could mean anything… or nothing. What was going on? What about my Abuelo? Had he gotten dragged into this somehow?

He’d never spoken about any of this—not even that he’d been an MP—but other people who’d been witnesses suddenly became silent and didn’t say anything for decades. Whatever the “Roswell Incident” meant, Abuelo’s secret, only hinted at by the photo, was still silent. Was I to be thwarted at ever unraveling the message in that photo or learning if one plus one plus one really added up to three?

But it came. I was going through the footlocker for the umpteenth time when I lifted out his old boots. This time, I felt inside. There was something shoved down into the toe. I fiddled it out. Instead of a stiff old sock, which my fingers suspected, I teased out a ball of what I at first took for a wadded ball of tin foil. As I held it on my palm, the silvery lump unfolded itself, regaining its shape as a flat, creaseless sheet of light, metallic material.

Just as the rancher had reported! He’d told the news reporter that the debris field was littered with similar pieces of thin, shiny metal that was extremely light and very strong, obviously torn to shreds by a terrible explosion. And, just as the substance I held in my hand, traced with odd, hieroglyphic-like purple writing.

I was holding an alien artifact. Extraterrestrial? I couldn’t know that, but I could recognize that it was a substance that I’d never seen nor heard of. Unidentified Foil-like Object. Abuelo had been there, a witness. He’d seen it! What his thoughts were I’d never know, but he had known that it was something unlike anything that existed in his world. He’d also known that keeping it was not permitted; he’d probably already been warned that it was top secret and

to say anything to anyone would be punished severely. His boot had kept his secret for the decades of his life, which he then passed on to me.

And what was I to do with it? What could it prove in the face of all the conspiracy and denial? Could even solid, material fact overcome all that?

I’m a writer. That’s how I deal with things.

Where does a loose accumulation of details sort into a structure of possibility? When does that structure turn into a plausible theory? And finally, when does that theory attain status as fact? That’s the challenge for the human mind, an organ that is designed for associative gathering of random—even unrelated—pieces of data to create a picture. The human mind does not rely on logic to construct a perspective. It takes a broader approach. Sometimes that method displays genius. Other times it creates nonsense.

By the way, the headline on that newspaper from the 9th of July, 1947, was “Army Debunks Roswell Flying Disk.”

The dead have their places, but so do the living.

DAVID MILLEY | BREWIS

From my father’s island: salt cod and hardtack, potatoes and fatback, fishing nets and carpenters’ nails, and with the Carpenter, fishers of men.

From my mother’s table: milky black tea served hot in china cups, long remembered tales, lives seen new through heavy-lidded eyes.

From Warren’s woods: sawdust, chainsaws, cord wood, corded arms, arms that hold me fast against the gale that wants to blow our world away.

I come to this: gray hairs in a long beard, moonlight on bare shoulders, a catalog of blooms, cities dreamed on a paper bed, a wilderness of love.

AARON LELITO | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The theme of “Bloodlines: Lineage, Inheritance, and Legacy” suggests depth and connection. It suggests digging down through layers of relationships and memories, successes and failures. Even though we are impermanent beings and our subjective experience is fleeting, there may also be a continuity running through it all—perhaps even a sense of inseparability between what is perceived as “then” and “now.”

In my visual art, I try to see beyond this sur face layer of perception. The initial shapes and patterns that arise within an image can tell a story, of course, but they also have the ability to reveal details and nuance that are otherwise unseen in our everyday lives. Considering the nature of what we inherit, create, and pass along can be a reminder that every fiber of existence is fragile. Each thread that persists to be carried forward must be treated with reverence.

I’m drawn to imagery that conveys a tension between what is felt and what lingers, both present and absent. “The Grace” combines photograph layers and text from my notebook. When I use notebook pages in this way, it is important for me to allow for some areas of the text to recede into the background while other areas stand out, as if to comment on the scene. The layering of these elements happens intuitively at times—it’s a place of intimacy, where the imagery collides with unfiltered content from my daily surroundings, impromptu lists, imagined dialogue, inner thoughts, and cross-outs.

AARON LELITO | THE GRACE

AVRA WING | THE BOAST OF THE PROSTHETIC

It’s true what they say of me. I began as an Egyptian toe: papier mâché, linen and plaster circa 600 BC. At least, that’s the earliest evidence unearthed. 300 years later a Roman leg: bronze, iron and wood. Admittedly crude beginnings. I gained through war, the bloodier the better. So many missing parts and the dream of replacement. Each battle a victory for me. Honor to Ambroise Paré, military surgeon of blessed memory, the Civil War, WWII both sides—German ingenuity!— Vietnam, Afghanistan.

Now plug me in and see what I can do: Microprocessor humming along uneven ground and sidewalk, controlling swing and stance. They call you bionic, but I am not a natural thing, not part of human you. Don’t blame me if some days you’re confused—which leg is which. Not my concern if you can’t tell pretend. My preference to remain detached: You wear me down til I’m out of warranty. My fellows close ranks, an army of our own— sleek, powerful, titanium soldiers taking over the streets. No kids dare point and question, no mothers shush. If this has upset you in the past, it shows how weak you are. Man up! I am the genius of your every step. Remember where and what I come from. Never forget the legion of the maimed whose shoes you walk in.

REBECCA WOOLSTON | WILLFUL WOMEN AND DISRUPTIONS OF YOUR HAPPINESS

I have spent much of my life thinking about having children. Imagining what they would look like, what names I like, what extracurriculars I would like to do with them. I have spent so much time responding to what many feel is a standard bit of small talk when they ask if I have kids, or when I would have kids, and why don’t I have kids, and why don’t I want them, can I have them? Is there something about my body that won’t let me? There must be a reason, no woman would just choose not to have kids. Do I really not want them? What kind of a woman actually means that. How can a woman not like kids? What about your clock, who will take care of you when you’re old, what about your legacy, you’ll regret it when you’re older, it’s different when it’s your own, it’s all worth it when they smile at you, I didn’t want my kids, but I love them anyway. I wish I could go back and make the same decision as you. I’m jealous. I wish I had thought about it more. I’m not cut out for this. They drive me crazy. It’s a scary world.

I am fascinated by the honesty in which people, mainly mothers, share with me about their children because they think I won’t judge them if they say they wish they would’ve made a different decision. I don’t judge them, but I do wish they felt more freedom to express their experience of motherhood honestly. I have spent so much time in my life thinking about my decision, asking myself questions, reading other (mostly) women’s experiences and decisions. I have spent so much time defending my decision to absolute strangers and new acquaintances. I am absorbed by and enraged at people’s compulsion to convince me to procreate.

In her book Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed reminds us that women often experience being directed, but that we can resist; we can make our own direction. One way resistance shows up for us is to redefine what happiness means for ourselves—and, Ahmed reminds us, this redefining may include deviating from what others think will make us happy. To say as a woman, what you directed me to enjoy, to accept, to make my life about and be happy, does not.

To be a woman and to say that not only do I not want children, I don’t want them because it would not make me happy. To resist direction disrupts the social contract of happiness; we have been directed to find happiness in childrearing our entire lives, after all. This deviation, this choice, takes away others’ happiness, and when a woman does that, she becomes the “feminist killjoy [...] who does not make the happiness of others her cause,” according to Ahmed. Deviation from what is supposed to make us happy, from what makes others happy, shines a light on the opportunity for choice, for women to act of their own

accord, for women to be willful, as Ahmed calls it. The feminist killjoy has a will of her own. The child-free woman made a disruptive choice, but it fulfills her own will: to live her life the way she wants.

Only in queer spaces have I not been interrogated about my choice. My sense is that queer folks are painfully accustomed to invasive questions about our sexuality, about our gender and our bodies, that we understand the weight of questions people think are simple. I’m not defending the way people assume no harm when asking these questions. I am saying that a lot of people completely miss how harmful questions about a person’s body are. This also highlights to me that any slight difference from status quo, especially for female-presenting people, so quickly becomes threatening to others, particularly those who benefit from and are invested in maintaining patriarchal social norms.

This is a problem for people, especially for women, whether we are fluid, trans, or cis, precisely because of the scrutiny social and cultural norms subject our bodies to, precisely because of the external expectations for what it means to be “woman.” This is a problem because of the lack of boundaries people feel toward and about women’s bodies, and that compounds when you take into account the intersection of identities we have. This question of parenthood is not exclusively a “woman’s” problem, either. It is a cultural problem, of placing the burden and unrecognized labor of childrearing largely on women, and of pretending people of all genders don’t consider whether or not they want to or should become parents. This is a problem because we live in a culture that damns people for not having kids, but does little to ensure communal wellbeing of children who actually exist.

What happens when a willful woman’s decision disrupts patriarchal—and capitalist— notions of what it means for a woman to be happy, to be fulfilled, to be “useful?”

There were most definitely times in my life I thought I wanted a child, that it would be a thing I would do, eventually. It was always that, though: a thing I wanted in the future. It never felt like the right time and even when I thought about my life in a year or two or three, that didn’t seem like it would be right, either. I started to pay attention to that never-feeling-right thought, that I never seemed to visualize my life with a kid in it.

There were nieces and nephews. There were babies of friends from college. There were growing distances between people I loved to spend time with. There were constant interruptions during conversations and cancellations. Most of this had never happened before and I found it frustrating, especially because there wasn’t anyone in particular to be

mad at. I can’t blame a kid for getting sick, or for needing the attention of their parent, but it left me with a sense of loss. All these people I loved had stepped into parenting and were completely absorbed by it. There were coworkers who had one, then two, then three children and complained about them. They were tired and anxious all the time. There were neighbors who yelled at their kids about mundane things. A ticker-tape in my mind started: why would I do this? In my mid-twenties, I decided I was not willing to add “mother” to my package of identities. Now in my mid-thirties, I feel even stronger about this decision.

My partner’s trajectory to this decision is linear: he thought when he was younger that he would have children because that’s what you do. It was just a thought and then he moved on to the rest of his life. Then in college he knew that’s not what he would do, and that was it. No one asked him every other day at work, “when is it your turn?” No one (except his mom a few times) has given him that look like they think he was lying when he said he didn’t want kids. Rarely do strangers he just met at a work event ask if he has children, which is the second or third question for me.

Much of my life has been impregnated with the potential of my body to produce another body. This is perhaps the most demanding way patriarchal ideologies have been forced on my body: to exist is to fulfill desires that do not belong to me. This was made even clearer when legal protections that gave me rights to my body were rolled back, and more limitations are coming down the line. I want to be careful to note that Ahmed specifically warns about reducing feminist willfulness down to individualism. I am speaking about a deeply personal decision, but for women, this decision is never just ours. It is informed, questioned, antagonized, disbelieved by our lineages, strangers, cultures, and social circles. The decision to have or not have children has not always been available—and continues to be threatened. It is a political choice to even have the choice. Ahmed reminds us that “when you are assumed to be for others, then not being for others is judged as being for yourself.”

It took me a few years to understand part of my decision to continue a child-free life included a process of grieving. Not grief in the way I have experienced when a loved one dies, but grief as in recognizing and then letting go of a dream that was given to me that I wasn’t sure I wanted. Grief as in learning to give myself permission to deviate. Grief in the way of shifting friendships because of parenthood, most especially the ones who I thought were in this child-free club with me.

Ahmed notes that conventionally, women who do not have their own children “would be an end point.” I understand Ahmed’s point, that women who do not have children from their bodies are seen as not just disrupting a genealogical line but ending it altogether. But I would argue something that many choose to disregard or fail to see: many of us are aunties, and the presence we have in the lives of the children of our siblings and friends—whether extensive or not—impacts that next generation. But more than that, we child-free women have existed for a long time, and more of us are giving each other permission to speak about our choices. I have found that once my choice becomes known, many women confess their indecision, or that they didn’t realize they could make the choice, or that they thought they had made the choice and then something happened, and maybe they regret it. Child-free women have our own genealogy, and we are finding each other and putting together our history and our future by discussing individual choices, naming past women who had the means to make the choice. We knit together our tree leaf by leaf, choice by choice.

I love spending time with my nieces and nephews. Recognize that not every child-free person enjoys spending time with children. Recognize too that word choice: I enjoy spending time with, not having my time absorbed by, children. Ahmed brings up the “snap” experienced by others when a woman chooses to act of willfulness, as a willful woman in a patriarchal culture. To snap is to break, to “give way abruptly under pressure,” to sever a bond. Ahmed writes about this snap, this breakage of bonds, of the interpretation that to deviate from the chosen path laid out for you is to break that bond, to sever the happiness of others by withholding the imagined future. By withholding, you are received as passing judgment on others who have followed a well-trodden path. Deciding not to have children is a snap. To yourself, to your culture, to strangers you just met. It can be received as an immediate judgement on those who are parents.

I’m not here for comparisons on whose life is harder or easier. I am fully aware of the constraints children place on one’s life. People have all kinds of reasons they have or don’t have children. To be a willful woman, to deviate from the well-trodden path, to be disobedient—we shouldn’t have to explain, or justify, or defend our deviations and disruptions to anyone if we don’t want to. Yet it is 2025 and we are still fighting to maintain the ability to choose family planning, to choose our lives as we see them best lived. It is 2025, and we have to demand that strangers stop invading and interrogating our bodies and decisions.

TROI SPEAKS | DEATH CARD: THE THEROINES’ QUEST

It is called necromancy, my womanhood, that is; wherein I forgo this transformative undertaking of reinvigorating my lineage of witchery whilst deconstructing my generational trauma. There is wisdom in enduring an ending, and even more so in nurturing a beginning.

Somewhere in my bloodline, my people evolved by developing the ability to see blues and from then on dreamt in color like I do; with sensational vibrancy and detail—did you know that the brain activity of REM sleep is the same as being awake? When I rest I am free and it is real. Oh, how transcendental and thrilling to be engrossed in such necrosis liberation—I see now how my womb is a portal for metempsychosis and that my spirit is a traveler of many dimensions. Thus the only way out of my ego is through it— this journey of rebuilding bridges back to my pneuma, my authentic self, with brave vulnerability is something new. Yes, I am black, and I am queer, etcetera, etcetera. And yes, it is exhausting work, recreating your natural self in this patriarchal nation under capitalism, but it is oh so worth it to shed all that had once clung to my skin like grime and gasoline by simply setting myself on fire.

This is how I will de-baptize myself. For if my body is a temple, then I too am both my own God and religion. So as such, my ancestors’ cycles of cerebral colonization will end with me. Knowing that, I don’t want to kill myself anymore.

And in like manner, my living will be an omen of healthy, honest, and humane change among the world as we know it burning down around us

I will bloom even in bleakness.

JESS FALKENHAGEN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

With her background in Cultural Anthropology and Indigenous rights work, Jess uses her photography to capture the diverse ways that different cultures express themselves through customs, traditions, celebrations, and other forms of cultural practices across the globe, as well as through the small rituals of family life. She has photographed ceremonies, funerals, dances, and festivals in Latin America, West Africa, Europe, and Asia on her extensive travels. Closer to home, she often trains her lens on the quiet (or loud) drama of life with children and the rich cultural life of New Mexico. A fan of street photography and photojournalism, she is inspired by the great Sebastiao Salgado as well as the work of Bill Cunningham, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Josef Koudelka, Mary Ellen Mark, Vivian Maier, and Lynsey Addario.

JESS FALKENHAGEN | CHIMAYO

ELIZABETH GALOOZIS | I KEEP FALLING ASLEEP IN THE MOTHERLAND

Kalymnos, Greece

The ferry rocks us like it’s our mother who’s been up all night; she’s tried being gentle and now just wants us to go the fuck to sleep.

After setting foot on the island, I can’t keep my eyes open. I can barely take in the one-way streets, the tiny white churches, the impossible cliffs— details I’ve dreamed of placing.

Five people a day tell me my last name is their grandmother’s, their cousin’s. The woman who gives us the key to the room where once it’s dark I can’t rest.

I try to revive myself, stir the blood.

The sea is cold enough to wake me up but warm enough to keep me from leaving. It grasps me as I apprehend it.

I came into this world landlocked. They pulled me out by the same ankles the sea now circles, pushes my feet to the edge of the land I came from. The waves tug at my blood, lulling me, slowing me, whispering why would you ever leave.

LYNN PEDERSEN | BRATTON FRUITCAKE

We follow the recipe exactly, the same hand-scrawled steps handed down in 1920 from a Mrs. Hanks in Crenshaw, Mississippi on a folded, torn-atthe-creases, dog-eared piece of paper with faint hints: Be forewarned about the mess when you add the liquids to the creamed butter and sugar. We labor through the instructions that each generation has every midNovember—my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunt, mother, sister— measure sugar, flour, buttermilk, molasses & coffee, then mix four eggs & enough candied cherries, nuts, raisins, citron & figs to make a sevenpound concoction. We steam the pungent mass five hours, then cool & swaddle it in cheesecloth, seal it in tin foil. Leave it in a lard can in the attic for a month. This tradition held fast in Mississippi & thrived in Tennessee, too, but this year, a new arrival: mold. We trim off & save what we can; surmise it was colder years back, even that far south in the heart of the Delta—winters with frost, sometimes snow. What do you do when it’s too warm for the old ways to work? First the teetotalers swapped out the recipe’s alcohol for grape juice during Prohibition & now the weather’s shifted. We amend the directions, banish future cakes to the back of the fridge for six weeks to age. As my great-great-aunt Lala in Mississippi suspected: For years, the first frosts have been occurring later and later each fall.

MARCY RAE HENRY | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Photography is a way to document, to capture light and poetry, and to attempt to stop time for a moment. I am often inspired by beauty in the quotidian, seeing things in a fresh way or in a different context. While taking pictures, I often think of magical realism: seeing the ordinary in the extraordinary and seeing the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.

KELLY LAYNE | SAND FLEAS, CIGARETTES, AND ANDY PANDA

The sand is soft but my skin itches. All over. I slept outside underneath the Mexican starry sky on the patio of the beach-front condo belonging to Grandma Joan’s stepson and got eaten alive! I didn’t want to share a bedroom with my older brother, so this was the alternative. Rocky Point is only a few hours’ drive over the border from Grandma’s place in Tucson, so it’s an easy weekend trip for our four families. The adults are playing cards, so I spearhead an excursion for the younger kids—one that does not include older siblings.

We make our way down the beach to the small rolling sand dunes out of eyesight of the condo and overlooking the sea. My youngest cousin Andy is nine, six years younger than me and sweet as can be. And easy. We call him Andy Panda with those big brown doe eyes. Gabe, the cousin by Grandma’s marriage, is about twelve and trouble with a capital “T,” blue eyes, curly mop, and grit in his grin. He has cigarettes stashed in his board shorts. I’ve been secretly pretending to inhale them with my friends, too. I think Andy is surprised. He doesn’t feel any pressure to participate as Gabe and I take turns with young teenage tokes—more showing off than actually inhaling the smoke.

Sitting on those dunes with the hot sun beating down makes my bites itch more. I’m not sure what’s more uncomfortable—the itching or the awkwardness I feel when I allow Gabe to kiss me in front of Andy after much provoking and insistence. I don’t want to seem prude or uncool, so instead I do something I don’t want to do. Of course, it’s not a make-out or anything, but probably impactful on young Andy, something he’s never been witness to—especially “kissing cousins,” even if only by marriage. He looks puzzled but handles it well. I feel unsettled as hell—what a weird-ass thing to do! So, I smoke more and scratch my bites as we head back to the condo. Gabe struts his stuff, and I want to barf. I never mention it or bring it up to Andy. I’m not sure how many other impactful moments we share before he dies tragically, four days before his twentieth birthday—six people killed instantly, his friend drunk driving. I wonder what moments and memories flash before him in those minutes before he dies.

I love you forever, Andy Panda.

ERNEST WILLIAMSON III | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I began painting seriously at nineteen; the glorious works of the old masters inspired me to develop my own artistic vision. Notable works by Raphael, El Greco, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo had a profound impact on my desire to take up painting. Once I sit down at my desk and decide to create, the drawing or painting creates itself; I do not visualize anything at any time. I listen to Gregorian chants when I write poetry, and old school R&B sets the mood for me when I paint. Relaxation and intent are vital ingredients in all my creative undertakings. I equally enjoy writing and painting; however, I spend more time creating visual art.

IVY RAFF | ANCIENT, STOIC TENDERNESS

after Reuben Jackson

I never knew it. That cord, cut in 1950s Brooklyn, commenced its fray at that 20th Century’s opening call when, at the back of a Leeds sweatshop my immigrant great grandmother entered labor and died on the floor. They say that woman, blood of my mother’s mother’s blood, smuggled herself into England and probably I’ll never know what that looked like, what it felt like in her dark, crunched-down spine, but when I hear the word smuggled I imagine a large box, brass-rivered, leatherbound—treasure buried. Smuggled. She tried to abort the baby herself—recovered from massive infection on the family bed in the tenement, where her sister brought bowls of boiled water for Rachel to inhale herb-laced steam, keep breathing, breathe again. The baby lived. Rachel didn’t. My mother said her mother said I wanted to be a good mother to you, for I never had one. I think of how, in whipped frenzy, our greatest desires’ storms, we capsize our gilded ships. We drown the whole natural fleet.

An ancient, stoic tenderness: all I’ve ever wanted: I have skin, just touch it. But the wood salt air-warps, rusts

copper. The Long Island Sound a narrow vessel for the wounds my women brought from Europe. I’ve never been to Latvia, where Rachel was born. The very word labors the tongue, sounds like sickly desserts thick with poppy seed paste I’d pass on the Shabbos table in favor of Betty Crocker mix brownies, Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies you could break into neat orbs of dough. Ancient, stoic tenderness— I can hardly imagine.

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Stephen Abban Junior (b.1992) is a Ghanaian illustrator and a multidisciplinary artist currently working and living in Sekondi-Takoradi and a native of Mankessim in the Central Region of Ghana. Abban studied visual arts in high school, holds a BTECH in Studio Practice from the Takoradi Technical University, and was awarded an Erasmus international exchange program by the European Commission in Hungary to study visual representation (Fine Art) at Eszterhazy Karoly University in Eger. He has also exhibited in numerous international art exhibitions and fairs, including the Mauritius International Art Fair (MIAF).

Erin Averill has traversed a serpentine career phylogeny—branching from existential crises in San Francisco’s tech sphere, to botanizing in New Mexico’s borderlands and alpine deserts, to now indulging in delusions of becoming a journalist. She was a radio host for KNCE in Taos, and her words have been published in Southwest Contemporary magazine. Raised in Southern California, she recently relocated from Taos to Santa Fe. Read more at erinaverill.com.

C. Bellettini is a writer/researcher living in Los Angeles. They earned their M.F.A. from Columbia College Chicago and have been published in The Los Angeles Review.

Ben Bruges works in education, is co-Features Editor for Hastings Independent, and has published poems in Interpreter’s House, Banyan Review, London Grip, Write Under the Moon, Clare Songbirds, Howling Owl, Creaking Kettle, and Elizabeth Royal Patton Memorial Poetry Competition anthologies. Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, complimented the poems “for their density, thoughtfulness and cleverly pausing rhythms. [They] manage to make the urban city-scape resonate like a pastoral one.”

Clarissa Cervantes is a travel researcher photographer. Clarissa's photo gallery includes images from all over the world, where she finds inspiration to share her photographs with others through her creative lens, inviting the viewer to question the present, look closer, explore more the array of emotions, and follow the sunlight towards a brighter future. Clarissa also supplies freelance articles on a variety of topics for newspapers and magazines such as USA Today.

Daniel Joseph Combs grew up in the upstate New York town of Waterford. After college in Michigan, he traversed the U.S. with stints in Burlington, VA, Seattle, WA, New York City, and Grand Rapids, MI. He now divides his time between Louisville, CO, and New Mexico, where he lives with his partner, the poet Shelli Rottschafer, and their Pyrenees-Border Collie rescue pup. His passion, which has developed over the years, is photography. He observes humanscapes as well as naturescapes. He hopes that his images invoke a connection to a sense of place and one’s personal beliefs, fusing harmony with one’s land-of-origin as well as one’s land-ofbelonging. He aspires for his images to promote justice and animacy through giving voice to land and identity. Learn more at danielcombsphotography.com.

Natasha Cuiffo is an English teacher with a B.A. in English and a M.A. in Education. As someone constantly working with young writers, she is passionate about pursuing a variety of her own writing. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, who also teaches and writes.

Shymala Dason is a first-generation immigrant from Malaysia to the US, and the child of second-generation immigrants from India to Malaysia. She was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Literary Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is also a developmental editor and writing coach. Carrying the Ocean, her poetry debut, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Jess Falkenhagen is a photographer and poet who lives with her family in an old adobe house at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Northern New Mexico. She has a background in cultural anthropology and is passionate about books and travel. Her goal is to try to capture the human condition in all its beauty and tragedy through images that encourage reflection and foster connection.

Deborah Fleming’s nonfiction collection Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape won the 2020 PEN-America Art of the Essay Award. She has published five collections of poems, a novel, two nonfiction collections, and four volumes of scholarship. Winner of a Vandewater Poetry Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she served for many years as director and editor of the Ashland Poetry Press.

Elizabeth Galoozis’s debut full-length collection, Law of the Letter (2025), won the Hillary Gravendyk Prize from the Inlandia Institute. Her poems appear in Air/Light, RHINO, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and for Best of the Net. Elizabeth works as a librarian, lives in southern California, and can be found on Instagram and Blue Sky @thisamericanliz and at elizabethgaloozis.com.

j.h. gho is a queer and trans person of the Korean diaspora. In their creative practice, they are interested in exploring and portraying the connections, overlaps, and relationships between intergenerational and personal trauma, inheritance, land, food, bodies, translation, and queerness. They have appeared in Kitchen Work and have been a Public Ceramics Fellow. Their artwork is forthcoming in Arkana.

Cynthia Hartling lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union and also studied at the Istituto Statale d'Arte, Urbino, Italy and at SUNY New Paltz. Her visual language lies in the tactile and hidden, utilizing color and form as her subject matter to capture both static and fleeting moments in order to question and inhabit felt/perceived experience in an almost diarist confession. Learn more at cynthiahartling.com

Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Latina/e artist from the Borderlands and the author of dream life of night owls, We Are Primary Colors, and the body is where it all begins. Her collection death is a mariachi won the May Sarton New Hampshire Prize for Poetry and will be published in 2025. She has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, and a Pushcart nomination.

Jodi L. Hottel’s recent chapbook is Out of the Ashes from Pandemonium Press. Previous chapbooks are Voyeur (WordTech Press, 2017) and Heart Mountain, winner of the 2012 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize. Jodi’s been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Learn more at jodihottel.com.

Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for the Jake Adam York Award, The Vassar Miller Prize, and The Levis Award, A Slow Indwelling (Harbor Editions, 2024), and Distributary (Texas Review Press, 2025). Quiver was recently named one of four finalists for the 2024 California Book Award. Johnson was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the esteemed 2024 Robert Frost Residency through Dartmouth College. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Désirée Jung is an artist from Vancouver, Canada. She has published translations, poetry, and fiction in several magazines around the world, taking part in many artist residencies. Her series of video poems were screened in various film festivals and won several prizes. Her nonfiction story, “Dispatches from the Womb,” was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Learn more at desireejung.com.

Kelly Layne, writer and local resident, appreciates the beauty, magic and community of Santa Fe. As an outdoor enthusiast, she spends her days outside in the mountains alongside her frolicking dog, Falco. In between writing the final pages of her first book of prose and poetry, Kelly produces events and consults non-profits and lifestyle ventures on community development.

Aaron Lelito is a visual artist and writer from Buffalo, New York. His poetry chapbook, The Half Turn, was published in 2023, and he released a collaborative notebook/art collection titled If We: Connections Through Creative Process in 2024. His work has also appeared in Stonecoast Review, Barzakh Magazine, Novus Literary Arts Journal, SPECTRA Poets, and Peach Mag. He is Editor-inChief of Wild Roof Journal. Follow him on Instagram @aaronlelito.

Cameron MacKenzie's work has appeared in Blackbird, Salmagundi, CutBank, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. His novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, which chronicled the rise to power of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, was called "original, poignant, brutal, and beautiful" by Kirkus Reviews. His collection of stories, Theories of Love, is forthcoming by Alternating Current Press.

Cheryl Marita is writing her way into her recently-discovered birth family relatives. Her new book about adoption and its sequalae will be published in 2026. She has a blog, morselsofmarita. com, about aging, and a book about her hospice work, Touching the Veil. The bosque along the Rio Grande is her home, with her favorite cottonwood tree named after her birth mother, Freda. Email Cheryl at morselsofmarita@gmail.com.

Jennifer Markell’s first poetry collection Samsara (Turning Point, 2014) was named a "Must Read" by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her second collection, Singing at High Altitude, was published in 2022 by The Main Street Rag. Her poems have been included in The Bitter Oleander, Consequence, Diode, RHINO, Storm Cellar, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. Jennifer works as a psychotherapist with an interest in therapeutic uses of writing.

Megan E. McDonald is a video game producer in the San Francisco Bay Area. A 2016 recipient of a Stanford Online Fiction Certificate, she was named 2018 Literary Stage Exhibitor of the Year at the San Mateo County Fair and placed in the poetry and fiction divisions in 2019. She was a semi-finalist on writing reality show America’s Next Great Author and has published essays and poetry in several anthologies.

Patrick McEvoy enjoys creating and is thankful to be published in various mediums, with an affinity for genre/surreal works. His illustrated stories have appeared in Apricity Press, Glint, and Murder Park After Dark among others. In addition, his short plays have been performed at various festivals in New York City, including The Dream People in 2024. His photography has also been exhibited with Artistonish and elsewhere.

K. A. McGowan lives 49 feet above sea level near Lafayette, Louisiana. His first full-length poetry collection, Pangaea, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.

David Milley's work appears in Christopher Street, Muleskinner Review, RFD Magazine, Friends Journal, and Feral. David lives in New Jersey with his husband and partner of 48 years, Warren Davy, who's made his living as a farmer, woodcutter, nurseryman, auctioneer, beekeeper, and cook. These days, Warren tends his garden and keeps honeybees. David walks and writes.

Andrew Alexander Mobbs is the author of the chapbooks A Walk in the Garden (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Strangers and Pilgrims (Six Gallery Press, 2013). A Pushcart Prize nominee, he’s grateful his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Terrain.org, Frontier Poetry, Arkansas Review, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Santa Fe Literary Review, and other fine publications. He’s the co-founding editor of Nude Bruce Review.

Andrea Montano is an illustrator and comic book artist that has been working throughout the years in different publications. Andrea also produces portraits for events and children's books for a variety of clients. She lives with her husband, also an artist, in New Jersey.

Lynn Pedersen’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Ecotone, Nimrod, Borderlands, and The Southern Poetry Review. She is the author of The Nomenclature of Small Things (Carnegie Mellon) and two chapbooks. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Learn more at lynnpedersen.com.

Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains (Editorial DALYA, forthcoming 2025), a bilingual English/ Spanish poetry collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024). Poems and translations appear in Ninth Letter, International Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature, and West Trade Review, among numerous others. Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell's Senior Systems Project Manager.

Mary Robles is from El Paso, Texas. She is a current M.F.A. candidate in poetry at Bowling Green State University and Poetry Editor at Mid-American Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Grain Magazine, and Copper Nickel, among others.

Zoë Romans is utterly fascinated with the “Why”. She's currently getting her undergraduate degree in International Studies and Photography at UNM, working on preserving her longings of traveling into unknown realms with a camera and pen in hand. Her artistic focus resides in what often goes unnoticed to harness stories into multimedia images.

Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year. Her forthcoming collection, Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. Learn more and contact her at rikkisanter.com.

Jennifer Saunders (she/her) is the author of Tumor Moon, winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest (Concrete Wolf, 2025) and Self Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019). She is also co-editor of the Stained anthology (Querencia Press, 2023). A Pushcart, Orison Anthology, and Best of the Net nominee, Jennifer's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, Salamander, and elsewhere. Jennifer lives in Switzerland.

Zeke Shomler is a poet and educator in Fairbanks, Alaska. His work has appeared in AGNI, Modern Language Studies, The Shore, Folio, and elsewhere.

Originally from Van Nuys, California, Troi Speaks is an emerging black queer multimedia artist currently working on a series of semi-political artworks, including some portraits and a poetry chapbook, with intentions of becoming an art therapist.

Julie Sprott returned to live in New Mexico for the third time in 2020. She became an avid nature photographer during her 20 years in Alaska. As a freelancer, her garden spreads were published in various issues of Better Homes and Gardens Perennials. Notably, a full-page image taken of a massive wildfire in the Yukon was printed in an April 2006 issue of Time magazine devoted entirely to global warming.

Deborah Jackson Taffa, a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo, is the author of Whiskey Tender, a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and widely acclaimed debut included in The Atlantic's Top 10 Books of the Year. An M.F.A. graduate from the University of Iowa, Taffa has received awards from PEN America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Taffa’s work spans a range of genres and has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Boston Review, and elsewhere Taffa is Director of the Creative Writing M.F.A. Program at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Tony Tracy is the author of The Christening, Without Notice, and Welcome To Your Life, all fulllength poetry collections. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, I-70 Review, Tar River Poetry, North American Review, Hotel Amerika, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry East, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He lives in middle America with his wife of 29 years and their two dogs, Rizzo and Maverick.

After growing up in the desert borderland with Mexico, Santa Fe has been Robert Jesten Upton’s home. Reading is his window into the larger world and writing is his way of honoring the gift of books. Twenty-five years as a writer/editor for the New Mexico libraries allowed him to write fiction as well, and a story, “Cat,” won first place in a science-fiction contest. Upton’s first novel, Milo and the Dragon Cross, received the 2018 Young Adult award. His second book, Gamepiece, is looking for an agent or publisher.

Kathy Whitham is a Parenting Coach for non-traditional families based in Boston. Her poetry gives voice to human connection in its myriad forms. For bedtime stories, Kathy’s father taught her atoms, ESP, and poetry. She's currently circulating a chapbook, Drawing The Big Dipper. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including What the Poem Knows: a Tribute to Barbara Helfgott Hyett, Thriving: An Anthology, and The Love Book.

Ernest Williamson III is an artist living in Tennessee. His artwork has appeared in numerous journals including New England Review, Fourteen Hills, Columbia Journal, and Penn Review. His poetry has appeared in over 200 journals, including Roanoke Review, Pinyon Review, and Poetry Life and Times

Avra Wing’s poems appeared most recently in Red Wheelbarrow, The Healing Muse, and Hanging Loose, and are upcoming in Grist, Pirene’s Fountain, and Image. She is the author of two novels: Angie, I Says, a New York Times “notable book” made into the film Angie, and After Isaac, for young adults. Avra leads a writing workshop at the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York.

Born in Austin, Texas, Sandy Winkelman has enjoyed a successful 30-year career as a graphic designer in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout his career, he continually honed his fine art skills, but after moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he found his true calling: blending pyrography and watercolor to create works inspired by the nature and spirit of the American Southwest. Learn more at art.winkstink.com.

Nolan Winkler paints today in her studio in Hillsboro, New Mexico. Nolan has studied art at U.C.L.A. and in Italy and Arizona as well as at the Santa Fe Institute for Fine Arts where she won scholarships to work under master printmaker Garner Tullis and painter Nathan Oliveira. Her paintings, drawings, and monotypes are included in the Governor’s Collection at the Santa Fe Round House, the Lieutenant Governor Diane and Herb Denish Collection, the collection of artist Sol LeWitt, and the collection of California Senator P. Johnston.

Rebecca Woolston holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Mills College and a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She has appeared online at A Room of Her Own, So to Speak, and Lumen Magazine, and in print in Red Light Lit Volume 5 and From Sac: Home, Myths, and Other Untruths. She received her Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Sacramento State and works in educational research and evaluation.

Emily Zhang is a student artist and poet who aims to transcend boundaries between visual arts and written language. Her work has been recognized by organizations including the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Celebrating Art, The New York Times, and the Toyota Dream Car Foundation.

ABOUT 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 nonfiction, and reproducible visual art. We use Submittable, an online submissions platform, for all submissions.

Our 2026 suggested theme is “Resistance: Grit, Rebellion, and Dissent.” Our submissions period opens July 15, 2025, and closes November 1, 2025. Contributors receive two copies of the magazine and are invited to share their work at our celebratory reading and reception, held each year on the third Thursday of October at the Santa Fe Community College campus.

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 Santa Fe Literary Review, Office 225B, 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87508, or call us at (505) 428-1903.

Poetry, Prose, and Dramatic Writing Submission Guidelines

Word limit per prose submission is 2,000 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 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

The Santa Fe Literary Review is funded annually by the Santa Fe Community College. 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 Santa Fe Literary Review 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.

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2025 Santa Fe Literary Review

SANTA FE LITERARY

REVIEW

Volume 20 ● 2025

SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

FROM THE EDITORS

C. BELLETTINI | CROSSING THE RIVER

SANDY WINKELMAN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

MEGAN E. M c DONALD | BLOODLINES

JENNIFER SAUNDERS | SETTLING THE ESTATE

BEN BRUGES | THE EXHIBIT

DANIEL JOSEPH COMBS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

JENNIFER MARKELL | WHAT A GHOST CAN DO

DEBORAH FLEMING | ANGEL TRAIL

CLARISSA CERVANTES | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

NOLAN WINKLER | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

MARY ROBLES | DRESSING FROM MEMORY

Good Luck

Good Luck

EMILY ZHANG | GOOD LUCK

BEING MAD

EVOY

PATRICK

K.A. M c GOWAN | LAST RITES

CYNTHIA HARTLING | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

JENNIFER SAUNDERS | WHEN I’M 25 MY MOTHER DIES

after Sharon Olds

STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

SHYMALA DASON | NAMASTE

ZOË ROMANS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

KATHY WHITHAM | FAMILY ALBUM—FALL RIVER, MA

TONY TRACY | HOW LUCKY LAZEROV GOT HIS NAME

JULIE SPROTT | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

RIKKI SANTER | MY PERIPATETIC FATHER

AARON LELITO | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

AVRA WING | THE BOAST OF THE PROSTHETIC

REBECCA WOOLSTON | WILLFUL WOMEN AND DISRUPTIONS OF YOUR HAPPINESS

TROI SPEAKS | DEATH CARD: THE THEROINES’ QUEST

JESS FALKENHAGEN | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

ELIZABETH GALOOZIS | I KEEP FALLING ASLEEP IN THE MOTHERLAND

LYNN PEDERSEN | BRATTON FRUITCAKE

MARCY RAE HENRY | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

ERNEST WILLIAMSON III | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

IVY RAFF | ANCIENT, STOIC TENDERNESS

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

ABOUT THE SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW

Poetry, Prose, and Dramatic Writing Submission Guidelines

Visual Art Submission Guidelines

Support the Review

Learn More

Articles inside

C. BELLETTINI | CROSSING THE RIVER

ZEKE SHOMLER | HYDROLOGY