Santa Fe Literary Review 2020

SANTA FE

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Volume 15

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Santa Fe Literary Review

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SANTA FE

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Volume 15

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2020

Faculty Advisor: Kate McCahill Creative Non-Fiction Editors: Holly Beck, Tintawi Kaigziabiher, and Kate McCahill Fiction Editor: Austin Eichelberger Poetry Editors: Nancy Beauregard, Jade McLellan, and Serena Rodriguez Art Editor: Brittney Beauregard Editors at Large: Pat Hastings, Tintawi Kaigziabiher, Cheryl Marita, Jillian Prendergast, and Tristan Van Cleave Editor Emeritus: Miriam Sagan With special thanks to Elizabeth Anthony, Deborah Boldt, Bethany Carson, Linda Cassel, Behzad Dayeny, Julia Deisler, Maria Eleas, Tracey Gallegos, Andrew Gifford, Julia Goldberg, Sarah Hood, Ernest Kavanaugh, Shalimar Krebs, Shuli Lamden, Jenny Landen, Todd Lovato, Laura Mulry, Rob Newlin, Val Nye, Amy Pell, Margaret Peters, Zsuzsanna Rossetter, Becky Rowley, Sarah Sanchez, Kelly Smith, Laura Smith, Roxanne Tapia, Nick Telles, and Amy Tilley. We’re also grateful to the folks at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the Santa Fe Public Library, the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Santa Fe Writers Project.

We at the Santa Fe Literary Review gratefully acknowledge that the Santa Fe Community College is located on ancestral Tewa lands.

The Santa Fe Literary Review is published by the School of Liberal Arts at the Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Copyright © 2020 by Santa Fe Community College

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FROM THE EDITORS

Humans have always quested for space: The space to evolve, to create, to space just for the sake of having it. We occupy and build our world upon physical space; we require inner space to regroup and rewire, reconnecting with our links to all that is. Safe spaces empower; personal space protects. We take up space.

We defy it.

This year, the Santa Fe Literary Review’s theme is “The Spaces Between.” As we of space: the space between individual bodies; the spaces between cities, countries, and continents; the space we’re instructed to keep from each other.

We’re assembling the 2020 Santa Fe Literary Review from our own separate homes while we wait with millions of others to see what will happen. As we face an uncertain future, we take comfort in knowing that we may be alone, but we are not lonely. Indeed, we’re surrounded: by the stories, images, rhythms, and emotions presented in this issue. As an editorial team, we’ve never been more grateful for the solace and the sense of community this publication—and its myriad contributors and supporters—provides.

you to let the words and images on the following pages be your embrace.

The Editors

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Without community, there is no liberation.

Audre Lorde

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INTERVIEW

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CREATIVE NON-FICTION VAL NYE Heart Stain

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teklu Down There

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On Poetic Identity, Typography, and Star Quilts: Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks with Layli Long Solider 54

POETRY

RYAN M. MOSER Sunrise Over Me

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SEAN FITTING Consider the Comma

60

JOCELYN ULEVICUS I Remember the Violets

66

SIBEL MELIK Man Hunt

80

CHERYL MARITA What Makes a Miracle?

86

LAURA REECE HOGAN Exodus

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FREDDA S. PEARLSON wings: fortunate sounds

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MICHELLE M. FAITH Unsettled Boundaries

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PAUL WILLIS Strange

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FICTION

MERVYN R. SEIVWRIGHT Dangling

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MARISA CRANE Self-Portrait as

ELIZABETH JOY DUNHAM My Paleolithic Head

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EMILY PEPIN Learning How

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TOM HOLMES When I Became a Father

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RENE MULLEN After I Moved Out of Town

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BRENDAN SHAY BASHAM To Sam, Love COVID-19 TINTAWI KAIGZIABIHER The Thorn Bush BARI LYNN HEIN Life In Reverse THOMAS L. SMALL Dreams

7 21 36 98

WASABI KANASTOGA Made in Cuba, Broken in the U.S.A.35

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DEBORAH H. DOOLITTLE There Was Always That Line

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GABE GOMEZ Samsara at Quantum Zero

KATHARYN HOWD MACHAN Woodbury Unicorn

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JANE SHOENFELD Museum Guides

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SUSANA H. CASE Otis Redding out of Georgia

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ANNE MACNAUGHTON Divorcing the Hard Luck Farm

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CEDRIC RUDOLPH Girls’ Night

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JEAN TUCKER The Country Where You Live Now

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URSULA MOELLER Mist, Birth and Remembrance

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PAUL WILLIS Franklin Lakes

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ISABELLA BERMAN CHODOSH Kids

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JONATHAN GREENHAUSE My Dad, In Limbo

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MARTY I. LEVINE Charlie Hebdo

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GUNILLA NORRIS Sitting by the Bed

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GRETCHEN ROCKWELL [un]seen / [un]known

123

DAVID JOPLIN Moonglow

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VISUAL ART

MARCELLA WOLFE Wakamiho

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CATIE POWE Dawn

MARISA CRANE What You Would Call an

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JASMINE SIERRA So I Had A Mouse Problem, Right? 78

JERRY FRIEDMAN: An Artist’s Statement

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CAROLINE COTTOM Two Virginias

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JERRY FRIEDMAN Yellow Salsify Seedhead

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JOHN HICKS Distances

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RICK VON KAENEL: An Artist’s Statement

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

RICK VON KAENEL Tarantula Rain

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LINDA MORRIS Lemaire Channel, Antarctica

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SARAH WALLSTROM: An Artist’s Statement

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CATIE POWE: An Artist’s Statement

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SARAH WALLSTROM Bridging the Divide

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CATIE POWE Dusk

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STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR: An Artist’s Statement

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MIKE KIMBALL Santa Fe Station

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STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR Economics

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TINTAWI KAIGZIABIHER: An Artist’s Statement

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JERRY FRIEDMAN Northbound

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TINTAWI KAIGZIABIHER Omo

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LAURA ROSENFELD: An Artist’s Statement

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STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR Sparks of Change

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LAURA ROSENFELD Relative Distance (detail)

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EVALYN BEMIS: An Artist’s Statement

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MAGDALENA KARLICK: An Artist’s Statement

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EVALYN BEMIS Awaiting Their Moment

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MAGDALENA KARLICK Lengthen and See

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ISATU KAIGZIABIHER: An Artist’s Statement

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MIKE KIMBALL: An Artist’s Statement

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ISATU KAIGZIABIHER Sunk-In Reality

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MIKE KIMBALL Midnight Rambler

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LAURA ROSENFELD Future (detail)

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LINDA MORRIS: An Artist’s Statement

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LAURA REECE HOGAN

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EXODUS

Was it shining tunnel curve of salty side dripping

or crimson crawlway, shaft of Egyptian sun refracted as they

I am vastly empty The pink of my cheek wet The parting of the waves

so lonely now he is gone. the furrows white with anguish. a vise-cracking of the heart

ribs open to the sky. Bleeding

out is not what a body expects.

The waters saw you, beloved. you opened wide the red mouth Let us pass through the parting

They trembled through their hips, and hummed us home. part us in passing, it happens that way.

Only part of me is sure of sure of the yes, the ruby passage undertow pulling me beyond

the dividing path but yes I am of you, splendid sea, lodestar, reach, through your tangled deep,

navigation belonging only Those Osiris buds of life

to my belonging to you. of death of life after death

Let us drink what laps at the root

split and start the bloom.

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VAL NYE

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HEART STAIN The hospital doors slide open for me and I step forward without a break in my stride. I take a sharp left turn into the women’s restroom next to the outpatient check-in desk, across from a family waiting area. I know the chairs and tables in the waiting area look much more comfortable from a distance than they actually feel. They are hard and unforgiving. Today, no one is waiting.

The restroom is open. Most of the time there is a yellow cart outside the bathroom indicating that it’s closed for cleaning, but today is Sunday and the hospital is relatively quiet. As the restroom door closes behind me, I realize I am alone. Passing the mirror above the sinks, I glimpse myself and notice with some surprise that my forehead is smooth, not creased with worry, and my eyes seem to smile even though they feel heavy and dark. I go into the second-to-last stall, where I have become used to hanging my bag on the door hook and balancing my cell phone on the toilet paper roll.

Alone in this small space, I admit I am tired. I am sad. My heart is broken.

Tears fall from my eyes and brush past my cheeks, falling onto the sleeve of my shiny black winter coat. Still, I am grateful for this moment of silence before I go upstairs to the patient rooms.

As I grab my purse off the stall hook and prepare to leave, I look down and see a skinny little arm with a pink sleeve come under the wall of the bathroom stall. Her hand is open, holding something small and silver.

I am not alone. She has been in here all along.

“Here, here!” a small voice insists. In her hand there appears to be a piece of candy. The voice cannot belong to a girl older than six. Why is she in here down and squint my eyes; it’s a chocolate kiss. I stay quiet. I don’t want to take it; I want the little girl to keep the candy for herself.

“Here, Miss, here!” She pushes her hand toward me and the wrapped piece tiny hand reaches further into my stall to pick it up. I don’t want it. The kiss is With the candy back in her hand, she insists, “Here, this is for you. Miss!” Her voice demands that I accept the gift. She isn’t offering me the chocolate; she is telling me I must take it.

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“Here, take it! It is for you!” The hand shakes with the command.

Her persistence reminds me of the things I have been forced to see and try to understand in the hospital room upstairs. A small blonde boy’s delicate body is shaken by the machines that churn to keep him alive.

During the darkest moment in that room, the hospital chaplain’s hands reached out to me, and they had nothing to give.

Looking down at the small girl’s open hand, I pick up the chocolate and whisper, “Thank you.” My lips pierce in what feels like a smile.

“You’re welcome,” she returns in a whisper, and her arm disappears.

She is gone.

Stopping at the sink, I put the chocolate on the counter while I wash my hands. Then, I tuck the kiss in the right front pocket of my jeans. I want to such thoughts.

The kiss is quickly forgotten as I make my way to the elevator. Before the end of the day, the chocolate will melt and form the shape of a heart on the pocket of my jeans.

Doing my laundry months later, I see the stain is still here. Since that Sunday, my life has changed in unwanted and unexpected ways. I run my thumb over the heart stain, as if I can erase it like a smudge of dirt.

The heart shape makes me think of the little girl. I want to believe that she knew something that I didn’t know that day, and that she gave me the chocolate kiss to help me practice gracefully accepting unwanted and unexpected gifts.

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FREDDA S. PEARLSON

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wings: fortunate sounds to the ground, with nowhere to hide, all the star stuff around you, too feels the pull, tries to let go and the leaves fall and fall somehow you have managed one brittle inch of fortune a half-turn into an easy morning no longer in anyone’s temporary company no longer watching the old broken clocks

moving higher, higher you have learned to swallow time in great gulps your parched throat has broken away unable to make even bird sounds as you raise your arms and let them fall a cautious strategy of height and silence measuring your own wing span as it unravels to fortune stepping into the cool empty air

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DAWN | CATIE POWE Santa Fe Literary Review

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MICHELLE M. FAITH

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UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES

(after a print by Eleanor Rubin) George Orwell, 1984 The body billows swells its bounds out of control.

An irrational self slips through.

All those little openings all those jagged lines.

They lead both ways.

What enters or leaves my body does so as easily as breathing in breathing out as simply as eating defecating.

But help!

I am amoebic.

I am beyond recognition even by myself.

Through this this

taking in giving out I alone.

am What are shells for if they are

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not

MARISA CRANE

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SELF-PORTRAIT AS CO-STAR NOTIFICATIONS * You should have known you were gay the moment you made your ex-boyfriend a CD with “Fast Car” on it—not once, but twice. * Have you considered the very real possibility that you are an octopus * Quit arguing over whether a hotdog is a sandwich or not. Do you fear * * Greet your loved ones with the enthusiasm of a puppy. * You have access to every moment at once & still, you never learn. * Share a bucket of popcorn with someone tonight; watch the dinosaurs & the Compton’s Cafeteria riot. Your college championship game & Watch everything at the same time. Make it all make sense. * * You were sculpted by someone with a resting tremor. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with that. * Just like an octopus, you have three hearts—one for your past, present, & future. What you do with that information is up to you. * its greatest wish come true. * Santa Fe Literary Review

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Forget what you think you know about happiness. Backstroke through the heavens. Wipe the stars from your thighs. When you’re ready, spit up your hearts. * Give up your desire to be the only one to have done a particular thing. * Either change your life or don’t, no one’s going to beg you. * Today the popcorn is under-salted. No matter. Watch the Stonewall riots, anyway. Watch the Juneteenth celebrations all over the country. * blank your body. Do anything but abandon your body. * * There is no such thing as a god who loves you. * Love is both a verb & a noun. Act accordingly. * Everything you do is a distraction from yourself. Try painting an abstract portrait of this distraction. * Your abs are not a measure of your self-worth. * * Go to the gay bar & remember just how unimportant you are. Tip the bartenders. Step in vomit. Flirt with the emotionally unavailable—just once, for old time’s sake. * It’s a good day to lick the Hot Cheetos bag clean. *

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Body dysmorphia is a free ticket into a funhouse without an exit. Lucky you. * People are on their worst behavior today. You have permission to look directly into the imaginary camera as many times as you want. * Some alcoholics only drink on weekends. * Experiment with rearranging your bones. Transform your sternum into a bookshelf. Go looking for yourself where spine meets spine. * If you can’t be honest between someone’s legs, where can you be * Call in horny to work. Watch Disobedience in your boxer briefs. Maybe if you’re lucky, you will become Rachel Weisz’s spit the moment it drips into Rachel McAdams’ mouth. * Raise your paw if you feel like bad taxidermy. * Whenever you’re feeling down, try imagining a bear on a job interview. * Send a sext that reads like the closing to a poem. * Submit a poem that reads like a sext gone wrong. * No amount of microdermabrasion scrub can smooth out your personality. * * Don’t be surprised by the thinness of your blood. Despite what you may think, plenty of things are thicker than blood. Like boundaries, for example. * Santa Fe Literary Review

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It’s never too late to see signs everywhere. * You didn’t throw the second brick at Stonewall, either. * Experiment with serotonin & dopamine today. There are some breakers hiding behind the milk in the fridge. * They say the one unifying facet of all stories is tension. Do you want to * You should investigate what you mean by useful. * Those thirty-seven open tabs aren’t doing you any good. * You aren’t far from everyone; you’re far from yourself. * past-tense heart is singing “Strawberry Fields Forever” in the courtyard & staring directly into the sun. * * Don’t you dare hit up your ex today. Forget what they say about blooming where you’re planted—sprout some legs & outrun your own disappointment. * * Today the popcorn is smothered in butter. Flip through the universes. * Learn to pronounce homage then pay it to all the trans & queer angels of the world. *

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Your ancestors don’t deserve love—yours or anyone else’s. * Stop interpreting every non-kiss, non-cuddle, & non-date as abandonment. * You don’t get to resent your chores when you were the one who made the mess. * The sooner you stop assuming every domestic task will turn into a * Stop carrying on about the love letters you never sent. The sea lions ate them for breakfast. * Lean so far into your depression that you manage to fall through it & into a giant, glimmering ball pit. * Stop telling everyone that sad songs make you happy when in fact they make you time-travel. * * Replacing your memories with a basket of pomegranate seeds is always a good idea. * Think before you shoot that burning arrow into the past. Your future-

* good without saying the word me. * First person POV has eaten your brain & tangled all of your arteries. *

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Dip your toe in the sky, even if it’s too hot to dive in. * Spend the day asking the mountains if they even want to be moved. * Your therapist is not a replacement for the mirror you tore down. Listen when she says You’ve done nothing wrong. * It doesn’t count as an I feel statement if you say I feel like you’re a cunt. * * The human condition is NSFW & neither are you. Play hooky today & every day moving forward. * Enjoying yourself is not a treat—it’s a vital nutrient. * Tomorrow you turn 10,000 years old. Celebrate by inventing 10,000 languages to love yourself with. *

* loveseat is levitating eight feet in the air. The night is calm & sweet.

There’s enough room for every version of you here.

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teklu

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DOWN THERE That summer, I spent days on end wandering the town, seeking recluse. I needed a home, and with nowhere in particular to belong, I needed a place that allowed me to become no one. Not too far from food shelves, yet not too far gone from society. Living in the wild of the city, nature’s threats (and blessings) lessen greatly, but still, you chance yourself before the nature of others.

Finally, I found a bridge, and it was good. I was concealed from the gaze of any common passersby, but only a few miles from town square. No one else was there. When called for, I could hide (from the sun, from the others), and when it was necessary, I was no more than thirty or forty minutes from my grocer. As it turned out, the arroyo was not that uncomfortable. I even learned that when you have everything you own in one backpack, it doubles as a decent pillow.

And so, I settled underneath that bridge for the season, not unlike a troll, and drank myself to sleep nightly, a mind full of riddles until I felt gone.

The isolation felt appropriate in the new life I had adopted. Having been raised too close to the streets to trust any notion of seeking out the company of those others, I instead kept the company of myself for weeks on end. It wasn’t hopeless—I knew that I only needed to survive for a few months. School would reopen its doors to me and I thought about the food they had there every day.

It wasn’t hopeless.

In fact, revelation crept around the bend and pounced one day, as I rummaged through a bin, just behind the rich people’s market: I realized all at once that I had never felt so free. I was hungry and drunk. Hot and bothered.

Dehydrated in the high desert, curing like meat, and ill. But no one knew of me—whether I was coming or going, it didn’t matter where I was (unless I was scaring white people). And when it doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do, you may do as you will. At all times. Follow a few general rules so you don’t get arrested, keep an eye out for those that would count you as prey, stay out of the sun, and keep to yourself. It felt like an elaborate treasure hunt that didn’t have a treasure to speak of, nor did it have a point, really. That’s when I started talking to myself.

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My gnarled circadian rhythm was one law that I could not break, and though I bent it to extremes, it faithfully led me back to the bridge, time and again.

Every trip home, I stumbled through nervous fear that someone may have found my place—and spoiled it: the only place I trusted, the shadow of an overpass, I left; I worried that some other would somehow take it from me. That’s when I stole a pencil. in conversation, after a while. May be that I wrote to ease the pain, or to accentuate it. I knew a small part of me was leaving notes behind, from that hole in which I slumbered, as a means of claiming the spot as my own. But most probably, I was leaving words to that bridge because it had taken me. It had taken me in when no one else cared to, and I wanted to give it something back.

That gift was little more than my everything. Not including my backpack. I wrote automatically and in a cipher that only I can read (and, I assumed, the why I had asked if I could stay a spell. I asked the bridge who else had been there and why that dog slept with me sometimes. I recounted times in my life that I could barely connect to the present, and I combed through them meticulously, clarifying the path that had led me there. Most of these tales revolved around my college, a school about which that bridge now knows many things. I told the bridge about the future, about where I’d be going one day; I mocked society. I laughed at myself. And the bridge, it stuck around. I still see it sometimes.

The day I did leave, it was simply time to go. Strange as it may seem, I felt a little remorse to leave that place—my most dangerous of safe places that I or two down there.

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JERRY FRIEDMAN

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT

go far for the pictures here; they were taken in or near my yard. “Yellow Salsify Seedhead” is an experiment in showing a sometimes overlooked non-native weed.

I’m fortunate to live in Española, New Mexico, where migrating whenever I hear their tremolo calls. “Northbound” (page 46) was a lucky Santa Fe Literary Review–“The Spaces Between.” Another accident: only when I was preparing to publish the photograph did I notice that the birds in the line at the farthest right are not cranes but Canadian Geese. Partly because of surprises like these, I’ve gotten so used to documenting sightings and looking for beautiful images that I’ll turn my car around if I’ve left without my camera.

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JERRY FRIEDMAN

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YELLOW SALSIFY SEEDHEAD

PAUL WILLIS

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STRANGE

almost sixty years now and hardly ever thought of it having another shore.

Theoretically, there is one, with glass balls

We dropped a bomb there once or twice. Easy to do, in a place that doesn’t really exist.

I don’t exist myself, to the people who vanished.

They say a little rocket man will do us in sooner or later.

Fire and fury—it’s easy to forget whose.

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MERVYN R. SEIVWRIGHT

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DANGLING “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Billie Holiday Spanish moss is hanging off poplar trees like nooses.

I walked between checkerboard corridors of steel copper pillars hanging. Feeling cold— the weight of each soul lost as Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” tune whispers in my ears.

Memorial sitting on a hill, looking over an Alabama city feeling guilty of its slave market past.

Spanish moss is hanging off poplar trees like nooses.

Four thousand four hundred negro souls etched by state, county, name.

I never knew Knoxville had strange fruit—in 1894 Tennessee, Knox County, James Perry left dangling.

Blacky blamed bringing them smallpox

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ELIZABETH JOY DUNHAM

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MY PALEOLITHIC HEAD Hoary memories screeching At the multiples of He Who told me what is right For me to be Be ashamed be guilty be chaste Submit defer obey Be owned be sold be raped Be fertile be quiet betrayed Blooming rage Seeded by the church Who, when I was seven, told me We are all unworthy in the eyes of God Archetypal rage burgeoning Deep in my Mother’s blood Honors my table as the Mevlevi Sheik

A blow to his patriarchal paradigm For “I’ll never call God a She” Says he Why are you bringing up the pantheistic past My young daughter replies She who remembers the egg never dies Refusing to shrink beneath his calm discourse I glue my Paleolithic head back on With vagina’s divine voice And watch the Patriarchal Church Burn to the ground

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BRENDAN SHAY BASHAM

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TO SAM, LOVE COVID-19 To: Sam G. New York, NY It’s been seven hours and sixteen days. We stare out of windows the cracks, smash wasps with the backs of our hands. We were indoors when the blossoms opened for viruses, green buds took their time unraveling for the cardinals and bluebirds. The only sounds we hear are their bickering. The occasional siren. A neighbor behind closed doors humming off-key Mozart’s Don like an ocean should. But it smells like bleach, antibacterial material, a cold slice of salt lick. Remember the pathogens. They remember us. It’s in their DNA. They untangle themselves like a long hot yawn and burrow into cells. Have a tea party with mitochondria. Sip on our nuclei. We look out the window and see two lovers dancing in the overgrown grass, purple clover in their toes. We are in the throes of the new era of the penpal age.

These are our cells from the center of our bones to muscle and tendon and out of this tightening skin to your cells, countless and pickled in the springtime haze overlooking the river and the city and they wish you a happy birthday in the arms of a city that loves you and this is how she shows it. Pull down the ivy and burn the hornets’ nest and raise your glass high and sing to your son and don’t forget to call your mother. Blame it on the bats.

Love, COVID-19 Nashville, TN

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RICK VON KAENEL

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT My initial deep dive into photography came when I was living in New York City. There were people everywhere, and so I took pictures of people. I moved to Santa Fe and then out into the country. Now I photograph the land and the sky and the inhabitants here.

Initially I was certain that I would be bored so far from “civilization.” fascination with our New Mexico landscape has only grown over time.

So, some thoughts on this image and the theme of “Spaces Between”:

I’m a bit alarmed. If it’s on the outside, maybe it’s just trying to get out of the rain. Maybe it needs some help. Are we on the outside looking in

That’s what I like about photography: you can make up your own story.

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RICK VON KAENEL

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TARANTULA RAIN

EMILY PEPIN

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LEARNING HOW ‘Grief is love with nowhere to go.’

Helen Macdonald

I wrapped you in cloth color of the thickest blood.

There a-possumed you slept, pallid skin and obsidian hair, for many hours sleep without weeping until the many violent motions of your life jolted you awake.

I wanted you then as I want you now, ribbed tight to the place that knits my softest gut and sharpest in only the rhythm of my breathing. Now you are not here.

I think of a tree hatchet falls, the knotted wood, I think of prairie dogs out on highways

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trilling for loved ones killed on the road.

I‘ve seen them leap onto the asphalt to touch their fallen, reaching for the prayer I am learning how to make.

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RYAN M. MOSER

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SUNRISE OVER ME Before I even open my eyes this morning, I am reminded of where I am: the loud yelling and commotion throughout the open-bay dormitory; the hard metal bunk beneath my stained, three-inch thick cloth mattress; the sweat; my anxiety at awakening to another day in hell. There is a gray sorrow deep within me, hammered and forged on an anvil of regret.

gambling on Texas hold ‘em, sitting on rusty footlockers and smoking cigarettes. Some are hustling for their living—washing laundry, sewing clothes, or rolling cigarettes. The maelstrom of activity never seems to stop.

Gang tattoos cover most of the inmates around me, and I immediately my game face for the inevitable Machiavellian struggle of daily prison life, and drop down to do one-hundred diamond pushups.

I am not weak. The weak do not survive in here. You’re a fucking warrior.

Never give up.

I think of my mantra and vow never to let prison change me into an animal. As I sit on the edge of my bunk and wipe the sleep from my tired eyes, I try to slow my monkey mind and listen to the Buddha’s voice. The concrete block walls surrounding me are a drab, gunmetal gray; the paint peels away and black mold grows rampant from the leaks in the ceiling.

Life is dangerous and fragile, which heightens my senses: my situational awareness is waking up, too. already challenging a small, distant hope. The feeling is momentary, but damaging. A constant shift in experiences dictates my every emotion, like a potter manipulating his clay, yet my mindfulness seems to bring me back, over and over and over. The battle continues. When I enter the dayroom

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to get hot water for my coffee, the morning news plays on the small television, reminding me of my past life. I return to the eighteen-squarefoot living area and put my radio on, listening to Dave Matthews to tune out the melancholy. Like Ernest says, I am destroyed but not defeated— and that’s enough for now. I know I am worthy of great things, but those things live in a future that’s not guaranteed.

Suddenly, movement comes from the rear of the cavernous dorm, and in a violent world, saved only by my genetics. I’m six foot four, carrying two hundred twenty pounds of muscle, and my stature and stoic demeanor are all that stand between this alpha white boy and a mob of unruly convicts bent on destruction. An argument ensues, but doesn’t evolve.

I put on my blue prison-issue pants and my black boots, make my bunk My stomach growls. I wait for the cattle call—chow—to echo through the inside his Plexiglass bubble, waiting for his twelve-hour shift to end. The guards do not care about what we are doing. At all.

While I wait for the door to open for breakfast—which gives me an my footlocker. The box is responsible for holding every possession I have in the world: Ramen noodles, socks, family photos, a stack of Playboys, t-shirts, a cleverly-hidden shank (like the nuclear button, only to be used when all efforts at diplomacy fail). Everything sits compartmentalized in my tiny storage unit. My entire life squeezes into a three-foot by two-foot metal box. Depressing.

for a personal threat, and after twenty seconds, the two Latin Kings are

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separated by their brothers. It’s only a couple of gangbusters quarreling over a poker debt—none of my business. My hands shape imperceptibly

“Chow! Chow! Chow!” the loudspeaker orders. “Last call for chow!”

A frenzy of prisoners lines up and clogs the doorway, anxious to be fed between me and any potential attacker, and instead step outside into the crisp air of autumn dawn in the Florida panhandle. I watch the serpentine line of lost souls on the concrete sidewalk, stained with the blood of prior towards the most dangerous place in any correctional institution: the chow hall. I trail behind, quietly scoping my environment. I was a Krav Maga instructor in a previous life, and I will not let someone get the jump have to watch our backs. Potential gang members regularly stick neutrons to get initiated, but I’ve earned a reputation: Don’t fuck with the German. mentally ill, violent, and impatient. I am living in a war zone, and I’m trying to stay alive. I want to see my family again. My sons. I’m weary, already loathing another calendar day imprisoned because of my addictions, but as I look up and around at the morning sky, I’m dumbstruck at the beauty that suddenly surrounds me. A light rain falls. I have a panoramic

inmates inside of the fences have jaded me, but at this very moment, I’m awestruck with wonder.

To the east is a monumental sunrise gaining ground; all above are the cumulus-nimbus clouds of a gentle rain shower weeping on the earth. To the west is a mythic rainbow. Arches of lavender, ruby red, mint green, canary yellow, and orange spread their joy across the land, the colors

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staccato birdsong of sparrow and sandpipers, and dew lies upon the grass and clover in the yard. This morning owes nothing but another day to the dawn—a soft cradle for the approaching vermilion sun. I feel peace. As I walk, the daybreak brings a nourishing freshness and an aurora of vitality, shining wide with good tidings of bold might, a gift of nascent light.

Damaged men snake through the gates and past barbed wire fences

from a window in the tall guard tower, its shadow looming long over the forgotten. Just before we walk into the jungle to be fed, I turn to look at the heavens one last time. The ephemeral rebirth of Gaia starts with a

I enter the fray. I can do this.

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TOM HOLMES

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WHEN I BECAME A FATHER for Stan Coe My partner is four weeks along she’ll tell me she’s a lesbian.

In week six, the baby’s gone somehow. Lost. A black dot washed down the toilet I imagine. A black dot, an end stop. Much grief and holding. She tells me she’s gay. I think black dot.

There’s no Sistine Chapel for this. I apologize to it for bringing hope to us and her or him and the going away.

And here we are down south years later eating po’boys and fries, nearly brushing hands.

There’s a black dot between us connecting our lonely sentences.

Luckily, you’re not here.

One repression is enough for a life.

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RENE MULLEN

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AFTER I MOVED OUT OF TOWN Evenings, mother used to ask Can you see the moon?

I’d pull iron curtains aside to see a false source of light yes Me too she’d whisper It means we’re not all that far apart Funny how she never spoke of closeness in daylight Only in shadows when mother’s touch became something else I don’t look at night moons any longer It and I have seen too much together I speak of day moons now Everyone can know its truth /Her lies exposed/ She provides no light or guidance She’s just

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SARAH WALLSTROM

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT This image comes from a collection of shots I took while exploring the interplay of light and shadow in the city structures of downtown Manhattan. Skyscrapers are so densely layered within and amongst each other throughout New York City that eventually space itself can quality, and how the layered buildings manipulate space to confuse the boundary between inside and outside. Space and distance become arbitrary as they melt into a shimmering fabric of light and and dance, or reveals itself as mere shadow, and reality bleeds into

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Santa Literary Review 33 SARAH WALLSTROM | FeBRIDGING THE DIVIDE

BLANK

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WASABI KANASTOGA

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MADE IN CUBA, BROKEN IN THE U.S.A. First came the chirping I had so often heard the mockingbird make Chuwee-Chuwee-Chuwee Followed by a demand, Hey ese, where you from?

Coming from a white Impala, red interior Swinging from the rear-view mirror My broken English answer, From Cuba, I was made in Cuba!

The door sprung open and one of them sprinted after me, You wise ass motherfucker, he kept yelling, chasing Pocket knife in hand, khakis 4x’s his size Up ahead was the San Antonio Library, Huntington Park (not Huntington Beach, but Huntington Park, The Hood, no surf boards, no rad waves, Lots of liquor stores and helicopters) Sanctuary for this Nouveau Quasimodo Fresh arrival made of palm fronds and blue skies Smoothened by equatorial humidity Propelled by mamonsillo juice (look that shit up).

San Antonio Library, A 1950s art deco with heavy front doors That my sweaty hands trembled in opening But once inside all else disappeared This was their kryptonite

No trespassing into this world of paper and ink of musk and silence As this ritual repeated itself Until I learned to bow my head and murmur, Not from here and no longer from there Somewhere in-between, perdido.

San Antonio Library bound Each afternoon after the last bell San Antonio, Patron Saint of the Lost.

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TINTAWI KAIGZIABIHER

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THE THORN BUSH

When I was a girl my grandfather would sit me on his knee and tell me the story of the two villages. They were within a short walk of each other and were called the Stone and Mud villages. The Stone people thought the Mud people were dirty and therefore not to be trusted. The people of Mud assumed the people from Stone had hearts that were hard and cold, and so they kept their distance so as not to have their hearts crushed.

Popie, my grandfather, said: “No one really remembers why the two villages maintained a separation, but you know how it is if you say the wrong thing often enough to the right people they will believe you. Without any concrete evidence of wrongdoing, one group built a faulty case against the other. Their hatred accumulated and divided the people based on their ancestral lineages.”

Mud was composed of what the people were known for: earth. The dwellings were the former homes of their clan’s ancestors. They stood side by side in a humble beauty. The plastered walls of their homes held the plaster reminded the people of their origin. People were grateful for the warmth that their homes harbored in the cold season and the cool retreat they were blessed with during the warm months. The people taught their children how to build with mud as soon as their feet would carry their wobbling bodies on the earth. The children absorbed everything their parents taught them through doing it themselves. In their youth, it was all about who made the best mudpie. As they grew, they learned the different consistencies for plastering and making bricks. The gift they received at the end of their labor they owed to their own hands, their

large and tiny dwellings formed of granite, quartz, and volcanic rock. Yet these homes where the Stone people raised their families were built so strongly, they had been passed down by their great grandfathers and grandmothers. They were beautiful homes that could withstand time

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and nature, but they were always cold. In Stone, the older boys crossed over into manhood when they could lift enough stones to build a small house. The girls in Stone no longer built dwellings because they learned that the weight of hauling stones as youth squeezed their wombs, making pregnancy hard or impossible as adults. The young boys were also not allowed to build to protect their backs from the weighty burden of the stones. Nevertheless, the minerals in the stones danced in the afternoon sun, and the homes sparkled.

rest, a young Mud boy named Tariq was out picking berries. He’d found the last small grove. No berries until next spring pot with the sweet treats. As he was reaching for the last bush laden with juicy berries, he stumbled and fell on a giant thorn bush. Tariq sustained terrible wounds from the needles. All over, the angry bush had pierced his boy, bleeding, sobbing, and unable to resurrect himself from the bush.

walked, Tariq listened to his savior’s breaths, heavy with his own weight. He was carried through some castor groves for what seemed like an eternity

placed round stones on the embers. In a short time, the stones gleamed

cauldron and dropped bush plants inside. He touched the bucket to Tariq (something he’d seen his grandmother do when people came over for

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her healing sessions), and then poured the contents onto the hot stones.

sap that oozed out into every spot the boy had been pierced. Within a

looked like all the Stone boys, bright-eyed and curious. As he was thinking,

“I am called Tariq. Thank you for saving me … I-I … I don’t know what I would have done, I fell, and I couldn’t get up because the thorns hurt so much. Every time I tried to move they just dug deeper into my skin. I don’t know why my family says people from Stone are mean. You have shown me only kindness. The same kind-heartedness I feel from my own people. In Mud when someone saves us from harm we are indebted to that person.” found you and that you allowed me to help.”

“Please, I want to do something for you.” Tariq looked around, wondering what he could offer his new friend. “Will you give me permission to work

more comfortable.”

You need to begin the work after the sun sets and the people are in their Tariq went to work at once, making mud. He mashed earth as he poured him and learned some new methods along the way. Unlike the solid brick mud houses in his village, he had to slap the mud onto the stones carefully so as not to slice his palms. He worked and worked, mixing mud and

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as the light peeked out from behind the mountain. He admired his gift to

rude song. When the people of Stone came out to milk their goats and collect the eggs from their nesting chickens, they all stopped and stared

They didn’t understand why a Mud boy would be willing to do anything

walls of his home. They felt foolish for the way they had treated the Mud people, and the clan decided to walk together to Mud. Upon their arrival, they were greeted by the young boy and his family, who uttered chants of gratitude for rescuing and healing their son. The share a meal. They sat down together, exchanged stories, and hand-fed each other stew from the huge pot in the middle of the compound. The Mud people learned that the Stone people had gentle hearts in opposition to how they built their homes. In the same way, the Stone people learned not to pass judgment on someone just because they worked and built with mud. All learned the value of taking the time to get to know people for themselves.

As Popie brushed my curls out of my face, he said, “The great separation that had plagued the villages led to a merging of cultures which produced new homes, dwellings mixed with cold, hard stone and wet, earthy mud.

Like the sap from the thorn that healed the boy’s pierced skin, the people learned that healing can come from the very thing or being you despise.”

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STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT The formalism of Stephen Abban Junior’s oeuvre is comprised is characterized by vibrant watercolor-like washes using acrylic his paintings, Abban uses the human body (depicted in varied postures and spaces) metaphorically, as a way to address the pertinent historical narratives that are reticent in contemporary history. This has led to his recent series of portrait paintings of prominent personalities globally, from history.

Art is the only profession where its past is as relevant as its present. Hence, the antiquity of an artefact adds up to its value.

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STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR

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ECONOMICS

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DEBORAH H. DOOLITTLE

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THERE WAS ALWAYS THAT LINE of trees, which in winter looked dead, bare-branched and broken in the wind, which was rain-swept and harsh and fell from clouds cuddling the rounded hills some called mountains, which made the trees stand tall in their trunks, the branches tremble, the twigs turn tender and sigh. There was always that leaden sky, which was thick with clouds foaming above the mouth of the river, which always made for a gloomy gloaming, which was one way to say that our days were mainly gravy we poured out like thick dairy cream.

There was always that line between us, which looked a lot like those trees, which for a time some people called sublime, and I thought was enough.

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KATHARYN HOWD MACHAN

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WOODBURY UNICORN recalls the cows next to Weekeepeemee Road where she used to hide when she felt lonely and dream of dyeing her rippling mane every shade of summer sky.

Sometimes her father played piano for her.

Sometimes her mother stayed for more than a day.

And sometimes her brother didn’t touch her in ways about which they both had to lie.

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JEAN TUCKER

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THE COUNTRY WHERE YOU LIVE NOW In the country where you live now the permafrost is not melting.

Your close friend was not gunned down by a jealous husband.

The cat who rode shotgun with you eighteen years has not died.

But in this country you have not thrilled scudding through whitewater nor hunched over a bed of seedlings nor marched for justice, holding a placard high.

In the country where you now live today is the only today and the birdfeeder by your window And your face and your heart still turn

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JERRY FRIEDMAN

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NORTHBOUND

URSULA MOELLER

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MIST, BIRTH AND REMEMBRANCE May 1963 Mist lies thick over the sea so thick that the sound of waves rolling pebbles onto the shore seems disembodied.

does it call out to you or

remember layers, like an onion peel

Who was that lying on a blinding-white, high, sterile table,

Lonely and freezing, I felt abandoned. remember how the strawberries peeked out

Across the hall my husband, banned from my room, paced back and forth he, who could have comforted me the best of all, back and forth, hour after endless hour.

Focus, I needed to focus, count breaths, but my mind swirled through

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deep blue mists.

I couldn’t land anywhere.

Alone, all alone. remember hearing the labored breath of a loggerhead turtle her carapace gleaming in the moonlight mucus-covered eggs by the dozen covering them then lumbering back through the curling waves

The sound of rolling, rasping stones would have been a relief, a reality to hold on to. remember the strobed lightning snatching darkness from your dripping sodden tent

But then

the pushing, gasping, waiting, pushing.

or the dentist chair taut muscles throughout your body

Push more, harder, more.

I squeezed my eyes tight, as tight as could be, and pushed harder. remember the endless tick-tock, tick-tock of the clock

Dispelling the deep mist. Finally

truly, I was in my own body.

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do you remember the Milky Way’s spill of endless stars Down Under as we lay, forty miles offshore

Nine pounds, fourteen ounces. A healthy, screaming boy.

The nurse hands him over, lips pursed. one day

you’ll remember:

you will run after his school bus wildly waving both arms when he misses his stop.

They took him away, after his birth, to a nursery where I couldn’t see him.

All I wanted was to lie, with relief, in bliss my arms hugging him tightly over my heart. remember, oh remember that moment of birth exhaustion balanced with wonder under the sickle May Day moon.

stood, my love, our baby’s father, glowing and grinning from ear to ear.

Fog was dispelled remember, oh remember

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fear forgotten.

PAUL WILLIS

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FRANKLIN LAKES

Said the gibbous moon to the foxtail pine, Just hold me for a while. —Sequoia National Park

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LAURA ROSENFELD

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT To say we are human-centric is the ultimate understatement.

We are human-centric, and have been for a very very long time.

Central in our destructive infestation, yet so un-essential.

I work in a contemporary narrative mode to convey my understanding of a concept or situation.

Time we can understood as cyclical or like a pinecone, as a spiral. There is a pattern that is obvious if one is far enough away from the sticky present.

Landscape is a vehicle to look more closely at our effect on the natural world and the hypnotic timeless beauty of small things.

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LAURA ROSENFELD

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LAYLI LONG SOLDIER

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On Poetic Identity, Typography, and Star Quilts: Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks with Layli Long Solider Poet, writer, and artist Layli Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Long Soldier’s book of poems, Whereas, was published by Graywolf Press in 2017, and received the PEN Jean Stein Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Whereas Professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Long Soldier is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Culture Foundation. Long Soldier holds a BFA in Creative Writing from IAIA and an MFA with Honors from Bard College. Members of the Santa Fe Literary Review staff were honored to interview Long Soldier by phone on December 6, 2019.

SFLR Staff: To begin, please tell us a bit about the work you’re making now. What are you focusing on these days?

Long Soldier: I have several groups of poems that I’m working on at once that relate to different themes, but in some way they’re all connected by the idea of love. I know that’s really corny or cliché, but it’s what I’m doing. I have a set of what I call star quilt poems, which came out of an exhibit of visual art, using a pattern to make a star quilt, except I expanded that pattern so it’s about twelve feet high by twelve feet wide. I made two star quilts, and there are about eight poems in each quilt, so right now I’m editing and revising those pieces. It’s about sixteen in total. Then I have a group of poems that came out of an exhibit in Canada on the subject of grief, and so I’m sort of working with some of the submissions from that. Lastly, I’m just writing some love poems in general, which is kind of embarrassing–it’s embarrassing, but it’s necessary.

When did you realize that writing was something you needed to do?

What fueled you, and who encouraged you?

My “decision to write” was a actually a very practical decision. I

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I just couldn’t continue working minimum wage jobs or doing things were a number of things going on, and it was both economic as well as for personal satisfaction. So I went back to college, this was later in life, and I was a returning student. I wanted to go into the arts, but I wasn’t sure what to do, so I chose the writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), but I can’t necessarily say I had my sights on being a writer as a young person. It came down to a very practical matter. But when I started studying writing, before studying and discussing things and reading the way that we did at IAIA. It was really also the faculty and the environment there at IAIA that helped me to sort of turn my life around.

has publication brought to your career–and what challenges has it posed? We formulated this question because a lot of people, especially young writers, feel like they aren’t real writers until they’ve gotten published, and it seems like sometimes people make that a priority rather than the process or anything about self-discovery.

How did publication change you as a writer–or how did it help you?

How important is it to you?

First of all with publication, it’s important in the sense that you’re able to share your work with others, so your poems aren’t sitting locked up inside your laptop for eternity. It gives you an opportunity to share with others through journals, through magazines, or even in book form. But I certainly don’t think that publication makes you a poet, if that makes sense. I have, for example, friends who have the publication of a book as a marker of validation for who they are in the world as poets or as artists. I think that whether you have a book out or not, whether you have any poems published in journals or not, you’re still an artist and you’re still a writer. There are many, many, many ways to participate in the world around you creatively that have nothing to do with publication. So, I think that we cannot

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rely on publication to validate us–I think that’s a dangerous place to be. It’s really more about process and interaction and connection with others, at least for me, that has made me feel like I have a place in this world.

In your poetry collection, Whereas, the reader encounters crossedout lines, boxed-in text, and poems as shapes. We want to know how you decide what form and shape your poems will take. How does your use of typography inform your work?

canvas in front of us–the page. I think that we have to take into account the shape, and the visuals of our piece as well, and be as attentive and bold and joyful in the use of that space as we are with language, because I know this for sure: shape communicates. I encounter any of the words or the text. For example, you can be because of the way it looks, because it’s an invitation, or you think, “Oh wow, this looks interesting,” or it grabs your attention. That is something I take into account when I’m writing as well. I want the visual effect, and I want the shape to be as inviting as the language itself.

Writers are sound artists too, and sometimes we’re really attuned to that, but sometimes we forget, so we need little reminders–Hey, you have sound available to you as well, to create feeling, to heighten emotion in your piece. It’s like we’re kind of driving these cars, the poem or the story that were working on, and we have all these things–we’re shifting the gear, we’re putting our foot on the gas pedal, we’re using the steering wheel–those are all the aspects of writing besides just language. We’re kind of utilizing to get where we’re going. We’re utilizing sound and the visual space on the page, and so on. It’s good to keep that in mind.

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Please tell us a little bit about who–or what–inspires you to write and produce.

To be quite honest, lately I’m realizing more and more that art and writing and making things often comes out of a place of trying to climb outside of myself. I am trying to shake off an old skin, if you will, and there’s nothing else I can do about present conditions or way out of it. That is one way that writing and art functions for me, and that is what motivates me to write. The other thing is community, so working with others, collaborating with other artists, or simply being involved with different events. That human connection is the other motivator. It’s enjoyable. It’s a beautiful life, interacting with other artists, thinking together and resolving things together. I have those two things: the inner world and the outer world at work in what I do.

Might you describe an obstacle, or set of obstacles, you’ve faced in your writing career? How did you work with or through those obstacles?

When my book, Whereas, was published, I feel like I went from relative obscurity to a kind of level of demand that I was not used to, and it may sound ridiculous, but that was actually really hard. It Whereas were written from a place of being nobody, and I don’t mean that in the sense of self-esteem or self-worth–it’s not like I thought that I was nobody–but in terms of visibility and being known as an artist, I really was not anyone important. For that reason, I think that was very healthy for the work that I was writing in Whereas. I think those poems came from a place of having nothing to lose, and candor in that work. So after Whereas came out, I really had to adjust, and I have actually been working hard to slip back into my own kind of obscurity and a quiet place. I have found that that’s really essential to being able to write from a centered place.

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MAGDALENA KARLICK

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT “Lengthen and See” started with curved lines. My drawing process includes following the movement of my arm, hand, and the pen on paper. I accentuate shapes and thicken lines based on both my own aesthetic delight, as well as what seems to be my relationship to the collective unconscious. In this piece, I see a bird headed towards the ground. I see a bent human leg. I see a serpent with others see, as it helps me understand the messages from the artwork, as I believe that what I create is mine, yours, and ours.

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MAGDALENA KARLICK

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LENGTHEN AND SEE

SEAN FITTING

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CONSIDER THE COMMA Consider the comma. Less than one tiny space between order and the chaos of the multitudes of unchained FANBOYS. Fingers hovering over the pause button, trying to freeze a pop song in a vain effort to decode the the great whoosh of waves breaking on the beach and the softness of a Aldus Manutius’s stylistic slash separating subject from predicate, separating strings of data, separating days from months, separating the time it takes for the sound of a gun to reach the ears of its victim, the fraction of a second the victim from the last breath; closing the parenthetical expression. All breaths together make up a single story in the saga of human existence, the single story summed up by a long list of things separated by Oxford commas.

The California rolling stop on the late-to-work morning commute when a cop sleepy from the graveyard shift is too tired to go looking for go-cart Mozart’s funky breaks. A comma is the second before the sun breaks the horizon, turning the night into the day, pausing before the light world leaps to life and darkness descends into slumber. Primordial commas predate punctuation; they are found, or created, when we need a breath; lungs need oxygen, hearts gasp for life, heads spit seconds processing each single drop in a sea of information. Commas indicate awkward breaks in conversa-tions, and countless hours on hold waiting to pay the phone bill, or listening to the spaces between the notes of the endless elevator music. The high diver stares into the pool below, collecting her thoughts before surrendering to the muscle memory and warm water as the calliope crashes to the ground. Struggling with commas means struggling with arcane rules that predate St. Augustine and Plato; the struggle is between control and powerlessness. The struggle is between breathing and breathlessness. The struggle is between growth and entropy. The struggle is between order and chaos. The struggle is to know if the world ends with a period, or with a comma.

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ISABELLA BERMAN CHODOSH

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KIDS I cut my hair too short.

I read The Feminine Mystique while burning sage, then I lust for happiness.

I run around the plaza under the moon-shot sky. smiles and harsh eyes, who drive real slow past me in rusty red ‘67 Ford Broncos, and whistle or say something nasty, then I giggle, and scamper into oblivion.

My footsteps become synchronized with the way she smiles.

We fall asleep in my twin bed while the deaf dog howls across the arroyo.

We both dream in jazz, Miles Davis’ “Blue in Green” encapsulates us.

Quarter notes twirl and writhe.

When the sun rises, then I document my callouses.

I walk like a rebellious feminist, a riot grrrl.

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I go home and he wants to die again, it’s a metaphor for something, I think I cry a lot I sit in silence observing the cobwebs forming in the corner of my room, and scream internally.

I think about how ephemeral love and sorrow and death are.

I fall asleep, hear Bowie in my dreams, and lust for my happiness again.

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JONATHAN GREENHAUSE

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MY DAD, IN LIMBO After 2 weeks in the ICU, the doctors say they’re running out of options, are waiting to see what the endoscopy shows, to spot where my father’s still bleeding, where they might insert coils & foam; &, if that fails, where to make an incision, where to release the mountain lion or hang the bunting, where to blow up the balloons into his prom dress. This is serious stuff, life & death, Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, Transformers vs. GoBots; thus, the doctors kneel to Satan, seek guidance from Santería, roll the dice to be sure they’re clueless, are grasping at straws, are about to break the camel’s back. There’s

my dad’s open abdomen, but perhaps this’ll help. We’re running out into the cold, wheeling my father’s bed past the stop sign & into a snowbank, lifting it upon our shoulders, pushing it aboard the train. None of us notice he’s not in it. We soon return our consciousness coalesced & taught us there’s no escape, no simple resolution to the setback of death.

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MIKE KIMBALL

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT “You’re that car guy!”

Yes, it’s true. I am a car guy. And a truck guy, and a train and plane guy, too. Not in that gearhead way—I couldn’t tell you the cubic displacement of

My artwork celebrates the nostalgic freedom and romanticism of an imagined time in America where the open road offered up endless possibilities of adventure through transportation.

I celebrate that time and place where you could “See the USA in a Chevrolet,” even if it was largely dreamed up by an advertising executive.

I associate the vehicles I depict with that freedom, and that romanticism rings especially true for me here in the vast expanses of the American Southwest, where lonely two-lane roads and rail lines have now given way to interstate highways.

I hope that my linoleum block prints capture a little bit of that excitement and elicit emotional responses or pleasant memories in the hearts and minds of those who view them.

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MIKE KIMBALL

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MIDNIGHT RAMBLER

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JOCELYN ULEVICUS |

I REMEMBER THE VIOLETS

life too much. Maybe I don’t care about life enough. A force has no choice but to express itself: my body is a run-on sen-tence of corporeal The sounds my mouth makes when sipping a cup of coffee: is it only loud and terrible because I am alone and self-critical and there is no

I know my body well, but I do not know what my body wants. I need to listen, listen better and more. Harder. Okay, here it is: my body wants a home. But my body is a home. My body governs my soul. Do I know my

years old, though perhaps I was younger. Maybe I was three years old that afternoon on the brown living room couch—I am not sure if the age matters. But I know this was the day I was alienated from myself.

What I remember most about that day was the light: it is mid-afternoon, and there are tiny specks of dust undulating in the yellow-white light mother. I am standing by the couch and he is showing me what to do, how to use my hands. I wish I had the impulse back then to ask why: the mouth is a vital arena for negotiating—that feels instinctual, yet the word no remained imperceptible on my child tongue.

There is a black baton, it is wrapped in electrical tape, and he is

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pattern of the electrical tape wound around the baton. I am mesmerized for a mo-ment. The moment is not long enough.

Soon, he is encouraging me onto the couch and into his lap. Just

and then I can’t remember anymore. Except I remember I did not cry— which, I am certain, would have called attention to my body a palpable and effective force, a body that mattered; a body that is capable of evoking emotion or beauty. From that point forward, the freedom of my true self became immutably distant.

A dream.

Truth is a moment of noticing. There can be no beginning without being noticed: nothing is just one thing. In my trauma, I found a modus of survival: those violets. Later, I would climb onto the couch to touch their petals which felt smooth, the green leaves like velvet on my Then and now I remain a little girl searching for the spaces in my life We have to locate the wounds and heal them. Birth seems like a good place to start. Does birth begin at my mouth—the portal for which But when I was born, I did not cry. Instead, I was given a name and a code: girl.

My mother went into labor with me four weeks before the due date.

Her uterus was distressed, and cramping. Later on, she said I must have been dancing in her womb, but the truth was the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck.

By the time she got to the hospital, the birth plan was emergent—the by the one-inch scar on my left leg from when the surgeon cut my mother

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open, and the knife caught my leg. I call it my angel scar. It glows in the summer when my legs are brown. a sound, I was taken away from her. I was not pressed into her chest. I did not search for her nipple. Instead, she bled out on the table as the doctors worked to save her. And later, I was handed to my father.

Later, when I was older, when my father would stand in front of me with

The body remembers everything.

My mouth was how I learned to care for myself. I want to use my mouth for other things. must be patient.

I remember how I used to dress, though. I’d wear sleeveless crop tops to show my toned abs and my sculpted arms, the entire time feeling superior about it; all the time and effort it took making discipline a virtue and my eating disorder saintly. For thirty years, I have wanted to make my body both visible and invisible; visible as a point of approval and invisible because I didn’t want to be seen, heard, or known. And for a long time, it worked: I could be touched, fucked, yelled at, torn, and still, you couldn’t get inside of me.

And I did and didn’t like it that way.

What I started to do is practice the habit of stripping my body down to any man who proffered the slightest hint of affection to avoid showing my true self—the girl of me, the wounded child, I am ashamed of.

Eating and not eating, and fucking and not fucking had all to do with

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hesitance toward intimacy, my trouble with trust, with being vulnerable, with saying yes, and saying no: shapes of words that form on my tongue, say them, I would want them to be more than performative gestures. I would want to be held accountable.

If only I could trust myself.

There are social consequences of naming abuse, and knowing this, I do not need to name my abuser. Naming myself as a survivor is enough.

And it also isn’t enough.

It isn’t enough because don’t like it—I cannot swallow the memory; I cannot shit it out. It is never done with me—it ties me down in an ongoing crime against myself. It prevents me from living, living fully anyway.

Every time things start to feel good, the sublime yellow of happiness, the warmth of steadiness strikes in me a nerve to run: I do not deserve it. It is unsafe.

I am a bad girl.

And so then memory of the cock remains lodged in my throat, threatening language, speech, my is-ness, my wholeness, my potential to bear fruit, to be ripe.

I have a body.

Words are needed for survival.

I feel the pulse in my neck.

There is a great responsibility with surviving.

Seeds contain futures.

on and at no particular rhythm, and the more distance you gain, the more the life you built around your pain starts to crumble. It does. It does

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will you do with it—the knowledge that you were the earth, you were the Little by little, what you’ve buried starts to surface, just like little buds A tree begins to grow.

And soon, you notice it.

Look, one of the leaves seems interesting.

You pick it; you start to explore, it is good to handle the things of this world. You turn it over and over and over, and, suddenly, the colors look different. You begin to realize that your pain wasn’t only your pain, but someone else’s. And somehow, that helps.

Your body feels changed then.

Different, alert.

Just like waking up.

Suppose I need my words to be naked so I don’t have to be: what moment of noticing / there can be no beginning without being noticed.

The splendid burden of bearing fruit is loss: if I were water, would I be I am worthy.

I hear something, a rattling of bells in my body: my body wants to grow It’s happening.

Freedom is near.

I see the violets.

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GUNILLA NORRIS

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SITTING BY THE BED Your mouth is open Your eyes closed You’ve shut the door but you’re still breathing Dying is not an emergency I know there are two sides to any threshold You’re facing away one foot is already on the other side and I can’t help myself but face the same direction The clock ticks in a quiet that is tender and piercingly lonely Drawn out day after day we are both dying or perhaps we are simply emerging

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LINDA MORRIS

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT I love painting landscapes, from the grasslands and barns of Northern California to the more exotic landscapes I’ve encountered in my travels.

Sometimes I focus in close, on rocks or trees or doorways, and sometimes I try to capture more dramatic scenes, such as those I found in Antarctica.

My paintings are almost all personal, meant to evoke memories and the feelings engendered by my travels; sometimes my work leans nostalgic, all, I love subjects with rich textures, and I try to capture those textures in watercolor, which is always a special challenge, and one that I welcome.

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LINDA MORRIS

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MOONGLOW “Listen to me and learn some peace of mind: no skill in the world, —Jocasta Out a quarter million miles, winter moon brightens cold desert night, bringing all visible.

I see cholla, catclaw, creosote—on the bank of Coyote Creek, a cottonwood; its crisp leaves cling to bare branches—the past superimposed on the present. Beyond moonglow stars show surprisingly bright. Gazing at them, I look

I stand in soft glow of time-past.

above dream-like, alive with light.

My eyes fall to rock and sand, solid earth, the here and now of time-present, the new-born moment— I front cholla, creosote, cottonwood: all shimmer under moonglow.

Bathed in light, I stand in two worlds, one of starshine, another of moonglow, one past, another here and now. Restless, I want for more, glimpses of becoming, of tomorrow’s light now—the triad of the eternal moment, completed. I sigh, grasp at time’s edge, face light’s boundaries.

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MARCELLA WOLFE

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WAKAMIHO Wakamiho ties herself up. Rope-knotting art.

Hooks in. Swings from a low trapeze.

Kinbaku-bi (

), “the beauty of tight binding.”

Her form as open as the mouths of the men and women still air moves in her sway.

Some like rope because the world falls away …

To hitch, a joining, a fastening tight enough. We all submit in some way.

Kinbaku-bi from Hojojutsu ( ), the traditional Japanese martial art of restraining a person using cord or rope; the art of binding a prisoner of war, though it is noted that some drew inspiration from other forms including Kabuki theatre.

Uncaptured, Wakamiho twists her own knots.

Hemp is soft, unlike jute. No chafed, red wrists, or freaks with manacles.

Only a knot she escapes through.

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CATIE POWE

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT I lived in eight different states before I turned ten. I met a sea of incredibly complex humans and most of their faces have since become a blur. The memories themselves have become largely intangible. Their faces represent a time, a mood, a place. Wrinkles are a topography of a complex map of human existence. They represent time and experience as well as peaks and valleys of grief and joy. Capturing a person’s emotions and likeness as an outside viewer is an exploration of color and brushstroke as well as questioning one’s own experiences and memories. Creating a narrative explores those intertwined emotions and introduces a heightened evocation of mood.

In my Circle of Time series, each piece celebrates the energy of a time of day: ritualistic new beginnings and the hope therein. “Dawn” is met with existence. Later, after the passing of high “Noon,” “Dusk” has worked hard, and as the sun burns its last few rays, she thinks back on her day and the evening to come. Her wild hair spins tales of hours of hard work, and the last burning rays of sunshine are a liberation to begin a new phase of the day.

With every dawn comes a new day; with each dusk, a new night. Rebirth and reinvention are new experiences not just at the beginning, but continually and cyclically.

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DUSK 77

JASMINE SIERRA

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SO I HAD A MOUSE PROBLEM, RIGHT?

And I thought it was over, except for the part where I knew better than to trust good things can last. That’s why I called you at two-something in the morning when I heard it again, the scratching and the scurrying.

I was outside in the throes of panic’s embrace, my mouth loaded with ultimatums when I told you I needed to leave the shrouded threat. Your another state altogether.

It’s okay, you say. The often-present humor I know you for gives way to tenderness.

Okay, I say. I’ll try to trust one good thing.

II. I KNOW YOU DON’T WANNA FUCK WITH FURRY GUESTS But who cares about what danger hides in the insulation of my walls when

me between your hands. Not when I am breathless in your ear, turned on my back, head on the edge.

I should have thanked you then, when we fucked into release. For the rest of the night, I never heard scratching of the nails-on-cabinet kind—only the dig of my blunted nails into your skin, and the way you told me to look you in the eyes.

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III. OKAY, I THINK DO THINK MY MICE ARE GONE THIS TIME, BUT I still had to stay up until one-something just to see you.

I mean, no, I didn’t have to do anything—you told me I could sleep for the sake of my 9-to-5—but I wouldn’t have it. I waited for the moment I got to open the door and greet you in my baby pink bralette and panties. All you could muster in response was a quick look-down at what greeted you, moving yourself into my shoebox of a home.

I said you’re late. You said I know, I’m sorry.

I let you in anyway—in the front door, and into me.

IV. FINALLY, I GOT RID OF THOSE DAMN THINGS But I am still a heart-attack-on-legs after you go back home. If I’m not waiting for the silence of my shoebox to be punctured again by sharp claws and squared teeth, then I am thinking about what will happen when I return my body to the earth. I don’t want to fear the inevitable, but dread.

This is where you come in.

murmuring on the line, are brimming with affection. It makes me remember you again; your hips to mine, your hands lifting my thighs—heaven bound.

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SIBEL MELIK

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MAN HUNT I. Zane was younger than I was and had a beautiful deep voice. I had known him since he was seventeen, when he found a baby bird and raised it by feeding it from his own mouth. He thought it was a raven, but it grew up to be a pigeon.

When I approached Zane ten years later, he turned me down; he said that he was deep in a relationship with a married couple. There was something beautiful about him then, and also, he was a real mess.

I must have been quite a jerk in my past lives as a man. I will have to give birth and become a mother in my next life, because it didn’t happen in this one. My curiosity and sadness and yearning for a child and a male partner helped to end my only long-term relationship, when I was in my thirties.

with my short hair, and what she said did not make me happy. I had not yet learned that everything was not hopeless, that love and kindness were possible, and were always the correct choices. It took me a very long time to come to believe this, and often still, I forget.

II. with me. We both came in late and stayed late at the archaeology lab and would talk in the artifact analysis room after everyone else went home. One night I told him that I wanted to have a child and started to cry. He was kind, and not available. His wife was overtly hostile towards me whenever I ran into them and their little boy. Later, when he was seventy years old and long divorced, he

III. “Crazy Don” wasn’t crazy in a homeless way—he was in fact a teacher, and an artist, and very smart. You just couldn’t hold a conversation with him because he was so manic. I met him at the coffee shop. He had a big shock of white hair and looked at me over the top of his reading glasses. When I did manage to get

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a word in and told him that I was looking for “a healing experience with a man,” he spit out his coffee. Later, I gave him some of my Adderall and it changed his who tracked him down online after her wealthy attorney husband turned out to be a meth head and destroyed their life together.

IV. I grew up as the awkward, ungainly daughter of a beautiful woman and a handsome man. I was never comfortable as a girl or as a woman. I can’t sort out what may be biology from the rigidly gendered roles that I learned from my family. I was smart enough, so I went with that. My self-presentation veered from androgynous to slightly butch to slightly femme, mostly due to the length of my hair. Too butch for some, too femme for others, never just right, and in the end mostly on my own. But I always fell for the pretty ones, just like my father and with a cat carrier in my car, in case I get lucky. I like my cats to be beautiful too.

There is, after all, so much pleasure in beauty.

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CAROLINE COTTOM

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TWO VIRGINIAS

Two ships instead of one to cover loss when one went down.

Two Virginias, both my mother, the one who home-held me; the other took to drink, too many slaps across the bow before she sank.

daughter’s death— nothing could buy her smooth seas except the solace of empty bottles stuffed in closets.

Face as unblemished as a child, my mother stands the prow, her hair, sea oats bright.

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MIKE KIMBALL

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SANTA FE STATION

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JOHN HICKS

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DISTANCES Hear that? There it is again. That’s a dove.

And down there, across the creek bed: Hear the response?

Your mom called this morning.

You were asleep. Told her you’re doing OK. Sometimes wonder if the Pueblo folks used to come up here for the wild horses.

Did you see the hoofprints back there?

Easy to spot when sun’s this low.

She didn’t like it here. Said nothing ever happened. Wanted to be back in Chicago.

Cities give some folks a major high.

But you’ve got to stay there for it. Get away a bit— your spirit’s own pace. It’s always there.

Those clouds out there beyond the Rio Grande— like cotton balls spilled out on a glass table?

Distance isn’t the same when you see so much.

I like how they bring the sky down. It’s like you can touch it.

That big juniper by your bedroom window?

Come October you should see it.

Flickers and robins go crazy

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riding up and down on the branch tips going for its berries. Can you remember planting it? You were three.

Left not long after.

I think about you when I look at it.

Your mom said you’ve a full summer lined up.

Call, won’t you?

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CHERYL MARITA

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WHAT MAKES A MIRACLE? People ask me why I do the work I do. It’s in my bones, my brain, my DNA. Some say it’s a calling, but it feels more like a command from somewhere either deep inside or far outside, beyond my grasp.

I’m a palliative care nurse. Before that, my nursing focus was in hospice, home health, and hospital administration. Somewhere along the path, I decided to get a master’s degree in counseling. I like to listen, to hear stories, to talk about life’s challenges, including death and dying. In hospice, the dying teach me more about life than any class or book. They teach me stillness, honesty, patience. Acceptance for what is, rather than what could be. situation. I don’t tell many people that magic happened to me. I don’t know if people are jealous or judgmental, but their eyes darken as they listen to my story, so I don’t often share it.

Addiction has always been in my life, growing up with an alcoholic father who chain smoked. I learned early to use food for solace, for fun, then traded donuts for smoke rings in nursing school. I liked the menthol I smoked, ate, and drank myself through nursing school, never identifying myself as an addict. That was my father. Then I tried to quit smoking.

I didn’t need to quit. It was the seventies, and most healthcare quit. I didn’t like the smell of my clothes; I didn’t like hiding my cigarettes from my husband and kids. The kids brought home graphic pictures of “your lungs on cigarettes.” I tried hypnosis, aversion therapy, gum, eating as an addict.

Now, years later, as I sit with a young woman dying from alcoholism, I see the connection. Stella looked at me, looked at her mother, and said, “I can’t stop. I wish I could, I prayed, I went to rehab, I went to counseling.

Miniatures own me. I prayed for a miracle, but it didn’t happen.”

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A miracle happened to me, decades ago, but I hadn’t prayed for it. I

It was 1978. A friend asked me to join him at a seminar hosted by a new self-help guru, John-Roger Hinkins, the leader of Insight. New-Age-style selfhelp was the rage, and I could get credit towards my master’s degree for attending. Insight was described as a way to access your personal power.

I wanted all the help I could get, feeling lost in a world I was too physically big to be in, too skeptical to trust therapists, too insecure to navigate the expectations of parenthood and career. I paid the fee and went willingly,

downtown Chicago hotel. Hinkins introduced Insight, the agenda for the weekend of silence, meditation, and New Age rituals, such as rebirthing.

Then he asked us each to stand, separately, and announce into a microphone our intention for the weekend. What were we going to leave emotions that I knew could not be abandoned. Then, a large woman stood up and said, “Fifty pounds.” That got my attention. A concrete, objective goal. After another twenty people took the mike, I stood up and announced, “Smoking, cigarettes.”

Four days later, I left the ballroom and never craved another cigarette.

And four decades later, I still wonder what happened that weekend. I remember the details, the joy I felt afterwards. I never went back to any

Stella’s voice brings me back into the room, back to the reality of palliative care.

sober for six months before you could be placed on the transplant list, and then stay sober for the rest of your life.”

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Stella watched my eyes look at her belly, heard the hopelessness of the rules. “I can’t do that. I don’t want to live like that.”

Stella, her mother, Margaret, and I had been talking for a while about their life together, about how Stella’s father and uncle had introduced her to alcohol when she was ten. About how Stella had held her father as he died after falling off his horse. He’d been a drinker all his life, and when he hit his head the brain bleed killed him. Stella tried to quit then, but the cravings made her go back. She tried AA, rehab, counseling. Both Margaret and Stella went to church every week, walked on Good Friday to the Santuario, lit candles to the Virgin Mary. But Sella kept drinking.

Addiction, not miracles. Miniatures, not life. I was quiet for a few moments, praying for the next words, the next steps. Finally, Margaret stood up from her chair and sat on the bed next to Stella.

“Stella, you’ve tried hard. I’ve tried hard, too. I won’t abandon you now.”

Grateful for the answer to my prayers, I used the opening that Margaret presented to move to the next step. “There is another option, to support you both. It’s called comfort care, care that’s focused on enjoying every day, focusing on comfort rather than cure.”

I don’t use the word hospice early in any discussion, as I know the shock that some feel when it’s spoken out loud.

Margaret spoke the word “comfort,” tears darkening her blue t-shirt.

“Yes, I mean hospice.” I paused, took a few deep breaths. Breathing in moments like this one can be healing for me. I remember my addiction, my miracle, but I needed to stay present with Stella.

“Stella,” I said. “You can go home with your mother. You don’t have to quit drinking, and hospice will come to your home to help you both.

Hospice does mean that you know there isn’t a cure for your liver, that it will take your life.”

Stella and Margaret touched their foreheads together as their tears blended into one. I reached out and hugged them both.

After a few minutes, Stella and Margaret agreed that hospice

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would be the best choice, and we began planning for Stella to be discharged home.

Sometimes I think miracles do happen when families can embrace both life and death in the same room, in the same place. But sometimes, I wish there were other miracles for people like Stella. Maybe someday, after I’m gone, I’ll know more about how miracles happen. In the meantime, I’ll continue listening, opening doors to decisions, and praying for the right words at the right time.

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TINTAWI KAIGZIABIHER

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT I am a storyteller who utilizes mixed media to bridge the gaps between the experiences of Africans on the continent of Africa and those in the Diaspora. From my youth, I was surrounded by the photography of Gordon Parks, Edmund Umoja Herman, and James Van Der Zee. Heeding the call of spirit, I armed myself with my dad’s 35-millimeter and embarked on a lifelong adventure of showing the world who we are through our own eyes. Now, digital camera in hand, I honor the sacred space between lenses by breathing new life into a single moment in time.

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GABE GOMEZ

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SAMSARA AT QUANTUM ZERO

Into a pair of hands, Mondrian segments They pulse with blood of a spring pile under winter asparagus

Strange, as the garden greens and circular hum of Hidden bulbs that lie concentric and divided in sleep

More so, how pearly callouses disturb the palm Grip the voice box as it prepares to sing

Innate lines of migratory duck and railroad truss Twist out of frames, farmer orange, quail-egg blue

That old wave hits once and dissipates again To have known between our now your then

Of cresting frequencies, of octave loop Vibrating reed, thyroid and chamber, preparing for noise

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Wait for the sound to anneal, adjust to us You dress how I thought you would dress

It’s summer, I think. Expository, I think.

Unspooling the hunger of us Our frequency under the branches Yes, they are booms catching our sound

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We once knew everything about the world Through dramatic irony and the divine

A covenant softened with dim light made us Believe mothers, like you, were enveloped in grace

Beginning one activity in English then ending In vowels dropped and silent ch, e, and p

A trembling cask spurred by the spirit, wrapped her roomy bloodstream

Her bounce, it hardens, over the sidewalk, until she is in my room, when I saw the shirt coming over your arms, I barely noticed you were drowning; merely thought you were saying “yay!”

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1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Afternoon light decays A voice with treble Control burn is eye shadow blue Raku birds shatter back to dust The landscapes pans, exit music

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Become the arms Become the grasps Apply limbs There you are Reassured me

Rhythmic models Arrested bursts Becoming stars

Stellar wiles Roaming tongue Wings and wire

Drawn to redrawn

of cornered light of tilting axis of buoyant frame

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97 STEPHEN ABBAN JUNIOR

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SPARKS OF CHANGE

BARI LYNN HEIN

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LIFE IN REVERSE Halfway across the polished lobby I reel and walk backward, just the way I did twenty years ago in this very hospital. Back then an epidural was to blame, the exertion of having just delivered twins. This time it’s lack of sleep.

No, it’s shock. The doctor said I’m in shock and offered to call someone for me. I told him my children are on their way home. Zach and Zoë left campus two hours ago, and in just four hours, they’ll reach the city and we’ll be together. broadcast will distract me for a minute or two. A woman seated on a neighboring chair watches without expression; perhaps she’s in shock too.

From my purse I pull out a plastic bag containing Oliver’s belongings: his phone, keys, wallet and a small notebook with a scuffed leather cover and

in Reverse.

“Oh no.” The woman sitting beside me draws my attention back to the television screen. There it is, printed on the news crawl: Acclaimed Author Oliver Schreiber Dead of Apparent Cerebral Aneurysm. “I loved his work.”

She clicks her tongue and wags her head. “You just never know.”

I cannot open my mouth to respond. I try to read the reporter’s lips as they move soundlessly. When the crawl changes to Stock Market Update

Life in Reverse On his 50th birthday, protagonist jokingly says he wishes he had fewer candles on his cake. The following morning he relives the day before.

Continues to live his life in reverse. Revisits experiences he did not fully

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The synopsis of his sixteenth novel, never to be written, ends there.

I replace Oliver’s belongings to the bag and go to the revolving glass bus leaves the curb and merges with yellow cabs and delivery trucks, and gradually, other sounds of the city rise up: voices, brassy horns, a distant jackhammer.

I hurry away from the hospital, trip over a stroller wheel and stop to catch my breath beneath the dark green awning of a bookstore. A pair of potted bushes stand like soldiers to either side of the doorway. A red-haired woman appears between them, unlocks the door and holds it open. She recognizes me.

“Oh good, you’re here,” she says. “We’re just about to begin. Right this way.”

I follow her past stacks of books to the back of the store, where passage is impeded by a packed-in crowd. My two teenagers are leaning against the self-help shelves; I call out to them but they can’t hear me through the din. I squeeze my way through the throng and pull them each into an embrace.

Zoë recoils. “Get a grip, Mom,” she says, as I reach out to hug Zach. She rolls her eyes and her brother grins. I’ve seen this exchange too often; my kids think I’m overly demonstrative. They’ll judge me less harshly in a few years, when they start college.

I tremble when I see Oliver approach a table toward which all eyes are instantly turned. His hair is dark, his temples free from gray bristles. He peers around the room, stops when he spots the three of us, grins at me while the red-haired woman introduces him to the quieting crowd.

When she steps away, he lifts a copy of his fourteenth novel from a stack on the table. This time, instead of reading along, I watch the motion of my

Oliver has managed to pull all these people into a world of his creation.

Through a rattle of applause, I slip away, race to the exit, and leave.

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As I pass each vendor cart, familiar yet unfamiliar fragrances reach me: whiffs of coffee, fried donuts, oranges and bananas piled in wicker baskets.

At the crosswalk I step down while the red hand is still raised. An old woman pulls me back.

can hear. Walk until I feel mist on my face.

I sit on the cool ledge of a fountain, drop my heavy head and listen.

Gradually, splatters become clatters.

“Come join us.”

That’s Oliver’s voice.

I lift my head and see kneepads on my knees and rollerblades on my feet.

It all makes sense now; the weight on my head is a helmet; the clattering sound comes from my children rollerblading over hexagonal stones.

“C’mon over, Mom,” Zachary yells. His voice hasn’t changed yet.

“I’m not very good at this,” I say.

Zoë zips over to me. The top of her helmet barely reaches my shoulders; I’m so used to looking up at her. “You just make a V-shape with your feet, Oliver skates over to the fountain. His hair is so thick and dark. “The problem is, you always lock up your knees. You need to relax, push out.”

We watch our children crisscross beneath a spotlight of sunshine. Our wrist pads connect and he helps me to my feet. I relax my knees and glide past my family, hear the children cheering, Oliver clapping. I keep going, follow the shadow of the arch to the curb, where I hail a cab. away. I can’t open my mouth to state my destination so I hand the cabbie an envelope with my address on it.

“Stop here, please.”

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confronted by new aromas: sausages, onions, peppers. I’m hungry. I I race through lacy leaf shadows. It’s just around the corner, the red canopy emblazoned with gold letters. I walk beneath it, between a pair of men dressed like Buckingham Palace guards, pass through a jungle of oversized stuffed animals, up an escalator, up another, and there they are: Oliver and the children. Zoë and Zach’s little mouths are twisted in frustration; every time they step out from the watching crowd, a bigger kid pushes past them and jumps onto the shiny black and white keys, hops out a tuneless tune. came,” Oliver says. He looks ridiculously young.

on our son’s back.

Zach takes two steps forward and is passed by a pair of teenaged girls.

My stomach is growling; we haven’t had lunch yet and at this rate, we won’t be out of here until dinnertime. This time, however, I’m not going to grumble; I’m not going to suggest they share the piano or come back later when it’s not so crowded.

My kids are inching forward, staking their claim, and while I’m staring jump on, Zoë’s feet landing on Middle C and E, Zach’s on G and B. They squeezes. A boy and girl twice as tall as mine join them on the piano and my kids continue to dance. window. I release Oliver’s hand.

my hand over my bulging belly. The babies are playing inside me. I smile

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and walk past a tot lot, watch a toddler slide down twisted red plastic. His father scoops him up at the bottom and cheers, as if he’s traveled a great distance. Relatively speaking, he has.

There’s the pizza place where we’re supposed to meet. I smell the garlic and herbs of their legendary sauce.

“I almost thought you weren’t going to make it,” Oliver says, when I join him. His hair hangs to his shoulders. He places his hand on my belly. “And “No way,” I say. “Nuh-uh.”

“We’ll just have to keep working our way through the alphabet till we come up with names we can agree on.”

“They don’t have to start with the same letter, you know.”

He laughs. He’s not going to budge on that. “I have something to tell you.” We take a step closer to the counter. “I made the bestseller list.”

“Oh, Oliver!” Tears sting my eyes.

I step out of line and leave the pizzeria, walk to the bank on the corner, whose slanted blue awnings shade the sidewalk in stripes.

To one side of its interior are the trappings of every bank: partitions and teller windows and a counter with chained-down pens. To the other side are tables and chairs and row upon row of bookshelves.

From a bottom shelf, I extract a hardback book, bring it over to a chair and sit.

By the time I’ve started the second chapter, I notice someone standing by the stacks, watching me, a man a bit older than me, in his late twenties.

He’s very handsome.

“I couldn’t help noticing you were laughing,” he says.

“Very.” I turn the page.

“Sorry to have disturbed you.”

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I look up at him. “I think it’s possible the author is actually a woman, pretending to be a man,” I say. “Like George Eliot.”

“Because men don’t write this way.”

I look up at the woman standing over me. “Did you know this bank used

“No… I’m… You’re the second person to ask me that today. I’ll be okay.”

Oliver walks over and stands beside her. “Here’s your chance to back I nod.

He grins. “We talk for a while. And then I ask you out.”

I remember. I remember his confession, on our third date, that he’d been watching me from behind the stacks, jotting down a list of adjectives to describe my face. He framed the list years later; it hangs above his desk.

Oliver takes a step closer to the chair on which I’m seated. “There’s some pain in store for us, but I promise you, a hell of a lot more joy. So, knowing what you know now, I want you to consider your next move very I stand up.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m sure.”

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JANE SHOENFELD

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MUSEUM GUIDES

*In response to The Sacred Realm: Blessings & Good Fortune Across Asia, an exhibition at The International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico

My visit begins with water Feng shui of sacred guides and protectors Have not slept am coated with the glaze of dream Weight of mother in bed last night heavy inside my head I’m in the river

Dragons and protective beasts

I hiss at her bluster

Made of metal, carnelian, and gold hair ornaments for women pendants worn in woman’s dorsal braids

movement of dragon’s tail entwines with blossoms glides over rectangular coat I’d like for my husband to see this Reach out to the sacred realm where powerful beings reside Female spirits carved in stone Folds in the dress of Chuan Yin increasingly delicate layers the feminine through folds then heavy head gear again Head ornaments worn by women for decoration even if they did not believe in their power to protect Chuan Yin is near to human size on a pedestal hands clasped at heart invisible she listens leans towards me gentle gesture of her bending head

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feet

In the dream I do not want to lie close to my mother even though I know she loves me Spirits made of paper even a spirit bicycle

Sweet amulets for protecting animals Docent’s voice shrills again in my ear

never again will a cat of mine get hit by a car no idol can shield me from her

I walk in the tide of dream Am I sleeping or awake my mother’s empty bed in the next glass cage a wire from his groin to his heart As a submission to God, a tradition of covering one’s head

Standing next to the teens who escaped the guide He chats so cleverly makes puns his body animated In this lifetime at least I know he loves me

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SUSANA H. CASE

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OTIS REDDING OUT OF GEORGIA A man not much for dancing, I wonder what he would have thought, watching Suite Otis, six of his songs, years after the plane crash, audience shouting and clapping, four Alvin Ailey women in “Try a Little Tenderness,� slow-tempo speedup, skirts twirling, dancing, dancing, dancing, as if they could bring him back if they whirled enough, as if there were still time to love, to buy her that brand-new dress.

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EVALYN BEMIS

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT My goal is simple but not easy: to see the world around me and connect to all of its beauty. Having survived a paralyzing depression, I take each day as a gift not to be squandered. Photography propels me out the door into the lives of people I don’t know, places I’ve never seen, as well as a rediscovery of long-familiar things.

A photograph represents something composed of light and form. Each press of the shutter button is an act of anticipation and collaboration, succeeds when it serves as a window, transporting a viewer into my sense of that ephemeral moment.

I once set up my tripod to take an image of the October harvest moon rising over the plains of New Mexico. I had an approximate idea of where the moon would appear, but it seemed scarcely a second between the the arc of the moon was sailing above the horizon. I was awed. It was an ordinary occurrence that happens every 28 days or so, but through the magic of photography, I see how we spin through space and live amidst the miraculous.

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EVALYN BEMIS

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AWAITING THEIR MOMENT

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ANNE MACNAUGHTON

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DIVORCING THE HARD LUCK FARM across the kaintuck river from where boone parked the immigrants behind protective palisades and nearby forest game a century past

two brothers split

my granny took the heights

and strangers moved into the other the whitewashed homestead disinhabited sagging above the green river, lost to drunken gambling a ways off, leaving us to climb to reach the gate

till missouri no longer called tore out the fencing then corn, still corn then tobacco ruinous of land and farmer till it went from legal and taxed to unlegal and taxing then horses perhaps after all it’s bluegrass and clover till father cuts the trees and plows an abortifacient for mares

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illegal as well but fruitful till damp buds grew mold between and keepers stole the rest so i relinquish this seat of my ancestors’ dreams site of grandmothers’ treks their sweep through wet grass grown taller than they 5 generations a fabled feather bed storied teams, hens and pigs dry stone fencing stacked across turkey roosts by a spring dried up the grape vine tangled creek conical cedar that won’t burn black raspberry brambled hills slave works and ginseng yarbin’ woods oak tree hollars thrive where no one walks any more even the air sweats my heart my root an earth bloodied with mine cracked bones beneath the hickory a source but now only the ancient cemetery grows and i have sold it all away i release you i release you i release you

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THOMAS L. SMALL

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DREAMS On occasion, mornings started with my mother muttering the words, “I dreamt of Dennis last night.” All activity at the breakfast table stopped.

A dreamy expression came over her face. Then, as if in slow motion, she lit one of her Kent cigarettes and exhaled a large plume of grey smoke.

She sat rigid, her eyes unfocused, as though watching a movie only she could see.

My father looked across at her. The expression on his face, which I saw only on the mornings when she uttered those words, was a pained mixture of pity and loneliness. Saying nothing, he went back to his paper.

After a prolonged pause, I would resume eating. Amidst the Sugar Crisp and toast crusts, I don’t recall he ever asking her what she’d dreamt about. He assumed that I would forget having heard anything, that I was too young to understand what was being discussed.

I grew up, went away to college, and stayed far away, rarely returning, although I wasn’t sure why. Forgotten for many years were these odd words mumbled at the breakfast table and the accompanying silence.

Yet I heard them in my head on those rare occasions that I looked into the face of someone else’s blonde infant. That should have told me something but didn’t. Then as now, I was much like my father.

It couldn’t happen today. Back then, no one suspected because it was such an outrageous thought. Had I had children of my own, I would with whom I slept were always touched at the diligence I exhibited in taking responsibility for birth control. Mistakenly, they thought it was their best interests that motivated me.

Steering clear of the rocky shoals of parenthood, I willingly gave up the evenings when I could sit at the edge of a tiny bed and read Good Night Moon. Never would I run alongside a two-wheeler as someone wobbled off into a nascent independence. By striking that bargain, I also made sure that there would never be an occasion when I would year old and blonde, splashed in the rising water.

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My father was long dead. Mother had lived in a nursing home for several years before she stopped recognizing her visitors. On the occasion of one of my exceedingly rare visits she was sitting in bed eating a piece of toast, when she said, “I dreamt of Dennis last night.”

She looked in my direction, her eyes unfocused. Knowing who she Her reply chilled me. “You know.” She looked at me with a half-smile, the smile that passes between people long married, when they share a private truth. “Of the last time I bathed him.”

I said nothing, just stood at her bedside, listening to my heart beating.

“That kid cried too damn much,” she said.

It didn’t seem possible that the wizened woman lying in the hospital bed had ever been capable of such a thing. I gripped the bars at the years as faulty memory.

“Tell me,” I said, “About your dream.”

Her eyes focused on a point at the other side of the room as she stared into the past. Her voice was wistful as she spoke: “I made sure it was the last time.”

I said nothing. At that moment, I was again four years old and playing had been crying from the moment he awakened that morning. In the bathroom, water sloshed audibly, which was odd, because we didn’t take baths in the afternoon. Standing at the door, I peeked into the crack between the door and the jamb with a clear view of the tub. My mother knelt on a bathmat at its side. Water gushed from the faucet,

pretending not to notice that Dennis was no longer crying. He lay still as she dried him, dressed him, and put him into his crib.

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After he’d been taken from the house, I crawled onto my father’s lap. His face was prickly against mine as I tried to get as close to his ear

shut.

“You saw no such thing,” his voice was low and resolute, his stare unwavering as his dark eyes burned a hole in my head. A silent moment passed during which he waited for me to believe him, before he took his hand away.

Now my sleep is interrupted by the sounds of Dennis’s panicked shirt stuck to me, unable to catch my breath as though I too had been held under water. Sometimes, I smell the faint aroma of a Kent cigarette.

Although there were several women who wanted me, I never married. The other side of my bed remains empty and cold, for I feared the parent I might grow to be like.

Either one of them.

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CEDRIC RUDOLPH

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GIRLS’ NIGHT As if the building of my face is crumbling, they rush in with primer and blush, rescue me from skin coarse as sand.

Here, rub this in like moisturizer.

Tilt your head to the left for me. There!

These, my newfound sisters: Sam, goddess of make-up.

Donna, keeper of accessories.

Kay, taker of pictures.

I’m the clumsy foal they nuzzle bright.

Sam etches a stiff brush into my crêpe eyelid, mixes paints on her wrist.

I’m wearing a sacred Indian tunic from Etsy. Palms spread.

When I was six, I watched Mom pick which earrings to wear. She owned a pair from each decade: square from the 80s, hoops from the 60s.

She never chased me from her boudoir as she pout-puckered her lips, smoothed maroon evenly as Matisse.

I stared, owl-eyed, at the aura she slipped on,

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wondering if I’d ever don such glinting brushstrokes.

Today, my sisters don’t kick me out either.

Donna adjusts her toga.

Kay slides a glittery dress over her torso.

1/3 can of hairspray to seal my beat face.

Look in the mirror.

Girl, you are hot.

the regal man I hide beneath suits and collared shirts.

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MARISA CRANE

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WHAT YOU WOULD CALL AN AMBITIOUS MISFIRE I am god-like when it is least convenient.

I don’t have to tell you what I mean by that— you’ve been to the honest parts of poems & come away with human reasons stuck to your sweater.

Suppose I am a room full of people.

Suppose you’ve forgotten how to Irish good-bye.

Do you know just how erotic it is to listen

The one reserved for ruining games of Twister & levitating in the purple charm of desert.

I am one breath away from How did you decide on me?

I remember crying in bed looking at photos of vandalized Joshua Trees.

They don’t get other bodies to love each other with.

This morning you saved a crow who got its head stuck in the neighbor’s fence

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so now we are legally married twice.

The crow will remember your face & the weathered wings of your kindness.

But you’re not a monster; you didn’t do it for the fame amongst murders. That’s not why you did it.

You are a read receipt.

An honest reckoning.

You are a timestamp at the center of the multiverse & I am up to my minute hand in love.

This is a poem about becoming who we already are.

Even coping mechanisms have their own coping mechanisms.

I am god-like when it is most convenient— what you would call

I am one missing hubcap away from Where won’t they think to look for us?

A promise: I’ll always stand where you can see me.

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It can be said that the confession fell in love with itself not when it realized it couldn’t turn back time but when it looked in the crowd & saw its private parts made public.

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ISATU KAIGZIABIHER

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AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT Feeling free is a big part of my life goal. I believe freedom should be convenient, because I was born as a sovereign being with the right to choose my path. This choice must be uninhibited by anything external.

This self-portrait demonstrates this belief.

One afternoon on a Sunday in mid-September 2019, a feeling of joy and appreciation came over me. I realized I was living a dream my wife and I held for many years while living in New Jersey. We had a house on a prairie, chickens, children, land, and well water with which chose well.

My photography embodies convenient freedom. All of my photographs are done using my Samsung Galaxy 7. This is because it isn’t cumbersome, I always have it, and it happens to have a great camera. I have no need for special software, a neck-strap, lenses, or any other accessories. I need nothing outside of what I use to live movements; otherwise, I feel it is premeditated, which represents neither freedom nor convenience.

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ISATU KAIGZIABIHER

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SUNK-IN REALITY

MARTIN I. LEVINE

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CHARLIE HEBDO “It’s just the translations have gone wrong” John Lennon I have known you from the time of the serpent: in the soulless ruins of the high desert fortress, the upside down crosses in the great arenas, a sea of blood at the gates of Jerusalem, burning bodies in the streets of the book, the missionary disease, the pilgrims of intolerance, the triangle trade, the tears of Gandhi, “the troubles” in the green isle, caves for bodies

the ancient ways dying in the sands of the Mahdi; and the Sunday comics, the funny pages of my youth, bleeding out across the streets of Paris

Paris, January 2015

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GRETCHEN ROCKWELL

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[un]seen / [un]known

inside every snapdragon

sits a skull

this is a metaphor

everything but the black hole since by its nature a black hole swallows light still they caught its corona the whirling mass of gas and rock and dust and particle and system and light and star debris spiraling inevitably inward it is believed that a black hole waits in the heart of every galaxy it takes billions of years but its maw waits patient a snapdragon is called a snapdragon because it looks like one if you squeeze its seedpod mouth opening and closing a red and gold bloom does look alive if you can ignore the framing of it the careful adjustment the calculated angle unlike snapdragons

they are easy as the absence

to recognize of snow in April

their pull and yawn unmistakable the snapdragons are uncertain this is a metaphor too

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LAURA ROSENFELD | FUTURE (DETAIL) Santa Fe Literary Review 125

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES Stephen Abban Junior is a young contemporary Ghanaian artist currently working and living in Sekondi-Takoradi (the twin city of the Western Region, Ghana). He is a native of Mankessim, in the Central Region of Ghana. Abban’s passion for art began at an early age, scribbling on walls and replicating popular cartoon characters in books and on any available sheet of paper.

His uncle, Abam, a farmer and one of the prominent personalities in the village, supported him throughout his artistic journey. Abban studied visual arts in the senior high school, and holds a Higher National Diploma (HND) in commercial arts (painting) from the Takoradi Technical University, where he is a Teaching Assistant. Abban is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Technology degree in painting (studio practice) at the same university.

Brendan Shay Basham and raised in northern Arizona. His work has appeared in the Santa Fe Literary Review, Red Ink, Yellow Medicine Review, Juked, Cloudthroat, and Sheepshead Review. He has been awarded two Writing By Writers Fellowships, a Truman Capote Trust Fellowship, a Tin House Fellowship, and was a nominee for a 2016 PEN / Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, as well as a 2018 Pushcart Prize. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian and writing.

Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Opole University Press. Case is also Body Falling, Sunday Morning, from Milk and Cake Press.

Isabella Berman Chodosh is a high school student at The Master’s Program in Santa Fe. She loves to write and hopes to pursue writing in the future. She is passionate about environmental issues and politics. She also plays bass guitar and guitar and loves music. Her dream is to study political science, eventually becoming a politician of some sort, music as a side hobby.

Caroline Cottom, Ph.D., directed the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign and the national coalition that brought an end to nuclear testing in Nevada, described in her memoir, Love Changes Things, Even in the World of Politics. Her poems have appeared in Silk Road, Schuylkill Journal of the Arts, Serving House Journal, Mandala Journal, Glassworks, Broad River Review, negative capability, and Cumberland Poetry Review, among others.

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Marisa Crane is a queer, nonbinary writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, , and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Our Debatable Bodies (Animal Heart Press, 2019). Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, she currently lives in San Diego with her wife.

Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places but now calls North Carolina home.

Teaching at Coastal Carolina Community College, she is the author of No Crazy Notions, That Echo, and Floribunda. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, some of her poems have appeared in Poem, Rattle, and Slant.

After living throughout the United States while raising a family for over twenty years, Elizabeth Joy Dunham divorced and moved to Santa Fe for a wonderful new adventure. As an artist, a curator, and a gallery director, she has created art installations for over forty years. Dunham holds a diploma from the Boston Museum School, an M.Ed. from Harvard University, and an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire.

Michelle M. Faith’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Art New England, Deus Loci, Kalliope, and others, and has been heard twice on MPBN’s Poems from Here. Eureka nominated one of her poems for a Pushcart Prize. She is a retired editor, teacher, and theater director now living in Camden, Maine.

Sean Fitting has worked, among other jobs, as a printer, a cook, and a custodian while attending Palomar Community College and California State University San Marcos, where he majored in economics and social sciences. After graduation, he worked as a librarian while attending the University of San Diego School of Law. Fitting is now an attorney for the State of New Mexico. This

Gerald Friedman teaches physics and math at Santa Fe Community College. He has published poetry in the Santa Fe Literary Review and elsewhere, but these are his only published photographs.

His photographs are mostly of nature. The better ones are on his Flickr pages, with a selection at https://bit.ly/35Jo0gO. Gabe Gomez The Outer Bands, won the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas and the University of Notre Dame Press. Mouthfeel Press published his second poetry collection, The Seed Bank. Gomez holds a B.A. in creative writing from the College of Santa Fe and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California.

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Jonathan Greenhause was the winner of Aesthetica Magazine’s 2018 Creative Writing Award Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, The Dark Horse, Moon City Review, New Ohio Review, and Salamander, among others.

Bari Lynn Hein’s stories are published in The Saturday Evening Post, Adelaide, Verdad, The Ilanot Review, HCE Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and elsewhere. Recent awards include placement in The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest, Jerry Jazz Musician 48th Short Fiction place). Her debut novel is on submission. Learn more at barilynnhein.com.

John Hicks is a narrative poet whose work has been published or accepted for publication by Valparaiso Poetry Review, Blue Nib, Bangor Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Ekphrastic Review, Glint Literary Journal, Mojave River Review, and others. Hicks earned an M.F.A. from the University of Nebraska—Omaha, and now writes in Placitas, New Mexico.

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of the poetry chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press, I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock, 2017). She is one of ten poets featured in the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books, 2019). Her poems can be found in America, Whale Road Review, The Cresset, Dappled Things, Poets Reading the News, The Windhover, and other publications. For more information, visit laurareecehogan.com.

Tom Holmes is the founding editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics and author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as four chapbooks. He teaches at Nashville State Community College—Clarksville. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: thelinebreak.wordpress.com/. Follow him on Twitter @TheLineBreak.

Katharyn Howd Machan’s most recent publications are Secret Music: Voices from Redwing, 1888 (Cayuga Lake Books, 2018), Katharyn Howd Machan: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2018) and What the Piper Promised (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Sound and Sense. She is a professor in the Writing Department at Ithaca College in central New York State.

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David Joplin has taught at universities and colleges throughout the West, primarily at Monterey Peninsula College in Monterey, California. He now lives in Santa Fe. Joplin has published essays on American and British authors and a book on philosophical implications of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry. His poetry has appeared in bosque and Railyard Review.

Bronx native Isatu Kaigziabiher children, and husband to a beautiful woman. He is extremely passionate about his spiritual and creative development. Though raised in the concrete jungle, his heart is that of a tree-hugging mountain gazer. One of his great joys is staring at the activity of insects as they forage through his compost pit.

Tintawi Kaigziabiher is a writer, potter, doula, and crochet designer. She migrated to New Mexico from the New York City Metro area seven years ago. Kaigziabiher is married to a scientist, and and a leopard gecko named Milo. In the late 1990s, Kaigziabiher performed as a spoken word artist throughout the New York City Metro area, the Midwest, and Montreal. In the early 2000s, she belonged to a group known as The Hottest Poets. She has also performed at the National Black Theatre, The Apollo, the Boston Comedy Club, and elsewhere. As a woman of African descent, Kaigziabiher writes to give a voice to the African presence and experience in the Diaspora.

Wasabi Kanastoga is a Cuban-born poet raised in Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in various anthologies and reviews. He works as a counselor with victims of abuse.

Magdalena Karlick is an artist, art therapist, and professor at Southwestern College. She is actively engaged in encouraging creative exploration of self, other, and community with her students.

Karlick is a multi-media artist and follows her hands when creating, through which the collective unconscious speaks. Consistently interested in collaboration, she has worked with art therapists and activists in cross-cultural creative exchanges. For more information, visit magdalenakarlick. com.

Artist Mike Kimball

western landscape. Many of his carved prints are monumental in size, often so big that they require a steamroller to print.

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Marty I. Levine is a high school teacher of Special Education and Social Studies in the Bronx, where he has run poetry clubs for many years. He has seen poems published in the anthologies Mercy of Tides, Rough Places Plain and Drash. Levine’s poems are also forthcoming in Elusions: Refugee Poetry and From the Farther Shore. He is very happy that his poem, “Charlie Hebdo,” has found a home here.

Anne MacNaughton teaches writing and performance in the mountains of New Mexico. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Notebook, Minerva Rising, The Best American Poetry, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, Thus Spake the Corpse, and In Company. Her essays on poetry are included in Spoken Word Revolution and Poetry Flash.

She is a recipient of the New Mexico Literary Association’s Gratitude Award.

Cheryl Marita, a nurse and writer, is happy to call Española, New Mexico home for the past twenty years. Cheryl provides Palliative Care at Presbyterian Española Hospital and has a blog, morselsofmarita.com. There, Cheryl documents her own process of end-of-life decisions to help herself and her readers explore their own values and options. She is currently writing a book about her experience as a hospice nurse in order to help others who are interested in the biggest conscious transition we make as humans.

Sibel Melik Archives. She loves the community of writers and teachers that she has met in writing classes at the Santa Fe Community College, and looks forward to continuing the exploration that is writing.

Ursula Moeller moved from snowy Syracuse to sunny Santa Fe in 1996. She has been immersed in writing two memoirs and poetry since, as well as photographing the wonders of New Mexico.

Moeller has enjoyed many English and Art classes at the Santa Fe Community College, and has seen her poems and photographs published in earlier issues of the Santa Fe Literary Review. She never tires of exploring this state’s outdoor wonders.

Linda Morris is a retired professor at the University of California, Davis. Her scholarly work focuses on American women’s humor and the works of Mark Twain. After her retirement, she took up watercolor painting and has been painting ever since. She has been fortunate to travel extensively, including many trips to New Mexico, with scenes from her travels central to her art.

Ryan M. Moser is an essayist and poet, with work published in Evening Street Review, The Storyteller, and elsewhere.

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Rene Mullen and a mental health advocate. He is also one of two 2018 Albuquerque Slam Champions and member of three slam teams that have been on multiple regional and national stages. His poetry has been featured in Poetry Quarterly, 50 Haikus, and Stronger Than Stigma: Poetry from the 2019 Mindwell Poetry Slam Team.

Gunilla Norris is the author of two books of poetry, Learning from the Angel (Lotus Press), and Joy is the Thinnest Layer (Homebound Publications). The latter won the Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry in 2017. Norris is currently working on a poetry book with the working title Calling the Creatures.

Besides writing poetry, Norris has published eleven books on the spirituality of the everyday. Learn more at gunillanorris.com.

Valerie Nye was born and raised in Albuquerque and has worked in libraries and archives in Santa Fe for the last twenty years. She has co-authored two books: Posted Marked Milledgeville: A Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s Correspondence and Breakfast Santa Fe Style. Most recently, she is the editor of a book of essays written by professional librarians, Intellectual Freedom Stories from a Shifting Landscape.

Fredda S. Pearlson is enjoying her third career as a cardiovascular RN. Her poetry has appeared in The California Quarterly, The Wisconsin Review, The Cincinnati Review, Panoply, Helicon Nine, The Feminist Renaissance, Chrysalis, Stone Country, The Little Magazine, The Dolphin’s Arc: Poems on Endangered Creatures in the Sea, Connecticut River Review, Common Ground Review, Miramar, Bryant Literary Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Pinyon.

Emily Pepin is a social worker, yogini, doula, and poet who dreams of having her own Ghost Ranch along the banks of the Rio Grande. “Learning How,” the piece featured here, is dedicated to the twelve foster children her family has helped raise over the years. Emily lives in her hometown of Santa Fe with her small dog Rosy, where they can be found roaming different trails.

Catie Powe is an artist currently living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2009, she decided to pursue art academically. She earned a B.F.A. from TTU in 2012, and has had exhibitions in Midland, Slaton, and Lubbock, Texas, as well as in Santa Fe. Her art is inspired by her travels and invites the viewer to immerse themselves in personal memories and experiences through her portraiture.

Gretchen Rockwell is a queer poet and supplemental instructor of English at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, Rhode Island. Xer work has appeared in Glass: Poets Resist,

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Into the Void, Noble/Gas Qtrly, Kissing Dynamite, FreezeRay Poetry, and elsewhere. Rockwell enjoys writing poetry about gender and sexuality, history, myth, science, space, and unusual

Cedric Rudolph teaches middle-school writers at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts school (CAPA). He is a contributing editor for The Fruit Tree, an LGBT+ journal of prose and poetry.

Rudolph is also a founding editor for Beautiful Cadaver, which publishes social justice-themed anthologies and stages theatrical performances. In May 2018, he received his M.F.A. in Poetry from Chatham University. Rudolph’s poems are published in Christianity and Literature Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Laurel Review.

Mervyn R. Seivwright is of Jamaican heritage, born in London, England, and currently living in Tipp City, Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rigorous Journal, The Trinity Review, Montana Mouthful Literary Magazine, io Literary Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, Toho Journal, Z Publishing’s 2019 Emerging Poets in Kentucky, and has been commissioned by the British Museum in Ipswich, England. Seivwright has an MFA from Spalding University, in Louisville, Kentucky.

Jane Shoenfeld is a poet and painter. Her poems have appeared in Iconoclast, Santa Fe Literary Review, Malpais Review, Sin Fronteras, Taos International Journal of Poetry, Adanna Literary Review, Stories That Need To Be Told, TulipTree Anthology, and others. Numerous publications have chosen her work as cover art. In her Santa Fe studio, she paints and teaches. She opens her Learn more at janeshoenfeld.com.

Jasmine Sierra is a poet based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is surrounded by her collection of too-many-books-and-clothes. She is currently an M.F.A. student at Spalding University, where she is working as a student editor for The Louisville Review poems, title pending. Her work has appeared in Santa Fe Literary Review, Peach Velvet Magazine, Winter Tangerine, and Platypus Press.

Thomas L. Small

Passages North and The Cooweescoowee, among others.

Amoskeag. He earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Newark in 2011. Presently, he lives in northern Pennsylvania with his wife, Maxine, and a phalanx of Pug dogs. He is presently working on a collection of short stories. teklu is from Anchorage. They were born for the Crow/Frog clan.

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Jean Tucker, of Louisville, Kentucky, has published poems in a variety of journals, including San Pedro River Review, Hummingbird, The Awakenings Review, Common Ground Review, Nerve Cowboy, The Sow’s Ear, The Comstock Review, and Ruminate on a poetry chapbook, The Country Where You Live Now, a memoir about memory and its loss.

Jocelyn Ulevicus has a background in social work, psychology, and public health. Her writing explores family violence and re-humanizing after trauma, and has been published in magazines such as Mindful Matter, Entropy Magazine, Life in Ten Minutes, and the Santa Fe Literary Review.

Birth of A Tree, which was recently shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2019 Literary Awards Program.

In her spare time, Ulevicus hunts truth and beauty.

Rick Von Kaenel discovered his fascination with the visual arts while living in New York City, where he worked professionally as both a still photographer and a cinematographer. Eventually

Hitler, clairvoyants, and penile implants.

Sarah Wallstrom has lived in New Mexico her whole life, except for a four-year stint in New York time she enjoys trail-running, reading, and environmental activism.

Marcella Wolfe is a freelance writer and poet who lives a split life between Washington, D.C. and Paw Paw, West Virginia. Her poetry has been published in California Quarterly, Animus, , and other journals. Wolfe has also read on love at the Library of Congress Valentine’s Day series in Washington, D.C. Paul Willis has published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which include Deer at Twilight: Poems from the North Cascades (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018) and Little Rhymes for Lowly Plants (White Violet Press, 2019). Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Ascent, Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry series. Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. To learn more, visit pauljwillis.com.

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SUBMIT TO THE SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW The Santa Fe Literary Review (SFLR) is published annually by the Santa Fe Community College. An in-print literary journal, SFLR features work by local, national, and international writers and artists.

At SFLR, we aim to promote a diverse range of writers and artists, and to present a wide variety of stories, styles, and perspectives. We’re especially committed to promoting voices that aren’t always empowered in the publishing world, so if you’re a writer of color, a non-native English speaker, a female, a member of the LGBTQIAPK+ community, a disabled person, a trauma survivor, or anyone else frequently silenced or ignored by the modern media, please submit. SFLR cares about sharing your voice with the world.

Our 2020 theme is “Tapestry: Diversity, Culture, and Common Ground.” Our submissions period opens June 1, 2020, and closes November 1, 2020. We accept mailed submissions of poetry and prose, and electronic submissions of visual art.

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

Prose and Dramatic Writing Submission Guidelines The Santa Fe Literary Review invites mailed, previously unpublished submissions of creative

Only typed, previously unpublished submissions will be read by SFLR staff—kindly double-space prose and dramatic writing. Poetry may be single-spaced. Please include a cover letter with your name, mailing address, email address, and phone number. On your submission itself, kindly remove all identifying information, keeping your name and contact information for your cover letter only.

Please include a SASE—a Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope—for our reply. Rejected works submitted without a SASE will receive no response.

Count at top of submission.

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For dramatic writing and screenplay excerpts, SFLR encourages a limit of ten double-spaced pages, and ask that you submit a full-length piece or standalone scene.

Address submissions to the SFLR Dramatic Writing/Screenplay, or Poetry Editor. Then, mail or hand-deliver submissions to: SFLR, Room 225E, 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87508 Simultaneous submissions to SFLR accepted elsewhere.

Visual Art Submission Guidelines Aside from our cover, we’re only able to print in black and white. As such, we ask that artists submit works in black and white, or else ensure their works will reproduce well in black and white before submitting. Kindly send visual art submissions as emailed attachments in .jpg or .tif formats, at 300 dpi or similar. In the body of your email, please include the title of your submission(s), the estimated dimensions, and your full name and contact information.

line read: 2021 Art Submission.

Contributors receive two copies of the magazine and are invited to present and share their work at the annual SFLR reception, hosted on campus each fall.

Our editorial team is dedicated to promoting and celebrating the contributions of SFCC students, Santa Feans, and writers and artists from around the world.

To learn more about SFLR, visit us online at https://www.sfcc.edu/santa-fe-literary-review/.

Or, follow us on social media: Facebook @SFLRSF Instagram @santafereview

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

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

Kindly write “SFLR/ENGL Fund” in the memo.

To donate by credit card: Call (505) 428-1855 or visit https://www.sfcc.edu/give-now/. Be sure to indicate, over the phone or in the “Comments” section online, that you’d like your gift to be designated for the SFLR/ENGL fund.

For other ideas about how to support the Santa Fe Literary Review, email forward to hearing from you!

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