​Taking the Dare

Niagara seemed to dare me: make your mark
with a giant panorama of the Falls.
And so I tackled that terrifying arc,
sketching just behind the viewing wall
its crashing rush, its plumes of towering spray.
That day, as water thundered, the day grew late;
the sky, cloud-streaked in puce and smoky gray,
added drama. Studio weeks would wait.

I added a rainbow so realistically
that critics thought it was reflected from
the window of the New York gallery
where for two weeks my finished artwork hung;
one hundred thousand people paid to see it.
I had succeeded. Niagara guaranteed it.

Amid this Rising Strife
​
I’ve heard that Mr. Church
now has a picture twice as wide
with a beguiling, come-and-go rainbow.
But mine, they say, has a stronger glow.
And though I have no wish to chide,
nor any wish to besmirch

that rich New York White man
(my racial heritage is mixed),
my rainbow here is representing hope
for peace. Isn’t that of greater scope
than an artful trick of light betwixt
that artist’s sky and land?

War is always brutal.
The rainbow is my last-ditch prayer
that civil strife will somehow be averted.
I compose a scene where land’s converted
to peaceful pastures; all is fair.
It’s only art. It’s futile.

. . . except it’s only art
that builds a bit of self-respect, 
feeds my children and my very soul. 
It’s the one part of my life I can control.
Right now I count on one effect:
art calms my anxious heart. 

Barbara Lydecker Crane

Barbara Lydecker Crane's most recent book is Art and Soul, Kelsay Books.Amid this Rising Strife

​What is Loss?

I was a kid. I curved space before I knew of Einstein. We now see billions of galaxies, and billions more we can’t yet see. And then some.

How can anyone imagine eternity?

And then there is the first law of thermodynamics. And then there was the famous physicist who sighed and said: Perhaps, at the beginning, there was just an idea. And then there is John 1:1—In the beginning was the Word… And then there is quantum mechanics.
 
How can anyone imagine eternity?
 
Can anything come from absolute nothing? What has always been and will always be, is that its own eternity? Serious cosmologists, philosophers, and physicist are beginning to suggest that ALL IS CONSCIOUSNESS, that there is nothing but consciousness, that we and all creation are three-dimensional expressions of consciousness.
 
We come and we go, like the waves of the oceans, like the waters of the rivers, like the highest mountains and the deepest caves, like the Pleiades and the supernovas, like the atoms, the quarks, the electrons, Like thoughts, like prayer, like song…
 
And we can never be lost.

Rose Mary Boehm
 
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, once for the Best of Net. Her latest: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), and Saudade (December 2022) are available on Amazon. A new collection, Life Stuff, has been scheduled by Kelsay Books for February 2024. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

The Woman Who Stuffed the Devil into a Bottle

after A Mulher Que Botou O Diablo Na Garrafa, woodcut by José Francisco Borges (Brazil) contemporary
https://indigoarts.com/mulhere-que-botou-o-diabo-nagarrafa-0

Bigger than a wine bottle, he’s a sweet talker.
But he only wants to dance. His horns are yellow,
his tail grips a snake—its tongue  
forked like future tense.
She has on a red dress with white polka dots. 

Lots of polka dots. (The soft wood of the block
allows for cuts of fine detail.) She is smiling 
as she holds him over the mouth of the bottle. 
As she diminishes him.

**

The Girl Who Turned Into a Snake

She looks glum as she kneels before an even glummer priest, 
her body a long river from the waist down, 
undulating like a snake, like a snake that was once a river,
like a river that once snaked through the countryside,
contained now in snakeskin and story.
A horse with its long strange shadow of a body half-hidden  
by a tree, grins, wide-eyed, lascivious—am I reading 
too much into the plot?—and the priest, 
with his silly little hat and outline of a cross, such 
a young face, looks only at the horse, shadow horse
behind the tree. It’s his fate to be afraid 
of snakes. O Girl, O Cobra Girl, don't despair, 
be bold like the two blackbirds flying over your head 
and over the horse's head, away from the priest.
Bold and black like the river and your shimmering hair 
and the butterfly in the upper left corner.
 
Sue D. Burton

Sue D. Burton’s poetry appears in the just released anthology In the Footsteps of a Shadow: Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa (MadHat Press). She is the author of BOX (selected by Diane Seuss for the Two Sylvias Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2019 Vermont Book Award) and the book-length poem Little Steel (Fomite Press). She lives in Vermont and worked (retired now) for over twenty-five years as a physician assistant specializing in women’s health. She‘s done linoleum block prints for cards and banners and loves José Francisco Borges’s wild and wonderful woodcuts.

Something’s Gotta Give 
 
I entered Le Grand Colbert beaming with expectation. Here was the Parisian restaurant Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give insisted had the best roast chicken ever. The host guided me along the buffed gold and brown mosaic tile floor to Keaton’s very seat in the movie, in front of a beveled art nouveau glass divider. I could have ordered an appetizer and entrée that reflected far more French cuisine: foie gras, onions gratin, escargot, sole meuniere, chateaubriand, duck confit. But there on the menu: half a Normandy roast chicken. 

I ordered it. 

Just the smell of a roasted chicken made me salivate. The crispy-skinned chicken came dressed with a white paper frilled chef’s cap on the leg, along with grilled onions, a micro greens salad, and a smothering, glistening thyme gravy that I wanted to slurp up. The chandelier lighting made the carrots and mushrooms on the plate shine and the gravy shimmer with delectability.

I sat in Keaton’s seat, ordered Keaton’s meal. But neither Keanu Reeves nor Jack Nicholson was there to give me birthday gifts or ply me with wine to loosen me up.

And today, Diane Keaton died at age seventy-nine. I sat in her seat. I ordered her meal. Maybe I even drank out of her glass, held her knife and fork. Though she’s gone, as she said to Jack Nicholson, “We’ll always have Paris.”
​
Keaton’s star has dimmed, but her light remains at Le Grand Colbert, in the laminated scrapbook the owners kept of the filming, in the delicious meal they continue to serve in her honour.

Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including the recent ekphrastic poetry chapbook, Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press), and the ekphrastic collection, The Night Watch (Kelsay Books). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than seventy literary journals, including Tupelo Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Nimrod, and The Ekphrastic Review. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com.

Observing The Bathers

after The Bathers, by Vivian Browne (USA) 1971

Humans move around the gallery. 2, 5, 7, 11. Now it’s 2,4,7.

I try to think of The Bathers while my paranoia priorities proximity.

When are bathing women not a subject in art? Acteon’s transformation by the exposed and enraged Artemis. Melusine’s serpentine silhouette revealed to her husband. Picasso’s model on the teal tub. Bonnard’s colourful depictions of his wife in many bathtubs. Some painting in the permanent collection; I forget the name. (It’s The Small Bather by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.)

Three women bathing under a waterfall of triangular waves. Two have become ghosts behind waters and against rocks. The final bather either stands on ground land or walks the waters like Jesus.

Why does her right Achilles’ heel twist into Cinderella’s shoe even though she only wears a belt? How do her triangular features fuse with her doll anatomy? Why are her friends’ hair straight while hers curls into braids? How does she stand out in the dark while their faces dissolve in white waters?

**

Seven Deadly Men 

after Seven Deadly Sins, by Vivian Browne (USA) 1968 

Seven deadly men are everywhere.

They run businesses, federal departments, and even the schools you send your children to every day.

Are they from Hell? Most likely. However, they don’t possess demonic powers or any magic at all. Which is what makes them scarier.

The seven deadly men all have names: Misters B.L. Phegor, Bob Beezel, Levi Athens, Azz M. Odious, Mammon, St. Ann, and Lou Cypher. 

Mr. B.L. Phegor and Mr. Bob Beezel were the grossest of men, always by each other’s side. Mr. B.L. Phegor’s sunken red eyes and cheeks contrasted his fingers coated in algae and his shirt was so tight, his stomach looked like a polished spherical sculpture. Mr. Bob Beezel’s blank face was void of personality, even after drinking a full bottle. As Mr. Bob Beezel drank, his sloth of a friend licked his toes.

Mr. Levi Athens was always yelling at his gluttonous colleague. Why was his face so bright? Why did their lazy colleague only put effort in waiting on him? Perhaps, because Mr. Levi Athens was the darkest in the room and had the roundest lips, Mr. Bob Beezel attacked him the most?

Mr. Azz M. Odious was the most detailed as the ugliest of the seven. Bruised wrinkles framed his reddish pink eyes. His shirt was always unkept and his pants’ zipper always dangled in the worst way. He always drank his wine at work with confidence the same way he slept with a woman once and then kicked her like a dog for the rest of her career.

Mr. Mammon was clearly a mamma’s boy, always sucking his thumb unless he got what he wanted and celebrated with a cigar later. He always dressed in mint-conditioned outfits. Nothing he wore was old.

Mr. St. Ann was the youngest, entitled and easy to provoke. Whenever he screamed, his lungs puffed out all their air, draining Mr. St. Ann’s complexion into that of an ice cube. His expression was always compared to Ghostface.

Finally, there was Mr. Lou Cypher. Clearly important because of his old top hat. He had a look of indifference and calm that none of his six colleagues could hold. He always sat firmly in the back, waiting for the others to terminate their tantrums,

Thus are the seven deadly men. If you see one of them in your workplace, change jobs as soon as possible! If you see them run your child’s school district, move out of town! Their presence poisonous people’s prosperity.

**

Her Self-Portrait

after Vivian (Self-portrait), by Vivian Browne (USA) 1965

Her paintbrush pressed against the canvas, giving her brown hair the swirls she carried. Her peony pink jacket had some raspberry folds but still looked like a perfect fit. She had made sure to capture her confident composure, the wall behind her capturing her finest works as of now.

Her paintbrush soaked in water, dissolving the oils away. Her work complete, the painter stepped away, admiring her work with a stranger’s eyes. No white audience would believe she could pull of such a splendid self-portrait. No male audience would believe her work would capture her better essence.

She knew that not many would embrace her achievement, the purest counterpart of Dorian Gray. She’d grow, mature, and change as a person. Her hair would trade its swirls for a bob, a perm, a wrap, an afro, and finally short waves. She knew she would change, but her self-portrait would immortalize the confident young woman she had started off as.

The next week, sturdy paper wrapped her canvas. She carried it out where her friend Emma waited for her. Once their works were secured, the van drove off. They made small talk during the ride.

“I should tell you. I saw the list.” Emma made a left turn. 

“What list?”

“The show in New York. I saw the list for all the artists. We’re the only girls on that show.”

“Women.”

“What?”

“We’re not girls. We are women. We will be the only women.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Emma frowned. “I mean, it could be fifty years from now, and no matter what we do, we’d be the only women in an art show! It’s like we’re automatically set up to be forgotten.”

As she reclined in her seat, our painter stared at the sunlight glowing over the interstate.

“They’ll remember us,” she told Emma, her confidence stronger than it was.

Celine Krempp
​
Celine is a French-American artist and writer. Working part-time as an art museum security guard inspires Celine in her ekphrastic writing. Her writing has been featured once in the Ekphrastic Challenges. When she’s not brainstorming her next creative project, she walks her dog VanGogh, reads books, indulges in sweet cravings, and binge-watches adult animation on streaming services. She has art exhibited at the Phillips Collection and Fine Line Creative Arts Center.

The Light Within 
 
I said goodbye to a lot when I left Santa Fe, but I am not pining for sage, chamisa, piñon, and blue corn. I stayed too long. 

The angel I miss.

I don’t miss the guilt. Her steady, sad gaze watched me come and go each day, from the eight-foot-by-three-foot painting propped against our garage wall.

Why did it live in garages for ten years? First, because my modest little post-divorce house did not have the free wall space it required. After I moved into a house big enough for me, my kids, my soon-to-be wife, Laura, our art, and her two dogs, the walls were had too many windows, letting in the fabled New Mexico light. 

The Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains define Santa Fe’s northern crescent. They glow red at sunset. The same light paints the valleys gold, and all the different shades of beige adobes, too. 

Laura and the kids thought the painting was creepy. I thought about bringing it to work. But it didn’t fit in our cars, and I couldn’t see hiring someone with a truck when I knew we’d be moving out of state soon. Laura and I were both ready for something new. 
 
When the man I sold the painting to asked about its provenance, I said, “I knew the painter, Antonio Roybal.” 

Antonio had apprenticed with Jean-Claude Gaugy, my then-husband’s father. I remember Peter being irked that Jean-Claude said Antonio was kind of like a son to him. Jean-Claude had always been marginal enough in Peter’s life for a statement like that to really sting. 
 
Imagine a tall, slim, black-haired angel in a flowing red gown.  She at first seems to be sitting on a window ledge in a medieval castle tower room, but the shadow on the floor below the hem of her skirt shows she is floating. Emerald velvet drapes frame the window’s crown glass windowpanes. Large flame-tinged wings extend from her shoulders. Her hazel eyes glow limpid in a pensive, blade-featured, beatific face. 

She holds a green candle in one hand, and two fingertips of her other hand rest below the hollow of her clavicle. A gold cross with an emerald bezel stone shimmers against her gown. Velvety brown shadows pool in its folds.

Behind her, an illuminated book with gilded edges rests open on the windowsill. On the left page, words: Magical, Godly, Carnal, Love, War, Christ, Blood. The right page depicts a crimson and yellow rose on a black background. Above the book, a bumblebee hovers, fruitlessly drawn to the bloom but never satisfied enough to leave. 

The Light Within, made in in 2004, melds the styles of El Greco and Van Eyck. The New Mexican artist who made my painting claimed the latter as his primary influence. You can see it in the compressed depth of field, how the tiled floor seems to rise to meet the wall behind it, and the use of luminous white amid jewel-toned backgrounds.

In The Light Within, a diabolical little Kewpie doll demon stands atop a veiny placenta mound of lava on the tiled floor, holding a pitchfork. It wears red pajamas and has two shiny horns. Far above the red angel’s right shoulder, its angelic counterpart stands on a puffy white cloud in a penumbra of golden light. The cloud weeps raindrops that evaporate in midair. 

In New Mexico, rain that evaporates before it hits the ground takes the shape of a high gray tornado-shaped curtain called virga. It taunts during dry times, which are most times, then thins out to nothing against milky lapis skies.

Roybal mixed his own egg tempera paint. Most of the colors articulate to pigments no longer used for taste or safety reasons. The green candle the angel holds might allude to using Scheele’s green pigment, made of toxic cupric hydrogen arsenic. In the late 1700s, it sickened and killed people who wore its green-dyed clothing, lived in its painted rooms—or held its green candles. The angel’s gown is the red of cinnabar, a form of mercury; and the purple floor tiles are of a hue once bestowed by Tyrian snails. The crown window’s filtered light and the angel’s face are pearlescent with the glowing-from-within quality of lead white. And the brown recalls mummy brown, a pigment made of ground-up Egyptian mummies used up until the 1960s. 
 
Before Peter and I moved to Santa Fe, we came to visit his father. We were weary of New York City’s congestion and jockeying, and had been thinking of buying a house in, say, a less obnoxious suburb. But once we opened the door to leaving New York, it was like a blown porthole on a spaceship. Before we knew it, we were planets from our first hypothetical: red cliffs, cow skulls, tumbleweed and roadrunners. When Peter’s father offered him a job selling art in the family gallery, we had both a will and a way. 

Our family of three pulled into Santa Fe in a Budget truck a few days before Halloween. It loomed tall on the narrow dirt road that led to our drafty old adobe. 

We soon met Antonio and his wife Shelly, who worked in the gallery. We had a baby daughter and they had a baby son. Shelly insisted we come with them to trick or treat at the mall. I was used to going door to door as a kid on Long Island neighborhood roads rustling with fallen leaves, knocking on the doors of Cape Cods and bungalows. We would have done that if we hadn’t moved. Instead, we were importuning second-tier chain retail shops inside a 70s-era mall. I held one-year-old Honorée in my arms. She wore a ballerina costume, had big eyes for the other children in costumes, and was thrilled to be given candy. 

Shelly and Antonio were a little bit younger than us. She was from a Colorado suburb, full of chatty banter, with a Kewpie doll face. He was boyishly handsome, quiet, charming. His last name marked him as being from one of the first Spanish families who came up the Camino Real and settled in Santa Fe in the late 1600s. 

Peter and I were the old-fart kind of late twentysomethings, into wine and midcentury modern furniture. Raised by unreliable parents, Peter and I had grown up too fast, and cleaved to that identity as if it were something we chose. Antonio and Shelly still loved playing video games and watching superhero movies. We went to dinner at each other’s homes and to our children’s birthday parties for a few years. 

The night I first saw The Light Within, it was at Shelly and Antonio’s medium-beige adobe house. Almost all of their toddler’s son’s toys blinked, beeped, and squawked. Our daughter loved them. At home, most of Honorée’s toys were handmade and wooden, or strategically engineered to stimulate the intellect, or referenced midcentury modern design—or all of the above. No wonder she liked his better.

I would have been less judgmental of their suburban scene if we hadn’t just moved from New York City. I missed it and my friends. My crumbling former identity as a fashion editor and freelance writer was not yet ready to coexist with a new persona that felt sincere appreciation for their hospitality. I softened the edges—the grease in the air dueling with air freshener, the beeps and bleats, Antonio’s death metal playing low in the next room—with extra glasses of wine.

Antonio’s paintings were interesting—most were too stark, pop, and nymphets-with-popsicles for me—but I loved the red angel painting at first glance. 

Peter traded one of his father’s paintings for it, and soon it hung on the huge living room wall of the fixer-upper, first-and-only house we bought together. 

Antonio and Shelly had another baby, a girl. We had another baby, a boy. 

Shelly got another job, and we drifted apart. 
 
In the small pocket of time after Peter and I mounted the painting on the living room wall—in the stone-khaki beige adobe house we bought in the Sangre de Cristo foothills—and before we got divorced, we hosted a lot of dinner parties. Peter and his oenophile friends paired fancy wines with our menus. Each menu seemed like it aimed to top the last one. Oh, the cookbooks I paged. The spices I sought. Corks were sniffed. Peter held forth, I made small talk while keeping an ear out for the rising hilarity of children that crests right before someone gets hurt. 

Sadly, almost every couple who came to the parties got divorced at the same time or shortly after we did. Shelly and Antonio got divorced, too. Turns out he fathered another child in Colorado when he was engaged to Shelly, and when the mother pursued child support, Shelly, of course, found out. I don’t think Shelly left him after that; she left him after he beat her up. Or maybe she left him after he beat her up one too many times. Peter and I, on the other hand, brought into our marriage the seeds of its destruction: his childhood fury seeking a blowhole, paired with a refusal to go to therapy, and my weakness in the presence of rage, and unexplored thing for women. 

Peter loved the painting, but when we were divvying up our shared belongings, he gave it to me without a fuss. At the time, I noticed on Facebook that Shelly and I both dyed our hair different shades of divorcée blonde. Hers was admittedly a brassier shade, but my need to make judgmental distinctions about us had softened after I found myself within the humbling identity of a single mother who came out at the age of thirty-four. Although rife with the unknown and often terrifying, that identity was far more authentic than my brittle Manhattan persona or Santa Fe housewife pantomime.  

Peter and I shared custody, and he had the children on a night when I was going to perform a monologue I’d written for a fundraiser. He’d wanted to bring the kids to the performance, pretend everything was normal, until I insisted he must not. There I was on stage, talking about my own motherhood, the end of our marriage, and falling in love with a woman. As I talked, my eyes raked the audience for the woman I’d fallen in love with. I’d invited her. I was so high on infatuation that I thought my paean would serve as the ultimate seduction move. Doubtful. She didn’t show up and it never panned out. At the same time, my furiously bereft yet forward-looking husband hosted a dinner for his work friends, the children jumped on the couch in the living room below the red angel, and my son Nathaniel caromed off the couch and cut his forehead on the coffee table. 

Peter had been calling me multiple times a day and night to plead and harangue me into coming back to him, so I ignored that rash of phone calls. When he finally got through to me, he was beside himself. Nathaniel was okay; he just needed stitches. But I hadn’t been there to hold my son’s other hand. 

Instead I’d cried myself to sleep. I’d been floating above the hoodoo badlands of divorce pain inside a virga of fantasy about the woman. Her lack of interest sent me crashing down. And then I woke up a confirmed terrible mother. 

Before I moved out, I would have made sure the kids were okay while their father drank wine and held forth in the kitchen. He wasn’t used to remembering he was a father when he had company. It was the first moment I understood our family would not be immune to the ways children become more vulnerable when their parents become single parents. 
 
Eleven years went by. I met Laura one year after the emergency-room visit. I finally put the painting on Craigslist because Laura and I were moving to Ohio, after I was accepted into a PhD program for creative writing. My scholarly and creative journey finally pushed us into making our long-deliberated move. We had to get rid of things that hadn’t fit into our old house, let alone our new one half its size.

The Light Within belonged within the stark, open landscape, the same one that awed me, but never quite felt like home. For a long while, that suited me; I had fled the claustrophobic, slippery, but typical dysfunction of my family back in New York. I felt like I had gotten out of jail free. Then I watched the tragic film Manchester by the Sea, set in a New England town, and found myself crying far more for my sense of loss of the landscape of my birth than the plight of the characters. Ohio was more like the Long Island of my childhood, rolling hills and tall trees, before condos rose up uniform where peach farms and oddball summer cottages used to be. 

Our leaving elicited questions from friends, movers, and even the mailman. 

“But it’s so beautiful. Why would you leave?”

“How could you leave your perfect job?”

 “But the light.”

“But the sunsets.”

“But the green chile.”

Why would I leave? Sublimity for me must be balanced with the beige: the fallow time of integration and healing, the culling and rearranging. Beige was shelter as well as earth—dirt, dust, mud, clay—plus water, plus sunlight. It was a healing place. 

But in New Mexico, I had stayed too long. The many beiges dulled me: I was losing time. I’d get in the car in my work parking lot, then pull into my driveway, almost no memory of those miles of highway between piñon-dotted brown hills and waving grama grasses. I was like the bee in Antonio’s painting, aware of the flower in the book, hovering above it, unable to drink its nectar, blaming myself. 

I now understood the Land of Enchantment’s bitter twin moniker, the Land of Entrapment. Losing time meant years were going by too fast. My “perfect” job felt like it would be perfect for someone else. 

Yes, the light. Its golden, rosy scintillae anointed everything, and artists went crazy for it. I also loved Paris’s grisaille, but didn’t need to live there. 

I could order green chile online.

When I moved to Santa Fe, I’d been running away. I now had something to run toward. 
 
The painting didn’t sell right away. I listed it and then dropped the price. 

“Whatever happened to Antonio?” I asked Peter. “What kind of market do you think there is for the painting?”

He wrote back that Antonio had a rap sheet a mile long now. I didn’t press him for details. But the painting’s more noir aspects—the devil doll, the shadows, my wife and kids’ dislike of it—made sense and made me feel like I was missing a danger sensor. Had my affinity for it marked me? Like Antonio, I had been secretly unhappy in my first marriage. Like Antonio, there was a walled-off part of me that, once revealed, would shock and devastate Peter and reshape the contours of his life against his will. He gave me a lot to forgive and I, him. His and my divorced parents nurtured ex-spouse acrimony like a hemlock garden. We wanted to spare our children. And so we forgave—iteratively and imperfectly over time—as a closing pact, an unforeseen bookend of our wedding vows.

I dropped the  price again.

Finally, at $300, I got a call from an Italian-American man with a thick New York accent whose voice sounded like it was escaping in gasps from a strangled neck. Eddie loved it. He wanted to come buy it immediately. Then he realized it wouldn’t fit in his car. He told me he’d ask to borrow someone’s car next week. 

We texted back and forth a few times. In a very calculated way, I said I was also from New York, also Italian (among other things). Both true, but I wasn’t trying to build a friendship with him. I was trying to build rapport to make the sale. I offered to find someone to deliver it; we could split the cost. Eddie agreed. He told me he lived in Cañada de los Alamos, about twenty minutes outside of Santa Fe. It was a weird, rustic, funky little community of about a couple hundred people. You had to drive down Old Santa Fe Trail until it dead-ended there. The only way out was the way in. You’d drive past haphazardly arranged, pink-beige and sunburn-beige and mustard-beige adobe houses, an old greige church.

On Craigslist, I connected with someone named Reyes with good online reviews who could come to my house and pick up the painting. I’d follow him out to Eddie’s house.

Reyes, like the angel, had deep black hair and wore a crucifix. Tall and broad, he took his time wrapping up the painting, each move imbued with reverence. He tied it to the truck bed then drove away slowly.

As I followed him, I felt the weight of my time with red angel, and the lightness just beyond it. I would miss not just the painting, but my daughter, who was eighteen now and staying in Santa Fe for a year to work and save money before beginning college. Peter and I had entreated her to either come to Ohio or to move to Austria, where Peter now lived with his Austrian wife, and our son, Nathaniel, who had gone with them to attend a free international high school. But Honorée refused, and she was eighteen, so we couldn’t make her. I felt like I was leaving her in the land of magical, Godly, carnal, love, Christ, blood, and I was. The little moppet on my hip with big eyes for Halloween mall candy was now a strong-willed, independent young woman who dressed up for Comic cons and Instagram photos—and made paintings that promised to soon rival her grandfather’s, and Antonio’s. 

Reyes and I turned on Two Trails Road, and then on Old Santa Fe Trail. It took longer than I remembered to get there, in part because he was driving slowly. Just as I drove out of cell phone range, I realized I hadn’t told anyone where I was going. 

Reyes made a sharp right onto a sandy dirt road that looked like a dry arroyo. Lots of people accidentally drown in New Mexico when arroyos flood with water rushing down from the Sangres. Loose mutts ran toward our cars, barking. Reyes made another right into a lot with a chaotic adobe house, flanked by wilting, rusty trailers. Trucks took up space in the compound’s parking area, along with a few rusting shells of vintage automobiles, and a couch on its side. Of course the painting would be landing here in this classic New Mexican assemblage of funk, and yet why would a New York City guy ever choose to live in such a remote cranny? Most of the New York transplants I’d encountered either made a beeline for hipster neighborhoods (like Peter and I initially had) or embraced overwrought, overpriced, cast iron-bedecked haciendas. They didn’t live like disowned locals.

I was glad I was with Reyes, yet I had only met him forty-five minutes beforehand. 

I got out of my car and rang the bell in front of the adobe house. A sturdy woman in hiking shorts came out. 

“You must be here for Eddie,” she said. “He lives next door.” 

Reyes, carrying the wrapped painting like an enormous relic, followed me as I picked around a path that led me past a carport and up a slope to the front porch of a trailer. This scene was sketch. I rang the doorbell. The door opened. There stood Eddie, very short and wide with greased back hair, wearing a white button-down shirt with suspenders, unbuttoned to show a ribbed tank undershirt, and black suit pants with shiny shoes. Beside him, a henchman-looking guy in similar garb. 

Eddie invited us in. I felt simultaneously like I was about to get killed and also couldn’t possibly refuse. Reyes and I looked at each other, and then we ducked inside. He might be a stranger to me, but I had a feeling he would protect me if it came down to it. The henchman melted away.

We followed Eddie to his living room, dominated by an overstuffed couch. 

“Look,” he said, pointing to a pair of Kokopelli lamps. “Beautiful, huh?”

Kokopelli is an indigenous trickster figure who was mega-co-opted by home décor stores in the 1990s. I once visited a home with a full-on Kokopelli bathroom, from tissue holder to shower curtain to light fixture. 


“Yes,” I said, full of shit the way one is at these times. 

He gestured to a bare wall. 

Reyes brought the painting forward and leaned its shrouded bulk against the wall, untied the knots, and pulled away the fabric. 

That same early awe hit me.Although I’d been holding out for a big-enough, right-enough space for the red angel, she looked perfect in that poky little room. 

“Wow,” Eddie hoarsely exhaled. He shook his head, wiped at his eye. “Beautiful. Where’d you get it?”

“I knew the painter, Antonio Roybal.”

He reached for his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills, fluidly slid his fingers into the crease of cash, licked a finger, and counted off the twenties. Reyes slipped away as if it would be indelicate for him to witness the transaction. No, I thought. Stay. I heard the screen door snap shut. Eddie handed me the cash, I said thank you, glanced once more at the painting, and then bolted. 

As I stepped into the bright sunlight, I felt the screen door’s tension slacken. Eddie, behind me. “I’ll walk you out,” he said. “I have something for your guy.”

Reyes was folding fabric at the tailgate of his pickup. Eddie handed him cash and then turned to me, arms outstretched. Under the pińon branches, the dogs dozed, each in their own dugout.

“Thank you,” he said, veering in for a hug. What?

His lips smacked against my ear. Oh good god. 

“Where are you moving?” he murmured into my neck as he let go of me.

“Ohio,” I said. Why was I even telling him? 

“God bless,” he said. 

I thanked him and gave Reyes thirty dollars. More than my half, as Eddie had only given him $10. When I first moved to New Mexico I would have insisted Eddie split it with me, as we’d agreed. Maybe he forgot. Maybe he was seeing what he could get away with. It didn’t matter or seem worth it to me now. I jumped in the car, close to three hundred bucks in my pocket, feeling like I got away with something. As I drove away, the pack of dogs roused just long enough to bark me down the road like it was their idea. 

That was six years ago. I’ve been back since and have learned that sometimes a place doesn’t feel like home until you move away. Green chile doesn’t taste the same outside of New Mexico. The sunsets in Athens, Ohio are reliably pale blue, pink, and peach: a Fragonard palette I will miss. We’re packing again because I’ve been hired for my actual dream job: creative writing professor in central Washington state. 
 
Millions of people visit museums to see a beloved painting, and only a few decide they must somehow, instead of buying a replica postcard, find a way to take it with them. Some call them art thieves; I call them fools for love, like I once was, as I kept the red angel pent up in the garage. Entrapped. That which we confine confines us. 

I remember her still. I carry her in my--magical, carnal, love, blood--heart.

But the light.

It’s within.  

​Candace Walsh is an assistant professor of creative writing at Central Washington University. Her book Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity (Hachette/Seal) won the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona LGBT Book Award, and two essay anthologies she co-edited were Lambda Literary Award finalists: Dear John, I Love Jane, and Greetings from Janeland. During the 18 years she spent living in Santa Fe, Candace served as editor in chief of El Palacio and managing editor of New Mexico Magazine. She holds an MFA and PhD in fiction. Recent publications include The Greensboro Review, Trampset, California Quarterly, and March Danceness.

Antonio Roybal is a figurative artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He apprenticed with Jean Claude Gaugy and studied with Ernst Fuchs. Roybal’s timeless paintings draw upon a broad range of cultural influences that include Renaissance paintings, religious iconography, and contemporary culture. He often distorts or exaggerates his figures. His bright colors are refreshing and intoxicating, while his haunting, manneristic figures can be intense, playful or meditative. Femme fatales, strong noble women, mystical men, and playful children, fill his canvases with narratives that are enigmatically soulful and poignant. Faith and hope are the main psychological elements at the apex of his oeuvre. 
​

​Bathsheba Bathing
 
The living doll in the sun spilled fountain 
flicks the water’s sleeping surface 
and the sparkling nimbus catches
the eye of the starry-eyed king 
restless upon the roof,
who, in no time, 
clouds the air with 
his own seed-strewn milky way,
deadlier than a slung stone.
 
And faithful Uriah rolls in his
sleep with a proleptic moan.
 
King David sends and inquires
after the woman. The wife, they
tell him, of Uriah the Hittite.
And David sends messengers
 
and takes her. Her lips are like
a thread of scarlet, her skin is 
dark and comely, clear as
the copper Spring of Gihon. 
 
And faithful Uriah rolls in his
sleep with a doleful moan
 
The royal baitsim of the young king
are full of vigor and he plants
Bathsheba like a fertile field,
filling her with life that very night.  
They rut like teenagers until,
too sore to move, they sleep
the easy sleep of youth till dawn.
 
And faithful Uriah, on the field of 
battle under the rolling sky,
troubles his own sleep with a ragged moan.

Alec Solomita

Alec Solomita is a writer and artist working in Massachusetts. His fiction, poetry, and art have appeared in many journals and anthologies.

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Pharoah on the Seventh Plague
 
I fell in love with polished sandstone 
at ten. Cats, and Jackel-headed gods. 
Ears, snouts and claws. I could never 
believe in such creatures. 
 
My earliest memory is the cool weight 
of palace gold. I dreamed refining silver 
from billet to broach. Twisting precious 
metals into precious filigree. Matching 
lapis blue, and turquoise. Green emeralds.
I was filled with amulets and bracelets. 
Anklets and breastplates. Scarab rings. 
 
I hate palace life. It’s obsequious servants. 
Endlessly repeated abortive funerary rituals. 
The fecal streets of Thebes. It’s fetid air. 
The endless parading required. My 
mummified life.
 
Now I have this Hebrew and his Hebrew 
magic calling forth fire, hail, and thunder, 
from the sky. My Nile seethes. My ships 
capsize. My subjects drowning. The seventh 
time he has trifled me. 

Matthew Sisson

Matthew Sisson’s poetry has appeared in journals ranging from the Harvard Review Online, to JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and read his work on NPR’s On Point. His book, Please, Call Me Moby, was published by The Pecan Grove Press, of St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas.