Issue 53, September 2021

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Dragonfly Out in the Sun

Tracey Dean Widelitz

Hold On To Me,
Sunlit Beauty,
and Rose Petals and Golden Wings

Refugees DRC

Despair Paintings

Owen Brown

The world seems to carry on as if there aren’t a million reasons to be shocked. But because I don’t want to go numb, I try to paint them, at least a few. For these, I paint figuratively, as I was trained, even though now, often, my desires, and my output, is abstract. Still, how can we ignore the drought in Afghanistan, the strife in Sudan, the war in Gaza, the invasion of Ukraine? Or even what goes on in our own lives?

Finding a Pathway

Finding a Pathway

Mark Rosalbo

As an emerging artist, the art form I work with is primarily abstract painting and large-scale installations. My artistic process involves using various mediums and techniques to create physical manifestations of internal dialogues and personal judgments. In my abstract paintings, I use house paint, various tools, and textured canvases. The technique involves creating overconfident brushstrokes that mask my imposter syndrome, with multiple layers of paint partially hidden under the surface. The inner turmoil arising from self-doubt is expressed as geometric shapes woven together with texture.

In Between

Wholeness Through Fracture: Sculpting the Human Condition

Aleksandra Scepanovic

Three works in clay by Aleksandra Scepanovic.
Each of these works tells a story of the complexity and beauty found in life’s fractures, embracing the wholeness that emerges through resilience.

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Coastal Grey

Miki Simic

This series of photographs, titled “Coastal Grey,” depicts elements of summer themes. My goal was to capture a vibrant setting and allow the viewer to realize it remains vibrant even though color is lacking.

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Symphony in Green

Patrice Sullivan

I paint landscapes, interiors, exteriors, still life’s with figures interacting and posing for the camera displaying memorable moments with families, friends, and neighbors.

friends

Friends, Triplets, and Family Narrative

Tianyagenv Yan

Tianyagenv uses light clay to make miniature figures and wishes to capture the characteristics of femininity, vulnerability, and resilience in potential.

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Green Canyon Bridge 1993, Thrive, and Tarot Deck: The Moon

Robb Kunz

My paintings explore the abstract simplicity of ordinary life and the deductive impulse to see ourselves reflected back in art.

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Metamorphosis

Marianne Dalton

The photographs are from the series, Metamorphosis. Each painterly creation constructed from dozens of layered photographs is driven by my reaction to nature’s extreme seasonal change.

La Huasteca

La Huasteca, Roots in Nuevo Leon, and Frames

Tee Pace

La Huasteca, Roots in Nuevo Leon, and Frames

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Cherry Blossoms

Annika Connor

Cherry Blossom Forest

Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White

Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White

Janet Brugos

Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White
Hurricane
Chicago Ice

Sunset over the Pacific

Three Photographs

Lawrence Bridges

UNDER THE PIER, MALIBU CA
SUNSET OVER THE PACIFIC
and POOL, POST RANCH INN, BIG SUR

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Joshua Tree Project

Holly Willis

The images are part of a larger series created in the Mojave Desert around Joshua Tree in the fall of 2023 that explore the shifting state of the desert.

October Still Life

Chasing Paradise

Marianne Dalton

This series, Chasing Paradise, draws upon my work as a fine artist in painting, as I create stylized photographs of flowers and plants found in my rural environment.

Turtle Light

Ocean Sleep and Turtle Light

Maite Russell

Turtle Light and Ocean Sleep are works of multimedia and sculpture mediums, respectively, depicting the natural world with fantastical elements.

Issue 53, September 2021

Featured image for “Witnesses, or, Who Will Take Out The Trash?”
Michele Suzann

Witnesses, or, Who Will Take Out The Trash?

For a while I had friends who used phrases like “holding space,” and “I had to get really quiet in order to receive guidance,” and “it just is,” and “so I allowed him his feelings.” They’d say “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual,” in a way that implied persons who might claim membership in the former camp were clearly more benighted than those of the latter, but hey, “we each have our own path [mine just happens to be more evolved].”

September 2021
Featured image for “Seven Journals”
Daniel Laing

Seven Journals

While visiting a city filled with canals, the name of which I forget, a gentleman thrust a copy of this slender pamphlet into my hands. He made off into the night. Strangers are often handing me bizarre objects and making off into the night. Perhaps they sense I am waiting for an event, that I am perched here with my binoculars, scanning for noteworthy material.

September 2021
Featured image for “Surface Tension”
Nicholas LaMendola

Surface Tension

I started with the globe, then zoomed in. I narrowed my focus over one city, over one neighborhood, onto one block, onto one man. That was a long time ago.
I’ve watched him for decades now. I watched him start small, and rise into himself. Now that you’re here, we’ll watch him together. He’s finally started to come together. He’s finally started to come apart.

September 2021
Featured image for “Carry On Baggage”
Erin Conway

Carry On Baggage

The flight wasn’t long from Guatemala City to Dallas, two hours. It wasn’t long from Texas to Wisconsin either, two and a half hours more. Finding something to do for that timespan was nothing compared to the twenty-four plus hours it took to visit my brother and his family in Tel Aviv.

September 2021
Featured image for “Keepers of the Light”
Brittany van der Merwe

Keepers of the Light

“Hurry.” She spoke softly, her demeanor quiet yet emphatic as she stared into the horizon. He slipped on his remaining boot and stood, joining her in the doorway, eyes squinting towards the focal point. A winter storm loomed portentously.
“Well, let’s get moving then.” Warm breath and a quiet fear chased his words and hung in the late October air for a fleeting moment before dissipating.

September 2021
Featured image for “Climbing in Vain”
Stuart Baker Hawk

Climbing in Vain

I was sitting in a poolside chair nursing some mixed concoction at Bally’s Las Vegas. Two days earlier, I stood atop Mt. Whitney via the Mountaineer’s Route, the same route first climbed by John Muir in 1873.
I had several more peaks to grab on my list. Denali in Alaska at 20,237 feet was next up, the highest peak in all fifty states.

September 2021
Featured image for “A Gift of Fire”
Laura Walker

A Gift of Fire

When you first drive into Riverside, it has as much distinction as any other town in this smear of Southern California cities—that is to say, virtually none. But if you look closer, through the haze of pollution that browns the summertime air, beyond the stark graffiti that coats the concrete surfaces, past the drooping palms and withered storefronts lining the freeways, you’ll start to see some character.

September 2021
Featured image for “The Man Can Dance”
Alyssa Katz

The Man Can Dance

My father, George Katz, was drafted into the U.S. military in 1942. Life in the military began in Roosevelt Field, Long Island, where he received a physical examination. The exam revealed flat feet and a high IQ. Owing to the high IQ, he was not sent overseas for combat. Rather, he stayed on the mainland in the U.S. Army Air Corps (today the Air Force) working on airplanes.

September 2021
Featured image for “Dogs, Post-Polio and the Poetry of Living and Dying”
Alpheus Williams

Dogs, Post-Polio and the Poetry of Living and Dying

You have to wonder what it was like when the L’Esperance and La Recherche came into these uncharted waters. The young ensign Jacques-Bertrand Le Grand high in the rigging of the frigate’s mast, pitching and yawing precariously in big swells and rough seas, guiding ships and crews through the treacherous waters of the archipelago. Here they were thousands of miles from their homeland.

September 2021
Featured image for ““Leda,” “Mary Magdalene is” and “Aeaea””
Virginia Laurie

“Leda,” “Mary Magdalene is” and “Aeaea”

Leda carries so many
swanlike things
inside her body.

King-daughter, Sparta’s
Wife, she was made sturdy
for transaction.

September 2021
Featured image for “The 23rd Hero”
Rebecca Anne Nguyen

The 23rd Hero

Sloane Burrows was racing down the train station steps, holding her bicycle by the handlebars, trying to keep a birthday cake from flying out of the basket as the doors began to close on the northbound line to Downtown Vancouver. “Hold the doors!” she called as she reached the bottom of the steps. Of the ten or so passengers she could see through the glass, a few looked up, but nobody budged.

September 2021
Featured image for ““Circe,” “Andromeda” and “Lot’s Wife””
Everett Roberts

“Circe,” “Andromeda” and “Lot’s Wife”

Have you ever seen a man,
made into a beast?
Have you ever watched men
change into something else—
Entirely at Desire’s goad,
Did you know any woman
Can transform a man

September 2021
Featured image for ““and yes there is no happy ending,” “and that’s just life” and ‘“it’s not a big deal”’”
Dakotah Jennifer

“and yes there is no happy ending,” “and that’s just life” and ‘“it’s not a big deal”’

for some
there is always
the split.
the sea parting like a zipper,
unveiling this vulnerable heart.
it might’ve started at the first sign of trouble but also might’ve never started.

September 2021
Featured image for ““On Birds,” “Tristan” and “My Loneliness as Kafka’s Diaries””
Nadine Klassen

“On Birds,” “Tristan” and “My Loneliness as Kafka’s Diaries”

Papa nearly kills a pigeon
with a rock.
That means, your own name
can be used
against you
& that is the way a mother can carry hope
without its burden. Then,
grandma’s fingers
pinch
my flawless cheeks like salt. She drafts
a boat

September 2021
Featured image for ““And If She Dies Before I Wake” and “My Cat Always Hears My Writer’s Block””
Jenny Keto

“And If She Dies Before I Wake” and “My Cat Always Hears My Writer’s Block”

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my Soul to keep,
and if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take.
Mother changed the last words
of my nightly prayer in attempt
to stave me from the futility of
how we all end—in an attempt
to save me from her.

September 2021
Featured image for ““Bone Marrow Biopsy Reverberations” and “Return to Gamble Garden””
Robert Eugene Rubino

“Bone Marrow Biopsy Reverberations” and “Return to Gamble Garden”

The oncologist instructs you to lie face down
like you’re going to get a massage
except you’re not going to get a massage.
And you think of the thousands of dollars
you spent while hooked on erotic massage
during the final years of your third marriage.

September 2021
Featured image for “Golden Seagulls”
Megan Monforte

Golden Seagulls

Elizabeth Boyd was staring at the big yellow M beyond the windshield of her car. She’d been doing this for so long it had gone blurry and distorted, becoming a pair of small hills, a set of rabbit ears, a golden seagull the way her daughter, Caroline, used to draw them. Every single picture that child drew had birds of some kind, plus trees, flowers, a ragged strip of turquoise sky along the top.

September 2021
Featured image for “Don’t Be Such a Drag”
Andi Van den Berge

Don’t Be Such a Drag

The sound of the crowd reverberated backstage like a mallet roll on a timpani drum. Wim tried to calm his heartbeat with large gulps of air, but the sweat that slid down his spine let him know there was no calming this frazzle. Stage time was in less than ten minutes.

September 2021
Featured image for “How Ordinary Yet How Perfectly Sublime”
Mieke Leenders

How Ordinary Yet How Perfectly Sublime

In May of 1889, Vincent van Gogh checks himself into an insane asylum after cutting off his left ear. At the same time very close by, a girl starts a diary.

September 2021
Featured image for “A Cat’s Tale”
Marvin Cheiten

A Cat’s Tale

I was born by the shore. Or, rather, I was assembled by the shore. The lady who put all my pieces together was an excellent doll maker, commissioned by an artist who knew exactly what he wanted: a toy cat for his son. My fur and eyes and ears were all there, as well as my long, fluffy tail, but the artist wanted me to look like the captain of a 17th-century sailing ship…

September 2021
Featured image for “The Engineer”
Everett Roberts

The Engineer

There’s no place on this ship where I can find complete dark. The floor panels light up beneath our feet as we walk. Overheads immediately come on when we enter a room. It took some getting used to, but once my eyes adjusted to the constant blue-white of the glowing floors, it’s become second nature, like living with a constant low-grade hangover

September 2021