Issue 92, February 2025

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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 92, February 2025

Featured image for “How to Love in Reverse”
Sarah Harley

How to Love in Reverse

If time could fly backwards instead of forwards, could I love you in reverse?
In the beginning, a farewell. Two lovers say goodbye. An embrace begins to loosen before letting go. Hands that clasped tightly together, slowly slip apart; a space opens between palms, fingers are no longer entwined.
The attraction that once drew us together turns into a force pushing us apart.

February 2025
Featured image for ““Étude 128,” “Étude 143,” and “Interval 404””
Ray Malone

“Étude 128,” “Étude 143,” and “Interval 404”

no music, only the daylight, the green
of the trees growing, so fresh and bright,
imagine a leaf, a single one of them
held to your cheek, in its chill,
its refusal of heat, this early in the year,
the stars so far from here, the birds
in their lightness going about their business

February 2025
Featured image for “The Amazing Merletti”
M.L. Lyons

The Amazing Merletti

Marco Merletti came from a long line of magicians. His mother Talma was a noted mentalist from the old country, capable of convincing the Tuscan villagers of her inscrutable powers of clairvoyance. The moment her searing brown eyes alighted on a young woman’s tearful face or an old man’s trembling white handkerchief, she knew who had been the mistress of whom, who was to give birth and why and countless other secrets the country people thought were their own.

February 2025
Featured image for “Down Among The Barley”
Mark Wagstaff

Down Among The Barley

This bathroom, shared with a dozen others. Now, three years on, she’d pause in this bathroom. To retrieve that spike of energy when, finally, after interviews and tests, she secured her right to live in this building. To know its ways. To share this bathroom.
L-shaped, the shower far back in the alcove. The slant to the drain steep enough to alert bare toes. The basin’s obese taps with Hot and Cold in foxed enamel. Their bolts and washers industrial and gleaming.

February 2025
Featured image for “Glowfish”
Sophie Hoss

Glowfish

Because it’s always dusk, we make everything neon: our clothes, our furniture, our streetlights. The City is far north enough that the sun never breaches the sky—it skates the horizon’s rim, dips up and under like a coin circling the drain. Neon is our bioluminescence, and it’s always cold in the city.
I don’t remember how I started researching liminal spaces. Couldn’t even say which ology my post-grad work is classified as.

February 2025
Featured image for “Empty Black Circle”
Mohini Dasari

Empty Black Circle

I feel as hollow as the empty black circle staring at me from the screen. The nurse practitioner is quiet as she scans my uterus. A push to the left, a push to the right. Left, right, left, right. I gaze at the monitor, searching for what I’ve waited seven weeks to see: a white blob floating in a black ovoid sea, outlined by a bright white line.
Left, right, left, right. Back and forth, the cold probe pushes against my insides. The empty black circle keeps coming in and out of view. Nothing else.

February 2025
Featured image for ““What Remains” and “A Hole In Her Head””
Penny Jackson

“What Remains” and “A Hole In Her Head”

Discarded on the train tracks,
a crushed bag of potato chips,
bright red label glaring.
Two bus drivers linger
by their idling vehicles—
one bends to his lighter,
the wreath of smoke
drifting briefly

February 2025
Featured image for “Sophia”
Andrew Plimpton

Sophia

Sophia built her first shrine when she was six years old. She took a fragment of a fallen bird’s nest, decorated it with dandelions and acorn shells, and surrounded it with a circle of stones on the surface of a tree stump in her backyard. The tree had come down very recently, and she’d been staring out the window at the place where it used to be. No one had taught her to build this shrine; she had no word for what she was doing.

February 2025
Featured image for “The Face in Between”
Elan Maier

The Face in Between

Arleen Dunson was there. She was there, outside Boise, among the other surrounding police, when three pit bulls came blitzing towards tactical from around the corner of the decrepit house, like sharks with legs, swinging ropes of drool, rodeo-eyed and thinking kill kill kill. Two of the dogs were hooked and pulled away, no problem. The last one, incensed and alone in the dust, bucked and sprung back and forth…

February 2025
Featured image for “Beyond the Frame”
Timothy Loftus

Beyond the Frame

Sometime around 1912, twenty-two-year-old Great Aunt Annie took a photo of Mayme and Beth, two of her younger sisters, standing on opposite sides of an unnamed friend. They were all eating apples at the same time. Annie framed the scene with her camera then snapped the photo, capturing their impish goofiness on black-and-white film. The smiles hidden by the apples show in their eyes.
Ninety years later, in February 2002, I was hiking with my three daughters,

February 2025
Featured image for ““A Purple Orchid,” “Poem for The Pink Petal Dragons,” and “At The Cusp of Autumn: Where Do Geese & Husband Go?””
Jerrice J. Baptiste

“A Purple Orchid,” “Poem for The Pink Petal Dragons,” and “At The Cusp of Autumn: Where Do Geese & Husband Go?”

Evelyn’s caramel colored
fingertips rub center of an orchid.
Soft saturated purple petals

awaken her eyes, like discovering
carving of ancient writings.
The Nile River on cave walls.

February 2025
Featured image for “Into the Flooded Field”
Brandon Daily

Into the Flooded Field

The water began to rise from the soil three days after the storm passed. By then, the rest of the valley and the neighboring town had become feverish again with the heat of early summer, and all remnants of rain had completely disappeared. It was a thing of magic, the townspeople said when they finally drove the five miles into the lowlands of the valley to see it with their own eyes. Water seeping from the depths of the earth.

February 2025
Featured image for “Why Is It So Hard?”
Marie Chen

Why Is It So Hard?

These few days, the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare has become the center of attention of the media, and the talking points extend to the injustice of America’s private insurance system introduced to patients. I am staying in Taiwan now since September and have gone through the healthcare treatment many times for my injured knee and chronic problem of Spondylolisthesis. I would like to talk about my own experience enjoying a healthcare system that’s totally different from America’s.

February 2025
Featured image for ““Not Drowning,” “Solstice,” and “Magi-Conomy””
Julie Benesh

“Not Drowning,” “Solstice,” and “Magi-Conomy”

Are you listening? I have access
to all the words, at least

hypothetically. Language, emotion,
cognition commingles in combinations

infinite, experiments replicable,
but only barely, in theory

February 2025
Featured image for “Threadbare”
Dharmini Saravanan

Threadbare

Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend.

February 2025
Featured image for ““Like Lost Dogs,” “Solitude at Midnight,” and “Eden’s End””
Alexander Etheridge

“Like Lost Dogs,” “Solitude at Midnight,” and “Eden’s End”

Walking at dusk again,
and stray lines tap
on my mind’s window,
looking for a poem.

February 2025
Featured image for “Though Some Have Changed”
Jon Shorr

Though Some Have Changed

The 2024 presidential election’s over: I’m starting to sleep better again; my blood pressure is returning to normal. It didn’t surprise me that Donald Trump won the election; it just appalled me.
It didn’t surprise me that during the campaign, Trump supporters saw those of us that opposed his election to president as the enemy; nor did it surprise me that we saw Trump supporters as stupid, naïve pawns.
It did surprise me, though, to learn that my girlfriend was the enemy.

February 2025
Featured image for “Local Clown”
Kevin Yeoman

Local Clown

The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it.

February 2025
Featured image for ““Spring is a Good Season for Reconciliation,” “Where Were You,” and “The Thing That Remains””
Jodi Morton

“Spring is a Good Season for Reconciliation,” “Where Were You,” and “The Thing That Remains”

The moment we turn the corner,
a cold front hits,
a carpet of chilly air
unrolled at our feet.
I pull my cardigan tightly
around my chest, hold it closed.

February 2025
Featured image for “The Poseur”
Michael "Tuna" Coley

The Poseur

A generation of kids wanders into a DIY venue and gets their fill of drugs relevant to their generation and locale. Blues, speed, blow in Denver it’s cheap grass. And the ever-present booze. Piles and piles of discarded PBR, Miller High Life, and Rolling Rock cans with a few of the well-off kids’ craft beers thrown in for good measure. An aluminum salvager’s wet dream.

February 2025
Featured image for “The Dream Netters”
Emily Larkin

The Dream Netters

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. It’s strange, I know. Mermaongs are supposed to be adventurous. We’re meant to love every part of the ocean—from its glittering surface to the rotting hull of a drowned ship, to the thrill of the Deep Dark, where the blind fish and the shadows with teeth live. There is always some measure of dark: the shadow of fish or sharks, a cloud passing overhead, the shape of something in the distance.

February 2025
Featured image for ““Summer Music, For my Father,” “Caught,” and “Color as Language””
Stephanie Trenchard

“Summer Music, For my Father,” “Caught,” and “Color as Language”

The setting:
Notes in a measure of motion
with dissonant zinc-white daylight splashing
and dancing upon the path
as the horizon softens to a bluer hue, and vanishes

February 2025
Featured image for ““No X-Men in LA” and “Missing Rehoboth””
Jonathan Fletcher

“No X-Men in LA” and “Missing Rehoboth”

Where are you? the seven-year-old in me
asks as I watch the screen fill
with frenetic red and orange,
billowing gray, curtained black.
Storm, come and still the winds.
Jean Gray, divert the water.

February 2025