B E A B I G K I D A N D O N O TC R Y ‍ i squeeze ma’s hands tighter as we walk out of the funeral home sunshine hits my face with heat i lift my face up to the sun and squint the sunlight and tears on my face are hot and cold at the same time it feels funny i look at ma the strings from her glasses sway as we walk tears hang on the bottom of her chin

“Can we talk?”
He sounds almost too forceful in his delivery, the tone of his voice transforming his question into an attack, so he selects his next set of words deliberately, knowing he’d only have one shot at his opening.

reaching across, hand into the blackberry bush,
a walk from where we were down to the sea,
a small bay, of pebbles & the incoming swell of the water,
listening for the rhythm, as if it might be the key to writing

Going to art therapy puts my anxiety into overdrive. I don’t have the patience for painting, not even for the five-minute figure studies, and I’m not here at these sessions because I respond so well to criticism. The coffee dispenser is practically bottomless, though. It’s never good coffee, obviously; it’s free and unlimited; by my eighth cup I start to feel like I’m someone else, which, to my understanding, is the point of being here.

After spending a year in Northern Spain with my father’s sister’s family, I reunited with my parents and siblings in Bogotá, Colombia, instead of our home in Los Angeles, California. My parents were starting over again from scratch and setting up shop to establish themselves. Mom, who was a perpetual optimist, had recently hit the jackpot, and with an endless display of excitement she was paying-off debts, shopping for new home furniture, and preparing for my milestone birthday celebration.

How can something
come out of nothing,
let alone the universe?

But that is what contemporary
theory of cosmology proclaims—

If Mina stared long and hard enough at the harsh fluorescent lighting, she could disappear into the abyss of all the other times she burned under its harsh whiteness–she could forget where she was, how old she was, who she was. Mina wondered if these self-proclaimed staring contests with the lights were the cause of her headaches, or if there was something actually wrong with her.

I was too tired to even squeegee the shower glass door on a recent May morning. Just the day before, my husband Jon and I had set up my solo exhibit at the Ledyard Gallery on the second floor of the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was fatigued by the physical effort of moving art over the previous week and a half as I had also delivered paintings to a few additional locations in my home state of Vermont. The real tired came from completing the goal. The task.

Seeing blurred writing
on an abstract painting
brings me right back

to begging you to teach me
to read before I went to school

My name is Saghani, which means Raven in our tongue. Some say with a name like that, I’ve been cursed since the day I was born. Perhaps they are right.
At eighteen years of age, I was already a widow, gathering fish from the nets alongside the other members of the widows’ colony, knee-deep in the frigid water of the Nilak River.

…skyward, lying on our backs listening for rainfall,
lying, we the ones of loitering, of settling into the longing for dreams to overtake us,
asking if anything could overtake us,
this overwhelming desire, this yearning for…

Wade saw the roofline of the house while he hiked along the edge of the forest. He walked past it initially, but the tall spires and darkened stained glass windows’ Gothic look weren’t to be ignored. He’d never seen a real Gothic mansion before—only what he’d seen in movies and knew about from what he read in books.

“Why do you say Felipillo is a savage? Sure, he likes to eat with his hands, and he doesn’t speak perfect Castilian, but there is nothing cruel or barbaric about him. Father Dominguez told me savages drink human blood and sacrifice children to their gods. Felipillo has never done anything like that. And neither have his people.”

My earliest memories of loving stories were when I was sitting in the light-filled corners of the kids’ stacks at the newly built Northland Public Library in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburbs in the late 1970s. In 1976, my family arrived in the state after my father started a new job. Even before the library collection was moved to the new building from its humbler previous address at what was then called Three Degree Road, the older library was a quiet place of respite for all of us.

I have been watching White Christmas for 65 years so
tonight, the first film shot in VistaVision and Technicolor
rolls onto my tv screen; but the evening news, with far more
advanced tools, has begun to seep into my holiday films …

I used to be an oak tree. Or maybe it was a maple. Regardless, there was a nest in my branches, a twiggy little thing woven with scraps of yarn, strands of dental floss, and kiss-curls of hair. I gave it to the sky, but it was always empty.

It’s the lunch rush at Pyszne, the restaurant where I work every weekday from seven in the morning to two in the afternoon. Pyszne, which is pronounced push-nah, has the distinction of being the only Polish restaurant in the neighborhood of Bloomfield, Pittsburgh’s Little Italy.

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

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

Mariana Rodriguez Salazar thought George Hickenlooper was being foolhardy and perhaps delusional when he told her he had decided to issue a public proclamation the next day in Managua’s central plaza and that he intended to send copies to be posted in the capitals of all the other Central American republics. As he read it to her, Mariana was sure her little dwarf was laying the groundwork for his own death.

“GEORGE HICKENLOOPER THE GREAT FILIBUSTER HEREBY ANNOUNCES THAT HE IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF CENTRAL AMERICA, ALSO KNOWN AS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF CENTRAL AMERICA…”

I lose myself in Taiwan. That’s why I hate going there, feeling like a deer in the headlights; perhaps this time the buzzing crowds, alien sounds of chitter-chatter, and layered characters on never-ending menus will feel more like home. It doesn’t.

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.

I was upstairs in the bedroom/office having just begun a writing coaching session with my last online student of the day when I heard the doorbell ring. My son’s feet met the floor with a thud and pounded their way from the living room couch to the front door…

La Huasteca, Roots in Nuevo Leon, and Frames