New home at the edge of a wilderness, but tingling quiet brings only dreams of the city. Vision brighter than snow gives upon her old home’s sprawl. Her husband calls, Come back to bed. But she stands in her thin gown at a wide window, cold bulging from its cataract of frost. A frozen lake beyond. In just dawn, she scratches a metropolis from memory, its early shadows flaked through to song. Finger going numb; nail making a metal lathe’s fans of ice. And again, the voice from behind. Steam catches light above winter-muted towers. An ionosphere reflecting the first sounds of traffic. Radios pretending they have been awake the whole time.

Back under covers, she holds her hand under her chin to bring it back to life. Strange bird. Her husband snores faintly beside her. He has told her, tells her, the emptiness will be cleansing. But behind her eyes—an unbinding brightness, and the teeming call of a different way of being lost.

Blue and Gold for Ukraine (mixed-media painting, 16x40 inches)

Copyrighted © 2022 by Lorette C. Luzajic. All rights reserved.
Reproduced here with artist’s permission.

Lorette C. Luzajic

is an award-winning mixed-media artist whose collage paintings have been shown in galleries and museums, on movie sets and textbook covers, in poetry and art books, and more. Her work has been collected at home in Canada, and in more than 30 countries around the world.

She is also a widely published writer whose prose poetry and flash fiction have appeared in several hundred literary journals in print and online. The founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted entirely to creative writing inspired by art, Lorette teaches ekphrastic writing, art appreciation, and mixed-media art in person and online.

Artist’s website: https://www.mixedupmedia.ca/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Shining Skylines, a group of four paintings (including Blue and Gold for Ukraine above) displayed and described by the artist on her Facebook page (26 November 2022)

⚡ [Seven Questions About Process: An Interview With Lorette C. Luzajic] by Jordan Trethewey in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 2, March 2020)

Daryl Scroggins

has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas, and the Writer’s Garret, in Dallas. He now lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), Winter Investments: Stories (Trilobite Press), and Prairie Shapes: A Flash Novel (winner of the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest). His poems, short stories, and creative nonfictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, including Blink Ink, Cutbank, Eastern Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Star 82 Review, and Third Wednesday, among others.