Two superstars, before their meteoric rise. Cosmic stuff. No one knows the future yet, but the energy in the room is dynamite. The scrappy little Italian girl with the torn fishnet stockings will change the world. The beautiful Black boy will turn the museums upside down and bring the streets inside. He will fall long before his star fades. She will still be unstoppable at seventy. Madonna recognizes his brilliance: she already knows what we cannot yet see. But she leaves him, because he won’t stop using crack. She has no time for distraction or destruction. She won’t stand by to watch him die and she won’t go down with him. Basquiat demands that she return the paintings he made for her. He is going to paint over them with angry streaks of black housepaint, obliterating their connection. Madonna thinks the paintings will be worth millions. But she hands them back to him. She will make her own millions, she tells him defiantly, and all these things turn out to be true.

 

 

*A Panel of Experts (acrylic and oil pastel, 1982), by the Neo-Expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), resides in the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/works/14684/

Lorette C. Luzajic

writes, edits, publishes, and teaches prose poetry and small fictions, usually ekphrastic. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Bending Genres, The Citron Review, The Disappointed Housewife, Flash Boulevard, Ghost Parachute, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Flash Fiction Review, Trampset, Unbroken, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Two of her flashes were chosen for Best Small Fictions anthologies.

She’s also the author of five collections of small fictions and/or prose poems: Disgust; The Rope Artist; The Neon Rosary; Pretty Time Machine; and Winter in June.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Mackinaw, a journal of prose poetry, which debuted on 15 January 2024. She is also the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal established in 2015 and devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Her ekphrastic journal’s first print anthology, co-edited with Clare MacQueen, was released in March 2024: The Memory Palace.

In addition, Lorette’s a teaching artist, and an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The White Rooms, ekphrastic flash fiction by Lorette C. Luzajic in Issue 27 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (March 2025); nominated for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Southern Soul, flash fiction and visual art, an homage to Lucinda Williams by Luzajic in Issue 26 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (January 2025)

⚡ Patience, and Other Virtues That I Lack, CNF by Luzajic in the Gratitude Issue (20X) of MacQ; nominated for Best of the Net 2025

⚡ Blue and Gold for Ukraine, mixed-media painting by Luzajic in MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023); nominated for Best of the Net 2024

⚡ The Triaminic Man, flash fiction by Luzajic in MacQ (Issue 14, August 2022); reprinted in Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary by Clare MacQueen in Issue 9 of MacQ (August 2021), with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem by Luzajic in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net 2019 (selected as a Poetry Finalist) and the Pushcart Prize