Denise Zubizarreta, Featured Artist

January 2022 | visual art

Picturesque

Atrophy

At My Core

 

Denise Zubizarreta

Denise “The Vamp DeVille” Zubizarreta is a Puerto Rican and Cuban American Mixed Media Interdisciplinary Artist raised between Union City, NJ, and Hialeah, FL, currently living and working in Denver, CO. She is the former President of the Student Government Association at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design where she is completing her BFA in Fine art. ​ Zubizarreta recently presented The Modern Borikén (an award-winning paper on the Puerto Rican Statehood movement and colonizations impact on the cultural identity of the Puerto Rican people) at the HERA (Humanities Education + Research Association) Conference hosted by University of Texas – El Paso and at the RMCAD Research Symposium where it won the Quality of Paper Research award. Her artwork focuses on her connection to self through exploring childhood angst, chronic illness, PTSD, and cultural identity. It has been exhibited in gallery and in performance with Microtheater Miami, the Fort Lauderdale Fringe Festival, Emmanuel Art Gallery, Las Laguna Gallery, RedLine, CORE New Art Space, EDGE Gallery, Cicada Magazine, and the Providence Art Club. Her sculpture and assemblage piece “Exposed” is presently included in D’Art Gallery’s – Spot On 2: Juried by Dr. Gwen Chanzit.

Milkers

January 2022 | fiction

The men’s hands are coated with a perpetual skim of black. Dirt from the fields, grease from the tractors, dust from the animals. The men’s hands are large and sturdy. Steady. Their hands smell like sweet hay, manure, curdled milk.

The cows in the barn have their favorite sets of hands. Lettie will stand still for Tom but will kick like a devil if Vincent tries to get near her. Mabel flicks her tail at Andrew every morning in a come-hither motion, batting those huge black eyes as the farmer’s oldest son limps his way into the barn. Goldberry won’t tolerate anyone but Vincent, whose hands, still young, are not yet two solid calluses.

And Estella. That cranky old bitch. Lost her last calf but the milk keeps coming. She shrieks when the men reach for the udder. Her big eyes roll. She stamps in her stall, enormous hooves smooshing into piles of her own shit. Her milk is cloudy gray and useless.

One morning Tom tells Andrew to get the rifle. Tells Vincent to get the shovel. The Leavitts are having an auction next week; they can buy another cow. A better milker. Vincent says they shouldn’t all have to watch. Why not just Tom alone. Tom says it’s a man’s job, and it’s time Vincent learn to be a man. Andrew doesn’t say a word. His younger brother’s weakness annoys him, but he also thinks their father’s a bitter old bastard, part of a world that should’ve stopped existing long ago.

Out in the field, Estella screeching and shaking between them, Tom tells Vincent to take the rifle from the Andrew. It’s time he learn. Stop being a little pussy. Nothing in this life is fair; nothing in this life is pretty. It’s late spring, chilly. Glue-white sky hanging low. By noon it’ll be raining. By noon the cows in the barn will be milked and content, udders greased with the bag balm Tom is always so careful to apply.

The rifle is heavy. The echo of the shot breaks the morning, brings hot, panicky tears to Vincent’s eyes. The blood is everywhere. Andrew says nothing. Tom takes the gun from Vincent and lays one huge, warm hand on the back of Vincent’s neck. Holds him there a moment. It’s a sonofabitch, he says. Then the farmer tells his sons to go inside, rustle up some breakfast. Flapjacks would be good. Maybe some of that sausage.

At the edge of the field, Vincent stops and looks back. His father kneels beside Estella, leans toward her empty eyes, says something no one else will ever hear. Then his father takes the green tin of bag balm from his jacket pocket. Dips his big, cracked fingers into the yellow grease. Strokes those fingers along the dead girl’s udders. Carefully. Lovingly.

 

Shannon L. Bowring

Shannon L. Bowring’s work has appeared in numerous journals, has been nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net, and was selected for Best Small Fictions 2021. She is a Finalist for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Maine Literary Awards. Shannon earned her MFA at Stonecoast, where she served as Editor-in-Chief for the Stonecoast Review. She lives in Maine, where she works for a public library.

Never Finished

October 2021 | nonfiction

Fast/efficient—I was competent in both. Each task was prepped and aligned to reduce wasted time and eliminate unnecessary arm, leg, head, and hand movements. Every action was gauged against an internal stopwatch. I successfully turned daily living into an obstacle course race with a satisfying red pencil finish line crossed through each to-do list item. My heroes were robots, sleek purveyors of performance perfection. They got the job done.

In my first week as an art handler at the Brooklyn Museum, I was tasked with cutting individual archival storage mats for their extensive collection of John Singer Sargent watercolors. Easy. “Measure twice, cut once,” I was advised. Not likely. I immediately reconfigured the poorly set up frame room, creating a mat board—cutter—artwork assembly line. I could now accomplish the cutting with just a quarter-turn of my body.

In poetry, there is a moment called a “turn” where something unexpected is introduced that changes everything. Opening the first portfolio of art was like pulling back a curtain, being struck breathless. Gone was the tidy frame room. I was gliding along the dappled waters of Venice, finding a bit of shade against a mossy bank, silenced by the play of light across the beautiful façade of Saint Mark’s Basilica. With each watercolor, I was transfixed. Rapid strokes, translucent to opaque brushed dabs of color, created infinite moments. I felt I saw directly through the artist’s eyes.

Nearly nothing got done. Maybe one or two mats an hour. My shame was mixed with wonder and hunger for more beauty, more journey. Day after day, I toured Venice.

“How is it going with the matting?” Sarah Fay, the seasoned curator of the collection, inquired a month into my employment. No lie could explain why I’d only gotten a tiny fraction of the massive collection safely into their mats. I fully confessed my greedy fixation, this unproductive love affair.

She gazed at me, her eyes narrowed. I waited for the inevitable, “You’re fired!”

“Isn’t it marvelous,” she said, “that moment when you realize that our job in life never really was to ‘get it done.’ Our job is to fully live it, let it wash over us, wave after wave. That’s why we’re here.”

I followed her gaze, gently taking in our surroundings. Our eyes caressing each carved pilaster, gliding further upward into the airy, sunlit dome of the museum’s vaulted marble ceiling. Finding a space where breath itself is sacred, where the one and only responsibility is simply to be.

Slow now, and even older than Sarah was back then, I see how that turn in my life touched every aspect of my existence. Slow to taste each morsel, slow to let go of the hand of a friend, slow to leave a moment full of generous giving.  There is no race except the one you create. Measure twice, cut once. Take your time. I promise you, what needs to get done has already happened.

Lou Storey

Lou Storey is an artist and psychotherapist living on the edge of coastal New Jersey with his husband of thirty-three years Steve, and a happy bounty of dogs, cats and chickens. Lou’s writings have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Tiny Love Stories, as well as an assortment of poetry magazines and various academic journals related to mental health.

Dave Sims

October 2021 | visual art

Smoking Prison Ghost

Dave Sims

A recovering professor, Dave Sims now makes art and music in the old mountains of Pennsylvania. His tangible and digital art appears on the walls, covers and pages of over 60 galleries and publications, including The Raw Art Review, Sunspot Literature, Shanti Arts, High Shelf Press and Toho Journal. See more at www.tincansims.com.

Waste

October 2021 | poetry

When I think of heaven, I see trash:

Broken bottles, leaking Freon, used notebooks,

Thanksgiving scraps, industrial dross, ash

Of lives that rot and leach into the brooks

And streams that feed the river, then the sea.

Yet, when I conceive a perfect hell, it looks

Unpeopled, manicured, fresh, foolproof, each tree

Equal, sidewalks flat, no black oil stain

On any gray driveway. Loveless and pure.

Why, then, am I so ashamed of my pain?

I haul my grief in my sinful junk cart,

As if I could secure peace from this vain,

Broken, human life. No, I live, not apart

From death, my pardon pawned, deep of my heart.

Richard Stimac

Richard Stimac writes poetry about growing up in the Rustbelt. Richard published poetry in Faultline, Havik (2021 Best in Show for Poetry), Michigan Quarterly Review, Penumbra, Salmon Creek Journal, Wraparound South, and others, and an article on Willa Cather in The Midwest Quarterly.