Somewhere in a black forest, a black dog. The black dog has been running since the beginning of time, never getting where he’s going, never catching up. The leaves change, the colour of morning changes, the weather changes from sunshine to frost to rain, but the black dog never stops running. His mouth is half-open in panting; his haunches in motion are as sleek as a horse’s. The forest turns into ocean, the ocean turns into desert, the desert turns into glaciers, and the glaciers turn into trees. But the black dog never stops running, never has and never will.

* Publisher’s Note:

Four Trees (oil on canvas, 1917) by Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is held by Upper Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria. The image above was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons in August 2024:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egon_Schiele_094.jpg

Lorette C. Luzajic

reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches flash fiction and prose poetry. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Unbroken, Trampset, The Citron Review, Flash Boulevard, New Flash Fiction Review, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and The Best Small Fictions. She won first place in a flash contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly. The author of four collections of small fictions and/or prose poems, The Rope Artist, The Neon Rosary, Pretty Time Machine, and Winter in June, she has also acted as judge for the Tom Park Poetry Prize.

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

In addition, she’s 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

⚡ Patience, and Other Virtues That I Lack, CNF by Lorette C. Luzajic in the Gratitude Issue (20X) of MacQueen’s Quinterly

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary in MacQ-9 (August 2021) by Clare MacQueen, 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 in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize