2Kool 2B Forgotten (mixed media on stretched canvas, 12″x12″)
copyrighted © by Lorette C. Luzajic. All rights reserved.

If we lived in a world without tears, how would scars
find skin ... how would broken find the bones?
—Lucinda Williams, “World Without Tears”^[1]

Lucy. Lean, all tooth, tough, but topsy turvy. The summer of seventeen. Blue jeans and silver rings and a guitar that was heavier than she was. The blistering air hot with smog and pork and mango. Her favourite cantina is loud and humid. She takes a shot of tequila blanco before a cerveza.

She writes her own songs. But the hard-living men drinking here have soft hearts and hang on her every word. They are men who spend all day fixing roofs or pouring concrete. They are missing teeth and missing fingers and they smoke and smoke. And they want to hear the American. She’s shy, she’s young, but she already knows she’s got something, and they know it too.

After a few shots, she clambers onto the little stage and starts strumming. Even the pirate at the pool table stops his stroke and turns to listen. Girl’s got balls, he says to his opponent. Her voice is raw and real. Small soul spilling open.

:::

Girl from the south. Her father was a poet, put words in her blood. He was a teacher, Texas, Louisiana, Mexico City. Her jeans were barely filling out, and she was banging out the blues from bayou to zocalo.

:::

Oh, there have been motorcycles and the men who rode them. Lucy straddles both sides of the highway. The holy, hollow halls where thin-haired bony tweed men with expensive certificates spout Pound and stir up trouble with the girls who iron their hair. And the road, with the roadies, and the juke boxes and the drums, and the sweaty men in leather, and the booze.

:::

And now, suddenly, seventy. Her right side vanished in a stroke of midnight. She learns to speak again. Keeps writing, longhand, pencil, with an eraser. The songs keep coming. Her one arm hangs helpless against her denim hip. But she’s still got the other.

:::

“I didn’t expect the stroke; there were no warning signs.
I was real tired ... I just didn’t feel I could stand up.”
—Lucinda Williams, Vanity Fair ^[2]

:::

They say that when you get old, your memory gets rusty. Lucy feels differently. She remembers everything.

:::

Oh, there was nothing to stop her singing. Trends came and went. She never blinked. Just kept doing what she did. Just kept doing what she wanted.

There were big stars smattering the firmaments, and the pavement, anywhere she went. And she just kept on going.

There were poets, sweet and sensitive, and others, harder, mean. There was one that she loved, the one who put a bullet in his mouth, when another girlfriend found out about his wife.

Dry those tears, buttercup, Lucy said to the woman in the mirror. And on she went, writing, singing, slinging that guitar. One foot in front of the other.

:::

“I don’t want nothing, if I have to fake it.”
—Lucinda Williams, “I Lost It”^[3]

:::

Alligators, cigarettes. Nacogdoches, Texas. Buses in the night through Alabama and Tennessee. Gas station coffee, Navajo turquoise, red wine. No way of stopping how those rivers of stories turn into songs.

:::

The artist. The dark horse.

:::

Where do the decades go? Where does the sun set when the swamps seep over the cities? When the rains keep pouring and the floods keep coming and the years keep going by?

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 Prize, 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 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

⚡ Patience, and Other Virtues That I Lack, CNF by Lorette C. Luzajic in the Gratitude Issue (20X) of MacQueen’s Quinterly (aka MacQ); nominated for Best of the Net 2025

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

⚡ The Triaminic Man, flash fiction by Lorette 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 Lorette in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net 2019 (selected as a Poetry Finalist) and the Pushcart Prize