Night Sax in Mexico City (mixed-media painting, 2017)
Copyrighted © by Lorette C. Luzajic. All rights reserved.

I just had one glass of vino but was feeling it, the way I was feeling the blues that came on when I flicked open a playlist. It was the humidity, likely; it was choking me all afternoon. The Pinot Grigio was briefly brisk, then melting to puddles between my flushed fingers. I’d been thinking too much since morning, about the rising Covid numbers and the looming rent, and whether to go with blue and orange again in a new painting. And Mexico. I was longing for it like a lover. There was a night roof overlooking the cathedral. They were playing Mexican trance. You could sip Mezcal and survey the zócalo, the spread of the city in the heady undertow of the darkness. But for now, I was just here, surrounded by the rest of what I loved, orange cats and white wine and yellow roses from my lover. What would the world be like, after 2020? America was burning up and falling down, and the parks were turning into mass graves. I wanted to blink and be there, in Tlaxcala, soaked in hibiscus water in an oversize tumbler, kneeling before a broken saint. The church would be raucous with gold and lepers. I wanted to fly over our empty cities and into the tempestuous, flower-festooned arms of that place. I wanted to get back there, but there was no going back.

—From Winter in June (Mixed Up Media Editions, 2021), Luzajic’s latest collection of ekphrastic writing; poem and painting appear here with her permission.

Lorette C. Luzajic

is from Toronto, Canada. Her prose poetry and flash fiction are widely published in literary journals and anthologies, with recent or forthcoming appearances in Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Bright Flash, Club Plum, Red Eft, and Indelible. A recent story won first place in a contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly, and her work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her most recent of six collections of prose poems are Pretty Time Machine (2020) and Winter in June (2021). Some of her works have been translated into Urdu.

Lorette is founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review (established 2015), a journal devoted to writing inspired by art. She is also an award-winning visual artist, with collectors in 30 countries from Estonia to Qatar. Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ 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