Originally posted April 19, 2009
Dionysus has been toying with me lately. Maybe it’s just the spring air, but I have the overwhelming urge to kick my shoes off, run screaming through the maze of cubicles where the adjunct faculty slave, grading endless stacks of composition papers, and out into the sunshine. I recently read the “Bacchae,” by Euripides, for a class I’m teaching and am consequently, it would seem, possessed by the effeminate, upstart god. I feel irresistibly drawn to the abandonment of reason, the throwing off of social mores, and complete surrender to the irrational. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of rending flesh with my teeth is not in the least appealing. A wild, naked run through the forest, on the other hand, is extremely enticing. Rationality is not really doing it for me today. I have the urge to be swept away, caught up in Bacchic frenzy, and driven to the brink of madness by animal urges—all without repercussion, of course. That must be it, why we struggle against the irrational side of our nature, stick with the rational. It’s safer, nothing to explain the next morning.
Leslie
Editor
Sari Krosinsky lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner and two cats.
She received a B.A. in religious studies and a M.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. Her poems have appeared in Poesia, Pebble Lake Review, The American Poetry Journal, Arsenic Lobster, Verse Daily, and others. Fiction Editor
Leslie Fox lived in Central America during her formative years and in New Mexico since the mid-70s – before it was cool.
She writes novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and creative nonfiction. Some of her short fiction has appeared in The Medical Muse, red. a journal of arts, Earth’s Daughters and Earthships: A New Mecca Poetry Collection. She has a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico.Art Editor
Dianne Schlies is a practicing artist and has taught studio art since 1986. She received her M.F.A. from SMU at Dallas, Texas in 1990. She has studied or worked with David Bates, Mel Bochner, Squeak Carnwath, Harmony Hammond, Ed Harris, Joyce Kozloff, Mary Ellen Mark, Duane Michals and Robert Rauschenberg. Schlies presently teaches Drawing and 2-D Design in Albuquerque, New Mexico.