A mere three months after the US invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Taliban was overthrown and a US-supported administration was installed in Kabul. Yet 10 years later, US and coalition troops are still fighting in Afghanistan, marking the War on Terror as American’s second longest war ever, behind the War on Drugs.

Just because we are homeless doesn’t mean we can’t do anything,” Sophia Cranmer says as she watches over her four children, Jerrmy Jr., Debrah Lynn, Michael and Brandon, ages 2-10. The Cranmers are staying temporarily with their friends Bryan and Marlene in a small, two-bedroom apartment in southeast Albuquerque.

The second installment of SFR’s annual writing contest winners, this issue features the top nonfiction and poetry entries. Nonfiction writers were charged with creating a narrative around corruption—whether in its traditional, political incarnation or in a more figurative sense, as demonstrated by Arianna Sullivan’s winning entry, “Cigarettes.” Poetry entries had to relate to the much-vaunted impending apocalypse—an “ode to the end of the world” of sorts. And as Michele Heeney’s third-place poem illustrates, the end of the world doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Cigarettes
By Arianna Sullivan

The Inquisition of Dr. George Tiller by the State of Kansas
By Dianne R Layden

Paradise Corrupted
By Paula Nixon

The Boundary Waters
By Daniel Bohnhorst

Jaguar Spotted in Hidalgo County
By Wayne Lee

The Last Mayan Calendar By Michele Heeney

Around 2:30 am, I finally turn off the digital recorder and go inside. I have just spent two hours by a gas fire pit in the courtyard of a Las Cruces condo with seven members of the Santa Fe art collective Meow Wolf, discussing how the group had grown from a grassroots organization throwing parties in an empty storefront to a formal business entity commissioned by New Mexico State University to create art. The artwork, titled Glitteropolis, is the group’s 14th immersive art experience—a 3,200-square-foot installation that serves as a fantastical diorama built by anthropologists of the future.