And the first words out of my mouth do not buck into a shield, do not blast his ears with refusal, not never, in my quiet defense something un-proud: it’s not even Muslim, as I convert that s to a z, and twist, twist my hair all of it uncovered for his ease and a […]
perched in a cricket cage the canary waits to read your life you stand, sunbound eating mamey, guanaba favas con chile, pan dulce drinking agua pura y piña drop a few pesos in the guira the marimba comes to life two men like a wind-up toy or well-trained spider monkeys play Guadalajara, two mallets in […]
without permission or probation. if you can judge the pedigree of a windy day in April you may just get this. the same boy endless and radiant and doing exactly what a title as smooth as shea butter would suggest. sprinting across what little grass the west side has to brandish the opening of the […]
She wishes she could beat the dust mites out of the rug of this world. But she’s a woman, and her body is the inherited fabric men wipe their boots on, woven and patched by generations of furious women. Her hands are an ancestral tree, she names each branch of herself on her fingers: wife, […]
Most mornings I deliver my child into the arms of strangers who will lead him through passages papered in apples and rainbows, pencils and stars, each holding a single name, the names’ owners a crush shouting cascades of syllables, furious energy heating the room, swallowing my joyful son. Not safe to play outside today —shadows […]
Three minutes before the mudslide, I sit in the gardenshed of you— woodrot, pardoned given to the carpenter ants. I peel at plywood, name my body a townhouse built to be the walls of someone else. One minute after the mudslide, I am asked to qualify what happened give it a name: this […]
Picture the big windy-soft midcentury rain rinsing the windows of the San Fran hospital where it’s the goofy John Cage’s job this afternoon to babysit a roomful of kids whose parents just doors down are dying, so silently with his spindle arms he mimes first a fast breaststroke against the window’s water then, even better, […]
I That spring I counted hydrogen ions, followed waste through porous membranes into silent bio-soups, waited for the nucleus to wake. It was late in the last century: pale blue moons and sugar cereals, Baghdad statues coming down, anti-aircraft tracers loverly in the amniotic night. II Can you guess where I’m calling from? The county […]
“look, we don’t know each other, but we don’t have to—” just give me your careless, normal hunger— i know we saw each other on that gay app we won’t ever mention out loud irl— i’ve served you the coffee breath that lives, sometimes, in another man’s mouth— you’ve seen me bloodshot and rude— maybe […]
I never think of my uncle as a man with rabid mouths burgeoning inside his skull. I’ve never seen him draw his teeth like burning hatchets or pull dead wolves out of his head. I’ve heard the stories; man leaves the hospital door ajar & wakes up peeling mothwings off a hospital floor. Man removes […]
I nearly die laughing you’re a hunter in costume—Eckō Unltd. Pepe Jeans, Timbs with the tag an official member of the House of Decoy in the cab you’re pungent—consumed by the Michael Jordan Cologne I gave you inching close, you affirm you’ll shield me from the freaks two tabs of Love dissolve under my tongue—it […]
Lengua de mi madre, have you forgotten me +++++in greenness of your green Havana palms, in your thousands of orchid +++++blooms, in woven shades of your mango trees, flamboyant trees stretching +++++like a brocade or aged fishing net? When did I lose what I never received from you? +++++Some part I’m missing or some part […]
we, the grandmas practicing tai chi
in the public library, we the aunties gossiping
over mahjong and tea, we the pacific mall karaoke /
queens, we the tender queer who finds self care
in astrology, stakes their dreams on something bigger. /
we the kid who crosses out her poetry
so she can become a doctor.
The streets near abuela’s would crumble with each step so we’d run the two blocks to Don Lalo’s bodega, where we’d snatch tamarindo and Rancherito’s from plastic shelves within our reach and pay with smiles and small-handed pesos. He’d smile back, his gold tooth a flash of every hissing summer we’d spent chasing frogs around […]
I stand in the closet choosing which of my father’s belts my mother will beat me with. Bridle, latigo, braided or smooth. His tastes contain so many fashions. Night cow hanging on top of the hill breaking grass— when they come for you do not give your skin. Countless children depend on your escape over […]
My mother is an assembly line of mirrors: my too borderless hair, my two-handful hips, all the parts the mannequin would not hold. If you subtract one mother, how many are left? This problem is called adoption. My mother is a locked file cabinet. No, my mother is the one who put my mother inside […]
I Wasn’t One (Inspired by Yehuda Amichai) I wasn’t one of the stolen. I wasn’t one of the many million who had once only known the sweetness of the sea. I wasn’t confused cargo stacked like the bricks of Babel in the belly of a wooden beast. I wasn’t shackled to my skin, forgotten in […]
Whispered messages dissolve in rivers of attention and glances A long sigh exhales through the valley to Kaipara-moana Molecules of sound emanate from luminous branches A syntax of yellow leaves on black trees Filaments of falling marked by fluid silvery drops Accurate shapes, incarnate wairua exclamations Hallucinations of glamorous echoing veils Silky clay nostalgias, transgressions […]
because you were never more than hands to boil the deer skulls, a tongue to lick the blood that dried between the creases of his knuckles. Just bones to grip and flesh to fuck on whiskey nights when his apartment stank of you. Only a bale of wheat left out in late November frost. You […]
—for James Fuson (20 Years Reflections of an Empty Sky, Soft Sculpture Press, 2014) from a prison cell window seven inches of rectangular blue sometimes gray or black, but no stars the spotlights too glaring once a month the setting moon before dawn he stares pencil moves—tiny scratching of the mouse’s scurrying feet in the […]
This is the tree I had my first kiss—it was like a viewing, gory and wet. Classmates in almond branches, watching the wreck. Doing nothing to feign casualty. This is the water tower I’ve told you of many times. Yes, it was the drinking supply I swam in, naked. Yes. I got a thrill, at […]
in the dream that got me fired The plane was just a stomach, really. I said, “eat me” It insisted on retching and language was like dry bread cu-clut-clawing at my throat. clog glug we could just say it was the fault of the Security Clearance, oh that agency is in the blood now, lineage […]
The doctor noticed me fidgeting with my ears like a toddler, and asked if he could look at them. Yes, I told him, they had been bothering me, and I didn’t know why. After the examination, he asked if I had been through something traumatic recently— a breakup, or a loss of a job. Yes, […]
Swallow / Swallowed / Swallowing swal·low | noun 1. a small oscine bird with a short bill, long pointed wings, & a deeply forked tail, which feeds on insects caught on the wing. swal·low | verb 1. to take or receive through the mouth & esophagus into the stomach. 2. to accept without question, protest, […]
Out where the streams etch away from Devil’s Head, out of the bear’s coarse fur, shot in the back over in the bushes in hours before dawn when we were afraid of the wounded, afraid of this shape pulled down from the stars, when we were neighbors on the road to Harmony, up late every […]
Visiting into the night, a dog found a buck sprawled onto the back porch of her home, lung pierced and bubbling a thick stripe onto its side. A creature of this type usually dies in the woods. Something about the leaves: they dance a soul to sleep. Yet, somehow, this hulk of hide had found […]
There must be a Yiddish word for the birds chittering in the bare bushes ablaze with the life of their voices; though their bodies blend with branches their voices belie nothing. My mother’s of course I will I want sew themselves through the fabric of […]
In our last conversation, he sat
on a milk crate, held the unlit
cigarette like a fountain pen,
and kept tapping the filter against
his weak heart. …
in the 1960s The name itself is a kingdom brambled over in exotics, where fish & birds read like orchids, and an oil-flat sea’s gone dull beside a land possessed of its own drumbeat—fist to heart, a howled & primal green. After all, Amazon sounds more tribal than rivered. Venezuela, its new language an assignation […]
Tree branches sneak into my mouth errant like Christmas lights strung across a house in July, skies embrace and push — suffocate the world’s radiant lusciousness. Leaves on the sidewalk thrum and this is where I want to share a bit of death every day, peeling strips of joy from branches that are about to […]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.
