Two boys pull green oranges from the tree
that hangs over the churchyard fence. They
throw them into the street with such auto-
matic skill that they may be the same boys
sent to kill in any war that will never be theirs […]
With Cleopatra eyes and Sadé skin her words sting clear as Noxema lather:
“Mom, I’m not pretty,” she confesses. “What?” I accuse—“What do you mean,”
I spit and sputter, my mind scrambling to organize an understanding
of this violence she commits against herself […]
I almost see myself trip and shatter
us both on the stairs. I almost see
my arms slip and tumble you over
the balcony to crack on the sidewalk
below […]
The Shekhinah Some say the Shekhinah is the queen of presence, pulsing upward through the living earth, bidding us to bloom in our skins. The apple orchard in full blossom. But when you see me, I am a burning flame, blonde hair billowing behind. You have no throne festooned with ribbons, no needle to embroider my […]
The children pick the peeling yellow paint from the bathroom pipes and lick it while Mama is gabbing on the phone with her sister. Papa returns from work at four and takes the yellow plastic strap out of the second dresser drawer and whips their thighs since Mama has delegated punishment for their transgressions during […]
in college, the men i gave trembling permission to scurry inside of me, would, more often than not, send me hobbling to the student clinic. the nurse, as incandescent as a light bulb with rage, tells me that sex is not supposed to require three tylenol. my roommate, eyebrow raised at the troupes of grubby-nailed […]
mother 1. noun. presence, as in constant ex: “the mother is here.” see also: mama, mommy see the child cry out in fear, in loneliness see the presence quiet the child see presence beyond himself 2. verb. to rear, as in to create ex: she mothers and mothers and mothers until she is no […]
Christine Imperial is a queer Filipino-American poet. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at CalArts. She won the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts for her poetry in 2016. Her work has been published in NoTokens,Heights,Rambutan Literary,among others.
Triptych of the Adobe-Cotta Army East Palo Alto, Circa 2000 AD My fingers are desperate to unearth the ruins of my countrymen. Only to find a Tesla on the second floor of our apartments —now a parking garage. The Amazon logo smirks above me, like a biblical cloud. * Out here, hooded saints tore the […]
I am not a girl who is pretty in all seasons. With the russet of fall painted on my mouth the scar across my face (climbing from the lip) Splits the silence with a noise less like Mozart, Closer to clanging; Rock metal, metal and rocks. Winter blues recall the time, Drowning in surgery, waves […]
אמר רבי יודן Rabbi Yudan taught: פעם אחת חזר על כל המניקותOnce, Mordekhai searched but ולא מצא לאסתר לאלתר מיניקהcould find no wet nurse for Esther, והיה מיניקה הואso he nursed her himself. • My breasts judge a handshake, have five-o-clock shadow. I know the proper verb for a deal with God is To Cut. […]
Today I find comfort in the thunder’s holy growl. Hunger sometimes smells like petrichor: dead bacteria awakening our most primal sense to the promise of replenishment. All this while, I’ve been singing along: Honey, please try to understand it’s time to love your woman. Maybe it is time to make me your woman, to let the […]
—Do you have a fear of losing people? I once rustled moonlight underneath the blanket and threatened to keep it. I unwrapped it slowly like sand loosed by waves, a child with one present come Christmas morning. —Do you feel that being black makes you a target? If shooting holes into darkness was not a […]
Light folds around her yellow-silk like a pillar-candle Shadows round her cheek curve between lips press below her nose On her left a thickened impasto of fading paint and varnish layers obscure shapes and it’s hard to see a dark boy in blue livery bending brown skin black hair without a stroke of light to […]
Architectural Integrity My floor could possibly be coming apart but I’m hanging on for now & for good reason Catastrophe should only be used as the name for a fragrance that only exists in a fictional universe One where a person starts every day with a montage full of clues I’ve spent the past week […]
Rally (n.) 1650s, originally in the military sense of ‘a regrouping of renewed action after a repulse’ I confuse the armored buses for deliverance a line of colored steel some tarnished some spit— shined My surprise at this release of white bodies Their flocking together Their delivery of renewed action the guns hanging […]
Up the stairs coiled around the hotel my new friend Frank and I are lamenting that there is no gym after all—he lamenting— I going along—at my door I half stick the key in, he asks again about how to iron his pants, I have these pants with a crease—he uses his hand to saw […]
Not a pyre, but a chimney, a beetle shaking mercilessly on top of my doormat to the sound of its own catharsis a tongue my neck both hands shaking exactly the same. My teeth as antenna & my cords wings Sing I watched a beetle die today; not a crate not a crypt not a […]
Real boy the love I have made to you is unremarkable, as it should be in a perfect world, impossible to tell where you end and I begin. Real boy I have recessed in your nation, your looted land, pronounced it dead, & closed the borders I once bled for. Real boy I dream of […]
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 […]
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.