Author: Ruben Quesada

American Flora

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By Monica Falcon

America loves its daughters
Cradled in the calloused hands of those incapable,
Words scraped together from the ground to settle, then
decanted in the sentiments of
What it means to be used,
to be loved.
But such a child never wanted anything more
than the milk boiled to the rhythm of a heart reverberating.
Where the trees carrying pollen in spring
smelled of a hometown longing to be remembered,
In the place where my mother and father plotted fields of chrysanthemums
and taught me that watering alone will not make them grow
There needs to be sunlight first to nurse the life,
to nurse the sickness

America loves its little girls wrapped in
Color-blocked bikinis with grass stained knees
suckling honeyed poison,
Until they begin to crave the kind of love
That rots from the inside out
Where in languid movements, and
bare skin blushing under a perpetual summer
I learn to distill memories and drown them in vinegar
Let bruises bloom deep purple hues,
brilliant reds and soft pinks
Until the phrases decorating my thighs become the words become the letters become the
Syllables
Poured into the depths of lullaby
And sung to the tune of a Sunday morning whisper

America loves for its deserters
to beg for forgiveness.
Loves, if anything, to prick the skin beneath the nail,
draw out the marrow,
So lungs filling with water
Nourish the tempest growing inside me
Turn it sweet
Until one morning I can wake to the smell of this baby blue earth
And that hometown longing dissipates in the petals of a thousand chrysanthemums
Salted and pulled from the warmth of my belly

When the world, on the clip of its axis
Stops
Turns to me,
Dares me to leave it

Monica Falcon grew up in Austin, Texas, where she spent her childhood writing endless stories and painting anything and everything she could get her hands on. She graduated from Rhodes College with a BA in Creative Writing, and soon after, moved to South Korea. Currently, she works as a part-time instructor and studies Korean at a local university in Seoul. 

Sideshow!

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By Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez

For Oakland, forever.

When Jesus walked He walked on concrete. Barefoot over sidewalk glass and sewer slits. His body a crisp white t-shirt and his blood pooled on the street. His disciples followed in basketball shorts– stomachs bloated with rice dinners and heels pruned with weight. They carried crosses around their necks in gold. Even if they faded silver, even if their skin shaded green. Loyalty weighs more than pride– at least that’s what my Mama says. After He vanished they kept on walking. Over glass. On ash. Through the smog, to the smoke.

Bethlehem is in Oakland, on the corner of Foothill and High. It’s beneath an overpass, plump with bodies that stand together in something like worship. Their eyes follow cars turning in discs, ears pierced with zirconia and rubber squealing on pavement. As they walk toward it they listen to crashing, a bumper swerves and strikes a hydrant. Water shoots up like a Fourth of July sparkler and the first summer rain smacks down onto Foothill. Air cakes beneath Air Forces– the last time they ran this fast an ice-cream truck circled the block, a pitbull raced down Bancroft, a gun shook ripe and ready.

People say Oakland is beautiful for all the wrong reasons. Somewhere in that manmade lake someone is drowning. Somewhere in Piedmont’s gutters there’s blood. East Oakland became East Oakland because it was East, pushed to a thumbnail edge and hidden beneath skin. But you’d never be able to tell now. Now people from all over come to find hostels. Walking backwards into a nativity not to witness birth, but to witness murder. To see pools of red cradled in their white palms. White people fled violently and returned violently, and now everybody has to become nocturnal just to see faces as dark as theirs against the sky.

So they push forward in darkness to witness birth. They leap over wire fences, their ankles grazing barbed wire, their skin bloody and unafraid. Everybody’s stepped on worse: their mama’s needle, their daddy’s toes. Through the cement they see smoke a block down. When they find the mouth of the 880 their heels skid to a stop.

They point their fingers like smoking pistols. Shoot sharp fingertips at glistening spinning rims, their round silver reflecting off of their chrome teeth. They gather with broad bodies in an open circle, their sneakers wet between a four-way intersection. Atop them, cars sandwich along a freeway shoulder, drivers stand atop the hoods of their cars, legs dangle from the ledge of the highway. Everyone gasps with every sharp turn, night air whistling between gold teeth. Their chests swell with lungfuls of exhaust, they cough black for days.

Kids are round-mouthed and wide-eyed. They watch cars loop in circles wide like mango seeds, tight like peach stones. Everything cycling like sirens on a cul-de-sac, white fingers pointing at brown bodies, oranges sold on the side of the street, mothers mothering mothers, bullets perforating skin, their father’s hand on their mother’s face.

Hands are tight on a steering wheel and heads pop out from a sunroof, howling to a moon no one’s looking up to see. And then a fist hooks like a needle, and a nose runs like tap water. Then, a pop. Hail Mary and Joseph, blood mixes holy on the street. It stains a white t-shirt both in unity and separation. It’s July but it never thunders in Oakland. When the shot rings, they all know what the sound is.

Everyone scatters. Trails down Foothill, Bancroft, and High. When they sprint home they run in the center of the road and stop to catch their breath on a street divider. They wink an eye up to the moon, jab their fingernails up to scale. They eye constellations, study them before they disappear into a dawn of light. Before everything is interrupted with the newscast forecasting brown violence– a bleaching reminder that the streets get cleaned come sunrise.

They slow their run to a walk for the first time in an hour. They balance their feet on yellow dividing lines, approaching their porches with their shirts scented of salt and gasoline. One of them shifts— Did you see that swerve? All of them nod, all of them cross themselves, all of them say amen.

What Would I Want? Sky (creative nonfiction)

Para mis estudiantes.

Second Tuesday of the school year and my students are chanting their weather poem on the hopscotch tiles. BART trains pass above them. Today is Tuesday yesterday was Monday tomorrow will be Wednesday the season is summer the weather is sunny and cold. They keep asking me about the sky– what makes clouds so big and why does the sun look

like an orange and what makes the sky the color blue? They’re learning about weather patterns but don’t understand the inconsistency of the summertime. Honestly, me neither. They kick their new shoes on the slate and look up at the sky cracked in two colored halves. Then they stare at me with eyes wide like pitted stomachs. I blink. All I know is that the weather hopscotches on the sky. They glance up and watch the sky match their capped teeth and say– hey teacher, what if it rains? So I shrug– yeah what if it rains, what would come down? And they tilt their heads and laugh: baby dogs, what if it rained baby dogs? I always wanted a dog but my dad said maybe when I turn six. You have a dog? So does my cousin. The dog is brown like me. No, no what if it rained money? Big, big money! One wipes milk from his mouth– what if it rained police? It rained police and robbers, and in the air the police shot the robbers. He sets his milk down to point his fingers like a gun. His hands are dripping white. They look at me and say teacher what do you want it to rain, you play the game. I look at the chalk lines on the concrete. I can’t say all the things I’m thinking: we’re bilingual in this classroom but there’s no language that exists to say you imagine it raining their child support checks. Money, big big money, so fat it could power-wash the windows of this school so that when they looked outside the sky would stand uninterrupted. What if it rained fathers black and blue with bruises they give themselves in the mirrors of gas station bathrooms– sprinkled mothers tired from loading their backs with their children’s fathers and tired from loading their hands with their children’s children. Poured parents dark blue as new denim and rained their children who carry their blues but lighter: that’s how it works, right? We all carry blue– it demands to be carried. What if it rained true red and true blue uniforms– no burgundy, no navy– because Oakland didn’t draw lines and draw blood the way that it does. It should rain contraband bandanas and rosaries confiscated in the drawer of the principal’s office. Pour the tire marks and bullet casings on the street behind the playground. What if it rained the mural a few blocks down from East 12th behind the McDonald’s behind the Dollar Tree behind the unhoused encampment that says “I LOVE MY OAKLAND.” It should pour the people this city belongs to and we should be drenched guilty in blood and then stand stiff in a drought. What if it hailed BART trains shooting faster than bullets– my student’s pistoled fingers pointing at its slate and the train pointing back all the names that expired on its platforms. What if it rained the cushioned seats on BART that feel like sleeping on my Mamá Mamá’s couch when the sideshows dragged outside– and honestly that’s why I’m upset there are plastic seats on the new trains. I never said goodbye to her house and now I drive by it all the time because school is just a block away. Whoever sleeps on that couch slept where I slept and really that’s intimacy. What if it rained every goodbye I never got to say and in the downpour I finally got to shake my father’s hand. Not like when I shook it at the church when my Mamá Mamá finally died, but shake it enough to understand I’d be shaking my own hand. What if it rained my face and what if it rained my father’s face and what if it rained Jason’s father’s face. Jason who pulled on my pant leg on the first day of school and said– teacher, I don’t know where my dad is but he usually says bye to me before work and he hasn’t in a week, where do you think he is?

It should rain me standing there with my face puddled on the classroom floor and my hands still. I should’ve said something. I should’ve done better. I look down into their eyes, discs of brown in all the blue, and realize I can’t say all that. They didn’t ask for all that. It starts sprinkling. I cut recess short. They line up with their hands hooding their faces and I think of my Mamá Mena saying that every time it rains, my guardian angel Gabriel is crying from all my misbehaving. I don’t know what I did wrong but lately I’m seeing blue everywhere. Blue in the tongues, blue in the moms swallowing baking soda, blue in the grandmas checking their blood sugar, blue in the tías crossing themselves. It starts pouring and I think maybe this is God spitting. Even God has to spit, even His spit sticks down. Everyone ducks inside and I say it should just rain water. None of them are listening anymore but my mouth is silver like theirs, running wide like a faucet. Water water water— how many sounds are in water, sound it out, you can do it. Wuh-awh-t-urr— is that four our five? Show me with your fingers. It should rain water. I close the door all kinds of shut, afraid water will hit their heads, afraid something bigger will flood the classroom. They settle on the carpet and listen as puddles form on the black top, the only swimming pools any of them have ever seen. I look at their round faces that shift like moons and know that this ending is not an ending but just a filler. A silver cap on a growing tooth. Next year more eyes will hollow my stomach when they ask about the sky. I’ll pull dried liquid glue from my palms and still see my own skin– if it’s not in the sky, it’s in my hands. I’ll pray, I’ll swim, I’ll sit in the school parking lot. I’ll watch rainwater inch onto my car tires and panic. I’ll think of doing something new.

I’ll blacken my heels running. I’ll purple my knees talking to God. I’ll close my eyes from being tired and find my insides painted blue.

Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez is a writer from Oakland, California. Her is primarily focused on the intersections between the Latinx experience, urban communities, and personal trauma. She is primarily a fiction writer, but experiments with other forms of writing including flash fiction and memoir. Alongside writing, she is currently a bilingual fifth-grade teacher in San Leandro, California. She is passionate about literacy for young folks and narratives about students of color. You can follow her at @carolinaixta on Twitter and Instagram.

The Inheritance of Cultural Appropriation and the Scarlet Letter of Latinidad

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By Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.

“… I happened to place it on my breast… it seemed to me then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of a burning heat;” – The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Through my life I had always struggled with style.  But not just style in terms of clothing, but writing, selecting participle phrases, speaking for myself, the metric dance of writing.  It had something which began and ended in a recurring alienation of the self.  Specific, the lock-step I had with my inherited identity.  Spanish, Latinx, or Hispanic, my last name wore on its sleeve the refrain that I was not fully white.  Yet, the crime of all crimes, I was not fully Hispanic!  From the first look of the other from white New England friends and colleagues in school, the origin story remained ambiguous, and generated a guilt when I couldn’t speak Spanish fluently. 

I was brought up by a single mother throughout my childhood. One that played in the 1980s assimilationist ideals, through no fault of her own.  I blame no one for the coughs, roars, and truth that I inherited.  She pushed me to excel in school from the first English-style private school she entered me into, to the boarding school, where I found myself to be my greatest enemy. 

Skipping to today the Latinx community is one of the most victimized and villainized of all non-majority groups in the U.S. While I am speaking about the cost of the flooding-across-the-border speculation garnered by a commander in chief with little to no regard for the intricacies of being not of the Mayflower.  I am talking about American Dirt and Jeanine Cummins[1] accusations of phony-Latinidad.  To surrender to the otherness that causes confusion (and by extension fear) in the majority that those who are proximate in name, or attempted ethno-historiography, such as Jeanine Cummins, have someone plagiarized or appropriated her Latinidad for profit is not new.  Many of my social media networks have accused her of profitability, and that she is in fact “white.”  Hers is a specific brand of whiteness and class that cannot be undone (many claim she is a white Puerto Rican), and thus, her attempt at transmuting proximate Latinidad represents a wholly un-American and un-Democratic liberal repetition of further disenfranchises “real” and “suffering” Latinos who have the birthmark of class struggle.

This was recently repeated by natural echo in Lana Del Rey’s attempt[2] to also re-historicize her Latinidad in an Instagram post, attempting to accentuate her name and space with a kind of feminist woman of color colloquium. She was lambasted and later posted a mea culpa claiming that she meant only to write about advocacy.

But I would like to couple this discussion with what many post-structural philosophers return to as the origin of all thought – lived experience.  It is a tired argument from the 1990s identity politics generalist era to objectify categories of identity as 100% identifiable by politicized voting blocs.  For example, being that she identifies as Latino and argues that her Latinidad allows her to advocate on behalf of others who are nominally, but not proximally, or economically, or socially, Latinx, as a sort of identity-family.  The 1990s identity sociologist would then offer: well if she was visibly African American, Black, or Caribbean, marked by her visible appearance, she could more easily claim her born-identity, and construct a kinship with needed refuges of advocacy.  But, she cannot as the Latinx community has inherited structural inequity through systems of U.S. and global inequity of forced incarceration due to histories of immigration policy, employment discrimination, social and personal assumptions about the global south and communal bias. 

If she or this imagined white-Latinx is anything like me, let me be really frank and transparent: one does not have a choice where one’s parents send you to school, what last name you inherit, what identity has been uniquely tagged (to use a social media trope) to you. Imagine for a minute your name is Latinx Perez, Lopez, Rodriguez – each of which I have been called numerous times out of naivete of the email sender, or caller, in employment, personal, consumer, and educational contexts – perceived as one of  group of purely Latinx persons.  Then, imagine you grow up in a single parent household, not outside the realm of possibility.  This household aligns you with your mother who is identifiably white and class-oriented driven by the American dream to extend the finest in the world of education and class-based upward mobility. You are shipped off to boarding school or another institution of your choice.  There, you become a formal aberration, an alienated experiment within the realm of a pseudo-affirmative action (private schooling does not necessarily abide by the intricacies of the constitutional mandate that public schooling does, but instead, adhere to the consumerist belief that the school must prepare the majoritarian full-paying students to be “prepared for the world”).  You have been represented as a scholarship student, or one is there for purposes of the multicultural mandate that the real world will require.  You are not accepted into the stabilized atmosphere of white girls and boys, and have affixed to you a kind of humbling ancient image of the magical genius who made it out of the lower-middle class.  Mind you, this is not at all a reality, other than the single-parent household and a hard working single parent who is sacrificing to give you this opportunity. 

You make your life’s mission that of archaeology, a kind of mea culpe, but more a way to paint the picture you are Latinx and will work hard at reaffirming the alienated identity that you have inherited. Your family is worlds away, and your household never had Spanish. Your grandmother did not speak English, and when she passed that little connection to the decades of generational ethnic complexity disappear.  You become a community-advocate for those who nominally are like you. You study and write about the history of public inequity and use your privilege to advocate for the voiceless.  However, everytime you use voiceless there is a tinge of regret, guilt, dare I say, majoritarian eyes of judgment for your false representation. 

There is nothing quantifiable about Latinidad and it stresses qualifiable moments of advocacy, as Lana Del Rey begins to describe in her Instagram post.  The stresses of your name, and the stresses of the shame that the United States continues to position on a community in need of organizing is just another form of harm. 

In the end only time will tell, but to have this discussion now is urgent before we are all detained. 

[1] For more on Cummins’ controversy with the publication of American Dirt, see here: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/31/801530214/american-dirt-a-conversation-about-a-controversy

[2] For more on the Lana Del Rey controversy see: https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/lana-del-rey-called-anti-black-for-only-calling-out-the-urban-girls/ar-BB14tMt3

Jonathan Andrew Pérez is a senior Assistant District Attorney in Social Justice and has developed the first-ever study of the History of Systemic Inequity to train law enforcement, and prosecutors across the country on the history of laws and policies that have resulted in structural inequity in the hopes of transformation change. He teaches at Wesleyan University. His first book is published by Finishing Line Press, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies.

utilizing Google Maps to triangulate the course of my desmadre over the years

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By Viva Padilla

First start at some hospital run by nuns in East Los

Move me over to South Central
To a house built in 1910 with an 80-year-old avocado tree
Overrun by weeds
The house never changed its bones after the Northridge earthquake/ but it’s bracing itself for the Big One

The airplanes that flew over Century Blvd. always sounded closer in the rain
The freight train to Wilmington at night disrupted my sleep
My grandpa went straight to sleep as soon as he stepped on the tracks/ that train in Colima, Mexico was known to never miss a thing

An Ak-47 once killed a 8-year-old boy around 1am outside of a bar down the street from my house,
Since then i imagine angry bullets are a spatial anomaly in the spacetime continuum / there is no one ever there actually holding a gun

Dad’s last song request was time to say goodbye by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, he said that when he fell asleep he wasn’t there anymore / he woke himself by calling my name. I was there by his side telling him what time it was/ he could feel no more pain / i swear i could feel nothing either but it wasn’t my time yet

I smoked weed on a rooftop of a converted garage in Lynwood/ shaved my head soon thereafter/ the city blamed it on the coming and going of freight trucks/ stolen panties under the seats of truck drivers/ and little cesar’s being the worst pizza because you can’t eat it the next day

In torrance, i threw a halloween party in a barn in my backyard, no one could hear it from the street/ no one lived on those streets anyway i suspected

There’s no way to know now/ one night many nights
truck bed / trying to find stars
wandered to who knows where there’s no way to now
Never found gold/ with meth heads meeting at donut shops at dawn/ 80-year-old men stuck in front of TVs at 2 o clock in the morning/ and him showing me the mustang he couldn’t put back together again/ his mom begging me to marry him as she sprays Raid all over his carpet/ wandered back out of south central who knows how

coyotes are now surrounding the car i’m in with a man whose afraid to get high/ atop a hill on the eastside/ i’m always crying/ He never cries/ i walk up the hill/ shake hands with the creatures and ask them to quiet down/ they roll their eyes/ later in silence they agree that the universe needs a balance

30 days after quarantine i leave my house/ i rolled a blunt with a tree full of mockingbirds/ and a Camaro full of Swans on the street/ me and Eva look at calla lilies etched onto a fence/ the sky is so big above us/ i dream of a house/ lawn chairs and hammocks/ to make it real

i drive back home/ park atop a hill on the eastside/ can’t see outside my studio with its one window/ a cricket is loud somewhere in the room/ can’t make pacts with creatures that won’t stay still so i sleep

Viva Padilla is a bilingual poet and writer from South Central Los Angeles. She’s the founding editor in chief of Dryland, an independent and grassroots print literary journal. Viva’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in the L.A. Times, The Acentos Review, Cultural Weekly, wearemitú, and Every. Thing. Changes. an art exhibition by the L.A. Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Viva is a first-generation Chicana. She dedicates her work to the memory of her father and the sacrifice made by both of her parents. Follow her on social media @anotchka.

Maria, in Three Acts

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By Marcella Peralta Simon

ACT I SCENE I

2020, A Living Room in Florida

The painting hangs on the wall. It depicts an oxcart winding its way on rutty brown dirt roads past red tiled roofs. Slouching men with battered hats carry spades and machetes. Women stand outside doors in shapeless skirts, hands weathered from grinding corn and hanging freshly washed sheets in the dusty wind. All is brown and rust and grey.

ACT I SCENE II

1930’s Rural Costa Rica

The young girl brightens with childish joy when she finds an egg under the hay in the old barn. She shrieks with horror when a fuzzy chick is carried off by an eagle. She droops with sadness when her father leaves for God knows how long, his Model T jolting over the ruts on his way to town.

They all work for her father, the men with battered hats, their shapeless wives, their dirty children and flea ravaged dogs, skinny oxen. He is a Diputado (Senator), a self- made “man of the people”- with vast tracts of coffee- dark green leaves with ruby red berries, and mistresses scattered across the county.

Two fat little girls run screaming around the corner, hair ribbons flying. They are identical twins, triumphant at fooling the nuns by swapping out identities. They are the last of seven and largely ignored, once dumped by servants into a pit to play with a shared doll.

ACT I SCENE III

1950’s San José, Costa Rica

“Girls do not need to go to university”, her father declares sternly. She quietly enrolls and works in her cousin’s lab to pay tuition. Her twin Teresa takes off to study art in Florence. Their older sister, the beauty, falls in love with a campesino and marries a Mafioso who owns half the buildings downtown, belt marks from their father scarring her back.

ACT II SCENE I

1980’s Rural Costa Rica

A young woman, Maria’s daughter, sits on the porch beneath swinging wire baskets of pink veranara reading vintage science fiction. She shouts “A Dios” at women trudging up the hill to the old farmhouse carrying burlap bags from the market. Tractors rumble past pulling carts of blackened sugar cane stalks to be weighed at the cooperative founded by her grandfather. 

Holstered men sent by her uncle appear at the door, meant to threaten, to intimidate over water. Coffee is a thirsty plant. “Vayase, get off of my land”, her mother shouts, hands on hips in defiance.

Twenty five years the stranger in a strange land, the housewife in Ohio, Maria suddenly appears to her daughter.

ACT II SCENE II

2016, A House in Suburban Virginia

She can still speak, mostly Spanish now, and sips her morning coffee, pursing her lips with a sigh after each swallow. She defied her father and brothers, but cannot defy the illness that slithers through her brain, leaving tracks in the sand.

She tells her daughter “You know, Teresa came to see me yesterday. She was on her way with a family to a town deep in the mountains.”

ACT III, SCENE I

Christmas 2018, a House in Rural Costa Rica

Maria’s daughter, now retired and a grandmother herself, comes bearing a bag of ashes. First stop to visit Teresa, her mother’s twin, resting comfortably in a wheelchair, her oil paintings choking the walls and scattered in piles displacing the spare bedroom. She tells her niece “you know Maria came to see me yesterday. She was travelling with some students on a bus, going to university.”

Her niece takes out a pair of nail scissors and carefully separates a canvass from its frame, staple by rusty staple. Dry with age, the canvass wheezes as it is rolled and placed in a suitcase.

ACT III SCENE II

2019, A Park in Suburban Virginia

A Crepe Myrtle sits behind a bench, its scarlet blooms in full glory. An inscription on a plaque rests by its trunk. It reads Maria E. Simon 1926-2018. The whole of her, Maria Eugenia Peralta Rodriguez de Simon, would not fit on the plaque.

ACT III SCENE III

2020, A Living Room in Florida

The painting hangs on the wall. It depicts an oxcart winding its way on rutty brown dirt roads past red tiled roofs. Slouching men with battered hats carry spades and machetes. Women stand outside doors in shapeless skirts, hands weathered from grinding corn and hanging freshly washed sheets in the dusty wind. All is brown and rust and grey. Two fat little girls run screaming around the corner, hair ribbons flying.

Marcella Peralta Simon is a recently retired grandmother, splitting her time between Cambridge, UK and Kissimmee, Florida. She has been a diplomat, university lecturer/administrator, and instructional designer. She published Coogee Haikus in a journal for emerging Western Australian Writers. She also teaches online, paints landscapes and abstracts, and explores woodlands and wetlands with her husband and Treeing Walker Coonhound. She wrote Maria, In Three Acts as a tribute to her late mother.

in footnotes, footnotes

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By Michael J Pagán

to break the ice, a school counselor once asked about my childhood.
“but begin with i feel,” she said. so i told her about how i used to keep
nunchucks inside my jansport backpack, right next to my ninja turtle
coloring books. she thought i was joking. i could instantly tell she wanted
to laugh, but only smiled to her credit. so i told her how i knew what it felt
like to hear gunshots in the distance while watching a friend fly a kite
at a nearby park. how my mother once owned a blue, ’87 corolla
i’d eventually get head in for the first time from a girl my age who was
guilted into doing so by my older stepbrothers even if i didn’t want to.
how she did it because she like them & not me & how my mother
didn’t know or care because according to her, “this city is too big
& decayed for lovers,” but she was talking about herself.

i told her about the first spanish class i’d ever taken: 5th grade spanish one.
how la profesora asked us to pull out our cuadernos so the class
could review together la tarea that was assigned the day before.
how i had no clue (i’d started the school year late) & how i’d joked
that my mother & i would always call ourselves Miami gypsies because
i didn’t want to admit i had no idea what cuaderno meant but more importantly,
i didn’t want to admit what my mother once told me: “spanish is very important,
but your survival? in this country? that’s more important to me.”

she would eventually refer to me as a highly functional depressive:
“but you want to have & that’s what’s saving you,” she said.
she made it sound like being person was like being born in medias res:
right smack dab in the middle of an action sequence then left to wander
(& wonder) around in our pre-destined timeframes, hoping to put together
in our minds what the hell it was that we actually saw. what the hell
it was that happened in the first place? only for someone to then call
you crazy because someone always does eventually. instead of just listening.

“but what about my feelings?” i then asked her, but she wouldn’t say more.
even though, now, is wish more than anything she did. i wish she would’ve
reminded me: you want to be here, with all its noises reminding you
of what you want to be, instead of just lying there in the dark inside
wounded hallways trying to figure out how to belong to other people.
we’re all so close, but not because we’d like to be—the bodies have always
there. here. & the worst thing in life is witnessing every day & all its devastating
of the things we love & only in death make complete because catastrophes,
they say, oftentimes is where we rediscover our humanity, but is that true?
she never answered that question. is it true? to treat our lives like a bare mattress
we lay on where some else has already died?

Born and raised in Miami, FL, Michael J Pagán spent four years (1999-2003) in the United States Navy before (hastily) running back to college during the spring of 2004. A graduate of Florida Atlantic University’s Creative Writing M.F.A. program, his work has appeared in Apogee Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, Juked, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Revolver, ANMLY, The Florida Review, Frontier Poetry, and Dialogist, among others.

una parda, which is me

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By India González

parda (feminine): a general term used in the spanish colonies of the americas that referred to the mixed-bloods whose ancestry could almost never be accurately described. for our purposes here, it is being used in reference to the multi-racial descendants of africans, natives, and europeans.

i am a perpetual pardon
i limp into the room &
you say: fox woman get out!
 smudge it & start again

i am naked & without clothing
i am the roasted house slave
i am the white man’s leftovers
i am the white woman’s hate
i am the high highfalutin rape
 smudge it & start again

i get seasick now that i’m older
the colonial in me is wearing away
but i still have that candle in the eye
called bloodlust
those kleptomaniac grabbers
it must have felt good wearing all that gold
i am a broke down ship la niña
 smudge it & start again

nobody is a purebred anymore
i’m precocious mutt
i know all about the small living quarters for
tender-tribed-people like me
the people-with-too-many-ancestors-inside-of-us
we have now painted our living room
we chose the color of bloodied-up hide
we chose us

in the end i screech during childbirth
my husband takes off down the hall
like meaty antelope man
my skin is slick with sweat

i’m telling you it feels good to be this naked
forgive me you who are so fully clothed

Photo by Justin Aversano

India Lena González is a poet, educator, artist, and Sagittarius. She received her BA from Columbia University, where she graduated with honors, and is a recent MFA graduate from NYU’s creative writing program. She is the current Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers. In addition to her passion for writing, India is also a professionally trained dancer, choreographer, and actor. She lives in Harlem with her beloved twin.

Proven Worth// My White American Novella

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By Mateo Perez Lara

Mateo Perez Lara is a queer, non-binary, Latinx poet from California. They received their M.F.A. in Poetry as part of the first cohort to graduate from Randolph College’s Creative Writing Program. They are an editor for RabidOak Online Literary Journal. They have a chapbook, Glitter Gods, published with Thirty West Publishing House. Their poems have been published in EOAGH, The Maine Review, and elsewhere.

Forget About the Rap Star and Choose Me

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By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

At 32 I fell for a man I met through OK Cupid. Still a couple of years before the dating app deluge, I joined the site determined to end my history with short-lived, non-boyfriends.

We chose Barnsdall Park for our first face-to-face. I found him sitting under the shadow of a tree at a small table on a terrace overlooking Los Feliz. The conversation began with the last topic discussed online, our mutual fondness for shrooms. With his face turned toward Vermont street traffic, his crisp blue eyes peered sideways at me from time to time. Talk turned to his work in the studio as a sound engineer. Sessions often went all night and he’d woken up only an hour or two before this meeting while I’d come from a day of teaching high school students. I noted his strong arms and the absence of any pained pauses or awkward interview questions.

I suggested touring the Frank Lloyd Wright home in the middle of the park. We walked to the entrance and found the house closed for the day. I spied an opened side door beyond a clasped velvet rope and dared him to sneak in with me. Our footsteps creaked along the hardwood floor of a darkening hallway as we entered an antique sitting room. The act felt clandestine, and I silently willed him to kiss me, but he didn’t. Later he’d say that kissing me hadn’t crossed his mind because he didn’t yet know me.

One date became multiple, and at each Jason showed at my door in a pressed collared shirt, and more often than not, holding a bunch of hot pink flowers picked from the street. Sometimes he’d drop by after a long night in the studio to leave flowers on the windshield of my car for me to find on my way out to class. Once he even sprinkled pink rose petals across my bed for no reason at all.

To repay his acts of kindness, one time I borrowed a waffle maker from my mother to cook his favorite breakfast, but he ended up being too wrecked from a late session in the studio to eat. In fact, derailed plans due to his demanding and unpredictable hours became increasingly frequent. Some nights, he wouldn’t come over until 5am, and then we might drink a beer together before he crashed in my bed. But the way his feet rubbed against mine beneath the blankets on Sunday mornings, said maybe he found something in me worth loving. 

About five months into dating and at the end of summer, a well-known rap artist Jason worked for asked him to housesit while he was on tour. For days we enjoyed an uninterrupted love affair bouncing naked from room to room of the palatial, hillside Studio City home, but when the rap star was rumored to be coming back, Jason said I needed to go. The change felt abrupt and hurtful. I ignored his request and insisted on being taken on an overnight adventure. He’d been promising me such a thing, a tender shroomy moment in the outdoors, since soon after we met, and with the harvest moon soon to rise over the city and me about to start a new school year, it seemed like the perfect night to deliver.

The adventure was a test.

I wanted to be important to him, to be deserving of flowers and foot rubs, but an ugly and irritating fear lodged itself into my heart, maybe I wasn’t lovable at all. It seemed the only way to know for sure was to press him to forget about the rap star and choose me.

I prodded, and he agreed to drive up the coast but said he wouldn’t leave overnight. I rushed home for supplies and packed a sleeping bag just in case.

We drove to Leo Carillo Beach. I popped a couple stems into my mouth, and offered him the bag. He declined, and the irritating fear turned to an ache.  

At the beach, we walked into a secluded cove lit by the full moon and made love in the sand. After we climbed onto a lifeguard tower and looked out over the black ocean. I took photos.

“You’re acting like you’re on vacation.” His tone stabbed. I snapped another.

On the way back to the city, he took a route through the winding Santa Monica hills and parked on a dirt turnoff to fool around. Down to my underwear, he dared me to jump out and run around the car. I did, and then he jumped out in his underwear and chased me for another loop before we fell into the back of his van for a romp. For a moment the ache eased. 

As we entered the house, his phone rang. The rap star was on his way.

“You really have to leave now,” Jason said. “He can’t see you in his house.” The ache turned searing. My eyes went blurry. I angrily accused him of I-don’t-know-what before ripping my way out the front door. On the street, the rap star saunter up the hill with his entourage trailing behind. I paused for a moment before waving. His eyes said, Who the fuck are you? 

At home I immediately sent an apology text and asked Jason to come over. He said no. The next day, I asked him to come over. He said no. Later that day, I suggested taking a walk. He said no. The following day, I suggested a movie, and he said no.

A week later, he showed at my door wearing a ratted and stained sweatshirt and holding no flowers. My skin felt raw. 

I drove us to a neighborhood bar. After ordering a round and settling into a table he said, “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” Don’t cry, I told myself.

“Why not?”

“You kinda went crazy.”

“I guess I do that, but you’re the first person I wasn’t crazy with. Well, until now.”

“Maybe you should have hid that longer.”

“Right,” I said. “It’s just hard with your work and never knowing when we can hang out and things changing last minute.”

“That’s how it is.”

“But when we first started dating, you’d tell me your schedule. You’d give me a heads up.”

“That was me trying.”

“But if you tried again…”

“I’m tired of trying.”

We sat in silence as I drove us back. I willed him to reach for my hand on the gearshift but knew he wouldn’t. Why did we go out when he could have dumped me at home or even over the phone? I desperately wanted for this moment to be different. I remembered a day when I thought it could be.

He’d taken me to a lookout of the Pacific Ocean in San Pedro where a hiking path followed the rocky bluffs. I chose to wear a strapless denim dress and wedges because my legs looked good in the outfit. At the path, I slipped my shoes off and held them in one hand as I followed barefoot alongside Jason. When a piece of debris pierced the bottom of my foot, I said nothing and did my best not to limp. Thankfully, he cut our walk short and took me back to his place in Long Beach for the first time.

Sitting on his bed, he brought my feet into his lap and began massaging them. “Do you have a splinter?”

“Do I?”

“Don’t you feel that?”

“I guess, but it’s no big deal.” He disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a leather-bound grooming kit. He picked out the tweezers. I winced pulling my leg back.

“I promise not to hurt you,” he said guiding my leg to him and hugging my foot between his warm hands before proceeding.

It didn’t hurt. In fact, when he tweezed the tiny piece metal from my foot, I noticed an immediate disappearance of a throbbing I pretended all afternoon didn’t exist.

“Better?” He placed the piece into my hand.

“Much.”

I can think of other splinters when my flustered mother dug into my palm with a blackened tip of a safety pin telling me to be quiet when I cried. That’s the kind of care I knew before this.

Next he turned on some music, and we danced in the middle of his bedroom. As a melodic song played he slowly slipped the red cardigan I was wearing off my shoulders sliding it down my arms. Next he unfastened the belt at my waist. Last he moved around to my back to pull the dress up and over my body kissing my naked shoulder as he dropped the cloth onto the floor.

Later that night he introduced me to his roommate and his favorite hometown food, Chicago-style Italian beef sandwiches. Yes, that day I thought, Maybe. 

Back at my place, Jason walked me up the front steps. At the gate, he stopped. A step below me, we were eye to eye.

“I hope you know, you’re a very beautiful person,” he said, “and you deserve love.” His eyes focused on mine cutting through to a hurt below. “I only wish you knew it.”

He hugged me, but when tears began to pool at the rim of my lids, I pushed him away and went inside. I never saw Jason again.

All I can say is, I thank him for finding the splinter in me.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, and crazyhorse among others. She considers herself an experiential witness poet, and she fights for gender parity in publishing as the director of Women Who Submit.  

My Name

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By Zulma Ortiz-Fuentes

My name is Margarita. In Spanish it means daisy. The name is just right for me because daisies have long spindly stems for legs and big wide eyes like I do. Also, my face is surrounded by unruly hair similar to the wavy petals of a margarita. Margarita was my father’s choice. The name of a favorite cousin. The maid of honor at his and Mami’s wedding.

I think my given name is beautiful, but along the way I’ve picked-up several nicknames that are not as pretty. This is what happens when you are from Puerto Rico. Let me explain. In Puerto Rico, if you’re a little different from everyone else, you come to be known by that difference. Take my cousin Victor, for example. He was born with one leg shorter than the other. His apodo is El Cojo since he walks with an uneven step, rocking from side to side as if he’s had too many shots of rum. And Uncle Moncho’s wife is called La Bizca instead of Rosario because one of her eyes likes to chase the other instead of behaving and looking straight out at the world. Then there’s the man behind the counter at the colmado where I buy candy. His nickname is El Gago. Wordsstumble trying to get out of his mouth; they hesitate on his tongue, trip and bump into each other, like they’re afraid to come out.

As for me, I have more than one nickname. I gather apodos the same way pesky burs attach themselves to my clothes whenever I trample careless through the uncut pasture by my abuela’s house. The names hurt the same way burs do whenever I attempt to pull them off my clothes—a needle sharp prick to my heart and my fingers.

One of my apodos is La Mellá. It means girl without teeth. Most of my teeth were pulled out when I was four. I lived in Texas then with my family. I didn’t realize what was going to happen the day my father put me in his big pink car, the one with silver tail fins in the back. It was a warm, honeysuckle smelling afternoon when he drove me to the Army hospital where soldiers and their families went when sick. I wasn’t sick—just my teeth hurt sometimes.

At the hospital, Papi said, “I’ll come get you tomorrow. Behave and listen to the nurses.” Then he left. I didn’t mind him going away since I’m afraid of Papi most of the time. Besides, I was excited to sleep away from home, free from my annoying little brothers. 

A nurse with golden hair and sky-blue eyes helped me change into the soft pajamas she pulled like treasure from the bag Mami handed Papi as we left the house. The beautiful lady in white admired the pajamas’ grey and pink pattern of parading baby elephants.

“Aren’t they cute,” she said.

Mami thinks elephants are lucky animals, but only if their noses point up. And that’s what mine were doing, prancing around my pajamas, their curly trunks tossed up as though in celebration.

After I got into my pajamas, the nurse fed me toast and applesauce. Then settled me in a bed all by myself. She told me not to worry. I said I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t because the room felt magical. It had tall sparkly windows and two other beds covered in tight, bright white sheets. When the pretty nurse left, I pretended to be on a grand adventure with elephants as my guides. I imagined the other empty beds were a mountain and a hill in a far-away land filled with hidden treasure.

Just as I became tired and thirsty from my adventures, the nurse returned to offer me a paper cup filled with a sweet liquid. She didn’t tell me what it was, just said to drink it all up. Which I did. Then she said sleep tight and put out the light. It seemed like a switch also got flipped inside my head, because that night I didn’t have any bad dreams.

Next morning, I struggled to wake up, reluctant to come out of the deep dark place I’d gone to. I sensed ripples of pain pacing restlessly just above the surface, waiting for me to arrive. Once fully conscious, I didn’t understand why blood drooled from my mouth, why most of my teeth were missing, why my gums throbbed with pain. I’d gone to sleep one way, and woken up another.

“¿Por qué?” I kept asking throughout the morning between hiccupping sobs, no longer thrilled with my room or my lucky pajamas.

“¿Por qué?”

But the nurses were too busy to answer.

“Your baby teeth were rotten,” Mami said when I returned home that afternoon, still in tears, feeling betrayed by everyone—Papi, Mami, and the nurse.

“That’s for not drinking your milk,” Mami scolds.

“But how am I going to eat without my teeth?” I wail back.

*****

Right after my teeth were taken out, Papi returns us to Puerto Rico. He’s a soldier in the United States Army and sometimes has to go places without a wife and so many children. We stay in the mountains with Mami’s family. But as soon as we arrive, her two brothers begin to tease me about my missing teeth; they call me La Mellá and say I look like a viejita. Which is true because when I smile into the mirror in TíaRosalía’s room, a little girl looks back with an old woman’s toothless mouth. In fact, I resemble my great-grandmother Carmela when she removes her teeth at night before sleep and puts them in a cup of water. Her face suddenly collapses into itself, and she looks vieja, vieja, like she’s one hundred years old.

It’s hard to eat without teeth. That’s why Mami’s mother, Abuela María, boils green bananas and other verduras for me, and mashes them up until they are mushy like baby food. But sometimes, I like to eat hard-to-chew food. And end up in trouble. Like the day a bone got stuck in my throat after I ate a salty piece of bacalao. Mami attempted to fish the bone out with a finger while exclaiming, “Help her, San Blás!” But the santo must have been busy that day saving other children who were choking worse than me, because the bone never came out. Instead, it went down. For a while I worried about that bone inside my body—Would it pierce my stomach? Was it stuck in my intestines? Would it come out the other end?

At school some of my classmates, the mean ones, also call me La Mellá. But I don’t care that much because I love school. I’m more bothered by having to use the school outhouse, the one boys and girls have to share because the girl letrina caved into its hole. Some of the daredevil boys play on the tilted roof of the half-submerged hut during recess. I predict that one day, the letrina will finish collapsing into the mysterious opening below it, and take the boys along. Letrinas are so disgusting. I hold my pee until I get home after school, even though Abuela also has a letrina. We had a really nice bathroom with a proper toilet when we lived in Texas. I really miss that toilet.   

I almost earn an additional nickname one day in school after dismissal. It was raining so hard we couldn’t go home. I waited with the other second graders inside the classroom for the rain to stop. We stood looking out the open door, hypnotized by the thousands of hard silver drops falling with an angry roar that sounded like the end of the world. As usual, I’d avoided the letrina. But the sound of the rain and the angry rush of water sweeping down the road was too much for me. When the warm streams of pee began to wander down my legs, I froze like a statue. The pee flowed freely and seemed to go on forever. When the trickles finally stopped, I carefully inched away from the little puddles on the floor, pretending they were charquitos made by the water dripping from the leaky school roof. I was terrified one of my schoolmates would realize the truth, laugh, and then call me La Meona. Back home, Mami scolded. Said a manganzona like me should not be wetting herself like a baby.

I also get called La Patilarga on account of my long skinny legs. This name is not so bad. I pay it no mind, anyway, since my patas largas help me run swift like a gazelle. But sometimes I run too fast. Then my feet get tangled up, and I fly headlong onto the newly laid gravel meant to make it easier for cars to travel on the mountain road where I like to run. This happens so often that Mami just shakes her head when I come home in tears, pieces of skin dangling like ornaments from bloody palms and knees.

Despite scabby knees and scraped palms, and Mami’s exasperated huffs, I keep running on the gravel-strewn road; it’s the best spot to play since everywhere else is hilly and uneven. Besides, there are hardly any cars in the mountains, the heart center of Puerto Rico. According to my teacher, Miss Rivera, a powerful Taíno cacique named Orocovix once ruled this area. That is, until Colón and the Spaniards arrived to kill or enslave most of the Taínos. That’s what Miss Rivera told us. Some days I pretend to be a Taína running and playing on the tree-lined road where green vines dangle like snakes from thick branches. My friends and I pull the sturdy bejucos down with sharp tugs and strip the leaves to make jump ropes. Just like Taíno children must have done in the times of Orocovix, we play right in the middle of the road. Our long legs going faster and faster as we chant: “pa’ arriba, pa’ bajo; pal’ centro y pa’ dentro.” And wouldn’t you know it, my patas largas are also good for jumping rope.

Some adults también call me La Ojona; say my eyes resemble those of a vaca cagona. Yet when I examine Abuela’s vaca, the one that gives the warm but nasty-tasting milk I’m offered at breakfast, I notice that, yes, she has big brown eyes. But the rest of the name—vaca cagona—is about a cow that shits a lot. How is that me? I wonder. Since I try to hold that in, as well, to cut the time spent in la letrina.

I’m La Mellá, La Patilarga, La Ojona—defined by mouth, legs, and eyes. No one mentions what a smart six-year-old girl I am. That soon I’ll be entering third grade. That I can read and write in Spanish, and know some English, too. When Papi gets drunk, he likes to boast that people called me La Pulga Amaestrada when I was two because I talked so much, like a cotorra, he says. But I don’t think being called a smart flea and a parrot is anything to brag about.

My name is Margarita. Like the flower. And like a wide-eyed daisy, I keep reaching eagerly towards the sun. I don’t like those other names, they are not mine, but there is nothing to be done about them for now. In my world, no one pays attention to what a toothless, long-leggedniña with big brown eyes has to say. Someday, though, when I am old enough to insist on being called by my given name, everyone will listen. Margarita. My name is Margarita.

Zulma Ortiz-Fuentes is a Puerto Rican writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She holds degrees from the University of Puerto Rico, New York University, and The New School. She is a former Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, and was short-listed for the 2019 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Prose Project, Writer’s Digest, bosque magazine, and Boricua En La Luna: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Voices.