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(Calle Jera) (Chonga Nation) — Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. Her first book of graphic poetry titled The Lost Girls Book of Divination was published in April 2018 by Tolsun Books. Her chapbook Chonga Nation was selected as a finalist in the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series.

(Exclusion) (Glimpses) (INRI) (Redemption) (Vendetta)   — Claire Ibarra received her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. Her photographs have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Topology Magazine, Roadside Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Alimentum~The Literature of Food.

— Bailey Cohen is the author of the chapbook Self-Portraits as Yurico (forthcoming, Glass Poetry Press), founder of Alegrarse, and associate editor for Frontier Poetry. His poems are in or forthcoming from Southern Indiana Review, Boulevard, [PANK], The Shallow Ends, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere.

  — Alfredo Aguilar is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook What Happens On Earth (BOAAT Press 2018). His work has appeared in The Shallow Ends, The Iowa Review, Best New Poets 2017 & elsewhere. He lives in North County San Diego.

(Crying Rainbow) (Your Hands Look Like My Hands 2) (Your Hands Look Like My Hands) (Ilana Smile)   — Alanis Alvarez – 21 Novembers ago I was born to Cuban parents and with them came a million cousins. After my birth mother’s passing I was adopted by the coolest lesbians alive.

— Natalie Sánchez, known as @hongopolis on internet. In the daylight is the editor of the art magazine StopArt.com; at night writes poetry, illustrates and can be seen in bars making stand-up comedy (and eventually drinking). As a journalist she has written for several Colombian publications such as Semana, El Alacrán and Soho magazine.

  — Steven Alvarez is the author of The Codex Mojaodicus, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize.

How To Wait: Place both feet firmly on the floor in front of the subway entrance. Feel the earth beneath you holding the everyday things that turn the days above it. Exhale the muttered, bitter remark that would itch if left inside about how much longer is the damn train going to take.

Real brown boys don’t always hang like nooses in the summer breeze but can run with raw blistered toes, heels kicking back freshly cut grass wind carrying backs like thrones.

Xenophobia When I die, my spirit is elsewhere like a pterodactyl’s soul so please don’t pour bleach on my grave, my immigrant bones are white enough.         Train wreck The child was happy, and that is rare nowadays.

I. MOTHER & SON “fruit” When you describe them as fruits, I think of a tree and garden and the green or red-orange skinned objects I’d puncture with the front of my teeth and the juice that would run down the gutter of my lips, the crescent shreds that slid down my throat.

— Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (TAR Chapbook Series, 2017) and has work forthcoming from or featured in DREGINALD, Cosmonauts Avenue, ANMLY, Hobart, Alien Mouth, and Potluck. She is an MFA candidate at Rutgers-Newark.

_____ Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Masters Review, Lightspeed, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently lives in Seattle.

Defending Your Life On the bus ride back to Abuela’s house from Guanajuato, I tell Mamá I am dying. I figure the timing is never right—especially not stuck in a clay cabin in Guanajuato visiting my Tío Raul—but a confession en route to Abuela’s is better than one whispered over my uncle’s sick bed.

One single person is killed.   The oranges stood in witness in the orchard, were pressed the next morning at Miguel’s frutería. The nixtamal sat in the dark rotting in tubs. When the marigolds turned to dust no one noticed.

Before, I drew pictures of what I thought the antichrist would look like. I’d fill pages and pages with mashed up black, dark lines curving and smudging. Once, a boy found me sitting in the grass behind the swings and knocked my sketchbook out of my hands.

  — Nick Cruz is a Jersey-based artist of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent whose work also appears in ANMLY’s Radical: Avant Garde Poets of Color folio.

— A first-generation Mexican American, Nick Brown‘s poetry appears in publications such as Puerto del Sol, Wildness, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle with his wife, where he works as a proposal writer in the A/E/C industry. Nick’s first chapbook, Exactly What Happened to My Mother, is forthcoming at Madhouse Press.

— Mario Duarte is an Academic Advisor at the University of Iowa and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems and short stories have appeared in aaduna, Arachne Press, Carnival, Chicago Literati, Corazón Land Review, Hinchas de Poesía, Medusa’s Laugh, Slab, Huizache, RavensPerch, Steel Toe Review, Storyscape, and Typishly.

“hhhhhhhhrrrrrrrr…” Little bits of rocky debris, collected over many decades laboring in the Americas, twister about beginning their journey. They rumble alive. The earthy bits are brought up through squishy canals dusted by the fields of New Jersey.

— Louisa Muniz is a freelance writer and a reading/writing tutor. She lives in Sayreville, N.J. with her husband & son. She holds a Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has been published in Rose Red Review, Tinderbox Journal, Snapdragon Journal, Words Dance, Menacing Hedge & Poetry Quarterly.

begins with a C. The best thing I have left that I own in secret. Lost whole days in the hallway of Hotel Zaza. By the time we reached room 315, lost years ages eight through 20.

Mi preciosa, my Abuelita says, gripping my shoulders, tan querida. She looks so far into my eyes I wonder if she’s searching for freckles on the back of my pupils. There are dark curtains around us in her Mexico City apartment, and outside it’s a thick fog of pollution kind of day.

WHERE I INHERIT MY SILENCE i once walked into my grandfather’s shadow dug for spanish with a stick of dynamite felt it explode on my mother tongue i bruised & he called them flowers i spoke english & he fed me more spanish until my stomach knew the taste of vinegar how his gold ring

This was before all had a name. This was before the earth was divided into continents. This was before steeples were built upon the sun. This was before the streets were colonized by the galleons of cocaine and legislation. Capital by another name: this was before the birth of the machine. Of the wheel.

I Think of Us as Teenagers as I Think about Consumption I remember when paraphernalia used to sound sexy, now it sounds clinical.

Translated by Janet McAdams 14 Your kingdoms are fields of ice: strange and crystalline chasms. In your kingdoms a language marches forward testing the hours’ edge and dried leaves cover your naked bones. In your kingdoms, Poetry, the voice dazzles. We are like indices to a lost fauna, delineating barely a carnivore’s delusions.

Florida—America’s well hung state. The land is stretched, like a swollen drop ready to break. We are circus-folk and death metal, illiteracy and bath salts. We are amputees and retirees, bikers and diabetes. We are Disney. We are Aileen Wuernos and Old Sparky. We are late night tent revivals on the side of monotonous highways.

You run around like a crazed horse during recess. After school, you continue to run, passing by your mother’s apartment and other apartments, all with cherry-colored doors and brass numbers. You rush into the shared laundry room. Your little brother, Alfonzo, follows you inside. The room is small and dark. There are no windows.

never embarrassed to kiss my father’s cheek in public      grateful for that simple gesture in culture carried in affection held on to un-assimilated a cultural difference      tradition like a circle      going unbroken   — Daniel Suárez is a first generation Cuban American born and raised in Chicago, IL.

Photogenic The newest form of social media displays the worst times of users’ lives. Snapshots like broken windows. Glimpses of hardships at the swipe of your fingertips. Users can share friends’ photos because there’s unity in misery.

rare bite me, she said, & i slid my hand across her body in search for the softest spot. delicately, at first. you’ve really never done this before? i had not.

Requirements • U.S. citizenship. • 1 year military or police experience. • Border Patrol work requires the ability to read & speak Spanglish.   Education • No college degree required.   Duties • Border Patrol Agents slash open jugs of rosewater. • Border Patrol Agents shoot & kill an unarmed // Mexican teenager.

Hernán Cortés said let there light     & the temple of Huitzilopochtli burned he said let there be a river of gold ripped from the skin of antique gods      & Spanish spread like wildfire like a plague of locust     & there’s the story of half my blood’s blood      they awoke one day to an origin half-burning    

The method passed forward through the mouth like anything good: flesh // worship // gossip // breath. Their little fate measured out by my mother’s hands // measured by her mother’s // by her mother’s // going back & back like that, in a circle. Roll a masa ball the size of an infant’s fist.

with words from an interview by Rita Moreno on the red carpet   I wear the galaxy like a dress: little suns bending in their own orbit. Their tongues hammered into darkness you would think they would tarnish. I keep telling myself everything that is gold stays gold.

Translated by Jonathan Simkins   1984 A life of pain is born. A life is born, the first test tube baby was born on a day like this, a Sunday like this one, a leap year Sunday. The fragmented crystals speak: A mother chained to an orphanage will remain an orphan.

     Sunday Early morning I wake up to find Papá has eaten one of his arms. I see him through the open door of his room on my way to the bathroom, upright in bed & naked over a mess of red sheets.

VI. We were young, in the time of life scored to popular music, marked            unrelenting                 marked restless           marked wicked like Prince’s purple smile and too-tight pants.

When you are exiled by circumstance, only the exile is legible to others: your body, your illness, your employment status, your poverty, your citizenship or lack thereof.