What the Dresses Remember

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Sarah Dalton

Signature Jones New York Wrap Dress

Product Description: The ever-flattering and flirty wrap dress in a bright fuchsia floral print accented by sky blue, charcoal grey, and golden yellow brushstroke-like marks. Knee-length, long sleeve. 95% polyester, 5% spandex. Dry clean only.

Fabulous Dress!! Customer: SarahD

I call this dress my waterlily dress because it reminds me of Monet’s famous Waterlily paintings if they were crossed with the bold, bright bougainvillea colors of a Latino neighborhood. Like a model on a catwalk, this dress struts and poses just hanging in the closet. It’s so stylish, so wild and alive with color. The wrap dress design tucks around the chest and hips, securing at the waist with a long belt enhancing that most coveted shape, the hourglass. People still give me compliments about this dress, even though they saw me in it at the last wedding. My mom complains that all my Facebook pictures look the same, and, for her, that must mean I don’t have enough clothes in my closet. It’s a genuine wrap dress, and, if it gets too windy, everything below the waist can burst open like Marilyn Monroe on the subway grates in Seven Year Itch. On the plus side, this means the dress accommodates a variety of body shapes.

3 Comments:

MsLinda: I’m torn between this dress and another, how did you decide to get this one?

SarahD: Serendipity. In my early 20s, usually around New Year’s, I used to sit on my bedroom carpet, women’s magazines fanned out around me, and spend hours thumbing through the glossy pages, carefully cutting out the pictures that I found beautiful. With Mod Podge and a sponge brush, I collaged these pictures into an artist’s sketchbook, a style inspiration book, before Pinterest, of course. It was a blueprint to create the style I wanted—sleek pencil skirt office suits for the professional-me; airy weekend dresses for the romantic-me; tight skirts with lush patterns for the confident-me; jewel-toned blouses to accent the brown-skin-me; statement necklaces for the playful-me. If my perfect sense of style existed on paper, I only needed to find something, anything, to magically manifest it. This serendipity has happened once with this dress, and once with a roll of wallpaper.

SarahD: Here’s the link to the wallpaper: https://www.anthropologie.com/shop/blazing-poppies-wallpaper

Park Avenue SA Madrid White Dress with Black Embroidery

Product Description: Black and white offer a striking contrast in this feminine button-down, A-line dress. Knee-length, short sleeve. Vestido/Dress 100% lino/linen. Forro/Lining 100% algodón/cotton. Limpieza en seco/Dry clean only.

Classic European Glamour Customer: SarahD

Finally, more European designs! Very refreshing! Black details dance around the white linen backdrop. Black stitches give a vertical (and slimming) illusion up the front. Black embroidered floral cut-outs punctuate the hem and sleeves, and a black woven belt cinches at the waist. The accents are flattering and alluring. Not to mention, black and white never go out of style, right?

When I saw this dress on the sales rack honeymooning in Spain, it immediately reminded me of my favorite movie at the time, Under the Tuscan Sun, specifically that scene where Francis, the heroine, played by Diane Lane, has a dream to buy a white dress to visit her lover. In the dressing room, I gestured to my new husband to come over and look. I needed to lose ten pounds for the dress to fit perfectly, but the dress was made for me. I was in love with its potential. Back in California, I started to call it my “Under the Tuscan Sun” dress. Every woman needs a Little Black Dress. This is its perfect partner, the Little White One.

8 Comments

Anni: What a gorgeous dress! I’m trying to figure out what size to get. Would you be willing to give height, weight, and size?

SarahD: In 2009, when I bought it, I was 5’6” and 150 pounds. I got size 44. In 2016, after seven years of marriage, the death of a neighbor woman who was like my second mother, 2 children, two bouts of postpartum depression, I was 220 pounds. Nine months postpartum, I went down to 180. Now I’m back at 220.

Joanna L: Where have you worn the dress to?

SarahD: Technically, I’ve never worn it out of the house. Alone in the bedroom, I took out the dress and fingered the black details, thinking about Francis next to the ocean, waves spraying around her like confetti, her white, silk dress billowing in the wind. I tried on the dress and gauged myself in the mirror. My arms couldn’t lift past my shoulders without the sound and feel of fabric straining on the back of my armpits. The buttons at my breasts looked like they would burst when I breathed deeply. I sucked in my tummy and held my breath. When I sat on the bed, my stomach fat pushed through diamond-shaped holes or the buttons popped undone. The dress fit like a stretched out torture device. In the movie, following that epic ocean-dress moment, Francis arrives at her lover’s house and finds him with another woman. She leaves crying, heartbroken. All dressed up, looking like a modern day Audrey Hepburn and even she got rejected.

Tina: Are you planning on wearing it anytime soon?

SarahD: For now, the fantasy’s alive in my closet, protected by a thin, plastic sarcophagus. Why do I keep it? What do I hope to capture about myself when I can finally wear this dress? Francis’s sense of adventure, her I-should-know-better -but-I’m-in-love-and-I’m-going-to-drop-everything-and-run-after-it feeling, her elegance, her confidence, before the heartbreak, when hope makes all of us beautiful.

Studio M Sheer Floral Halter Dress

Product Description: The luxury of silk in a sheer, floral paisley print halter dress with plunging neckline. Knee-length. Dress, 100% silk. Lining, 100% silk. Dry clean only.

This Dress Will Change Your Life Customer: SarahD

Proceed with caution (or not) because this dress is transformative, and don’t say I didn’t warn you! It is deceptively sexy because it’s a below the knee dress with a silhouette that slides along your curves, form fitting but not tight. And the silk! Smooth and liberating, like skinny dipping in the ocean. The high empire waist and halter top changes the dress from demure to sex goddess. A thin string is the only support for the girls, ladies, so there are two options: stick-on bra cups, which have always made my breasts look lopsided, or braless, which is not just for hippies anymore. The Venus in me was born from this dress. Here’s how I remember it:

It was December 2003, and I had just returned to my university from a year studying abroad in Chile. I left a country I loved and a man who broke my heart, before I could break his when my flight left. Over the next several months, I wrote thirty-five letters to him in my journal. On Valentine’s Day, the bold black letters of his name in my inbox made my heart gallop and my breath tremble. The fantasy became real, and suddenly, I was terrified. I opened the email and responded immediately. Heartbreak breeds scarcity thinking. A few days after that message, I ventured into an expensive hair salon and told the stylist, “I want my hair Halle Berry short.” With her 2002 Oscar, Halle was the trendsetter, the history-maker. The stylist took a pair of massive scissors and with drawn out snips, lopped off 12 inches of hair that I donated to Locks of Love. Twelve inches to let go of my first love and shed the dream of running away to live the expatriate life. Surprisingly, once I cut my hair, I acted more “feminine,” wearing dresses, skirts, even make-up. My mom told me I looked different, pretty. In September, with money from my first job post-graduation, I bought this dress. In October, I wore it for the first time after a night with a revolutionary lover. The morning after, I stood in front of the closet, my skin warm and naked after a shower. This dress beckoned me, and I didn’t feel the least bit intimidated by its siren song. My body could do that, and therefore, I could wear clothes that mirrored these confident and euphoric feelings. I had fallen in love with myself that morning and discovered how abundant love really is when I know where to look for it.

2 comments

Lady Lou: I bet you get lots of compliments when you wear this dress.

SarahD: It is a showstopper! That day, I walked to my car and got a rain of piropos from a group of men. Yes, I thought, I am f**king beautiful, and my body can do that.

Alfani Pink and White Dahlia print Nightgown

Product Description: This sleeveless nightgown with pink dahlia flower print is both effortless and lovely. Full-length, sleeveless. 95% polyester, 5% Spandex. Machine washable.

The Nightgown That Made Me A Mother Customer: SarahD

I usually walk around the house in yoga pants, sweats, or flannel pajama sets. This nightgown changed all that. The color reminds me of a pink Crepe Myrtle in full summer bloom, and the dahlia flower print explodes like firecrackers all over the fabric’s design. Soft, lightweight, very touchable. When my first son was born, this dress was there for me morning and night, as I waddled between couch and bed, nursing an insatiable baby, wondering when will the highlight of my day not be sitting on a sitz bath or escaping the house for a thirty minute drive around the city. It combines comfort with beauty, which apparently are not mutually exclusive.

4 comments

Mia M: I’m thinking of buying this nightgown for my daughter who’s about to give birth to my first grandchild. She and I clash over clothes and style, and I don’t want to give her this dress and start a fight. Would this be a good gift for her or should I get something else?

SarahD: My mother gifted me this dress for my first Mother’s Day when my son was a month old, and she is the fiercest, most beautiful and independent person I know. She met my father (stationed with the US Air Force in Panamá) at a YMCA dance, married him, and at seven months pregnant, came to the US. She is the consummate Latina who never left the house in tennis shoes until well past menopause and, even then, only to go to the gym. She knows how to lucir como una Latina. I inherited many of her finest traits: her flawless skin, her wide nose, her dainty ankles and wrists, her independent spirit/stubbornness, perhaps even her taste for foreign lovers. However, I did not inherit her love for clothes, shoes, make-up, or her patience for a Sunday night hair straightening routine.

She enjoys buying me clothes. Not including black items, about half of my closet she bought for me as a gift. While pulling this nightgown out of the reused, pastel pink gift bag, I must have had an “oh, another one” look on my face because she threatened to return it. Once I tried it on though, I never took it off. This dress marked my transition into motherhood, and my mom made sure I would lucir, even with leaky boobs and sore nipples. Your daughter will love it, she will love you, but she might not admit that to you out loud, and she might not be ready to take the gift with grace. Give it to her anyways.

TT: I always wear the same grunge-style pajamas, flannel pants and a big, button-down flannel shirt. I want to try something new, but I don’t want lingerie. Would you recommend this dress?

SarahD: This dress is loungewear. Rest assured that your flannel pants are not getting subverted by itchy, lacey frills. I remember the grungy outfits I used to wear once a month for the free dress days at my Catholic middle school, the boxy shirts and baggy jeans, a la Nirvana. My mom never failed to remind me how pretty I could be, if I just didn’t look like an ugly boy all the time. Twenty-five years later, I realize, she’s right, that grunge outfit I hid behind had less shape and color than a cardboard box. She understands my style better than I do and is not afraid to nudge me out of my comfort zone. This nightgown will feel as comfortable as your flannel pjs, but the braver act is trying something new.

Studio 1 New York Red and Ivory Scroll Print Maxi Dress

Description: Turn heads no matter where you go. Red and ivory scroll print maxi dress with front keyhole neckline and halter top. Full-length, sleeveless. 95% polyester, 5% spandex. Lining, 100% polyester. Hand wash, line dry.

Choosing Love Over Fear Customer: SarahD

My mom buys me a lot of clothes in her Sisyphean task of helping me look prettier, but this dress I bought myself, or, rather, the unbridled, confident, beautiful, unafraid woman living inside me did. Instinct bought it before I could talk myself out, and I am learning to listen to that voice for more than just purchasing a dress. This dress was a gift to myself for crawling out of my second, more severe, bout of postpartum depression which started when my son was diagnosed in utero with a rare musculoskeletal disease. I found comfort in eating, which was convenient while pregnant, even those weeks of pumping when my son couldn’t latch, but when the food was no longer going indirectly to baby, I couldn’t deny that I was using it to avoid how scared I was to become a mother of a special needs baby.

Mornings were the hardest part of the day. The baby started to fuss about 9:15. I would fret, fumbling with bottle parts, frantic that if I could just get a fucking bottle then I wouldn’t be such a fucking awful mother who couldn’t fucking figure out what was wrong with her screaming fucking child. By 10, he was asleep. Though relieved, I believed I was an inept mother. I turned on a “dinosaur Train” for my two-year-old and retreated to the bedroom to cry on the carpet until the baby woke up from his nap. I felt disconnected from my children, ashamed that I found not joy but anger and helplessness in new motherhood. I stayed home with the kids most days because I had no desire to leave the house. A good day was taking a shower. Leaving the house for anything other than a medical appointment was a feat. Postpartum Depression was a glacier that carved a canyon between my sons and me. It hijacked my thoughts with an absolute power, convincing me that I was a horrible mother. When my son was three months old, I started to see a trainer who ran fitness classes especially for women. My husband and I perfected our “pass-offs” as I came home from an early morning workout and he zipped to work, a quick kiss hello/good-bye. Working out became a routine act of rebellion against depression’s tyranny. After nine months of exercise and a commitment to self-care, buying this dress for myself was another.

2 comments

Flor: Where have you worn the dress to?

SarahD: I went on a girls-only trip to NYC to visit college friends and wore it to my first Broadway musical The Color Purple. My favorite scene was when Celie, played by Cynthia Erivo, tells her abusive husband that she is going to leave him. On a chair in the middle of the stage, she sings about being poor, black, and ugly, crecendoing into a final decree, but she’s heeeeeeeeere! The entire audience gave her a standing ovation, in the middle of the play! When Erivo reprised the song, her transcendent voice became a call to action. We sat enraptured, inspired by Celie’s climatic transformation, awakened by our own souls vibrating from witnessing the beauty of a risk, of choosing love over fear, of watching a woman find the courage to renounce a despot and start to listen to the voice of the divine within. Check her out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ok14OZhdg

A New Day Black, Sleeveless Maxi Dress with Slits

Product Description: A must-have for any woman’s wardrobe. V-neck and belted at waist for maximum hourglass accentuating. 93% rayon, 7% spandex. Machine-wash, gentle cycle.

The Woman and The Dress Make Each Other Customer: SarahD

I love myself in this dress and not just because it hides my unshaven legs. Wherever my weight is on that Ferris wheel, this maxi dress will meet me exactly where I am. Most of my life, I’ve preferred clothes that didn’t draw attention to myself or were low-maintenance like t-shirts and jeans, but my secret favorites were always my dresses who waited patiently for me like heirloom jewels. Most of my life, I’ve pined for a beauty that is a fantasy I’ve consumed like a goose fattened up for foie-gras. Its rules told me who, and it was never me; what, and it was never clothes made for a body like mine; where and when, and it was only acceptable for special occasions. This dress has edged its way into my daily life, teaching me that I don’t need a reason to be beautiful, that the moments when I feel Lawrence’s “sense of fineness” are rooted in noticing my body with pleasure–when I hold my sleeping child and feel his unconditional trust in his warmth and weight against my chest, when I pump my arms bringing groceries in from the car, relishing my biceps, when I do something outrageous and out of character, like wear a dress, and the air that tickles my legs reminds me I’m here to celebrate my body, not hide it, be afraid of it, or apologize for it. This is a lesson still in progress.

Closed for comments.

Sarah Dalton was the Managing Editor for Reed Magazine, Issue 153 where she coordinated an oral history project about the aftermath of a mass shooting called “Gilroy Strong: A Community Speaks.” She is an alumna of VONA, Macondo Writers’ Workshop, AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship, and a graduate student at San José State University.? Her nonfiction has
appeared in MUTHA Magazine, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things,” The Sun’s
“Readers Write,” and Reed.

Hedges

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Gabriella Navas

The hospital didn’t smell like a hospital.

It smelled like hairspray and new textbooks. Like plastic sofa covers or the wax of an unscented candle. My mother’s room, in particular, smelled of buttercream frosting and anise.

I inhaled deeply, suddenly reminded of the last Noche Buena I spent at home: how Mami and I stayed up late making coquito, stealing sips of rum straight from the bottle.

“Conoces el secreto?” she asked, already tipsy. “Mira.”

She opened the cabinet above the sink and took out a jar full of star anise, shaking it like a makeshift maraca as she popped her hip slightly and stuck out her tongue.

“Este.” I watched her add half the jar to a pot of boiling water, followed by a handful of cinnamon sticks. She paused, looked inside the pot, then at me. “Demasiada?”

“No hay tal,” I shrugged.

“No hay tal?”

“No hay tal,” I repeated, my tongue heavy with alcohol.

“Bueno,” Mami said. “No más coquito. Este año, estamos haciendo jugo de canela.”

It wasn’t funny, really, but we were drunk together for the first time in our lives, so we broke out laughing: hers a wheezing, hearty laugh and mine an anxious, overcompensating one.

I was two weeks post-suicide attempt, which of course she knew nothing about.

During my college years, she’d witnessed my depressive episodes, but she always chalked them up to the devil or technology or both, often saying that you couldn’t have one without the other. I never bothered to correct her. I wanted to prove to her that she didn’t need to worry about me, though I knew she always would.

“Incluso en la otra vida,” Mami told me once. Even in the afterlife.

I won’t talk about the empty hospital bed. At least not yet.

After we finished making the coquito and cleaned up the kitchen, Mami and I sat on the front steps of her house, unfazed by the cold. We watched the neighborhood go quiet around us: a still life interrupted only by stray cats skulking down the street and the passing of booming cars. A few doors down, a neighbor came outside to turn off his Christmas lights and gave us a slight wave, then disappeared back inside before we could return the gesture.

Mami took my hand and said something about how small it made hers feel, a subtle way of reminding me that I took after my father. I studied her profile: her upturned nose, her cleft chin, the beauty mark near the corner of her eye.

She was the kind of person who turned everything into a love story: the way doors fit perfectly in their frames, contracting and expanding depending on the season; the way the wheels on her shopping cart squealed like giddy, crushing teens; the way her necklaces tangled together in the small wooden jewelry box she bought with the first paycheck she ever earned.

“Querida,” she said after a while. “Qué pasa?”

“Nada, nada. Estoy bien.”

“Mentirosa,” she teased. “En serio, hijita. Qué pasa?”

“No se si…me gusta quien soy,” I whispered.

“Y por qué?”

There were plenty of reasons to not like myself. But my mother understood this only as an insult to her motherhood and, even worse, an insult to God. And maybe it was.

“No importa, Mami. Lo siento.”

We stayed like that for a little while longer, knowing full well that it was safer to remain unspeaking. For Mami and me, silence was always a selfless act—never a weakness. It was a meal we could prepare together, a delicacy, something we could chew on without ever having to worry about it breaking our teeth.

“Se está haciendo tarde,” my mother said, standing up. She walked up the steps and I heard her open the screen door, then stop. I turned around to look at her.

“Estás bien?” I asked. She gave me the same soft smile I imagined she gave her students when they told her they wanted to be astronauts: like she was afraid of what gravity would do to them once they realized they were powerless to it.

“No tienes que amarte a ti misma ahora mismo. Sé que es lo más difícil. Créeme.” She put a hand on her heart. “Pero…deja que mi amor sea suficiente, Valeria. Hasta que aprendas a amarte bien. Puedes hacerlo? Para mí?”

I wanted nothing more in that moment than to make her feel like her faith in me wasn’t wasted. But I hesitated for too long. The sheer weight of her love was paralyzing.

“Okay,” she said. She wiped her eyes and went inside. I stayed there for a while longer, nervously scratching at my wrists, waiting for her to come back, but she never did.

I realized then that some separations are anticlimactic: they end with a conversation, not a fight. Sometimes they end simply because one person is tired of trying to escape the maze of the other person’s obstinance. Here is the truth: our relationship was built on avoidance, a lifelong plena carefully choreographed to keep the peace. But avoidance is not the same thing as being unaware. Mami saw it all—my suffering, my defeat—even if she said nothing about it.

I was gone in the morning. I thought that my leaving would let her out of the maze, but maybe it just created a new one. Maybe my leaving was what made her sick.

That was three years ago.

Back in the hospital, nurses flickered around me like fireflies: there one moment and gone the next. None of them could get me to talk or move. I just sat there, collapsed on the floor, staring at the empty bed, hands numb, breath shallow.

There should be an afterlife just for mothers, I thought. A place where they can finally rest, where they can’t remember or miss the children who left them when they were alive.

Where Mami couldn’t remember me.

Gabriella Navas is a Puerto Rican writer hailing from Jersey City, NJ. She is the author of What the Locusts Leave Behind,a collection of short stories about what it means to rebuild. Her poetry has previously appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Tulane Review, and AERIE. She is easily distracted, frequently smitten, and always willing to talk about the healing powers of Chavela Vargas’s discography.

The Twelve-Step Guide to Getting Married Without a Partner

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Karen Gonzalez-Videla

One: Ensure you live at least 1,000 miles away from that aunt who calls you every other hour to ask if you’ve finally found a man who glues you to his body at night like a glob of lotion. Take a plane to that town you saw on TV last week, the one that’s a couple of miles away from “Middle of Nowhere” national park and has less than 2,000 inhabitants. Rent a one-bedroom cabin. Check that it doesn’t come with a couch people can sleep on, and if it does, buy a chainsaw, cut it, shred it to pieces with a woodchipper, and toss the shreds in a nearby gully.

Two: When your aunt calls, she’ll scream into the phone “My sweet pea, how many hearts have you broken?” Tell her you broke fifteen. She’ll want to know whether you kicked one man in the balls so hard that he doubled over and vomited into his polished leather shoes, or if you yelled “You fucking pervert!” into his right ear so loud that he needed a cochlear implant. Say yes to everything. Add a little “you know me so well” and a snort disguised as a chuckle.

Three: Prepare a story about a man called Thomas Hunnington. He was born at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center at 6:27 in the evening. It was a breech birth, so the doctors cut him out of his mother’s womb like that tentacled alien in the 2012 Prometheus movie. The technical term is “caesarian section.” He scored more than 95% on every High School test he ever took, becoming every teacher’s shooting star. He once witnessed a physical fight between his Calculus and AP English Literature teachers because they both craved to name him subject leader, which, according to twenty-one years of school tradition, could not be awarded twice. He was offered a full-tuition scholarship at UC Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, and UPenn. He chose UC Berkeley because he relished the aroma of his mom’s brioche and the tickling of his Persian cat’s whiskers at seven in the morning. He’s everything you’ve ever sought for in a man.

Four: Set an alarm at one-hundred percent volume for a time that simulates randomness and lovesick-despair, like 1:17 in the morning. Jog from your room to the kitchen at least four times (add more if you’re still not out of breath). Call your aunt. When she picks up, spurt out random details from Thomas’s backstory, like how he’s slept with his feet uncovered ever since his grandmother told him toes could suffocate, or how he taps his nose with his index finger whenever he’s thinking, or how he can only wink from his left eye, until she begs, “Calm down, sweet pea, cause I can’t understand anything.” Start again, but with less panting and word-spitting. Stay on the phone until the sun peeks through the blinds and bathes your sheets in gold. By the time you hang up, you should have mentioned the word “love” at least twelve times.

Five: Draft a memory in which you and Thomas bike for fifteen miles to a field of sunflowers in the early days of June. Your bike is pastel blue, and Thomas’s maroon with a white stain on the handlebar. It’s the first time you don’t clog your ears with alternative music because the creaking of Thomas’s feet on the pedals is enough to make flowers bloom before your eyes. Thomas announces there will be a biking race and claims the tallest sunflower in the field as the finish line. He screams “Go!” and the motion of your legs on the pedals becomes a windmill in the midst of a firm breeze. Thomas reaches the sunflower two seconds before you, but you grin as if you’ve just won an Olympic gold medal because this is the first time you’ve raced with a boy who hasn’t let you win.

Six: When your aunt asks how you remember these details, tell her that love does that to you, that it ingrains a memory into your brain like the lyrics of a childhood melody.

Seven: Wait some years, preferably one or two.

Eight: Set Tuesday aside to browse through wedding invitation templates on Minted.com. Find one that doesn’t require an image of you and Thomas holding hands by a dock as seagulls harmonize above the water. One of those with a circle of leaves around the bride and the groom’s names will work. Customize it so the circle sparkles with sunflower petals and seeds that intertwine around each other like legs on Valentine’s day. Listen to the forecast for your family’s town and set the wedding date as close to the next catastrophe as possible (hurricane, snowstorm, volcano eruption, worldwide migration of Albatrosses, anything). Order enough cards to invite your aunt, parents, grandparents, sisters, best friends, nephews, cousins, cousins twice removed, etc.

Nine: Seal the wedding invitations inside peach-pink envelopes with flowered stamps, mail them, and let the rush of arranging your first scam settle in.

Ten: Call your aunt and spell out your dream dress: A-line cut with a V-shaped neckline. Laced backside, so that your shoulder blades float in the cloth like leaves on water. Enoughpadding at the front to elevate the curves of your breasts without turning them into inflated balloons. And most importantly, silver sunflowers sprouting from the waistline and spiraling downwards in a series of braided vines.

Eleven: Your aunt, parents, grandparents, sisters, best friends, nephews, and cousins will call crying because the receptionist with the short black skirt at the airport spread her lips into a smile and said with a squeaky voice that planes are not allowed to fly in the midst of an impending hurricane/snowstorm/volcano eruption/worldwide migration of Albatrosses. Think of that scene in Lady Bird where Marion drives away from the airport and realizes she has let her daughter fly to college with nothing but a mother’s stoic face, how she turns the car around and runs into the terminal, how by the time she’s inside her daughter is already up on the clouds. Let mucus and tears culminate on your face as you mumble, “I know, I know. I just wish you could be there.”

Twelve: It’s your wedding day. Slip into the A-line cut dress with laces and padding and sunflowers and vines your aunt mailed as a gift for finding the man who will efface your last name with the effortlessness of a Staedtler Mars Plastic eraser on a Walmart-pencil mark. Bathe your face in Sephora foundation until your skin is as freckle-free as an antique porcelain doll. Paint your eyelids in shades of rose and your lips a nude beige. Cover the white spots on your nails with a coat of watermelon pink and adorn your hand with a silver bracelet to conceal the nudity of your wrist. Dig within the wiring of your brain for the notes of Richard Wagner’s Bridal Chorus you heard at your cousin’s wedding some years ago, walk outside the cabin and into the grass fields beyond it and breathe yourself in.

Karen Gonzalez-Videla is an undergraduate at the University of South Florida. She’s currently pursuing a degree in Psychology and Creative Writing, and she loves combining these two passions in her work. Although she writes about a variety of subjects, she focuses mostly on the immigrant experience and the exploration of one’s womanhood. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in Ghost Parachute, Sidereal Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day, Menacing Hedge and other places. You can find her on Twitter at @Gv12Karen.

Before you visited

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Laura Villareal

I lock-boxed every 50 cent piece
of vending machine jewelry

still inside their acorn capsules,
each one, a childhood prophecy.

I scattered holy water & salt-
ed the boiling pan until it turned ocean.

Vacuumed the bird’s nest
inside the fireplace,
still full of fox fur

nebula colored eggs
cracked like bone

china, gold filling the crevices.
I’ve always filled time this way.

But I left the front door open
& cats gathered on the lawn.

They left koi on the porch in piles
& hid mice in the flower pots.

I would have flooded the street
in candlelight had I known
you’d be here so soon.

I would have hidden
my fists in my pockets,
until compressed diamonds.

I would have traded
diamonds for starlight.

I would have made the world
give itself up to you. I would have

welcomed you to never leave

Laura Villareal earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. In 2018 her chapbook The Cartography of Sleep was published by Nostrovia! Press. Her writing has appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from National Book Critics Circle, Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, Key West Literary Seminar, and The Highlights Foundation.

Francis

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Marilo Nuñez

Roger doesn’t want to go to see his sister. He clenches his jaw and continues hitting the ball into the hockey net. He is outside playing ball hockey by himself. It is cold out and the leaves are beginning to turn. The weather has cooled dramatically from one day to the next. Only yesterday he was wearing a t-shirt while out with his friends. Fall is fickle that way. This November wind could freeze your fingers if you aren’t dressed for the weather. His blue jacket is thin, but the physical exercise keeps him warm. He focuses on the ball.

His foster mom yells out to him from the living room window. She is leaning against the ugly brown couch that blocks all of the light coming into the house. She shouts through the window screen, her words muted by the wind blowing in his ears. Roger, it’s time to go and see your sister, she is saying, it’s time to go say goodbye. He ignores her and continues to hit the bright orange ball into the empty hockey net. He is comforted by the sound of the wooden stick scraping its edge against the concrete road beneath him. Methodical sounds have always soothed him.

She’s family, he thinks as he slams the hockey stick into the ball once again. Why is he dreading this so much? The knot in his stomach is tightening, telling him that it doesn’t matter, so what if she is family? HIs breath comes in short gasps now. He’s so angry, he can’t breathe. He sees, in his mind’s eye, his foster mom, sitting there, having tea and cookies with the social worker. As if this is just another regular day. Their laughter rings out from the window. They are waiting for the hour to take him to see his sister so that he can say goodbye to her, forever. His anger makes him tremble and he hits that ball so hard he tips the net over.

He’s leaning down onto his thighs, now, to catch his breath. And he’s thinking about what he has to do. How is he going to say goodbye? This makes him angrier even than the time they took him away from Molly when he was eight.

His foster dad is standing on the sidewalk facing the road where the boy is slamming his anger out onto that tiny ball. He stands there with his hands in his pockets, not saying a word. He’s supposed to come out here and tell him it’s time to go, but he doesn’t. He can’t. He knows how hard it will be on the boy and he’d rather just give him a few more minutes.

The boy picks up the fallen net and begins slamming that ball into it again. Let him get it out of his system, the foster dad thinks. Roger stops suddenly and looks to his dad. He is breathing hard as he turns back and stares at the empty net. He drops the stick and grabs the ball, puts it into his jacket pocket and turns towards their car without saying a word. They both walk in silence towards the car.

“I’ll find you, Francis. I swear I will.” Those are the words he is saying to himself as the car pulls onto the open field. The sky is grey, and he sees his sister standing there, looking so small and lost in her green rubber boots, her brown tights and her blue dress. He’s forgotten how small she is, because five years have passed. She must be nine now. She is wearing a faded yellow sweatshirt that is one size too big for her, with the words Beach Bum across the front. She looks unwanted. He tightens his mouth and looks away.

Francis’ pin straight brown hair is in her eyes as she leans her head forward towards her chest. Roger can’t tell if she’s crying or not, but he suddenly feels like telling her to run as fast as she can. A small noise comes alive in his throat, but then dies and sits there, in silence.

They are both being adopted out to new homes. The news came just a few days ago. Adoption, when you have been in the system for a long time, is like winning the lottery. But he doesn’t feel like celebrating. He feels like someone has punched him in the stomach. He wants to be happy with the news of the adoption. Because he hopes that the new home will make him feel less afraid, less unsure of everything. More wanted. He needs the stability of a home, a place for him to feel safe, to feel like himself again.

Since he was a kid, he’s always felt like a loner. Molly, just a kid herself when she had him, pushed him into being the man of the house because she just couldn’t cope. So, he was responsible for taking care of the six of them, the six siblings. He doesn’t even want to think about the other four, the younger ones who were sent to other foster homes. He doesn’t even know where they are. But he and Francis, they were sent out into the system together. And they kept in touch. And now, his sister standing here in this field, she’s being sent away. Really far away.

Francis’ brown eyes still can’t find his. Her head is down as she fiddles with her sweatshirt’s zipper. He kneads the ball inside his jacket pocket, it’s helping him to stay calm and not cry. The social worker is saying something to his foster dad as they lean against her brown station wagon. Why are they in this field? There are farmhouses and barns all along the ridge line but nothing else really, for miles and miles. It’s a strange place to say goodbye.

“Come on you two, we don’t have all day. Go on, hug her. Hug your sister Roger. Tell her goodbye.”

He moves towards Francis with what feels like lead inside his legs and she looks up. He knows those eyes like he knows that the sun will come up tomorrow morning. They remind him of their mother, of Molly, when she would look straight into his eyes and tell him he was her little man. This was before she started drinking and before she would go out for hours at a time and leave them alone to fend for themselves. Before the police were called and social services decided all the kids were better off in other homes.

Francis looks like a scared rabbit and again he has the urge to tell her to run. She pushes her bangs away from her eyes and smiles shyly at him, smiling with pride at her older brother. He nods to her that it’s okay and she runs towards him. She clings to him, letting out an exasperated sob, the kind that keeps inside of you like a clenched fist. He knows that her throat must feel like a raw wound because he’s been there. The desperation of loss clinging to your throat like a sickness. She’s crying uncontrollably now. He hugs her to him, tight.

“I’ll come and find you Francis. I swear it.”

A little lie he tells her to try to make her feel better. Or maybe to make himself feel better. He can feel her hot face pressing against his stomach as she holds onto him for dear life. She is sobbing now, and he can’t make out what she is saying. The social worker is trying to pry her away from him and he is standing like a statue, frozen in place. The social worker finally disentangles her and pushes her towards the car. Francis doesn’t turn back to face him, and he can see that her shoulders have fallen all the way down by her knees.

Roger is silent on the walk back to the car. He gets in first and stares out across the field as the station wagon with Francis inside, drives away. The silence in the car is deafening as his foster dad traverses the front to get into the driver’s seat.

“I got to pee. Can we stop here?”

Roger says this while the car is driving past a forest of trees on both sides of the road. He stands amongst the trees and tries hard to pee but can’t. Suddenly, up ahead he sees a deer, caught in the headlight of his vision. The two share a moment of recognition, of understanding. About how life is not fair and that sometimes someone has to die in order for things to be better. He zips his pants back up and takes out the orange ball from his pocket. He whips it across, and it slams into the neck of the deer. He jumps back in surprise, at his strength? At his precision? At his audacity? The deer jumps up and twists its head in mangled shock and bolts towards the highway. A car coming fast in the opposite direction is suddenly overtaken by the deer that is running frantically for its life. There is the screech of tires and a loud blast of a horn and the car is suddenly on its side in the ditch between the road and the forest.

Roger watches his foster dad running across to road to the overturned car. It is the brown station wagon that faced them in the field. His foster dad is calling for him, but he can’t hear a word, he just sees the man’s mouth moving and everything is in slow motion.

A lone green rubber boot lies against the asphalt as the medics and the firemen try to pry the car doors open. There is nothing but the sound of an incessant horn blaring into the dusk’s embrace. Nothing but the sound of a silent scream bellowing into the never-ending night.

Marilo Nuñez is a Chilean Canadian playwright, director, and writer. She was the founding Artistic Director of Alameda Theatre Company, a company dedicated to developing the new work of Latinx Canadian playwrights. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies at York University. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, and Playwrights Canada Press. Her short story “We All Want to Change the World” has been turned into a podcast @Line720. Follow her on Twitter @marilonunez99.

Cuentos y Leyendas for the End of The World

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Bessie F. Zaldívar

If your count is right (it is), the world has ended for us three times now. You want to mean something big by us, like all millennials or something. But thanks to all the infographics that keep coming up on your Twitter feed saying who is doing what in all this, you now know you’re not even a millennial but a Gen-Z. You feel weirdly betrayed by this fact. From what you gather, Gen-Z say like a lot in and eat tide pods. You do say “like” a lot. “Us” can only exist within your life frame, 1997-2020, within your reality, within your country, family, etc. Some us are bigger than others and you’re not sure that means anything.

The first time the world ended, you were too young to understand it. It rained for days. You slept with your 19-year-old mother and 1-year-old brother and many other families in a church, on the floor, wrapped tightly with grown-up’s jackets and sweaters that smelled like sweat and sun. In candle-light, the older women tell stories, scary stories, from their own piece of floor or mattress. You will grow to know these stories and people who have sighted the characters in them, La Sucia and La Llorona and La Lechuza.

Your father and other men had to stay behind, looking after the flooded vacant houses in case los ladrones came in the night to steal, taking advantage of the hurricane. Military helicopters dropped supplies every other day. One of them crashed down. The mayor of the city was in it. He died. The world was brown and underwater and murky. And then it wasn’t. Ten-thousand people died, faceless, drowned by a hurricane with an English name, Mitch. Killed by something they couldn’t even pronounce or spell. You are glad it wasn’t named Maria or Pedro or Juan. Many more would’ve died if the beast had been namesakes with our cousins, our mothers, ourselves. We wouldn’t have been afraid. But Mitch? Mitch sounds like any gringo motherfucker ready to spit on your face. Spit until you and yours drown.

The second time, on June 28, 2009, you were still too young to understand but old enough to be afraid. You wake up that Sunday and there is no power, where the incessant drone of the old fridge and the voices from your grandmother’s telenovela usually are, there is nothing. Silence. Maybe a rooster or a bird. And then, suddenly, a helicopter, far away. Your mother’s and grandmother’s voices. An explosion, another one, and then a ring. A ring so high-pitched it must have cut all the trees in the mountain you live in half, with the precision of a saw. For weeks, everyone stays home. At first, we use the time to clean the house over and over. To open drawers that we haven’t in years, to throw out shoes and hats older than you. At night, your family, like many others across the country, uses a battery-powered radio to listen out for the name of those that have been killed and, at 9 PM, tune in for Cuentos y Leyendas de Honduras, a 90-minute long radio show in which Jorge Montenegro narrates the stories you heard all those years ago, at night, in a church full of people. There are sound-effects this time, whistles that stand in for wind and thunder for the most dramatic moments.

But this deteriorates quickly. Soon, everyone’s hair starts to look like an old toothbrush. There really isn’t any food or water, but not because people rushed to the stores and took it all. The stores were burnt. The fast-food American-chain restaurants too. When you finally leave your house again, all that remain are the bones of these places. Half of a McDonalds arch, a vandalized Burger King wall, a broken yellow slide from a Wendy’s playground. Vaguely, you understand your country doesn’t have a president anymore and people are being killed and many are missing. Vaguely, you remember throwing up in that same yellow slide once, during a birthday party.

The last time is now, of course. Old enough to understand and be afraid. It reminds you of both last times and it’s also bigger, global. And this time, you tell the stories. La Lechuza, La Llorona, La Sucia. But the people reading this could google those stories if they cared for them, so instead you tell them like this.

Trade these like playing cards, lotería cards, que se yo. It doesn’t matter.

La Llorona, the woman who caught her husband cheating, drowned their two children, and then herself. Denied entry to heaven until finding her sons’ souls, she stalks children near rivers, ready to drown them and steal their souls. She cries for them, for the children souls she lost. “The Weeper”

I’ve had three surgeries. For my age, I don’t know if that’s a lot or very few or what. But what strikes me about these is that, in paper, they were all considered aesthetic surgeries. I’m not not-vain, but this still sounds weird to me. I’ve also paid for them all out-of-pocket, myself. The first was the removal of a dark, somewhat hairy mole. It was the size of a Coca-Cola bottle cap. It rested, unbothered, on the right side of my chin. It was carved out of my face using local anesthesia. Years later, I forget I ever had it, and I also, unconsciously, will rub with my thumb the space where it used to be, up and down, sometimes in slow circles. Hey, I know. Very sexual. By the time other women’s clitorises came around to my life, my phantom mole had given me all the training I needed.

The second time was not aesthetic at all. I contracted HPV from a lover. By the time it was detected, my only treatment option was to have a sort of “cone” carved on my cervix using a laser. I’m doing a poor job explaining this. Yes, because of the laser, it was considered aesthetic. It burned the HPV-cells in me. No anesthesia could be used. I bled for days. I told no one. I was 19. Every so often, close to my days of ovulation, I will feel the faintest pull under my belly-button, deep inside me. I can feel the doctor pulling and burning those cells in me.

The third, and last, was a few days ago. Eye-muscle surgery. Local anesthesia and some sedation. I woke up in the middle of it all as the doctor cut and snipped the muscles behind my left eye. The nurse said, “her blood pressure is rising.” Both my eyes were shut. Days after it, my eye is blood-red. I cry bloody tears. I’ve never known a greater physical pain as the muscles inside my eye socket heal and turn and adjust. My eye leaks, and leaks, and leaks. I carry a tissue under it, permanently. I’m a weeper and I’m also missing some things, while not children, parts of my body. Parts of me.

La Lechuza, the shape-shifting owl-woman who clings to the ceilings over babies’ cribs, ready to suck their life out through their navel the moment parents close the door, turn off the light. “The Owl”

I’m young, so young I still haven’t run away from this house. My mother holds a large, fabric-cutting scissor to my belly. Slowly and meticulously, she snips the air above by belly-button, three times. It is as if she could really see an umbilical cord growing from me, like an immature lemon tree.

“This way,” she says, raising her index finger, her perfectly manicured nail, “La Lechuza can’t pull you up. But if she does come, don’t look at her.”

Have you ever read those fake-psychology facts that plague Twitter and Instagram? Like, “if you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason it is because someone was looking at you” or “the average person only uses 10% of their brain.” To this day, when I wake up in the middle of the night, alone, I look up immediately, convinced La Lechuza is up there, staring at me. Convinced she must be the reason I wake up so much at night. And wouldn’t that be very on-brand? For a woman to be the reason I cannot sleep?

The world has ended three times, but in between those times, it has also exploded several more. Like when, months after I do run away, my mother shows up at my door, her eye swollen shut, her beautiful face bleeding. Or months after I move to the United States, four men shoot her, missing barely. Or when she gets Dengue, another plague, and when doctors try to draw blood from her veins, it comes out in cubes, like a popped-out ice tray.

It’s not a fictional owl-woman that wakes me. It is my mother. Even three countries apart, the lemon tree that once grew from her navel to mine, tugs me awake. It whispers, Bessie, only you can take care of your mamí. Bessie, your mami never made it home. Her body will be found in a ditch tomorrow morning. Bessie, your siblings will call you anytime now, crying. Pick up. Bessie.

If anyone knows how to cut this haunted cord, please let me know.

La Sucia, the woman who couldn’t get married to her lover because she had never been baptized, so she lost her mind, especially after he found someone else and forgot her, quickly. She never took off her wedding dress, and now she roams the streets looking for him, dressed all in white. She haunts drunk men, luring them as a beautiful woman and then transforming into a monster, at the very last moment. “The Dirty”

Two weeks ago, I woke up in San Antonio. But, for a brief moment, before I opened my eyes even though my ears were already alive, I thought I was somewhere else. I thought I was home. I thought I was on the bed I slept ages 11-19. In my house, which is in another city that also is named after a Saint. A she-saint, Santa Lucia.

It was the rooster. The rooster tricked me for a moment, and I was home. Later that first night, I would be tricked again. As I tried to fall asleep, and the neighbors of my Airbnb played Ozuna and Daddy Yankee and some rancheras. I slept like I hadn’t in a very long time, huddled by the familiar umps-umps-umps and the clinking of beer bottles. The parallels between these Saint-named cities were many. San Antonio is the city of the United States with the largest majority-Hispanic population, I learned later. But, at the time, I swear I could feel it in the air. I ate tacos every day. My traveling mates stopped asking me what did I feel like eating.

And then, one morning, I decided to have breakfast by myself at a Honduran restaurant called Geneses. I ordered un desayuno tipico, with eggs and beans and corn tortillas and plantains and chorizo and aguacate. I ate slowly. A flat-screen T.V hung on a corner. It periodically went out, freezing, and then came back again to a new image. The lost image forever gone. An old couple next to me seemed to know the owners. We had the same accent.

My uber picked me up at the front of the restaurant. “Why this place?” he said. “Is it like Puerto Rican?” “Is it like Mexican?” “Is it like Argentinian?” “I was so humbled when I was sent to Argentina, all those poor families that can’t even feed their children and still choose to feed you.” “I mean, most parts are shitholes, I’m sure you know, but there are some sights.”

Bessie F. Zaldívar is a Honduran writer and poet. She is currently getting
her MFA in Fiction at Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in F(r)iction, On the Seawall, Salt Hill, The Acentos Review
and elsewhere. To read more of her work visit bessiefzaldivar.com

The Immigrant’s Pandemic

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Angela Maria Spring

Angela Maria Spring is the owner of Duende District, a mobile boutique bookstore by and for people of color. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and you can find her recent poems in Rust + Moth, Radar Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and Pilgrimage. Her essays and reviews are at Catapult, LitHub and Tor.com. Follow her online at Twitter at @BurquenaBoricua.

Brother, in Pieces

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Leslie Contreras Schwartz

You were five, or eleven
years old. a .22 bullet
clinking your teeth.

you were twenty-
five and asking me to stay
without asking. you were

eleven, or fourteen, teeth
punched out by boys.
Twelve when your swallow

& the end and the vial, crumbled

and the dollar bill, your saved
pennies. golden red copper in its
day old scar, under your sleeve

and my cut-up arms. Let’s count
them, I said. The splits in your totaled
car, your knocked out face. My forearms

covered, already bleeding for you.

I can buy so much, this throw down
bills of wet sorrow collection plate.

and I humored you, love you.
Come here, sweet, I’ll save something for you.

You were four when I left and hit
my floor. I’d lied. I never came back.

Left my head where I fell it. I laid.
my neck waiting for snap while you

watched. stayed lying.

Men kept coming
and flattening.

Get up, you said. Get up, sis.

I spent my nineteenth birthday
at the gynecologist’s office

getting multiplying cells
scraped. then drove home to
eat with dad and other brother

to nightglow and television.
where were you?

mom can never come
to such things and I can’t ask
where you left. She told you

what happens anyway,
the girls these girls become.

The girls beneath lids with my son next to me. My daughters.
And you. My children that aren’t you. And you.

At 20, I gave you a penny & you
ran hide-and-seek with shadows.

My first apartment infested
with ghost girls. And you.

And orphaned. We should have
shaved off our hair. Shared twins
and heads. We thought

the same shed, the dead rodents in our parents’
wall. Get the fuck outa there—I said, slamming the door

instead saying See you next month
see you I’ll see you

next year, or tomorrow,
eleven or twenty. Please
let it be twenty-six,
twenty-seven. To myself,

to my son or my brother.

I will be your
eleven or thirteen for you, swear

on my child’s piggy bank.

Knocked face and all the ones.
I would spend every last penny,
every last bill to see you come brighten

my door, ours.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the author of Who Speaks for Us Here (Skull + Wind Press, 2020), and the collections Nightbloom & Cenote and Fuego (St. Julian Press, 2016, 2014). Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, among other publications. She is the current Houston Poet Laureate.

The Fifth Commandment

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Juan Morales

Every time Mom wanted to cuss,
she’d say “chuleta con papas”
or “miercoles” instead
of the swear words my dad muttered
toward the heart of the matter.

Porks chops, potatoes, and Wednesday’s
were her musical equivalent to
the “Oh shit” or “dammit” she felt
but never said. Meanwhile, Dad
would corral cuss words from

every cardinal direction. When he would lose
his reading glasses, he’d exclaim,
“Where is that piece of shit?”
Mom surprised us with her calm
“I don’t know where you left

that piece of shit.” I always gasped,
“Mom!” in response. In my dad’s most
flustered moments, we joked
about his ears turning red, then white
and then imagined shooting steam

like a cartoon kettle. Mom somehow
walked into his storm and defused the unfurling
anger until the room was calm again.
In witnessing, they helped me to learn to honor
the profanity of the mother and the father.

Accept their balance
of words to help you
let go of whatever angers
you have clamped
all around your heart.

Juan J. Morales is the author of three poetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times (University of New Mexico Press), winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine, and a Professor and the Department Chair of English and World Languages at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

Holy

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Ruben Quesada

By Iliana Rocha

Irene Garza, 1934-1960

What matters is not what she confessed, but
what he heard: I will never be yours. Any incongruity,
violence the speed of light, lightning rage, desire punctured

by light’s split second, razor-sharp, sawtooth, light
knifing through the cathedral windows at the point past
lightning. The gray storm clouds of manhood

thundered through his hands, she died by them, & this poem
will go no further—no familiar detour casual
in its delivery—to describe the violence, unabridged.

What mattered, the locals said, was her beauty,
her silhouette tortured by the decade in which women
were being built & rebuilt, especially if she happened

to be Latina. A purse, shoe, & lace veil—the necessary
paraphernalia of femininity gone dark
into a canal. In the center of every horrible geography,

there is a man named John we run from, but the map
grows legs to follow us, the map pools
& lakes, oceans into an ocean to drown us, despite

attempts to drain the Gulf of Mexico from the folklore.
I think of all the women buried in bodies of water.
I think of the water prophetic in its churning.

liana Rocha is the 2019 winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry for her newest collection, The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Karankawa, her debut, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). The recipient of a 2020 CantoMundo fellowship and 2019 MacDowell Colony fellowship, she has had work featured in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latin American Literature Today, RHINO, Blackbird, and West Branch, among others,and sheserves as contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her three chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo are the loves of her life.