Self Portrait as a Difficult Name

by Paola Capó-García

Paola was my mother’s middle finger to my father’s mother who demanded I be named after her. Edith was too risky of a prophecy, my mother is not a gambler. Italian for small, which I tried to be my whole life and failed, according to the worst parts of myself. Perhaps she named me this as a prayer.

Doomsday

by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Fig of Unfolding

by Octavio Quintanilla

Tonight, I expect the only star in the sky to be so bright I’ll forget all I know about sorrow, how it feels like sandpaper against skin, how it looks like the old woman my mother has become.

Vulture

by Rachel Sahaidachny

She lifts from the dead thing she was eating  in the road and hulks gargoyle large on the corner of a house. 

How well do you know the dust? Its mother?

by Samuel Ace

I know something about the apostrophe the part that says I own I also know something of the dry river and the brown dust that coats my shoes

crash your car (after marquette)

by Marzi Margo

an android app for logging every time my car has hit another car 

Remedy

by Angel Dominguez

Eat the heart of your oppressor con un habanero. Add some salt y limón to taste.

Every year my funeral playlist grows longer

by Angel Dominguez

No -body told me growing older

What You Knew About Virginity

by Rosa Alcalá

That it was something to be given in holy matrimony. That it was the only thing you had to give. That once you handed it over, you could never get it back. That it was a tightly woven hammock rocking an idea inside you.

Dream of a Trans Sister

by H. Melt

Can you imagine/transitioning together/in the same old house...

Bliss Montage, a Review

by Bleah B. Patterson

Ling Ma understands that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the result to change.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona Is Absolutely Not Set in a Post-Trump Era, and That’s the Point

by Bleah B. Patterson

Lapvona sets us right in the heart of a medieval town that absolutely could have existed, tucked away in a valley with an almost comically evil lord on a hill just above who is influenced by a transparently fraudulent clergy member with predictably selfish intentions.