top of page

By Raul Garcia

I don’t know if it was because of what I saw, how I stayed up all the way for the impending dawn, from an impulse to remain awake, dreamless, watching all things occupying the bedroom, invisible, gradually retake form, becoming apparent, forged by sunlight’s drift through the blinds, the skin of darkness slipping, burning through the visible, that I could no longer see my mirror image, just a black smudge of a figure, like a humanesque haze, standing before me unknown to me, my bed, a block of impenetrable darkness, and I was afraid to return to it, fearing I might fall into its prismatic abyss, but the windows, still bright, yet I stayed away from them, how I might blindspot other things, these stains of night that day cannot absolve, how I may never see your image again, because I cannot sleep.



Raul Garcia is a filmmaker from Jersey City, NJ.


Art by Raul Garcia.

By Margarita Cruz

Norteña musician Ramón Ayala is my father, which, is to say is true to some extent by means that my father took my mother or perhaps the other way around in that my mother took my father as they wound their way around a tiny apartment bathroom and a tiny apartment shower where the color of the tile would follow them to their first home in the US as a family where I would trace the grout with my fingers, let the water pour over me as I listened to my parents in the next room fight or sing, sometimes I heard them dance and always Ayala in the middle of their breathing, in the middle of their bed, in the words they whispered to each other at night when they believed me to be tucked away instead of rummaging through their photo albums in the closet, examining the time before me in a jungle I recognized only in dreams—here where in every photo Ayala’s presence was overwhelming; Ayala at the wedding, Ayala at the gas station holding his countless CDs the peddlers would sell my parents, Ayala in the back of a Ford pickup with all of the uncles I remember holding me to the sky to say hello to the abuelos Ayala had outlasted in Tamaulipas where he is still holding parties, still snorting coke in the same fashion as myself—in the dark on some stranger’s bathroom sink becoming lost, him in Mexico and I in Seattle where I am tracing a map of his words into the purple tiles of a stranger’s shower in hopes that someone recognizes that I, too, am a Norteña.



Margarita Cruz is an assistant editor for Tolsun Books, a columnist for Flagstaff Live!, Vice President for the Northern Arizona Book Festival and recently received her MFA from Northern Arizona University in Creative Writing where she exists outside of herself most days at PANK, the New Delta Review, and the Susquehanna Review among others and at @blue_margaritas anywhere.


By Carol Stockton







































andyougetupandwalkoutandrunbacktotheemptyhousealwayshauntedbythosemetwhileyouweredecidingwhoyouwerelivingmostlyamongthestarsdreamingnightrealdaythinkingifhetakesoffallthegarmentseveryselfabsorbedshredthatcoveramyprivatesufferingeventheweightofblendedmemorieswillnotprotectmewhenistandjudgednakedbetweenthefrescoedheavenandhelliwaswrongaboutcapturedaloneinmyexistentialconnectednakedness



Carol Stockton is a photographer, art quilt creator, in-door gardener, survivor of three different cancers, happy writer.


Art by Carol Stockton.

Submission Manager

For info on how to submit, click the SUBMISSION GUIDELINES tab in the Header

SUBMISSION RECEIVED!

bottom of page