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the jasmine hedge is intoxicating by Gretchen Mattox

I fear being like her and I am like her the critical part that wants to hurt the other render them helpless and needy no one measuring up, everything falling short like the woman on the news who bit the nose of the pitbull that attacked her retriever (really happened) I like to break skin, … Read more

Bugs By Morgan W. Strauss

            Instead of thinking about Sonny, his traveling companion wishes she were in Spain.  How far of a drive is it from Granada to Barcelona?             Twenty miles south of Fresno a sign says Visalia 24 miles. Sonny pilots the car with dirty hands, a torn shirt, an unintentional beard, last … Read more

Absorption by Robert D. Montoya

This is the sound             of losing myself: the drips of continuous rain as it             disperses itself             along the wet ground, *** Where Costa Rican vines, like syringes, suck the water (tender roots like a child *** sucking upon a nipple, absorbing the minerals, the liquid of … Read more

Melanie L. McNair: The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair *** Community In Shock at Vicious Murder; Vigil Tonight There will be a vigil tonight beginning at 7PM at the site of the slaying of Sally Green, 111 Great Heights Place, in Echo Park. Friends and neighbors are gathering to remember Green, 35, who had only recently moved into the … Read more

Petra by Robert D. Montoya

I’d watch you cook with your manteca in your brown-tiled kitchen fuzzy chanclas, paisley-printed muumuu dress. *** We found that curly black wig in the hall closet You started crying We were just pretending. *** We’d sort the gravel from beans Eat potatoes, skin-on Raw and sandy We never talked. *** We didn’t need to. … Read more

From Where I Sit by Robert D. Montoya

The world is distorted: *** A tiny crack where walls meet Forms a burrow, where a spider Weeps its web onto the sinews Of my increasing thought. *** The dust on the cabinet is settled, staged with a perfect conception; With one large sweep Of breath, it is in chaos, *** It is indivisible as … Read more