I think sometimes about my old customers. The ones who died young.  There were so many of them: painters, roofers,  landscapers, handymen. Salts of the earth.  Some had been coming into my shop for decades, always with the sense  that it would go on like that forever,  the two of us – shopkeeper and customer – […]

My name is Bosco Maltez. I’m an artist, poet, photographer born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. My artwork focuses on the city I was raised in as well as “lines,” in my poems and my photography, which represent paths that we take that lead us to where we are meant to be. This […]

It is the soundsthe sounds which surround,that fill my brainwith mild and quick adrenalinethe sounds which fuel my desirefor change. I lie awake in my bednext to my wifelistening to every exhalethis city takes will you not quiet your anguish? now silence devours the spaceand the more sinister soundsbegin to echo in tandemwithin the chambers […]

Material music hardens, takes form chanting of a world disassembled invoked by the remote song of a bird that once was. Harmony perspiring  from feathered body matter – knowing  eyes listen to past life encoded in petrified shapes. Art a futile attempt like science to grasp the past, mesh it into the present – regardless […]

Yusuf Akman was born in Denizli, Turkey. They are a senior philosophy student at Boğaziçi University whose literary focus revolves around what having a queer identity in Turkey is like. Their works appeared in the online journals Trampset, Raised Brow Press, Resurrection Magazine, Cypress Press and Pink Plastic House. Twitter: @Akman_Yusuf_

Two swords. One stained by sharp forgiveness taken. The other sheathed, disguised asadoration that is unveiled as analysis. I begged for the acrid iron smell of blood. The altar was set at the base of my own feet. There is nothing that compares to warmth. Sometimes it must be sliced out. Smoke is rising at […]

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their poems have appeared in Yes, Poetry, Gone Lawn, The Collidescope and Thimble Literary Magazine. They live by the simple but true motto that “feelings matter,” every shape and size of feeling. They believe that every small act of […]

Mauricio Moreno is a 1st generation Colombian-American artist and writer, originally from Elizabeth, New Jersey. He moved to California to fulfill his life mission of being a writer and sharing the stories of others to bring readers closer together and heal the world. His work has been published in Conchas Y Cafe, a Los Angeles-based quarterly […]

somewhere in the nettles of PTSD haze are vague recurrences of the few weeks I went to high school.  The school was built by an architect who specialized  in prisons, and it showed. Great brutalist cement slabs jutting to unforgiving metal doors, where all dreams of bright futures were tempered by  bulletproof glass. and out […]

The day the date the specific now is gone. The words in my mouth dissolve as a bucket of liquid anxiety drenches my upper body, primed for travel across tissue and organs, dripping leaking seeping from my ribcage onto my intestines. It slowly passes. When it does, I want to throw up in hopes the […]