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 […]

Once there was a fisher. Poor. Lived in a humble shack by the ocean and always wore the same pair of loincloth and vest. People didn’t despise him, but they didn’t love him either. They saw him with a peculiar mixture of disgust and empathy, and kept an eye on him out of ennui.  His […]

in last night’s dream i knowingly did awful. our love’s trauma snuffs the courtyard, salts it glass-stained—vegetation grows only to house the tongues of snakes, preening to bite. the old hotel encores its chant of honeymoon suites, all of them buzzing  decaywards. my own soul, askew, charms against what was once a mattress, now a […]

i can’t be.and i carry that magical burden of the fact that i can’t be.i can’t be the spectrum of colors that shows up after the rain, to be a good scene.i can’t be the sugar in the coffee that makes it taste sweet.i can’t be a gold key for my folks that feel locked […]

Measure Blue There are browning crescents, where I dug my nails into waxy mottled flesh. The moon is out with a rising sun- waning sharp, soapy pear and thumbprint smooth bark. There are many different kinds of cyanoscopes, holding the green up transforms what kind of sky it is. Arm up with branches- I notice- […]

When my feet touched dark soil, flowers sprang up.  Why does the sight  of meadowsweet make me sad? It reminds me of who I once was.  The power I had,  under the face of the sun.  When I fell, I did not fall alone, now I suffer in the dark,  my sadness, a bitter fruit, […]