A Normal Interview with Daniel Chacon

By Monique Quintana

Monique Quintana: I’d like to talk about the concept of story and how it has evolved in your experience. This semester, I assigned my beginning fiction writing class to read your short story collection Unending Rooms, and several of my students told me that the book overturned their expectations of what a story could be. They felt liberated. Can you talk about what your expectations of a story were growing up, and how those expectations have changed?

Daniel Chacón: Like a lot of writers, I went into writing stories without any sense of craft. I was going on the impulse, the knack. Bernard Malamud says we write because we’re good at it, and I think that’s true—people who write and have that impulse and give up everything to get an MFA and study writing are probably good at it. I had no sense of craft at first, but I knew what I liked, and I knew how to follow language and a character’s need into a story. My first workshop professors said I was being experimental, but I didn’t know I was being experimental. Then I went to the University of Oregon for my MFA, and I studied under one of the greatest writing teachers I ever had. His name was Ehud Havazelet, and he taught us form. He wrote on the board, “Form is necessity in a work of art.” Of course, I rejected it because it was craft, because I was a Chicano and we didn’t need form; we didn’t need craft. We just needed expression.

When I graduated with my MFA, I saw how ridiculous I was being to reject the concept of craft, so I dedicated myself to studying form for about five or six years, and I got to understand what form is. Form is not formula; form is not structure. “Form is necessity in a work of art,” means, to me, that a story should contain all the elements necessary for the ultimate impact, and that all the elements should be so intertwined that if you pulled one aspect out of the story, the whole thing would collapse. This helped a lot because I was writing a lot of character-based stories.

If you look at my first book, Chicano Chicanery, most of the stories are very character based. There was still some weirdness going on because I can’t help but contain the way I see reality, which isn’t necessarily linear or material; but nonetheless, they were the kind of stories you would see in mainstream literary journals, characters with an ambiguous ending. But once I understood what form meant, and once I understood how to enter into a story – which I do through language and I do through syntax – once I got to that point where I understood form – and I don’t think you could ever say that you’re a master at form, but that you’re going towards mastery of form – I started to write stories that were influenced by form and the way I hear character. They just started coming out that way.

I didn’t set out to write experimental stories. I always tried to write a conventional story. But if I was going to be honest with the language, and I was going to be honest with the character, they just kind of went where they did. If you look at Unending Rooms, people would say to me, “You’re writing experimentally, you’re writing theme-based stories,” but they’re really not. I’m following language. If you’re authentic with your own language and your own syntax, it leads you to a direction where you see how reality functions.

I remember in the first workshop I taught, all the young nineteen-year-old males were writing stories with imagery that was male-centered, often centered in their libido, and it’s not they were setting out to write that story, but that’s what was on their mind. That was their reality. They were always thinking about that. I think that you don’t have to assert a political agenda, or a philosophical agenda, or a theme. If you follow language, if you study craft and form, it becomes intuitive after awhile. If you study Kung Fu, you have to learn a lot of forms, and it seems weird and unnecessary, but once you practice those forms over and over again, when you’re walking down the street and somebody taps you, you just get into the stance—what you’ve studied has become instinctual. So it’s a combination of studying form and staying instinctual to the voice and the syntax.

MQ: I found it interesting when you recalled how you were initially resistant to form because of your because of your Chicanismo. I found the way you use form to be very Chicano.

DC: I don’t set out to write Chicano literature, but I can’t separate my writing from my Chicanismo. I can’t separate my culture; I can’t separate my experience from the way I see the world and the way I admire stories. I used to read a lot of Malamud and Flannery O’Connor, but when I got my hands on Cortizar, when I got my hands on Borges—the Latin American writers, I loved the way they told a story, because I was already doing that unconsciously in my writing. It’s a different way of seeing the world.

When Cisneros came out with her novel, Carmelo, she used a lot of footnotes. When people asked her about her experimentation, she said she wasn’t being experimental, she was just being Mexican. I really think there are cultural differences to how we see reality. Ultimately, I think when we create a landscape, whether it’s fiction or poetic, we’re creating a reality. For me, reality is not really that linear. People might think I’m weird if I were to explain some of the things I’ve seen and some of the things that have happened to me. They would say, yeah, that can’t happen, but that’s just the way life is for me. I think a lot of it had to do with growing up in a Mexican family. I had grandparents that were from Mexico and didn’t embrace the narrative traditions of the mainstream.

MQ: The concept of rooms is pervasive in your fiction, especially in Unending Rooms: Stories and also in Hotel Juarez: Stories, Rooms, and Loops. Is there ever any space that is sacred for you, where you feel the need to write it as close to reality possible? You’ve written about Fresno, Paris, El Paso, Juarez—is there any space, landmark, relic, that you feel you have to capture truthfully, or does it all become fiction?

DC: I think what’s sacred is syntax. If I begin to enter into a landscape, and that landscape presents itself in a particular way based on the syntax and the characters’ yearning, I find it a reality that may not be your neighbor’s reality. There’s a quote by the poet Evelyn Underhill. She says that reality is entering into the illusions of your neighbors. So if I’m following into a story, and I enter a landscape that most people wouldn’t consider real, I don’t think that’s necessarily a reason for me to stop. But if enter into a story and suddenly the syntax stops, and it seems forced, and I begin to assert myself too strongly into the story, and it fights the language, then I know I’m not being authentic, and I stop.

Fighting with ego is different than fighting with duende. Borges said that fighting with duende is when you don’t want to let certain things into you work because it doesn’t fit your preconceived image of it. I keep going back to a quote by Borges: “If a writer achieves what he set out to achieve, it’s really not worth much.” So, I have to be true to the language and the character, and inevitably how I see reality. I think the only sacred space is not in time space, but in language, in rhythm.

MQ: I just realized that I’ve been trying to write stories about Fresno-specific places, like the Rotary Playland or Pizza and Pipes. I think it comes from a desire to retain those places in my memory. I find that when I try to capture every minute detail, I feel stifled.

DC: I think what’s happening when we experience that as writers is that we’re entering the story image first. We have a lot of poets on my “Words on a Wire” radio show. I mostly interview poets because I want to learn from poets. One of the questions I frequently ask them is how they enter into a poem. Almost all of the beginning poets say image and almost all of the more experienced poets say syntax. When we enter with an image, its just like we’re entering with an idea, because an image in not disconnected from a meaning for us.

I used to go to Rotary Playland in Fresno a lot as a kid. If I set out to describe it, then I’m saying I want to write about an idea, something that is meaningful to me, and I think that’s what kills a story, when we try to write ideas. However, if I’m writing a story about a little boy in Fresno, growing up in the 1970s, and I follow desire and I follow syntax, it might inevitably end up at Rotary Playland. As you follow language and image authentically, then the images come out. Even if you’re struck by an image, you’re probably simultaneously struck by some sort of syntactical, rhythmical expression of that. You’re really entering with sound. I think the more you study your craft, the more inseparable your syntax becomes from your imagery. We love entering into a landscape as readers and writers and the only key to that landscape is language.

I’ve been reading about the brain and how the whole frontal cortex of the brain was created for us to move along the landscape—that’s also where we create poetry. There’s a connection between movement and poetry. Poetry isn’t static; it’s all about movement. There’s a squirt fish that moves in the water, but eventually finds a home and stays there for the rest of its life, and it starts to eat its own brain. What a lovely metaphor. The movement of poetry and the movement of fiction are like walking into a landscape. As the poet Billy Collins would say, we enter into landscape through language, it’s the only key, it’s the only wormhole into the parallel universe of the poetical landscape, of the fictional landscape.

MQ: Since we’re speaking of writing as a transient act, do you see your projects as separate entities, or does one project birth another?

DC: I really believe that I haven’t written a single book yet. I’m still writing it, and I don’t think the book will be written until I die. I called my third collection Hotel Juarez: Stories, Rooms, and Loops. One of the things that loops means to me is that images come back, and although there may not be a thematic connection, there is a release of energy. If you bring up an image in one story, and then it comes back in another story, in essence, you’re releasing energy from one story to another. These loops are like wormholes. You’re going from one time space to another, and if you’re aware of that, then you can manipulate the energy in such a way that it is in dialogue with the earlier use of that image. If you use it several times in different works, the image becomes more powerful, and it releases even more energy. Even if the reader isn’t aware that you’re doing it, the fact is that the image is vibrating with energy from these other stories makes it a more powerful image.

In my first book, there’s an image of a tubercular bookseller and he’s trying to convince another character, who’s walking around Mexico City very alienated, to buy a book. That tubercular book sales man has probably showed up three or four times in my work, not intentionally, but because that image probably carries for me some kind of meaning, so he keeps showing up, even though he’s a different character. He showed up in Poland one time and again in my story, “Page 55.” That’s a loop.

It has been said that people write the same story over and over again, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I would say that a person is developing artistically and developing as a human being at the same time, because ultimately, there’s no separation between the two. Our obsessions might change. I used to be obsessed with things like time travel, and now my obsession is the brain. Even though our obsessions change, we want there to be development.

MQ: This winter I visited Paris and London for the first time, and I was blown away by how differently race and ethnicity work in those places. It made me think about your stories and also Garcia Marquez’s 1992 short story collection Strange Pilgrims. He was writing about Latin Americans travelling through Europe. I think your work complicates this concept because you’re writing about Chicano-identified characters travelling through Europe. Can you speak about your own experience in Europe and how it informs how you craft characters?

DC: Going to Europe was very similar to the first time I went to Mexico City. The first time I went there, it became exceedingly clear that I was a U.S. citizen, that I was a pocho, even though I identified as Mexican and Chicano. It was an interesting experience for me because it added a complexity to my identity. I wasn’t going home, like I thought I was. I was going into a land where I was a foreigner. I remember, in Chapultepec Park, there was a clown that was doing a sort of stand up comedy, and I walked up to the circle to watch, and the first thing he said was, “Hello, gringo!” in a U.S. accent, and all the Mexicans started laughing, and I wondered how they knew. That was a very othering experience for me, but ultimately a very positive one.

When I went to Paris for the first time, two things happened. If I claimed to be Mexican, people believed me. I could be a Mexican there, and I could speak Spanish there, and they wouldn’t recognize my gringo accent. That was really liberating. One time I spent three months there during the height of anti-Americanism because the “great” president George Bush. There was all the tension between the U.S. and France—people in the U.S. wanted to call French fries “freedom fries” and such. All the White people from the United States that would go to France would say they were Canadian, even though everyone knew they were lying. I would claim to be from Mexico. When I was interacting with the French, I would always speak to them in French and Spanish until they asked me if I spoke English. I would always assert my Mexicanidad. It really made me feel at home in Paris, because Mexicans were so much more accepted there than people from the United States. There is a Latin American community there.

The only people that didn’t buy my accent were the Mexicans. I would tell them I was Chicano and they were OK with that. It allowed me to negotiate Paris in a way I couldn’t have if I was puro gringo. I got to hang out with the Arab men that were hanging out in the Plaza. I would buy from them, and we would exchange numbers. They were very nice to me, and I felt very much at home in their community. However, I also can’t escape my Americanness. So I had multiple identities. It alienated me in a positive way. I was living in a particular way, a way that was more complex than just being a tourist. Anytime you’re pushed away, you’re othered, it allows you to observe a culture in a way that you couldn’t if you were fully a part of it.

I think every writer has had that experience where they’re with their family, and they feel like they’re fully a part of it, but then something happens where there’s a shift of perspective, and suddenly they’re observing their family and they don’t feel a part of the family, and then they write about it. I think the more you’re othered, the more you’re able to see multiple realities simultaneously.

MQ: Connected to the idea of “the other,” I appreciate how your characters don’t fit into the binaries of “likable” and “unlikable” characters. I don’t think fiction could exist without the misfit characters.

DC: To have a fleshed-out character, they can’t be fully evil. I’ll use driving as a metaphor. If we’re driving, and some asshole pulls in front of us, and we’re honking our horn, and we want them to die, we’re essentially wishing death on ourselves because we’ve all done the same thing. People do shitty things. One of the weaknesses of the human brain is how we attribute consciousness to other beings, and in that attribution, we give look at them through a singular perspective. It justifies the way we judge. We can’t do that in fiction, unless we’re really using characters as a theme, as a symbol. We have to attribute a consciousness to them that is more complex.

MQ: In putting your collections together, was there ever any piece that you were particularly devastated about excluding?

DC: I have no trouble killing my babies. In fact, I like it. I learned a long time ago not to be in love with anything I write. Even if it’s really wonderful writing, who cares? I will kill as many babies as I need to make the book better. I will cut off fingers; I will cut off toes.

MQ: [Laughs.] What happens to these pieces? Do they go off into the ether? Are they get used in another project?

DC: When you’re working on a book for several years, you don’t always have distance. So you don’t always know what to cut off, what to kill. The makes me think of the character, Victor, from the “Je Suis Chicano” section of Hotel Juarez. I was working on a novel for ten years, and I got to the point where I didn’t believe in it. I thought it was the worst thing I had ever written. I got the idea to mix it all up and tell it as flash fiction. I took two stories from it. One became the “Je Suis Chicano” section of Hotel Juarez and the other became “Cherry Auction,” a piece in the same book, where a Chicano artist learns that he has talent.

So the other day, about a month ago, I woke up at 3 a.m. and I had a heavy heart. I wanted to be promoted to full professor, but I’ve only had two books since I’ve gotten tenure. I’ve been working on a collection of poems, but I don’t feel it’s ready yet. I still want a lot more time to learn more about poetry. I just wished I had a book. I fell back asleep, got up at about 7 a.m., and I went to my desk to write for a day, to work on my poems. As I’m going through my list of documents, I see this document called, The Last Chicano Novel. I thought, what the hell is this? I opened it up, and it was the novel that I had been working on for years before I cut it up into pieces. I had no idea that I saved it. I thought I had killed it. There were parts of it in Hotel Juarez, but there it was, in its entirety. Three hundred and fifty pages. I read it that morning and I thought, damn, this is good! I thought it was horrible when I was writing it, because I didn’t have that distance. But that morning, I knew it was ready to send out. I took two days to edit it, and then I contacted the publishers of Hotel Juarez because they did a great job with that book. I sent it to them, and two days later they emailed me and said that they loved it and wanted to publish it. A day later, I got a contract. So, from the time I woke up at 3 a.m. wanting a book, a week later, I had a contract for a book that I didn’t even know that I had.

MQ: So that book is The Cholo Tree? When is that book coming out?

DC: Yes, it comes out in 2017. The main character is Victor, a Chicano artist from Fresno who learns that he has talent and ultimately goes to Paris.

MQ: So, Victor is a loop?

DC: If you look at all the details, you can’t say it’s the same guy, but really it’s the same guy. I don’t think that material reality is as important as energy. So, I don’t care if there are contradictions because it’s the story that matters. I’ll just be like Whitman and say I contradict myself.

MQ: Besides compiling your own books, you’ve done the same for other writers. You’ve been putting together Andrés Montoya’s posthumous collection, A Jury of Trees. Can you speak to a moment in that experience that particularly resonates with you as an artist?

DC: When I first got the manuscripts, there was a stack about a foot high, all kinds of notes. They were hard to go through because everything was handwritten. There was one complete manuscript and I thought, maybe I should publish this, but then I found other poems, so I decided to take the completed manuscript and make it one of the sections of the book. I found these poems that he had written in the hospital when he was dying, and they were amazing. They were Rumi-like. They were beautiful, mystical poems from a man who knew he was dying and felt closer to his deity, closer to his source. When he was dying, he was so full of joy. When people came to visit him in the hospital to cheer him on, they would leave cheered on by him. The poems he wrote then are so beautiful. I transcribed them and put them in the collection. To me, they are the essence of his spirit, and now I can’t imagine the collection without those poems.

MQ: I’ve always been drawn to writing that celebrates joy and death simultaneously.

DC: There’s a mystic Sufi poet named Rabi’a. She had a mystical experience where she came into her source, her god. She has a poem where she says, “One day he did not leave/after kissing/me.” It’s so beautiful because the speaker was used to all the men in her life just leaving. It’s so beautiful. I find Andres’ poems from when he was dying to be at this level. I’m having trouble with my own poetry, and I’ve realized that I should be writing as if I were already dead, as opposed to poetry I just want people to read. Andres was writing poetry as if he was already dead. It’s some of his most beautiful work, and it wouldn’t have been possible if he weren’t thinking about death.

MQ: What keeps you writing?

DC: What else is there? When the disciples were following Jesus and others started to abandon him, he turned to those remaining and he said, Are you going to abandon me too? And Peter said, What else is there? I love that answer. What else would I do? You’re it! That’s the way I feel about writing. What else am I going to do? I’ve got to do something.

---

Daniel Chacón is the author of four books of fiction, including Unending Rooms and Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops. He won an American Book Award, the Pen Oakland, and the Hudson Prize. His novel, The Cholo Tree, is forthcoming in 2017. He is cohost of the literary radio show and podcast, Words on a Wire.

Monique Quintana is an M.F.A. Fiction candidate and president of the Chicano Writers and Artists Association (CWAA) at California State University, Fresno. She is working on her first novel, Chola Mona Lisa.

Tunnels by Marytza Rubio

Tunnels by Marytza Rubio

Tijuana

Epifania Fogata gave birth to three girls and four boys. My dad’s bedtime stories were full of defeated warriors and lost battles. Each night my grandmother asked him, What did they do wrong? How could they have won? When he was a teenager, he was entrusted with details of an inherited revolution. Two of his sisters were sent to schools in New England and one was sent to Paris. His brothers were taught to dig.

The walls along the border between Mexico and the Unites States disrupted the natural migration pattern of every living creature that couldn’t fly or swim. The mountain lions and jaguars suffered tremendous losses to their populations. They would have become extinct if not for the ingenuity and vast underground network built by the Fogata Landscape Company. When the mountain lions discovered they could travel under the freeways, their populations boomed and spread across Southern California. Moving the jaguars required meticulous planning. The Fogatas devoted decades preparing for their journey.

Nha Trang

After we all graduated from high school, I moved to L.A., my sister stayed home, one of my cousins became a trophy wife, and her sister backpacked across Southeast Asia. At the farewell barbecue before Miriam’s trip, she asked my dad if he had anything she could take for him when she visited Vietnam. Miriam told us about a documentary she’d seen about veterans who went back to the jungle to do a burial ceremony for the lives they’d taken—and for the parts of themselves now lost. She said she’d be happy to take something or bring something back if that would help him heal. My dad said he had nothing to heal, he was A OK, baby and served himself another plate of ribs.

Laguna Beach

Miriam’s sister Molly Bianchi (née Maricela Fogata) lived in one of those seaside cliff homes that was always in danger of burning down during fire season or falling off the edge of the earth during rainy season. The house’s fragility was part of its cachet: We can afford to be destroyed. The last time I visited that house I was twenty years old. My dad and I had taken a day trip to the beach and stopped in to visit Molly and her new husband. They were overseeing the construction of a gazebo for their telescopes. I saw in her face what my dad was asking me to fight. I saw my cousin get uncomfortable when the man working in her yard asked her a question. The question is in choppy accented English and it frustrates her, and when my dad interjects to interpret, she demands that my father, a veteran and her elder, speak English, please, and she and I never spoke again.

Santa Ana

On my way out of my parents’ house, I carried a blanket and wrapped it around my dad’s shoulders. He leaned forward in the lawn chair with his hands clamped together and his black wiry eyebrows tangled above his eyes. I let him know I was leaving and would be back the next weekend. When he didn’t respond, I moved closer to his good ear and repeated it. He said, “We’re running out of time.”

I took a deep breath and looked at my watch. There would be another train. I sat on the asphalt and joined him in his silence. Coddling him would only upset him and reminding him to have patience would anger him. I picked up a fallen leaf from the avocado tree and started to pinch off the browned pieces when the squawks of Santa Ana’s emerald parrots cut through the dusky sky, loud enough to distract my dad from his brooding. “Next time, bring me a dessert,” he said.

At the train station, a woman talking on her phone said it was “the strangest Monday ever.” She said global warming had made Friday the 13th come late, and what we really had to worry about now was Monday the 16th. As she said this, flecks of ash from the wildfire swirled around us and settled on the train tracks. The latest casualty was some billionaire’s multi-million dollar Laguna Beach house. One of his houses. The winds were forecasted to pick up again that weekend. The news would call it the “Santa Ana Wind Event.” It felt good hearing my city’s name on the news. It felt good to make people afraid.

A bearded man sat across from me on the train and asked for a piece of paper. He said he needed to write down an idea. All the passengers ignored him, so he started to recite his thoughts. I reached into my purse to find my notebook, hoping if he had something to scribble on he’d stop talking. I tore off a few sheets and handed them to him. The man mumbled I was “one of the good ones” before snatching the paper out of my hand and sprawling out in the middle of the aisle to write in silence. I looked down at my notebook and touched the embossed gold dove decorating the cover. The printed text below read We have so many dreams that we cannot talk about them all which I first misread as We have so many dreams that we cannot talk about them at all.

Los Angeles

When I arrived at the Little Tokyo station, my favorite man greeted me with a white rose. He asked me about my visit with the family and his voice jumped up an octave the way it did when he talked to children or homeless dogs. I didn’t respond. We walked past the sparkling metal and glass of the Japanese American Museum and slipped through a gap in the brick wall and down a narrow alley into our restaurant. This is where we came whenever we needed to feel right again. We never said it out loud, to do so would destroy the dream, but when we came here, my fiancé and I pretended we were in Tokyo. The lights of the Los Angeles skyline blurred away and the hammering steel blades of a vigilant helicopter warped the audio fabric of our conjured Japan.

Chicago, Denver, San Francisco

The explosions occurred in the late evening, when the office workers and executives had gone home and the cleaning crews had just arrived. One hundred and forty-seven dead. The targets were undocumented—it took years to uncover their true identities. A smaller explosion with a bottle rocket occurred at a nativity scene in Phoenix, but no souls were claimed. It was later determined to be an act of vandalism not related to the bombings, yet the image of the bubbling plastic of the Virgin Mary’s face become a symbol of national mourning to some, a declaration of war to others.

Himeji City

We got married in my parents’ backyard. The ceremony was celebratory enough to be special but subdued enough to be appropriate. Only his parents and my parents attended, and the next morning we boarded a plane to Japan. I needed distance from the States. Mid-flight, I told him I was going to quit teaching ESL because an old friend of my dad’s had asked me to care for his flock of trained pigeons.

Asuncíon

There are two Guarani phrases I retained from once working with a Paraguayan teaching assistant: Mbaé’chepa and Ipora. This knowledge and a valid passport were the two things that qualified me to record the vocabulary we’d use to build our code. My husband insisted on coming with me and I pretended to put up a fight but knew I would be more productive if I didn’t spend so much energy missing him. “Do you think is going to work?” he asked me the third week in. I only had a page and a half of words we could use. The phrases needed to be simple to scramble and decode, and concise enough to be legible on the small scroll we’d tuck inside our pigeons’ anklets. “Don’t worry about writing a complete sentence,” he insisted, but I couldn’t shut off my years of being an English instructor. “They don’t need to make sense, just get the point across.” He was right, words were all I needed: Coast, Hill, Beast.

Erupt, Earth, Run.

Santa Ana

When I was a newborn, there was a disruptive humming above the kitchen stove that concerned my mother. After complaining about the noise to my dad, she took me out for a stroll. My dad then dragged in a ladder from the backyard and crawled into the attic to investigate. The attic was a glorified crawl space full of itchy insulation, hot, dark, and only one way in, one way out. When we returned from our walk, the humming had stopped and my mom found my dad sitting in the living room staring at the wall, his face pale and wet. He told her he’d gotten trapped. He said that because everything was so dark, he didn’t know if he was left or right or day or night or city or jungle. When he heard his heartbeat echo in his ears like a desperate alarm, he decided to crawl backward, hoping that going in reverse would bring him to the edge of the attic door. If his foot dropped into an open space, he would survive but until it did, he believed he would not. He said this while holding me in his arms, rocking me back and forth and telling me he was sorry.

Montebello

My aunt Christina bought a cap-gun from the neighborhood paletero. As a joke, she fired it at my twenty-six-year-old dad when he was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. His shocked face drained to khaki, like when he got lost in the attic and when they told him he had to have surgery and when they covered his body several hours after I told him, for the second and last time, I loved him very much.

Santa Ana

When I was a little girl, my dad showed me how to set up pigeon traps in our backyard. We’d prop a cardboard box up by one corner using only a twig from our avocado tree, then tie a string around the twig. Dry cat food was the bait. The pigeons swooped down and pecked around the trail leading to the trap. They always did a hesitant little dance when they reached the outer rim of the propped-up box. My dad held his hands like a conductor and I held the other end of the string, waiting for his cue. “Uno, dos, y…” he’d draw out the “y” until the curious bird took its place in the center of the trap. “Tres!”

We set every bird free. The point of the traps wasn’t to collect pigeons. The point was to learn timing.

Tijuana

We arrived at Las Playas to scatter my dad’s ashes. His soul inhabited the altar in my mom’s living room and his name was engraved on a rock inside the Japanese garden next to City Hall. I insisted we wait until a full-moon weekend to scatter his ashes. My Tio escorted us out into the ocean on his boat, far enough into the water where the waves were still enough to reflect the sky, but close enough to shore that I could see the flickering lights of the candles on the sand. My sister read a poem and my mother gave the ocean a bouquet of gardenias and white roses. We poured my father into the moon. The boat lolled atop the rippling waves. We each heard our name echoed in the laps of water. I could clearly see him, smiling and clapping his hands: Uno, dos. Uno, dos. Uno, dos, y…

Laguna Beach

I broke my fifteen-year silence and left a message for Molly to join me in San Francisco for my sister’s book signing. She ignored me. Molly always wanted to be white so she never developed the instincts of a brown girl—there are unexpected gifts that accompany being hated and underestimated for who you are. One of them is sensing when you are in danger. Molly rejected us—and her full self—but our family still honored blood: The Fogata Landscaping crew did not connect her yard to the underground migration network. They did not spare her neighbors.

The sleek black jaguars roared as they burst through the ground, hungry and determined to reclaim their land.

---

Marytza K. Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, California.

www.marytzakrubio.com

AdrianMalec via Foter.com / CC BY

last blues on red hands by Charlotte Covey

last blues on red hands by Charlotte Covey

the ocean stayed

silent; waves quiet, sand

still. windows half-opened made the world

blur— soft light, longing to

kiss my skin. your hands

on the steering wheel, paled

under pressure, a vein in your forehead,

teeth biting down on your

tongue. you washed over me, & i left

musty indoor air, ripped upholstery,

climbed down rocks & shells

to the place where the sand is

wet. it was the first of the

year; i held my

breath, standing at the water's

edge. i wonder if you were

watching me. wonder if you

drew blood when you bit, the way you

drew a circle on my neck with

your mouth. i wonder if you scrubbed

the stains left on the passenger

seat— rusted red, dripped from slits on

dimpled knees made with drunken

fingers & sharpened nails.

---

Charlotte Covey is from St. Mary's County, Maryland. She is currently a senior studying Creative Writing and Psychology at Salisbury University. She has poetry published or forthcoming in journals such as Salamander Magazine, Slipstream, The MacGuffin, SLAB, and The Summerset Review. She is co-editor-in-chief of Milk Journal.

Jo Naylor via Foter.com / CC BY SergioMonsalve via Foter.com / CC BY-ND