The two Cristeros were sitting at the Abajeño Cantina in central Guadalajara after having spent several months in the mountains of Jalisco waging war against the military forces of the anticlerical President Plutarco Elías Calles.
Turtle Light and Ocean Sleep are works of multimedia and sculpture mediums, respectively, depicting the natural world with fantastical elements.
There is an army of ghost trees ringing the coastlines of the world.
Once verdant, evidence of a healthy environment,
now leafless, bleached white in death,
phantoms of the forest that once was.
This will help you to remember
what a forest was. This one, North Temperate.
Might have been where we are standing.
Here, adjust the strap
around your forehead, rest this over
the bridge of your nose. Click the button.
See.
Each corner of a globe
With no corners
Born of the sea as
Liquid or solid
In dances with humans
And dances between humans
Fear and hope meet in their own dance
As the earth cries
Each insect turns a fraction on its axis, a cocooned child shifting in a half-sleep,
oblivious beyond cool mud to flames of wildfires as they streak across the hills
of Paradise.
when they’re born…
they g r o w
they m o v e
crawl and
c a
l v
e
Looking deep into my child’s eyes,
I see both my ancestors and
my descendants, I fall
into a meditation about Mother Earth…
Zero degrees outside while cozy warm inside
Mother opens apartment’s bedroom window
reels in creaky clothesline of dried laundry
In the final days of the Age of Dwindling Resources, Alejandra Sánchez, as young and fearless as a latter-day Joan of Arc marching to war, led a ragtag procession of nearly two hundred women from their city of Santillana del Mar to the sandbanks of Playa El Sable where they gathered to witness the end of the world.
We slept at gunpoint but woke up alive, so it was a good night.
For the first time since Bai disappeared, I didn’t dream of monsters. I dreamt I was in my tiny childhood bedroom and my mother was alive and calling me for a pungent dinner I could smell wafting from the kitchen, sweetness and spice.
Captain’s Log: The last stage of our short Kerosene Age is upon us. Stationed here, at the Rainbow Rides Fairgrounds, the end we’ve all been anticipating is now wetting the souls of our feet. Our best estimates place us only a day ahead of the imminent deluge.
There isn’t a hard edge to be found in the hut. Round walls slope into concave ceiling. Amoeba-shaped windows display the world outside: ferns, wavering in steam, and droplets dangling from speckled red toadstools. So vibrant, these exterior views could almost be cinemagraphs, mounted on soft grey walls, inside the climate-controlled seal.
When the rain came, no one in Mossville, Georgia, could have ever imagined the Ohoopee River would spill over its banks and become the reason for so much tribulation. Everyone assumed a brand-new Army Corp of Engineers earthen dam would hold back the river for the next hundred years. But they were wrong.
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LAST DECADE OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 1600 scientists, including 100 Nobel Laureates, signed a “letter to humanity” which concluded, “We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”
—Come here. Closer. I know you love a good story, but the thing is…this is a long story…no, it’s not even a story…it’s a complete fugazi!
The Bourbon Restoration had a dark cool ambiance and friendly young servers and was a hit with local professionals. No matter that its name evoked antediluvian attitudes. After a couple of visits, Chuck Sullivan decided it was his favorite place to go after work.
Tom Cuthbert opened his garage door. A light snow topped the denuded branches of his crabapples and lay like a pale gauze over his yard. Winter’s depressing, steely-hued clouds clung tenaciously to the lake and its surroundings, still chafed about the warm air that had broken their hold a few weeks earlier.
reprieve thickening
in threatening
the still winter light
encrusted as a high
gray sky in thickness
turning in another silence
as in the waiting
Now that she is gone – meningitis in a Brazilian convent – perhaps it will be easier to put everything into perspective. Perhaps now I can figure out what I never fully understood while she was alive.
In front of the door of her building, Maria’s male black cat Dash is waiting for Steve’s cuddles. Steve lifts Dash up and kisses him on the head. Dash allows it.
— This thing could kill me, he says, and Maria knows Steve means Dash, as usual.
Steve places Dash back on the ground. Dash disappears behind the brick wall surrounding Maria’s garden. Maria and Steve go inside. Apparently, Steve is allergic to Dash.
When her uncle came to visit from Florida, he brought a bagful of shells.
“Look at you! How big you’ve gotten! C’mere, c’mere! Give your Uncle Glenn a big hug! Aren’t you glad to see your Uncle Glenn?”
Her siblings (“half-stepsiblings,” as her mother joked about her confusion over the distinction between stepsiblings and half-siblings) were jealous that he gave her the big conch shell, but her Uncle Glenn had said that she was the youngest, so she would appreciate it the most.
Like the original mother Mary, Mariá Elena Moyano – known affectionately as la negra by the masses – was considered a mother not just to her own two sons, whom she adored, but also to the thousands of children of Villa El Salvador, the largest shantytown in Lima. She had run hundreds of communal kitchens and the extensive Glass of Milk program since her days as president of the Women’s Federation of Villa El Salvador. By February of 1992, by which time she was vice-mayor of the town of three hundred thousand people, the program delivered a glass of milk each day to sixty thousand children and elderly who would otherwise succumb to malnutrition.
In France, I met Irving Rivera, a Puerto Rican born in New York City, about twenty years older than me. He lived on the same floor as I did in the Maison Américaine at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. I saw him often, since there was a cafeteria in the basement of the dorm room, where both he and I often ate. We gravitated toward a group of Spanish-speaking friends, some Latin American but mostly Spaniards, who also lived at the huge American dormitory. I would also regularly see Irving on a table in the plaza behind the Maison Américaine, with a sign saying, “Independence for Puerto Rico Now!” He requested donations, ostensibly to help rid Puerto Rico of its American colonial masters.