cory fisher 

We are holding our first written contest.

The theme is:

According to linguist Joan Corominas, the Spanish term duende originated as a contraction of the phrase dueño de casa (or duen de casa). Dueño means owner/possessor. So duendes are mischievous possessors; tener duende is to have spirit.

In “Juego y Teoría Del Duende,”  Federico García Lorca writes: “Así, pues, el duende es un poder y no un obrar, es un luchar y no un pensar. Yo he oido decir a un viejo maestro guitarrista: El duende no está en la garganta; el duende sube por dentro desde la planta de los pies. Es decir, no es cuestión de facultad, sino de verdadero estilo vivo; es decir, de sangre; es decir, de viejísima cultura, de creación en acto.”

Susana Lezra translates this as: “And so, duende is a power not an act, a fight not a thought. I heard an old guitar master say: duende does not dwell in the throat; duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet. This is to say, it is not a matter of faculty, but of live true style, of blood; that is, of ancient culture, of creating in action.”

Our word limit for this contest is strict; we want your duende in 650 words or less.

Please send us unpublished fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in either English or Spanish in a PDF file. We are looking for work with heart-stopping images, rhythms, textures; you can submit up to three separate pieces.

Finalists will be determined by a team of six editors ranging in age, background, and experience.

Click here to submit your work for consideration.

Winner gets $100.00.

Runner-up gets $50.00.

Honorable mention gets $25.00.

All submissions are considered for standard publication.

This contest will close on December 1st. Our “Duende” issue will be published on the first day of 2020.

Also, check out our new website. We just went live.

Love,

 billy lezra 
Editor-in-Chief

Unlove Song 

 hilary brown 

We get off at Embarcadero and walk
between the stalls, and I don’t love you.
It’s my birthday and you’ve offered
to get me anything that anyone
is selling in these stalls and I realized
over breakfast that I don’t love you.
So I choose a set of five art prints
that a man is selling for twenty bucks,
real Book of Revelation stuff, Dürer-esque
and we walk to the ATM to get money
and you reach for my hand and I
don’t love you. I imagine my face is like
one of those pained hellfire faces in one
of those prints I’m getting
for my birthday, and I’m wondering
how long I can stick this out. Not long,
I’m sure, because I don’t love you.

Past Lovers

(excerpt)
 Taylor Simmons 

We turned into the Big Rock campsite around dusk and you immediately got your running shorts from the trunk and stripped your black jean shorts in the middle of the empty site. I watched you do this from the picnic bench near the fire pit and longed to be as confident as you. I found you beautiful and bizarre.

You ran along the curving road as the golden hour rested on the Joshua trees surrounding you. You made all the food and I felt anxious because I wanted to help, but didn’t know how. It was all still tense because you had all the power because I had told you I loved you but you hadn’t said it to me. That night we wrapped our limbs around one another because we only had one sleeping bag and used it as a comforter, but it was 30 degrees outside. Eventually I moved to the car and kept the engine running and the heater on until I fell asleep. You stayed in the tent. You woke me up with a kiss on my cheek. We went to a coffee shop in town because you had to upload poetry. I read while you uploaded. The baristas called out the name Autumn and then Leaf and then Birch. You looked up and into my eyes. “Those eyes.” You said casually and I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and looked into those eyes. At some point on this trip you became distant because you were afraid of loving me. On one of our hikes you fell to your knees and put your arms up to the sky and yelled “I am being the best that I can for you. But I don’t know if it is good enough for you. You are so wonderful. You are better than me.” These kinds of theatrics I had no patience for and I continued walking, thinking I’ll just keep walking to the campsite, get in the car and drive away. You’ll figure it out. You knew how to get yourself out of tricky situations. But I didn’t.

You caught up with me and we silently stomped back together and then you suggested that we write when we got back. We wrote for what felt like a long time but was really only half an hour. And then we shared what we wrote. It was our versions of the same hike and in this moment it felt like our entire relationship was a story that we were writing rather than living and it felt like we were living art and our life together felt both beautiful and exploited. Later that night I told you I felt alone and you got angry telling me you were right there. But you weren’t. You were somewhere else. We fell asleep without speaking or kissing. I longed for any sign of affection. You got up early and went for a run, still treating me like a stranger and when you got back we packed up camp in a silence that, for me, was filled with rage. We parked in the lot of the same coffee shop. I yelled at you in the parking lot of the same coffee shop and you yelled back, eventually storming away and slamming the car door. I was worried you would be gone for hours. But you were back soon. “We just need to keep some boundaries. You need to understand that when I become distant like that, I am processing things and I am giving as much of myself to you as I can.” You were calmer now and pulled me towards you from the back of my head. We both wore baseball caps and awkwardly angled our heads so that the bills wouldn’t stop us from putting our lips together. We extended our trip an extra night and I was proud of us communicating so well.

the day we turned red

 prose poetry collaboration between billy & liam lezra 

I’m no stranger to broken glass, and you aren’t either. Us feral beasts know how to tiptoe and keep quiet; when to starve panic. So the day you picked me up in that bright red car and told me to peel off the snake skin I just imagined the day I’d be picking through glass to find you eviscerated because:

we’re no strangers to scalpels.

So you picked me up in your bright red car. Your Wife called and you put Her on speaker; I laughed like a harmonica; you said shut the fuck up because She didn’t know I was in your hand, but I kept laughing; we popped painkillers that tasted like California poppies and ate the cold sea and resurfaced

with foam forming parentheses around our lips.

I used to wake up with ghosts and bruises; you used to sleep bleeding; now we’re free of adam and eve; free of the rotten fruit and it’s gnawing sour. There’s nothing to build; nothing to wait for.

Air mixed with air; no touch; just glitter.

 claire wade-hak