(Fade In): EXT: PARK BENCH — MORNING It is grey. Lightly misting. YOU, an attractive young woman, are wearing maroon leggings. Jacket that crops tight above your waist. Hair up. Sunglasses on your head. Putting on day cream. You act like you are waiting for a FRIEND (me). Impatient. You film yourself with your iPhone.  […] The post Illuminated by Andrew Skola appeared first on The Los Angeles Review ..read more

The God of Freedom by Yuliya Musakovska Translated by Musakovska and Olena Jennings Review by Nicole Yurcaba Interview by Tiffany Troy Publisher: Arrowsmith Press ISBN: 9798987924181 Pages: 116 “Our Home is Not a Bottomless Pit” Review by Nicole Yurcaba  Ukrainian poet and translator Yuliya Musakovska’s poems have been translated into more than 30 languages and […] The post The God of Freedom by Yuliya Musakovska Review by Nicole Yurcaba and Interview by Tiffany Troy appeared first on The Los Angeles Review ..read more

Bangladeshi American poet Shams A. Momin is the author of seven full-length books of poetry in Bengali. His selected poems were published at the Kolkata Book Fair 2022, India, and an upcoming book, Critical Essays on the Poetry of Shams A. Momin, edited by Dr. Abedin Kader of the City University of New York, is scheduled to be out at Dhaka Book Fair in February 2024. A regular contributor to many renowned literary journals in Bangladesh, India, and the U.S.A., Momin’s poems have also appeared in Queens Bound 2021. Momin studied English literature at Central State University in Ohio, wher ..read more

I used to date this girl who would put on sunscreen every night before bed. At first I thought it was just lotion, but the smell was unmistakable, that slightly chemical, almost-sand almost-chlorine scent, and the bottle on her nightstand read SPF 50, with little blue waves drawn on the front. We didn’t even live near water, instead in the shadow of a mountain thick with trees. When I questioned or teased her about it, she offhandedly said it was something she picked up from her mother. That it was better for skin than regular lotion. I didn’t push it, assuming she knew better than I did.  ..read more

The sun’s rays slip through the gaps in the gate, and your children ask for a snack to hold off hunger until you finally decide to leave the pool behind. Fruit snacks, ritz crackers, goldfish. A boy at a table next to you is crying—he does not like his snack, and his brother wants yours—and so you offer to trade. Thank you, says the boy’s parents as he munches goldfish from the bag and his brother pulls saltines from the sleeve.  You get to talking, as parents tend to do when in close proximity for this many hours, and you say that they look familiar. He has a hipster haircut and cool gla ..read more

SIN DOCUMENTOS Of God, we only understood His wrath, and still, we spoke about Him  as if He were an older brother. Another one of us: brown and buzzed cut,  running into the ditch, learning about the dangers of tall grasses.  Of bullets. Uninsured. On weekends, He’d drive across the bridge  to get drunk off two-dollar liquor. Listened to country music  while sucking bone marrow when afternoons got cold and lonely.  Not the good kind of songs. The ones with heft and heartache,  pulled from the deepest wells of His throat. Untranslatable.  Then, like ..read more

This was back when I was dating Ziggy, when I didn’t know any better, about anything. He had this leather jacket—vintage, according to him, and handmade from the most venerable bull on his grandfather’s ranch—that he wore all the time, rain or shine, hot or cold, and I loved being able to pick him out in a crowd or a photo or an old, pixelated video of him playing bass in 10,000 Merrimacks, the tribute band he’d formed during college. Even five years out from graduation and a bona fide Texan after a failed master’s in psychology, he still flew back to Massachusetts a couple times a year to lim ..read more

Winter Meanwhile, what had been green went gray and became a concept from a manual on keeping orchards. Outside the window, the civilization of reason is in uneventful bloom. The experts in weather are enumerating the weather’s virtues, while a chance radio station calls on us to take the walks we’ve planned for July. The lava of snow. Nature, under constant surveillance, reveals its mysteries, and the press runs a photograph of animals frozen in place. The gulf between culture and nature grows deeper, that justice may descend upon us in triumph. Justice descends. Nature has always been dumber ..read more

Mother is weaving a net on the ceiling made of sailors’ rope. She braids, knots, and untangles, muttering instructions from a maritime book she found in Granddaddy’s collection. It will be sturdy and beautiful, she says. When it’s done, we’ll climb in it, hang upside down from it, and sleep in it.  Mother is always working and so she is always above us, looking over us as we play. Sometimes she curses and sometimes she sings. When she sings, we ask for pie.  We are building a mountain of pillows. Mother calls down to us to find our baby sister, so we pull her from beneath a boulder ..read more

I. I have unfinished business with the penis. Don’t we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, yes, cultural differences aside) that is obsessed with, privileges, worships, and fears (losing) the penis. This isn’t simply a “man’s world,” this is a world designed by and for the penis. Many brilliant feminists have made brave and poetic attempts to write their way out of phallocentrism. I love Hélène Cixous’ plea to women to write their desire through their vaginas, her cry for the vulva to be heard (“je veux vulve!”). I shivered with joy when I first read Luce Irigaray’s love ode for the mu ..read more