Joseph Rios – The End of a Fresno Summer

Joseph Rios

The End of a Fresno Summer

For Ethan Pacheco

The leaf footed bugs are crowding the ripe pomegranates
and my little cousin wants to crush juice for the first time. 
The soil in the backyard is like moon powder 
and it’s the color of ash. The hills are on fire, again.
You know, I’ve long admired our chemical skies, but 
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sun this red.
It’s like we put a silk over the lamp again. It’s red 
like the tissue in my hand stained with my blood
or the pink fruits reddening skin or, of course, the arils
as they spill onto my faux granite countertop. 
I think there’s a breeze. Man, I hope that’s a breeze. 
I should say one of those DeNiro lines like: I wish 
a big rain would come and wash over this whole town
and I want you to know that I mean it. Me and the kid 
make enough to fill a bottle to take home. No one knows, 
but I’m counting down the days ’til I get to ignite my own flame
in the wall furnace. Boy, what a roar it’s gonna make. 

Monique Quintana – mapping peach and nautilus

Monique Quintana

mapping peach and nautilus

            For Jamie Moore

When queens probed you underwater to test your intellect, you grew scales and swam to the surface, but you decided to stay in the water because you thought it was safer. You used an ammonite rind to make a boat for your daughter. She sailed past ink monsters and silver kelp. When your daughter was beached, she asked herself, haven’t I been here before? Knowing what she knew about ammonite, she built a schoolhouse and taught her own damn self under the palms. She learned to examine the bones of nectar to put in resolutions. She wrote play scripts to rival the fuzzy parts of breathing. She missed breathing underwater.

Monique Quintana – before the grapevine / pray for rain

Monique Quintana

before the grapevine / pray for rain

            For Kamilah Okafor

You write a story, and you start at the end—The daughter walks the horse through the vines and the freeway until a clatter of bells tells her she’s home. Her mother keeps a mechanical horse in the city, and every winter, her mother makes the trip out to feed them. One year her mother asks her to take her place. The clouds had frozen their grain buckets, but the horse ate away, and for the first time, the daughter knows what makes the sound of rain at night.

Monique Quintana – My Plume Drunk / or Love is Fiction


Monique Quintana

My Plume Drunk / or Love is Fiction

            For Carleigh Takemoto

I find Macaw beneath the lattice of bone, dozing the third and fourth bikes we rode last dawn. I only find crave in the turn when luck buckles my shoe strap to keep me from drowning. I don’t think of luck anymore, not until now, when it teaches me how to look the right way on film. And now I’m enamored with the green sea. Luck tells me not to remember it again. Macaw reminds me of things that I bought me, parachute sleeps storied of mule deer from our mountain, but when I come close, touch her head, she murmurs love, the violent umbrella, the last pour rite there that luck gave me.

Monique Quintana – Being Aries in Sylvia Savala’s Swimming Pool

Monique Quintana

Being Aries in Sylvia Savala’s Swimming Pool

            For Sylvia Savala

I never believed in the plot. The rising action, the climax, or the fall. The little chalkboard mountain that an animal could climb over. I was a ram, stubborn. My blue dress converged to pain belts at my thighs. I began to wonder if the men in Sylvia’s paintings could hear us charting our attributes. I didn’t believe in the plot. I just thought that maybe a ram is combustible with a ram. Now I write a story with this in account. It’s not a plot. Just two rams making fights in the snow. In the morning, we talked shit and devoured cold fruit and fish.