Monique Quintana – Eating Sweets and the Domestic


Monique Quintana

Eating Sweets and the Domestic

            For Nancy Hernandez

All night we pour milk into clay cups. As I write this, I lay in a haunted house. I will never believe it again. Rice and milk climb in our throats. This is a ladder to who knows where? This is the only time we can sing a powder soprano. I am a second soprano. I never got to sing in the discant. When I was in college, my white teacher tried to get me to sing the washing machine line from the West Side Story song as a solo with an accent. I couldn’t do it and never went back to that room even though I often passed it. I never sang again. Thank you for laughing at her even when you weren’t there to see it. Now I know this is what ghosts are. When will we do the washing machine? This walk to pine garde is longer than I expected. Chips of stone fall into my rain for fortune. I eat the milk and rice in an old-new bed. It feels neutral in here, like spice in our throat. Spice is not violence if it makes us remember our dead.

Monique Quintana – Stereo Baptism


Monique Quintana

Stereo Baptism

              For Arielle K. Jones

There is a gazelle that waits at our door, mawing until we forgive our mothers. With her, we open our fields emptied of color and paint them green. The rains come in and wash the color off. There’s no feed in the clouds to give us substance, and there’s no river to bathe us. We cut the field in its stomach and eat the matter, and it weeps and says, you’re almost here.

Monique Quintana – If chickadees were born to the tune of oxblood

Monique Quintana

              For Marisol Baca

If chickadees were born to the tune of oxblood,

how brighter would their bodies be? If Sor Juana wrote to the Marquess in oxblood, what would her commandments be? Fold this paper in quarters to make a bed to sleep in or not sleep in. I say that a bed is only good for two things. Don’t eat regret and orange rinds in bed. That’s what my love is. Nuns cup their palms to laugh behind a stone. The scent of birth stalks the rain until it grows more women. There would be a city of women riding into this city on oxen. 

Marathon #3 – October 2021

Author photos of Monique Quintana, Joseph Rios, and Brian Turner.

Marathon #3

October 1-31, 2021

Featuring Monique Quintana, Joseph Rios, and Brian Turner.

Visit the Fresno State crowdfunding website to support our authors: crowdfunding.fresnostate.edu

Monique Quintana

October 2-16, 2021

MFA Creative Writing, Fresno State; B.A. English Literature, Fresno State

Monique is the author of the novella Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019) and the chapbook My Favorite Sancho and Other Fairy Tales (Sword and Kettle Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Pank, Wildness, Winter Tangerine, The Acentos Review, and other publications. Her work has also been anthologized in projects such as Remapping Wonderland: Fairytales Retold by People of Color (Alternating Current Press, 2020), Grafitti (Aunt Lute Press, 2020), and Latinx Screams (Burial Day, 2020). You can find her book reviews and artist interviews at Luna Luna Magazine as a contributing editor. Her writing has been supported by Yaddo, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Community of Writers workshop, and the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat. She was Amplify’s Inaugural Writer of Color Fellowship winner and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Fresno’s Tower District.

Author website

Joseph Rios

October 9-23, 2021

MFA Creative Writing (in progress), Bennington College; B.A. English Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Joseph is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations (Omnidawn), winner of the American Book Award and was named one of the notable Debut Poets by Poets & Writers Magazine for 2017. He is from Fresno’s San Joaquin Valley. He’s been a gardener, a janitor, a packinghouse supervisor, and a handyman. He is a recipient of scholarships from the Community of Writers workshop and CantoMundo. He is a VONA alumnus and a Macondo Fellow. In 2015, he received the John K. Walsh residency fellowship from the University of Notre Dame. He is a graduate of Fresno City College and the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently attending the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College. He lives in Fresno.

Author website

Brian Turner

October 16-30, 2021

MFA Creative Writing, University of Oregon; B.A. English, Fresno State

Brian is the author of two collections of poetry: Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He’s the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. Turner served in the US Army as an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq (2003-2004) and he deployed to Bosnia prior to that. His poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He directs the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University and lives in Orlando, Florida.

Author website

Sarah A. Chavez – Halfbreed Helene Ponders Her Name in the Numerology Section at Barnes & Noble

Sarah A. Chavez

Halfbreed Helene Ponders Her Name in the Numerology Section at Barnes & Noble

Helene (French spelling): Greek, meaning “bright, torch, light”: pronounced with an “een”
or an “aine” or an “enn” sound at the end, Helene doesn’t feel as current as the more
forthright Helen or the airier Helena. – “Helene Origin & Meaning,” The Name Book

No, not “Helen,” classic, simple. Not “Helena,”
culturally specific, the name of sexy Latin
actresses with full dark lips and generous hips.

Helene—“hell”: where no one wants to go
and “lean”: what lazy workers do against
brick walls, smoking filter-less cigarettes.

I am not a lazy demon ! Helene thought
indignantly, so loudly, it made her lips move.
And a name without nicknames too. No 

abbreviations for reprieve from the moldy
six-letter tyranny. She envied her friends who got
cute intimacies to denote familiarity: Leti for Leticia; 

Angie for Angelica. She’d asked her mom
once for a nickname or even a pet name,
What about “Lene,” she’d said, Or “Lenny?” 

Her mother crooked an eyebrow. Hell, H had said,
even “Hel” would have been fine. Helene sounds
so formal, so adult—the name of an “an old soul,” 

a despicable phrase said to and about her by men
her father’s age asking her out while waiting tables
or steaming milk for a latte. Ugh, & at Starbucks,

the pronunciations were atrocious! Those
are the times she thought fuck it, and tried on
names like Sally, Maria, or Erica—such delightful

straightforwardness! Her favorites though
were the ambiguous, androgenous names like Sam, Tyler,
Alex, or Jordan. Better to be unknown than falsely
labeled or misunderstood. The reality, of course, was that
she was a half Mexican, half Midwest white, Californian
with a French spelling of a Greek name. Like all things 

in her life, this nomenclature lacked clarity & singularity.
It was—modestly put—a goddamn mess.