by Brent Ameneyro She made the best red rice and frijoles.After the table was cleared,it was filled again with tamales—peel back the huskfind something steaming, damp,what some might call flesh-toned. After the table was cleared,something else appearedfrom the kitchen, and so it went like this all day.After the flan went cold,Mayté turned into a Crested […]
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by Linda Petrucelli It is difficult to begin new things when you are nearly seventy. The ridiculous condition of your bones (the titanium implants) discourages adventure. Incidental mental lapses create doubt about the reliability of your synaptic connections. For every septuagenarian who takes up Taekwondo or learns to speak Portuguese, there are hundreds more like […]
by Brent Ameneyro I walk past the half-finished cinderblock buildingthe not yet blooming Jacarandasand the police lights turning the laundromat bluein search of a floweror a church that could make me feellike the child licking tamarindotalking to himself I watch two volcanoes at sunseton the left a woman sleeps or dies of grief she glows every […]
The Art of Boiling Water
by Rose Strode Water is easy to drink. Too easy, considering it’s not easy to find. Once found, one must consider its source. Water’s powerful, shaping the landscape through which it flows, yet also vulnerable, retaining in itself particles of all the places it’s been. The first time I considered water, I was twenty-seven. The […]
What Gone Looks Like
by Leah Claire Kaminski Crazy Snail and Backseat Driver by Igor Kasev I eat my first mushrooms in traffic with my sister on Seven Mile Bridge. I’m a small notch in the metal spine of cars cooking over the hot sea. Over the old bridge running next to us like a mouth missing teeth, a […]
Don’t worry, I promised my mother,I’ll finish the room. She lay in the hospice bed,her chest spongy with cancer.She had me get the scrapof paper from her purse, her notes:the carpet, the table, the wicker, the paint.I stroked her skeletal hand.Then day turned its face away. Weeks later, I bought the paint, made the time.But […]
by Christina Perez Brubaker Hanna hadn’t planned on taking the rabbits. It was one of those things that just sort of happened. An impulse her husband, Matthew, if he were still alive might’ve slapped her cheek for because according to him, nothing ever just-sort-of-happened. In a way, he’d be right. She’d been thinking about it […]
by Stephen Dean Ingram Eastern Kansas, 1974 “Ouch!” His forearm grazes the inside of the oven as he pulls out the baking sheet. On the sheet are ten hard brown disks. Nothing like the golden-topped flaky biscuits he remembers. He puts the baking sheet on top of the stove and watches them. They look like […]
by Michael Sheriff The submission period for this issue began with a necessary structural change at Gulf Stream Magazine: We added a no-fee submission option for BIPOC writers and artists. Removing the barrier of cost for people who have been systematically oppressed created an opportunity for our staff and future as a literary magazine. Through […]
by Ji A Ines Lee All the girls in Symor village reduced at least once a year. Some reduced on their faces, others on their arms, and the braver ones on their legs. They came to school with white scars running down sunken cheeks, bones visible beneath their diaphanous skin that bloomed with purples and […]