Meteor Shower
February 4, 2024
The entirety of this place, / this sky, rests in the cavern / of my mouth. I chew on it / listlessly.
Infrarrealista Review
Issue 5 has everything you could possibly want. We’re bringing you Central-Texascore with Camille Sauers’s essay about the closure of the iconic Pig Stand in San Antonio. In Jacob Moore’s short story, “The Cows of Tyon,” a couple becomes frustrated and bewildered in their search for a seemingly nonexistent brewery in Tyon, TX. We love Moore’s writing, because of lines of dialogue like:
“I’m going to throw it out the window,” he said, his voice not yet calm enough to pass off the remark as a joke.
“Then the cows will take it. They’ll doxx you.”
“They should post udder.”
We also have five poems in this issue. Laura Villarreal’s poem “Golden Shovel with Abbreviated Time” captures feelings of anxiety and depression through ecopoetic imagery:
On good days I hum like a machine with production—they
say you can hear my brain whirling without a hitch. I say
it won’t ever last before a spring snaps then a flood of despair
like oil overtakes me as if I’m the ocean
I first heard Jonathan Fletcher’s poem, “Prize” at a Voces Cosmicas Reading at Bazan library late last year. Hearing his explanation for the complicated feelings towards his adoption by his white mother prompted me to ask him to send it to us for publication right away. Jessica Bagwell’s concise poem, “Meteor Shower,” presents tactile images of stars and sky in the mouth that keep the speaker from talking. Dario Beniquez describes a migrant center that has “the stench of God.” Lian Sing’s prose poem, “First Confession” describes a speaker’s childhood home full of Christian and Buddhist iconography and contemplates her relationship to religion, “Even now the rosary remains to me a mystery, but I ask myself the same questions Job did daily.”
We hope you find yourself reading this issue on your laptop or phone, maybe with some tea or coffee, and then listen to some Wednesday.
As we enter a new year, we’re continuing our promise to provide more creative work by Texan writers. This year we’re publishing three books: The 2023 Hays Poet Laureate Anthology, to be a woman (not a girl) by June Paddison (winner of the 2023 HYPL), and Anthony Isaac Bradley’s full-lentgh poetry collection, Peppermint. We’re also excited to share that we will have a monthly section in the Caldwell-Hays Examiner. If you are interested in submitting, please contact us at infrarrealistareview@gmail.com.
-cloud delfina cardona
The entirety of this place, / this sky, rests in the cavern / of my mouth. I chew on it / listlessly.
The way you tell me
how you found me—inside glass,
under lights, surrounded
by other babies, mostly dark like me—
I sometimes feel like a stuffed toy
inside a claw machine.
I whisper apologies to trees, kiss gratitude into my bread, and press my palm onto stones as if looking to sync heartbeats.
A head
cannot live without the body. But a head can isolate itself from its
body. No, not simple mathematics, but how do I explain the mechanics of my body
any other way?
The stench of God is everywhere, in the water, on the walls,
in the air.
People at the diner were looking around, wondering if the place ever perfected itself. Wondering if this is what it would be like at the end of their own lives. With the shelves soon to clear – there’s the assessment of how things used to be, the rushed importance of meaning.
Tyon, Texas is ninety minutes southwest of Austin. You take the highway for about half the trip, and the rest is through backroads and farm-to-markets. The roads are lined with cows, horses, and some goats, and at nighttime the only substantial source of light is the odd oil refinery a mile or so off the road. For this reason, it’s suggested that travelers either stay the night or plan to get into town early enough to enjoy all that it has to offer and leave before it gets dark.
Infrarrealista Review is a literary nonprofit dedicated to publishing Tejanx voices.
