I Just Learned About Gay Panic

This was very much a wish I made, I think. I learned about this legal defense, that it was still applicable in several states, and I was just tired. I didn’t have the strength to be angry, though I wanted to be. I think of it as a prayer, or a spell. For me, it felt necessary. -Author

Connor Nielsen

cleaning – Seguin | early 2000s

This piece is about not getting lost in the small beauty and still looking for more. In our town most lives are spent working, raising families, and finding small moments to take for ourselves. What’s often forgotten is that even in a life of work that isn’t ideal, there is still meaning.

-Author

Stephen Rendon

Song for America

Song for America is my ongoing tribute to this country which is a land rife with so many contradictions, contrasts, & so much at stake in the present hour. It’s difficult to keep up with all that is transpiring on a daily basis. The poems represent at best a lyrical encapsulation of the times we find ourselves in. -Author

Fernando Esteban Flores

Catcherâ€™s MittÂ

This piece serves as a rejection of gender duality and a reflection of the gender norms associated with adolescence. Throughout much of America, it is an unquestioned truism that Baseball is for boys while Softball is for girls. Catcher’s Mitt examines a third possibility: non- participation.

Anonymous

DONâ€™T BE SELFISH, MOTHERHOOD GIVES A WOMANâ€™S LIFE MEANING

Common side effects of a child-bearing person in their peak fertility years: baby fever, parental lectures, therapy to repair relationship to parents, therapy to repair relationship to self, self-educating, learning that this is the first time in recorded history that we do not have to commodify our bodies by having children to survive, existential crises, gender studies, Feminist philosophies, trying to find a partner who understands, trying to be convinced to procreate, existential dread, dread.

Gazzmine Wilkins

DJing as Community Education: An Interview with Bonnie Ilza Cisneros

Bonnie Ilza Cisneros is a fourth-generation educator in a line of Tejana schoolteachers. She taught middle school English for five years in San Antonio Independent School District and coordinated the El Placazo Barrio Newspaper program at San Anto Cultural Arts. Bonnie earned a Creative Writing Master’s degree from Texas State University, was altered forever at the Macondo Writers Workshop in 2016, and was awarded the first artist grant she ever submitted from NALAC in 2018. Her poems and essays appear in El Retorno, Chicana/Latina Studies, River Teeth, Porter House Review, Infrarrealista Review, La Voz de Esperanza, Buckman Journal, and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. All the while, Bonnie and her husband raise two m’ijas and keep a flock of five gallinas in San Antonio, Texas. She has many exciting upcoming projects and is available for creative commissions, DJ gigs, and collaborations. Learn more about Bonnie on her website. Her venmo is @bonniecisneros

Cloud Cardona