California State University (CSU): Open Journal Systems

Angelina Leaños (she/her) is a Ventura County Youth Poet Laureate Emeritus and a second-year MFA student at Fresno State. Angelina regularly serves as a Poetry Out Loud coach and a Poet-Teacher, mentoring youth in poetry recitation and creative writing. Additionally, Angelina is a member of California Poets in the Schools’ Board of Directors and was a reader for the 2023 Philip Levine Prize. Her work has been published by Urban Word, Flowersong Press, the Chicanx Writers &amp; Artists Association, Arkana, and Fruitslice. You can find her on Instagram at @angelinaleanos

Leaños, Angelina

6
Le
a
ño
s
i root / myself / as a mother’s reincarnation mission / to 
reinvent / what words graved my grandmother / no 
más gritos / no más abuso / no más descuido / i 
/ vessel / my great-grandmother’s volcano / tongue / 
earthquake / el amor / mi abuela so rarely slumbered / 
Jamás temas / hija / te voy a cuidar / en esta vida
Because my name blossoms my bisabuela | 
Angelina Leaños


English

Because my name blossoms my bisabuela

Urbina, Caroline

Diamond Bars 2 by David A. Romero: Book Review: Book Review

Goli, Sam

On Reflection

Hernandez, Israel

55
Flowers From My 
Garden
The first blessing bestowed by my stroke was that I 
got to see my three beautiful daughters. Had I known that 
was all it took to gather them for me once again, I would’ve 
lied long ago. I would’ve made my neighbor, Doña Meche, 
call Maggie and say she found me on my living room floor. 
She would tell them I hadn’t shown up to our sunset seats 
by the fence, where we met daily and shared the latest 
chisme of our pueblo. I know now they would’ve believed 
it. They must have sensed my sprouting death, because 
they were home before I could water my garden the 
following morning.
I had longed to have my daughters together for 
years. I couldn’t remember the last time my garden felt 
complete. Gratitude overwhelmed me as I appreciated the 
three beautiful flowers at the foot of my bed. Their sweet 
smells mixed in the stiff air of my small house of block. It 
must’ve been decades since we all shared the same scent. I 
longed for those days, when we lived together in our warm, 
yellow home. My house didn’t feel as warm when it was 
left to myself. That morning when I woke to my daughters, 
I noticed the sun rays rest on my skin through the iron bars 
behind the window. 
Margarita must’ve caught the surprise in my face 
before I did because she excused herself from the room to 
fix breakfast, as if to not overwhelm me.
“What do you want?” 
“I…” I didn’t know how hard it would be to spit my 
first words. I learned to speak again. “Anything’s fine.”
She smiled at me and I smiled back. I knew she 
would know just what to make. I couldn’t remember if 
Maggie had asked that the weekend before, when she had 
visited last. I wondered if she knew that would be my last 
meal. I also wondered if that put pressure on her. Before 
 56FICTION
I could hope it didn’t, she had already left my sunny pink 
room. 
“Can I talk to her alone for a minute?” Hortensia 
asked her younger sister.  
“Are you serious?” 
“Just give us a minute. Go help Maggie with 
breakfast or something, ‘bout time you make yourselves 
useful.”
Dalia simply rolled her eyes and left. She never 
entertained the bickering of her sister. She had realized 
long ago there was no fight to win with a woman who 
always made sure the last sound in the air was her voice. 
Hortensia sat beside me and I wondered if she realized 
Dalia still hadn’t had the chance to share a single word with 
me at all.
“How are you?”
“I’m… very happy to see you girls.”
“I’m happy to see you too. It’s strange though, none 
of us are little girls anymore.”  
“I know. You’re all great and grown now. You’ve 
watered the dry seeds I’ve given you and out of flowers 
made grand trees full of life. I’m so proud of you.” 
“You have no idea how much everything you’ve 
done for us means to me,” she stopped herself from 
sharing more and I wished she hadn’t. I glanced at the 
gloss in her eyes and understood. I wished I didn’t have 
to understand, and instead my daughter felt comfortable 
enough to cry in front of me. 
“I know, mija.” There was silence until I spoke again. 
“Did you fly in from el otro lado?”
“No, I actually didn’t have to. I was in a city nearby 
promoting my new book.” 
“You weren’t going to tell me?” 
“It was for business. I didn’t say anything in case I 
was too busy to come visit.” 
“What did you want to talk to me about?” 
“Oh, about that…” she became nervous. “You’ve 
been getting the money I’ve been sending right?”
I couldn’t tell if she was reminding me or asking me. 
So I simply sighed. 
“Pinche Margarita, is she keeping it for herself?”  
 57FICTION
“I’m not the only one that needs help, you know?” 
“She has been keeping it, hasn’t she? I can’t believe 
her. It’s her fault she’s—” 
“No.” I coughed.
“I’m sorry Ma,” she said and stared. I could see her 
struggling to come up with anything to talk to me about. 
“You know I’ve been thinking about moving back here.”
“Really?” my eyes blossomed into bright sunflowers 
of excitement.
“Yeah. I was thinking of maybe spending a few 
months here, to write my next book. It could be like a work 
getaway. A visit home even. Of course I’d have to find a 
place to stay…”
The petals of my sunflower eyes dried up and 
the seeds in my pupils fell to the dirt as I realized what 
Hortensia was leading to. 
“I could stay with you, right?” She said as if I would 
be alive by the time any plan of such would come to 
fruition. It must’ve been her way of asking me for the 
house, or the land, or whatever value it was Hortensia 
found in the place I called home. The same place she 
had worked so hard to get far away from. I stared out the 
window disappointed. Before I answered, her phone rang 
and she began to walk closer to the door.
“I’ve got to get this.”
She picked up the call and left. Alone, I smiled out 
the window and admired my backyard. It was a work of 
art stretched through lifetimes. I had lived on the same 
plot of land my whole life. Over the years, I saw it become 
smaller and smaller as the soil was sold. My mother and I 
had lived where she and her mother had once lived. My 
mother spoke often of the times when the whole block 
belonged to our family, when the lands and the grass 
belonged to everybody. She dreamed of the riches nature 
had once afforded us. Of a time when the fields were more 
fertile, and the animals more lively. I never dreamt of these 
times. I recognized the beauty in the life that blessed my 
garden. I savored the juice from the fruits of my trees. From 
my window, I fantasized about walking barefoot on the 
wild grass again. I took a moment to appreciate two small 
cempasúchil flowers that had begun to blossom in the 
 58FICTION
back of my garden. I thought of the last Día de los Muertos, 
when I cut the flowers from the plant myself and took them 
to my mother’s grave. I wondered if my daughters would 
cut those same flowers for me that November. I hoped they 
would. 
Even though she never had a quinceñera, Dalia 
always walked around with her hair curled and propped 
up like she was ready to slip in her first heels and receive 
her last doll. When they were growing, we would often 
joke that Hortensia’s hair had been done simpler at her 
quinceñera than Dalia’s was done on a common day. When 
she walked back in the room her bark brown curls bounced 
like they did when she was fifteen. She still looked as 
beautiful and as young. It was I that had become wilted and 
frail. 
“Are you sure you don’t want to eat in the kitchen?” 
she asked as she balanced her way in with a fresh glass of 
tamarind water, a large plate of red chilaquiles, and a sliced 
orange.
“I’m sure,” I said, with no energy left to get up. 
She placed the food on a pillow on my lap. I hadn’t 
eaten anything spicy for years. Maggie always yelled at 
me when she caught even a serrano in my fridge, but 
today she must’ve remembered how I loved spicy food in 
my teens and twenties before my health was a concern. I 
imagined she had gone to buy the ingredients, or possibly 
even sent Dalia to the store down the street. When they 
were younger, it had always been Maggie’s duty as the 
youngest to go get the morning tortillas. I wondered if 
this time had been different. I reached for the pills on my 
bedside as routine, but I placed them back down without 
taking any. Of the breakfast, I had no more than a few bites 
and a couple sips, that I rejoiced in, as if that day were my 
last. I gave the plate back to my daughter who stared back 
at me speechless. 
“Where’s Maggie?”
“She’s making more breakfast for her girls. She said 
she’ll be here when she’s done.”
“Tell her I said thank you. It was delicious.”
“I will,” she grinned as I reached towards the plate 
and popped a last slice of orange in my mouth. The sweet 
 59FICTION
familiar juice and pulp burst on my tongue. “But the orange 
is from me. I remembered when my sisters and I would 
compete bringing you fruit from the backyard. We’d always 
try to guess what you were in the mood for.” 
“Somehow, you were always the one that knew 
exactly what I wanted,” I reminisced. 
“I just… know how to read you. I noticed your 
craving often aligned with how you were feeling on that 
day.”
I didn’t know if Dalia was right or whether she had 
been following a useless made-up strategy all those years. 
However, I didn’t question her, for I knew of the child’s 
observant nature. 
“Thank you for the orange, mija.” 
“What did Hortensia want? Did she ask you to leave 
her the house?”
I answered only through expression. I knew Dalia 
wanted the house too. She had made sure to remind me 
enough times before, that she didn’t think she needed 
to now. Her and my nuera had been struggling to find a 
stable safe place to live, and my house had become one 
more thing Dalia felt entitled to. Truth was, I didn’t know 
who would keep my home when I passed  and I didn’t wish 
to decide. I didn’t wish to compare and choose among my 
flowers. 
“Doesn’t she make enough money already? She 
barely ever sees us. Now she suddenly wants to be part of 
the family?” 
“Dalia, please.”
“Well, did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Leave her the house.”
“I’m not dead yet. I’m still deciding what to put on 
the will.”
“You don’t have a will? What do you mean you don’t 
have a will?” 
“Diosito gave me another day for a reason. I’ll fix one 
in the evening.”
“It’s okay, Ma,” she hugged me with her empty hand 
and kissed my cheek. She started to walk towards the door, 
“Just worry about getting better for now.”
 60FICTION
“Dalia,” I said and she stopped at the entrance. 
“When do I eat oranges?”
“Mande?” she asked, confused. 
“When I eat oranges, how do I feel?”
“You feel happy.” 
“And how do you know I’m happy now?” 
“I don’t,” she answered and she gave one last smile 
before leaving. 
“Dalia said you needed me, she didn’t even let me 
finish breakfast.” 
“I wanted to see you.”
“Is everything alright?” 
“I don’t want to die here,” I begged Margarita. 
“What? You’re not going to die,” she lied, holding 
back her tears. 
“Can you take me outside?” If I was to have my last 
breath, it would be of fresh air. “Please.”
Margarita gently grabbed me by the hand and 
walked me to the garden. I could hear her girls fighting 
inside the house, too young and clueless to understand 
loss. Maggie looked back, but instead tightened her grip 
on my hand. I nodded towards the house, making sure she 
knew I would be okay. 
“I love you, Ma.”
“Me too, mija.”.
“Call me when you want to go back inside.”
She left me by the fence where Doña Meche smiled 
at me from her usual seat and enjoyed the last rays of sun. 
“I was hoping you would come.”
Instead of walking to the seat on my side of the 
fence, I walked into my garden and planted myself on the 
ground. I sunk into the soft soil. I laid relaxed, intoxicated 
with the scent of my favorite flowers. The bees flew from 
my flowers to my skin. They buried me in pollen and fed 
me the sunlight they carried with their thin wings. The 
smooth spring breeze kept me fresh. All I did was lay 
among my flowers, as I withered away back into the earth 
and embraced my second blessing.


Flowers From My Garden

Williams, Emma

!
 Flaminia Cruciani’s collection of poetry, A Crown of 
Flames, intertwines lyrical rhythm and beauty with profound con-
templation. Through intricate verses that weave through themes 
of love and loss, connection and experience, and faith and hu-
manity, Cruciani demonstrates an ocean of understanding, both 
graceful and significant of language and human emotion. 
 “I gave birth to humanity, in the woods of indifference” 
(Excerpt from “We Were Silent in The Same Language”). Through 
this collection that demands the confrontation of thought and 
feeling, Cruciani allows readers to go through a self-reflection 
of personal experience that one can only describe as healing. 
Each poem in this collection is crafted with carefully bril-
liant imagery designed to resonate deeply with readers. This 
excerpt from one of the poems in this collection, “Reporting 
From A Dig,” captures that imagery perfectly: “An olive sleep, 
the senses hauled down in hemorrhaging millenia // undoing the 
knit of sacred sleep // a desert tunic without a hem, castle of 
bones fortified in white // clay sunflowers the cogwheels of 
your afflictions.” 
 Cruciani’s ability to capture fleeting moments and instill 
them with an air of timelessness without taking away from their 
modern relevance demonstrates her in-depth understanding of the 
human experience being just that: felt by all and unchanged by 
past or present. Cruciani writes like an ocean moves, her words 
often similar to the calm before the storm. Her poems allow 
readers to linger over her words and savor their meanings with 
language that is sometimes subtle at first glance, then power-
ful as a tidal wave of feeling and understanding. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  A CROWN OF FLAMES - a microreview
EMMA WILLIAMS
L


A Crown Of Flames

Karraa, Ameera

The Story of Daydreamers

Shafii, Cyrus

Sacrificial Fly Rule

Lara Jacobo, Veronica

!
760 WAINE’E ST.
chorused cries grieving what is gone,
ashes covering what once was love.
my soul is set ablaze,
death by flame
nothing is ever the same.
still stuck inside four walls,
laughter fresh from the day before,
where the young came to grow.
the sky has darkened,
suffocated by shadow.
six hundred degrees,
have turned my heart into rubble.
a rouge-stained sun bleeds into your valleys,
the smoke has set,
your beauty now charred with agony.
weeping,
your burning open arms,
now i’m fleeing.
five years old,
leaving home for the first time,
here goes the second try.
what do i gain from my cries?
the world is up for grabs,
but i can’t erase from my mind,
the home i no longer can have.
lullabies of waves crashing,
ashore, the arc of colors splashing.
heavenly orange hues of the setting sun,
all your splendor is now gone.
i’ve re-lived this nightmare a thousand times,
now i think of you when i weep at night.
 HOME 
 VERONICA LARA JACOBO
45a hui hou, until we meet again
my home, my love,
for now i will live with the pain.
APT. A207
and if i was stranded amidst the orange tide
would it matter?
to feel warmth for once in my life,
from the spark in my heart, long expired.
turns out the light at the end of the tunnel
was simply fire.
so come and dance around my funeral pyre
if it really, really matters.
but it doesn’t, really,
when the slightest breeze
feels like a storm.
suffocate me with air, can’t breathe
i’m carrying the child in my arms
“we’re safe from harm,”
but i see in her eyes
agonizing thoughts
as the embers rain on either side
“i wonder how it will feel to die.”
and i cry for her
never had a chance to say goodbye
to all her childless lullabies
“we might yet survive,”
“but will we feel alive?”
and i’ve spent a lifetime
convincing her not to cry A
46
when love was worth a nickel-and-a-dime
and here we are, nearing our time
“i’m not scared,”
as i watch hell rise in her stare
“i’ve felt father’s anger burn more,
more than this orange storm.
that was the first time i lost my home.”
and now, she easily lets go
of every physical thing she owns.
we both watch the walls crumble down
of the second home
where we came to grow
and i hold the hand of my wounded child
knowing the ashes had piled
and maybe we won’t rise from the fire.
but maybe it doesn’t really matter.
LAHAINA, 96761
and the room reeks of smoke
as i sit
unwavering, ever still
to burn with your memory
in peace.
perhaps the flames provided warmth
to the cold sting of our goodbye
and my unwillingness to let go.
then i hear the echoes grow
from the screams desperate to run
as the wind carries me far.
tripping down the steps
with nothing but the clothes on my back.
the air was lead to my lungs
and the heavens weep tears of fire.
deep down
i was ready to die,
47if i wasn’t so used to being alive.
i watch the embers swallow you whole
against the glass, opaque from smoke
covering the streets i used to know.
only shadows now.
far away, the sun suffocates from ash,
glowing red from anger.
hands tied behind his back
as the bad cleanse their sins
against the orange tide.
hell in paradise.
repentance, please keep me alive.
i’ve never seen God cry
until day became a moonless, starless night.
so we scream prayers in the car,
begging, God, i want to be alive.
atrophied heart in my hands.
tempting, death was offering me a dance.
as the world collapsed in a heap of orange
and the sky regained its blue tinge,
fighting against the shadows that reigned.
sighing, we escaped with our lives,
and throughout the night
i wondered if you were still alive.
despite the orange glow i watched
under a roof that wasn’t mine.
i didn’t know you scorched
under clouds of smoke
until the morning i awoke.
and i wondered,
why was i kept alive?
my heart burned with you as you died.
and here i am
shallow with life.
A


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Because my name blossoms my bisabuela

Diamond Bars 2 by David A. Romero: Book Review: Book Review

On Reflection

Flowers From My Garden

A Crown Of Flames

The Story of Daydreamers

Sacrificial Fly Rule

Home

A Mother\u27s Kitchen

Dinner and a Movie

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