(Nonfiction) The Monstrous Bird
-in Nightmare Magazine’s The H Word

“I love birds, slipping into nature most days to observe some kind of their foraging or hunting behaviors. I’ve seen a red-eyed vireo, caterpillar in its bill, smacking its victim left and right against a branch until the thing stops wriggling. And then again for good measure. Seen wrens do the same thing against logs and even curbs. Grasshopper sparrows might play a game of gather the crickets and see how many they can stuff in their bills to take back to their nest. I’ve seen bald eagles tear into ducks and coots, their raw power on full display. There’s one that certainly plays the Grendel of our nearby lake. Their victims don’t suffer . . . much.”

(Nonfiction) CRAFTING THE REAL AND SURREAL IN ECO-HORROR
-in CrimeReads

“Our expedition, if you could call it that, was to find a whale head. The very idea of seeking out a head is surreal, odd, enticing, terrifying. It conjures both sad and monstrous imagery. We feel the pain of loss. We may see the horror of decay. Right away we ask questions, mainly: what will we see? Add a pristine sandy beach filled with marshmallowy snowy plovers, cute seaducks, and lone fishermen staring at the blue-green horizon line. Whale heads don’t seem to belong.”

(Nonfiction) SOUTH BAKERSFIELD’S CONFEDERATE REMAINS
-in Boom California (University of California Press/Fresno State)

“We heard the crash from our living rooms and front yards and now the community mobs the street. Years later I think this must have been what watching the Civil War was like: a community coming together to observe the collision of gunpowder, steel and flesh. Only, this is our poor man’s take. The barrio version. The working class.”

(Nonfiction) COMMENTARY: HOW ONE LATINO COMMUNITY MAY BEGIN TO SHED SIX DECADES OF CONFEDERATE AND SOUTHERN IMAGERY
-in Latino Rebels (Futuro Media)

“An oppressive political shadow drips onto the landscape, one seemingly intertwined with excessive smog and decaying apartment rentals. The power structure is Trump happy, a lust-filled fervor infects them, one that the unwary might attribute to some kind of Viagra for political xenophobia, powered and fueled by little elephant-shaped pills. The Republican base is increasingly challenged by a growing Latino population caught within the intersection of the Chicano and Immigration Reform movements, a majority-Latino citizenry who have one purpose in common: to seek a life free from oppressive ideologies spread by U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s allegiance to the Trump Administration.”

(Nonfiction) A LETTER ON WHY BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA’S PLANTATION ELEMENTARY, SOUTH HIGH SCHOOL, AND RACIST STREET NAMES SHOULD DISAPPEAR
-in Medium

“One of your brown friends lives on Raider Drive, another on Shenandoah Drive. These streets are all you know. Your mom doesn’t let you wander far. “You need to be safe,” she says. “Stay within the boundaries.” You ride bikes down these streets. They become part of your daily dialogue. Your parents mail is stamped with these names. This small world is all you know, you have no idea of the intention of the planning that went into your neighborhood, how it created a ghost-white image over your every move, how it was meant to be a white area that towered over distant poor Black neighborhoods whose taxed incomes were funneled to white schools.”

(Nonfiction) PERSPECTIVE: GEORGE FLOYD AUTOPSY APPEARS SIMILAR TO CALIFORNIA BRUTALITY CASE
-in Latino Rebels (Futuro Media)

“George calls for his mother. He groans as if his own car is atop his neck bones, let alone the knee on his neck, knees everywhere on his body, crushing down, his arms twisted. This over a twenty-dollar bill, in an America where twenty counterfeit bucks won’t get you much. Neither will Trump’s pandemic economic stimulus, which left millions struggling, wondering if rent and food money will drop through the bomb bay doors of some magical red-white-and-blue Space Force vessel.”

(Speculative fiction) SKY SEEKERS
–in El Porvenir Ya!

“Then again, she was like most people who weren’t there. A bot’s just a piece of pipe to her. Doesn’t matter if it’s a little pyramid like Mascota, or something he killed. It’s all empty machinery. Worn parts. Synth blood, a synth heart, just some liquid processor, information flowing back and forth through factory-made arteries. He’d seen that blood spill onto decks, freeze in the void in glistening chunks. He’d seen a bot beg just like anything else.”

(Fiction) THE BULLET
–in Southwestern American Literature (Center for the Study of the Southwest, Texas State University, Spring 2019 edition)

“He can hardly breathe in the humid basement. Doesn’t stop him from rocking out and bobbing his head to ska records with Delgado. These cats are old school. They spin vinyl from underground bands such as La Banda Skalatone, Mezcali, and She Went Bowling. They love all the ska they can get their hands on. I’m there too. I’ve just turned thirty. My Pops, Alfonzo’s older brother, had been found dead a few weeks ago from a heart attack in the cab of his big rig tanker truck clutching a glow-in-the-dark rosary. Alfonzo says the bullet story isn’t about Pops. That’s for another time, he tells me.”

(Speculative fiction) A DANGEROUS WAND
–in The Latinx Archive: Speculative Fiction for Dreamers (Ohio State University Press)

“They thought the magician a malabarista like Trico, that Mr. Tiré had been chased out of the streets of Mexico City for his cheap tricks and for stealing from the purses of the ladies who stopped to watch him. The villagers claimed that a young man like Mr. Tiré, no matter how well dressed, likely stuffed stolen belongings in his bags and lizard cages. Perhaps the chuckwalla with its angry eyes and tongue always flicking toward the unseen was an accomplice, stuffing rings in its fat belly. Perhaps Mr. Tiré had been nearly caught and so ran far away across the Sea of Cortés just like the war deserter whose motorcycle now belonged to Grandfather. Whenever I heard this part of the story from gossips in the short time before I was allowed to meet Mr. Tiré, I imagined him a giant, like the strange two-armed trees here that when five hundred years old tower above the sand like gods, bending whimsically toward the clouds ready to cast their spells on this place.”

(Fiction) POLAROIDS FROM MOTHER RIVER
–in Southwestern American Literature (Center for the Study of the Southwest, Texas State University, Spring 2018 edition)

“‘You don’t make sense,’ Martha said with a half smile, grabbing stacks of paperboard, while Vince just kept squinting and flipping pages, grabbing stacks of paperboard too, hardly keeping to the box count. The funny thing was, as soon as most pages entered his brain, Martha could see that he was more lost than ever. Entire parables, even the tripped-out apocalyptic bear-claw-footed, seven-headed monster rising out of the ocean seemed to slip through the fabric of his consciousness. In fact, by mid shift, he stopped talking about God at all. He turned to complaining about his wife who was studying medicine at the local college.”

(Serialized Novel) THE 12 RULES OF SURVIVAL
–in Pine Reads Review (University of Arizona YA publication)

“I’m in the third row, second seat, nearly invisible. I mean, not totally transparent like a ghost. I just feel that way sometimes, like everything is disappearing around me. I am pretty scrawny. Skinny arms and lumpy elbows. Hair ragged like a storm tossed it in every direction, and a face that I think always seems slightly confused, like I want to know the answers but someone’s keeping them from me. At least twelve kids have a better view than me but no one sees the classroom fish tank quivering, the water sloshing up toward the edges like when I dive in the bathtub with my Chewbacca action figures. Doesn’t help that the fake eel skeleton the goldfish have been darting around has fallen over in the tank. I always thought that stupid eel was looking at me.”

(Fiction) ST. AUGUSTINE THE STARFIGHTER
-in Carve Magazine

“The horror of Tim Mercury’s carcass is interpreted as a failed mission by one of the ground crew (me). I ask why our astronauts always have to die. No one answers. Marco the sheepdog yaps and leaps at the smashed craft. He runs around the side of the barn and won’t be seen again until dinnertime. Had the wreck not crashed so close to his tail, he might have examined or even licked Tim’s dead eyes.”

(Fantasy) A FAMILY OF FAILED MAGICIANS
-Listen to entire 7-minute flash speculative fiction tale, narrated by Matt Brown. Music and sound by Landen and Jordan Belardes. Won BEST SOUND at Project Twenty1 2019 Competition.

(Speculative Fiction) THE SECOND DEATH OF OSCAR ZETA ACOSTA
–in Afterlives of the Writers

“Anyway, one of the last things I remember before being reincarnated was falling. Not falling on a pile of fish guts or slipping on the layer of white powder covering part of the deck where we’d spilled, in our madness, several pounds of coke on the deck like some kind of fish batter for ourselves to wallow in and cook ourselves. No, I had been tossed off the ship with a bullet hole through my midsection.”

(Speculative Fiction) SESSIONS IN AUGMENTED REALITY
–third place entry in Somos en escrito, The Latino Literary Online Magazine’s First Annual Extra-Fiction Writing Contest (scroll to third entry)

Eleadora’s ghost accompanies Dorota to the tea garden in San Jose. They ride the train around the storybook maze. Dorota knows if she tries to touch her shimmering form Eleadora will leap off the train. Eleadora points out the strangers: “You see that old man. He has the flat face of a dog with no snout. You see that boy on the bridge staring at koi? His profile resembles a fish and his arms are short like fins.” She points out fairytales too. “This one’s a rabbit. That one’s an aardvark. She’s cake frosting. Let’s go eat cake.”

(Fiction) A DIFFERENT KIND OF BOILING POINT
-in Acentos Review

“Camila recalled seeing onions on the ground like the eyes of a great giant beneath the earth peeking at the empty shell of the valley. She wondered if the giant was judging her. The media would listen, though they would come at her with hard questions. She would lay in wait, knowing she was even greater than the giant. She was the crack in the earth where he lay, ready to shake loose the veil of the growers and swallow the earth they stood on.”

(Fiction) MIDDLE OF THE PASSAGE
-in The Island Review

“Grandma Sally’s round face was twisted in a grin. She smelled faintly of sea glass polished by the surf. ‘Makawa yava. Makawa liga,’ she said to Kesa. ‘Will bring bula.’ The old woman touched her fingers to Vijay’s chest. Then she turned back to Kesa. ‘Makawa ucu. Marau.’ She said the last word as if she was saying it to the sun, as if in the sky there gazed an eye above a mouth whose lips were hidden in the sea. Then she handed Kesa a brown paper bag.”

(Fiction) GASPAR
-in Pithead Chapel 4

“Most nights Gaspar would rather be out in the dark, ducking around houses, far from all the babies and mamas, smoking with his friends in the alley. Not tonight. He sat up watching a Monte Carlo driving past the house and was glad he wasn’t walking alongside it. Was the shooter in the car? He would have mouthed off to the driver. Probably would have died a real hero. The muffler vibrated his bed. Hydraulics popped and wheezed. The driver, the shape of smoke, had surer eyes than the flickering retina of summer’s Venus.”

(Comic) THEM BONES
-in Barrelhouse

“We thought about what Michael said about change. We wondered who we were. Were we satisfied with who we’d become as writers? We admitted our surprise about Michael’s militant past . . .”

(Novel excerpt) JOEY MINSTREL
-in Specious Species 7

(Poems) OPENING PRAYER, THE HORSEMEN, THE HOUSE THAT RICHARD BUILT, BOY IN THE VINEYARD, DRIVING TO THE VIGIL OF RICHARD CHAVEZ
-in Mission at Tenth 5 (California Institute of Integral Studies)

(Nonfiction) A WATERLESS ISLAND: EXPLORING A RIVER IN DROUGHT-STRICKEN CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
-in Latino Rebels

(Nonfiction) ERIC’S STORY
-in Jotters United 11

(Novel excerpts) ANHINGA
-in Memoir Journal: Invisible Memoirs 2

(Nonfiction) LETTERS FROM VEGAS
-in Memoir Journal: Invisible Memoirs 1

(Essay) POSTCARD FROM THE MOST ILLITERATE CITY IN AMERICA
-in The Weeklings

(Essay) DAVID SAL SILVA: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
-in Latino Rebels: Parts one, two, three, epilogue