The Los Angeles Review No. 24

By Kate Gale

The Los Angeles Review is a literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis. Established in 2003, LAR publishes both the stories of Los Angeles, endlessly varied, and those that grow outside our world of smog and glitter. LAR seeks voices with something wild in them, voices that know what it means to be alive, to be fallible, to be human.

Issue 23 features work from Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Oliver de la Paz, Pete Hsu, and more.

The Los Angeles Review Masthead
Publisher: Tobi Harper
Editor: Kate Gale
Managing Editor: Deirdre Collins
Assistant Managing Editor: Eric Howard
Fiction Editors: Meredith Alder and Amy Sather
Assistant Fiction Editor: Meredith Westgate Russo
Flash Fiction Editor: Brittany McLaughlin
Poetry Editors: Blas Falconer and Vandana Khanna
Nonfiction Editor: Florencia Ramirez
Translation Editor: Piotr Florczyk
Book Reviews Editor: Alyse Bensel
Assistant Book Reviews Editor: Daniel Pecchenino
Contributing Editor: Sophia Ihlefeld
Editor-at-Large: Riley Mang
Production Editor: Rebeccah Sanhueza
Copy Editor: Breana Gomez

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781636280486

Book preview

TO OUR READERS

Kate Gale

This has been a year of great awakening for America and for the world. The human suffering and forced hibernation of COVID juxtaposed with the police brutality and protests of last summer brought the challenges of inequality into stark relief. More than ever, we find ourselves thinking about the way all of us want to participate in change. Writers are active change makers.

At the Los Angeles Review, we work in the vineyard of stories, and we believe that stories and language can help redefine the world. The poems, tales, and creative nonfiction in this issue speak to our ongoing conversation with the evolving landscape, as each of us in our own way is also working toward change. The writers we present in this issue, both emerging and established, join us in that journey.

Each of us is adept at overcoming the challenges necessary to create an extraordinary world, and each day brings us closer to the world we want to see. We invite you to read this work—to invite the words of creators, writers, and artists into your life—and to realize your own marvelous world.

AWARDS

MEXICAN SHOOTS HIMSELF IN THE CHEST

Stanley Delgado

Flash Fiction

Judge: Brittany McLaughlin

Netta says Alessandra killed herself. We’re in bed, Lily asleep with her nose buried in my armpit. Netta stares at the ceiling. I don’t even know an Alessandra.

My cousin, remember? A little fat. Dentist. Single.

I tickle Lily’s neck, just to make sure she’s not awake; five-year-olds shouldn’t hear about this stuff.

Well, yeah, Netta says. It was an overdose.

We’re both quiet for a while, pretending to fall asleep. I had a friend who overdosed, once. But he survived it. Marco with the sad eyes who laughed a lot.

Not a lot of Mexicans kill themselves, Netta says.

What?

Alessandra is one. But I can’t think of a lot.

I don’t bother thinking about it, I say. Lily spent the whole day piling her toys in our room. Teddy bears, baby dolls. All of it. And who’s going to clean it?

Name a famous Mexican who’s killed themselves.

I can’t.

She grabs her phone. Siri, name Mexicans who have killed themselves.

A little pink-and-green spiral pulses on the screen, thinking . . .

I don’t know how to respond to that.

Ha! she shouts, I flinch. She starts tapping, typing.

Calm down, Lily’s sleeping, I say. I pull the blanket just over her ears and see the bits of dried chocolate milk on the little hairs of her upper lip. Tomorrow she will learn how to clean up after herself.

Wikipedia says only five Mexican celebrities have killed themselves. Four girls, one guy.

Ever? I could name five Hollywood actors from like last year.

Pina Pellicer? Netta says.

Don’t know her.

Sleeping pills. Lucha Reyes? ‘The mother of ranchera music,’ apparently.

Kinda familiar.

Wikipedia says, Acute intoxication by unknown substances.

‘Unknown’ . . . ? I look around the room. I don’t want to look at Netta, talking about this. I see Lily’s baby doll, the one that keeps its eyes open unless you cradle it in your arms and put its head back. Its eyes are open, blue, staring at the ceiling.

Lupe Velez: Seconal. But it says it could’ve been murder.

Lily is sleeping, I say.

The last one! Miroslava. Seconal, too.

Miroslava? Doesn’t sound Mexican.

It isn’t! Netta acts like this is all just gossip. It says she was born in Czechoslovakia and her parents moved to Mexico, to escape the Nazis. Her big break was winning a beauty contest.

She wasn’t even Mexican, and she won?

I pull the blanket up to my chin, covering Lily’s entire head. How can I sleep comfortably while making sure Lily doesn’t suffocate, I’m thinking.

Well, that was depressing, Netta says. She shuts her phone off.

I push the blanket back down under Lily’s ears. Didn’t you say there were five?

Oh. Yeah, huh. She looks at her phone again. There we go, last one: Pedro Armendariz. Shot himself in the chest. Never heard of him. She shuts her phone off but doesn’t fall asleep. I can hear her blinking. So I hold her hand.

I actually have heard of him, though, just a little. He studied law, journalism, stage-acting. Maybe I saw a documentary? I don’t know why I know, just one of those things. His big break was reciting Hamlet to a crowd of tourists, and a filmmaker just happened to be there. He must’ve said something like, Stick with me, kid, and you’ll go straight to the top. At least Pedro shot himself in the chest, and not the head. Anything but the face. They probably dressed him up real nice for the funeral. I’m sure the casket was wide, wide open.

THE BLUES, REPRODUCTIVE

Aurielle Marie

Poetry

Judge: Matty Layne Glasgow

See my hands? They strong hands. They hold worlds, they break men open with a snap. My hands is strong hands and I learned them from my mother’s mother. She had a pinch that could end a nerve, could bruise steel with her hands. Somehow not strong enough to live forever, but she shole did live. I see her in her grave turning over when she hear my mother tell me she too had an abortion. My mother tell me our strong hands held a small bloody part of her, and let it go. My mother’s hands checked the time & it wasn’t time, & that’s that on that. My mother & my grandmother gave me my hands. My mother & my grandmother gave me timeliness. I am the daughter of the daughter of the clock. I am the incarnate of a just hour. I am the first born my mother was meant to have. She tells me so, every morning. I make up the difference, I hang tough. I will tell my daughter one day what it felt like to sever, the choice I held to make a way for her. I will hand her our inheritance, our punctual strength. I will tell her what it means to be churned in the dirt by loss. I will tell my daughter to question everything asking to be housed in her. If it ever isn’t time, I will love her and the empty ache. My mother taught me how & now the men have come for my mother. I will teach my daughter, and then the men will come for me. The men don’t know what they do not know. The men’s clocks are too late, or very early. The men think it is a time before my grandmother, and my grandmother isn’t here to laugh, to tell them how wrong they are. When I learned my hands and my mother’s were the same kind of criminal, I wept. Then rejoiced our kindred, beautiful strong. We could have had a fate worse than this. I could be the daughter of the mother of regret. I could be the mother of too many daughters. My child will ask me why the words have been outlawed. My child will one day question what the men did to her birthright to choose what grows and what unroots. In the prison yard we’ll water herbs and collect them. From a jail cell I’ll tell my daughter to tuck them into her palm. It is impossible to make a birthright illegal I’ll tell her do not tell show the men your hands. make a tea from these leaves, draw a bath &

warm a coat hanger.

A REDBONE’S REALITY

Renée Ozburn

Creative Nonfiction

Judge: Adrianne Kalfopoulou

I am a Redbone. It refers to a range of skin color that makes people ask, Are you mixed? Going out on a limb, I’d say most black folks know Redbone is slang for a light-skinned African-American. But I’m not so sure about its familiarity to the vast majority of non-black Americans. There seems to be no authoritative etymology to explain its origins. I suspect Redbone’s more colloquial usage among blacks started with someone making up a story—maybe a blues singer. Black vernacular has a whole bucket of these idioms for those on the light to dark spectrum of skin shade. Although it isn’t necessarily a gender-specific term, I like being called Redbone because it’s usually said affectionately with a flirtatious smile, as in Looking good, Redbone.

This hereditary condition has often thrust me into a role of splainin the predicaments and perspectives of my entire racial group to curious Caucasians. Something about Redbones makes us more exotic (not that I’ve ever seen exotic in a mirror) than threatening to our white compatriots. Light-brown and white-looking blacks are often privy to racially provocative musings of whites who wouldn’t divulge their thoughts to just any person of color. More than once, I’ve been a recipient of the declaration, I don’t really consider you black right before, or after, audacious statements and questions such as, The police would never harass blacks who weren’t breaking the law or Are all black people loud?

I’ve had a lot of practice with this dynamic of identity. I can’t opt out.

I was eleven in 1963 when my parents yanked me from a comfortable, mostly black, middle-class neighborhood school in Detroit and placed me in an almost-all-white academic environment miles away from my home. My mother, a schoolteacher, had an insider’s knowledge of how white flight to the suburbs was taking talented teaching staff and financial resources with it.

I doubt there were ten students of color in my new school, but I bonded with a group of seventh grade white girls who seemed unfazed by my ethnicity. My skin shade was similar to one they might acquire after a long day at the beach. With hugs and tears, we commiserated together after hearing President Kennedy had been shot. They invited me into their circle during lunch breaks. And when a scraggly prepubescent boy called me, and a handful of other students of color niggers, the sting was lessened by my posse rallying around to remind me that he was stupid and Neanderthal. At that age I was more interested in being a social butterfly than a social justice advocate, but I do remember being vaguely aware that the well-being of my friends with darker pigment was not so generously defended.

There were more black students in my high school—but on any given day I could still walk through a crowded hallway without seeing another pupil of color. And because of my tendency to socialize more interracially than many in my ethnic group, I was subjected to some good-natured teasing on the long bus rides we took to and from our homes each weekday. In my high school yearbook, one boy wrote: To an elite girl who loves white people . . . Another inked the corner of a page: Although you’re one of the biggest Aunt Jane Negroes (the female version of Uncle Tom) I know, you’re still a pretty hip person. But I also remember a quiet boy with a big afro and perpetual frown who, without rancor, told me, You are easier for them to talk to because you are softer on the eye. So use it to your advantage because sometimes they may actually pay attention. The implication that I should use my looks to make inroads in cultural wars made me a little uncomfortable, but I understood his point.

In 1967, during my summer break from high school, race-riots erupted in Detroit. Troops were stationed near my house on a playground where I had attended kindergarten. Only a few select groups of Americans have experienced the equivalent of civil war, with armored tanks rolling down the street and bullhorns blasting orders at sundown to Stay inside with your lights off. Of course, my sister and