Reading nonfiction for September and is Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, who also has an essay in The James Franco Review Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo was the 2013 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner and a 2015 writer-in-residence at Ragdale Foundation. She has work published in Acentos Review, The American Poetry Review, CALYX, Los Angeles Review, Lumen Magazine, … Continue reading
Our fiction editor for September and October is Gabrielle Bellot. Gabrielle, who has also written under J. Bellot, holds an MFA from Florida State University, where she is currently a PhD Candidate in fiction. She has contributed work to Guernica, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Small Axe’s sx salon, The SouthEast Review, and other journals. She grew up in the … Continue reading
Our poetry editor for September and October is Oliver de la Paz, the author of four books: Names Above Houses (SIU Press 2000), Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2008), Requiem for the Orchard (U. Akron Press 2010), and Post Subject: A Fable (U. Akron Press 2014). With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: … Continue reading
I think of safe places and a single weighted word forms in my mind: home. Continue reading
On Wednesday issue 4 comes to a finale with an essay by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. Below are thoughts by editor Courtney Kersten, on why she selected Xochitl’s essay. This past spring, I had the good fortune to take a workshop with the generous, spirited, and wise writer Allison Hawthorne Deming during her time as a … Continue reading
Jenny sees Eva’s gaze drop to Jenny’s shoes. This is it. It’s over.
She smiles, pretending they just met. Pretending she was never afraid of Eva, like nothing ever happened. Fake it till you make it. Whatever gets her out in one piece.
“How funny that we have the same shoes, huh?”
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Once as a child you believed the graveyard shift
meant whole cemeteries uprooting themselves &
passing like ghosts through cities
to some other hills
that would accept them as they were,
would take them in
with the grace of an unhinged door.
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The successful ticket machine would reply cheerfully to each order… would provide enough agitation and compliance to let someone yell at it, let them explode while it sits silently. But all of these actions would be purely surface level. The machine won’t ache for a better life, for fulfillment. The best android won’t long to be human. Continue reading
I loved birds before “put a bird on it” was a thing. Birds are delicate, and I have never been that word. Continue reading
we run for reassurance of what is
found and all thoughts vanish, our hands cupped
the night yellow and spilling in our quiet coming
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The James Franco Review 