issue 124

The climate crisis has already arrived.–-Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, The Guardian Before the era of megafireswas an era normalized. Before then, a different era normalized. Adinfinitum. Death Valley approaches a hundred thirty degrees andwe complain that our air conditioner does not suffice,so we buy a new one, new ones built and useduntil we buy […]

something about her parakeet openingthe kitchen cabinets and dying on the tilefloor     in the basement for months standingwater blooms toward the staircase    breedstendrils of mold      spores dancing beneathmy bed   in the mornings, morning sicknesslets me lean over the kitchen sink      whenFloorbird was distressed     she laid […]

In the pink of every lakelit eveningI rattled home from work, chin up to catch the glimpse of blue flame,a flirt of sulfur, beckoning of gulls. Did they ever go home, lost sealake birdswith so much landscape in their cry? There: the blue torch, proud as a monument,on the only mountain in this landfill state. […]

Francisco Delgado is a Chamoru writer of fiction and poetry, as well as of literary scholarship on contemporary Indigenous literatures. His novella, On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD (Texas Review Press, July 2025), won the 2024 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Other creative work has recently appeared in MANOA: A Pacific Journal […]