ISSUE TWO - FALL 2019
Since publishing our debut issue in June, the dust has settled and we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to assess the direction of Contra Viento and further establish our project …
NONFICTION
Two Poems
What is site in this radius of struggle, / in this inverted sheen of horizon. / For the scene is a mirror unfolded …
Abundance
I saw the gold haze in the sky, that night when Thomas and I got away and used his car. The roustabouts light the flare stacks to ease the pressures caused by the gas …
Mavericks
I do not remember what had brought us to these designated pregnant cow barns, or why I was with my father at all on a workday …
The Springs of San Pantaleon
Past Mission Viejo, past Lake Forest, I walked Irvine Boulevard with an oily grapefruit in my pocket, one I had picked from an overhanging limb in a neighborhood behind me …
One Poem
Formal Dude and Saturday feel the ground / hollow beneath their heels / thighs furrow / on either flank / he imagines Black / cowboys and frog skeletons dismembered …
Bondage
She crossed the open desert, one bleeding foot after the other. Through dark and bitter cold. A hundred billion stars burning overhead …
Six Poems
the ocean / has fashioned a cave / into which all oceans disappear. / into caves / that situate dreams in / daring …
Three Poems
you have a face only a fence could love / but today our call logs are not detecting your usual self / no casandra to gel your hair or open the door in the wall …
Two Poems
Down to the ground; up to the clouds; down to the ground; up to the clouds; down to the ground; up to the clouds; down to the …
Lucy
Lucy woke suddenly with a vision of the scorch burning toward them. She looked at her daughter’s face — the wax and wane of shadow on her cheek …
In The Nature of Things
Come one come all they say, here at the desert market. Step right up they say. Hats spin while faces contort in the exclamation and receipt of rhetoric …
The Point at Which Blue Becomes Black
In the morning before the sun rises, the little gas stove projects the classic flicker of flame on the ceiling of the cabin: real flame slowed down, blurred, large scale …
Two Poems
I wanted to stop seeing bodies strewn along the side of the Pan-American waiting for their names. These losses dotted the periphery the further away we got from the volcano …
Why Petals Tear
You could come here and we could go out and open the south gate, strew hay along the tin troughs for the cattle to graze, their warm broad noses finding …