Whenever I’m writing, I have a “different brain.” As a writer, my main goal is to protect that first brain which is the first-draft-brain. And I just have to let this brain get from beginning to end. After that, I can do whatever I want with the page. That’s how I approach my work now.

For a title that beckons death, the pages of Fernando A. Flores’ debut short story collection charm with an intoxicating amount of life. But debut might be the wrong word. In 2014, Flores published an earlier version of his imaginative and sometimes unflattering depiction of the Rio Grande Valley music scene, which was called Death […]

A wrist of sticks cut, thrust in water
to force the sweet crease of cherry flosses
& then forgotten now thickens with fur-dross,
greeny on the windowsill through which a neighbor’s

radio pines in Friday-night nostalgia
to the tune of a six-pack of something.

At night I think about my mother —
how she no longer inhabits
all the rooms in her body.

I wonder if in her dreams

she walks outside or even flies
over the corrugated roof.