Featured Stories
Lost and Found: Wanda Coleman’s Desert Boxes, by Charles Hood
Santa Monica Review, Spring 2024
Wanda Coleman, a poetry god, died poor, and that means she died in the desert (where the poorest people always end up), and because she was poor and because she died in the desert, and because her husband Austin Straus loved her but also died poor, the Wanda Coleman archives (worth, I assume, many tens of thousands of dollars) ended up not at UCLA or Stanford or Howard University or even for sale on eBay, not in the literature vault of the Ransom Center at UT Austin, and not even in the nerdy, buggy loft of some poetry-obsessed superfan, but in a stack of split-sided, water-ruined, roach-infested cardboard boxes abandoned in the desert.
LA Ruins, by Meghan Cason
Santa Monica Review, Spring 2022
“Don’t people visit the graves of their loved ones on Christmas? Isn’t that a thing?” I asked John, my husband, as we got in the car. I’m no expert on this variety of macabre etiquette — I don’t know where anyone in my family is buried or otherwise stashed — but as it turns out, I was right. Forest Lawn’s massive gates were open, and we drove right through them, bypassing the information kiosk and the English Tudor-style main office building. Up a hill, we park outside the vaguely Italian-looking Great Mausoleum. Later, I will learn this building was inspired by the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno, a cemetery in Genoa, Italy, famous for its lifelike mourning sculptures.
Dhaba, by Parveen Parmar
Santa Monica Review, Spring 2022
The best age for slaughter is above fifteen. Usually they have some curves, some meat on them by then — the younger ones are too stickly-bony. Karalika knows that the Farm restaurant customers like fat. It is difficult to slaughter in the heat, the flies are everywhere, and they will lay their eggs inside the girls if you do not sell them quickly. Thankfully garlic, onion, chili, and turmeric cover a bit of rot, Kara thinks as she begins to slice the child’s neck.
The Best-Ever Doom Metal Band, by Lara Markstein
Santa Monica Review, Spring 2020
Pushcart Prize anthology winner
The best-ever doom metal band out of Oakland played for an aging audience lounging in lawn chairs that had sunk into the Savannah sludge so that their occupants appeared drunk, perched at odd angles between the RVs and the oaks.
A Tale of Two Trolls, by Marcus Spiegel
Santa Monica Review, Spring 2020
Pushcart Prize anthology winner
Here come the frogs. The hooded clerics of the meme. Long have they uploaded their darkness to the virtual realm. It falls on them now to bring their crypto-anarchy to the world.
Yuri and Winch are zipping their way through the tower-shaded streets, just another rain-rinsed car in the traffic gauntlet. “We’re making fine time,” Yuri says, cracking a window to dispel some of the fermented cabbage odor Winch carries on his clothes. “Keep speeding when you can. Quick, cut this guy off.”
