Smoke Moving Out of the Way as It Rises

Flamenco Sánchez owned a race horse. The horse would die once a year by catching on fire and turning into bones & ashes before reappearing a week later good as new inside Flamenco’s stable. Flamenco did not know what to do, whom to tell and trust with such a heavy secret. The horse loved to race locomotives and dream about his political ambitions. The horse once dreamt it was the Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. It stood like men stand for speeches. Rearing on its hind legs, ascending to 12 feet and to the awe of everyone who gathered to hear, but for all its climbing it was not granted words to move men. Its power remained in the realm of beasts, and so when it moved toward its calling to lead, it could only do as much through fear. Its wild stomps, its pained neighing drove everyone away from it, the upset and excitement forming first a matrix of crystals in its heart, then a palace to glow blue in sunlight and purple-gold in the night. Only to awaken again to a wet slap of skin and muscle, the hardness of bone beneath.

Steve Castro is a Costa Rican surrealist. His poetry was most recently published in 32 Poems; Image; The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review and Bayou Magazine.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in Syracuse, New York.

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2022), A Family is a House (C&R Press, 2019), and Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing.