Monique Quintana
Rain Locket
Crow resented the painting hanging on the gallery wall because its curves and lines had prowess he would never possess. Anguish built a house in the image, and it painted Crow inside pecking patterns on the wood floor, and he moved so fast that the house became dust, and the children in the gallery still flutter the bone from their eyes.
Spite Locket
Hurt by his lover, Crow broke a harp in two with his mouth, and all the city's instruments were mad at him, and as a punishment, the trees in the park rattled so hard that Crow couldn't roost with his family and his friends even as their chatter faded in the piano chords.
Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has been published in Maudlin House, Wildness, Lost Balloon, Okay Donkey, and The Acentos Review, among other publications. Her work has also been supported by Yaddo, The Sundress Academy for the Arts, The Community of Writers, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She was the inaugural winner of Amplify's Writer of Color Fellowship and is a contributing editor at Luna Luna Magazine, where she writes book reviews, artist interviews, and personal essays. You can find her at @quintanagothic and moniquequintana.com.