Keystone Poems in Angel City Review

The story goes the tenant’s package was sacrificed to Mercury, the God of Commerce. The beguiling prophet demands plastic goodies and swallowed subscription fees daily to ensure the safe passage of prayers to beloveds on the other side. This day was the tenant’s turn to sacrifice mail and ensure the continued blessings of the community. ”

Excerpt From
“Keystone Apt C” Angel City Review Issue 16 2026

Founded in Los Angeles in Fall 2014, Angel City Review is a literary journal that is committed to bringing the cutting edge in fiction and poetry to a modern audience.

I have cultivated an identity as a balcony gardener. Someone who, with limited apartment space and only containers to hold soil for growing plants, dedicates themselves to turning concrete spaces into hosts for plant life: medicinal herbs, tomatoes, golden berries, jasmine, geranium, rubber plant tree, passion vine, aloe. In doing so, you create an ecosystem where one was demolished by the building of infrastructure: a home for insects, birds, a place to sit peacefully in the sun. I had learned so much about growth and tending and relationship. I cultivated a thriving garden on my balcony, when in 2021, as the pandemic kept us sheltering in place and access was limited and tried and dangerous, structural issues to the infrastructure of the apartment building from years of neglect by the landlord became increasingly apparent. My balcony was demolished; the retaining wall collapsed. My garden, what I could salvage, was brought indoors or given away. I learned so much about loss and renters’ rights and falling leaves. 

These magical realism poems are inspired by that experience and by being a renter in one of the country’s most expensive places to live. As these poems are all Los Angeles, I am grateful to Angel City Review for debuting them. Read the full issue below or at https://angelcityreview.com/.