Congratulations to the selected artists featured in our August issue! Submit your work to www.megacityreview.org for a chance to be featured.

Table of Contents:

1. The Daughter Is A Train, Elena Bowman, Non-Fiction

2. Ripe For The Teeth & Other Poems, Precious Ejim, Poetry

3. Spiders, Mikayla Ferguson, Fiction

4. SECTOR 38, Seraph Kaplan, Fiction

5. Call of The Sirens: A Symbolist Tale, Christopher Tran, Mixed Media

6. ORITATAMUSEUM, Miku Yanagi, Mixed Media

7. Eschatology, Luca Zani, Fiction

The Daughter Is A Train, Elena Bowman

Non-Fiction

Ripe For The Teeth & Other Poem, Precious Ejim

Poetry

Spiders, Mikayla Ferguson

Fiction

Instagram: @kaylaferguson10

SECTOR 38, Seraph Kaplan

Fiction

Call of The Sirens: A Symbolist Tale, Christopher Tran

Mixed Media (Poetry & Visual Art)

ORITATAMUSEUM, Miku Yanagi

Mixed Media

• ORITATAMUSEUM is an ongoing project, created by Yanagi, that reconstructs museum visits into foldable paper architecture.

Eschatology, Luca Zani

Fiction

Website: weurd.com

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Table of Contents:

1. Generations, Richard Conti, Visual Arts

2. Black Friday, Cecilia Doherty, Fiction

3. Crow Poem, Parker Galloway, Poetry

4. The Concrete Grid & The Human Pulse, Lucy Kuo, Photography

5. “At least we’ll always have this,” Allaine Stephens, Fiction

6. The Cave, Elise Uhlar, Non-Fiction

Generations, Richard Conti

Instagram: @richardmichaelconti

Website: richardmichaelconti.com

Black Friday, Cecilia Doherty

Crow Poem, Parker Galloway

Instagram: @gallowayphotographic

X: @causalsaintbede

The Concrete Grid & The Human Pulse, Lucy Kuo

Instagram: @lkuo.jpg

“The Concrete Grid & The Human Pulse is a visual exploration of the modern metropolis, capturing the continuous friction between a city’s permanent, imposing infrastructure and the transient, fast-paced lives navigating within it. Rooted in the visual language of urban realism and geometric abstraction, this series moves from the cold, massive scale of concrete overpasses to the intimate, sometimes isolating, pockets of everyday street life. It is a study of how we shape our cities—and how, in turn, their stark lines, glowing windows, and relentless rhythms shape us.”

—Lucy Kuo

I. Scale & Structure

• See, here, Kuo’s focus on the grand, imposing architecture that forms the stage of the urban condition.

II. The Hinge

• A transitional visual bridge where architecture and humanity warp into a single frame.

  

III. The Pulse

• Here, Kuo captures the essential, fast-paced, unglamorous backbone of city logistics and the gig economy.

IV. Shared Spaces & Solitude

• Here, Kuo explores the quiet, nocturnal, and weathered pockets where city dwellers seek refuge or find isolation.

“At least we’ll always have this,” Allaine Stephens

Instagram : @privatesidoney

X: @AllaineStephens

Substack:

The Cave, Elise Uhlar

Instagram: @eliseuhlar

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Table of Contents:

1. Hollywood, Larry Brownstein, Photography

2. Poetry Collection, Jessie Anne Harrison, Poetry

3. Thanks for Your Time, Ben James, Fiction

4. Thank You, Evan Johnson, Fiction

5. Twilight Zone, Daniel Tierney, Poetry

6. Master Negative, Michael Washburn, Fiction

Hollywood, Larry Brownstein

“Hollywood is the industry of illusions. I’ve looked beyond the glitzy and glamorous façade in search of the real Hollywood and found touching cinematic moments: lighthearted moments as if from a romantic comedy; dark moments as if from a post-apocalyptic sci-fi dystopia. . . .”—Larry Brownstein

Featured are a few photos from the collection. Click this link to view it in full.

Poetry Collection, Jessie Anne Harrison

Instagram: @allthebestjess

TikTok: @allthebestjess

Website: allthebestjess.wordpress.com

Thanks for Your Time, Ben James

Thank You, Evan Johnson

Twilight Zone, Daniel Tierney

Master Negative, Michael Washburn

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Congratulations to the authors of the selected poetry & prose for our April issue! Submit your work to megacityreview.org for a chance to be featured.

Table of Contents:

1. Windfall, Fiction, John Abbott

2. HIERARCHY, Poetry, Vera Atieno

3. Pizza Boy, Fiction, X.C. Atkins

4. Lose Everything, Prose, Karen Figilis “Figgy”

5. What The Concrete Holds, Poetry, Suraj Gupta

6. Just A Typical, Poetry, Christian Joseph Montante

7. Practical Criticism, Poetry, Frederick Pollack

Windfall, John Abbott

HIERARCHY, Vera Atieno

Pizza Boy, X.C. Atkins

Instagram: @wolf_cassoulet

Lose Everything, Karen Figilis “Figgy”

Instagram: @Figgyworld

Facebook: Karen Webber Figgy

Website: http://kfwbdesign.com/

What The Concrete Holds, Suraj Gupta

Just A Typical, Christian Joseph Montante

Practical Criticism, Frederick Pollack

Website: http://www.frederickpollack.com/

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Amidst the flutter of love letters, enjoy a poem about love gone sour.

Miss Mountain Dew is a 17-page prosaic epic of a tumultuous relationship—visceral and unflinching.

Take a sip: she’s sweet, corrosive, and hard to quit.

Socials:

Instagram: @renryunchang

Instagram: @megacityreview

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Table of Contents:

1. Ode to Sunday Brunch, Lorraine Casazza, Fiction

2. Miss Mountain Dew, Ren Ryun Chang (Mother Therese), Poetry

3. Homecoming, Trisha Jandoc, Poetry

4. The Last Lady in Kenzo, Sarah Juniper, Fiction

5. Vendor’s Vigil, Sumit Kumar, Poetry

6. An Ode to My Split Ends, Mary Quinn McNaughton, Poetry

7. Cassandra in The City, Betty Stanton, Fiction

8. Solitude in a Clothing-Optional Space, Sara Sebastian, Essay

9. Brave Dreams & Dive, Nicholas Vigiletti, Fiction

Ode to Brunch, Loraine Casazza

Miss Mountain Dew Excerpt, Ren Ryun Chang (Mother Therese)

Homecoming, Trisha Jandoc

Instagram: @trishajan

The Last Lady in Kenzo, Sarah Juniper

Vendor’s Vigil, Sumit Kumar

An Ode to My Split Ends, Mary Quinn McNaughton

Instagram: @mqmcnaughton @niceirishcatholicgirl

Cassandra in The City, Betty Stanton

Bluesky: @fadingbetty.bsky.social

Solitude in a Clothing-Optional Space, Sara Sebastian

Brave Dreams & Dive Bars, Nicholas Vigiletti

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Jupitter Larsen, born Gerald Xe Jupitter Larsen, March 2nd, 1959, is an underground, American, multimedia Artist who specializes in experimental sound performance. With a practice that he himself admits to be “absurd,” he mirrors the entropic nature of life and revels in the irony of existence.

Larsen rose to prominence in the underground art scene in the late 1970’s, taking inspiration for his practice from the world of wrestling, with an important aesthetic influence of his being Gorgeous George, admiring the way George turned the ring into the absurd performance that is often attributed with pro-wrestling today. And ‘absurd performance’ is at the center of all that Larsen does.

With a “light-hearted and flippant attitude,” Larsen turns stage into storm, performing pieces that leave the space in ruins; tearing up books, smashing glass, even setting trucks on fire. As a result of this, Larsen has taken to warning venues in advance about the nature of his performances, however many of them agree to house his art in spite of the risk they inquire.

Though his work usually consists of him and the haters, his masked entourage, performing on stage, at times these soundscapes become interactive, with audience members being called to participate. “Once in 1993 I used a giant ion-gun to charge an entire audience to volts. Audience members chased one another around the club giving each other shocks.”

Larsen also regularly ventures beyond the confines of the stage, with a notable piece of his, Building an Empty Hole, in June 26th, 1994, consisting of himself skydiving with a drill in hand, thus drilling a “hole through the sky.”

Those in opposition of this medium cite its absurd practice and lack of precision as proof that it is not, in fact, ‘art’ and shocking at best. But one cannot be so quick to write off these disaster artists. Afterall, do we not all hold up traffic to catch a glimpse of the wreck? Do we not marvel at the chaos of a storm? Indeed this very feeling of awe has been attributed to the understanding of life itself, with existentialists marveling at the destructive and all encompassing power of nature.

Why, then, discredit human nature? It is summed up best by Larsen himself, who states “The absurdity I find in rot and decay is the fact that biology is based on unstable molecules transferring energy between stable molecules. This very process, which gives life, simultaneously takes it away. Because the molecules that are doing the energy transferring are unstable, aging occurs. This is irony. And irony is funny. More recent broadcasts of mine have consisted of slowly pushing live microphones into power grinders. Go ahead, laugh. You know you want to.”

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Socials:

Artist Instagram: gxjupitterlarsen

Author Instagram: viola.evertetts

Sources:

GX Jupitter-Larsen, gxjl.bandcamp.com/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.

IMDb. “Gerald Jupitter-Larsen | Director, Writer.” IMDb, IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/name/nm5622059/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.

Index, Author Mail Artists’. “G.X. Jupitter-Larsen.” Mail Artists Index, 11 July 2021, mailartists.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/g-x-jupitter-larsen/.

Larsen, G.X. Jupitter. “More Facts on the Polywave.”

“Performance Index for GX Jupitter.” Larsen, performances.jupitter-larsen.com/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.

“‘GX Jupitter-Larsen’ Interviewed by Daniel Ableev.” Pif Magazine, www.pifmagazine.com/2017/05/interviewtf-with-gx-jupitter-larsen/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.

Phranc The All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger is an internationally acclaimed performer and visual artist whose work uses both humor and anger to interrogate traditional gender perspectives. She writes, records, performs and creates paper sculptures that tell stories, document history, honor Amazons and protest injustice. She has forged her butch identity in cardboard, on stage and on album covers. As a teenager she attended The Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building where she focused on songwriting and silk-screenin1.

Socials:

Artist Instagram: phranc.la Artist website: www.phranc.la

An artist at the Craig Krull Gallery

Gallery Instagram: craigkrullgallery

Galley Website: craigkrullgallery.com

As time slips softly from our laps and falls into the new season, MEGACITY invites you to ease into this brief, beautiful solace in between. Allow the haze of summer to give way to cool, crisp weather. Change with the winds and move in step with the shift of time. Usher in this new period with excitement and earnestness, without reservation. Mourn not the loss of leisure but celebrate this cyclical ending that births new beginnings.

The Peace of Wild Things 
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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Featured Article

Dodger Blues

Camouflage, Code, and The Cost of Being Seen

by Genaro Trejo

I walked into my children’s private school in Los Angeles not long ago — clean jeans, crisp shirt, Dodgers cap pulled low — and was stopped at the gate. By the same Mexican security guard who had always waved me through with a smile.

Nothing about me had changed, except the hat. But that was enough.

I first read Caspian Kang’s “The Red Sox Hat” a few years ago, when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine. It stayed with me—not because I’m a Red Sox fan, or particularly nostalgic about baseball caps—but because of how precisely he captured the power of clothing to let someone slip under the radar. Kang wrote about how, as a Korean American teenager, his Red Sox hat helped him pass as white, made him less visible, and safer.

The hat, he said, was camouflage.
I understood that — but I also knew it didn’t work the same for me.

When I wear a Dodgers hat, I don’t disappear. I become hypervisible.

In Los Angeles, the Dodgers hat means many things. For white men, it can signal civic pride. For Black and brown men, it can signal something else entirely — a kind of coded geography. In the wrong neighborhood, it might be read as a gang affiliation. In a private school parking lot, it might read as a stereotype. And in my case, it read louder than my resume.

That morning, I was the same man who donates to the school, who sits on admissions committees, who’s on a first-name basis with the faculty and staff. But with the Dodgers cap and a little bit of scruff on my face, I was also, apparently, someone to be second-guessed.

There’s a kind of performance to being Mexican American in elite spaces — one I’ve learned to navigate quietly. I’ve spent my life proving I belong: as a public policy graduate from the University of Chicago, a fellow at Stanford Business School, a former COO of a major nonprofit, and now as a trustee for the California State Bar. These credentials are my armor. The Dodgers hat strips that away.

What Kang’s essay elides — understandably — is how phenotype changes the equation. For some, a baseball cap is a costume. For others, it’s a confirmation. You can’t put on whiteness, but you can sometimes put on safety. Not everyone gets that choice.

I think often of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ letter to his son, in which he speaks of what it means to carry a Black body through a country built on the illusion of innocence. That letter haunts me — not just for its clarity, but for the way it teaches us to look at the body as a kind of evidence. When I walk into certain rooms, or raise my hand in a board meeting, or sit in the audience at a donor breakfast, I feel the same thing: my body, my face, my family history arrive before my words do.

The Dodgers hat isn’t just a cap. It’s a symbol — of my dad, who loved the team, who took me to games as a boy, who wore his own faded cap while working construction. It’s a gesture toward pride, memory, and belonging. But it’s also a mirror, reflecting back how others see me — or think they do.

I don’t wear it any less now. But I wear it with the knowledge that in some places, it makes me more than a fan. It makes me a question.

Genaro Trejo is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He served as COO of Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), is a trustee of the California State Bar, and holds degrees from UCLA and the University of Chicago. He is the editor of MEGACITY Review, a literary and arts journal focused on underrepresented voices.

Support Our Work

Funded by the people, for the people, MEGACITY Review is a nonprofit literary journal that is dedicated to the community, and thriving because of it. Every contribution supports our mission of amplifying modern voices and promoting the arts. Donate now.

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White Dress by Lana Del Rey

As June breaks open to reveal its sweet, summer center, sizzling upon the paved pan of city streets, many take the mellowed mood as an opportunity to rehash old passions and perhaps learn new tricks. Yes - all around town, bodies busy themselves with that happy work of passion - life’s appreciation - stocking up on books, reconnecting with friends, going on long, meandering walks where one talks about nothing at all.

These moments can feel inconsequential in their happenings, but prove to be the most cherished in memory. What happened before it became - the breath before one speaks, the spaces between the narrative of thought. All this time spent writing in the margins of life, underlining our favorite parts.

Life Often Catches Up to You when You are Busy Living.

By Genaro Trejo

The book Moshi Moshi caught my attention because the title is often heard whenever a Japanese person answers the phone—and to me, it was the first phrase I consistently remembered during my many years traveling between the U.S. and Tokyo. As innocuous as the phrase may seem, in Banana Yoshimoto’s novel, it becomes the quiet entry point into a deeper search for meaning.

The story follows Yoshie, a young woman coping with the mysterious dual suicide of her father and a little-known woman with a perplexing past. As she and her mother move to Shimokitazawa and rebuild their lives, Yoshie begins to unravel the emotional and psychic remnants her father left behind. What begins as a ghost story transforms into a meditation on grief, identity, and the subtle ways we grow through loss.

It’s a quick read that gently draws you into the minds of Yoshie and her mother—two women suddenly faced with the emotional wreckage of a man they thought they knew. The prose is deceptively simple, the pace unhurried, but what lingers are the textures of everyday life: the rituals of food, the rhythm of work, the comfort of a new neighborhood. Moshi Moshi doesn’t offer neat answers, but instead gives us the gift of quiet resolution.

Perfect for readers who appreciate understated storytelling and emotional depth, Yoshimoto’s novel is a reminder that sometimes the most profound healing begins in the most ordinary moments.

Events

A few photos from May 31st’s Literary Salon in collaboration with the Craig Krull Gallery. Thank you to all who were in attendance for making the evening unforgettable. And if you couldn't make it - fear not, there are more events yet to come ✧˖°.

Literary Gallery

A visual archive of poetry and prose—where words meet design.

Submit your art to submissions@megacityreview.org for a chance to be featured in our newsletter (please follow the submission requirements as outlined in the flyer). We look forward to seeing your work!

Support our work

Funded by the people, for the people, MEGACITY Review is a nonprofit literary journal that is dedicated to the community, and thriving because of it. Every contribution supports our mission of amplifying modern voices and promoting the arts. Donate now.

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*photo1

It is said by Camus that the only practical2 way we can know our fellow man is through their “behavior, by the totality of their deeds, [and] by the consequence caused in life by their presence” (The Myth of Sisyphus). An artist is reaffirmed by their very being - by the pen marks that stain the writer’s hand and song that slips past the singer’s lips - and it is only the lack of creation (undefined) through which thought begins to undermine them. In a similar vein, that which we love can only be deduced through how we spend our time - where we choose to be - and the people we surround ourselves with in life.

True, it is best for an artist and patrons of the arts to make a masterwork out of their very existence, investing in moments that will make up their memories, their consciousness, that which is intangible and essential to our personage. It is best to spend this life in artistic appreciation and existential revelry via beauty’s investigation.

What better way to do so than at a Literary Salon with others in the creative community? Join us this Saturday (May 31st) in affiliation with the Craig Krull Gallery for a night full of art, literature, and laughter.

Guest Speakers

Submit your art to submissions@megacityreview.org for a chance to be featured in our newsletter (please follow the submission requirements as outlined in the flyer). We look forward to seeing your work!

Support our work

Funded by the people, for the people, MEGACITY Review is a nonprofit literary journal that is dedicated to the community, and thriving because of it. Every contribution supports our mission of amplifying modern voices and promoting the arts. Donate now.

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As we near the end of may and warm weather begins to saturate grey days into blue1, it is important to take the time to reflect on our lives and honor the path we have paved amidst the chaos of figuring where next it will lead. May, named after Maia - the Roman goddess of growth and spring - is a harbinger of change; April showers cease, flowers bloom, periods in people’s lives draw to an end (well wishes towards the graduates) in favor of personal evolution .

We at MEGACITY have chosen to honor this month of metamorphosis with our first ever Literary Salon in collaboration with the Craig Krull Gallery . Join us for a night of artistic revelry and appreciation where we will bid farewell to all that was as we enter a new season of creativity.

Submit your art to submissions@megacityreview.org for a chance to be featured in our newsletter (please follow the submission requirements as outlined in the flyer). We look forward to seeing your work!

Past Happenings

Support Our Work

Funded by the people, for the people, MEGACITY Review is a nonprofit literary journal that is dedicated to the community, and thriving because of it. Every contribution supports our mission of amplifying modern voices and promoting the arts. Donate now.

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