“Mi Amor, Mi China, Mi Delirio” by Leslie Blanco

A story by alum Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appears in the Kenyon Review:

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Chicago, city of crabgrass and gleaming lakeshore, listen.

Yanet was a bride when she first saw you, with a craving for babies like a craving for a smoke. She loved your margins, those peripheral neighborhoods where botánicas hid like spider webs in corners. How many times she passed and thought of a trabajito, a red candle for Santa Barbara (patron saint of the disenchanted), or a cigar for Changó (Yoruban and now Cuban god of revenge), and of course the foreign incantations that would vanish you for a moment like the fog that sometimes engulfed downtown completely. She loved your Aztec virgins, the ones who paraded up and down Western Avenue in red dresses so tight she could see every ripple on their thighs. She loved your seedy jazz clubs and the old foreign women no one bothered to stop and listen to.

Continue reading an excerpt of the story online. The full story can be found in the January/February 2016 edition of the Kenyon Review. You can also find a conversation with Leslie about the process of writing “My Amor, My China, Mi Delirio” and other topics at the Kenyon Review’s website.