A few days before Halloween, we drove home from a friend’s church where parishioners had decked out the trunks of their cars with lights, plastic skulls, and spiders, even fog machines, then backed them up into rows in the parking lot so the kids could Trunk or Treat. “Mom!” Blaine hollered, pointing out the window. […]
What are they that move Through these rooms without even The encumbrance of shadows? —Tracy K. Smith In a land so sharply lit Of such vast emptiness dry scrubbed Of rock ocotillo and arroyos Framed by mountains canyoned Toothed and mesa flat a sky That won’t release one’s gaze The blues of it with […]
Baby, let’s not go to the place where you and your other lover go. That place is ugly. Let me take you to the reservoir instead. We’ll go in the middle of the week, in the middle of a drought, the worst one in decades. When we get there we will be alone. The water […]
What have we to say that bears repeating? Statements that start out I love … or I’m sorry … those are best. The rest of speech will mostly miss the mark we aim for. Language frets free the instant syllables escape the lips: so little mercy from our mouths. Wonder is best expressed in music, […]
after Mark Rothko’s “Rust and Blue” I watch a woman who smells of Dior bare her hinged fist at a Rothko: My grandson could paint better. As she swings her hips toward Renoir, I want to catch her handbag’s strap and say, Look again. Here, my chest peals with iron bells, my sternum cracks like […]
In a bed/ in an ink-wash of night sky/ a Chagall dreamer rises/ An omniscient moon/ hovers above the pines…
While mowing the lawn, a small bird flew into my chest and stuck there. It’s America. I can’t afford health insurance…
Back in September, in the midst of a submission deluge for our upcoming Winter/Spring issue (out next month), our fair blog posted a piece On The Importance of Following Submission Guidelines. I know you read it, because afterwards there were far fewer single-spaced, comic sans, 10-pt. font essays in our CNF pile. Still, quite a […]
You asked me once at dawn about forgiveness and I said
I didn’t think you had any need to be forgiven and you said
nothing…
You may not know this about me, but I’m pretty reticent. I am also an able-bodied white heterosexual male (read: abundantly privileged from the get-go). Speaking out and speaking up is a challenge for me, and it’s one I often let get the better of me. I am privileged in more ways than I know, […]
Last night I woke up at 3:30 AM in a panic. “I’m never going to finish my memoir!” I thought. Toss, turn, fluff the pillow. “I’m never going make money as a writer.” Toss, kick, throw off the blanket. “I’m never going to be able to pay back my student loans.” Flip onto stomach, flip onto […]
On the first day there was stillness. For a moment nothing moved. The wind held its breath. The birds stopped in midflight—their wings pinned against the blurry space of sky.
When I travel I usually like to go into random stores and peruse through strange things I really don’t need. My top priority though is always to check out the local bookstores and see what goodies I can walk away with and I’m sure to check out the staff picks. Somehow I believe that if […]
Woman, where is your crown? Why do you stand there dumb-founded? It does not abide in the swivel of your hips or the bouncing of your breasts!
I am a nighttime reader. I turn pages till my eyes glaze, my fingers lose their grip, and my sweetheart moves my book to his nightstand. I find it there under a ray of sun while dressing for work the next morning, no recollection of his kindness or the last two pages. Beside my bed […]
It keeps showing up like a complaint no one has answered for…
Here at Lunch Ticket, we pride ourselves on encouraging emerging writers. It’s part of our social justice mission: we’re looking for pieces that tell new stories, written by authors who are underrepresented in the professional literary world. If you submit to Lunch Ticket, you’ll receive a note that tells you how much we look forward to reading your […]
Maybe it is because it’s the middle of the semester for us MFAs or maybe it’s because the summer is ending and the fall equinox is about to begin and with anything new, change is inevitable. Whatever it is, it’s happening all around me and now it’s happened to me: stress, sickness, and bad moods […]
Sitting under a café umbrella recently, sipping iced tea with an MFA colleague, the conversation naturally, unsurprisingly, turned to writing. We’re both in our second semester of graduate school. As I’ve mentioned previously in this blog, I’m “Creative Nonfiction.” It’s a fact which never ceases to amuse my fiancé who takes it as an existential […]
Since it happened, Beverly has been able to talk and think only in imprecise terms. She’s said there was an accident and the baby is gone, but on the third day she wakes up and the first thing in her head is the baby is dead, and this, finally, is something real she can taste in the back of her throat…
Let’s face it: many of us were spaced out during grade school English classes. I know I was more concerned if I had pizza stuck in my braces after lunch than whether or not I knew what an “unclear antecedent” was. Now, we all have a Grammar Nazi in our lives. I’m talking about the […]
Casting off the fashions of those finders who refined their finery too far in passion’s fire, and reining in my own too-fond desire, I’ll tell the truth of what I’ve found in you…
Sometimes it is hard to be bicultural. Add to the challenges if you marry someone else that is from a completely different part of the world. Recently my husband and I traveled to Costa Rica and it was difficult to explain to everyone we met where we were from. I can only imagine once […]
As a writer we are constantly looking for ways to describe things. We are always consumed with the inevitable questions of how phrases sound, if sentences flow, if we are getting to the point. Always trying to get good sentence that will get our readers intrigued, but there is the power of the senses. One […]
Dawn calls the haenyo. They return to the shore, the soles of their feet worn smooth. They listen for the ripples of pearls and urchins, sing the sun from darkness…
Michael Brown died on my birthday.∗ No peace. No justice. We have been here before: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Native Son By Richard Wright To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee Beloved By Toni Morrison And… Now What? To what do we turn […]
This one’s going to start out with some family folklore. Bear with me. When I was a wee little one, so the story goes, I sat in my crib with a secret smile but nary a hint to my parents of a new talent I was budding. Once left alone, door shut, no adults around […]
In painting my memories, I turn them into fortune-telling cards—my own deck of cards, for my own type of reading…
Last week I traveled from Los Angeles to Montana, and while I peered out the window watching the landscape change from state to state, I realized the journey was much like writing an essay. When I begin a new essay, my mind is a jumble. Things are moving this way and that way. I head […]
Hello, fellow scribblers! It’s been a while! We need to talk about titles. We had a grand total of 350 submissions for fiction for our last issue of Lunch Ticket. That means that I read 350 titles that mostly made me yawn. ****** Trigger Warning ****** I am using the following titles for educational purposes. […]
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