The child sits by an open window, watches rain bounce off red clay while Rufous-sided towhees wait out the storm, grip tangled limbs of azaleas. She hears wind tear through leaves, smells rain as it pounds the earth. ++++++++++Slowly, she picks up scissors, cuts off each finger from her only doll. The child talks to […]
Dear Lunch Ticket Readers, On Fridays, Lunch Ticket always publishes an original blog, written by someone from the blog team. We try to blend the idiosyncratic with the universal. We talk about how we live and write. Today, in the aftermath of the election, in lieu of our usual one-author essay, the blog is a […]
Waiting room TV wanna know “CREDIT NO GOOD?” in blinkedy blue letters blue plastic chairs hard as rocks blue scrubs and blue shower caps on the nurses and docs blue-eyed po-lice ++all in blue beat my cousin black and blue the PA system sayin ++code blue ++code blue I wonder if they talkin bout him […]
How do I say this? I’ve been trying to say it for years. Wait, let me think. Yes. Years. I can’t say it in conversation. I am never very articulate in speech. I get over-excited and miss my meaning. I swing hard but the ball flies past me, through my bat, snaps into the catcher’s […]
This is a novel written by an author in extremis, an author both blessed and possessed. John Banville admits to experiencing a nervous breakdown while writing the book. He called it his attempt to set himself free in the practice of writing. The story is a first-person narration in the past tense. It is set […]
According to Darwin, the earthworm is an essential player in creating the fertile conditions for the perpetuation of plant life. I remember the earthworms of my Brooklyn childhood. Slimy and gray, fattened on a diet of dirt and decay, they crawled to the surface through cracks in the sidewalk. In a display of girlish torment […]
I don’t know how he figured it was me who told the school he had AIDS, but he found out—and finds me under the bleachers, smoking a cigarette. He even throws the first punch, which I think is out of character for the rich bitch star of our high school track team, headed to Yale […]
Felt the lightning / And we waited on the thunder / Waited on the thunder ~Bob Seger Monday, 3 October St. Johns County has been placed in the 5 day forecast cone by the National Hurricane Center. A workshop submission is due today for my MFA residency in December. At 5:00, I send it away […]
I read the essay collection Loitering by Charles D’Ambrosio, and returned to my own work-in-progress that suddenly resembled the cute chicken scratch of a toddler. Or an actual chicken. I looked at my attempt at an essay and thought, surely there’s a mistake. This can’t be my most recently revised draft. Alas. And so D’Ambrosio’s […]
In July 2012, my teenaged daughter Reiley and I hiked into the San Gorgonio Wilderness—a landscape of rolling foothills, canyons, and steep slopes that marks the eastern boundary of the Los Angeles Basin. Our destination was Mt. San Gorgonio. The 11,503-foot peak, fondly called “Old Greyback,” is the highest mountain between the Sierra Nevada mountain […]
Picking Blueberries My mother’s colander: metal with small, heart-shaped mouths— It was an old thing, probably my grandmother’s before, just like that blueberry bush in our backyard, planted 50-odd-years ago, a natural inheritance. We never used the colander except when picking blueberries, and even that became a hobby my parents left for their aging relatives […]
I’ve always loved the ocean. When I was a child my family visited friends on the Jersey shore in the summers. We spent most of that time on a small stretch of beach a few blocks from the summer home the friends all shared. The adults would set up their beach chairs for the day, […]
Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment explores a woman trying to survive the emotional storm after her husband leaves her. While thin on plot, the specificity of the character study strikes a universal chord. The brutal and ugly honesty is striking, off-putting, and at times self-indulgent, but the character always remains true, which makes her […]
I used to pray a God was listening I used to make my parents proud I was the glue that kept my friends together Now they don’t talk and we don’t go out I used to know the name of every person I kissed Now I made this bed and I can’t fall asleep in […]
Lunch Ticket is honored and proud to nominate the following two pieces in Fiction, two in Creative Nonfiction, and six Poems from our Winter/Spring 2016 and Summer/Fall 2016 issues for Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net 2016. Do read these wonderful pieces! 1.HONOR’S JUSTICE by SABRINA FEDEL ISSUE: WINTER/SPRING 2016 2.RUIN by LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA ISSUE: WINTER/SPRING 2016 3.DOWN […]
On a heavy Saturday in June, Steven and I wait for strangers to pound through my mother’s front door, but the strangers never come. Exclamation points, dotting our Craigslist posts like lollipops, have failed to lure buyers for the Vintage, Mint Condition! Italian provincial dining room set! and the Like New! Singer Sewing machine. No […]
This month I am struggling with my writing. I may be falling into the trap of trying to write “well.” In my desire to improve my work, I leave the world of honest reflection and search for beautifully descriptive language instead, trying, perhaps too hard, to be good at it. I recently discovered the English […]
Writer’s block. We’ve all experienced it. Sometimes we force ourselves through it. Wait it out. Try a writing prompt, take a break for coffee or something to eat. And sometimes it’s stickier than that. Now, you can’t get a word down. You’re staring at the white page. Maybe a revision? Maybe you should start over—like, […]
… I never wanted anything from you / Except everything you had / And what was left after that too… ~Florence Welch & Isabella Summers With tonight’s Harvest Moon and next week’s equinox, autumn is upon us. I’m not sorry to see this summer go: my once-disciplined practice of writing first thing each morning […]
A Thin Season (For a young man beheaded for listening to Western pop tunes in his father’s grocery store) It is a thin season culling the air of blue breath choked sudden as a sword at the throat of a young infidel the forbidden pop tune of his innocence still playing in the annals of […]
In June, my husband took our daughters to Kansas City for two weeks. We thought it would be a good time for them to travel without me because I’d be at my MFA residency in Los Angeles and it’s hard to coordinate child care for the four and six-year-old in my absence. It’s hard to […]
Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History consists of a series of 366 vignettes, one for each day of the Roman calendar year, not noticeably related to one another, which create a mosaic of fractured memories of human history. The volume continues the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Hegelian approach to understanding and articulating Latin […]
Back to school arrives so early now—often weeks before Labor Day, the unofficial last day of summer. Thanks to my teaching schedule, which doesn’t begin until late September, and home-schooling history, I routinely extend summertime for my children. I teach summer school in July to fund late summer road trips. Instead of posing for pictures […]
I am interested in different forms of communication (verbal, written, body language, etc). I generally paint the female form in uncomfortable positions and circumstances to see if an idea, emotion, or critique can be communicated using bodies, symbols, and titles. People are gregarious by nature. We are not meant for solitary existence. Our need to affectively communicate with each other […]
My job is as a roaster and green buyer for a coffee company. I roast the coffee but I also source the green (unroasted) coffee beans (technically green coffee is a seed and not a legume), and so it’s my job to taste samples and figure out what roast profiles work best for each specific […]
What I Brought Back Peace Corps Lesotho, 1980-82 I brought images of a motorcycle, a tsetututu, sputtering down pot-holed roads to a village where men stuff mint in their nostrils, women stretch their mouths in ululation, boys extend legs in Bruce Lee moves, and babies are secured on mothers’ backs by blankets with airplane designs. […]
My parents were not joiners. Mom was a healthcare worker. Singing on the church choir and attending occasional PTA meetings was the extent of her activism. My dad, employed as a transit worker, occupied his free time trying to out run his despair. Though both of my parents were members of labor unions (Local 1199 […]
My last living memory is of my husband carrying my half-conscious body away from the thick heat and clinging wetness of the rice field. Something has bitten my right heel, leaving a crescent of bloody marks. He places me on our cart, jumps on, and prods Sakhi, our cow, into a jingling trot. Sweat and […]
He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory… ~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient I owe a debt of gratitude to middle school Latin. I could already pronounce and spell many words in the language of medical terminology when I started […]
A Field Guide for Immersion Writing is Robin Hemley’s non-fiction methodological primer for writers on immersion journalism. In this compilation, Mr. Hemley covers a gamut of approaches to tackling immersion-writing projects, using examples of his work and other writers’ works to apply the mechanics of the narrative process. His techniques cover advice for undertaking and refining […]
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