“Isn’t it her right to write her experience in the way she experienced it?” My friend and I were having a heated discussion about the New York Times best-selling novel, All the Bright Places, and I’d said that I thought the portrayal of one of the main characters reinforced negative stereotypes about people with mental […]
Moorings Suppose you say water. We’re on the boat, making for Babson Island, one of three tiny beach slabs that connects at high tide. We set anchor, mark the drift, account for wind, row to the shallows. This place has sand dollars. You find some, bring them to me. I will wrap them in tissue […]
French National Day commemorates the July 14, 1789 storming of the Bastille by a mob of enraged Parisians looking for ammunition in the fortress-prison that symbolized the tyrannical Bourbon monarchy. The Bastille’s fall marks the beginning of the French Revolution. On Bastille Day this year, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a nineteen-ton white Renault truck […]
On the Friday following the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Chinaka Hodge performed selections from her newly released poetry book, Dated Emcees, at 826LA to benefit the literacy organization. With poems honoring Jordan Davis, references to Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, and tributes to Tupac and Biggie, Hodge has no shortage of words for […]
When I was sixteen I read a Christian men’s book called Wild At Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul. The book was about how to unleash the inner William Wallace (from the film Braveheart), and live a life of adventure and danger (within, of course, the bounds of traditional gender roles and conservative, evangelical Christianity). […]
The train ride from Osaka to Arashiyama took an hour. Noriko rested her head against her husband’s shoulder and drifted off into a light sleep. She was exhausted from long days working at the Tesagara Tea Room and taking care of their two-year-old son, Eiji. Disembarking at the station, Ichiro instructed the cab driver to […]
Home is that accumulation of memory and sensation, not always sweet but invariably familiar. The familiarity is a gift which never ceases to orient me to my place in the world. As a memoirist, I draw on the abundance of this gift to excavate building blocks of story buried deep in my subconscious. My long […]
In “On Convention,” Margot Singer is less interested in defining what creative nonfiction is, and more interested in what it is doing and what it can do. She seeks to understand the evolving nature of the art of the genre, and how it blurs the lines between the “conventions,” of good writing—an imitation of mimetic […]
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. / Where did it all go wrong? ~John Berryman, “Dream Song 4” Next year I will turn forty. Thirty-nine feels dire some days, at the edge of oblivion. I walked away from my career last year to start grad school and focus on writing, and now […]
Each Time We Enter Costco I cannot help myself. I have to say, “See that? Free hearing tests!” To which I add, “Can’t hear me?” He ignores that, so, “Eh? Eh? What’s that?” His brittle bearing flashes mad. The cart gets filled in silence. Stuff we do not need in ludicrous amounts: pintos, potato chips, […]
This is a letter of gratitude. Gratitude for having had the opportunity to serve as Blog Editor here at Lunch Ticket for two issues. Gratitude for my peers in the writing community. Gratitude for being given the privilege of editing and writing among such a talented gaggle of writers (an inkwell of writers? a creed […]
The great thing about graphic memoirs is that they tell a story with pictures and somehow capture a feeling or an expression that no words can explain. It’s tricky, though. Because the association that a graphic novel is a story of cartoons, the expectation is that the subject matter is fiction. With a graphic memoir, the […]
When I arrive at the DMV at eight in the morning, the line is already out the door. A woman wanders person-to-person managing the queue with a clipboard of forms and checklists. She asks me what I am here for and when I say “Name change,” she congratulates me. “Thank you, I’m glad it’s over […]
My “Peoplescapes” are colorful and exaggerated narratives about the condition of today’s world. Our culture is designed to ignore certain fundamental truths, causing great obstacles to our continuing existence. Addressing these issues by capturing moments of ordinary life confronting us all, while sharply observing and commenting, I’m able to shine a light on these subjects […]
Recently, my son Quentin called to report that he’d summited Mt. Rubidoux and would be home soon for dinner. I chuckled. Mt. Rubidoux is, more accurately, a hill that rises 500 feet above the Santa Ana River in Western Riverside. Under most circumstances, “summit” would be excessive, though that was not the case […]
In Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies, Tara Ison taps into her subconscious and squeezes out a rich stream of life lessons. Weaving her personal stories together with scenes from iconic films, Ison reflects on the “influence of film on [her] own authenticity” (5) and specifically examines […]
(What the white man say?) A piece of mine’s That’s what the white man wanted when I rhyme “Untitled 3,” Kendrick Lamar In my small mountain hometown of Bailey, Colorado—filled with rednecks, conservative Christians, new age hippies, construction workers, adventure enthusiasts, and commuters to Denver, most of whom, like me, were white—I grew up knowing […]
Audrey T. Carroll is a Queens, NYC native whose obsessions include kittens, coffee, Supernatural, Buffy, and the Rooster Teeth community. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Fiction International, So to Speak, Feminine Inquiry, the A3 Review, and others. Her poetry collection, Queen of Pentacles, is forthcoming from Choose the Sword Press. She […]
We wake again pleading for the last time, a forked tongue once lost between planetary failures. Their rotation had become dangerous like birthing hips on the move, either circled in naked light, or coiling an orbit around the throat of some dark diviner’s rabbit. Anti-gravity had taken its unsteered toll, the air having long been […]
The tenth child, your parents gave you to the church as tithe; I don’t know if I would do the same had I ten, twenty, a hundred to my name. In our church, the young families have begun to foster local children, taken from mothers who are high, forgetful, taken from days spent strapped in […]
Longing, as dirge The wood in warp and disrepair has had its share of everything. Never drinking not even rye and absinthe puddled sickly on this old porch. No, the sazerac’s candy burn fails to impress this sagging terrace— it smolders on as coal beneath the eves. Although my foot glances toward his thigh and […]
There is a black and white photo of El Capitolio on the wall of Abuelo’s house. Its icy frame catches the golden dust in the kitchen air, appearing Pardo. There is no such term in English. He tells me of the colors like a dream. Suddenly, I am ten again, learning Spanish and shame, drowning. […]
Father glowers into her mouth— a drain, clogged with leftovers, a dirty sun. Lays his fork down, swallows mashed potatoes like they’re whole. Her mouth, which never stays closed, happily churns herring morsels and syllables into viscous mounds that morph whole sentences into crowds, spilling in and out of a rush hour train until nobody’s […]
Can we assume the bald man dresses himself in a skin-colored turtleneck to intentionally resemble a phallus or must he announce he’s studied Freud? When she suggests I think outside the box I respond that saying think outside the box is an example of thinking inside the box. She looks at me like I’m French-Canadian, […]
Content is a glimpse +++++Willem de Kooning +++++We look at the world once, in childhood. +++++The rest is memory. ++++++++++Louise Glück 1. Cóntent is a Glimpse Trapped in the dream of wisdom birthed out of the deep desire for a magisterial eye’s +++++deific “I am” fantasy of a scalpel-sharp panoptical glimpse, itself at war with […]
When I graduated from University of California, Irvine in 1980, with a BFA in theatre, I didn’t stick around for the commencement speech. The day of my last class was the same day I boarded a plane and flew back to New York. I hadn’t been in Southern California by choice. Six years had gone […]
She sits over coffee until it goes cold and I dump it and pour new. I get her to take a bowl of soup sometimes, which may be all she eats. She doesn’t look bad, considering. She can’t hear much. Sometimes she writes to a daughter out West, but mostly she’s deep in a book […]
Brother, your body is a spit-pig, a split trunk of light-struck oak. They will quarter your meat, deny you Styx. In coinless eyes I’ve seen the thugs who come to stuff themselves in our scared spaces, the waves of snails that stick horrible to our shores. My tongue tied with limestone, I cannot stop it. […]
Dear Lunch Ticket readers, The literary community has circulated a letter criticizing The Antioch Review’s recent publication of a piece by Daniel Harris, titled “The Sacred Androgen: The Transgender Debate.” If you haven’t read the piece, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you do. However, many of us have. Appalled at its ill-informed and insensitive […]
He follows you into the woods as always, staying within reach of a stray touch: out of habit, yes, and because there’s no reason to believe this day will end any differently than others. Were he to know the spade’s grim purpose—blade laced with rust, old earth— he might plea for the earned mercy of […]
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