What’s Past is Prologue The man said sorry. That’s all he could manage to say. He knew that it was in pain. It was the “right thing to do.” He knew that long years, wear & tear, unavoidable science, and an old expiration date was only bringing it intense pain. He said sorry some more […]
Living on Sandy Hook Bay in New Jersey gave me a personal stake in global warming. Superstorm Sandy took a devastating toll on our neighborhood and our beach. I completed the Rising Series five years before Sandy. The series helped me to express the fear 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina imprinted on my psyche. Each year as the destruction from storms stretches around the globe […]
It’s 8:30 a.m., and unlike me, New York City is already fully caffeinated. I am an international woman of mystery, poised in the stairwell ready to carry out my orders. This is my mission, I have chosen to accept it. Name: James Wolff. Age: fifty as of today. He stands approximately 5’11” with brown hair. […]
Note from a Loving Friend I. For weeks, high school girls giggled, slipped folded notes to each other, their noses pruned, leaving me on the outskirts, alien that I was. True I had my green card, always in my wallet, but still I did not know why I felt alone in their company. I read […]
As a kid growing up on the asphalt of Los Angeles, I treasured any chance to play outside. My schoolyard was concrete. My various apartment buildings had courtyards with potted plants if we were lucky, or underground parking garages if we weren’t. At my best friend’s house, I was always the one begging the other […]
Sherri Cornett’s German immigrant and pioneer roots are set deep into the homesteads around the small south Texas town of Cuero, where both of her parents grew up, met, and married. By the time she settled in Billings, Montana, in 1993, she had lived in eleven cities and, in some of those, several homes. Out of […]
39.7768° N, 105.0382° W The clouded sky and thunder have been threatening to start something for a little over an hour when Justin and I begin our walk with our dog, Corky. Occasional afternoon storms rarely last very long anyway. We cross the street to say hello to our neighbor, Lynn, and her dog, Shadow. […]
I create art to inspire change. I draw inspiration from artists whose creations are a means to construct dialogue around taboo topics. My art is focused on societal issues that are expressed through painting. Hiding in Plain Sight is a body of work that documents the people of our century, in order for future generations to have an understanding of our present-day experiences. These portraits represent the urban community […]
Twenty years ago, in a storefront on Avenue D in New York’s Alphabet City, I visited my first psychic. She was sturdy, middle-aged and wore a silk turban. I was tipsy off of the millennium drink du jour – a “cosmo.” Tarot cards with worn edges flipped into neat clusters and rows in front of […]
[fiction] 4 My babysitter is an old bat. Old and mean. She makes me drink water standing by the kitchen table. She won’t let me sit down. After I drink, she pushes me back outside to play. She won’t let me in until lunch at eleven. I play with the other kids in the yard. […]
Breakfast Club I had a story published recently about the first time my husband fried me over-medium, farm-fresh eggs for breakfast. They were velvety, oozing, and accompanied by buttered sourdough toast. The eggs were a revelation to my palate. I ate a lot of canned, frozen, boxed, bagged, fake, cheap, and subsidized food growing up. […]
ache when you came here, you were a shadow on the wall of the episcopalian church on the water, fourteen hours away. you had your mother’s face and father’s eyes. limbs that bent into edges and straw, skinny red lines frowning across your left wrist. a hunger you couldn’t name yet rustled beneath your ribs. […]
This morning was as close to a semi-typical morning as it gets for me and my family. We woke up at 6 a.m., took showers, got dressed and ate, gathered all of our stuff together, and roly-poly-pell-melled into the car by 7 o’clock to drive the thirty-or-so minutes to my husband’s work in Modesto, CA. […]
Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (2018), When We Wake in the Night (2012), and Breath in Every Room (2001), winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. She earned a BA and MA in English literature from the University of Montana and a MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College. Her work […]
A four-letter word that ends in “k.” That’s how my friend, Kristi, used to refer to the color pink. In her youth she was a competitive swimmer, because it was the one sport open to both boys and girls. She writes: “A touch with the fingertips on the kicking feet of the swimmer in front […]
[creative nonfiction] Where did it begin, the pain, the images that haunt me? — La Prieta, Gloria E. Anzaldúa Tyler Clementi was eighteen in 2010. Before he ever became eighteen, he was a toddler. He was a kid with exceptional abilities, and he was known to have taught himself how to play the violin, accompanying […]
My mother opens her eyes to a vast cloud of nothingness. Freckles of light poked through the edges of the roof piercing the blended darkness. This was her sixth month living in Baltimore alone and winter was in full swing. Some nights she could see her breath. She wished she hadn’t underestimated the lack of […]
Googling flowers that sound country enough to create my own lemon on a step because it is smart to discuss a field of goldenrods rather than the hood flying up on the old eighty-four ford ranger while we were doing seventy on seventy-five because the truck was a lemon held together by bungee cords, electrical […]
Two years ago, I was talking to my roommate, who is Mexican American, when I realized how much I felt like an outsider. She had just come back from a lawyer group in San Diego for women of color. As we talked about it, I started to get nervous, anxious. A thought kept floating through […]
The poet Vijay Seshadri said that “the purpose of poetry is to deal with unprecedented experience.” Poets will use unprecedented language, but few have made poems mostly made up of entirely unprecedented words. Jos Charles’s feeld accomplishes just that, living in an invented and unnamed dialect that is as new as it is familiar. Her […]
I tell mothers: Be careful how you bodytalk in front of your daughters. You could be teaching them the language of self-hate. The universe was kind and gave me boys. I threw them in some undershirts and cut-offs, gave out shovels and told them to come back inside when they were sixteen. I swear, I […]
I consider my work a contemplation of the contemporary image. I create through scribbling twisting and interlacing lines creating this mass of interesting shapes. A vital expression is then released and an innovation of an image emerges. I enjoy delving into the psychological portion of my mind through drawing […]
When a nighthawk leaves her nest, she takes only the feathers on her back. Can you imagine? My partner and I are packing up to move from Connecticut to California. We are bringing some furniture, some art, kitchen stuff, clothes, and about a thousand books. Probably more than a thousand. As I pack box after […]
i dream about time i dream, that it loves me that time will give Black Bodies more of itself this poem is about a universe where time runs the world this poem is about a universe where time aint got no time for Black Bodies a universe in which time plays chess with Black Bodies check mate. the speaker of […]
You were my best friend, and I didn’t know you very well. We met at T-Time, a trans support group on our college campus. You were a founding member, and I was a latecomer. I’d transferred to UC Irvine as a junior, entering the queer community late in the school year. At my first T-Time […]
LeVan D. Hawkins is a writer, poet, and performance artist formerly of Los Angeles and based in Chicago. In Chicago, he has appeared at the You’re Being Ridiculous storytelling series at Steppenwolf Theatre, Links Hall, the Homolatte Reading Series, This Much Is True Chicago, OUTspoken!, Fillet-of-Solo-Storytelling Festival, and Center on Halsted. Hawkins’s prose has appeared in […]
Is it embarrassing that my nineteen-year-old child has never read a book? I was once asked if maybe he didn’t read, because he couldn’t. A lot of well-meaning, natural born, corn raised, American people tend to generalize when the child in question is adopted from a foreign (pronounced: /FUR-ən/) country. “That poor child, I’m sure […]
[creative nonfiction] “Every year, hundreds of thousands of American families become homeless, including more than 1.6 million children. Even a seemingly minor event can trigger a catastrophic outcome and catapult a family onto the streets.” The National Center on Family Homelessness December in Philadelphia had closed in fast, with a sudden shift from the […]
For most of my life, I’ve had issues with women. But it grew worse in college when I became a victim of sexual assault. When I think about that night, I am not angry at the boy who took advantage of me. I’ve forgiven him. I don’t even remember his name. When I woke up, ashamed, […]
What to Expect When You Become a Bell There will be hands. A litany of them. You will be lifted by the saffron cuffs of a temple priest, tuned lip tapped against your sister’s to synchronize every supplicant heart to the beat of rapture. But don’t fear— between blows, something will persist. You will be […]
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