Writing feels impossible now.
Necessary, but impossible.
I don’t want to try making deep metaphors right now. I don’t want to inch my way to some profound realization, hoping the reader is inching along with me. Just writing those words, the poet in me felt inclined to add a metaphor to the previous sentence, as if everything needs to be earnest and pretty.
I’d received a rejection letter just minutes earlier. This demonstrated that I was an utter failure and needed to move on—maybe take up candle-making and open an Etsy store or finally veganize all my grandmother’s recipes or literally anything that didn’t require putting words on a page. Almost instantly, responses began pinging my phone and inbox. Most went something like this: “You’re overreacting. Rejection’s part of being a writer.”
One of the signature pieces of mine at 826LA is to integrate mindfulness into our pedagogy, because the world has been traumatized over the last five years, particularly. You don’t have to look far to see what we’ve been through as a country, with COVID-19, with the racial reckoning, a failed coup, and everything else. People are traumatized.
It’s good for me, in my own brain and life, to talk about these issues. It brings up a sort of mindfulness for me in terms of my own emotional storm. It’s good that it feels like a broader issue around the way that the world cares for mothers, and around depression, and not just about me, because mom rage doesn’t feel like such a constant anymore in my life.
Having been an art teacher, woodcarver and a printmaker in my formative years, I
emerged as a painter, joyously overwhelmed by color and searching for pattern.
Color and pattern are everywhere, but the seeing and interpretation of them are
different for each of us. Pattern in nature is primal to me – which fuels my desire to
find a glimmer of logic in vastly complicated, confusing and tumbled landscapes.
On July 23rd of 2018 I witnessed a 10’ flash flood tear past my Santa Fe home, a tsunami in a quiet valley, washing downstream animals, debris and tumbling boulders, leaving behind a raw, reordered landscape. My work went from the universal to the personal, understanding that our presumed control over the environment had evolved to a “new norm.”
The origins come from the life I was living and writing about while I attended Louisiana State University for Creative Writing. I wrote a story about a man wandering around Baton Rouge, where the novel is set. My professor, James Wilcox, liked the story and suggested I continue it. I went to law school instead.
The girl leaned her forehead against the window in the backseat and watched the fields of green rolling by while she searched for wildlife. She’d heard bison were in Wyoming, sometimes blocking the roads as they crossed. They said Pronghorns bounced across the fields on spring-like legs. She didn’t think she’d see a bear from the road, but oh, how she wanted to.
we’re easy to recognize
dressed in our work uniforms.
those fellas are security guards. if you give them
something to guard they think themselves gods.
she wants to see if we have all we need
SHE purges into the porcelain bowl down the hall from the nurse’s station all the while wondering how can she still have morning sickness nine months and seven days into a pregnancy? Still eighteen hours away from giving birth, the sickness has not abated at all during this long, arduous journey. Salty foods and acrid tartness are the only two sensations she can stomach…
Doğan’s lifeless body bumped into one of Istanbul’s many small docks. He had no ID on him. There were bruises and nibbles from bream, mackerel, and bluefish; in the water’s rage, the body had quickly begun to rot, and plastic bags and seaweed were wrapped around it. Fishermen, believing at first they had landed enough food to feed the extended family, reeled in a nameless son.
in the dark, i find a new boy’s tongue in my mouth like the searching hand
of a clock: the witching hour, the rhythm of his hips, magic
against mine. sweat pools at his nape, soaking his dress shirt,
but i grip a handful of hairs, pulling his sour heat into my palm.
when he tucks his name into my ear, the syllables bounce from me
I’m supposed to go straight from my cell to the return room, but I grit my teeth and etch my poem into the concrete walls of the clone factory. Someone, at some time, will read these poems and know that I too questioned my role. My latest one reads: Would we all just be machines/ if we couldn’t do bad things/ on purpose.
I just want today to last forever. The thought is pinwheeling in my head during my morning walk, when my phone buzzes in my pocket and breaks the loop. I stop under an oak tree to make sure it’s not an emergency, because my obsessive brain is always ready for bad news.As I tap the screen, a gravelly voice yells out behind me. “Watch out!”
First a tarmac, strangers deicing plane wings
my father at arrivals, a worker yelling sir
as he leaves the car to come hug me
then we’re driving & he’s telling me
Danny’s not really alright, how he fell into a literal hole
My father passed his hands down to me.
In an essay, I wrote “I am a second-generation Mexican, fourth-generation Polish immigrant.” When the publication debuts, I’m texted why did you say you’re second-gen? You’re first. Just like your father. I forgot that in coming to the U.S., he sacrificed himself so that I may be counted and remembered first.
What I hoped to do with Neruda on the Park was to think about displacement, not just through gentrification, but also– through the lens of womanhood, right? To think about how we as women are sometimes displaced from ourselves. My family and I immigrated from the Dominican Republic to New York City when I was ten. We were separated from my father, and my mother worked 24 hours a day.
Making a living as a writer is not easy, but it’s possible. Workshop can be challenging. To learn about writing, you have to open yourself up to so much vulnerability. Not only with what you’re writing, but simply being a writer at your desk who wants to have people take your things seriously. The thing I don’t want anyone to feel, after interacting with me, is discouraged.
Goldie writes her name in big, cursive letters. She has always liked the look of her name, the way the letters loop together. She writes it over and over again, up and down the sides of the paper until the words overlap, closing in on the white space of the paper. There is at least one page like this for every entry in her diary.
My wife no longer washes her hands when she comes in from the garden. I find traces of earth around the house: dirty fingerprints on the refrigerator handle, last season’s leaves on top of the toilet seat, blood-like drops of tomato juice on the hardwood floor. When we got married, we promised to eat one meal a day together, even if it was just leftovers in front of the TV.
I think now of leaving something
behind without my name.
This house, with windows just replaced
to last another twenty years
I dream of living by the ocean, the waves crashing as close to my front door as possible. I love everything about this fantasy, but it takes an ominous turn if I think of going into the water. I don’t even want the calmest swell covering the top of my foot. That’s too far in for me, no thank you!
I’ve been prioritizing myself, something I’ve been unsuccessful at in the past. I am a survivor of sexual assault (SA) and child SA, among other complex traumas, and I live with the resulting PTSD. These experiences have caused me to value hyper-productivity and validation instead of taking care of myself.
I’ve always wanted to work in education.
“When did you start climbing?” Evgeniy asked me while we lay in his bed after showering together. One of the things that kept me coming back to him was how he liked to clean up immediately after we were done. He did not linger in filth.
“Come with me next time I go,” I said instead of answering, taking on the active voice to combat the antisocial, post-coital placidity.
I hear the oldest woman alive died. Again. That’s her prize. Assume the title, only to bestow the inevitability of its fate to the next woman in line. I ponder how far down that line I might be. If you line all of us ladies shoulder to shoulder, in order of earthly eviction how many miles down the line do we go before I am the oldest one standing?
The greatest shame of my young life was the first time I failed my driver’s test.
I had never failed a test in my life, despite the fact that my Pre-Calculus teacher frequently left for 60 minutes of our 80 minute period and never really closed the loop on what radians are. How could I possibly start failing now?
Exercise: v. middling, meddling, 500 years ago—To put into action. Circa 1340: to raise from the dead. Circa 1729: to exercise one’s tongue. To practice one’s genius. To exercise one’s pipes. To bring to bear. Circa 1738, of Psalms and Hymns. A prompt of no serious exchange—except one’s rights. Take advantage of property laws. Speak out. Hear me out: i.e. to exercise power.
Isabel Yap is a Filipino writer of fiction and poetry. Her debut short story collection, Never Have I Ever (Small Beer Press, 2021), contains thirteen unique and extraordinary stories based on Filipino culture, history, traditions, legends, and mythology. Full of monsters, magic, and miracles, each story has its own touches of fantasy, horror, mystery, and/or hope that will keep readers enthralled.
The year I turn 9, my father hurls a telephone across the kitchen. My dad has just received news of a friend’s death from brain cancer. I suspect he figures the receiver might as well die too, and wound the kitchen on its way out. By the time he is shoved up against his own cancer diagnosis, 17 years later, my father is too weak to weaponize telephones.
When we wake up in the morning Sam says, “Okay, get up, let’s go. Before you start distracting me.” Before I start distracting him. Like it’s my fault he just wants to get me naked all the time. By the time I’m putting on my pants he’s on the couch checking his email. I’ve already decided that this isn’t happening again.
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