CNF Archives - Page 3 of 5

Paper Shackles

November 22, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2018 / by Sean Enfield

Centuries of history consolidated in a single lecture, a fiery star. Our teacher did not make eye contact as she spoke. I do not think she could have if she tried. All the kids were staring down at the carpet, drawing imaginary lines with the tips of their fingers. She stared straight ahead, through the walls. Her words carried the weight of each body lost to the atrocity. That incalculable multitude, not even given the courtesy of a statistic. When those words fell upon us, our bodies became vessels of historical trauma and sunk below the surface of the earth.

Lagrimitas

November 20, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2018 / by Ricardo Jose Gonzalez-Rothi

Mami used to tell people that I was a very delicate boy. My parents instilled in me to do right and to avoid hurting others. I took it to heart. I always assumed that if I treated people the way I wanted to be treated, people around me would do likewise. It was the golden […]

We Race American

November 17, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2018 / by Brian Oliu

0.1 We race distinctly American. .2 The run in itself is familiarized as 26.2 miles—a half 13.1. Here, we change to meters as the distances shrink: a 10K is more impressive than 6.2 miles in the same way that a 5K sounds further than 3.1. And yet with the marathon, there is something less glamorous […]

How to Disappear

November 16, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2018 / by Sarah Shotland

Here is how they disappear: Slowly, and then completely. The phone calls go from once a week to once a month, then a text message here or there; a string of emails at two in the morning full of drunk poems and questions like: How am I supposed to stop shooting dope when the asshole […]

Testimony

November 15, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2018 / by Leah Silverman

I wear my purple suit to testify against my father. Deep-hued and simply tailored, it masks my insecurities, costumes me in a longed-for confidence that I hope will belie my fear. I resist smoothing the brushed-gold buttons on the jacket, avoid fingering the garment’s knotted rayon slubs. Instead I worry the flat gold pendant around […]

Out of Houston

May 22, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Cathleen Calbert

When I think back to that bar in Houston, the one that offered us mahogany and beveled glass and a brief reprieve from our hot, damp lives, I can still see Lynda and me: my blue-jean jacket, her skeleton earrings. We’ve swiveled onto our stools, and she’s paid for our drinks. She is laughing, leaning […]

Mapping Coordinates of Poor, Queer, and Feminine in the High Desert Air

May 21, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Sossity Chiricuzio

Every bit of pride her life doesn’t allow for her own sturdy beauty is poured into that chestnut coat, that black horsehair. One afternoon just three days before show-time, her father saunters into the house, swinging a large, rusty pair of shears. “Spring haircut…” he drawls, and she’s already out the door, running for the stable. …

The Day We Buried My Father

May 20, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Guy Choate

On the day of my father’s funeral, I wake up in a twin bed at his house. Liz is still asleep in the identical twin bed across the room. Dad and Penny bought these beds for Caroline and Cate, my nieces, but as usual, we make accommodations that negate the previous accommodations we’ve made for […]

Matches

May 16, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Kristine Langley Mahler

Green signs loom over I-80, beckoning us towards Omaha; it’s difficult not to exit downtown to the Courtyard Marriott, tell them we want our old room so we could pretend we’re still new at this. I could still get butterflies when he emerges from the bathroom in a shirt and tie, flash-forwarding to the man […]

If Memory

May 15, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Carol D. Marsh

If memory is talisman, this I hold in my palm: my father strides, back straight and face serious, to the edge of the pool. It’s a late summer day. Children of other families splash and shout, a cooling breeze chases the sun. My father is sturdy, not fat and not thin, handsome with wavy dark […]

Imposter

May 13, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Bree A. Rolfe

Today: “Ms. Rolfe, are you dying?” This isn’t the first time a student has asked me this after I had a coughing fit in class. In fact, I get asked this all the time. Too often. And I’m used to it. But today, I am hanging on by a thread. I have trouble walking up […]

Flash Point

May 12, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Lauren Sarazen

My best friend is buying a house in Upstate New York with her boyfriend. A family friend expects her first child in eight days. I’m twenty-two, and I have never felt more alone. I. “For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly […]

Faith Is What You Have: Reading Photographs with Flannery O’Connor

May 11, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Engram Wilkinson

On the day of my great-aunt Era Mae and great-uncle Alvin’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, I wore my stepfather’s striped, navy tie and—after stopping for breakfast on the drive through North Alabama—a small grease stain on my khaki pants. Over the air conditioner, my grandmother told me I should’ve put a napkin on my lap first. […]

Big Ball of String Theory

May 10, 2017/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Linnea Wortham Harper

Yoo-hoo! I’m back here, in the bedroom, in the bed. I’m seventeen, I’m twenty-two, I’m thirty-seven, fifty. I dress in white and lie here. Let’s just say it’s mono, or Some Disease, the lazies, or the dreads. Let’s just say I never learned to spell élan vitale right. Let’s just say I should be dead. […]

Progress Notes

November 25, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Jennifer Anderson

The first time I visit her, she lies in bed at the far end of the hall where residents with the worst kinds of dementia are placed, where the man in room 308 rigidly slumps in a geri-chair, eyes and mouth open wide as if in a trance, where the wild-haired woman in room 309 […]

Every Man a Fortress

November 24, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Jason Arment

We traded snippets about ourselves when the chaos allowed and found we’d both joined the Corps to make something of ourselves, serve our country, and shoot things—Schnieder wanted to be a Rifleman while I was already slated to be a Machine Gunner. Before enlisting, Schnieder had been a degenerate living in his parents’ basement. I’d […]

Somebody. Still.

November 23, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Alexandra Dane

I had wanted to be something in the world once. A teaching degree, a Masters degree, and several academic honors hang framed on my study wall. I might have had any number of careers but at twenty-five I made a choice and let the world go on without me: Bedside for my mother’s cancer right […]

Hollow

November 22, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol

I dig my fingers into the pockets of my jacket and tilt my face towards the sun. The sharp wind of fall stings my cheeks. I want to drink in the spaciousness of this place, disappear into the rust red canyon, become the shadows dancing on painted rock. Behind me, there are voices belonging to […]

Chassis

November 21, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by T. Lucas Earle

I knew I was in trouble when the Director asked me to cock my head to the right. “I can’t cock my head to the right. Or the left.” “Just like this.” He cocks his head to the right. But, see, he’s not wearing a fiberglass suit of armor with a helmet attached to the […]

Community

November 20, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Bernard Grant

A few weeks before my brain broke, as I waited in a grocery store coffee line, an elderly man in front of me dropped his cane. I focused on it. The cane’s clatter, the man’s shaky stoop, careful and slow as he picked it up. How sad, I thought, the need to link one hand […]

Nipple Gazing

November 19, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by L.L. Madrid

Nineties Girlhood No one ever praised me for being smart, only for being good. Good meant pretty and quiet, pressed like a flower in the middle of a bell curve. The first time I thought about becoming an adult had nothing to do with ambition but with a yearning to be beautiful. Baywatch was playing […]

Falling—A Mothering (Or, a Tale of Postpartum Depression)

November 16, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Courtney E. Morgan

Leaves fluttering down on the grave in the fall, and her ashes. And I’m lying, it wasn’t fall, it was February. But the leaves were real. And it felt like she was supposed to die in the fall. Maybe I read that in a book, saw it in a movie. A girl who goes on […]

When a Neighbor Dies

November 15, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Milena Nigam

When I get home from my morning run, there are two police officers hanging around my driveway. They look like babies, plump skin and short bangs under their caps. Barely in their twenties. They stand under our ancient weeping cherry tree, and scant snowflakes flutter down between the tired skeleton branches. It’s not cold enough […]

Are We There Yet?

November 13, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2017 / by Amber Wong

I imagine my father as a small boy, sitting on stone steps. Chin in hand, he glares at the dry towel and swim trunks he’s thrown beside him. The façade of the Hayward Plunge, a public swimming pool near his Oakland, California home, stands in harsh rebuke. How dare you, it seems to say, Chinese […]

Elvis Has Left the Building

May 7, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2016 / by Eric Day

The second I escaped high school, I went to work at my father’s full-line music store in the little corner hovel called the M.I. department, which stood for Musical Instruments. There wasn’t much to do but restock the clarinet reeds and trombone grease, make sure the ¼-size violins had bows in their cases, and dust […]

Down in the River to Pray

May 4, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2016 / by Lois Ruskai Melina

This is what I knew: My nephew Benji graduated from drama school. When he crossed the stage to accept his diploma, he wore a sultry Lauren Bacall wig and a cream-colored satin evening gown with padded shoulders. His make-up was perfect, his lips the color of blood and desire. My mother told me he looked […]

The Half-Buttoned Effect

May 3, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2016 / by Saeide Mirzaei

I want to reach out and slide the button back in the buttonhole. She’s standing right in front of me, wearing a light green dress with buttons on the back. A row of buttons, like a dotted line drawn from her nape to a random point halfway down her spine. I count the buttons: one, […]

Nothing Beats a Beergut Breakfast

May 2, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2016 / by Genevieve Morck

After I pass through security, I’ll have left them. Beergut, Special Son, and I hang out in a loose triangle several feet away from the glass doors. Nothing left to say or do, the time of my flight to Seoul heavy and ticking. I avoid Beergut’s icy gaze, look to metal crossbeams. The airport houses […]

Home is Home

April 30, 2016/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2016 / by Suzanne Ushie

The car goes around a bend. The windows are up, the air cool, and we are hemmed in from every angle by the afternoon sun. In the back seat, my mother clasps my palm, as though to assure herself that I am really here. We ease onto IBB Way. On either side, the town lies […]

A Few More Miles

December 6, 2015/in CNF, CNF, Winter-Spring 2016 / by Meghan Florian

It never gets easier, you just go faster. —Greg LeMond After my father’s stroke, after months of rehab, after coming to terms with the fact that the blind spot on his right side—his lost peripheral vision—was the new normal, his doctor told him he couldn’t ride his bicycle. Last fall he had aortic valve replacement […]

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