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A person with long hair smiling into the camera.

Grief Exercise

June 9, 2023/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2023 / Cat Jones

A few years after my dad dropped dead, he called into an NPR gardening show to talk about some kind of tomato nymph. I should’ve been shocked, hearing his voice crackle over my car radio like that, but I’d already been seeing him around town for years. I passed him in grocery store aisles, he passed me in his car.

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Image of a person outside wearing sunglasses

As Good As Dead

June 8, 2023/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2023 / Jessica Manack

I learned a lot from my box of crayons growing up, about things I had never heard of before: Periwinkle, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Maize. But even Red Orange couldn’t prepare me for the brilliance of a poppy. I saw my first ones in Italy, espresso-edgy, trying to take in as much as I could in a little over a week.

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KT Ryan Headshot

Belonging Again

June 7, 2023/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2023 / KT Ryan

Goggles in hand, water smacked against the boulder on which I stood. A drumbeat reminder of why I was standing at the edge of Lake Tahoe—to swim. One mile, maybe more. I used to be the type of person who would plunge right in. Instead, I kept my arms folded across my chest wondering what had become of me.

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Frances Ogamba Headshot

Here’s to the Breed of Flying Hens!

November 24, 2022/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2023 / Frances Ogamba

When my toddler son says the word “mum,” it is not me he looks at. While his voice enunciates the first letter with a clipped edge, he points instead at a trumpet-shaped hibiscus we always pluck from the flower tree tipping across the fence delineating his older brother’s school. It feels magnificent that he says this word, but it is also shocking that he cannot fit me into it.

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Siobhan Ring

Words

November 23, 2022/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2023 / Siobhan Ring

You might think words live in your mouth. But you would be wrong. Your lips, your tongue, your cheeks, your teeth are just a vessel language moves through. The headwaters of language rest deep inside your brain where image, sound, and memory curl into meaning, flow into words, and cascade into sentences. It can dry up or slow to a trickle.

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Maxwell Suzuki, author's headshot

NATIONAL GUN OWNERS SURVEY or WHAT IT MEANS TO KNOW THE BODY ISN’T A TARGET

November 22, 2022/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2023 / Maxwell Suzuki

1. Do you agree that the Second Amendment guarantees your individual right to own a firearm?
Yes, but—

2. Do you support the confirmation of pro-Second Amendment judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts?
No, the second amendment didn’t account for three round bursts.

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Quinn Forlini

This Year as a Compilation of Short Films I Can’t Decipher

June 5, 2022/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2022 / Quinn Forlini

My friend sends a video of her newborn opening and closing her mouth, testing the length of her tongue in air and then resting it back inside its wet, warm spot. Her spit and lips make soft sounds, the closest she could get to language. I want to come closer to how she must feel. It’s snowing.

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Nimisha Kantharia Headshot

The Girl with the Turquoise Eye-Shadow

June 3, 2022/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2022 / Nimisha Kantharia

It was mid-December in Mumbai, a city with just one season, hot and humid. Yet the worn cotton curtains of the consulting room I sat in billowed with an afternoon breeze that sent icy fingers down my neck and up my spine, and a hollow cough rattled my chest. The Out-Patient Department (OPD) was crowded, and patients pressed in on me from all sides even as I feverishly attended to them.

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Shannon Tsonis Headshot

Heir of the Cuckoo

June 2, 2022/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2022 / Shannon Tsonis

He’s poised with a notepad and pen on top of legs crossed tight like braids. He repeats the question, “When did you find out your father was the main suspect?”
The therapist sits in front of his motivational posters, the ones that frustrate me with their cornball optimism.

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Rookie Cam, Author Headshot

The Natural Order of Things

December 4, 2021/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2022 / Diane Forman

I am drawn to a series of black and white photos in a recent New Yorker magazine. The article reviews a book of 1200 images through which the author, Nancy Floyd, chronicles herself aging over a forty year period. Flabbergasted, I stare at the ease with which she leans against doorways or fence posts, without any of the vanity or careful posing that has been typical of most of my lifelong behavior when being photographed. . .

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JoeAnn Hard, Author Headshot

The Thing Speaks For Itself

December 2, 2021/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2022 / JoeAnn Hart

Look at this, a hand towel, hot from the dryer. A souvenir from a friend’s trip to Italy not so long ago. I bury my face in its warmth, unable to let go until the linen is cold. It clearly speaks for itself, but when I point that out, no one listens so I must make the case myself. . .

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Kristin Marie, Author Headshot

Hail Mary Pass

December 1, 2021/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2022 / Kristin Marie

About a year after Mom died, when I was a freshman in high school, I had a weekend job as a cashier at a car wash. Customers pulled their Range Rovers and Subarus up to my window and ordered the type of wash they wanted from a menu, kind of like McDonald’s, except this historical town’s zoning laws prohibited most chain restaurants and franchises. . .

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A Message to My Mother in Morse Code

May 19, 2021/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2021 / Amanda Crum

You asked me how it felt, my belly swollen with cramps and emptiness. Those were the cold-spark days when winter kept us huddled in bed. You were worried about how much pain I was in, but I had no answer to give that didn’t end in blood, so I turned my head due west and pondered the slice of sky framed in the window [. . .]

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Author Headshot

Stitches

May 18, 2021/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2021 / Lizzie Roberts

When I checked the clock again it was 5:16 a.m. I would get up in less than an hour. And I would have to stay alive until O, our five-year-old, was eighteen. When you don’t want to live another day, thirteen years is an impossible amount of time to fathom. In the half-light, simple math and insomniac logic can lead to infinity. [. . .]

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Author Headshot

Your Rapist has Famous Parents

May 16, 2021/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2021 / Danielle Shorr

You are with your parents when you first meet him. You are on vacation, a spring break trip to a big city you are going to live near next year. You are seventeen, and certainly, you look it, if not younger [. . .]

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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Danielle-Shorr.jpeg 1898 1898 Caroline Shannon Karasik https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Caroline Shannon Karasik2021-05-16 11:05:252023-08-10 10:47:30Your Rapist has Famous Parents
Photo credit: Stephen Tang

Hieroglyphics

December 6, 2020/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2021 / Jordan Guevara

Almost every night now, I cauterize my jaws shut. Our melancholy, this weight—as Ginsberg once put it, this love—grinding and pressurizing my teeth into dust.[…]

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The Beautiful Mundane

December 2, 2020/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2021 / Anne Pinkerton

Each time a new friend was in treatment, I held my breath waiting for results of follow-up scans, my entire body exhaling when results were positive. As in negative. As in clear.[…]

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Sue Hann

Master of Light

June 11, 2020/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2020 / Sue Hann

You get to re-live childhood again if you have children, a kind of a do-over, the opportunity to
create the kind of childhood you had and loved, or, even more seductive, the chance to create
the childhood you never had and missed your whole life.[…]

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Tom Wade

An Ancestor’s Legacy

June 5, 2020/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2020 / Tom Wade

Well, it looks as though you have three choices. You can go to him as he orders; you can refuse,
be whipped, and then have him take you by force; or you can run away again.[…]

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Life Only Gets Harder, or Silver Plungers at a Pre-K Graduation

December 3, 2019/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2020 / Mandy Brown
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White Man’s Poison

December 1, 2019/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2020 / Kelley Jhung
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Love in the Archives

November 18, 2019/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2020 / Eileen Vorbach Collins
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Memento Meninges

May 31, 2019/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Tyler Arndt

1. Despite my protests, neither my mother nor my father will concede the point. I was not, according to them, in my right mind when I called from a hospital bed at Ajou University Hospital. They detected something. An aberrance. Like an incoherence of speech, or a delirious register of voice. It’s only natural they […]

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Secret Ingredients

May 24, 2019/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Nicole Nimri

Turkish Coffee Mama tilts the cup to the side, rolls it around, examines each line, dot, drop. They look like black, crusty Jackson Pollock paintings. She doesn’t take it too seriously. “Ah, habibti, it’s a man in a hat. You’ll meet him soon, and he will be very important to you,” she says to my […]

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In the Zone

May 21, 2019/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Lindsey R. Swindall

Folks, it’s a beautiful, clear day here on the Florida coast. We have just been given a go for today’s space shuttle launch. *     *     * I grew up in south Florida not too far from Cape Canaveral when the shuttle program was active in the eighties. The heady days of the space race were […]

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Polar Nights

November 24, 2018/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Megan Donnelly

It’s Monday at the top of the world. It’s morning, but the sun hasn’t risen in weeks. The elementary school where I teach is a fifteen-minute walk across the tundra and past the lagoon where Arctic swans glide during the brief summer season. In the fall, snowy owls fly overhead in the dusky morning hours […]

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Playing House

November 20, 2018/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Alex Myers

There was an abandoned house a few miles from where I grew up. It was out on Mt. Mica Mine Road, past the egg farm, past the little cemetery that held just a few toothlike stones, up a big hill and then down the other side. If you did it right, if you let the […]

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Betrayed by Blood

November 15, 2018/in DWM, DWM, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Denise Tolan

In 1973, the Squirrel Cage was just another scummy go-go bar on a street filled with businesses that paired well with scummy go-go bars. It’s gone now, of course; replaced by an above ground pool company—almost an elbow-to-the-ribs attempt at baptismal humor. The Squirrel Cage sat at the crossroads of Austin Highway and Walzem Road […]

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Bad Mom

May 30, 2018/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Elizabeth Brico

By the time I brought my son to vacation in Hawai’i, I knew something was wrong. With him, with me, with the world—take your pick. I remember it as perfect; the month we spent lost among the wild sunshine of the deep Pacific. A time outside of time. Our special little bubble of happiness when, […]

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Arabian Night

May 25, 2018/in DWM, DWM, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Diane G. Martin

Call me Ismail, not Ishmael, which rhymes with wish fail, or Tom, Dick, or Harry, which rhyme with nothing that rings true to me, just because you cannot be bothered to learn to pronounce my name. It goes like this, three separate syllables: Is—like the prolonged break of a wave; ma—half of Mama; il—like a […]

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

A bird’s-eye view: Taking a sabbatical to prioritize myself

October 27, 2023/in Blog / Ashley Russ
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The Enduring Haunting of a Failed Driver’s Test(s)

September 15, 2023/in Blog / Meghan McGuire
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Glitch Wisdom

May 12, 2023/in Blog / KJ McCoy
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Deep Dive–No Thanks!

November 3, 2023/in Midnight Snack / Kait Leonard
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/jared-rice-k3pYa0CDLl0-unsplash.jpg 2398 1853 Kait Leonard https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Kait Leonard2023-11-03 22:04:572023-11-06 07:52:18Deep Dive–No Thanks!

The Long and Short of It: Ramblings on the Desire to Live as Long as Possible.

October 6, 2023/in Midnight Snack / Josie D Wong
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/danie-franco-o1PKM7-8AH4-unsplash-scaled.jpg 1707 2560 Josie D Wong https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Josie D Wong2023-10-06 23:45:012023-10-06 23:58:47The Long and Short of It: Ramblings on the Desire to Live as Long as Possible.

The Secret Histories of Everywhere

June 2, 2023/in Midnight Snack / Brian Lynn
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

enchanted

November 24, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Emma Chan
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I Hope So, I’m Working on It, We’ll See

October 20, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Edward Daschle
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Exercise

September 11, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Cecilia Savala
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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-FB-Isabella-Dail.png 788 940 Isabella Dail https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Isabella Dail2021-04-28 11:34:132021-04-28 11:34:13A Communal Announcement

Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

If you are an artist of any kind, chances are you are no stranger to The Unknown. In fact, it has probably been a motivating factor in creating your art. I know it has been for me. Wrestling with The Unknown is a fundamental part of the human experience, and the human experience is a fundamental part of art.

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