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Leaving Cleveland

May 31, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Ann Arthur-Andrew

It was June 24, 1994. A Friday. And it was my last day in Cleveland. I was surrounded by stacks of boxes piled high in makeshift towers. I’d spent the last week shredding papers, dusting, and mopping. Toiling and cleaning was in my blood, gifted to me by my Caribbean ancestors. I was holding a […]

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A Life in a Body (With Breasts)

May 30, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Leigh Camacho Rourks

The Blackening (Or That Time It Wasn’t Cancer)   My nipples started turning black a month or so before I hit forty. Well, not exactly black. Not then. Not at first. Just—dark? Deepest brown? Existential crisis grey? Forty? Is forty a color? I ignored it. That sounds crazier than it actually is—of course I didn’t […]

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Dope

May 29, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Kristie Robin Johnson

The first time that I ever saw a crack pipe, I must have been five or six years old. My mother was still raw from my father’s suffering and eventual death. He had been only forty-four years old when he passed away. Still young and beautiful by human standards. My mother had dubbed him the […]

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Notes to Self

May 28, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Elliot Gavin Keenan

“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and […]

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LIGO

May 27, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by DJ Lee

Every year when my breast is squeezed into the machine and the woman behind the Plexiglas tells me not to move, when the radiologist reads the film and says, “You’re high risk,” I’m forced to think of Barbara, my maternal aunt, who found a lump at fifty-six, the age I am now. My mammogram happens […]

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Losing Faith

May 26, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by MJ Lemire

My daughter’s hand was gone. It took me only moments to slide coins across a counter on Santa Cruz’s boardwalk. When I dropped my hand back, hers was missing. In my left hand, I found the familiar grip of her five-year-old brother, Austin. As I used my chin to snap my wallet, I groped around […]

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You Memorize The Way Your Hand Lets Go

May 24, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Matthew Mitchell

Aesculus glabra: My father, a tall, fat-fingered guy with a stomach that fell over his belt buckle who used to hold my entire hand in his palm, rubbed his thumb against the smooth side of his index finger. He had been sitting in the beige recliner with his eyes glued to the television set. In […]

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Encounters with Snakes

May 22, 2018/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2018 / by Emily Withnall

1981 When I am born in Taos, New Mexico, following my parents’ raucous 1970s commune living, my mom and dad agree they will not raise me with any religion. This means I will not learn the story of the Garden of Eden and the snake that goads Eve to eat the apple until much, much […]

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Issue Archive

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Genre Archive

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Friday Lunch Blog

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

Today’s course:

Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
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Mother-to-Mother: An Open Letter about White Privilege and Fragility

November 22, 2024/in Blog / Dr. Valerie Nyberg
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
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Disappear Where? A Meditation on the Lost and Getting Lost

November 1, 2024/in Midnight Snack / Reid Delehanty
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
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Fourberie

May 2, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Terese Coe
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Vernacular

April 18, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Mary Morris
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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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Seventeen

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

The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand…

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