Our first date was going pretty well, I thought. Learning to make guacamole in a cooking class. “Oh no, I’m getting teary onion eyes,” Brooke giggled. She wiped at her cheeks with her forearms, but they were all skin and elbows, with nothing fleshy to apply. I was supposed to be learning how to fondle a ripe avocado, but I…
Ubutata Kutatishyanya The duties of a father and child must be reciprocal Bemba proverb. I am learning about forgiveness through a recollection of vertigo after my father. A Sunday before school, I am eleven, and the most important worry is how I will render myself to my friends in light of another loss for which they’ll punish me with…
It was Christmas Day at the prison. Several inches of snow had fallen during the night, and the temperature was a biting twenty degrees below zero. I helped McKenzie, our youngest, zip her pink parka and snuggle the fake fur hood around her beautiful face. Katie, fourteen, and Beau, eleven, were all suited up before McKenzie finished wrestling with her…
By Breen Nolan I first met Emily May the summer of 2021 in a Zoom room. We were attending the Southampton Writers Conference and spent five days workshopping our essays with a small group of other writers. It was the height of the Delta variant and the West was burning; everything felt bleak. But May’s writing beckoned to something in…
By Breen Nolan Award-winning author Edgar Gomez is back with his second book Alligator Tears, an arresting memoir-in-essays that chronicles his experiences growing up in poverty with a single mother amidst the backdrop of touristy Florida. Gomez’s writing evinces a skillful analysis vital for examining one’s life on the page. Whether interrogating the systems hell-bent on silencing marginalized individuals or exploring the path to…
My fingers are filthy. Blackened at the tips with grime underneath my fingernails. I should wash my hands, but I have more to do. I look up at the fluorescent glowing numbers on my dusty cable box. The figures are blurry at first, forming an indecipherable shape. I squeeze my eyes shut and reopen them. I imagine my corneas, dry…
At the end of a book tour, rosy thoughts don’t come naturally. You’re alternating between an audience of ten or one hundred, a sense of giddiness and futility. You’ve searched for your novel in airport bookstores, handled reader questions about your use of the wrong car model, introduced yourself to people you’ve met before. You’d ideally be placed in suspended…
The Compton Creek is the Los Angeles River’s southernmost tributary, the only one that starts in the inner city. Its headwaters come from the street storm drains of South Central Los Angeles. Other LA River tributaries like the Tujunga Wash, Arroyo Seco, Rio Hondo, Pacoima Wash and the Burbank Western Wash flow downstream from the northern foothills of either the…
I don’t know when the decision-makers brought in two trailers and divided them in half to make four classrooms. They were like that when I arrived. Slapped between the main building and the ball fields, the big playground constantly beckoned to us. The bank of windows on the other side of the classroom faced the cafeteria. Isolated and tucked away…
By Kevin Morales Samuel Sattin has been playing tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons since he was an adolescent. The game and others like it have slowly expanded into the mainstream since the 1970s. The connection of communities has grown thanks to the proliferation of the internet and the game finding its way into the homes of anyone…