This small town, the place where I grew up and occasionally return to, is beautiful, but dull. When I am away, I long for the town’s routines, which, as a teenager, bored me: the boats lowing in the morning; the fog ...
California Romantics by Becky Peterson
LAR Online, Nonfiction
2020
The first fall of my empty nest, a white-hot aloneness. Covid-19 raging, and no vaccine against it. No café, no colleagues, no classes except on my laptop.
And suddenly it’s raining ash. Stay inside, seal ...
Fire Song by Samina Najmi
LAR Online, Nonfiction
I’m learning how to be a good neighbor. On my walks to work I turn and turn again, charting through the network of neighborhood dogs. Set on edge by the unfamiliar click of my heels, offended by my proximity, they ...
GOOD NEIGHBOR by Gabriela Valencia
LAR Online, Nonfiction
A MAGIC TRICK
Marvelous Melvin said I was the bravest girl he’d ever met.
The magician came to my elementary school every year in the spring. On a Friday afternoon, our teachers packed us into the gym, where we ...
Two Works by Joanna Grisham
LAR Online, Nonfiction
I would like to believe that when the heavy elevator doors slammed shut, separating me from my 81-year old parents at The Louvre, that it wasn’t a big deal. Except that it was. It was a really big deal, though I’m ...
Let’s Try Not to Get Separated Again by Liz Rose Shulman
LAR Online, Nonfiction
I.
The trick to cleaning up the lyrics of a song about sex, like Ariana Grande’s “Love Me Harder” is to swap the words and/or phrases about copulation for ones about singing. The family-friendly company that spells ...
Idolatree by Courtney Miller Santo
LAR Online, Nonfiction
When I think of my mother, when I try to see her in my mind, I can only see her hands. Though they must have been beautiful once, in my memory, her hands are gnarled roots.
They’re calloused and yellowed by tobacco, ...
Every Tree is a Mother, Every Mother a Tree by M Jaimie Zuckerman
LAR Online, Nonfiction
When a snake is coiled, she is ready to strike, though sometimes the coil is a defensive bluff, pure tactic, and she’s protecting herself, her soft vulnerable underbelly, from predators or threats, real and perceived, ...
Coiled by Ana Maria Spagna
LAR Online, Nonfiction
When in major chronic illness flare-ups or activated trauma states or brain fog arising for any number of reasons, I sometimes gain a stutter. Because of childhood trauma, I also have historically not been fantastic at ...
Stutter, Stammer, Stumble: On (Not) “Speaking Well” by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
Nonfiction, Uncategorized
