nonfiction
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Glossary (excerpt) by Judy Halebsky
Li Bai — I should tell you that Oakland is a city on the coast of California with lots of things people want to buy with paper money or lines on a page tracked by a bank. This is called abstract wealth. It means money that exists separate from bags of rice or seashells or gold.…
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Getting Fragonard’s Goat
A cabinet painting, measuring only 12″ by 7″ in Gallery 7 of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, is half the size of a neighboring Watteau (1684-1721). The artist, 38-year-old Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), was Watteau’s true successor as a specialist in romantic comedy. Both artists exemplify the French Rococo’s appetite for…
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#TheGreatConspirator
The hall is dark. The mood is blissful. My breathing is natural. Relaxed. In community with 49 others, my body is gleaming, serene. Glowing. Suddenly my mind veers off. My thoughts race back to Trump’s remarks earlier today during his celebratory speech—the day after his impeachment acquittal—flaming, toxic, hazardous. Vile. Only the tranquil voice of…
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D minor
It plays who, when, where I am. Maybe why. They call it being in your “late teens.” As if your adulthood were somehow hurrying to arrive, to get past the protected pop songs of childhood and into something serious. I’m in my late teens, in the evening, late in the year, which means it’s already…
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Myrtle Avenue Dirt
Thanks for sending me back to all that is fresh, where I can still see it and smell it and feel it across these scores of years. As you read me, as you hear me, do I hold your hand, and are we seven years old again? See: that’s me, the chubby kid with the…
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Calluses
That boat had been my home for going on four months. I lived, breathed, ate, slept, smoked, drank, waxed, waned, loved, and hated on that boat. My mother has told me, “you’ll never go home again,” a phrase that always bothered me, but this phrase had fallen flat as this boat was the one home…
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Encounter with Tommie
Fresh air mingled with cigarette smoke with the inhale. The exhale was warmed by sidewalk heat mingled with cool mist of an open fire hydrant. Tommie enjoys for the moment kids at play in the flooded street, laughing, splashing water fights. Cars stop just before the pool eyeballing the biggest kid directing the fire hydrant…
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Pump
I don’t remember the actual diagnosis. I remember later, in the hospital, my mom sitting by the bed and crying with a hand over her eyes. I recall a nurse, wearing the bright scrubs of the pediatrics ward—green, pink, blue, with dancing bears or smiling frogs—as she handed me a fat orange, showing me how…
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Getting Out – Helen Head
Finding friendship in the woods of North Carolina Safety I stood at the water pump. Everyone else had their lunch in hand, sitting or squatting on old wooden logs. I looked down at my red plastic shoes labeled 37 and in a moment they were off and I was sprinting away as fast as my…
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Baja – Helen Head
“Awake?” Katie calls. A beam of light sweeps over me and I give a thumbs up. Ready. It’s 4:45AM, mildly chilly. There are 5 million stars in the sky, and I think I can see them all. I reach out of my sleeping bag, pull the plug on my sleeping pad and drop to the…
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