Month: April 2021

“Gay” takes on multiple meanings and connotation as the author dissects depression and the facade of happiness, as well as sexuality and its variable expressions. […]

The summer after her junior year of college, the author lived alone in a house of five, or she thought she did. This essay tells the story of discovering that somebody who did not belong in her house was there without her knowledge, and the lasting effect it has had on her sense of safety in her home. […]

“Like many, I learned a lot in college. I learned that I didn’t like sociology and that it was pretty easy to finish a minor. I learned that I matter and that toxic people aren’t worth my time. And slowly over the course of those years, I learned that I was bi.” […]

This essay explores a few assumptions and real-world events about what we as children are taught to believe regarding the social concepts of family, fraternity, and fidelity. Formative experiences from the author’s childhood turn the home-spun concepts of familial love, brotherhood, and justice on their heads. After all is said and done however, there is love in the world—genuine love. None of us is perfect, but perhaps the critical period for human decency spans not weeks or months, but a lifetime. […]

A meditative piece on a brief encounter witnessed a few years ago on Albuquerque’s Jefferson Street on a winter afternoon: in the daily grind of just trying to get where we need to go – physically, figuratively, spiritually – we are faced with the realities of our circumstances. And when we connect as humans, it is oftentimes done so when we stop to really see each other, to pay witness to the brief, fleeting, often ignored struggles that become our everyday life. […]

“Lesbian Y.A. Novel” is a fragmented coming-to-terms with lesbian identity across hometown, high school, and college. Interspersed with anecdotes about lesbian bars from Artforum’s “Confessions On The Dance Floor: Reveries From The Gay Bar,” this essay contemplates what it means to be a lesbian in any space — warm or cold, closed off or open. […]

This story about LGBTQIA+ yearning and the hardships of navigating one’s boundaries — while also trying to be open to the experience of falling in love — explores how much we give of ourselves in order to get the most minuscule response, and then call that response affection because as LGBTQ+ people, we rarely know what healthy reciprocity is, especially when we’re young and still learning. […]

This essay is an attempt to explore the author’s relationship with the Arabic language and love. Although his relationship with his father is the centre of this exploration, this essay remains a love-letter to all of Nofel’s friends and former lovers and an invitation to a different linguistic experience of love. […]

The true story of what can happen to a relationship when you see what you shouldn’t and refuse to see what you should. […]

After living in Connecticut for a decade, Victoria Buitron, at fifteen years old, returns to reside in her hometown. […]

“Yellow Fever” is a coming-of-age piece that explores the fetishization of young Asian and mixed-race women. It describes the frustration of being seen as an exotic prize and not as a woman with complex emotions or as a human having value beyond men’s sexual desires. […]

In Backstrokes the author describes a reconnection with a cherished friend and kindred spirit from four decades ago. Their meet-up sparks a series of reflections in which she reassesses the value of usefulness as a lifelong priority. […]

This essay recounts a story of mutual discomfort between two teenagers. The speaker considers the events in retrospect in which he realizes the degree to which he made a person, to whom he was romantically interested, uncomfortable. The piece centers on communication breakdown, the failure of a friendship, misapprehension of others, the speaker’s journey to self awareness, and a healthier, yet still evolving, approach to intimacy and rejection. […]

During a solitary evening in New York City, the author contemplates the chasm between glamor and brutality, between transitory human connection, and disaffected loneliness. […]

“A Poor Puerto Rican Girl’s Bread”, by Mydalis Vera was inspired by the structural social inequalities in the United States of America. Puerto Ricans have long been disenfranchised by policies that have robbed them of their land, ushered them into new concrete jungles, and created infinite ladders in the climb to socioeconomic freedom. […]

The essay considers the experiences of being biracial in the late 1990s through the college application process. It ends with a reflection on the persistence of the idea that society does not allow for a “biracial” or “multiracial” category, and that those of us who are mixed-race must demand it. […]

The short essay Encounters with Māya (Illusion) takes us on a journey through dreams, poems, and sacred texts to reflect on living as a human, awakening to ‘reality’, and staying connected to one another through hardship. […]

This personal essay is about the ever-present feeling, as a migrant, of not belonging to any one place. It explores the author’s long line of migrant ancestors, reflecting on whether the accumulation of their experiences have made her feeling of unrooted-ness run even deeper. At the center of the piece is an exploration of the concept of “home,” what that means for migrants and how that can affect our sense of self. […]

Sometimes shyness and loneliness go hand in hand. And sometimes loneliness is not so much about being alone, or isolated, but an inability to connect with others on a meaningful level. A feeling too raw and too embarrassing to be expressed except within the protective shell of a hermit crab essay. With thanks to Sara Ryan for her piece, “Body Puzzle,” which offered the perfect shell.level. A feeling too raw and too embarrassing to be expressed except within the protective shell of a hermit crab essay. With thanks to Sara Ryan for her piece, “Body Puzzle,” which offered the perfect shell. […]

The author recalls: “An older male friend told me once that if a woman was over 18, “she was up for grabs”.  I thought he was just being facetious: most men have a sense of decorum. An eye-opening incident, may have proved my friend’s point.” […]

This piece is about the author’s ongoing struggle with her decision to not press charges against her rapists. It also includes struggles she had with how her family and friends reacted to her victimhood and coping mechanisms. The author makes a subtle defense for her decision to cope. […]

“Cold Coffee” is a creative nonfiction piece by Helena Ducusin that depicts her experience growing up half-Filipino and half-white in an Americanized household. It describes her interactions with parents, comparisons made to her friends, and the hurtful reactions of strangers that hindered her search for identity as she grew older. […]

“The World Behind the World” grapples with the restaurant industry’s insularity and examines how that exclusivity embodies wider dynamics of power, race, and class. […]

A poem about the author’s journey as a bisexual woman struggling with anxiety, told through very minimal Google searches that she (and many other queer people) have made in her life, along with some she hopes to make in the future. […]

As the narrator encounters winter-stranded birds desperate for whatever food they can find, she considers a night in which she witnessed a girl desperate to reunite with her abusive boyfriend, as well as the narrator’s own desperate attachments to an abusive lover. […]

Themes of belonging, of isolation, of expressions of identity, and of the nuances between the African American and the African Immigrant experience arise from a conversation between the author and the author’s inner voice. […]

“My Dead Darlings” is a creative nonfiction essay that focuses on the author’s personal connection to Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Lisbon sisters from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. The characters are used as conduit through which to explore the experiences of teenage girls. […]