100% Armenian Blood: A Theoretical Performance
BY NANCY AGABIAN
I want to set up a stand at Vernissage, the weekend flea-market-cum-craft-fair in the middle of Yerevan, where all the tourists get their Armenian souvenirs, beautifully crafted and sold at rock bottom prices. I will sit at a table, and there will be someone with me in a white coat and a syringe and a tourniquet, sapping red fluid from my arm into tiny vials. I will dab white makeup on my face to appear pallid and there will be a sales rep passing out brochures explaining the prices and the authenticity and the dire …
Idaho Fell
BY JEN HIRT
When I moved to Idaho Falls in August 2005, I couldn’t take my new home seriously. It was a 75-unit apartment complex with a name meant to evoke grandeur and respite: Shadow Canyon. Two-story buildings ringed a parking lot and a grassy area, and tall Ponderosa pines provided the aesthetics that vinyl siding couldn’t. It was within walking distance to the mall, one of two Wal-Marts, and a buffet called Chuck-a-Rama. More importantly, it was within walking distance to a technical college. There, my partner in good times and …
Understanding My Kenya
BY BITSY
I have often seen youth as the lyrical age, that is the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him… then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude. [Milan Kundera, The Curtain]
I search for meaning everywhere as I try to understand what is happening in my country, Kenya. Lyrical implies something beautiful, pure, good, even. Does it speak for the stage of being that Kenya has gone through, or does it speak for me as an individual, or can I even separate my country from myself as our birthdays …
Giants: Parade or Election?
BY YUCEF MAYES
Monday evening, I was walking down a desolate street, on my way to a church meeting. I heard a boy screaming something in the distance. I saw a couple carrying a box of Pizza from the Pizza parlor from the Main Avenue. Thinking about the New York Giants. My joy for them. My loyalty to New York. But when I heard that their parade would be on election day, my conspiracy theorist personality surfaced. What difference would the parade make on votes? How many would waste much of their day at the parade celebrating only to forget to vote? How many people held the election in the back …
Oriovac
BY CATHERINE KANJER KAPPHAHN
Kutina, Ilova, Banova Jaruga, I keep track of the names. Each time the train stops at a station, I search my map for the village. Where am I? How far? With my fingertip, I trace the line from Zagreb to Oriovac, which I have circled in blue ink. For years it seems as though I have been inching toward this elusive village, the place where my mother was born between two World Wars, the place where she spent the first five years of her life, the place I have written about, but have never seen.
I …
Hawxhurst Road, Circa 1981
BY DARA AMCHIN UNDERBERG
We have been tucked in, pleaded with, and threatened. “Go ahead and stay up all night,” my father said before closing the door, “but don’t you dare get out of those beds.” As usual, I am not tired. I am eight years old and I think I have insomnia. I have smuggled into bed whatever book I am reading that day, either a Beverly Cleary or a Judy Blume. Sometimes, I plan to read all night. I pull the blanket over my head and get lost between the pages. In the bed across the …
Five Minutes
BY JABIZ RAISDANA
Jabiz Raisdana is a writer and former NYC public school teacher, living and teaching in Malaysia the time this story was written, and now living in Qatar. Check out his website: http://intrepidflame.blogspot.com/. On Sunday, December 26, 2004 he and his wife, staying on Koh Phi Phi Island in Thailand, rented a sail boat and headed out to sea. Then, everything went wrong. This is his story. An excerpt from “Five Minutes” was read by writer and friend Reed Dickson at the January 16, 2005 Sunday Salon.
We were evacuated the next morning at dawn. A week has passed …
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