The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during the month of November. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available) or a blurb (if available) if the publication is a book, along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in November!
Congratulations to Leslie Blanco, whose short story “A Ravishing Son” appeared in Best American Short Stories 2022, edited by Andrew Sean Greer and Heidi Pitlor.
Light, is what I remember.
Joy.
Honeysuckle vines wild against fences, dresses with tiny, inlaid pearls, a vineyard, Xavier and I new as baby’s skin. A Long Island wedding. We are so radiant the bride’s grandmother says we should get married on the spot.
And on the winding road the next morning: a motorcycle appears out of a blind curve.
Congrats also to Melissa Chadburn, whose essay “Freedom to Want: What the Mall Tells us About American Needs” appeared in The Conversationalist.
I know what it feels like to want.
As a young girl, I had a spunky friend, who bossed me and dressed me, and she’d stand in her driveway, hand on her hip, taunting me, “How does it feel to want?”
It was a line in a film she saw.
At that time, I could not afford to want. But still, I wanted to have her hair, the way hairspray and crimping irons gave her that perfect Who’s The Boss, Alyssa Milano flair; her capacity to pick up dance moves, jumping off a chair like Janet Jackson in the “Pleasure Principle” video. I wanted her mom, how she sat with us at night and tickled our backs until we fell asleep, how she stocked the kitchen with healthy food, wheat germ, and honey.
Kudos to Preeti Kaur Rajpal, whose poem “the place of articulation” appeared in Agni.
A shout out to Carolina Rivera Escamilla, whose short story “The Wall” appeared in Mandarin Magazine.
I like the brick wall, the one Papá built of brick. The other ones are made of corrugated metal like at my friend Cande’s house, although mine are shiny and new, while hers are rusty and decaying with holes. My little brothers yell to her from the street, “Your house is a colander,” and Cande hurls at them the first stone she finds on her patio, stones with fallen coffee tree leaves stuck to them. Her house is inside a coffee grove. Mine is on the edge of a gully. I always defend Cande. I invite her in the afternoons to touch the brick wall and to play tic tac toe on it.
Congrats to Hannah Sward, whose personal essay “Nobody Wants a Crying Stripper” appeared in Arts & Letters.
Congratulations to Toni Ann Johnson, whose short story “Gramercy Park is Closed to the Public” appeared in Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor.
New York City, 1972
In her stacked heel pumps Mabel marched away from the pew directly after service and headed toward the front of the sanctuary in a hurry to get to her work and finish it. Her granddaughter was with her and the child would be still for only so long. As Mabel set foot into the tiny treasury office just past the pulpit, a clamorous thump banged behind her.
The noise turned her back into the large room.
Of course it was Luna. She was up on the platform the pastor had just stepped down from moments ago. Nobody told the girl to jump up there.
“Precious Lord . . .” Luna sang.
Have mercy, Mabel thought. Her granddaughter wasn’t what she’d call vocally gifted. The little girl could carry a tune but merely staying on pitch wasn’t nearly enough to mess with gospel songs.
Kudos to Eva Recinos, whose personal essay “This Unlikely Hobby Helped Me Come Out Again” appeared in Refinery 29.
“Can I ask you something?” I said tentatively to my partner as we sat on the couch one evening In 2018. I had my phone in my hand, open to the application page for a queer writers retreat.
“Do you think I technically qualify for this?” I asked.
He read the name of the retreat and excitedly told me to apply. There was no doubt in his mind. But there was plenty of it in mine: Was I queer enough to apply? I told my partner (who is a cis man) I was bisexual in the our early months of us dating, but could I still claim that label? How would I prove to people that I was queer?
Kudos to Alixen Pham, whose poem “Thirty-two Nocturnes” appeared in Rust & Moth.
Bleach bites my nose, fugitives me from my bankrupted
sleep. I do not recall my dreams, only slithering charcoal.
The walls seem to bend, become a toothless mouth,
gumming my unleavened body. I am yeast that cannot rise,
belly a black hole, mind struggling to break glass, bird
a breath of unfiltered air. Outside, the sodium street light
halves my beige curtains, knifes the shadows in my white
room jaundice. ,,
Papá tells us he built the brick wall from bricks left over from the last mansion he finished in the neighborhood of Escalón. People from my neighborhood, my girlfriends, my sisters, and brothers get jealous of me, because I love my wall. They tell me that I nurture that wall like I do our baby sister. To her I give kisses all over her little face, as I comb her fine hair.
Congrats to Valerie Anne Burns, whose personal essay “Gulf Stream Awakening” appeared in Ocean Culture.
It was in a green salty sea where I sought to fill large holes of emptiness and fulfill a desire to immerse my young spirit in the magic of a mermaid. That’s where I wanted to be—not in the concrete world of hurt and hurdles.
Mermaids fascinate me. They live in the grace of the ethereal and swim free. As a young girl, I had no fear of the ocean. It was my magical place to escape the things I feared. Swimming with confidence like someone who was half-fish and half-girl, I could be a mermaid.
Valerie also published a personal essay in the anthology Rituals, edited by Brina Patel and published by Bell Press.
Kudos to Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, whose short story “We Watch” appeared in Greetings From Inlandia.
Tía has a collection of owls. Mostly blue, a few gray and brown, one pearly pink. All of them with giant open eyes that watch us as we walk down the hall, watch us as we take a dump, watch us watching TV or half-assing the dishes. When Tía makes us mad, serves only cream of tomato soup without grilled cheese on Fridays during Lent, we move her owls. Never break one. Just shift their positions on her dusty shelves and wipe away evidence of our wrongdoing. We trade the hall owl with the toilet owl, the kitchen one with the living room one. She only notices when we lay the bedroom owl on its side, eyes facing the wall because it’s too tall for its new place by the front door. She sends us outside for the rest of the day.
Fine by us. We’d rather play with Tío’s pit bull, throw balls and climb trees, hang upside down by our knees.
Elisa busts out jacks that our Tías used to play with. Hard to imagine them once being our age. We sit with our feet touching, our legs in the shape of a pentagram. Elisa scatters the ten metal jacks across the rough concrete. She bounces the shiny red ball. Onesies, twosies, threesies, she misses. “Let’s pretend they’re ninja death stars.”