April 2023 Publication Roundup

The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during the month of April 2023. 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 April 2023!

Congratulations to Monona Wali, whose essay “The Monkeys are Laughing” appeared in Folio.

1. Ashes

Lights refract off the sacred Ganges River as if from a dusty jewel. It’s hard to see the goddess in her silent flow or know if she’s calling to me this January evening in Varanasi. Dark is settling in, and the air has a wintery bite. This city in northern India is where my parents fell in love over sixty years ago, and it is where I was born. My daughter Maya and I walk south on the embankment that runs along the river to meet up with Maya’s sister, Kanchan, who has been living here for six months on a Fulbright-Nehru research grant. Maya is twenty-two and Kanchan twenty-five. Kanchan has been our guide and has come to know my birthplace better than me.

In addition, Monona’s short story “Thank You” appeared in Juked.

Congrats also to Gerda Govine Ituarte, whose poem “Rain” appeared in Four Feathers Press in Southern California Poetry of Weather e-book.

Kudos to Carla Sameth, whose poem “When You Left for Portland” appeared in El León Literary Arts.

A shout to Cherisse Yanit Nadal, whose short story “Someday Find My Time” appeared in Miracle Monocle.

Liezl was three months into her twenty-seventh year when her vague anxiety over the static movement of her life became obsessive. Before then, thoughts about not measuring up to the success of her cousins were brushed aside by an easy refrain: I still have time. But once the truth of this refrain had altered, she could no longer prevent herself from fixating on her own failure.

It started on the day the new batch of first-year residents arrived on the floor, and she realized that ninety percent of the doctors in the cohort were younger than her. While she was accustomed to the crispness and the shine of the clothes they wore beneath their equally impressive lab coats, this cohort was brighter than those preceding it. And fuck, if she didn’t feel the deficit of shine when she considered the flop of her maroon, poly-blend scrubs and the shabbiness of the worn-out threads of the gold embroidered word “volunteer” on her breast.

Congratulations to S. Pearl Sharp, whose poem “Literate” apeared in Altadena Poetry Review.

We did library
Monday Thursday
certain like sunrise
the paper card a passport
expire pocket glued to The End
Her in the adult section
me across the hall dodging
Dick and Jane
seeking worlds not harnessed
to Negro and poor

Congrats to Ashunda Norris, whose poems “Gethsemane Painted Black” and “Praise House” appeared in The Adroit Journal. Here’s an excerpt from “Gethsemane Painted Black:”

gardened
governed
& alive beyond myself

, I forego agony
for meditative ceremony guided by magic

, messiah blood skin
pouring from my eyes

I weep as seven locs are cut off
my divine head

Please click here to view “Praise House.”

Kudos to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, whose poem “Sanctuary” appeared in Vibe.

I tell a man straight for the first time, “I need to be valued,” and a hot pink tropical flower blooms. I step back to see the many retaining walls I’ve built. I recognize these as fears, and vines grow and stretch until every border is reclaimed. As the garden becomes more lush, more green, so, too, my voice becomes more rich. Soon call outs echo through the valley, and each one becomes a tree to sit under and rest.

A shout out to Tanya Ward Goodman, whose essay “Jolene’s Clothes” appeared in TheKeeptThings.

I’m not sure why Dad left me in South Dakota with his parents that summer. He was headed to Fargo to paint ride panels for a carnival while my mom and brother stayed home in Albuquerque. (Though my parents were still together then, we often split as a family, with Dad taking one kid on the road.) On other trips, I’d helped him mix colors or clean brushes, but maybe this time he was working for a “bad-news guy.” Or maybe he needed to drink a few beers and do the job without worrying about me. All I know is that the night before he left, I cried hard, then spent the next morning jumping rope in the hall outside my grandparents’ one-room apartment.

Congratulations to Saba Waheed, whose short story “Falling” appeared in Asian American Writers’ Workshops.

Rami was riding ahead of her, his control over the bike unsteady. Naira watched his knees rise to the handlebars and realized she should have lifted up his seat. He was nervous and overthinking what he was doing. Trying to go slow, when he should go fast.

“We can go up the hill just a little bit and then turn around,” Naira said.  

They were on a street used to pick up students at the elementary school, but it was empty on the weekend. The road was long, part flat and part hill. When Rami started to turn the bike, he reduced his speed so much that the bike dropped to the side. He jumped off. 

Congratulations to Ashton Cynthia Clarke, whose essay “The Unjoy of Cooking” appeared in Academy of the Heart and Mind.

I don’t remember why Daddy suddenly told me to fix dinner. Making our beds and polishing the wood veneer furniture with Pledge were the only household chores assigned to me and my little brother. Preparing food was strictly Mommy’s job. 

But where she was, I don’t remember. There was a period when Mommy was very ill, bedridden with some frightening leg pain. Sometimes, I would hear her moaning in her bedroom, even crying out. What caused the problem or how long it lasted escapes me. More likely, I never knew what was wrong. Neither of my parents were in the habit of volunteering explanations and I rarely asked.

Congrats to Kyla Walker, whose article “8 Novels Spotlighting Middle Eastern American Women” appeared in Electric Literature.

My mother was born and raised in Istanbul, then moved to the U.S. alone when she was twenty-four years old. Turkish, like many Middle Eastern ethnicities, is not white, nor is it part of a large minority group in the United States. It is a hazy, ambiguous ethnicity that feels stuck between two continents and two eras, mostly because it is. It is a country that on one side borders Syria, Iraq, and Iran; and on the other, Greece and Bulgaria. As a second-generation Turkish American, I’ve witnessed and felt the fear, confusion, and discrimination that my mother experienced throughout her half-life in the United States, especially post 9/11. I’ve watched, countless times, the way people’s faces change in line at the supermarket or the shopping mall when they hear her accent—one often immediately profiled as “Muslim” or the vague, fictitious term “Middle Eastern.” I later learned that “the Middle East” was a distinction coined in 1901 by a US Naval Officer and popularized by more white men during the First World War. In reality, the label is an amorphous, imaginary line simply drawn around a war-torn region with precious oil reserves. Giving it a name gave English-speaking men control over yet another thing and place they couldn’t understand. 

A shout out to Pam Ward, whose poem “Stella On Friday” appeared in the anthology Beat Not Beat, edited by Rich Fergeson and published by Moontide Press.

Congrats to Laura Sturza, whose preview of the musical “Passing Strange” appeared in the Washington City Paper.

In the Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange, opening April 25 at Signature Theatre, Youth, a young musician, sets out on a globe-trotting adventure of self-discovery. Traveling from his middle-class Los Angeles birthplace to Amsterdam and Berlin, the protagonist hones his musical chops, searches for “the real,” and figures out who he is, all while accompanied by a genre-bending soundtrack that includes blues, punk, heavy metal, rock, jazz, funk, and gospel.