Essays 2024-25

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Prior Essays: Essays 2020-2021, Essays 2022-2023

ESSAYS - November 2024: Allison Field Bell & Sabrina Hicks

Allison Field Bell

Habit

Every morning, she’s up before six and driving to Roasters, where she orders a spelt muffin and black coffee and tries—usually unsuccessfully—to get a window seat. The men are always there before her: white-haired and with newspapers in their laps. Not that they ever read. They’re too busy gossiping but not calling it that of course because they’re men and this is Prescott, Arizona. This is 2009. Their gossip is about hunting and guns and that latest thing the president did that pissed them right off. Or perhaps not. Perhaps her memory is wrong—as it often is—and these men mostly speak of their wives, the way one wife insists on cooking some meal one man definitively doesn’t like, the way another wife booked a plane ticket for the wrong wedding weekend for a dear niece.
            Either way, she’s there with a computer, typing away. Trying, unsuccessfully, to write something brilliant. Or at least something decent. But she’s twenty-three and what the fuck does she know? Every morning she’s at it again, shaping words into stories. And then, when the morning is spent, she’s in class. College. And when that’s over, she’s at her house with the astroturf on the patio and the big thin sliding glass doors that let in all the heat in the summer and let out all the heat in the winter. She’s there on the orange paisley couch she found at a thrift store for five dollars. Or maybe it was ten. That’s not the point. The point is: it was cheap and orange and she’s sitting on it with a glass of gin. Or arak. She persuaded the liquor store down the road to order in some bottles.
            So she’s on the couch with gin or arak, and if it’s gin, there’s soda water and lime, and if it’s arak, there are ice cubes that turn the liquor milky, flakes of it catching on the edges of the glass. She’s drinking, and she drinks until she sleeps. Usually. And she’s alone, usually. And it’s fine. Usually. And usually, she looks out the window above the sink in the kitchen as she pours her refill, and she sees an array of trees out there—ponderosas shot through with orange bark. And she laughs because there’s the orange bark and the orange couch and the gin or the arak and she is not happy exactly but not not. But then, if it’s Thursday, the whole night transforms.
  Thursday every week in the basement bar of some weird building off Whiskey Row, they host 80’s night. And all the other kids from her college are there in bright colors and spandex. Dancing. And sometimes, when she’s drunk enough, she makes her way there too. Sometimes, she dresses up—she’s got a whole bag full of costumes because she’s twenty-three and has been to burning man so of course she does. Of course, picking an 80’s outfit is easy and fast and then she’s out the door. Maybe walking. Maybe a friend has picked her up. Maybe biking. She can’t remember her mode of transportation, but it’s not driving. She doesn’t drive in the evenings because she’s drunk in the evenings and she’s not that kind of drunk.
  At 80’s night, she’s a bubbly bright drunk of a dancer. She orders gin after gin. She owns the dance floor. With her long blonde hair tied up in a high ponytail. Her neon spandex. Or maybe a polyester jumpsuit. Or maybe she didn’t dress up at all because she was too drunk at home and now she’s at 80’s night in jeans and a tank top just floating around. One thing is for sure, she’ll pick a man. It doesn’t much matter who. She’ll take him home with her. They’ll have sex, and it will be—well, she won’t remember—but probably bad. She’ll want him out of her bed before dawn, lying there wide-awake with his hot heavy breathing and his sweat-sticky body bare and half out of the covers.
  Once it’s six, she’ll get up, kick him out of her house, shower him off her skin and start the whole day over again. Roasters, the men, the muffin, the coffee, the words. Or maybe not. Maybe she’ll just lay there imagining she’s left already. Maybe she’ll be too polite or too hungover to make it to the coffee shop at that time. The time she loves best. When the light is spilling in through the window and you can see all the particles of dust like gold flakes in the air drifting, drifting.

Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY, forthcoming 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, EDGE OF THE SEA, forthcoming 2025 from Cutbank. Allison's prose appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, New Orleans Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Palette Poetry, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Sabrina Hicks

Preskit

My mother kept a room in our house dedicated to her grandmother, a woman who’d helped raise her. On the dresser there was a large black and white photo of her grandparents, two stern looking Italians fresh from the old country. Thin lipped, eyes sunken, hands folded in their lap, giving off a defiant obedience. The room was a throwback to another era, with lace curtains, a collection of antique pieces adorned with handsewn handkerchiefs her mother and grandmother had made, and my mother’s wedding slippers oddly in the corner under a nightgown she wore on her honeymoon. She wanted a room of artifacts, it seemed, a before, when she was a girl in Connecticut, raised in a neighborhood of poor immigrants with vegetables gardens and clotheslines threading backyards and families. It was at odds with the rugged individualism of our ranch in Arizona and the land outside, filled with cattle and acres of junipers and scrub-oak. The ranch house sat at headquarters in a place called Skull Valley, just outside of Prescott. My two older brothers tended the land and cattle.
I’d tried sleeping in the room of artifacts one summer when I had an English course in town at the local community college. I’d just graduated high school and was looking to build credits before heading to the university in Tucson. My parents had been gone and the house was empty. I had my pick of beds, but it turned out I could only sleep on the couch, over a high, peaked ceiling. I feared the crawl spaces above the rooms. At night, the country mice would scurry overhead, chased sometimes by the wild cats meant to keep their numbers down, inducing dreams of rodents raining down on me. The house was old and creaky. It moaned and moved with the winds coming off the mountains.
  It didn’t help it was branding season for the calves and they were kept separate from their mothers. Outside I could hear them bawling, loud and mournful, a call and response from over the pastures. If I thought too hard about their separation, I was afraid I’d become a vegetarian and never be allowed to step foot on the ranch again. There was no air conditioning so all the windows remained open and their cries filled the house. Moonlight spilled across the floors, casting a blue light upon the paintings of cowboys and cattle—the outside bleeding in. I would drag my feet into class, sleep deprived and achy from the soft sofa, while the professor dissected WWI poems about mustard gas, green fogs, and fields of death. The classroom on the Yavapai community college campus sat up high so you could see the tops of the ponderosa pines in the surrounding forest. We’d break at noon, make small talk about our plans for the future and stand outside staring out at the wilderness.
  There was a pregnant woman in the class who’d use the break to smoke. It was the early 90s, passé even then to smoke while pregnant, but this was Prescott, or as locals pronounced it—Preskit—an eclectic town of cowboys, hippies, artists, rednecks, retirees, and a growing number of recovering drug addicts—and she was young, around my age, which was 18 at the time, unconcerned with the effects it might have on her baby. I remember watching her so intently she offered me a cigarette one day. It was summer but there was always cool air coming off the mountains, shifting the wind, shifting my mood, reminding me of the past, about my great great grandparents and WWI. I thought of the poet we’d just studied, Wilfred Owen, the way he described the mustard gas as a sea of green and I pictured the ranch at night filling the fields with a haze of toxic air, coming for me.
  “No thanks,” I said, when she held out a pack.
  It was an honest offer and I felt conscientious of my disgust so I overcompensated with faux indifference, which had been my way then, paralyzed by judgment and protest and a need to overlook them both in order to survive in a world that seemed indifferent to my own sensitivities. I was not from Prescott. I’d been born in Phoenix, resided mostly in the rural outskirts of the valley, and always driving from one place to another so that I felt anchored more to mountains and roads, specifically to the Carefree Highway those years. I did not like the idea of place defining me the way so many people seemed to relish. Land, in the true western sense, was claimed and coveted, making people resistant to movement and change, perspective and growth.
“How do you like the professor?” I asked.
  She blew smoke out the side of her mouth, surprised by my question. I think she thought I was going to ask her when she was due or what baby names she was tossing around. But I viewed pregnancy as the worst thing that could happen to a young woman and avoided acknowledgement, though she seemed content. We were in a conservative town where boys got girls pregnant in high school with stunning frequency and the girls had to live with the consequences.
  “He’s all right,” she said. “He asks a lot of questions.”
  Wasn’t that his job, I wanted to say. Why are you even here? But I couldn’t shake the feeling of the poem we’d read, the sea of gas, the loneliness of the ranch, unable to sleep in a room I was convinced was haunted, my great great grandparents staring back at me as if to say, this is where you ended up?
  “What did you think of the poem?” I said, aware I was possibly annoying her with more questions.
  She smiled, drew in smoke with one hand while the other rested on her belly. “It’s all right.”
  But it was more than all right and it struck me I was beginning to fall in love with language. I’d taken my reading and writing assignments to the town square across from the saloons called “Whiskey Row” to read poetry and watch the parade of locals and tourists mill about the day. Our professor had printed out a small biography of the poet and I stared at Wilfred Owen’s face trying to picture him in modern day, the way I did with all old photos of young people captured long ago. He was handsome, with full lips and a strong jaw. I could see him walking by me right then and there more than I could my own great grandparents, who would have been in their early thirties during WWI, just ten years older than Owen. I’d finished a poem he’d written touching on the coping mechanisms he struggled with in war to reduce the fear of feeling too much, thinking too deeply, and does the price of that outweigh numbness.
  All around me were Victorian style houses. Prescott is one of the only places in Arizona reflective of the wider influences of American culture, unlike the valley surrounding Phoenix. I’d grown up in an adobe house made primarily of mud, a style of Native American architecture that understood the desert and made use of the arid land. Our house preserved the cool nights in preparation for the hot days. But Prescott is considered high-desert, 5,300 feet in elevation and is more indicative of a Mediterranean climate. All around me in the Plaza was grass and trees, Victorian peaks on storefronts, a town square that seemed plucked from the Midwest or East, a rewinding of time and place.
  I remember, aside from class and going to a few of my brother’s rodeos, the feeling of loneliness or maybe quietude, a stillness that comes with no distractions and spending time with oneself, understanding that words could conjure up parallels and patterns in life. I became aware of my own unease, a feeling that plagued me, walked around with me like a shadow. Aware, too, that our connectedness is everywhere, embedded in our DNA, our land. I would learn much later that I was tethered to the land in ways that would only present themselves upon leaving, upon an absence. We are always trying to get back to something.

Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in Cleaver, Reckon Review, Split Lip Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Best Small Fictions and Best Micro Fiction anthologies, Wigleaf’s Top 50, as well as numerous journals, both online and in print. More of her stories can be found at sabrinahicks.com.

ESSAYS - August 2024: Paul Hostovsky

Paul Hostovsky

LAST WORDS

When my mother learned that she would be acquiring a Deaf daughter-in-law, she tried to learn sign language, God bless her. But she had a hell of a time with the pronunciation, i.e. the manual dexterity involved in articulating the signs in ASL. She got her Ds and her Fs mixed up. She got her dominant and her non-dominant hand mixed up. And also her clockwise and her counterclockwise. Her palm orientation was, well, disoriented. And most frustrating of all was the fact that, as poor as her expressive skills were, her receptive skills were even worse: when it came to reading sign language she was downright dyslexic.

Nevertheless it came in handy in the end, when she was dying, when she was lying in the hospital after having been intubated because she couldn't breathe on her own. And she couldn't talk because of the big ventilator tube in her mouth and all the surgical tape keeping things in place. It had all happened so quickly--one day she was fine and power walking around the track at the JCC and eating organic and being healthier than thou, and the next day she was in the hospital dying of a pernicious infection that had somehow invaded her lungs and completely overwhelmed her system overnight. When she arrived at the emergency department, the doctors didn't yet know if it was a bacterial or a viral infection and within a few hours they had intubated her, and now they were pumping her full of meds and hoping one of them would do the trick and reverse the downward spiral. And all this within a matter of 24 hours. So while she was lying there in the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses and family, unable to speak for the breathing tube, she dragged her right forefinger up her left arm, from the wrist all the way up to the shoulder, then back down to the wrist, tapping it twice: “Long time.” Actually, a more accurate translation would be “Very long time,” because while “long” occurs on the forearm, the farther you extend the sign up the arm (i.e. to the elbow, the biceps, the shoulder) the longer the “long,” which is just one of many ways of modifying adjectives in ASL. So she signed: VERY LONG TIME, which may have meant: This is taking a really long time, how come I'm not getting better yet? Or maybe it meant: I've had a long life, time is an illusion, and I'm ready to go. Or maybe it meant: Long time no see, Uncle Hank, what are you doing here, I thought you were in Tel Aviv, thank you for coming to stand and watch at my deathbed while this nightmare keeps unfolding. Maybe it meant all these things. And more. Or less. They were her last words. She died a few hours later.

They say that fingerspelling, or the manual alphabet, was invented by Spanish monks in the 16th century. After taking a vow of silence, they used it for communicating with each other. And with God. I imagine them lying on their deathbeds, like my mother, too sick for words, holding up the first letter only of the prayer they wanted to recite but couldn’t. And those handshapes, each representing a whole passage, were lifted up to God and since God knew all the words by heart anyway and only needed a hand—a finger, really—to point Him in the direction of an intention, I guess He heard their prayers. And like the mythological Phoenix, those handshapes rose up like smoke from the burning sickbeds of the monks, up through the chimneys of the centuries, and have turned into the birds that build their nests in the hands of the Deaf, flitting and darting from sleeve to sleeve, where they sing to this day.

Sign language teachers will tell you that hearing people who like to dance, or who know how to play a musical instrument, have an easier time learning how to sign than those who don’t dance or play a musical instrument. Go figure. My mother never learned to play a musical instrument. And I have no memory of ever seeing her out on the dance floor. Except at my wedding (see above) when I married that Deaf daughter-in-law of hers. But she had always been good at languages. German was her first language, then Dutch, then English, then French (she spent her junior year abroad, and eventually became a high school French teacher), a little Czech, and a little Danish. But in her 60s, when her only child informed her that he was going to marry his sign language teacher, and she ended up with a Deaf daughter-in-law---and two years later, a Deaf granddaughter---she had a hell of a time learning ASL. To her credit, though, she gave it the old college try: She took an ASL class at a local college. She studied hard, did all the homework assignments, made pages and pages of notes, had perfect attendance. But when it came to remembering the signs and trying to produce them on her hands, she was all thumbs.

After she died, I found the notebook in which she kept a vocabulary list, approximating the signs with glosses and pithy little descriptions of the hand movements (“HAPPY: The 5 handshape tapping the chest upward in a circular motion. ANGRY: two bent 5 handshapes at the chest “ripping” up and away from each other; UNDERSTAND: The S handshape held up to the temple and opening into the G handshape, like a light bulb turning on.”)

I knew her ASL teacher, a Deaf guy named ALB. He’s a great guy, I told her. You’ll love him. But she didn’t love him. Because having been a French teacher all those years, she had some very definite opinions about how and how not to teach a language, and she did not approve of ALB’s teaching methods. As a matter of fact, she blamed him for her lack of progress with the language, saying all he ever did was stand in front of the class and sign to them, expecting them to learn it by osmosis. What’s wrong with osmosis? I asked her. Wasn’t it kind of like immersion? Wasn’t that how she herself learned French when she was living with a French family during her junior year abroad in Paris? She allowed that language immersion had its advantages, but she felt ALB was gearing the class toward the better, more fluent students and leaving the slower ones behind in the dust of their incomprehension. Plus, she said, she was the oldest student in the class at age 63 and her facility for learning new languages wasn’t quite what it once was. ASL, she said, felt like a magic trick or disappearing act. Now you see it, now you don’t. Voila! A sleight of hand that she couldn’t seem to get a handle on.

But within a year, when she was in the hospital, unable to speak, unable to breathe on her own, with all of us standing around watching helplessly as her life was rapidly, inexplicably slipping away, her last words to us were in sign language. And her pronunciation was absolutely perfect: one expertly modified adjective (right forefinger tracing a path all the way up the left arm to the shoulder) and one abstract noun (that same forefinger tapping an imaginary wristwatch on the left hand twice). VERY LONG TIME.

There was a tiny interfaith chapel off the main hallway of the hospital. No religious symbols or iconography in the room, just a simple tapestry on the wall with these words sewn into the fabric: Be still and know that I am God. It’s from Psalm 46, though I didn’t know that at the time. And I didn’t know how to pray but I prayed anyway. I like the first part of that quote better than the second part. Be still. I think that’s good advice. As for the second part--know that I am God—I don’t know anything about God. And neither does anyone. No one knows. Be still and know that you don’t know. That’s how I would have revised Psalm 46, if King David had asked me for some feedback on his psalm. I think there’s great comfort in knowing that we don’t know. That we don’t know anything. That we’re wrong about everything. The good news is not what we thought. The bad news is not what we thought. That’s the good news! And it’s greater than we know. And it’s greater than we can imagine. Because we can’t imagine being wrong about everything. Understanding is overrated. I don’t understand how or why my mother got that infection and died in less than 48 hours. And I don’t understand exactly what she meant by VERY LONG TIME. It broke her heart that she couldn’t understand ASL in spite of trying valiantly to learn it. And it breaks my heart to go back and reread those ASL vocabulary lists in a little notebook in her own hand. A hand that I’d recognize anywhere. A hand like a kind of face. The face of her writing. “UNDERSTAND: The S handshape held up to the temple and opening into the G handshape, like a light bulb turning on.”

Paul Hostovsky has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book of poems is PITCHING FOR THE APOSTATES (Kelsay, 2023). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter.
Website: paulhostovsky.com

ESSAYS - February 2024: Okbi Han

Okbi Han

Tenno Heika Banzai

       My maternal grandfather is a man who adds jazz and classical music to his iPod Nano. Listening to Rachmaninoff, he cuts up newspaper articles to make a scrapbook. He is a sweet old man who appreciates Frida Kahlo and tells me to become an artist like her, an artist to be remembered even after death. Once he discovered a strange tattoo on his granddaughter’s neck. He thought she loved Vegemil so much that she inscribed it into her body, and he decided to send her a box of Vegemil. The truth, however, is that I am such a big fan of Britney Spears and got a bottle of poison tattooed, not a bottle of soy milk.
       My grandfather loved his wife so much that he couldn't even set foot at her funeral. He is a war hero of the Korean War, and a burial site is reserved for him at the Memorial Hall in Seoul. After hearing that his wife could not be buried with him there because she had died before him, my grandfather was furious. He was literally jumping around the hall.
       In his military years, he used to be a trumpeter. His band played for the US Army. My grandfather would send me letters on my birthday and some short English phrases were included in them. I believe his years spent in the US Army base are the reason for those phrases.
       My grandfather is a Japanese collaborator, though.
       A few years ago, my whole family gathered for a Chuseok evening out. On the way back, my grandfather declared that he was a Japanese collaborator. My aunt, busy with driving, did not seem to care so much. She simply mumbled something like “yeah, sure” without understanding what he was actually saying.
       In his loud angry voice, my grandfather again declared that he was a Japanese collaborator. He attended a national people’s school when he was a boy. That was what the elementary school was called when Korea was under the colonial rule of Japan. Every morning at the school, he was forced to cry out “Tenno Heika Banzai!” Long live His Majesty the Emperor. He confessed that he screamed harder and louder than anyone else because he was afraid and did not want to get beaten up by the teachers. Sometimes he would also shout three times in a row, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
       My grandfather concluded that there was no way he could be exempt from being a collaborator with such deeds and that he deserved to be purged. “I am no exception. It was never a right action, no?” He asked my aunt and umma in the car.
       I believe my grandfather wanted to hear back from us that it was not true. I told him that he was not a Japanese collaborator. The reply made in haste, however, did not leave my grandfather relieved. While the whole family went to a café to have coffee and dessert, he went home alone.
       Splitting a matcha macaron into halves for my nephew, I was still thinking about what my grandfather had said. Maybe I should have told him that a young child does not know anything, and he is unable to do something so bad. On the other hand, I thought there was something farcical about how he remembered his boyhood. Dessert time with a young nephew was not the best occasion to ponder on a colonial memory, nevertheless. The next moment, I was reminded that I prefer matcha from Japan, as Korean ones tend to taste bitter.

Okbi Han is a poet, painter, and video editor. She lives in Seoul and can be reached at [email protected]. She is also a professional french fries craver.