Creative Nonfiction

In Tokyo, there are no trash cans. At least, not in the way I once understood them. I moved here for work, and the first week I arrived, I searched for one the way a child might search for a familiar landmark in a strange city…something to tell me that the world was still operating by the same rules. But I found no bins. The sidewalks were immaculate, the subway gleamed, the surfaces looked freshly washed, and yet the small convenience store where I bought a rice ball had not

On the window ledge in my office, I keep a license plate hovering just out of direct eyesight. The license plate is near a container of holy dirt from Chimayó I’d collected on my last visit to the pilgrimage site in New Mexico, even though I still had enough dirt at home after I’d scrubbed it onto the back of my skull, trying to stop the inexplicable spasming on the back left quadrant of my head, spasms that sent me to the emergency room on my 39 th  birthday in a complete pa

An Essay on Substance & Style Onscreen, the table is set. A white saucer sits on a tablecloth printed with oysters and olive martinis. In the center of the frame, a brown egg waits in a silver cup. Manicured fingers appear. They wield a small spoon shaped like a seashell. It taps the egg once, then bites. A pearl jumps to the plate at the strike; another. The egg is full of them—large and small, glowingly pooled in the white curb of its belly. The spoon digs and scoops out a

Winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Nonfiction I am not worried about praying, because I am not going to stop writing. I am not sensational at writing. I am terrible at praying. If I do not toddle through the Lord’s Prayer in my first wisp of the morning, I fail to have a proper conversation all day.  I am a magenta hypocrite. I bleed internally when the people I love forget to ask me about me. They spend twenty minutes of our short lives expounding on gutter helm