I’ve run the job search gauntlet before and having a record makes it even more difficult to change employers. Staying at my current job, no matter my happiness level, means not having to start over in proving my value and capability. Of the things holding me back, foremost is my fear of the box.
Category: COLUMNS
Bootstraps: Single Mother/ Courtney Gutierrez
I answer emails and nurse and write treatment goals and rock the baby and meet over the phone and jiggle a pacifier and enter data and bounce a vibrating chair with my feet and all the time I am buzzing, buzzing, buzzing inside.
Yerba Mala: Todos los gatos/ Hugo Esteban Rodríguez
De noche todos los gatos son pardos. All cats are brown at night.
Again: Who is the other? Who is the enemy?
Black, I: The Truth About Slavery
I was in the ninth grade, the only black girl in a classroom of white peers, when I learned the truth about slavery. At the time, I thought I knew all there was to know. No fault of my mother’s; she just didn’t have the heart to tell me the whole truth…
Bootstraps: The Happiest Place on Earth/ Asha Doré
The American Dream, he’d say, and we’d both go quiet and watch the short evergreens and palms out the front window for a beat, their leaves waving a little under the swarm of midday sun. When the window filled suddenly with with a spray of water, the trees and road went liquid. Their colors blurred. Dad would gasp, Shit, Asha it’s happening again. He’d say, God’s raining only on us.
Rust & Remembrance: Nicknames
We all had nicknames in the shipyard up north, not so down south. I don’t know why that is; maybe because the yards down south were so damned big and the bosses were always watching. We would never collect in groups out in the open in the southern yards, while up north we had real unions and some really tough shop stewards, so the ass-kicking went both ways…
Felony Record: An Introduction
Normally, I would offer you my name, by way of an introduction. Names are important; they are currency in a conversation, they are expected, for good or ill, and we bind ourselves to each other with them. But I won’t be offering my name in this case: talking about my time in prison could cost me my career.
Ridge & Holler: If Your Right Hand Offends Then Use Your Left
Lonnie Ray was all gangly arms and lanky legs and big ears and toothy grin when he lit out across the Ohio River looking for work. His big brother in the driver’s seat put his mind at ease and they had some food to hold them over till their first payday: a couple fried baloney and biscuit sandwiches, six Cokes, four whole Hershey bars. The Skaggs boys weren’t strangers to growling bellies. That grumble and a little gnawing on their backbones didn’t intimidate them boys a bit.
RABBLE LIT 