My Cardboard Balcony

Well. Life has dealt me a rather shitty hand in cards lately, hasn't it? The new job didn't work out. I wish it had, but it didn't. I don't want to go into heavy detail about it because it hurts too much, but let's just say that some administrators in the education system should not be allowed to make decisions or treat employees in the same awful, unprofessional fashion that they treated me. And let's just say that three of my friends who I told my story to believe the reasoning for the job not working out was discriminatory. Shame that I can't prove that. The bottom line is: I'm unemployed again, possibly for a part of me that I cannot control and I cannot change. And that sucks. The thing is, my last job at AmeriCorps before this botched attempt was an amazing, even if difficult, experience. I was treated with respect using the oh-so-startling concept that I was young and I was learning. My AmeriCorps supervisors were there to support me - they ...

Letters Before Graduation by Belinda Roddie May twenty-first seems like a sub-standard, succulent trifle of a day, like mint melting on the lips of a sweet-toothed lover. To some obsessive Christ druggies, keen on the idea of heaven after an earthquake and a potential zombie apocalypse – keen enough to sell their homes and drag their children by the ears out of the gleam of sunshine from a classroom window – May twenty-first is the dawn of the Rapture, grace among dead bodies. And if that’s the case, then I should wear a machete under my gown as I receive my bachelor’s in compulsive imagination because there’s a new dawn for me, a day when I hope I can be redeemed by the browned hand of a carpenter who felt nails in every place but the thumb. And after my mentors, not so old and wizened, shake my hand and tell me that I’m in for an adventure, I will absorb each word like the ultra-violet rays soaking my cheeks and nose and chin in red and green from the leaves masking the unfi...

"Yes...I can feel hostility coming from you. It's discoloring your aura. The pastel is fading to shade..." "Shut up," I muttered with my eyes half-closed. "You're full of shit." She continued to move a single finger up and down my bare chest. Sweat mingled in a friendship across my collarbone, which bulged outward from my skin and created a bony halo. She giggled.