Mona’s writing has appeared in:
Featured writing
I Need to Scream
I need to scream
But nothing comes
Because it's this family
That doesn't speak
Of blues and hurt
Hollow Pain
Wanting to take back her words, it was too late. The teacher made eye contact with me, and her face had lost much of its color. She tried to hug me as my tears came.
The Gluttony of Nature
Thank you Cosmic Daffodil Journal for publishing my photography!
This photo was taken in Québec near Lac St Jean.
If you zoom in, you can see the Little Dipper in the sky and reflected in the lake. That was a special view to behold along with the magic sky.
The Indigenous Story: a Horror Tale Unheard of and Untold
If you had to talk about the lives of the indigenous peoples that inhabited California before and during the arrival of whites, would you have much to say? Do we really know much at all?
That was precisely how I felt before I read "We Are Not Animals" by Martin Rizzo-Martinez. Their real story, the way they must have felt, the way they must have made sense with a world pulled out from under their feet.
To me, the indigenous story had always been effusive. It was a world so far away and so unheard of, so unspoken of, that it felt near impossible to really connect, to understand the fragments I did learn of.
Belonging
"How do you heal from such things, things that are bigger than you, from history? How do you forgive yourself when there’s never in a thousand moons enough shame for one person to feel? Enough shame to make up for the cruelty of an entire atrocious era in time?"
Out of the Cold
The baby hummingbird drank greedily from the dropper. She had named him Finn. Mona let out a pained sigh of relief. It was 3:37 a.m., exactly four hours and twenty-three minutes before her graduate committee would arrive. This Ph.D. defense was her last exam. She would have to demonstrate how torpor worked—the state somewhere in between a power nap and hibernation that hummingbirds went in and out of to withstand cold temperatures.