We proudly present another amazine reading!
Our wonderful contributor Diana L. Gustafson reads an extract from her nonfiction piece Curating Death, published on The Amazine in January 2025.
Give it a listen below ❤
Read More »Tag: writers
Diary of an adventurous homebody
by Haley Young
“It’s just that you don’t seem that adventurous,” said an acquaintance when I told her about our plans to move into a converted camper van.
I smiled. She wasn’t wrong about my personality. She was wrong in her assumption that living on the road demands the highest level of adventurous spirit. Two years into travelling full time, I’m more of a homebody than ever.
I just take my house with me.
Read More »free dreams about dunya
by Easter Mukora
one a.m: i am looking at quotes from the Waking Life and ran into ‘dream is destiny.’ it’s one of those things i never thought i would remember to associate with you, which might be weird because it’s literally written on you. it’s so late into the night that it’s morning and i am better off waking up than sleeping. so i am writing. i still don’t understand what dream is destiny means. i will rewatch it again next week. or some week when it comes up and i want to watch more than i want to write. or if you waltz into my life again when you app finally works. teknolojia! how does anybody know when they’re telling the truth
Read More »Say Cheese
by Gillian Fletcher
Apartment hunting in The Netherlands is an adventure, to say the least. If you read about it online, it sounds like non-stop madness riddled with scammers, false hopes, and broken dreams.
So far, it’s only a little bit like that.
Read More »On Getting Dressed and Getting Coffee
by Charlotte Deason Robillard
Getting dressed
When I was somewhere around age 8 or 9 – still homeschooled, living in rural Alabama, and mostly wearing thrift store clothes and hand-me-downs from my cousin – I meticulously put together an outfit I was proud of. Basing my vision off of whatever snippets of pop culture I’d been exposed to – Nickelodeon on the cable TV at my grandmother’s house, my best friend’s occasional copies of Tiger Beat – I pulled together a study in plum: purple jean shorts, a purple paisley oversized t-shirt, and a purple-hued tapestry vest. Since I didn’t go to school and I couldn’t wear jean shorts to church, the only obvious place to debut my outfit was homeschool day at the local roller skating rink. Despite my general lack of athletic ability, I was pretty good at skating, and I was excited to cruise around the rink in my fly new ‘fit. But my outfit was too avant-garde for the Pelham, Alabama homeschool crowd, and I soon had my first experience of bullying. Two girls (who I envision in the bland but popular Umbros and Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts of the era) shoved me and snickered about my clothes as they whizzed by me in a fit of giggles. I don’t remember what they said, but I remember being hurt and confused. I was the one who was dressed cool, right? I had seen vests and oversized t-shirts on TV, and I’d so carefully paired each color and pattern. This was my first introduction to conformity, and while my feelings were hurt, my taste for getting dressed up had not been stifled.
Read More »Courtesy Never Dies
by P. A. Farrell
No one told me I would be using a walker, hunched over those curved aluminum handles and hoping the brakes on the wheels would hold, but that’s life. You never know what it’s going to throw at you, and you’ve got to be ready to catch it with both hands and draw it toward your chest so it doesn’t fall to the floor. But today, the bus jostled, slamming me into a pole. A man sneered at me, “They shouldn’t let people like you on the bus!” Yeah, people like me, with walkers.
A slow slog from the bus stop sends stabs of pain to my ankle, but I push on. Good thing my folding friend has wheels. I don’t think I could pick it up. Each slab of the sidewalk is daring me forward. The beast is waiting, and I’ve got to gather my strength, so I take it slow to save my breath and prepare.
Read More »Concord Purple on the Sunrise
by Pran Phucharoenyos
The thunderhead is willing to break any and all windows because there’s no insurance around, and still, I take a blue car out West. The way I brought myself down to California— you would have been proud.
I leave Enchanted Wells adjacent to Rainbow Blvd and across from Wishing Coin Road and other counterfeit fairytale worlds Nevadan roads titled themselves after. The Santa Ana reports here that this boulevard I’m residing in contains steamed rainbows from kitchen sink dishwashers and the youthful and overly sentimental scent of a clean glass picked up from the cabinet reminds me to bring water when I leave to lie flat on backyard artificial grass as if I’m in wait for a high danger surgery as the southwest sticks on my sunscreened legs.
Read More »I Could Be Modern Art
by Natalie Hunter
I used to care so much about my body hair. I remember the face-melting shame I felt when a boy at school announced loudly that I had hairy arms, while we coloured pictures at a table. But, when I think of it now, it is just a memory of a memory. I feel detached from the experience. I grew up with plenty of unconditional love at home. Therefore, I knew intrinsically that my value was inherent and unshakable … at home. Like so many people in this world, it took venturing out into the world for school, to initiate the confusing experience of being “othered.” Some years later, at the age of fourteen, I would stand in front of the mirror enumerating every single thing that was unacceptable about my beautiful, youthful body, as if identifying the offending aberrations could bring me closer to perfection. It amuses me to think of that fourteen-year-old seeing me now, two weeks from my fortieth birthday, thinking, “How could you let yourself become so ugly?”
Read More »Catching Cars
by Stacia Laroche
Back when I was a 12-year old living in the warm rays of my youthful golden days, I used to sit on my rickety front porch steps with a disposable camera in hand taking pictures of every classic car that drove down our suburban street. The first car I ever captured was a 1957 Buick Roadmaster.
I was captivated by that car because driving it in a time period that it didn’t belong in meant you were taking a risk. It was a deep green, the same shade that belonged to leaves in the forest after returning from the winter. The kind you don’t remember seeing blossom. All of a sudden they’re just there again.
Read More »My Lily
by Chase Wootton
As I looked over the bridge, hundreds of feet above the waters, I couldn’t decide which was more beautiful: her, or the sunset. It unfolded in front of me — a splash of red, gold, and orange across the sky, as if a godly chef had sprinkled oranges, pineapples, and cherries across the heavens. The wind was cool and peaceful, the sky clear of rain, snow, or dreary weather. In front of me, there was only beauty, only color, only depth of goodness.
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