FOR THE CITY, it was certainly a step back— although things could have been worse. In March, after a brief standoff, the Houston City Council struck a new two-year deal with Waste Management, one the financially strapped city was able to afford. Our curbside recycling program, Houstonians were relieved to hear, wouldn’t be nixed entirely. […]
Archive | ESSAYS
What the City of Houston Will Do, Post-Harvey
IN THE WAKE OF HARVEY’S DESTRUCTION, we have heard so much from the national media about the ways Houston has screwed up—how our lack of zoning resulted in over-eager developers building in flood plains, how the Katy prairie, which once acted as a huge sponge, is now almost entirely paved over. How our city, state, […]
Reporter’s Notebook: Teenage Idiocy a Huge Gamble in Many States
By: ROXANNA ASGARIAN | November 21, 2014 on JJIE.org I was 13, and my girlfriends and I had just begun to hang out with some older boys. It was the summer before the eighth grade, and they were 16, going to be juniors, and they had a car. We’d hang out late at night, each […]
Embracing My Period at a Woodstock Moon Lodge
BY ROXANNA ASGARIAN 5/16/14 at 1:40 PM on The Cut, nymag.com We sit silently, the 12 of us women, in a wooded clearing on the 55-acre property of the Wise Woman Center. After a series of chants, dances, and songs, we settled in this circle from oldest to youngest, here on a farm outside of Woodstock, New […]
A Trucker Named Sue
First Published in the Fall 2013 issue of Vagina: The Zine. Oh, Trucker Sue. “Five-foot-two, eyes of blue, name of Sue,” she rapid-fire spits through the nubs of her teeth, mostly gums really, sticking her wiry hand out to shake mine. Firmly. She smokes Seneca Menthol 100s, the kind she picks […]
My Bronx Cherry
Roxanna Asgarian on her first time in the northernmost borough First published June 15, 2011 in the New York Press I stood alone in a long line in front of the Tropicana, wearing a white lace baby doll dress, black, heeled boots and a studded denim vest. I was hot. My face was sticky and […]
i was the palm fronds
First published in CRATE literary magazine, Volume Seven. Vegas isn’t a city most equate with self-discovery or soul searching. But home is where you go when you finish college and don’t know yet what to do with your life. It was winter and I broke up with my boyfriend, or he broke up with me. I don’t […]