“Like are you really even healed? Because you done accepted the call.” Leilani felt reflective after the name of a Certain-Somebody-She-Shouldn’t-Be-Talking-To reappeared on her phone.
“I just feel like he, men like him, are just playing around with us like little puppets,” she laughed. “Just Andy’s toys waiting to be put back up on the cupboard again.” She smoothed out the NYX foundation on her cheeks, eventually spreading it down her neck.
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Samantha Arriozola (she/her/hers) is a Chicana writer and youth worker from the Chicagoland-area. She has spent the past ten years working within nonprofit spaces and community centers in Madison, WI and NYC. Sam received her B.A. in English-Creative Writing as a proud member of the 8th Cohort of First Wave—a Hip-Hop and urban arts full-tuition scholarship program at UW-Madison, centering the pursuit of higher education with arts, academics, and activism. Samantha is a poet with roots in the world of spoken word poetry and slam, a background which has carried over in coaching young spoken word artists to compete in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in 2017 and 2018. Samantha’s poetry has been published in Pinwheel Journal (2019) and Cutthroat Journal: Contemporary Chicanx Writers Anthology (2020). Samantha lives in Queens with her human and plant roommates, editing both her own and fellow writers’ work with an oat chai latte.
By Samantha Arriozola
Chelle A. Carter-Wilson 
Margery Hannah