Mary Slowik has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She has published essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, Frank Basso and Greg Sarris, Garrett Hongo, Asian American immigration poetry. She has also published articles on short animated films. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, The North Dakota Quarterly, MELUS, Gargoyle 50, Northwest Edge, The Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com), and Narrative.
I still can’t figure out how zippers work, how roughly 800 teeth, 400 to a side, clasp together when a metal tongue passes over them one way, or how they unclasp when the metal tongue passes over them the other way.
The zipper, that ingenious mechanism: I’ve stared at it many times—sometimes in fury, sometimes frustration, sometimes even in sadness. The zipper: a kind of touchstone for my life, recalcitrant and stubborn when my children refused to go to school and used the zipper as their excuse; exasperating, even dangerous when down parkas blew open on […]
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