Nate Haken

Fiction · Haiku · Music

Stories

From the Road

  • Cockfights and Pig Shit

    When Rae and I first arrived in Tumbes, Peru, I asked people where the cockfights were and nobody seemed to know, which was weird because once we figured it out for ourselves, wandering around the market and the cemetery and the Plaza de Armas one…

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  • Christmas in Jail

    At roll call, the deputy chief assigned me to Officer Murphy.  I don’t know if Off. Murphy was happy to have me tagging along all night on his patrol, but probably not.  On the other hand, a lot of people like to talk to reporters.…

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  • Fish

    In Waco Texas, my friend and I got picked up by a guy in a hatchback who looked exactly like David Koresh. Couldn’t have been him though because Koresh had died in 93 and this was a couple years later. Sure was weird though. Maybe…

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  • Kindness in Four Acts

    In North Carolina a rowdy bunch of gamblers on their way to a casino at the reservation picked me up and laughed about how they saw some sucker sleeping on the shoulder of the road some days before.  Boy they sure yucked it up when…

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  • San Diego: Please

    I hitchhiked from Phoenix to San Diego one winter night with a boot knife in my pocket and a cardboard sign that said San Diego Please.  The driver preached and prophesied to me the whole way, in hopes that I’d find Jesus somewhere in the…

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Published Elsewhere

  • “The Luo Have Taken Over the World” (as J. Barook), Satellite Press: Transmission, 2014
  • “The Vine and the Branches”, Witness 26:3, Winter 2013
  • “La Grande Aventure”, Livre des Fêlures, 31 Histoires Cousues de Fil Noire (Paris: 13e Note Editions, 2010)
  • “The Frigate Bird”, Danse Macabre, 2010
  • “Leach Pad”, Narrative Magazine, Winter 2010 — third place, Fall Contest
  • “Starting Over”, Narrative Magazine, Stories of the Week, 2008–2009
  • “Knowing Truth”, in Adam Jones, ed., Men of the Global South: A Reader (London: Zed Books, 2006)
  • “Dolphins Dancing Somewhere off the Coast of Cuba”, The Massachusetts Review 47:3, 2006
  • “The Long Haul”, The Raven Chronicles 11:1, 2004
  • “Alonso and Baruch”, The Iconoclast Literary Magazine, No. 83, 2004
  • “The Center of the World (Part 2)”, The Iconoclast Literary Magazine, No. 71, 2002
  • “Music in the Courtyard”, Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Experience of Disability through Literature and the Fine Arts, No. 44, 2002

Parallax

A guest column for the JMWW blog, 2013–2018, sometimes under the pen name J. Barook.