By Tricia Theis
Tricia Theis lives in Baltimore, and keeps house casually with her husband, two kids, and two dogs.
Photo, “Blast Off” provided by Centophobia via Flickr’s Creative Common license.
Tricia Theis lives in Baltimore, and keeps house casually with her husband, two kids, and two dogs.
Photo, “Blast Off” provided by Centophobia via Flickr’s Creative Common license.
By Jess D. Taylor
After the eggs hatch, we sneak glimpses of the dove parents feeding the babies, their fuzzy heads just visible in the hanging basket...
Dec 9, 2024 | 2 min read
By Kate Freeborn
I lean into the wind and trek toward the empty center of the lake. Whipping snow zigzags across the whited plane and I race the snow snakes, my lungs exploding white plumes into the bright, egg-blue sky...
Dec 6, 2024 | 2 min read
By Bex Hoffer
The bonfire is blazing when I arrive. Later, back home, I will relish the woodsmoke lingering on my skin, my clothes. Sweet balm of October...
Nov 25, 2024 | 2 min read
By Sarah Hare
The snow is blinding, fluorescent white. Olive, not quite four, squints to watch a middle schooler descend the hill, staring like he’s in the circus...
Nov 18, 2024 | 2 min read
By Kit Carlson
You could hear them calling, cries reverberating between black November treetops and low-hanging pewter clouds. Reedy honks, voices from the far north, warning of winter.
Nov 11, 2024 | 2 min read
By Edith-Nicole Cameron
It was citrus season, which meant something once, when citrus had a season (December through March), came from a place (thirty degrees north of the equator), defined a culture (Orange County livin' was sweet and easy, Dad would say)...
Nov 4, 2024 | 2 min read
By Deb Werrlein
Dad bought a Miami of Ohio ashtray in 1957—a tin dish with a bean bag for a base, a red M on its side. I imagine him, eighteen in his dorm, tamping out butts and laughing through smoke over cards as he perfected his bridge game and became his own man...
Oct 28, 2024 | 2 min read
By Melanie Ritzenthaler
I think about God a lot because I think all ex-Catholics do. That means I think a lot about sin, and also about death...
Oct 21, 2024 | 2 min read
By Elaine Edwards
Below deck, musty with summer, a woman in a wilted white bonnet guides my hands through the motions: loop, cross, pull...
Oct 14, 2024 | 2 min read
By Ainsley McWha
One year post escape from the city—with its sharp, steely edges and shadowy tunnels; the collective vibrations, unwelcome grazes, and peering eyes of eight million urgent, shouting strangers—all I do these days is notice: clouds; birdsong; three droplets of morning dew along a blade of grass...
Oct 7, 2024 | 2 min read
By Tess Kelly
That June, trees crisped and browned. Grass yellowed like old newspapers. Each morning I filled my blue plastic watering can at the outdoor spigot and carried it across the garden to the birdbath, a basin of concrete nestled beneath an Ironwood...
Sep 30, 2024 | 2 min read
By Jodie English
The line goes dead two minutes into the month’s only phone call, his face flat against concrete, ankles raw from shackle sores, his hand cuffed to a metal plate high on the wall, fingers swollen, saying hello, hello as if she could hear him, as if the struck match of her voice was still there...
Sep 23, 2024 | 2 min read
By Sanobar Sabah
Passionate red and sensuous saffron were my mother’s favorite colors. Inspired by the Bollywood queen of yesteryear, Rekha, my mother’s wardrobe was laden with glamorous chiffon sarees and handmade embroidered blouses from all over India...
Sep 16, 2024 | 2 min read
By Carol Moody
She’s elbow-deep inside the dryer, searching for that old Halloween costume—as though everything depends on wearing a frayed polyester police officer jacket. Her parents have separated for good, and the three-year-old little brother wants to play “hopspital”—announcing himself as “Dr. Butter"...
Sep 9, 2024 | 2 min read
By Paulette Studley
My mother thinks people are breaking into her house. Leprechauns. She tells me they’ve stolen her eyeglasses and supermarket receipts. At eighty years old, she sits beside me as I dole out antipsychotics to her pillbox and remind her that it’s not true...
Sep 2, 2024 | 2 min read
By Hanna Saltzman
His eyes are shimmering lakes of grays and blues, absorbing all that he sees above: chipped paint the color of clouds, an arcing sparrow, summer sunlight dancing the polka on leaves of ivy draped across his sky. His weight pulls him down, while his awe pulls him up.
Aug 26, 2024 | 2 min read
By Lindsey Pharr
“I can call ‘em, you know.”
“Call who?”
“The gators.”
“Bullshit.”
Aug 19, 2024 | 2 min read
By Ginny MacDonald
I want to let Allie know that the autumn leaves were beautiful when she left, and now the trees are budding out in every green. The days are long again, and I showed her kids where the wild strawberries bloom. The growing is so quick and condensed up here...
Aug 12, 2024 | 2 min read
By Candace Angelica Walsh
Dad sat at the park picnic table smoking one Marlboro after another, with not a word of protest from my sister or me — poles apart from the week before when we snapped his whole pack in half and flushed it down the toilet.
Aug 5, 2024 | 2 min read
By Helen Collins Sitler
My brother, nearly seventy years old, sits at his kitchen table. A sharp tang bursts from the bottle of nail polish he has opened. His wife, barefoot, sits facing him...
Jul 29, 2024 | 2 min read
By Ghazala Datoo O'Keefe
Our days begin early. The sky is dark, stars hiding behind the wispy grey clouds...
Jul 22, 2024 | 2 min read
By Eve Maisey
Inside, my mother lives in a tornado of moods. She is the garden, shining like a rainbow of colors that dance beneath the sun. And then she is the mud, sulking into the shadow crevices of her blackened bedroom...
Jul 15, 2024 | 2 min read
By Emma Baum
After calling eighteen days in a row, I know not to hang up when my mom doesn’t answer after the fourth or fifth ring. Her phone is chronically lost, and I imagine her elbow deep in the living room couch or emptying her overstuffed purse onto the kitchen counter...
Jul 8, 2024 | 2 min read
By Lina Lau
My kids leave artifacts, fragments of themselves for me to find. Crumpled cheese stick wrappers shoved between couch cushions...
Jul 1, 2024 | 2 min read
By Hanna Saltzman
When my toddler looks for the moon he squirms in my grip, arcs his body toward the cold dark sky. It’s our routine as we walk home from daycare, he the last child there, hospital pager clipped to my pants...
Jun 24, 2024 | 2 min read
By James Geary
In the midst of the move, standing in my study among shoulder-high stacks of book boxes, I had that feeling you get after committing to a dramatic course of action that is, you now suddenly realize, too late to reverse: My God, what have I done?!...
Jun 17, 2024 | 2 min read
By Casey Loken
She tucks her hair behind her ears and removes the first clean sheet. We lean in to see the photo formerly concealed. Strong winter light pours through the tall windows and illuminates the image–bougainvillea in shades of gray tumbling down a mottled stucco wall.
Jun 10, 2024 | 2 min read
By Rebecca Ingalls
He’s eleven. The headaches started when he was five. They stab, go away, return in fury. Sometimes they build, a stampede of wildebeests charging through his left eye.
Jun 3, 2024 | 2 min read
By Michael Bishop
Ehukai is a case of magic lost in translation—Hawaiian for ‘sea spray,’ a faint wisp or mist of seawater. The phenomenon, though, is divine: the veil of a wave lifted by the power of the sea.
May 27, 2024 | 2 min read
By Elita Suratman
“Look,” Abah says, his thumb pointing to the pouch taking shape in my sister’s hands. In mine, a tangle of green fronds. Unshaped. Unformed...
May 20, 2024 | 2 min read
By Miriam Mandel Levi
My father does not hug or kiss me, has never said he loves me, or that he’s proud I’m his. He gives me money. “Here, this’ll help with those roof repairs,” but looks bored when I tell him anything. At the end of a phone conversation, he’ll say, “Well, that was productive,” if it was...
May 13, 2024 | 2 min read
By Lisa VanderVeen
Dusk at Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath Temple is monkeys. Settling into the November chill, succumbing to the dark vignette of the horizon, this time is theirs...
May 6, 2024 | 2 min read
By Gaia Holmes
We’re in lockdown, and, until today, I had not touched another living thing for three months apart from my house plants, but this morning I held a woodpigeon, felt its frightened heart thudding and kicking against my palm and I nearly cried...
Apr 29, 2024 | 2 min read
By Robin Lanehurst
On the day my mother died, it was raining, the kind of corded sheets of rain that soak you through before you
even realize you're wet. The long hallway of the ICU had a wall of windows with drab hospital chairs on one
side and door after door on the other—all closed...
Apr 22, 2024 | 2 min read
By Nancy Huggett
Sarah, the chair of the church council, walks the poinsettia over to my house under the full winter moon. I can see her standing haloed under the porch light, with the tiny tender plant held lovingly in her mittened hands.
Apr 15, 2024 | 2 min read
By Marian Rogers
In a dream, my mother and I are in a small boat with a mast but no sail. We run aground on a beach—a pastel place, pale sand, rose sky, a faint blue sea behind us.
Apr 8, 2024 | 2 min read
By Austin Hagwood
One morning a single hummingbird, iridescent green, tapped its sword-like beak against the windows of a Forest Service lookout tower 8,000 feet above sea level.
Apr 1, 2024 | 2 min read
By Robin Schauffler
Once a jagged, broken chunk of black basalt, then polished for decades or centuries by sand and wind and sea.
Mar 25, 2024 | 2 min read
By Virginia Boudreau
My fingers stayed tangled in our terrier’s silvery fur. His breath calmed, hitched once, then stopped. I cradled his still-warm body.
Mar 18, 2024 | 2 min read
By Alyssa Lindley Sinclair C- Section; noun; 1) The lights are on bright, the room freezer-cold and strangers wheel you in on a hospital bed, helpless and naked beneath a thin cotton gown, and they stick a needle in your back and you start shaking, from the drugs,...
Mar 11, 2024 | 2 min read
By Janet Johnston
1934. Two sisters in flower sack dresses face the searing panhandle sun. The hot Texas wind blows their bobbed hair back toward Grandmother’s gap-toothed gate.
Mar 4, 2024 | 2 min read
By Jennifer Robinson
Today the checkout clerk at Safeway folded my newspaper into three vertical sections, then opened a sliver of pages at one corner and tucked the other corner neatly in, making the whole thing into a trim and sturdy little rectangle.
Feb 26, 2024 | 2 min read
By Lavinia Spalding
We are at the dinner table when my young son asks, “The day after a lot of tomorrows, will we build a treehouse?”
Feb 19, 2024 | 2 min read
By Ella Mei Yon Harris
My Chinese family revered our ghosts. We made altars, gave offerings, and publicly denounced accomplishments, inherited or earned, to make sure the ghosts passed us by.
Feb 13, 2024 | 2 min read
By Rebecca Suzuki
The sun is slow to rise, and my mother says it’s because it’s cold and “the sun too, wants to stay warm under a blanket.”
Feb 5, 2024 | 1 min read
By Sari Fordham
"Why can't you be more careful?" I ask my daughter, Kai. She is nine. Wild in her beauty. Her face reflects an ocean of moods–exhilaration, wonder, fury. Now it's awash in regret.
Jan 29, 2024 | 2 min read
By Kathryn Ganfield
Labor Day is made for a garden, for a field. In childhood, it was made at Mr. Wright’s, his garden expanding my notion of what one could be, where the rows of tomatoes and peppers and trip-hazard zucchinis vined to the horizon, where a baby blue water tower cast the only cooling shade. On Labor Day, we were Mr. Wright’s pickers, us five kids tumbling from our diesel station wagon with our summer scabby knees, suntans, and streaks of blond.
Jan 22, 2024 | 2 min read
By Jillian McKelvey
We sit on the cement porch, our legs folded over the top step eating seafood in the dark, like lovers.
Jan 15, 2024 | 2 min read
By Bhushita Vasistha
Chipped tiles. Sulphur fumes. Rust-freckled mirrors. Queues. A large vault of cement walls hived with twelve conjoined toilet booths on each side. Girls’ bathroom...
Jan 8, 2024 | 2 min read
By Jeanette Tran
Get the Ham, Head Cheese, and Pâté, a.k.a. Special Cold Cut Combination, or Ðặc Biệt for short. Chicken is fine for the less adventurous, but only old people order shredded pork floss or sardines.
Jan 5, 2024 | 2 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
At age 70, my mother has taken up watercolor painting. In our family chat, she uploads photographs of her progress—birch trees, beachscapes, stems of lavender. For my birthday, I requested a scene of a wildflower field, so she framed it and gifted it to me, brushing off my compliments with her usual deflections.
Dec 25, 2023 | 2 min read
By Annie Barker
I discover him on my morning walk, in the yard of a brick Tudor home in my neighborhood, anchored to the dry brown lawn by wires and stakes, but nonetheless tipping forward at the waist, somewhere between mid-fall and flat-on-his-face. A full month into the new year, he still holds out a present—blue bow on blue paper—and he is smiling. Here, I have this present for you.
Dec 18, 2023 | 2 min read
By Jennifer Gallo Gaites
Searching for a recipe—old school, pulling cookbooks from the shelf and scanning glossy photographs—a yellowed advice column slips to the floor. “Hints from Heloise.” I bend down, and carefully slide my nails beneath the stiff newsprint. “A Seasoned Skillet.”
Dec 11, 2023 | 2 min read
By Joel Savishinsky
He had red hair, almost white in certain slants of light. It was his first time on the ward. Barely three years into his life, the stuffed creatures were larger than he was, and he liked hiding among them. He loved his coloring book, and with his crayons he re-made creation to fit his palette: a smiling blue lion, a grinning green giraffe, a playful purple monkey. The hues each found a home in the peaceable kingdom of his mind...
Dec 4, 2023 | 2 min read
By Kim Chinquee
There are people stuck in cars. There’s a driving ban, save essential workers. The essential workers are getting stuck and the rescue teams trying to rescue the essential workers are getting stuck, snowplows are getting stuck trying to rescue the rescue teams, and finally the city gives up. Three people have already been confirmed dead...
Nov 27, 2023 | 2 min read
By Candace Angelica Walsh
Dad sat at the park picnic table smoking one Marlboro after another, with not a word of protest from my sister or me — poles apart from the week before when we snapped his whole pack in half and flushed it down the toilet. We were extending some grace in exchange for the freedom of a Tuesday outing during the school year, not yet knowing...
Nov 20, 2023 | 2 min read
By Naomi Cohn
After getting held up in the Y parking lot all those years ago, after the weirdness of seeing the dark circle within the approaching gun muzzle, after feeling the metal on my cheekbone, the exact spot I’d bumped with the phone receiver earlier that day, after the adrenalin rush...
Nov 13, 2023 | 2 min read
By Rasma Haidri
The first one said honey was what Vietnamese hookers called from doorways, so don’t call him that. The next one said honey was a substance to spread on bread, so why did I call him that. Store clerks in the South called all of us honey. Teachers, too, even when paddling our behinds. Oh honey...
Nov 6, 2023 | 2 min read
By Sarah Kilch Gaffney
Even nearly a decade on, they couldn’t have known that your cognitive decline and general dislike of communications necessitated all emails come to me.
Oct 30, 2023 | 2 min read
By Joseph Gross
He runs laps around the yard that culminate in a cannonball or a backflop or a headfirst dive. He has shed his gloves, coat, hat, despite the forty-degree temps. I think of my own jumping age, the familiar mold and fruity cedar smell down in the pile, the desire to be buried completely.
Oct 23, 2023 | 2 min read
By Jill Talbot
This is our end-of-the-day walk with our dog. A few nights ago, she picked two of the tulips—red-pink petals, black anthers—and put them in a mason jar on my nightstand. Tonight, she asks if she can pick one for herself. And because they're on an island not attached to any home, I say sure...
Oct 16, 2023 | 2 min read
By Alvin Johnson
Several years ago, my wife and I drove from Charlotte to Pinewood, South Carolina, hopeful we might find the gravesite of my Johnson ancestors. This was the town where my ancestors were slaves on plantations owned by the Richardson and Manning families, who produced five governors of South Carolina...
Oct 9, 2023 | 2 min read
By Sabrina Hicks
One evening, when my kids were little and demanding, and my sense of self felt like a slow leak, replaced with the repetition and duty of young motherhood, I took refuge in my backyard. I was alone, feeling a thousand miles away from the desert and mountains of my childhood, uprooted and placed in a New York suburb near a hidden coastline.
Oct 2, 2023 | 2 min read
By Katie Machen
Sundays give the impression of time. There’s patience, even as a line forms to the back of the shop, everyone coming in all at once for their week’s salami and ham.
Sep 25, 2023 | 2 min read
By Rebecca Reynolds Weil
Along the edges of bramble rose and burdocks, he flushed wild turkeys into flight in front of him, like a ship scattering schools of fish before its bow. Gleams of deer, wide-eyed beneath the apple tree, would freeze in place—hocks cocked to run, green apples paused in their mouths—cupping our sound in their ears as we clattered by, all hooves and thunder over the ground...
Sep 18, 2023 | 2 min read
By Laura Joyce-Hubbard
I think of John Ogonowski, leaving his farm at dawn in his green Chevy pickup. John flew cargo planes in Vietnam, knew the Boeing 767 like creases in his palm...
Sep 11, 2023 | 2 min read
By Kate Lewis
I heard the snap before I saw it – my late grandmother’s worn rosary tugged apart by my preschooler’s tight grip. She’d only wanted to look, and I’d let her, and my sudden tears were a surprise. . . .
Sep 4, 2023 | 2 min read
By Michele Rappoport
The glass is splotched from her many attempts to escape, but she is not frantic now. She floats in the small space like a seahorse in deep ocean...
Aug 28, 2023 | 2 min read
By Eric LeMay
“Do you think we’ll find treasure?” he asked.
I stomped on the shovel, feeling it tear through the dead grass.
“Sure,” I said.
Maybe he believed me.
Aug 21, 2023 | 2 min read
By Liv Kane
I watch a little part of my mother heal, stitched together with each slow blink shared between them; she is a girl left behind, feeding a man who never fed her. His jaw broken from a one-sided fistfight, from sleeping on the street, his graying tongue and beating heart flashing wildly each time he chews...
Aug 14, 2023 | 2 min read
By Carol Moody
We’re an unruly bunch, his kids—buying all sorts of over-priced junk food with money Mom gave us. She’s the fun one—cheering us as we whack the vending machine, bumping an extra Snickers off the rotating coils...
Aug 7, 2023 | 2 min read
By Kelly Shetron
“Everything is copacetic!” Memom would say whenever I called. I imagined her feeling her way around her small apartment, keeping up with her rituals: drinking instant coffee in the pre-dawn morning, singing aloud to Sinatra, organizing her closet...
Jul 31, 2023 | 2 min read
By Ann Kaye
After we’ve been watered, she pulls me toward the garden filled with descendants of my mother’s divided hostas and lilies. I press my ear against a tiger lily, name it, and ask if she hears it roar. She listens, eyes wide, and says no...
Jul 24, 2023 | 2 min read
By Diane LeBlanc
I don’t know the student leaning into my office with this question. But I’ve just finished active shooter training, a mental health webinar, and several pandemic-response seminars, so I assume the worst. I follow her down the hall as she explains. A bird is swooping around their classroom. It might hurt itself...
Jul 17, 2023 | 2 min read
By Rebecca Turkewitz
This is my dad’s particular gift: to find wonder and surprise in the daily act of living. "You really just made that?" he says with delighted skepticism when I bring a platter of French toast to the table. "Oh, wow! You’re GOOD!" he exclaims after my mom remembers where the birthday candles are kept...
Jul 10, 2023 | 2 min read
By Heidi Fettig Parton
When the Pixies’ song, “Where is My Mind?” comes on the radio, I turn it up.
My backseat passengers usually spend the drive home in a sort of side-by-side engagement with their phones, occasionally sharing mutual laughter at things I cannot see...But on this day of spring weather, the boys go eerily quiet, and I wonder if this 1997 song translates perfectly into 2022...
Jul 3, 2023 | 2 min read
By Robin Hemley
“Wow. Well, welcome to Iowa.”
“I live here,” I said.
“Oh, how long were you in Japan?”
“Three days, but before that I was in Singapore for a year.”
“Singapore,” he said. “I’ve never been out of the country. Well, Canada. At least here, we got toilet seats with covers.”
Jun 26, 2023 | 2 min read
By Sarah Beth Childers
At sixteen-and-a-half months old, my daughter was committed to speed crawling across the drought-dirt lawn, to strolling the summer sidewalk while clutching a large, firm hand. An early crawler, she’d scuffed out the knees of every zip-up sleeper and pair of baby jeans she’d worn since she was five months old...
Jun 19, 2023 | 2 min read
By Anna Leahy
That night I drove in the dark with you across the lawn, we were each leaving in our own way and had been drinking for tomorrow, and after I didn’t hit the college security guard on his bicycle, thank god, I let you take the wheel and also the rap because, even though it was my car, you were driving when the siren stopped us.
Jun 12, 2023 | 2 min read
By Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho
I recently framed the first piece of paper where my anglicized name appears. I paid extra for the non-reflective glass, so that viewers can see the details, including the black and white passport photo of my six-year-old self, looking very serious...
Jun 5, 2023 | 2 min read
By Melanie Bryant
I hope she finds lucky pennies and treasures, but she tells me there are only weeds and cracks in the concrete. I want my mother to unbend herself. I want her to see how the clouds break in the evening sky, the cascade of purple wisteria that falls from the rooftop, the fullness of the moon...
May 29, 2023 | 2 min read
By Caitlin Horrocks
As we drive, the houses swell until they are mansions with sweeping green lawns. Of course my four-year-old notices. His noticing becomes a competition: every house he deems nicer than ours...
May 22, 2023 | 2 min read
By Emily Brisse
All along the creek trail, the grasses were taller and thicker than we’d ever seen them, the tops brushing our foreheads, even my husband’s, the bottoms obscuring the path, even for the children, their small bodies still so close to the earth...
May 15, 2023 | 2 min read
By Ginny MacDonald
I want to let Allie know that the autumn leaves were beautiful when she left, and now the trees are budding out in every green. The days are long again, and I showed her kids where the wild strawberries bloom. The growing is so quick and condensed up here...
May 8, 2023 | 2 min read
By Robert Barham
From Alabama, Tennessee, and Michigan, China, Austria, and Indonesia, they see the world’s grandeur and glory, menace and ruin. They are Nabokovs, Morrisons, O’Connors, Didions. They want answers, want to know what matters, would rather be somewhere else...
May 1, 2023 | 2 min read
By Hanna Saltzman
His eyes are shimmering lakes of grays and blues, absorbing all that he sees above: chipped paint the color of clouds, an arcing sparrow, summer sunlight dancing the polka on leaves of ivy draped across his sky. His weight pulls him down, while his awe pulls him up.
Apr 24, 2023 | 2 min read
By Jodi Paloni
The morning I found a loon curled in seaweed, breast picked clean, bones laced with foam from the outgoing tide, I had just been thinking how content I’ve been living and walking this brief bit of Maine coastline, black and gold sand glitter shifting in the shallows.
Apr 17, 2023 | 2 min read
By Angela Sucich
After repairing her ruptured aneurysm, her doctors still worry about blood-on-the-brain; the risk of stroke. Funny how that word can refer to both a deadly blow, and my hand caressing her hand.
Apr 10, 2023 | 2 min read
By Lindsey Pharr
“I can call ‘em, you know.”
“Call who?”
“The gators.”
“Bullshit.”
Apr 3, 2023 | 2 min read
By Jeniah Johnson
Her nighty glowed in the dim light as she filled the kettle from the tap. Long fingers tweezed in a mason jar of golden buds picked from the scars of stones.
Mar 27, 2023 | 1 min read
By Peter Welch
I ask her how she is holding up. If she is safe. "Yes, I am safe, and out of Ukraine," she quietly offers.
Mar 20, 2023 | 2 min read
By Vandana Khanna
My mother wanted order wherever there was wildness. It was the same with words. She’d make me break them up into two and three syllables, manageable units that she insisted I repeat. The sound of them in my mouth like some kind of ancient prayer, my tongue shaping them against my teeth until ambition slid easily into atonement like I’d been saying these words forever.
Mar 13, 2023 | 2 min read
By Lesley Stanley Roberts
On a morning when I need you most, the cardinal appears in the dead bush we meant to pull last spring. His round frame hefty, feathers tight to his bobbing body, as if he’s the beating heart of the gray yard.
Mar 6, 2023 | 2 min read
By Sara Martin
The pastor talks of frankincense and myrrh, but Jeff and I are fixed on Grandpa’s hands as he creases and folds one of the papers until he peels the sides apart into a small boat.
Feb 27, 2023 | 2 min read
By Tom Fate
The image just didn’t make sense. The rainbow of warm colors was gone, replaced by a ball of eerie green light. Where did that come from?
Feb 20, 2023 | 2 min read
By Jody Keinser
We sit on her bed, legs touching, and I read I’ve Loved You Since Forever, her choice, a story about adoption. After she came home with us three years ago, I searched the internet for books about adoption and with protagonists who are Hispanic, like her birth father’s family.
Feb 13, 2023 | 2 min read
By Kiely Todd Roska
Emmalani prefers life without clothing. Today she sports purple butterfly underwear. Nothing else. Her brown bangs fall over her eyes, finally regrowing after her latest full-headed self-haircut.
Feb 6, 2023 | 2 min read
By Edward Iwata
Dad and his pals call themselves buddhaheads---street slang for Japanese Americans. He believes in Uncle Sam---until his immigrant parents lose their livelihood and Los Angeles farm during World War II.
Jan 30, 2023 | 2 min read
By Ken Martin
...Those were the early days. I would later learn the best tools for helping Dad were not confrontation or argument, but simply calm and understanding, always approaching him with a smile and an attitude of acceptance.
Jan 23, 2023 | 2 min read
By Alexandra Dane
Fifteen years before, on the terrible day we buried my grandmother’s only daughter, my mother, we leaned against each other sharing family stories. Then she told me one I had never heard: “In a letter from Paris a charcoal drawing just fell out, your mother, nude!”
Jan 16, 2023 | 2 min read
By Heather Lanier
My husband’s hand slips beneath the back of my waistband...A year before forever, another boy did the same. I was twenty-one. My dorm light was as dim as my knowledge of bodies.
Jan 9, 2023 | 2 min read
By Rasma Haidri
Store clerks in the South called all of us honey. Teachers, too, even when paddling our behinds. Oh honey, I hate to have to! Honey is why I’m supposed to be careful with how much heather I hack to clear the cliffside path where I want to walk with bad knees...
Jan 2, 2023 | 2 min read
By Rick Joines
At least an inch, with an underlayer of ice, a glaze of tiny beads, encrusted light. Strange and rare here, so everyone stays home. No school. A few cars creep by, spin sideways into the intersection. The kettle dings. Coffee burbles in the filter, steams in its pot. Across the street, the little girl and her brother, only a bit older, step out. Side by side, for balance. They bend to touch frozen blades of grass, leaves, pine cones, needles, the peach tree’s bare stems.
Dec 26, 2022 | 2 min read
By Mazzer D'Orazio
A freshman appears in my doorway, late for class again, extending an orange traffic cone. She proclaims: “I found it in a ditch!”
This is the blessed randomness of a high school creative writing class. The students’ hair colors are a rotating gradient of pinks, purples, and blues. At any given moment we could make a rainbow. When thirty percent of your face is covered, your hair color matters thirty percent more.
Dec 19, 2022 | 2 min read
By Sarah Kinch Gaffney
Even nearly a decade on, they couldn’t have known that your cognitive decline and general dislike of communications necessitated all emails come to me. They couldn’t have known about the radiation oncologist there who spent hours with us, but never spoke to you, or that the proton beam radiation she ordered, galactic and mysterious still, was meant to save your life, but instead prompted a cascade of complications you would never recover from.
Dec 12, 2022 | 2 min read
By Kaci Stiles Laws
A woman scrunches up her nose. I follow her gaze to my five-year-old son, oblivious to her, picking out his favorite Zevia. He grabs a root beer; she sneers, makes a sideways comment, her husband laughs, and I catch his eye. I brush it off and smile because I have a choice. My first option is to let my insecurity tell me a story about the couple at the store: It's my son's hair. It’s his clothes. It’s the ringworm on his cheek he got from our kitten. It’s about us. Something mean.
Dec 5, 2022 | 2 min read
By Adrie Kusserow
Northeast Kingdom, Vermont
Ground frozen, mice and voles on lockdown below, still they skitter beneath, not even the fox dares to dive into the snow taut with a glassy sheath of ice. The Barred owls, too, are starving, crouched near birdfeeders in broad daylight. This morning, I spot a huge one huddled in the gangly clutch of our plum tree, tucked deep into its speckled feathers. I tiptoe up. No matter how close, it doesn’t budge, watching me, but lapsing into sleep, grunting as it dozes off in a dopey hunger trance.
Nov 28, 2022 | 2 min read
By Libby Brydolf
We make it to the brushy meadow before we get our first glimpse of the moon: a slip of glow rising. We watch in the cool spring evening until it hangs whole over Kwaay Paay Peak before continuing on the wide dusty track.
Two teachers, a dozen wild-eyed preschoolers and their parents, we are on a full moon hike, no flashlight in sight. We chat as we wander down a slight slope toward a grove of old oaks and watch shadows deepen in the rising blue light.
Nov 21, 2022 | 2 min read
By Gary Fincke
In our kitchen, some nights, my wife walks backwards, but mostly she does her retreats in the living room, where there is room for additional steps. She says this exercise postpones the arrival of unsteadiness, mustering a smile when she manages back and back again with grace. Mobility is vital now that we are in our mid-seventies. A friend’s hip-breaking fall is already stored on our anxiety’s flash-drive.
Nov 14, 2022 | 2 min read
By Monica Judge
I never witnessed Grandma Judge in the act of creation. On her visits, she presented crocheted doilies and Kleenex box covers, butterflies stitched in monarch colors affixed to magnets. My sister and I snuggled under the blanket she’d hooked together, dozens of brown circles edged in orange and yellow. We hung her angels, fluttering in white yarn, on our fir.
Nov 7, 2022 | 2 min read
By Sheree Winslow
Your mom, dad, and sister left for California first, explorers in search of housing after Dad got a job in Los Angeles. When they returned to pack and fetch you, they talked fast, words buoyant, while describing an event at Paramount Studios, then another in Beverly Hills to celebrate the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. Tom Hanks was there. Mom had a new CD, music acquired after hearing it on smooth jazz radio, a variety of station not available on Billings FM. From the house they rented, they could hear the crowds attending World Cup games at the Rose Bowl, celebrating winner Brazil. But the skies were barren at night, no stars.
Oct 31, 2022 | 2 min read
By Brad Snyder
Dan has lost weight along with most of the feeling on his left side. His wife, Amanda, holds a four-pronged cane. The two of them perform a slow maneuver to get him into his wheelchair in preparation for our lunch. I’m seeing my friend for the first time since his diagnosis, brain cancer at 43, during this visit that the vaccines made possible.
“Are you in pain?” I ask.
A tear runs down Dan’s cheek. I want the question back.
Oct 24, 2022 | 2 min read
By Melissa Bowers
After practice, she pulls down her unicorn pictures and the hand-lettered painting that reads My love, only you know what my heart sounds like from the inside. Replaces them with creased softball posters. I’m sorry, she tells me, I’m not sure if I believe in unicorns anymore.
Oct 17, 2022 | 2 min read
By Anita Lo
When I was a child I frequently imagined ways in which I might perish in a natural disaster. I remember one night waking my father to ask whether it was more likely that a volcano, a tornado, or a flood would destroy our house.
Oct 10, 2022 | 2 min read
By Anna Farro Henderson
We cut the peaches, cook them down and pour the meat and juice into glass jars. We collect the seeds in another jar. “Why do you collect the seeds?” I ask. I am working on a farm in Alba, Italy. In exchange for my labor, I eat meals with the family and sleep in a small trailer by the chicken coop.
Oct 3, 2022 | 2 min read
By Rose Strode
I found a silver coin in my mother’s fancy things drawer when I was six: a large coin, inscribed with inscrutable writing, nestled among thigh-high nylons and diaphanous shortie nighties. On one side was the harp of royal Ireland; on the other, a horse.
The horse wore no saddle, but stood braced, head high, ears pricked as if listening to someone outside the silver circle of its world. A hole was drilled through the top. Ma left rural Ireland in 1960 when she was nineteen, married in Boston at twenty-five. Her parents couldn’t afford to attend her wedding, but sent this coin, which Ma wore under her dress.
Sep 26, 2022 | 2 min read
By Elizabeth Koster
“Isn’t this magnificent?” my mother says, sweeping her arm across the sky’s reflection in a pond of water lilies in Giverny. To think, we were in the very garden that Monet had painted....
Sep 19, 2022 | 2 min read
By Emily Lowe
On the day we move to Mount Airy, we stand in the front lawn of our new home next to a large magnolia tree in full bloom. Already, we are less than three years away from my father’s stroke, just feet from where he will fall. As we move our bags into the house and unload the small bits of our lives that fit in the trunk, we walk past the magnolia again and again, not realizing it is where my father...
Sep 12, 2022 | 2 min read
By Jennifer McGaha
In April of 1979, my mother, father, and I lounge on a jon boat on Lake Keowee in South Carolina. In the stern, my dad props his fishing rod against the motor handle, then pulls off his hat, wipes sweat from his bare head. In the bow, my mother guards the cooler. If you want something to eat, you have to run it by her....
Sep 5, 2022 | 2 min read
By H.T. Ngo
The combination to my gym locker is 6-22-32. Locker number 433.
To unlock the gate at the club, use 5024. It’s usually already opened by the groundskeeper.
My code for the office copier is 4599.
My credit card number is 4024-0071-3578-1044.
You can have them all.
Aug 29, 2022 | 1 min read
By Vimla Sriram
I can’t remember if the teacup was under the cutting board or above it but obscured by the mountain of plates, glasses, and steel pots on the dishrack. All I remember is the crack of porcelain on the wooden floor and two pieces instead of one. Why I was a dam breached I couldn’t understand. I sobbed as if someone close had suddenly died, prompting my son to fix the cup like only a 12-year-old could, with a tape fastened over the crack like a sash around a broken beauty queen.
Aug 22, 2022 | 2 min read
By Anita Vijayakumar
I was an untested psychiatry resident learning the intricacies of therapy. She was my first patient, a young woman who needed to unpack her suffering. She spread out her traumas like snow globes, delicate stories encased in fractured glass. What will you do with them? she asked without speaking.
Aug 15, 2022 | 2 min read
By Anna Chotlos
When my friend texts me her first ultrasound photo, it’s still early, 8 or 9 weeks. We hold our joy tenderly, hoping it sticks.
This is the first time I have looked closely at a sonogram, and to me, the baby looks like a lima bean or a popcorn kernel or a tadpole. Wet, blobby. Recognizable, but unfinished. A dark spot that might become an eye or an ear. A little notch that might be a mouth. The beginning of an umbilical cord.
Aug 8, 2022 | 2 min read
By Desiree Cooper
Jax perched on his brand-new bike. I stood beside him, a human kickstand.
“I can’t do this, Nana!” he yelled, his nervousness masquerading as anger. “It won’t stay up!”
“I’m right here. Put your feet on the pedals.”
My back groaned as my six-year-old grandson gave his body to the bike. The weight of his fears surprised me.
Aug 1, 2022 | 2 min read
By Amber Wong
When you called, I was careful not to interrupt your soliloquy. Sometimes the best truth comes in fragments, unguarded bits of prose, an ugly tone or misshapen phrase that reveals much. Words, unfiltered, somehow arranged themselves into a story, and even without sturdy markers of time and place and who exactly you were worried about hurting, by the time you’d exhausted yourself you always came back to one question. Should I leave her?
Jul 25, 2022 | 2 min read
By Tonya Coats
The cast-iron skillet has been in our family five generations, since the early 1900s. Twice as thick as when it was forged, it has layers of black scales on the outside. An imperceptible skin inside. Every time I use the skillet, mothers from both sides of our family–mine, and my husband’s–arrive to teach me how to teach the next ones.
“Mommy, when will this be mine?” my daughter asks, tracing the hieroglyphs on the outside of the skillet, understanding how it was passed down from them to me.
Jul 18, 2022 | 2 min read
By Christopher Notarnicola
The morning is here again. My fiancée and I have taken to acknowledging the miracle of recurrence. The water is hot again. The towel is dry again. The mirror is us again. And the coffee, about once a week, is the ever-coffee again ...
Jul 11, 2022 | 2 min read
By Cicily Bennion
Surely, in his two and a half years of living he’s seen the moon. But he looks at it now like it’s the first time. He knows it, yes, but only from his books on the shelf, the ones I read on nights I’m home for bedtime, when the sun is on the horizon and the blinds are closed. He presses his nose to the glass. The moon is a celebrity; he can’t help but gawk.
Jul 4, 2022 | 2 min read
By Laura Joyce-Hubbard
I think of John Ogonowski, leaving his farm at dawn in his green Chevy pickup. John flew cargo planes in Vietnam, knew the Boeing 767 like creases in his palm...
Jun 27, 2022 | 2 min read
By Caroline Sutton
Two-year-old Ella takes a stick and draws zigzags in the sand. She asks me to write her name; I say each letter aloud and she knows that these are the marks that make words that make the stories we read to her, which she inhabits and commits to memory. I have shown her footprints, hers and mine and a seagull’s and a dog’s. I wave at our shadows.
Jun 20, 2022 | 2 min read
By Erika Nichols-Frazer
We adopted Nala the day my mother fell down the stairs. That wasn’t her name, but she didn’t look like a Mindy.
In the ICU waiting room, my boyfriend said, “We don’t have to look at dogs today.” I’d completely forgotten our plans. My mother lay in a narrow hospital bed, unconscious, neck in a brace, bruises everywhere. She looked impossibly small and pale, a porcelain doll...
Jun 13, 2022 | 2 min read
By Darien Andreu
My husband raps on the kitchen window from the deck outside where the cat sews in and around his legs. "Can you hand me that thing?" he says, pointing unsteadily. The scar from his brain surgery curves over his left ear...
Jun 6, 2022 | 2 min read
By Susan Barr-Toman
We were late for an appointment. I wove through the afternoon crowd at a quick clip with my son and daughter, nine and six, following behind me like ducklings. Head down and shoulders bent, I had the posture of someone punched in the gut.
Days earlier my husband was diagnosed with cancer, and already surgeries, treatments, and scans scheduled. I lived on the verge of erupting...
May 30, 2022 | 2 min read
By Erin Murphy
Your high school teacher mother taught you a trick for taking comprehension tests: always skip ahead to read the questions before the passage.
(Why are the mother’s hands discolored?)
You remember her sitting at the kitchen table, her pen carving into the triplicate mimeograph sheets, the edges of her hands bruised with blue ink. Sometimes she’d let you grade her students’ papers—yes, the way Tom Sawyer “let” the other boys whitewash Aunt Polly’s picket fence.
You loved making red checks and Xs for the root of “salubrious” or the Italian city where Romeo and Juliet was set.
(What is the significance of “first”?)
It was in a classroom that she had her first heart attack...
May 23, 2022 | 2 min read
By Kerry Herlihy
Blow out the candle that burned for his last days. Dump the OxyContin and morphine in the cat litter like the hospice nurse told you to do. Touch his cheekbones that emerged like knives these last few weeks. Fill a large pot and bathe him like you used to bathe your daughter, part by part. Open a window so his spirit can leave...
May 16, 2022 | 2 min read
By Billie Hinton
In autumn, my massage therapist comes to the barn, plugs in her electric pot to warm the large black stones she regularly returns to the river, whose current removes things bodies hold onto: the ache of arthritic knees, tight pelvises, a woman’s chorus of sharp edges, shrill songs of sore muscles and little heartaches...
May 9, 2022 | 2 min read
By Kim June Johnson
This was a particularly hard number for me, and in the back of my mind, I knew it was because the late Nora Ephron, in her book about aging as a woman, wrote about how much she regretted not wearing a bikini the entire year she was twenty-six and suggested to anyone reading that they...
May 2, 2022 | 1 min read
By Deb Werrlein
At every lesson, she serves me tea. She steeps it with cardamom and swirls of evaporated milk then pours it steaming into “my” cup—a white ceramic blue-flowered mug—and adds a heaping spoonful of sugar.
Apr 25, 2022 | 2 min read
By Beatrice Motamedi
I’m at my desk, playing with the idea of taking the day off, when the phone rings, and shit, it’s the landline, the number I dread, the one on too many contact lists and credit card applications to ditch, and unfortunately it’s in the bedroom, across my office and one hallway away, and even worse, I have to answer it, as I had a mammogram yesterday and I’m expecting a call from my doctor...
Apr 18, 2022 | 2 min read
By Robert Barham
Hunting was a source of food, the main recreation, and a rite of passage. Everyone hunted. Still, I had a choice. It was dusk, and my father and I sat beside a crop field, plowed over in the fall.
Apr 11, 2022 | 2 min read
By Noah Davis
This past Saturday, the fire burning on the north side of the river jumped a ridge and lit another hillside of drought-stricken timber, sending a plume so high that the air turned red with the seared skin of Douglas fir and larch.
Apr 4, 2022 | 2 min read
By Jill Quandt
I take my grandma to the grocery store. While perusing the produce, I mention that it is my father-in-law’s birthday. She takes that to mean we are making a pie, and who am I to remind her that she doesn’t make pies anymore?
Mar 28, 2022 | 2 min read
By Jamey Temple
The day Papaw Laster kicked out Mamaw, just before their divorce, our pickup pulled up to their porch. Daddy worked in the bed, stacking and arranging furniture handed to him by Papaw.
Mar 21, 2022 | 1 min read
By Bex Hoffer
Fingers flower-yellow.
I want to make a poem from those words, but as always, line breaks trip me up like wires at ankle-height. Still, yes, my fingertips are tinged yellow, blessed by the blossoms of dandelion suns.
Mar 14, 2022 | 2 min read
By Brandy Bauer
We picnic by firelight in the bombed-out carapace of a hotel, where a guard in tattered shawls sips tea, cradling his gun. Beyond the balcony, mud homes jut out from the snowy hills.
Mar 7, 2022 | 1 min read
By Sherrie Weller
A friend and I are at happy hour. Icy doubles swim in glasses before us. Recently discovered: We are both adopted. Blooming: An intimacy unwarranted by the length of time we’ve known each other. I describe growing up with an identical twin, wondering about our birthmother. Ask if she has done a search.
She tells me she lied to the Catholic Diocese in St. Paul, conjured a research paper on matrilineal genealogy for class at the University of Minnesota, gained access to the 1965 baptismal records on microfiche. She found her birthparents’ names, looked them up in the phone book, made her husband dial the number...
Feb 28, 2022 | 2 min read
By Kathryn Petruccelli
Spring in a cold place. Which means everything is so heartbreakingly tender—tulips lifting their dusky prom skirts, dandelions twinkling in their green sky.
I've lived here a little while, this rural New England town, its six months of winter, a place accustomed to waiting for beauty to appear. I've left somewhere I loved to move far away in service to a restless heart, the bonus draw of family. In the time since, I've witnessed a father-in-law dissolve from brain cancer, a second-born survive the bypass machine, tiny heart sewn back together...
Feb 21, 2022 | 2 min read
By Monika Dziamka
The AC rattles above me, but all else is silent, so silent, so blissfully silent. My baby is asleep at grandma’s tonight, across town and across space so wide and deep and needed that I now almost don’t quite know what to do with all this time. (Write? Read? Sleep. Stretch?) But I’m hungry, too. (Order Indian? Pick up Thai? Leftovers. Make popcorn?) But I want to binge on TV, too. (Hulu? Netflix? HBO. Nightly news?) How can minutes move so differently when you’ve got a baby, and when you don’t...?
Feb 14, 2022 | 2 min read
By Rachel Greenley
It happens six, maybe seven times a day. I'm crouched. He looks at me with those liquid eyes, his face in front of mine, his wet nose quivering, exploring my breath...
Feb 7, 2022 | 2 min read
By Heidi Czerwiec
John Cage experimented with silence in his music, after an experience in a completely soundproofed chamber—he realized that, far from silent, he could still hear his nervous and circulatory systems, his breath, a white noise.
Silence is impossibility.
Cage claimed he composed all the notes to 4’33”—also called the “Silent Sonata”—but that they were all silent...
Jan 31, 2022 | 2 min read
By Anne Leiby
The blush pink of the dogwood is still packed tightly into a bud on the small branch that floats among the other flowers. That tree, planted in your memory and now ten years old, has been with us as long as you have been gone...
Jan 24, 2022 | 2 min read
By Laura Rose
My father was orphaned at eighteen, and though he’d made his own family, we weren’t enough to satisfy his craving for deep roots. For that, he had his sixth great-grandfather and the American Revolution...
Jan 17, 2022 | 2 min read
By Yelizaveta Renfro
On the morning of the day the jury would return, snow swirled with fallen white blossoms in the gutters of the streets. April can be cruel like that. The next day, as I drove, all over town I saw plants that had been protected from the hard frost with sheeting and tarps, and the covered shapes seemed to shift before my eyes—or rather, my mind contorted them—until they took on the outlines of human bodies—as though, after the guilty verdict, in the night, we had all dragged out our collected corpses, the unjustly dead, and left them in our yards, under bedsheets, to say: And what about this one?...
Jan 10, 2022 | 2 min read
By Mariah Anne Agee
I want waking up to feel like shuffling a new deck of cards: smooth and full of intention. The citrus sun rises early now. I remember that my body is also a tender peach, wrinkling as I stretch to the horizon line. I will be a little kinder to this flesh, to these cells within me working the third shift just so I can smile at strangers I pass in the park...
Jan 3, 2022 | 2 min read
By Ann Guy
On nights I was restless as a child, my grandmother, Ama, would put her gentle hand under my shirt and rub my back...
Dec 27, 2021 | 2 min read
By Renata Golden
"My mother taught me to look at birds by pointing out their details, like bill shape and breast color. She taught me the names for American Robin and House Sparrow..."
Dec 20, 2021 | 2 min read
By Laurie Klein
We share the rowboat. I’m nearly nine; he could be 100, my uncle, sole survivor of his platoon...
Dec 13, 2021 | 2 min read
By Jessica Rapisarda
Julie’s name is Adriana or Alessandra. I can’t remember, because she insists on Julie. More American. It’s not that she doesn’t love Brazil, but she worries that her real name will be too big for American mouths...
Dec 6, 2021 | 2 min read
by Steph Liberatore
She wanted people to see the antique clock when they entered the house. That’s why she put it on the shelf to the left of the window, the one you see when you first come through the door. The black mantel clock, with its golden dragons for handles and clawed feet ...
Nov 29, 2021 | 2 min read
By Jehanne Dubrow
Soon the insects would come up from the ground. It said so in the newspaper. After seventeen years—five longer than I had been alive—the cicadas would tunnel upwards from sleep into the hard touch of daylight ...
Nov 22, 2021 | 2 min read
By Brian M. Kohl
I cut green apples into fourths and then eighths. I slice them into smaller and smaller pieces, the flesh slippery in my fingers. I arrange them in a careful line on the plate, counting as I go—one through twenty-four ...
Nov 15, 2021 | 2 min read
by Alison Asagra Stoos
I’ve forgotten about the sourdough starter again, bubbling in the warmth of the oven light, the only temperature-controlled environment we have in our apartment ...
Nov 8, 2021 | 2 min read
By Michael Diebert
My father-in-law, Vietnam vet, ex-medic, sat in his low-slung love seat. The thermostat was set at 80. Outside was 100. Through the sliding glass, the Strip shimmered like an alternate planet ...
Nov 1, 2021 | 2 min read
By Amy Wright
We circle the farm first, gathering storm-downed branches for the pyre of a fallen buckeye tree like funerary lilies, without mourning the giant whose dark-stare fruit we bucketed at harvest to safeguard the cattle. Half each chestnut sweet, the other lethal. “Only squirrels know the difference,” my grandfather would say. The colossal trunk’s rings indicate its seed found this streambed at the height of the 1918 influenza...
Oct 25, 2021 | 2 min read
By Maryam Ahmad
For three years of my teenage life, I fought. Around 5 PM each day, I’d walk into the boxing gym—a repurposed garage—and carefully wrap up my hands, winding the black cloth over and over my wrist and palm, in and out through my knuckles, until my hands felt safe. Then, I would start working the heavy bag, ducking and dipping and stepping around it as it swung back and forth, back and forth, in response to my hits. The coach, a vaguely sexist and perpetually sunburned man, would always comment on how hard I hit. "Damn, girl. You really hate that bag."...
Oct 18, 2021 | 2 min read
By Lou Storey
Feeling lonely and hopeless, I went ahead anyway. Long before computers took over the planet, ManMate, a gay dating service, mailed me a multipage paper form to complete.
I had help.
“How is this?” I asked my friend Jill, handing her my completed self-description and candid photo...
Oct 11, 2021 | 2 min read
By Zoe Randolph
I’m not worried about the meat in the freezer or the milk in the fridge. The only concern I have about the sudden soupy darkness is how I can maximize my time spent soaking in it...
Oct 4, 2021 | 2 min read
By Anne Pinkerton
He taught the dog to howl when it was just a puppy.
I’d find the two of them sitting on the couch together, both tipping their faces skyward, eyes closed, solemn, focused. The little beast mimicked his best friend, his idol, his everything—in harmony, they pursed their lips and aroooo-ed as loud as their lungs could push their animal voices...
Sep 27, 2021 | 2 min read
By Kelly McMasters
His small voice cuts a jagged line into the not-quite-morning quiet. My body reflexively lifts out of bed, finds its way over the piles of tiny cars and books, through the stone darkness of our new apartment, our first without his father. I steer myself into the bedroom he shares with his younger brother, find his bed, crawl in...
Sep 20, 2021 | 2 min read
By Gary Finke
The week-old “Going out of Business” sign sagged in the store window the last night my father baked. Bread and sandwich buns near midnight. Coffee cakes and sweet rolls at two a.m. Last, as always, the deep-fried doughnuts were finished near dawn while my mother readied the display cases where cookies, cakes and pies were already waiting for their last opportunity to sell. At six-thirty, he filled cream puffs and whoopee pies, and then he drove home to sleep....
Sep 13, 2021 | 2 min read
By Miranda R. Carter
**Content Warning** This essay discusses suicide.
My student tells me she is going home and then is found hanging by a shower rod on Tuesday afternoon. We do not sleep. All that was hers is now ours to sort through. We speak about her now in past tense.
Sep 6, 2021 | 2 min read
By Danielle Madsen
You don’t start out with coffee cups. You start with single-serve espressos and chai lattes at the coffee shop around the corner from your co-op. But a coffee together after work becomes morning coffee for two. And, suddenly, you’ve moved in together and have cupboards to fill. So you do...
Aug 30, 2021 | 2 min read
By Kate Levin
When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird. ...
Aug 23, 2021 | 2 min read
By Stacy Murison (reposted from May 9, 2016)
The first time, you drive by yourself. You have some idea you are going there, but are still surprised that you know the way, without her, through the turning and turning driveways. Left, left, left, left. Park near the rusted dripping spigot. ...
Aug 16, 2021 | 1 min read
By Chansi Long (reposted from May, 2 2016)
I was walking to the store with my brother when we stumbled upon a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike. He was in his early thirties, the age my father must have been when he left us, with a widow’s peak and roseate cheeks. The man clutched the bars of the bicycle and dashed along, keeping it balanced. ...
Aug 9, 2021 | 2 min read
By Vivian Wagner
I liked the hens, with their kind eyes and soft, red feathers. I was seven, and I wanted to sleep with them, to nestle with them, because they felt like a dozen mothers, all watching out for me. ...
Aug 2, 2021 | 2 min read
By Kim Liao
First, take pork spare ribs. Hack them up with an impossibly large cleaver into bite-sized pieces. Rub them with a proprietary mix of star anise, black beans, garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, and secrets. Never ask him what happened in Taiwan, or why his mother never spoke the name of her former husband again. ...
Jul 26, 2021 | 2 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I’ve recently dedicated myself to learning the names of trees. Before I never thought it made much of a difference, but the beauty of their names compelled me. ...
Jul 19, 2021 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep, she and I curl up on the mattress in the guest room below the big window, and I drift off with her tiny fingers gripping my thumb. ...
Jul 12, 2021 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
Tonight I peeled and chopped carrots for dinner, tossed them with oil and thyme, oven-roasted them. The simpler the ingredient, the more miraculous it seems to me. ...
Jul 5, 2021 | 1 min read
By Katie Greulich
Everyone went to sleep, except my cousin and me. I lingered a bit, my own children upstairs, sprawled across air mattresses, or burrowed in rented cribs. He wanted to stay awake, to party. Or at least have a companion to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He keeps checking my reaction at the characters’ antics. I muster a smile. The curtains inside my brain are closing. His parents and sister are sleeping. I am responsible simply because I am awake...
Jun 28, 2021 | 2 min read
By Tina May Hall
Parties were for destroying. You hit the patient hero with a stick until he broke open to rain down candy. Every wall was filled with pinholes and sword dents. In the backyard, your friends tore up the grass in handfuls, sundering unwary worms, leaving gouges to slip on after rain. One boy nearly drowned trying to bite an apple...
Jun 21, 2021 | 2 min read
By Robert Barham
She dances beside the highway each morning. You’re driving your son to school, in thick traffic with lights to make, when you notice her across a stretch of construction and broken streets. Bearing marks of itinerancy and sleeping rough, she reaches the center of an empty lot, and it begins: a dancer’s poise with sure cadence and confident, inevitable steps...
Jun 14, 2021 | 2 min read
By Justin Florey
The Army Corp of Engineers lowered the water level of the Mississippi River below St. Anthony Falls so they could inspect the locks. My wife took the kids down there at my suggestion. Children frolicked in areas where, in any other circumstance, they would surely drown...
Jun 7, 2021 | 2 min read
By Kathy Fagan
On most surfaces in my house, you’ll find short notes I’ve written for my father. I flip the phone’s camera on FaceTime so he can read them when he can’t hear me. He mouths them slowly out loud...
May 31, 2021 | 1 min read
By John Bonanni
It’s nearing Easter, 2020. My lover, David, and I watch The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. We break it up across three days, one hour per day. I always associated Heston with the NRA, with white old man gun-toting Uhmerca toxic masculinity, but the more I watch, the more Moses’s shoulders and thighs seem to flex, seem to bulge out of the screen, oiled...
May 24, 2021 | 2 min read
By Kimberly Goode
We pulled out of the driveway. Our destination: Newark International Airport for a pre-dawn flight back to Seattle. My father drove his Ford Taurus just below the speed limit. Staring out the window, I thought of all the times we’d travelled this road together before. For Sunday trips to the zoo. To grab a birthday present for a party...
May 17, 2021 | 2 min read
By Susan Hodara
I am reading. I have spun into the writer’s words, how his grandmother curled and uncurled the telephone cord around her fingers. I remember those curly cords, how the coils unspooled when you walked around, and then jumped back, spiraling in on themselves, hanging like a wonky rubber ringlet...
May 10, 2021 | 2 min read
By Amanda Yanowski
I sit in my gray office and scribble words onto a piece of stationary I wish I could remember picking out, yellow flowers wrapping around the edges.
Believe me when I say I do not have a choice. And I am so sorry. And I tried to fix myself...
May 3, 2021 | 2 min read
By Lea Page
I’ve learned that jokes are the best and maybe only antidote to terror.
My daughter often reminds me, “Don’t relive past traumas,” so I won’t describe the horror show of dental malfeasance that got me here...
Apr 26, 2021 | 2 min read
By Nancy Jorgensen
A fifty-something woman, wearing a faded floral dress, showed me the antique pump organ. “No one plays anymore,” she said, her wooden cooking spoon in hand. “And I could use the $150.” She went back to her farmhouse stove to stir a pot that smelled of onion and sage while my new husband and I—some said too young for marriage at only 22—whispered about the price. And whether the organ could survive the long trip home in our borrowed pickup truck...
Apr 19, 2021 | 2 min read
By Jenny Apostol
“What kind of urn do you have in mind?”
“No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.”...
Apr 12, 2021 | 2 min read
By Laura Marshall
I don’t care for the pie, really, the corn syrup pulling at my teeth. But shelling is a calendar as much as it is culture, making me remember where we are in the world, when we are in the world. Because it is pecan season, it is pecan pie season—which makes it the holiday season, even though we live in a winterless land...
Apr 5, 2021 | 2 min read
By Courtney Hill Gulbro
She was known for being on her own time. Mama was late to her wedding and to just about every event thereafter. Books, birds, an ant trail in the yard—all captured her attention. She was never in a hurry...
Mar 29, 2021 | 1 min read
By Craig Holt Segall
One summer, we glided downstream in the old metal canoe, my father and I. He sat in back, in his old jean shorts and his not clean shirt, his thin legs scabbed from falls on long runs. Around us was the thick peace of August: rising trills of birdsong, deep thrum of a far-off tractor. This was when I was just out of adolescence, still close to mornings when, small in the tent, I would wake at dawn and watch the leaf shadows on the canvas, my father sleeping next to me.
Mar 22, 2021 | 2 min read
By Jill Kolongowski
Around 10:30 this morning the world is orange. The sky, the houses, the air. Inside, my new baby is trying to roll over. She wants to do it so badly she tries to do it in her crib instead of sleeping. She is hopeful. She is determined. She tried it yesterday, and tries again today. She is so close. She does not notice the orange. This orange is not fire, but an atmospheric phenomenon, the result of wildfire ash high above the marine layer, scattering the sunlight into color...
Mar 15, 2021 | 2 min read
By Christina Rivera Cogswell
My brother retraced my father's steps with a camera. He called his collage of ugly photos our dad’s “street life”: cement sidewalks, hanging traffic lights, squat buildings with short awnings, a white-rimmed sign with WALL ST marching across. My father isn’t in the photos because no photos were taken of him...
Mar 8, 2021 | 2 min read
By Michael McAllister
I once took a job with a major online retailer, listening to the words that people spoke in their own homes to a voiced virtual assistant I’ll call Amaya. Our ragtag team of English and Linguistics majors tapped away on laptops, categorizing the words for the developers so she’d respond better over time, listening to the private words of a faceless people...
Mar 1, 2021 | 2 min read
By Mary Lane Potter
At the peak—932 feet above the Mekong floodplain—beyond the holy caves and the Cham, Buddhist, Hindu, and Mother-Goddess temples that litter the twisting pilgrim road, a mother and father are teaching their young son how to pray...
Feb 22, 2021 | 2 min read
By Cora Waring
There’s a single, beat-up black jack bobbing around my purse, its wrapper feathered from accidental collisions with lipstick tubes and wallet, the once-bright stripes gone gray...
Feb 15, 2021 | 2 min read
By Lisa Hadden
The images are still with me thirty-five years later. The weather in the Northeast Michigan woods on Grand Lake is warm, heavy with fragrance of late summer, cedar pines, sandy soil, the water clapping the edge of the land. The turquoise sky turns to twilight with a soft glow of lavender rising...
Feb 8, 2021 | 2 min read
By Brie Deyton
Another set of packed bags. After another get out now. This time my mother, sister, and I landed in a trailer across the abandoned tracks. Fake wood paneling on the walls repelled all light, and years of cigarette smoke made every surface feel singed...
Feb 1, 2021 | 2 min read
By Terri Kent
Mom, sitting on the floor among a group of cross-legged Girl Scouts, teaches us a song in a language none of us know...
Jan 25, 2021 | 2 min read
By Katie Walsh
When we get home from the hospital, I realize the electrodes are still stuck to my father’s chest and back. He says that it hurt too much when the nurse tried to remove them, so he told her to forget it...
Jan 18, 2021 | 2 min read
By Lisa Huffaker
I got better at drawing when I began to think of petting an animal. I sent my eye running along the spine of a thing, felt it warm and alive, arching its back into my palm...
Jan 11, 2021 | 2 min read
By Kristin Engler
My four-year-old son plays with the blue rubber tourniquet from his latest hospitalization. A nurse tied it around his arm to insert an IV into the tender part of his forearm near the crook of his elbow...
Jan 4, 2021 | 2 min read
By Rachel Sudbeck
“Am I sad?” I ask my dog, because it’s not something I recognize anymore. Sadness had come so thick and urgent for a while that the quieter emotions don’t register like they used to. She looks back at me, mid-squat, doesn’t seem to have an answer. ...
Dec 28, 2020 | 2 min read
By Bridget Lillethorup
“I can drive today,” my partner said, and I tossed him the keys over the hood of my 1999 Jeep Cherokee.
Up went the key to my mom’s house, which opened a small home of wall-papered, floral prints and a retired woman shuffling in a bathrobe, slowing sipping coffee, leaving lipstick stains on the mug, and listening, always giving space to listen....
Dec 21, 2020 | 2 min read
By Anna Reid
We’ve come to Switzerland and we’re in love. It’s the crisp air, the towering waterfalls and majestic peaks––a guise to hide the death that lurks behind the exquisite landscape where we’ve flocked to feel alive. ...
Dec 14, 2020 | 2 min read
By Mee-ok
Until I decided to come to Korea, I hadn’t realized how special my mother was—how selfless, how enlightened. Most adoptive parents of her generation can’t understand that searching for our origins isn’t a direct affront to them. In truth, it has nothing to do with them at all. ...
Dec 7, 2020 | 2 min read
By Robert Erle Barham
Roused before dawn, my siblings and I stood at the edge of the kitchen and marveled at gleaming red jars that filled the room. Our parents shuffled wordlessly from stove to kitchen table and back again, their bright faces like blacksmiths’ flushed by forge light, and we stared in wonder as they stirred, poured, and sealed...
Nov 30, 2020 | 2 min read
My grandfather wakes, confused and flooded with his body’s toxins. "Sit down," he tells my grandmother. "We’re going around a bend." He thinks they’re on the train forty years ago. He reaches for invisible handholds and says, "It’s bumpy. Will you please sit down, dear?"
Nov 23, 2020 | 1 min read
By Aisha Ashraf
The china tea set, wrapped in tissue paper, nestles in its warped cardboard box on the shelf inside my mother’s wardrobe. She draws it down gently, as though not to wake it, places it on the bed, slides the lid off...
Nov 16, 2020 | 2 min read
By Sarah Ives
I push through the brambles and climb over the rotting, peeling fence that inevitably grabs at the cuff of my pants. Getting snagged, I always seem to fall cursing onto the beach, an unfitting way to enter the quiet beauty...
Nov 9, 2020 | 2 min read
By Shannon Cram
What I remember is the salt that formed in his pores like crystalline grains of sand. A million tiny specks covering his skin. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere...
Nov 2, 2020 | 2 min read
By Jennifer Todhunter
I open the door to see if you’re there, the door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges. There is a noise, a constant; it could be the rain or the thick of my heart in my eardrums...
Oct 26, 2020 | 1 min read
By Kelly Gray
He steps out of the grass like a god. Thick necked to hold up east-to-west spanning antlers which in turn hold up the entire sky, three clouds and a Northern Harrier...
Oct 19, 2020 | 2 min read
By Karen Langley Martin
Our house was like a radio playing six stations at once: brothers arguing, piano keys banging, lawn mower mowing, blender blending, phone ringing, dog barking...
Oct 12, 2020 | 2 min read
By Stacy Murison
The yellowed aspen leaves shimmer like so many pennies against the setting sun, almost frantic in their last-dance enthusiasm for the night’s forecasted hard frost...
Oct 5, 2020 | 2 min read
By Desiree Cooper
My parents are old and inert, their bones want only to be still. There’s not much we can do for entertainment, except sit here, and then for a change of scenery, sit there....
Sep 28, 2020 | 2 min read
By Vince Puzick
I watch her snap the skateboard’s tail to the street just like her boyfriend does, mount it, one foot at a time, steady herself and roll to the corner....
Sep 21, 2020 | 1 min read
By Jonathan Rentler
I started wearing Mom’s nighty after she died. “You don’t remember?” Grandma asks. “You used to spray her perfume on ribbons.”...
Sep 14, 2020 | 2 min read
By Marsha Lynn Smith
My toddler grandchild sits still on the carpet between my knees, her back cushioned against the sofa. I consider detangling her springy hair coils. Should I fix her hair similar to the way my mother did mine?...
Sep 7, 2020 | 2 min read
By Irene Fick
Flying over deep water in the inscrutable dark. We are doomed. I hear the pilot slur his words. My neck is stiff. I feel a headache coming on. My legs begin to cramp. The anxiety pills make me nauseous....
Aug 31, 2020 | 2 min read
By R.S. Wynn
In the produce aisle, I consider genetically modified pomegranates: ruby globes that overflow my palms cupped together. But the one I choose to bring home I pluck with my thumb and forefinger....
Aug 24, 2020 | 2 min read
By Susan Hirsch
“You don’t have to go in, Mom,” my son said through the phone. I was standing on the porch, holding the phone, and knocking on his dad’s door....
Aug 17, 2020 | 2 min read
By Annie Penfield
Low-slung fog canvasses our narrow valley. The film of haze blurs the trees, rubbing out their distinct edges—as if the forest is fine print and I am trying to read it without my glasses....
Aug 10, 2020 | 2 min read
By Jennifer L. Hollis
The black, four-inch stilettos with pointed toes were a gift, so I tried to be polite as I thought of a kind way to say: Hell no....
Aug 3, 2020 | 2 min read
By Diane LeBlanc
Rain falling on the cabin roof isn’t music or balm or metaphor. For two days and two nights, it’s nothing but water saturating the stairs I descend in the dark to go to the outhouse while my husband sleeps....
Jul 27, 2020 | 2 min read
By Stephanie Cox
Fourteen cedar waxwings cluster in the apple tree. The bright February sun sharpens their dark masks and perky crests as they bounce from branch to branch...
Jul 20, 2020 | 1 min read
By Deborah Elderhorst
Henry Moore’s bronze sculpture Large Two Forms sits like a pair of discarded vertebrae on the pavement outside the art gallery, where small children clamber and slide through its round openings on their bellies and backsides. Teenagers, too, are drawn to these primal shapes....
Jul 13, 2020 | 2 min read
By Harmony Hazard
I want to believe that the first song I heard came from my mother. She sang "Moon River" while putting me to bed....
Jul 6, 2020 | 2 min read
By Beth Boyle Machlan
My father decided he wanted an airview, a photograph of our summer home taken from a tiny plane on a clear, bright day....
Jun 29, 2020 | 2 min read
By Claudia Monpere
My beloved friend dying of cancer said she’d been afraid of poetry for too long. I suggested a poetry party....
Jun 22, 2020 | 2 min read
By Kathryn Petruccelli
I try not to give too much power to what some call signs. Sure, when my mother was dying there was that thing with the poem I’d written about lightning, followed by the plane ride I took to her deathbed in the lightning storm...
Jun 15, 2020 | 2 min read
By Jeff Ewing
My father’s face could accommodate almost any emotion but disappointment. There were times it was called for, certainly, but it just couldn’t get any purchase....
Jun 8, 2020 | 2 min read
By Carolyn Rose
My granddaddy’s knotted hands were forever peeling a tangerine, slicing a fig, cracking a native pecan, offering it to someone he loved. Most often, most tenderly, to my grandmother....
Jun 1, 2020 | 2 min read
By Leanne Ogasawara
In the Japanese taxonomy of breezes, the perfumed winds blow just before the south-easterly winds of the rainy season, which arrive later in the month. Known as plum rains—so heavy, the downpours are said to knock the ripening plums right off their branches....
May 25, 2020 | 2 min read
By Joseph Gross
Somewhere after the turn of the millennium I slid from leaf jumper to leaf raker, and so on this smoky November afternoon I hold down my job for the boy in front of me during what will be his only non-digital hour of the day....
May 18, 2020 | 2 min read
By Amber Emanuel
When my mother sits in front of our antique upright piano, it is almost always Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Almost always only the refrain....
May 11, 2020 | 2 min read
By Kat Read
I think the apartment is horrible––the bathroom sink is in the bedroom, the blind in the shower falls down every other day, the sliding closet door skitters out of its track. Everything feels rickety and as though it is about to topple, especially the life that I am living inside it....
May 4, 2020 | 2 min read
By Kelly Zanotti
Pedro is quiet as we walk, and is still quiet when we stop to rest on a rock where above us pawpaws hang overripe like clean green hearts....
Apr 27, 2020 | 2 min read
By Emily Withnall
My house is leaky. Wisps of cold air seep in—but my kids remind me this isn’t possible, that scientifically the warm air is leaking out....
Apr 20, 2020 | 2 min read
By Amy Suardi
These Italian pastries were decorated by an 87-year-old woman in a drawn-out process involving almond paste and mandarin oranges. I bought them at a cliffside stand in a cellophane bag tied with red curling ribbon on the Sicilian island of Lipari....
Apr 13, 2020 | 2 min read
By Laura Stott
Think about the spirit of an animal that could occupy a house this big—the whale. There goes my first born, gliding past me at the pool with her dad in a man-made river, smiling and carrying the sun like she was born to do...
Apr 6, 2020 | 2 min read
By Leanne Ogasawara
The Chinese calendar had it right. Insisting that spring begins in February is to begin a season at the beginning, when the season is only just awakening, a quiet stirring....
Mar 30, 2020 | 2 min read
By Carla Panciera
A cardboard pine tree of Caribbean Colada swings from the rearview mirror, the mirror in which my daughter considers whether she needs eyelash extensions, teeth whitening....
Mar 23, 2020 | 2 min read
By Donna Steiner
My mother’s greatest pleasure since her stroke is to sit in the courtyard of the rehab center. It’s not a beautiful space, just a square of concrete surrounded by high walls....
Mar 16, 2020 | 2 min read
By John Yu Branscum & Yi Izzy Yu
The Delicacy by Ji Yun (1724-1805), Imperial Librarian and Investigator of the Strange...
Mar 9, 2020 | 2 min read
By Erin Wood
After the very worst winter, spring pushes back the smell of antiseptic, the taste of iron, the pain of useless milk, and fills the air with the green aroma of life once more....
Mar 2, 2020 | 2 min read
By Robert Erle Barham
“Daddy, are you going to work?” my son asks when he sees me wearing a jacket and tie before I leave for campus and a day of teaching. Years ago my father’s work boots and overalls prompted the same question from me before I was old enough to join him on the farm....
Feb 24, 2020 | 2 min read
By Misty Urban
On a bench in the zoo a girl walks past me wearing my sister’s face—my sister’s smooth, pre-teen face, before acne, before irony, before the long humped shuffle of illness....
Feb 17, 2020 | 2 min read
By Mary Potter
My dad was an exacting man. When he ran a motor assembly plant in Belgium, he plastered the shop floor, break rooms, and bathrooms with signs that urge-warned in Flemish, WHAT YOU DO, DO IT RIGHT!...
Feb 10, 2020 | 2 min read
By Margaret Emma Brandl
You were always underfoot, in fibers of the carpet, your big shape blocking doorways and chair-paths until you decided on your own where to go....
Feb 3, 2020 | 2 min read
By Kristine Crane
My mother’s fingernails were sculpted and strong—not like salon nails, more like the backs of beetles. Every Saturday night she’d paint them for Mass the next day—usually deep red, her favorite color....
Jan 27, 2020 | 2 min read
By Angie Crea O'Neal
“Because, what if they don’t turn out okay?” The question, posed by my 14-year old daughter, hung in the air as we drove past the park after school late one afternoon.
Jan 20, 2020 | 2 min read
By Leah Christianson
He’s outside, singing. On the record player, Sinatra spins. Next, it will be Pavarotti. Maybe a big-band soundtrack. Whatever the treasure, he will make a big show of dusting off and placing a needle upon before heading back to his garden....
Jan 13, 2020 | 2 min read
By Vivian Wagner
I liked the hens, with their kind eyes and soft, red feathers. I was seven, and I wanted to sleep with them, to nestle with them, because they felt like a dozen mothers, all watching out for me. ...
Jan 6, 2020 | 2 min read
My husband hadn't meant to render us in silhouette. He was a novice, the camera new and heavy in his hands. As we gazed out the window he didn't realize that by aiming into the sun he'd cast us in shadow, erasing specifics.
Dec 30, 2019 | 2 min read
Come spring, there is imbalance—too much snow that’s too quick to melt. The river becomes my backyard. The walnut grove sinks first, followed by the meadow. A day or two later, the river overcomes the pond banks. We are hemmed in.
Dec 23, 2019 | 2 min read
The life in these coastal margins is sparser now, stripped of extravagance, down to survivors. A few darting fish, the odd crab, glossy black clusters of mussels clinging here and there at the brim of the booming surf.
Dec 16, 2019 | 2 min read
He taped her photograph to the inside of his military locker. When the war ended, they married and lived in an apartment without running water in the kitchen, so they carried their dirty dishes to the bathtub.
Dec 9, 2019 | 2 min read
She was over dogs when one appeared by their table at a beachside cafe. Strays roamed everywhere in Nosara, breedless, leashless wonders. This one had some pit bull and Corgi.
Dec 2, 2019 | 2 min read
Inside me, I felt a squeezing in my chest. Even as I write this I can feel again that bound-up thumping of my heart, feel the warm still air, the smell of the creaky pews, light casting down through stained glass, all of us in the honey jar of light together.
Nov 25, 2019 | 2 min read
It was just a gray concrete shell, wrapped with chain link fence. A dream home, unfinished, left to sun, dust, and rain. Around it, pastel mansions with swimming pools, iron gates, and razor wire.
Nov 18, 2019 | 2 min read
This Chinese bowl, smooth in my hands, white as bone, entwined with blue dragons, reminds me of my friend Joyce’s mom. Faizai she’d christened me.
Nov 11, 2019 | 2 min read
A loon is not crazy for spending more time in the water than in the air, though the other birds may think so. He is made for it. Unlike his feathered brethren, his bones are solid.
Nov 4, 2019 | 1 min read
Years ago, in another state, I watched a car fail to turn with the road. It mounted the sidewalk, spiraled into the air, and, after rolling once or twice, came to rest in a vacant lot. Dust swirled and settled like memory.
Oct 28, 2019 | 2 min read
Blue skies, blazing sun, of course. But honestly, it was a perfect day for fleeing steaming city streets, freezing corporate offices, our apartment, where a stuffed hippo and a crocheted blanket menaced.
Oct 21, 2019 | 1 min read
My son pops the lid on the swing-top bale jar, and using both arms to hold onto it, presses his face into the opening, taking a big whiff.
Oct 14, 2019 | 2 min read
Dad is hungry for a clementine; my three-year-old daughter Sarah is hungry for a clementine. I peel one for her and feed her the wedges; my mother peels one for my father.
Oct 7, 2019 | 2 min read
By Jan Priddy
This could be the morning I slide out the door instead of back under sheets and escape before I drink my coffee. My arms unburdened, no one calling me back, no shame or remorse to shadow my escape. Away...
Sep 30, 2019 | 2 min read
My former life neatly gone and never was. Sell the car and take the bus. Live within my means.
Sep 30, 2019 | 2 min read
By Stacy Boe Miller
Sometimes as a child I would brush my grandfather's thinning hair. He was a long haul trucker turned Pentecostal preacher who mostly showed affection through prayer and cash money, both of which he handed out at random to his grandkids. The chance to be physically close to him made me feel as though I’d been chosen for something special...
Sep 23, 2019 | 2 min read
Sometimes as a child I would brush my grandfather's thinning hair. He was a long haul trucker turned Pentecostal preacher who mostly showed affection through prayer and cash money, both of which he handed out at random to his grandkids.
Sep 23, 2019 | 2 min read
By Andrea Marcusa
On the plane home, out the window, all I see is empty sky. As a girl, when talk of dying arose, I always gazed up to where I am now, drifting past the tops of snowy clouds.
But you are nowhere...
Sep 16, 2019 | 2 min read
When I understood you were dying, I remembered the sound of your feet on the stairs each morning when I was a school girl. You dashing down them, spare change jingling in your pockets. You already wide awake for your long commute while I dozed in bed.
Sep 16, 2019 | 2 min read
By Dina Relles
The baby's shoes were nowhere.
That morning was spent in the chaotic swirl of cleaning and packing the vacation house. Countertops lined with coffee cups, milky-bottomed cereal bowls, last laundry loads, shouts up the staircase, don’t forget the shampoo in the shower! It was New Year’s Eve. We had a flight to catch...
Sep 9, 2019 | 2 min read
A deep, irrational sadness swelled at the thought of my son’s sweet shoes sitting at the shoreline as night fell. The waves lapping relentlessly, the mysterious draw of the ocean depths, the heavy awareness that, when it comes to water, what goes in does not return.
Sep 9, 2019 | 2 min read
By Kelly Morse
Most nights I nurse my four-month-old daughter to sleep. The internet connection is terrible in our bedroom, the light thrown by the little green glass lamp not enough to read by, so I end up sitting in the semi-dark, looking across the bed to the window, or down upon the face of my baby in her steady, drowsy pleasure...
Sep 2, 2019 | 2 min read
The first couple of months, I listened to the dry rattle that preceded the radiator's strange atonal song. I watched ice crawl up the sill, watched storms fling themselves across the prairie, flapping tree limbs across the neighbor's outside light.
Sep 2, 2019 | 2 min read
By Carolee Bennett
"There are two red planets tonight," I say. And you reply, "What a brave universe." And I feel brave. Two 30-lb packs hang near the tent we pitched just before it got dark enough to need headlamps. It’s Night One of this backpacking trip, and I’m an amateur, clumsy at everything, even walking. But right now, we are the only humans on the peninsula at Pharaoh Lake. And we divvy up the skies between us: one for me and one for you. The night’s so black stars reflect on the lake. Mars, too...
Aug 26, 2019 | 2 min read
It’s Night One of this backpacking trip, and I’m an amateur, clumsy at everything, even walking. But right now, we are the only humans on the peninsula at Pharaoh Lake. And we divvy up the skies between us: one for me and one for you.
Aug 26, 2019 | 2 min read
By Christopher Bundy
Today: summer afternoon on the front porch as thunderheads grow over the top of a giant oak. In the yard you perform perfect cartwheels, your legs long and straight in the air.
Watch this, Daddy, you say,
and execute another textbook cartwheel before you bounce up the steps to sit in my lap and rest your head against mine. You stare at the darkening sky. A breeze lifts your hair as distant thunder rumbles...
Aug 19, 2019 | 2 min read
And I see it too—the end of the movie. I play my part, holding your slight frame in my oversized hands.
Aug 19, 2019 | 2 min read
By Andrea Fisk Rotterman
Rain falls, dimpling puddles.
I kick off my clogs. My toenails shine like sparkling pumpkin peel. I slide my underwear and jeans down my legs, unsnap my bra, pull my sweatshirt over my head, lay my folded clothes on my shoes. I cross my arms over my silicone implants, icy to the touch in the November chill...
Aug 12, 2019 | 2 min read
Isis, the photographer, is making portraits of 800 mastectomy survivors, the same number of breast cancer diagnoses in the United States each day. Her vision of beauty is inspired by Ancient Greek sculptures, pitted by weather and wind, missing a nose or an arm.
Aug 12, 2019 | 2 min read
By Pamela Rothbard
At the boardwalk, everything is past its prime: sweating hot dogs, mashed bags of cotton candy, melting ice cream. The workers move by rote--lifting and lowering the gate, pulling up on harnesses, scanning tickets. I slump in line. My daughter presses her whole body against the bars that separate us and the ride. As we board the teacups, the song, “Hey Mickey,” blares...
Aug 5, 2019 | 2 min read
At the boardwalk, everything is past its prime: sweating hot dogs, mashed bags of cotton candy, melting ice cream. The workers move by rote--lifting and lowering the gate, pulling up on harnesses, scanning tickets. I slump in line.
Aug 5, 2019 | 2 min read
When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry.
Jul 29, 2019 | 2 min read
When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry. She took me into the house and pulled out the large glossy art books with paintings by the Impressionists. “A woman’s body is beautiful,” she told me...
Jul 29, 2019 | 2 min read
Night sets me free, free from the need to know, free to be, free to go, free from the face of God staring down, free from the world around, from the hours that chain me down.
Jul 22, 2019 | 1 min read
By Allen M. Price
My father turns his head, puts me on the floor, opens the screen, and walks out the back door. Just the silhouette of the bare trees shadowing night's sky is all I can see. I stand there for long minutes listening as night whispers peace. Night sets me free, free from the need to know, free to be, free to go, free from the face of God staring down, free from the world around, from the hours that chain me down...
Jul 22, 2019 | 1 min read
In 1976, when you were still alive,
I wrecked my car on 14th Street
in D.C. on our first date.
Jul 15, 2019 | 1 min read
By Nikki Hardin
In 1976, when you were still alive,
I wrecked my car on 14th Street
in D.C. on our first date.
ME: A single mother and student in your “Death and Dying” course...
Jul 15, 2019 | 1 min read
Gravel dots her fingertips, her knees, the edges of her yellow dress. She runs along the parked RV, the sun hanging low above its roof. She bends and picks up a pebble; it stretches along the small of her hands. Her arm cocks back as she eyes me, smiles.
Jul 8, 2019 | 2 min read
By Emily James
Gravel dots her fingertips, her knees, the edges of her yellow dress. She runs along the parked RV, the sun hanging low above its roof. She bends and picks up a pebble; it stretches along the small of her hands. Her arm cocks back as she eyes me, smiles...
Jul 8, 2019 | 2 min read
Experience has taught me to turn the pant legs out to see if anything moves. Has he captured some critter and forgotten it there? Using my thumbs, I push the fabric inside out. I’m careful to do this over a container.
Jul 1, 2019 | 2 min read
My brother and I grab hold of dangling metal chains fastened to schoolyard swings in this expanse of crabgrass, red dirt, goalposts, and hard bleachers, where he'd slapped the face of the sky with baseballs all those years ago, where I'd ducked every flying thing—small-town insults and countless foul tips.
Jun 24, 2019 | 2 min read
By Laurie Granieri
My brother and I grab hold of dangling metal chains fastened to schoolyard swings in this expanse of crabgrass, red dirt, goalposts, and hard bleachers, where he'd slapped the face of the sky with baseballs all those years ago, where I'd ducked every flying thing—small-town insults and countless foul tips...
Jun 24, 2019 | 2 min read
My father was a rocket scientist for NASA, so the idea that a person could be anything, in this world or beyond, was real to me. With his telescope we peered through the reaches of time, to stars and planets light years away.
Jun 17, 2019 | 2 min read
By This One Guy
As a child, when adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had plenty of answers, but they all sounded like Halloween costumes. Race-car driver. Astronaut. Olympic track star. My father was a rocket scientist for NASA, so the idea that a person could be anything, in this world or beyond, was real to me...
Jun 17, 2019 | 2 min read
You have been ours for ten months, and tomorrow, the state will return you to your mother.
Jun 11, 2019 | 2 min read
By
You have been ours for ten months, and tomorrow, the state will return you to your mother.
Not ours, of course. We know. Foster parents have no rights, not really...
Jun 11, 2019 | 2 min read
As sunshine dropped behind the buildings up the hill, we rendezvoused to march the streets. The Dykes on Bikes ripped by, leading the way, two gals to a bike, bridal veils drifting behind. Loud-as-shit motors rippled inside our chests over the constant song of women’s voices.
Jun 3, 2019 | 2 min read
By Sam Brighton
Weeks after California first legalized queer marriages but before the voters snatched them away in 2008, my girlfriend introduced me to the dyke march. Women of every kind gathered in Dolores Park to lounge about the hill and drink liquor and crack “lick her” jokes...
Jun 3, 2019 | 2 min read
By Abigail Thomas
When he woke again he questioned how had he come to be here in this terrible room, who had allowed it to happen? And he raged at his wife for betraying him, and when in her pained look he could read nothing he understood, I should never have trusted you, he said and went on that way like a bath overflowing until his voice softened, I loved you passionately, always, and let his head fall back on the pillow...
May 27, 2019 | 2 min read
I loved you passionately, always, and let his head fall back on the pillow. She wasn’t his wife anymore, but she would always be his wife.
May 27, 2019 | 1 min read
The last time we saw her, two weeks before she died, her dementia seemed to have taken everything from her. The traits we thought particularly hers were no longer visible to us. We could discern nothing of her intelligence, her compassion, her vitality, her humor, her charm.
May 20, 2019 | 2 min read
I woke in 3 a.m. darkness to what sounded like a barking seal. It was my husband—teeth chattering, too weak to stand, and too confused to speak. I called 911 and paramedics arrived to find him gasping for air at 107 degrees.
May 13, 2019 | 1 min read
By Anne McGrath
I woke in 3 a.m. darkness to what sounded like a barking seal. It was my husband—teeth chattering, too weak to stand, and too confused to speak. I called 911 and paramedics arrived to find him gasping for air at 107 degrees...
May 13, 2019 | 2 min read
By Kristin Tenor
Remember that afternoon you asked me to be your accomplice, your getaway driver, your ticket to freedom? Side by side in the front of your rusted Chevrolet—I, at the wheel and you, your parchment-thin eyelids closed in a state of ecstasy...
May 6, 2019 | 1 min read
By Sharon Goldberg
In Jokulsarlon Lagoon, at the edge of Vatnajokull, Iceland's largest glacier, ten of us and Erik, our guide, bounce bounce bounce in a Zodiac boat. We are here to see icebergs, calves of the glacier, chunks that break off and fall into the water...
Apr 29, 2019 | 2 min read
By Gina Williams
If it wasn't for me, maybe he'd still be dreaming. When I told my Dad I wanted to live forever, he said, "Just wait 'till you get to be my age, then you'll wish you were dead." I was eight. He was twenty-eight. He was always joking, never kidding...
Apr 22, 2019 | 2 min read
By Laura S. Distelheim
Yesterday, when I was riding the train north from Chicago back to the suburb where I live, I happened to look up from the newspaper I was reading just as the tracks veered up alongside the back of a faded brown brick building, where I saw two children seated at a kitchen table in one of its windows, with their homework spread out before them and their mother standing close behind them, leaning over, pointing to something on one of the pages...
Apr 15, 2019 | 2 min read
By Kate Hopper
On the hottest days in San Vicente, I sit on the front porch of my host family's house, sweat dripping from under my arms, dust turning to mud on my salt-streaked legs. I watch the heat shimmer up from the dirt road, dissolving into blue sky. On these days, I long for snow, hunger after the numbing cold of January in Minnesota...
Apr 8, 2019 | 2 min read
By Elizabeth Paul
The peach's soft flesh is so barely protected by its thin and fuzzy skin that I think it can't possibly be serious, but rather a jubilant sunburst, radiant and unworried in the brief noon of its summered existence, simply satisfied with the bright sweetness of its being. I take eight of them from a dusty crate at the farmer's market and place them in a bag. On the bus ride home, I hold the bag in my lap and feel their round sun-touch on my legs...
Apr 1, 2019 | 2 min read
By Rachel Rueckert
Mom gave me the idea, an object lesson given to her as a girl. "Pass it around," I said to my Bible study class. After a pause, the other preteens passed around the slice of Wonder Bread...
Mar 25, 2019 | 2 min read
By Kristine Jepsen
Yesterday my uncle Russ, my dad's older brother, texted me a video of a peony bush in bloom. The plant isn't his—he left the farm where it grows, in the remains of his mother's garden, to become a middle-school band director a half-century ago. But he can't stop tending things, a dogged farmer...
Mar 18, 2019 | 2 min read
By Ann Vallee
While traveling in New Mexico, I made a pilgrimage to the high desert to see the Karl G. Jansky Array, curious to witness a telescope as big as a valley.
An hour up an empty road, I come to a towering dish antenna, and then another and another, lined up like cairns across the sprawling plain...
Mar 11, 2019 | 2 min read
By Alexa Dodd
We are limbs, braided and heavy, under sheets reluctant to release us. We are dreams interrupted, sleep sliced away like an appendage, the knife a familiar siren, filling the space between walls. We are silhouettes, faceless shapes against muted window glow...
Mar 4, 2019 | 1 min read
By Melissa Sevigny
The moon drifts in the west, too thin to be called a crescent, Venus above like a sleeping child lowered by invisible hands into a cradle. It's a glimmer in the sunset sky above a skyline of pine, a sweep of summer grass...
Feb 25, 2019 | 2 min read
By Kathryn Wilder
October light leaks between slats of graying barn wood. A yellow stripe marks Craig's cheek, his shoulder. I taste salt and smell sun on skin and in the hay beneath me that makes our bed in the neighbor’s old hay barn, a place we run to in daylight...
Feb 18, 2019 | 2 min read
By Madeline Bodin
Our off-the-grid neighbors say that they know when the power has gone out because a chorus of hums rises from the generators in the valley. Now, our house has joined that choir...
Feb 11, 2019 | 1 min read
By Michelle Hope
You taught me, once, about the Swainson's thrush—its call like an invitation to another world: a swirling up of sound, unseen. Teach me the names of all the birds you know, and how they sing—the Northern shovler, the greylag goose, the magnificent frigate—so when you hear that call to another world—the snowy egret, the golden-crowned kinglet—you’ll know I’ve heard it, too...
Feb 4, 2019 | 2 min read
By Ashley Hutson
The library building was my body like your children are your body, like your spouse is your body. Its wood and glass grew out of my chest. It came with a key and code...
Jan 28, 2019 | 2 min read
By Heidi Czerwiec
I want to tell you that the word 'musk' comes to us from the Sanskrit mushkas, meaning ‘testicle,’ testimony to its source in the aromatic abdominal sacs of musk deer...
Jan 21, 2019 | 2 min read
By Rachael Peckham
You pinned me to the basketball court in the middle of gym class while Mrs. Thompson was busy tending to a "situation" in the locker room, or off fetching ice from the cafeteria. Whatever drew her away, you seized the moment...
Jan 14, 2019 | 2 min read
By Terry Parker
I survey the elegant glass skyline crowded on the tray: the fine-boned Chanel, curvy Burberry, sleek Cabochard. The bottles display various levels of fragrant amber liquid, belying their owner’s favor...
Jan 7, 2019 | 1 min read
By Arra Ross
The way, on the fourth day, the sepals' little leaflets, grown twice yesterday's size to a fourth inch, have curled back–like legs spread or backs arched—from the buds, and....
Dec 31, 2018 | 2 min read
By Holly Pelesky
I wasn't like the other 22-year-olds after you, carelessly wearing bright bikinis. I was too preoccupied with how I looked suddenly: child bearing hips, a soft middle....
Dec 24, 2018 | 2 min read
By Jean-Marie Saporito
My drive to the Delancey Street Christmas Tree lot begins on snowy roads through a canyon hemmed by pinion and sage studded cliffs and the icy Rio Grande....
Dec 17, 2018 | 2 min read
By Mary Elizabeth Reilly-McGreen
Jen was so venomous that I stopped having my students read their journal entries aloud. She said such cutting things unsolicited. She made a student cry just by staring at him....
Dec 10, 2018 | 2 min read
By Rachel Smith
I tell Cory "no" again. I can't help him resurrect dinosaurs using chicken eggs, even if I am impressed that an eight-year-old already knows so much about genetics and paleontology....
Dec 3, 2018 | 2 min read
By Anna Claire Beasley
1) A tent flap When the zipper teeth cut the air, filling the tent, humid from a night of bodies letting out breath after breath....
Nov 26, 2018 | 2 min read
Nov 19, 2018 | 2 min read
By Sarah Weaver
And still unkissed. Blame it on our strict Christian homes, the rules at the Bible school we were attending, guilt, or just plain old nerves....
Nov 12, 2018 | 2 min read
By Sian Griffiths
I am correcting your typos (fallow becoming follow, gooing becoming going), correcting the interesting but incorrect with the boring and banal because what you meant was boring and banal....
Nov 5, 2018 | 2 min read
By Joanne Lozar Glenn (reposted from July 18, 2016)
They saved it for Fridays. Every teacher had the same projects. Fall: iron leaves between waxed paper. Winter: chalk snow scenes on black construction paper. Spring: draw daffodils. Except for Miss Malik. She was young, pretty, and not a nun....
Oct 29, 2018 | 2 min read
By Jessica Terson
Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl. After you died, they said the only thing to do was keep on living....
Oct 22, 2018 | 2 min read
By Abby Mims
Dr. A, my mother's handsome Bolivian neurosurgeon, lost his father on Everest. I pictured whorls of snow, a crumpled map and a man, stepping into thin air....
Oct 15, 2018 | 2 min read
By Lynn Barrett
You take me for a ride in a sixties Oldsmobile. The radio doesn't work and you had to put additive in the gas....
Oct 8, 2018 | 2 min read
By Laurel Santini
You hoped she wouldn't show up today, the student who scares you. She in her crop tops and lace-up tanks, her camis with labels like Juicy or Nasty Gal that stick up between her thick shoulder blades....
Oct 1, 2018 | 2 min read
By Kiley Bense
I'm the one filling it now, and I've never minded sugar under my fingernails less. Its surface is dark with shine; it's been swallowing butter and heat for two lifetimes at least....
Sep 24, 2018 | 1 min read
By Darlene Young
Praise God for a venue with a parking lot....
Sep 17, 2018 | 2 min read
By Donna Steiner
Some boys found a little brown bat in the parking lot outside the surgeon's office. Delicate as a tea bag, they poked it with a stick, kicked it....
Sep 10, 2018 | 2 min read
By Gail Hosking
She is a bird in song with whole consonants flying out of the cave of her tiny mouth, the tones airborne like a floating leaf. She hands me a block, and with it comes language not yet molded into comprehension, but so sweet, that I listen carefully like one does on a forest walk....
Sep 3, 2018 | 2 min read
By Catherine Pierce
We'd gone to the lake to watch. We had the special glasses, and I toggled between gaping at the razor-precise disappearing of the sun and looking down at my children to make sure they both had their glasses properly affixed.
Aug 27, 2018 | 2 min read
By Susan Rukeyser
The placenta blocked my exit. I was lifted from my mother just in time. London, 1968—bound for my father's USA. The month between Martin and Bobby; I imagine everyone sad.
Aug 20, 2018 | 1 min read
By Maya Khosla
For a long time, we could not go back. But once we were done averting our eyes, once we had mourned and banished all smoldering thoughts about the tribe of blackened trees replacing the known world for now and another season, and the last long fingers of smoke were ushered out by wind, a ticking began....
Aug 13, 2018 | 2 min read
By Jia Lim
I do not want to be naked. The thought consumes me to the point of obsession. As we crunch across the luminous blue-gray glacier, as we delicately spear a rack of the best lamb I've ever had in my life, as we drive for hours in the liquid darkness searching for the northern lights, my mind churns over scenarios....
Aug 6, 2018 | 2 min read
By Kelsey E. Moore
On the porch, under a Blood Moon, our fire is dying down, so we wear wool blankets over our shoulders. We're drinking cider warmed in a pan on the stove, splashed into mugs with whiskey....
Jul 30, 2018 | 2 min read
By Sheldon Lawrence
Seek stillness. Close your eyes, relax in the lotus position, and breathe deeply. But hold on tight. Search every corner of the cosmos and you find only a universe in motion....
Jul 23, 2018 | 2 min read
By Mark Liebenow
Evening returns to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the land cools. Day follows the sun across the valley floor and up into the mountains in the west. Birds settle down for the night.
Jul 16, 2018 | 2 min read
By Jessica Gigot
We sprinted by the worn house with the closed blinds that reeked of pot and who knows what else. I gave the leash a short tug and we slowed to a walk again....
Jul 2, 2018 | 2 min read
By Ksenia Panova
You know what I heard, I heard your mother was a mail order briiiiiiide. The girl with a thoroughly sensible name in my first-grade class drew out the last word, and I struggled with the new sentence structure....
Jun 25, 2018 | 2 min read
By Chris Erickson
Sassafras, shagbark hickory, spicebush, paw paws and sycamores marked the descent to the creek. The untillable acres, as they call them. The hills too steep and outcrops too rocky. The forgotten backs of farms....
Jun 18, 2018 | 2 min read
By Marybeth Holleman
They lie like bits of tissue on the bathroom floor rug, caught in the fibers; I bend to pick them up and see the yellow and pink threadworn veins, dry and broken and translucent pieces of geranium and nasturtium....
Jun 11, 2018 | 2 min read
By Diana Rico
At the tiny Eretz Shalom Cemetery on the mesa south of Taos, I feel like I have stepped into a John Ford Western. The impossibly big New Mexican sky dwarfs the mourners standing in sagebrush around a six-foot-deep hole in the ground....
Jun 4, 2018 | 2 min read
By Sunni Wilkinson
Our three-year-old sits on my husband's shoulders, bouncing. Red rock and yellow cottonwood trees and blue sky surround us. Fall break in Capitol Reef, Utah, and we’re winding up a trail we’ve never hiked before to see an arch...
May 28, 2018 | 2 min read
By Denise Wilkinson
Show me the shape of your thoughts when the doctor announced my cancer. Reveal the colors and the shadows. Tell me not the lines, but the in-betweens, right to your bones. Lament with me the unrest of memories yet to be lived, then speak them...
May 21, 2018 | 1 min read
By Amber D. Stoner
When the house went cold - not the oxygen and nitrogen, but the mood, the atmosphere around my parents - when that froze into stasis, into wariness, into step-lightly-quietly-invisibly, I would retreat outside where I could breathe without...
May 14, 2018 | 2 min read
By Jan McGuire
Mom danced with The Dancing Divas - women in their seventies proudly performing in over thirty elaborate costumes. Accessories included a Fedora with a plastic mafia machine gun, a red suitcase doubling as a small platform for tapping to...
May 7, 2018 | 2 min read
By A. Mauricio Ruiz
This morning I went out to the garden with my mom and picked up guavas, tiny yellow pieces of fruit that had fallen from the tree and now lay scattered on the ground. I bent over and picked them up, one by one, thought of the time when there was only...
Apr 30, 2018 | 1 min read
By Valerie White
They surround her eyes, her nose, and her mouth. She likes to touch them, to run her fingers over them, to try and count them, although it is nearly impossible to see where each one starts and ends. Each wrinkle seemed to appear with a major...
Apr 23, 2018 | 2 min read
By Rachael Button
When I climb, my husband catches me. Peter is younger than me, lankier, quieter. His body weaves up rock with a grace my shaky, short frame cannot yet settle into--but he's learned not to correct or coach me. Instead he holds me on belay...
Apr 16, 2018 | 2 min read
By Cathy Luna
Learning to Tell Time Corpus Christi, Texas: February 1, 1969 It will always be eighty degrees in Corpus and I will always be six when the telegram comes. For me, this day will always have passed as if it were any other. I will always be inside...
Apr 9, 2018 | 2 min read
By Nicole Baute
In September, they carry Ganesha to the river. The bedazzled elephant god sits Sukhasana, mala of flowers around his neck, unlikely to swim. My inherited religion is about a man who rose from the dead, his bloody corpse the symbol...
Apr 2, 2018 | 1 min read
By Renee Nicholson
Thud of drums, The Edge’s guitar lick reverberating in our sternums, and the first flinty sound of Bono’s voice. We never expected...
Mar 26, 2018 | 1 min read
by Traci Brimhall
Spring is the season for burning on the plains. Ranchers across the tall grass prairies of Eastern Kansas watch the forecast for the stillest days, when wind nests between mountains, before they bring the driptorches to the fields.
Mar 19, 2018 | 2 min read
By Chloe DeFilippis
If I put my ear to the hardwood, will I hear the shuffle of his steps? The velcro shoes? I never saw him with his socks off. I imagine his toes like his fingers: thin with long thick yellowing nails. "To grab things with," he told me...
Mar 12, 2018 | 2 min read
By Tamara Lang
I nest, my sleeping bag encircling me as I sit, skin-hot down sheltering this present happiness as if it were a round, warm egg. Clouds have erased the peaks beyond the harbor, and I feel the boat that formed my bed tugging at its lines...
Mar 5, 2018 | 2 min read
By Jen Sammons
The instant I pull into the gas station, he starts screaming, starts pummeling the back of my seat with his gray and green Velcro sneakers....
Feb 26, 2018 | 2 min read
Feb 19, 2018 | 1 min read
By Elissa Favero
By morning, feathers had settled lightly in the corners of the bathroom. They swept up into the air, though, as I moved past. Down, up and down. One brushed the nape of my neck as I stepped from the shower, and clamped there to damp skin. A torn comforter; a small domestic catastrophe....
Feb 12, 2018 | 2 min read
By Olivia Dunn
I am calling my current situation 'vow of poverty' because that sounds much nobler than 'slumming' or 'lazy.' Vow of poverty helps me remember that the reason I will eat chickpeas for dinner for the next three nights is because there is a larger goal at hand....
Feb 5, 2018 | 2 min read
By Rhonda Owen
Grandpa slumps on the three-legged stool, his clouded brown eyes intent on me as I reach into a cabinet drawer to scoop flour for dredging pieces of chicken soaking in a bowl of buttermilk....
Jan 29, 2018 | 2 min read
By Francisco Martinezcuello
In Massoud's Circle, weathered plastic shopping bags are captured by the thorns of Afghan roses. Armored vehicles crisscross in formation. Liberators with their guns pointed bully civilian cars to halt. My convoy breezes by, failing to free the bags from their thorny prison....
Jan 22, 2018 | 2 min read
By Mia Aguilera
My brother Ian and I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have a small brick house with wooden floors and a wall of French windows, letting in plenty of light....
Jan 15, 2018 | 2 min read
By Magin LaSov Gregg
On a rusted railroad bridge overlooking Ohio's Rocky River, I stand with my father beneath an ocean blue sky and listen to the water's murmur. My father removes his glasses and points to a large rock beside the lower bank...
Jan 8, 2018 | 2 min read
By Krys Malcolm Belc
In Arizona, in Queens, it is the same everywhere. Brains give way, cannot tell bodies to get up and hike, to get up and go to work...
Dec 25, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jay Wamsted
I saw the sunrise, huge and orange, peeking up over the skyline of Atlanta, dazzling. I had to look away. Bewildered, I swiveled my head right again to the blue sky before looking straight ahead into a roiling mass of dark gray clouds. Water careered about me as I kept inadvertent pace with the storm. ..
Dec 18, 2017 | 2 min read
By Carmella Guiol
It's important for the bird to see the world, one man tells me, his birdcage propped on the seawall, the sea crashing against the rocks a few feet away. That way the bird doesn’t forget what the sky looks like, what the wind feels like in their crayon-colored feathers...
Dec 11, 2017 | 2 min read
By Sarah Dalton
My memory unfolds, and it is inevitable: the scent of a sweet Navel orange reminds me of my first love. I see his clean, large hands, the prominent lunulas on each nail...
Dec 4, 2017 | 2 min read
Ny Hannah Cauthen
A tiny green lizard clings to a brick outside the window. It takes in the late-morning light, attempting to combat the smooth chill in the air. I watch people filtering in and out of the restaurant wearing sweaters too thick for early September in Georgia...
Nov 27, 2017 | 2 min read
By Erica Meurk
And then, as if called to midday prayer, they swoop as one into the air, their shadows littering the square below like paper napkins in a swift wind. Once around, twice around, bunching and spreading and bunching again as they fly.
Nov 20, 2017 | 2 min read
By Rachel Anne Murphy
This is the painting that would have greeted us, at the top of the stairs, just inside the gallery doors, centered on its own freestanding wall, seven feet by nine feet, we couldn’t have missed it, if I had said, yes, when he asked, would I like to go with him, to the Art Institute, that weekend, or the next?, instead of looking down at his classroom floor and saying, um, no...
Nov 13, 2017 | 1 min read
By Sarah Marty-Schlipf
A breeze tousles the cottonwoods, sending down fine white seed tufts like snowfall in early summer. Minnows gather and part at her pink sneakers. Charli is still, hands cupped at the surface, waiting.
Nov 6, 2017 | 2 min read
By Lynne Nugent
Everyone talks about the sweetness of expecting a baby, but less about the terror at having created something so vulnerable. I spent each of my prenatal appointments barely breathing until the moment they swirled the Doppler through cold gel on my belly and relocated that rhythmic swishing...
Oct 30, 2017 | 2 min read
By Holly Willis
In the late afternoon, as my mother breathed her way toward her last breath, a deer stepped from the edge of the woods into the coppery light and stood tall, fixing us with a direct gaze from across the field. Waiting for death, I yearned for a signal, a sign, a way to sort figure from ground...
Oct 23, 2017 | 2 min read
By Aaron Newman
When I was twelve or so, I shared a poem with Aunt B that I was to read at the public library later that evening. It was called “Summer Skies and Her Silver Eyes,” but she read it as “Summer Skis.” When I corrected her, she laughed first, then continued, line by line, with enough care to make me blush.
Oct 16, 2017 | 2 min read
By Richard LeBlond
There were Beatniks and wannabes like me in 1959 Portland coffeehouses. We sipped espressos and listened to cool jazz, whatever that was. Too young and inexperienced to distinguish authentic from pretentious, I tried, impossibly, to be cool.
Oct 9, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jessica Jacobs
Only after the starter gun's snap, did my father burst from the port-a-potty. Only after the other triathletes had raced across the sand and high-stepped it through the shallows like a flamboyance of flamingos in wetsuits, did he run, a streamer of toilet paper flapping from his heel, a crowd of funny guys shouting, "You can catch 'em, buddy!" as he waved to my sister and me in the stands...
Oct 2, 2017 | 2 min read
By Sarah Beth Childers
Often, Grandad descends into a wasteland of words, connecting blessings, family, country, and company with “help to help to help,” but sometimes, he gets stuck on his thankfulness. One night, he bowed his head over the pot roast and said only, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Sep 25, 2017 | 2 min read
By Erin Slaughter
I can laugh, and do. I’ve long since domesticated grief and whatever grief turns into. Grief the cat, rarely resembling grief the lion...
Sep 18, 2017 | 2 min read
By Danielle Madsen
When the first mug cracked, you thought it wouldn’t matter, but then they started to shatter. You end up, somehow, in battles over alimony and the kids’ college funds and that broken-down crockpot, and you forget to put your coffee cups into the divorce proceedings. When it’s finally over, you’re both too bitter, too broken, to give each other anything–even a worthless old mug. So they all get thrown in the trash.
Sep 11, 2017 | 2 min read
By Michael Torres
You wanted me to find you. So I interrogated the avocado tree, searched behind the broken Virgin Mary statue. Finally, I asked the sky for help. Your giggling betrayed you.
Sep 4, 2017 | 2 min read
By Luba Feigenberg
I breathe in, feeling the air fill my lungs. Here I am reminded that leaving the warmth of my bed is worth it. Here I feel the possibility of the day with its new energies, new mysteries, new discoveries. The view offers a fresh start with countless opportunities to begin again. I blink, my eyes like the shutters of a camera, snapping the image to my mind. Inhaling deeply, I pick up the pace...
Aug 28, 2017 | 2 min read
By Robert Hardy
There are three girls in Poetry Club. Tra’niyah, the third grader, walks around the classroom looking at everything through a magnifying glass—the leaves of the plants, the point of her pencil, her fingerprints—remarking on how different everything looks...
Aug 21, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jason Bruner
"And," he continues, “don’t forget there were the Mongols and” he shakes his head, sighs a smile, “and...” he trails off. I smell their voices weaving with the silver smoke, from the altar up to the golden throne of God. Qadisha...
Aug 14, 2017 | 2 min read
By Wendy Fontaine
My corner of the world is finally quiet - no cars, trains or helicopters; no neighbors clanging soup pots or shouting into cell phones. My daughter, too, is asleep in her bed, limbs spread like compass points. In this stillness, I go inward, listening for the small voice that exists after everything else has been stripped away...
Aug 7, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jonathan Starke
There’s this letter on the wall in there that a young boy writes to a young girl during the Bosnian War. They meet at gunpoint, marching toward a van that will drive them to a war camp. The girl doesn’t know the boy loves her...
Jul 31, 2017 | 1 min read
By Catherine Klatzker
You admit it’s not death that makes you shrivel into yourself and brings up those old whimpering voices pleading for safety; it’s dread of that conversation, of giving permission to one’s life partner to take that journey alone, without you.
Jul 24, 2017 | 2 min read
By Margaret Renkl
An irreplaceable life had winked out in an instant, but outside my window the world was flaring up in celebration. Someone was hearing, “It’s benign.” Someone was saying, “It’s a boy.” Someone was throwing out her arms and crying, “Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!”
Jul 17, 2017 | 2 min read
By Rijn Collins
There hadn’t been many other teenagers on the ward. I’d watched the obsessive-compulsives, addicts and anorexics, admired the rainbow of pills in my palm, and listened to the speech slur from my mouth, thinking, I am not one of you.
But I was.
So was he.
And there you go.
Jul 10, 2017 | 2 min read
By Kathryn Stinson
A radio interviewer asks an aging mystic, “What will you miss the most when you leave this world?” My mind replies silently, sunlight on moving water, and fills with images: afternoon light glancing off the lake, morning sun on ocean tidepools...
Jul 3, 2017 | 2 min read
By Erin Ruble
Retrieving our boat, we pass into the rose-storm of sunset, startling a pair of loons. For twenty million years these birds have lived here. Over my children’s heads I watch this pair sound their tremulous cries, resurrecting their ancestors—as do we, in our melancholy and joy...
Jun 26, 2017 | 2 min read
By Alan Rossman
I can still feel the insignificance of those two degrees sloughing off the shoulders of my teenage indifference. For despite all his lectures, Mr. Mitchell never taught us the meaning of two degrees. He never let us feel how those two extra degrees could warm your face and kindle your heart or loosen the rust that had been building around your joints all winter long.
Jun 19, 2017 | 2 min read
By Edvige Giunta
The asparagus grew in the Sicilian garden, and my mother made frittata that was sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, sometimes snack. Food ran like a thread through our days, and it was orderly and good...
Jun 12, 2017 | 1 min read
By Natalie Tomlin
We stole it at night, one of us running across a lawn we had scoped out beforehand. With a firm kick, I popped it out neatly and ran away with it under my arm like a football, never really breaking my stride. The runaway car was there, waiting...
Jun 5, 2017 | 2 min read
By Scott Russell Morris
Such delight at this chance meeting, pleasure measured by the firmness of the embrace: their teeth showed, their hearts so close together the employee badges intertwined...
May 29, 2017 | 2 min read
By
In the Midwestern auditorium, a tired Richard Ford reads a fiction about Grand Central Station to a ticketed crowd as tired and sparse as his scalp. He is old and disappointed, and he is reading about old disappointment...
May 22, 2017 | 1 min read
By Isaac Yuen
People post sticky notes on what they think it is:
Kirk's ego
Cthulhu Slime
MOM'S MEATLOAF
oblivion...
May 15, 2017 | 2 min read
By Kelly Miller
I see her hustling with baby and bags of food. So close to stacked bumpers. Cars hurrying toward fast food or fun. People inside who hate their jobs or spouses. People who don’t understand why they’re always angry...
May 8, 2017 | 2 min read
By Michael Fischer
“YES,” he writes back. That’s all, just like that. All caps.
On the 17th, he kills himself...
May 1, 2017 | 2 min read
By Sam Brighton
I loved her with all the kinetic energy rocketing up from this ruckus. We rumbled the tectonic plates below our feet, no doubt, but they held us, all of us together...
Apr 24, 2017 | 2 min read
By Don Dussault
Every Saturday evening I put on my best jacket and roll out to my car and fold the wheelchair and place it on the backseat and get behind the wheel and the hand controls and drive five miles out of my small town to the dance hall on the lake. When I roll up to the front double doors and pull out my billfold, the cashier won't let me pay...
Apr 17, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jenny Apostol
“Cheerful!” she said, “What is it?” Then recognizing the compact rows of marigold trophies lining spray upon spray arcing over the yard, “Oh, kerria, that was my mother’s favorite.” A moment of silence for one mother’s mother gone twenty years...
Apr 10, 2017 | 2 min read
By Stephanie Eardley
Like a mother waiting for the reassuring cry of her newborn, I pine for the pop of jars sealing. Like apples to apple pie filling I have gone from intimidated tomboy to homemaker...
Apr 3, 2017 | 2 min read
By Lisa Romeo
The bride, it turns out, is a large woman. The bride, in her floaty white dress, and you, in your drapey black-and-white dress, are only one size: the size of love. Your husband says, "Let's dance." On the dance floor, you twirl...
Mar 27, 2017 | 2 min read
By Ah-reum Han
But consider for example the six-year-old daughter, face down on her new dorm bed, who cannot possibly imagine what to write to her mother a thousand miles away. What she remembers: departure, leaving their house like thieves, by moonlight, so they wouldn’t miss the first ferry or the first day of school. Dear Mama, she begins...
Mar 20, 2017 | 2 min read
By Angie Crea O'Neal
“What if it’s just sleeping,” I muse, “like Jacob on his pillow of stones?”
But she’s nine now and knows...
Mar 13, 2017 | 2 min read
By Stephanie Dethlefs
She lifts the pencil to her tongue, wets it, and answers 34-Down before noticing us and smiling softly. She presses her hands into the armrests and rises to greet us, placing her small, soft palms on each of our cheeks...
Mar 6, 2017 | 2 min read
By Cheryl Lynn Smith
Tim’s apartment was cleaned and all his belongings put out on a curb in the parking lot. This is the saddest part. Seeing a life in a parking lot...
Feb 27, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jolene McIlwain
When I smile, my son says, “What?” But, I can’t explain. It’s simply something I know...
Feb 20, 2017 | 2 min read
By Heather Osterman-Davis
“You can take my arm if you want help across,” he says, crooking his elbow as if offering me a dance. "Though I understand if you don’t want me to touch you.”
Feb 13, 2017 | 2 min read
By Anna Vodicka
To the birds, we must look like ants at a picnic, the way we crawl from our dark caves and run crazed for sidewalks and grassy parks, which hours ago sat empty...
Feb 6, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jenny Lara
You’s two look like a coupla happy birds says the jackhammer man, all lit up in sparks and a midnight streetside spotlight and the Bronx turns his birds into boyds...
Jan 30, 2017 | 1 min read
By Clara Mae Barnhart
When I was a child I liked to squint at street lamps at night because it makes them look like eight-pointed stars. We walked around late in our little village. In the summer we would dodge the toads on the sidewalk in the soft copper glow. Our cat would follow us everywhere...
Jan 23, 2017 | 2 min read
By Julia Shipley
They'd stung him all summer: his face, his ankle, his arm, but never me, though sometimes they veered for my curtain of hair...
Jan 16, 2017 | 2 min read
By Jack Bedell
As many times as I heard that story growing up, I could never shake my focus off the chickens, the fault in their nature, blame and loss. All stories held hard lessons for me then...
Jan 9, 2017 | 2 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep, she and I curl up on the mattress in the guest room below the big window, and I drift off with her tiny fingers gripping my thumb...
Jan 2, 2017 | 1 min read
By Jessica Terson
Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl. ...
Jan 1, 2017 | 2 min read
by Jennifer Bowen Hicks (repost of 07/20/15)
We no longer remember the sound of birdsong or the feel of dry pavement beneath our feet, but we walk to school anyway because school is the place we're meant to walk to on Tuesday mornings...
Dec 26, 2016 | 2 min read
by Aaron J. Housholder (repost of 03/09/15)
The manager brings me two white sacks too full to close. Steam from fresh chips tickles my face. Salt and oil, a ravenous fragrance. Foil-wrapped fajitas still sizzle...
Dec 19, 2016 | 2 min read
By Kathryn Wilder (repost of 09/29/14)
My sister and I live on either side of sixty. We've been mothers half our lives. Visiting her in Oregon, Ashland running a steady hundred degrees for days into weeks, we head to Lake of the Woods for the coolness of lake water and wind in the pines. Winding up the mountainside and back through our lives, our four children are never far from our conversation, like our own childhood—childhood, singular, as we shared it, for better or worse, till death do we part...
Dec 12, 2016 | 2 min read
By Marissa Landrigan (repost from 12/01/14)
On Thanksgiving, after the turkey is carved and gutted – after we slice through half of the twenty-pound bird my mother insists on ordering, though there are only ever seven of us for dinner – my father and grandfather return to the half-spent carcass and harvest the rest...
Dec 5, 2016 | 1 min read
by Jia Lim
Once, I skulked into her darkened bedroom, and hid the card for her forty-sixth under her wallet. I was too antsy, announced my fatigue too loudly, and retired for bed too early...
Nov 28, 2016 | 2 min read
by Lisa Laughlin
But today I have an hour, and can help them harvest their small backyard lot. I bend more easily than my grandpa to twist a cucumber from its prickly lair...
Nov 21, 2016 | 2 min read
by Jo-Anne Cappeluti
It’s always strange to see someone in the flesh after you’ve talked about them—in our case someone we supposed to be lame or wounded...
Nov 14, 2016 | 2 min read
by Ariana Brocious
Puppeting her hands into the rounded corners, swiftly finding the points. She deftly converted scrunches and wrinkles to smooth lines, the whole thing a neat, soft rectangle in moments...
Nov 7, 2016 | 2 min read
by Suzanne Farrell Smith
Only now, head and shoulders above-coffin, do you look forward and see nothing of your mother’s patchwork skirt that once shielded you, smallest mouse in a big house...
Oct 31, 2016 | 2 min read
by Ethan Joella
I do remember watching the beach rental disappear behind me as he pedaled away. I remember wondering if he saw the potholes in the dirt road. I remember fallen pine needles on patio umbrellas and in the water of bird baths...
Oct 24, 2016 | 2 min read
by Melissa Ballard
Pointing to the tree above, he says, “See those red birds?” I, with my college education, am too busy for birds, but I’m vigilant about dad’s vocabulary...
Oct 17, 2016 | 1 min read
by Leah Silverman
When Rachmaninoff swallows my mother, I no longer know the woman who gleefully embellishes with staccato flourishes nursery rhymes and schoolyard chants and ditties of her own that make us run run run through the living room dining room kitchen...
Oct 10, 2016 | 1 min read
by Andrea Fisk Rotterman
She hands me a filmy gray scarf with silver sparkles. She directs me. Drape and tuck the scarf around your waist. Breathe from the bottom of your lungs...
Oct 3, 2016 | 2 min read
by Jennifer Wortman
At the park, I spied a fallen hatchling in the grass. When I returned with my husband for help, it was a crushed rainbow mess. Why hadn’t I lifted it?...
Sep 26, 2016 | 2 min read
by Chris Huntington
My thermos is stainless steel with metallic green paint and says L.L. Bean on one side, my name on the other. Above my name, there is a ring of exposed metal exactly the width of my fingers; this is where I lift the thermos to take a drink...
Sep 19, 2016 | 2 min read
by Kate Michaelson
I didn’t have to ask what she meant, but encouraged her that the more she read, the easier it would become. Some days she was so tired she cried...
Sep 12, 2016 | 2 min read
by Carolee Bennett
It’s Night One of this backpacking trip, and I’m an amateur, clumsy at everything, even walking. But right now, we are the only humans on the peninsula at Pharaoh Lake...
Sep 5, 2016 | 2 min read
by Diane de Anda
Don Isidro stood at the front door, gunny sack in hand. His hair fell in twisted grey strands just above his shoulders, his beard patchy and uneven across the flushed skin on his face, his nose redder, with purple lines snaked across it...
Aug 29, 2016 | 2 min read
by James M. Chesbro
This woman still moves in the paper route of my mind. I see her when I’m loading the car with my bag and my son’s mini-cooler for daycare...
Aug 22, 2016 | 2 min read
by Katie Powers
The efficiency of it is always shocking: a few moments of the saw at high pitch; the wedge taken from the trunk like a bite – a bright and wide open wound; him stepping away, practiced...
Aug 15, 2016 | 2 min read
by Laurie Granieri
Hope and defiance loiter beneath the stars, we'll take our chances, because have you ever felt your own body fling itself into grace?...
Aug 1, 2016 | 2 min read
by
At a distance, I watch as he grabs candy bars off the shelf and slides them inside his coat, so absorbed in the act of stealing, he doesn't notice me approach...
Jul 25, 2016 | 2 min read
by Joanne M. Lozar Glenn
Every teacher had the same projects. Fall: iron leaves between waxed paper. Winter: chalk snow scenes on black construction paper. Spring: draw daffodils...
Jul 18, 2016 | 2 min read
by Laura Haugen
There is no time this time, in this age of no-time, time that spins in ballerina shoes leaping across years to then dig for fossils with trucks in a sandbox, now taking off running to hunt for frogs, one-last-look, and hey do you see the stars, do you?...
Jul 4, 2016 | 2 min read
by Sheila Squillante
I stood in front of my bedroom window watching the sky turn a pretty dark purple. I couldn’t hear birds anymore, but I could hear, far away but coming closer, the sound of a train...
Jun 27, 2016 | 2 min read
by Paul Crenshaw
Small world, we say, when we uncover these coincidences, but what we really mean is that we feel small in it, struggling to find some connection through age or geography...
Jun 20, 2016 | 2 min read
by Megan Renart
Three months ago, the windows were open and we put on music and laughed. Now the windows are closed and the only sounds are the wind in the trees and grass...
Jun 13, 2016 | 2 min read
by Matthew Vollmer
Once born, the doctor said he’d give the mother fifty cents if she named the baby after him. It wasn’t the first time Dr. Hubby had paid a new mother to perpetuate the moniker. At one time, these mountains had been full of Hubbys...
Jun 6, 2016 | 2 min read
by Matthew Barrett
I want to graffiti the walls where my grandmother lives, white and sterile walls (egg-shell colored walls, as the nurses say), replace her sanitation lists with photographs, magazine spreads, and paper clippings...
May 30, 2016 | 2 min read
by Wayne Scott
My shy, contemplative daughter started wearing my clothes when she was thirteen. On her they looked baggy, her thin body lost in wrinkled folds...
May 23, 2016 | 2 min read
by Terrance Manning Jr.
Without me, no welds could pass a real test. I’m like the clean-up guy, the shoe-polisher. I’m the real damn artist....
May 16, 2016 | 2 min read
by Stacy Murison
The first time, you drive by yourself. You have some idea you are going there, but are still surprised that you know the way, without her, through the turning and turning driveways...
May 9, 2016 | 2 min read
by Chansi Long
His daughter sat on the banana seat, pink streamers dangling, a mess of tightly wound ringlets atop her head. Her expression was one of fierce determination: eyes squeezed into slits, head tilted, legs peddling wildly...
May 2, 2016 | 2 min read
by Jonathan Starke
The girl doesn’t know the boy loves her. Some will say the boy doesn’t know what real love is yet. If he does, the war camp will break him of it....
Apr 25, 2016 | 1 min read
by Michelle Webster-Hein (repost of 02/21/14
We have a carpet of dandelions over our front lawn--bright yellow heads peppering the cushions of moss and tufts of grass...
Apr 18, 2016 | 1 min read
by Sara Ackerman
Bits of grit from the stairs stuck to my knees and the marker tip. Branches from the cherry tree, the white-pink petals so papery and particular, threw shadows across the stoop....
Apr 11, 2016 | 2 min read
by Rebecca Swanson
Their heads will press together over a book, a game, a map, a worm. When one gets too close, the other shoves. When one cries, the other worries....
Apr 4, 2016 | 2 min read
by Michael Levan
Trained by his body to wake now every two hours, he doesn’t much need her voice to tell him it’s time for more meds...
Mar 28, 2016 | 2 min read
by Erin Slaughter
To me, the mountains are still intimidating and holy. I haven’t yet learned to live among them as domestic creatures, the way we forget that house-cats are made of lions....
Mar 21, 2016 | 2 min read
by Sarah Thieman
After all the ruckus there were a few silent hours when no one would be seen or heard. My three older siblings and I hid together in the bedroom my two sisters shared, one of the only two bedrooms in the house...
Mar 14, 2016 | 2 min read
By Verna Kale
In the two-years-ago garden she sat in the tilled soil and pulled an earthworm taut between two hands and touched it with her tongue....
Mar 7, 2016 | 2 min read
By Dina Relles
A deep, irrational sadness swelled at the thought of my son’s sweet shoes sitting at the shoreline as night fell....
Feb 29, 2016 | 2 min read
By Kim Liao
Marinate for at least two hours, but preferably overnight, or maybe 23 years. He never felt the need to tell his daughter where this recipe came from....
Feb 22, 2016 | 2 min read
By Gina Williams (repost of 08/10/15)
On the day of his visit, I did Helen's makeup, spritzed Chanel No. 5 onto her wrists, and held the mirror while she frosted her lips with Rouge Noir from a gold case...
Feb 15, 2016 | 2 min read
By Mark Liebenow
Alpenglow colors the white granite peaks a warm crimson. Half Dome, rising a thousand feet above everything else, holds the last golden rays of the sun...
Feb 8, 2016 | 2 min read
By Ashley Hutson
Here, a man casually told me he had kidney cancer. A woman wept while revealing her son's autism diagnosis. Teenagers exchanged kisses of clandestine devotion, unaware of Alton Brown's kitchen chemistry near their shoulders....
Feb 1, 2016 | 2 min read
By Catherine Rankovic
There is this invisible and constant musical theme, the oscillating and haywire sound of locusts...
Jan 25, 2016 | 2 min read
By Danielle Harms
You know the world is full of begonias and yours is unremarkable. But it is remarkable to you, so you rearrange the back seat...
Jan 18, 2016 | 2 min read
By Karen Zey
As a child in the fifties, I didn’t understand that my mother sewed our clothes out of necessity, not as a hobby...
Jan 11, 2016 | 2 min read
By Maria Jerinic
In this city of artifice, where there is attention to the last detail in the recreation of Paris or New York or someone’s idea of an Italian village, I live in a spot that has been forgotten, abandoned, allowed to take on its own shape...
Jan 4, 2016 | 2 min read
On the porch, under a Blood Moon, our fire is dying down, so we wear wool blankets over our shoulders. We’re drinking cider warmed in a pan on the stove, splashed into mugs with whiskey. This cold is still new, still exhilarating; the season is shifting, like the roll of a wave against your body.
Dec 28, 2015 | 2 min read
I dipped my finger in my water glass and ran it evenly around the rim. After a few circles, it started to sing, a fragile ethereal sound, a sound of the soul. My boys, intrigued, dipped their own fingers in their glasses and as each got the hang of it, each glass sang its own note. My husband joined in.
Dec 21, 2015 | 2 min read
Seek stillness. Close your eyes, relax in the lotus position, and breathe deeply. But hold on tight. Search every corner of the cosmos and you find only a universe in motion. Everywhere bodies and matter interrupt one another. Everywhere stars and planets and forests and cell tissues are born. Everywhere they die.
Dec 14, 2015 | 2 min read
Hand-built, smoothed gray with age, the stubby ladder rests against the old apple tree, its gnarled bark accepting the still, hopeful embrace of the rails and rungs once climbed by a child when this tree by its stone wall watched over a field of corn...
Dec 7, 2015 | 2 min read
We don’t know her, the woman who grins and waves as we wander north along Hollywood sand, bedsheets for yoga class billowing in our hands. But maybe, I think, we do know her from somewhere, and it’s not in our nature to be rude, so we wave, too.
Nov 30, 2015 | 1 min read
What was that feeling last night, of chasing a thread of thought from sleep to wakefulness, back into sleep again, not quite sure at any moment whether I was fully awake or fully asleep and only knowing when I got up to use the restroom and perhaps not even then and what was I doing, trying to string some thoughts together...
Nov 23, 2015 | 2 min read
You admit it’s not death that makes you shrivel into yourself and brings up those old whimpering voices pleading for safety; it’s dread of that conversation, of giving permission to one’s life partner to take that journey alone, without you.
Nov 16, 2015 | 2 min read
The Frank Lloyd Wright calendar hangs askew on your cubicle wall, the citrus skylights of July turning right angles into August in an attempt to create unity on a Tuesday morning when you’re wearing stripes and your socks don’t match.
Nov 9, 2015 | 2 min read
The sugar maple stands on a ridge alongside the old tobacco barn. Dark green leaves, the undersides the color of luna moth wings, waggle in a cross wind.
Nov 2, 2015 | 2 min read
Birds keep getting lost in my living room. It’s my fault, for leaving the doors open. For answering the knock of valley wind so strong it rips posters off the walls, comes pounding, shaking our wood-framed house with big fists, demanding to be let in.
Oct 26, 2015 | 2 min read
On the hottest days in San Vicente, I sit on the front porch of my host family’s house, sweat dripping from under my arms, dust turning to mud on my salt-streaked legs. I watch the heat shimmer up from the dirt road, dissolving into blue sky. On these days, I long for snow, hunger after the numbing cold of January in Minnesota.
Oct 19, 2015 | 2 min read
The Italian museum had a gory multitude of blood-streaked Jesuses. But in one immense painting, he was flanked by two anonymous thieves—palms nailed, faces obscured, genitals exposed, legs cudgeled by a guard to speed their deaths.
Oct 12, 2015 | 2 min read
I know Big Rock from a story he has told me, a strand of his story now interwoven with mine. I know my father, as a boy, stood on Big Rock, while neighborhood boys stood across from him, on a narrow cliff ledge, and hurled rocks at him.
Oct 5, 2015 | 2 min read
When he was younger, just born, fear overtook me in waves. I could lose him at any time. I could lose him because I had him, and anything I had, I could lose. The logic was airtight, suffocating.
Sep 28, 2015 | 2 min read
by Kate Levin
When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird ...
Sep 28, 2015 | 2 min read
Alone, I stare down the wide notch behind my house where the mountain to the east rolls inward to the west, and the western mountain rolls inward to the east till at last the two converge. A thousand feet below, a ground fog grays the Piedmont, but the sun has risen quite high and the thermals bend the spring-green hardwoods. These are worn mountains, the last mounds of the Southern Appalachians.
Sep 21, 2015 | 2 min read
We were having drinks at a friend's house when my two-year-old entered the room, pantless, sans diaper. Whenever his older sister and her friends played dress up, he'd get silly and play dress down. But this time he was red-faced and crying. I excused myself, brought him to the other room.
Sep 14, 2015 | 2 min read
Overhead, a pair of just-returned Canada geese honk and carry on, their long necks stretched toward a pond in the middle of the field. Their bodies turn bronze in dusk, but it's the blending of their voices that makes us curve our necks upward.
Sep 7, 2015 | 2 min read
My August garden has changed overnight, like a middle-aged woman looking into a mirror, asking, When did that happen, or how did this happen so soon? The cornstalks stand shoulder-to-shoulder, answer in sibilants, and that answer is enough.
Aug 31, 2015 | 2 min read
In the weeks before we end our active service in the Marine Corps my roommate, Caleb, and I slug Wild Turkey in our barracks room, and then decide to celebrate our impending freedom by burning down the thirty-foot-high diving platform a mile away off Christianitos Road.
Aug 24, 2015 | 2 min read
My dad took me to pick it up in an empty school parking lot, at night, like a drug deal.
Aug 17, 2015 | 1 min read
They hadn't seen one another since her diagnosis. Pete was her last boyfriend and because she was terminal, would always be the final man in her life, the only remaining thread of sexuality, desire.
Aug 10, 2015 | 2 min read
There was a row of shops where the flyovers now swirl and swoop. The shops were cubes of tin and plywood on a strip of pavement in heaving, humid Calcutta. They stood under gulmohar trees; fire-red petals with shade as cool as coconut water.
Aug 3, 2015 | 2 min read
Tom lived just five minutes away from my house, and his wife said his legs were so swollen that it would require a 911 call to get him to my office. This was the only house call I’ve ever made.
Jul 27, 2015 | 2 min read
We no longer remember the sound of birdsong or the feel of dry pavement beneath our feet, but we walk to school anyway because school is the place we're meant to walk to on Tuesday mornings. Temperatures register -23 below zero if you don’t count the wind chill, and I always count the wind chill.
Jul 20, 2015 | 2 min read
When I was married I crushed on another man. He played a pan flute while riding his bike past the reservoir and I stepped into his path feeling reckless one evening on one of my walks. Our groping shouldn't have led to anything more.
Jul 13, 2015 | 2 min read
A moist breeze hints at the monsoon that will soon descend on our city in South India. My son has fourteen orange- and coffee-colored guppy-fish swimming in a thin plastic bag. He is waiting to empty the little, translucent creatures into the garden pond.
Jul 6, 2015 | 2 min read
From my quiet perch, I would marvel at how effortlessly the men would grab hold of a bin and swing it forward, dumping the entire contents of a week’s worth of trash over the metal ledge and out of sight, then drop the empty can back onto the tired grass.
Jun 29, 2015 | 2 min read
I want to be a man who pays each bill the day it arrives. I want to be a man who knows the precise location of every object in his backpack. I want to be a man who knows about carpentry.
Jun 22, 2015 | 1 min read
For all that, gentle reader, behold these two loons that paddle so close along the riffled band of light, which the moon has deftly laid on the nervous water by the shore, where leaves titter above me. The birds’ calls are plaintive, an adjective so precise it needs no iteration.
Jun 15, 2015 | 2 min read
At four he is an earnest collector. He keeps his secrets in his pockets and leaves them for me in the laundry basket. As I unroll the cuffs of his too-long-yet pants, sand dribbles out, a clump of mud caking the cloth. Even if all is quiet, I remain cautious.
Jun 8, 2015 | 2 min read
On warm August nights, I take out my contacts and go outside, find a spot to lie down, and look up through the basket of live oak branches.
Jun 1, 2015 | 1 min read
In his 70s, dad bought a gas-powered log splitter and would perch on a stump for hours, loading one log after another, pulling the lever to engage the iron wedge, which descended with a crushing force to split the logs. He recruited his young grandsons to help and they ran back and forth, to stack the wood in orderly rows in the mossy roofed shed in the meadow.
May 25, 2015 | 2 min read
We are given a project to do. Here are the parameters. Lines parallel. Lines perpendicular. Clear relationships. Mass, plane, line. No diagonals. I put the safety glasses on. I cut the wood.
May 18, 2015 | 2 min read
My mother stands at the grocery store counter. Tiny purple flowers rest tucked behind her ear. They have wilted as we walked through the aisles, comparing prices per ounce and coupons to sales. Now, the flower petals are withered balls of lint.
May 11, 2015 | 2 min read
Someday, the newspaper photographer told me as we drove back from the fire, he was going to do a photo essay on all those raptors along the highway.
May 4, 2015 | 2 min read
We are deep in the woods standing at the top of a ridge, surrounded by leafless, lifeless trees, as the last dull light fades into charcoal gray. Bracing for the momentous roar of the next gust of wind, it whips and ruffles the tops of the pines below, then blasts up the ridge in waves of long, slow moans at forty miles an hour
Apr 27, 2015 | 2 min read
Starlings and sparrows darted from ground to bush and back again, but one little bird, so like a titmouse in size and color but uncrested, remained perched on a yellowed remnant of last summer's weeds. I was entranced by this slate-colored creature I could not name.
Apr 20, 2015 | 2 min read
I sat on the plank deck of a house in the forest and shared my watercolors and brushes with my nine-year-old nephew. I painted the chestnut-colored ponderosa pines with their puzzle-piece bark. I painted the blue morning sky and white clouds.
Apr 13, 2015 | 2 min read
I'm a bad surfer because I'm not patient enough to watch the sets roll in, but the boys can stand forever, gauging the swell, watching spray flip up off the closeouts, noticing patterns. That spray is the same color as the rime of ice on the driftwood, the silver of refracted light.
Apr 6, 2015 | 2 min read
Before you arrived in our household, we used a coffee mug to get the contents of the cast iron pot to the comfort of our ceramic bowls. I owe you so much.
Mar 30, 2015 | 2 min read
Steer into the skid, my dad had taught me. (No one tells you your steering won't matter.) It was like falling in love, that loss of control.
Mar 23, 2015 | 1 min read
Up in the air are hundreds of fireflies, like scattering sunlight. We—me and the man I've been seeing—pedal our bicycles through dusk on the Keystone Trail in eastern Nebraska.
Mar 16, 2015 | 2 min read
The manager brings me two white sacks too full to close. Steam from fresh chips tickles my face. Salt and oil, a ravenous fragrance. Foil-wrapped fajitas still sizzle.
Mar 9, 2015 | 2 min read
The helicopter flies north. At the same moment, another flash of crimson flutters into view. A male, red-winged blackbird—bands of red on each black wing— darts south toward the marsh.
Mar 2, 2015 | 2 min read
On the back of your motorcycle, somewhere between Leadville and Castle Rock, I plan our future together as we ride along jagged eggshell cliffs overlooking canyons whose gaping mouths open to swallow anything that falls.
Feb 26, 2015 | 1 min read
In southern Spain, in the military, in December, I once danced in a field of sunflowers. Or not danced, so much as sang.
Feb 23, 2015 | 1 min read
Until my father's uncharacteristic awareness, I never looked closely at the beauty of bananas: cylindrical bodies, tapered ends, and sturdy stems attached to inflorescent stalks.
Feb 9, 2015 | 2 min read
I remember childhood school days, just learning about the singularity of snowflakes, no two alike, the teacher said. At home, my sisters and I duplicated her classroom experiment, substituting white paper rubbed thick and waxy with black crayon for the black construction paper she had used.
Feb 2, 2015 | 2 min read
I sat at my grandparent's dining table making clothespin dolls while the crickets whined and Teddy-dog sat by the back door smacking his muzzle at errant flies. The doll project made me feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I clipped red and white checks and velvet strips from grandma’s quilting stash.
Jan 26, 2015 | 2 min read
He awakes crying just after 6 a.m. Hard rain pounds against the windows, and the sky is black as coal, electric with dances of lightning.
Jan 19, 2015 | 2 min read
From the riverbank I watch a great white egret on jointed stilts near a patch of tall reeds, calm as the shallows where it stands. My father would come here the way other people come to morning mass, this river his wide altar.
Jan 12, 2015 | 2 min read
In March, with the sun dropping gold and the slosh of snowmelt soaking our boots, we hauled buckets of sap down from those endless trees to the waiting truck, back and forth till the air turned chill and our shoulders throbbed.
Jan 5, 2015 | 2 min read
By Elettra Pauletto
The war is near, but not here, not now. The air is infused with the spiced scent of eucalyptus, and the smell of burning wood, used to cook the evening meal of cassava and beans, blends smoothly through it. I can hear a firm breeze brushing the treetops with clean, sure movements, and the soft humming of the nuns preparing dinner...
Dec 29, 2014 | 2 min read
By Linda Crowe
Nighttime is the best time. I peek in and watch him sleep in his dim room. Sometimes he talks in his dreams. "Mansion Hills, yeah, yeah. Mansion Hills. Good old 2807," and I know he’s wandering through his house and his neighborhood, a nice enough neighborhood, but with a name far above its station...
Dec 22, 2014 | 2 min read
By Jennifer Alessi
We called it "seek and go hide" because we thought it sounded cooler. In summer we’d play all day long. After quick cereal breakfasts, we’d gather on our rural street—aged six to ten or so, Lee jeans and tattered tees, mosquito bites like satellite maps on our elbows...
Dec 15, 2014 | 1 min read
By Steven Harvey
When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry. She took me into the house and pulled out the large glossy art books with paintings by the Impressionists. “A woman’s body is beautiful,” she told me. I’m almost sure those were her words...
Dec 8, 2014 | 2 min read
By Marissa Landrigan
On Thanksgiving, after the turkey is carved and gutted – after we slice through half of the twenty-pound bird my mother insists on ordering, though there are only ever seven of us for dinner – my father and grandfather return to the half-spent carcass and harvest the rest...
Dec 1, 2014 | 1 min read
By Linda Dunlavy
A thunderstorm breaks this morning. Afterwards, my nine-year-old daughter calls me to come outside and look. I go, resisting the temptation to finish washing the dishes first. My youngest child won’t be young much longer...
Nov 24, 2014 | 2 min read
By Andrea Caswell
As a child, when adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had plenty of answers, but they all sounded like Halloween costumes. Race-car driver. Astronaut. Olympic track star. My father was a rocket scientist for NASA, so the idea that a person could be anything, in this world or beyond, was real to me...
Nov 17, 2014 | 2 min read
By Julie Marie Wade
When I ask her “What was the greatest adventure of your life?”, my grandmother grows quiet. Like all questions I have ever asked, she takes this one seriously...
Nov 10, 2014 | 1 min read
By Riane Konc
Where’d they go? you ask. They just got scared, I say. You lean your head on my shoulder...
Nov 3, 2014 | 2 min read
By Marilyn Borell
I begin fishing with the commercial fly already rigged to my line. Plosh! It strikes water, disappears, and I feel in the line between thumb and forefinger the sinker’s dash-dot-dash progress along the rocky bottom. I hook a sockeye that’s been too long out of saltwater, as red on the outside as its now mushy flesh...
Oct 27, 2014 | 2 min read
By Louise Krug
Depending on whom you talked to, it was either a recumbent bicycle or an adult tricycle. There was a big difference between the two terms. “Recumbent bicycle” sounded like a serious piece of machinery, and called to Louise’s mind old men who wore spandex shorts and sucked packets of energy gel. “Adult tricycle,” though, sounded too special, something for people who could not ride a two-wheeled bicycle, and well, who couldn't do that?...
Oct 20, 2014 | 2 min read
By Andrea Mummert
Swans start making noise about fifty yards away, swimming and flapping their wings, along with long-legged sandpipers. Reverberating sounds, like an old culture’s crafted wind instruments. “This is a perfect moment,” I think, “if only I could get out of my head to really be here—how incredible it would be."...
Oct 13, 2014 | 2 min read
By Robert Root
Our children are up to their knees in the waves before we notice the dark cloud above the lake, a blur of rain below it, moving toward us. As I wade out to them, the cloud comes closer, and we return to the beach. Within minutes the sky darkens overhead and the first chilly raindrops strike bare shoulders and backs...
Oct 6, 2014 | 2 min read
By Kathryn Wilder
My sister and I live on either side of sixty. We've been mothers half our lives. Visiting her in Oregon, Ashland running a steady hundred degrees for days into weeks, we head to Lake of the Woods for the coolness of lake water and wind in the pines. Winding up the mountainside and back through our lives, our four children are never far from our conversation, like our own childhood—childhood, singular, as we shared it, for better or worse, till death do we part...
Sep 29, 2014 | 2 min read
By Tami Mohamed Brown
Sprawled sideways on the ground, I pull an oversized piece of pink sidewalk chalk across the uneven cement, my hand echoing the jerks of the car in an attempt to carefully form letters on a square of pavement next to the bus shelter, the rough concrete cold under my hands...
Sep 22, 2014 | 2 min read
By Asha Dore
My daughter points to her chin and signs, my favorite then points to a moth that bumbles through the air on the other side of the sliding glass door. When the moth lands on the door, she moves toward it. She presses her hand on its glass. Wing against wing. The words she will fling through the twitch of her knuckles, the clasp of her palms, the flap of her wrists. Years and years of words, of stories that reach past hearing, past telling...
Sep 15, 2014 | 2 min read
By Patrice Gopo
To the right of my childhood home, where the grass melted into a thick wood, our tree’s steady wooden arms embraced two sisters and their imaginary games. I remember low branches covered with lichen and soft moss, just a foot or two above dark soil. The dip between branch and trunk served as a sort of woodland lap, a seat to welcome even the most unlikely tree climber...
Sep 8, 2014 | 2 min read
By Christopher Bundy
Watch this, Daddy, you say, and execute another textbook cartwheel before you bounce up the steps to sit in my lap and rest your head against mine. You stare at the darkening sky. A breeze lifts your hair as distant thunder rumbles...
Sep 1, 2014 | 2 min read
By Jennifer Niesslein
We’re in our bunk beds. Summer in western Pennsylvania, windows open. Someone nearby mowed his lawn not too long ago. The carnival is in town behind the fire hall, and earlier tonight, we stuffed ourselves with cotton candy and elephant ears. In the darkness, we hear the barker for the freak show. Come see her! Half-lady, half-baby!...
Aug 25, 2014 | 2 min read
By Jill Talbot
This is our end-of-the-day walk with our dog. A few nights ago, she picked two of the tulips—red-pink petals, black anthers—and put them in a mason jar on my nightstand. Tonight, she asks if she can pick one for herself. And because they're on an island not attached to any home, I say sure...
Aug 18, 2014 | 2 min read
As a child, I would gather flowers by the armful. I wrapped wet newspapers on the ends of broken stems placed inside an empty bread bag and carried them to my schoolteachers. The lilacs on my grandparents' farm grew wild, richest around the crumbling outhouse, unused for years but an area of fertile soil, no doubt...
Aug 11, 2014 | 2 min read
By Sarah Robinson
The wall outside my window is a bending patchwork -- out of plane, out of level, sloping in opposing directions; each one of its red bricks is imperfect like pottery and bread -- shaped by hand and baked in fire. It is a fragment of the thick red halo that once wrapped this whole city, was once a part of its strategic embrace...
Aug 4, 2014 | 2 min read
By Elizabeth Glass
My four-year-old niece, Cheyenne, runs toward me, jumps into my arms when I arrive at her house in the woods. I pull her up, our faces are close. She smiles, raises her hand. "Can I see your pretty teeth?"...
Jul 28, 2014 | 1 min read
By Marion Agnew
A flash of brilliant yellow startles me; a thunk pulls me to the back window. On the porch lies a quivering feather ball, yellow mottled with dark gray-blue and black. A bird hit the window. Its breast feathers pulse, golden and glowing. The bird struggles twice, three times to right itself on bent-toothpick legs, then subsides. "Try again," I whisper...
Jul 21, 2014 | 2 min read
By Sarah Wells
I see the stones I wear on my left ring finger, glistening in the creek. They are new and old, ancient in their creation and recently purchased by my husband of ten years. Five are on my wedding band—diamonds I deemed “stones of remembrance” after we married. Stones like the Israelites carried through and across the Jordan, stones the children could see later and ask, “What do these stones mean?” Back then, I thought, Faith. Hope. Love...
Jul 14, 2014 | 2 min read
By Kelly Morse
The first couple of months, I listened to the dry rattle that preceded the radiator's strange atonal song. I watched ice crawl up the sill, watched storms fling themselves across the prairie, flapping tree limbs across the neighbor's outside light. Recently I realized this half hour is one of the few spent away from the presence of a computer or smart phone...
Jul 7, 2014 | 2 min read
By Jason Schwartzman
You’ve only just met her. This high, you’re trying to trick your brain, trying to distract it, so don’t look up, don’t look down. The river is something you wouldn’t survive. Look outward, lost in the view, or inward, at the barrier between you and the stagnated cars. Here are the very bones of the bridge, you think, fortified with metal. There are scattered shards all around, bolts and screws, strewn across the floor...
Jun 30, 2014 | 2 min read
By Elizabeth Paul
All my life I've sought a thicker skin, seen a silver lining of virtue in each cloudy bruise, looked for the recompense of callous from rejection and strife. But now I think how much better it would be to mature into something so thin skinned as a peach. What confidence and trust and peace would need to swell between such a skin and the hard pit of being to ripen so bold and gentle a fruit. What a firm and tender substance it takes to shine such a fine and fearless face on the world...
Jun 23, 2014 | 2 min read
By Marcia Aldrich
The day my father died, my husband and I drove in the bright, tilted light of autumn, past farms, pastures, and ponds, finally arriving at the orchard. We parked the car, picked up two half-bushel bags to fill, and walked up the trail of powdered dust, fine as confectioner’s sugar, that led to the grove. That’s when I noticed them—my father’s shoes on my husband’s feet...
Jun 16, 2014 | 2 min read
By Pamela Rothbard
As we board the teacups, the song, “Hey Mickey,” blares. It takes me back to college, to crazy humbling love with a boy named Mickey, to being on my own for the first time. The teacup spins and the fair blurs and I’m in high school, free and unworried, dancing with my friends and belting lyrics...
Jun 9, 2014 | 2 min read
By Luanne Castle
I wouldn't be here if my father hadn't sent me in his place. Under the insistent fluorescents and amid the smell of machine grease, a small forklift truck operates to the left, and ahead of me, a couple of men in overalls finger the cigarette packs in their pockets as they chat....
Jun 2, 2014 | 2 min read
By Dawn S. Davies
Not too long ago I was in a crowded public place, trying to slip past people without touching them, when I caught a whiff of the same cologne my ex-husband wore while we were married. I would have thought it would sicken me, revisiting this scent of something so long dead, shoveled down into the underground of memory, the way we bury regret and sadness in order to keep on moving through life...
May 26, 2014 | 2 min read
By Elizabeth Gaucher
In the 1970s, a necklace dangled long and lonely over our Kick the Can circle at the end of the street. Legend had it that a neighborhood boy had flung it, swung his arm like some cartoon pitcher and released the chain into the blue. It had been a soaring serpent, a dragon scraping the moon with its wings...
May 19, 2014 | 2 min read
By Sarah Evans
My son grins, then jumps through the beam of light again and again, back and forth, parting the air and setting the dust on a new lazy path. Eventually he will tire of the game, the sun will move, the sliver will disappear, but the dust will remain, no longer illuminated, but floating just the same...
May 12, 2014 | 1 min read
By Georgie Hunt
I was just talking to my grandmother on the phone. Oftentimes when we speak, she apologizes to me for the scratchiness of her voice. She says she has a cold that refuses to go away. I know this is just how her voice sounds now after the stroke...
May 5, 2014 | 1 min read
By Jessica Jacobs
After a month alone in this New Mexico canyon, five miles from the nearest neighbor with no electricity and no reception, the cabin’s last inhabitant began hearing things. I wonder if I will, too...
Apr 28, 2014 | 2 min read
By Martha Park
When I was a child, though, I was afraid of the shower, so Dad washed my hair every night. Kneeling on the cold tile of the shower, he poured water over my head with a plastic lemonade pitcher...
Apr 21, 2014 | 2 min read
By Sonja Livingston
I’ve taken to collecting driftwood along the river. This is because I don’t have Cable TV and therefore lack better vices..
Apr 14, 2014 | 2 min read
By David Frey
But how did a canary end up here, a driveway to a house on a hill in a forest? How long did it think it could avoid the hawks that prowl these woods, this bird, so unwary we could nearly touch it?
Apr 7, 2014 | 1 min read
By Marsha McGregor
There are times I rock on my porch in this battered chair, listening to life going on in the distance and long to be a part of it. A band playing on the green, the crack of a bat followed by whistles and cheers – even the traffic shushing by can make me wonder why I’m not going anywhere...
Mar 31, 2014 | 2 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
A carrot. What must that have been like, on first discovery? One insistent tug, one long orange tooth slipping upwards. Bright and grubby, sweet. Had I been that cave woman rooting in the dirt, I would have thought anything possible...
Feb 28, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I read a story once about a woman who gives herself over to the night. She encounters no one, just sneaks outside, surveys the dark desert, and comes back changed...
Feb 27, 2014 | 1 min read
Feb 26, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
Today there was the slumbering hush of a house in the morning with everyone else asleep, then the vacant stillness of an empty house in the afternoon.
Feb 25, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I’ve recently dedicated myself to learning the names of trees. Before I never thought it made much of a difference, but the beauty of their names compelled me...
Feb 24, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
Once again, I have decided to grow a garden. These aspirations tend to end in hard green tomatoes, withered basil, and parched soil. Yet today in a surge of optimism we shoveled the sod from our raised bed and lugged home giant bags of dirt...
Feb 23, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
Slow as a turtle his hand reached back and grasped the string and pulled it forward. Then he fell asleep holding the balloon while his great granddaughter batted it back and forth and I thought, over and over, I am in the presence of a very good man...
Feb 22, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
We have a carpet of dandelions over our front lawn--bright yellow heads peppering the cushions of moss and tufts of grass.
I don’t understand why they garner so much resentment, these cheerful and persistent volunteers. I admire them, their spirit...
Feb 21, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
It is so impossible to believe that we will ever grow old--that I could ever be the grandmother at the front window waving goodbye to my grandson and his wife and their brand-new baby. Or that my husband could ever be the man at the roadside restaurant hours later, who, drawn to our table by our smiling child, recited all of the jobs his father had ever worked in his life, though he had died so long ago...
Feb 20, 2014 | 2 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
Were it not for my infant daughter, I would not be home on a Wednesday morning in my pajamas, catching up with yesterday’s dishes and laundry and forgotten clutter...
Feb 19, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
When I arrive early at the office on Tuesdays, the morning sun floods the eastern windows, and I hang my coat and empty my books onto my desk and wait a moment before switching on the overhead lights...
Feb 18, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
No matter what pandemonium has shaken the day, there comes a time a little past nine in the evening when we turn down the lights and close the curtains and our beloved drifts off to sleep in one set of arms or another...
Feb 17, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I would like to be remembered someday for the work I have done--my writing, teaching, music. But I think more than anything I want the children I’ve known to remember that I played with them...
Feb 16, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
So much less would have sufficed. And yet here I am, with everything.
Feb 15, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
We have spent a good bit of time together, this bike and I, mainly summer mornings and Saturday afternoons, the occasional evening whipping down a sidewalk in the dark. But there is something magical about the first ride of spring, when the wind burns your throat and chaps your hands and stings your eyes..
Feb 14, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I was dense today, rushed. I kept losing important things--the keys, the phone, my daughter’s pacifier. I forgot to keep an eye out for something beautiful...
Feb 13, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
When I was twelve years old and so afraid of dying, I wrote in my journal that maybe by the time I grew old I would be ready. Perhaps after ninety years, after approximately 32,400 breakfasts and lunches and dinners and nighttimes, I would be weary of life...
Feb 12, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
Now is the season of every green imaginable--the wet emerald of grass, the pale lime of newly broken buds, the chartreuse shock of fresh algae, the midnight fir of country lakes...
Feb 11, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
This afternoon, before the youths from our church arrived at our house, I was distracted by the scarred baseboards and stained carpets and how much the kitchen walls needed washing...
Feb 10, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
And my work is beautiful, I suppose, if only because I will appreciate my people when they finally interrupt it--when my husband, still in his jacket and hat, sits down at the piano, and my daughter, impatient to sing, clings to me and coos her mournful songs...
Feb 9, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
She reminded me of myself at sixteen--plain but curious, aloof, the kind of girl who imagined much more than she actually lived. When he flitted off and she followed, I had an urge to call after her, assure her that, in a few years, she would be grateful...
Feb 8, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I am thirty-one years old. I have done a few things of which I am proud. But I don’t believe I have ever felt so singularly necessary as I did today..
Feb 7, 2014 | 1 min read
This afternoon a friend brought over, among other things, a garter snake she had rescued from her cat...
Feb 6, 2014 | 1 min read
Today, a work day, I made it through one class and graded half a stack of essays before the daycare called to tell me my daughter had spiked another fever...
Feb 5, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I was struck today by a couple of things--the perfume of hyacinths, a woman with white hair that hung down to the backs of her knees--but I have finally settled on dust...
Feb 4, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
Sometimes it is hard for me to believe in God, heaven, restoration, but it is easy on Sundays, when the Mennonites sing, to suspect that goodness is always paddling about at the edges of things...
Feb 3, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep, she and I curl up on the mattress in the guest room below the big window, and I drift off with her tiny fingers gripping my thumb...
Feb 2, 2014 | 1 min read
By Michelle Webster-Hein
I sliced a beet in half and discovered that it has rings. Rings like you would find on a tree stump to mark its age--one ring, one year...
Feb 1, 2014 | 1 min read
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