We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Joan Murray is the author of Looking for the Parade and editor of Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times. She grew up in a loud, congested South Bronx neighborhood and now lives in a quiet, tiny Hudson Valley hamlet in New York. She has changed some names in her essay to protect privacy.
He never listens to my dreams. “Dreams / aren’t real,” he says dismissively. And he’d prefer it / if I filled out a rebate for a toothbrush instead of starting another / poem.
February 2016How can you help remembering it, all of it, when Christmas comes? Christmas is like drowning and seeing your life before your eyes. Every year — and it’s the darkest week of the year — someone strings lights on a tree, and you stand in front of it with whoever or whatever is supposed to make you happy. And you smile, maybe in honest, naked joy, or maybe you fake it because you got an umbrella.
November 2013Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
SEND US A LETTER