Featured Selections
From the Archives
On Being Unable To Breathe
Something was drastically wrong with my lungs: every night, they made sounds like a basketful of squealing kittens. I was always coughing, had pains under the sternum, and could not push a car or even run up a flight of stairs without gasping like an old melodeon full of holes.
March 1988Giving Away Gardens
A Crip gang member approached the woman for whom I was building a vegetable garden — an old woman on welfare, an ex-prostitute, ex-waitress, ex-chicken-butchering plant worker. He said he was tired, pimping was hard work.
December 1990The Unhealed Life
Sitting has become very difficult. Each day, I can manage about three hours in a chair. Consequently, “up time” is of great value. It is cherished, planned for, and jealously guarded.
January 1989Work
Figuring out what you really want, barely making ends meet, looking busy
February 1974
Leaving Austin
It seems she was surprised to hear from me. “Marion,” she wrote back a week later, “I kinda liked you when I met you, and then I learned to love you, but now you’re just the skank that fucked my man when I was struggling to make a family.”
January 2019
You
Early on I thought about wiping your memory. I might as well admit this to you now. I thought maybe if you stopped believing you were something else on the inside, then you wouldn’t be sad anymore. And you wouldn’t change. This was before your body really began to transform.
January 2019
We Need To Talk
Anne Hallward On Breaking Our Silence And Overcoming Shame
We develop courage by coming out of hiding, coming out of the closet, and there are thousands of closets.
January 2019
The Only One She Told
You had the face of a man who couldn’t help understanding everything — all of it, the whole pathetic, tragic human thing — and that draws people in. To me you were a magnet of kindness.
January 2019
Hello, Goodbye
You want to write back, He died. You want your hurt to be the world’s hurt. This pain is what was born tonight. It’s a palpable, physical thing, an object of infinite dimension that can be looked at from many angles, held closely or at a distance, and always there is some new aspect of the sorrow.
January 2019
