Issue 537 | The Sun Magazine

September 2020

Readers Write

Strangers

Sharing a cab, hitching a ride, staying in a marriage

By Our Readers
One Nation, Indivisible

September 2020

Featuring George Gerbner, Stephanie Coontz, Ani DiFranco, and more.

The Dog-Eared Page

The Race

I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life

By Sharon Olds
Quotations

Sunbeams

There had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One [cabinet] minister suggested a curfew: women should stay home after dark. I said, “But it’s the men who are attacking the women. If there’s to be a curfew, let the men stay home, not the women.”

Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel

The Sun Interview

The Most Dangerous Place

Rachel Louise Snyder On The Persistent Problem Of Domestic Violence

Another woman’s husband got a rattlesnake and kept it in a cage at home. He would threaten to put it in the bed or the shower with her. That kind of emotional torture needs no physical violence.

By Tracy Frisch & Finn Cohen
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Les Calanques

I think of that ancient time when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low it sank, the way the rivers carved canyons to replenish it. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.

By Melissa Febos
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Missing Ghosts

My father tells me about the ghosts. He tells me about lying on his stomach in a trench and falling asleep and hearing the voice of a friend who had just been killed shouting, “Brina, look out!”

By Elizabeth Miki Brina
Fiction

Groundhog, Woodchuck, Whistlepig

When he tired of talking, he’d slap a red, hand-shaped conclusion to the quarrel onto my face, pressing his brand upon me, the mark that labeled me as his.

By Samuel J Adams
Fiction

White Folks

I was working in the yard, raking out the sunny patch where I plant tomatoes and cucumbers, and feeling the pot gummy I’d eaten a half hour ago start to come on, announced by an uneasy self-consciousness and a brightening little buzz.

By John Holman
Poetry

In The Days Wherein He Looked On Me

Thursday, sad wet morning, / reading the Gospels on my way to work. / I’d been doing that all year: waiting for the bus / on the front stoop’s top step, / making my way to the same back seat

By Grady Chambers
Poetry

Musings

A stink bug perches on the bristles of my toothbrush. I know more about ventilators than I should. This morning’s coffee tastes luxuriously of earth. As I run through the forest, pileated woodpeckers hammer and cackle from above. I’ve got an ache in the ball of my foot. Some things never give up.

By Christy Shake