Issue 547 | The Sun Magazine

July 2021

Readers Write

The Woods

As a refuge, as a threat, as a place to live

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

Mr. X

One Scientist’s Experience With Cannabis

The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

By Carl Sagan
Quotations

Sunbeams

Is marijuana addictive? Yes, in the sense that most of the really pleasant things in life are worth endlessly repeating.

Richard Neville

The Sun Interview

High Time

Alyson Martin And Nushin Rashidian On The Move Toward Legalizing Cannabis

Cannabis is legal in Canada for both adult and medicinal use. Mexico could legalize cannabis by the end of this year. The United States is going to be squeezed on both sides, with Americans vacationing in Cabo San Lucas and Montreal, using legal cannabis, and perhaps wondering why their own country isn’t moving forward with similar policies.

By Mark Leviton
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Ghost Dogs

What happened next I shoveled into that dark ditch of my psyche, and then I covered it with heavy stones, and it wasn’t until more than twelve years had passed that I remembered what I’d made myself forget.

By Andre Dubus III
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What Clouds

When I need to think, I clean. I sort and organize. I give away scores of possessions. In my mind I repeat the word away, away, away. I need clear, open space before I can even begin to understand the latest problem I’ve conjured for myself.

By Meg Thompson
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Unknowing

Watching my wife, I have finally found the key to the map. I understand why men have spent millennia constructing systems to strip the power from this body: Look how she pulls her spine up to the sky. Look how effortlessly she strings herself between the ordinary and the divine.

By Laura Price Steele
Fiction

Happiness

She liked classic rock and country, while I favored singer-songwriters with whispery voices and acoustic guitars. She teased me that this was typical of kids whose older parents had made them listen to Bob Dylan instead of Michael Jackson. In fact, my parents had usually listened to silence, but I liked her theory anyway, because it suggested that my personality was not my fault.

By Marian Crotty
Poetry

Near The End

Without her glasses she couldn’t see, / so she’d touch her thumb to the bristles / of the two toothbrushes / to figure out which one I’d used, / then she would use the other.

By Grady Chambers
Poetry

A Slip Of Paper

found amid the rolls / of gift wrap: / a Trader Joe’s receipt / from December 23rd / eight years ago

By Michele Herman
Poetry

Before

It’s not as though I was going on dates, gorging / on the daily bread of sex, before the governor told us all / to stay home.

By Jane Hilberry
Poetry

The Buttonhook

My son sprinted to each traffic light / in his black hat and dark Sabbath suit / while the elderly congregation two miles away / waited for him to help lead morning prayers.

By Yehoshua November