Issue 551 | The Sun Magazine

November 2021

Readers Write

Brothers

The good-looking one, the one in need, the one that almost was

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

Miracle Fair

One of many miracles: / a small and airy cloud / is able to upstage the massive moon.

By Wisława Szymborska
Quotations

Sunbeams

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. . . . I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

Rachel Naomi Remen

The Sun Interview

The Best Defense

Paul K. Chappell On The Urgent Need For Peace Literacy

The most dangerous weapons of war in the twenty-first century are not bullets and bombs; they are the weaponization of this rage, mistrust, alienation, and other tangles of trauma, which make all forms of violence more likely.

By Leslee Goodman
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

On Time

Music is simply decorated time.

By Sparrow
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Life, Without Imitation

Some nights, when medication and meditation have failed to put me to sleep, I think of the relatives who abandoned my family to become white people.

By Caille Millner
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Relationship Tips

I put aside the previous rejections and try again. This time I don’t mess around with coffee. I don’t want anything that might allow her a graceful out or result in a request to be friends. I have friends. I ask her on a dinner date.

By Sandra Gail Lambert
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Between Notes

I add thirty-eight points to Dad’s side of the scorecard. “You’re kicking my ass,” I say. He gathers the cards and begins to shuffle, his hands clumsy, the cards slipping out onto the table. “Let me,” I say, but he says he can do it, that it’s his turn.

By Emily Rinkema
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

OR-93

The wolf has traveled a thousand miles in two months. A director of a wolf-advocacy group said his arrival here is “something akin to the [first] moonwalk.”

By Teddy Macker
Photography

A Thousand Words

November 2021

A new feature in the magazine, A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Photograph By Dan Pearlman
Poetry

Fifteen Strokes Of Luck

The first was that I was no longer in pain; I could sleep. / The second was that I was finally able to love: all my life I had been more or less shut. / The third was that I lived near a pond. Watching the mallards dunk made me laugh. I was happy looking at dragonflies and even their empty exoskeletons, their shells shaking a little in the wind.

By Ellery Akers
Poetry

Jewish Community Center Entrance, July 1971

It’s dark and I don’t feel / at all well and my mother / will soon arrive to take me / home and the overripe aroma / of the hedges with the tiny / white flowers is making me / want to throw up but I’m / not alone because a fellow / counselor-in-training, / my first friend who is a boy, / has left the camp sleepover / to wait with me

By Michele Herman
Poetry

Steady Daylight

Today in heaven / my father turned 105. / Finally working steady daylight, / he’s got it knocked: / eight to four, / double time and a half, / no asbestos, / no shoveling slag / on the open hearth, / no boss, / thirteen weeks vacation annually, / kingdom come. / The union up here takes zero shit.

By Joseph Bathanti