Issue 553 | The Sun Magazine

January 2022

Readers Write

Trash

Collecting bottles, tossing leftovers, taking out the garbage

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

Reading From The Desert Fathers At The Laundromat

A certain brother went to Abbot Moses and asked him for a good word. And the elder said to him: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.

By Robbie Gamble
Quotations

Sunbeams

Silence is something that comes naturally when you are watching, when you are watching without motive, without any kind of demand, just to watch, and see the beauty of a single star in the sky, or to watch a single tree in a field, or to watch your wife or husband, or whatever you watch. To watch with a great silence and space. Then in that watching, in that alertness, there is something that is beyond words, beyond all measure.

J. Krishnamurti

The Sun Interview

The Desert Within

Douglas Christie On The Power Of Silence And Contemplation

There was a value placed on listening as closely as possible to the mysterious silence that supports existence, which is both the actual silence of the desert landscape and the silence of the self in contemplation.

By Leath Tonino
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Penned

Drugs can make us do stupid things — though, to be fair, drugs can also help us meet formidable demands. Meth can make you work hard as hell, the way my mom did, doing a full-time job at a farm-equipment company on weekdays and part-time retail jobs on weekends, until it all came crashing down.

By Jonathan Winston Jones
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Devil Takes Back

No one would admit that they’d stolen my phone, so Manager threatened to call a juju priest to settle the issue spiritually.

By Blessing J. Christopher
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Mother Returns, This Time For Good

Six weeks ago my wife walked into our living room to find me curled up on the couch, sobbing. In our twenty-one years of marriage we had experienced a lot of griefs, big and little, but she’d never seen me cry like this.

By Lisa Dordal
Fiction

Disclosure And Consent

I understand that though it was not my choice to listen to the Jackson 5 during the procedure, I will now think of their seminal hits every time I smell isopropyl alcohol in my vicinity.

By Hanna Bartels
Fiction

The River Corrib

Lovely things, the railings. When it’s raining just right — half raining, the way it so often does here — the spiderwebs spun across the rails collect mist and shine, so that the Corrib looks like it’s swathed in sequined cloth.

By Mohan Fitzgerald
Photography

A Thousand Words

January 2022

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 Eric Davidove
Poetry

Test

This time my mother got it all right. / The year, the month, and the day. / The president’s name. Where she’s staying. / So she thinks she’s going home. / When I stop by the rehab center, she tells me / to make sure the heat’s turned up, / the cable switched on again, fresh / milk in the fridge.

By John Bargowski
Poetry

Quarantine Poem #17

Staying at home with my books and out-of-tune piano / and a cat who loves me only when she’s out of food is nothing new. / I’m OK. Thank you for asking. I have become quite used to sending / thoughts and prayers to those who keep the world going round / while I spin old punk records — Dead Kennedys, Buzzcocks, Crass — / lamenting days long past.

By Norman Minnick