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I count out the dog’s pills — one for pain, / one for swelling, five to oil those scraping joints — / a rosary I pray will go on forever. I believe / I am staving off the inevitable.
— from “Devotion”
By K.T. LandonSeptember 2022You’d donated most of your organs, so the body in your coffin was basically a scarecrow version of you. . . . Thank God they don’t do brain transplants, I thought. Anybody who’d gotten your brain would’ve woken up from surgery a total asshole. I heard you laughing at this. I could remember your laugh really well. It was a letdown that I could hear it only in my head.
By John Paul ScottoSeptember 2022Because my car is twenty years old / and the gizmo that goes ding ding ding / when you leave the lights on / has been busted for at least a decade, / I’m always contending with a comatose battery.
By Alison LutermanSeptember 2022Frisch: You found about a 1 percent decline in sperm counts per year.
Swan: Yes, which would mean a 50 percent decline over fifty years. We’re actually seeing something a little steeper than that.
By Tracy FrischSeptember 2022How can I find a way to praise / it? Do the early inventors & embracers / churn with regret?
By Elizabeth BradfieldSeptember 2022To live long enough in this world means to learn to nestle the twins of grief and hope in your arms. I tuck the bottle of fertility medication next to the black dress I bought for my mother’s funeral. We plant a white pine in the yard, in view of the window of our empty nursery.
By Jacquelyn GillSeptember 2022The one where you blow your head off with the gun, the gun / I searched for, the gun you fired over the phone while you / stayed silent to make me think you’d finally done it.
By Alison McGheeSeptember 2022My uncle finally kicked me out, and I was living in the twenty-four-hour Kroger on Fairhaven Avenue in Tustin, California, pilfering food and sleeping at the coffee bar. One day Mr. Muniz pushed a cart through the frozen-foods section where I was fanning myself, and he stopped. I’d gotten ugly, my face wasn’t right, and I could tell he was thinking, What the hell?
By Bruce McKaySeptember 2022A fifth-grade bully, a blossoming romance, a late-night crash
By Our ReadersSeptember 2022A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
September 2022Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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