We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Every hour or so I take a break and go out to the garage. Our sixteen-year-old cat is curled on a blanket there. He has an awkward cast on one of his hind legs. I broke the leg three days ago when I accidentally backed over him with my car.
By Michael ChitwoodJune 2004Having failed to pay the rent for three months, my mother, my little brother, and I came home to find an eviction notice on our trailer. The front door was barred.
By Steve FellnerMay 2004I opened my heart, and the world rushed in. But my heart wasn’t big enough to hold the world’s pain, and my heart broke. After that, I couldn’t get my heart to close again: not completely, not for long.
By Sy SafranskyMay 2004Last November I published the following poem in The Sun: If you are / dissatisfied / with / this poem / IN ANY WAY, / return it to: / Sparrow, P.O. / Box 63, / Phoenicia, / NY 12464.
By SparrowMay 2004April 2004Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
Philip Roth
How odd that I still distance myself from my feelings, as if sadness itself were my enemy, a smooth-talking terrorist with one foot in the door.
By Sy SafranskyApril 2004Once, while passing notes during a chemistry lecture, Jane and I decided we would each write on a piece of paper what articles of clothing we had not taken off on our last date. When we unfolded each other’s notes, we had both written the same thing: socks.
By Theresa WilliamsApril 2004I was walking on the ice. Let me say up front that I am not a foolish woman, that the ice was thick and I was dressed warmly. Let me add that, though I do drink too much on occasion, I wasn’t drinking that morning. I’d just had one teeny-tiny hit of good pot. That was all.
By Sybil SmithMarch 2004Leading up to the war, I doubted the value of anything but antiwar poetry. I thought all my nature poems were . . . well, stupid. But the moment the antiwar movement failed and the bombing began, I knew how important poems about birds and trees and loneliness and sex and food and joy were. I knew those little poems were weapons in the war for human kindness.
By Diana S. McCallMarch 2004January 2004What was any art but a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself — life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today