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For years now my brother has gone by the name Captain Smoke, or Smoke for short. I’ve always figured it’s a reference to his chain-smoking cheap cigarettes, but it could be about marijuana. I’ve never asked. I do know that living with our father off and on for more than three decades, as Smoke did, would drive anyone crazy enough to come up with an alter ego.
By Corvin ThomasFebruary 2007My attraction to thick girls began when I was eleven and growing up in the South Bronx. For the most part I hung out with my Uncle Kove, who was ten years older than me and a master of kung fu, gymnastics, and graffiti art. He had the initial attraction to larger girls.
By Akhim Yuseff CabeyFebruary 2007The ultimate consequence of my time in the Seed was an overwhelming self-disgust that lingered for years. Everything seemed a mockery of itself. I fundamentally doubted the authenticity of any conviction — my own or someone else’s. I had acquiesced and adopted the Seed’s judgment for a time, and I could not easily disown it.
By Marc PolonskyJanuary 2007For a long time, during the dirty war in Colombia, when my friends were being shot dead all around me, my goal was just to survive. But after I was tortured, my goal changed. It was not just to survive, but to live a meaningful life. Sometimes, in the ordeal, we find the seeds of our identity.
By Diane LeferOctober 2005Delivering a calf, surviving a rape, arm-wrestling like a girl
By Our ReadersApril 2005On one level mystics and pluralists from different faiths have more in common with each other than they do with fundamentalists of their own religion. Sometimes I feel like I belong to two peoples: the Jewish people and a pluralistic people drawn from all faiths.
By Rebecca DreisingerMarch 2005I’ve been staying with my friend Jackson, and I’m wearing his large red flannel jacket with the blue padding inside. I hope he lets me keep it. It’s a comfortable jacket, and I’d freeze otherwise. The wind is blowing. In Chicago in the winter, the wind chill is the only measurement that matters. I wish Maria would get here before the cold sinks into me permanently.
By Stephen ElliottFebruary 2004The heat that summer was a living thing that tangled around you, tripping you, slowing you to a crawl. New York City was draped in an impressionist haze. It was 1957. I was thirteen and had my first job, stapling tags onto winter clothes in the warehouse of a department store.
By Michelle Cacho-NegreteJanuary 2004I should have listened to my intuition about that job. When I got my PhD in 1995, I was one of only two people from my program who landed professional positions; the other woman was going to teach a heavy load at a state college. I had been offered an endowed chair at a prestigious Baptist college in Georgia.
By Gillian KendallJanuary 2004It was no surprise that the judge had given me the harshest sentence allowed by law. The nuns had always said I was a bad boy, and here was the judge making the same condemnation. I was sure I was convicted mostly because of who I was, expunged from a society that didn’t want people like me in it.
By Jimmy Santiago BacaDecember 2002Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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