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At fifteen I know the word molestation, but it is something done to you by strangers, not brothers who build you forts and make homemade peanut-butter cups.
By Katherine LaBelleOctober 2014The day that it happened, / my teacher had written crap on the bottom of my first poem. / I wanted to throw it into the Hudson / where it would sink with its no / under the gulls, the garbage scows, and the litter.
By Ellery AkersSeptember 2013When I was twenty-four years old, it looked to me as if America were coming down. It was 1979, and there was runaway inflation, long lines for gasoline, a nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island. Men were curling their hair and wearing high-heeled shoes, and the Soviets were still poised to bomb us off the map.
By Poe BallantineJune 2013There are four types of brick. I remember two of them: pavior and stock. Our row house was all brick with ledges near the roof, four stories up. Pigeons liked to make nests there, but it was stupid; the ledges were too shallow, and with the first strong gust of wind their nests blew down. Still, year after year, they did it. Optimists, those pigeons.
By Mary Jane NealonJanuary 2013— from “Wondrous” | I’m driving home from school when the radio talk / turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit / the here and now of the freeway at rush hour
By Sarah FrelighAugust 2012Catching fireflies, caring for a newborn calf, hearing a slamming door for the first time
By Our ReadersApril 2011You are not ashamed. You are stunned: By this new thing that he left behind, that spread through you like blood in those hours he was with you. By how easy it is to die.
By Jackie Shannon HollisMarch 2010A noodle shop in central Burma, The Phil Donahue Show, the Tet Offensive
By Our ReadersJanuary 2010Go-boy made a knife for his girlfriend. He called it an ulu, and I had never seen anything like it before. The ulu was an Eskimo fish-cutting knife. It was about the size and shape of the bill on a Lakers cap. When Go showed me how an ulu was used, he held its handle and carved up the air with card-dealing slashes. He said Eskimos never wasted any meat because of this knife.
By Mattox RoeschSeptember 2009Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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