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.
Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing
Browse Topics
Friendship
Poetry
Preparations
You can prepare for some things. / Others fall on you like / meteors ripping open the sky.
October 2022Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Hey, Man
You’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.
September 2022
Fiction
Sticks And Stones
In 1986 I was the Horse Girl of St. Margaret’s, the tallest girl in sixth grade, with dark-brown hair I tossed like a mane.
August 2022
The Dog-Eared Page
Four Poems From Ancient China
Call next door, ask / neighbors on the west if they can spare / any wine, and suddenly a jarful comes / across the fence — fresh, unfiltered. We / open mats beside Meandering River’s / long currents, crystalline winds arrive, / and you’re startled it’s already autumn.
July 2022
Poetry
Love In Our Seventies
We don’t take each other for granted, because we know we’re old. Sometimes when we’re bird-watching — field guides, binoculars — happy to be looking at egrets or green-winged teal, I think, One of us is going to die first.
July 2022Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Beacon
I felt a flash of hope for you, even though I knew — because of the distant and resigned tone of your voice — that you were going to die soon.
April 2022
Fiction
Saved
It was true what Mrs. Berry said: no one expected to see an old woman in a muscle car, a red and black Mustang convertible with a scooped hood and an engine that ran with a throaty hum.
April 2022
Photography
We Were All Just Kids, Really
It was never wholly about music; it was also about being part of a community of like-minded misfits and broken dolls. I felt a responsibility to capture these bands and that world specifically because it seemed like nobody else was.
April 2022
Fiction
Sometimes Things Just Don’t
We always went to Dancing Pins because it was cheap and we could spend all day there, easy, no complaints. We’d go when our mom was drunk and didn’t have anyone to sleep with. She brought her own vodka in a paper bag, like it wasn’t obvious.
March 2022
Subscribe & SaveSAVE 52%
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today