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My mother, my stepfather, my five-year-old brother, and I lived in a sunny three-room tenement in Brooklyn, New York. The walls of our foyer were lined floor to ceiling with my mother’s books, and I read as many as possible, entering a trancelike state in which everything else floated on the edges of my awareness.
By Michelle Cacho-NegreteApril 2008Five packs of Red Vines, Uncle Wiggily’s Garden Patch, Jackie Robinson
By Our ReadersApril 2008A tattoo, a stolen kiss, the Gulf of Tonkin incident
By Our ReadersAugust 2007I was thirteen in 1956. There was a lot going on in the world that year. Elvis Presley released his first album, the U.S. exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll, and the Soviets invaded Hungary to put down an anticommunist revolution. There was also something going on in my house. I was only half aware of it, but it formed a kind of constant undercurrent, like a noise that your brain has not yet registered hearing.
By Madeena Spray NolanJuly 2007At fourteen, shoplifting is fun. Like a sport, it takes a lot of skill. I have to be quick and gutsy and able to fool people. I put on my good-girl face and wear my cargo pants because they have deep pockets.
By Bella Mahaya CarterApril 2007Like most older neighborhoods, ours had a haunted house. Mrs. Licht and her grown daughter lived in it. (Mr. Licht had died many years earlier.) The lawn was unkempt and overgrown with weeds, the windows had wrought-iron grillwork over them, and the green paint on the clapboards had cracked into a scaly pattern like the skin of a lizard.
By Howard LuxenbergFebruary 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 2007January 2007The family seems to have two predominant functions: to provide warmth and love in time of need and to drive each other insane.
Donald G. Smith
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