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.
Because it’s embarrassing how many poems you’ve written / about killing yourself.
By Chris BurskOctober 2015Once again a student asks me why I became a writer and this time I say: Because of the staggered, staccato music of my dad’s old typewriter in the basement. Because when he really got going, you could listen to it like a song. Because after a while you could tell if he was writing a book review or a letter just from the shift and drift and thrum of the thing. Because it sounded cheerful and businesslike and efficient and workmanlike and true.
By Brian DoyleJuly 2015Part of Charlotte’s mystique was her complete lack of fear. Even during rough-surf warnings and undertow advisories, she swam out past the green breakers, avoiding skates and jellyfish and rafts of seaweed. I’d see her head bobbing or her arms doing a demonstrative backstroke in the jade swells. She had learned to swim while growing up near Boston. “Wheatley isn’t afraid of anything,” my mother would say proudly. I never had the guts to go out that far.
By Dave ZobyJuly 2015Crossing the border, avoiding the draft, living on the streets
By Our ReadersJuly 2015My mother became a missing person in the summer of 1994, when I was fourteen. The day she disappeared, she told my father and me she was going to the Piggly Wiggly in Lineville, about ten miles from our home in Delta, Alabama. She didn’t come back.
By D.T. LumpkinJune 2015An engagement present from my husband’s parents, / they seemed like something from a yearbook photograph. / I’d have preferred a wrought-iron pendant, costume / beads that caught the sunlight.
By Lyn LifshinJune 2015I can still picture the room where he set up his ham radio. / Homemade furniture. Threadbare rug. A small space heater.
By Catherine FreelingJune 2015Each year on April 25 my mother calls to remind me that it’s the anniversary of my father’s death, so I should take a moment to think about him.
By Peter WitteMay 2015The short story is my brother got arrested. Again. In Pampa, Texas, this time: possession of marijuana and driving under the influence. “A total violation of my rights” is how he put it. They took his passenger into protective custody — “they” being animal control, since his passenger was a snake.
By Thomas BoydApril 2015Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today