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When we arrived in Florida, my in-laws found us at the baggage claim, and it seemed at first that the visit could be a success. They were touchingly nervous, and they’d dressed carefully: Floyd in pressed khakis and Dolores in a coral dress. Her dyed hair escaped from her scarf, and when she leaned close, I could see the fabric was patterned with parrots. She likes birds, I thought. Something to talk about later.
By Janice DealDecember 2009Most Romanians hated winter, because it meant waiting in line for food in front of empty grocery stores, waiting for the daily two hours of hot water, and sleeping in their clothes while using their kitchen ovens to heat their homes. And most hated the snow, because it made the city look dirty. I liked the snow, because when it fell, everything was suddenly quiet, and when it stopped, time seemed to stop as well.
By Florin Ion FirimițãDecember 2009We knew we had a sister who was dead. Her little footprints and handprints, in black ink on a stiff piece of ocher cardboard, were hidden in a deep box above our winter coats in the room off the kitchen. Her weight and length were scrawled in blue under the tiny footprints, in our mother’s handwriting.
By Doug CrandellOctober 2009You’re on 14th Street headed west / to buy a new seat for your bicycle. / In Casper, Wyoming, a hospice nurse / backs her car out of your parents’ / driveway.
By Meg KearneyOctober 2009His palsied hands shiver as he twists the fishing line one, two, three, four times around, then threads it through. He pulls the tangle of line tight and drops the blue-silver lure. It swings between us. “That’s a fisherman’s knot,” Pa Peters tells me, and he chuckles and pushes his thick glasses up the bridge of his bent nose. “That’s how you do it.”
By Joe WilkinsSeptember 2009My dad flew to Paris to rescue me, armed with music and marijuana. I was in France to study the language as part of my college major. Before that I’d spent a few months at a Buddhist monastery in India, where I’d experienced for the first time since childhood what it was like to be happy every day, to enjoy waking up each morning.
By Hannah Tennant-MooreAugust 2009In April I believe only in lilac, dogwood, and wisteria — such suddenness and color, indecency and mess, / always opening and opening, and fading, and falling away.
By Joe WilkinsAugust 2009Access to water, a moose disappearing into the trees, the Israeli security fence
By Our ReadersAugust 2009Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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