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I hospitalized an obsessive-compulsive depressive who had been trying to kill himself for four years. Fifty times he’d removed his head from the noose to check the lock on the door, change the color of his socks, tie a better knot.
By Adele LevinJanuary 1992A thousand stars, a billion. Thundering silence. It’s Tom who reaches over. He puts his hand on my chest and says, “I wish we had more grass,” and leaves it there. Till I curl up beside him.
By Andrew RamerDecember 1991“Here, take this and get out of my sight already,” he’d yell, pushing money into my shirts and pants. I learned to keep my opinions to myself. I also wore clothes with lots of pockets.
By Janice LevyDecember 1991If you make effort, beings seen and unseen will help. There are angels cheering for us when we lift our pens, because they know we want to do it. In this torrential moment we have decided to change the energy of the world. We are going to write down what we think.
By Natalie GoldbergDecember 1991Somehow the knowledge of his identity passed through to me in the moment I stood there locked to him. It passed through his knuckles and into my skin. It burned out at me through his eyes.
By Robert KoehlerDecember 1991Russia, once the poor turned to you, but you betrayed them. You told them how hard it was. You went on vacation and said help would arrive on the next train. In the bitter cold, they waited at the station, while their children starved, and still they waited.
By Sy SafranskyNovember 1991When you have grown from infancy to adulthood in one home. . . . The shape of the rooms becomes indistinguishable from the shape of one’s consciousness. I’m thirty-four years old, and that house and land are still the setting for half my dreams each night.
By Betsy SharpNovember 1991What is in a body? We see flesh with blood going through, but who knows what it is? I never asked before. All my life I saw a body as just a body, this bit of flesh we’re put inside the day we come alive.
By James JankoNovember 1991A tiny duckling, a bullethole in the ceiling, chocolate chip cookies and bomb craters
By Our ReadersNovember 1991Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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