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A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face
By Our ReadersJuly 2024I ask the youngish eye doctor why my eyes itch / and burn and why new floaty bits / of paramecium-shaped debris swim // through my view each day
By Hayden SaunierJune 2024I just read The Diary of Anne Frank, about a girl who hid from the Nazis. There are many similarities but also differences between us: When she started the diary, she was thirteen, and I will be thirteen in August. We are both girls, and, like her, I have many secrets and depressed emotions. I never hated my mom the way Anne hated hers, but last spring I came close.
By Marian CrottyJune 2024June 2024There are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.
Rosalynn Carter, quoting a caregiver colleague
Life is funny. For some it’s quickly snuffed out. For others it burns on and on, like a fire fed by kerosene. Stella can’t seem to die. Though she’s eighty-four and can’t walk, and her weight is almost the same as her age, still her heart beats on and her blood courses through her body, the cells scrubbing and knitting like faithful housewives.
By Sybil SmithJune 2024Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.
By Mark LevitonJune 2024Gobbling tortilla chips with gleeful abandon, I forget to chew, and one triangle catches in my throat. Instantaneous panic. Sudden, deep, mammalian fear.
By Leath ToninoMay 2024What if I’d said yes? Imagine I go home with you that night, / when I’m twenty, and when we wake up in the morning, / you ask, You know you snore? You laugh at my / nighttime retainer, which I’ll wear for the rest of my life, and say, You look hot.
By Chrys TobeyMay 2024Any comedian will tell you, losing an audience’s attention for even a split second can snowball. Handle it wrong, and you may die onstage like Elvis on the toilet, like Lenny Bruce beside the toilet, like William Howard Taft in a bathtub near a toilet.
By Andrew GleasonMay 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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