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.
In grad school I had a writing teacher who’d completely cream my essays. / Cross-outs and tracked changes. He took me at my word / when I said I wanted to get better.
By Emily SernakerApril 2022At Woodstock, at a school in Nepal, at an all-ages punk show
By Our ReadersApril 2022It sweeps and arcs across my path / almost every day on my walk to the cafe, / under sun or cloud, its red / seeming lit from inside, a brightness / bold as the lipstick my mother wore
By Andrea PotosMarch 2022November 2021Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. . . . I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.
Rachel Naomi Remen
The first was that I was no longer in pain; I could sleep. / The second was that I was finally able to love: all my life I had been more or less shut. / The third was that I lived near a pond. Watching the mallards dunk made me laugh. I was happy looking at dragonflies and even their empty exoskeletons, their shells shaking a little in the wind.
By Ellery AkersNovember 2021October 2021For almost everyone the notion of home is usually a positive one. It is the known as opposed to the unknown; it is certainty as opposed to uncertainty. . . . It is the familiar and predictable. Better that than the unknown, the unpredictable, with a stranger imposing strange ways. It is also the primordial sense of the need for security, of being held, of belonging.
Stephen Shaw
The kind you’re born with, the kind you choose, the kind that teach Catholic school
By Our ReadersOctober 2021A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
By Margo SteinesNovember 2020July 2020To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task . . . tremendous and foolish and human.
Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Dear Ross: How can you miss on purpose? If I’m late getting back on defense, you’ll bounce the ball off the bottom of the rim and catch the “rebound” for a point. Alone under the basket. Missing.
Dear Noah: Bouncing the ball off the bottom of the rim is, as you say, a poorly missed shot, but also a perfectly missed one, because it results in a point in our game, which means it’s a way for me to stay on the court. If there were a way I could stay on the court without cheating — without those perfectly, beautifully missed shots — believe me, I would do it.
By Noah Davis, Ross GayJune 2020Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today