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A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Mind the Gap

Melissa Deckman on the Challenges and Strengths of Gen Z

The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.

Sunbeams

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?

Martin Luther King Jr.

still lives

The omen comes in the ruin of a robin’s egg on the sidewalk: fractured blue splattered with the pink makings of a flightless thing. A plum membrane of skin stretched over eyes like bruises. I make the mistake of looking back at this small disaster, and then the calamity of it fingers the threads of my morning.

Misunderstandings

Missed calls, misheard lyrics, mistaken identities

Transvestite Freak

Many confident, gorgeous men stare at me from the walls. They all seem to be wearing makeup. This is what a man can be too, I imagine them whispering. I’m nervous, but I want what they have.

Wedding Colors

Somehow my bubble went unpunctured for twenty-four years, allowing me and my coffee-colored skin to arrive in Hartford, Arkansas, blissfully ignorant of what my Blackness might mean in this place.

Athens, Revised

Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her.