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Browse Topics
Grief
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
How We Met And What Happened Next
A middle-aged New England lawyer, you were dressed like a cowboy. This, as much as anything else, underscored that it was over between us. A suede-fringe jacket. Snakeskin boots with stacked heels. An oversized Stetson. What, I said, no spurs?
December 2021
Poetry
FaceTime
I held an iPad for Miguel as he lay in his hospital bed / so he could see his family sheltered at home. / He was suffocating, this man who at the worst of times / would only tell his loved ones, Me siento bien. / All around us the equipment of life / and death was buzzing, humming, beeping, / a stubborn choir of mockingbirds.
December 2021Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Between Notes
I add thirty-eight points to Dad’s side of the scorecard. “You’re kicking my ass,” I say. He gathers the cards and begins to shuffle, his hands clumsy, the cards slipping out onto the table. “Let me,” I say, but he says he can do it, that it’s his turn.
November 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Better
My eyes filled again. Filippo came by and murmured, “Think of the little light in your chest,” and somehow I understood him. I don’t know how. I let the light shine.
October 2021
Readers Write
Sisters
The kind you’re born with, the kind you choose, the kind that teach Catholic school
October 2021
Fiction
Lawrence The Enormous
Slowly, Heidi finished the last of her champagne. She wiped her lipstick from the glass with her thumb, and something stirred inside Lawrence.
October 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Ungrown
The cataracts give her an otherworldly countenance, like a blind prophet who gazes more easily into the past than into the present. She is otherworldly, because she isn’t a part of this time where I dwell — not fully. She floats closer to us and then away again before we can grasp her.
September 2021
Tribute
A Tribute To Chris Bursk
The selection that follows — just a small sample of the fifty-plus poems of his that have appeared in The Sun — display the heart and honesty that first drew us to Chris’s work in 1977. A self-described “compulsive writer,” Chris once said, “I do not wait for inspiration. . . . Some days I watch the page until a few words come — and then I find myself inside the world they invite me into.” That world will be missed.
September 2021
Fiction
Deep Eddy
They fished three tournaments together without breaking the top fifty before I told him to sign me up as his partner instead. At least I knew the difference between monofilament and fluorocarbon. I mean, damn.
September 2021
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