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Grief
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
Poetry
Before
It’s not as though I was going on dates, gorging / on the daily bread of sex, before the governor told us all / to stay home.
July 2021Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What Clouds
When I need to think, I clean. I sort and organize. I give away scores of possessions. In my mind I repeat the word away, away, away. I need clear, open space before I can even begin to understand the latest problem I’ve conjured for myself.
July 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Ghost Dogs
What happened next I shoveled into that dark ditch of my psyche, and then I covered it with heavy stones, and it wasn’t until more than twelve years had passed that I remembered what I’d made myself forget.
July 2021
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