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Fear
Don’t Panic
Rebecca Priestley On Finding Hope Amid The Climate Crisis
I’m not talking about burning the system down. . . . I simply think that the things we can do to respond to climate change will also make the world a better place for most people.
May 2023Observations On Ice
We have been repeatedly warned about the dangers posed by calving ice. Yet I still hope to see it: a spectacle of devastation. Reveal yourself to me, I demand. The glacier answers with silence.
May 2023On Seeing A Sex Surrogate
Pounding the keys with my mouth stick, I wrote in my journal as quickly as I could about my experience, then switched off the computer and tried to nap. But I couldn’t. I was too happy. For the first time, I felt glad to be a man.
March 2023The Patron Saint Of Traffic Lights
My child is in the backseat with her mother / and can’t understand what’s happening, / keeps forgetting we’ve already told her / that she fainted and hit her head hard / on our living room’s stone floor
February 2023Captain’s Log
7:17 — Wife yells, Oh, God, look! Dusk now, harder to see. What? I say. Bear! she says. To right, where riverbank gives way to pasture, large beast lurks in shadow of tree. Dark, terrible beast, now moving slightly toward us. Large, dark beast says, Moooo.
February 2023Sins Of The Mother
Although I still identify as a Christian, I am endlessly unpacking and discarding the church teachings of my childhood. My belief in God is no longer built on the fear of what will happen to me after I die.
January 2023Good Housekeeping
How could she tell her son that although she bathes, puts on clothes, laughs at Colbert, and has conversations with people, people don’t know. They don’t have a clue they’re talking to a bunch of scattered molecules trying to imitate a human being.
April 2022Ocean City
I’d never been taught how to say no to an adult — nor even to consider the possibility that it might be necessary to do so.
February 2022The Count
I counted because I had told myself that if the count was right, my mother would be spared. My father would not die. My older sister, Jeanne, would make it to high school. But only if I kept the count.
January 2022The Unknowing
Watching my wife, I have finally found the key to the map. I understand why men have spent millennia constructing systems to strip the power from this body: Look how she pulls her spine up to the sky. Look how effortlessly she strings herself between the ordinary and the divine.
June 2021