Browse Topics
Identity
The Hat
“You found it?” I could tell my answer had pleased him. By then the cashier was ready for me. The checkout had two conveyor belts, and I pushed my cart around to the belt on the opposite side, relieved to be out of close proximity to the man, who now stood across from me.
January 2024
Anger Management
Dr. B. spun a finger in the air, his signal to let the games begin. I think I called Michael a “no-good fucking loser,” a put-down one of my bosses had once leveled at me. I watched Michael’s hands form fists and the whites of his eyes get bigger.
January 2024
Falling Action in Hoboken
There is something hard in me, a seedlike malignancy. I can’t say how it got there or when, but I can’t remember the last time I felt pure love or sadness or joy. It’s always a mix of things, some confused and muted in-between.
January 2024
I Was Carrying a Velvet Wingback through the Streets of Houston
Who isn’t, at twenty-three, sexy? In never-been-kissed / cutoffs with buzzed hair. Did I even have a beard yet? / I looked like the virgin I was—was, at least, in all / the interesting ways. “Chicken,” they would’ve said / back then.
January 2024Macho Baby
I know that what we call hate is sometimes love that was pushed under a rock, love deprived of light and water. “Tell me to what you pay attention,” writes the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his book Man and Crisis, “and I will tell you who you are.” How much love is putrefying inside boys this very moment, starved for nourishment?
December 2023
Key Marco Cat
Legs folded / under its body, / the figure sits / straight up, alert, / an incarnation / of stillness, of eyes / looking everywhere / at once. I look at / this possibility of me/ rooted in the dark, / invisibly still.
December 2023La Diáspora
People of sub-Saharan African descent have lived in what is today Mexico since the early days of Spanish colonization. . . . Today there are only a handful of communities left with large Black Mexican populations. The Costa Chica, the coastal region of southern Guerrero and northern Oaxaca, boasts the greatest number. . . . My experience in Juárez and the relative scarcity of information about Mexico’s Black communities made me curious to visit the Costa Chica myself. So a few years later I did. I ended up staying there for six months, forming friendships and documenting the residents’ daily life. This is a selection of photos from my time there.
December 2023
Basements
I was considered “good,” considered a “good influence.” It amazed me — like the cool feeling of Marshall’s tongue on my labia had amazed me — that I could possess all of these qualities; that I could be both warm and cold, virtuous and defiant; and that someone could love me for all of it.
December 2023
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
The most important December in Sun history is, well, this one: the month in which Sy Safransky, after fifty years of laboring to put out the magazine he founded, steps away from his desk and becomes, deservingly, editor emeritus.
November 2023
20, 40, 60, 80
Middle-aged people shrink, crease, fade, and, if they’re lucky, slowly lose the desire to be noticed, the way we once lost our childhood taste for Necco Wafers or Pez. My desire to be seen is gradually being replaced by the desire to see: the faces of those I love, the cardinal in the bush, the socks of the woman with multiple sclerosis who swims at the Y.
November 2023
