We enshrine our relics in museums and churches or keep them safe in our homes, where the sight or touch of them brings back memories and associations. But how much does the authenticity of a relic matter? What if they have no real connection to what or who we remember? […]
What is our responsibility to nature? How do you be true to yourself, your neighbors, your city? What can happen when you turn your brain from consumer toward producer? One man gives it a try and finds more than bargained for in an attempted backyard Eden. […]
A woman infuses her scrawled notes and day-to-day jottings with tenderness. Small words on slips of paper capture moments of youthful passion, maternal devotion, and enduring romance—love notes, the unfinished story of a woman’s life. […]
“Made of Mirrors” is the memoir of a young girl and her body. After years of dancing in a room made of mirrors, countless lessons on the theology of modesty, and the birth of her niece, she unlearns and relearns that her body is worth loving. […]
“The Sandal” begins with the discovery of a wounded cat stranded in the middle of a dark road. The narrator’s feelings of helplessness trigger a memory of witnessing child abuse on a city street and feeling similarly incapable of intervening. This story explores the tension between gendered powerlessness and agency. […]
Part memoir and part computer science lecture, this essay explores how what we think of as inconsequential and what we think of as meaningful interact in a range of experiences, from looking for new music recommendations on Spotify to making sense of a romantic relationship. […]
A childhood best friend, Jesus Freaks, and a dead mother play roles in this story of breached friendship and the pain that mutability and misguided righteousness can bring to a relationship. […]
On Addiction is a snapshot of alcoholism from a child’s perspective. It explores the duality of addiction and the duality of loving someone who is an addict. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, a statement of what it feels like to endure abuse from the person whose role it is to care for you. […]
“Anything but That” begins with an uncomfortable incident caused by her husband’s early dementia. She reminds us that things are not always what they seem. When he forgets her son’s birth story, Paris retells it so that we will know how Courage sets the table for Love. […]
An exploration of the concept and effect of death from a perspective of a girl who, in spite of having grown up in Mexico, had to censor any confrontations with the end of life—her own and her family’s. At the same time, it is a celebration of death within our lives. […]
Deep inside an ancient ruin, writes E. J. Myers, “I came face to face with a deity, and the meeting did not go well.” What does it mean to confront a lost culture’s image of divinity? And in that confrontation, what is the source of the resulting mysterium tremendum? […]
“Cluttered Table” follows Briley Dewayne Jones in the winter of 2018 as he attempts to bring back repressed memories from his time in conversion therapy. […]
You don’t know Zakia? / She is in grave number forty over three, over there. / They put my name on her mud-formed stone and / when I went to see her on that rainy afternoon, my shoes became stuck in a soupy quick sand which pulled me into the city of the always awake (those who no longer yawn after a long day’s labor, or close their ears to dull the screeching sirens of the bombs) / Did you know that Zakia hid in the cavern on the edge of al-Qusoor hill during that summer when the refugees outgrew their stay? […]
I take pen and paper with me everywhere I go, even on a hike, where I walk and scrawl at the same time. I figure you never know what you might find. Today, a chance encounter with a loquacious tough guy sets up a skirmish of madscapes and loosened memories. […]
sunshine bottles, changwon heat-lush and dry,
we leaned against nude cherry blossom trees,
boozed and bullshit late into afternoon.
Tom wanted to wrestle, just to see how it felt
to tangle with an american […]
When her lifelong best friend died suddenly, Taylor Feld found herself severed from her childhood. “Sad Stuff” celebrates that childhood and explores that friendship, before and after death. It’s about how grief transforms, disrupts, and warps. It’s about the levity we find amidst agony. It’s about love outliving. […]
In “Human and Divine,” human limitations collide with divine expectations as a young pastor-in-training botches the duty to comfort a grieving family and bumbles his way through a dying man’s last moments. […]
Dances of naked women in a single file
(Only the darkness covers their nakedness)
Carrying on bare heads small earthenware pots
Smoked in rituals of the night around flaming logs
Singing for Ijogwu, the water goddess
Imbuing the air with tingling
Relics of the ancient dreams
Dawning on the hallows of the grove
Far sprung in the distant forest. […]
You’re at a friend’s art exhibition. The art walk at full swing, paintings are spilling out of doorways. But you are looking around questioning the festivity, wrestling with the value of all this work, and wondering about your own elusive art career, the course artists take, the meaning of it all. […]
outside of richmond, virginia–full day’s / drive north of tampa. bulky old tv’s / and a lobby sharp with chlorine, the pool / absolutely alive with the ignorant / joy of children who know not cheap hotels, / only that there is water deep enough / to drown in, […]
In a letter to her daughter she put up for adoption, Holly Pelesky muddles through the emotional distance from her own mother who tried to leave her father once. An exploration of the tension between mothers and daughters; a reflection on how the choices we make wedge space between us. […]
Getting caught in a sandstorm in Death Valley makes for gritty contemplation. The aptly named National Park puzzles the author with its past secrets and possible previews of the future. Did a professional dancer really perform without an audience for decades in this desert? Will tougher conditions for all homo sapiens force more empathy from us? Join Tom Molanphy in this memorable tour of Death Valley National Park. […]
– Believe it or not, the ancient Chinese 5-Agent Principle accounts for us all. 1/ Water (born in a year ending in 2 or 3) -helps wood but hinders fire; helped by metal but hindered […]
Julia Wright chases a man to another island in the hopes of getting married, but she leaves her two young sons behind. Her mother has cared for Julia’s illegitimate boys for a year when Julia […]
Is it a crime that I liked you for the collapsing breadth of your lips? I keep wondering if my life would have been different had I arrived at the party ten minutes later or […]
I’ve drank in hangers built to maintain the airplanes my grandfather operated on, under the eye of a traffic control tower that’s quiet now in the after-effects of all those solvents. Of course the suds […]
Her father used to cook the turkey on Thanksgiving, but every year it came out of the oven dry and overdone. As a self-proclaimed foodie and frequent cook, she smugly took over the ritual one […]
Beware of the spiritual journey. You may end up in a place that’s not so comforting. I discovered this hard truth at a meditation retreat in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Vipassana Meditation, the time-honored method […]
Each time I go back to Tirana, I see big changes, but I seek out the old parts of town, the narrow streets, talk to people who live there and people who are visiting, and […]
A reflection of Catholicism and Tarot/light occult beliefs; how they intertwine and connect despite being taught they were opposites, and how those teachings affected the writer as an adult. The moon had broken through, just […]
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