Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Elisha Emerson
You held my eyes from the back of Advanced Studies of Dramatic Literature as if you were a tousled debauchee from an unrated foreign film, the kind with a sophisticated plot line, sure, but also plenty of straps, leather, and velvet. Years after our son’s autism diagnosis and days after your own, we sit at… Read more »
By Lynda Rushing
It’s morning and I am about to open the refrigerator when I see my mother squatting on the floor, shaking a thin line of white powder along the baseboards. Her face is furrowed in concentration, her forehead slicked with sweat. I’m ten, it’s the first day of summer vacation, 1967, and a long stretch of… Read more »
By Julia McKenzie Munemo
We sit in a line on a bench in Washington Square Park, my first son, me, my second son. Suitcases flank us—two of us are headed to the train station and on back home. One of us will stay here in the city of his birth. I can’t hear their voices because what I’m thinking… Read more »
By Lisa K. Buchanan
A former public-school teacher, she was fluent in multiple languages and said she had a graduate degree. Born into the post-war prosperity of the 1950s, she was raised in an upscale San Francisco neighborhood, three generations of her family in the same single-family Edwardian, recently valued at up to four-million dollars. Her father had been… Read more »
By Diana Tokaji
Pliny, the Elder, a Roman naturalist (AD 23-79), believed Borage, or Starflower, to be an anti-depressant, and it has long been thought to give courage and comfort to the heart. 20 Infusions 1. Suddenly I cannot imagine offering my arm. The German nurse with her V-neck whites, her fair hair and kind… Read more »
By Ashley Memory
The first day I ever heard the name Cody Lee Moffitt was in late January. I’d just finished a lunch of peanut butter and crackers when my phone beeped. A friend, Ray Kearns, had posted a note on our church’s message board. There’s a man on the loose who wrecked on Gopher Lane. Drug deal… Read more »
By Amory Rowe Salem
1. My father was twelve when he learned that his mother had kept a part of herself hidden. Five of them were standing at a Customs desk at Orly airport in Paris in 1957: my father, his older brother, his younger sister, their parents. The Customs officer held the family’s passports like a royal flush,… Read more »
By Zibiquah Denny
“It’s more than just a rock to us, it’s a stepping stone to a better future.” –John Trudell as told to a reporter after the takeover of Alcatraz Island They kicked in the doors at the crack of dawn. It was the first direct action by the Milwaukee American Indian Movement (AIM)… Read more »
By Richard Jeffrey Newman
1. I never knew his name. When I picture him now, I see a man somewhere between my age—I’m fifty-nine—and ten or fifteen years younger. I don’t think of myself as old, but I think of him as “the old man in my building,” because that’s what he looked like to my twelve-year-old eyes.… Read more »
By Lena (Sunada-Matsumura) Newlin
Two halves. Together do they make a whole? United, do they intertwine, mix, meld? Half. Can half alone, by itself, be whole? Can half be complete? What do you get if you double half? Is there such a thing as a whole half? What does it feel like to be half? What does it… Read more »
By Alexis Lathem
There is a farm in the heart of the Green Mountains that sits by a winding road near a bend in the river, its two-hundred-year-old brick house lording over the valley, a backdrop of forested mountains behind it. It is nestled in the landscape, as a New England farm is supposed to be. A… Read more »
By Trisha M. Cowen
May 27, 2020 Today, we dig. Bees circle our heads and our hands, inspecting our movements in the grass, their grass. Ella, my fairy-like child, wants to plant a whole field of sunflowers on our front lawn. We have purchased a single pack of seeds. Perhaps it is too late in the season to plant… Read more »
By Dave King
“Oh, wow,” says my husband. “I blacked out.” He and I are sprawled on our bed; we’ve just had sex, and I’ve got my arm around him. “You dozed off,” I say. “Both of us did.” It’s the Monday after Pandemic Thanksgiving, a gray day in upstate New York. A kitty circles the bed, the… Read more »
By Baron Wormser
Author’s Note: All quotes are from the Modern Library College Edition published in 1981 and originally published in 1856 under the title, History of Plymouth Plantation. My title comes from a poem by Richard Michelson that is the title of his book published in 2015 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. As a résumé of… Read more »
By Jen Dupree
You’ve been having some trouble with your bowels, so we’re at the gastroenterologist’s office. The nurse leads us into an exam room and says, “Okay, just hop up on the table.” I laugh because I think she’s making a joke. It’s clear you can’t hop. If she looked closely, or looked at you at all,… Read more »
By Clara Bosak-Schroeder
I came to the Brooklyn Museum to see Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party but it was the work of Judith Scott that stopped me in my tracks. I do not like sculpture much, I do not know how to feel about it. My mother had died three years before and I was thinking of her when… Read more »
By Celeste Mohammed
I was initially surprised when the Solidarity Book Project, which is a social justice initiative of Amherst College, Massachusetts, invited me, a Trinidadian writer, to contribute to a communal monument to solidarity. However, when I read the Project’s espoused aim of pushing against legacies of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism, I had to concede the… Read more »
By Jane Shiau
In 2014, my parents announced they were leaving Massachusetts and retiring to California. I marched into my therapist’s office and flung myself onto the couch to cry. I couldn’t believe they were abandoning me. Worst of all, I told my therapist, was that now I was going to have to be an adult and buy… Read more »
By Lance F Mullins
I am a Christian minister who once spent the night with a sex worker named Adam. Although, to be technical about it, I was a first-year seminarian – not yet a card-carrying minister – when I spent the night with this sex worker. And since we’re being technical, I didn’t actually spend the night with… Read more »
By Jill Frances Johnson
We’d driven north for five hours straying off the highway to admire the countryside along billboard-free roads. I’d point to white houses with green trim, that one, like that, imagining a future when we’d own a house instead of renting. Thom’s new broadcaster’s license was in his pocket. One suitcase, orange crates of LP records… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
We didn’t arrange for a week of travel in the south of Wales in order to trail in some literary wake of Dylan Thomas. Anna wanted to relive some of her travels during her university days at Cambridge, and she thought I would be thrilled with the opportunity to hike through rugged greening landscapes. But… Read more »
By Herb Harris
When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left Langston Hughes The more I stared at the drawing, the more alien and unrecognizable it became. I had labored over every line, but it was not the person I… Read more »
By Roz Roseboro
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 I swirl my Sonicare in small circles to remove the invisible plaque the dentist assures me is there. Diligent dental hygiene practices seem a small price to pay to have my natural teeth for the rest of my… Read more »
By Steve Fellner
–LGBT civil rights lawyer and environmental activist David Buckel engaged in self-immolation to protest using fossil fuels for their destruction of global welfare. I dream of sounds: a body burning in the middle of Brooklyn Park, gasoline dousing the body of a man, the light, the flame, the drop of a plastic Ziploc bag on… Read more »
By Kerrie L. Kemperman
Through the mist, Washington, DC’s stately lamp-lit brownstones and tree-lined streets could have been Paris — I was far from the wild woods, tilled acres, and sturdy farmhouses of my rural childhood. With a fluttering in my ribcage, I felt giddy going outside into the night, alone with my umbrella. When the mist changed to… Read more »
By Michael Sheehan
ἀλκὴν δ’ εὐδόκιμον Μαραθώνιον ἄλσος ἂν εἴποι The last time I spoke to my uncle Lary was on January 19, 1992, the day before he was to go into surgery. It was an operation he wouldn’t wake up from. He was having his hip replaced, one of a series of surgeries he’d had. He… Read more »
By Kerry Herlihy
Dear One, In the first hours after you were born in a small hospital on the coast of Maine, I traced my fingers around the gray-blue birthmark that looked like a map of America bleeding into your back. I felt your cheek and puckered lips on my naked chest and all I once knew dissolved… Read more »
By Elisha Emerson
1. A cousin second-removed asks me to pray for her in a Facebook comment, and I nurse indignation for days. She reaches out kindly enough, to express support for my youngest son whose Zoom-accessible play I’ve advertised on social media. She says she’d love to watch, asks me how I am (It’s been years!) and… Read more »
By Nicole Walker
My mom just called me to remind me I have a big birthday coming up. I said, “Let’s celebrate in Mexico.” If you turn an age in a country in which you were not born, it does not count just as when a forest that has been clear cut down to the earth’s skin doesn’t… Read more »
By Marlee Miller
Dear Sister Audre, I was in Mrs. Parker’s fourth grade class the first time someone told me I was too sensitive. The New England Patriots had won the SuperBowl two months prior, but the boys in my class still never missed a chance to whisper about Janet Jackson’s exposed breast. It was a Friday, and… Read more »
By Natalie Hodges
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is… T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” Hurrying to the Quad in the cold, almost late, I was overtaken by a man walking swiftly and determinedly, exhaling white gusts into the November… Read more »
By Charter Weeks
In the 60s I took the Orient Express from Paris to Athens, sitting up in a compartment for six days while people got on the train in Italy, heading home to Yugoslavia with livestock. I have ridden the Shinkansen at 220 miles per hour from Hiroshima to Tokyo with splendid views of Mt Fuji out… Read more »
By Alexis Lathem
Not too long ago, the field behind our home was planted every spring with industrial corn. Year after year, the tired soils, loaded with chemical fertilizers and liquid manure, produced their truckloads of number two corn. Now and then a tractor would pass over the land, spreading its gossamer wings of poison, but I almost… Read more »
By Aaron Sosa
What does it mean to see your childhood behind a wall? To know that you left behind what you love for a chance at freedom. What does it mean to be free? Over two years ago I walked along the border wall at the Reynosa-Hidalgo cross point. I was invited to participate as a student… Read more »
By Debra Monroe
1 My friend once saw wildflowers in an alley and a purple string mop set out to dry, its mop head up, seemed to her like wisteria—its dangling purple strings—but I always want roaming to transport me, and I hope to be alone with trees, to be do not disturb with trees, admiring their smallest,… Read more »
By Kathy Davis
Sing to me of the man, muse, the man of twists and turns. —The Odyssey by Homer, trans. by Robert Fagles Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a tornado roared through Tupelo, a town in northern Mississippi of approximately 7,350 people. There were no early warning systems. The black cloud sudden on the horizon. No… Read more »
By Meg Senuta
Fight or flight, I knew about those options. Fight like my father, who waved his beer and shouted, his face bright red. Flight, like my mother, who left the house for long stretches of time. It turns out there’s another option: Freeze. Early in the morning one high school summer I woke to loud wheezing… Read more »
By Joseph Cuomo
Sometime after I turned sixteen, sometime around the late 60s, I started hanging out at Little Ed’s, a clapboard house in blue-collar Queens, where we could get high without hiding it, listening to music as loud as we liked, singing, shouting, nodding out, luxuriating in a kind of easy, indolent, beautiful oblivion. And yet, even… Read more »
By Mosab Abu Toha
This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.
By Rani Neutill
This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.
By Charles Coe
This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.
By Anne-Marie Oomen
Among the Maya, four gods of the winds and of the directions who hold up the four corners of the world. 1. Little Estefania wiggles her butt into place on a bench in the open-air cafeteria, empty of children for this hour, wiggles into place in this wide room where the wind rushes through carrying the dust-laden… Read more »
By Herb Harris
Kindergarten classroom was covered with pictures and decorations that were much brighter than those of my nursery school. Big windows let in the sunlight. I remember pictures of owls, bunnies, and butterflies everywhere. There was a rainbow painted across one of the walls along with a sun that had a smiling face. It was a… Read more »
By Michelle Blake
Jean Valentine is small and white-haired. When she greets me at the elevator, she is full of an energy that shines in the dim hallway. Inside her three-room apartment, a woman is there helping out, Christine, who comes from nine to one every weekday. After she has introduced us, Jean says, “I’ve lost most of
By Steve Fellner
Twenty years after a gay bashing, I wrote an essay about the incident. It was published. It revolved around a simple happening. This is what occurred: During my graduate school years, three men dragged my friend into the middle of the road, hitting him with a baseball bat. From a short distance, I saw this… Read more »
By Helen Fremont
Count Giulio Vincenzo Zannini was conspicuously beautiful – when he entered a room, you could feel the air skip a beat. Almond-brown skin and features so fine they could have been carved by Michelangelo. He was born in Rome on July 13, 1900, but Mom always said he was better suited to the Renaissance. I… Read more »
On Apology
Pendulum
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