BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Nada Siddiqui
Rain splattered against our bedroom window on a chilly spring weekend morning. I burrowed deeper under the thick cotton comforter, tightened my arms around my husband’s trim waist, and rubbed the lingering wetness of tears on my cheekbones off on his soft sleep T-shirt. That morning, I didn’t want to be comforted or to comfort.… Read more »
By Omid Fallahazad
When I pick up my 9-year-old daughter from school, the first thing she does, as soon as she clambers up onto the backseat and dumps her heavy backpack aside, is to squeeze her petit torso between the two front seats and, like a trained parakeet, bend her head to offer me my bribe, a kiss… Read more »
By Tobey Ward
The test was supposed to be a precaution. I had an IUD, but my period had been light that month, only a few drops of blood. When I put the white stick on the counter, two lines appeared instantly. I was pregnant. This was in the bathroom, in our house in South Philly. A floor-to-ceiling… Read more »
By Matt Paczkowski
Water Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) In February of 1995, when I was four-and-a-half years old, my mother had a nightmare. In her dream, she was at Rockaway Beach with her mother and me – three generations – and I waddled through the sand toward the waves. When she reminisces, my mother mentions the weather first, how… Read more »
By Gail Griffin
Cri de Coeur Some years ago, in a workshop on whiteness I was leading, a delegation from the local Friends’ Meeting was among the participants. One of them was a very elderly woman, so disabled she was nearly bent double and moved slowly, with great difficulty. I’m saying she had every excuse to stay home.… Read more »
By Dickson Lam
1 I think of letters as faces. 2 You want that E to look like it’s uppercutting somebody. 3 Back in the day in Chicago, gangs used to have gang cards—almost like a business card—and there were all sorts of dope logos and images and especially lettering. 4 By the way a person writes, you… Read more »
By Natasha Israni
Last summer I climbed an English hill my seven-year-old son said I shouldn’t. On a family road-trip across the United Kingdom, while walking around a sparkling, oval tarn in the verdant Lake District, we reached a fork. So far, we had strolled past giant oaks and leafy copses, quaint fences, and mellow glades—a pleasant enough… Read more »
By Brandy E. Wyant
My thoughts won’t turn off long enough to let me fall asleep, so I watch dog agility competitions in bed on my phone. After watching dog after dog attempt the same course, and inevitably commit the same errors in the same places, my eyes start to grow heavy. I know to let another dog or… Read more »
By Gary Percesepe
Ghosts Years ago, I found a picture of my mother and father with their first-born son. Tommy is perhaps two years old, balanced on my father’s knee. All three look straight at the camera and smile, dressed in their fifty’s finery. They appear to be in a photography studio, posing for a family portrait. But… Read more »
By Bronwyn Jones
As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book by Anne-Marie Oomen We will all experience mother loss. Yet, our mothers are also eternally with us, their formative presences lodging in our beings in ways that run the gamut from interstitial balm to sharp-edged irritant. How we lose our mothers is shaped by a larger
By Richard Hoffman
Writing While Parenting Ben Berman Able Muse Press ISBN: 978-1-77349-111-0 One might think a book titled Writing While Parenting would be filled with tips about time- and stress management, about how to straddle the competing demands of parenthood and authorship, but the brief, incisive, funny, profound, and memorable essays in Ben Berman’s book offer us
By Richard Cambridge
The Beloved Republic Steven Harvey Wandering Aengus Press, 2023 “The beech tree rising in our bow window finds its own shape without any help from me.” So begins “A Whole Life” Steven Harvey’s preface that, like the taproot of the tree, anchors the collection of essays in The Beloved Republic. Written over a quarter of
By Lorena Hernández Leonard
During our first week of class Alysia Abbott asked “If your memoir was made into a movie, what actor or actress would play you?” The next week, all ten of us memoirists came back with our answers: Salma Hayek, Annette Bening, Claire Danes, Sigourney Weaver… It was June 2021 and I had just embarked on… Read more »
By Alison Hawthorne Deming
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Corinne Pines
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By A. Molotkov
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Kristen Paulson-Nguyen
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Alysia Abbott
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Bridget Verhaaren
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Steven Harvey
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Joy Von Steiger
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Amy Burroughs
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Richard Hoffman
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
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 » Receive news, reviews, interviews, and more in your inbox! Plus be the first to hear about our latest issues, contests, and events.
Attention, Humor, Curiosity, and Poetry. Writing While Parenting by Ben Berman
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Fairyland, an Interview with Alysia Abbott
Ten Takes on Ecology and Justice
247
My Putin Failure
Liza in 17 Fragments
Beautiful Boy
Detonation
Two Eternities
Our Bodies Were Never Our Own
Luddites and the Next Frontier
Backtalk and Backlash
The Lid and the Jar
Poison
On Raising Black Children in Whitopia
Pea Princess
20 Infusions
Fugitive in the Woods
Family Poker
The Takeover
The First Time I Told Someone
Half Empty, Half Full
A Fable for Yesterday
Waiting for the Bees
Figure Out the Damn Year
More Money Than God: William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation 1620 -1647
Care and Keeping
Two Lives
If You Don’t Know Me by Now
The Price of Membership
The Seminarian and the Sex Worker
That Night
Plaque
Portrait of the Artist as a Black Man
The Heaviness of Hair
A Letter for David Buckel
The Chess Players of Dupont Circle & I
Endure, My Heart
Letter to My Black Daughter
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