BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Patrick Milian
In the shelved episode “Lucy Tells the Truth,” Lucy was supposed to encourage Ricky to fudge his tax return. In the script, Ricky was going to refuse to cheat. In reality, Desi Arnaz wouldn’t entertain committing the scene to film. He was Cuban Pete, king of the rhumba beat and all, but he insisted on… Read more »
By Ulrik Andersen
My son is born in the morning in early September as blue-black shadows recede, gently pushed aside by the burgeoning dawn streaming through the windows of our tiny studio apartment on 7th street. That morning I step into the world a New Man and I ride my racing-red single speed with its carefree drop handles… Read more »
By Susan Rich
On April 20th, twenty-five years ago, I underwent a midterm abortion in New York. The choice was not mine. I had just returned from serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Niger, West Africa. Those three sentences have taken several decades to write. Trauma is like that. It never actually leaves the… Read more »
By Alexis Rizzuto
Actually, two Robins. On the hood of an old Jeep by our garage. I found them aligned head to foot, on their backs, wings folded. They lay as if placed there by someone: side by side, not a feather askew, stone cold dead. There was no sign of trauma, just a little blood at each… Read more »
By Kassie Rubico
This is not my mother’s eulogy. She’s not dead. In fact, today she tells me (in a very lively voice) to put the two on the three. She tells me this four times before I tell her that I can’t because both the two and the three are red. “They are?” she asks, leaning forward… Read more »
By Grace Talusan
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Rob Arnold
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Deborah Derrickson Kossmann
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Chris Arthur
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Elisha Emerson
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Jill Frances Johnson
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Caitlin McGill
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Abdallah Nasrallah
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Kathleen Aguero
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Allen M. Price
How long have I in bondage lain, And languished to be free! Alas! and must I still complain– Deprived of liberty. On Liberty and Slavery George Moses Horton thisismyschoolitisbeigethereismrshickey sheisnicesheismyteachersheissmilingilike hersmilesmilemrshickeysmilesheisplaying withherpapershereismyfirstgrade classroomthekidsareplayingwearehappy thereismeiambymyselfiamcoloringiseea kidbuildingwithblocksiwanttoplaycome andplayhelaughscaniplaywithyouhewill notplaywithmelaughingandplayingicryhe playsalltheotherkidsstareatmemrshickey walksoversheisfrowninghewillnotplaywith mewhynothisparentswillnotallowhimto playwithniggersirunhomeafterschool runningandrunningtomymomitakeoffthe keytiedroundmyneckandopenthedoor momisatworkmydogladyjumpsonmewoof woofshebarkssheisspringerspanielsheis brownandblackandwhitelikemewewillplay chaseiwillrunshewillchaseirunandirun runningandrunningiamstillrunningaway this is my school it is beige… Read more »
By Jendi Reiter
On the afternoon I come home from surgery, I converse with a giant snake. * On an evening six years before surgery, I am teaching a poorly-attended church group about Jungian theology. The wounded healer. Chiron the centaur. How to lie in the cave of Asklepius, on the couch from which clinic gets its… Read more »
By Amber Wong
The sharp staccato of Cantonese swirled around Ming’s Restaurant as twelve of us sat, shoulders almost touching, at a round banquet table. Steam billowed from the swinging kitchen doors, wafting a seductive scent of steamed buns and ginger. For a moment I was a child again, going to yum cha with my parents after… Read more »
By Adriana Páramo
I’m lying on my back, scrawny feet up in the stirrups. In my head, I go like, don’t look, don’t look, don’t you look at her, but of course, I do. I raise my head, and there next to the gynecologist is Mom, peering into my most private me. Mom cranes her neck over… Read more »
By Beverly Burch
Typewritten pages buried in an obscure book. Yellowing, unlined, composed by my mother with penciled corrections in her hand, they told family history in fits and starts, gleaned from my grandmother’s memory. On a wintry day, they fell out of the book so I sat on the floor to read them because my mother’s voice… Read more »
By Thuy Phan
I. Because you are only 5 feet 1.5 inches tall, and your limbs only stretch so far. You often speed-walk to keep pace with anyone over 6 feet. Because your family tells you that you didn’t drink enough milk while you were growing up. Because you hate the taste of it. As… Read more »
By Anne C. Wheeler
Mike Hippler wanted to be remembered. That’s what he told me, through the pages of his journal, approximately 31 years after he died from AIDS on April 4, 1991. When I arrived at the GLBT Historical Society, in the basement of a beautiful building on a seedy street in San Francisco, I knew that I… Read more »
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 » 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
Connect with us!
Subscribe for FREE!
You have Successfully Subscribed!
Subscribe for FREE!
Receive news, reviews, interviews, and more in your inbox! Plus be the first to hear about our latest issues, contests, and literary events.
You have Successfully Subscribed!