BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
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 »
By Carol D. Marsh
I was in the middle of a challenging year-long internship position in Washington, DC and earning the princely sum of $12.00 per week when a couple friends offered to treat me to a movie. The work—resident manager of a house for homeless, pregnant and addicted women—was requiring the last shred of my emotional resources. Feeling… Read more »
By Ashley Memory
The nurses in the Pinecrest Neurology IV suite, including Maya, Nicole, and Karen, my favorites, usually glided among patients on rolling stools but the one assigned to me today came springing over like a gazelle. As her tawny curls flew through the air, she knocked against my knees. “I’m so sorry,” she said, blushing. “My… Read more »
By Kimberly Tolson
I locate two seats in our local movie theater and wait for The Gentlemen to begin. The sconce lighting permits slow and small movements, navigating the stadium seating a journey of numerous pitfalls; there are about ten of us, which is more than I thought there’d be considering the director. I know what to expect:… Read more »
By Anne P. Beatty
“I want you to move to class with all deliberate speed!” This sentence boomed over the loudspeaker each day at my first teaching job. The principal meant to discourage stragglers, sometimes several hundred of them, from ending up in the tardy room, a morning euphemism for the cafeteria. My homeroom students ignored him, applying mascara… Read more »
By Cindy Carlson
I My grandmother’s hands—small and mannish—were always busy with vegetables. Potatoes mostly, although I remember the snap of fresh green beans as she clipped each end with her thumbnail, and then the plop as they met the bottom of a Pyrex bowl. She could peel a potato with one motion, round and round until the… Read more »
By Tatiana Johnson-Boria
By the McDonald’s there’s a prison. When we walk the 15 minutes or so from our section-8 brownstone to the golden arches, I look at the prison windows. Glossy, yet dark. Enchanting because I can’t see inside. I wonder how many people are staring back at me. I am craning my neck up while my… Read more »
By Vanessa Lewis
After being hospitalized for stroke-related complications, my wheelchair-bound grandmother was transitioned into an inpatient rehabilitation facility to help her get back on her feet. That’s why we showed up at a sprawling brick building in one the most affluent suburbs outside Boston with a Popeyes’ family meal deal and a birthday cake in tow the… Read more »
By Alyssa Marshall
1. They met in the pit of despair. They didn’t know it then. They couldn’t see outside of the context they lived in. Context is an interesting word for drugs and alcohol and sickness. He bought her roses on Valentine’s Day, but she didn’t know they were dating. She went out drinking and saw his… Read more »
By Alicia Googins
Walking into the lake, I wince as the water rises to the tops of my thighs. It inches up over my stomach, over my ribs, and when it reaches my chest, I’m cold enough that I dive under, just to be done with it. Early Spring in New England is cold. When I surface, my… Read more »
By Helena Rho
“Mom! There’s a woman asking for you. I think she’s Korean!” my nine-year-old daughter whispers loudly, her eyes wide. She thrusts the black cordless phone into my hands and stands as if rooted to an imaginary spot in our mint green kitchen. She follows me with her eyes. I brace my elbows against the butcher-block… Read more »
By Lisa Ohlen Harris
Warmth purrs through the heat registers. These dark mornings while my children still sleep, I hear the sounds usually masked by a busy household: from the back bathroom, the cascade of water as my husband takes his shower; from the kitchen, a slow drip, coming not from the faucet but from a steady Oregon rain… Read more »
By Robert Stothart
A handful of swans eat like pigs across wet fields under clouds dragging hills and border trees. These big white transients tread stubble off Route 9, south of Nooksack Valley High School in the northwest corner of Washington State, just a couple of miles below the Canadian border. I drive off onto the shoulder to
By Bonnie Costello
I’ve got to get this letter off, certified, today, and the P.O. closes in an hour. It isn’t a pretty walk– two- and three- family houses with postage-stamp yards, a laundromat, bus stops I’ve passed a thousand times. I could drive, skipping the in-between, but the short walk always feels like a little adventure, a… Read more »
By Elizabeth Foulke
Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. –Herman Melville We’d grown accustomed to the cop car parked in front of school. Unmanned, it was meant to be a deterrent, though we weren’t sure for what—a possible school shooter, or the speeding cars that… Read more »
By JennyMae Kho
You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which know and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. – Seamus Heaney 1. The Flaggy Shore is a charcoal sketch dressed in ink. The sky is sometimes a smudge… Read more »
On Apology
Pendulum
Sensitivity
Of Needles and Kindness: My Filigree Heart
Make That Cunt Sing
Unexcused Absence
Legacy
The Uprooting
I Just Hope He Can Breathe
Wife
Walden
Becoming Korean
Deep Waters
Winter Swans and the Assembly of God:
A Landscape
Address
Like the Movies
Neither here nor there
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