BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
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 »
By Scott Russell Duncan
The Chicano Version That Never Will Be Seen The 7th sequel, of a book, movie, video game, or potato chips, gets a Chicano version. We get tossed a limón y chili encrusted bone by a white guy in Day of the Dead makeup shouting: MEXICANS TAKE NOTE, BUY OUR PRODUCT, WE ARE LIKE YOUR… Read more »
By Laura Price Steele
The violence is coming. We’ve been warned our whole lives that this might happen, but still the fear is thready. The thing is: we know that brutality is always doled out unevenly and we might be spared from it. We say we hope no one gets hurt, but that’s not true. Someone is going to… Read more »
By Laura S. Distelheim
His name was Eugene Williams and he was seventeen years old on that nearly 100 degree Chicago Sunday in July, 1919. Already a century ago now, and yet I often find that I can’t stop myself from thinking about him when I’m standing in my usual spot at Lake Michigan’s edge on a beach on… Read more »
By Tej Rae
In a brick courtyard tucked behind a busy Roman street, eight students and their teacher stand in an awkward circle, eating turkey and lettuce on whole wheat bread and drinking tap water out of plastic cups. An end of the year class party means some will be in Germany by September, and others will end… Read more »
By Deborah Esther Schifter
“Deb, Alan needs you.” I bolted out of bed, past Alan’s caregiver, to the next room where my husband was rocking back and forth in his wheelchair, gasping for whatever air he could pull into his lungs. ALS had so weakened his diaphragm, he couldn’t get enough breath. The hospice nurse had told us lack… Read more »
By Steven Harvey
Like a drawn bow the moral universe brings high and low together. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 77 Personal: Glass Art Studio Outside the Art Glass studio, Lake Chatuge lies serenely like a languid lover among the blanket folds of the southern Appalachian Mountains, while inside the chaos of creation roars. David Goldhagen has… Read more »
By Judith Nies
“This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history.” ––Marilyn Robinson I. Encountering History I first went to Holland in the summer of 1976. It was an impulsive trip motivated by a KLM Airlines lottery ticket that I won for $176. The price echoed the numbers in the bicentennial anniversary… Read more »
By Penny Guisinger
“Then I was drunk for many years; and then I died.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, On Booze When I pulled F. Scott Fitzgerald from my bag, things were often stuck to his head. A quarter. Paper clip. Tin of curiously strong mints. It’s the magnet beneath the sienna fuzz of his hair that did… Read more »
By Baron Wormser
I once heard a Buddhist teacher give a talk in which he stated that the word that gave the human race the most trouble was “more.” I see no reason to doubt him. There is much that is inherently uneasy within us, the vulnerability of being in a body, the anxiety of being uncertain about… Read more »
By Rachel D.L.
Don’t step on the cracks or you’ll break your mom’s back. It was something my dad had said to me when I was younger. It was something he had said to me before my parents divorced, before my own body spent more time shuffling over the cracks in the sidewalk than stepping over them. I… Read more »
By Robin Clifford Wood
After my second round of standing vigil at the side of a dying parent, my siblings referred to me as “the closer.” They lived nearby and had spent months tending daily to Mom, then Dad. They accompanied them to doctor’s appointments, joined them for dinner, put up the Christmas tree, filled the woodbox for the… Read more »
By Ira Sukrungruang
I. This One Time A. This one time at my buddy ____’s high school graduation party I came outside of myself. One moment I was playing volleyball in a grassy yard, flirting with a girl with pink hair and a pierced tongue who had the habit of looking over her shoulder and winking at me,… Read more »
By Ben Berman
Not that life was all that bad in France compared to the rest of Europe but we came to America with dreams of making it new. And in some ways we did. The problem, though, was that to fit in you always felt this pressure to be something that you weren’t. There were these anthologies… Read more »
By Adriana Páramo
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
By Megan Baxter
On an unusually warm Sunday morning in January I must walk out into the woods and try to get lost. Sunday mornings in rural South Carolina are quiet, hauntingly so. In our little valley there is no sound from traffic, just red-tailed hawks screeching and bluebirds chirping in the dull vegetation. I had hoped, when… Read more »
By Judith Padow
“You get everything. I get nothing.” “Not true,” my brother would have said, in some alternative universe where he and I talked to each other. “You were everything. I was nothing.” “But I felt like nothing too,” I would have told him. _____ Grandma Fannie, a heavyset woman in a floral print housedress, carts… Read more »
By Magin LaSov Gregg
We watch “The Golden Girls” in bed. I am 21, too old to lay against my mother, old enough to sense her leaving. My body clings to her side, while her fingers untangle hair at the nape of my neck. She laughs at something Sophia says, and my gaze turns from the TV to an… Read more »
By Adriana Páramo
I I want to tell you a story about innocence, skin color, privilege and invisible walls. It was a cold, rainy evening in England. My husband and I had flown in to spend the holidays with his adult children and two granddaughters, aged three and one. Vivian, the older of the two, a gorgeous redhead… Read more »
By Suzie Vander Vorste
I. Here, in the middle of the Dakota plains, land races the sky in every direction. The fields of corn, soybeans, sunflowers, and wheat wander mile after mile, rolling off into the horizon. The flatlands are lush, heartened by a recent series of summer rain showers. I spent my childhood here, in a speck on… Read more »
By Michelle Blake
One cold morning in January, I wake before dawn and write down: It’s ridiculous to blame anyone else for our lives. Our lives are gifts that exist long before we enter them and go on long after we leave them, intact, just as they are. What we do and see and learn is what we… Read more »
By Gail Hosking
After a long day of writing at a friend’s house, we rest in her kitchen, sipping tea at the table before bed. Her son, home from graduate school, sits with us talking about his future as he pulls potato chips from a bag, his other hand touching the Buddhist amulets hanging around his neck. Outside,… Read more »
By Michele Cacho-Negrete
When I was dying at seventeen I was too young yet old enough. I stole Chinese slippers with tiny beaded flowers from the store around the corner when I was dying, wore my longest silver earrings, my mirrored, tasseled blouse, my Indian silk skirt. I was a kaleidoscope of melting brightness. I ate donuts for… Read more »
By thandiwe D. Watts-Jones
Even now, as the mother of a 35-year-old African-American son, I never shake the uneasy feeling that he is at risk. Holding my breath as the late night local news rolls out its not infrequent version of “Two men were shot tonight in Brooklyn, one fatally wounded,” I am not alone. Generations of mahogany… Read more »
By JoeAnn Hart
In June 2002, as I was driving around Stamford, Connecticut, lost trying to find the library in a city I barely recognized anymore, I had to roll down the window for air. I had imagined that my old boyfriend, Joe, was sitting next to me again, telling me what road to take, and I couldn’t… Read more »
By Daniel Mueller
Among the first purchases my father made upon moving into our olive drab duplex on Fort Hood Army Base was a Teac turntable on a cherry wood base, a silver-faced Marantz receiver with LED lamps that turned the radio dial on the AM/FM tuner arctic blue, and a pair of Ohm speakers with eight-inch woofers… Read more »
By Gail Griffin
December in Michigan, but no snow yet. A cold, wet night. Five months since Eric Garner begged for breath as his face was shoved into the pavement in New York City. Four months since Mike Brown bled out on the pavement in Ferguson, Missouri, lying for four hours in the heat of an August afternoon
By Trent Masiki
I: Colder Still Once in Texas, I pulled up next to a Latino asleep in something like an Impala, outside the washeteria where I had come to do my laundry. He slept to the mournful Tejano music coming out of his back speakers. One booted foot hung limp outside the car’s window. Maybe tendrils… Read more »
By Gillian Haines
I didn’t know for five years that Ringer was innocent. It wasn’t my fault but I still feel ashamed that at first I’d thought him resigned and defeated. But getting to know him was hard.
Address
Like the Movies
Neither here nor there
Mexican American Psycho is in Your Dreams
A History of Fear
World Peace 101
Refugee Class Party
The Stories We Tell
The Arc of the Moral Universe
The Desire of the Country
Borne Back Ceaselessly
More
The Road I Choose
How Do You Help Your Parents Die?
Toxic: an Outline of Why Men Are Violent Idiots / I Am a Violent Idiot / There Are Too Many Violent Idiots
The Prose Poem as a Jew
Milk, Oil, and a Night of Tequila
Live Find
Broken
The Gleaming Miraculous
Mi Piel Morena and I went to England
Distanced Daughter: Reflections on Standing Rock
Sonny
Come Home in Glory
When I was dying
Belonging
The Ferguson
B-Side
Bringing Up the Bodies:
An Advent Story
Whiskey Under the Mattress, Playboy on the Porch
People Think You Deserve It
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