Nonfiction

  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

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

  “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)

  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.

  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

  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

“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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                                              “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

‘–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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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:

“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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

    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

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

She was a big girl. Over six feet with enormous hands. She wore a skirt, silk blouse, and oversized pumps. Black hair framed her face like curtains. It was 1994, long before Caitlyn Jenner put a famous face on the puzzle my English class was trying to solve. The library was transitioning to a computerized

“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?” Benedick asks as he listens to Balthasar sing and play his lute in Much Ado about Nothing.  “There’s part of me, lying on a page,” I sometimes think reading a poem, feeling delight, wonder, and perhaps a touch of envy. “Why

On the way to the demonstration to protest the big-business theft of water from indigenous peoples, I passed by a crowded bus stop and noticed in the clutch of waiting commuters a grimy, disheveled man carrying a magnificent russet and black rooster perched on his forearm, a bird of tremendous dignity and aplomb. A bus

Little Women is nominated for an Oscar for best picture and writer/director Greta Gerwig for best adapted screenplay. This recognition by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is well-deserved. But it is not enough. Gerwig deserves a nomination for best director. If Little Women wins the 2020 Oscar for best picture, the award

“This hospital would be impossible for anyone with a normal brain to navigate,” Barbara says, eyes flashing anxiously. We stand arm in arm, staring at the colored squares and rectangles on the wall map that shows Building A connecting to Building C via hallways called B. I’ve never looked at a hospital floor plan before

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

  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

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

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

“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

  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

“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

“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

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

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

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,

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

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

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

  “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

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

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

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