Opinion Opinion
It was a lean-to one could live in so long as it never rained. It was a grain of salt close up, looking like a crystal, growing from itself like an outcrop of land. I…
Jan 14, 2020 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Militello
Formalwear Formalwear
“everything takes form, even infinity” —Gaston Bachelard, from The Dialectics of Outside and Inside So I died. Then I filled out a form. It asked how I made do & a living &…
Jan 14, 2020 / Books & the Arts / Devon Walker-Figueroa
Book of Dolls 45 Book of Dolls 45
God’s carpenters are busy putting nails in the idea of heaven. Make no mistake. It’s hell. If you see my hand shake, do not worry. It is just the motion that persists, with or with…
Dec 24, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Bruce Bond
Grid Grid
All energy, to the engineer, or the soul, is the same. Today’s illumination might have come, way back, from either love or pain— no whiff, when the light flicked on,…
Dec 24, 2019 / Books & the Arts / James Richardson
From ‘Diary’ From ‘Diary’
I hate this sweater but I’m too cold not to wear it as a metaphor for my career. My therapist says yes corporations take advantage of human beings’ ambitious nature. …
Dec 3, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Marisa Crawford
From ‘outside voices, please’ From ‘outside voices, please’
I grew drunk on the dragonflies’ ultra Three times I asked our misogynistic uncle, the family patriarch, for money for books for the girls to which he then scoffed drunkenly throwi…
Nov 19, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Valerie Hsiung
Tenderness Tenderness
That summer I was a body. I was that body. The Body. Overnight, a fog of linen inside the mauve Victorian down the block. Another house empty for the season, for the season, for th…
Oct 8, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Derrick Austin
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society Starts Its Third Annual Petition Drive for the Abolition of the Interstate Slave Trade and Slavery in Washington, DC, and the Territories (1836) The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society Starts Its Third Annual Petition Drive for the Abolition of the Interstate Slave Trade and Slavery in Washington, DC, and the Territories (1836)
Letters and pamphlets are good. Petitions, better: Ye who have pens, prepare to use them now. We’re going to need all of you to go house to house to collect signatures. We’ve been…
Sep 17, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Melissa Range
The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s ‘American Slavery as It Is’ (1838) The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s ‘American Slavery as It Is’ (1838)
Somebody had to be the first to amass the proof from slaveholders’ mouths: twenty thousand newspapers from the South, the unthinking testimony parsed, scissored carefully into stri…
Sep 17, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Melissa Range
Everyone Is Acting as if We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home Everyone Is Acting as if We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home
When he said, Sometimes we learn the most from losing, I think how often I’ve been bamboozled by life, how I’ve dropped a quarter in a slot machine and instead of cherries got coff…
Sep 10, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Kelli Russell Agodon