The Tunnel: A Sacred Place By James Eric Watkins
Even though four yards or more of open air separated our being, in those moments, we were one, brothers. I could feel my Sioux and Cherokee heritage run through...
Category: 1 minute Read
Ripple Effect by Janis Butler Holm
As a little girl reading fairy tales, I came across the word “replied.” Though a bookish child, I somehow read “replied” as “rippled,” as in “Because I said so,...
1 minute Read/ACEs/Being Body/Featured/Girls & Women/Justice/#MeToo/MeToo/nonfiction/Sexism/Society/trauma
Walking Home by Kate Zobel
I am twelve years old and, between fifth grade and seventh grade, I have gone from flat-chested to a Double D cup. Some girls envy me, and gossip, but they don’...
1 minute Read/Addiction/Art/Audible/Audio Visual/Black Memoirs Matter/Incarceration/Institutions/nonfiction/Society/Survival/trauma
A Poem in Prison: A film by Daniel Cantagallo (and Etheridge Knight)
Sometimes a voice stops you in your tracks. For me, such was the case with Etheridge Knight. During the past few years, I have been remixing old footage and aud...
Ticket to Ride by Audrey R.L. Wyatt
Surgery done, the ride slammed to a stop. The cancer was removed and I was pronounced cured.
1 minute Read/ACEs/Featured/Girls & Women/Haibun/Literature/Loss/Memory/nonfiction/On Memory/Secrets
Back to Jackfork Quarry by Stacy Pendergrast
This is the place I remember—with its pine branches, hung like lace canopies. There is the rock slab where they took turns, each first pounding his chest, then ...
1 minute Read/Black Memoirs Matter/Escape/Featured/Flash/Girls & Women/Grief/Literature/Loss/Love/nonfiction
Spare by Maame Blue
It wouldn’t be the last time I tried to cure a broken heart with recklessness.
Redacted Relationship By Keith Hoerner
Redacted Relationship By Keith Hoerner
1 minute Read/Black Memoirs Matter/Cancer/Featured/Flash/Food/Funny/Health/Literature/nonfiction/On Memory/Religion
What Would Jesus Eat? by Marissa McNamara
The clerk was stringy and gray. “I recommend the Jesus diet,” she offered, as we explained our goals which were, mainly, for him to outlive cancer. “You eat onl...
Lies My Mother Told Me / Lies I Told My Mother by Daniel Uncapher
You must go to school. I’m too sick to go to school! I have eyes on the back of my head. I missed the bus! We can’t afford cable. I wasn’t watching TV!
Skylark in Tawny Mist BY Julie Ann Wenglinski
Before surgery, a rabbity young man in a white jacket hurried by and put his hand down the front of my dress, then bustled away. On my gurney to the OR, a chatt...
Flood By Erin Murphy
They did not think: moonlit bank where my ancestors were unloaded from ships or branch from which bodies once swung. They did not have to...
Splinters By Brigid Hughes
At the hospital I met a young woman who’d smashed a light bulb, poured the glass into her afternoon Diet Coke, and drank it. Then she called her husband to tell...
Perched High By Sara J. Sutler-Cohen
Lies don’t shine, no matter how hard one scrubs.