Her admission that her diagnosis was terrible news showed a vulnerability in her I had never before witnessed. I had believed that nothing ever weighed on her,...
* Artwork: “Mirror” by Ann Marie Sekeres “Are you staying here tonight?” Aunt Mary asks me as she takes my hand and pulls me into our pyramid of sol...
My father and mother are trapped in this country, waiting for many years for permission to immigrate. Every six months he patiently goes alone to the Soviet Vis...
In a second union, things you took for granted during those years with your first spouse float in your unconscious like twigs along a clear or muddied stream, o...
Life with Dad was an endless game. We shot candles out of Mother's silver candelabra on the picnic table. I learned to drive racing the jeep around hay bales in...
Only when the moon rises do I see it, see her—the glint of silver and then green and silver, the flash of scales. Only then do I know: my mother is a mermaid, a...
My mother pressed her cheek to Leslie’s cold face and cried. She rocked back and forth, holding my sister’s limp body close to hers. And those Congolese women r...
This short experimental piece of approximately twenty four hundred words explores questions of belonging from the perspective of a Syrian boy who lives in diffe...
My left leg is stuck out as if I was on the verge of going somewhere. My mother will meet him for the first time three months from now.
Does it start with what damaged him—a father who only survived starvation in a series of Japanese POW camps because he was a natural scientist, a botanist, who ...
Hell hath no fury like an 8 year old about to not get Western Barbie. Christmas was not our strong suit. Easter—that my parents could pull off. It all happens i...
Like everyone in our family, I cut Uncle Ben a lot of slack. He’d returned from the Second World War a paraplegic. He would spend the rest of his life on the si...
*Featured Artwork by Mali Fischer The word understory was gifted to me by a dear friend, as many good things are. Its meaning can be assumed, because all humans...
He waited until after we had made love for the first time to reveal his age. He was thirty-six years older than me. I knew he was older, but this confession too...
