The Museum of Past Grievances by Jax Peters Lowell Featured Image: “In de maneschijn” by Martine Mooijenkind My beloved won’t answer the phone. He’s...
Memoir is about absence, emptiness; it’s about crossing divides–of time, space, language, and that ultimate divide between the living and the dead. It’s standin...
A memoir in the finest sense of the genre! An easy read, packed with astonishing events that flow into one another like water, The View From Breast Pocket Mount...
Most days, I manage to distract myself from the horror of losing my bearing and blurring the lines in the fog of forgetfulness. I carry the markers for Alzheime...
I try to cool the heat in my cheeks that her sarcastic “wise, rich daughter” comment brings on. Her walker embarrasses me, too – unsightly, attention-seeking, d...
The waiting was unnerving. Alli asked almost daily when Daddy would go to jail. For a second-grader, jail was something imagined from cartoons. We did little to...
Melissa was killed six years ago. A couple of years after, I learned a TV show was to feature her story. I felt compelled to watch it. The show opened with the ...
I am lazy, fat, asinine, stupid. I still feel his red hot anger, the spit on my face, and the insults flying toward me. The feelings and labels remain, despite ...
This is how the Holocaust ended for me, a solitary Polish-Jew liberated by American soldiers from the infamous death camp Mauthausen. I was at the time an emaci...
Working with the bees, I am not just looking at the same insects my mother once looked at, I am also becoming her. I am lying down in her body and standing up. ...
Nick the manager announced that he was heading out for boot camp in a few weeks. His career as a fast food manager was done. Better things were in his future. H...
If you had asked me before this tragedy what the chance was of her committing suicide, I would have said zero percent. Zero. Ask me now and I’ll tell you, if it...
It was only a matter of time before one of us was going to break down and scream, beat our fists against the van’s upholstery in disbelief and frustration.
In presentations for Breaking the Silence NM, a program to teach mental illness and suicide awareness to youth, I wanted to reach young people before suicide be...
I never thought of our river as hungry until it swallowed Schafer whole, until he breathed water instead of air. He and some friends doused themselves in Jim Be...
A friend, or a date, or a stranger who spotted him lying in the street, a person brave enough to touch a seizing, unconscious man, would search Eric’s pants for...
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,...
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...
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...
