It was late December, and I was heading to downtown Vienna during a pandemic. As I reflected on the task ahead of me, buying Christmas presents for my mother and grandmother, the mayhem inherent in completing that […]

My study may be a mess, but, on one wall, I have meticulously created a shrine of sorts. My “Air Force Wall” is—like my connections to its theme—a mixture of the authentic and inauthentic. The shrine came togethe […]

Marinara stains blotted my white hoodie’s waist hem like blood droplets. Posters of fighter jets lined the grey walls of the recruiter’s office. A Dodgers baseball cap squeezed straight brown hair over my ears and […]

Primarily a poet and writer, I came to photography by accident. I was on a summer nature walk in southern Ontario, Canada, when I got lost. It was incredibly hot and I had forgotten my water. My wife had […]

In truth there was never a snake or an apple;
and they knew already about lust, had known forever
what creature didn’t

It was that they lived long
saw the wolf and the tiger grow old and die
saw the t […]

My evolution from wanting to write, to loving writing, to having to write did not proceed quietly. The more I lost myself in the craft, the more I anguished over what it meant to be “good enough” and, once goo […]

To: Team Members

From: Jill Valentine, MENTOR

Re: Time-Off Requests

Dear Team,

First off, how lucky we are to still be thriving in this economy! Because not everyone’s so lucky. Some people are o […]

White spotted breast, orange and black
on your head—I wouldn’t have seen if you
were not warm in my hand, but dead.
At the thud of a window strike I ran
for the deck, hoping for merely s […]

Each year for the past eight or ten, I have been given The Best American Poetry by a member of my family at Christmas time. The adults of our family are assigned, on a rotating basis, their gifts recipient, […]

I have a scar under my chin, right at the end where it meets the jaw. You can’t see it unless I’m hanging upside down, which is a rare occurrence these days. I’d forgotten about it—hadn’t seen or touched its rough […]

“The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic.”
………………………………………………………………………-Adam Phillips

Duskless days of cloud-smoke and […]

I’ve written before about the upside of long-term ditziness (mostly having to do with the silver-lining aspect of it not being a new, and therefore alarming, decline.) And I’m glad that I’ve documented it.

The […]

Last night I received an email from Emily, the copy editor, reminding me I’d signed up to provide the blog post for Monday. Uh, oh. For some reason I never added the deadline to my calendar. I knew I’d signed up […]

This year’s contest was our first as co-editors and we are pleased to announce our selections.  We want to thank all participants, without whom we could not sponsor this contest. Kudos to each and eve […]

Picasso’s Self-Portrait at Twenty-six,1907
Cheeks stabbed with dark lines. Tender
mouth any woman would want. Hair
slashed in broad black strokes. His mother

said If you become a soldier, you’ll be a gen […]

The sound of rustling leaves, like old fashioned petticoats, soothed the cold lodged like a stone above my brow. Compliant for once to the vagaries of my body, I stretched out on the floor letting my mind […]

I was on the patio in my lounge chair journaling. The year was 2017 and I had been living in Los Angeles for the past twenty-three years, having moved from Chicago. I loved my husband Dave, family and friends but […]

My mother had a chair that when she sat in it, she was invisible. At first she put it in a corner where she would be unseen and could not be found and where she would hide from our rambunctiousness and our […]