Smoke
 
When it’s almost too dark to see,
my uncle sits out on the back porch,

rolling a cigarette, holding it up
to his mouth for the lick.

He’s trying to remember a boy
from the next farm […]

1

“The houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us…they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living.”*

I liked to throw a base […]

I started to become a writer with the first writing exercise I was ever given. I was 12. Mrs. A, my seventh-grade teacher, called it a ‟theme.” She said a theme should have a title, like ‟I Like Horses,” and the […]

Within just a few months living in New York’s Hudson Valley, we stopped buying our eggs anywhere but Sawkill Farm down the road. “Your eggs are better than anyone’s,” I told Kallie who runs the store and who mov […]

Most things, no matter how trite and mundane, have intrinsic beauty or interest when presented in just the proper way. This is the core premise underlying Forensic Foraging, an alternative technique for […]

The Return of the Woolly Mammoth
 
You rarely wore it,
though you yourself chose the color, midnight blue,
and knee-length cut. In derision, you named it
“the woolly mammoth,” pointing to its Pleistocene prop […]

Discussion about multiculturalism can have a polarizing effect on people and it often slides into train wreck conversations or initiates a war of words. People tend to pick sides based on affiliation and then […]

Heaven and Earth

Off the coast of the continent stars pinprick a black sky—tiny and plentiful, a cloud of a luminous multitude—announcement of lives, flows of history that date to creation and reach to unc […]

Recently, I participated in a group public reading of poetry at Richmond Public Library in Richmond, Virginia: Memento Mori: 26 poets responding to mortality, impermanence and grief, curated by Leslie Shiel and […]

As Briefly as Salmon
 
clouds part
we drive on rain-slicks of light

cars before us
trailing little rainbows

in tire sprays
fountains from the road

up the shoreline
under the shadow of rain

we […]

The old cantor and the new rabbi were to meet in the lunchroom behind the office wing of Congregation Beth Tzedek, the House of the Righteous. There was no empty office for the new rabbi, Jacob Kleck, to occupy, […]

Podcast: A family’s trip to the beach becomes a metaphor for colonialism, gentrification and class struggle.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Natives by Chuck Nwoke

Of course it’s only a coincidence that Armistice Day, the conclusion of World War I, falls (or used to) in November, that month which begins with All Hallows Eve and proceeds briskly to the Day of the Dead. It j […]

Chicago is in my blood, even though today I consider myself a Californian. My parents immigrated to the Windy City in the late 1950s; my younger brother, my three older sisters and I were all born on the […]

That Sketchy Area Known as Writer's Block by Erika Raskin Sometimes trying to write is like playing Scrabble (old school—not virtual) and reaching into the bag for more letters o […]

Because
For Yannis Ritsos
Because the watcher wrote red on the shop’s wall,
because the half-candle was stolen & sold
for fuel,
because the innocent got hit with a cold,
wet branch,
because the town is d […]

I wrote an entirely new Chapter 1 for the new edition of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt 2006; rev. 2016). The idea to open the biography at a low point in the her life, instead of during childhood […]

My father seemed well enough when I saw him, though he did remind me of someone who’d been woken up too quickly from a deep sleep and was trying really hard not to bump into any walls. I’m not sure how rel […]

The New World Order Blues is inspired by the late conspiracy researcher and radio personality Mae Brussell, updated for today’s concerns and presented in one of the greatest music styles ever created by A […]