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    Standards of Care
    The Sun InterviewBy Naomi PittsStandards of CareRolonda Donelson on Bias and Anti-Science Attitudes in Medicine

    The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.

    Milk
    Readers WriteBy Our ReadersMilk

    Pumped for an infant, spilled at the dinner table, used as a tear gas antidote

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David Koteen

David Koteen is a devoted father of three sons, writing and farming at the Hearthwind Community in Umpqua, Oregon.

Fiction

Kusadasi

In summer, cruise ships bring exultant droves of westerners to the town, who, along with extensive drug trafficking, have transformed the region into a wealthy, peaceful appendage to the otherwise bellicose, indigent body of Turkey. Like the thin layer of crude oil on the Mediterranean, affluence stratifies.

August 1990
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Blind As A Fish

Time passes and you learn that you overlooked a fairly simple and important ingredient. Yeast is necessary. The only time you’re definitely right is when it doesn’t matter. Failure and pain, twin stepping stones to knowledge.

January 1989
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Hannah

Just as it is difficult to picture an angel without wings, it is difficult to picture a human with wings. But more than I once considered, it seems that, under certain circumstances, the two are readily interchangeable, just as some solids will transform directly into gases.

December 1987
Fiction

Gold And Black

Then he turns to me, and direct as an arrow says, “You gonna be there?” (This, I thought, is what they refer to in books as “the moment of truth.”) My heart was creeping up my esophagus like an inchworm; but my tongue would not unwind.

October 1986
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Acorns

I was about to run out of meter time when an elderly gentleman approached, moving about as fast as a snail with a broken leg. He carried two large bags full of food and sundry housekeeping paraphernalia. Red-faced and puffing. I offered him a hand.

July 1985
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

The Lucy Syndrome

The inexorable pride that haunts me, the fever of gluttony, and lust that would forego God for an ecstatic moment are the gas, grease, and oil that lubricate this Hellbent vehicle. They are tears the sperm that race up the tube; they excite and terrify but they will never, never save me.

August 1983
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Cholestiatoma

Cholestiatoma is a loving beast; as with other cancers, he comes like a string around the finger, a chain around the throat, to insure that we do not idly forget why we are here. Cholestiatoma (Chole when masculine, Choleste when feminine) lives in my skull between the meninges and the right orbit.

February 1983
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