Issue 502 | The Sun Magazine

October 2017

Readers Write

Mischief

A teenage vandal, a burning secret, a sexual awakening

By Our Readers
One Nation, Indivisible

October 2017

Featuring Pramila Jayapal, Ralph Nader, Sister Helen Prejean, Sy Safransky, Tim Wise, and more.

The Dog-Eared Page

The low road

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.

By Marge Piercy
Quotations

Sunbeams

The [prison] system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you. They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent’s funeral.

Damien Echols

The Sun Interview

Jailhouse Blues

Henry Robinett On Teaching Inmates To Play The Guitar

These guys are allowed almost no dignity. As far as I’m concerned, their sentence is their punishment. They aren’t supposed to be treated cruelly on top of that.

By Aaron Carnes
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Wayward Daughter

I’m at my father’s bedside, his hand resting in mine. His skin feels thin, but his nails grow thick and long, creeping a half inch beyond the rounded flesh. They’re the only part of him that seems healthy. How can the nails keep growing like this when his heart pumps barely enough blood to keep him alive?

By Brenda Miller
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Home From The War

I am waiting to turn left at an intersection. A driver cuts me off, we make eye contact, and I am caught in the endless loop of a memory I thought I had left behind eight years ago in Afghanistan. I begin to feel panicked.

By Benjamin Hertwig
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Tides

Then ahead I saw a small, dark shape perched on the sand, well back from the water. As I drew closer, the shape revealed itself to be a bird, sitting back on its tail feathers. It was vaguely penguin-like, about eighteen inches tall, with black back and head, white breast and cheeks.

By Richard Jay Goldstein
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Nesting Ground

After fifteen years in prison I was beginning to assume my life couldn’t get any more lopsided and annoying, but now some cruel functionary has started a war against the local swallows.

By Saint James Harris Wood
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

We Are All Children Here

I was never able to answer my mother when she asked how her Holocaust experience had affected me. And she deserves my good-faith attempt, albeit these many years late.

By Paul Mandelbaum
Poetry

I Was Reading A Poem

I was reading a poem by Ryōkan about a leaf, and how it showed the front and the back as it fell, and I wanted to call someone — my wife, my brother — to tell about the poem.

By David Rutschman