October 2021
Sisters
The kind you’re born with, the kind you choose, the kind that teach Catholic school
from The Grapes Of Wrath
What happened to the folks in that car? Did they walk? Where are they? Where does the courage come from? Where does the terrible faith come from?
Sunbeams
For almost everyone the notion of home is usually a positive one. It is the known as opposed to the unknown; it is certainty as opposed to uncertainty. . . . It is the familiar and predictable. Better that than the unknown, the unpredictable, with a stranger imposing strange ways. It is also the primordial sense of the need for security, of being held, of belonging.
October 2021
Displaced
Graham Pruss On Why More People Are Living In Cars And RVs
To insist that people who have a mobile shelter are “homeless” not only denies that their shelter can be a home; it also has the potential to deny their humanity, because it insists that they are incapable of making a home.
Under The Influence
I snuggled closer to him to show my loyalty. See, I am your grandson. I belong to you. Placing my head lightly against his shoulder, I could smell the oil, the sweat, the Old Milwaukee.
Invitation
Maybe I write because I want visibility and invisibility, each on my own terms. I want you to accept these paragraphs as photographs from my mind, and I want these photographs to tell you something useful about me. Yet I don’t want you to see me.
Better
My eyes filled again. Filippo came by and murmured, “Think of the little light in your chest,” and somehow I understood him. I don’t know how. I let the light shine.
On White Violence, Black Survival, And Learning To Shoot
But some things are clear: Power begets violence. Violence reinforces power. White Americans damn well know this much.
Lawrence The Enormous
Slowly, Heidi finished the last of her champagne. She wiped her lipstick from the glass with her thumb, and something stirred inside Lawrence.
A Thousand Words
October 2021
A new feature in the magazine, A Thousand Words is meant to be a place for just this kind of image.
A Few Days After My First Vaccine
Walking by the lake, I lose an earring / and don’t even notice it at first, / overwhelmed as I am / by the strangeness of everything.
Almost Cha-Cha
I tell people that when I was born, my mother / was on drugs, and so she named me Brett. / But what I don’t tell them is that she almost / named me Charlotte and wanted to call me / Cha-Cha.
Intensive Outpatient
On our way back from a Mother’s Day celebration in Newport Beach / my sister turned to me & said, Have you ever thought about treatment for your / eating disorder? For years the only eating disorder in the house was hers.
