Mental Health

The Empty Room Inside Each of Us

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Crumb is always right, always the one telling the story, always the one who turns the drab, lonesome plains they call home into a world that’s dramatic and necessary.

Our Fraying Hearts

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

I have a sense of the drama people want to hear about, but most days our ER is filled with abdominal pain and vomiting—nothing like what you’re accustomed to seeing on TV.

Sunbeams

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

God and the Doctor we alike adore / But only when in danger, not before; / The danger o’er, both are alike requited, / God is forgotten, and the Doctor slighted.

John Owen

Practicing

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Taking piano lessons, learning to speak Russian, seeking enlightenment

Boxer’s Fracture

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

My mother once put her fist / through drywall, nothing fractured // but that already-broken home, / a little more of her spirit and ours.

Bars

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

On a playground, at a gymnastics meet, over an apartment window

The Coast of Nowhere II

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Sleet and black rain / pelting the eaves, the kind of predawn / that reaches through the window, hissing, / Your heart never was a bird let alone / a bright-red singing one.

A Conversation with My Father

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

You could make things up that actually felt more like truth, somehow. You could build a world so precise that other people started to believe it, too. And if you didn’t believe the things my dad said, he’d find a way to make you.

Selected Poems

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

It all reminds me of that moment when you take off your sunglasses / after a long drive and realize it’s earlier / and lighter out than you had accounted for.

The Night I Don't Remember

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

It doesn’t matter how many AA meetings you go to. As long as you are taking oxycodone and oxymorphone, you’re going to be high, and, as long as you have complex regional pain syndrome, you’re going to be taking something serious for the pain.

Indecision

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“Whether you go up the ladder or down it,” / says the Tao, “your position is shaky.”

Butt-Dials

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“How are you?” Janice asks her brother, because what do you say to someone you didn’t choose to call except the same thing you say to everyone?

Unruly

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

I’m rebellious, defiant, so I’m sent to the barn, driven there by my newly single mom, or my newly single dad, or my grandparents, or someone else. Another parent told my mom I should try horseback riding. Ice-skating and tae kwon do and ceramics didn’t stick, but I can already tell I’m a horse girl.

Waterfall

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Sex, to me, was like a solvent, cutting through layers of everyday grime. Without it, irritations accumulated with no way of wiping the slate clean; disappointment coagulated into distress. I felt forlorn, restless, and disconnected. Yet no matter how many times I sounded the alarm, my husband never seemed to hear me.

Celebrating

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0500

A fiftieth anniversary in Paris, a COVID Christmas in April, a first birthday in America

Rough Road

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Beat from cycling around town all morning collecting rejections, I scarfed down a fast-food burger that settled into my gut like wet plaster. I just wanted to sit in the air-conditioning and pretend things were going to be OK, but a kid in his polyester uniform started slinging ammonia water from a mop bucket, and the smell made my sinuses hurt.

The Tap Out

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I want to say that when Gavin told me he would kill me, I did not believe him, though there was nothing to suggest he was bluffing: He held me down in bed, his hand on my throat, knees locked around my waist, the alcohol-induced sheen to his blue eyes suggesting he could commit to his words without much thought. But the fear I should have felt—that I had felt minutes before, when I was running around, trying to escape him—was gone. I was gone. I had retreated into what the two of us referred to as my “shutdown mode.”

Zuma

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

When you get to your father's bedroom, you see Dad shaking like a freshly fumigated bug. Your brother is by his side on the phone, his face red and sweaty, like when he's been skateboarding all day.

Thievery

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I was sure I'd heard our front gate squeal and rattle. We live on a tree-lined Chicago street where 6 AM on Sunday is the time for arriving home from the night shift or heading out to the early shift or, in the case of a very few early risers, walking a dog.

Tart

jill.marie.k@gmail.com — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

After the massage I take myself to lunch. I eat a passion fruit tart. It’s delicious—sour and sweet both in perfect balance. Its perfection makes me angry. The filling is bright yellow. I watch my fork pick up the yellow and the crumbs. I am too focused on this tart. I wonder if I have been worrying so much that the worry muscles in my brain are now broken, permanently sharpened to a point of attention that is useless now, an ambulance siren for no one.

The Only Alternative

rcurriejr@gmail.com — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

I’ve taken to telling young people that it takes ten years to get from age twenty to age twenty-five, five years to get from twenty-five to thirty, and three years, tops, to get from thirty to forty. So far, forty to fifty doesn’t seem like it’ll amount to much more than a long weekend. The people my age and older laugh knowingly, and the youngsters nod like Sure, sure, whatever you say, Gramps, and I am left, every time, wondering why the only thing we know to do with the stuff that terrifies us is to make jokes about it that aren’t really jokes at all.

Without the Gate

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.”

Butter

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

I went on absorbing Beth’s hostile digs until a new patient stole her attention from me. Louise had a round face, dark curly hair, and a generous, pear-shaped body. Her weight seemed concentrated in her thighs. When she arrived at lunch for the first time, her figure filling the doorframe, Beth’s eyes brightened as if she were an African lion coming upon a gazelle. I could practically feel my tormentor’s focus lift off me.

Mind the Gap

mcdermon@gmail.com — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.

still lives

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The omen comes in the ruin of a robin’s egg on the sidewalk: fractured blue splattered with the pink makings of a flightless thing. A plum membrane of skin stretched over eyes like bruises. I make the mistake of looking back at this small disaster, and then the calamity of it fingers the threads of my morning.

Dear Woman Who Tried to Pick Me Up at a Hollywood Club in 1998

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:05:00 -0400

What if I’d said yes? Imagine I go home with you that night, / when I’m twenty, and when we wake up in the morning, / you ask, You know you snore? You laugh at my / nighttime retainer, which I’ll wear for the rest of my life, and say, You look hot.

Such Gifts

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:05:00 -0500

He tells me how Mom’s rabbi tried to convince him that life has a purpose, but my brother wasn’t having it. Existence is a tapestry of chaos, he writes, that we impose meaning on to give our lives purpose.

Anger Management

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Dr. B. spun a finger in the air, his signal to let the games begin. I think I called Michael a “no-good fucking loser,” a put-down one of my bosses had once leveled at me. I watched Michael’s hands form fists and the whites of his eyes get bigger.

The Ice Age

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:05:00 -0400

I could see others finding happiness, but whenever I approached it, an invisible sheet of ice stopped me from getting any closer. I could never cross over to the other side; I could only pound on the ice that never cracked.

No Small Wonder

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400

Emotions aren’t discrete bubbles. They are blending into each other all the time. You might be feeling awe and wonder at the miracle of life, and also realizing that we all die, which perhaps moves you closer to terror. In our work we try to find what’s true in it all.