Healing

Because I became allergic to chocolate when I was seventeen

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

because a rash spread on my chest when I ate mole sauce at Sanborns; because acne populated my face every time I drank hot cocoa; because I believed it to be easy to give up something I loved

Formed Otherwise

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

There’s a presumption that to raise a child with disabilities makes you brave. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t always a stellar mother, either. But I studied my daughter as if she were an ancient text to see what was beneath the chatter and the rage

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

Milk

Sun, 31 May 2026 11:00:00 -0400

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

My Bowstring Heart

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

On the field I was all animal instinct and brute force—a bruiser, a bone breaker. Every tackle was a rebuke against a life where fathers die. When I played rugby, I wasn’t a broke, lost little girl. I wasn’t a struggling amateur writer. I had goals. I was a winner. I was MVP. I was someone.

Bars

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

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

Pockets

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

Shoplifting cigarettes, running the pool table, creating a “pocket prairie”

Nicknames

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

Get to know Boxcar Betty, Stick Dick, Lali, and the Cajun Asian

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.

The Dead of Dream Town

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

As the majority population of Dream Town, the dead hold all elective offices. They determine the hours of the municipal pool. (Midnight swimming!) They program traffic lights to operate on peculiar patterns: Some never turn red. Others never turn green.

Stirring the Pot

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

Leading a strike, starting trouble between sisters, feeding strangers

Celebrating

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

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

Considerable Luck

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

In the weeks before my surgery I wandered parks and refuges where black-crowned night herons clung to cattails, pied-billed grebes fished ponds, and raucous crows cawed and flew upwind to find branches where they could shelter together. They would aim for a tree, fail to settle as a flock, then fall back and regroup to try again. Like the crows, I wouldn’t quit.

The Childless Aunt

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Though a faint hope that I might yet conceive continued to smolder in the back of my mind, at some point it dawned on me that none of these joys and trials I wished for myself were exclusive to biological parents. I could love any child who needed me.

About That Time I Pushed a Car Uphill

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I want to pause here and point out the obvious: According to the laws of physics, as soon as Darius put the car in neutral, it would begin to roll back. With me behind it.

Getting Dressed

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Sleeping in uniform, layering against the cold, wearing your spouse’s jeans

Avium

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

You don’t know what’s with Marjorie, // but you almost love her as you gird your loins for a cure / worse than the disease. Imagining two years of drugs / in your still-able body that climbs hills and sings, // you can’t stop wondering how you got this thing. Yet / it must be said avium blesses you with a meaning hardly / to be believed. . .

Moon Boots

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Our baby could not yet hold his head up. I lay on my parents’ living room floor next to my son, wondering how I was going to afford and overcome everything by myself, thinking I was too clumsy to take care of something as delicate as a child. And, in having these thoughts, I came undone.

The Seafood Stand

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

Once, my father drove from New Jersey to California by siphoning gas from strangers’ cars, then sent his van off the Pacific Coast Highway by laying a brick on the accelerator. His mother almost died when she heard.

Records

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

A favorite album, a fastest time, a handwritten note about an adoption

Tending the Wound

jarodanderson@gmail.com — Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

My memory of you is a knife // with no sheath, / heavy as November in my pocket.

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.”

The Healer

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

He was riding the train to his teaching job when he heard about Skimmer’s bike accident in a post from another college friend. It was noon in Tokyo, where he was an English instructor; his conversation school opened in thirty minutes. Skimmer had been one of his closest friends in college. They’d lived on the same floor for two years and had shared an off-campus house with others for three years after that. Skimmer had started mountain biking their first semester in the house. Sometimes he would have accidents, and his blood would smear the bathtub while he dressed his wounds. But then he would clean, and when Skimmer cleaned, he scrubbed and wiped and penetrated each corner, calling upon a small orchestra of sprays and rags, brushes and solutions. It was like watching Leonard Bernstein scour a tub.

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.

Time in the Shape of Hills

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

My bones wake me up at night. It was my hips at first, then my femurs screaming. Now my ankles. But my doctor won’t listen. It started last year when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Spain. I’m sure that’s why my bones hurt—from all the walking.

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.

Clean Breaks

kslunstrum@gmail.com — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Sonja wakes to a stranger’s voice in the boat with her. A man’s voice. A panicked moment passes before she realizes that it’s coming over the radio and not from inside the cabin. “Aidez-moi,” the man says. “Help. Ayúdame. Please.” His call cuts in and out between the fuzz of the handheld VHF’s granular static.

Athens, Revised

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her.