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I have spent hours in attics, the kind reached by pulling a rope in the ceiling and ascending to a stagnant room. It was in attics that I found love letters tied with ribbons, and wedding dresses in paper boxes the size of coffins, and sepia photographs of uncles in uniform and children who’d died of scarlet fever. I sifted through images of wraparound porches and white chickens, three-legged dogs and men with cigars. I think there is a reason why the past collects in attics: heavily, above us.
By Faith ShearinDecember 2024I watch for the fox that’s slaughtered / three Rhode Island Reds, the hens / just lumps of bloodied feathers I buried / before my son and daughter woke this morning.
By Mickie KennedyDecember 2024Driving upstate with my father / at the end of a bad year. Trees begin / to outnumber houses. Rain turns to snow / as fields hang like paintings. / Dad fills his lip with chew, talks.
By C.L. O’DellNovember 2024The mountain in winter enables the kind of sleep that restores, heals, allows brains to solve problems. The days have more than enough darkness to crawl inside.
By Todd DavisOctober 2024A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
By Ryan MalloyAugust 2024The fact is, “green” is the way we buried our dead over 150 years ago in the US. It’s the way many Indigenous peoples in North America have cared for their dead. This other, more recent, method is the anomaly.
By Derek AskeyAugust 2024We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.
By Doug CrandellJuly 2024The drive from Homer, Alaska, to Casper, Wyoming, is more than three thousand miles, much of it on winding two-lane highways where moose and bears slip from the underbrush and stand in the road. It had already been a rough trip.
By Dave ZobyJuly 2024The terrible emotions I was filled with are the truth of what it means to be alive. When you live, something else dies. Even if you only eat plants, animals die for you to be able to eat. We do not talk about that often enough.
By Wyatt WilliamsJuly 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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