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On a solo backpacking trip, in a desert military base, at a church revival
The best nights are when moonlight comes through the trees, casting indigo shadows across the ice. My partner swoops around, his arms swinging in front of his crouched body. “It’s the closest we get to flying,” he said once as he sailed past me. Another time: “Maybe this is how a dolphin feels carving through the water.” He loves the tension of the blade slicing across the surface, the whoosh of his skates drawing elaborate patterns on the ice, the crunch of a hockey stop. I listen for the occasional owl.
The South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest.
By Nick MartinJanuary 2025January 2025I’m not sure which matters more—where the seed comes from, or where it takes root and grows.
Zetta Elliott, A Wish After Midnight
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.”
By Bruce McKayJanuary 2025The day I waded out of the lake with a stand-up / paddleboard and a split tooth was four days after I knew / I would leave you and eight days before I told you / I knew.
By Angela JandaJanuary 2025A peach-pickers’ strike, a crisis of faith, a paralyzing accident
By Our ReadersJanuary 2025My 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.
By Beth AlvaradoJanuary 2025I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.
By Matt CashionJanuary 2025As he aged, my father dwindled, / not in stature—though he grew smaller, / as elders must—but rather in estate. / He never required much, // insisted on giving things away. / What am I going to do with all this?
By Joseph BathantiDecember 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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