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There’s something about art that too often goes unnoticed: art requires we engage. Each month we receive thousands of submissions of prose, poetry, and photography from people hoping to be published in The Sun. And we engage with each submission in hopes of finding those that will resonate most with you. Our commitment is to bring you the best we can find, the writing and photography that help to unwrap the layers of gauze we wind around ourselves and which obscure the things that matter most. We are profoundly grateful for your support.
By Rob BowersDecember 2024The prairie grass has always drawn things into its orbit. I’ve seen rabbits hide among the bluestem, and the occasional red fox, and after every storm there are objects that blow or float past and entangle themselves in the switchgrass and fescue. . . . Tonight, a windy September evening, a shiny new object has appeared in my yard, like a loose mylar balloon blown by the wind.
By Susan NevilleDecember 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 2024Sometimes I wonder if that moment when I came into the house after school, during a time when I was mostly friendless, dressed in matronly, dated clothes from the Cancer Society thrift shop, barred by my mother from concerts, movies, and parties, and I sat down at the table and was grabbed hard by my grandmother’s hand, which seemed to hold a charge of energy—sometimes I wonder if that moment, that physical connection, that pinch, was how I survived.
By Heather SellersDecember 2024The thing about the apocalypse is that nobody said it would be so beautiful. Spring is letting down her hair. The air is warm, sweet, and clear. Moss drapes over a storm drain, parting for the rush of early-morning runoff. A heavy quiet has descended since we took to our homes, save for the shrieking hawks circling the shuttered strip-mall parking lot next door to my mother’s house outside of Philadelphia.
By Jessica Hendry NelsonNovember 2024I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.
By Becky MandelbaumNovember 2024I 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.
By Mishele MaronNovember 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 2024There was a rumor the NAACP would call for a boycott of white-owned businesses. Eugene’s mother said it wasn’t clear what the objective would be, except to piss off white people and make Black people feel in control of something. “A show of Black power,” she said, holding up a fist from the living-room sofa, but she was worried more people would be killed.
By John HolmanNovember 2024It just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land. When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.
By Dash LewisNovember 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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