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Parents
Lost and Found
I 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.
January 2025
Right Guard
As 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?
December 2024My Ghost Fleet
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.
December 2024
Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda
I learned to breathe in my grandmother’s kitchen / despite life sitting on my chest. / Scent of cast-iron skillet seasoned by sunrises / and ancestors’ touch. Gospels of sizzling grease / and bubbling greens my uncle called hallelujah and amen.
December 2024
Luxuries
A foreign sports car, a Hawaiian vacation, a glass of water on a hot day
December 2024
The Work We Do
I can’t believe it took me so long to hold myself accountable for how much my life actually costs. Forty-two feels incredibly, abnormally late to realize that, yes, time is money. And, conversely, money is time—time that someone, somewhere worked.
December 2024
Become a Friend of The Sun
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.
December 2024The Wind Phone
The 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.
December 2024
Guarding the Coop
I 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.
December 2024
Greenie
Sometimes 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.
December 2024
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