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Physical Health
Considerable Luck
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.
November 2025
The Childless Aunt
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.
November 2025
About That Time I Pushed a Car Uphill
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.
October 2025
Avium
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. . .
September 2025Airborne
Seema Lakdawala on Viruses and How They Spread
Studies done with animals in labs don’t totally replicate the way humans get infected, which involves mucus, saliva, and other pathogens. We don’t know the full complexity of that interaction.
September 2025
Butter
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.
November 2024
A Seat at the Table
Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann on Indigenous Arctic Foodways in an Industrialized World
The 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.
July 2024
The Wisdom Package
I ask the youngish eye doctor why my eyes itch / and burn and why new floaty bits / of paramecium-shaped debris swim // through my view each day
June 2024My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother
My mother’s disease wants / to know my name. // My mother’s disease takes / me in // with my mother’s eyes.
June 2024Sunbeams
June 2024There are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.
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