Topics | Cancer | The Sun Magazine #2

Topics

Browse Topics

Cancer

Fiction

Debris

When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.

By Terry Engel October 2020
Poetry

The Hairdresser

sees the old woman — wheelchair bound, pushed by her daughter — glance / out the window, and goes in back / to fetch a shower cap. The woman tugs her daughter’s shirt and says, almost / inaudibly, It’s raining. / And it is raining. Barely.

By Benjamin S. Grossberg July 2020
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

How It Ends

It begins like this: You drop your son off at kindergarten. His first day of school. You think that nothing in your life will be as big as this: the moment he drops your hand, he who has clung to you since birth, since that first breath of air, first scream, first frantic rooting for the breast.

By Louise A. Blum March 2020
Readers Write

Bravery

Facing the police, facing your parents, facing the truth

By Our Readers February 2020
The Sun Interview

The World We Still Have

Barry Lopez On Restoring Our Lost Intimacy With Nature

One of the reasons we’re lonely . . . is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world, and have called this “progress.”

By Fred Bahnson December 2019
Poetry

Kenny

after my mother’s funeral   standing in the receiving line just / below the altar rail shaking hands with people I hardly knew / when Kenny  a face I hadn’t seen in twenty years    appeared and / grabbed me and hugged me so damn hard the wind went out / of me

By Jim Bishop November 2019
Poetry

The Extra Year: Selected Poems

from “Almost Done” | My wife has taken Pepper to the vet this morning. She is losing her hair, doesn’t like her food, has growths on her skin, moves slowly after eighty-four dog years.

By Jory Post October 2019
Fiction

The Samples

Helplessness makes monsters of people. He’s seen chairs thrown, exam tables kicked. The rooms pathologists speak to patients in now have everything bolted down.

By Kristopher Jansma June 2019
Poetry

Fear And Love

I wish I could make the argument that a river / and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego / are enough.

By Jim Moore June 2019
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Cure For Racism Is Cancer

This strange country of cancer, it turns out, is the true democracy — one more real than the nation that lies outside these walls and more authentic than the lofty statements of politicians; a democracy more incontrovertible than platitudes or aspiration.

In the country of cancer everyone is simultaneously a have and a have-not. In this land no citizens are protected by property, job description, prestige, and pretensions; they are not even protected by their prejudices. Neither money nor education, greed nor ambition, can alter the facts. You are all simply cancer citizens, bargaining for more life.

By Tony Hoagland September 2018