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Family and Relationships

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen

We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door.

By Leah Rutherford August 2023
Poetry

The Art Of Living

My fly line unspools across the water like a long sentence / whose final punctuation is a grizzly hackle tied by a friend. / He clamped his fly vise to the branch of a fallen pine / right after we arrived by mule train at this Montana river.

By Erik Reece August 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What I Don’t Tell My Wife

There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.

By Craig Reinbold August 2023
Poetry

Total Solar

We took our kids to City Hall Plaza / with its dead-on view / of South Mountain to watch / the moon eclipse our sun / in a certain way we’d been told / wouldn’t happen again / in our lifetime unless we traveled / to a far-off part of the globe.

By John Bargowski August 2023
The Dog-Eared Page

The Portal

There had been no omens to suggest that, by going through the portal a second time, Amber would ruin the rest of her life: no bats circling the entrance nor enormous crows cawing ominously from nearby branches. Even if there had been bats and crows, I believe Amber would have gone anyway.

By Debbie Urbanski August 2023
Fiction

Please Be Patient, Student Driver

My classmates were all getting their driver’s licenses. Like any of us had anywhere important to go. They drove cars their parents had gifted them, either a hand-me-down or a brand-new lease. I was the last without a provisional license and the only one without a car parked outside Shane Yamamoto’s house.

By Joseph Han August 2023
Readers Write

Privacy

A coded diary, a box of letters, a closed bedroom door

By Our Readers August 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Psychic Is In

Being exposed to psychics at such a young age was like being raised Catholic or vegetarian: you continue living out these belief systems even after they no longer serve you.

By Mishele Maron July 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Run Home

Long-distance running is the dogged refusal to bend to the way you feel. It is the accommodation of pain. If you run long enough, far enough, fast enough, you will carve out a place in yourself where pain can live.

By Margo Steines July 2023
Poetry

Poem In Which I Fail To Teach My Dog How To Fetch

Here, I call, using the sweet voice the vet psychiatrist recommended, not the hell no one I prefer. Here, I call again.

By Shuly Xóchitl Cawood July 2023