This is the tree I had my first kiss—it was like a viewing, gory and wet. Classmates in almond branches, watching the wreck. Doing nothing to feign casualty. This is the water tower I’ve told you of many times. Yes, it was the drinking supply I swam in, naked. Yes. I got a thrill, at […]
“Dad, the hurricane sent Puerto Rico back to the stone age,” was how my son put it after living through the wrath of Hurricane Maria, and witnessing the extent of the devastation and destruction of the island first hand. Hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods are Nature’s reset buttons. Its way to reclaim its space, to rid […]
With a background in geology, Rick Bass splits his time between environmental activism and writing. His work crosses genres and includes non-fiction, essays, novels, and short stories. You can find his work widely published and acclaimed in journals and magazines such as Esquire, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, […]
Those two punctured windows of the Mandalay Bay Hotel from the previous night’s news haunted me. I felt this same way after 9/11. I had never before imagined these particular acts of evil—a killer firing on a crowd from up high, or people using planes as weapons. In this world, there are things you can […]
The art in this series, “Art for Your Existential Crisis,” is an ongoing project that began in 2011, when I was in my late twenties and found myself deeply pondering and often immobilized by the most heavy-hitting questions we ask ourselves. Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? […]
It was a routine morning in the spring of my senior year at Vestal High School, 1997. I woke to the unfailing alarm of my father’s whisper-shout: “Hey bud, time to rise and shine. Up and at ‘em!” (My groggy inner retort: I guess I’ll rise, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna fucking shine.) I […]
[creative nonfiction] When I get to the top of Masada there are the canyons and there are the fortress ruins and there is the desert that stereotypically stretches out like a blanket location designed to set the scene for biblical abyss. There is this moment we are forced to be in together, all of us […]
Paralysis can be an education: it makes you infinitely more aware of the possible. Possibilities were all I could think about recently in urgent care when I sat on a bed waiting for a doctor to tell me why I could not move the right side of my face and was losing the ability to […]
[fiction] It was a young and tiny family—a wife, a husband, a three-month old son. They moved into the apartment on the tenth floor of a building which was one of the original high-rises in Chennai. There were six apartments on each floor around a central corridor into which the lifts opened. The corridor was […]
I got pregnant at twenty-one. It happened while I was still an undergrad, directly after a Bible study meeting at the campus ministry. And I do mean right after—maybe within the hour. The father and I had just prayed about fornication at the meeting. I think we were trying to stop, or considering trying to […]
Roxane Gay’s Hunger is a powerful memoir that depicts a very personal narrative while also serving as a work of criticism, exploring society’s inability to see or accommodate the needs of the extremely obese. Her examples range from descriptions of public and private erasure, the dearth of public accommodation, and so much more. In simple […]
It’s an early October morning in West Seattle and storming off and on. The trees are half a dozen shades of red and orange and last night’s downpour has left the pavement soaked. The neighborhood I’m walking through is chock-full of small-town peculiarities like a shed with a bold banner that reads, “Caddyshack,” an actual […]
[fiction] They called girls like her butterflies. At least the moms on Instagram did. Posting pictures of toddlers with low-set ears and thick necks and little girls with strangely puffed hands and feet. They used hashtags like #butterflygirl or #turnersyndrome. More often than not it was photos of blankets or baby toys bought for daughters […]
As a young child, I stuttered. “Mom, wha-wha-wha-what time is it?” Many times she would answer, but sometimes she would interrupt me mid-sentence to say, “Marlenia! You need to stop and breathe before you talk.” If I had been part of a household in which we each patiently and politely spoke after someone placed a […]
Jeremy Radin is a poet, actor, and teacher living in Los Angeles. He’s appeared on several television shows including It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, CSI, ER, and Zoey 101, in films such as Terrence Malick’s The New World and Wrestlemaniac, and in many plays […]
Last month, I visited my eighty-six year old mother, Geraldine, in New Jersey where she lives in a building for seniors. On the third morning, I woke to find that she had been up all night struggling to breathe. To my exasperation, she had waited out the terrifying night sitting up in a reclining chair […]
I live in Los Angeles and spend a lot of time exploring in nature when I’m not working in the studio or teaching. Regardless of what medium I use, my work has a whimsical quality and embodies my love of the outdoors and my awe of the natural world. These pieces are from a large collection of hand cut collages […]
At the intersection of Hayes and Van Ness, a thin elderly man stands in the median. He wears a baseball cap that covers most of his white, closely cropped hair. He is trim and clean-shaven. Hardly someone whom one would consider homeless. His posture is erect, and proud. He holds a sign with neat and […]
[fiction] The summer I worked at the casino pool, we took shuttles to and from the employee entrance. We were not allowed to park on property, only at a parking lot on the other side of the highway that added forty minutes, unpaid, to our workday. Sometimes in the mornings if I was groggy, or hung over from two-for-one margaritas from the Paradise Cantina, I walked onto the shuttle first without letting graveyard out. I weaved through them down the aisle, sunglasses on, somewhat ashamed yet inoculated to their glares.
Growing up, I consumed mysteries—gorged even. I binge-watched reruns of Unsolved Mysteries before binging was cool. I watched episodes alone in the dark and pretended to hold seances with Robert Stack. I had a thing for him. It wasn’t a crush. Maybe just a love of the macabre. Something about the theme music and the […]
Owl of Forest Park Early Saturdays, before the dawn, before the morning birds, I walked the trails of Forest Park beyond the zoo, crushed the arteries of Hoyt Arboretum beneath my spreading feet, turned the fallen petals from the rose garden to shaving peels. It was here, in the darkness of Portland mornings that I […]
As I approach seventeen years since I moved to Seattle from my home state of New York, as more and more of my memories melt down or vaporize, and as the world becomes a more and more streamlined doomsday machine, it feels like a ripe time to pause for some inventory. The century is a […]
Dearest Soon, I think I may be in love with you, Soon. The opening lines of Derrick C. Brown’s latest collection of love poems, How the Body Works the Dark, reveal the heart of his poetry in a sincere, simple declaration. Brown writes about love the way all poets should. His understated tone, diction, and […]
When you walk in the doors of a prison, you can’t help but be reminded that in order to leave, someone has to let you out. You are reminded by the big thick doors. You are reminded by the double paned glass. You are reminded by the tall gates outside. You’ve left everything in your […]
[poetry] Sonnet II: We’re Not in Chinatown Anymore Philly’s Chinatown has no Hollywood, just a bunch of ripped up movie billboards, blockbusters translated into Chinese, signs right in front of the bookshop where I wait: my father is buying his zodiac books, fortunes for the new year. He’s psychic— it’s the Tiger telling his Snake […]
One of my five roommates recently told me I am aggressive. We were in the kitchen and he was washing dishes. That night in the kitchen, I could be heard yelling, several times, “I am not f***ing aggressive.” The truth is, I have been in a six-month bad mood. My body is going through changes […]
Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress is a quintessential hard-boiled mystery novel. Mosley’s protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is on par with two of the genre’s most notable characters, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer. Set in 1948 Los Angeles, the sharply written first person narrative pays homage to its traditional genre conceits. […]
When I was a young girl, I tried to teach myself to fly. Every night before lights out, I’d stand on my bed, flap my arms, and look for a sign, any shred of evidence that I was improving my technique. I had a mad crush on the cartoon superhero Underdog, and I wanted to […]
[creative nonfiction] My mom sent me letters from Indiana. Stacks of cards with flowers and curly, purple ink inside. Breathtaking cursive spanned the card. My small hands touched the parts where she’d written sweet girl or my name. She had her first nervous breakdown when I was six years old, and was admitted to a […]
Recently I went to Spirit Rock Meditation Center searching for God. After years of searching inside holy books, places of worship, and time spent conversing with pious men, She was nowhere to be found. My goal was to commune with Her; I hoped to assuage the final vestiges of fear that I’d carried for much […]
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