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Waking Up from Ghana
I am waking up from Ghana as if from a dream of heat and thirst and hazy, blood-pink Harmattan skies. It is a dream in which I am a woman and it is a dream in which I am white: watched as I walk down blacktop roads in the blinding day or in the dark, when my pale skin glows in the cast of the streetlights. I have been a woman before: an odd body in a crush of turbaned, white-shirted....
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It Doesn’t Come Easy
The Pill’s fiftieth anniversary year is an odd occasion for me, the daughter of young parents who stoked their fiery love affair with accidental babies. Despite the pink plastic nautilus of Pills in our mom’s make-up tray, despite the condoms we found when we looted our dad’s sock drawer for impounded Nintendo controllers, my parents got pregnant – again, and again, and again, and each time I received a....
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Swinger’s Club
The Vienna Secession’s new exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries strikes me as somewhat apt for the artist, a man whose “Self-Portrait as Genitalia” looks at first glance like a cartoonish satyr stuck to the body of a chicken—but, on closer observation, reveals goateed Klimt with a haunch of engorged testicles and the plumage of an erect penis. Nevertheless, I did not realize....
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Wedding Dress
In the swelter of Ghana’s heat this past December, I rummaged through my suitcase and found the dress I bought the morning after Rachel’s wedding. It is not a dress anymore. It has not been a dress for years, not since the lean season when I needed new work clothes and....
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Imagining Sorrow
In West Africa, Haiti seems as far away as the moon. Present, distant, it rises every evening to hang in a balance with the glowing Harmattan sun. A few hours later it shows a bright white face against the night. Then the clouds take it back again. A shyster prophet called....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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