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Awake in the Waste Places
I received ashes twice yesterday: once in a cool, anonymous throng, and again in a friend’s living room, so full and warm that I could smell the evening’s food and sweat clinging to the bodies around me. I was sitting on the floor, legs curled, then stretched so that the blood could flow, and when....
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Across the Barricade
Two days after Obama’s inauguration, the crowds barely gone and the Mall barely cleared of trampled water bottles and blankets, the March for Life came to town. It was a Thursday and I headed to work early, looking forward to the post-inaugural respite of an empty metro train. Instead, the turnstiles and trains were crammed with people in neon orange stocking caps: teenagers, moms, brown-skirted Brothers, all decked out to....
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Writing on the Wall
January marks the anniversary of several family catastrophes. I keep trying to laugh about it, to applaud the humor of the general bloodletting. The impulse to laugh when things are really bad is a congenital defect—or a Darwinian asset, depending on how you look at it. My parents....
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An Ebenezer
Yesterday in the Saturday-crowded Safeway, I bought the same ginger candle that burned a year ago in my bedroom. The day before yesterday, I walked down the street and let my body ache, willed it to ache more at the year-old scars left from last winter’s hasty surgery....
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Incarnation
My mother is an exhibitionist. Her freedom with her body is beautiful to me, signaling a lack of vanity, a comfort with aging, a kind of joy in the healthy softness of her small frame, which bore all three of my sisters and myself and is just now beginning to show the creped swags of time....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
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