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Looking for Release
Dayne, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, spent his childhood in Tennessee, where he got his southern drawl and where his father, who drank, would stomp through the house and sweep his long arm across the crowded kitchen counter smashing greasy dishes onto the linoleum. It was a habit that followed their family on the move to Sauk Village, to Jeffrey Street, where Dayne’s father bought a house and kept....
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Blessing and Responsibility
At work last Tuesday, I found myself in a familiar place: my right side aching, my skin burning, my office walls a blur of florescent white and blue. Every month, I cycle through these symptoms and assume that they are normal. That all women carry this kind of pain. That the migraines and the blood and the surreal tenderness of my flesh are just par for the course....
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Beauty Evangelist
I spent the next year trying to prove myself to the people who filled my classes: working parents trying to finish a degree, masses of unemployed men looking to switch careers after the family farm downsized. Some of my younger students, only a year or so older than me, had already done two tours of duty in Iraq. I had a lot to prove to them, small woman that I was....
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Maid of Honor
This weekend, my younger sister is taking a train to Grand Rapids. She is coming to help me with details: to try on shoes and seal envelopes, to shake out the ivory folds of my wedding dress. She used to hate coming to Michigan. Four years ago, she went to a party with a sorority friend, at a cabin two hours north of my house, and was raped by a stranger. We spent the next three years going to court, telling....
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The Mystery of a Neighbor
When I was little, I had a bad habit of hanging around neighbors’ houses. I would knock and knock at their doors, whether they had kids to play with or not; I would ask questions about the house, their day, what plants they were growing in the garden. And eventually, I was sent home with a warning: “When I say go, I mean go!” I’m not sure what it was that drew me—the mystery of a neighbor, the hope of a cookie....
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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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