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The Love Song of Pepper Smith

By Caroline LangstonJanuary 23, 2018

The day of Pepper Smith’s funeral, it was a stiff fifteen degrees—ironic weather for a boy from Gulfport, Mississippi. Pepper was my dear old friend for twenty-three years; we had traversed some odd and complicated decades and had ended up living not far from one another in the D.C. area. We talked all the time,…

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Still on the Line

By A.G. HarmonSeptember 7, 2017

I will not claim credit for many things, but one virtue I own is that you can’t make me disloyal to that which I’ve grown attached. Even in my youth, when it was very important to me that I like what everyone else liked, I would not detach myself from that to which I had…

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The The Tattoo Monologues

By Claire PearsonSeptember 6, 2017

Getting a tattoo is not only about deciding what to etch onto one’s body forever, but also about deciding what brief monologue will be uttered any time someone points to the ink and asks: “What does it mean?” The expectation is universal: people want something succinct, a response that suspends their judgment, an answer that…

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An All Too Ghostly Ghost Story: Part 2

By Nick OlsonAugust 29, 2017

Continued from yesterday. Four years ago, my wife and I moved into our red brick cottage. The living room and bedroom walls were a bright pink; the kitchen floor was green linoleum; a small yellow ball with a star rolled around, but we had no pet to play with it. It was as if we…

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The Sweetness These Days

By Richard ChessAugust 23, 2017

On the phone, he says, Your mother throws me over her shoulder and carries me across the parking lot to the club house, the dining room. (She rolls his walker to a corner of the dining room where it won’t obstruct the servers and other residents who have come tonight for dinner.) His sense of…

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Poetry Friday: “My Life as an Open-Air Temple”

By Sharon DolinAugust 4, 2017

In Dolin’s poem we wake up abruptly inside the walls of an ancient temple. Walls are all we have to orient ourselves here in this place, which is without roof or pillars. “I don’t know how” this transformation took place, the unnamed speaker confesses almost shyly, but suddenly she seems to have so much space…

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Who Is This Aliveness I Am?

By Richard ChessJuly 31, 2017

I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.     Who is this aliveness I am? What is this aliveness I am? How is this aliveness I am? * We sing, we chant. Our leader, Rabbi Jeff Roth. The words: a teaching from Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, a student of the Ba’al Shem…

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Poetry Friday: “Graveyard Prayer”

By Robert CordingJuly 28, 2017

In this poem, Robert Cording places himself in an unusual spot: “at the graveyard where I’ll be / buried” and even specifically sitting “on my gravesite.” The poem is a testing out of various tones toward this meeting place of the living moment and its inevitable future end. Teasingly, he calls himself “a Constable imposter”…

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A Prayer for Kendrick Lamar

By Nick OlsonJune 15, 2017

It occurs to me each time I listen to Kendrick Lamar’s new album, Damn: The award winning and much celebrated rapper laments over and over that he feels like nobody’s praying for him. It’s his greatest fear. I’m not sure you can listen casually to a Lamar album. Each song demands attention to every word.…

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Cutting Down the Butterfly Garden

By Bryan BlissJune 7, 2017

When we bought our new house, a jungle of weeds marked the front yard. I was annoyed. The previous owners—moving out of the state—had obviously phoned in the upkeep in their last months of ownership and I wondered aloud what else they would abandon in their final nights. Would we come home to a clogged…

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