Lanecia Rouse Tinsley is an abstract artist based in Houston, Texas. She creates out of a desire to make the invisible landscapes within us known, using texture, form and color to speak to life in ways she feels words cannot. She says she is drawn to the “negative spaces” in life—times of ambiguity and uncertainty, silence and mystery.

“You OK?” my husband Craig touches my hand, looks at me. We’re in the car, Sunday evening, driving home. Something shifts inside me, like sand. This experience of having him check in with me is new. After almost fifty years of practice, I’m so used to saying fine that I don’t always feel what I’m…

One such patient, under my care, describes how he must “wake up” his phantom in the mornings: first he flexes the thigh-stump towards him, and then he slaps it sharply—“like a bay’s bottom”—several times. On the fifth or sixth slap the phantom suddenly shoots forth, rekindled, fulgurated, by the peripheral stimulus. —Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook…

I love it when poems speak to each other and expand on a shared theme. The epigraph here references the well-known poem “Church Going” by Phillip Larkin. Both poems describe churches, their architecture and unique interiors. However, they also explore more universal questions about the role and relevance of organized religion. Brown doesn’t mince words.…

  The phone rang. My newborn must have been asleep—I have no recollection of her at that moment—but my two preschoolers were with me, and I realized later that I had repeated the horrific news aloud. Thus, for months, my kids sat together at their play table to reenact the conversation. “What do you mean,…

I spent Christmas Eve with my mom last month for the first time in years. It was unexpected; she was happy and well. All through the drive to my aunt’s house—Dad at the wheel, Mom turning the music up—my sister and I watched the lights and thought about extraordinary transformations. How anything is possible, though…

What do I do with the daily news of disasters? Do I mumble a quick prayer for the victims, then turn to my day’s to-do list? Do I ever pause and ponder: this disaster might have struck those I love, or even me? These are the questions that Shara McCallum turns over in “The News.”…

From my office window I can see the pale yellow plantation house, its sharply pitched roof peeking from behind a huge conifer, its two Italianate cupolas, one at either end of the house. Since 1901, Sweet Briar House has been the home of the president of Sweet Briar College, a small women’s college in the…

It’s evening and I’m about to meet my older sister in baggage claim. Trained by years of overseas travel in my twenties—and having lost enough luggage along the way—I have taken very little with me on the trip: my carry-on, my diaper bag, and my nine-month-old baby.

I am between flights. It’s a four-day wait in this case, and I can spend it at home, so it probably doesn’t constitute a proper layover. But it feels like a layover, and I have a difficult time concentrating on anything but my connecting flight, the one that will unite me with my sister. I’m…