I wonder if there is an afterlife. Nancy believed in it, but she doesn’t seem to be cooperating. My friend Carrie tells me her dead partner Judy moved a chair…
family
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This is how one story goes: My PopPop’s PopPop and his family fled Romania sometime in the decades leading up to the holocaust, leaving behind land and family and lives…
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On Route 17M, heading toward New Jersey for Aunt Mary’s wake, my father asks me to keep an eye on the pond at the Goshen exit. At 70 mph, I…
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* * * And I wish for a moment, a moment to breathe. There is my teenage son, his knee bouncing under the kitchen table; my father, calling voicelessly for…
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When I make bread, I focus on the feel of the dough, the windowpane test for gluten elasticity, the delicate question of adding a pinch of flour. Will it turn…
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I knew it was a long shot, but I had to do it. It was now or never. I promised Joe, my agent of thirty years, two weeks. “Two weeks!”…
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Sifting under strawberry vines each week, I lift their long, leafy tendrils with god knows what on the end. Various shapes, colors, and stages of rottenness, or not. I’d planted…
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Creative Nonfiction / Essay
The Birds: Lessons From a Woodpecker
by Guest Contributor October 19, 2020Lessons I’ve Learned From a Woodpecker: Save your brain Get to work Be loving Be free I had a few concussions when I was younger. I feel like we are…
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* * * my sixteenth year spreads itself between steam flooding under a locked door & my mother knocking softly. a juicy lucy burger waits in my stomach & i’m…
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Image Credit: Engin Akyurt from Pexels Entangled in sleep, Omar lay across the porch in front of the door like a sack of laundry. I nudged him softly with…
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I never knew my lola. Every few months, I would hear her voice crackle through the phone from the other side of the Earth. On the mantel, I would see…
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I. They had all disappeared before I arrived. Death. Distance. Disconnection. And discontent. Mother said her mum jubilated when she conceived me. But earth had taken her in, folding…
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Creative Nonfiction / Essay
Literacy Narrative: Letter to an Uncle
by Guest Contributor June 11, 2020Dear Uncle R., Here’s what the stories have told me: you died in 1987 at home, not in Vietnam. I was born in 1990. My coworker—an army reserve who saw…
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My grandmother died the day I went to the dentist. My dad called me right as I was putting on some coffee. In three days, I was sitting in an…