father

“Someone has to take the iPad,” my mom said. “I’ll never use it, you know.” I am certain my eighty-year-old mom will never dabble with technology. She still calls the…

“Don’t move.” From the passenger seat behind me, Bryan grabbed my headrest and pulled himself up. “That is one big bug,” he said with excess enthusiasm. “Where?” I whispered. “On top…

Image Credit: Jesse Shofner   Last winter, your father asked if “queer” was still a slur. He asked this carefully, as he always does when it comes to your sexuality.…

Behind the mask, another mask. -Thou   Ghosts have no memory, but I do. -Janice Lee   On a drizzly Friday evening I decide to ride my bike to the…

For me, literacy was discovered in the Windy City’s cruel, winter howl—the intertwining of English, Spanish, and Polish a language all its own. Growing up in the Chicago Polish neighborhood…

WOVEN is an Entropy series and dedicated safe space for essays by persons who engage with #MeToo, sexual assault and harassment, and #DomesticViolence, as well as their intersections with mental…

Image Credit: Aaron Brame   1994. I drove around Memphis in my little green car with the big dent on the side. The speakers shook as Kathleen Hanna screamed, Suck my…

The year we move for the second time, my father’s study and my sleeping quarters share a room. My father wants to be close to his church and my mother…

WOVEN is an Entropy series and dedicated safe space for essays by persons who engage with #MeToo, sexual assault and harassment, and #DomesticViolence, as well as their intersections with mental…

Image Credit: The Stroop Report, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising   My mother’s first memory was a dark one. She was three, living in the gray, perilous misery of the Kovno ghetto…

I noticed the correlation between secrets and smells from the confines of my dad’s house. Later, I discovered that both coexist outside as well. On one Saturday morning, my brother…

There was nothing to do but climb. The turquoise sky was immeasurable above the yuyuga tree, slim branches swaying and bending with heavy fruit. At ten years old, waking life…

In what would be a life-long pattern of behavior for me, I was absent for the birth of my oldest child. In anger towards her mother, I ignored my daughter…

My friends and I waited our turn to ride the Model T. It idled on the edge of Alvina Elementary’s grass field, spitting oil, coughing smoke, rattling, shuddering. Black fenders…