Attention Volunteers: Due to ____________, we have updated the Get Out the Vote script as follows. Further changes will be uploaded to this site weekly daily hourly on the minute. Please note, we...
My first experience of isolation and social distancing occurred when I was four years old. Although I understand it now through the eyes of an adult, my recollection of the episode is utterly clear. I often...
Collateralized Debt Obligations Structured by Cows We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it. —unnamed Standard and Poor’s official It could be structured by cows and we would...
The building is filled with old ladies, some with walkers, some with aides, and many who manage quite well on their own. They are mostly widows, wearing sensible shoes from Harry’s, lots of black puffer...
Fact death’s birth theater: a circling thicket of negligent capability’s white folding chairs on a plantation or at an inauguration. Effluvium whiteness Mount Vesuviusing to thy neighbor’s lawn— an abscess. And I’m swaddled in white, stained...
Cradling Our Breath Afloat Rocking the Heart Safe Harbour In June, I sat with a guided meditation teacher on Dan Harris’s app, Ten Percent Happier, where the prompt was simply, “cradle your breath.” As I applied the...
The Last Time Things Were Normal The last time things were more or less normal, I got a haircut. Or rather, a trim. There was no particular reason for it. I woke up, noticed the dullness of the dark, wiry strands wrapped in a bun, felt the...
They’re dressing up cats on Facebook and someone has taught a dog to play volleyball— a natural, he always makes the return. Bocelli and Orlenski transcend and console, nepenthe for the quarantined. I hold onto a kitchen chair and learn to plié. The...
Happy hour in the memory care unit means Frank Sinatra on the stereo, kiwi smoothies in little plastic cups, and my mom, wearing elasticized pants and my dad’s old zip-up sweater, dancing among wheelchairs. This late-January snapshot of my mom’s...
“…to become native of this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might be truly at home.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass So many processes...
Como Pizza 4035 Broadway ★★★★★ $ · Pizza A hot hot slice, a treat, the epitome of NYC, an orange bubble of oil shimmering on the surface of cratered cheese. A premature bite...
Note: This essay contains spoilers. Bong Jung-Ho’s award-winning film Parasite centers around two families, the Kims and the Parks, each with four members: father, mother, son, and daughter. The Kims are all savvy, intelligent, and hardworking;...
Listen to my last breath you’ll hear each breath I’ve drawn Since my voice changed and the sound got Deeper incline your head pull down a shroud from the heaven white Folks get peace privacy from pull one down To cover us...
1. Because the blue and gold pot on my windowsill is made of Prague glass, it seems to glow in the dark. There are four small windows in the bedroom where I am living now. Deep wells set into the low wall of an attic with a sloping ceiling. Each...
FLACCID COVID ODE Threw a book party but no one came— _____ MAKE NO MISTAKE You didn’t wear a mask to the Hasid funeral during Mardi Gras! You didn’t plan ahead and bring enough PPE to the BBQ in the Lone-Star State where abortions are no longer...
In 1967, when I was 7 years old, I learned to pace at night. Those were nights when my father and his fellow black ministers in the Tioga-Nicetown neighborhood of Philadelphia held ride-alongs with Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo’s cops to prevent...
The homeless man, whom I’ll call Gerald, hunched on the end of my exam table, gingerly picking at the metal shield taped over his left eye. “It happened like this, see, I was out panhandling, and with this new virus thing I’ve been trying to keep to...
Here are some seemingly unrelated facts: One of my daughters used to babysit a young boy in an apartment down the hall. The boy called her “La-lot.” Without revealing my daughter’s name, I can say that “La-lot” is nowhere close to it. The boy’s name...
Blanche walked through the lobby, her hands in her pants pockets, and looked out the window. Her short hair, usually curled and slightly teased, hung straight and was tucked behind her ears. “That snow is out there taunting us,” she said. I couldn’t...
-Lake Orion, MI 2020 My mind tossed all night like ragweeds caught in a storm, thinking of these words Cut your hair tomorrow what my mother said to me after watching a video where yet another innocent black man was killed...
Jack has a job. It’s the sort of job where he doesn’t get to tell many people what to do or what not to do. Say he’s a travel agent or an insurance claim adjuster or a legal clerk, and he’s probably quite good at whatever this job is. Presume that...
In mathematics, the quotient is what you get when you divide one quantity by another. Thus, 3 into 36 yields the quotient 12. In Tracy O’Neill’s vertiginous new novel of information and its discontents, quotients are what remain when carefully...
“Remember Hoping Hospital?” I started my oral training class with a rhetorical question. Silence. The eighteen English majors, even the active speakers, had been quiet since the class began in early March. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the spring...
