Winner of the 2019 SLS Essay Contest On a 100-degree June morning, Eddie Canales was driving from Corpus Christi, Texas, to the town of Falfurrias. A call came in on the Bluetooth screen of his Prius. It was...
Stonewall at 50: Still Making Our Place
“We have to read this new book for book club,” my friend Michael told me during a fall afternoon call in 1994, back when people still telephoned each other without texting first. I was 32 and Michael was a role model for me at the time – in his...
Please Leave a Message After the Tone
1. Hello, this is June Finley of the Internal Revenue Service calling for Dawn and Bill Cramer. I am calling because we have discovered a significant problem with your federal income tax return. To correct this problem, you must call us back...
Three Poems By Jill McDonough
The Serious Downer I tell Josey when she dies I am going to eat her face before I call the cops. They’ll be on their way to pick up her dead body and I won’t be able to stop, finally able to bite adorable chunks of her perfect cheeks, gnaw on the...
An Interview with Johannes Lichtman
Scoundrel Time’s Robert Anthony Siegel talks with Johannes Lichtman about his first novel, Such Good Work. Johannes Lichtman’s beautiful first novel, Such Good Work, follows a protagonist named Jonas, a Swedish-American dual national who leaves...
Two-minute video
WASHINGTON—White House Chief of Staff John Kelly hangs his head during heated Charlottesville press conference The most compelling thing I’d seen in a long time. Sound coming from the video, the president —some very fine people on all sides— I can’t...
The Kabul Olympics
She decided on swimming the channel to think through the chances of a character escaping the camps in Calais. When the weather turned, the organizer had to cancel, but training in the murky Dover water was not all beside the point: Swimming Pool...
Waiting for Fireflies
They should levitate from the meadow at dusk. Sporadic, one here, one there, an occasional landing on a sleeve, but tonight there is no light show. The mason jar lantern sits empty, the gifts of a June evening are not. We watch, hoping for a rising...
Scrap and Pig: A Foundry Hand’s Education in Heat and Light
I was laboring in heavy industry when this country’s brief history of shared prosperity started to fail like a piece of fatigued metal, fracturing between the class to which I was born and the one to which I pretend. To this day, with every return...
[Margaret Sanger did the first one, I was awake and felt terribly sorry]
Margaret Sanger did the first one, I was awake and felt terribly sorry for myself, then when I didn’t learn my lesson for I was dumb and hazy about how babies were made and girl, I needed love, I set up the second one with the breezy...