Mattea Kramer: Finding Peace Amid the New Opium Wars
I learn so much from people in recovery that sometimes I think my head will explode. Instead what happens is that my heart grows.
George Monbiot: The Unlearning
Boarding school, a peculiarly British form of abuse, has devastating impacts not only on the boarders, but on those they grow up to dominate.
Michael Simms: Antbed
You may remember my father
died when I was eight
my mother closed up
the house and we went to stay
with my grandmother for a few months
Stephen Pyne: California wildfires signal the arrival of a planetary fire age
We can envision Earth entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions, and sea level changes.
Majid Naficy: Visiting the Moon
I was fifteen years old
When I found the moon in the Biabanak sand dunes.
Kristofer Collins: A Poem for Michael Wurster
The only connection I felt to the mills
was to the children of a generation of flayed men
on unemployment, the storefronts boarded…
Elizabeth Romero: So, Mr Death
So many I’ve lost; I see them
Down a long corridor the door open
To a bright snowy day.
Eloise Stark: My Autism Journey
Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It’s that you’re destroying the peg.
Allegra Harpootlian: Why I Weep While I Work
A majority of my day is spent bearing witness to the pain, fear, and terror that America’s actions have been causing across the Greater Middle East and North Africa.
Peter Forbes: We are heading for a New Cretaceous, not for a new normal
We’re on the road to even more frequent, more extreme events than we saw this year.
Deborah Bogen: Homeless Box
Sometimes we cross to the other side to get away from their carts and tarps, to avoid their dirty murky faces, but mostly we look through them, past them, above them, our eyes seeking the sanctuary of the shiny store windows.
Video: Fitting
Inside a lingerie fitting room, two strangers – a customer who has recently undergone a mastectomy and a bra fitter – are bound on a mission to find a bra that works.
Sandra McPherson: Going to See Dr. Jones Out of Loneliness, 1966
You have to get ready
for a more complicated life.
You have to tell him the simple things
don’t know how to put their round heads together.
Adrie Kusserow: The Adoration
All morning I groom you with tiny lovenames.
I am a cat, you are my kitten, cowlicked
with locution.
