Love is adoring children so much that you decide not to have them on account of your shit genes, race, and gun-nut country. After all, addiction is an enemy cavalry in, like, half of your chromosomes—along with refined abuse.
Read MoreAfter the eighth foul, the crowd cheers both men’s refusal to yield. After the sixteenth, fans turn in their seats, marveling in joy and wonder with complete strangers—who’da thunk it?! After the nineteenth, a cloud in the shape of the future floats by, unnoticed; by morning it resembles a love song.
Read MoreI am staring in to the tiny picture inside a phone
inside a tent, my children
in a tent beside me: cloud-bullets,
river and connected flower, blur-faces.
To stop the children,
sconce them in their down.
I keep a copy of my work in the trunk,
a copy in the bedroom in my muscle and fat.
I’m the dark priest, the shaman
grafted in and out of the body’s end
One day late in life, Alice acquired a husband. Our Alice…or so we’d assumed.
He was a small, dark presence in her house. Measly. Scrawny. Slope-shouldered. A husband, we were told, but in our view more like an ill-matched suitor. A timid if persistent petitioner. We could have easily ignored him except for the shock of his showing up in the first place.
Read MoreYou, reckless hope of a town.
And my mother’s dinner whistle
and the shirt I stained mulberry
with me bloodied in it
at the bottom of a tree.
The word “secret” is alluring, particularly in Official DC, and catches a woman’s ear, but beyond that, he’s truly convinced that these anonymous walks carry him into an unfathomable, private space, peeling through exoskeleton, de-layering to a forgotten scrap of soul, where he imagines himself capable of surprise and what he would call “intimacy.”
Read MoreOh, cover letters. After 10 years and 22 issues, TSR has accumulated a mountain of them. They fall into distinct groups: the useful (name, contact info, simultaneous submission, word count, etc.) and the awesome. The latter is bursting with sub-categories, a few of which we showcase here. We hope you enjoy these excerpts from some of the numerous cover letters we’ve received throughout the years as much as we do.
Read Moreas he likes to call it, and we humor him,
though it’s really two rooms with a roof,
terracotta tiled and country styled,
surrounded by a moat six inches deep
to keep marauders at bay.
Our doctor gave us a decent prognosis, a reasonable chance to live. He said that if we did everything right: if we quit smoking, and ate green leafy vegetables, if we did the chemotherapy, and maybe a round or two of radiation, there was a reasonable chance we’d go into remission.
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It was the first time I’d had to think of God as something like a person, with eyes and, perhaps, hands. When I’d heard stories about God in church, He always seemed an awfully touchy character, so it made sense at the time that He wouldn’t want us acting above our station.
Read MoreOn the table behind him rusty Seagulls wait their turn. Silver Swans perch on the bookshelf. Sidewinders lie motionless on the floor. After breakfast he opens the window and sits down with a turn-of-the-century Peerless—steel, non-oscillating, thin spokes curved like heat waves.
Read MoreThere lives a woman who keeps her baby in a box.
She works as a letter sorter at the post office and keeps the box at her feet. Her parents died when she was young, leaving her with nothing but debt, and after a solitary upbringing she finds solace in her work and in her baby. Not one to gossip or flirt, she is able to sort the mail with one hand and tickle the baby’s chin, or check her diaper, with the other. Even when her mind is occupied with distribution routes and sorting codes, her hands remember what needs to be done.
Read MoreA Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in GQ
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang
(Here's one of the stories from the collection, Why Were They Throwing Bricks?)
Writing the Other: Intensely practical advice for representing other cultures in fiction by Corey Doctorow on boingboing.net
Soul Snatchers: How the NYPD’s 42nd Precinct, the Bronx DA’s Office, and the City of New York Conspired to Destroy Black and Brown Lives (Part 1) by Shaun King on Medium
Sarah Hall and Tessay Hadley in Conversation in Granta
Read MoreThis possibility really never
occurred to me. I knew it
could happen, but I assumed
I would be at home.
I pictured my own comforter,
my own ringed tub. Certainly I
thought I could stretch out. The woman
on the plane beside me works for you.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
I always believed in blind dates, especially when arranged by my kid brother. He's the tall, good-looking one surrounded by beautiful people in the ad agency where he runs their biggest accounts. Then there's me, the bookworm—the divorced woman with two young boys holding down a job while juggling joint custody rules. You can image how little time I had to meet men.
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