Issue 24 / Winter 2021 / Special Issue: Pleasure In the summer of my thirty-first year, I decided it was time to become pregnant. It was a decision my husband and I had anticipated for months, years, really, but it was not made until that summer. We had met in the...
Issue 24 / Winter 2021 / Special Issue: Pleasure “I like pleasure spiked with pain” —Red Hot Chili Peppers Sometimes, I limp. Whether it’s from the cold, or a run, or just existing, I limp. Sometimes, people ask me about it. Same with when we used to go to bars and...
Issue 24 / Winter 2021 / Special Issue: Pleasure The lyric went like this: “If six of y’all went out, then four of you were really cheap. ‘Cause only two of you had dinner. I found your credit card receipt.” The blend of simple arithmetic and deductive reasoning from...
Issue 21 / Spring 2020 I remember my grandfather happy. I remember how he cheered as he drove us up the hill in his front yard in the small town of Hope, New Jersey. His John Deere Tractor going up, up, up, so we could sled down the snowy mountain only to go to...
Issue 21 / Spring 2020 He walks on the cuffs of his pants and the way he clears his country boy throat is an abomination. For someone that I suspect might be an on-the-sly sex worker, you’d think he’d be better at it. There were things I liked—maybe even...
Issue 21 / Spring 2020 Every now and then during my childhood, my mother would put our family through the tumult of trying out a new church, but it never really took. A divorced mother of four little kids didn’t fit in, not in the South, not in the early...
