1. In a commercial, a Chinese-American laundry owner promotes an “ancient Chinese secret” and his wife…
Category: Nonfiction
content warning: rape and other violent assault
At the toll, I ask, Is the tunnel very long? I’m claustrophobic in tunnels, enclosed spaces. Can’t even drive a car into a car wash.
(nonfiction)
[A year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
We found a way of existing where we didn’t have to know who lived and who died.
(nonfiction)
With each video, I knew Pete was getting closer to his death. I never believed he would make it out alive.
(nonfiction)
[A year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
It’s not as if we don’t all know what we’re there for.
(nonfiction)
I had the gun now because it made me feel safe for myself, Dean, and the rest of the monitors at this poll site. It made me feel safe in the way that the president’s people were made to feel safe when he exercised his gun-lobby muscle and equivocated about good people being on “both sides” of an incendiary protest scenario.
(nonfiction)
She’d come to California a couple weeks before, staying with her brother, reminding me of how my mom relied, at times, on my Uncle Ken.
(nonfiction)
Only the life of a human being has meaning, but we cannot decide what that meaning is.
(nonfiction)
Years passed. The joke continued. So did the dustings.
(nonfiction)
Walking changed her.
(nonfiction)
So now what are we going to do?
(nonfiction)
The invisible turns home into battlegrounds and destroys the romance between man and woman. These details never make it to history books.
(nonfiction)
My brother, sister, and I climbed the steps of the fire escape at the local hospital, and our dad opened the door from the inside as we snuck into our mother’s room one by one, all too young to officially visit our mother.
(nonfiction)
While the rest of the department read books, wrote papers, and graded student work, Tim and Rick printed out pictures of clowns.
(nonfiction)
O, America, a horse like us would have been glue by now.
(nonfiction)
How I loved sitting on a barstool listening to James choose his words to perfection and pronounce them in a way that was subtle and glowing, as if they were wrapped in beautiful paper.
(nonfiction)
Perhaps they found another way. Perhaps they could stop. Perhaps they just go to church. What I wouldn’t give to possess their simple freedoms. (nonfiction)
There is a small Italian restaurant two blocks from my house in Inner N.E. Portland. It’s been there for decades.
(nonfiction)
You spend the winter telling me it’s almost summer.
(nonfiction)
We don’t know names, on our street.
(nonfiction)
“Chicago has nothing to be ashamed of in comparison with New York.” (nonfiction)
I loved her. But I never, ever felt close to her. The few times I tried to speak honestly to her as I struggled to understand how I’d come to see the world as I did, she was so hurt that it would have been cruel to persist.
(nonfiction)
In the city that some used to call the Seattle of Italy, nowadays you can only overdose on poetry.
(nonfiction)
“What have they been feeding you in here?” I ask.
“A bunch of bullshit!”
(nonfiction)
So here I am writing about it in America.
(nonfiction)
As children under Nixon and teens under Reagan, first-wave Generation Xers like myself have spent our lives watching the rout of the political left from power. Progressive reforms from the New Deal and Great Society were dismantled piecemeal to enrich a profiteering few.
(nonfiction)
It’s the last corner of paradise, here, evaporating like spit on a hot sidewalk.
(nonfiction)
Oak Woods Cemetery is located in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Grand Crossing, and the Confederate Monument towers over the gravesite of the Chicagoan suffragist and anti-lynching activist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, a former slave.
(nonfiction)
The professor should have burned the letters. He had no right to give them to a stranger.
(nonfiction)
In December 1989 in Romania, the crowds spilling into the streets chanted: “We will die and we will be free!”
(nonfiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 