Mercury is in retrograde when we swear our blood oath, palms sliced with butterfly knives stolen from the Berkeley flea market. We promise to live fast and die young and press our bloody hands together, holding them still until they coagulate.
(nonfiction)
In the kitchen, the mixing of the ingredients was quite simple—the Aunt Jemima mix, eggs, and water. Not so simple was my grandmother raising her daughter’s two kids for ten years, her daughter having gone off to San Francisco to experience the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies.
(nonfiction)
He isn’t here today, and his empty desk seemed emptier than all the other empty desks, where half of the students saw an opportunity to capitalize on tragedy and get a day out of school.
(nonfiction)
“Roberts has described her work as “vignettes of meaningless experiences,” but this meandering, nonlinear work feels honest in its making mountains out of molehills” write reviewers Nora Hickey and Amaris Feland Ketcham.
(graphic nonfiction review)
In both cases—the poem and the trembling couple—I seem to love the very thing that raises questions for me in my own life: I love how settled the pizza eaters and the bean eaters are with each other.
(nonfiction)
“Can we go to your place?” I asked at the coffee shop after he said that Blue Nights was Didion’s magnum opus. I argued in favor of Magical Thinking but he said the most feverish hallucinations of grief shone through her later work.
(nonfiction)
After the woman / tells him how that first night really went. After months pass, / and this child is born. After this child’s first birthday, / first day of school, First Communion, first love, / first loss, first child, that child’s first introduction to Grandpa.
(nonfiction)
From up where we were, we hadn’t noticed the defeathered bird corpses littered down below…This friendly bird graveyard was never swept away, probably to teach us all a moral lesson. (TCTC nonfiction)
1. In a commercial, a Chinese-American laundry owner promotes an “ancient Chinese secret” and his wife…
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)
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)
The invisible turns home into battlegrounds and destroys the romance between man and woman. These details never make it to history books.
(nonfiction)
While the rest of the department read books, wrote papers, and graded student work, Tim and Rick printed out pictures of clowns.
(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)
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)
“What have they been feeding you in here?” I ask.
“A bunch of bullshit!”
(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)
The professor should have burned the letters. He had no right to give them to a stranger.
(nonfiction)
I can’t conceptualize the poverty. None of us can. How do you make something of yourself in a new country when you came here with nothing?? When you’ve been starving for years in your own country and come here to a land with so much food, so much sweet smelling, fattening, beautiful food . . . and you with no money to buy it.
(nonfiction)
Imprisoned behind glass in New York City’s Jewish Museum: a sinister grin in graphite. Too big-teeth and hairy brows crowned with a jester’s coxcomb. “I wanted something visually exciting,” Jerry Robinson said of his concept sketch of The Joker. “I wanted something that would make an indelible impression, would be bizarre, would be memorable.”
(nonfiction)
Solve this problem: Your daughter’s playing with a doll, a gift she just received from a friend. The doll is white.1968: John Carlos gives the black power salute Arthur Ashe wins the first US Open. 1970: Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye the problem of “whiteness” as a standard of beauty Arthur Ashe wins the Australian Open. 1972: Bettye Saar The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 1975 the liberation continues Arthur Ashe outthinks Connors to win Wimbledon “no matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others watching me, judging me.”
(nonfiction)
It all seemed too much to successfully handle, but there was nothing else to do.
(nonfiction)
It isn’t genteel to point out, but spit can be beautiful. It’s an ordinary beauty—the parabola, the clearly practiced skill.
(nonfiction)
There’s a telephone. Three syllables, telephone, so it’s the kind with the handle—you could bring it from room to room only with the help of long cords, like a medical attachment of saline. Its speaking and listening parts imitated your own. Meeting in a kind of lonely kiss: plastic, teeth, cartilage, bone.
(nonfiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 