ISSUES | spring 2023

Seize the Day  We often do well at forgetting about mortality. It’s hardly useful to relentlessly mull over the subject, since it might be hard to get our teeth brushed…    read more

Trouble Will Find You  Ann-Marie Blanchard    Violet sped towards home and vaped till the cabin smelled like Pink Lady apples. She wore the sweat of competition. The judges at…    read more

House Hunting    I’ve taken to driving past places where I used to live.  Peering at the landscape, the façade  of this one or that one     as if I’m…    read more

Someone  Robin Reif  Midway through my precarious twenties, I met a man I’ll call Hugh. Decades older, an accomplished academic and critic, he was a minor though respected figure in…    read more

You’re Starting to Get a Reputation  Therese Eiben  Don’t look in the mirror. Just brush your teeth and then get in the shower. That’s right. Gentle, warm water soothing the…    read more

Mother Stay  Jennafer D’Alvia   It’s true what you’ve heard. There was once a special day when mothers came back from the dead. It happened on a Saturday, so we were…    read more

Les Bijoux Rita Ariyoshi He stepped from Dublin’s fine and familial mist into the aromatic modernity of the coffee shop. Tim thought this to be the biggest change wrought by…    read more

The Rapture of the Deep  Abby Geni  Eloise hated and adored her scuba gear in equal measure. On the deck of the Aphrodite, she stripped it away like the plating…    read more

Horses   I’d have known the horses anywhere, sweat-slicked muscle and twenty hands high, all wet nose and   one crusted tooth in each of their mouths. I knew them…    read more

Coming Out 1989   On the fire escape, someone gently strumming a guitar. And a woman whispering. If I sit up, I’ll see the glow of their cigarettes in the…    read more

My Editor and the City Anuradha Kumar I once worked for a magazine that was on the sixth floor of a building near the Victoria Terminus station. The city was…    read more

Be Happy, Go Lucky  Joe Walpole   Boyhood, if you’ll remember, was performance art. So I traded my youth for a cigarette. At the time, I considered it a good deal.…    read more

Gerda Wegener and the Pleasure of Art Deco  When Gerda Wegener moved from Copenhagen to Paris in 1912, her artistic career took off. In Denmark, her artwork had been considered…    read more

Man Ray: Reluctant Celebrity Photographer  Kristine Somerville     “If it is practiced by a man of taste, photography will have the appearance of art.”   —Henri Matisse     In 1920, on…    read more

Deep Listening and Time Passing: Four Recent Nonfiction Books of Note  Sam Pickering    Steven Harvey, The Beloved Republic: Essays. Wandering Aengus Press, 2023. 216 pages.   $20.00. Paperback. E.B. White…    read more