Featured Selections
From the Archives
Fighting Back
When I was nine, / my father began / telling me how to hurt / other boys. He said to / squeeze their upper lips / until their eyes watered / or twist their ears and / hold them low so you can / walk them like a dog.
February 2021Intensive Outpatient
On our way back from a Mother’s Day celebration in Newport Beach / my sister turned to me & said, Have you ever thought about treatment for your / eating disorder? For years the only eating disorder in the house was hers.
September 2021Displaced
Graham Pruss On Why More People Are Living In Cars And RVs
To insist that people who have a mobile shelter are “homeless” not only denies that their shelter can be a home; it also has the potential to deny their humanity, because it insists that they are incapable of making a home.
September 2021
Our Rag-Bone Hearts
Richard was introduced to mental institutions when insulin and shock treatments were in their experimental heyday. Inappropriate and excessive use of these treatments dealt him the blow ensuring that he would never again plead for his home or protest his lot.
September 1993The Homeless
I was just rousted off the floor of Grand Central Station by two cops, one of each race. It didn’t occur to me to say, “But I’m waiting for the train to Poughkeepsie!”
November 1988A Pale Blue Dot
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark.
October 2019
Man, Videtan Flora, And The Berendora Of Equatorial Videt
“Dangling in his face was a single stem of the graceful foliage of the Eighteenth Species. He saw then that he could not hold back, and yet must risk doing terrible damage to the crowning floral creation of the Universe. He crept forward in an agony of joy and terror.”
February 1979The Good Heavens
The sky is perfect tonight. The flawless close to a false Spring day in mid-February — an odd day with chirping birds, open windows, shirtless basketball and soft outdoor conversation before supper.
March 1977
