“In lieu of toys, my closet filled with these tokens of violence: an antler, rodent bones, feathers and wings, and in a small paper bag crimped at the top, a lone cobbled talon curled to a fist.”
childhood
Posted inEditor's Pick
Revisiting My Rastafari Childhood
“Babylon was everything forbidden, and looming all around us—and my father tried to protect us from it at all costs.”
Posted inUncategorized
A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future
“Two lives bound into one story by immigration and illness.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Every Day I Worry My Kids Will Be Killed at School
“’Will I be okay?’ my children ask me as the mass shootings in America continue. None of us like my answer.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Decade of Temporary Homes
“I see, in hindsight, how mastering the ability to see through cards did not seem like an impossible thing to him. He had made seemingly impossible things happen before.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Of Innocence and Experience
“Can anybody really say that socially reproducing the present state of things is a desirable goal? So, then, what do we dream of?”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Extraction
“When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Fighting the Tree
“Maybe I wasn’t the son Dad wanted. Maybe, if he could have, he would have picked another kid, a son he could enjoy parenting.”
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Story
Families Like Ours: A Reading List for the Children of Queer Parents
Some of us got to stay with our moms or dads. Others did not.