In late February of 2020 I traveled home to Pittsburgh to salvage what I could of my grandparents’ lives. After caring for them and their things during their final years and after, my aunt was moving to Florida and giving …
Read MoreGenre: Essays
In the face of precarity, unsustainability, and isolation, artists, activists, and revolutionaries are turning to care. Militant research collective Precarias a la Deriva asked in 2006, “why not begin to imagine and construct an organization of the social that prioritizes …
Read MoreAh, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
—Robert Browning, “Memorabilia”
Spring semester of 1974, I was a student …
Read MoreOver morning coffee, I read Science Daily, scanning the titles as if they were Tinder profiles. What do I desire today, I ask, because my appetite for the world is an erotic force that can be kindled by a …
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Hold
. . . the ditto ditto fills the archives of a past that is not yet past. The holds multiply. And so does resistance to them, the survivance of them: the brittle gnawed life we live, / I …
Read MoreMy mother is Susan Power. And I am Susan Power. People call us “Big Susie and Little Susie,” all in one breath as if we are a single creature with two heads and four hands. Mama sews us dresses out …
Read MoreI want to start by saying that I am in love with someone who has a chronic illness.
I want to start by saying that I research fecal transplants, pituitary gland tumors, Lyme disease, ME/CFS, antibiotics, immune boosters, immunosuppressants, anti-fungal …
Read MoreThere has always been, in Lucille Clifton’s work, an abiding elegiac quality; she had many losses after all: her mother at a young age, then her husband, her father, two of her own children. Amid all her poems contending with …
Read MoreWhen I was nine or ten years old, my grandmother gave me a book full of so many random, interesting facts and tidbits of science and history I sometimes think it’s the secret source of all my adult obsessions. It …
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