Essays

Sittin’ in the Back of My Memory: My Father and His Musical Commandments

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cassette

Sittin’ in the Back of My Memory: My Father and His Musical Commandments
by Genevieve Sachs

While I was growing up, my Jewish father could barely keep track of Hanukkah. When he would remember, the holiday would most likely be halfway through already and we probably wouldn’t have any candles. Therefore, at my mother’s behest and my father’s defenseless surrender, I landed in Catholic School, enduring plaid skirts and mass twice a week for the first thirteen years of my life. However my dad, Lloyd, was the one who passed down the religion that stuck. Not Judaism—although I definitely have his nose—but the religion instilled by growing up under a music critic’s roof.

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Essays

Ode to the Queen of Strays

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Cat

Ode to the Queen of Strays
Beth O’Halloran

I am in the emergency vet – the pricey one based in a university, where the not-yet-vets get to earn their chops. I’m thinking about chops because at my feet is a cat carrier with a wildling of a cat in it. Last night, I found her in my kitchen under a chair with her mouth hanging open above a pool of drool and a blinked-back look of pain on her face. It was 1 a.m. I was ready for bed. My children were at their father’s, sleeping in a house I’ve never seen. I had once again fallen asleep watching TV and was preparing for the usual light switching and door locking. But then there was a cat that did not look at all right in my kitchen. I put out a saucer of milk. It lapped. I tried some cheese, thinking, hoping, an appetite might mean it was not dying a painful, poisoned death. She let me rub her forehead. Now I really have to worry about this cat. But she managed to gum the cheese. 

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Essays

Fishing, Painting, Fireflies, and Metaphor

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fishing

Fishing, Painting, Fireflies, and Metaphor
by Alex DiFrancesco

It was about a decade ago, and a romantic partner and I were driving back to New York City from the Catskill Mountains. My partner at the time’s name was Oscar, he was about twenty years older than me, and owned a cabin and some property at the top of a mountain upstate. We’d spent the weekend there, and on Sunday night, we were driving back into the city, down the highway, with WNYC on the car radio. We were mostly quiet, Oscar focused on the road in front of us, and me drifting in and out of thought, tired from hiking, happy to be in a heated car and headed back to Astoria, Queens, where we both lived. In the quiet, a song started playing through the car’s speakers. It was jazz — jazz is something I’ve always appreciated, but never been deeply into —  but it was a totally different kind of jazz than I’d heard before. There was something joyful and a different kind of wild about it, something I responded to by immediately leaning forward and turning it up. 

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Essays

Salchow and Seminoma

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Skates

Salchow and Seminoma
by Logan Davis

I was treated for cancer at the age of 23. Not the kind of cancer that could kill you, but the kind that takes a while to heal from, and destroys any semblance of trust in your body. The thing I was principally grieving at that time was any possibility of living the first half of my twenties being bad at dancing, getting a little too drunk with friends, and knowing my body would recover by the time I went to sleep the next day. I innately trusted my body, and I knew after this that I couldn’t. 

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Essays

Safe In Heaven Dead

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Kerouac

Safe In Heaven Dead
by Michael Stutz

I’ve been ripping through lots of books during quarantine, going at a mad pace — faster than I’ve done in years. I haven’t read this many books this fast since I was a kid: 14 in the past month or so, and the count’s rising quickly.

One of my favorites in this batch was the smallest. It’s a book I’d read before, an old friend I’d first discovered many years back, a book that’s exactly the size of a pack of cigarettes sliced in half from the top down – Safe In Heaven Dead by Jack Kerouac, published by Hanuman Books in 1994. I think I first bought it, and read it, not long after it came out.

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Essays

The Ghost of Karen Dalton

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Karen Dalton

The Ghost of Karen Dalton
by Siân Evans

Across the distance of a computer screen, I’ve witnessed a dear friend process her trauma around starting her career as an ER nurse in a pandemic this year. I’ve felt helpless as so many people I love lost family members they didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to over the past few months, haunted by the irony of their loved ones dying alone in overcrowded hospitals. And while I’ve wanted to hold all this grief in my small hands, it often feels like this year has stretched the very limits of empathy, distancing us all from each other – both physically and in our varied experiences of loss.

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Essays

Sontag on Heartbreak

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Sontag Journals

Sontag on Heartbreak
by Lee Felice Pinkas 

My first heartbreak, at age fifteen, sent me to songs. To schlocky inspirational books whose platitudes I held close, repeated like mantras. Later, revisiting the knots of a complicated relationship in my late twenties, I found Susan Sontag’s journals.

“I always fell for the bullies,” Sontag admits. “Their rejection of me showed their superior qualities, their good taste.”

I found her book in Berlin, Germany. I had followed a guy named Jonah there the summer after our breakup. I was not proud of myself, leaning on pretexts to save myself from the truth that I had crossed the Atlantic to pursue the ghost of a relationship. 

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Essays

Billie Jean and Me

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racquets

Billie Jean and Me
by Jesse Ludington

I don’t remember the name of the bar in Paris, or what time it was, although it had to be late. I remember that it was a Thursday. I remember that the air felt cool on my face when I walked outside. Ashley was inside the bar, getting to know her Tinder date, Carl, an almost impossibly tall and lanky Swedish boy with shoulder-length blond hair, so textbook Ashley’s type I found it hard to believe she hadn’t created him in a lab. Kayla was inside too, nursing what she’d described to me as the worst piña colada of her life. My unfinished jack and coke sat somewhere along the bar—it had been too strong, and overpriced.

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