The Sun Magazine

“At that moment I loved him completely — my grandfather, who could fix anything that broke down in all of Iowa, who made sauerkraut and homemade wine in the garage, who let me win at poker. I listened to him rage, and I heard every word that came spilling unfettered from the dark chambers of his heart.”

“Along with fire, my brother loved the sound of breaking glass. He seemed to enjoy chaos in all forms. I thought it was unfair that I had to be my brother’s keeper. I just wanted to be the younger brother in a normal family, and Jon, I thought, was keeping us from being normal.”

Two poets exchange letters about language, love, and basketball.

Have you read Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book “Thick” yet? If not, that’s a mistake, but a mistake you can begin to rectify by reading this excellent, wide-ranging interview to understand just how sharp a thinker she is.

“The pistol has always been my private affair, a kind of secret lover, more seductive for being clandestine and dangerous. We have this thing, the pistol and I, and I don’t want to betray that.”

Christine Marshall considers cats and kittens, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and how writing has helped her to express and process her anger, resentment, and grief after a series of miscarriages.

“The transformation from citizen to prisoner is terrible to behold, regardless of its justice. Unlike my sister the teacher or my brother the lawyer, I take prisoners, and to exercise that authority is to invoke a profound social trust.”

At age sixteen, the daughter of a wealthy Florida couple with chemical dependencies found herself facing her uncertain future, tangled in a web of trauma, self-harm, sexual objectification, and leaning on her tight relationships with other young women. This essay is part of the author’s forthcoming memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls.

After two breakups, a single mother starts building a sense of self that’s true to herself and not beholden to other people.

The writer, who is black, on how his experience with racism and racial profiling has formed his identity in the U.S.:

“Among the more concrete ramifications of this corruption of the imagination is that when the police suspect a black man or boy of having a gun, he becomes murderable: Murderable despite having earned advanced degrees or bought a cute house or written a couple of books of poetry. Murderable whether he’s an unarmed adult or a child riding a bike in the opposite direction. Murderable in the doorways of our houses. Murderable as we come home from the store. Murderable as we lie facedown on the ground in a subway station. Murderable the day before our weddings. Murderable, probably, in our gardens.”