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Where Beauty Goes by Joe Bonomo

May 1, 2025

Because something is gone, that doesn’t mean that it goes away. We often clutch at stories, real or those we imagine, that can help give our lives meaning against randomness and disorder.

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In Nonfiction Tags Where Beauty Goes, Joe Bonomo, music, Nonfiction, 2025 Spring

Place of the Shades, or: Letter to Your Laughter by José Orduña

April 22, 2025

You stood in our living room just after your first birthday as the television played aerial footage of prisoners in hazmat suits lowering caskets into mass graves. Mercifully, you’ll have no memory of it, but your early life unfolded as death felt just there, right outside the front door, delivered by a friend's fingertips, floating on a loved one’s breath.

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In Nonfiction Tags Place of the Shades, or: Letter to Your Laughter, 2025 April, April 2025, 2025 Spring, Spring 2025, José Orduña

Surfer's Journal: Part One by Ann Petroliunas

April 16, 2025

I am three days into a new life. In a new state in a new town at a new elevation where there are other things for single 30-year-olds to do than attend baby showers and bridal brunches. Three days into a new life and I am sitting on a beach waiting for a surf instructor, fantasizing about his abs and our potential.

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In Nonfiction Tags nonfiction, Surfer's Journal: Part One, 2025 Spring, Ann Petroliunas

Dissapearing Act by Peter McInerney

April 16, 2025

A week later and the horse is a hollow shipwreck, ribcage bared to the quartermoon. The jetsam of carrion eaters strewn amidst a palimpsest of tracks printed in the dirt.

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In Nonfiction Tags nonfiction, Peter McInerney, Disappearing Act, 2025 Spring

Alongside Blue by Afton Montgomery

February 4, 2025

I, alongside him, folded every napkin in the same direction. Nudged straight the faded carpet samples that made every cement step down to the basement a different frugal pattern and color. I wished our house number—off by only one digit—was a clean 12345.

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In Nonfiction Tags nonfiction, Afton Montgomery, 2025 Winter

Colors of Sound by Hantian Zhang

December 12, 2024

White emerges when all wavelengths of light reflect off an object with equal intensity, much like how white noise distributes its amplitude across its entire frequency range. Examples abound: running water, the whir of a fan, the hum of a vacuum.

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In Nonfiction Tags nonfiction, creative nonfiction, Hantian Zhang, Colors of Sound, 2024 December, Nonfiction

At the Supernova of Boyhood by Joe Bonomo

December 11, 2024

In his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Robyn Hitchcock’s assembled a lovely, evocative, characteristically quirky portal back to that heady time.

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In Nonfiction Tags At the Supernova of Boyhood, Joe Bonomo, Nonfiction, Music, 2024 December

Exercises by Brooke Champagne

November 1, 2024

Enter: The Clown.

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In Nonfiction, Print Tags Throwback, throwback, Brooke Champagne, Archive, 2018 fall vol. 11 issue 2, 2024 November, print

The Third-Best Clown in New York by Aaron Rabinowitz

November 1, 2024

Suddenly, the building’s main door banged open. Something heavy was being lugged up the stairs. Kevin slid behind me and dragged open the apartment door.

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In Nonfiction Tags Aaron Rabinowitz, The Third Best Clown in New York, 2024 November, nonfiction

Terminal Degrees by Angela Townsend

October 11, 2024

I have letters after my name, but they are profane, so I do not use them. The saints in the catacombs would rise up and declare me anathema if I did. But the transcript says what it says.

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In Nonfiction Tags Angela Townsend, Terminal Degrees, 2024 October, creative nonfiction

Delivery Window by Alison Powell

May 15, 2024

I never meant to raise my own children, not all the time, anyhow. Not like this. Some days I really miss John, but really what I miss is when people could seem like whole cities instead of swamps.

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In Nonfiction Tags Delivery Window, Alison Powell, Nonfiction, 2024 May

In the Crowd by Joe Bonomo

May 8, 2024

What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone.

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In Nonfiction Tags In the Crowd, Joe Bonomo, Nonfiction, Music, 2024 May

This land is by Bill Marsh

April 11, 2024

Without trying, D and B are helping me understand the truth about forever—that it works both ways and travels the earth in all directions, thwarting all human attempts to move forward by going backwards.

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In Nonfiction Tags This land is, Bill Marsh, nonfiction, 2024 April

Turn Away by Stephanie La Rose

March 13, 2024

Permanently installed in my mortal mind’s corner sits Mrs. Eddy, ram-rod straight on her wooden chair, dark hair pleated, expression severe, Victorian jacket battened down, white ruff protruding round neck and wrists.

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In Nonfiction Tags Turn Away, Stephanie La Rose, Nonfiction, 2024 March

The Smokers’ Daughter by Rosemary Harp

February 14, 2024

My mother lit her first cigarette on waking. My father smoked himself to sleep at night. They smoked as we carved pumpkins, sang Christmas carols around the piano, dipped eggs into bright dye. They smoked in our bedrooms while they read aloud to my brother and me. My mother, a skillful and innovative cook, especially for the time, smoked while making dinner every night, an ashtray balanced on the back end of the stove, lighting cigarette after cigarette on the gas burners under simmering pots.

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In Nonfiction Tags The Smokers’ Daughter, Rosemary Harp, 2024 February, Nonfiction

Will We Hear it Coming? by Amy Benson

January 10, 2024

I adopted my father’s fears, but the fear on tap at church spoke to what felt like my native suspicions—that harm was gestating in me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. I learned to be in constant fear of my thoughts, lest something unforgivable dash across them at the very moment of the apocalypse.

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In Nonfiction Tags Will We Hear it Coming?, Amy Benson, nonfiction, 2024 January

Margo Price Macro Doses by Joe Bonomo

December 19, 2023

Price is a difficult artist to box-up, for those so inclined. She’s lived in Nashville, Tennessee for decades, and has both courted and been denied Music City’s trappings. A dynamic study in contrasts, she grew up in rural Illinois but sings with a southern accent; her debut album was released on maverick Jack White’s Third Man Records, hardly a Nashville industry staple (though it may be on its way); she cut a live album at historic and revered Ryman Auditorium, waltzing (and rocking) within a storied tradition.

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In Nonfiction Tags Margo Price Macro Doses, Joe Bonomo, Nonfiction, Music, 2023 December

Sleepless by Ann Hood

December 13, 2023

“But here was evidence that maybe, if this ever did happen, I wouldn’t be able to scream or run out the door. That something—fear, disbelief, paralysis—might keep me right there, in place.”

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In Print, Nonfiction Tags Sleepless, Ann Hood, 2023 December, 2014 fall vol. 7 issue 2, Nonfiction, throwback

The Plague of Lice by Julie Marie Wade

December 6, 2023

Lousy: a permissible way to express displeasure, even contempt, without resorting to the verboten profane. Profanity, after all, could get you sent to your room, your mouth scrubbed out with soap, or worse if the Lord’s name was taken in vain. But lousy had a strange twist to it, a little corkscrew in the language that opened a different bottle.

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In Nonfiction Tags the plague of lice, Julie Marie Wade, 2023 December, nonfiction

A 1993 ZR1 Spyder by Rachel Sudbeck

November 15, 2023

The hotel where I worked saw a pilgrimage then of portly old men with mustaches and cabbie hats, their stomachs tucked into ill-fit jeans. They came into the lobby weeping, clutching at their thinning hair like the oracle at Delphi, asking God or me or whoever else was in the room why this had to happen to those beautiful machines.

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In Nonfiction Tags A 1993 ZR1 Spyder, Rachel Sudbeck, 2023 November, nonfiction
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