A home for nonfiction prose about the grueling, exhilarating, essential business of finding peace (or not) with the bodies we inhabit, considering age, sexuality, race, ability, gender identity, size, athleticism, addiction, illness, and the experience of occupying unfamiliar, hostile, and wonderful spaces.
by Elizabeth Marquis~Mayorca
I asked the stylist to buzz cut my hair from the roots. He patiently made more than ten braids, using rubber bands at both ends to keep the hair from unraveling. He would donate them to be made into a wig for cancer patients.
by Sebastián Ponce
Father told my sister and me to pray to the volcano: Please allow our visit and let us enjoy the day in the paramo. But I knew my cousins in the car in front weren’t doing it, so I closed my eyes and just pretended.
by Katie Alafdal
I used to hide under the table when my father returned home from business trips. It was something I learned relatively late in childhood—if seven years old can be considered late. Before, the strategy had been simple: if he found me during one of his rages, I made myself as small as possible and disappeared. If his hand swung back as though to strike, I simply ceased to exist.
by Alexandra Cardona
In my black and white dotted lunchbox, under used napkins and plastic spoons, sat 407 calories, wrapped in plastic. The highlight of my day. I had waited two days for the opportunity to lie on my bed, expectations and standards falling off my shoulders like crumbs. Those 407 calories were mine to taste and then to lose on the treadmill, at the speed of 6.5, height 3.0, after 27 minutes and 45 seconds.
by Frances Thomas
I can’t name the man who took my virginity, but I remember that he mentioned liking Stumptown Coffee. Of the thirty-two men I’ve slept with, I recall the first names of twelve off the top of my head. From my Notes app, I can retrieve some last names and a smattering of superficial details: Tribeca investment banker, Tinder/Brooklyn College film student, Northeastern Uni guy visiting Zeta Psi townhouse, Probably gay, The virgin.
by Megan Vered
Her legs dangle over the edge of the table, her back curled into a C. The anesthesiologist plunges the catheter into her spine, numbing her lower extremities and silencing contractions turbulent as white caps in a storm.
by Daniele Skor
In the throes of a global pandemic, four childhood friends float in a pool, discussing ways to die: the cancers that run in our families, from breast to blood; heart disease; a freak accident; the sun, heat stroke or melanoma.
by Robin Clifford Wood
I have no cause to grieve the loss of my uterus. I have an abundance of children, all grown, grounded, flourishing. So why was it so hard to see it go, that vessel that delivered life through me and sent four new beings down the gangplank with a little nudge?
by Kathy Key-Tello
I sometimes feel as though I am not there. No—let me rephrase. I sometimes feel as though I am other people, and the saggy sack of bones I see in the mirror is a new, grotesque monster that…
by Lu Chekowsky
Ring around the rosie, pockets full of posies, ashes, ashes. The game is a circle that moves on eight legs. We are a spider of four hairless girls. Our small hands are squeezed inside other small hands…
by Lauren Krauze
The first few times, I sent you to deep outer space. In those dreams, you floated between planets, shape-shifted between stars.
by Ben Wolf
I know my room like the back of my hand. Better, even. My hand continues to grow and change with the rest of me, but my room remains the same…
by Lauren Sharpe
The thunder says, I’m here for you. I’m here with you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid....
by Armando Batista
One New York winter day, three separate women on three separate occasions asked where I was from...
by Elanna Bellows
They call me “horse-girl” at recess. “Thank you,” I say, and gallop away on my wrong two feet...
by Laura Ohlmann
My father had borderline personality disorder. That meant a lot of things, but mostly it meant that he couldn’t stand to be alone...
by Karim Kattan
My brand-new sneakers are white and radiant. My mother bought them a few days ago, and this is the first time I get to wear them…
by Gavin Larsen
The pop from my ankle cracked like a gunshot—audible to everyone but me. The music abruptly silenced...
by Marla Eizik
The year 2009 took more than it gave. In a season of financial earthquakes and drought, I stood in front of ATMs, staring at a negative balance…
by J Brooke
“Take this baby back! Check again! Find the one which looks like me!” My mother waved meticulously manicured hands, dismissing me like an unwanted shrimp cocktail…
by Adam Gianforcaro
A sweat-soaked man in the gym’s sauna explains why he frequents one local neighborhood over the others. “It’s where I go for young pussy,” he says to the older guys, gawking through the dry heat and then turning his gaze to me…
by Laura Maffei
The Verrazano Bridge comes at me in waves from the back seat of my parents’ car. Thick metal cables rise higher and higher until they stretch above my line of vision with the first tower, impossibly high. Then the cables dip lower and rise higher again
Inside the car, in front of me in the passenger seat, my mother’s head turns. I see her face in profile. She is speaking to me.
“We’ll only tell Aunt Grace and Uncle Sal,” she says…
by Sonia Ruyts
Infertility, unexplained. The diagnosis was rendered unceremoniously: a box checked on a form I wasn’t supposed to see. After years of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, the answers weren’t coming, only percentages, protocols, and more procedures. I was quietly unraveling…
by E. J. Myers
After reporting to the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station, acquiring my packet of initial paperwork, taking the fourth-grade level I.Q. test, and providing samples of urine and blood, I accompanied sixty or seventy other draftees into a large room to undergo the mass physical exam…
by Yennie Jun
My grandmother is naked as she sits beside me on the stone step and pours water from the hot spring over her shoulders. She fills the white plastic bucket and dumps the steaming water over my head. I exhale in surprise as my skin turns bright red. She smiles widely and hands me the bucket. “Do you want to do it yourself?”…
by Lindsay Brown
We eat well. There is duck (freezer burned) thawing in the sink. I found it in the discount bin at the No Frills market. My husband, James, is making Duck A l’Orange for dinner. We stand side by side in our galley way kitchen, bodies close as we cook for our children.
I turn down the Iron Maiden blasting from his phone. Talking while we prep reminds me of better days…
by Anu Kumar
I was eleven when I first felt the pain on my left side, somewhere around the circular, darker tinted spot of skin on my upper left torso. I had no words then to describe the location, so the doctor, a kind middle-aged lady, lifted my dress, exposing my large bloomers, and looked where I pointed.
“It’s just her breasts,” the doctor said, in a mildly dismissive way…
by Stuart Watson
While my aunt and uncle were downstairs drinking themselves to an early grave, my cousins invited me into their bedroom closet. Then, they pulled out the magazines. Handed them around. Looked at me as if they were sharing the secret answer to everything. So, I flipped the pages, got my first glimpse of everything…
by Jenn Hall
Some say it’s a Celtic thing. Others that I’m “kissed by nature.”
You’re blessed.
Special…
Thick and unruly, the first gray hair stakes its claim when I’m 15. Socially anxious with acne to match, this leaves no place to hide…
by Sarah Taylor-Foltz
I lay blindfolded on a mattress on a hot day, wearing nothing but a thong. It’s not what you think. I am alone. This is research...
by Nazanin Soghrati
You begin picking your skin at age fourteen—freshman year—shedding it like leaves falling from maple trees in autumn. Picking at your skin is an unconscious urge. You pick again and again: in class, at home, amidst birthday parties, during family dinners, on restless nights sitting in the humid heat of the city, under the burden of a slew of homework, in bed at 3 A.M. when you can’t sleep and have long since given up counting sheep…
by Brian Ascalon Roley
We four always took the free busses down from the slopes to town. The ratty ones that had 1970s-style Day-Glo and hippie paint, rust-encrusted bumpers, and old rickety platform lifts that could raise my older son’s wheelchair with him on it and sometimes me too standing behind him, clasping the handles for his safety…
by Erica Kent
The dim hum of an infirmary. A womb of faded pink curtains. The gurney’s vinyl slab.
You are eighteen. Your gut is a swirling mass of snakes. It’s hard to breathe.
A week before, you flew from Boston to Arizona on the shaky premise of attending college, but really you just want to soak in hot tubs and drink beer—and hopefully, meet a long-haired boy with bed-you-down eyes.
