We Want Your Writing.

Embody

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.

Seeing Vanity

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.

Read More

Down the Middle of the World

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.

Read More

Hyacinth Girl

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.

Read More

Trash Brownie

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.

Read More

What I Remember

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.

Read More

Lost Breath

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.  

Read More

For Nana, a Sunrise

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.

Read More

Come, Pain

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?

Read More

Healthy Skepticism

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…

Read More

First Fall

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…

Read More

Yours (Truly), Your Body

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.

Read More

The Best Defense

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…

Read more

Cloud-to-Ground

by Lauren Sharpe

The thunder says, I’m here for you. I’m here with you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid....

Read More

Magical Realism

by Armando Batista

One New York winter day, three separate women on three separate occasions asked where I was from...

Read More

Unbridled

by Elanna Bellows

They call me “horse-girl” at recess. “Thank you,” I say, and gallop away on my wrong two feet...

Read More

Removing the Noose

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...

Read More

The Incident with the White Sneakers

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…

Read More

Scarred

by Gavin Larsen

The pop from my ankle cracked like a gunshot—audible to everyone but me. The music abruptly silenced...

Read More

You Can Stop Now

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…

Read More

Hideous

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…

Read More!

Extreme Heat

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…

Read More

The Verrazano Bridge Has a Way of Looming

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…

Read More

INFERTILE

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…

Read More

Mr. Big Balls

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…

Read More

In the Bathhouse

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?”…

Read More

Hot Wire

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… 

Read More

Safely Pinned

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

Read More

Carlos

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

Read More

Five Stages of Gray

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…

Read More

The Thong

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...

Read More

Obsessive

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…

Read More

Adaptive Sports in Crested Butte, Colorado

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…

read More

The Good Doctor

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.

Read More