Category: Nonfiction

Essay: “Proving Our Salt” by Sarah Fonseca

From the beginning, there was a lot of talk about his hands; so much that a particularly religious eavesdropper might’ve mistaken a conversation about him—transpiring during Easter, Ascension, or an average Friday train commute—for one about his antithesis, the martyred Jesus Christ. Coined by the clairvoyant writer Graydon Carter in 1989, “the short-fingered vulgarian” nickname…
Essay: Erin Gunther’s “On Dancing”

I watched the two of them dancing on the table, my father sitting on the couch opposite the spectacle, looking utterly horrified. My mother was dancing with a mutual friend of my father’s, Helene. They had been drinking all night. I was only nine years old and had not often been around drunken adults. My…
Side A Featured Essay: Harmony Neal’s “Allyship”

A response to the piece by the same name by Will Waller Oppressor: I’m here to help! I’m not like the other people from my group. I believe in equality for all. Oppressed Person: You’re standing on my neck. O: No I’m not! Wait, what? OP: You’re standing on my neck. Could you please get…
Essay: “A View from Across the Pond” by Claudia White

Donald Trump’s first year in office as seen by an American living in Ireland. 01/04/2017 Donald Trump will be the President of the United States in less than three weeks. This horrifies and scares me but mostly makes me sad. I make jokes about him dying in bed but then my daughter says, “Pence…
Essay: “Seattle Women’s March, 2017” by Amberly Baker

We are perched at the top of a hill, waiting, feet already starting to ache against the pavement. In front of us is a traffic light barrier we are not yet allowed to pass. My hands shake as I move in a small circle, careful to keep to myself, careful not to bump into anyone…
Essay: “Allyship” by Will Waller

Will Waller is a queer disabled experimental speculative author from the Finger Lakes Wine Region of New York whose writing focuses on memory, music, and the weather. After two years spent in San Francisco as the Managing Editor of Eleven Eleven, he moved to St. Louis to tune pianos and write. His experimental genre novelette,…
Essay: “a crooked thing is a riot/a riot is a crooked thing” by Hannah Rubin

i. there was a fire last night, of course there was. news cameras love the glow of orange against a black-clad body. makes everything look hedonistic when really it’s us just fighting for our fucking lives. ii. you know milo said rape culture was a fiction? I circle the word fiction loosely with my tongue,…
Essay: Anna Laird Barto’s “Telenova Tyrants”

I saw Fidel everywhere when I studied in Havana in 2004. Not the man himself, but his image, broad-shouldered, bushy-bearded, on postcards and billboards, grinning slyly through rings of smoke or gazing ferociously over the horizon, finger pointed at an unseen oppressor. His words were immortalized in black and red spray paint on the ruins…
Essay: “Feelings on Breastfeeding in the Age of Terror” by Lee Matalone

“For those who are against breastfeeding in public the issue is often not about themselves, but in protection.”—“The Breastfeeding in Public Debate,” published on a site focused on women’s health I tell myself, do not trip over that bag on wheels, or that bag on wheels, the one overflowing with bananas and avocados and…