Homesickness

By Sam Meekings

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            Grief is sneaky. Like the most stubborn of weeds, it finds its way through every crack. Sometimes I’d be working on my computer and hear my phone ping or the sound of a car turning onto our road, and I’d nod to myself and think that must be Luke, and it would take a moment before the penny dropped. Something in me refused to believe he wasn’t somewhere close by. After all, he couldn’t possibly have gone far. At any second I expected him to come strolling nonchalantly into the kitchen and order whoever is in there to make him some food.

            I mean, this was a guy who’d lived his whole life within half an hour’s drive of home. In the last decade, he’d left West Sussex only a handful of times.…

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Trouser Fruit

By Scott Pomfret

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            People no longer smell sulfur when they see me. A papaya vendor at Hangman’s Market takes a sudden interest in the depths of a coin purse. A bank clerk’s posture stiffens with dignity and fear. A young man seizes me up and dismisses me as a possible competitor for any female he would seek to bed.

            As a result, in my dotage, I’ve permitted myself to become a man of habit. Hangman’s Market each weekday at 11, where I load my string bag like all the market-goers–papaya, yams, some dried sausage. A daily glass of tafia before lunch at Don Pedro’s by the sea. A crossword puzzle I make no real effort to complete. The siesta afterward, while my housekeeper cooks my evening meal without supervision, since she’s the only person who can be trusted, and even then, I make her taste dinner first.…

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Folk Medicine

By Christine Pennylegion

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Steeped sage massing at the bottom of a cup
Moves as seaweed moves in the brothy sea

            My child’s tears as salty as the sea
            Deprived of the comfort I withhold

Her comfort dried up like a potsherd
Unearthed from beneath red desert sands

            The sand empty-handed but for heat
            Burning as this mug burns in my hands

I hold a mug that promises remedy
Passed down to me by ancient mothers

            Sometimes a mother must dry up quickly
            However bitterly she cries for milk

I swallow and it’s bitter on my tongue
Steeped sage massing at the bottom of a cup

– Christine Pennylegion

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Enormous Goose

By David Milley

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I’m not a youngster anymore. Our family doctor says I need to exercise more, to lower my blood sugar and to lower my weight. So I walk. A lot. I walk the treadmill at the gym every other day. Four times a week, I head up the road to the Echelon Mall to do my five miles there. Yes, I’ve become a mall walker – I never thought I would.

The first Sunday this March was windy and cold. I grabbed my favorite jacket, a well-worn, tan hoodie I’ve kept at least ten years longer than I should. It’s unraveling around the pockets and cuffs. I donned it, went outside to my truck, and drove to the mall.

Back in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the Echelon Mall was a showplace.…

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Branches that reach for me

By Sally Ryan

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The trees with branches thick and coarse, barely move when children swing from them.
Those trees have strong, deep roots that won’t let a child fall.
            Such trees have branches that can hold the weight of an argument over who did the dishes last.
            Such trees can stand to have the very bark torn from their bodies over screams of ‘I hate you’ and ‘just leave me alone.’ Such trees know how to bounce back and start a fresh the next day.
            Trees like that, solid and unmoving, can handle weather changes—cold stares and burning tension.
            Trees with roots that cannot be ripped from the ground are able to handle the heat of a good old fiery career change.
            But there are trees that haven’t grown to be so resilient.…

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The Man from Kawo

By Blessing Tarfa

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By now my mother and I do not speak. Nonetheless, she is a presence hovering everywhere I go. She has smelled the same for as long as I remember. When I had outgrown the powdery smell of babies she too stopped smelling like talcum. Now she smells like bubblegum as if littering the air with a confetti of bubblegum wrap long after it has lost its sweetness in her mouth. I assess that smell in the room to confirm she has left or if she has merely retreated to a far corner where I won’t hear the catching of her breath or the restless shuffle of her feet.

And so the smell slowly fades away…

Comforted by this finding, I shift in my seat and lower myself until I am lying comfortably.…

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Paradise Complicated: A Review of ‘The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise’ by Olivia Laing

By Cynthia Gralla

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The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (W.W. Norton & Company)

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf captures the allure of gardens for those with equivocal feelings about fellow humans, writing that Sally Seton “often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” Gardens offer us a glimpse into prelapsarian natural beauty and slow living, but as Olivia Laing demonstrates in The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, not everyone gets to relish the peace of these Edens. They are inherently politicized and deeply emotional spaces.

Laing’s celebrated works of creative nonfiction include To the River and The Lonely City, both of which prove she is unrivaled in her ability to interweave memoir with accounts of English landscapes and other artistic touchstones.…

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